mid-feb flush

main
iOS 2 months ago
parent 12d058a167
commit 7de1594e2f

@ -19,7 +19,7 @@
"601d1cc7-a4f3-4f19-aa9f-3bddd7ab6b1d": {
"locked": false,
"lockedDeviceName": "iPhone",
"lastRun": "2025-01-15T07:37:12+01:00"
"lastRun": "2025-02-20T10:26:22+01:00"
}
}
}

@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
{
"tutorialIndex": 0,
"currencySymbol": "CHF",
"ledgerFile": "06.01 Finances/2024.ledger",
"ledgerFile": "06.01 Finances/2025.ledger",
"assetAccountsPrefix": "assets",
"expenseAccountsPrefix": "expenses",
"incomeAccountsPrefix": "income",

File diff suppressed because one or more lines are too long

@ -1,14 +1,14 @@
{
"id": "meld-encrypt",
"name": "Meld Encrypt",
"version": "2.3.7",
"minAppVersion": "1.0.3",
"description": "Hide secrets in your vault",
"author": "meld-cp",
"authorUrl": "https://github.com/meld-cp/obsidian-encrypt",
"isDesktopOnly": false,
"fundingUrl": {
"Buy Me a Coffee": "https://www.buymeacoffee.com/cleon",
"GitHub Sponsor": "https://github.com/sponsors/meld-cp"
}
{
"id": "meld-encrypt",
"name": "Meld Encrypt",
"version": "2.4.0",
"minAppVersion": "1.0.3",
"description": "Hide secrets in your vault",
"author": "meld-cp",
"authorUrl": "https://github.com/meld-cp/obsidian-encrypt",
"isDesktopOnly": false,
"fundingUrl": {
"Buy Me a Coffee": "https://www.buymeacoffee.com/cleon",
"GitHub Sponsor": "https://github.com/sponsors/meld-cp"
}
}

@ -1,42 +1,3 @@
/* FEATURE WHOLE NOTE */
.meld-encrypt-encrypted-note-view-content{
display: flex;
flex-direction: column;
height: calc( 100vh - var(--header-height) * 2.5 ) !important;
}
.meld-encrypt-encrypted-note-view .encrypted-note-message{
text-align: center;
padding-bottom: 0.5em;
}
.meld-encrypt-encrypted-note-view .input-container{
max-width: 400px;
}
.meld-encrypt-encrypted-note-view .content-container{
width: 100%;
}
.meld-encrypt-encrypted-note-view .is-readable-line-width .content-container{
max-width: var(--file-line-width);
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}
.meld-encrypt-encrypted-note-view .editor-reading-view{
user-select: text;
}
.meld-encrypt-encrypted-note-view .editor-reading-view,
.meld-encrypt-encrypted-note-view .editor-source-view{
padding-bottom: 233px;
}
/* END FEATURE WHOLE NOTE */
/* FEATURE IN LINE */
.meld-encrypt-inline-reading-marker {
@ -49,4 +10,14 @@
resize: vertical;
}
/* END FEATURE IN LINE */
/* END FEATURE IN LINE */
/* FEATURE ENCRYPTED MD */
div[data-type="meld-encrypted-view"] .view-content {
background-position: center;
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-image: url('data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" x="0px" y="0px" width="100" height="100" viewBox="0 0 50 50"><path d="M 25 2 C 17.832484 2 12 7.8324839 12 15 L 12 21 L 8 21 C 6.3550302 21 5 22.35503 5 24 L 5 47 C 5 48.64497 6.3550302 50 8 50 L 42 50 C 43.64497 50 45 48.64497 45 47 L 45 24 C 45 22.35503 43.64497 21 42 21 L 38 21 L 38 15 C 38 7.8324839 32.167516 2 25 2 z M 25 4 C 31.086484 4 36 8.9135161 36 15 L 36 21 L 14 21 L 14 15 C 14 8.9135161 18.913516 4 25 4 z M 8 23 L 42 23 C 42.56503 23 43 23.43497 43 24 L 43 47 C 43 47.56503 42.56503 48 42 48 L 8 48 C 7.4349698 48 7 47.56503 7 47 L 7 24 C 7 23.43497 7.4349698 23 8 23 z M 13 34 A 2 2 0 0 0 11 36 A 2 2 0 0 0 13 38 A 2 2 0 0 0 15 36 A 2 2 0 0 0 13 34 z M 21 34 A 2 2 0 0 0 19 36 A 2 2 0 0 0 21 38 A 2 2 0 0 0 23 36 A 2 2 0 0 0 21 34 z M 29 34 A 2 2 0 0 0 27 36 A 2 2 0 0 0 29 38 A 2 2 0 0 0 31 36 A 2 2 0 0 0 29 34 z M 37 34 A 2 2 0 0 0 35 36 A 2 2 0 0 0 37 38 A 2 2 0 0 0 39 36 A 2 2 0 0 0 37 34 z" fill-opacity="0.02"></path></svg>');
}
/* END FEATURE ENCRYPTED MD */

@ -12,8 +12,8 @@
"checkpointList": [
{
"path": "/",
"date": "2025-01-15",
"size": 11839252
"date": "2025-02-20",
"size": 8986543
}
],
"activityHistory": [
@ -4418,7 +4418,151 @@
},
{
"date": "2025-01-15",
"value": 1285
"value": 3326664
},
{
"date": "2025-01-16",
"value": 1438
},
{
"date": "2025-01-17",
"value": 1982
},
{
"date": "2025-01-18",
"value": 1924
},
{
"date": "2025-01-19",
"value": 1567
},
{
"date": "2025-01-20",
"value": 1438
},
{
"date": "2025-01-21",
"value": 36348
},
{
"date": "2025-01-22",
"value": 3783
},
{
"date": "2025-01-23",
"value": 0
},
{
"date": "2025-01-24",
"value": 2971
},
{
"date": "2025-01-25",
"value": 1944
},
{
"date": "2025-01-26",
"value": 1782
},
{
"date": "2025-01-27",
"value": 1454
},
{
"date": "2025-01-28",
"value": 1560
},
{
"date": "2025-01-29",
"value": 1583
},
{
"date": "2025-01-30",
"value": 1446
},
{
"date": "2025-01-31",
"value": 2323
},
{
"date": "2025-02-01",
"value": 2045
},
{
"date": "2025-02-02",
"value": 200956
},
{
"date": "2025-02-03",
"value": 1881
},
{
"date": "2025-02-04",
"value": 1439
},
{
"date": "2025-02-05",
"value": 1749
},
{
"date": "2025-02-06",
"value": 1550
},
{
"date": "2025-02-07",
"value": 1101
},
{
"date": "2025-02-08",
"value": 1814
},
{
"date": "2025-02-09",
"value": 1408
},
{
"date": "2025-02-10",
"value": 2699
},
{
"date": "2025-02-11",
"value": 1461
},
{
"date": "2025-02-12",
"value": 1462
},
{
"date": "2025-02-13",
"value": 1434
},
{
"date": "2025-02-14",
"value": 42593
},
{
"date": "2025-02-15",
"value": 3313
},
{
"date": "2025-02-16",
"value": 135700
},
{
"date": "2025-02-17",
"value": 1634
},
{
"date": "2025-02-18",
"value": 1728
},
{
"date": "2025-02-19",
"value": 1446
},
{
"date": "2025-02-20",
"value": 1426
}
]
}

File diff suppressed because it is too large Load Diff

@ -18,7 +18,7 @@
"prefix": "fas",
"icon": "fa-circle",
"markerColor": "blue",
"innerHTML": "<svg class=\"map-view-icon\"><use xlink:href=\"#icon-1804148836\"></use></svg>"
"innerHTML": "<svg aria-hidden=\"true\" focusable=\"false\" data-prefix=\"fas\" data-icon=\"circle\" class=\"svg-inline--fa fa-circle\" role=\"img\" xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\" viewBox=\"0 0 512 512\" style=\"color: white;\"><path fill=\"currentColor\" d=\"M256 512A256 256 0 1 0 256 0a256 256 0 1 0 0 512z\"></path></svg>"
}
},
{
@ -173,7 +173,10 @@
"openMapBehavior": "replaceCurrent",
"openMapCtrlClickBehavior": "dedicatedPane",
"openMapMiddleClickBehavior": "dedicatedTab",
"newPaneSplitDirection": "vertical",
"newNoteNameFormat": "Location added on {{date:YYYY-MM-DD}}T{{date:HH-mm}}",
"newNotePath": "",
"newNoteTemplate": "Admin/Templates/Template Note",
"showNoteNamePopup": true,
"showLinkNameInPopup": "mobileOnly",
"showNotePreview": true,
@ -200,12 +203,15 @@
}
],
"mapControls": {
"filtersDisplayed": false,
"filtersDisplayed": true,
"viewDisplayed": false,
"presetsDisplayed": false
"presetsDisplayed": false,
"minimized": true
},
"maxClusterRadiusPixels": 20,
"searchProvider": "osm",
"searchDelayMs": 250,
"geocodingApiKey": "",
"useGooglePlaces": false,
"mapSources": [
{
@ -218,13 +224,26 @@
"urlLight": "https://tile.openstreetmap.org/{z}/{x}/{y}.png"
}
],
"frontMatterKey": "location",
"chosenMapMode": "dark",
"saveHistory": true,
"letZoomBeyondMax": false,
"queryForFollowActiveNote": "path:\"$PATH$\"",
"supportRealTimeGeolocation": false,
"fixFrontMatterOnPaste": true,
"geoHelperPreferApp": false,
"geoHelperType": "auto",
"geoHelperCommand": "chrome",
"geoHelperUrl": "https://esm7.github.io/obsidian-geo-helper/",
"tagForGeolocationNotes": "",
"handleGeolinksInNotes": true,
"showGeolinkPreview": false,
"zoomOnGeolinkPreview": 10,
"handleGeolinkContextMenu": true,
"routingUrl": "https://www.google.com/maps/dir/?api=1&origin={x0},{y0}&destination={x1},{y1}",
"cacheAllTiles": true,
"offlineMaxTileAgeMonths": 6,
"offlineMaxStorageGb": 2,
"geoHelperFilePath": "",
"tilesUrl": null,
"snippetLines": 3,
@ -233,6 +252,5 @@
"defaultZoom": null,
"defaultMapCenter": null,
"defaultTags": null,
"newNoteTemplate": "Admin/Templates/Template Note",
"chosenMapSource": null
}

File diff suppressed because one or more lines are too long

@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
{
"id": "obsidian-map-view",
"name": "Map View",
"version": "5.0.3",
"version": "5.5.0",
"minAppVersion": "1.5.6",
"description": "An interactive map view.",
"isDesktopOnly": false

@ -1,20 +1,3 @@
.map-view-marker-name {
color: var(--text-normal);
font-size: var(--font-text-size);
font-family: var(--font-text);
font-weight: bold;
margin: 0 !important;
/* Make sure the marker name doesn't cover up the close button */
margin-right: 18px !important;
}
.map-view-marker-sub-name {
color: var(--text-normal);
font-size: var(--font-text-size);
font-family: var(--font-text);
margin: 0 !important;
}
.map-view-main {
position: relative;
width: 100%;
@ -38,7 +21,7 @@
overflow: auto;
position: absolute;
z-index: 2;
padding: 8px 25px 5px 12px;
padding: 8px 14px 5px 12px;
}
.graph-control-div {
@ -74,25 +57,6 @@ a.mv-icon-button.on {
background-color: var(--background-modifier-border-focus) !important;
}
.controls-toggle:checked
+ .lbl-triangle
+ .lbl-toggle
+ .graph-control-content {
display: block;
}
.lbl-triangle {
display: inline-block;
position: relative;
top: -1px;
transition: 0.25s;
}
.controls-toggle:checked + .lbl-triangle {
transform: rotate(90deg);
top: 0px;
}
.settings-dense-button {
margin-right: 0;
}
@ -142,11 +106,6 @@ a.mv-icon-button.on {
margin: 10px 0 !important;
}
.graph-control-follow-label {
vertical-align: top;
padding-left: 5px;
}
.marker-popup {
border-radius: 6px;
color: var(--text-normal);
@ -170,21 +129,21 @@ a.mv-icon-button.on {
.mv-marker-popup-container {
max-height: 20em;
min-height: 4em;
width: 30em;
overflow: hidden;
/* Initially this isn't displayed */
display: none;
z-index: 2;
z-index: 1000;
box-shadow: 0px 4px 20px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);
}
.mv-marker-popup-container .markdown-embed {
border-left: 0;
max-height: 200px;
overflow-y: auto;
}
/* Simple placement mode is used on mobile, where the screen is too small and Popper is unavailable anyway */
.mv-marker-popup-container.simple-placement {
bottom: 32px;
bottom: 0px;
position: absolute;
width: 100%;
}
@ -253,8 +212,12 @@ div.map-view-highlight.marker-cluster {
}
.mv-emoji-icon {
text-shadow: 0 0 1px #fff, -1px -1px 1px #fff, 1px -1px 1px #fff,
-1px 1px 1px #fff, 0 0 2px #fff;
text-shadow:
0 0 1px #fff,
-1px -1px 1px #fff,
1px -1px 1px #fff,
-1px 1px 1px #fff,
0 0 2px #fff;
top: -2px;
position: relative;
}
@ -289,7 +252,9 @@ div.map-view-highlight.marker-cluster {
height: 200px;
opacity: 0;
visibility: hidden;
transition: opacity 0.2s ease-in-out, visibility 0s 0.2s;
transition:
opacity 0.2s ease-in-out,
visibility 0s 0.2s;
padding: 2px;
}
@ -322,3 +287,8 @@ div.map-view-highlight.marker-cluster {
.mv-simple-circle-marker .mv-emoji-icon {
top: 0;
}
.mv-highlight-offline img.mv-offline {
padding: 1px !important;
background-color: blue;
}

File diff suppressed because one or more lines are too long

@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
{
"id": "obsidian-media-db-plugin",
"name": "Media DB",
"version": "0.7.2",
"version": "0.8.0",
"minAppVersion": "1.5.0",
"description": "A plugin that can query multiple APIs for movies, series, anime, games, music and wiki articles, and import them into your vault.",
"author": "Moritz Jung",

File diff suppressed because one or more lines are too long

@ -1,8 +1,8 @@
{
"id": "obsidian-read-it-later",
"name": "ReadItLater",
"version": "0.10.1",
"minAppVersion": "1.7.2",
"version": "0.11.4",
"minAppVersion": "1.7.7",
"description": "Save online content to your Vault, utilize embedded template engine and organize your reading list to your needs. Preserve the web with ReadItLater.",
"author": "Dominik Pieper",
"authorUrl": "https://github.com/DominikPieper",

File diff suppressed because one or more lines are too long

@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
{
"id": "obsidian-reminder-plugin",
"name": "Reminder",
"version": "1.1.17",
"version": "1.1.18",
"minAppVersion": "1.0.3",
"description": "Reminder plugin for Obsidian. This plugin adds feature to manage TODOs with reminder.",
"author": "uphy",

@ -1,124 +1 @@
/* fakecss:/home/runner/work/obsidian-reminder/obsidian-reminder/src/ui/components/Calendar.esbuild-svelte-fake-css */
.reminder-calendar.svelte-18sic8s.svelte-18sic8s {
padding: 0.5rem;
}
.reminder-calendar.svelte-18sic8s .year-month.svelte-18sic8s {
font-size: 1rem;
font-weight: bold;
text-align: center;
}
.reminder-calendar.svelte-18sic8s .month-nav.svelte-18sic8s {
color: var(--text-muted);
margin-left: 1rem;
margin-right: 1rem;
cursor: pointer;
}
.reminder-calendar.svelte-18sic8s .month.svelte-18sic8s {
color: var(--text-muted);
}
.reminder-calendar.svelte-18sic8s .year.svelte-18sic8s {
color: var(--text-accent);
}
.reminder-calendar.svelte-18sic8s th.svelte-18sic8s {
font-size: 0.7rem;
color: var(--text-muted);
}
.reminder-calendar.svelte-18sic8s .calendar-date.svelte-18sic8s {
text-align: center;
min-width: 2rem;
max-width: 2rem;
}
.reminder-calendar.svelte-18sic8s .calendar-date.svelte-18sic8s:hover {
background-color: var(--background-secondary-alt);
}
.reminder-calendar.svelte-18sic8s .is-selected.svelte-18sic8s {
background-color: var(--text-accent) !important;
color: var(--text-normal) !important;
}
.reminder-calendar.svelte-18sic8s .other-month.svelte-18sic8s,
.reminder-calendar.svelte-18sic8s .is-past.svelte-18sic8s,
.reminder-calendar.svelte-18sic8s .is-holiday.svelte-18sic8s {
color: var(--text-faint);
}
/* fakecss:/home/runner/work/obsidian-reminder/obsidian-reminder/src/ui/components/ReminderListByDate.esbuild-svelte-fake-css */
.reminder-group.svelte-gzdxib {
margin-bottom: 1rem;
font-size: 13px;
color: var(--text-muted);
}
.reminder-list-item.svelte-gzdxib {
list-style: none;
line-height: 14px;
padding: 3px;
overflow: hidden;
white-space: nowrap;
text-overflow: ellipsis;
word-break: break-all;
width: 100%;
}
.reminder-list-item.svelte-gzdxib:hover {
color: var(--text-normal);
background-color: var(--background-secondary-alt);
}
.reminder-time.svelte-gzdxib {
font-size: 14px;
font-family: monospace, serif;
}
.reminder-file.svelte-gzdxib {
color: var(--text-faint);
}
.no-reminders.svelte-gzdxib {
font-style: italic;
}
/* fakecss:/home/runner/work/obsidian-reminder/obsidian-reminder/src/ui/components/DateTimeChooser.esbuild-svelte-fake-css */
.dtchooser.svelte-fjfxbq {
background-color: var(--background-primary-alt);
z-index: 2147483647;
}
.dtchooser-divider.svelte-fjfxbq {
margin: 0.5rem;
}
.reminder-list-container.svelte-fjfxbq {
padding: 0.5rem;
max-width: 16rem;
}
/* fakecss:/home/runner/work/obsidian-reminder/obsidian-reminder/src/ui/components/Icon.esbuild-svelte-fake-css */
.icon.svelte-1gcidq0 {
vertical-align: middle;
}
/* fakecss:/home/runner/work/obsidian-reminder/obsidian-reminder/src/ui/components/Reminder.esbuild-svelte-fake-css */
main.svelte-yfmg28 {
padding: 1em;
margin: 0 auto;
}
.reminder-actions.svelte-yfmg28 {
margin-top: 1rem;
display: flex;
gap: 0.5rem;
}
.reminder-file.svelte-yfmg28 {
color: var(--text-muted);
cursor: pointer;
}
.reminder-file.svelte-yfmg28:hover {
color: var(--text-normal);
text-decoration: underline;
}
.later-select.svelte-yfmg28 {
font-size: 14px;
}
/* fakecss:/home/runner/work/obsidian-reminder/obsidian-reminder/src/ui/components/ReminderList.esbuild-svelte-fake-css */
.group-name.svelte-2zqui4 {
font-size: 14px;
color: var(--text-muted);
border-bottom: 1px solid var(--text-muted);
margin-bottom: 0.5rem;
}
.group-name-overdue.svelte-2zqui4 {
color: var(--text-accent);
}
button.svelte-15dajvg{background-color:transparent;box-shadow:none;justify-content:flex-start;gap:.3rem;display:inline-flex}.reminder-group.svelte-15dajvg{margin-bottom:1rem;font-size:13px;color:var(--text-muted)}.reminder-list-item.svelte-15dajvg{padding:3px;width:100%}.reminder-list-item.svelte-15dajvg:hover{color:var(--text-normal);background-color:var(--background-secondary-alt)}.reminder-time.svelte-15dajvg{display:inline-block;font-size:14px;font-family:monospace,serif}.reminder-title-container.svelte-15dajvg{display:inline-flex;overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap;flex-grow:1;justify-content:flex-start;align-items:center}.reminder-title.svelte-15dajvg{overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap;flex-grow:1;text-align:left}.reminder-file.svelte-15dajvg{overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap;color:var(--text-faint)}.no-reminders.svelte-15dajvg{font-style:italic}.no-reminders.svelte-15dajvg:hover{color:var(--text-muted);background-color:transparent}.group-name.svelte-2zqui4{font-size:14px;color:var(--text-muted);border-bottom:1px solid var(--text-muted);margin-bottom:.5rem}.group-name-overdue.svelte-2zqui4{color:var(--text-accent)}button.svelte-kmxndl.svelte-kmxndl{background-color:transparent;box-shadow:none}button.svelte-kmxndl.svelte-kmxndl:hover{box-shadow:var(--input-shadow)}.reminder-calendar.svelte-kmxndl.svelte-kmxndl{display:inline-block;padding:.5rem}.reminder-calendar.svelte-kmxndl.svelte-kmxndl:focus{border-radius:var(--input-radius);box-shadow:0 0 0 1px var(--background-modifier-border-focus)}.reminder-calendar.svelte-kmxndl .year-month.svelte-kmxndl{font-size:1rem;font-weight:700;text-align:center}.reminder-calendar.svelte-kmxndl .month-nav.svelte-kmxndl{color:var(--text-muted);margin-left:1rem;margin-right:1rem;cursor:pointer}.reminder-calendar.svelte-kmxndl .month.svelte-kmxndl{color:var(--text-muted)}.reminder-calendar.svelte-kmxndl .year.svelte-kmxndl{color:var(--text-accent)}.reminder-calendar.svelte-kmxndl th.svelte-kmxndl{font-size:.7rem;color:var(--text-muted)}.reminder-calendar.svelte-kmxndl .calendar-date.svelte-kmxndl{text-align:center;min-width:2rem;max-width:2rem}.reminder-calendar.svelte-kmxndl .calendar-date.svelte-kmxndl:hover{background-color:var(--background-secondary-alt);border-radius:var(--input-radius)}.reminder-calendar.svelte-kmxndl .is-selected.svelte-kmxndl{background-color:var(--text-accent)!important;color:var(--text-normal)!important;border-radius:var(--input-radius)}.reminder-calendar.svelte-kmxndl .other-month.svelte-kmxndl,.reminder-calendar.svelte-kmxndl .is-past.svelte-kmxndl,.reminder-calendar.svelte-kmxndl .is-holiday.svelte-kmxndl{color:var(--text-faint)!important}.time-picker.svelte-193wkl6{padding:0 .5rem}select.time-picker.svelte-193wkl6:focus{box-shadow:0 0 0 1px var(--background-modifier-border-focus)}.dtchooser.svelte-ps5dkj.svelte-ps5dkj{background-color:var(--background-primary-alt);z-index:2147483647}.dtchooser-divider.svelte-ps5dkj.svelte-ps5dkj{margin:.5rem}.dtchooser-wrapper.svelte-ps5dkj.svelte-ps5dkj{display:flex;flex-direction:row;justify-content:space-between;align-items:center;padding:.5rem}.dtchooser-time-picker.svelte-ps5dkj.svelte-ps5dkj{display:inline-flex;flex-direction:row;align-items:center}.dtchooser-time-picker.svelte-ps5dkj span.svelte-ps5dkj{color:var(--text-muted);margin-right:.5rem}.icon.svelte-1wmvl6g{vertical-align:middle}main.svelte-32got5{padding:1em;margin:0 auto}.reminder-actions.svelte-32got5{margin-top:1rem;display:flex;gap:.5rem}.reminder-title.svelte-32got5{overflow:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap}.reminder-file.svelte-32got5{color:var(--text-muted);cursor:pointer;background-color:transparent;text-decoration:underline;box-shadow:none}.reminder-file.svelte-32got5:hover{color:var(--text-normal);text-decoration:underline}.later-select.svelte-32got5{font-size:14px}

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@ -1,8 +1,8 @@
{
"id": "obsidian-tasks-plugin",
"name": "Tasks",
"version": "7.14.0",
"minAppVersion": "1.1.1",
"version": "7.15.1",
"minAppVersion": "1.4.0",
"description": "Track tasks across your vault. Supports due dates, recurring tasks, done dates, sub-set of checklist items, and filtering.",
"helpUrl": "https://publish.obsidian.md/tasks/",
"author": "Clare Macrae and Ilyas Landikov (created by Martin Schenck)",

File diff suppressed because one or more lines are too long

@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
{
"id": "templater-obsidian",
"name": "Templater",
"version": "2.9.1",
"version": "2.9.3",
"description": "Create and use templates",
"minAppVersion": "1.5.0",
"author": "SilentVoid",

@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
{
"types": {
"aliases": "aliases",
"cssclasses": "multitext",
"tags": "tags",
"TQ_explain": "checkbox",
"TQ_extra_instructions": "text",
"TQ_short_mode": "checkbox",
"TQ_show_backlink": "checkbox",
"TQ_show_cancelled_date": "checkbox",
"TQ_show_created_date": "checkbox",
"TQ_show_depends_on": "checkbox",
"TQ_show_done_date": "checkbox",
"TQ_show_due_date": "checkbox",
"TQ_show_edit_button": "checkbox",
"TQ_show_id": "checkbox",
"TQ_show_on_completion": "checkbox",
"TQ_show_postpone_button": "checkbox",
"TQ_show_priority": "checkbox",
"TQ_show_recurrence_rule": "checkbox",
"TQ_show_scheduled_date": "checkbox",
"TQ_show_start_date": "checkbox",
"TQ_show_tags": "checkbox",
"TQ_show_task_count": "checkbox",
"TQ_show_tree": "checkbox",
"TQ_show_urgency": "checkbox"
}
}

@ -57,12 +57,12 @@
"state": {
"type": "markdown",
"state": {
"file": "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-01-15.md",
"file": "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-02-20.md",
"mode": "preview",
"source": true
},
"icon": "lucide-file",
"title": "2025-01-15"
"title": "2025-02-20"
}
},
{
@ -91,7 +91,8 @@
"state": {
"type": "file-explorer",
"state": {
"sortOrder": "alphabetical"
"sortOrder": "alphabetical",
"autoReveal": false
},
"icon": "lucide-folder-closed",
"title": "Files"
@ -143,8 +144,8 @@
"state": {
"type": "msg-handler-search-view",
"state": {},
"icon": "MSG_HANDLER_ENVELOPE_ICON",
"title": "MSG Handler Search"
"icon": "lucide-file",
"title": "Plugin no longer active"
}
},
{
@ -170,7 +171,7 @@
"state": {
"type": "backlink",
"state": {
"file": "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-10-18.md",
"file": "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-02-15.md",
"collapseAll": false,
"extraContext": false,
"sortOrder": "alphabetical",
@ -189,7 +190,7 @@
"state": {
"type": "outgoing-link",
"state": {
"file": "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-10-18.md",
"file": "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-02-15.md",
"linksCollapsed": false,
"unlinkedCollapsed": false
},
@ -216,68 +217,84 @@
"icon": "dices",
"title": "Dice Tray"
}
},
{
"id": "1b1bb853fe2ad284",
"type": "leaf",
"state": {
"type": "outline",
"state": {
"file": "01.02 Home/@Main Dashboard.md",
"followCursor": false,
"showSearch": false,
"searchQuery": ""
},
"icon": "lucide-file",
"title": "Plugin no longer active"
}
}
],
"currentTab": 5
},
"left-ribbon": {
"hiddenItems": {
"obsidian-kanban:Create new board": false,
"switcher:Open quick switcher": false,
"graph:Open graph view": false,
"canvas:Create new canvas": false,
"daily-notes:Open today's daily note": false,
"templates:Insert template": false,
"command-palette:Open command palette": false,
"markdown-importer:Open format converter": false,
"audio-recorder:Start/stop recording": false,
"msg-handler:MSG Handler": false,
"obsidian-rich-links:Rich Links": false,
"obsidian-gallery:Gallery": false,
"obsidian-metatable:Metatable": false,
"table-editor-obsidian:Advanced Tables Toolbar": false,
"obsidian-tts:Text to Speech": false,
"ledger-obsidian:Add to Ledger": false,
"obsidian-map-view:Open map view": false,
"meld-encrypt:New encrypted note": false,
"meld-encrypt:Convert to or from an Encrypted note": false,
"meld-encrypt:Encrypt/Decrypt": false,
"ledger-obsidian:Add to Ledger": false,
"templater-obsidian:Templater": false,
"obsidian-metatable:Metatable": false,
"obsidian-memos:Thino": false,
"obsidian42-brat:BRAT": false,
"obsidian-read-it-later:ReadItLater: Create from clipboard": false,
"obsidian-book-search-plugin:Create new book note": false,
"obsidian-tts:Text to Speech": false,
"table-editor-obsidian:Advanced Tables Toolbar": false,
"templater-obsidian:Templater": false,
"obsidian-kanban:Create new board": false,
"obsidian-rich-links:Rich Links": false,
"msg-handler:MSG Handler": false,
"obsidian-gallery:Gallery": false,
"obsidian-media-db-plugin:Add new Media DB entry": false,
"obsidian42-brat:BRAT": false,
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"switcher:Open quick switcher": false,
"graph:Open graph view": false,
"canvas:Create new canvas": false,
"daily-notes:Open today's daily note": false,
"templates:Insert template": false,
"command-palette:Open command palette": false,
"meld-encrypt:Encrypt/Decrypt In-place": false
}
},
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"lastOpenFiles": [
"01.02 Home/Fashion.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-01-15.md",
"03.02 Travels/Andermatt.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-02-20.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-02-19.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-02-18.md",
"00.03 News/He Had No Fear Ryan Weddings Path From Olympic Athlete to Drug Lord.md",
"01.02 Home/@Shopping list.md",
"00.07 Wiki/Romain Gary.md",
"01.02 Home/@Main Dashboard.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-01-14.md",
"00.03 News/How Iran moves sanctioned oil around the world.md",
"00.03 News/On the Grid.md",
"00.03 News/Steward Health a cautionary tale in private equity's push into health care.md",
"00.03 News/Sunset Boulevard in ruins Palisades fires massive scale comes into focus - Los Angeles Times.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-01-13.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-01-12.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2025-01-12 ⚽️ PSG - ASSE (2-1).md",
"00.03 News/Power Failure On Landscape and Abandonment — Switchyard.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-12-29.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-12-30.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-12-31.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-01-01.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-01-02.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-01-03.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-01-04.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-01-05.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-01-06.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-01-07.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-01-08.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-01-09.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-01-10.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-01-11.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-02-17.md",
"00.03 News/50 Saturday Night Live Cast Members Reveal Their Favorite Saturday Night Live Cast Members.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-02-16.md",
"00.03 News/Teenage Carjacking Gangs Play a Real-Life Game of Grand Theft Auto.md",
"00.03 News/Mike Whites Mischievous Vision for “The White Lotus”.md",
"00.03 News/Rape under wraps how Tinder, Hinge and their corporate owner chose profits over safety.md",
"00.03 News/Her job is to remove homeless people from SF's parks. Her methods are extraordinary.md",
"00.03 News/When Flamingos Came to the Chesapeake - The Sunday Long Read.md",
"00.03 News/How the Most Famous Burger in the World Was Created in Pittsburgh.md",
"03.03 Food & Wine/Korean Barbecue-Style Meatballs.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-02-15.md",
"03.02 Travels/Klosters.md",
"03.02 Travels/Arosa.md",
"02.03 Zürich/Albishaus.md",
"02.03 Zürich/Ski Rental Zürich.md",
"03.03 Food & Wine/Beef Noodles with Beans.md",
"03.03 Food & Wine/@Main dishes.md",
"03.03 Food & Wine/Thai Pork Rice Bowl.md",
"06.01 Finances/2025.ledger",
"00.01 Admin/Pictures/Ambar",
"00.01 Admin/Pictures/Sally/ima3958121943638555313.jpeg",
"00.01 Admin/Pictures/Sally/IMG_5006.jpg",
@ -297,7 +314,6 @@
"test.zip",
"00.01 Admin/Pictures/Kolkowitzia",
"00.01 Admin/Pictures/Hibiscus",
"00.01 Admin/Pictures/Viorne Tin",
"00.01 Admin/Test Canvas.canvas"
]
}

@ -115,7 +115,7 @@ This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
:blue_car:: [[$Basville|Basville]] to [[@@Paris|Paris]]
:blue_car:: [[$Basville|Basville]] to [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]
&emsp;

@ -102,7 +102,7 @@ This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
- [x] 08:45 🐎 [[@Lifestyle|Lifestyle]]: Buy [corrective goggles for Polo](https://www.evileye.com/en/), [[2024-09-24|link]] 📅 2024-11-15 ✅ 2024-11-13
- [ ] 12:46 :racehorse: [[@Lifestyle|Lifestyle]]: Check for a new [polo helmet](https://instinct-polo.mybigcommerce.com/design-your-own/#/customise/72546487?basketIndex=9), [[2024-09-24|🔗]] 📅2025-01-31
- [ ] 12:46 :racehorse: [[@Lifestyle|Lifestyle]]: Check for a new [polo helmet](https://instinct-polo.mybigcommerce.com/design-your-own/#/customise/72546487?basketIndex=9), [[2024-09-24|🔗]] 📅 2025-03-31
%% --- %%

@ -16,9 +16,9 @@ Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water:
Coffee:
Steps:
Water: 2
Coffee: 5
Steps: 12186
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
@ -114,7 +114,6 @@ This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-01-16
Date: 2025-01-16
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2
Coffee: 3
Steps: 13591
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-01-15|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-01-17|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-01-16Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-01-16NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-01-16
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-01-16
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-01-16
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-01-16]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-01-17
Date: 2025-01-17
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2
Coffee: 3
Steps: 10135
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-01-16|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-01-18|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-01-17Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-01-17NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-01-17
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-01-17
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-01-17
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-01-17]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,140 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-01-18
Date: 2025-01-18
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 8
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 1
Coffee: 2
Steps: 12286
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-01-17|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-01-19|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-01-18Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-01-18NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-01-18
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-01-18
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-01-18
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
🥐: [[Turkish Eggs]]
🍴: [[Chilli con Carne]]
:blue_car:: [[Davinie|Poupi]] est arrivée en voiture de Ville la Grande
🍸: [[Old Crow]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-01-18]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-01-19
Date: 2025-01-19
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2
Coffee: 2
Steps: 13625
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-01-18|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-01-20|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-01-19Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-01-19NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-01-19
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-01-19
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-01-19
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
🥐: [[Turkish Eggs]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-01-19]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-01-20
Date: 2025-01-20
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2
Coffee: 4
Steps: 5361
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-01-19|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-01-21|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-01-20Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-01-20NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-01-20
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-01-20
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-01-20
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-01-20]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-01-21
Date: 2025-01-21
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2
Coffee: 3
Steps: 11660
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-01-20|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-01-22|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-01-21Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-01-21NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-01-21
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-01-21
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-01-21
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
🍽: [[Korean Barbecue-Style Meatballs]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-01-21]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-01-22
Date: 2025-01-22
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7
Happiness: 90
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2
Coffee: 4
Steps: 11345
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-01-21|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-01-23|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-01-22Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-01-22NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-01-22
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-01-22
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-01-22
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
:tv:: [[Anatomy of a Fall (2023)]]
🍽: [[Velouté de carottes à lanis]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-01-22]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-01-23
Date: 2025-01-23
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 3.03
Coffee: 4
Steps: 12690
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-01-22|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-01-24|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-01-23Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-01-23NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-01-23
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-01-23
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-01-23
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-01-23]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-01-24
Date: 2025-01-24
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2.33
Coffee: 4
Steps: 8519
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-01-23|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-01-25|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-01-24Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-01-24NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-01-24
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-01-24
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-01-24
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-01-24]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-01-25
Date: 2025-01-25
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2.66
Coffee: 3
Steps: 5003
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-01-24|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-01-26|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-01-25Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-01-25NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-01-25
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-01-25
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-01-25
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
:tv:: [[2025-01-25 ⚽️ PSG - Reims (1-1)]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-01-25]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-01-26
Date: 2025-01-26
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 8
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2.66
Coffee: 3
Steps: 10710
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-01-25|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-01-27|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-01-26Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-01-26NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-01-26
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-01-26
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-01-26
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-01-26]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,135 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-01-27
Date: 2025-01-27
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2.15
Coffee: 4
Steps: 11246
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-01-26|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-01-28|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-01-27Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-01-27NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-01-27
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-01-27
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-01-27
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
🛫: [[@@Zürich|Zürich]] to [[@@London|London]]
:book:: [[Berlin Alexanderplatz]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-01-27]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-01-28
Date: 2025-01-28
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 1.91
Coffee: 5
Steps: 7493
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-01-27|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-01-29|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-01-28Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-01-28NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-01-28
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-01-28
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-01-28
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-01-28]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-01-29
Date: 2025-01-29
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2.5
Coffee: 5
Steps: 5746
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-01-28|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-01-30|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-01-29Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-01-29NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-01-29
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-01-29
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-01-29
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-01-29]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-01-30
Date: 2025-01-30
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 0.33
Coffee: 4
Steps: 6681
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-01-29|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-01-31|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-01-30Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-01-30NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-01-30
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-01-30
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-01-30
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-01-30]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-01-31
Date: 2025-01-31
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 1.83
Coffee: 4
Steps: 8618
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-01-30|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-01|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-01-31Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-01-31NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-01-31
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-01-31
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-01-31
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
🛬: [[@@London|London]] to [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]
:book:: [[Berlin Alexanderplatz]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-01-31]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-01
Date: 2025-02-01
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 8
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 1.33
Coffee: 1
Steps: 1913
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-01-31|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-02|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-01Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-01NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-01
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-01
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-01
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
🍴: [[Turkish Eggs]]
🍽: [[Velouté de carottes à lanis]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-01]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-02
Date: 2025-02-02
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2.75
Coffee: 1
Steps: 19246
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-01|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-03|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-02Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-02NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-02
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-02
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-02
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-02]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,137 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-03
Date: 2025-02-03
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 6.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2.16
Coffee: 4
Steps: 15893
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-02|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-04|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-03Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-03NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-03
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-03
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-03
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
- [x] 10:22 🧹 [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: buy all stuff for Viviana [[2025-02-03|🔗]] 📅 2025-02-08 ✅ 2025-02-08
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
🛫: [[@@Zürich|Zürich]] to [[@@London|London]]
:book:: [[Berlin Alexanderplatz]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-03]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-04
Date: 2025-02-04
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 1.61
Coffee: 4
Steps: 9380
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-03|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-05|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-04Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-04NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-04
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-04
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-04
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-04]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-05
Date: 2025-02-05
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 8
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2.83
Coffee: 4
Steps: 9212
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-04|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-06|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-05Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-05NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-05
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-05
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-05
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-05]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-06
Date: 2025-02-06
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2.5
Coffee: 3
Steps: 9229
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-05|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-07|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-06Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-06NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-06
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-06
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-06
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-06]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-07
Date: 2025-02-07
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 6.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2.49
Coffee: 3
Steps: 10337
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-06|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-08|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-07Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-07NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-07
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-07
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-07
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
🛬: [[@@London|London]] to [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-07]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-08
Date: 2025-02-08
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2
Coffee: 1
Steps: 9889
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-07|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-09|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-08Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-08NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-08
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-08
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-08
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
🍴: [[Spicy Szechuan Noodles with Garlic Chilli Oil]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-08]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-09
Date: 2025-02-09
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2
Coffee: 2
Steps: 5627
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-08|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-10|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-09Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-09NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-09
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-09
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-09
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
🍽: [[Spicy Coconut Butter Chicken]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-09]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-10
Date: 2025-02-10
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 1.5
Coffee: 3
Steps: 10233
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-09|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-11|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-10Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-10NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-10
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-10
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-10
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-10]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-11
Date: 2025-02-11
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2.6
Coffee: 6
Steps: 25272
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-10|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-12|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-11Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-11NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-11
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-11
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-11
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
:book:: [[Berlin Alexanderplatz]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-11]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-12
Date: 2025-02-12
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water:
Coffee: 1
Steps:
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-11|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-13|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-12Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-12NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-12
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-12
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-12
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
:book:: [[Berlin Alexanderplatz]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-12]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-13
Date: 2025-02-13
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 1.6
Coffee: 6
Steps: 21075
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-12|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-14|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-13Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-13NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-13
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-13
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-13
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-13]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-14
Date: 2025-02-14
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2
Coffee: 6
Steps:
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-13|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-15|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-14Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-14NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-14
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-14
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-14
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
🍽: [[Minnie Sushi]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-14]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-15
Date: 2025-02-15
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 8
Happiness: 90
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2
Coffee: 1
Steps: 12473
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-14|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-16|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-15Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-15NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-15
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-15
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-15
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
🍴: [[Beef Noodles with Beans]]
🍽: [[Albishaus]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-15]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-16
Date: 2025-02-16
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 20
BackHeadBar: 30
Water: 3.16
Coffee: 1
Steps: 3506
Weight:
Ski: 11
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-15|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-17|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-16Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-16NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-16
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-16
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-16
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
🎿: [[Andermatt]]
🍽: [[Korean Barbecue-Style Meatballs]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-16]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-17
Date: 2025-02-17
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2.5
Coffee: 6
Steps: 15704
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-16|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-18|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-17Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-17NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-17
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-17
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-17
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-17]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-18
Date: 2025-02-18
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2.5
Coffee: 5
Steps: 12364
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-17|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-19|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-18Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-18NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-18
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-18
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-18
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-18]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-19
Date: 2025-02-19
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2.33
Coffee: 6
Steps: 18417
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-18|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-20|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-19Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-19NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-19
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-19
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-19
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-19]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-20
Date: 2025-02-20
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water:
Coffee: 4
Steps:
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-19|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-21|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-20Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-20NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-20
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-20
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-20
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-20]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,13 @@
---
title: Médecin
allDay: false
startTime: 11:15
endTime: 12:15
date: 2023-01-23
completed: null
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
[[2023-01-23|Ce jour]], 1er RDV avec [[Dr Cleopatra Morales]].

@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
---
title: Genève
allDay: true
date: 2023-02-06
endDate: 2023-02-08
completed: null
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Depart à [[Geneva|Genève]] [[2023-02-06|ce jour]] et retour le [[223-02-07|lendemain]].

@ -0,0 +1,13 @@
---
title: ⚕ Médecin
allDay: false
startTime: 12:15
endTime: 13:15
date: 2023-02-09
completed: null
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
[[2023-02-09|Ce jour]], RDV de suivi avec [[Dr Cleopatra Morales]]

@ -0,0 +1,91 @@
---
title: "👰‍♀ Mariage Eloi & Zélie"
allDay: true
date: 2023-02-10
endDate: 2023-02-12
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Mariage d[[Eloi de Villeneuve|Éloi]] avec [[Zélie]] en [[@France|Bretagne]] (Rennes) [[2023-02-11|ce jour]].
&emsp;
🚆: 23h11, arrivée à Rennes
&emsp;
🏨: **Hotel Saint Antoine**<br>27 avenue Janvier<br>Rennes
&emsp;
### Vendredi 10 Février
&emsp;
#### 17h: Mariage civil
Mairie de Montfort-sur-Meu (35)
&emsp;
#### 20h30: Veillée de Prière
Chapelle du château de la Châsse
Iffendic (35)
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Samedi 11 Février
&emsp;
#### 14h: Messe de Mariage
Saint-Louis-Marie
Montfort-sur-Meu (35)
&emsp;
#### 16h30: Cocktail
Château de la Châsse
Iffendic (35)
&emsp;
#### 19h30: Dîner
Château de la Châsse
Iffendic (35)
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Dimanche 12 Février
&emsp;
#### 11h: Messe
Chapelle du château de la Châsse
Iffendic (35)
&emsp;
#### 12h: Déjeuner breton
Château de la Châsse
Iffendic (35)
&emsp;
🚆: 13h35, départ de Rennes

@ -0,0 +1,13 @@
---
title: 🎬 Tár @ Riff Raff
allDay: false
startTime: 20:30
endTime: 22:30
date: 2023-02-19
completed: null
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
[[2023-02-19|Ce jour]], [[Tár (2022)]] @ [[Riff Raff Kino Bar]].

@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
---
title: 🩺 Médecin
allDay: false
startTime: 15:00
endTime: 15:30
date: 2023-03-06
completed: null
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
[[2023-03-06|Ce jour]], rdv avec [[Dr Awad Abuawad]]

@ -0,0 +1,13 @@
---
title: 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Marg & Arnold à Zürich
allDay: true
date: 2023-03-11
endDate: 2023-03-13
completed: null
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Arrivée le [[2023-03-11|11 mars]] de [[Marguerite de Villeneuve|Marg]] et [[Arnold Moulin|Arnold]].
Départ le [[2023-03-12|lendemain]].

@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
---
title: 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Molly & boyfriend in Zürich
allDay: true
date: 2023-03-18
endDate: 2023-03-20
completed: null
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Weekend in [[@@Zürich|Zürich]] for [[@@MRCK|Meggi-mo]]s cousin Molly and boyfriend.
Arrival on [[2023-03-18|18th March]] and departure on Monday [[2023-03-20|20th March]].

@ -0,0 +1,13 @@
---
title: 🩺 Médecin
allDay: false
startTime: 11:45
endTime: 12:15
date: 2023-04-14
completed: null
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
[[2023-04-14|Ce jour]], rdv avec [[Dr Cleopatra Morales]]

@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
---
title: 🏠 Arrivée Papa
allDay: false
startTime: 20:26
endTime: 21:26
date: 2023-12-21
completed: null
---
[[2023-12-21|Ce jour]], arrivée de [[Amaury de Villeneuve|Papa]] à [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]

@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
---
title: 🗼 Départ Papa
allDay: false
startTime: 13:30
endTime: 14:30
date: 2023-12-27
completed: null
---
[[2023-12-27|Ce jour]], départ de [[Amaury de Villeneuve|Papa]] de [[@@Zürich|Zürich]] pour [[@@Paris|Paris]]

@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
---
title: ⚽️ PSG - Stade Reims (1-1)
allDay: false
startTime: 21:00
endTime: 23:00
date: 2025-01-25
completed: null
---
[[2025-01-25|Ce jour]], [[Paris SG|PSG]] - Stade Reims: 1-1
Buteurs:: ⚽️ Dembélé<br>⚽️ Nakamura (SR)
&emsp;
```lineup
formation: 433
players: Donnarumma,Nuno Mendes, Hernandez,Beraldo,Zaïre-Emery,Lee,Ruiz,Doué,Kvaratskhelia,G.Ramos,Dembélé
```

@ -0,0 +1,171 @@
---
Tag: ["🎭", "📺", "🇺🇸"]
Date: 2025-02-02
DocType: "WebClipping"
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp: 2025-02-02
Link: https://www.gq.com/story/1-snl-greatest-cast-funniest-person
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Parent:: [[@News|News]]
Read:: [[2025-02-17]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-50SNLCastMembersRevealTheirFavoriteCastMembersNSave
&emsp;
# 50 Saturday Night Live Cast Members Reveal Their Favorite Saturday Night Live Cast Members
*This story was featured in The Must Read, a newsletter in which our editors recommend one cant-miss story every weekday. [Sign up here to get it in your inbox.](https://www.gq.com/newsletter/mustRead?newsletterId=249017&sourcecode=articleCTA)*
---
*Saturday Night Live* turns 50 this year. A sketch-comedy moon shot launched by a scruffy band of Canadians and stoners has become a pop-cultural institution—the longest-running scripted show on TV that isnt a soap opera or *Sesame Street.* Late last year, to mark this historic anniversary, *GQ* interviewed over 50 other past and present *SNL* cast members—from original Not Ready For Primetime Players like Laraine Newman, Jane Curtin, and [Garrett Morris](https://www.gq.com/story/saturday-night-live-garrett-morris) to newcomers like Ashley Padilla, Jane Wickline, and Emil Wakim, each of whom had been on the show for all of eight weeks when we talked—and asked each of them the same eight questions about the shows broader cultural footprint and their own experiences making it.
A feature story drawn from those conversations, “Saturday Night Forever,” will appear in the March print edition of *GQ*—but all this week on GQ.com, were bringing you an expanded, Bill Braskysize version of that story, along with anecdotes and recollections that didnt make it to the page. And were kicking it off today with the casts answers to two questions, including one that almost everyone found impossible to answer.
Which era of *SNL* do you think had the all-time greatest cast, and why?
**[Chris Rock](https://www.gq.com/about/chris-rock),** *cast member, 199093:* The original cast was the best.
**Joe Piscopo,** *cast member, 198084:* First cast, original cast. Never before. Never since. Best cast ever. Television history. No ones matched it. Not marginally. It was [the Beatles](https://www.gq.com/about/the-beatles), it was Frank Sinatra. And then all of us tried to do the best we could. And some of us had some really great moments.
**Tim Kazurinsky,** *cast member, 198084:* They could have ended this series after the first five years. That first cast was untouchable.
**Kenan Thompson,** *cast member, 2003present:* They made a foundation to build on. A foundation of freedom, creativity, really funny performance and smart material. Dan Aykroyd used to do some wild runs.
**Dana Carvey,** *cast member, 198693:* They were just rock stars and badass pirates. When I got the show, I didnt really feel I belonged. Aykroyd, Bill Murray—they were all over six feet tall. Belushi obviously could beat you up or hit you. And Chevy was six four. So I just felt like they could make you laugh or beat you up. So when I came in with Phil Hartman, God rest his soul, and Jan Hooks and everybody, I didnt really have any sense of thinking we could do anything like that. I pretty much thought the plug would be pulled on the show when I was on it.
But from 90 to 93, we still had Phil Hartman and Mike Myers, and then we added in what we used to call the junior varsity: Chris Rock, Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, David Spade, Tim Meadows, Ellen Cleghorne. The show had an inordinate amount of firepower, if its a military analogy. When those guys were coming into their own and we still had the other team whod been there a while, it was pretty magic to be there.
New York Daily News Archive/Getty Images
**Pete Davidson,** *cast member, 201422:* My favorite era is definitely the Sandler-Farley-Spade era, because you can tell they were best pals and it was more like watching your friends goof off. The best cast ever, though, was the class before mine—Hader, Wiig, Armisen, Samberg, Forte, Seth \[Meyers\], et cetera.
**Tracy Morgan,** *cast member, 19962003:* It was between Not Ready for Prime Time and mine—[Will Ferrell](https://www.gq.com/about/will-ferrell) and Chris Kattan and everyone. That's what we were compared to. We were compared to Not Ready for Prime Time.
I mean Eddie Murphys cast, it was just Eddie there, and Piscopo, but us—it was all of us. All of us could sing.
**Ana Gasteyer,** *cast member, 19962002:* To pick one \[cast\] would be kind of unfair to the legacy. But, specifically I wanted to be a comedian when I first saw Jan Hooks and Nora Dunn work.
**Robert Smigel,** *writer, 198593, 19962008; cast member, 199193:* Im always going to have ultimate respect for \[the original\] cast. And then Dana and Phil and Jan and Kevin \[Nealon\]—super impressive. But I think maybe the biggest collection of creative geniuses was—I would put it somewhere between 2004 and 2010. What was unique about that cast was they had the same taste collectively.
You didnt feel like any one person was dominating, even though some of those people were absolute all-timers. Just, collectively, the talent both on and beyond the show—I dont know that any cast can match that group, honestly.
**James Austin Johnson,** *cast member, 2021present:* Its the one that has Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Fred Armisen, Jason Sudeikis. Thats the best cast of *SNL.* I feel very comfortable saying it. Theres something really, really special about those years. Im in awe of their connection to each other when I see them in scenes together. They are so bonded. And that is what I tune in for, as a sketch-comedy enjoyer. It doesnt get better than “The Californians.” Theyre breaking because yes, its a silly, really fun sketch, but I mean, theyre breaking because they enjoy each other. And I think that that is sublime. Thats what Im always striving for, is a sublime moment. Thats me speaking very, very highly of what is, at its core, a very ridiculous sketch. But this is my lifes work, so Im happy to speak that elevatedly about it.
**Bill Hader,** *cast member, 200513:* I think its always the cast that you first saw. And so, for me it was 1986. I think maybe the first episode of *SNL* I remember watching was their first show, Sigourney Weaver hosting, and its when Dana Carvey sang “Chopping Broccoli.” I remember that vividly. I'm sure there was stuff I saw before then, like Billy Crystal and [Martin Short](https://www.gq.com/story/steve-martin-and-martin-short-friends-interview) and Eddie Murphy and all that. But the cast I latched onto was that one. and Eddie Murphy and all that. But the cast I latched onto was that one. Nora Dunn and Jan Hooks, who was so funny. Jan Hooks in the Judge Wapner sketch, with Rosanna Arquette, where she says, “I am a bar fly”? Thats funny.
**Ellen Cleghorne,** *cast member, 199195:* The all-time greatest cast, I would have to say, is the original, of course. But I want to be egotistically subjective and say that my era was the best. Chris Farley, [Adam Sandler,](https://www.gq.com/about/adam-sandler) David Spade, Kevin Nealon, Julia Sweeney.
**Devon Walker,** *cast member, 2022present:* Am I allowed to say its our cast? Truly—I know youre supposed to say it was the 70s cast, or the 90s cast. But I believe in what were doing at the show right now so much that, I dont know—Im going with our squad. Give me Dismukes and [Bowen Yang](https://www.gq.com/story/bowen-yang-saturday-night-live) and Sarah Sherman and James Austin Johnson and Ego Nwodim. Give me my starting five. I like our team. I believe in us a lot. My favorite era is the one we're in. Present day.
*Who was the single funniest cast member in* Saturday Night Live*s history?*
**Mark McKinney,** *writer, 198586; cast member, 199597:* I cant give you one. I cant. Theres just too many. No. I have to have at least 10. No—15. Write down that Im refusing to answer your question.
**Smigel:** [Bill Murray](https://www.gq.com/about/bill-murray). Hes also the funniest person Ive ever met—if I had a gun to my head, that was being held by Bill Murray.
**Newman:** There simply cant be a single funniest, but Id say in the original cast, Dan Aykroyd, in my opinion, was the funniest.
**Jim Belushi,** *cast member, 198385:* John. Absolutely. The greatest.
**Bowen Yang,** *writer, 201819; cast member, 2019present:* The one that set the model for all the future success of the show was probably Gilda Radner. She technically had the first recurring character, with Roseanne Roseannadanna. She had the first catchphrase with, “Its always something.” She came on and just set the blueprint. She literally is the blueprint for the show being successful, for individual people coming in and making the show successful, and having that translate across different eras of politics and culture and also comedy. Its still the working document, you know what I mean? And theres the tragedy there too—theres every part of human life.
NBC/Getty Images
**Rob Riggle,** *cast member, 200405:* I would say, on the Mt. Rushmore of that show, it has to be Eddie, it has to be Will \[Ferrell\], probably Belushi and probably Aykroyd. Ahh, God—thats not fair either, because Amy Poehler belongs up there too. Its going to be a big Rushmore. Its going to be like an eight-faced Rushmore.
**Amy Poehler,** *cast member, 200108:* Maya Rudolph.
**Chloe Fineman,** *cast member, 2019present*: I think Kate McKinnon is such a freak of nature. Shes a gift from the gods, in terms of, like, a truly uninhibited weirdo, who I was really lucky to get to be insane with.
**Chris Kattan,** *cast member, 19962003:* It has to be [Eddie Murphy](https://www.gq.com/about/eddie-murphy). He could do no wrong. Every character was hilarious, and theyre all so different, and he was so relaxed and so confident, and he just looked like he was having so much fun doing what he was doing.
**Piscopo:** Eddie. Far and away. Everybodys going to tell you that same answer, but I had the honor of creating with him. And I may be not objective in that regard, but Eddie Murphy, hands down.
**Taran Killam,** *cast member, 201016:* He was 19 years old and just had the confidence of maybe the most confident comedic performer in history. He just was undeniably funny. He was very cool. He wasnt afraid to be silly, but he was also very cool, which I found very appealing.
**Jay Pharoah,** *cast member, 201016:* Without a doubt, its Eddie Murphy. Come on.
**Alex Moffat,** *cast member, 201622:* Its got to be Murphy.
**Rock:** Eddie Murphy was the best, second best was Phil Hartman.
**Cleghorne:** Eddie Murphy. A close second for me is Chris Farley. Just ridiculously funny. \[Chris Farley voice\] *Van down by the river!* That ability to make anger really funny.
**Carvey:** Farley doing “In a van down by the river…” was the most explosively funny thing. You would never want your sketch to come on after that.
**Jay Mohr,** *cast member, 1993 95:* Chris Farley \[doing\] “Little Women” was the greatest sketch Ive ever seen in my life. Theyre all speaking this Victorian fancy-schmancy language. And then he falls through the ice and hes swearing at them.
But when it was over, he got up out of the water, out of the crack in the ice, and he put his fists up over his head, and the place erupted like a fighter leaving the octagon. And that was one of the more powerful things Ive ever seen in my life.
**Sarah Silverman,** *cast member, 199394:* Farley had been there three years and he was already a big star there. And I remember showing up for rehearsal on Thursday or Friday and sitting on the stage and I got there early and so did he. And he was like, *Can you believe it? Can you believe were on the same stage as John Belushi? I cant even believe it.* It really opened my eyes to being in the moment because I was kind of coming from a place, like so many comedians, of like, *Well, if I got the job, it couldnt be that great*. But it was, you know what I mean? He saw it that way and I thought that was really cool. It affected me to see him that grateful and still so excited.
**Davidson:** My favorite cast member and human being forever will always be the Sandman.
**Janeane Garofalo,** *cast member, 199495:* I cant answer that. I feel like its going to hurt somebodys feelings. Im going to go with Jan Hooks, goddamn it.
**Thompson:** I think most people would give it to Will Ferrell because hes one of the funniest people but also one of the nicest in the world.
**Cheri Oteri,** *cast member, 19952000:* Will Ferrell.
**Andy Samberg,** *cast member, 200512:* I mean, this is generational. I would say, I dont know about the funniest ever, but probably the hardest I laughed the most at one cast member personally is Ferrell.
I think Im just saying there was a moment in my life, when Ferrell was on fire on the show, that I was really keyed in, and he was speaking my language. It felt like he was talking right to me, with the way that him and McKay were writing.
**Walker:** [Tracy Morgan](https://www.gq.com/about/tracy-morgan). Give me Tracy. I love Tracy so much. Hes my favorite *SNL* cast member of all time. I dont think theres ever been anybody like him on the show before or since.You know what Im saying? Theres not two Tracy Morgans in the game. And I dont think there ever will be another one. He was just so delightfully weird in a way that really, really resonated. I hope to tap into just a tiny piece of what he found on the show.
NBC/Getty Images
**Sasheer Zamata,** *cast member, 201417:* Tracy came to host when I was there, and you know, he knows the show because he was on it for so long. But I remember he was in my office when I was writing. Maybe this was my first year or second year? I remember him \[and I\] having a really—not exactly a heart-to-heart—but just a moment of like, recognizing, “Hey, this is *hard*.” He was kind of giving me advice and saying theres definitely value in being grateful and appreciative of the job that youve been given, but after a while, you got to show your teeth and remind people why youre here, and kind of bring out that tiger in you.
I really loved that and took it to heart. I do feel like it changed my perspective of my energy there, and my time there. I feel like by the time I left I really was so comfortable saying how I felt and fighting for my ideas. I dont know if I would have gotten to that place if I didnt have someone say, like, “Oh, you can do this. Youre allowed.”
**Bobby Moynihan,** *cast member, 200817:* Quickly, two Tracy stories. The first time I ever met Tracy, when they opened the doors for the pitch meeting, I walked in and he was standing in the center of the room with his arms up in the air screaming, “*The Dark Horse has returne*d.” Then the next time I saw him, he was in the writers room and he had Colin Jost and he was screaming at Colin and a couple of the other of the writers, saying, “Man, if a girl disrespects you, you have to give her the butt.“ I dont know what that means, but that was what he was saying.
And then my last Tracy story: One night, for some reason, we all thought it would be funny to go to Dave and Busters on a Wednesday night at 9 p.m. We went there and Tracy Morgan was there. Hes like, “What are you guys doing here?” And we were like, “What are *you* doing here?” And hes like, “I come here every Wednesday.” He goes to the Dave and Busters in Times Square every Wednesday, if you want to meet him.
**Jane Wickline,** *cast member, 2024present:* Kristen Wiig. Shes just a genius.
**Tim Meadows,** *cast member, 19912000:* Kristen Wiig, probably. She does weird shit, she does character shit, and she just seems nuts, and I love that about her.
**Emil Wakim,** *cast member, 2024present:* Will Forte—every single word Will Forte says makes me laugh so hard.
**Killam:** Theres just an inherent kindness about Will, but no one is willing to commit harder or farther for the bit than Forte. I love his absurdity. I love the sort of deranged quality of his work. He can go from really, really sweet and unassuming to horribly, offensively dark.
**Hader:** I cant name one person. Theres so many people that made me laugh. Phil Hartman and Martin Short made me laugh so hard. Eddie Murphy, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph. Kristen Wiig made me laugh so much. Doing sketches with her was so impossible. Fred Armisen, Will Forte, Andy, Jason.
But if I had to pick one, I would just say Phil Hartman. When I got the show, I went, “I want to be like that guy. Just give me whatever, Ill play it the best I can, and I will serve your piece.” I didnt feel very confident as a writer, so I was like, Just whatever you put me in, Ill do the best job I can do in it, in making it funny and fun.“ And for the most part, I did that.
And then, by the end I was getting lazy and loose, and I would laugh a lot, and that was when I was like, “I should probably leave. Were having maybe a little bit too much fun.” Especially me and Fred—we would just start fucking with each other out there. And I was like, “Ah, maybe we should leave.”
**McKinney:** Hey—Ill pick a long horse. I loved Danitra Vance. She came to the show as a performance artist from Chicago and was funny and wise and is no longer with us. So Im going to tip my hat to her.
**Kevin Nealon,** *cast member, 198695:* Besides me?
*As told to Brittany Loggins, Gabriella Paiella, Alex Pappademas, and Zinya Salfiti.*
---
*SNL50: The Anniversary Special* airs at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT on Sunday, February 16, on NBC and Peacock. To read all of *GQ*s coverage of *Saturday Night Live*s 50th anniversary, [click here.](https://www.gq.com/about/saturday-night-live)
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# A 19-year-old Stanford phenom is blazing a new trail from Japan to the majors
STANFORD, Calif. — The dugout chatter for intrasquad games at the Sunken Diamond can be merciless.
The slings and arrows are nonstop when Stanford baseball players are pitted against one another. The guys wearing red jerseys shout streams of insults at players on the black team and vice versa. “Whoa, hey, Lukes got a new stance,” a player wearing a black jersey yells as freshman catcher Luke Lavin stands upright in the batters box, perhaps imitating the Chicago Cubs [Cody Bellinger](https://theathletic.com/mlb/player/cody-bellinger-C79P7luR8MM8ZftM/).
Lavin pops up the next pitch. *“Same swing, though!”*
But the tone changes when No. 3 for the black team, a husky teenager and early enrollee who wont begin his freshman season until next year, steps in the box. The good-natured ribbing gives way to full-throated encouragement from both sides. *Lets go Rintaro! Cmon Rintaro! Give it a ride, Rintaro!*
“We still cant believe hes here,” infielder Jimmy Nati said. “Were all fanboying him, for sure.”
Rintaro Sasaki is not the typical Stanford baseball recruit. Back home in Japan, he is a national celebrity, instantly recognizable almost anywhere he goes. Last year, Sasaki was the top-rated high school player in a country where high school baseball is a national obsession. The left-handed slugger was projected to be the most coveted name in last Octobers Nippon Professional Baseball draft. He mashed a national record 140 home runs, with twice as many walks as strikeouts, for Hanamaki-Higashi High School in Iwate Prefecture, the same school that produced [Los Angeles Dodgers](https://theathletic.com/mlb/team/dodgers/) superstar [Shohei Ohtani](https://theathletic.com/mlb/player/shohei-ohtani-PYXhWEdNdM6bQVDP/) and [Toronto Blue Jays](https://theathletic.com/mlb/team/jays/) left-hander [Yusei Kikuchi](https://theathletic.com/mlb/player/yusei-kikuchi-1W4GePfKB8OMgQX4/). Sasakis father, Hiroshi, coached all of them and is a legendary figure in his own right.
When Rintaro graduated from high school this past March, television stations dispatched more than 30 camera crews to cover the event.
It would be a last glimpse. Sasaki announced a few weeks prior to the NPB draft that he would not register for it. Instead, he would blaze a trail and play collegiate ball in the United States — a nearly unprecedented path that could fast-track him to [Major League Baseball](https://theathletic.com/mlb/) as a draft-eligible sophomore in 2026.
In February, Sasaki stunned Stanford coach David Esquer and recruiting coordinator Thomas Eager when he requested a Zoom call with them, asked a few logistical questions, then told them that he was selecting the Cardinal over Cal, UCLA, and Vanderbilt.
Sasaki arrived on campus at the beginning of April, moved into a dorm room and enrolled in three classes as a pre-freshman. He can participate in all team activities except playing in games. He practices and works out with his new teammates. On game days, he suits up, cheers them on from the dugout and eagerly takes part in all the pregame traditions. Hes gone on road trips to Utah and Oregon State. Hes surprised everyone with how much English he understands, and hes left them slack-jawed with his batting-practice shots over the light standards. When he turned 19 on April 18, his teammates took him out to a dinner that included ice cream, candles and tables of complete strangers joining in to sing “Happy Birthday.”
He is absolutely loving all of it.
“I made the right choice,” Sasaki said through interpreter and team trainer Tomoo Yamada. “People are nice to me. Everyone is my friend. I havent missed Japan yet. I feel completely settled. I cant believe its been only four weeks. Im enjoying life.”
![](https://cdn.theathletic.com/app/uploads/2024/04/29214618/45084241_Rintaro_Sasaki_JPL_03242024_00042-scaled.jpg)
Sasaki was a national star in high school, but his first month in California has largely been filled with normal college experiences. (Courtesy of Stanford Athletics)
---
Beyond the right field fence at Klein Field, past the scoreboard and a stand of trees, is the Avery Aquatic Center. Its where Olympic swimmer Katie Ledecky would lap the competition during her brief time as a Stanford student. As best as anyone can tell, thats where a couple of Sasakis tape-measure home runs have splashed down.
Everything about Sasaki is broad and powerful, a body rendered in letterbox format. He stands 6 feet and 250 pounds, and his full-tilt swing puts every ounce behind the baseball. He hits line drives to left field that dismiss gravity as they streak over the fence. His pull power is pure astonishment. The ear-splitting sound off his aluminum bat exceeds OSHA safety standards.
“He looks like Barry Bonds,” Nati said. “Thats how good hes going to be. When he runs into balls, he hits them over the light tower. Its crazy.
“The ball comes off different. You can close your eyes, hear the sound and know its him.”
In a simulated game at Stanford last Wednesday, Sasaki lined a single off the fence and crushed two homers. According to Trackman, the second homer traveled 422 feet, with an exit velocity of 111 mph.
“Hey Rintaro,” Esquer called out. “Youll need to get that one out of the swimming pool.”
“Swimming pool?” Sasaki replied, then nodded and laughed. He knew what the words meant. He just needed a second to process them.
Heres another word to add to his growing vocabulary: *Trailblazer*.
“Ah, pioneer?” Sasaki said in English. “Yes, I know it.”
If Sasaki had been drafted by an NPB team, he would have been under club control for nine years. Although Japanese pro teams often gain a windfall in posting fees by making their players available to MLB before their nine years are up, there are no guarantees. Sasaki might have been pushing 30 by the time he had an opportunity to play in the U.S.
He made it clear: His goal is to play in the major leagues.
“Ohtani and Kikuchi are already overseas,” Sasaki said. “I always thought one day, hopefully I can get there. They were big influences for me. Ohtani said, Follow your instinct. That is what you decided. That is a path you need to keep walking.'”
Sasakis path — to become MLB draft-eligible by attending an American university — has almost no precedent. [Rikuu Nishida](https://theathletic.com/mlb/player/rikuu-nishida-9TLGm5n6p0d7S0sz/), a speedy infielder from Sendai, was an 11th-round pick of the [Chicago White Sox](https://theathletic.com/mlb/team/whitesox/) last year after a standout season at the University of Oregon. But Nishida, who played two seasons at a junior college upon arriving in the U.S., was not an NPB draft prospect in Japan.
Although there are no written rules that would prohibit an MLB team from signing a Japanese high school player out of its international signing pool, theres been an unofficial understanding among teams against the practice. (Until 2020, when it rescinded its rule, NPB enforced a ban of two to three years on Japanese players who opted out of the draft and signed with a foreign league.)
Ohtani came close to setting a groundbreaking precedent as a high school phenom in 2012, when he advised NBP teams against drafting him, saying that he intended to sign with an MLB franchise. The Nippon Ham Fighters took him anyway, then persuaded him to sign by promising to let him develop as a two-way player.
NPB teams had no such hope of signing Sasaki, who ensured that he would be taken off the NPB draft board by attending an American university. Now he will have two seasons to improve his conditioning and address weaknesses in his game before turning pro.
The chance to develop in less of a fishbowl environment was appealing to Sasaki and his father, as well.
“In Japan, people tend to focus more on shortcomings. But in the U.S., they develop individuality,” Hiroshi Sasaki [told CNN](https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/30/asia/ohtani-kikuchi-japan-baseball-prodigy-intl-hnk/index.html) in March.  “I think this is a very good choice for him.”
It is a choice that involves financial risk and delayed gratification. As a first-round pick in NPB, Sasaki likely would have received a signing bonus and incentives worth more than $1 million, plus personal services contracts that could have earned him hundreds of thousands more. At Stanford, of course, he is merely a student-athlete on scholarship. He also cannot participate in NIL opportunities while on U.S. soil because he is an international player on a student visa.
He would earn a multimillion bonus if he is a first-round pick in 2026, but that is far from assured. Because he is limited to first base and his defensive skills are unpolished, his bat must be compelling. And although he faced top high school competition in Japan, advancing to the Best Eight at the famed Koshien tournament last year, he mostly hit against pitchers who threw in the upper 80s.
He is betting on himself. And on Stanford to help him develop his gifts.
“I had the confidence to come to the States,” Sasaki said. “Right now I want to settle in here, take classes and do well. Take one step at a time. And two years from today, well see where I am at. Getting to the major leagues is not everything for my life. Of course I want to get drafted and get to the major leagues. But I want to keep studying and also be a good person.”
Does that make him a pioneer? He shrugged. Thats for others to decide.
“Hes showing a lot of courage to come here spring quarter, practice on a daily basis with a college team and look so comfortable,” Esquer said. “He wants to get an education and maybe become an entrepreneur, but hes also told us that he wants to leave a mark and blaze a trail for Japanese players to come here and play college baseball. Eighteen-year-old kids dont normally think that way.
“He grew up with Ohtani. Hes seen the standard of what it takes to be great.”
If Sasaki becomes a top MLB draft prospect two years from now, hes likely to be regarded as the baseball player who upended an entire system — something that even Ohtani could not accomplish.
Ohtani, asked about his influence on Sasakis decision, said he merely offered support and encouragement.
“I didnt really offer any advice or anything like that,” Ohtani said through Dodgers interpreter Will Ireton. “Making the best decision usually comes from being convicted. Ive made decisions like that in the past as well. I feel like thats the decision he made from his conviction.”
![](https://cdn.theathletic.com/app/uploads/2024/04/29210433/Screenshot-2024-04-13-at-4.56.17-PM-e1714439137556.png)
Sasaki (right) has known Ohtani since he was young, and has turned to the megastar for advice over the years. (Courtesy of the Sasaki family)
---
Esquer and his coaches still have trouble believing Sasaki is here.
Stanford was a late entrant when the recruitment process began last year. Sasaki took unofficial visits to Vanderbilt, Duke, UCLA and Cal — he also attended a [Giants](https://theathletic.com/mlb/team/sf-giants/) game at Oracle Park — but did not go to Palo Alto. At the time, there wasnt a spot for him at Stanford, which allows a strict number of admissions per sport. Then two Cardinal players entered the transfer portal and a few others de-committed.
Suddenly, Stanford had a spot — and plenty of interest.
“We were playing catch-up, to be honest with you,” said Eager, who is the teams pitching coach as well as recruiting coordinator. “In the Japanese culture, because we werent involved in the first go-around, we didnt know if they would take it as a sign of disrespect. We hoped to explain that this is just how it operates here. We liked him all along. And we had a good official visit in January. But I tell you what, I did not think we were getting him.”
The official visit included meet-and-greets with three Stanford alums who are major leaguers: [Chicago Cubs](https://theathletic.com/mlb/team/cubs/) second baseman [Nico Hoerner](https://theathletic.com/mlb/player/nico-hoerner-Kuwj5u6wl0Zejo84/), [Kansas City Royals](https://theathletic.com/mlb/team/royals/) pitcher [Kris Bubic](https://theathletic.com/mlb/player/kris-bubic-BS13R3Nbm6cptfCh/) and San Francisco Giants pitcher [Tristan Beck](https://theathletic.com/mlb/player/tristan-beck-FKypLOG4plywtbHr/). Hoerner drew on his experience playing with Japanese outfielder [Seiya Suzuki](https://theathletic.com/mlb/player/seiya-suzuki-2K0ed4mlUN93bC3A/) in Chicago while encouraging Sasaki to make sure he could continue the routines that are important to him.
“You can do your best to put yourself in someones shoes, but it is a totally different experience what hes going to be doing,” Hoerner said. “The adjustment to college, even for myself, driving 45 minutes from where I grew up, was really different. Doing that with a language barrier, taking classes, and the whole schedule is a lot.
“In pro ball, youre in charge of your own career at the end of the day. But a lot of times in college, youre pretty much subject to whatever the program believes in. So I just felt it was really important to stress that whatever it is that makes him tick as a player, hed be able to continue to do that. Because not all college programs would really be (OK) with that. And I did feel like Stanford, with the staff that they have, are there for whatever the players need.”
Esquer knew what was at stake, even beyond adding a potential impact hitter. If Sasaki chose Stanford, it would enhance the universitys already prestigious international brand. And if Sasaki became the first arrival that breaks a dam, perhaps the pipeline of talent from Japan would lead directly to the Sunken Diamond.
Sasakis visit was thorough but not ostentatious. The team hired a taco truck to cater a post-practice party. Several players remarked that they saw Esquer wearing a suit for the first time. Mostly, Esquer hoped to convey that Sasaki would have every resource to develop as a player and person.
“My promise to you is that were going to take care of your son,” Esquer told Hiroshi Sasaki. “Were going to coach him and help him get better, but also were going to make sure hes well looked after.”
Beck laughed when he recalled his recruiting visit more than a decade ago. No taco trucks, no meetings with trustees, no coaches in suits. But he remembered one thing someone told him that might have resonated with an international celebrity like Sasaki.
“One of the adages I heard before I enrolled was, Dont worry about being bothered, because the most famous people here dont play sports at all,'” Beck said. “The most interesting people here arent even athletes, even with people like Andrew Luck walking around campus.
“He did mention his favorite team was the Giants, which is sweet. I made sure he said that a couple more times so Nico and Kris were sure to hear it.”
![](https://cdn.theathletic.com/app/uploads/2024/04/29221823/46157938_Rintaro-Sasaki_JPL_04112024_00052-scaled.jpg)
Sasaki was projected to be a top pick in the NBP draft after hitting a national record 140 home runs in high school. (Courtesy of Stanford Athletics)
---
You might assume that Sasaki wants to become the next Ohtani. But theres another home run hitter that he has spent his life emulating.
“I dont know how far I can go, but I respect Barry Bonds a lot,” Sasaki said. “(To) one day get to be as close as possible to Barry Bonds — that is my goal.”
Bonds, and not Shohei?
“Ever since I was in elementary school, I was watching Barry Bonds,” Sasaki said. “Ohtani was one of my mentors. Sometimes I communicate with him and get advice. But Barry Bonds was my ultimate goal since I was little. Dont misunderstand. I respect Shohei and Barry Bonds both.
“When Bonds got in the batters box, people expected to see something big or something special. I want to be like that.”
> Rintaro Sasaki, my goodness.
>
> Wish we couldve seen this swing in NPB but Im confident hes going to blossom into a superstar. [pic.twitter.com/ifkODlbc2g](https://t.co/ifkODlbc2g)
>
> — Yakyu Cosmopolitan (@yakyucosmo) [April 30, 2024](https://twitter.com/yakyucosmo/status/1785342803008159893?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)
For now, Sasaki just wants to be a good teammate and fit in. He is taking a language skills class with other international students, but his other two courses, including an introductory class in human biology, are in English. He understands more than he can speak, but baseball tends to operate with its own universal language. When Yamada, the trainer, returned to Japan for a week, Sasaki appeared to manage just fine. If Sasaki gets stuck on a word, bullpen catcher Michael Fung, who is minoring in East Asian Studies and spent time last year studying in Stanfords overseas program in Kyoto, is usually able to help bridge any language gap.
Sasaki declined Esquers offer of a full-time interpreter, saying he would chip away at the language barrier faster with the help of his teammates.
“It fired us up to hear that,” said Lavin, who has become one of Sasakis more steady companions. “Because it seems hes really bought into the teams culture and being around us. Hes a normal teammate here. You cant tell from talking to him that hes super famous. He has not brought it up once, how many people know his name.”
Still, Sasaki is likely to draw crowds very soon. The word is just beginning to trickle out that he is on campus. At a recent game at Santa Clara University, two dozen Japanese baseball fans waited outside the ballpark so they could meet Sasaki and take pictures with him. Stanford officials are gearing up for more attention, more media and more fans.
For now, his competition is limited to those spirited intrasquad games. A couple of his teammates already feel comfortable enough to engage in a bit of sarcastic banter. And theyve learned that Sasaki is already comfortable enough to dish it right back.
“We were at Oregon State and Im watching him flick home runs the other way,” Lavin said. “So I said to him, Ah, its just the wind. Then the wind died down and he started hitting pull-side homers over the stands.
“And he looked at me and said, Its not the wind.'”
**The Athletic*****s Fabian Ardaya and Patrick Mooney contributed to this story.*** 
*(Top image: Sean Reilly /* The Athletic*; Photos: Courtesy of Stanford Athletics)*
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# A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It?
Last August, Lucy Letby, a thirty-three-year-old British nurse, was convicted of killing seven newborn babies and attempting to kill six others. Her murder trial, one of the longest in English history, lasted more than ten months and captivated the United Kingdom. The *Guardian*, which published more than a [hundred](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/lucy-letby) stories about the case, called her “one of the most notorious female murderers of the last century.” The collective acceptance of her guilt was absolute. “She has thrown open the door to Hell,” the *Daily Mail* wrote, “and the stench of evil overwhelms us all.”
The case galvanized the British government. The Health Secretary immediately announced an inquiry to examine how Letbys hospital had failed to protect babies. After Letby refused to attend her sentencing hearing, the Justice Secretary said that hed work to change the law so that defendants would be required to go to court to be sentenced. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, said, “Its cowardly that people who commit such horrendous crimes do not face their victims.”
The public conversation rushed forward without much curiosity about an incongruous aspect of the story: Letby appeared to have been a psychologically healthy and happy person. She had many close friends. Her nursing colleagues spoke highly of her care and dedication. A detective with the Cheshire police, which led the investigation, said, “This is completely unprecedented in that there doesnt seem to be anything to say” about why Letby would kill babies. “There isnt really anything we have found in her background thats anything other than normal.”
The judge in her case, James Goss, acknowledged that Letby appeared to have been a “very conscientious, hard working, knowledgeable, confident and professional nurse.” But he also said that she had embarked on a “calculated and cynical campaign of child murder,” and he sentenced her to life, making her only the fourth woman in U.K. history condemned to die in prison. Although her punishment cant be increased, she will face a second trial, this June, on an attempted-murder charge for which the jury could not reach a verdict.
Letby had worked on a struggling neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital, run by the National Health Service, in the West of England, near Wales. The case centered on a cluster of seven deaths, between June, 2015, and June, 2016. All but one of the babies were premature; three of them weighed less than three pounds. No one ever saw Letby harming a child, and the coroner did not find foul play in any of the deaths. (Since her arrest, Letby has not made any public comments, and a court order has prohibited most reporting on her case. To describe her experiences, I drew from more than seven thousand pages of court transcripts, which included police interviews and text messages, and from internal hospital records that were leaked to me.)
The case against her gathered force on the basis of a single diagram shared by the police, which circulated widely in the media. On the vertical axis were twenty-four “suspicious events,” which included the deaths of the seven newborns and seventeen other instances of babies suddenly deteriorating. On the horizontal axis were the names of thirty-eight nurses who had worked on the unit during that time, with Xs next to each suspicious event that occurred when they were on shift. Letby was the only nurse with an uninterrupted line of Xs below her name. She was the “one common denominator,” the “constant malevolent presence when things took a turn for the worse,” one of the prosecutors, Nick Johnson, told the jury in his opening statement. “If you look at the table overall the picture is, we suggest, self-evidently obvious. Its a process of elimination.”
But the chart didnt account for any other factors influencing the mortality rate on the unit. Letby had become the countrys most reviled woman—“the unexpected face of evil,” as the British magazine *Prospect* put it—largely because of that unbroken line. It gave an impression of mathematical clarity and coherence, distracting from another possibility: that there had never been any crimes at all.
Since Letby was a teen-ager, she had wanted to be a nurse. “Shed had a difficult birth herself, and she was very grateful for being alive to the nurses that would have helped save her life,” her friend Dawn Howe told the BBC. An only child, Letby grew up in Hereford, a city north of Bristol. In high school, she had a group of close friends who called themselves the “miss-match family”: they were dorky and liked to play games such as Cranium and Twister. Howe described Letby as the “most kind, gentle, soft friend.” Another friend said that she was “joyful and peaceful.”
Letby was the first person in her family to go to college. She got a nursing degree from the University of Chester, in 2011, and began working on the neonatal unit at the Countess of Chester Hospital, where she had trained as a student nurse. Chester was a hundred miles from Hereford, and her parents didnt like her being so far away. “I feel very guilty for staying here sometimes but its what I want,” she told a colleague in a text message. She described the nursing team at the Countess as “like a little family.” She spent her free time with other nurses from the unit, often appearing in pictures on Facebook in flowery outfits and lip gloss, with sparkling wine in her hand and a guileless smile. She had straight blond hair, the color washing out as she aged, and she was unassumingly pretty.
The unit for newborns was built in 1974, and it was outdated and cramped. In 2012, the Countess launched a campaign to raise money to build a new one, a process that ended up taking nine years. “Neonatal intensive care has improved in recent years but requires more equipment which we have very little space for,” Stephen Brearey, the head of the unit, told the Chester *Standard*. “The risks of infection for the babies is greater, the closer they are to each other.” There were also problems with the drainage system: the pipes in both the neonatal ward and the maternity ward often leaked or were blocked, and sewage occasionally backed up into the toilets and sinks.
The staff were also overtaxed. Seven senior pediatricians, called consultants, did rounds on the unit, but only one was a neonatologist—a specialist in the care of newborns. An inquest for a newborn who died in 2014, a year before the deaths for which Letby was charged, found that doctors had inserted a breathing tube into the babys esophagus rather than his trachea, ignoring several indications that the tube was misplaced. “I find it surprising these signs were not realised,” the coroner said, according to the *Daily Express*. The boys mother told the paper that “staff shortages meant blood tests and X-rays were not assessed for seven hours and there was one doctor on duty who was splitting his time between the neonatal ward and the childrens ward.”
The N.H.S. has a totemic status in the British psyche—its the “closest thing the English have to a religion,” as one politician has put it. One of the last remnants of the postwar social contract, it inspires loyalty and awe even as it has increasingly broken down, partly as a result of years of underfunding. In 2015, the infant-mortality rate in England and Wales rose for the first time in a century. A survey found that two-thirds of the countrys neonatal units did not have enough medical and nursing staff. That year, the Countess treated more babies than it had in previous years, and they had, on average, lower birth weights and more complex medical needs. Letby, who lived in staff housing on the hospital grounds, was twenty-five years old and had just finished a six-month course to become qualified in neonatal intensive care. She was one of only two junior nurses on the unit with that training. “We had massive staffing issues, where people were coming in and doing extra shifts,” a senior nurse on the unit said. “It was mainly Lucy that did a lot.” She was young, single, and saving to buy a house. That year, when a friend suggested that she take some time off, Letby texted her, “Work is always my priority.”
In June, 2015, three babies died at the Countess. First, a woman with antiphospholipid syndrome, a rare disorder that can cause blood clotting, was admitted to the hospital. She was thirty-one weeks pregnant with twins, and had planned to give birth in London, so that a specialist could monitor her and the babies, but her blood pressure had quickly risen, and she had to have an emergency C-section at the Countess. The next day, Letby was asked to cover a colleagues night shift. She was assigned one of the twins, a boy, who has been called Child A. (The court order forbade identifying the children, their parents, and some nurses and doctors.) A nursing note from the day shift said that the baby had had “no fluids running for a couple of hours,” because his umbilical catheter, a tube that delivers fluids through the abdomen, had twice been placed in the wrong position, and “doctors busy.” A junior doctor eventually put in a longline, a thin tube threaded through a vein, and Letby and another nurse gave the child fluid. Twenty minutes later, Letby and a third nurse, a few feet away, noticed that his oxygen levels were dropping and that his skin was mottled. The doctor who had inserted the longline worried that he had placed it too close to the childs heart, and he immediately took it out. But, less than ninety minutes after Letby started her shift, the baby was dead. “It was awful,” she wrote to a colleague afterward. “He died very suddenly and unexpectedly just after handover.”
A pathologist observed that the baby had “crossed pulmonary arteries,” a structural anomaly, and there was also a “strong temporal relationship” between the insertion of the longline and the collapse. The pathologist described the cause of death as “unascertained.”
Letby was on duty again the night after Child As death. At around midnight, she helped the nurse who had been assigned to the surviving twin, a girl, set up her I.V. bag. About twenty-five minutes later, the babys skin became purple and blotchy, and her heart rate dropped. She was resuscitated and recovered. Brearey, the units leader, told me that at the time he wondered if the twins had been more vulnerable because of the mothers disorder; antibodies for it can pass through the placenta.
The next day, a mother who had been diagnosed as having a dangerous placenta condition gave birth to a baby boy who weighed one pound, twelve ounces, which was on the edge of the weight threshold that the unit was certified to treat. Within four days, the baby developed acute pneumonia. Letby was not working in the intensive-care nursery, where the baby was treated, but after the childs oxygen alarm went off she came into the room to help. Yet the staff on the unit couldnt save the baby. A pathologist determined that he had died of natural causes.
Several days later, a woman came to the hospital after her water broke. She was sent home and told to wait. More than twenty-four hours later, she noticed that the baby was making fewer movements inside her. “I was concerned for infection because I hadnt been given any antibiotics,” she said later. She returned to the hospital, but she still wasnt given antibiotics. She felt “forgotten by the staff, really,” she said. Sixty hours after her water broke, she had a C-section. The baby, a girl who was dusky and limp when she was born, should have been treated with antibiotics immediately, doctors later acknowledged, but nearly four hours passed before she was given the medication. The next night, the babys oxygen alarm went off. “Called Staff Nurse Letby to help,” a nurse wrote. The baby continued to deteriorate throughout the night and could not be revived. A pathologist found pneumonia in the babys lungs and wrote that the infection was likely present at birth.
“We lost \[her\],” Letby texted a close friend Ill call Margaret, a shift leader on the unit. Margaret had mentored Letby when she was a student training on the ward.
“What!!!!! But she was improving,” Margaret replied. “What happened? Wanna chat? I cant believe you were on again. Youre having such a tough time.”
Letby told Margaret that the circumstances of the death might be investigated.
“What, the delay in treatment?”
“Just overall,” she said. “And reviewing what antibiotics she was on, etc., if it is sepsis.” Letby wrote that she was still in shock. “Feel a bit numb.”
“Oh hun, you need a break,” Margaret said. Reflecting on the first of the three deaths, Margaret told her that the babys parents would always grieve the loss of their child but that, because of the way Letby had cared for him, theyd hopefully have no regrets about the time they spent with their son. “Just trying to help you take the positives you deserve from tough times,” Margaret wrote. “Always here. Speak later. Sleep well xxx.”
A few days later, Letby couldnt stop crying. “Its all hit me,” she texted another friend from the unit. She wrote that two of the deaths seemed comprehensible (one was “tiny, obviously compromised in utero,” and the other seemed septic, she wrote), but “its \[Child A\] I cant get my head around.”
The senior pediatricians met to review the deaths, to see if there were any patterns or mistakes. “One of the problems with neonatal deaths is that preterm babies can die suddenly and you dont always get the answer immediately,” Brearey told me. A study of about a thousand infant deaths in southeast London, published in *The Journal of Maternal-Fetal & Neonatal Medicine*, found that the cause of mortality was unexplained for about half the newborns who had died unexpectedly, even after an autopsy. Brearey observed that Letby was involved in each of the deaths at the Countess, but “it didnt sound to me like the odds were that extreme of having a nurse present for three of those cases,” he said. “Nobody had any concerns about her practice.”
The head of the pediatrics department, Ravi Jayaram, told me, “There was an element of Thank God Lucy was on, because shes really good in a crisis.” He described Letby as “very popular” among the nurses. To make sense of the events, Jayaram said, “you sort of think, Well, maybe the baby wasnt as stable as we thought, and maybe that longline was in just a bit far, and it got into the heart and caused a heart-rhythm problem. You try and make things fit, because we like to have an explanation—for us and for the parents—and its much harder to say, Im sorry. I dont know what went on.’ ”
Four months later, another baby died. She had been born at twenty-seven weeks, just past the age that the unit treated. At one point, she was transferred to another hospital, called Arrowe Park, for more specialized care—she had an infection and a small bleed in her brain—but after two nights she returned to the Countess, where her condition deteriorated. Brearey told me, “Senior nursing staff were blaming the neonatal unit that sent back the baby, saying that they hadnt been entirely honest, that they were just trying to clear a space.” The babys mother worried that the staff at the Countess were too busy to pay proper attention to her daughter. She recalled that a nurse named Nicky was “sneezing and coughing whilst putting her hands in \[the babys\] incubator.” She added, “To top it off, whilst Nicky was in the room, the doctor, who was seeing another baby, asked Nicky if she was full of a cold, to which she said, Yeah, Ive been full of it for days. So even the doctors were aware and didnt do anything.” In a survey the next year of more than a thousand staff members at the Countess, about two-thirds said that they had felt pressure to come to work even when they were ill. (None of the hospitals mentioned in this piece would comment, citing the court order.)
The staff tried to send the girl to a specialized unit at a different hospital, but, while they were waiting to confirm the transfer, she began struggling to breathe. Her designated nurse was not yet trained in intensive care, and she shouted for help. Letby, who had been assigned to a different baby, came into the room, followed by two doctors, but the baby continued to decline and could not be revived.
A doctor later saw Letby crying with another nurse. “It was very much on the gist of Its always me when it happens, my babies,’ ” the doctor said, adding that this seemed like a normal reaction. Letby texted Margaret that she had spoken with the neonatal-unit manager, Eirian Powell, who had encouraged her to “be confident in my role without feeling the need to prove myself, which I have felt recently.”
Three of the nurses on the ward attended the babys funeral, and Letby gave them a card addressed to the childs parents. “It was a real privilege to care for \[her\] and to get to know you as a family, a family who always put \[her\] first and did everything possible for her,” she wrote. “She will always be a part of your lives and we will never forget her. Thinking of you today and always.”
Jayaram, who was on duty during the girls death, discussed the events with Brearey and another pediatrician. “ You know whats funny?’ ” he said that he told them. “ It was Lucy Letby who was on. And we all looked at each other and said, You know, its always Lucy, isnt it?’ ”
They shared their concerns about the correlation with senior management, and Powell conducted an informal review. “I have devised a document to reflect the information clearly and it is unfortunate she was on,” she wrote to Brearey. “However each cause of death was different.”
The next month, Letby, who was in a salsa group, got out of class and saw three missed calls: the nurses on the unit had called her because they didnt know how to give a baby intravenous immunoglobulin treatment. “Just cant believe that some people were in a position when they dont know how to give something, what equipment to use and not being supported by manager,” Letby texted her best friend, a nurse Ill call Cheryl. “Staffing really needs looking at.” She described the unit as “chaos” and a “madhouse.”
One of the senior pediatricians, Alison Timmis, was similarly distressed. She e-mailed the hospitals chief executive, Tony Chambers, to complain that staff on the unit were “chronically overworked” and “no one is listening.” She wrote, “Over the past few weeks I have seen several medical and nursing colleagues in tears.” Doctors were working shifts that ran more than twenty hours, she explained, and the unit was so busy that “at several points we ran out of vital equipment such as incubators.” At another point, a midwife had to assist with a resuscitation, because there werent enough trained nurses. “This is now our normal working pattern and it is not safe,” Timmis wrote. “Things are stretched thinner and thinner and are at breaking point. When things snap, the casualties will either be childrens lives or the mental and physical health of our staff.”
At the end of January, 2016, the senior pediatricians met with a neonatologist at a nearby hospital, to review the wards mortality data. In 2013 and 2014, the unit had had two and three deaths, respectively. In 2015, there had been eight. At the meeting, “there were a few learning points, nothing particularly exciting,” Brearey recalled. Near the end, he asked the neonatologist what he thought about the fact that Letby was present for each death. “I cant remember him suggesting anything, really,” Brearey said.
But Jayaram and Brearey were increasingly troubled by the link. “It was like staring at a Magic Eye picture,” Jayaram told me. “At first, its just a load of dots,” and the dots are incoherent. “But you stare at them, and all of a sudden the picture appears. And then, once you can see that picture, you see it every time you look, and you think, How the hell did I miss that?” By the spring of 2016, he said, he could not “unsee it.”
Many of the deaths had occurred at night, so Powell, the unit manager, shifted Letby primarily to day shifts, because there would be “more people about to be able to support her,” she said.
In June, 2016, three months after the change, Cheryl texted Letby before a shift, “I wouldnt come in!”
“Oh, why?” Letby responded.
“Five admissions, 1 vent.”
“OMG,” Letby responded.
Cheryl added that a premature boy with hemophilia looked “like shit.” His oxygen levels had dropped during the night. Letby took over his care that morning, and doctors tried to intubate him, but they were unable to insert the tube, so they called two anesthesiologists, who couldnt do it, either. The hospital didnt have any factor VIII, an essential medicine for hemophiliacs. Finally, they asked a team from Alder Hey Childrens Hospital, which was thirty miles away, to come to the hospital with factor VIII. A doctor from Alder Hey intubated the child on the first try. “Sat having a quiet moment and want to cry,” Letby wrote to a junior doctor, whom Ill call Taylor, who had become a close friend. “Just feel like Ive been running around all day and not really achieved anything positive for him.”
A week later, a mother gave birth to identical triplet boys, born at thirty-three weeks. When she was pregnant, the mother said, she had been told that each baby would have his own nurse, but Letby, who had just returned from a short trip to Spain with friends, was assigned two of the triplets, as well as a third baby from a different family. She was also training a student nurse who was “glued to me,” she complained to Taylor. Seven hours into Letbys shift, one of the triplets oxygen levels dropped precipitously, and he developed a rash on his chest. Letby called for help. After two rounds of CPR, the baby died.
The next day, Letby was the designated nurse for the two surviving triplets. The abdomen of one of them appeared distended, a possible sign of infection. When she told Taylor, he messaged her, “I wonder if theyve all been exposed to a bug that benzylpenicillin and gentamicin didnt account for? Are you okay?”
“Im okay, just dont want to be here really,” Letby replied. The student nurse was still with her, and Letby told Taylor, “I dont feel Im in the frame of mind to support her properly.”
A doctor came to check on the triplet with the distended abdomen, and, while he was in the room, the childs oxygen levels dropped. The baby was put on a ventilator, and the hospital asked for a transport team to take him to Liverpool Womens Hospital. As they were waiting, it was discovered that the baby had a collapsed lung, possibly a result of pressure from the ventilation, which was set unusually high. “There was an increasing sense of anxiety on the unit,” Letby said later. “Nobody seemed to know what was happening and very much just wanted the transport team to come and offer their expertise.” The triplets mother said that she was alarmed when she saw a doctor sitting at a computer “Googling how to do what looked like a relatively simple medical procedure: inserting a line into the chest.” She was also upset that one of the doctors who was resuscitating her son was “coughing and spluttering into her hands” without washing them. Shortly after the transport team arrived, the second triplet died. His mother recalled that Letby was “in pieces and almost as upset as we were.”
While dressing the baby for his parents—a standard part of helping grieving families—Letby accidentally pricked her finger with a needle. She hadnt eaten or taken a break all day, and as she was waiting to get her finger checked she fainted. “The overall enormity of the last two days had sort of taken its toll,” she said. “To imagine what those parents had gone through to lose two of their babies, it was harrowing.”
The surviving triplet was taken to Liverpool Womens Hospital, and his mother felt that the clinical staff there were more competent and organized. “The two hospitals were as different as night and day,” she said.
That night, Brearey called Karen Rees, the head of nursing for urgent care, and said that he did not want Letby returning until there was an investigation. The babies deaths seemed to be following Letby from night to day. Rees discussed the issue with Powell, and she said that Powell told her, “Lucy Letby does everything by the book. She follows policy and procedure to the letter.” Rees allowed Letby to keep working. “Just because a senior healthcare professional requests the removal of a nurse—there has to be sound reason,” Rees said later.
The next day, Letby was assigned a baby boy, known as Child Q, who had a bowel infection. At one point, he was sent to Alder Hey, but he was transferred back within two days. Taylor texted Letby that Alder Hey was “so short of beds that they can only accommodate emergency patients. Its not good holistic care, and its rubbish for his parents.”
Letby was also taking care of another newborn in a different room, and, while she was checking on that baby, Child Q vomited and his oxygen levels dropped. After he stabilized, John Gibbs, a senior pediatrician, asked another nurse which staff members had been present during the episode.
“Do I need to be worried about what Dr Gibbs was asking?” Letby texted Taylor after her shift.
“No,” he reassured her. “You cant be with two babies in different nurseries at the same time, let alone predict when theyre going to crash.”
“I know, and I didnt leave him on his own. They both knew I was leaving the room,” she said, referring to a nurse inside the room and one just outside.
“Nobody has accused you of neglecting a baby or causing a deterioration,” he said.
“I know. Just worry I havent done enough.”
“How?” he asked.
“Weve lost two babies I was caring for and now this happened today. Makes you think am I missing something/good enough,” she said.
“Lucy, if anyone knows how hard youve worked over the last 3 days its me,” he wrote. “If anybody says anything to you about not being good enough or performing adequately I want you to promise me that youll give my details to provide a statement.”
“Well I sincerely hope I wont ever be needing a statement,” she said. “But thank you. I promise.”
Letby was supposed to work the next night, but at the last minute Powell called and told her not to come in. “Im worried Im in trouble or something,” Letby wrote to Cheryl.
“How can you be in trouble?” Cheryl replied. “You havent done anything wrong.”
“I know but worrying in case they think I missed something or whatever,” Letby said. “Why leave it until now to ring?”
“Its very late, I agree,” Cheryl said. “Maybe shes getting pressure from elsewhere.”
“She was nice enough, I just worry,” Letby responded. “This job messes with your head.”
Letby worked three more day shifts and then had a two-week vacation. Brearey, Jayaram, and a few other pediatric consultants met to discuss the unexpected deaths. “We were trying to rack our brains,” Brearey said. A postmortem X-ray of one of the babies had shown gas near the skull, a finding that the pathologist did not consider particularly meaningful, since gas is often present after death. Jayaram remembered learning in medical school about air embolisms—a rare, potentially catastrophic complication that can occur when air bubbles enter a persons veins or arteries, blocking blood supply. That night, he searched for literature about the phenomenon. He did not see any cases of murder by air embolism, but he forwarded his colleagues a four-page paper, from 1989, in the *Archives of Disease in Childhood*, about accidental air embolism. The authors of the paper could find only fifty-three cases in the world. All but four of the infants had died immediately. In five cases, their skin became discolored. “I remember the physical chill that went down my spine,” Jayaram said. “It fitted with what we were seeing.”
Jayaram and another pediatrician met with the hospitals executive board, as well as with the medical and nursing directors, and said that they were not comfortable working with Letby. They suggested calling the police. Jayaram said that the board members asked them, “ Whats the evidence? And we said, We havent got evidence, but weve got concerns.’ ” To relieve the general burden on the unit, the directors and the board decided to downgrade the ward from Level II to Level I: it would no longer provide intensive care, and women delivering before thirty-two weeks would now go to a different hospital. The board also agreed to commission a review by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, to explore what factors might explain the rise in mortality.
After Letby returned from vacation, she was called in for a meeting. The deputy director of nursing told her that she was the common element in the cluster of deaths, and that her clinical competence would need to be reassessed. “She was distraught,” Powell, the unit manager, who was also at the meeting, said. “We were both quite upset.” They walked straight from the meeting to human resources. “We were trying to get Lucy back on the unit, so we had to try and prove that the competency issue wasnt the problem,” Powell said.
But Letby never returned to clinical duties. She was eventually moved to an administrative role in the hospitals risk-and-safety office. Jayaram described the office as “almost an island of lost souls. If there was a nurse who wasnt very good clinically, or a manager who they wanted to get out of the way, theyd move them to the risk-and-safety office.”
After shed been away from clinical duties for more than a month, Letby texted Cheryl that shed spoken with her union representative, who had advised her not to communicate with other staff, since they might be involved in reviewing her competence. “Feel a bit like Im being shoved in a corner and forgotten about,” she wrote. “Its my life and career.”
“I know its all so ridiculous,” Cheryl said.
“I cant see where it will all end.”
“Im sure this time after Christmas itll all be a distant memory,” Cheryl reassured her.
In September, 2016, Letby filed a grievance, saying that shed been removed from her job without a clear explanation. “My whole world was stopped,” she said later. She was diagnosed with depression and anxiety and began taking medication. “From a self-confidence point of view it completely—well, it made me question everything about myself,” she said. “I just felt like Id let everybody down, that Id let myself down, that people were changing their opinion of me.”
That month, a team from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health spent two days interviewing people at the Countess. They found that nursing- and medical-staffing levels were inadequate. They also noted that the increased mortality rate in 2015 was not restricted to the neonatal unit. Stillbirths on the maternity ward were elevated, too.
A redacted portion of the report, which was shared with me, described how staff on the unit were “very upset” that Letby had been removed from clinical duties. The Royal College team interviewed Letby and described her as “an enthusiastic, capable and committed nurse” who was “passionate about her career and keen to progress.” The redacted section concluded that the senior pediatricians had made allegations based on “simple correlation” and “gut feeling,” and that they had a “subjective view with no other evidence.” The Royal College could find no obvious factors linking the deaths; the report noted that the circumstances on the unit were “not materially different from those which might be found in many other neonatal units within the UK.” In a public statement, the hospital acknowledged that the review had revealed problems with “staffing, competencies, leadership, team working and culture.”
In November, Jayaram was interviewed by an administrator investigating Letbys grievance. There had been reports of pediatricians referring to an “angel of death” on the ward, and the interview focussed on whether Jayaram had made his suspicions publicly known.
“Did you hear any suggestion that Lucy had been deliberately harming babies?” the administrator asked Jayaram, according to minutes of the interview.
“No objective evidence to suggest this at all,” Jayaram responded. “The only association was Lucys presence on the unit at the time.”
“So to clarify, was there any suggestion from any of the consultant team that Lucy had been deliberately harming babies?”
“We discussed a lot of possibilities in private,” he responded.
“So thats not a yes or no?”
“We discussed a lot of possibilities in private,” Jayaram repeated.
The hospital upheld Letbys grievance. At a board meeting in January, 2017, Chambers, the chief executive, who was formerly a nurse, told the members, “We are seeking an apology from the consultants for their behavior.” He wanted Letby back on the unit as soon as possible. In a letter to the consultants, Chambers expressed concern about their susceptibility to “confirmation bias,” which he defined as a “tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms ones preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.” (Chambers said that he could not comment, because of the court order.)
Jayaram agreed to meet with Letby for a mediation session in March, 2017. A lithe, handsome man with tight black curls, Jayaram appeared frequently on TV as a medical expert, on subjects ranging from hospital staffing to heart problems. When the cluster of deaths began, he was on the reality series “Born Naughty?,” in which he met eight children who had been captured on hidden cameras behaving unusually and then came up with diagnoses for them. Letby had prepared a statement for the meeting, and she read it aloud. “She said, Ive got evidence from my grievance process that you and Steve Brearey orchestrated a campaign to have me removed,’ ” Jayaram recalled. “ Ive got evidence that you were heard in the queue to the café accusing me of murdering babies.’ ” (Jayaram told me, “Now, Ive got a big mouth, but I wouldnt stand in a public place doing that.”) Letby asked if he would be willing to work with her. He felt obligated to say yes. “I came away from that meeting really angry, but I was not angry at her,” he said. “I was angry at the system.”
Jayaram and Brearey felt that they were being silenced by a hospital trying to protect its reputation. When I spoke with Brearey, he had recently watched a documentary about the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle, and he described the plight of an engineer who had tried to warn his superiors that the shuttle had potentially dangerous flaws. Brearey saw his own experiences in a similar light. He and Jayaram had spent months writing e-mails to the hospitals management trying to justify why they wanted Letby out of the unit. They wrote with the confidence of people who feel that they are on the right side of history.
Serial-killer health professionals are extraordinarily rare, but they are also a kind of media phenomenon—a small universe of movies and shows has dramatized the scenario. In northwest England, this genre of crime has not been strictly limited to entertainment. Harold Shipman, one of the most prolific serial killers in the world, worked forty miles from Chester, as a physician for the N.H.S. He is thought to have murdered about two hundred and fifty patients in the span of three decades, injecting many of them with lethal doses of a painkiller, before he was convicted, in 2000. The chair of a government inquiry into Shipmans crimes said that investigators should now be trained to “think dirty” about causes of death.
In April, 2017, with the permission of the Countesss leadership, Jayaram and another pediatrician met with a detective from the Cheshire police and shared their concerns. “Within ten minutes of us telling the story, the superintendent said, Well, we have to investigate this,’ ” Jayaram said. “ Its a no-brainer.’ ”
In May, the police launched what they called Operation Hummingbird. A detective later said that Brearey and Jayaram provided the “golden thread of our investigation.”
That month, Dewi Evans, a retired pediatrician from Wales, who had been the clinical director of the neonatal and childrens department at his hospital, saw a newspaper article describing, in vague terms, a criminal investigation into the spike in deaths at the Countess. “If the Chester police had no-one in mind Id be interested to help,” he wrote in an e-mail to the National Crime Agency, which helps connect law enforcement with scientific experts. “Sounds like my kind of case.”
That summer, Evans, who was sixty-seven and had worked as a paid court expert for more than twenty-five years, drove three and a half hours to Cheshire, to meet with the police. After reviewing records that the police gave him, he wrote a report proposing that Child As death was “consistent with his receiving either a noxious substance such as potassium chloride or more probably that he suffered his collapse as a result of an air embolus.” Later, when it became clear that there was no basis for suspecting a noxious chemical, Evans concluded that the cause of death was air embolism. “These are cases where your diagnosis is made by ruling out other factors,” he said.
Evans had never seen a case of air embolism himself, but there had been one at his hospital about twenty years before. An anesthetist intended to inject air into a babys stomach, but he accidentally injected it into the bloodstream. The baby immediately collapsed and died. “It was extremely traumatic and left a big scar on all of us,” Evans said. He searched for medical literature about air embolisms and came upon the same paper from 1989 that Jayaram had found. “There hasnt been a similar publication since then because this is such a rare event,” Evans told me.
Evans relied heavily on the paper in other reports that he wrote about the Countess deaths, many of which he attributed to air embolism. Other babies, he said, had been harmed through another method: the intentional injection of too much air or fluid, or both, into their nasogastric tubes. “This naturally blows up the stomach,” he wrote to me. The stomach becomes so large, he said, that the lungs cant inflate normally, and the baby cant get enough oxygen. When I asked him if he could point me to any medical literature about this process, he responded, “There are no published papers regarding a phenomenon of this nature that I know of.” (Several doctors I interviewed were baffled by this proposed method of murder and struggled to understand how it could be physiologically or logistically possible.)
Nearly a year after Operation Hummingbird began, a new method of harm was added to the list. In the last paragraph of a babys discharge letter, Brearey, who had been helping the police by reviewing clinical records, noticed a mention of an abnormally high level of insulin. When insulin is produced naturally by the body, the level of C-peptide, a substance secreted by the pancreas, should also be high, but in this baby the C-peptide was undetectable, which suggested that insulin may have been administered to the child. The insulin test had been done at a Royal Liverpool University Hospital lab, and a biochemist there had called the Countess to recommend that the sample be verified by a more specialized lab. Guidelines on the Web site for the Royal Liverpool lab explicitly warn that its insulin test is “not suitable for the investigation” of whether synthetic insulin has been administered. Alan Wayne Jones, a forensic toxicologist at Linköping University, in Sweden, who has written about the use of insulin as a means of murder, told me that the test used at the Royal Liverpool lab is “not sufficient for use as evidence in a criminal prosecution.” He said, “Insulin is not an easy substance to analyze, and you would need to analyze this at a forensic laboratory, where the routines are much more stringent regarding chain of custody, using modern forensic technology.” But the Countess never ordered a second test, because the child had already recovered.
Brearey also discovered that, eight months later, a biochemist at the lab had flagged a high level of insulin in the blood sample of another infant. The child had been discharged, and this blood sample was never retested, either. According to Joseph Wolfsdorf, a professor at Harvard Medical School who specializes in pediatric hypoglycemia, the babys C-peptide level suggested the possibility of a testing irregularity, because, if insulin had been administered, the childs C-peptide level should have been extremely low or undetectable, but it wasnt.
The police consulted with an endocrinologist, who said that the babies theoretically could have received insulin through their I.V. bags. Evans said that, with the insulin cases, “at last one could find some kind of smoking gun.” But there was a problem: the blood sample for the first baby had been taken ten hours after Letby had left the hospital; any insulin delivered by her would no longer be detectable, especially since the tube for the first I.V. bag had fallen out of place, which meant that the baby had to be given a new one. To connect Letby to the insulin, one would have to believe that she had managed to inject insulin into a bag that a different nurse had randomly chosen from the units refrigerator. If Letby had been successful at causing immediate death by air embolism, it seems odd that she would try this much less effective method.
In July, 2018, five months after the insulin discovery, a Cheshire police detective knocked on Letbys door. Two years earlier, she had bought a home a mile from the hospital. A small birdhouse hung beside the entrance. It was 6 *a*.*m*., but she opened the door with a friendly expression. “Can I step in for two seconds?” the officer asked her, after showing his badge.
“Uh, yes,” she said, looking terrified.
Inside, she was told that she was under arrest for multiple counts of murder and attempted murder. She emerged from the house handcuffed, her face appearing almost gray.
The police spent the day searching her house. Inside, they found a note with the heading “NOT GOOD ENOUGH.” There were several phrases scrawled across the page at random angles and without punctuation: “There are no words”; “I cant breathe”; “Slander Discrimination”; “Ill never have children or marry Ill never know what its like to have a family”; “WHY ME?”; “I havent done anything wrong”; “I killed them on purpose because Im not good enough to care for them”; “I AM EVIL I DID THIS.”
On another scrap of paper, she had written, three times, “Everything is manageable,” a phrase that a colleague had said to her. At the bottom of the page, she had written, “I just want life to be as it was. I want to be happy in the job that I loved with a team who I felt a part of. Really, I dont belong anywhere. Im a problem to those who do know me.” On another piece of paper, found in her handbag, she had written, “I cant do this any more. I want someone to help me but they cant.” She also wrote, “We tried our best and it wasnt enough.”
After spending all day in jail, Letby was asked why she had written the “not good enough” note. A police video shows her in the interrogation room with her hands in her lap, her shoulders hunched forward. She spoke quietly and deferentially, like a student facing an unexpectedly harsh exam. “It was just a way of me getting my feelings out onto paper,” she said. “It just helps me process.”
“In your own mind, had you done anything wrong at all?” an officer asked.
“No, not intentionally, but I was worried that they would find that my practice hadnt been good,” she said, adding, “I thought maybe I had missed something, maybe I hadnt acted quickly enough.”
“Give us an example.”
She proposed that perhaps she “hadnt played my role in the team. Id been on a lot of night shifts when doctors arent around. We have to call them. There are less people, and it just worried me that I hadnt called them—quick enough.” She also worried that she might have given the wrong dose of a medication or used equipment improperly.
“And you felt evil?”
“Other people would perceive me as being evil, yes, if I had missed something.” She went on, “Its how this situation made me feel.”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a23911)
“I hate it when they put kittens in the impulse-buying section.”
Cartoon by P. C. Vey
The detective said, “You put down there, Lucy, that you killed them on purpose.’ ”
“I didnt kill them on purpose.”
The detective asked, “So wheres this pressure thats led to having these feelings come from?”
“I think it was just the panic of being redeployed and everything that happened,” she said. She had written the notes after she was removed from clinical duties, but later her clinical skills were reassessed and no concerns were raised, so she felt more secure about her abilities. She was “very career-focussed,” she said, and “it just all overwhelmed me at the time. It was hard to see how anything was ever going to be O.K. again.”
In an interview two days later, an officer asked why one of her notes had the word “hate” in bold letters, circled. “Whats the significance of that?”
“That I hate myself for having let everybody down and for not being good enough,” she said. “Id just been removed from the job I loved, I was told that there might be issues with my practice, I wasnt allowed to speak to people.”
The officer asked again why she had written, “I killed them on purpose.”
“Thats how I was being made to feel,” she said. As her mental health deteriorated, her thoughts had spiralled. “If my practice hadnt been good enough and I was linked with these deaths, then it was my fault,” she said.
“Youre being very hard on yourself there if you havent done anything wrong.”
“Well, I am very hard on myself,” she said.
After more than nine hours of interviews, Letby was released on bail, without being charged. She moved back to Hereford, to live with her parents. News of her arrest was published in papers throughout the U.K. “All I can say is my experience is that she was a great nurse,” a mother whose baby was treated at the Countess told the *Times* of London. Another mother told the *Guardian* that Letby had advocated for her and had told her “every step of the way what was happening.” She said, “I cant say anything negative about her.” The *Guardian* also interviewed a mother who described the experience of giving birth at the Countess. “They had no staff and the care was just terrible,” she said. Shed developed “an infection which was due to negligence by a member of staff,” she explained. “We made a complaint at the time but it was brushed under the carpet.”
One of Letbys childhood friends, who did not want me to use her name because her loyalty to Letby has already caused her social and professional problems, told me that she asked the Cheshire police if she could serve as a character reference for Letby. “They werent interested at all,” she said. Letby seemed to be in a state of “terror and complete confusion,” the friend said. “I could tell from how she was acting that she just didnt know what to say about it, because it was such an alien concept to be accused of these things.”
Shortly after Letbys arrest, the pediatric consultants arranged a meeting for the hospitals medical staff, to broach the possibility of a vote of no confidence in Chambers, the hospitals chief executive, because of the way hed handled their concerns. Chambers resigned before the meeting. A doctor named Susan Gilby, who took the side of the consultants, assumed his role. Gilby told me that the first time she met with Jayaram it was clear that he was suffering from the experience of not being believed by the hospitals management. “He was in tears, and bear in mind this is a mature, experienced clinician,” she said. “He described having issues with sleeping, and he felt he couldnt trust anyone. It was really distressing.” She was surprised that Ian Harvey, the hospitals medical director, still doubted the consultants theory of how the babies had died. Harvey seemed more troubled by their behavior, she said, than by anything Letby had done. “In his mind, the issue seemed to be that they werent as good as they thought they were,” Gilby told me. “It was They think theyre marvellous, but they need to look at themselves.’ ” (Harvey would not comment, citing the court order.)
The week of Letbys arrest, the police dug up her back garden and examined drains and vents, presumably to see if she had hidden anything incriminating. Four months later, while she remained out on bail without charges, the Chester *Standard* wrote, “The situation has caused many people to question both the ethics and legality of keeping someone linked to such serious allegations when seemingly there is not enough evidence to bring charges.” Letby was arrested a second time, in 2019, but, after being interviewed for another nine hours, she was released.
In November, 2020, more than two years after Letbys first arrest, an officer called Gilby to inform her that Letby was being charged with eight counts of murder and ten counts of attempted murder. (Later, one of the murder counts was dropped, and five attempted-murder charges were added.) She was arrested again, and this time she was denied bail. She would await trial in prison. As a courtesy, Gilby called Chambers to let him know. She was taken aback when Chambers expressed concern for Letby. She said that he told her, “Im just worried about a wrongful conviction.”
In September, 2022, a month before Letbys trial began, the Royal Statistical Society published a report titled “Healthcare Serial Killer or Coincidence?” The report had been prompted in part by concerns about two recent cases, one in Italy and one in the Netherlands, in which nurses had been wrongly convicted of murder largely because of a striking association between their shift patterns and the deaths on their wards. The society sent the report to both the Letby prosecution and the defense team. It detailed the dangers of drawing causal conclusions from improbable clusters of events. In the trial of the Dutch nurse, Lucia de Berk, a criminologist had calculated that there was a one-in-three-hundred-and-forty-two-million chance that the deaths were coincidental. But his methodology was faulty; when statisticians looked at the data, they found that the chances were closer to one in fifty. According to Ton Derksen, a Dutch philosopher of science who wrote a book about the case, the belief that “such a coincidence cannot be a coincidence” became the driving force in the process of collecting evidence against de Berk. She was exonerated in 2010, and her case is now considered one of the worst miscarriages of justice in Dutch history. The Italian nurse, Daniela Poggiali, was exonerated in 2021, after statisticians reanalyzed her hospitals mortality data and discovered several confounding factors that had been overlooked.
William C. Thompson, one of the authors of the Royal Statistical Society report and an emeritus professor of criminology, law, and psychology at the University of California, Irvine, told me that medical-murder cases are particularly prone to errors in statistical reasoning, because they “involve a choice between alternative theories, both of which are rather extraordinary.” He said, “One theory is that there was an unlikely coincidence. And the other theory is that someone like Lucy Letby, who was previously a fine and upstanding member of the community, suddenly decides shes going to start killing people.”
Flawed statistical reasoning was at the heart of one of the most notorious wrongful convictions in the U.K.: a lawyer named Sally Clark was found guilty of murder, in 1999, after her two sons, both babies, died suddenly and without clear explanation. One of the prosecutions main experts, a pediatrician, argued that the chances of two sudden infant deaths in one family were one in seventy-three million. But his calculations were misleading: hed treated the two deaths as independent events, ignoring the possibility that the same genetic or environmental factors had affected both boys.
In his book “[Thinking, Fast and Slow](https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.KP7SbRzcre9DpN2LWPIgYeuUQQSnHrRQrcy8gnDT93A-vvp2ViI6AUe8ujnH_YsocO3Mj0I-g799KxVF2_xkaxGG2UKbHDoO9Va_cN8B04FPFFw24WWutQzLuwdB-j2SbER4KJr93qnQqFB3G9ZYxkUAi7EIWjwgopBcrT3CEfH7E5daC1Y2DWKhocIKcIeysa4M4fYUvrBNZe2AAn72VGz2NCZ25lxox6mDz4kjkNA.-3Q_47k2ytWqaoqK698edFzkOJlixpoXEBxXu8z1rEI&dib_tag=se&hvadid=598729179038&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9073499&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=7319156310836186384&hvtargid=kwd-316358223323&hydadcr=22595_13531227&keywords=thinking-fast-slow-daniel-kahneman&qid=1716309023&sr=8-1)” (2011), Daniel Kahneman, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, argues that people do not have good intuitions when it comes to basic principles of statistics: “We easily think associatively, we think metaphorically, we think causally, but statistics requires thinking about many things at once,” a task that is not spontaneous or innate. We tend to assume that irregular things happen because someone intentionally caused them. “Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events,” he writes.
Burkhard Schafer, a law professor at the University of Edinburgh who studies the intersection of law and science, said that it appeared as if the Letby prosecution had “learned the wrong lessons from previous miscarriages of justice.” Instead of making sure that its statistical figures were accurate, the prosecution seems to have ignored statistics. “Looking for a responsible human—this is what the police are good at,” Schafer told me. “What is not in the polices remit is finding a systemic problem in an organization like the National Health Service, after decades of underfunding, where you have overworked people cutting little corners with very vulnerable babies who are already in a risk category. It is much more satisfying to say there was a bad person, there was a criminal, than to deal with the outcome of government policy.”
Schafer said that he became concerned about the case when he saw the diagram of suspicious events with the line of Xs under Letbys name. He thought that it should have spanned a longer period of time and included all the deaths on the unit, not just the ones in the indictment. The diagram appeared to be a product of the “Texas sharpshooter fallacy,” a common mistake in statistical reasoning which occurs when researchers have access to a large amount of data but focus on a smaller subset that fits a hypothesis. The term comes from the fable of a marksman who fires a gun multiple times at the side of a barn. Then he draws a bulls-eye around the cluster where the most bullets landed.
For one baby, the diagram showed Letby working a night shift, but this was an error: she was working day shifts at the time, so there should not have been an X by her name. At trial, the prosecution argued that, though the baby had deteriorated overnight, the suspicious episode actually began three minutes after Letby arrived for her day shift. Nonetheless, the inaccurate diagram continued to be published, even by the Cheshire police.
Dewi Evans, the retired pediatrician, told me that he had picked which medical episodes rose to the level of “suspicious events.” When I asked what his criteria were, he said, “Unexpected, precipitous, anything that is out of the usual—something with which you are not familiar.” For one baby, the distinction between suspicious and not suspicious largely came down to how to define projectile vomiting.
Letbys defense team said that it had found at least two other incidents that seemed to meet the same criteria of suspiciousness as the twenty-four on the diagram. But they happened when Letby wasnt on duty. Evans identified events that may have been left out, too. He told me that, after Letbys first arrest, he was given another batch of medical records to review, and that he had notified the police of twenty-five more cases that he thought the police should investigate. He didnt know if Letby was present for them, and they didnt end up being on the diagram, either. If some of these twenty-seven cases had been represented, the row of Xs under Letbys name might have been much less compelling. (The Cheshire police and the prosecution did not respond to a request for comment, citing the court order.)
Among the new suspicious episodes that Evans said he flagged was another insulin case. Evans said that it had similar features as the first two: high insulin, low C-peptide. He concluded that it was a clear case of poisoning. When I asked Michael Hall, a retired neonatologist at University Hospital Southampton who worked as an expert for Letbys defense, about Evanss third insulin case, he was surprised and disturbed to learn of it. He could imagine a few reasons that it might not have been part of the trial. One is that Letby wasnt working at the time. Another is that there was an alternative explanation for the test results—but then, presumably, such an explanation could be relevant for the other two insulin cases, too. “Whichever way you look at this, that third case is of interest,” Hall told me.
Ton Derksen, in his book about Lucia de Berk, used the analogy of a train. The “locomotives” were two cases in which there had been allegations of poisoning. Another eight cases, involving children who suddenly became ill on de Berks shifts, were the “wagons,” trailing along because of a belief that all the deaths couldnt have occurred by chance.
The locomotives in the Letby prosecution were the insulin cases, which were charged as attempted murders. “The fact that there were two deliberate poisonings with insulin,” Nick Johnson, the prosecutor, said, “will help you when you are assessing whether the collapses and deaths of other children on the neonatal unit were because somebody was sabotaging them or whether these were just tragic coincidences.”
But not only were the circumstances of the poisonings speculative, the results were, too. If the aim was to kill, neither child came close to the intended consequences. The first baby recovered after a day. The second showed no symptoms and was discharged in good health.
On the first day of the trial, Letbys barrister, Benjamin Myers, told the judge that Letby was “incoherent, she cant speak properly.” She had been diagnosed as having post-traumatic stress disorder following her arrests. After two years in prison, she had recently been moved to a new facility, but she hadnt brought her medication with her. Any psychological stability shed achieved, Myers said, had been “blown away.”
Letby, who now startled easily, was assessed by psychiatrists, and it was decided that she did not have to walk from the dock to the witness box and instead could be seated there before people came into the room. The *Guardian* said that in court Letby “cut an almost pitiable figure,” her eyes darting “nervously towards any unexpected noise—a cough, a dropped pen, or when the female prison guard beside her shuffled in her seat.” Her parents attended the entire trial, sometimes accompanied by a close friend of Letbys, a nurse from the unit who had recently retired.
Press coverage of the case repeatedly emphasized Letbys note in which shed written that she was “evil” and “killed them on purpose.” Media outlets magnified the images of those words without including her explanations to the police. Much was also made of a text that shed sent about returning to work after her trip to Spain—“probably be back in with a bang lol”—and the fact that shed searched on Facebook thirty-one times for parents whose children she was later accused of harming. During the year of the deaths, she had also searched for other people 2,287 times—colleagues, dancers in her salsa classes, people she had randomly encountered. “I was always on my phone,” she later testified, explaining that she did the searches rapidly, out of “general curiosity and theyve been on my mind.” (Myers noted that her search history did not involve any references to “air embolism.”)
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a27837)
Cartoon by Roz Chast
The parents of the babies had been living in limbo for almost a decade. In court, they recalled how their grief had intensified when they were told that their childrens deaths may have been deliberately caused by someone theyd trusted. “Thats what confuses me the most,” one mother said. “Lucy presented herself as kind, caring, and soft-spoken.” They had stopped believing their own instincts. They described being consumed by guilt for not protecting their children.
Several months into the trial, Myers asked Judge Goss to strike evidence given by Evans and to stop him from returning to the witness box, but the request was denied. Myers had learned that a month before, in a different case, a judge on the Court of Appeal had described a medical report written by Evans as “worthless.” “No court would have accepted a report of this quality,” the judge had concluded. “The report has the hallmarks of an exercise in working out an explanation” and “ends with tendentious and partisan expressions of opinion that are outside Dr. Evans professional competence.” The judge also wrote that Evans “either knows what his professional colleagues have concluded and disregards it or he has not taken steps to inform himself of their views. Either approach amounts to a breach of proper professional conduct.” (Evans said that he disagreed with the judgment.)
Evans had laid the medical foundation for the prosecutions case against Letby, submitting some eighty reports. There was a second pediatric expert, who provided what was called “peer review” for Evans, as well as experts in hematology, endocrinology, radiology, and pathology, and they had all been sent Evanss statements when they were invited to participate in the case. The six main prosecution experts, along with at least two defense experts who were also consulted, had all worked for the N.H.S. Evans wasnt aware if Letbys lawyers had sought opinions from outside the U.K., but he told me that, if he were them, he would have looked to North America or Australia. When I asked why, he said, “Because I would want them to look at it from a totally nonpartisan point of view.”
In the five years leading up to the trial, some of the experts opinions seemed to have collectively evolved. For one of the babies, Evans had originally written that the child had been “at great risk of unexpected collapse,” owing to his fragility, and Evans couldnt “exclude the role of infection.” The prosecutions pathologist, Andreas Marnerides, who worked at St. Thomas Hospital in London, wrote that the child had died of natural causes, most likely of pneumonia. “I have not identified any suspicious findings,” he concluded. But, three years later, Marnerides testified that, after reading more reports from the courts experts, he thought that the baby had died “with pneumonia,” not “from pneumonia.” The likely cause of death, he said, was administration of air into his stomach through a nasogastric tube. When Evans testified, he said the same thing.
“Whats the evidence?” Myers asked him.
“Baby collapsed, died,” Evans responded.
“A baby may collapse for any number of reasons,” Myers said. “Whats the evidence that supports your assertion made today that its because of air going down the NGT?”
“The baby collapsed and died.”
“Do you rely upon one image of that?” Myers asked, referring to X-rays.
“This baby collapsed and died.”
“What evidence is there that you can point to?”
Evans replied that hed ruled out all natural causes, so the only other viable explanation would be another method of murder, like air injected into one of the babys veins. “A baby collapsing and where resuscitation was unsuccessful—you know, thats consistent with my interpretation of what happened,” he said.
The trial covered questions at the edge of scientific knowledge, and the material was dense and technical. For months, in discussions of the supposed air embolisms, witnesses tried to pinpoint the precise shade of skin discoloration of some of the babies. In Myerss cross-examinations, he noted that witnesses memories of the rashes had changed, becoming more specific and florid in the years since the deaths. But this debate seemed to distract from a more relevant objection: the concern with skin discoloration arose from the 1989 paper. An author of the paper, Shoo Lee, one of the most prominent neonatologists in Canada, has since reviewed summaries of each pattern of skin discoloration in the Letby case and said that none of the rashes were characteristic of air embolism. He also said that air embolism should never be a diagnosis that a doctor lands on just because other causes of sudden collapse have been ruled out: “That would be very wrong—thats a fundamental mistake of medicine.”
Several months into the trial, Richard Gill, an emeritus professor of mathematics at Leiden University, in the Netherlands, began writing online about his concerns regarding the case. Gill was one of the authors of the Royal Statistical Society report, and in 2006 he had testified before a committee tasked with determining whether to reopen the case of Lucia de Berk. England has strict contempt-of-court laws that prevent the publication of any material that could prejudice legal proceedings. Gill posted a link to a Web site, created by Sarrita Adams, a scientific consultant in California, that detailed flaws in the prosecutions medical evidence. In July, a detective with the Cheshire police sent letters to Gill and Adams ordering them to stop writing about the case. “The publication of this material puts you at risk of serious consequences (which include a sentence of imprisonment),” the letters said. “If you come within the jurisdiction of the court, you may be liable to arrest.”
Letby is housed in a privately run prison west of London, the largest correctional facility for women in Europe. Letters to prisoners are screened, and I dont know if several letters that I sent ever reached her. One of her lawyers, Richard Thomas, who has represented her since early in the case, said that he would tell Letby that I had been in touch with him, but he ignored my request to share a message with her, instead reminding me of the contempt-of-court order. He told me, “I cannot give any comment on why you cannot communicate” with Letby. Lawyers in England can be sanctioned for making remarks that would undermine confidence in the judicial system. I sent Myers, Letbys barrister, several messages in the course of nine months, and he always responded with some version of an apology—“the brevity of this response is not intended to be rude in any way”—before saying that he could not talk to me.
Michael Hall, the defense expert, had expected to testify at the trial—he was prepared to point to flaws in the prosecutions theory of air embolism and to undetected signs of illness in the babies—but he was never called. He was troubled that the trial largely excluded evidence about the treatment of the babies mothers; their medical care is inextricably linked to the health of their babies. In the past ten years, the U.K. has had four highly publicized maternity scandals, in which failures of care and supervision led to a large number of newborn deaths. A report about East Kent Hospitals, which found that forty-five babies might have lived if their treatment had been better, identified a “crucial truth about maternity and neonatal services”: “So much hangs on what happens in the minority of cases where things start to go wrong, because problems can very rapidly escalate to a devastatingly bad outcome.” The report warned, “It is too late to pretend that this is just another one-off, isolated failure, a freak event that *will never happen again*.’ ”
Hall thought about asking Letbys lawyers why he had not been called to testify, but anything they said would be confidential, so he decided that hed rather not know. He wondered if his testimony was seen as too much of a risk: “One of the questions they would have asked me is Why did this baby die? And I would have had to say, Im not sure. I dont know. Thats not to say that therefore the baby died of air embolism. Just because we dont have an explanation doesnt mean we are going to make one up.” The fact that the jury never heard another side “keeps me awake at night,” Hall told me.
After the prosecution finished presenting its case, Letbys defense team submitted a motion arguing that the medical evidence about air embolism was so unreliable that there was “no case to answer” and the charges should be dismissed. Though the motion was rejected, perhaps it had seemed that the prosecutions case was so weak that defense experts werent necessary. The only witnesses Myers called were the hospitals plumber, who spoke about unsanitary conditions, and Letby, who testified for fourteen days.
She said she felt that there were systemic failures at the hospital, but that some of the senior pediatricians had “apportioned blame on to me.” Johnson, the prosecutor, pushed her to come up with her own explanation for each babys deterioration. Yet she wasnt qualified to provide them. “In general, I dont think a lot of the babies were cared for on the unit properly,” she offered. “Im not a medical professional to know exactly what should and shouldnt have happened with those babies.”
“Do you agree that if certain combinations of these children were attacked then unless there was more than one person attacking them, you have to be the attacker?” Johnson asked at one point.
“No.”
“You dont agree?”
“No. Ive not attacked any children.”
Johnson continued, “But if the jury conclude that a certain combination of children were actually attacked by someone, then the shift pattern gives us the answer as to who the attacker was, doesnt it?”
“No, I dont agree.”
“You dont agree. Why dont you agree?”
“Because just because I was on shift doesnt mean that I have done anything.”
“Ill use numbers, all right? I wont refer to specific cases. Lets say if baby 5, 8, 10 and 12 were all attacked, if the jury look at the medical evidence and say they were all attacked by someone, and youre the only common feature, it would have to be, wouldnt it, that youre the attacker?”
“Thats for them to decide.”
“Well, of course it is, of course it is. But as a principle, do you agree with that?”
“No, I dont feel I can answer that.”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a26640)
“Sorry my story ended up just being me describing a TV show I watched recently.”
Cartoon by Daniel Kanhai
After a few days of cross-examination, Letby seemed to shut down; she started frequently giving one-word answers, almost whispering. “Im finding it quite hard to concentrate,” she said.
Johnson repeatedly accused her of lying. “You are a very calculating woman, arent you, Lucy Letby?” he said.
“No,” she replied.
He asked, “The reason you tell lies is to try to get sympathy from people, isnt it?”
“No.”
“You try to get attention from people, dont you?”
“No.”
“In killing these children, you got quite a lot of attention, didnt you?”
“I didnt kill the children.”
Toward the end of the trial, the court received an e-mail from someone who claimed to have overheard one of the jurors at a café saying that jurors had “already made up their minds about her case from the start.” Goss reviewed the complaint but ultimately allowed the juror to continue serving.
He instructed the twelve members of the jury that they could find Letby guilty even if they werent “sure of the precise harmful act” shed committed. In one case, for instance, Evans had proposed that a baby had died of excessive air in her stomach from her nasogastric tube, and then, when it emerged that she might not have had a nasogastric tube, he proposed that she may have been smothered.
The jury deliberated for thirteen days but could not reach a unanimous decision. In early August, one juror dropped out. A few days later, Goss told the jury that he would accept a 101 majority verdict. Ten days later, it was announced that the jury had found Letby guilty of fourteen charges. The two insulin cases and one of the triplet charges were unanimous; the rest were majority verdicts. When the first set of verdicts was read, Letby sobbed. After the second set, her mother cried out, “You cant be serious!” Letby was acquitted of two of the attempted-murder charges. There were also six attempted-murder charges in which the jury could not decide on a verdict.
Within a week, the Cheshire police announced that they had made an hour-long documentary film about the case with “exclusive access to the investigation team,” produced by its communications department. Fourteen members of Operation Hummingbird spoke about the investigation, accompanied by an emotional soundtrack. A few days later, the *Times* of London reported that a major British production company, competing against at least six studios, had won access to the police and the prosecutors to make a documentary, which potentially would be distributed by Netflix. Soon afterward, the Cheshire police revealed that they had launched an investigation into whether the Countess was guilty of “corporate manslaughter.” The police also said that they were reviewing the records of four thousand babies who had been treated on units where Letby had worked in her career, to see if she had harmed other children.
The public conversation about the case seemed to treat details about poor care on the unit as if they were irrelevant. In his closing statement, Johnson had accused the defense of “gaslighting” the jury by suggesting that the problem was the hospital, not Letby. Defending himself against the accusation, Myers told the jury, “Its important I make it plain that in no way is this case about the N.H.S. in general.” He assured the jury, “We all feel strongly about the N.H.S. and we are protective of it.” It seemed easier to accept the idea of a sadistic “angel of death” than to look squarely at the fact that families who had trusted the N.H.S. had been betrayed, their faith misplaced.
Since the verdicts, there has been almost no room for critical reflection. At the end of September, a little more than a month after the trial ended, the prosecution announced that it would retry Letby on one of the attempted-murder charges, and a new round of reporting restrictions was promptly put in place. The contempt-of-court rules are intended to preserve the integrity of the legal proceedings, but they also have the effect of suppressing commentary that questions the states decisions. In October, *The BMJ*, the countrys leading medical journal, published a comment from a retired British doctor cautioning against a “fixed view of certainty that justice has been done.” In light of the new reporting restrictions, the journal removed the comment from its Web site, “for legal reasons.” At least six other editorials and comments, which did not question Letbys guilt, remain on the site.
Letby has applied to appeal her conviction, and she is waiting for three judges on the Court of Appeal to decide whether to allow her to proceed. If her application is denied, it will mark the end of her appeals process.
Her retrial in June concerns a baby girl whose breathing tube came out of place. She had been born at the Countess at twenty-five weeks, which is younger than the infants the hospital was supposed to treat. In a TV interview that aired after the verdict but before the retrial was announced, Jayaram, the head of the pediatric ward, said that he had seen Letby next to the baby as the childs oxygen levels were dropping. “The only possibility was that that tube had to have been dislodged deliberately,” he said. “She was just standing there.” He recalled, “That is a night that is etched on my memory and will be in my nightmares forever.”
Brearey, the head of the neonatal unit, told me that after Letbys first arrest, in 2018, a “significant cohort of nurses felt that she had done nothing wrong.” But, in the past six years, many of them have retired or left. In an interview with a TV news program shortly after the verdict, Karen Rees, the former head of nursing for urgent care, seemed to be struggling to modify her beliefs. She routinely met with Letby in the two years after she was removed from the unit. “If I think back to all the times when I have seen her really, really upset—I wouldnt say hysterical but really upset—then I would think that . . .” She paused. The camera was focussed on her shirt, her face intentionally obscured. “How can somebody continually present themselves in that way on a near-weekly basis for two years?” Her voice trembled. “I find that really difficult, and I think, Oh, my gosh, would she have been that good at acting?”
Brearey told me that only one or two nurses still “cant fully come to terms” with Letbys guilt. The ward remains a Level I unit, accepting only babies older than thirty-two weeks, and it has added more consultants to its staff. The mortality rate is no longer high. The hospital has, however, seen a spike in adverse events on the maternity unit. During an eight-month period in 2021, five mothers had unplanned hysterectomies after losing more than two litres of blood. Following a whistle-blower complaint, an inspection by the U.K.s Care Quality Commission warned that the unit was not keeping “women safe from avoidable harm.” The commission discovered twenty-one incidents in which thirteen patients had been endangered, and it determined that in many cases the hospital had not sufficiently investigated the circumstances.
It was another cluster of unexpected, catastrophic events. But this time the story told about the events was much less colorful. The commission blamed a combination of factors that had been present in many of the previous maternity scandals, including staff and equipment shortages, a lack of training, a failure to follow national guidelines, poor recordkeeping, and a culture in which staff felt unsupported. It went unstated, but one can assume that there was another factor, too: a tragic string of bad luck.
Throughout the year of the deaths, Letby had occasionally reflected on the nature of chance, texting friends that she wanted to imagine there was a “reason for everything,” but it also felt like the “luck of \[the\] draw.” After the first three deaths, she wrote to Margaret, her mentor, “Sometimes I think how do such sick babies get through and others just die so suddenly and unexpectedly?”
“We just dont have magic wands,” Margaret responded. “Its important to remember that a death isnt a fail.” She added, “Youre an excellent nurse, Lucy, dont forget it.”
“I know and I dont feel its a failure,” Letby responded, “more that its just very sad to know what families go through.” ♦
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# A Bullshit Genius
**O**n a friendly stroll somewhere in Colorado in the summer of 2004, Steve Jobs asked Walter Isaacson if he would consider writing his biography. Isaacson, a journalist, academic, and policymaker who was then CEO of the Aspen Institute, an influential think tank, had just published a six-hundred-odd-page study of Benjamin Franklin, and was at work on another about Albert Einstein. “My initial reaction was to wonder, half jokingly,” Isaacson later reflected, “whether he saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence.”
Isaacson did not take Jobs up on the offer until 2009, when he learned that the Apple boss was dying of pancreatic cancer. When *Steve Jobs* was published in 2011, just a couple of weeks after its subject passed away, it became clear that during his years of reporting the book, Isaacson had been convinced of what had first struck him only in jest. The front cover, designed with input from Jobs himself, featured a black-and-white photograph of the tech guru gazing knowingly at the camera, his thumb on his chin in contemplation: here is Jobs as world-historic genius, Silicon Valley successor to Franklin and Einstein. The narrative resonated with a public still enthralled by the misfit, college-dropout tech genius. That year was a kind of high-water mark for techno-optimism; the Arab Spring protests were still bringing democracy to the Middle East one tweet at a time; Google, with its ping-pong tables and massage rooms, was still widely considered the best place to work in the world. Isaacsons portrait of Steve Jobs played to this market, selling around 380,000 copies in its first week.
A decade later, Isaacson was casting around for the next genius to include in his rarefied canon, which had grown to include Leonardo da Vinci, too, and was being sold as a “genius biographies” box set. What was kindred among these men, according to Isaacson, was not necessarily high I.Q. but an original spirit. They thought differently than others did — hit targets, as Schopenhauer put it, that no one else could see. This quality often put them out of step with the prevailing attitudes of their time, but these men did not acquiesce to ideological pressure or subscribe to social mores. The Isaacson genius was an avatar of intellectual freedom, a kind of liberal humanist hero who flourished in the Wests innovative meccas: Renaissance Florence, revolutionary America, prewar Western Europe, Silicon Valley.
As Isaacson surveyed the landscape in search of a new genius, one name kept coming up: Elon Musk. He was, without a doubt, a man with grand vision — electric cars, space travel, telepathy. He was unyielding in this vision, too, sometimes belligerently so. In Isaacsons telling, he arranged a call in 2021 with the help of some mutual friends, and the two spoke for an hour and a half. (Musk has also taken credit for the idea.) Musk, unsurprisingly, was enthusiastic about the prospect of being written about. Isaacson, in turn, demanded full access to his subject, and the freedom to make up his own mind. “You have no control,” he reportedly told Musk. Over the next two years, the biographer followed the Tesla boss around, spoke to his family, friends, and colleagues, and received Red Bull-fueled text messages from Musk late into the night. During this period, Musks already bizarre life devolved into pandemonium. He bought Twitter at a massive loss, intervened in the war in Ukraine, spawned offspring with otherworldly names, and challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match. A Fox News segment compared the two men by height, weight, age, and I.Q.: Zuckerberg, 152; Musk, 155. A battle of the geniuses, and also one of the dumbest spectacles of all time.
Nevertheless, when *Musk* was published in September of last year, it was clear from the dust jacket alone that the book would situate Elon in the Isaacson lineage, painting him as the true heir to Jobs — a brilliant, if troubled, Silicon Valley genius. The cover features a head shot of Musk staring directly into the camera, fingers on his chin — like Jobs, in a thinking position — and the epigraph consists of two quotes, the first from Musk: “To anyone Ive offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and Im sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?” Directly below it is one attributed to Jobs: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
This time, the pitch didnt quite land. Mainstream liberal attitudes toward Silicon Valley culture had cooled since the Jobs era, in large part due to a perceived rightward lurch among its upper echelons during the Trump years. Musk had emerged as the poster boy for this shift; he shared a meme that compared Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Hitler, and frequently posted about the “woke mind virus” and Covid vaccines. Isaacsons book was panned by many; some critics accused the author of engaging in access journalism. In a combative interview, tech reporter Kara Swisher repeatedly asked Isaacson if he had come to “like” Musk. You can hear her frustration and bewilderment. How could Isaacson, her old friend and fellow liberal stalwart, not see Musk for the “asshole” he is, and, in fact, try to rehabilitate his image and burnish his legacy? Jill Lepore posed a similar question in her *New Yorker* review. Isaacson, she wrote, is “a gracious, generous, public-spirited man and a principled biographer.” Why did he write this apologia for a “supervillain”?
But within the context of Isaacsons nine books, *Musk* is not an anomaly. In method and thesis, it is perfectly in line with a career built on promoting elite interests under the guise of biographical neutrality and insipid humanism. This time, though, his “genius” subject is idiotic enough to throw the bullshit at the heart of the project into stark relief. Musk is not just the natural successor to Isaacsons genius canon; he may be its necessary conclusion.
**I**saacsons first book was not a biography, but a collection of essays entitled *Pro & Con: Both Sides of Dozens of Unsettled and Unsettling Arguments*. Published in 1983, when Isaacson was an up-and-coming editor at *Time m*agazine, it lays out opposing positions on controversial topics like gun control, abortion, and smoking. Isaacson acts as a kind of referee, mediating impartially in order to allow his readers to come to their own conclusions. It is a role that Isaacson would later leverage to great effect — as a neutral observer floating above the political fray — but this early attempt went mostly unnoticed. He had more success with his second book, coauthored with *Newsweek* editor Evan Thomas, which told the story of the coterie of East Coast statesmen who crafted U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. But his breakout achievement came in 1992, with his next project, a biography of Henry Kissinger. The book was an amalgam of his first two works. Isaacson sought to present both sides of the bloody machinations of one of Americas most notorious statesmen — to produce, as he put it, “an unbiased biography that portrayed Kissinger in all of his complexity.” While *The* *New York Times* called it a “devastating portrait of Mr. Kissinger,” Christopher Hitchens felt that Isaacsons fealty to “the tradition of New York-Washington objectivity” led him to grossly euphemize Kissingers war crimes. Isaacson, Hitchens wrote in the *London Review of Books*, “moves in a world where the worst that is often said of some near-genocidal policy is that it sends the wrong signal.’”
Isaacsons interest in power, and his commitment to that “New York-Washington objectivity,” made him particularly at home at *Time*, where he was promoted to managing editor in 1996. Under his leadership, the magazine pivoted away from hard news to entertaining profiles of prominent figures across the political and cultural spectrum. Isaacson had a knack for covering the influential in affable, entertaining prose that gently probed entrenched hierarchies, but did little to upset them. (Kissinger, for instance, still accepted invitations to Isaacsons *Time* gala dinners after that supposedly “devastating portrait.”) Isaacsons magnanimity was less usefully deployed at CNN, where he was made CEO in the summer of 2001. He arrived at a network under attack from an ascendant Fox News, which had been pitched by Rupert Murdoch as an alternative to the hegemony of the liberal media. Isaacson aimed for principled impartiality — or he played both sides, depending on how you look at it. One of his first moves as chairman was to meet with Republican lawmakers to discuss how the network could cover conservative perspectives with balance. The strategy backfired. Liberal viewers thought Isaacson was pandering to the right, while conservatives still preferred Fox, particularly after 9/11, when Roger Ailes expertly appealed to patriotic bloodlust. In 2002, Fox eclipsed CNN in the ratings, and Isaacson left the following year.
His next job, as president of the Aspen Institute, was a far more comfortable fit. The organization was established in Colorado in 1949, by a wealthy industrialist named Walter Paepcke, who enlisted the future curator of the *Great Books of the Western World* series to put together a continuing education program for business leaders with limited reading habits, composed of the most significant works in the Western canon. Paepckes hypothesis was that mountainside discussions of the likes of Sophocles, Adam Smith, and Herman Melville — interspersed with picnics and the occasional afternoon white-water rafting trip — would help the upper crust “gain access” to their “own humanity by becoming more self-aware, more self-correcting, and more self-fulfilling.” Over the decades, the Institute grew into a kind of nonpartisan paradise, where participants from various, and sometimes opposed, political backgrounds could think out loud and learn from their differences. Aspen was a neutral zone, an intellectual Switzerland, facilitating the peaceful transmission of ideas among people of goodwill. But if Aspen encouraged collegial disagreement, it wasnt a place for true dissent. With professed neutrality, the Institute quietly pushed its own agenda — to imbue participants with the feeling that they were rightful heirs to and custodians of the Western intellectual tradition, of which their wealth and power were somehow natural outgrowths.
Isaacson took to this agenda gladly, and his biographical works began to reflect the values and style of the Institute. He published his biography of Benjamin Franklin during his first year as president, presenting the founding father as the type of guy who would have felt right at home in the mountain seminars. Isaacson writes that he could “easily imagine having a beer with him after work, showing him how to use the latest digital device, sharing the business plan for a new venture, and discussing the most recent political scandals or policy ideas.” A few years later, Isaacson framed Einstein, too, in the mold of a liberal think-tank fellow of the late 2000s. What made Einsteins insight into the fabric of the universe possible, Isaacson proposes, was a “nonconformist” spirit, unbounded curiosity, and an appreciation for the arts. (He makes much of the physicists prowess on the violin.) Isaacson trumpets not just Einsteins scientific virtues, but his liberal values, too: “Tyranny repulsed him, and he saw tolerance not simply as a sweet virtue but as a necessary condition for a creative society.” As with Kissinger, Isaacson narrates the two mens lives in impressive detail, and without too much editorializing. When he does intervene, the analysis is banal, platitudinous, and sentimental. Einstein teaches us, for example, to “question every premise, challenge conventional wisdom, and never accept the truth of something merely because everyone else views it as obvious.”
Isaacson also sought to modernize Aspen for the 21st century. If, in Paepckes era, the elites were capitalists who wanted to delve into Goethe, by Isaacsons time they were increasingly tech investors and founders who wanted to pontificate about the future. The tech scene was one that Isaacson was already familiar with and enamored by. In the 1990s, he had briefly left *Time* to work as the new media editor for Time Warner, where he helped develop Pathfinder.com, a web portal that aggregated content from across the media company. This early attempt at digital journalism failed, costing the company over a hundred million dollars. Isaacson was sent back to edit the magazine, where he satisfied his entrepreneurial urge by establishing a new section covering science and technology, with a focus on the wunderkinds of Silicon Valley. By the time he arrived at Aspen, Isaacson knew how to appeal to this crowd, and one of his first major initiatives was to establish the Aspen Ideas Festival, a weeklong event where “thought leaders gathered to give [TED-like talks](https://www.thedriftmag.com/what-was-the-ted-talk/) to card carriers and members of the public who paid the price of entry. The conference fulfilled the Aspen remit to a tee, but with a modern twist, providing the ruling class with an opportunity to broaden their horizons not by reading ancient tracts, but by listening to snappy presentations from the likes of Colin Powell, Jane Goodall, and Jeff Bezos.
Under Isaacsons leadership, the new Aspen ideal was to be as interested in Goethe as in quantum computing. Amusingly, Isaacson also retrospectively imposed his admiration for tech innovators onto his historical subjects. Franklin is not just a “successful publisher and consummate networker with an inventive curiosity,” but a man who “would have felt right at home in the information revolution.” And although Einstein was not, like Franklin, much of an inventor — he was more prone to theorizing in the abstract than to patenting — “his fingerprints,” Isaacson emphasizes, “are all over todays technologies. Photoelectric cells and lasers, nuclear power and fiber optics, space travel, and even semiconductors all trace back to his theories.” There was, clearly, a taste for this kind of thing in the 2000s, when the phrase “techno-enthusiast” could still be uttered with a straight face. Both biographies were best sellers.
**W**ith Franklin and Einstein, Isaacson was simply rearticulating the achievements of canonical geniuses in the vernacular of his time. Jobs represented a different challenge: because he was still alive, a case had to be made for his inclusion in Isaacsons coterie of polymaths. Following some two years of reporting, Isaacson wrote a fluent narrative about Jobs that, at least superficially, depicted a man with two sides. Sometimes he is a brilliant, intense, eccentric creative with an uncompromising aesthetic vision. Jobs drops acid and travels to India. He takes a course in calligraphy and later uses what he learned there to help develop the Macs font range. He sees a Cuisinart food processor at Macys and has the idea to encase his computers in molded plastic. Other times, Isaacson shows Jobs as volatile and cruel. He gets his girlfriend pregnant, then denies it. He betrays old friends (including his Apple cofounder, the true engineering genius Steve Wozniak). He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. But whenever Jobs behaves badly or demands too much of his staff, or loses himself in perfectionistic pursuit of some detail, Isaacson demonstrates how the unwieldy parts of Jobss temperament allowed him to create world-changing products. The cruel and authoritarian impulses were established, in other words, as necessary components of his creativity. “His personality and passions and products were all interrelated,” Isaacson writes, “just as Apples hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system.”
It is a classic stereotype: the flawed genius, wherein the flaw is the essence of the genius. It is also a pose that Jobs had previously adopted to market Apple products. In 1997, Apple launched the “Think Different” ad campaign, which featured black-and-white footage of iconic twentieth-century geniuses — Einstein, Picasso, Edison, Martin Luther King, Jr. — as well as a spoken-word poem that, according to Isaacson, Jobs helped draft. Isaacson buys right into the conceit. Instead of offering critical reflection on what type of person invokes Martin Luther King, Jr. to advertise computers, he recapitulates the ad campaign wholesale, concluding the biography with a quote directly from the spoken-word copy (the same one that would later appear in the epigraph of *Musk*): “While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
“Think different” encapsulated Isaacsons idea of genius in two words, and became one of his mantras. After the biography was published, the chairman of the firm that created the ad accused Isaacson of “revisionist history.” It is true that Jobs had been involved in overseeing the ad, but he had not been the mastermind, as Isaacson portrayed him. In fact, Jobs had initially described the copy for the ad as “shit.” This corrective notwithstanding, Isaacson would continue to attribute the slogan to Jobs alone, and also apply it to his own subjects, even retrospectively. “Einstein had the elusive qualities of genius, which included that intuition and imagination that allowed him to think differently (or, as Mr. Jobss ads said, to Think Different),” Isaacson wrote in a 2011 *New York Times* editorial. “Like Mr. Jobs, Franklin enjoyed the concept of applied creativity — taking clever ideas and smart designs and applying them to useful devices.” Whats remarkable here is that Isaacson compares Einstein and Franklin to Jobs, instead of the other way around: with Isaacsons spin, Jobs becomes their apotheosis, and Silicon Valley begins to look something like the genius promised land.
Of course, Isaacsons Jobs biography did not inaugurate the Silicon Valley myth. It was evangelized throughout the 1990s, when tech founders were framed as geek heroes who were engineering machines that would one day turn libertarian principles into social facts. What Isaacson did in *Jobs* was repackage the folklore for a mainstream audience and focus it on one person. The pitch worked — and the books success transformed Isaacson into a star biographer. In 2012, he was named to *Time*s list of influential people for writing a “trio of brilliant works about men of genius.” Isaacson later [referred to himself](https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2014/mayjune/conversation/venn-diagram-walter-isaacson) as a Boswell for Silicon Valley, a shadow-like scribe who exists to record how the ingenious live for posterity. A more apt analogy, though, might be Giorgio Vasari, a prominent architect and mediocre artist who lived some five hundred years ago in Florence. In 1550, Vasari published *Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors*, a group biography of Italian artists. A seminal work, it originated the concept of the “Renaissance” and its association with Florence, where Vasaris benefactors, the Medicis, ruled. It also featured the first full account of the life of Leonardo da Vinci. “So great was his genius, and such its growth, that to whatever difficulties he turned his mind, he solved them with ease,” Vasari writes. Indeed, it was Vasari who established the endlessly repeated trope that it was ingenious Renaissance Men like da Vinci who led Florence, and then all of Europe, out of the darkness and into the light. The book made Vasaris reputation, too, forever linking his name with this period in history. With the Jobs biography, Isaacsons project began to bear a distinct resemblance to Vasaris; Palo Alto became a kind of American Florence, the home base of the 21st-century Renaissance, leading the world towards a brighter, enlightened future. Isaacson was the court biographer.
In his next book, *The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution* (2014), Isaacson traces the lineage of Silicon Valley, a place where “authority should be questioned, hierarchies should be circumvented, nonconformity should be admired, and creativity should be nurtured.” The first forebear of the digital revolution, according to Isaacson, was Ada Lovelace, the mathematician daughter of Lord Byron who developed a theory for programming a prototype computer called the Analytical Engine. Isaacson uses her poetic pedigree and unconventional approach to mathematics to make the argument that, like the Renaissance, the digital age was a product of irreverent creatives who embraced the marriage between the arts and humanities. “I was struck by how the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who were able to connect the arts and sciences,” Isaacson writes. Each subsequent figure is cast in this mold. Claude Shannon is “the eccentric information theorist, who would sometimes ride a unicycle up and down the long red terrazzo corridors while juggling three balls and nodding at colleagues.” Alan Kay builds graphical user interfaces and plays in a jazz band. Sergey Brin and Larry Page attend Montessori schools.
This angle may have sold in 2011, but by 2014 perceptions about tech culture were just beginning to shift. The books publication coincided with the beginning of the so-called “tech-lash,” heralded by *The Economist* the year before as a “revolt against the sovereigns of cyberspace.” Pundits were panicking about device addiction and misinformation; the internet, where knowledge was supposed to be free, was beginning to reveal itself as a giant surveillance engine that accumulated wealth and power for the few, while fragmenting society into increasingly antagonistic and paranoid groups. The tech industry was dominated by megacorporations — Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google — that tried to ameliorate concerns about their consolidation of wealth and power with noble slogans like “Dont Be Evil. Critiques emerged from Silicon Valley stalwarts, like virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, who lamented how the hyper-successful tech lords had lost touch with their formerly radical, free-spirited values. Tristan Harris, a tech entrepreneur who began to freak out about the fiendishly addictive affordances of social media, established a Center for Humane Technology. Others, like Peter Thiel, thought the problem was that the bloated tech giants had become enfeebled by establishment politics and liberals more concerned with effecting social change than fortifying American power with new technology. Donald Trumps populist, antiestablishment posturing only emboldened Thiels reactionary grievances. Meanwhile, disinformation-obsessed liberals blamed social media and iPhones for rending the fabric of our shared reality — and for bringing about Trumps election.
If the tech-lash caused Isaacsons faith in the Silicon Valley model of genius to wobble, he didnt show it. In 2017, he published a biography of Leonardo da Vinci in which he described the original Renaissance man as innovative — an outsider, the noble bridge between science and art. This was almost indistinguishable from how he wrote about his coterie of hackers, geniuses, and geeks. He went so far as to invoke Jobss advertising slogan “Think Different,” this time to capture the spirit of the man who painted the Mona Lisa. “The fifteenth century of Leonardo,” he writes, “was a time of invention, exploration, and the spread of knowledge by new technologies. In short, it was a time like our own.” He continues with a lesson: “Above all, Leonardos relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it — to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.”
After the da Vinci biography, Isaacson left the Aspen Institute, became a history professor at Tulane University, took a consulting role focusing on “technology and the new economy” at a global financial services firm, and launched a podcast in partnership with Dell called “Trailblazers, which looked at “digital disruption and innovators using tech to enable human progress.” He also continued working in policy, something he had intermittently done for decades. (Isaacson advised the Bush administration on U.S.-Palestine relations, for example, and under Obama, he was appointed to the Defense Innovation Board.) His next biography, *The Code Breaker* (2021), was about Jennifer Doudna, one of two winners of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on CRISPR gene-editing technology. Although it reprised some themes from his previous works — maverick scientist, innovation, code — it was a departure, too. This was Isaacsons first full-length work about a woman, and it contained extensive deliberation about the ethics of biomedical technologies. It was also timely. In it, Isaacson reports on how Doudna and her collaborators assisted in the development of the mRNA Covid vaccine. The savior in that moment was not some tech maven, but an international conglomerate of scientists who collaborated extensively with global public health institutions. Was Isaacson taking a step away from the hyper-individualistic Silicon Valley and towards a broader, more complex conception of scientific innovation?
**N**ot quite. A few months after the Doudna book came out, Isaacson spoke to Elon Musk on the phone. Musk was, at the time, on the cusp of becoming the richest man in the world, a position consolidated during the pandemic. For some, this made Musk a hero: a brazen, freethinking visionary, leading humanity into a brighter future. For others, Musk became a symbol of everything that was wrong with Silicon Valley: he was the mad king of a high-tech feudal state. In any case, he was the object of our collective fascination, a walking headline. Isaacson embraced the opportunity to get close to this powerful and polarizing figure, and he produced a biography of astounding access and significant detail. If youre curious about what Musks life looks like day to day, Isaacson paints a vivid picture of the chaos — all laid out in highly consumable prose. As usual, Isaacson promises to be objective — to show all sides of the man while withholding judgment. This may have worked with Einstein, da Vinci, and even Jobs. But Elon Musk was like cable news come to life; he may have once appealed to CNN viewers, but was now looking more and more like a Fox guy. And Isaacson did not learn his lesson from his time at CNN. In his effort to appeal to Musks lovers and haters, he ended up making himself look like an apologist.
To begin, Isaacson delves into Musks upbringing in apartheid South Africa. Two formative experiences are recounted. The first is veldskool, a sadistic militant survival camp for boys, where Musk learned “that if someone bullied me, I could punch them very hard in the nose, and then they wouldnt bully me again.” The other comes courtesy of Errol Musk, the psychologically abusive father who berates Elon after he is awfully beaten by another boy at his school. Evidently, Musk internalized the savagery of his early years; Isaacson could have offered a psychoanalytic reading of how this prepared him for the cutthroat, domineering, hyper-capitalist world of Silicon Valley. But Isaacson would rather view his high-tech Florence as a creative utopia. Accordingly, he frames Musks trauma in cartoonish, Marvel-like terms: Musk is beset by demons, but like Jobs, he ultimately channels them to “nurture the flame of human consciousness, fathom the universe, and save our planet.” In one scene, Musk challenges the CTO of PayPal, Max Levchin, to an arm wrestle to resolve a disagreement about operating systems. Musk wins and enlists a team of engineers to rewrite the existing code. The effort takes an entire year and achieves nothing other than distracting engineers from a dire fraud problem on the service. But Isaacson ties this up in a mini-redemption arc: Levchin is seen marveling at Musks technical expertise. As in *Jobs*, Isaacson employs his troubled-genius bait and switch, recounting an unhinged Musk anecdote and then justifying it with a moment of brilliance.
The trouble is, there is very little in Musks early life that offers any evidence of genius, creative talent, or even above-average intelligence. He is an emotionally detached child who sits in class staring into space. He likes computer games and *The* *Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy*. He gets As and Bs. The only evidence of superlative capability that Isaacson can conjure is that Musk read his dads encyclopedias and made small rockets with chlorine and brake fluid. What does stand out among this otherwise entirely unremarkable youth are stories in which Musk succeeds through dumb luck and aggression. In one, Musk competes in a Dungeons and Dragons tournament with his brother and cousins. The game master tells them that their mission is to identify the bad guy among the opposing players. On the first move, and without any evidence, Musk correctly guesses that the game master himself is the bad guy. The others accuse Musk of cheating. How did he know? “These guys were idiots,” Musk explains to Isaacson. “It was so obvious.” Any reader can see that this story is just Musk being a cocky teenage boy. Isaacson, however, takes it as proof that Musk could “think different.” Musks big break comes when he sells his first company, Zip2, at the height of the dot-com boom for $307 million. Zip2 is a searchable business directory that uses map software to give users directions. Its not exactly the Mona Lisa, but, as Isaacson insists, “some of the best innovations come from combining two previous innovations.” Musk parlays the capital from that sale into an online-payments business that, fortunately, merges with PayPal. What does he contribute? An idea that new users could sign up with their email addresses instead of their Social Security numbers. Isaacson: “Like Steve Jobs, he had a passion for simplicity when it came to designing user interface screens.”
If there is anything remarkable that emerges about Musk in the biography, it is his grandiose, cosmic sense of mission — his obsession with making humanity multi-planetary, for example — and his absurd appetite for risk. The combination could be inspiring for those Musk worked with — and it certainly makes for good marketing. Like Jobs, Musks great talent is in self-mythologizing. He builds his cult of personality not around the guru-creative ideal, as Jobs did, but as a crazed, workaholic, alpha-male superhero: a manic Iron Man sending a Tesla Roadster into space. Isaacson credulously regurgitates Musks lore, just as he did in *Jobs,* recounting an anecdote in which Musk plays a game of Texas Hold Em and goes all in on every single hand — losing, doubling up — until he eventually wins. “It would be a theme in his life,” Isaacson writes. “Avoid taking chips off the table; keep risking them.”
To redeem Musk as a Jobs-like genius, Isaacson leans heavily on the “crazy” element of the “think different” campaign. It is the “crazy ones,” the ones who go all in at poker, who change the world. The problem is, as the biography progresses, the craziness intensifies even as it bears little connection to the genuine achievements of Musks companies, which are adeptly run by very talented employees who do their best to keep Musk out of the way. Isaacson tries to craft a coherent narrative out of such life events as: Musk accusing a British caver who helped save trapped Thai soccer players of being a “pedo guy”; smoking a fat blunt on Joe Rogans podcast while talking about our coming A.I. overlords; naming his son with the musician Grimes X Æ A-Xii. Isaacson attempts humor at times, affecting the befuddled tone of a naive grandfather regaling internet drama. When Musk takes over Twitter, Isaacson frames the chaos as a kind of clownish farce.
The contrived goofiness distracts from the troubling reality that, as Musk grew more deranged, his power increased. By 2021, when Isaacson began reporting the book, Musk was running two of the worlds most important companies: Tesla and SpaceX (including its subsidiary Starlink). Isaacson got to see in real time how Musk wielded his influence. One evening, in September 2022, Musk messaged Isaacson to tell him that Ukraine was planning a surprise attack on a Russian naval fleet in Crimea with Starlink-connected submarine drones. Musk told Isaacson he believed there was a “non-trivial possibility” that such an attack could trigger nuclear war, so, as Isaacson tells it, “he reaffirmed a secret policy that he had implemented, which the Ukrainians did not know about, to disable coverage within a hundred kilometers of the Crimean coast.” But Isaacson got the facts wrong. There was no Starlink coverage enabled all the way to Crimea to begin with. The Ukrainians asked Musk to switch it on for their drone attack, but he declined. Much was made of this error after *Musk* was published, but more concerning than Isaacsons errant reporting was his indifference to the fact that, whether Musk made the order directly or simply affirmed the preexisting geographical limit, the final decision was still ultimately his alone, giving Musk almost state-like authority. Isaacson fails to call this for what it is: a completely undemocratic consolidation of power. Instead, Isaacson tempers the whole terrifying ordeal by assuring us that Musk never sought such power. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars,” Musk told Isaacson during a late night phone call. “It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.” Once again, Isaacsons performance of neutrality precludes him from a clear-eyed assessment of his subject. If Kissinger was a serial killer dressed up as a peacemaker, Musk is a mad, petulant oligarch dressed up as a genius.
Isaacson is fond of concluding his books with pithy parting phrases that capture, and also reduce, his subjects. Einstein, were told, is the “locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe.” Da Vinci is “the epitome of the universal mind.” Jobs is one of the “crazy ones” who “push the human race forward.” He makes no such attempt to summarize Musk. This biography ends at a Starship Launch on 4/20, Musks favorite day, because of its associations with weed. He is hyped up on Red Bull with Grimes and three of his eleven kids by his side. He whistles “Ode to Joy” and then gives the command for his rocket to self-destruct after it fails to get into orbit. It is a scene of almost fantastical madness, but Isaacson cant tell what it all means. In part, this is because Musk just doesnt fit within the rubric of Isaacsons new Renaissance Man. Its also because, as Isaacson was writing the draft, and also after the book was published, Musk continued to unravel publicly, doing dumb things and posting about it for us all to see. In fact, the sense I got, on finishing the book, was that if Musks life signifies anything it is how the Vitruvian sense of ourselves as heroic creatures about whom coherent biographies may be written disintegrates online. Life on the platforms unfolds in a fractious and disorienting present tense, never cohering into a meaningful narrative. It is all crisis and reaction, grist for the content mill.
**T**here must be a valuable lesson in the material of Musks life — a metaphor for the false promise of Silicon Valley, maybe, which was always the veldskool painted as utopia. But Isaacson has made himself a main character in this tragedy (or is it by now a farce?). Like Vasari to the house of Medici, Isaacson has tied his name to the house of Palo Alto. He is unable to unveil its darker truths without implicating himself.
In the books penultimate chapter, Isaacson is summoned to meet Musk in Austin, where the purported genius waxes lyrical about how human intelligence is leveling off while digital intelligence increases exponentially. The A.I. overlords are coming. Musk feels it is his duty to intervene, to develop A.I. according to the principles of rationality and truth, so that our civilization may endure — which is why, Musk tells Isaacson, he is starting an A.I. company. This is right out of the Silicon Valley marketing playbook: by framing the algorithms in folkloric terms of good and evil, tech companies distract from the ways in which they are leveraging mass-surveillance apparatuses, accumulating our data and selling it back to us in the form of supposedly super-advanced A.I. that sometimes gets basic math wrong. Isaacson, as always, repeats the tale dutifully, with little critical intervention.
All this suggests that Isaacsons next project might just be a ham-fisted biography of A.I. itself — the genius machines created in our image. After all, Isaacson is perfectly placed to whitewash power with the language of humanism. Its been his project all along. Though Isaacsons biographies have become so predictable, his style so platitudinous, that we could probably just do it for him, with a bit of help. Computer: write a genius biography of A.I. in the style of Walter Isaacson.
Oscar Schwartz is a writer and journalist. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.
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# A Familys Disappearance Rocked New Zealand. What Came After Has Stunned Everyone.
![Cartoon images of a missing poster with three kids, footage of two bank robbers, loose bank notes flying through the air, a pickup truck parked on the beach, and two people on a motorbike.](https://compote.slate.com/images/cdc9afab-22a6-4479-a15f-b67a2a10a410.jpeg)
Illustration by Toby Morris
The waves were already crashing over the Toyotas hood when they found it.
It was a blustery September Sunday in 2021, and the Hilux pickup sat far down the gray sand in a remote cove on the wild west coast of New Zealands North Island. The Māori men who noticed the car live in mobile homes and cabins up by the road, on ancestral land near Kiritehere Beach. The truck was parked below the high-tide line, facing the sea, and was nearly swamped by the waves pummeling the shore. The men found the keys, tucked under the drivers-side floormat, and backed the car up the beach. They couldnt help but notice empty child seats strapped into the back. If any kids had gotten close to the sea on a day like this, they were long gone.
The truck, it would turn out, belonged to Tom Phillips, the son of a prominent Pākehā—white—family with a farm nearby in Marokopa. Phillips, 34, spent much of his time on the farm, where he home-schooled his three kids, Jayda, 8, Maverick, 6, and Ember, 5. Hed separated from his wife three years before and had custody of the kids. Locals heard she was down on the South Island, struggling with her own problems.
Now here was his truck, marooned. The next morning, Toms brother Ben drove down to the beach. Hed last seen Tom and the kids on Saturday, Sept. 11, when theyd left the farm, heading, everyone thought, back to Ōtorohanga, the inland town where Tom kept a house. Now it was Sept. 13. Ben inspected the Toyota, then called the police.
Soon photos of the missing father and his three smiling children were in every newspaper and on every TV channel in New Zealand. Police and volunteer searchers fanned out over the area, knocking on doors. Helicopters, planes, and heat-detecting drones flew over the deep bush surrounding the beach. Rescue boats and jet skis buzzed through the roaring waves, looking for bodies. On days the sea was calm, swimmers from surf rescue teams explored caves along the shoreline. The local hapū, or Māori clan, cooked hot meals for the searchers in a shed near the beach. Three days into the search, Phillips ex-wife [released a careful statement](https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/126382867/mum-holding-out-every-hope-for-children-missing-on-stormy-waikato-beach?rm=a) through the police, thanking the searchers for their efforts. “We are holding out every hope that my children Jayda, Maverick, and Ember are safe,” she said.
But the stark facts—the lonely car on the beach, the 8-foot waves, Tom and the children vanishing completely—were daunting. “I do fear the worst,” Toms sister, Rozzi Pethybridge, told a reporter. “I am worried a rogue wave has caught one of the kids and hes gone in to save them.” Phillips uncle seemed to be hinting at something even darker when he told another reporter that in some ways he hoped it *had* been a rogue wave: “If something has happened to the children, the best-case scenario is that they were washed out to sea,” he said. “That way its an accident.”
September in New Zealand, the height of Southern Hemisphere spring, is whitebaiting season, when locals set up nets at the river mouth to capture the shoals of immature fish headed back to their freshwater home. But during the search operation, authorities placed a rāhui, a ban, on fishing. Some Marokopa residents grumbled about halting what had been a boom season. But others put things in perspective. “Thats the end of the whitebaiting,” one local [told a reporter](https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/300408397/the-mystery-of-the-missing-family--whats-become-of-tom-phillips-and-his-kids), “but thats small-time compared with losing a family.”
On social media and on Reddit, observers seized on rumors of a custody dispute and [spun out dark theories](https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/puhmqz/missing_family_daily_searches_for_family_last/) of an abduction or staged disappearance. Phillips was an experienced bushman, camper, and hunter. In passing, locals told reporters that if Phillips *had* taken the kids out into the wild for some reason, they were confident he could last for weeks or months out there, even with three children in tow. A week into the search, family members seemed to be pinning their hopes on this idea. “Were looking on the bright side,” the uncle [told Radio New Zealand](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/451509/family-hope-missing-dad-and-children-are-in-hiding-uncle-says). “Were hoping hes just gone and hidden in the bush.”
After 12 days of active searching, the [police stood down](https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/300415580/missing-family-daily-searches-for-family-last-seen-in-marokopa-suspended). The whitebaiting rāhui was lifted. Emergency services personnel moved out of the Marokopa community building on the banks of the river. Other than the Toyota, not a single sign had been found of the four missing Phillipses. The media continued covering the case, but there wasnt much to say—everyone understood that until bodies washed up somewhere, it was unlikely there would be any further news.
No one knew that the disappearances were just the beginning of an ordeal that has not yet ended—a case that has only grown stranger and more ominous in the two and a half years since, prompting pleas from family, increasing public astonishment, online speculation, a shocking crime, and a communitys closing ranks around one of its own.
Back in September 2021, the real mystery started when the first one was solved. Because 17 days after they had been reported missing, Tom Phillips and his three children walked through the front door of his parents farm.
The Tom Phillips disappearance captivated New Zealand. But the incident never reached the 24/7 fever pitch of blanket coverage that would have characterized the story if it had happened in the United States. In part thats because theres no CNN-style 24-hour news channel in New Zealand, though pretty much every outlet in the country sent a reporter to the west coast in hopes of digging something up. But no one had much to say. Phillips uncle spoke to press during the search, but other members of the Phillips clan stuck to the farm and stayed away from television cameras. The police delivered a daily briefing most afternoons, which never offered any new information. The childrens mother remained unnamed. Reporters were unable to reveal details of the couples custody disputes, because family courts in New Zealand strictly prohibit media from reporting on their proceedings.
Even after Phillips and his children returned, there [was no footage](https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2021/09/family-missing-in-south-waikato-found-safe-and-well.html) of the happy family waving from the front porch, no soft-focus newsmagazine interviews, no morning-show feature. Phillips never spoke to the press. The family issued a statement—“Tom is remorseful, he is humbled, he is gaining an understanding of the horrific ordeal he has put us through”—and Pethybridge gave a brief interview to the New Zealand Herald in which she [seemed shell-shocked](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/marokopa-mystery-family-of-missing-kids-on-weeks-in-dense-bush-didnt-do-it-hard-at-all/FGZYKWO6KWPJ4QPBHOQ6WXRRIY/?utm_campaign=nzh_tw&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter&utm_campaign=nzh_tw#Echobox=1633037862-1) by the situation. “Hope dwindled and we became more and more resigned and sad,” she said. Now, she added, she could “smile and laugh for the first time in three weeks, and not feel bad if you have a little smile.”
![A triptych of the three missing kids.](https://compote.slate.com/images/60367ead-248c-48c6-964b-81d75dba9c70.png?crop=1400%2C840%2Cx0%2Cy0)
The Phillips kids: from left, Maverick, Jayda, and Ember. Courtesy of NZ Police
She did not, however, smile once in the entire interview. The family closed ranks, and reporters were stuck combing social media for clues. (“Pethybridge also shared a song [titled Hey Brother](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cp6mKbRTQY) by Swedish DJ Avicci,” one report noted.)
The residents of Marokopa, too, had little to say once the children were safe, one reporter told me. “After he was found, no one wanted to talk,” [said Karen Rutherford](https://newsroom.co.nz/2021/10/04/man-found-mystery-continues/) of Newshub. “He has put people through the wringer, to be honest.” After all, what had all that work been for? Theyd served meals to rescuers, opened the community center 24/7. Many residents had tramped along the shoreline, looking for bodies. Even after the police had called off the search, members of the local hapū went out every day. Then it turned out that Phillips simply had not bothered to tell anyone he was taking the children to the deep bush, pitching a tent 15 kilometers south of the beach where his car was found. “Hes done this before. Its not the first time,” a [local farmer said](https://www.stuff.co.nz/waikato-times/news/300420778/from-joy-to-frustration-over-marokopas-lostthenfound-family). “Were glad to have him back, but he should be held accountable. What was he thinking?”
And why had he left the car there, anyway? Though one friend suggested that the pickup had been stolen by joyriding kids, most everyone assumed that Phillips had parked on the beach to throw searchers off the trail. But for what purpose? Some [noted Pethybridges comment](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/452625/missing-marokopa-family-found-safe-and-well) that Phillips was in “a helpless place” and wanted to “clear his head.” A [Reddit user mused](https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/py73jy/missing_marakopa_family_found_safe_and_well/): “Its one thing for him wanting to clear his head but what about the kids? Hope theyre OK, might need some therapy stat.” Others leaped in to assure everyone that a trip to the bush was just what any kid needed: “Going camping with dad and forgetting about the rest of the world would be pretty sweet.”
Indeed, theres a long tradition in New Zealand of valorizing backcountry adventure—getting lost in the bush for a while—shared by parents and children. “Its a [*Man Alone* thing](https://thespinoff.co.nz/books/29-04-2021/locked-down-and-far-from-home-with-man-alone),” the Auckland education researcher Stuart McNaughton told me, referring to the 1939 novel by John Mulgan still viewed by many as essential to understanding the “Kiwi character.” “Getting on with stuff, taming a difficult environment, getting hurt in the process.” To many New Zealanders, a proper father figure is a guy who knows how to handle the wilderness, a place where increasingly citified Kiwi kids seem less and less comfortable. McNaughton summarized the attitude: “If theyre gonna have an accident, theyre gonna have an accident—itll probably do them good.”
The modern urtext on this subject is Taika Waititis 2016 comedy [*Hunt for the Wilderpeople*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunt_for_the_Wilderpeople), still the most successful locally produced film in the nations history. In the movie, a troubled Māori kid from the Auckland streets bonds with a brusque Pākehā outdoorsman in the deep bush. The movies villain is a maniacal child protection officer who hunts them down—the overweening nanny state, in the flesh. Its based on a book by the late Barry Crump, famous for his reputation as a rugged bloke; New Zealanders know him best for [his long-running ads](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyHBKX29_Q8) for the Toyota Hilux ute, the official truck of bushmen—unsurprisingly, the truck Tom Phillips owned and parked on Kiritehere Beach.
After he returned, [Phillips was charged](https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/126656040/man-charged-over-search-for-father-and-children-in-marokopa-waikato?rm=a) with wasting police resources and ordered to appear in court. He was “reckless as to whether wasteful deployment of police resources would result,” the charges read. He “behaved in a manner that was likely to give rise to serious apprehension for the safety of himself, Jayda Phillips, Ember Phillips and Maverick Phillips, knowing that such apprehension would be groundless.” The charges carried a maximum penalty of three months in jail or a $2,000 fine.
In neighborhood Facebook groups and on playgrounds across New Zealand, parents debated the news. How dare this screw-up risk the lives of searchers and terrify his family because he hadnt bothered to tell anyone where he was going. Shouldnt he at least pay the government back for what it spent on that search plane? Or: How dare the government charge a parent for going camping with his children! Wasnt he the kind of throwback dad we didnt see enough of anymore, as modern kids become coddled and soft?
I was certainly sympathetic to this second argument. Id taken my own family to New Zealand to live for a period in 2017, specifically to capture that spirit of adventure, something that felt sorely lacking in our suburban American lives. Our daughters—just a little older than Phillips kids were when they disappeared—rarely left their comfort zones, and no one we knew let their children roam our neighborhood freely. We hoped that New Zealand might help shake us up. I was no bushman like Tom Phillips, but the four of us [did go tramping](https://longreads.com/2019/09/17/tramp-like-us/) across graywacke streams, into the forest primeval, even along a remote shore that looked quite a bit like the Marokopa coast. Unlike Phillips, I told my friends where we were going, but still: Were the police really charging this guy for giving his kids what might have been a wondrous adventure?
Reporters, struggling to [advance the story](https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/126543524/the-marokopa-mystery-what-we-still-dont-know-about-the-phillips-familys-disappearance-and-survival), asked experts what they thought about it all. One family lawyer admitted he knew nothing about the childrens custody arrangement but said, “If there was no parenting order, and he was just going on holiday, legally hes done nothing wrong.” The same outlet asked a “human rights lawyer” what she thought about a parent taking children out into the deep bush without letting anyone know. “Its not best practice,” she replied, in a tone I could almost hear from the page.
![A balding white man in his 30s wearing a gray sweater.](https://compote.slate.com/images/0eae91df-9f97-4395-9e92-8daaec890b6e.png?crop=1086%2C1086%2Cx0%2Cy0)
Tom Phillips. Courtesy of NZ Police
Then, in December, as summer vacation season began, the New Zealand Herald found a Facebook post—seemingly from someone close to the childrens mother—stating that Phillips had once again [taken his kids](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/marokopa-family-missing-again-tom-phillips-and-his-children-havent-been-seen-for-a-week/FJCUY5RR5MG7NTVX6Z4L6NHWZU/) on walkabout. “He notified family of where he was going,” the local police commander said in response. “In terms of current court restrictions of what he can and cant do, hes doing nothing wrong.” Commenters online were aghast that the paper had [pursued the story](https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/rk40i0/marokopa_family_missing_again_tom_phillips_and/). “So this is just literally a man taking his kids camping?” one wrote. “Correct,” replied another. “His ex-missus has gone to NZH and theyve run with it.”
Phillips scheduled court date was Jan. 12, 2022. That morning, reporters packed the tiny wooden courthouse in Te Kūiti, lured by the chance to finally ask questions of the enigmatic father who had made news and driven debate across the country for months. More media spilled onto Queen Street outside, pacing in the warm summer sun.
Tom Phillips [never showed up](https://www.stuff.co.nz/waikato-times/news/127475663/marokopa-dad-thomas-phillips-a-noshow-in-court-on-charge-of-wasting-police-time). Appearing via video, his lawyer told the judge that hed informed his client of the appearance date and never spoken to him again. He also asked to withdraw as counsel in the case.
The judge issued a warrant for Phillips arrest. But the police couldnt locate Phillips or his three children. They had disappeared into the bush. And this time, they didnt come back.
When I spoke to New Zealanders in the months after the second disappearance of Tom Phillips, it was clear that some in the country still viewed him as a kind of quirky folk hero whod taken his kids out into the wilderness to avoid the oppressive, overreaching government. “There was a lot of talk like that,” said Max Baxter, the mayor of Ōtorohanga, where Phillips house sat empty, weeds growing over his fence. “He felt that his personal protection of the children was paramount, and the result was that he was opening them up to experiences that kids nowadays dont get. Hes teaching them to be bushmen.” He laughed. “My grown children probably couldnt survive two weeks in the bush!”
“A lot of people are like, Leave him alone, those kids are probably having the time of their lives, ” said Karen Rutherford, the New Zealand reporter who got the [only on-camera interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0e5AT4EhTw) with Phillips ex-wife. But others, she told me, felt that “now hes skipped court hes stuffed all his chances of being a good dad.”
In the United States, I felt my admiration of Phillips wash away like the road to Marokopa [as heavy rains](https://www.stuff.co.nz/waikato-times/news/300516303/marokopa-locals-caught-off-guard-as-rain-dump-floods-the-village) [swept through the region](https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/128843903/marokopa-cut-off-as-floods-make-road-unpassable). Was he really hiding his kids in the bush during *this* kind of weather? The childrens mother made a public [appeal for assistance](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/468228/desperate-mum-pleads-for-safe-return-of-missing-phillips-children-from-marokopa) in May, as New Zealand winter approached. Other relatives on the mothers side [launched an online petition](https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/128560653/adult-sisters-of-missing-marokopa-children-launch-petition-asking-authorities-to-do-more-to-find-them) urging police to do more. They complained that Phillips parents were refusing to let anyone onto their enormous Marokopa compound to search the wilderness around the farm—or the baches, the guesthouses the family [used to rent out](https://www.oocities.org/marokopa2002/Accommodation.htm) to tourists.
The Phillips family remained silent objects of fascination for the news media. On the day of Phillips courthouse no-show, his mother had told reporters assembled outside the gates of the family farm, “I am trespassing all media from this property.” According to one outlet, asked if she knew where her son was, “Julia Phillips simply answered with a shrug and a smile.”
“Theyre real sort of rugged, coast-y people who dont come into town much,” a local reporter told me. “Theyre kind of unusual. Youd call them rednecks, I think.” (Being “coastal” has a very different connotation in New Zealand than it does in the U.S.) Tony Wall, a reporter for the newsmagazine Stuff, told me that Phillips parents have been “very uncooperative. If you read between the lines, it definitely seems like they know something but theyre not telling us.”
Someone, everybody assumed, was shopping for supplies and ferrying them out to Phillips, wherever he was hiding out. “Its almost unfathomable to think a father could survive with three small children without someone buying them supplies,” Baxter told me. “But whats the endgame? Im looking out my window now, and its pouring down rain.”
The lack of urgency on the part of Waikato police was often commented upon. “Its very strange,” one reporter whos been covering the case said. “The cops are not pouring any resources into looking for him and those children. I think they are of the view that hes not going to hurt them and hell eventually come out.” The department responded to press requests with a not-particularly-inspiring statement: “Police continue to make enquiries to establish the whereabouts of Tom Phillips, who we believe is currently with his three children. While Police understand the ongoing interest in this matter, we will not be disclosing the details of the enquiries that are under way.”
Whatever enquiries were under way, that cold and wet winter passed with no sign of Tom Phillips. As 2022 turned into 2023, Phillips and his children had been missing without a trace for more than a year. Then came the bank robbery.
The two figures were dressed in all black—motorcycle helmets, puffer jackets, and boots—when they walked into the ANZ bank branch less than half a mile from the courthouse in Te Kūiti, just before noon on May 16, 2023. When the banks anxious staff asked them to take their helmets off, the pair displayed guns and demanded money. Tellers quickly gave them cash and, within moments, the pair ran out the front door.
As the robbers hurried down Rora Street, one witness later said they were dropping cash out of their pockets, “heaps of $50 notes.” The street was strewn with money. The confused passerby asked one of them, a slight figure whom they described as “a girl,” if she needed help picking up the money. Up ahead, the girls companion—a man, it seemed—turned back to look at what was happening. Right then, he was tackled to the ground by the owner of the SuperValue supermarket theyd been hurrying past.
![Surveillance camera footage of two figures, one an adult and the other a child, in face masks and camo gear walking down a sidewalk.](https://compote.slate.com/images/55de22c4-4326-457e-9cc8-b1bedc3ddfea.png?crop=602%2C360%2Cx0%2Cy0)
Courtesy of NZ Police
Suddenly, the girl brandished her gun. The passerby backed away. Someone called, “Fire the gun!” No ones quite clear who did what, or whom they were aiming at, but someone did fire, more than once. The passerby froze in their tracks, and the supermarket owner retreated.
The robbers ran past a vape shop and around a corner to a parking lot, where they climbed onto a motorbike and rode off to the north. Behind them, bank notes littered the pavement, 20s and 50s—as much as $1,000, one witness estimated.
The armed robbery shocked the town, which bills itself as the nations sheepshearing capital. A week later, the robbery led a Waikato Times feature about growing [youth crime concerns](https://www.waikatotimes.co.nz/a/nz-news/350015252/very-country-robbery) in Te Kūiti, full of nervous quotes from residents and shop owners about meth, burglary, and car thefts broadcast on TikTok.
Yet on the subject of the bank robbery itself, one Maōri warden had only to say that he reckoned locals already knew who did it. It wasnt some wayward Te Kūiti youth or a more organized criminal element. Even in those early days, speculation was running rampant among residents that the bank robbers were, in fact, Tom Phillips—and one of his children.
It took four months for police to [officially name Phillips](https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/300964573/arrest-warrant-issued-for-missing-marokopa-dad-tom-phillips-over-alleged-bank-robbery) for the crime, charging him with aggravated robbery, aggravated wounding, and unlawful possession of a firearm. They believe that he was the larger of the two robbers, the one who seemed to be leading things, and have not identified the second, smaller robber, other than to say that they think she is “female.” At the time of the robbery, Jayda was 10.
The September 2023 charges in the Wild Weststyle bank robbery—guns blazing, bank notes blowing in the wind—eliminated any residual goodwill Phillips had accumulated in his long months on the run. They capped off an eventful winter, Phillips second on the run with his children.
The month before, Phillips had stolen a truck—naturally, a Toyota Hilux—and driven to Hamilton, the biggest city in the Waikato region, about 40 miles north of Ōtorohanga. An acquaintance recognized him in the parking lot of Bunnings, a Home Depottype home improvement store, where Phillips, [wearing a surgical mask](https://www.odt.co.nz/news/national/police-reveal-items-marakopa-father-bought) and a woolen hat, used a large amount of cash to buy headlamps, batteries, seedlings, buckets, and gumboots.
That evening, Phillips got into an altercation on a road about an hour up the coast from Marokopa. The owner of the Hilux—who had also realized that winter clothing had been stolen from his property—fought with Phillips, then chased him along the winding highway, reportedly attempting to run him off the road. Eventually multiple vehicles were pursuing Phillips, who switched off the Hiluxs headlights and turned sharply into the parking lot of the Te Kauri Lodge, driving through a gate and into a paddock. “He went in there and he hid,” a lodge custodian told [Radio New Zealand](https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/495109/tom-phillips-father-of-missing-marokopa-children-evaded-multiple-pursuers-residents-say). “These fullahs drove straight past.” The police sent out a search helicopter, to no avail. A few days later, the [Hilux was found](https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/300943316/stolen-ute-driven-by-tom-phillips-found-by-police-in-marokopa-bush) deep in the undergrowth, about 25 meters off Marokopa Road, not far from the Phillips farm.
A few weeks later, a private investigator—he tells reporters he “follows the case on his own time”—tipped off Tony Wall, the reporter at Stuff, that the property to which the Hilux was returned had hosted Phillips for a visit the year before. (The P.I. says he reported the sighting to the police but nothing came of it.) According to an informant, Phillips had been receiving help from a network of local residents “since day one.”
Wall chronicled his visit to the steep, densely wooded property near Ōtorohanga in a hair-raising story [published last August](https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/300957682/marokopa-mystery-police-knew-of-possible-fugitive-sighting-last-year-at-property-where-he-later-stole-a-ute). A neighbor, who was reportedly also present when Phillips visited the property in 2022, launched into a coy, taunting conversation about the disappearance. “I cant say if I have or havent seen him in the last few years,” the man said. “Its like a good game of hide-and-go-seek. Hes fucking good at it. Never, ever play hide-and-go-seek with him because youll give up, and he wont come out.” When Wall asked the man how someone like Phillips could simply vanish, the man scoffed. “Its easy in New Zealand. The justice system is shit, the court system is shit, the police are shit, the media is shit. Thats the facts of it.”
As Wall drove away, his car was overtaken by two other drivers, who boxed him in and forced him to pull over to the side of the road. One of the vehicles was driven by the owner of the stolen Hilux, who accused Wall of “snooping around” and “causing havoc.” “Youre in the wrong fucking place for this, man,” he said. “You want to come and harass us out here, on my own turf?” He tried to force open Walls car door, telling him, “Im gonna fuck you up, mate.”
Wall finally managed to drive away, but the utes owner had one last thing to say. “Youre fucking lucky were letting you out of here, cunt. You want the truth about the whole fucking scenario, mate, youd better be on your game, cause youre pushing shit uphill now.”
After the police named Phillips in the bank robbery, [residents phoned in](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/missing-marokopa-fugitive-tom-phillips-police-reveal-12-more-sightings/IVMXVESFAZFMNPHP4I72R5NAKQ/) more than a dozen sightings, but the police could never seem to catch him. Late one night in November, Phillips and one of his children rode a stolen quad bike to the town of Piopio and smashed the window of a superette in an attempted burglary, police say. [Security footage showed](https://www.waikatotimes.co.nz/nz-news/350110471/missing-marokopa-dad-tom-phillips-allegedly-used-stolen-quadbike-smashed) a pair dressed in full camo gear approaching the stores camera with a spray can. When an alarm sounded, they fled south.
This January, the two-year anniversary of Phillips second flight passed with just another wan police announcement—this time that [they had narrowed](https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/350155353/police-narrow-marokopa-search-phillips-family) Phillips hiding place to the Marokopa area, a development that surprised absolutely no one whos been following the case. Yet I feel for the police, who are looking in an area spanning hundreds of square miles, where a number of residents clearly still have no desire to share information with them. (The owner of the stolen Hilux—a guy who disliked Phillips enough that he tried to run him off the road—nevertheless referred to the police as “fucking pigshits.”) “If a plane crashed in this bush, youd be fortunate to find it,” Max Baxter told me. “Its really, really hard to begin somewhere, unless theres someone who knows and decides its time to come forward.”
Few New Zealanders still believe that Phillips and his kids—now 10, 8, and 7—are roughing it, stalking game in the deep bush like the wilderpeople of old. Most everyone thinks that hes hiding on or near his family farm, aided by a network of friendly locals that may or may not include his parents. (Thats certainly what Wall, still trying to [crack the case](https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/350166823/could-wanted-man-tom-phillips-be-or-near-his-family-farm), believes.) On social media, its been a long time since anyone has called Phillips a good dad merely fighting authority. “Hes just a piece of shit human being with anger and control issues who is subjecting his children to child abuse,” went [one typical comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/17upm0f/missing_marokopa_family_in_piopio_tom_phillips/).
And few anticipate any ending to this story that feels happy at all. In the worst-case scenario, Phillips and his kids are injured, or killed, robbing another bank or battling it out with the cops. But even the best-case scenario at this point feels grim. Phillips children have spent the past two and a half years with a father whos surely told them that everyone is out to get them, that they can trust no one but him, that the only way to stay safe is to hide out far from the rest of the world. Hes relayed to them that their future depends on smashing windows, stealing cars, waving guns.
Someday those children will be found, and their father will almost certainly be sent to jail. Every news report about the case—a dwindling number, as the months go on—features the same photos of the children: the girls in fairy dresses, all three of them grinning widely. In the next photos we see of Jayda, Maverick, and Ember, they wont be smiling. I once thought perhaps their father was giving them a gift, the adventure of a lifetime. Instead, he stole their childhoods. When its all over theyll be as alone as that truck was, parked on the gray sand, the implacable sea rushing up to meet it.
- [Crime](https://slate.com/tag/crime)
- [Family](https://slate.com/tag/family)
- [Parenting](https://slate.com/tag/parenting)
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# A Gaza Conundrum: The Story Behind the Rise of Hamas
DER SPIEGEL 51/2023
![](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/1d964129-f08f-49d0-b2f2-bd19e5f639d0_w335_r0.7502857142857143_fpx50.96_fpy50.26.jpg)
**The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 51/2023 (December 16th, 2023) of DER SPIEGEL.**
[SPIEGEL International](https://www.spiegel.de/international/ "SPIEGEL International")
It must have been three or four days after October 7 when the Hamas leader visited his hostages in one of the many tunnels under the Gaza Strip. “Hello, Im Yahya Sinwar,” he said, introducing himself in fluent Hebrew. “Nothing will happen to you.”
Eighty-five-year-old Yocheved Lifshitz was one of the Israeli prisoners present for the meeting with Sinwar. She would be released at the end of October. According to the Israeli media, she asked Sinwar whether he wasnt ashamed to be doing such a thing to the very people who had supported peace all these years. Together with her husband, she told Sinwar, she had personally helped bring Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Israeli hospitals.
She says Sinwar didnt answer.
![Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar at a Hamas event in May 2021](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/b53f722a-7fda-4e7c-bea4-3c7d548a49e3_w520_r1.4904364884747425_fpx40.91_fpy54.98.jpg "Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar at a Hamas event in May 2021")
Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar at a Hamas event in May 2021
Foto: Majdi Fathi / NurPhoto / Getty Images
“Conditions here are unbearable. An explosion is inevitable.”
Yahya Sinwar, head of Hamas
The visit to the hostages must have been a great moment in the life of this man, who has spent more than 20 years in Israeli prisons. Some describe him as a butcher and others as a psychopath, but for many, he is seen as a heroic resistance fighter.
The October 7 massacre is the bloody climax of Sinwars terrorist career. His men simply overran Israels ultra-modern border facilities surrounding the Gaza Strip simply overrun. They took the vaunted Israeli army, which took several hours to respond, completely by surprise and sent the whole of Israel into a state of shock after an attack the likes of which the Jewish state had never seen before: at least 1,200 dead in one day, shot, burned, beheaded in addition to taking around 240 hostages, many women and children. And Hamas filmed the horror live and broadcast it to the world on social media.
### The Palestinian Question Returns To Center Stage
The attack is a turning point in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians; a turning point after which little will be the same again not only for the Israelis, but also the Palestinians. The massacre and Israels military response to it have created new traumas and reopened old ones. For the Israelis, the atrocities committed on October 7 are reminiscent of the bloody pogroms and the Holocaust. For the Palestinians, the Israeli response has evoked memories of the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe, which the Palestinians use to describe their flight and expulsion following the founding of the Jewish state in 1948.
![Buildings destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in the southern Gaza Strip](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/962383b9-b7fd-4863-80cb-e23c38788fb3_w520_r1.5_fpx34.65_fpy50.jpg "Buildings destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in the southern Gaza Strip")
Buildings destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in the southern Gaza Strip
Foto: Said Khatib / AFP
Since the attack, the Palestinian question has once again been at the center of global attention, while Israel has had to abandon the illusion that it can "manage” the conflict with the Palestinians. Talks on normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia are on hold. Russia and China sense an opportunity to assert their influence in the region. The European Union is struggling with its future role in the conflict. And the United States government faces both headwinds and isolation stemming from its pro-Israeli stance.
And as brutal and repulsive as the attack was, the Palestinians, says Israeli pollster Dahlia Scheindlin, now view Hamas as "number one” in the fight against Israel. The secular Fatah, which controls the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, has faded into insignificance, she says.
It can be assumed that this is exactly what the Hamas fighters wanted to acheive, in addition to the very specific goal of taking as many hostages as possible in order to leverage the release of prisoners held by the Israelis.
But Sinwar likely had another goal in mind: That of shaking the Israelis sense of security and their trust in the state and the army. And of hitting them at their weakest point the deep-seated fear of annihilation held by a people who have been persecuted for thousands of years.
The Israeli army began calling up reservists on October 7. And since then, the military has been waging a war against Hamas that has also had a far-reaching impact on the Gaza Strips civilian population. Thus far, Israels army has killed around 18,000 Palestinians, a figure that comes from Hamas sources, but is nevertheless considered realistic by international organizations. More than 100 Israeli soldiers have also been killed in the Gaza Strip. The north of the region, in particularly, has largely been destroyed. The Israeli army reports that 7,000 terrorists have been killed so far, including half of all Hamas commanders.
How was it possible for the terrorists to launch such an attack? Were the atrocities part of the plan from the start? Why did Hamas risk its control over the Gaza Strip, indeed its very existence? And can this war destroy the organization as the Israeli government is hoping, or will Hamas perhaps emerge even stronger than before?
In the search for answers to these questions, its impossible to ignore Yahya Sinwar. His story is deeply interwoven with the rise of Hamas, with its many transformations and with the horrific October 7 massacre, the planning of which he was deeply involved in.
### The Founding in Gaza
The history of Hamas began in December 1987, as a Gaza City offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The first intifada, the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation, had just broken out. Ahmed Yassin, who was partially blind and confined to a wheelchair, founded Hamas, an acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement. His most eager student was Sinwar, a young man in his mid-20s who had grown up in the Khan Yunis refugee camp. Despite his young age, Sinwar had already spent several months in Israeli custody and had embarked on a career of murdering alleged Palestinian collaborators.
![Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin surrounded by supporters in the Gaza Strip](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/776aae58-df48-4c5e-bd4f-64eadb7e9b38_w520_r1.3865944482058226_fpx36.04_fpy49.97.jpg "Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin surrounded by supporters in the Gaza Strip")
Hamas founder Ahmed Yassin surrounded by supporters in the Gaza Strip
Foto: REUTERS
Previously, Yassin and his comrades-in-arms had not taken part in the armed resistance, which was dominated by secular nationalists at the time. Instead, the groups main goal was to Islamicize society. Yassin received a license from the Israeli military administration in the 1970s for an Islamic association, and his people ran schools, hospitals and religious centers.
Israels primary concern at the time was militant nationalists, and the Muslim zealots were seen as a counterweight so Israel backed them. "It was a vast, stupid mistake,” an Israeli government official who spent years working in Gaza would later state. It was just the first of many mistakes made in dealing with the Islamists, culminating in disaster 36 years later.
Whereas Yasser Arafat, the head of the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), contemplated negotiations with Israel and a two-state solution while in exile in Tunisia at the beginning of the first intifada and recognized Israels right to exist shortly afterward, Hamas took a different path. They believed the moment for armed conflict had arrived.
Its founding charter from 1988 is steeped in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in which Hamas preaches jihad for Palestine and rules out any negotiations with Israel.
### Hamas Is Not Islamic State
Unlike the terrorists of the Islamic State (IS) or al-Qaida, Hamas is focused on the establishment of a Palestinian state not global jihad or the creation of a caliphate inhabited by Muslims from all over the world. The organization was founded by refugees who were driven by the idea of returning to the places from which they or their parents had fled or been expelled during the founding of Israel. They wanted a country, and for them, this country would be "Islamic.” Even if some of the acts they commit are similar, the origins, goals and ideology of IS and Hamas are quite different.
It didnt take long after its founding for Hamas to begin attacking the Israelis. In 1989, Hamas members kidnapped and killed two soldiers in the Gaza Strip.
Michael Koubi, now 78 years old, was in charge of investigations for the Israeli domestic intelligence service Shin Bet in the Gaza Strip at the end of the 1980s. He decided to take a radical step: On May 9, 1989, he had all members of Hamas arrested, including Yassin and Yahya Sinwar. Koubi met Sinwar, who was 27 years old at the time, in person.
“It was clear to me even then that Hamas was our biggest enemy,” he says. “What we are doing now in Gaza was long overdue.”
Michael Koubi, Israeli secret service agent
"At first, Sinwar didnt speak a word,” Koubi recalls. He says Yassin then explained that Sinwar was his most important helper, that he was the founder and commander of the Majd, Hamas internal secret service. It was only under pressure from Yassin that Sinwar said anything at all to Koubi. The Palestinian, says Koubi, admitted to having committed 12 murders. He said he strangled one of his victims with a kufiyah, the Palestinian scarf. He had another one buried alive by his brother, who was a member of Hamas. "Thats what Yahya Sinwar was like,” Koubi said.
Koubi says he spent between 150 and 180 hours interrogating Sinwar and that during that entire time, Sinwar never once smiled, that he seemed like a man without emotions. When he asked Sinwar why, in his late 20s, he still didnt have a family, he responded: "Hamas is my wife, my son, my daughter, my parents. Hamas is everything to me.” He stressed that the day would come when Hamas men would get out of prison to destroy Israel. "It was clear to me even then that Hamas was our biggest enemy,” says Koubi. "What were doing now in Gaza was long overdue,” he adds.
### Four Life Sentences
In 1989, an Israeli court convicted Sinwar to four life sentences. According to Koubi, he accepted the verdict impassively. Sinwar spent a total of more than two decades in prison.
"When we met in Shikma prison in Ashkelon in 1996, there were only a few hundred Hamas members there,” recalls Esmat Mansour, 48, who spent time in prison with Sinwar. Mansour served 20 years for the murder of a settler. He now works as a journalist and translator in Ramallah. During the second intifada after the turn of the millennium, the number of prisoners grew. "Hamas became the strongest force in the prisons. That caused Sinwars power to grow.” Both inside and outside the prison walls.
![Esmat Mansour, who spent time with Sinwar in prison, in Ramallah](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/00ba8c64-6021-40aa-bb04-e1f7e9f02163_w520_r1.25_fpx63.19_fpy55.01.jpg "Esmat Mansour, who spent time with Sinwar in prison, in Ramallah")
Esmat Mansour, who spent time with Sinwar in prison, in Ramallah
Foto: Lucas Barioulet / DER SPIEGEL
Israeli security services thought they could keep Hamas under control in prison, says Tel Aviv University analyst Michael Milshtein, the former head of the Palestinian division of Israeli military intelligence. But that was a mistake. "With Hamas, there is no difference between inside and outside.” Sinwars role model, Sheikh Yassin, also spent 10 years in prison and emerged stronger than ever, Milshtein says. Sinwar, the analyst adds, was constantly communicating with Hamas people in Gaza during his imprisonment through his lawyers and other prisoners, including by phone, which is actually forbidden in prison. But it was tolerated because it provided a means to eavesdrop on the prisoners.
Koubi, his former interrogator, says that Sinwar is extremely charismatic and intelligent that he learned Hebrew within just a few months and was interested in Israeli history and politics. "He read books about Ben-Gurion, Begin and Rabin, and even learned a little about the Jewish Torah.” Sinwar went on hunger strikes three times and campaigned for better treatment for his fellow prisoners. He was later elected the leader of all Hamas inmates in Israels prisons.
He often spoke about his childhood and youth in Khan Yunis, fellow inmate Mansour recalls: about his suffering, about the canned fish they had to eat, about the lack of a sewage system. He continually insisted, says Mansour, that Israel had to be defeated so that his family could return to their village near Ashkelon. The Nakba, Mansour emphasizes, is a central element of his worldview.
### The Years of the Suicide Bombers
The world changed during Sinwars years in prison: Then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Arafat shook hands in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington in 1993 and agreed on a process that boiled down to the formula “land for peace.” The process was to provide the Palestinians with their own state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in return for recognizing Israel and stopping the terror.
![Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shaking hands with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat shaking hands after signing a peace deal mediated by U.S. President Bill Clinton](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/e4e20771-969c-422e-9294-d4ce2ea05c5c_w520_r1.3801756587202008_fpx67.37_fpy52.95.jpg "Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shaking hands with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat shaking hands after signing a peace deal mediated by U.S. President Bill Clinton")
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shaking hands with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat shaking hands after signing a peace deal mediated by U.S. President Bill Clinton
Foto: UPI Photo / IMAGO
![The Gaza International Airport in 1998](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/b26ecae5-c1f7-421a-a6d3-0ffb5a2f5bbe_w520_r1.6897689768976898_fpx39.6_fpy54.96.jpg "The Gaza International Airport in 1998")
The Gaza International Airport in 1998
Foto: Ahmed Jadallah / REUTERS
But Hamas tried to sabotage that two-state solution by murdering Israeli soldiers and civilians and carrying out the first bombing attacks. Nonetheless, a better future still seemed possible. The Oslo Accords of 1993 ended the occupation and brought an independent state within reach. Thanks to money from Europe, the U.S. and the Gulf States, the Gaza Strip was thriving. An airport was built, separate Palestinian stamps were issued and Palestine received its own international telephone code.
In 1995, though, Rabin was shot dead by a right-wing extremist Israeli after months of agitation and death threats. Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is now national security minister, were central figures at the time. Two months after Rabins assassination, the most important Hamas bombmaker was killed with an explosive device planted in a mobile phone. Hamas took revenge by killing dozens of Israelis in attacks within a few days and hardliner Benjamin Netanyahu won the election against Rabins successor Shimon Peres.
Mohammed Daib Ibrahim al-Masri, known as Mohammed Deif, succeeded the slain bombmaker. Like Sinwar, he was born in Khan Yunis as the son of refugees. The two are said to be friends from childhood. In the coming years, Deif would rise to become the leader of the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, escaping at least seven Israeli assassination attempts, losing an arm, a leg and an eye in the process and planning the gruesome October 7 massacre together with Sinwar. There are only a few decades-old photos of him. He hasnt appeared in public for 30 years and reportedly sleeps in a different place each day to prevent getting killed by Israel. Hence his name: "Deif” means guest.
Netanyahu was followed by a two-year term in office for Ehud Barak and, in 2001, hardliner Ariel Sharon. In retrospect, it was the beginning of the end of the idea of land for peace. These were the years of the second intifada, the suicide attacks by Hamas and other terrorist groups and targeted killings by Israel. According to Israeli figures, Hamas carried out 425 terrorist attacks and murdered 377 Israelis at bus stops, restaurants and shopping centers between 2000 and 2004. Sharon responded with brutality: More than 3,000 Palestinians were killed through Israeli military operations, including many civilians, during this period.
### Hamas Driving Policy
Even as Israeli domestic intelligence agents went about killing Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip, including Ahmed Yassin, doctors in Israel were busy saving Sinwars life in prison. He developed a dangerous abscess in his brain and was operated on in 2004.
The journalist Yoram Binur visited him two years later in Beer Sheva prison and conducted an interview for Israels Channel 2. “When Sinwar spoke, the others fell silent. When he sat down, a fellow prisoner placed a prayer mat on his chair. And his Hebrew was perfect,” says Binur, now 69.
![Journalist Yoram Binur showing the interview that he conducted with Yahya Sinwar](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/30dbab34-7a74-4551-a7e7-3091d42aa47b_w520_r1.5_fpx66.67_fpy50.jpg "Journalist Yoram Binur showing the interview that he conducted with Yahya Sinwar")
Journalist Yoram Binur showing the interview that he conducted with Yahya Sinwar
Foto: Jonas Opperskalski / DER SPIEGEL
“Sinwar didnt come across as someone who wants to please but as someone who has something to offer.”
Yoram Binur, Israeli journalist
![Sinwar during his television interview from prison with Yoram Binur, aired on Israeli broadcaster Channel 2](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/a2b7630e-c79e-4862-bd58-82aa77f05446_w520_r1.7777777777777777_fpx55.67_fpy52.99.png "Sinwar during his television interview from prison with Yoram Binur, aired on Israeli broadcaster Channel 2")
Sinwar during his television interview from prison with Yoram Binur, aired on Israeli broadcaster Channel 2
Foto: Channel 2
The interview was also remarkable because it seemed as if Sinwar were holding court from prison. He looks directly into the face of the reporter sitting just a few inches away from him and says that the Israelis must understand that Hamas can never recognize the state of Israel, but that a long "hudna,” a ceasefire, is possible. He argues that such a suspension of hostilities could lead to peace and prosperity in the region "for at least a generation.” "Sinwar didnt come across as someone who wants to please but as someone who has something to offer,” Binur says of the interview 17 years later.
Things were going well in those years for Hamas. Arafat died in 2004, leaving a void that his less charismatic successor Mahmoud Abbas was unable to fill. And in 2005, Sharon also unilaterally evacuated the settlements in the Gaza Strip, and Hamas celebrated. The following year, parliamentary elections were held in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with Hamas participating for the first time. It put up candidates and hit the campaign trail.
In the overall result, Hamas received 56 percent of the votes and thus an absolute majority of seats in the de facto parliament in Ramallah. More than anything, it was a vote against the inefficiency and corruption of the Palestinian Authority and also an expression of disappointment with the stalled peace process. Even some Christians voted for the Islamists.
But a Palestinian government led by the terrorists of Hamas was unpalatable to Israel, the U.S. and the Europeans and they threatened a boycott. The U.S. government pushed for an armed coup by Fatah, which was arming militias in Gaza Strip in order to force Hamas to back down. But Hamas preempted the attempted coup and drove the Fatah militias out of Gaza in bloody battles in 2007. The Palestinian Authority called on its employees in Gaza to go on strike, but then Hamas simply deployed its own people, thus consolidating its power. Since then, Hamas has held power in the Gaza Strip, and the increasingly autocratic and unpopular Mahmoud Abbas has ruled in the West Bank. Elections are a thing of the past.
### 1,027 Palestinians for a Single Israeli Hostage
In the turmoil after Hamas came to power, an event took place that would have a major impact on future developments. In June 2006, terrorists abducted the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, a kidnapping that may have been planned inside the Beer Seva prison. Sinwars younger brother Mohammed was also part of the kidnapping squad, and he then spent years guarding Shalit.
It is thought to have been Sinwar who, from prison, had the idea of digging tunnels to kidnap Israeli soldiers. According to the Israeli newspaper *Yedioth Ahronoth*, he reportedly ordered Hamas to dig a tunnel in 1998 and use it to abduct an Israeli soldier, who could then be used to leverage the release of Palestinian prisoners. The tunnel was discovered a few months later, but the idea remained. By the time of the second intifada, tunnels had become part of the standard arsenal for attacking soldiers.
The Israelis spent five years negotiating Gilad Shalits release. A deal was close on several occasions, but time and again, Sinwar prevented it from going through from prison because he didnt agree to the conditions, recalls Yuval Bitton, his former dentist. Bitton treated Sinwar regularly over the course of several years before joining an intelligence agency in 2008.
![Yuval Bitton - a former intelligence official and one-time dentist to Sinwar - in the Shoval kibbutz.](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/426939a2-6eee-4990-980d-f935b9ace742_w520_r1.5_fpx33.99_fpy44.99.jpg "Yuval Bitton - a former intelligence official and one-time dentist to Sinwar - in the Shoval kibbutz.")
Yuval Bitton - a former intelligence official and one-time dentist to Sinwar - in the Shoval kibbutz.
Foto: Jonas Opperskalski / DER SPIEGEL
Bitton says he warned against Sinwars release, but his concerns were ignored. Yet he knew Sinwar better than almost anyone else. "Sinwar didnt trust any Israeli the way he trusted me. No one negotiated with him as much about the conditions of detention and about the Shalit deal.”
In October 2011, Sinwar, the most prominent of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners of whom 280 had been serving life sentences was exchanged for Shalits freedom. Thousands of people greeted him with shouts of "Allahu akbar,” shots of joy and a rally in Gaza City.
In the years that followed, Sinwar recruited thousands of new fighters for the Qassam Brigades, the military arm of Hamas. While still in prison, he encouraged cooperation with Iran and later brought Iranian trainers to Gaza. The Iranians also set up a rocket factory, says Sinwars former interrogator Koubi. "I still dont understand why my government allowed this to happen.”
The Shalit deal was approved by Benjamin Netanyahu, who had been back in office since 2009 and who, with a brief interruption, is still there today.
It was this deal that allowed Sinwar to be released, and it paved the way for him to become the political leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It may also have served as the model for the attack on October 7. If Israel was prepared to release 1,027 prisoners for a single soldier, what would happen if Hamas kidnapped dozens of Israelis?
### A Mini-State on the Mediterranean
Hamas has had its own mini-state since 2008, with around 2.3 million citizens today, but it is sealed off from Israel by land, air and sea and, as such, remains occupied territory according to the United Nations.
But the Hamas barely have any funds of their own and the Autonomous Authority in Ramallah stopped some of its payments. Hamas is also largely cut off from the international banking system. Over the years, much of the money for the fight against Israel has come from Iran. According to Western estimates, the regime in Tehran has been providing Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups with around $100 million a year since the 1990s.
More important for Hamas military clout, however, are the direct deliveries of weapons, rocket technology and ammunition. Iran and Hezbollah also share military expertise in the production of drones and missiles.
![Hamas fighters at a military parade in the Gaza Strip in July 2023](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/3c5ab5f9-7829-4509-a492-e089431fdf04_w520_r1.5344262295081967_fpx66.38_fpy49.84.jpg "Hamas fighters at a military parade in the Gaza Strip in July 2023")
Hamas fighters at a military parade in the Gaza Strip in July 2023
Foto: Ibraheem Abu Mustafa / REUTERS
In the years since Israels unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas has built up a de facto army. Before October 7, it is thought to have included 30,000 fighters, including cyber warfare units and combat divers. They have increased the range of their rockets from 40 to 230 kilometers. If not for the Israeli Iron Dome defense system, Hamas would be able to strike any place in Israel with them.
Even AK-47 assault rifles and the ammunition that goes along with them are produced in Gaza. Meanwhile, anti-tank missiles, kamikaze drones and heavy machine guns likely reach Gaza aboard fishing boats or via tunnels from Egypt. Despite four major military clashes with Israel since 2008, Hamas arsenal just kept on growing.
### An Odd Alliance
In 2012, the U.S. government asked the Emir of Qatar to take in the leadership of Hamas, which had previously been based in Damascus. Since then, the political leadership of Hamas has been living in Doha in addition to a representative in Gaza. The Americans goal was to establish a direct line to the terrorist group and to lessen Iranian influence. Qatar also became the most important donor to the Gaza Strip.
People familiar with the transfers in Qatar say that much of the money was wired directly. The rest was ferried from Israel to Gaza in suitcases once a month by Qatari emissary Mohammed Emadi. Upon arrival in Tel Aviv, Emadi would reportedly be met by Israeli secret service agents, and they would then travel together to the Kerem Shalom border crossing, where Emadi would meet up with people from Hamas.
But why? The Hamas fighters were continuing to fire rockets at Israel and Israel continued to bomb Hamas in retaliation. Why would Israels prime minister ensure that Hamas had access to money?
It appears as though Netanyahu and Hamas kept each other alive in those years. Netanyahu, elected on the promise of establishing security, regularly cracked down on the terrorist group. At the same time, though, he allowed Qatar to finance construction projects and, later, to even pay the salaries of public servants. According to diplomatic sources, Qatar supplied around $30 million a month to Gaza in 2019.
![Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visiting the troops in December](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/edb533e8-6126-4c6a-8e4b-a4a504a74efe_w520_r1.5_fpx66.67_fpy50.jpg "Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visiting the troops in December")
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visiting the troops in December
Foto: Amos Ben Gershom / GPO / Polaris / ddp
“Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state must support the strengthening of Hamas.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
"One effective way of preventing a two-state solution is to keep Gaza and the West Bank separate,” says former Israeli General Shlomo Brom, who has criticized this policy in the past, as have many other former military and intelligence officials. "Then Netanyahu can reject all peace talks using the excuse that he has no negotiating partner.”
According to media reports, Netanyahu in fact admitted as much at an internal meeting of Likud parliamentarians in 2019: "Anyone who wants to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support the strengthening Hamas.” But he has never said anything quite that clear in public. But in 2015, his far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said in an interview: "The Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset.”
The weakening of the Palestinian Authority was the common goal that united the right-wing in Israel with the terrorists in Gaza. And both sides initially benefited. Hamas continued to build up its mini-state, while Netanyahu bought himself peace and continued to expand the settlements in the West Bank, making a two-state solution increasingly unrealistic.
### A Model for Coexistence
In a number of different skirmishes and wars against Israel, Hamas was able to emerge as the defenders of all Palestinians. As a consequence, the Gaza Strip over the years became the central theater of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a symbol of Palestinian resistance.
Without anybody to negotiate with on the Palestinian side, Netanyahu meanwhile increasingly pursued a policy that foresaw the normalization of relations with Arab countries without ending the occupation of the Palestinian Territories.
It was almost as though Hamas and Israel had found a model for coexistence.
### Sinwars Rise
In February 2017, Sinwar was elected leader of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, marking the radical wings takeover of Hamas leadership. But outwardly, Sinwars election was followed by a phase of relative moderation.
Just a few months later, Khaled Meshaal, the outgoing leader of Hamas in Qatari exile, presented a new political program that added a few elements to the groups 1988 charter. While the new version also did not recognize the right of Israel to exist, it marked the first mention of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.
To the surprise of many, Sinwar also used the occasion to speak with foreign journalists, adopting an unusually flowery and personable tone. "We Palestinians are coming out in droves, looking for compromise,” he said in May 2018. "We believe that if we have a way to potentially resolve the conflict without destruction, were OK with that. We want to invest in peace and love.” He said he had spent almost half his life in Israeli prisons, and that such a life was easier than living in the conditions in Gaza. "The first words my son spoke were 'father, 'mother and 'drone.’”
But that was just part of Sinwars message. The other was far darker and more threatening. The people of Gaza, he said in the same interview, are like a "very hungry tiger, kept in a cage, starved.” An animal, he said, "who the Israelis have been trying to humiliate. Now, its on the loose, its left its cage, and no one knows where its heading or what its going to do.” Hamas, he said, could not continue on as before. "Conditions here are unbearable. An explosion is inevitable.”
A few months later, the Israeli paper *Yedioth Ahronoth* also published an interview with Sinwar. "The truth is that a new war is in no ones interest,” he said. "For sure it is not in ours. Who would like to face a nuclear power with slingshots?”
It seemed as though Sinwar was following a two-pronged strategy during this phase. On the one hand, he was expanding Hamas military capabilities. Following the last military clash with Israel in 2021, Sinwar spoke of "more than 500 kilometers of tunnels.” And Hamas poured vast quantities of money into building the tunnel system before then reinforcing them with concrete. Before long, they had an underground network that included bases of operations, weapon factories and sleeping quarters. Homes, city quarters and even towns located several kilometers from each other were linked up belowground.
![An Israeli soldier in a tunnel below the Al-Shifa Hospital](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/8105c1df-fce3-4b3b-82e0-a6abab17a275_w520_r1.5_fpx36.67_fpy45.jpg "An Israeli soldier in a tunnel below the Al-Shifa Hospital")
An Israeli soldier in a tunnel below the Al-Shifa Hospital
Foto: Victor R. Caivano / AP
On the other hand, Sinwar was also thinking about participating in elections to be held in the Palestinian Territories elections that never did actually come to pass. In the spirit of coexistence, he also negotiated with the Israeli government over a deal that would have secured Hamas rule in Gaza for the long term and also granted residents the ability to conduct far more trade than before. But that, also, never became reality.
### Sinwar No Longer Wants to Talk
In October 2022, Nasser Al Qudwa, now 70, met with the Hamas leader in Gaza. Qudwa, who, like Sinwar, was born in the Gaza Strip, belongs to the Palestinian political elite. A nephew of Yasser Arafat, he served for a time as foreign minister under President Abbas before the two had a falling out. He has lived in France since then but still travels frequently to the Middle East to mediate between different Palestinian factions.
The meeting between Sinwar and Qudwa lasted for around two hours and focused primarily on the latters attempts to achieve reunification between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. "We wanted Hamas to give up its claim to sole leadership in Gaza.” Qudwa says that his impression at the time was that Sinwar had been open to the idea. Indeed, Qudwa believed in fall 2022 that the Hamas leadership in Gaza was still looking for a possible return to the PLO and the Palestinian National Authority.
Just over two months later, Qudwa made yet another trip to Gaza and explored the possibility of holding another meeting with Sinwar. "But he was no longer receiving anyone.” To this day, Qudwa continues to wonder about Sinwars sudden withdrawal. Had the insular leadership circle of Hamas already decided by then to abandon the political route? Or was everything that had come before merely a charade, and the terror attack was already being planned? "It is possible,” says Qudwa, "that the previous talks merely served as camouflage.”
But Israels government apparently continued to believe that Sinwar was interested in a deal. Which led them to ignore the warning signs.
### A Vicious Plan
More than a year before October 7, the Israeli secret service obtained a detailed Hamas attack plan, codenamed Jericho Wall, as reported by Israeli media and the *New York Times* following the attack. The plan called for a barrage of rockets combined with drone attacks on the security cameras and remote-controlled machine guns affixed to the Israeli border fence surrounding the Gaza Strip. In the next stage of the onslaught, fighters on motorcycles and paragliders, along with others on foot, were to break through the border fortifications at 60 different sites.
But senior Israeli military leaders and secret service agents felt the plan was unrealistic, a Hamas pipedream. And that assessment didnt change, despite the fact that soldiers from a surveillance unit responsible for keeping an eye on the border fence later realized that Hamas was flying drones near the barricade on a daily basis. Hamas had even built a replica of an army observation post and attacked it with drones, and fighters were practicing attacks on models of Israeli Merkava tanks. Warnings from the surveillance unit, though, werent taken seriously.
When around 3,000 terrorists did, in fact, break through the border fence on the morning of October 7 and attack army posts, towns and kibbutzim, several hours passed before the army was able to relocate units to the south. And it was several days before the army killed the last terrorists on Israeli soil. By then, of course, Hamas had produced a bloodbath and abducted more than 240 people.
Was the size of the attack part of the plan? Or was Hamas surprised by how little military resistance they encountered? The answer depends on who you talk to.
"Sinwar likely just wanted to take enough hostages to force the release of the 7,000 prisoners,” says Yuval Diskin, who was head of Shin Bet from 2005 to 2011. Leveraging the freedom of all the Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons would have been a huge boost to Hamas popularity. "The fact that he would ultimately end up with far more than 200 hostages and kill so many civilians on Israeli territory he cant have anticipated that.”
Other experts believe the plan was so sophisticated that Sinwar may indeed have been envisioning a massacre of this size together with the harsh Israeli reaction.
### Kill as Many as Possible
If you look at Sinwars background and examine the detailed Hamas plans for murdering Israeli civilians on October 7, it seems likely that the extreme violence was pre-programmed. Israelis found notes on the bodies of dead terrorists with orders to "kill and take hostage as many people as possible.” Some of the terrorists were equipped with zip ties, rocket-propelled grenades and incendiaries. And the attackers were also carrying provisions and ammunition for several days, along with plans for assaulting targets far deeper into Israel.
It could be, however, that the attack was not coordinated with the Hamas leadership in Doha or at least not in its entirety. Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas in exile, has lived in the capital of Qatar since 2019 a pleasant existence far away from the suffering of the Gaza Strip. Even before the attack on Israel on October 7, relations between Haniyeh and Sinwar were said to be strained. The Qatari faction was apparently dissatisfied with the political process, and Haniyehs influence over decisions made in Gaza seemed to be shrinking. At the time of the terrorist attack, Haniyeh was apparently in Istanbul, where he also has a home. The Hamas offensive likely took him by surprise. High-ranking Qatari officials are certain that he hadnt been informed prior to the attack, as are the Americans.
![Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian together with Hamas political leader Haniyeh in Doha](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/6c0ae34a-0f9f-4cd5-abdd-430042cbfeff_w520_r1.554001554001554_fpx32.15_fpy49.97.jpg "Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian together with Hamas political leader Haniyeh in Doha")
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian together with Hamas political leader Haniyeh in Doha
Foto: Iranian Foreign Ministry / AP
But since October 7, Haniyeh has been the direct point of contact between Israel, the U.S. and the Hamas leaders in Gaza, who are thought to be hiding out in tunnels beneath the city of Khan Yunis. "Haniyeh can pick of the phone and reach Deif or Sinwar,” says a Western diplomat in Qatar. This connection proved instrumental in the deal for the release of the 110 hostages and for the seven-day cease-fire.
Currently, discussions are underway for a larger hostage deal and a lasting cease-fire. Majed al-Ansari, the Qatari prime ministers foreign affairs adviser, believes that the terrorist organization is hoping for a cease-fire. Even if the political leadership of Hamas says they will fight to the death, al-Ansari says, its just rhetoric. "Hamas isnt suicidal. They want to survive.”
### Rising Support
Many Palestinians celebrated in late November when prisoners were released in exchange for some of the Israeli hostages, just as they had cheered the images of Palestinian fighters breaking through the border fence around the Gaza Strip on October 7 even those who are not Hamas supporters. They have also sought to play down the massacre, with many believing that the dead civilians were merely collateral damage resulting from the fighting. There is also a widespread unwillingness to believe that rapes occurred.
In a public opinion poll carried out by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), which is considered to be largely reliable, 90 percent of Palestinians surveyed said that Hamas did not commit atrocities in Israel. The survey also found that 44 percent of people in the West Bank support Hamas against just 12 percent in September. Backing for Hamas also rose in the Gaza Strip, if only slightly from 38 percent to 42 percent. An overwhelming majority of those surveyed are in favor of Abbas resignation.
On the question as to whether the Hamas attack on Israel was the right move, opinions diverge between Palestinians in the West Bank, of whom 82 percent endorse the attack, and residents of the Gaza Strip, only 57 percent of whom express support. Almost two-thirds of those surveyed believe that Hamas will remain in control of the Gaza Strip in the future.
"It's more than just Hamas becoming more popular it is armed resistance that gained popularity,” says the Israeli Middle East expert Ofer Zalzbeg of the Herbert C. Kelman Institute in Vienna. Surveys have shown, he says, that people do not want to be governed by Hamas. "They want to inflict pain on Israel so that it changes its policies, but most dont want to live in a Shariah state. They want neither the repressive rule of Hamas nor do they want the Palestinian Authority. They want a new kind of governance.”
Despite the growing support for Hamas, there has yet to be a coordinated uprising against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank.
And there is also plenty of anger with Hamas. "No resistance movement sacrifices its people for party interests. You cant kill thousands of people and then call it liberation,” complains a refugee in the southern Gaza Strip who requested that his name not be published. He says he first fled from the northern part of Gaza to the city of Khan Yunis, and now, with the new Israeli offensive, he says he had to spend the night in the desert. Food is difficult to come by, he says, as is water. "We dont have anything to do with these maniacs who behave like Islamic State!” he rages. "Yahya Sinwar is a psychopath. He should go into therapy instead of acting like a representative of his people.”
### Can Hamas Be Defeated?
In the last two months, the Israeli military has transformed Gaza into a sea of rubble and driven the majority of the Gaza Strips 2.3 million residents from their homes. The humanitarian situation is a disaster. Allied nations like the U.S. are also pushing for a rapid end to the war. But the big question is whether Israel can achieve its primary aim destroying Hamas.
"What exactly does destroying Hamas actually mean?” wonders a source in Doha who is familiar with the negotiations. When Sinwar and Deif are dead? What happens if they are liquidated, but a new leader takes over control? Does the entire command structure need to be annihilated? Do all Hamas fighters have to be killed? The Israeli government, the source says, has thus far been avoiding all of these questions. Along with that of who should rule the Gaza Strip in the future. Netanyahu recently said that he will not allow Gaza to become a "Hamastan or a Fatahstan” once the war has ended.
Israel says that its military has killed 7,000 terrorists since the start of the fighting and smashed Hamas' command structure. But does that translate to a military defeat of Hamas? And is a military defeat sufficient?
### Eight-Hundred Tunnel Shafts Discovered and 500 Destroyed
Israel says that it has so far discovered 800 tunnel shafts during its offensive and destroyed 500 of them. But the vast tunnel network where the Hamas leadership is hiding and where the hostages are likely being held where weapons, food, drinking water, generators and fuel are being stored has thus far barely been touched.
During a press briefing in early December at a military base in southern Israel, a lieutenant colonel described operations targeting tunnels in the city of Beit Hanun, in the northeastern corner of the Gaza Strip. On October 7, said the officer, who may not be named, the terrorists fired 350 rockets within just a few hours from the city. The Israelis found weapons in almost every house, he added.
He said he doesnt know what kind of underground infrastructure Hamas may still have. There are orders to refrain from entering the tunnels, because there are explosives everywhere. And the army doesnt have any effective technological means to find the tunnels, the officer said, adding that numerous underground connections remain useable despite the fact that their entrance shafts have been destroyed.
Partly for that reason, the Israeli army has begun pumping seawater into the tunnels, according to reports that emerged last week. The procedure is apparently still just a test, and there are doubts as to whether it would be sufficient to destroy the wide-ranging tunnel network, not to mention the unpredictable consequences for the environment and Gazan infrastructure.
"The idea that Israel can defeat Hamas or that it can militarily decimate Hamas is unachievable,” said Hamas expert Tareq Baconi in a recent interview with the *New York Times*. "The movement is also a political body. Its also a social infrastructure. And so, even if Hamas were to be removed, that ideology of commitment to armed resistance for liberation would manifest in a different movement.”
It could be that after the war, Hamas might not be able to carry out military operations for an extended period, Baconi believes. "But what weve learned from the past 16 years (…) is that Hamas is playing the long game.”
Even Israeli hardliners like the military analyst Kobi Michael recognize that Hamas isnt just a terror network, but also a deeply rooted force in society. More than anything, he says, Israels war aim is that of destroying Hamas military capabilities. That doesnt mean "that we will dismantle the entire Hamas ideology. Ideology is rooted in peoples heads and hearts, so that would be a completely different process, comparable to the denazification of Germany after World War II. That would take decades.”
### Hamas Has Built Up a Network of Companies
It also isnt easy to weaken Hamas economically. The groups primary sources of income are overseas, and the millions of dollars the group receives from Tehran are likely to keep flowing, or even increase. The same can be said for the income the group earns from the 30 to 40 companies it controls, most of them thought to be active in the construction and real estate sectors in Turkey, Qatar, Algeria, the United Arab Emirates and Sudan. According to estimates, the terror organizations business activities bring in some $500 million each year.
The Israeli Hamas expert Milshtein also believes that even if Israel were to succeed in defeating Hamas militarily, the group would continue to exist underground and overseas. "Hamas cannot be destroyed,” he says.
Prior to October 7, he warned in vain that Hamas was continuing to pursue the destruction of the Jewish state. After the terror attack, he wrote an op-ed for the *Financial Times* in which he argued against bombarding and occupying the Gaza Strip. The economic costs of doing so, he wrote, would be enormous and the system installed by Hamas could hardly be quickly replaced because the Palestinian Authority is too weak. A large-scale attack, he wrote, "risks turning the Gaza Strip into a Somalia or Afghanistan.”
### A Future with Hamas?
Moderate Palestinians like former Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and Arafats nephew, Nasser Al Qudwa, have begun thinking intensively about what the postwar order should look like. For Fayyad, such an order would be impossible without Hamas involvement. "The first step must be the immediate and unconditional expansion of the PLO to include all major factions and political forces, including Hamas,” he wrote in a widely cited essay for *Foreign Affairs* in late October.
Al Qudwa also believes that cooperation with Hamas is fundamentally a possibility, but he has no illusions about how challenging and complicated that would be. The current war, though, "could lead to a different, military and politically weakened Hamas,” he says, especially if "Palestinian public opinion turns against the organization.”
![Members of the Qassam Brigades in the Gaza Strip in 2018](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/280fb0a0-1419-4690-98f7-dc16941796ce_w520_r1.4372697724810402_fpx62.62_fpy49.99.jpg "Members of the Qassam Brigades in the Gaza Strip in 2018")
Members of the Qassam Brigades in the Gaza Strip in 2018
Foto: Mohammed Saber / EPA-EFE
Islamist movements play a central role in almost every country in the Middle East: either as part of the government, like in Turkey and Iran; as an extremist organization held in check by an authoritarian government, like in Egypt and Tunisia; or as a powerful militia, as in Lebanon and Iraq. The idea that in a future Palestinian state, the Islamist element could simply be kept out of politics is unrealistic. But the question is whether it could be involved without an armed group like Hamas, which is focused on the destruction of Israel.
According to recent reports, Sinwar is "furious” that the Hamas leadership in Doha and representatives from Palestinian President Abbas have begun discussing possible future cooperation. He had apparently demanded that such contacts come to an end.
“Hamas has to be destroyed!”
Yuval Bitton, secret service agent and Sinwar's former dentist
Future developments now depend primarily on what happens in the coming weeks whether a hostage deal and a lasting cease-fire take shape, or whether significantly more civilians in the Gaza Strip are killed. Should the latter come to pass, support for Hamas may increase and the images of dead children from the Gaza Strip could produce a new generation of terrorists.
Indeed, Hamas could ultimately emerge from this war strategically more powerful despite being militarily weakened.
For Yuval Bitton, the Israeli secret service official and former dentist to Sinwar, the answer remains clear. "Hamas has to be destroyed!” Every time he spoke to Sinwar, he says, he could sense "that he hates Israelis and wants to kill them.” He was just waiting for the right opportunity, the dentist says.
Bitton also has personal reasons for his severity. He swivels around on his kitchen stool in his house in the Shoval kibbutz and points to the sofa, where there is a cardboard sign bearing a photo of his nephew. On October 7, he was kidnapped together with his grandmother Yaffa Adar and taken to Gaza, says Bitton. The elderly woman has since been released. But Bittons nephew has not.
*With additional reporting by Michal Marmary*
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# A Knife Forged in Fire
Sam brought out what looked like a deck of tarot cards with nothing on them. No Hermit. No Hanged Man. No Fool. They were gray, thicker than ordinary cards, and clearly heavy in his hands. Inside of them a message waited. He had a long ritual to perform to release it.
As he shuffled the cards, they clattered together, revealing the first hint of their message: They were made of steel. He stacked them and squared up the edges so that all of the cards were nice and straight, nothing sticking out or crooked. Everything neat. The alchemical precision favored by Newton in his dim laboratories.
He clamped them in an industrial vise. Now the cards made a block about the size of a thick paperback book. They would never be individual cards again, these 12 pounds of two different kinds of steel, arranged in alternating layers.
The vise was mounted on a large metal table in the shop that Sam shares with his two brothers, who are fine woodworkers. The shop is in Skokie, which means “marsh” in the Potawatomi language, for these environs were once rich and populous wetlands before they were drained and turned into rows of low industrial buildings like this one and sturdy, modest residential homes. But the brothers have transformed this space into a marvelous cabinet of wonders in which to create whatever they might dream. Much of what is inside could have come from the 19th or early 20th century, great cast-iron machines of fabulous design, embossed with symbols no longer thought necessary to display on slick modern devices. In addition, some of the things in this sprawling realm of clutter might have come from another galaxy, like the ballistic cartridge for the table saw. If you accidentally touch the blade, it senses electrical conductivity and retracts. Its gone so fast that it cant cut you. Its all part of the magic of this place of transformations.
Sam lowered his black face shield and picked up the MIG welder and pulled the trigger. The room lit up to an intensity such that Sam was cast as a silhouetted troupe of antic spiders dancing on the walls and floor and ceiling, sparks flying around him like a cracked nest of hornets and in his hands a burning blue hole at the center of things. All this to the roar of the forges fire across the room, heating up toward 2,400 degrees, and the insect chattering of the welder chewing away at liquid metal.
Sam bent over the light, his body curved around it like some sorcerer whod caught a star and had it pinned there on the bench and was leaning over to examine it and chip away the edges. The bits were falling all around him and bouncing up in little arcs off the diamond floor of heaven. It was positively spooky the way that light stole the glory of the crisp and sunny autumn day outside the open roll-up door.
When he was done and I could look more closely without safety glasses, I saw that he had tacked the cards together with a misshapen bead of melted metal at each end of the stack. As a 12-pound solid oblong block of steel with runes inside, the stack would now be called a billet. To finish it off, he welded a two-foot length of steel rebar to one end to make a handle so that he could hold it.
Sam is afraid of some of his machines in the way that the lion tamer is afraid of his cats. You are confident. You know your skills. You have been doing this a long time. But you know that wild animals are always wild animals, and a false gesture, perhaps an unexpected noise, could set in motion events that could not be stopped. This pact requires utter honesty, complete truth. Sam is harnessing powers that few of us ever encounter in our lives. Hes directing them in order to reach down inside of this deck of tarot cards and transform the very atomic nature of its being. Hes doing what sorcerers do: magic.
John Maynard Keynes, a British economist, owned some of Isaac Newtons papers. They were about alchemy, which was Newtons lifelong obsession. Keynes gradually came to the conclusion that Newton “was not the first of the age of reason.” No, Keynes said, “he was the last of the magicians.”
Not the last. We have some right here in Chicago.
Sam Goldbroch is a knife maker. He was getting ready to make me a traditional Japanese-style kitchen knife.
![Bladesmith Sam Goldbroch puts the metal he forged into a vise](https://www.chicagomag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/C202401-Japanese-Kitchen-Knives-Sam-Goldbroch-880x1024.jpg)
Bladesmith Sam Goldbroch puts the metal he forged into a vise so he can cut off what isnt needed for the authors knife. Forging Damascus steel is such an arduous process that he made as much as possible in the batch.
I first met Sam when he was just a kid. Id see him and his familyhis parents, Claire and Bernie; his twin brother, Phil; and their older brother, Simonat events in the neighborhood near Dewey Elementary School in Evanston where we all lived. My elder daughter, Elena, and Simon began dating in high school and are now married. The boys, as we came to call them, all went into the craftsPhil and Simon into wood, Sam into food initially. He worked as a chef in various capacities at some of Chicagos best restaurants, such as Blackbird, Elizabeth, and North Pond. But when he and his wife, Julie Zare, decided to start a family, they realized that a chefs grueling schedule would not encourage the best home life. So in 2016 Sam began teaching at the Chopping Block, the Lincoln Square school for home cooks. As he taught his students how to use knives in the kitchen, he saw that he really didnt know anything about them, though he had used them in professional kitchens for 12 years. And with a simple question from one of his students“What makes a good knife?”his life was swallowed up into the mysteries of metal and fire and force.
Both the Northeast of the United States and the Northwest have robust communities of knife makers. The American South has even more. Chicago and the surrounding area are just beginning to coalesce into a serious community of bladesmiths. You can see a sample of their wares at Northside Cutlery in North Center, a small and tidy shop of beautiful handcrafted pieces displayed in a wall-size cabinet Phil Goldbroch made for that purpose. The knives sell for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars each. They are all one of a kind, made by a variety of local bladesmiths.
Sam recently hosted a group of Chicago knife makers for a potluck lunch at the shop. After the meal, Sam cranked up the forge, and one of them, Dylan Ambrosini, crafted a blade while we all watched. Dylan, at 24, is one of the youngest and most talented knife makers in the Midwest. He and Sam collaborated on a nine-inch chefs knife, which sold for $950 before they could get it on display at Northside Cutlery. Top-end chefs knives can cost even more. Anthony Bourdain bought one of his favorites for $5,000 from Bob Kramer, a popular bladesmith in Washington State. It brought $231,250 at auction after Bourdains death.
In Sams kitchen and in the shop, I had seen a kind of knife called a nakiri. I wanted one. If youre a knife nut, as I am, thats all you have to say. Jacques Pépin, the popular French chef, once said that you need only three knives to cook well. “That being said,” he quipped, “I probably have three hundred knives at my house.” People who love cooking cant always say what makes them fall for a particular style of knife. Most chefs knives are at least eight inches long, which feels too big for me. Sam had already made me a chopping knife called a tall petty, whose blade was five inches long. “Tall” means that my fingers clear the cutting board, and “petty” means that the blade is short. I use it all the time for chopping, but sometimes its too short, as when I have a big onion. I wanted one that was a little longer. The nakiri is ideal for preparing vegetables, which is most of what I do. I have always loved the shape. And I knew that Sam would make his own Damascus steel for this knife. The blade and handle would mate to make a work of art that was an exceptional tool. When I had my first dream about this knife, I woke up and knew that I had to have it.
I decided that I wanted to follow Sam as he made my knife, to understand the process from start to finish. I did not expect that I would stumble upon a mystical and transcendent experience in the making of such a seemingly simple tool.
As my father used to say, theres a mile of wire in a screen door.
Sam took the billet of steel, holding it by the rebar handle in a heavy blacksmiths glove, and he carried it to the forge, with its interior of tangerine flame. The forge is a black cylindrical furnace, 16 inches long, as big around as a gallon of paint, and open at both ends. Two propane torch nozzles entered the top to provide the fire. The floor of the forge was populated by glowing white rocks of fractured firebrick. And it roared like a lion. The heat rising from it was so intense that the waves appeared to be dissolving the brick building I could see across the alley through the open roll-up door. I sat at Sams workbench. Although I was 20 feet away, the heat on my face was like summer sun.
Sam placed the billet among the white-hot rocks and we waited. He talked of the metals need to heat all the way through and “relax.” As we watched, the dull deck of gray cards began to wake up and take on the qualities of a living thing. Among the glowing rocks, it seemed to stir and issued a low, dark color. He had put two kinds of steel in the stack that became the billet, 1095 and 15N20, because he was making Damascus steel, a special kind of steel for swords and knives that combines metals to form beautiful patterns by way of forging and pounding, crushing (called “upsetting”) and twisting. Damascus is not particularly superior to other steels. Its just prettier. But it has acquired a special mystique because hundreds of years ago, as early as the fourth century B.C., it came into Europe from the East by way of Syria. That steel had a wavy pattern in it. So by analogy, people today call steel that has a wavy pattern “Damascus.” The Crusaders were armed with Damascus blades. It was said that theirs were quenched in the blood of dragons. And it was also said that those blades could do battle with the Saracens and afterward still sever a feather floating in midair.
> If you want to know what rock is like deep in the earth, you can see it here in the shape-shifting of the metal. These are the energies that we are not used to in the quiet simmer of our daily lives.
I watched the forge. It took a long time, but it had our attention the way a green shoot would where only some damp sand had been seen before. Something was changing. Transformations were coming. If you want to know what rock is like deep in the earth, you can see it here in the shape-shifting of the metal. These are the energies that we are not used to in the quiet simmer of our daily lives. The energies of the deep earth and the high sun, the two sources that power our planet.
Half an hour passed, and now the billet was no longer gray. It had taken on the look of a bright confection of orange marzipan. Sam put on his blacksmiths gloves. The billet was so hot that he wore glasses tinted against infrared radiation. He lifted the billet out of the forge for the first time to check the color of the metal. The rebar sagged like a fishing rod with a swordfish on the line. He wasnt pleased with that, but he liked what he saw on the billet, and so he swung it over to the 12-ton hydraulic press just a few feet away. The billet landed on the compression platform. Holding the rebar in his left hand, he brought down the handle on the press with his right, moving the square metal die down to gently tap the mushy billet with a few tons of pressure so that he could see if it had been heated through and through. He had to make sure that his welds were holding the cards together. The smith calls this process of initial compression “forge welding,” because if everything is right with the stack, the cards will meld into one solid piece.
As the cards of metal were deformed and compressed, the surface of the billet rippled and changed color as if in emotional response to the extremes of heat and force, turning gray and deeper orange and shedding dark flakes of oxidized metal. Sam tapped the handle and added more pressure. Waves of dull gray cascaded across the surfaces and calved off and fell to the floor. But the billet held together. First success. It had cooled enough now that Sam had to return it to the forge to reheat it to a working temperature of about 2,300 degrees.
While it was heating, Sam unbolted the flat dies from the press using a socket wrench. Dies are the parts of the press that actually make contact with the hot metal. He exchanged the flat ones for more rounded ones that are called drawing dies. They would draw the billet into an elongated shape and help start to flatten it.
When the billet was hot enough once more, Sam began compressing it more aggressively to transform it into what he called a bar. In the middle of this, the rebar handle melted, menacingly clattering to the floor, ringing and dancing, and Sam stepped gingerly back to let it settle, then continued his work by lifting the billet with heavy tongs. There was no stopping now. He would succeed or fail by the skill of his hands and his knowledge as a bladesmith.
A natural, lifelong student of anything interesting, Sam got his start by trying to answer that question of what makes a good knife. He began to buy knives of good quality, but old and beat up, to restore them. He talked to knife makers and chefs who knew about knives. He took blacksmithing classes in which he began to acquire a feel for metal, not as the solid that most of us are used to but as a substance every bit as malleable as potters clay. He began to get a feel for taming the fire.
Heating and crushing now with more and more force, Sam gradually transformed the billet into a crude bar of steel so long, about a foot and a half, that it hung out either end of the forge. He then took the bar back to the metal table and clamped it into the vise. He put on his ear protection and picked up an angle grinder. At 1,000 degrees, the steel had gone dark.
> Sam turned his grinder to cut from the other side, and an orange volcano shot up to the ceiling. He explained that you can tell the kind and quality of steel youre working with by the color and shape of the sparks.
To make my little six-and-a-half-inch nakiri knife, Sam didnt need all 12 pounds of steel that hed started with. But the process of forging Damascus steel is so difficult and time consuming that he wanted to make as much as possible in a single batch. As he began cutting the bar in half, orange sparks cascaded down, elves of fire skipping across the concrete and dancing away into the sunlight in the alley. He turned his grinder to cut from the other side, and an orange volcano shot up to the ceiling. He explained that you can tell the kind and quality of steel youre working with by the color and shape of the sparks.
Cutting through the bar took the better part of an hour, as he heated it to soften it and attacked it again and again with different tools. After destroying several angle grinder blades, he brought out a chisel hed forged in a blacksmithing class and began hammering it into the cut hed made in the bar. The making of Damascus steel takes a heavy dose of artistry and craftsmanship, and if one approach doesnt work, you try another and another until the thing in your head becomes a thing in the world. At last he had the metal bar hot and nearly severed and clamped in the vise, and with his blacksmiths hammer, he swung for the fences and knocked half the billet across the room. Fortunately, no one was in the path of the projectile, which landed, smoking, on the floor by the forge.
When the two black hunks of metal had cooled to a few hundred degrees, they took on an almost melancholy gloom of blue-gray, dashed with a distemper of rust, and their random-seeming warts and scars gave them the aspect of objects that had made a long and lonely journey through space, ending with a fiery entry into our world. Only the squared-off shape of these meteorites betrayed the hand of man.
Sam picked up one of the chunks with his tongs, saying, as unlikely as it seemed at that moment, “Theres a knife in there. Thats all that matters.” He also mentioned that the worst accidental burns in a forging shop occur when the metal has cooled off to black and is still at several hundred degrees. The visitor learns to touch nothing.
Now that he was working with a billet that weighed six pounds instead of 12, he could proceed much faster. Moving from forge to hydraulic press, heating and upsetting and turning, occasionally changing dies to different shapes, Sam gradually formed the bar into a piece about 16 inches long and an inch and a quarter square. Some time before, Sam had acquired a rusty old-fashioned monkey wrench. He had welded a piece of steel round bar to the head to make a long and heavy wrench for one specific purpose: twisting a bar of hot Damascus steel. Now he heated the bar and clamped it with the hydraulic press just enough to immobilize it, not enough to deform it. Then he fitted the adjustable wrench to it. Because the bar was now square in cross section, he could maintain a grip on it, as with a wrench on a nut. But when he went to twist it, he managed to turn it only halfway around. It wasnt hot enough.
He put it back in the forge and this time heated it until it was in a yellow rage of photons. Again, he fitted the wrench to the glowing end. And then, using his entire body and the leverage of the long-handled wrench, he began twisting and twisting. The metal shed great gray flakes, and the yellow bar gradually turned orange, looking like a twist of taffy as Sam put all of his effort into the now-helical bar until it would turn no more. It was as if he were doing battle not so much with steel but with fire itself, placing the bright yellow bar in the press and then wringing the light right out of it, for thats what it was, a blade of bright light that he strangled until it went black.
Then he put the bar back in the forge and did it all again. He repeated the process five times, and as the twists grew into a tighter and tighter pattern, the steel began to bend upon itself and undulate like an incandescent banded snake.
When Sam thought that the metals had thoroughly mixed, he placed the bar in the vise and picked up the angle grinder.
“Im going to give you a nice center cut,” he said, meaning the place in the bar where hed find the best pattern of steel.
He took a wooden nakiri template from a board on the wall where he kept the blanks of all the knives he made. He placed it on his anvil and traced its shape with chalk on the bar to get the length right for blade and tang. The tang is the slim projection from the blade that hed fit into the handle. Using the heat, the press, and a hammer on the anvil, he flattened the metal into a vague, cartoonish semblance of a rude asteroid-black knife that my four-year-old granddaughter, Annelise, might have drawn in charcoal. He clamped it in the vise to let it cool. He occasionally pointed an infrared meter at it to check the temperature. When it was cool enough to handle, he took it to the bench and again traced the nakiri shape onto the rough alligator surface. Then he went to the band saw and cut away as much metal as he could around the silhouette. Even though I had earplugs, the noise drove me out to the alley.
Sam was doing all this after taking a weekend forging class outside of Philadelphia. Hed driven 12 hours home, getting only five hours of sleep. Then he wrestled this demon all day, almost eight hours of back-wrenching work, until he got what he had envisioned in his head. It was roughly the right shape. But it was still scabbed black and ugly. Day one was done.
As if in rebellion against the taming of the fire, all night long the lightning lit up the low gray udders of the clouds, the wind milking them here and there for their pitiful rain. What epic history lay beyond the thunders crack and groan?
![Goldbroch chalks a template for the nakiri knife onto the rough-shaped steel.](https://www.chicagomag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/C202401-Japanese-Kitchen-Knives-template-811x1024.jpg)
Goldbroch chalks a template for the nakiri knife onto the rough-shaped steel. “Im going to give you a nice center cut,” he says.
On the second day, Sam retired to the grinding booth, an enclosure he had built for his power sanding. The belt grinder is a machine of admirable complexity that can turn every which way while keeping a six-foot loop of sandpaper revolving on drums, allowing Sam to make shapes such as Western knife handles. He has to wear a respirator, a heavy apron riveted in brass, gloves, and noise-canceling headphones.
I saw Sam at his best in there. He stood in his armor, confronting a clearly dangerous and indifferent machine of stupendous mechanical capacities for removing any material that came near it, including human flesh in large bloody quantities if he slipped up. Its a bit like a whirling wall of razor blades. Sam put both hands into this, holding something fairly smallit might have been a knife or a handle.
He is a big man, solid and steady on his feet, with wide shoulders and strong arms. He is soft-spoken, modest, and understated, a kind of gentle giant. Id see him Saturdays at the summer farmers market with one or the other of his two children on his shoulder. If you met Sam, your first impression might be of calm and strength, control and competence. Hed happily show you what he can do with hammer and tongs, and youd understand the deep dichotomy and even mystery that powers his mastery of energy and matter. What he does is simply so self-evident in the end that it cannot be questioned. When hes done, what he puts in your hand is self-explanatory. He does not apologize. He does not explain or boast. He does not have to. Its in your hand. And if you met him, youd wonder: What gives him such a solid platform?
> I think Sams mastery grew out of a catastrophic incident in his childhood. He had struggled with fire when he was young, and not in any artistic way.
I think Sams mastery grew out of a catastrophic incident in his childhood. He had struggled with fire when he was young, and not in any artistic way. The story of that struggle belongs to him and Simon and Phil, who went through it together, so it is not mine to tell. But I can say this much: They were trapped in an out-of-control fire when they were kids. They survived. Their parents did not.
When he came out of the grinding booth, Sam had the metal in the right shape and even close to the right size. This was called the rough grinding of the knife. Now he had to set the bevel, the angled portion of the blade that would terminate in the cutting edge. He did this with hammer and anvil, man against steel, as in images of 19th-century industrial infernos. The hammer rose toward the ceiling and then Sam put his whole back into it as it came ringing down on the steel. When he first brought the blade out of the forge, it was a tiger burning bright, and when he straightened up with the shape he was after, the black stubbly silhouette looked as if all it needed was a little stamp on the edge that said “Made in Hell.”
All morning long, a small heat-treating oven, actually a kiln that could have been used for ceramics, had been warming up. Now it had reached 1,650 degrees, the temperature at which to begin the process called “normalizing.” All of the forging and pressing and hammering and twisting of the metal had confused the internal crystal structure of the steel and introduced weird stresses among the grains.
But since the knife now had the exact shape that Sam wanted, he wouldnt need to do anything violent to the blade again, except one final explosive act. To prepare for that, he first had to heat it back up to the point that the steel could, as he explained, relax again and release the tensions within, so that rather than being, at a microscopic level, like broken and jagged sea ice, the metal would be like a quiet millpond.
He placed the blade in the oven and closed the door. He set the timer for 10 minutes and went back to his bench to begin work on the handle. The artistry of this knife was all Sams doing. I had given him absolute control. But Id spied a particular piece of wood among the materials he keeps for making handles. It was a rare Australian eucalyptus called vasticola burl, and when Id first pointed to it, Sam smiled and said, “Oh, I love that wood.” He picked it up. It was just a block, perhaps six inches long and two inches square. He wiped some oil on it with a paper towel, and it seemed to glow.
“It looks like fire,” he said.
The fire again. Hed had his taste of fire when he was a child. And now it was in his blood.
The block was too wide for the Japanese *wa* handle that he was going to make, so we went into a giant room with an array of limb-snatching machines, and he cut it to size on a 1912 band saw that was taller than we were. Back at his bench, he searched in the drawers full of materials for handles and came up with a nicely patterned piece of buffalo horn for the ferrule, the protective ring between handle and blade.
“This is good,” Sam said. “Its usually just black.”
The timer went off, and he took the blade out and put it in a rack to cool. He turned the heat down to 1,550 degrees, and when the blade had cooled, he returned it to the oven. After another 10 minutes, he put the blade aside again to cool and turned the oven down to 1,450. He repeated the 10-minute heat treating and set the blade aside once again.
“Its still not a knife,” Sam insisted.
It was not yet good steel. It couldnt be sharpened to take a cutting edge, and whatever edge you might put on it wouldnt hold. It was useless for the kitchen, which was where I wanted to take it. To eat, lets not forget. For what is a human but a transport channel for energy? And our energy comes from food. Lovely, gourmet food prepared with a fine knife. The qualities we need in a knife to create that food come from the atomic structure of the steel. But for the moment, what we had here was like a pig wallowing in mud and claiming to be cassoulet.
Sam stepped up to the oven, beside which the blade had been cooling. The oven had reached 1,475. He put the blade in and closed the door.
A slender, rectangular metal vessel sat upright on the floor by the oven. It looked somehow military, as if meant to shoot a rocket. It was filled with Parks 50, whats known as a high-speed oil and designed for this purpose. After 10 minutes of heating to 1,475, Sam took the blade from the oven with heavy tongs and gloves and plunged it into the oil. A cloud of smoke rose to the ceiling, and a searing sound filled the room like a basket of snakes.
> “This is the moment of truth,” Sam said, holding the tongs and looking away from the smoke. “This is when it becomes a knife.”
“This is the moment of truth,” Sam said, holding the tongs and looking away from the smoke. “This is when it becomes a knife.”
The quenching is a pressurized moment on which everything else turns. He cannot flinch. He cannot fake it. Like the free solo climber, he cannot make mistakes. The mere hint of a *ping* with the knife in the oil, and hed have to go back to the other half of the blackened billet and start over. Because the knife would have fractured. Hard to believe, but at this point, if Sam dropped the knife, it could shatter. Some American knife makers have even taken to having a quenching ceremony to mark the birth of a knife. Some of them also think that you can quench properly only while facing north. Sam doesnt hold to those ideas. You do your best and try to have more skill than luck.
The small heat-treating oven sat atop another oven that looked as if it wouldnt be out of place in a 1960s kitchen. It was a tempering oven. Sam had set it to 400 degrees, and now he put the knife inside for many hours of tempering, which would finish settling the structure of the metal and would reduce its hardness to the sweet spot where it could be easily sharpened and would also hold an edge. Sam could do nothing more with this blade until the tempering was finished. So he would turn to other projects.
Before I went home that second day, Sam said, “Ill finish the belt sanding tonight and leave about 10 percent of the hand sanding for the morning so you can watch. Assuming you like to sit there and watch people sand stuff.”
Steel is not steel. It is a chameleon, completely dependent on its environment. At temperatures such as Sam was using, it is a glowing portal to the world of the atom. Steel is iron mixed with carbon and some other elements, depending on what kind of steel you want. I had asked Sam to make me a high-carbon knife, which means that, by technical definition, at least 0.6 percent of its atoms are carbon. In practical terms, it means that its not stainless steel and will rust if you dont take care of it. Sam and I like to take care of our knives the way some people like to take care of their motorcycles.
Taking care of a knife is pretty simple. You strop it before each use. You dont throw it in the sink. You wipe it off and put it in a safe place when youre donea knife block, for example. And we would chop down telephone poles with it before wed put it in a dishwasher. Then again, to qualify as a master bladesmith with the American Bladesmith Society, you have to chop a wooden two-by-four in half two times with a knife you made and then still be able to shave with it. The rules for that qualification test clearly state: “The test knife will ultimately be destroyed during the testing process.”
The knives that Sam and his fellow Midwestern smiths make, passed from hand to hand with care, from mother to son to uncle to granddaughter, could last a thousand years, by which time every speck of high technology we know today will be dust. But the reality is that if a knife maker has become too famous, you simply cant get his or her knives any longer.
Iron atoms form crystals of various kinds, atoms connected electrically to one another. Iron atoms are like little magnets, having a north and south (positive and negative) end. So they can arrange themselves like those toys for children, magnetic shapes to create pleasing patterns.
When carbon mixes with iron, the smaller carbon atoms occupy the spaces between iron atoms. The crystal arrangement of the iron atoms changes to accommodate the carbon. Different crystal arrangements give the metal different properties. Think of it as bread. Its like deciding what kind of bread to make. White bread. Sourdough. Hard Lithuanian black bread. Fluffy Mexican bolillos. So goes the saga of steel. The tarot cards Sam dealt at the start of this process were 1095 steel, which is iron with between 0.95 percent and 1.05 percent carbon, and 15N20, which is iron with nickel. Mixing the two is popular for making Damascus and produces an attractive pattern and a very nice edge.
As a lover of good food and good kitchen tools, I dont need to know much about metallurgy. A bladesmith like Sam can take care of that. But I find this stuff fascinating, these amazing transformations. I like to know whats going down in the atomic world that will blossom into these beautiful patterns of his blade.
As I watched Sam work, I kept having the impression that he was trying hard to erase somethingthe traces of the fire, the encroaching flames, the blackened body of the meteorite after its travels. But the erasing was also an act of creating. Michelangelo said that the block of marble contains a man, and all you have to do is remove the rock that isnt part of the man, and then you will have your sculpture. So Sam said, “Theres a knife in there. …” And in this attitude of seeking, there is a humility that does away with the myth of the conquering hero or the towering artistic genius.
> Sam does not see himself as the creator of the knife. He sees himself as having found it inside of this other, most unlikely object.
Sam does not see himself as the creator of the knife. He sees himself as having found it inside of this other, most unlikely object. As he worked, he let the steel tell him things. He followed what the material suggested rather than sticking to a predetermined plan. He was facilitating the process. He was the sorcerer. He did not invent magic, did not really make magic, but he employed magic. And with the rackety dance of hammer and tong, he was urging the knife into stelliferous being. In the process, he was also taming the fire.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, an ape not all that different from us created an edge by fracturing one rock with a blow from another. Make no mistake. Such a knife is sharp enough to shave with. And at a stroke, the woolly mammoth could fall apart into bite-size pieces. It didnt change everything, but it laid a dense, high-calorie, protein-packed feast on our table that allowed the relatively small inner workings of our gut to extract the tremendous amount of energy needed to grow these giant billowing brains we have. In a sense, the knife marked the birth of civilization.
![After being ground and cleaned of oils, the blade is bathed in etching solutions to reveal its Damascus pattern.](https://www.chicagomag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/C202401-Japanese-Kitchen-Knives-etching-794x1024.jpg)
After being ground and cleaned of oils, the blade is bathed in etching solutions to reveal its Damascus pattern.
When I came in the next morning, while I did not feel that I had missed anything crucial (Sam sitting and sanding), the knife was now a revelation. It was the right size and shape, and it was all silver. It looked like a real knife awaiting a handle.
“Wow,” I said.
Sam smiled. Then, with a sly look: “Let me show you something.”
He carried the blade to the room of giant machines. Against one wall a sink was set up with gallon-size square beakers of colored liquid, one black or dark blue, one gold. “Well do a two-stage etch and see what weve got.” He washed the blade and cleaned it with Windex. He then put the blade into the dark solution. He set the timer on his watch, and when two minutes were up, he again cleaned and rinsed the blade and put it in the golden liquid. I knew that the dark fluid was ferric chloride. I asked what the golden liquid was. Sam reached to a shelf behind the sink and brought down a half-gallon bottle. It featured a cartoon alligator and was labeled “Gator Piss.”
“Whats in it?” I asked.
Sam shrugged. “Proprietary, I guess.” He left the blade to etch and went back to his bench to tidy up. “But it works,” he said.
The trade name might seem odd to those who dont know the history of Damascus steel. Ancient Afghan makers, for example, quenched their blades in donkey urine. Some makers during medieval times believed that only the urine of redheaded boys should be used. Other Asian smiths prescribed heating the blade until it looked “like the sun rising in the desert” and then shoving it “into the body of a muscular slave.” About quenching by murder, Sam said simply, “I dont make weapons.”
Half an hour later, he took the blade out of the Gator Piss and washed it. He held it under the lamp. We could clearly see the Damascus pattern, with its contour map of dark hills and bright craters, its sinewy valleys and far landscapes. And we could spot his signature, or makers mark, which hed electrically etched on the blade. And as with looking through a microscope, the longer you looked, the more you saw.
Sam took the blade back to the bench for finer and finer sanding. “You dont want to make it too fine,” he said. “Or the pores will close up and youll start to lose the sharpness of your pattern.” He would take this Damascus to 800 grit.
He had more polishing to do, more etching. The handle was a simple shape and Sam knew it well. Hed sand and polish it, and then the eucalyptus would really look like fire. Hed glue the tang into the handle. And of course, he would sharpen the knife and shave the hair on his arm to test its razor edge.
Outside the open door, I could see that the day was high and clear with light-year blue and upward-tumbling cumulus clouds that mirrored the Damascus pattern churning in the blade.
![The knife, nearly finished](https://www.chicagomag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/C202401-Japanese-Kitchen-Knives-almost-finished-788x1024.jpg)
The knife, nearly finished: The blade had been etched, the handle shaped. Now the epoxy holding the handle in place was left to cure.
The quenching of anxiety and stress through ordered, repetitive, directed, and meaningful physical motions is an effect well known among neuroscientists and others who work with human brains and nervous systems. The rhythmic movement is soothing. Sam had tamed the fire inside and coaxed it outside to create a work both useful and beautiful. A palliative process that would give rise to a tool that would feed us and satisfy our sensibilities with its physical beauty while doing so. All of human history would thereby be embodied in a single work of art.
On the third day, when Sam presented me with the finished knife, it was so beautiful that it took my breath away. I brought it home and cut some onion for my wife, who was making dinner. The knife slid through the flesh with no resistance. It felt like cutting air. I rinsed it and wiped it dry and during dinner we propped it up in its black velvet case and we stared at it like early humans in a cave somewhere, watching fire.
## Welcome!
We hope you enjoy our newsletters.
To subscribe to the print edition of *Chicago* magazine, go to [chicagomag.com/subscribe](https://chicagomag.secure.darwin.cx/I**D7BC).
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# A Teens Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld
After Zac Brettler died, his parents struggled to decode the mystery of what had happened to him. They thought that they could pinpoint the moment hed started to change: three years earlier, when, at sixteen, he began boarding at Mill Hill School, in North London. Zac had grown up in Maida Vale, a quietly affluent neighborhood in the city. His father, Matthew, is a director at a small financial-services firm; his mother, Rachelle, is a freelance journalist. As a child, Zac was bright and quirky, with curly red hair and a voice that was husky and surprisingly deep. He was an excellent mimic, and often entertained his parents and his brother, Joe, by putting on accents. Joe was nearly two years older than Zac, and he attended University College School, an élite day school in Hampstead. But when Zac took the University College entrance exam he struggled with the math portion, and wasnt admitted. He was clearly intelligent and creative, but he was less of a student than Joe, and after applying unsuccessfully to two other schools he enrolled at Mill Hill, as a day student, at the age of thirteen.
Established in 1807 and occupying a rambling hundred-and-fifty-acre campus, Mill Hill has a hefty tuition price, but it has a less academic reputation than its peers. In the bourgeois milieu in which Zac grew up, to mention that you attended Mill Hill could be interpreted to mean that youd been rejected by more rigorous schools. When Zac arrived, in 2013, he found himself in the company of the cosseted offspring of plutocrats from Russia, Kazakhstan, and China. “It was the children of oligarchs,” Andrei Lejonvarn, a former student who befriended Zac at Mill Hill, recalled. The kids wore designer clothes and partied at swank hotels. On cold days, rather than make the eight-minute walk from the dormitory to class, they summoned Ubers. Because London is a second home to so many rich people from abroad, the city has long been a bastion of gaudy consumerism. To Zac, his classmates ostentatiousness seemed exotic; his parents werent especially materialistic. Rachelle told me, “This world of Porsches and cosmetic surgery and Ibiza, its everything were not.” Once, an administrator called the Brettlers home to say that Zac had just left school in a chauffeured limousine. Zac confessed to his parents that hed paid for this extravagance himself. “I wanted to see what it would feel like,” he said.
The commute from Maida Vale to Mill Hill took nearly an hour, so Zac began boarding during the week. To his parents, he seemed relatively well adjusted. He got decent grades and excelled at tennis and cricket. Occasionally, he brought friends home, and they appeared to be nice kids. But Zac was becoming more fixated on wealth. Hed been interested in cars since childhood, and now expressed embarrassment at his familys humble Mazda. Like many adolescent boys, he developed a fascination with gangsters, watching documentaries about figures from the London underworld, among them the homicidal twins Reginald and Ronald Kray. He loved movies about guys on the make, such as “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “War Dogs,” which tells the true story of two young men in Florida who became international arms dealers.
By 2018, Zac had tired of boarding, and for his final year of high school he transferred to Ashbourne College, in Kensington, because it was closer to home. He still had a baby face, with unblemished skin and flushed cheeks, but he carried himself like an adult. He wore a Moncler vest to class and stored schoolwork in a briefcase. He talked to his parents about business deals—selling cars and high-end properties—that he was supposedly involved in. They didnt know how seriously to take these claims. Was their son precocious or playacting? Zac had always been congenial and a quick study, and these qualities, they figured, might well equip him to become a young entrepreneur. In any case, the Brettlers didnt want to discourage their son—or, worse, push him away. Even if they were dubious of his desire for wealth and glamour, they tried to be gently supportive.
In early 2019, as Zac was finishing up high school, he told his parents that hed become friends with Akbar Shamji, a wealthy businessman in his forties who lived and worked in Mayfair, one of Londons poshest districts. Shamji had a big, beautiful dog, a black Weimaraner named Alpha Nero, and Zac sometimes visited Shamjis flat, on Mount Street, and took Alpha Nero for a walk. Rachelle sensed that Zac enjoyed the feeling of strolling alone through Mayfair alongside this elegant, obviously expensive animal, as if it were his own. But he was no mere errand boy for Shamji. Indeed, he told his parents that theyd become business partners and were discussing various deals, from launching a line of CBD-infused skin-care products to investing in a mine in Kazakhstan. Zac incorporated a company, Omega Stratton, which was described in a public filing, obliquely, as engaging in “security and commodity contracts.” He occasionally e-mailed his family from his business account. For a month or so in the summer of 2019, Zac even moved into a luxury flat in Pimlico, in a new development called Riverwalk, which was right on the Thames, near Vauxhall Bridge. It wasnt clear if he had a roommate—he wouldnt let Matthew and Rachelle visit—but on a video chat he showed them the apartments sleek interior. Zac had received admission offers from several universities, but he was now thinking of skipping college. He told his parents that he was earning enough from his assorted ventures to afford the rent at Riverwalk, though by the end of the summer hed moved back home, saying that hed been lonely in Pimlico.
Matthew and Rachelle felt mounting unease about Zacs trajectory. He was growing up too quickly, and he sometimes behaved belligerently—stomping around their flat, slamming doors, at times becoming physically intimidating. Fearing that he was taking drugs, they asked his childhood physician to draw blood at his next checkup and surreptitiously screen it. The result was negative. Once, when they went on vacation in Oman and left Zac alone at home, Matthew hid a video camera in the living room; all it captured was Zac with friends from the local tennis club, watching soccer on TV. At Rachelles urging, Zac was evaluated by a psychiatrist. But the doctor found no clear indications of a disorder.
Matthews firm is international, and on November 28, 2019, a Thursday, he was in the United States on a work trip. Zac had told Rachelle that he planned to spend the weekend with Shamji, doing a “digital detox”: avoiding computers and phones. But that night, in the familys apartment, Rachelle discovered that Zac had left his wallet and keys behind. “I am a wee bit worried about you,” she e-mailed him. “You have left your jacket and coat and credit cards here—how does that work for you for a few days?” She signed off, “Sending you much much much love.” At 2:03 *a.m.,* Zac replied, “All good x.”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a28554)
“Hon, do you think its time you took a break from the light-therapy lamp?”
Cartoon by Meredith Southard
Twenty-one minutes later, a surveillance camera affixed to the Thames headquarters of the British spy agency M.I.6 captured sudden movement outside a building across the river. It was Riverwalk, where Zac had stayed that summer. The buildings façade featured curved balconies overlooking the Thames. At 2:24 *a.m*., the camera recorded Zac walking out of a brightly lit fifth-floor apartment. He went to one corner of the balcony, then to the other. Then, returning to the center, he jumped.
The Thames is two hundred and fifteen miles long, but the stretch that ebbs and surges with the saltwater tide runs from Teddington Weir, in West London, to the North Sea. The tide was high that Thursday night, but by morning it had lowered by some nine feet, exposing a broad shoulder of muddy shoreline in front of Riverwalk. Shortly after 7 *a.m*., a passerby spotted a pale body on the riverbed. Somebody called the police, and the London Ambulance Service soon arrived. The body was “cold to the touch and extremely stiff,” a paramedic later noted. “Life was recognized to be extinct at 7:36 *a.m*.”
Every year, scores of people attempt to kill themselves in the Thames, often by jumping off a bridge. Many survive the impact and are fished out by rescuers. But if a fall is fatal the body often drifts with the tide. Consequently, the police didnt realize, on discovering Zacs body, that hed plummeted from a balcony directly above; it was more probable that hed been borne to the Pimlico riverbed by the current. After loading the body onto a boat, they transported it to a mortuary. No wallet was found in the sweatpants Zac had been wearing that night, so the police had no idea who he was.
Four miles northwest, in Maida Vale, Rachelle woke up worried about her son. She kept calling Zac, but his phone went straight to voice mail. At around nine-thirty, the doorbell rang. The Brettler flat occupies the ground and basement levels of a handsome red brick apartment building. At the door, Rachelle encountered a muscular chauffeur with a shaved head, dressed in a tailored blue overcoat and a purple tie. He had a phone to his ear.
“Wheres Zac?” the chauffeur asked.
“I dont know. Who are you?” Rachelle said.
“Who are *you*?”
“Im Zacs mum.”
The man had been holding his phone so that whoever was on the line could follow the conversation. Through the phone, Rachelle heard a male voice say, “That cant be his mum. His mum is in Dubai.”
Rather than explain what this could possibly mean, the man climbed into a Range Rover and drove off, leaving Rachelle in her vestibule, feeling deeply unsettled. That evening, she called a police hotline and reported Zac missing. Zac had been gone only since the previous afternoon, but she had a sense of foreboding. Through a friend, she got the contact information of a private investigator. Shed alerted Matthew, who had decided to return to London. Rachelle had also tracked down a friend of Zacs who had a phone number for Akbar Shamji, and she arranged a meeting.
On Monday, December 2nd, the police still hadnt connected the John Doe found in the Thames with the missing-persons case in Maida Vale, so, as Matthew later said, “we thought we were looking for a living person.” Rachelle and Matthew went to the Méridien hotel in Piccadilly, where Shamji had suggested talking in a guest lounge to which he had access. Shamji was forty-seven and rakishly handsome, with an aquiline nose and a full head of dark hair. He wore a tight-fitting suit with a busy pattern. Shamji said that he, too, was worried about Zac.
He handed the Brettlers the black overnight bag that Zac had taken with him four days earlier. He explained that hed spent Thursday evening with Zac at Riverwalk, along with Dave Sharma, a fifty-five-year-old friend who lived in the apartment. Sharmas daughter, Dominique Sharma Clarke, who was in her early twenties, was also there. It had been an upsetting night, Shamji continued. Zac had confessed to having a heroin addiction.
The Brettlers were astounded: theyd seen no signs of heroin use. According to Shamji, Zac had said that hed been secretly using the drug for years. That Thursday evening, Shamji went on, both he and Sharma had vowed to find Zac a treatment program. Then he and Dominique departed, leaving Zac with Sharma. On Friday morning, Shamji said, Sharma had informed him that Zac had disappeared. “We started to worry,” Shamji told the Brettlers. “Hes obviously gone off to get some drugs.” Sharma arranged for an associate of his—the chauffeur, whose name was Carlton—to look for Zac at the Maida Vale apartment.
Shamji unnerved the Brettlers further by explaining that he and Sharma had known their son not as Zac Brettler but as Zac Ismailov, the wealthy child of a Russian oligarch. Shamji had been introduced to him roughly eight months earlier, by a man named Mark Foley, who worked for Chelsea Football Club, a team then owned by the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich. Foley had told Shamji that Zac was looking to invest some of his family fortune. Shamji said that, until he spoke with Rachelle, hed been under the impression that Zacs father had recently died, and that his mother lived with Zacs siblings in Dubai. Zac had claimed that his family owned a penthouse unit in One Hyde Park—a superluxury development in Knightsbridge famous for its secretive, often absentee tenants—and had described the Maida Vale flat as an investment property where he was living only temporarily, and alone.
Shamji seemed like a credible person: hed attended Cambridge University and had impeccable manners. Moreover, Zac had told his parents that Shamji had an office on Berkeley Square—a rarefied address even by London standards. His wife, [Daniela Karnuts](https://www.instagram.com/daniela_safiyaa/?hl=en), runs a successful fashion label, Safiyaa, which has made clothing worn by Meghan Markle and Michelle Obama. Yet Shamjis story seemed outlandish. Matthew found him nervous and fidgety, noticing that he avoided eye contact with them. But Shamji emphasized that he and Sharma were desperate to find Zac and “get him back” for the Brettlers. They all agreed to stay in touch and continue searching.
The next day, Rachelle was in the front room of the family home, on the phone with Joe, when she saw a police car pull up outside. “I instinctively knew why they had come,” she said later. Two uniformed policewomen entered the apartment. One of them held Rachelles hand as they told her that Zacs body had been found.
In a chill rain last fall, I visited the Brettlers. Id initially connected with them over the summer, and wed since had several long, and sometimes painful, conversations about their son. The Maida Vale apartment is spare and modern. Rachelle writes about crafts and design, and the space was elegantly decorated, and brightened by colorful glass vases. A framed snapshot on a bookshelf showed Zac and Joe as little boys, dressed up in costumes at a school fair. Zac was “a cute, fun goofball,” Rachelle said. Both Brettler parents are now sixty-one. Matthew is bespectacled, athletic, and bald. He has a conspicuously analytical mind and an amiable intensity, and he has coped with the devastation of losing a child by channelling his energies into investigating Zacs demise. Rachelle is petite, with lively eyes and a tendency to smile even when shes relating a sad story. Joe drifted in and out as we talked. He is twenty-five, with corkscrew curls, and has a casually affectionate manner with his parents.
In the four years since Zacs death, the family has had to confront the extent to which the boy they thought they knew had been living a double existence. Zac had always possessed a Walter Mitty quality: hed burnish his achievements (boasting to friends about his athletic prowess and his business prospects), or play up his supposed connections to prominent people (falsely claiming, for instance, that he knew Virgil van Dijk, the captain of Liverpool Football Club). But none of the Brettlers had ever imagined that Zac might be moving about London pretending to be someone else altogether.
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a27411)
Cartoon by Jared Nangle
Matthew said, “Zac was very good at picking peoples—”
“Sweet spots,” Rachelle interjected.
“He was a very good reader of people,” Matthew went on. In “War Dogs,” one character says, of the movies antihero, “He would figure out who someone wanted him to be, and he would become that person.” The Brettlers recognize now that Zac assembled fabrications like a magpie, picking up strands of truth in one corner of his life and repurposing them as fiction in another. Across the road from the Brettlers was a glamorous Russian woman, a single mother who drove a Bentley. She befriended Zac after he introduced himself on the street, and when she cooked meals she occasionally gave him some of the food. Her name was Zamira Ismailova. “He took her *name*,” Rachelle noted.
I spoke to Ismailova recently, and she told me that shed known Zac by yet another fictitious name, Thaimas, and that shed believed him to be a young Kazakh who lived by himself. Because the Brettlers building has a common entrance servicing multiple flats, she had no inkling that he shared the place with his parents. She spoke English with Zac, but he occasionally threw in a word of rudimentary Russian. London is full of children whose families and fortunes come from abroad but who are raised to be thoroughly English. “I never doubted what he said,” Ismailova told me. She learned the truth only after Zacs death.
Shamji was right about Zac being a fabulist, but Matthew and Rachelle are adamant that he wasnt suicidal. Hed never talked about killing himself, nor did he seem depressed. On the contrary, he was brimming with plans and ambitions, all too eager to commence adult life. Just after seven oclock on the evening he died, Zac e-mailed Rachelle to say that hed used her credit card to pay for a test to obtain his drivers license. “I hope that is okay x,” he wrote. While I was at the Brettlers, Rachelle disappeared into Zacs bedroom and came out holding the overnight bag that Shamji had returned, which Zac had packed hours before he jumped off the balcony. “Its not a bag of someone planning to commit suicide,” she said, pulling out neatly folded items. “Youve got underwear, underwear, T-shirt, T-shirt. Youve got *deodorant*.”
Police recovered an iPad among Zacs belongings, and discovered that two days before he died he had done an Internet search for “witness protection uk.”
When Zac moved into Riverwalk, in July, 2019, he told his parents that he was renting the apartment from Verinder Sharma, an Indian rubber tycoon. At the time, Rachelle did a Google search for “Verinder Sharma” and “India” and “rubber,” and found no obvious match. In fact, Verinder was the birth name of Shamjis friend Dave Sharma. In London, he was known to friends as Indian Dave. And he wasnt a rubber tycoon. He was a gangster.
The morning Zacs body was identified, the private investigator the Brettlers had hired, Clive Strong, visited Sharma at Riverwalk. Sharma, who was short, sharp-featured, and physically fit, liked to box, and told Strong that hed just returned from a sparring session. According to Strongs notes, Sharma said that Zac had presented himself as someone whose “father was an oligarch,” and had claimed that hed clashed so much with his mother—who lived in Dubai, along with four of his siblings—that shed barred him from their various luxury properties in London. He was therefore homeless, despite being fantastically rich. “I felt sorry for the young man,” Sharma told Strong. “I said that he could stay in my flat”—the Riverwalk apartment.
Sharma, the last person to see Zac alive, told much the same story as Shamji: the previous Thursday evening, Zac and Shamji had come to Riverwalk; Sharmas daughter, Dominique, joined them; after a few hours, Shamji and Dominique left; Sharma fell asleep, and when he awoke, at 8 *a.m*., Zac had vanished. In Sharmas opinion, Zac had been a troubled kid who was “becoming suicidal.” Sharma noted that he was happy to talk to Strong, because he was a private investigator, but he preferred not to speak with the police, as hed had some “bad experiences in the past.”
Sharma didnt volunteer what those experiences were, but he did have a history with law enforcement. In 2002, he was arrested on heroin-smuggling charges. He was later implicated in the murder of a bodyguard turned night-club owner, Dave (Muscles) King, who was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2003, as he was leaving a gym in Hertfordshire. It was the first time that a fully automatic AK-47 had been used to murder someone in England. At a high-profile trial, the judge described the assassination as “thoroughly planned, ruthless, and brutally executed.” The gunman and the driver were each sentenced to life in prison.
Sharma had been one of Muscles friends in the drug trade, but they fell out. When authorities arrested Sharma and others in the 2002 heroin bust, the only suspect they didnt end up prosecuting was Muscles, and in front of witnesses in open court Sharma angrily called him a “grass”: an informer. Moments after Muscles was shot to death, the assassin called a mobile phone in France, which the police subsequently linked to Sharma. I spoke to a former official who was involved in the investigation, and he said that Sharma was a dangerous person. At the time of the murder trial, authorities had tried to locate him in France for questioning, but hed gone underground. “Ive no doubt Sharma was involved in organizing the shooting,” the former official told me. “But we didnt have enough evidence to charge him.”
After returning to England, Sharma worked as a debt collector. I spoke to a source whos had occasional business in Londons underworld, and he said that Sharma wasnt afraid to exert his will through physical force. Stories circulated about Indian Dave hunting down people who owed money and dangling them off rooftops. When Clive Strong, the detective, visited him at the Riverwalk flat, he wanted to see the balcony. Sharma flicked a switch on the wall, the glass door slid open, and they stepped out and looked at the Thames. Strong made a note of the fact that the glass door was opened and closed from inside the apartment.
On December 5, 2019, two days after Zacs body had been identified, Dave Sharma and Akbar Shamji were arrested and questioned. Sharma refused to talk to the police, but he provided a handwritten statement saying that on the night in question hed passed out at about 12:30 *a.m*., having become “heavily intoxicated” after drinking Jack Daniels and taking a sedative. Before he woke up at 8 *a.m*., he said, Zac must have killed himself by jumping off the balcony. “I was not responsible,” Sharma added. “I am still very upset about this.”
Because the authorities didnt initially make a connection to the Riverwalk building when they discovered Zacs body, police didnt enter Sharmas apartment until four days after the fall. When two officers inspected the place, they found it “immaculate,” one said. On the balconys glass safety partition, right around where Zac had jumped, they noticed an area that appeared to have been recently wiped clean, though they couldnt tell what might have been cleaned off. One officer asked Sharma if he remembered whether the balcony doors were open or closed when he got up that morning. Closed, he said.
Sharma had some visible injuries—a cut on the bridge of his nose, another between his right thumb and forefinger—but the officers report doesnt indicate that they asked how he acquired them. As the investigators scanned the floor, they noticed something: the back of a “burner”-type phone that had belonged to Zac had fallen into the track for the sliding balcony door. They found the front part under a sofa. The phone had evidently broken in two, suggesting that it had hit the floor with force.
When a pathologist examined Zacs body, he found no trace of heroin. A forensic investigation determined that Zac had nearly made it clean into the Thames, but his hip had clipped the low stone river wall. He had a compound fracture of his left elbow, probably from hitting the water. The pathologist also noted an injury that couldnt as readily be attributed to the fall: Zacs jaw was broken on the right side.
The most dramatic revelations came when the investigators examined the phones of Shamji and Sharma. Interestingly, Shamji had deleted his WhatsApp exchanges with Sharma in the weeks before Zacs death. But Sharma had taken no such precautions, so Shamjis messages were visible on his phone. The police cross-referenced this data with CCTV footage from cameras around the Riverwalk complex, which allowed them to reconstruct the movements and the communications of both men that night.
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a27830)
“The assignment was three full pages *without* illuminated drop caps, Chauncey.”
Cartoon by Patrick McKelvie
Shortly after 9 *p.m*., cameras captured Zac and Shamji parking Shamjis red Mercedes outside Riverwalk. Accompanied by Alpha Nero, Shamjis dog, they went up to Apartment 504. A couple of hours later, Sharmas daughter, Dominique, parked in an underground garage and also entered the flat. At 1:25 *a.m*., Shamji and Dominique left with Alpha Nero. They descended to the garage and talked in Dominiques car until 1:56, when she dropped Shamji and the dog off at the Mercedes, and both cars drove away.
Sharma had lied about going to sleep for the night at 12:30 *a.m*. At 2:12—nine minutes after Zac e-mailed “All good x” to Rachelle—Sharma telephoned Shamji from the apartment. Shamji was on his way back to Mayfair, and they spoke for nine minutes. But something must have alarmed Shamji, because he turned around and drove back to Riverwalk. At 2:24, the camera on the M.I.6 building captured Zacs plunge. The footage—shot from a considerable distance, at night—is grainy, but he is clearly alone on the balcony. Nobody pushes Zac, in other words. But, just after the jump, the footage appears to show the silhouette of someone moving around the apartment.
Two minutes after Zac hit the river, Sharma telephoned Dominique. The call lasted three and a half minutes. Then, at 2:34 *a.m*., Shamjis Mercedes reappears on the CCTV. He goes up to Apartment 504, Alpha Nero still by his side. After twenty minutes, he leaves the building, heads back to his car, and loads in his dog. But, rather than get in himself, Shamji walks around to the other side of the building, where a promenade runs along the Thames. According to subsequent police testimony, this is what happens next: “Mr. Shamji is then seen to look over the river wall in directly the spot that Zac has fallen into.” The wall is about four feet high, and Shamji cranes his torso over it, peering down into the water. Then he straightens, returns to his Mercedes, and drives away.
London is so beautiful that it can be easy to forget that much of it was built on imperial plunder. This dissonance between the veneer of refinement and the sinister forces pulsing beneath has become especially stark in recent decades, as the United Kingdom, stripped of its empire, has found a new role as a commodious base for global kleptocrats. In the recent book “[Butler to the World: How Britain Helps the Worlds Worst People Launder Money, Commit Crimes, and Get Away with Anything](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250281937/butlertotheworld),” Oliver Bullough explains that a combination of lax regulation, permissive law enforcement, plaintiff-friendly libel laws, discreet accountants, unscrupulous attorneys, deluxe real estate, and venerable schools has turned London into a mecca for moneyed reprobates—a modern-day Casablanca. The London property market offers countless opportunities for someone looking to park a dodgy fortune. Take a stroll around Belgravia or Regents Park, and youll notice that many of the multimillion-dollar dwellings stand unoccupied, their blinds drawn. Here is a safety-deposit box for some tycoon in a turbulent industry; there is an insurance policy for a corrupt minister of mines. London is the capital of pristine façades, often painted in wedding-cake shades of cream or ivory; the citys dominant aesthetic is literally whitewash. As a [2021 report by the British think tank Chatham House](https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/12/uks-kleptocracy-problem/01-introduction) put it, the U.K. is a “comfortable home for dirty money.”
To launder cash—or a reputation—is to mingle the dirty with the clean, and one consequence of Londons new identity as a twenty-four-hour laundromat is that the city is full of crooks with pretensions to legitimacy and businessmen who seem a little crooked. Akbar Shamji arrived in London with his family in 1972, when he was less than a year old. His father, Abdul, came from an Indian family in [Uganda](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/uganda), where hed built a thriving trading company called Gomba. But Idi Amin, who became Ugandas President in 1971, blamed the countrys economic inequality on its successful Asian minority, and in 1972 he announced that he was expelling all Asians. They had just ninety days to leave. When the Shamjis arrived in England, Abdul was determined to rebuild his business. He started by shipping Johnnie Walker whisky to Zaire, and expanded into trucking, mines, and hotels. There was a handbag factory in Blackburn and a crocodile farm in Malaysia. The reincarnated Gomba was incorporated in the offshore tax haven of Jersey, and its offices were on Londons Park Lane. As Abdul grew richer, he donated money to the Conservative Party. [Margaret Thatcher](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/margaret-thatcher) attended a fund-raiser at his home, a mock-Tudor mansion in Surrey, where Akbar grew up.
Abduls holdings came to include several prominent London theatres, including the Mermaid and the Garrick. For a time, he was even a part owner of Wembley Stadium. In the 1980 thriller “The Long Good Friday,” Bob Hoskins plays a London crime boss trying to remake himself as a legitimate property baron. He owns an elegant white pleasure boat and hosts parties on it while cruising the Thames. The vessel used in the movie was reportedly rented to the filmmakers, at what one of them called a “humongous” price, by its owner, Abdul Shamji.
Abdul endured a scandal in 1985 after his principal backer, the Johnson Matthey bank, went under. Gomba owed significant debts to the bank, including five million pounds that Abdul had personally guaranteed. Questioned in court about his finances, he asserted that he had no Swiss bank accounts. But it emerged that he did—six of them. A Member of Parliament lambasted him as a “crook.” Abdul insisted that he was a scapegoat, but he was tried and convicted for perjury. “You lied like a trooper,” the judge said, sentencing him to fifteen months in prison. Akbar was seventeen at the time.
In 1993, fresh out of Cambridge, Akbar told an interviewer that his father had “moved his Monopoly board” back to East Africa, though the older Shamji retained at least one of his U.K. holdings: the Mermaid Theatre. When Akbar was twenty-one, he was installed as its general manager. Akbar had done some acting at Cambridge; in a student production of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” he played a swindler named Honest Achmed. The Shamjis poured money into the Mermaid, but, according to Marc Sinden, its artistic director at the time, the theatre presented hardly any shows. The family built a new restaurant and a stainless-steel kitchen, but nobody used them. “There were piles of monogrammed cutlery with the Mermaid logo on it, and china plates all still in their boxes,” Sinden told me. “It was as though Id walked into a hospital that was fully equipped, but theyd forgotten to put the patients in.”
The Shamjis did mount a brief run of a one-man show about Muhammad Ali, and they paid Ali to visit London for the première. “There were photographs everywhere of Akbar with Ali, and talk of what Akbar had done to save the theatre,” Sinden said. “But hed bloody near ruined it.” The show lost money. I spoke to the lead investor, a former boxer named Tony Breen, who told me that the Shamjis ended up owing him thirty-five thousand pounds. Breen suspected that the theatre was “a money-laundering operation.” (A lawyer for Shamji denied this claim, calling it “absurd.”) At the time, Akbar drove around London in a Rolls-Royce Corniche. When things started to get a “bit funky” with the Shamjis, Breen recalled, he suggested that he be given the car, in lieu of payment. But Akbar objected that the Rolls belonged to Abdul, whod never allow it. Akbar “was his father manqué,” Sinden said. (Abdul Shamji died in 2010.)
By the early two-thousands, Shamji had segued into the music business, operating a couple of undistinguished labels in the United States. In the decades since, hes hopscotched from one industry to another. His LinkedIn page is spotty; the Experience section calls him a “thought provoker.” The Web site for a company called *cpec*, which bills itself as a leading player in Indias renewable-energy sector, features a photograph of Shamji shaking hands with [Prime Minister Narendra Modi](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/narendra-modi), and lists Shamji as having been the companys chairman and C.E.O. between 2010 and 2020. But an old shareholder document indicates that *cpec*s board of directors consisted mainly of Shamji and two of his siblings; according to other records I found online, another senior executive was Daniela Karnuts, Shamjis fashion-designer wife. More recently, he has been getting very into [crypto](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/cryptocurrency).
When Shamji was arrested, on suspicion of murder, he was interrogated at Charing Cross Police Station. After the police made clear that they knew he hadnt gone straight home to Mayfair—but had returned to Riverwalk for twenty minutes before descending to look in the river—Shamji said that hed simply forgotten about this part of the evening, though only a week had gone by. (“If Id had a night like this,” one of the officers told him in a subsequent interview, “I would remember it.”)
Shamji didnt volunteer what he and Sharma had spoken about on the phone call that ended three minutes before Zacs jump. He insisted that he had no memory of any calls from late that evening. Why had he returned to the apartment? To say good night, he claimed. When the police asked him *whom* hed said good night to, Shamji initially maintained that hed found Zac in the apartment along with Sharma, and that theyd all hugged before he departed. But, as the investigators knew, this was impossible: Shamji had entered the building ten minutes after Zac landed in the Thames. Alerted to this discrepancy, Shamji shifted his narrative again. Maybe he hadnt actually seen Zac the second time. His memory was foggy.
Shamji was asked to explain the interlude when he went around the Riverwalk building and looked into the Thames. “Its a nice bit of river,” he said. “I sometimes sit there.” Serene spot, picturesque view—as good a place as any for a smoke break at three in the morning. “I spend a lot of time outside,” he said.
The cops pressed: Given how long the promenade is, why had he approached the precise point where Zac had fallen? “It seems a great coincidence to me, and I dont believe in coincidences,” an officer said. When Shamji was asked if hed seen Zacs body in the water, he said that if he had he would have immediately called the police.
Nothing malign had transpired that night, Shamji maintained. Yet he kept behaving like a man with something to hide. “If its not as bad as it looks, then why not tell us what it is?” another officer said. But Shamji continued to stonewall.
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a23183)
“Its too late for Greg. The tchotchkes have him now.”
Cartoon by Ellis Rosen
The police, meanwhile, learned about some further deceptions on the part of Dave Sharma. He hadnt slept until 8 *a.m*., as he had claimed. He was up and texting with Shamji by 6:50. When Riverwalks head concierge, Ana Nunes, arrived for her eight-oclock shift, police boats would have been visible through the lobby windows. A colleague told her that Sharma had already called the front desk, asking if there was any indication that somebody had jumped from the building. At 8:10, the front-desk phone rang again, and Nunes answered. “Hi, Ana,” Sharma said, according to a statement by Nunes. “Can you please tell me if someone jumped from the balcony?”
Sharma was calling from Apartment 504. If hed stepped out onto the balcony, or just looked out a window, he likely would have seen the dead body down below. Perhaps he called Nunes to find out whether the police had drawn a connection between the body and the building. Or perhaps Sharma believed that, through some wild coincidence, it was someone elses corpse, and Zac had survived the fall. This might explain why he sent the chauffeur, Carlton, to visit the apartment in Maida Vale that morning.
According to phone records, Shamji and Sharma exchanged messages several times that day. Yet when Shamji met with the Brettlers at the Méridien hotel, three days later, he didnt mention that a corpse had been discovered outside Riverwalk hours after Zac went missing. Nor did Sharma or Shamji alert the police that the victim might have fallen from Sharmas balcony, which would have enabled them to identify Zac—and commence their investigation—four days earlier.
When Sharma was interviewed by police, he responded to dozens of pointed questions with a gruff “No comment.” Although both he and Shamji had been arrested on suspicion of murder, they were released on bail, and were free to go on with their lives. To Matthew and Rachelle, it felt as if, after an initial flurry of activity, the investigation started to lose momentum. “They took their foot off the gas,” Rachelle said. Some of this was likely a consequence of the pandemic, which set in not long after Zac died. The Brettlers may also have contributed, inadvertently, to the diminution in the energies of the London Metropolitan Police by keeping the whole incident relatively quiet. The death itself was not a secret: “I have the saddest news. Our beautiful son Zac died,” Rachelle wrote in a Facebook post. Family and friends turned out in large numbers for a funeral at Hoop Lane, a Jewish cemetery in Golders Green. But the London press, which is insatiable when it comes to the mysterious deaths of young white people, never picked up on the story. No florid *Daily Mail* spread featuring photographs of Zac and Riverwalk; no grandstanding about police inaction. The result was a lack of sustained pressure on law enforcement. And the Brettlers, at least at first, put their trust in the authorities, assuming that the unexplained death of a nineteen-year-old from West London would compel a rigorous investigation.
This faith in the proper functioning of law enforcement and the justice system might seem naïve anywhere these days, but especially in London. In 2014, a fifty-two-year-old resident named Scot Young died in circumstances similar to Zac Brettlers, plunging from a fourth-floor apartment in Marylebone and getting impaled on a wrought-iron railing. Young was a property developer whod become mixed up with unsavory Russian businessmen. Before his death, he told friends and family that he feared for his life. But the Metropolitan Police declared the death unsuspicious; they didnt even dust the apartment for fingerprints. As it happened, a month earlier, a friend of Youngs, Johnny Elichaoff, had died after falling from the roof of a shopping center in Bayswater. Suicide, police had concluded. A vicious killer appeared to be stalking London: gravity. The Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky had died in 2013, hanging himself, supposedly, at his Berkshire estate, after many attempts on his life by adversaries who wanted him dead. The previous year, another friend of Youngs, Robbie Curtis, whod also become entangled with dodgy Russians, died after falling in front of a Tube train. Two years before that, yet another Young friend, the British developer Paul Castle, was killed (again, by Tube train).
In each case, there were circumstances—debt, drugs, divorce, depression—that made suicide plausible. But the fact of so many sudden deaths over a short period of time involving high-flying London businessmen with Russian connections seemed dubious on its face. The press called the alleged suicides a “ring of death,” but as far as Scotland Yard was concerned they were just a series of unfortunate events. In 2017, BuzzFeed News published a [groundbreaking investigation](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/heidiblake/from-russia-with-blood-14-suspected-hits-on-british-soil) identifying fourteen men “who all died suspiciously on British soil after making powerful enemies in Russia.” According to the report, U.S. intelligence had shared evidence suggesting that numerous deaths being described by the London police as suicides had actually been murders. But a culture of timidity within British law enforcement, combined with weak institutional capacity after years of budget cuts, had shut down investigations. Some people expressed an even darker view: Britain had become so reliant on the largesse of Russias oligarchs that decisions had been made at a high level not to persecute Londons new mafia class, thereby extending to them the courtesy of being able to kill their enemies on British soil with impunity. One national-security adviser to the British government told BuzzFeed that ministers were desperate not “to antagonise the Russians.”
The Brettlers did not view Zacs death as part of an international conspiracy, but they did come to fear that the Metropolitan Police had an inclination to categorize any suspicious death that wasnt obviously a murder as a suicide. Rachelle and Matthew emphasized to me that they harbored no stigma about suicide, and resisted the notion that Zac killed himself only because so many clues pointed to something more nefarious.
They began their own investigation, tracking down friends of Zacs and hounding the police for information, and uncovered additional signs that their son may have been in danger. They spoke to a friend whod seen him two days before he died (and who didnt know about Zacs oligarch persona). The two boys had gone for a drive, and Zac kept fearfully looking over his shoulder. He mentioned that he might have information for the authorities, and was considering going into police protection. I spoke with the friend recently, who asked that I not use his name. “He was being threatened by someone,” he told me. “Apparently, they threatened to harm his family.” Of course, it was difficult to know how seriously to take such talk from Zac, given his propensity for dramatic stories. Nevertheless, police recovered an iPad among Zacs belongings, and discovered that two days before he died he had done an Internet search for “witness protection uk.”
To a degree that his parents didnt fully appreciate, Zacs career as a fabulist started early. Numerous former classmates told me about his inventions. “He made up quite a lot of stuff,” a friend who met Zac at Mill Hill when they were both thirteen said. “He told a lot of people that his mum was dead.” Zac probably concocted this lie for sympathy or attention, the friend ventured. As an insecure new arrival at a school that he had not wanted to attend, he may have discovered that compassion can be a shortcut to intimacy—and that many people will open their heart to a stranger if they hear hes suffered a terrible loss.
Zac also told classmates that he came from money. “Most of the lies related to wealth,” his Mill Hill housemate Andrei Lejonvarn recalled. Zac claimed that his family lived in One Hyde Park, and that his father was an arms dealer who owned a pair of Range Rovers. Lejonvarn was Zacs doubles partner in tennis, and Matthew Brettler once drove them to a tournament. Before Matthew picked them up, Zac warned Lejonvarn that both Range Rovers were in the shop for repairs; his father would be driving a Mazda, and was “very touchy” about it, so Lejonvarn shouldnt under any circumstances mention the Range Rovers. When Lejonvarn, whod been expecting to meet a hardened arms dealer, got in the car, he was surprised by Matthews gently inquisitive manner. “Hes, you know, a nice guy,” Lejonvarn recalled. He said of Zac, “You could smell the bullshit.”
At one point, Zac told Mill Hill classmates that New Balance wanted to sponsor him as a cricket player.
“Youre full of shit!” one of them said.
“Zac, youre a compulsive liar,” Lejonvarn chimed in.
For a moment, Zac seemed genuinely chastened. “I know,” he said. “Im a compulsive liar.” Then he launched into a story about how hed developed the problem after having this terrible accident as a kid.
“No! Zac!” Lejonvarn cut him off. “Youre doing it again!”
When I told Matthew and Rachelle how extensive and long-standing Zacs duplicity seems to have been, Matthew offered the redemptive gloss of a mourning parent. His son, he said, had always had “a slightly preternatural ability to tell stories.” Being a boarding student, Matthew observed, is “a little like when you go to college, living away from your parents for the first time. It dawns on you that youre meeting people who know absolutely nothing about you. Youve got a tabula rasa—a reset point. You feel like youve got a little bit of editorial control in a way that you didnt previously. I think thats what happened with Zac. Being in that boarding environment with people who had this mind-boggling access to money, Zac suddenly saw a space in which he could create another version of himself.”
Another Mill Hill friend told me that Zac would forge quick bonds with people “for a certain moment, and then disappear” as they came to doubt his stories. The friend who saw Zac in London shortly before he died reflected, “If youre lying to your friends, its a bit of a lonely place to be, isnt it?”
Its difficult to say exactly when Zac Brettler graduated from telling classmates fanciful tales to road-testing an alter ego in the more hazardous environment of adult London. Nobody I spoke to from Zacs high schools remembered him pretending to be the son of a Russian or Kazakh oligarch. When did the charade begin? I recently spoke with Mark Foley, who confirmed that he has worked for many years as a consultant for Chelsea Football Club, managing properties. One evening in early 2019, he said, he attended an opening at the Chelsea Arts Club and got to talking with a young man who mentioned that he came from a wealthy Russian family. They agreed to meet for coffee several days later.
Shamji has maintained that Foley introduced Zac to him as Zac Ismailov. It is ironic that Foley vouched for Zacs story, because he is presumably no stranger to the post-Soviet oligarchy, given that Roman Abramovich owned Chelsea for nearly two decades. “From my knowledge of Russian investors, theyre a fairly secretive bunch,” Foley told me. “You didnt always get the full story from them, and they played their cards close to their chest.” Zac, he said, struck him as “one of these types.”
Its tempting to see, in Zacs final year, an echo of Tom Ripley, the sociopathic con man of the [Patricia Highsmith](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/patricia-highsmith) novels, who achieves the life style he covets by preying, brilliantly, on others gullibility. But its startling to think that Foley could have been duped by a London teen-ager whod never so much as vacationed in Russia—and that Zac might have been so reckless as to attempt this trick on precisely the sort of oligarch-adjacent Londoner poised to see through it.
Last December, I wrote to Akbar Shamji. “Zacs death is an event which I do not wish to talk about,” he responded, declining to speak by phone or to meet in person. When I pressed, he wrote that Zac “had built an extraordinary web of lies,” and intimated that it would be insensitive of me to dredge up this sad story, saying that he didnt “feel comfortable” taking Zacs “parents deeper into these wounds.” But in subsequent weeks I e-mailed Shamji various questions, and he replied. His answers were slippery, and he outright ignored many difficult questions, but he was unfailingly, almost ostentatiously, polite.
In early 2019, he told me, he was working with a friend and occasional business partner, John Connies-Laing, on a real-estate project in Lisbon. They needed financing, and Foley offered to introduce them to his new friend Zac. When I asked Shamji if hed bothered to Google Zacs name before the meeting, he responded, “Personal introductions in London are far more trusted than social media, particularly with Eastern Europeans who have to keep a lower profile.” When I asked Connies-Laing about this, he said, via e-mail, “Mark was well connected in the Oligarch world and I had absolutely no reason to think that Zac was not credible.”
According to Shamji, he and Connies-Laing met Zac at a café in St. Johns Wood, and Zac mentioned that hed recently made an offer on a lavish home around the corner, on Hamilton Terrace. Zac was dressed casually, but, Shamji told me, he was convincing in his role. As Shamji explained to police, Zac “talked the life of a very rich young kid—he had fancy watches, fancy cars, planes, all the stuff that is very aspirational wealth in London.” Shamji didnt actually