diff --git a/.obsidian/plugins/cron/data.json b/.obsidian/plugins/cron/data.json
index 9de75234..901aec01 100644
--- a/.obsidian/plugins/cron/data.json
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"601d1cc7-a4f3-4f19-aa9f-3bddd7ab6b1d": {
"locked": false,
"lockedDeviceName": "iPhone",
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+ "lastRun": "2024-02-16T07:42:36+01:00"
}
}
}
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diff --git a/.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-activity-history/data.json b/.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-activity-history/data.json
index 519db7dc..73a6ac56 100644
--- a/.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-activity-history/data.json
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@@ -12,8 +12,8 @@
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{
"path": "/",
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+ "date": "2024-02-16",
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}
],
"activityHistory": [
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{
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+ "value": 8103251
+ },
+ {
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+ },
+ {
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+ {
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}
]
}
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index 4bed5ff3..85fbf781 100644
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+ " 2024-02-14 ⚽️ PSG - Real Sociedad ",
+ " 2023-07-13 Health check ",
+ " Bookmarks - Media ",
" 2024-02-10 ⚽️ PSG - Lille OSC ",
" 2024-02-10 ⚽️ PSG - Lille OSC ",
" 2024-02-10 ⚽️ PSG - Lille OSC ",
@@ -13061,13 +11500,14 @@
" 2024-01-17 ",
" Sicilian aubergine stew with couscous ",
" Pia Bousquié ",
- " 2024-01-14 ⚽️ RC Lens - PSG ",
- " 2024-01-14 ⚽️ RC Lens - PSG ",
- " 2024-01-14 ⚽️ RC Lens - PSG ",
- " Juan Bautista Bossio ",
- " Jérôme Bédier "
+ " 2024-01-14 ⚽️ RC Lens - PSG "
],
"Created": [
+ " 2024-02-16 ",
+ " 2024-02-15 ",
+ " 2024-02-14 ",
+ " 2024-02-13 ",
+ " 2024-02-12 ",
" His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him. ",
" A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld ",
" How Nikola Jokić Became the World’s Best Basketball Player ",
@@ -13113,14 +11553,10 @@
" 2024-01-27 ",
" 2024-01-26 ",
" Untitled ",
- " Untitled ",
- " 2024-01-25 ",
- " Interview with the Vampire - The Vampire Chronicles (1994) ",
- " When Jewelry Influences Watchmakers ",
- " 2024-01-24 ",
- " Rain Man (1988) "
+ " Untitled "
],
"Renamed": [
+ " 2024-02-14 ⚽️ PSG - Real Sociedad (2-0) ",
" His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him. ",
" A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld ",
" How Nikola Jokić Became the World’s Best Basketball Player ",
@@ -13170,10 +11606,12 @@
" More American Graffiti (1979) ",
" Sicilian aubergine stew with couscous ",
" Sicilian aubergine stew with couscous ",
- " Warm lemon and Parmesan couscous ",
- " Warm lemon and Parmesan couscous "
+ " Warm lemon and Parmesan couscous "
],
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+ " Why Tim Cook Is Going All In on the Apple Vision Pro ",
+ " A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld ",
+ " His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him. ",
" A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld ",
" Nat Friedman Embraces AI to Translate the Herculaneum Papyri ",
" How Nikola Jokić Became the World’s Best Basketball Player ",
@@ -13221,10 +11659,7 @@
" After Two Decades Undercover, She’s Ready to Tell the Real Story of Human Trafficking ",
" A Knife Forged in Fire ",
" Skipping School America’s Hidden Education Crisis ",
- " An Iowa paperboy disappeared 41 years ago. His mother is still on the case ",
- " Bookmarks - Gift ideas ",
- " Galette des rois ",
- " Galette des rois "
+ " An Iowa paperboy disappeared 41 years ago. His mother is still on the case "
],
"Refactored": [
" Cuban Picadillo Bowls ",
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" 2023-10-02 "
],
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- " The Man in Room 117 ",
- " When Jewelry Influences Watchmakers ",
- " Olympic Champion Carissa Moore Goes in Search of a New Identity ",
- " The ballad of Lars and Bruno ",
- " 2024-01-19 ",
- " Notice 2024-01-15 19-56-51 ",
- " Seasonal Activities ",
- " Jacques Brel (by Jacques Brel - 2016) ",
- " Naked In The Summertime Volume 2 (by Prince - 2016) ",
- " Is This It (by The Strokes - 2003) ",
- " HELP (by Danny Wright - 2020) ",
- " Barbara - Collection ",
- " Bobby Womack - I Can Understand It ",
- " Bob Marley - Reggae Rebel ",
- " Barry White - Sings for Someone You Love ",
- " David Bowie - Images ",
- " Duran Duran - Arena ",
- " Lightnin Hopkins - Lightnin Strikes ",
- " Marvin Gaye - Dream of a Lifetime ",
- " Prince - Purple Rain ",
- " Nas - Nastradamus ",
- " Nastradamus (by Nas - 1999) ",
- " Nastradamus (by Nas - 1999) ",
- " Purple Rain (by Prince The Revolution - 1984) ",
- " Template Music ",
- " 2023-01-06 Chateauroux - PSG ",
- " 2024-06-08 💍 Mariage Rémi & Séverine ",
- " Novembre (2020) ",
- " Blanc de Noir - Nadine Saxer ",
- " Actual Life 2 Piano (February 2 - October 15 2021) (by Fred again - 2022) ",
- " PSG. AC Milan ",
- " Template ",
- " William's Butcherstable ",
- " Untitled ",
- " Carlos Alcaraz Is Bringing the Thrill Back to Tennis ",
- " 2023-08-26 Paris SG - RC Lens ",
- " Narratively ",
- " Narratively ",
- " Untitled ",
- " How a southern Italian crime family’s reign ended in tragedy ",
- " Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) 1 ",
- " De « Peaky Blinders » à « Oppenheimer », dans la tête de Cillian Murphy ",
- " How a Prison Gang Inspired by Hollywood Heists Stole $23 Million ",
- " Untitled ",
- " A Satisfying Steak Salad That’s the Answer to Your Summer Dinner Dreams ",
- " The Number-One Girl ",
- " The Navy SEAL Who Went to Ukraine Because He Couldn’t Stop Fighting ",
- " The Man Who Settled the Fox-Dominion Defamation Case From a Romanian Tour Bus ",
- " Bunkers ",
- " 2023-02-14 Bayern - PSG ",
- " Untitled "
+ " El Niño Is Coming—and the World Isn’t Prepared ",
+ " Buried gold, vampire graves and lost cities - the year's best ancient finds ",
+ " Queen Elizabeth II Dies at 96; Was Britain’s Longest-Reigning Monarch ",
+ " A Passage to Parenthood ",
+ " He Planned a Treasure Hunt for the Ages ",
+ " A Championship Season in Mariachi Country ",
+ " The Jail Money Trap ",
+ " How the story of soccer became the story of everything ",
+ " Searching for Zarahemla A van, the Yucatán, five Latter-day Saints, and the malleable nature of truth ",
+ " Inside the Case Against General Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda ",
+ " Secrets of the Christmas Tree Trade ",
+ " The Harvey Weinstein Trial and the Myth of the Perfect Perpetrator ",
+ " Drugs killed 8 friends, one by one, in a tragedy seen across the U.S. ",
+ " The Return of James Cameron, Box Office King ",
+ " Bodybuilders dying as coaches and judges encourage extreme measures ",
+ " Madame Palatine à la cour du Roi Soleil ",
+ " The Judge and the Case That Came Back to Haunt Him ",
+ " How Noah Baumbach Made ‘White Noise’ a Disaster Movie for Our Moment ",
+ " Murder and Loathing in Las Vegas ",
+ " The dirty road to clean energy how China’s electric vehicle boom is ravaging the environment ",
+ " How Much Would You Pay to Save Your Pet's Life ",
+ " A Matter of Honor ",
+ " Collections Why Roman Egypt Was Such a Strange Province ",
+ " ‘He was fast … he ran you right over’ what it’s like to get hit by an SUV ",
+ " ‘Russian warship, go fuck yourself’ what happened next to the Ukrainians defending Snake Island ",
+ " The Beautiful, Brutal World of Bonsai ",
+ " Extreme Heat Will Change Us ",
+ " Thanked by Shady Eminem's hip-hop idols react to Rock Hall shoutouts ",
+ " The story of a young mother, a fire and a Milwaukee landlord ",
+ " The death of NHL slap shots Why players are abandoning hockey’s signature offensive weapon ",
+ " Trump Is No Longer Enjoying Himself — And It Shows ",
+ " How the Dez Bryant no-catch changed the NFL forever ",
+ " DEA’s most corrupt agent Parties, sex amid 'unwinnable war' ",
+ " The Next Wave of the Opioid Epidemic Is Killing Black Men ",
+ " Margot Robbie Is Nobody’s Barbie The ‘Babylon’ Star on Navigating Hollywood ",
+ " 10 More Disturbing Revelations About Sam Bankman-Fried ",
+ " These three brothers scammed their investors out of $233 million. Then they lived like kings ",
+ " Meet the World's Top 'Chess Detective' ",
+ " Bad Faith at Second Mesa ",
+ " How the Record Industry Ruthlessly Punished Milli Vanilli for Anticipating the Future of Music ",
+ " True Grit ",
+ " Who Will Remove My IUD ",
+ " The Strange and Mysterious Death of Mrs. Jerry Lee Lewis ",
+ " ‘Trump’s Kevin’ McCarthy could soon be speaker of the House - Los Angeles Times ",
+ " The Most Lawless County in Texas ",
+ " How Ukrainians Are Protecting Their Centuries-Old Culture From Putin’s Invasion ",
+ " Do We Have the History of Native Americans Backward ",
+ " The Too-Muchness of Bono ",
+ " Mississippi's Welfare Mess—And America's ",
+ " Texas Goes Permitless on Guns, and Police Face an Armed Public ",
+ " Swamp Boy Medical Mystery "
],
"Linked": [
+ " How Nikola Jokić Became the World’s Best Basketball Player ",
+ " 2024-02-16 ",
+ " 2024-02-16 ",
+ " 2024-02-15 ",
+ " 2024-02-14 ",
+ " 2024-02-14 ",
+ " Precipice of fear the freerider who took skiing to its limits ",
+ " His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him. ",
+ " Paper mills are bribing editors at scholarly journals, Science investigation finds ",
+ " 2024-02-14 ",
+ " 2024-02-14 ",
+ " 2024-02-13 ",
+ " 2024-02-12 ",
+ " 2024-02-12 ",
+ " Why Tim Cook Is Going All In on the Apple Vision Pro ",
+ " A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld ",
+ " His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him. ",
" A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld ",
" How Nikola Jokić Became the World’s Best Basketball Player ",
" Nat Friedman Embraces AI to Translate the Herculaneum Papyri ",
@@ -13366,24 +11818,7 @@
" Super Bowl Strip Tease The NFL and Las Vegas Are Together at Last ",
" 2024-02-04 ",
" Hörnlihütte ",
- " 2024-02-04 ",
- " Lenzerheide ",
- " 2024-02-04 ",
- " 2024-02-03 ",
- " 2024-02-03 ",
- " 2024-02-02 ",
- " @Cinematheque ",
- " 2024-02-02 ",
- " 2024-02-02 ",
- " Fentanyl, the portrait of a mass murderer ",
- " The New Rules ",
- " 2024-02-02 ",
- " 2024-02-01 ",
- " Hippy, capitalist, guru, grocer the forgotten genius who changed British food ",
- " Did Drug Traffickers Funnel Millions of Dollars to Mexican President López Obrador’s First Campaign ",
- " @Health ",
- " 2024-02-01 ",
- " 2024-02-01 "
+ " 2024-02-04 "
],
"Removed Tags from": [
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diff --git a/.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-reminder-plugin/data.json b/.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-reminder-plugin/data.json
index 7e20bbc3..663491d1 100644
--- a/.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-reminder-plugin/data.json
+++ b/.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-reminder-plugin/data.json
@@ -332,50 +332,50 @@
}
],
"01.02 Home/Household.md": [
- {
- "title": "🛎 🧻 REMINDER [[Household]]: check need for toilet paper %%done_del%%",
- "time": "2024-02-12",
- "rowNumber": 92
- },
- {
- "title": "♻ [[Household]]: *Paper* recycling collection %%done_del%%",
- "time": "2024-02-13",
- "rowNumber": 75
- },
{
"title": ":bed: [[Household]] Change bedsheets %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-02-17",
- "rowNumber": 100
+ "rowNumber": 102
+ },
+ {
+ "title": "🛎 🧻 REMINDER [[Household]]: check need for toilet paper %%done_del%%",
+ "time": "2024-02-19",
+ "rowNumber": 93
},
{
"title": "♻ [[Household]]: *Cardboard* recycling collection %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-02-20",
- "rowNumber": 79
+ "rowNumber": 80
+ },
+ {
+ "title": "♻ [[Household]]: *Paper* recycling collection %%done_del%%",
+ "time": "2024-02-27",
+ "rowNumber": 75
},
{
"title": "🛎️ :house: [[Household]]: Pay rent %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-02-29",
- "rowNumber": 89
+ "rowNumber": 90
},
{
"title": ":blue_car: [[Household]]: Change to Summer tyres @ [[Rex Automobile CH]] %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-04-15",
- "rowNumber": 109
+ "rowNumber": 111
},
{
"title": ":blue_car: [[Household]]: Change to Winter tyres @ [[Rex Automobile CH]] %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-10-15",
- "rowNumber": 110
+ "rowNumber": 112
},
{
"title": ":ski: [[Household]]: Organise yearly ski servicing ([[Ski Rental Zürich]]) %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-10-31",
- "rowNumber": 117
+ "rowNumber": 119
},
{
"title": ":blue_car: [[Household]]: Renew [road vignette](https://www.e-vignette.ch/) %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-12-20",
- "rowNumber": 111
+ "rowNumber": 113
}
],
"01.03 Family/Pia Bousquié.md": [
@@ -454,15 +454,15 @@
}
],
"06.02 Investments/Crypto Tasks.md": [
- {
- "title": ":chart: Check [[Nimbus]] earnings %%done_del%%",
- "time": "2024-02-12",
- "rowNumber": 87
- },
{
"title": ":ballot_box_with_ballot: [[Crypto Tasks]]: Vote for [[EOS]] block producers %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-03-05",
"rowNumber": 72
+ },
+ {
+ "title": ":chart: Check [[Nimbus]] earnings %%done_del%%",
+ "time": "2024-03-11",
+ "rowNumber": 87
}
],
"05.02 Networks/Configuring UFW.md": [
@@ -495,7 +495,7 @@
{
"title": ":label: [[Bookmarks - Media]]: review bookmarks %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-05-07",
- "rowNumber": 80
+ "rowNumber": 92
}
],
"00.08 Bookmarks/Bookmarks - Admin & services.md": [
@@ -508,7 +508,7 @@
"00.08 Bookmarks/Bookmarks - Obsidian.md": [
{
"title": ":label: [[Bookmarks - Obsidian]]: Review bookmarks %%done_del%%",
- "time": "2024-02-15",
+ "time": "2024-05-15",
"rowNumber": 319
}
],
@@ -599,11 +599,6 @@
"time": "2024-02-08",
"rowNumber": 129
},
- {
- "title": ":confetti_ball: :love_letter: [[@Life Admin|Life Admin]]: Saint Valentin %%done_del%%",
- "time": "2024-02-14",
- "rowNumber": 142
- },
{
"title": ":telephone: [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Switch from Swisscom to Sunrise",
"time": "2024-03-31",
@@ -612,12 +607,17 @@
{
"title": ":confetti_ball: :mother_christmas: [[@Life Admin|Life Admin]]: Saint Nicolas %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-12-06",
- "rowNumber": 143
+ "rowNumber": 144
},
{
"title": ":confetti_ball: :crown: [[@Life Admin|Life Admin]]: Epiphanie ([[Galette des rois]]) %%done_del%%",
"time": "2025-01-06",
"rowNumber": 141
+ },
+ {
+ "title": ":confetti_ball: :love_letter: [[@Life Admin|Life Admin]]: Saint Valentin %%done_del%%",
+ "time": "2025-02-14",
+ "rowNumber": 142
}
],
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2023-01-04.md": [
@@ -728,14 +728,14 @@
"00.08 Bookmarks/Bookmarks - Social Media.md": [
{
"title": ":label: [[Bookmarks - Social Media]]: Review bookmarks %%done_del%%",
- "time": "2024-02-14",
+ "time": "2024-05-14",
"rowNumber": 79
}
],
"01.07 Animals/2023-07-13 Health check.md": [
{
"title": ":racehorse: [[@Sally|Sally]], [[2023-07-13 Health check|Note]]: Check front hoofs healing",
- "time": "2024-02-13",
+ "time": "2024-02-27",
"rowNumber": 53
}
],
@@ -851,11 +851,6 @@
"time": "2024-02-15",
"rowNumber": 93
},
- {
- "title": ":snowflake: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: ZüriCarneval weekend %%done_del%%",
- "time": "2024-02-15",
- "rowNumber": 114
- },
{
"title": "🎭:frame_with_picture: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out exhibitions at the [Rietberg](https://rietberg.ch/en/) %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-03-15",
@@ -864,12 +859,12 @@
{
"title": ":hibiscus: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Sechseläuten %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-04-15",
- "rowNumber": 115
+ "rowNumber": 116
},
{
"title": ":hibiscus: :runner: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Zürich Marathon %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-04-21",
- "rowNumber": 125
+ "rowNumber": 126
},
{
"title": ":hibiscus: :fork_and_knife: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Book a restaurant with terrace for the season: [[Albishaus]], [[Restaurant Boldern]], [[Zur Buech]], [[Jardin Zürichberg]], [[Bistro Rigiblick]], [[Portofino am See]], [[La Réserve|La Muña]] %%done_del%%",
@@ -884,7 +879,7 @@
{
"title": ":hibiscus: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Zürich Pride Festival %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-06-15",
- "rowNumber": 116
+ "rowNumber": 117
},
{
"title": ":sunny: :movie_camera: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out programmation of the [Zurich's finest open-air cinema | Allianz Cinema -](https://zuerich.allianzcinema.ch/en) %%done_del%%",
@@ -894,22 +889,22 @@
{
"title": ":sunny: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out Seenachtfest Rapperswil-Jona %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-08-01",
- "rowNumber": 119
+ "rowNumber": 120
},
{
"title": ":sunny: :runner: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out tickets to Weltklasse Zürich %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-08-01",
- "rowNumber": 126
+ "rowNumber": 127
},
{
"title": ":sunny: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Street Parade %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-08-10",
- "rowNumber": 117
+ "rowNumber": 118
},
{
"title": ":sunny: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Zürich Openair %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-08-23",
- "rowNumber": 118
+ "rowNumber": 119
},
{
"title": ":maple_leaf: :movie_camera: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out Zürich Film Festival %%done_del%%",
@@ -945,6 +940,11 @@
"title": ":snowflake: :swimmer: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Samichlausschwimmen %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-12-08",
"rowNumber": 113
+ },
+ {
+ "title": ":snowflake: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: ZüriCarneval weekend %%done_del%%",
+ "time": "2025-02-15",
+ "rowNumber": 114
}
],
"03.02 Travels/Geneva.md": [
@@ -985,13 +985,6 @@
"rowNumber": 129
}
],
- "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-01-17.md": [
- {
- "title": "12:53 :judge: [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Encheres a suivre",
- "time": "2024-02-13",
- "rowNumber": 104
- }
- ],
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-01-22.md": [
{
"title": "16:06 :ski: [[@Lifestyle|Lifestyle]]: Look for a ski bag & a ski boot bag",
@@ -1020,17 +1013,17 @@
"rowNumber": 83
}
],
- "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-08.md": [
+ "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-09.md": [
{
- "title": "15:48 :judge: [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Enchères à suivre",
- "time": "2024-02-15",
+ "title": "16:38 :judge: [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Enchères à suivre",
+ "time": "2024-02-21",
"rowNumber": 103
}
],
- "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-09.md": [
+ "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-14.md": [
{
- "title": "16:38 :judge: [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Enchères à suivre",
- "time": "2024-02-21",
+ "title": "21:40 :clapper: [[@Cinematheque|Cinematheque]]: Download 'All of Us Strangers'",
+ "time": "2024-02-28",
"rowNumber": 103
}
]
diff --git a/.obsidian/workspace-mobile.json b/.obsidian/workspace-mobile.json
index 251aaa9f..1fedb599 100644
--- a/.obsidian/workspace-mobile.json
+++ b/.obsidian/workspace-mobile.json
@@ -69,7 +69,7 @@
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"type": "markdown",
"state": {
- "file": "00.03 News/His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him..md",
+ "file": "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-16.md",
"mode": "preview",
"source": true
}
@@ -158,7 +158,7 @@
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"type": "backlink",
"state": {
- "file": "00.03 News/His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him..md",
+ "file": "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-16.md",
"collapseAll": false,
"extraContext": false,
"sortOrder": "alphabetical",
@@ -175,7 +175,7 @@
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- "file": "00.03 News/His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him..md",
+ "file": "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-16.md",
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- "00.03 News/@News.md",
- "00.03 News/His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him..md",
- "00.03 News/A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld.md",
+ "00.03 News/The Juror Who Found Herself Guilty.md",
+ "01.02 Home/@Main Dashboard.md",
+ "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-16.md",
"00.03 News/How Nikola Jokić Became the World’s Best Basketball Player.md",
- "00.03 News/Nat Friedman Embraces AI to Translate the Herculaneum Papyri.md",
+ "01.02 Home/Creations.md",
+ "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-15.md",
+ "00.08 Bookmarks/Bookmarks - Obsidian.md",
+ "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-14.md",
+ "00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-02-14 ⚽️ PSG - Real Sociedad (2-0).md",
+ "02.02 Paris/Paris SG.md",
+ "00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-02-10 ⚽️ PSG - Lille OSC (3-1).md",
+ "00.03 News/Precipice of fear the freerider who took skiing to its limits.md",
+ "00.03 News/His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him..md",
"00.03 News/Paper mills are bribing editors at scholarly journals, Science investigation finds.md",
+ "02.03 Zürich/@@Zürich.md",
+ "00.08 Bookmarks/Bookmarks - Social Media.md",
+ "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-13.md",
+ "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-12.md",
+ "03.03 Food & Wine/Warm lemon and Parmesan couscous.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-11.md",
- "00.03 News/A Knife Forged in Fire.md",
- "01.02 Home/@Main Dashboard.md",
- "00.03 News/How Two Single Moms Escaped an Alleged Sex-Trafficking Ring and Ultimately Saved Each Other.md",
- "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-10.md",
- "00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-02-10 ⚽️ PSG - Lille OSC (3-1).md",
- "02.02 Paris/Paris SG.md",
- "00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-01-28 ⚽️ PSG - Brest 29 (2-2).md",
- "00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-03-05 ⚽️ Real Sociedad - PSG.md",
- "03.03 Food & Wine/Korean Barbecue-Style Meatballs.md",
- "03.03 Food & Wine/!!Coffee.md",
- "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-09.md",
- "01.02 Home/@Shopping list.md",
- "03.03 Food & Wine/Big Shells With Spicy Lamb Sausage and Pistachios.md",
- "00.03 News/Did Drug Traffickers Funnel Millions of Dollars to Mexican President López Obrador’s First Campaign.md",
- "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-08.md",
- "00.03 News/Ripples of hate.md",
- "00.03 News/Bear Hibernation Uncovering Black Bear Denning Secrets in Arkansas.md",
- "03.04 Cinematheque/@Cinematheque.md",
- "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-07.md",
+ "00.08 Bookmarks/Bookmarks - Media.md",
+ "00.08 Bookmarks/Bookmarks - Travels & Sport.md",
+ "00.03 News/Why Tim Cook Is Going All In on the Apple Vision Pro.md",
+ "00.03 News/@News.md",
+ "00.03 News/El Niño Is Coming—and the World Isn’t Prepared.md",
+ "00.03 News/Buried gold, vampire graves and lost cities - the year's best ancient finds.md",
"06.01 Finances/2024.ledger",
"00.01 Admin/dv-views/query_vinyl.js",
"03.05 Vinyls",
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-01-17.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-01-17.md
index 1406f976..3d4cbf73 100644
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-01-17.md
+++ b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-01-17.md
@@ -102,7 +102,7 @@ This section does serve for quick memos.
- [x] 09:58 :minidisc: [[@Vinyls|Vinyls]]: Buy cleaning kit 📅 2024-01-30 ✅ 2024-01-29
-- [ ] 12:53 :judge: [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Encheres a suivre 📅2024-02-13
+- [x] 12:53 :judge: [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Encheres a suivre 📅 2024-02-13 ✅ 2024-02-13
- [x] 12:54 :judge: [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Enchere a mettre 📅 2024-01-21 ✅ 2024-01-21
- [x] 19:48 :judge: [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Enchere à suivre 📅 2024-01-29 ✅ 2024-01-27
- [x] 20:35 :judge: [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Enchere à suivre 📅 2024-01-27 ✅ 2024-01-27
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-08.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-08.md
index 3bfb3f0e..bd4e1138 100644
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-08.md
+++ b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-08.md
@@ -101,7 +101,7 @@ hide task count
This section does serve for quick memos.
-- [ ] 15:48 :judge: [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Enchères à suivre 📅2024-02-15
+- [x] 15:48 :judge: [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Enchères à suivre 📅 2024-02-15 ✅ 2024-02-15
%% --- %%
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-11.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-11.md
index ef887a74..747a2ab6 100644
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-11.md
+++ b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-11.md
@@ -16,9 +16,9 @@ Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
-Water: 0.25
+Water: 2.45
Coffee: 4
-Steps:
+Steps: 6352
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-12.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-12.md
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..ef681175
--- /dev/null
+++ b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-12.md
@@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
+---
+
+title: "🗒 Daily Note"
+allDay: true
+date: 2024-02-12
+Date: 2024-02-12
+DocType: Note
+Hierarchy:
+TimeStamp:
+location:
+CollapseMetaTable: true
+Sleep: 6.5
+Happiness: 85
+Gratefulness: 90
+Stress: 25
+FrontHeadBar: 5
+EarHeadBar: 30
+BackHeadBar: 20
+Water: 3
+Coffee: 4
+Steps: 14454
+Weight:
+Ski:
+IceSkating:
+Riding:
+Racket:
+Football:
+Swim:
+
+---
+
+%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
+
+---
+
+[[2024-02-11|<< 🗓 Previous ]] [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] [[2024-02-13|🗓 Next >>]]
+
+---
+
+
+
+```button
+name Record today's health
+type command
+action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
+id EditMetaData
+```
+^button-2024-02-12Edit
+
+```button
+name Save
+type command
+action Save current file
+id Save
+```
+^button-2024-02-12NSave
+
+
+
+# 2024-02-12
+
+
+
+> [!summary]+
+> Daily note for 2024-02-12
+
+
+
+```toc
+style: number
+```
+
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+### ✅ Tasks of the day
+
+
+
+```tasks
+not done
+due on 2024-02-12
+path does not include Templates
+hide backlinks
+hide task count
+```
+
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+### 📝 Memos
+
+
+
+This section does serve for quick memos.
+
+
+
+
+%% --- %%
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+### 🗒 Notes
+
+
+
+📖: [[Seven Pillars of Wisdom]]
+
+🍴: [[Warm lemon and Parmesan couscous]]
+
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+### :link: Linked activity
+
+
+
+```dataview
+Table from [[2024-02-12]]
+```
+
+
+
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-13.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-13.md
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..1360000b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-13.md
@@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
+---
+
+title: "🗒 Daily Note"
+allDay: true
+date: 2024-02-13
+Date: 2024-02-13
+DocType: Note
+Hierarchy:
+TimeStamp:
+location:
+CollapseMetaTable: true
+Sleep: 6.5
+Happiness: 85
+Gratefulness: 90
+Stress: 25
+FrontHeadBar: 5
+EarHeadBar: 30
+BackHeadBar: 20
+Water: 2.75
+Coffee: 5
+Steps: 13130
+Weight: 93.7
+Ski:
+IceSkating:
+Riding:
+Racket:
+Football:
+Swim:
+
+---
+
+%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
+
+---
+
+[[2024-02-12|<< 🗓 Previous ]] [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] [[2024-02-14|🗓 Next >>]]
+
+---
+
+
+
+```button
+name Record today's health
+type command
+action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
+id EditMetaData
+```
+^button-2024-02-13Edit
+
+```button
+name Save
+type command
+action Save current file
+id Save
+```
+^button-2024-02-13NSave
+
+
+
+# 2024-02-13
+
+
+
+> [!summary]+
+> Daily note for 2024-02-13
+
+
+
+```toc
+style: number
+```
+
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+### ✅ Tasks of the day
+
+
+
+```tasks
+not done
+due on 2024-02-13
+path does not include Templates
+hide backlinks
+hide task count
+```
+
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+### 📝 Memos
+
+
+
+This section does serve for quick memos.
+
+
+
+
+%% --- %%
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+### 🗒 Notes
+
+
+
+Loret ipsum
+
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+### :link: Linked activity
+
+
+
+```dataview
+Table from [[2024-02-13]]
+```
+
+
+
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-14.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-14.md
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..b03767e1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-14.md
@@ -0,0 +1,139 @@
+---
+
+title: "🗒 Daily Note"
+allDay: true
+date: 2024-02-14
+Date: 2024-02-14
+DocType: Note
+Hierarchy:
+TimeStamp:
+location:
+CollapseMetaTable: true
+Sleep: 6.5
+Happiness: 85
+Gratefulness: 90
+Stress: 25
+FrontHeadBar: 5
+EarHeadBar: 30
+BackHeadBar: 20
+Water: 3.33
+Coffee: 5
+Steps: 11511
+Weight:
+Ski:
+IceSkating:
+Riding:
+Racket:
+Football:
+Swim:
+
+---
+
+%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
+
+---
+
+[[2024-02-13|<< 🗓 Previous ]] [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] [[2024-02-15|🗓 Next >>]]
+
+---
+
+
+
+```button
+name Record today's health
+type command
+action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
+id EditMetaData
+```
+^button-2024-02-14Edit
+
+```button
+name Save
+type command
+action Save current file
+id Save
+```
+^button-2024-02-14NSave
+
+
+
+# 2024-02-14
+
+
+
+> [!summary]+
+> Daily note for 2024-02-14
+
+
+
+```toc
+style: number
+```
+
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+### ✅ Tasks of the day
+
+
+
+```tasks
+not done
+due on 2024-02-14
+path does not include Templates
+hide backlinks
+hide task count
+```
+
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+### 📝 Memos
+
+
+
+This section does serve for quick memos.
+
+
+- [ ] 21:40 :clapper: [[@Cinematheque|Cinematheque]]: Download 'All of Us Strangers' 📅2024-02-28
+
+
+%% --- %%
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+### 🗒 Notes
+
+
+
+🚆: [[@@Zürich|Zürich]] to [[@@Paris|Paris]]
+
+📖: [[Seven Pillars of Wisdom]]
+
+📺: [[2024-02-14 ⚽️ PSG - Real Sociedad (2-0)]]
+
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+### :link: Linked activity
+
+
+
+```dataview
+Table from [[2024-02-14]]
+```
+
+
+
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-15.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-15.md
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..85b136d6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-15.md
@@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
+---
+
+title: "🗒 Daily Note"
+allDay: true
+date: 2024-02-15
+Date: 2024-02-15
+DocType: Note
+Hierarchy:
+TimeStamp:
+location:
+CollapseMetaTable: true
+Sleep: 7
+Happiness: 85
+Gratefulness: 90
+Stress: 25
+FrontHeadBar: 5
+EarHeadBar: 30
+BackHeadBar: 20
+Water: 3.21
+Coffee: 5
+Steps: 12184
+Weight:
+Ski:
+IceSkating:
+Riding:
+Racket:
+Football:
+Swim:
+
+---
+
+%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
+
+---
+
+[[2024-02-14|<< 🗓 Previous ]] [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] [[2024-02-16|🗓 Next >>]]
+
+---
+
+
+
+```button
+name Record today's health
+type command
+action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
+id EditMetaData
+```
+^button-2024-02-15Edit
+
+```button
+name Save
+type command
+action Save current file
+id Save
+```
+^button-2024-02-15NSave
+
+
+
+# 2024-02-15
+
+
+
+> [!summary]+
+> Daily note for 2024-02-15
+
+
+
+```toc
+style: number
+```
+
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+### ✅ Tasks of the day
+
+
+
+```tasks
+not done
+due on 2024-02-15
+path does not include Templates
+hide backlinks
+hide task count
+```
+
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+### 📝 Memos
+
+
+
+This section does serve for quick memos.
+
+
+
+
+%% --- %%
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+### 🗒 Notes
+
+
+
+Loret ipsum
+
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+### :link: Linked activity
+
+
+
+```dataview
+Table from [[2024-02-15]]
+```
+
+
+
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-16.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-16.md
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..cbbe70d7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-16.md
@@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
+---
+
+title: "🗒 Daily Note"
+allDay: true
+date: 2024-02-16
+Date: 2024-02-16
+DocType: Note
+Hierarchy:
+TimeStamp:
+location:
+CollapseMetaTable: true
+Sleep: 5.5
+Happiness: 85
+Gratefulness: 90
+Stress: 25
+FrontHeadBar: 5
+EarHeadBar: 30
+BackHeadBar: 20
+Water: 0.73
+Coffee: 6
+Steps:
+Weight:
+Ski:
+IceSkating:
+Riding:
+Racket:
+Football:
+Swim:
+
+---
+
+%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
+
+---
+
+[[2024-02-15|<< 🗓 Previous ]] [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] [[2024-02-17|🗓 Next >>]]
+
+---
+
+
+
+```button
+name Record today's health
+type command
+action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
+id EditMetaData
+```
+^button-2024-02-16Edit
+
+```button
+name Save
+type command
+action Save current file
+id Save
+```
+^button-2024-02-16NSave
+
+
+
+# 2024-02-16
+
+
+
+> [!summary]+
+> Daily note for 2024-02-16
+
+
+
+```toc
+style: number
+```
+
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+### ✅ Tasks of the day
+
+
+
+```tasks
+not done
+due on 2024-02-16
+path does not include Templates
+hide backlinks
+hide task count
+```
+
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+### 📝 Memos
+
+
+
+This section does serve for quick memos.
+
+
+
+
+%% --- %%
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+### 🗒 Notes
+
+
+
+🚆: [[@@Paris|Paris]] to [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]
+
+📖: [[Seven Pillars of Wisdom]]
+
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+### :link: Linked activity
+
+
+
+```dataview
+Table from [[2024-02-16]]
+```
+
+
+
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-03-19 🏠 Arrivée Meggi-mo.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-03-19 🏠 Arrivée Meggi-mo.md
deleted file mode 100644
index 122f1493..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-03-19 🏠 Arrivée Meggi-mo.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,12 +0,0 @@
----
-title: "🧚🏼 Arrivée Meggi-mo"
-allDay: true
-date: 2022-03-19
-endDate: 2022-03-20
-CollapseMetaTable: true
----
-
-# Arrivée de [[@@MRCK|Meggi-mo]]
-
-
-- [l] Arrivée à [[@@Zürich|Zürich]] de Meggi-mo, le [[2022-03-19|19/03/2022]].
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-03-24 🎡 Départ de Meggi-mo.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-03-24 🎡 Départ de Meggi-mo.md
deleted file mode 100644
index 0887e8ee..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-03-24 🎡 Départ de Meggi-mo.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,11 +0,0 @@
----
-title: "🧚🏼 Départ de Meggi-mo"
-allDay: true
-date: 2022-03-24
-endDate: 2022-03-25
-CollapseMetaTable: true
----
-
-# Départ de Meggi-mo
-
-Départ de ma [[@@MRCK|Meggi-mo]] le [[2022-03-24|24/03/2022]].
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-03-31 🏠 Arrivée de Papa.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-03-31 🏠 Arrivée de Papa.md
deleted file mode 100644
index 052297da..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-03-31 🏠 Arrivée de Papa.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,9 +0,0 @@
----
-title: "👨👩👧 Arrivée de Papa"
-allDay: false
-startTime: 20:25
-endTime: 20:30
-date: 2022-03-31
----
-
-- [l] [[2022-03-31]], arrivée de [[Amaury de Villeneuve|Papa]] à [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-04-04 🗼 Départ Papa.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-04-04 🗼 Départ Papa.md
deleted file mode 100644
index c6442f28..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-04-04 🗼 Départ Papa.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,9 +0,0 @@
----
-title: "👨👩👧 Départ Papa"
-allDay: false
-startTime: 13:30
-endTime: 14:00
-date: 2022-04-04
----
-
-[[2022-04-04]], départ de [[Amaury de Villeneuve|Papa]]
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-04-10 🗳️ 1er tour Présidentielle.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-04-10 🗳️ 1er tour Présidentielle.md
deleted file mode 100644
index 43d43410..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-04-10 🗳️ 1er tour Présidentielle.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,11 +0,0 @@
----
-
-title: "🗳 1er tour Présidentielle"
-allDay: true
-date: 2022-04-10
-endDate: 2022-04-11
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
----
-
-1er tour des élections présidentielles à [[@@Paris|Paris]], le [[2022-04-10|10 avril 2022]]; avec [[@@MRCK|Meggi-mo]] dans l'isoloir.
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-04-24 🗳️ 2nd tour élections présidentielles.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-04-24 🗳️ 2nd tour élections présidentielles.md
deleted file mode 100644
index d1cf3be0..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-04-24 🗳️ 2nd tour élections présidentielles.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,8 +0,0 @@
----
-title: "🗳 2nd tour élections présidentielles"
-allDay: true
-date: 2022-04-24
-endDate: 2022-04-25
----
-
-2nd tour des élections présidentielles le [[2022-04-24|24 Avril]] à [[@@Paris|Paris]].
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-04-27 📍 Arrivée à Lisbonne.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-04-27 📍 Arrivée à Lisbonne.md
deleted file mode 100644
index edee1338..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-04-27 📍 Arrivée à Lisbonne.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,9 +0,0 @@
----
-title: "🛩 Arrivée à Lisbonne"
-allDay: false
-startTime: 16:00
-endTime: 16:30
-date: 2022-04-27
----
-
-Arrival on [[2022-04-27|this day]] in [[Lisbon]].
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-05-01 🏠 Départ de Lisbonne.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-05-01 🏠 Départ de Lisbonne.md
deleted file mode 100644
index e0351d91..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-05-01 🏠 Départ de Lisbonne.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,9 +0,0 @@
----
-title: "🛩 Départ de Lisbonne"
-allDay: false
-startTime: 15:30
-endTime: 16:00
-date: 2022-05-01
----
-
-Departure from [[Lisbon]] to [[@@Zürich|Zürich]] [[2022-05-01|this day]].
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-05-15 🏠 Definite arrival of Meggi-mo to Züzü.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-05-15 🏠 Definite arrival of Meggi-mo to Züzü.md
deleted file mode 100644
index 6f2fd72c..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-05-15 🏠 Definite arrival of Meggi-mo to Züzü.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,9 +0,0 @@
----
-title: "🧚🏼 Definite arrival of Meggi-mo to Züzü"
-allDay: true
-startTime: 06:30
-endTime: 07:00
-date: 2022-05-15
----
-
-[[@@MRCK|Meggi-mo]] is arriving to [[@@Zürich|Zürich]] for good on [[2022-05-15|that day]].
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-10-14 📍 Weekend à GVA.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-10-14 📍 Weekend à GVA.md
deleted file mode 100644
index e79d478c..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-10-14 📍 Weekend à GVA.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,17 +0,0 @@
----
-
-title: "🚆 Weekend in GVA"
-allDay: true
-date: 2022-10-14
-endDate: 2022-10-17
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
----
-
-Weekend à [[Geneva]] avec [[@@MRCK|Meggi-mo]].
-
-
-
-Départ: [[2022-10-14]] de [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]
-
-Retour: [[2022-10-16]] à [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-10-21 🗼 Weekend à Paris.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-10-21 🗼 Weekend à Paris.md
deleted file mode 100644
index 22a2d918..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-10-21 🗼 Weekend à Paris.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,16 +0,0 @@
----
-title: "🗼 Weekend à Paris"
-allDay: true
-date: 2022-10-21
-endDate: 2022-10-24
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
----
-
-Weekend à [[@@Paris|Paris]] avec [[@@MRCK|Meggi-mo]].
-
-
-
-Départ: [[2022-10-21]] de [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]
-
-Retour: [[2022-10-23]] à [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-11-19 💍 Fiançailles Marguerite & Arnold.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-11-19 💍 Fiançailles Marguerite & Arnold.md
deleted file mode 100644
index 4b31a67b..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-11-19 💍 Fiançailles Marguerite & Arnold.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,10 +0,0 @@
----
-title: "💍 Fiançailles Marguerite & Arnold"
-allDay: false
-startTime: 16:30
-endTime: 15:00
-date: 2022-11-19
-CollapseMetaTable: true
----
-
-Fiançailles de [[Marguerite de Villeneuve|Marguerite]] et [[Arnold Moulin|Arnold]] [[2022-11-19|ce jour]] à [[Geneva|Genève]].
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-12-26 🏠 Papa à Zürich.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-12-26 🏠 Papa à Zürich.md
deleted file mode 100644
index 23127bf4..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-12-26 🏠 Papa à Zürich.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,12 +0,0 @@
----
-
-title: "👪 Papa à Zürich"
-allDay: true
-date: 2022-12-26
-endDate: 2022-12-31
-completed: null
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
----
-
-[[Amaury de Villeneuve|Papa]] arrive à [[@@Zürich|Zürich]] le [[2022-12-26|26 décembre]] à 13h26.
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-12-30 🏠 Stef & Kyna in Zürich.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-12-30 🏠 Stef & Kyna in Zürich.md
deleted file mode 100644
index 143e9fb3..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-12-30 🏠 Stef & Kyna in Zürich.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,12 +0,0 @@
----
-
-title: "Stef & Kyna in Zürich"
-allDay: true
-date: 2022-12-30
-endDate: 2023-01-05
-completed: null
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
----
-
-Stef & Kyna arrivent à [[@@Zürich|Zürich]] le [[2022-12-30|30 décembre]] avec Swiss le matin.
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-01-23 🩺 Médecin.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-01-23 🩺 Médecin.md
deleted file mode 100644
index c32582d8..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-01-23 🩺 Médecin.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,13 +0,0 @@
----
-
-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]].
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-02-06 📍 Genève.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-02-06 📍 Genève.md
deleted file mode 100644
index 2a48ac3f..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-02-06 📍 Genève.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,12 +0,0 @@
----
-
-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]].
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-02-09 🩺 Médecin.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-02-09 🩺 Médecin.md
deleted file mode 100644
index 00dd4061..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-02-09 🩺 Médecin.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,13 +0,0 @@
----
-
-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]]
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-02-11 💍 Mariage Eloi & Zélie.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-02-11 💍 Mariage Eloi & Zélie.md
deleted file mode 100644
index 5e20b705..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-02-11 💍 Mariage Eloi & Zélie.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,91 +0,0 @@
----
-
-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]].
-
-
-
-🚆: 23h11, arrivée à Rennes
-
-
-
-🏨: **Hotel Saint Antoine**
27 avenue Janvier
Rennes
-
-
-
-### Vendredi 10 Février
-
-
-
-#### 17h: Mariage civil
-
-Mairie de Montfort-sur-Meu (35)
-
-
-
-#### 20h30: Veillée de Prière
-
-Chapelle du château de la Châsse
-Iffendic (35)
-
-
-
----
-
-
-
-### Samedi 11 Février
-
-
-
-#### 14h: Messe de Mariage
-
-Saint-Louis-Marie
-Montfort-sur-Meu (35)
-
-
-
-#### 16h30: Cocktail
-
-Château de la Châsse
-Iffendic (35)
-
-
-
-#### 19h30: Dîner
-
-Château de la Châsse
-Iffendic (35)
-
-
-
----
-
-
-
-### Dimanche 12 Février
-
-
-
-#### 11h: Messe
-
-Chapelle du château de la Châsse
-Iffendic (35)
-
-
-
-#### 12h: Déjeuner breton
-
-Château de la Châsse
-Iffendic (35)
-
-
-
-🚆: 13h35, départ de Rennes
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-02-19 🎞️ Tár @ Riff Raff.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-02-19 🎞️ Tár @ Riff Raff.md
deleted file mode 100644
index 4f2da539..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-02-19 🎞️ Tár @ Riff Raff.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,13 +0,0 @@
----
-
-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]].
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-03-06 🩺 Médecin.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-03-06 🩺 Médecin.md
deleted file mode 100644
index 9780ae6c..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-03-06 🩺 Médecin.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,12 +0,0 @@
----
-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]]
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-03-11 🏠 Marg & Arnold à Zürich.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-03-11 🏠 Marg & Arnold à Zürich.md
deleted file mode 100644
index e69a2915..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-03-11 🏠 Marg & Arnold à Zürich.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,13 +0,0 @@
----
-
-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]].
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-03-18 🇨🇭 Molly & boyfriend in Zürich.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-03-18 🇨🇭 Molly & boyfriend in Zürich.md
deleted file mode 100644
index 2f3197c0..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-03-18 🇨🇭 Molly & boyfriend in Zürich.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,12 +0,0 @@
----
-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]].
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-04-14 🩺 Médecin.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-04-14 🩺 Médecin.md
deleted file mode 100644
index 502d286d..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-04-14 🩺 Médecin.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,13 +0,0 @@
----
-
-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]]
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-12-21 🏠 Arrivée Papa.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-12-21 🏠 Arrivée Papa.md
deleted file mode 100644
index b0d95b10..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-12-21 🏠 Arrivée Papa.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,10 +0,0 @@
----
-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]]
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-12-27 🗼 Départ Papa.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-12-27 🗼 Départ Papa.md
deleted file mode 100644
index 544487a5..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-12-27 🗼 Départ Papa.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,10 +0,0 @@
----
-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]]
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-02-14 ⚽️ PSG - Real Sociedad (2-0).md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-02-14 ⚽️ PSG - Real Sociedad (2-0).md
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..9ca994e6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-02-14 ⚽️ PSG - Real Sociedad (2-0).md
@@ -0,0 +1,19 @@
+---
+title: ⚽️ PSG - Real Sociedad (2-0)
+allDay: false
+startTime: 21:00
+endTime: 23:00
+date: 2024-02-14
+completed: null
+---
+
+[[2024-02-14|Ce jour]], [[Paris SG]] - Real Sociedad: 2-0
+Buteurs:: ⚽️ M’Bappé
⚽️ Barcola
+
+
+
+```lineup
+formation: 433
+players: Donnaruma,Beraldo,Marquinhos,Danilo (Hernandez),Hakimi,Ruiz,Vitinha,Zaïre-Emery,Barcola (Asensio),M'Bappé,Dembélé (Kolo Muani)
+```
+
diff --git a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-02-14 ⚽️ PSG - Real Sociedad.md b/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-02-14 ⚽️ PSG - Real Sociedad.md
deleted file mode 100644
index f497d71f..00000000
--- a/00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-02-14 ⚽️ PSG - Real Sociedad.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,11 +0,0 @@
----
-title: ⚽️ PSG - Real Sociefad
-allDay: false
-startTime: 21:00
-endTime: 23:00
-date: 2024-02-14
-completed: null
----
-
-[[2024-02-14|Ce jour]], [[Paris SG]] - Real Sociedad:
-Buteurs::
diff --git a/00.03 News/10 More Disturbing Revelations About Sam Bankman-Fried.md b/00.03 News/10 More Disturbing Revelations About Sam Bankman-Fried.md
deleted file mode 100644
index de72dd84..00000000
--- a/00.03 News/10 More Disturbing Revelations About Sam Bankman-Fried.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,101 +0,0 @@
----
-
-Tag: ["📈", "🪙", "🤥", "💸"]
-Date: 2022-11-22
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-11-22
-Link: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/5-more-disturbing-revelations-about-sam-bankman-fried.html
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
----
-
-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-11-22]]
-
----
-
-
-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-10RevelationsAboutSamBankman-FriedNSave
-
-
-
-# 10 More Disturbing Revelations About Sam Bankman-Fried
-
- 
-
-Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
-
-The first stage of any collapse is confusion, maybe even Schadenfreude. It was no different during the wild week when Sam Bankman-Fried, the supposed crypto wunderkind and founder of FTX, tried and failed to sell his imploding empire only to find himself totally broke, his companies bankrupt, and [his polycule](https://www.businessinsider.com/ftx-inner-circle-all-dated-each-other-in-bahamas-report-2022-11) perhaps no longer in the mood. ([Read about all that here](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/it-was-all-a-game-for-sam-bankman-fried.html).) The stage after that, though, is fear — and that is precisely where we are right now. The sum of Bankman-Fried may have added up to less than his parts, but that doesn’t change the fact that he was deeply interconnected with the worlds of politics and finance beyond the relatively small world of digital currencies. Since his bankruptcy filing, the crypto empire Bankman-Fried presided over has been subject to even more embarrassing and damning revelations, and he is the target of multiple [investigations](https://www.reuters.com/technology/manhattan-us-attorneys-office-investigates-ftx-downfall-source-2022-11-14/). It is still too early to say that he’s headed for prison — if the prior big financial crisis taught us anything, it’s not to be shocked when nobody gets arrested for obvious crimes — but that is certainly [a strong possibility](https://fortune.com/crypto/2022/11/13/could-sam-bankman-fried-go-to-prison-for-the-ftx-disaster/). Here’s what we’ve learned about SBF since this all started.
-
-FTX owes money to more than 1 million different entities, according to a bankruptcy filing. So far, we don’t have a picture of who all those people and companies are — an obfuscation that has led to a lot of paranoia in the crypto markets, as everyone tries to figure out who is exposed to who. (FTX is seeking to keep those identities confidential, after saying it would make all of them public). What we do know is that the 50 largest accounts alone account for more than $3 billion, according to a filing. Of that, the six largest accounts make up more than $1 billion, with the very largest of them being $226 million. [Hedge funds](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-17/people-are-already-buying-depositor-claims-on-ftx) and [banks](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/business/ftx-assets-wall-street.html) have already circled around these stuck depositors, offering to buy the rights to their money for pennies on the dollar, in the hope that they’ll be able to one day recoup the crypto for much more. The whole process is going to be complicated and likely painful, and even the people who were able to pull their money off the exchange may have some of their funds [clawed back](https://www.reuters.com/technology/whats-next-ftxs-bankruptcy-2022-11-16/) during the bankruptcy process.
-
-I’m not a judge, so it’s not up to me to decide what’s against the law. But I’ve got eyes. [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/exclusive-least-1-billion-client-funds-missing-failed-crypto-firm-ftx-sources-2022-11-12/) first revealed that a back door was written into the code at the FTX crypto exchange that allowed Bankman-Fried to move customer deposits from that platform to his (supposed completely separate) hedge fund, Alameda Research. In essence, this was a way to keep quiet the alarm bells that would have started to ring if anyone else had been aware that he was moving this money. All told, Reuters reported that $1 billion was missing. Dipping into such funds is a cardinal sin (a crime, probably) in the financial industry: Customer deposits are subject to all kinds of careful protections and certainly aren’t available as a slush fund for the CEO to play with.
-
-So why the secret back door? Bankman-Fried has so far explained that a mistake in internal labeling had led to customer deposits being used to fund his hedge fund. This is important when you’re trying to come up with a legal theory that lets you off the hook: *Look, it was bad, but it was an accident*. If a back door built into the company’s code is only known to or accessible by the top executive (or something like that), it starts to get at something prosecutors really salivate over: intent. White-collar crime is difficult to prove, in large part because someone’s state of mind is crucial to demonstrating that something was an intentional fraud. How do you explain a back door as inadvertent? Reuters again is helpful here. When the reporters texting Bankman-Fried asked about the missing funds, he responded, “???”
-
-To the chagrin of his [lawyers](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/ftxs-sam-bankman-fried-hires-lawyer-for-milken-madoff-sons.html), Bankman-Fried has been direct-messaging reporters what he thinks of the mess he made. [DMing with Vox reporter Kelsey Piper](https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy) on Tuesday night, he said that his crusade to introduce real regulation to crypto in the U.S. was “just PR” and shared his real opinion on the matter: “Fuck regulators.” The big name in [effective altruism](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/effective-altruism-sam-bankman-fried-sbf-ftx-crypto.html) also appears to have revealed his real code of ethics in business:
-
-One might think that “I feel bad for those that get fucked by it” would be the money quote from the man who just lost billions of dollars of customer funds. But then Bankman-Fried basically admitted to stealing money through that back door in the code:
-
-> Vox: So … FTX technically wasn’t gambling with their money, FTX had just loaned their money to Alameda, who had gambled with their money, and lost it? and you didn’t realize it was a big deal because you didn’t realize how much money it was?
->
-> SBF: and also thought Alameda had enough collateral to reasonable cover it
->
-> Vox: I get how you could have gotten away with it but I guess that seems sketchy even if you get away with it
->
-> SBF: It was never the intention. Sometimes life creeps up on you.
-
-Even after all this, Bankman-Fried hasn’t realized he’s done. He told Piper that his single biggest mistake was declaring bankruptcy and that he still thinks he can salvage FTX: “I have 2 weeks to raise $8 b. That’s basically all that matters for the rest of my life.” He may be forgetting that he resigned from the company.
-
-Attorney John J. Ray III, who oversaw the dismantling of Enron after its massive fraud, has taken over as FTX CEO to try and set everything out in the bankruptcy process. In a [filing](https://pacer-documents.s3.amazonaws.com/33/188450/042120648186.pdf) in Delaware on November 17, Ray wrote that “never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.”
-
-“From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented,” Ray added.
-
-On November 6, CoinDesk published the first look into Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund, Alameda Research, setting off the whole cascade that led to this catastrophe. Over the weekend, the *Financial Times* went further and [published](https://www.ft.com/content/0c2a55b6-d34c-4685-8a8d-3c9628f1f185) a deeper look into what his financial empire was holding. For those without a subscription to the pink paper, here’s a screengrab that made it onto Twitter.
-
-Let me just lay out here that this is not what a balance sheet tends to look like if it’s being updated all the time by, say, an accounting department. There are, for instance, messages embedded into the cells. One is: “There were many things I wish I could do differently than I did,” which Bankman-Fried then goes on to say is how he labeled things.
-
-It’s not as if he had signed his name to this, but it’s fair to guess he wrote it or authorized someone else to do so. But still, it’s a sloppy document, and considering the number of caveats up at the top (“rough values,” “typos,” etc.) it’s essentially an unaudited, hastily assembled document with a bunch of round numbers put together by a probable fraudster.
-
-Based on what we now know about Bankman-Fried’s former empire, Alameda was largely just a way to prop up his other businesses — not just FTX but other crypto exchanges and technologies he was associated with. There are about $9 billion in liabilities. The non-crypto money account is negative $8 billion.
-
-The filing provides an early look into the unsophisticated chaos at FTX. The company responsible for billions in customer funds did not have an accounting department. Bankman-Fried used an auto-delete function for important messages to staff. When employees submitted payment requests, supervisors responded by emoji. The new management is having a hard time even [figuring out who worked at the company](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-17/here-are-the-craziest-parts-from-the-new-ftx-bankruptcy-filing?sref=frV97TwV).
-
-The document also reveals that Bankman-Fried, co-founder Gary Wang, and two more executives received $4.1 billion in loans from Alameda. Bankman-Fried [personally received $1 billion](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-17/ftx-s-bankman-fried-received-1-billion-loan-from-alameda).
-
-In the filing, Ray also wanted to make it clear to regulators that Bankman-Fried’s message of [“fuck regulators”](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/16/bankman-fried-praises-regulators-hours-after-saying-f-regulators/) does not represent the opinion of the company.
-
-A hacker appears to have stolen $600 million in customer funds from FTX on Friday night. Here’s the company’s general counsel on it:
-
-Later, an executive at another crypto exchange, Kraken, [tweeted](https://twitter.com/c7five/status/1591434844760076290) that they knew who was behind it. The identity of the person hasn’t been revealed, but this added a whole other layer of weirdness. Maybe all that money will get recovered; maybe it will get laundered and make a few people very rich (and leave many others poor). How it could happen in the first place is still an open question.
-
-Now we’re at the stage where everyone is asking who’s next. FTX didn’t grow to be a $32 billion company in a vacuum, and the prospect of financial contagion has the crypto world in a panic. Already, companies like crypto lender BlockFi, which Bankman-Fried bailed out, are basically shuttered. Crypto.com — you may remember it as the company that featured Matt Damon in a Super Bowl ad *—* admitted that it had accidentally [sent](https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/13/23456044/crypto-dot-com-accidentally-sent-400-million-wrong-recipent-ethereum) about $400 million to the wrong place and then had to [ask](https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/14/cryptocom-ceo-dismisses-speculation-of-financial-trouble-says-ftx-exposure-is-minimal/) people not to freak out. The owner of Huobi, a Hong Kong exchange, is [lending](https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-news-today-11-14-2022/card/ftx-bankruptcy-imperils-hong-kong-firm-s-crypto-assets-e4qr30KLYcF4AfArp9MK) money to try to stabilize things. Even Galois Capital, the hedge fund that correctly called the [collapse](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/05/do-kwon-how-terra-luna-founder-built-a-crypto-cult.html) of the TerraUSD stablecoin — which led directly to the destruction of [Three Arrows Capital](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/three-arrows-capital-kyle-davies-su-zhu-crash.html) — got blindsided.
-
-There hasn’t been a major fall yet, but other worrying things are happening. Since FTX collapsed, there has been a palpable feeling of distrust in the system. Essentially, if FTX could go and take all your money with no recourse, who else might do the same? Over the weekend, the volume of trading dropped by one-quarter (it has since rebounded); crypto investors are pulling their holdings [off](https://twitter.com/BitcoinIsSaving/status/1591853048699457536) the exchanges. This is not what happens when markets are going well. When there are fewer and fewer people trading, eventually things will dwindle to the point where prices collapse because there’s no one else to sell to.
-
-Despite all this, Bankman-Fried is tweeting through it — kind of. For the past 17 hours, he has been slowly spelling out “[What](https://twitter.com/BitcoinIsSaving/status/1591853048699457536) [](https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1592275869825134593)[happened](https://twitter.com/BitcoinIsSaving/status/1591853048699457536).” It feels like getting sucked into a black hole. He told the New York *Times* that he is, in fact, the one tweeting. What does it all mean? Who knows? But it’s still a good question.
-
-*Update:* after this story was first published, some Twitter sleuths may have hit on the reason for the strange, halted tweeting. SBF is not only adding tweets to his timeline — he’s deleting them.
-
-Note here that the deleted tweets that have been caught are about accounting and the makeup of the fund. (He’s also previously deleted a tweet saying that everything was “fine”). Not suspicious at all!
-
-In a [deleted tweet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Mto6h1TT52TVBNEwm31NV6hs9T0y-EdW-NuwrzfsC24/edit#gid=1729621767) from November 8, Bankman-Fried said that “FTX has enough to cover all client holdings.” But two days earlier, according to a new timeline from [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/technology/ftxs-bankman-fried-begged-rescue-even-he-revealed-huge-holes-firms-books-2022-11-16/), he got on the phone to see if he could gin up some more funding. He called giants such as Sequoia Capital and Apollo Global Management — and other embattled crypto companies like [Tether](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/05/the-crash-of-cryptos-perpetual-motion-machine.html) — asking for a funds. It didn’t work: The firms were scared off by the huge hole in the company’s books, with one calling the presentation “very amateurish.” It was only then, around 3 a.m., that Bankman-Fried called his rival Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of the exchange Binance, to bail him out.
-
-It seemed as if the bleeding had stopped. But then Binance walked away, too, “as a result of corporate due diligence” and the swirling reports of mismanaged funds. “I’ll keep fighting,” he messaged the remaining staff. He then tried Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and the Japanese investment bank Nomura Holdings. Again, no luck. By Friday, FTX was forced to declare bankruptcy.
-
-10 More Disturbing Revelations About Sam Bankman-Fried
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-
-Tag: ["🏕️", "🌡️"]
-Date: 2022-04-03
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-04-03
-Link: https://www.gq.com/story/eight-places-to-save-climate-change
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
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-
-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-04-27]]
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-
-
-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-8EndangeredPlacesWeCanStillSaveFromClimateChangeNSave
-
-
-
-# 8 Endangered Places We Can Still Save From Climate Change
-
-**Julia Baum**, a marine biologist at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, has been researching climate-threatened coral reefs for years. But recently she decided to make a change. “I’ve realized the best way I can help to save coral reefs is not to work on coral reefs,” she says. “It’s to work on the energy transition.” That’s because climate change is caused chiefly by the burning of fossil fuels, which now accounts for 86 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. And unless we rapidly transition to clean energy, all other efforts to save corals—or our warming planet—won’t matter.
-
-This reality is one that all of the earth’s inhabitants are now grappling with: If we want to preserve the places we love, we have to focus on moving away from fossil fuels immediately. The latest United Nations climate report, released in February, made it clear that irreversible destruction can no longer be avoided. The question is no longer “How can we fix climate change?” It’s “How much irreversible planetary damage are we willing to accept in order to continue extracting and burning fossil fuels?”
-
-Since the late 19th century, when, in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, humans started burning fossil fuels on a scale greater than ever before, the global average temperature has increased by about 1.1 degrees Celsius. Today, the desperate hope of climate scientists is that we prevent that number from rising to 1.5 degrees. Of course, some say that task is now impossible and that the best we can wish for is to limit warming to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Those two thresholds have come to define the discourse around climate change, and either would represent a stunning reversal of current trends.
-
-When delegates met to confront the issue at last year’s climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, representatives convened from the world’s biggest polluting nations. Each had already agreed to curb emissions in pursuit of two objectives set out by the 2015 Paris Agreement: limiting warming to “well below” 2 degrees and “pursuing efforts” to reach 1.5 degrees. But some have argued that the Paris Agreement is flawed: Even though countries are required to submit plans to reduce emissions, there is no way of enforcing those pledges, and six years after Paris, we remain on a disastrous course. One recent study projected that, under current policies, the world is on track to warm by 2.7 degrees by 2100—a catastrophic scenario.
-
-So, without the will to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, what comes next? Around the world, profound transformations are already under way. Ski slopes are bare. Storms are worsening. Regions are becoming inhospitable for human life. In one future, the world warms by 2 degrees or more and these trends continue to their catastrophic ends. In another, we pull the hand brake now and limit warming to 1.5 degrees. “People don’t realize that every tenth of a degree matters,” Baum explains. Here are some places where they matter the most.
-
----
-
-## Jacobabad, Pakistan
-
-*One of the world's hottest cities simply can't stand to get any hotter.*
-
-The hottest temperature ever recorded on the planet, 56.7 degrees Celsius (134 degrees Fahrenheit), was in California’s Death Valley. But Jacobabad, in Pakistan’s Sindh province, might be the world's hottest—and perhaps the most unlivable—city. Summer temperatures routinely exceed 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit); according to a recent study, Jacobabad—which has a population of 190,000 and a surrounding district of 1 million—is one of two cities on earth where temperatures and humidity levels have reached a point at which the human body can no longer cool itself, and has done so on four separate occasions.
-
-“My friends and family have died of heatstroke,” says Muhammad Jan Odhano, 43, who works for a Jacobabad-based community organization dedicated to improving access to health care and education. “This is normal for us. It’s part of our routine.”
-
-Odhano says that many of the city's residents relocate in the summer, but the nature of his work demands that he and his family remain in the Jacobabad, working at night or in the early morning and resting from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. “Every year we feel it’s hotter than the last,” Odhano says. “It’s unfair. We are not contributing many greenhouse gasses in Pakistan. We see nothing specific to reduce the climate effects.
-
-“We need a political movement against this evil,” he continues. “But there is a problem of illiteracy. Many people cannot read, so they don’t know about climate change. They don’t know about the importance of forestry and renewable electricity. We need to educate the people who are most affected. I have lived in Jacobabad for 30 years. This is my native place. I call on people to come and see.”
-
-Indeed, if current trends continue, people might not have a choice. One study projects that with 1.5 degrees of warming, 13.8 percent of the world would regularly be exposed to severe heat waves—a figure that would nearly triple, to 36.9 percent, with 2 degrees of warming. It seems that much more of the world might soon see what a Jacobabad summer feels like. —*Emily Atkin*
-
----
-
-
-
-Line Islands: Brian Skerry.
-
-Photo by Brian Skerry
-
-## Line Islands
-
-*Off the coast of this Pacific paradise, a coral reef teems with wildlife—but teeters on the brink of destruction.*
-
-Coral reefs are vital to both human societies and the ocean’s ecosystem—they protect shorelines from storm surges and erosion, and serve as nurseries for marine life. They’re also frighteningly imperiled by warming waters, which produce conditions that turn them a ghostly white and expose them to a blanket of algae. That’s what Kim Cobb saw one day in 2016 when she swam up to the reef in the central Pacific’s Line Island chain that she’d been studying for 18 years. A heat wave had killed or bleached 95 percent of the corals.
-
-“It was carnage,” the Georgia Tech climate scientist recalls. Disturbances like pollution and fishing are relatively limited in the vicinity of the research site, so Cobb felt rising ocean temperatures were the likely culprit. The impact has already been devastating, she says, adding, “I can’t even imagine what it would look like at 2 degrees Celsius.”
-
-If warming can be limited, however, there might be hope for the corals that remain. Scientists like Hollie Putnam are engineering so-called super corals with the ability to withstand higher ocean temperatures and acidity levels. Putnam, a marine biologist at the University of Rhode Island, places coral species under climate change stressors and breeds those that survive best, creating hyper-resilient organisms. “They’re really exciting and really hopeful,” Putnam says, noting that super corals could help maintain the biodiversity and genetic diversity of already struggling reefs, like the ones in the Line Island Chain.
-
-But super corals are more likely to survive if warming doesn’t get much worse. “If we push the climate system to 2 degrees Celsius, we’re talking about 1 percent of reefs surviving,” Cobb says. “That makes it less likely that coral-resilience engineering efforts will succeed.” She says it’s essential to limit warming to 1.5 degrees, a scenario in which up to 30 percent of reefs could survive on their own. If that happens, one of the world’s wildest reefs could be strengthened. If it doesn’t, even the savviest engineering intervention won’t be enough. —*E.A.*
-
----
-
-
-
-Napa Valley, California: Samuel Corum/AFP/Getty Images.
-
-Photo by Samuel Corum
-
-## Napa Valley, California
-
-*Wildfires and droughts are devastating vineyards, tainting vintages, and poisoning the future of the great American wine region.*
-
-Last July, Julie Johnson walked around her vineyard in the Napa Valley town of St. Helena. The grapevines looked exhausted, and the nearby land was scarred by wildfires. But it was hardly shocking: The western U.S. is in the midst of a mega-drought, the worst in over a millennium. California’s 2020 wildfire season burned 42 percent of the land in Napa County. And now warmer temperatures are changing the soil, and the wine itself.
-
-Grapes are defined by their terroir, so even small shifts in the soil matter. According to Johnson, the drier earth in Northern California doesn’t absorb water with the same sponge-like quality as it once did. Winemakers also encounter another challenge brought on by wildfires: Smoke can taint grapes, giving wine an ashy aroma.
-
-“The taste of wine is changing,” says Kimberly Nicholas, a sustainability scientist at Lund University, in Sweden, who hails from a family of winemakers in Sonoma. Some local vintners have conceded that certain long-favored grapes like Pinot Noir simply don’t flourish in the heat and have replaced them with varietals like heat-loving Grenache. Johnson is adapting, too, making her vineyards more resilient by improving the health of the soil. But even her organic vineyard, which is well-equipped to handle dry conditions, saw a 20 percent reduction in crop yield last year. And Napa Valley wine industry groups estimated that the fall 2020 Glass Fire alone cost the region $1 billion.
-
-Those losses might only be a taste of what’s to come. One study predicts that in a world with 1.5 degrees of warming, the global mean wildfire season would increase by 6.2 days; with 2 degrees of warming, it would increase by 9.5 days. Nicholas casts that difference in starkly simple terms. “The difference between 1.5 degrees Celsius and 2 degrees Celsius is the difference between life and death for many people and places around the world,” she says. “Wine producers are smart and adaptable, but there are limits to adaptation. I worry that the landscapes and wine industry I grew up with will not exist in a 2-degree Celsius world.” —*Caitlin Looby*
-
----
-
-
-
-Qikiqtarjuaq, Nunavut, Canada: Jonas Bendiksen/Magnum Photos.
-
-Photo by Jonas Bendiksen
-
-## Qikiqtarjuaq, Nunavut, Canada
-
-*Sea ice is vanishing near this Arctic island, imperiling an Inuit community's cherished tradition.*
-
-The roughly 15,000 Inuit who inhabit Qikiqtaaluk—also known as the Baffin Region, an area mostly composed of Arctic islands between Greenland and the Canadian mainland—are known for their resilience. In 2019, the Canadian government formally apologized for years of traumatic colonial practices, including forced relocation and the separation of parents and children. But now the Qikiqtani are facing a different threat. They depend on sea ice for hunting seals—a tradition that serves important economic and cultural functions. That ice is now deteriorating across Baffin Bay, including the area around Qikiqtarjuaq, an island home to just under 600 people. Locals acknowledge that reduced and less stable sea ice has made hunting more difficult.
-
-As an island, Qikiqtarjuaq is also vulnerable to the sea’s lapping waves. “Melting sea ice creates more open water, and more storms occur when there is open water,” says John Walsh, a climate scientist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks who studies the Arctic. “The storms then kick up waves that flood the coast and cause erosion.”
-
-According to Walsh, the island’s sea ice can still be preserved, but only by swiftly limiting warming. “The 1.5 degrees Celsius warming scenario is the only one where the sea ice cover stabilizes in the Arctic,” Walsh says. “That’s coming through in the climate model simulations loud and clear.” The climate models, however, have made another thing clear: “Once you get to 2 degrees Celsius to 3 degrees Celsius, the ice goes away in the long term.” —*E.A.*
-
----
-
-
-
-The Italian Alps: Tomaso Clavarino.
-
-Photo by Tomaso Clavarino
-
-## Italian Alps
-
-*Snowless slopes and shuttering resorts could mean the collapse of this classic European ski destination.*
-
-*One of the ski regions most affected by climate change is the Italian Alps, where some 200 resorts have already shuttered. And that trend could soon get worse: One study forecasts that with 1.5 degrees of warming, Italy would see about 750,000 fewer overnight stays each winter, and about 1.25 million fewer stays in a 2-degree scenario. Marcello Cominetti, an extreme skier in northeastern Italy, reveals the impact that warming temperatures have had on his native mountains:*
-
-I live in a village in the Dolomites, in a 350-year-old wood cabin. When I stay in my bed, from my window I see the Marmolada Glacier, our largest glacier. I remember what it looked like years ago. I’ve lived in my house for 40 years. When I look at it now, I understand how melted it’s become. I can see it with my eyes. I understand.
-
-My job is a mountain guide, but it’s also my passion. During the winter I ski every day. I ski mostly using skins, and without lifts. Today I climbed a mountain very close to my home and made a wonderful descent. For these climbs, I dress lighter than I did before. Years ago, it seemed to me that we would see temperatures of minus 20 degrees Celsius for many days in winter. Now it seems like just two to three days.
-
-This makes a big difference in the snow for skiers—especially for the free riders and ski tourers like me. It’s less of a problem at the resorts, because the pistes are prepared with artificial snow. Skiers on the pistes don’t understand the snow. They see white and they are happy. But I’ve noticed that when they try something more in nature, like ski touring or ice climbing, at the end of the day they are more happy. The light they have in their eyes is different.
-
-I don’t know for how many seasons it will be possible to continue. Artificial snow is expensive. And there are many valleys here where the only economy is skiing. I have a lot of friends who make a living in the mountains. I live in a wonderful place. But I am worried. —*As told to E.A.*
-
----
-
-
-
-Yakutia, Russia: Katie Orlinsky.
-
-Photo by Katie Orlinsky
-
-## Yakutia, Russia
-
-*In one of the coldest regions on earth, a thaw of the permafrost is releasing massive levels of methane—and maybe something worse.*
-
-With temperatures that regularly reach minus 40 degrees Celsius, Yakutsk, in eastern Siberia, is known as the coldest city in the world. Like much of the surrounding Yakutia region, the city sits atop the permafrost, a layer of soil that traditionally remains frozen year-round. But the permafrost here has begun to thaw, setting in motion a potentially catastrophic sinking. “The difference between 1.5 degrees Celsius and 2 degrees Celsius, for this kind of permafrost, is the difference between life and death,” says Vladimir Romanovsky, a geophysicist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who has studied the Yakutian permafrost. Particularly concerning, Romanovsky says, is the type of permafrost found in Yakutia, which contains abnormally large amounts of ice. “If it’s a huge amount of ice, then all this foundation will turn into a lake,” he says. “Imagine if it’s on a slope.”
-
-The effects of this thawing appear even more dramatic outside of Yakutsk, in the region of Yakutia, where gullies have opened up in the collapsing earth. Those include the Batagaika Crater, pictured here, about one kilometer across and 50 meters deep. These open wounds in the earth’s surface are releasing other dangers, including high levels of methane, further contributing to climate change, and long-frozen bacteria and viruses. “That’s potentially very dangerous,” Romanovsky says, noting that fragments of genetic material from smallpox can survive in permafrost for hundreds of years.
-
-No matter what, Romanovsky says, Yakutia will need help. “Even 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming could destabilize the permafrost,” he notes. The difference is that, with a 1.5-degree Celsius warming, engineering solutions to refreeze the ground are more likely to succeed. In a 2-degree Celsius scenario, he says, those solutions become “more expensive and probably not practical.”
-—*E.A.*
-
----
-
-
-
-Miombo Woodlands, Southern Africa: Martin Lindsay/Alamy Stock Photo.
-
-Photo by Martin Lindsay / Alamy Stock Photo
-
-## Miombo Woodlands, Southern Africa
-
-*In this cradle of biodiversity, climate change could upend the ecosystem—and spell disaster for a host of endangered species.*
-
-Stretching across southern Africa, the Miombo Woodlands—named after the umbrella-shaped miombo trees—are home to elephants, lions, leopards, spotted hyenas, buffalo, antelope, and giraffes. But it’s becoming a less hospitable habitat: Rainfall is now more sporadic and intense, while the shifting climate threatens to increase wildfires and imperil a number of the region’s charismatic megafauna, like the critically endangered black rhinoceros, already long threatened by poaching.
-
-According to Jeff Price, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia who has studied the region, even a 1.5-degree Celsius warming scenario would be unsuitable for up to half of all species in most of the region, and at 2 degrees Celsius most of the Miombo Woodlands would be unfit for up to three-quarters of its species. Of additional concern to Price are the insects underpinning the entire ecosystem. If pollinators die out, the region’s food supply would be undermined; limiting warming to 1.5 degree Celsius could prove critical for insects, which appear to be more sensitive to warming than plants and animals.
-
-The impending diminution of the woodlands’ biodiversity is playing out against another shift: The countries of the Miombo are experiencing rapid population growth, contributing to loss of the woodlands, which have shrunk by an estimated 30 percent since the 1980s. According to Natasha Ribeiro, a scientist from Mozambique who has studied the region for decades, the woodlands’ distinctive biodiversity supports 80 percent of the region’s people—a population that’s increasingly placing a strain on natural resources. As Ribeiro puts it, “Climate change is bringing us one more challenge.” —*C.L.*
-
----
-
-
-
-Antigua and Barbuda: Jose Jimenez Tirado/Getty Images.
-
-Photo by Jose Jimenez
-
-## Antigua and Barbuda
-
-*The island nation rocked by hurricanes is fighting back—and lawyering up—against the industrialized superpowers that pollute the most.*
-
-The world’s islands are, of course, under threat from rising sea levels, but many of those same places face another peril exacerbated by climate change: hurricanes. That danger was made shockingly clear in 2017, when a pair of hurricanes tore through Antigua and Barbuda days apart; Irma damaged 81 percent of Barbuda’s buildings. “Our region was decimated by Irma and Maria,” Gaston Browne, the country’s prime minister, tells *GQ.*
-
-So in October, the country joined with the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu to create a new commission that will seek to assign legal responsibility to higher-polluting nations for the adverse effects of climate change. “The basic principle of international law is that the polluter pays,” says Payam Akhavan, the legal counsel to the commission. “You pollute, you pay. You cannot use your territory in a way that harms other states.”
-
-Akhavan contends that nations like Antigua and Barbuda have no other choice. The Paris Agreement includes no mechanism to enforce signatories’ pledges to curb their domestic emissions. “Industrialized countries believe that assisting us to adapt and mitigate the effects of climate change is an act of charity,” says Browne. “It ought to be a legal compensation.”
-
-Palau has since joined the commission, and Akhavan says that other small island states are in the process of joining; together they will develop a legal strategy. But Akhavan hopes to bring his clients more than financial justice. “They are telling people that what’s happening to the small island states today is going to happen to all of us tomorrow,” he says. “By listening to them, I think we can avert this collective catastrophe for the rest of humanity.” —*E.A.*
-
-*\* A note on this story's methodology: To select these eight locations, we consulted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s* [*special report*](https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/) *on the projected impacts of 1.5 and 2 degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels. After identifying the regions likely to be the most afflicted in those scenarios, we spoke to climate scientists who study the most high-risk places within those areas. To determine whether a location would be “saved” at 1.5 degrees and “irredeemably lost” at 2 degrees, we asked whether it would become functionally unrecognizable to its current inhabitants. “Saved” and “lost” are subjective terms; they have no scientific definition here. Furthermore, this list is admittedly incomplete. It represents only a small sampling of places and people whose futures depend on whether we undertake a worldwide, herculean effort to rein in our use of fossil fuels. It is, however, (to our knowledge) the first list of its kind. We hope it is not the last.*
-
-*A version of this story originally appeared in the April 2022 issue with the title "The Razor's Edge of A Warming World."*
-
-
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-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
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diff --git a/00.03 News/@News.md b/00.03 News/@News.md
index 6d641b44..e8772c46 100644
--- a/00.03 News/@News.md
+++ b/00.03 News/@News.md
@@ -52,6 +52,20 @@ This page enables to navigate in the News section.
style: number
```
+%%
+
+---
+
+
+
+```dataview
+Table without id file.link as "Title", "**Read**: " + Read as "Read", Tag as "Themes" from "00.03 News"
+where contains(DocType, "WebClipping")
+where Read != "🟥"
+sort date(Read) asc
+limit 10
+```
+%%
---
diff --git a/00.03 News/A Championship Season in Mariachi Country.md b/00.03 News/A Championship Season in Mariachi Country.md
deleted file mode 100644
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-Date: 2022-12-19
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-Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/magazine/mariachi-texas.html
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-# A Championship Season in Mariachi Country
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-Credit...Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times
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-Every year along the Texas border, high school teams battle it out in one of the nation’s most intense championship rivalries. But they’re not playing football.
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-Melody Quiroz with fellow students from Rio Grande City High School’s Mariachi Cascabel, backstage at the Mariachi Vargas Extravaganza in San Antonio in December.Credit...Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times
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-- Published Nov. 3, 2022Updated Nov. 6, 2022
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-### Listen to This Article
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-Audio Recording by Audm
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-*To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times,* [*download Audm for iPhone or Android*](https://www.audm.com/?utm_source=nytmag&utm_medium=embed&utm_campaign=mariachi_country_balli)*.*
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-On a hot Monday in late August 2021, Marcos Zárate was starting his second week as the lead director of the mariachi program at Rio Grande City High School in Texas. In his practice room, 17 students in jeans and school T-shirts stood in a half-circle, playing songs from memory. Dozens of trophies lined one wall, and across another, someone had hung a cheery hand-painted banner spelling out the team’s name, “Mariachi Cascabel.” The pandemic had kept the young musicians home the past 18 months, and now, fresh out of lockdown, they were eager to play as a group again — to feel the adrenaline rush and transformation that came with being on a stage.
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-Dressed all in black, his thick hair gelled back, Zárate, who was 40, paced the room, listening intently. “Stop!” he said as the students tore through a huapango called “A la Luz de los Cocuyos.” There were problems.
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-“Those trills, they need to come out a lot stronger than that. Careful at the beginning — *ta ta ta ta ta* — I want to hear all the notes together at the same volume. I don’t want to hear *ta ta TA ta TA ta TA.* Very defined. OK? From the top!”
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-They began again, playing the same songs over and over. Zárate bounded among them, singing along to their instrument parts. When he ran out of ways to explain something in English, he did it in Spanish, which all of his students understood. “If you want to be competitive, especially in this part of the Valley, you have to be *super* detailed,” he told me. “That’s what gives mariachi music the style, all those little details we were going through. That’s the beauty of mariachi.”
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-The rest of the rehearsal was a chorus of instructions:
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-“OK, listen, let’s perform it now. *Perform* it.”
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-“Punch it! Build it up!”
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-“Make sure that everybody stops at the same part of the bow!”
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-“More aggressive! That first note is too, too soft.”
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-“Make sure you guys start together, together, together!”
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-“From the top, *ahora sí!”*
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-Until just a few weeks before, Zárate was directing the mariachi program at a nearby middle school. Then the high school director stepped down, and with the end of summer approaching, the school district urged Zárate to take the job. Now he was responsible for the high school and overseeing two middle schools whose mariachis had bled students during the pandemic. There was no replacement for him yet at one school, and the other was led by a fairly new director. The administrative work alone seemed overwhelming. “I wasn’t mentally ready for this,” he said. But he accepted the post out of a sense of duty. Now he was supposed to rebuild the whole program, even as he trained the high school’s varsity group to compete at the first and most decisive contest of the year, the Mariachi Vargas Extravaganza, in December.
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-Credit...Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times
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-Held yearly in San Antonio, the festival took its name from Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán, Mexico’s oldest continuous mariachi, whose members acted as the judges. It’s the largest competition that is open to student groups and individual vocalists from across the country. The festival had been going on for 26 years, founded by Cynthia Muñoz, a public-relations executive who played mariachi as a teenager. While there would be other contests the second half of the school year, a first-place trophy at the Extravaganza was the most coveted title of the season, since the winners could call themselves national champions.
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-Mariachi Cascabel was one of the best high school teams in America, but they faced significant competition. For years, students in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, the region that lies along the Rio Grande in South Texas, have been at the forefront of a renewed interest in mariachi nationwide. Three of the best groups are there in Starr County, one of the poorest counties in Texas. Zárate’s biggest rivals were just up and down the river along U.S. Highway 83, at Roma and La Grulla high schools. Roma was the school to beat. In the past seven Extravaganzas, its varsity team had outright won four titles and tied for two more — once with Grulla and once with Rio Grande City.
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-The directors knew each other well, having trained in the same influential mariachi-education program at the University of Texas-Pan American, in nearby Edinburg. And they were about the same age. Roma’s director, Eloy Garza, a year younger than Zárate, had briefly taught middle-school mariachi in Rio Grande City, then left to play for the widely venerated Mariachi Sol de México as they toured with the Mexican superstar Luis Miguel, crisscrossing the United States, Mexico and South America and analyzing how an elite mariachi trained. “After that year, I got all the knowledge I needed,” he said. He returned to Rio Grande City, and his middle school mariachi began collecting trophies. Then he was lured back to Roma, his hometown, to revive the once-legendary Mariachi Nuevo Santander. That was the year the team began its title streak at the Extravaganza.
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-At the other end of Starr County, Alfonso Rodriguez, then 38, the director of Mariachi Grulla de Plata, was equally hungry for a win. With just 1,500 residents, La Grulla has its own high school but shares a school district with Rio Grande City. Rodriguez’s mild demeanor belies his meticulousness and intensity as a director. Since he started the school’s program 12 years before, his varsity group had almost always landed in the top three at the competition. When he tied Roma for first, he started to believe they could outright win it. He had come out of lockdown more focused than ever. “Every year,” he said, “I compete against myself.
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-Credit...Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times
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-The directors had just over three months left to select and arrange two songs, teach the students their parts and drill and polish their shows so intensely the young musicians could do it in their sleep. With the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic waning, all three of the Starr County mariachis were ready to taste glory.
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-**The towns that make** up Starr County are older than Mexico or the United States, let alone the border that separates them. In 1749, a Spanish military officer named José de Escandón established the colony Nuevo Santander, which spanned the Rio Grande across what is now northeastern Mexico and South Texas. The communities that would become Rio Grande City, La Grulla and Roma began as ranches on Spanish land grants where families raised sheep, goats and cattle. What would become Texas cowboy culture was born in the region and flourished for a century. Then came a dizzying string of conflicts, as Mexico asserted its independence, Texas seceded and joined the United States and the Americans started the Mexican-American War, which ended in 1848. The river became a border, and the land to the north became Starr County. In only four decades, its residents had gone from being Spaniards to Mexicans to Texans to Americans.
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-Credit...Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times
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-It was around this time that mariachi began to emerge into the historical record, but it would be more than a century before the music would fully take root in Starr County’s schools. Musicians in western Mexico had long been melding the sounds of Spanish string instruments with the musical and performance styles of Indigenous and African peoples; the word *mariachi* may come from the Indigenous name for a kind of tree that was popular with local guitar makers. The word was well known enough by 1852 that a priest used it in a letter to describe a nearby band that was making too much noise. Jonathan Clark, a historian of mariachi, has traced the music’s progress since. By the 1930s, it migrated to the cities — taking on a sharper look and a brassier sound, with the addition of trumpets. The music made its way north to Los Angeles, and it was there in 1961 that one of the first U.S.-based professional groups, Mariachi Los Camperos, was established, as well as the first student mariachi, at U.C.L.A. Soon other student groups began to form across California and Texas. In 1970, the San Antonio school district began its high school mariachi program, and it became a model for other schools across the Southwest.
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-By the time the music came to the schools in the Rio Grande Valley a decade later, the region was ready for it. Residents of the South Texas border had their own storied tradition in folk music — first through corridos, 19th-century narrative folk ballads that were sung by rural, working-class people on both sides of the border, and subsequently through conjunto, the music of Tejanos that emerged in the 1920s through a collision of established local sounds (the guitar and Mexican bajo sexto) with the button accordion and polka styles brought to Texas by German, Czech and Polish immigrants. The culture was right, too. In the Valley, as locals refer to the region, residents felt comfortably Mexican and American, a perfect laboratory for a musical genre that itself knew no borders.
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-The first high school mariachi in the region was founded in 1982, in a town called La Joya, in part to help integrate Mexican immigrant students and in part to help lower the dropout rate. Then in 1989, the University of Texas-Pan American inaugurated its mariachi-education program. Mariachi was an oral tradition, but the instructors and students there began writing their own sheet music. They applied music pedagogy and techniques from band and orchestra education. “When we started graduating students with degrees in music, the climate changes a little bit,” said Dahlia Guerra, a classical pianist who helped found the program and is now a high-level university administrator. “So now we have professional musicians who are teaching it at this level. Not to say it’s better than or less than the folkloric oral tradition in Mexico, and what you see in restaurants and things. It was just more developed, a more learned way of teaching mariachi.” The school trained generations of mariachi directors. Today the university is called the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and it has the most highly regarded college mariachi in the country, Mariachi Aztlán.
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-Credit...Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times
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-Credit...Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times
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-Yamil Yunes, who founded Roma’s mariachi in 1993, said the level of musical training and his students’ intimacy with the music and language were two of the reasons his program eventually became an example for other high schools. He would travel the country as a consultant, yet would sometimes struggle to help directors improve their programs, because their students spoke less Spanish and were more removed from Mexican culture. He said there is something deeply enduring about mariachi and the way it shapes the young people who play it. Unlike band students, who often put their instruments away once they graduate, many mariachi students keep playing even if they don’t become professional musicians. “Once you’re a mariachi, you’re always a mariachi,” he said.
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-**By mid-October,** Starr County was in the full swing of homecoming games, parades and bonfires. Stadiums filled with families dressed in school colors and little girls wearing ponytails finished with giant bows. The temperature was still reaching the low 90s, but autumn took some of the edge off the summer’s suffocating heat and brought with it a fertile sense of possibility.
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-As the school day wound down in Rio Grande City one Thursday evening, Zárate sat in his office staring intently at his computer. Practice was about to start, and he was just finishing writing the opening song for the Extravaganza. On a dry-erase board in the practice room just outside his office, one of his students had written in red marker, “Days until Vargas: 41,” then surrounded the words with a cloud in blue ink. Below it she added, “Don’t believe in luck, believe in hard work!” with the last two words underlined twice.
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-Each school would get seven minutes to perform, and the directors’ job was to create a dazzling program that would show off all their students’ strengths. The groups first play a short opening tune called a tema that introduces their team, then a longer song highlighting their technical prowess and featuring solos by each instrument section. Most directors hire musical composers or arrangers; some arrange their own songs and a few even write them from scratch. Rodriguez had hired someone to write for the Grulla team, adding his own touches. His team was furthest along, having already been practicing both of their songs for three weeks. Garza had gone on a two-day retreat earlier that week to prepare Roma’s music, writing an original tema and arranging a popular song for the main portion of the program. He was holding extra rehearsals so his students could master the basics, then move into drilling and polishing.
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-Credit...Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times
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-Unlike the others, Zárate planned to write both songs — the show would all be original music. It was his first year, and he wanted to make it special. All he had right now was the opening tune, though, which was 2 minutes 30 seconds long. Students were beginning to stream into the hall, so he hit print on his computer. “Guys, let’s start!”
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-The students, music in hand, made a shaky effort at the opening. “Trumpets,” Zárate instructed three students in the back, “make the introduction sound majestic — *pa ra ra ra ra* — like a king is coming!” They tried again. “We’re going to keep drilling and drilling and drilling!” he warned them.
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-Then it was time to introduce the vocals, the lyrics for which he had shared through a group chat. The students pulled out their phones. Zárate was going to sing the harmonies to them, and the students would try to match them. They began together: *“Cascabel! Ha llegado su mariachi, sí señor!”* Without sheet music, it was hard to know what notes to hit, and some of the voices started to waver, singing the wrong note or going flat. Hearing the dissonance, their voices faded. Not only do mariachi members have to be good musicians; they have to learn to sing well too, especially the violinists, who most often are the leads. Zárate and his students had to figure out how to layer all the voices properly.
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-“Do it again,” he said. “Let’s do it slowly.” He sang the first note to demonstrate: *“Laaaaa* — don’t sound shaky!” The students tried singing the first few words again and again, Zárate stomping his foot each time they were supposed to change notes. Still it wasn’t perfect. He decided to try something different, motioning for them to gather around him. “Do it slowly, don’t do vibrato,” he said. “Let me just hear that note. Get close, get close!” “No le tengan miedo,” one of the students quipped — don’t be afraid of him — eliciting some laughs. “As long as you don’t bite,” another said. The students now stood shoulder to shoulder, some with masks still on. “Stick to that note,” Zárate said, demonstrating. *“Mariachiiiii* — then you change!”
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-Finally, he began to hear what he wanted. The complex harmony was coming together. “OK, *that’s* the chord!” he said. “Do it again!”
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-After more tries, Zárate was ready for his students to finish off the phrase, which would triumphantly announce the group’s arrival: *“Mariachiiiii ... Cascabel!”* This time, when the students sang, their voices produced a rich, sonorous harmony that brought goose bumps. “There we go!” he exclaimed. The students scattered back to their microphone stands. One of them, exuberant, declared to her director: “You’re so talented!”
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-The week was over, and all three teams had laid the foundation for their shows. Now the hardest work lay ahead. Next week, they would begin rehearsing longer hours and even on weekends. It wasn’t enough to play well. Mariachi Vargas would judge them on many other details, like how well they rolled their R’s, the aplomb with which they carried themselves and how much technique they could show off on their instruments. “With Vargas, it’s all about the show,” Rodriguez had told me. “You can’t go out there and play a bolero. You have five to seven minutes to win the judges. You have to *sell* the show.”
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-Credit...Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times
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-**The crown jewel of** Roma, Mariachi Nuevo Santander was always in high demand, even through the pandemic. Kelly Clarkson interviewed Garza on national television after the group recorded a performance video from their homes that went viral, and they were invited to play virtually for President Biden’s Latino inaugural, delivering a bilingual rendition of “This Land Is Your Land.” Locally, the students played regularly at ribbon-cutting ceremonies and other civic events.
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-One warm Thursday morning that October, they were set to play for an event sponsored by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, in honor of National Hispanic Heritage month. It was being held in Roma’s historic town square, which is ringed by elegant, pastel 19th-century buildings in varying states of restoration. Three white plastic tents were strung with papel picado. Under them, about two dozen Hispanic agents in blue and green uniforms sat around plastic folding tables topped with brightly colored tablecloths and clay jugs with flowers. Jaime Escobar Jr., the mayor, sat with the fire chief and a few other local officials. Nearby, a long table was draped in a Mexican serape and topped with platters of pan dulce, while next to it, two women pushed around sizzling pieces of chicken and beef on gas griddles. The mariachi members stood quietly to the side in their black-and-silver trajes de charro, the girls in matching red lipstick and sparkling chandelier earrings. At the front podium, one of the violinists, a boy named Francisco Garcia Jr., was singing the national anthem.
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-The event was intended to celebrate Hispanics’ rich contributions to the nation, a theme that seemed appropriate given that roughly half of the Border Patrol’s agents are Hispanic or Latino. It also reflected, if unintentionally, the degree to which the border and its policing have cast a lengthening shadow over life in Starr County. Over the past 30 years, the region has become more intensely patrolled, and walls have been going up to try to stanch the flow of drugs and undocumented immigrants. Some of this is responding to a stark reality, and some of it is political theater. In March 2021, Gov. Greg Abbott, who is running for re-election this year, launched [Operation Lone Star,](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/15/us/texas-border-immigration-operation-lone-star.html) flooding the region with thousands of Texas National Guard soldiers and state troopers. They were there to stop immigrants and drugs, but when the troopers first arrived, a county official told me, they issued almost 18,000 traffic citations in just over five months. On my visits, I was surrounded by agents who were staying at the same hotel in Rio Grande City on their temporary assignments, and as I drove between towns, it wasn’t uncommon for me to pass six or seven of their S.U.V.s within 10 minutes. I learned to drive at excessively low speeds, and had the feeling of constantly being watched.
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-The main speaker at the event was a Border Patrol officer named Sergio Tinoco, a man in his late 40s with a wide chest and a crew cut. He took the podium with American and government flags waving behind him and spoke quietly and earnestly. Along with other professionals, C.B.P. agents helped serve as role models for the Valley’s children, he said, many of whose parents hadn’t gone to college. He apologized in advance if he grew emotional, because this was his own story.
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-“Twenty-six years ago, I took the oath for the very first time,” he said. He explained that when he first joined the U.S. Army, it was just another job to him, following years of roaming the country with his family, picking vegetables by their side since he was 7 years old. “It was something I needed to do in order to finally break the family cycle of being a poor migrant worker,” he said. “This oath meant that I wouldn’t have to break my back anymore. I wouldn’t have to pick cucumbers or tomatoes at 35 cents a hamper.” But after the sharply dressed drill sergeants tore him down mentally in boot camp, then built him back up, he started to feel something welling up inside of him that he recognized as American pride. Then his life as a soldier took a harsh turn. He was deployed to Bosnia, where he found himself under fire, clearing mass graves and being slammed against a tank by an exploding land mine. He started binge drinking. One drunken night, he beat up his best friend so badly the friend ended up in the hospital. A commanding officer urged Tinoco to address his mental health and reconnect with the “greatness” that was still inside of him. Gradually, he started to climb out of his hole.
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-In 2005, two years after leaving the Army, the Border Patrol called, with a job that would bring him back home to the Valley. His family was opposed. “How could I join an agency that was responsible for apprehending and deporting people of my own kind, especially when I still had family living in Mexico?” But the work proved to be profoundly rewarding. The agents lifted each other up, he said. “All this in times when it seems the majority of the country is against us.” He pleaded with the agents and officers in the audience never to stop believing in people like him.
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-The program wrapped up with a few more speakers who talked about the strength the United States draws from its immigrant roots. Then the chaplain returned to the podium to close the event with one last prayer: “It is you, Lord, that spoke creation into being. As you breathed life into men, you, Lord, also made Hispanics, and it was good.” He asked God to “give us the strength and courage to create a place of welcome for all.”
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-With that, it was time for tacos and mariachi music. The Roma students arranged themselves next to the tents, planted their feet shoulder-width apart and turned their gaze to their leader as the agents applauded politely. The first-chair violinist, a senior named Adrianna Martinez, leaned forward and did a quick signal with her bow, and the students burst into their rendition of “El Son de la Negra,” a song that many people regard as the second Mexican national anthem. When the event was done, the mariachi and their director posed with the agents for a photo.
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-The students had the same dreams that Tinoco did. They were proudly American, and yet they yearned to be embraced by their community. A few days later, I spoke with them at school about their experiences. Three of the students lived in Ciudad Miguel Alemán, crossing the border each morning to attend school in Roma. Martinez, the violinist, brought up the C.B.P. ceremony, and the seeming contradiction inherent in celebrating border agents and Hispanic heritage at the same time. “I feel like those two things don’t really match,” she said. “It’s very interesting, because again, they are Hispanic, so they are technically on our side. But, it’s also interesting to see when they aren’t.” For her, being in mariachi was how she negotiated the way the education system was Americanizing her and the ties she wanted to maintain with her family’s past. She admired the veneration Garza taught them to hold toward the mariachi traje, showing them how to care for the uniform and respect it. “I think it’s important to always be connected to that, and know that there’s importance to that,” she said. “And that way, I feel like I’m not too Mexican, too American. I just — I’m Mexican American.”
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-Credit...Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times
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-**As Thanksgiving approached,** the mariachis entered the most grueling part of their preparations. With the Extravaganza now just three weeks away, it was time to rehearse their shows on a stage. That meant practicing walking in and out, synchronizing their movements upstage as different vocalists took turns singing, and projecting to the back of a large auditorium. “You feel it, they’re going to feel it!” Garza told his team as they rehearsed in Roma’s state-of-the-art performing-arts center. Rodriguez was rehearsing the Grulla team out of an older auditorium, where the microphones kept giving out. “Guys, it sounded decent, but you look boring,” he said. “Fix it, please!” The rehearsal time and demands of schoolwork were wearing the students down, but no one doubted that it was worth it.
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-One Tuesday after rehearsals, I went to visit Martinez, Roma’s violinist, at her family’s small brick home. The 18-year-old greeted me in jeans, white Adidas and a black T-shirt, her dark hair braided to the side. The senior-class valedictorian, she had played in the varsity group since she was a freshman. Martinez said she was the only student she knew of in a mariachi who played two instruments, switching to trumpet on some songs, which she had learned on her own. With varying degrees of proficiency, she had also taught herself to play the ukulele, vihuela, guitar, piano and drums. Her bedroom was a musical shrine, with at least nine instruments sitting on her desk or hung on her walls, next to contest medals and framed awards and pictures. She loved recording musical arrangements on her MacBook and was a video-production student at school. She dreamed of one day becoming a movie director, and said she was filming a documentary for her class about life in Roma, where she felt fortunate to have been raised, as it was so tight-knit. “But obviously,” she said, “and everyone will say this, it’s 99 percent Hispanic here, so I’m not exposed to other things. I’m just exposed to what we have here. So that could be very restricting.”
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-Martinez was naturally interested in politics. In sixth grade, she tried to pin down her classmates about their views on abortion rights. But it was in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election that she found herself following more closely. In 2016, Starr County, historically a Democratic bastion, overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, 79.1 percent to 19 percent. But in 2020, it registered the largest shift to Trump in the country, with Biden winning by only 5 percent of the vote. Martinez said Roma felt sharply divided in a way it hadn’t before; residents became more “in your face” about their politics. She considered herself to fall “further left than liberals,” but she knew plenty of conservatives and understood them. The national media ran stories about how Latinos were turning Republican and attributed the shift, in part, to its residents identifying as white in the U.S. census. But Martinez had a different view.
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-“Here, literally, my house is five minutes from the border to Mexico,” she said. “You’re going to hear that ‘We’re mexicanos, we’re Tejanos.’”
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-Instead, she said, Starr County residents were old-school Democrats who were family-oriented and socially conservative, and who had believed Republican claims that voting for Biden would mean losing their jobs in the oil fields. “At school, a lot of people are related to pipeliners,” she said. “I also understood it’s the pandemic, everyone’s depending on their income.”
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-The next evening, I met up with a different student, Joey Escamilla, the lead guitarist in Mariachi Grulla de Plata. As dusk turned to dark, we sat at a concrete picnic table in the town’s park. He had come from wrestling practice, freshly showered with his short hair gelled neatly to the side. He wore wire-frame glasses and a wrestling shirt bearing the school’s Gator mascot. Escamilla, then 17, was a senior who had also been on the varsity mariachi all four years.
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-La Grulla had not been an easy place to grow up, he said. Though the crime problem on the border is often exaggerated in the media — Rio Grande City’s mayor, Joel Villarreal, had told me, referring to the local grocery store, “You’re not fighting cartels to go to H-E-B!” — it was still an important part of Escamilla’s reality. In La Grulla, smugglers sometimes hire young boys to help them sneak drugs or migrants past the interior immigration checkpoint about 80 miles north. “You get paid to stash them or you get paid to move them,” he told me. Because the town is near the river, it’s crawling with police cars and Border Patrol S.U.V.s, and helicopters constantly hover overhead. The criminals are one thing, but the authorities pose their own set of challenges. The students have to deal with being pulled over by state troopers on their way to practice and being searched for drugs before traveling to competitions; a few of them have undocumented parents who couldn’t travel to the Extravaganza because of the checkpoint. As we talked, Escamilla warily scanned the park. Noting a yellow car that had circled a few times, he said, “I have a feeling they might think that you’re a narc.”
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-Some of his family had followed migrant work north three generations before, ending up in Richland, Wash., where he was born. Eventually, divorce led his mother back to the border to be near the rest of her family, and Joey lived with her and his three younger sisters next to his grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother — five generations in two homes on one lot. But two of his grandmothers died of Covid during the worst of the pandemic, leaving the family reeling with sadness. Starr County had registered one of the highest Covid death rates in the country. Escamilla’s mother, a home health aide, was out of work, and her partner worked outside the state. “What sucks about growing up here is that sometimes you got to learn how to grow up quick,” he said. “So now, here I am, a 17-year-old kid, worrying about: ‘Is my mom OK, are the girls OK? Are the bills paid?’” The pressure and conflicting schedules of wrestling and mariachi just added to the mix, and sometimes it was all too much. At a recent rehearsal, he’d had to walk off the stage, anxiety getting to him.
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-But when he talked about mariachi, his face lit up. “I love this music so much,” he told me. “This is, like, my entire life.” For years, he’d been watching YouTube videos of the industry’s top musicians. “I want to be the best there ever was,” he said, smiling. He hoped to join the Marine Corps for a few years after high school, then study music and become a mariachi director somewhere outside of Texas, away from the constraining boundaries he’d experienced in La Grulla. I asked him if he thought his team was ready for the Extravaganza, and he said not quite yet, but that they were sounding “pretty damn good, I’m not going to lie.” With a little more effort, he felt they could very well be champions. “If we could just have a couple of practices where we’re all laser-beam focused, having fun, but also have our eyes on the prize,” he said, “oh, man. We could become a monster.”
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-Credit...Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times
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-Credit...Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times
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-**After three more weeks** of rehearsals, December finally arrived. It was time for the Extravaganza. At Roma High School, the students were more than ready. The school district was sending teams from its two middle schools, as well as its junior-varsity and varsity high school teams, both of which Garza had trained. Come Thursday, 56 students would be departing to San Antonio on charter buses, and a separate fan bus for students would also be going, as well as a caravan of parents. Over at La Grulla, the team was holding its last dress rehearsals in the high school’s cafeteria, where the microphones worked better than in the older auditorium. It was time for some tough love, so the students could rise up from the realm of the good to the realm of champions. “You guys don’t want to win, do you?” Rodriguez’s assistant, Orlando De Leon, asked them one evening. “Because if you did, you would have a different demeanor at these practices!” Given the level of competition, one weak moment in a song, one musical passage they failed to clean up, one flaw in their postures could cost them first place.
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-In Rio Grande City, the students finally got their full set of music the week before. Deciding to write the whole show so quickly had proved an overly ambitious plan for Zárate. He was playing catch-up with the rest of his work demands, and at night, he prayed to God to fill him with inspiration so he could finish the second song. Whenever the students met, they’d ask anxiously for their music. They should have been rehearsing the complete show for six weeks now, like the other teams, but their music had come in bits and pieces. Zárate had heard about Grulla’s struggles with the microphones in the school district’s auditorium, so he’d signed up to use the cafeteria stage, but time was hard to come by because the theater class and cheerleading squad also needed it. The students had to practice their entrances and exits, so at one last rehearsal that Tuesday evening, they rehearsed inside their cramped hall, walking single-file into the room with their sombreros on, microphone cords curled about their feet.
-
-The next day, I found Zárate in his office and was surprised to see him looking relaxed. His students had caught up quickly with the music, he told me, and they were feeling ready. “They’re pulling their weight,” he said. “They’re doing what they’re supposed to. And more than anything, they’re just hungry. They’re musically hungry.” It seemed the pandemic had made everyone hungry — to reconnect socially, to listen to music, to feel something. “For me, music is all about feeling,” Zárate said. His strength as a director was his musical talent. He was singing and playing guitar by age 4; by age 7 he was accompanying his guitar-playing father on violin at a local restaurant. When he wrote music, he tried to make his songs unpredictable, with unexpected chords and rhythm changes that took listeners on an emotional ride. Still, his group wasn’t sounding as tight as either Roma or La Grulla. Zárate knew it, and felt he could have gotten them there with a little more time. But the students might have an edge in how they performed and touched people. Zárate’s second song, the one meant to show off their technical prowess, was a joyous, infectious huapango huasteco that was hard to listen to without wanting to dance.
-
-I asked him who posed the biggest threat in San Antonio, and he said it was one of the teams from Las Vegas, Las Vegas Academy of the Arts. They’d been inching up the rankings and placed second to Roma in the last Extravaganza. This could very well be the year they nabbed first, ending the reign of the Valley groups. The K-12 mariachi programs in the Las Vegas area have grown tremendously, enrolling some 6,000 students. Aside from Las Vegas and the Starr County teams, there were six other high school groups from the Valley that were usually competitive, Zárate said, although two would not attend this year. That still left at least eight mariachis that were serious contenders for a trophy.
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-Image
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-Credit...Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times
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-That evening, it was time for the young musicians to pack. Six girls from the varsity groups — four from Grulla, and one each from Roma and Rio Grande City — had made finals in the vocal competition, so they also had billowing gowns and accessories to take with them. Inside a stately beige stucco home in Rio Grande City, 14-year-old Michelle Meraz, a freshman, was practicing singing in hers, a floor-length, off-the-shoulder green mermaid dress that hugged her hips and flared out at the knees with a petticoat. A gold eagle from the Mexican coat of arms was embroidered at the top of the skirt, and its sides were lined with gold metal pieces like traditional mariachi trajes. She paired it with a bone-colored sombrero that had a green-and-gold rim, and tonight her dark, curly hair fell down her back. Her grandmother gasped when Meraz first walked out of her bedroom in her costume. She had transformed from a high school student to a beautiful ranchera singer, ready to mesmerize an audience.
-
-Meraz’s mother — who grew up in Ciudad Miguel Alemán before she and her husband moved north of the river to escape the drug-related violence — had ordered the dress from a tailor in Monterrey, Mexico, who regularly made costumes for Mexican celebrities. Meraz helped with the design, connecting with the tailor on video chats as her mother measured her, and when the dress was finished, the family drove two hours to pick it up. It cost $2,000, but she promised to make good use of it by also wearing it at her quinceañera in the spring.
-
-Meraz had worried about her group falling behind. “It was kind of hard because everyone already had their music,” she said. But she felt confident because she felt they had other strengths, and she couldn’t contain her excitement. Playing with the varsity team at the Extravaganza while also competing as a vocalist had been her longtime dream. She knew the competition would be fierce, but thought her team might have a chance at the top spot because of their energy and enthusiasm. “That’s what I really like about our group,” she said. “They’re getting into it — smiles, everything, showmanship. I love that!”
-
-**For students from** the Valley, San Antonio, roughly 200 miles to the north, is the nearest big American city. Families look forward to the Extravaganza all year, and even tiny babies arrive in matching T-shirts supporting a mariachi relative, while the adults bring placards and pompoms and noisemakers to show school spirit during the contest. When the Starr County students arrived on Thursday afternoon, the first order of business was to check into their hotels and change into jeans and school shirts for their first performance: a public serenade on the River Walk, where the San Antonio River flows around a small concrete platform surrounded by brightly lit shops and restaurants. One by one, each of the festival competitors crossed a concrete bridge onto the stage, next to a towering Christmas tree awash in gold lights, and played some of its more popular show tunes for the crowd, as tourist barges floated by.
-
-It felt like a joyful time, the beginning of the holiday season. But after performing, the Grulla and Rio Grande City students returned to their hotel. The Roma school district had housed its students at the official event hotel, the Grand Hyatt; to keep costs down, Cascabel and Grulla de Plata were staying at a La Quinta Inn two blocks away. Their directors wanted to squeeze in one more rehearsal, and after practicing individually, each team would play for the other so the students could get used to an audience. Until now, no one had watched their shows; the directors worked extra hard to keep the programs a secret, and Zárate warned his students not to take any video or post on social media. After Rio Grande City won a coin toss and chose to go second, the members of the two groups became fast friends. While each group played, the other listened, jaws dropped. Each was impressive in its own way, and it was hard to predict which one a judge might rank above the other. Both teams wanted to win, but it seemed the students also had developed a bond — whoever did best, they would cheer on one another’s success.
-
-On Friday afternoon at the city’s convention center, after a morning of workshops, the semifinals began. Twelve middle schools competed first, and the two Roma schools emerged victorious as they usually did, claiming first and second place. Then it was time for the high school contest. Over the next three hours, 19 groups would perform, and members of Mariachi Vargas would select the six finalists that would play again the next day. The three judges sat below the stage in matching blue festival polo shirts, each with a set of score sheets and a Starbucks cup. The auditorium was a sea of families and mariachi students.
-
-First up among the Starr County teams was Rio Grande City. As their school was announced, the members of Mariachi Cascabel walked onto the stage calmly, instrument in one hand, sombrero in the other. They set their hats down for a moment and adjusted their microphone stands as a tense silence filled the room. Sofia Ozuna, the lead violinist, looked around, making sure all the members were ready. The clock would start ticking with their first note, and violating the seven-minute limit by even a few seconds could disqualify them. Ozuna turned back to the audience and flashed a tremendous smile. She lifted her hat toward the sky as the others matched her gesture, then together, they lowered them onto their heads. This was where the ultimate transformation happened. The students had to pull from within them the very best they could, performing the biggest version of themselves. Ozuna did a quick one-two with her bow and the music began, the regal tema that Zárate had written.
-
-[Rio Grande City’s strengths were their energy, showmanship and musicality.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOXkHT8PjQU&ab_channel=mariachimusicdotcom) Zárate’s songs were unique and full of flavor, and the students complemented them by coming alive to a degree I hadn’t seen in rehearsals. They made big expressions with their faces and outstretched their arms, singing directly to the judges. After the second song began, the catchy huapango, the violinists launched into their group solo, a dizzying and highly technical arrangement of call-and-response. Then the trumpets, which had sometimes been cracking in rehearsal, followed, sounding bright and mostly clean. The judges listened attentively, occasionally leaning down to write notes. When the group finished, they leaned back and applauded.
-
-Image
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-Credit...Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times
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-Another high school played, and then it was Grulla’s turn. Across the auditorium, dozens of parents held up blue-and-white placards that read “G.H.S. 2021 Mariachi Grulla de Plata.” As the students walked onto the stage, their new suits shimmered under the lights, just as Rodriguez had intended. A similar ritual ensued. Hats came on, and teenagers morphed into professionals. The music began; voices boomed. The students pushed forth unrelentingly through their two songs, the intensity of their sound never waning. Collectively, they had the best vocals of any team at the contest. And they were highly technical and played tightly. [Their performance evoked a particular sense of Mexican pride.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P274SdOv8sM&ab_channel=mariachimusicdotcom) It seemed they could very well win this. When they were finished, the violinists held their bows in the air, then the whole group took an elegant bow. Again, the judges smiled and clapped approvingly.
-
-Twenty minutes later, it was the turn of Mariachi Nuevo Santander. They followed Las Vegas Academy of the Arts, which delivered a vigorous show that made clear why the Starr County teams considered them a threat. As the announcer called Roma’s name, the room erupted in loud cheers, red pompoms shaking in the air. Roma was known for packing the house with enthusiastic supporters. The relatives of Martinez, the violinist, waved individual block letters spelling out “NANA,” her nickname. As they’d rehearsed so many times, the students walked onto the stage in bone-colored outfits with red trim and red boots. Martinez signaled with her bow, and the first song began. [Roma played with a big, balanced sound and near-perfect technique,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cefwybr2G4A&ab_channel=mariachimusicdotcom) as it had done year after year under Garza. One judge, a guitarist named Jonathan Palomar, began nodding his head along to the beat.
-
-Then the second song started. Garza had selected “Qué Bonita Es Esta Vida,” popularized by the Colombian singer Jorge Celedón and arranged for mariachi. The song pays tribute to life, which Garza found appropriate after the isolation and deaths Starr County had endured because of the pandemic. Garcia, the violinist who’d sung the national anthem at the Border Patrol ceremony, began singing: *“I love the smell of the morning ... ”* Three students joined him in the chorus, harmonizing: *“Oh, how beautiful is this life! Although sometimes it hurts so much, and despite the sorrows, there is always someone who loves us, there is always someone who takes care of us. ... ”*
-
-The instrument solos followed. Christian Cano pulled his harp to the front of the stage and made his fingers dance on the strings. After playing with the violins, Martinez traded her instrument and joined the trumpeters in their group solo. As the students sang, Óscar Ortega, a judge who had been bobbing his head and tapping along to the music, now took a folded napkin and dabbed at his eyes. He’d done the same when Las Vegas Academy was performing, and now it became evident that he was wiping away tears. The judges took more notes, and when the show was over, they applauded as the audience chanted, “Roma, Roma, Roma!”
-
-The college teams followed the high schools, so it was nighttime before the judges walked onto the stage to announce the high school finalists. The first name they called came as a bit of a surprise — Roma’s junior-varsity group had made the cut. This was an impressive feat for Garza, who had coached both teams in the same amount of time the other directors had trained one. The next four announcements were not wholly unexpected. Mariachi Cascabel, Mariachi Grulla de Plata and Mariachi Nuevo Santander’s varsity team had made it, too, along with Mariachi Nuevo Cascabel from Sharyland High School, also from the Valley. Then, as Zárate had predicted, the sixth and last group was called: Mariachi Internacional from Las Vegas Academy of the Arts.
-
-That four of six finalists were from Starr County was another impressive feat. The judges explained that today’s scores would be tossed out, and each group would compete from scratch tomorrow before three new judges. After three months of preparation, it all would come down to one last performance.
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-**The last day of the** festival began on a promising note for Starr County: two of Grulla’s singers placed third in the vocal competition. All that was left for the directors that afternoon was to give the teams, now dressed and awaiting their warm-ups, a final message. Each director approached these moments differently. Rodriguez gathered his students in a hallway to tell them that, after reviewing a video of the previous day’s performance, he wanted to make some tweaks. “As a director, I’m asking for you to respect my decisions,” he said. The students nodded, and he led them backstage to their dressing room, where they would run through parts of the show he felt needed tightening.
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-In the dressing room next door, the Rio Grande City team’s warm-up had a welcome interruption when Carlos Martínez, the director of Mariachi Vargas, popped in to wish them well. He delivered an impromptu pep talk in Spanish. “For me, this is the most beautiful thing,” he said of mariachi music, “and how wonderful that being that you were born here in the United States, you’re continuing with our traditions from Mexico.” He encouraged the students to enjoy themselves onstage. When he left, Zárate decided to let his team relax in the minutes remaining before the show. He grabbed a guitarrón and joined the students as he sang “Mi Tesoro” — “my treasure” — and one of his assistants improvised a wistful violin solo.
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-A few doors down, the members of Mariachi Nuevo Santander stood around Garza with their eyes closed as he recited a prayer in Spanish. When he finished, they made the sign of the cross, and Cano, the freshman harpist, wiped tears from his eyes. A strong orator, Garza gave them a speech: “Yesterday, you thought it was your best performance? Keep it, or do it even better. But you’re going to show them the big heart that you have. And don’t leave anything behind. Everything, every single ounce of blood, of soul, of energy and heart and pride and passion will be onstage for everyone to hear it. You need to touch every single heart in that audience, including the judges’.”
-
-At 3:40 p.m., Mariachi Cascabel, the second group to perform, was in the shadows of the stage, ready to walk into the limelight. Zárate looked happy and relaxed. “Let it rip, guys!” he said, and the show was on.
-
-One by one, each of the groups repeated their rousing, energetic performances from the day before. There were small imperfections, but to the untrained ear, they were hard to discern. The judges, which this time included Martínez, along with the trumpeter Agustín Sandoval and the harpist Víctor Álvarez, listened intently, leaning in to share in one another’s ears and jotting down notes. At one point, Martínez drummed his hands on the table and played an imaginary guitar on his chest.
-
-Then it was over, and the judges disappeared into a private room to determine the winners. They had been asked to score the teams in five categories: trumpets, violins, rhythm section, vocalists and presentation. They huddled together and laid their sheets next to one another to compare notes. The judges shared their scores and positive impressions of each of the groups in the order they had performed.
-
-Rio Grande City: “Excellent change of rhythms, well managed. ... ”
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-Grulla: “The soloists, all of them, all of them very in tune, each one. ... ”
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-Roma: “Trumpets, it was just two of them, but they sounded very good. ... ”
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-Las Vegas: “I liked that they would sing pizzicatos, that’s something no one else does. ... ”
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-But there were also withering critiques. They were disappointed that one musician had sung so much she hardly played her instrument. In another group, they didn’t like that one boy wore an earring, another had long hair and a third had a nonmatching belt buckle. In the end, the scores for the top three teams were exceedingly close, with differences of less than a point and one tie. So they discussed additional factors, like the difficulty of the songs and how each group had made them feel. In the end, the judges agreed that they each ranked the teams in the same order, even if the differences were so minor.
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-“I do have one clear winner,” Sandoval said. “I do, too,” Álvarez agreed. When they were done scoring, Martínez reflected on how complicated it was, since only small details differentiated the top three mariachis. “How tough, how tough!” he said.
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-As word spread that an announcement was imminent, the restless students and parents returned to their seats, and the judges re-emerged on the stage. Martínez explained they would announce third, second and first place, and he passed the microphone to Álvarez to begin. “And third place goes to Mariachi — ” Álvarez paused for dramatic effect. “Nuevo Santander, Roma High School!”
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-The audience applauded, but an evident sense of surprise hung in the room. Several groups had hoped to push Roma into second place, but no one expected them to get third. This left the door wide open for not one but two other schools to shine this year. The Roma students looked disappointed, but they took the news gracefully, walking toward the stage with their heads held high. They accepted their trophy and posed for a group photo with the judges, then returned to their seats.
-
-It was Sandoval’s turn to announce the next place. “And second place — is for Mariachi Grulla de Plata, Grulla High School!” The room broke into cheers. The Rio Grande City students jumped from their seats with joy, shouting, and the Grulla team made its way to the front, looking proud and satisfied. On the stage, two girls sneaked in a selfie with their phones.
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-Now the Rio Grande City students stared tensely at the stage from their seats. Some clenched hands. Their school hadn’t been called, but neither had Las Vegas, which delivered powerful shows both days — as good as any of the Starr County groups, it seemed. So it was going to be everything or nothing for them. Martínez took the microphone and explained how difficult it had been to single out a winner. He congratulated all of the teams and their teachers for being such fine representatives of mariachi music.
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-“But this time,” he said, “we decided between the three of us that first place is for — Mariachi Cascabel!”
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-Image
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-Credit...Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times
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-Zárate’s students shrieked, jumping from their seats, clutching one another in sheer ecstasy and disbelief. They stormed the stage, screaming. They chanted, “Rio, Rio, Rio!” as they pumped their fists in the air. Down on the auditorium floor, Zárate smiled as his assistants hugged him and slapped his back. Ozuna, the violinist, accepted the trophy from a smiling Martínez, and the group posed for a photo. Then the Grulla students ran onto the stage to join their friends, and red- and blue-clad mariachis embraced each other joyously.
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-Afterward, in the theater lobby, Zárate looked happy but subdued. “I don’t even know what to feel — it’s just been a roller coaster,” he said. He reflected on all the challenges the semester had posed. His eyes were turning wet, and he smiled: “I should do another arrangement with all these feelings that I’m going through right now.”
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-**Plenty of other contests** would follow that spring. At an important competition at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Roma took first place over Rio Grande City and other teams, vindicating Garza and his students. And as summer came and turned to fall again, all three directors began to prepare to battle for another national title. On Nov. 17, this year’s Extravaganza competition will begin, though, in a somewhat melancholy transition, Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán, now under new management, will not return. The festival declined to meet a higher fee request, according to the event’s organizers, and another well-regarded group — as it happens, called Mariachi Nuevo Tecalitlán — will judge instead.
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-As far as what the future held for the Starr County students, that lay ahead. Some would leave the border, looking for greener pastures, and some would stay, responding to the pull of family and community. They would become mariachi instructors, engineers, perhaps even movie directors. Adrianna Martinez ended up enrolling in the radio, television and film program at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also plays for the university’s mariachi along with four other Roma graduates. Escamilla took a different path from his original plan, enrolling in a nursing program at a local college, all paid for through financial aid. “Yeah, it looks like this is my thing,” he told me with pride. But he was also consulting for Grulla’s mariachi, and he shared excitedly that five of their female vocalists made the finals and would compete at the Extravaganza.
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-What all the students shared is that mariachi had changed them. The experience of standing on a stage, of competing together as teammates, of pulling the audience into their music, had shown them all that they contained a much bigger version of themselves. Whatever path each one took, Yamil Yunes was right: They would always be mariachis.
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-Image
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-Credit...Benjamin Lowy for The New York Times
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----
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-**Cecilia Ballí** is a writer and cultural anthropologist based in Texas. She has conducted research on Tejano identity and culture, the sexual killing of women in Ciudad Juárez, the U.S.-Mexico border wall and Latino voter participation. **Benjamin Lowy** is a photographer who covered conflict and social issues for more than a decade before turning to adventure and underwater work.
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-# A Crime Beyond Belief
-
-## A Harvard-trained lawyer was convicted of committing bizarre home invasions. Psychosis may have compelled him to do it. But in a case that became a public sensation, he wasn’t the only one who seemed to lose touch with reality.
-
-###### The *Atavist* Magazine, No. 126
-
-[Katia Savchuk](https://www.katiasavchuk.com/) is a magazine writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. A proud generalist, she is drawn to stories about inequality, psychology, wrongdoing, and mysteries of all kinds. Previously, she was a staff reporter at *Forbes*. Her work has appeared in *The New Yorker, Mother Jones*, *Marie Claire*, *Elle*, *Pacific Standard*, and *The Washington Post,* among others. Follow her on Twitter at [@katiasav.](https://twitter.com/katiasav)
-
-**Editor:** Seyward Darby
-**Art Director:** Ed Johnson
-**Fact Checker:** Kyla Jones
-**Copy Editor:** Sean Cooper
-**Illustrator:** Juan Bernabeu
-
-*Published in April 2022.*
-
----
-
-1.
-
-**Just after seven** in the morning on June 9, 2015, Misty Carausu joined a group of police officers lining up outside a dark green cabin with white trim. The blinds inside were drawn. Jeffrey pines cast thick shadows across the driveway. The air was still but for the scrape of boots on asphalt and the occasional call of a bird.
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-Carausu, 35, was at least a head shorter than the other officers, and the only woman. She wore iridescent eye shadow and pearl earrings along with a tactical vest. As she gripped her gun, she felt as if she’d stepped into one of the true-crime documentaries she binge-watched at night. It was Carausu’s first day as a detective.
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-En route to the scene, she’d been filled in on the case. Around 3:30 a.m. the previous Friday, a 52-year-old nurse named Lynn Yen, who lived at the edge of Dublin, the suburb east of San Francisco where Carausu worked, had called 911. Minutes earlier, Lynn and her 60-year-old husband, Chung, woke to a flashlight and a laser shining in their faces. A masked man dressed in black stood at the foot of their bed. “We have your daughter, and she’s safe,” the man said. Kelly, 22, had been in her bedroom across the hall.
-
-Using what Lynn described as a “calm, soft voice,” the intruder told the couple to turn over and put their hands behind their backs. Then he announced that he would tie them up. When Chung felt the man touch him, he took a swing. Lynn grabbed her phone from the nightstand, locked herself in the bathroom, and called for help. She told the dispatcher that she heard fighting, then her husband yell, “Honey, go get the gun,” even though they didn’t own one. A few minutes later, the intruder fled downstairs and out the back door, which opened onto miles of rolling hills and open fields.
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-When officers arrived at the scene, Chung had bruises on his arms and face and was bleeding from a cut above his ear—he said the intruder had hit him with a metal flashlight. A window near the back door was open, and the screen had been removed. In the couple’s bedroom, police found a black wool glove and three plastic zip ties. On a gravel path behind the house, near a cluster of foxtails, officers recovered another zip tie and a six-inch shred of black duct tape. Kelly, who was unharmed, handed a sergeant something she’d found on a hallway cabinet near her room: a cell phone she didn’t recognize.
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-Police later traced the phone number to the cabin Carausu and her colleagues were now preparing to enter. It sat on a residential street in South Lake Tahoe, a ski resort town 130 miles from Dublin. As the raid began, Carausu heard the cabin’s front door splinter. Officers barked *“Search warrant!”* as they shoved through a barricade of chairs. Carausu maneuvered around clutter on the living room floor: a set of crutches, license plates, clothing, electronics, a massage table. Empty boxes were piled against a window; open bottles of wine and cans of spray paint littered the kitchen counters.
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-Carausu’s job was to process evidence. She snapped photos of a black ski mask, black duct tape, and mismatched black gloves. A stun gun sat on a rocking chair. In a banker’s box she found more duct tape and gloves, along with walkie-talkies, a radar detector, zip ties, rope, and a device for making keys. In a bathroom were makeup brushes and a partly empty bottle of NyQuil. An open tube of golden brunette hair dye lay on the sink, near a disposable glove stained with the dye’s residue. In one bedroom were three more gloves, yellow crime-scene tape, and, on the bed, a spiked dog-training collar; in another was a bottle of Vaseline lotion, used paper towels, and a penis pump. “This is creepy,” Carausu recalled thinking as she stuffed items into paper bags. “Something crazy happened in here.” The police also collected flashlights, cell phones, hard drives, and several computers, including an Asus laptop that had been stashed under a mattress.
-
-Around noon, Carausu and her colleagues drove to a tow yard to search a stolen white Mustang recovered near the cabin. Inside, they found items they thought could be linked to the Dublin break-in: two gloves matching one from the crime scene, both covered in foxtails; receipts for a flashlight, a speaker, and zip ties purchased near Dublin the night of the home invasion; burglary tools; and a metal flashlight. The back seat of the Mustang had been removed. Carausu wondered if someone had made room for a large object, such as a body.
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-Strangely, other clues didn’t seem connected to the Dublin crime. Among the recent destinations on the car’s GPS was an address in Huntington Beach, 400 miles south of Lake Tahoe. In the trunk, Carausu saw a blood-pressure cuff, a camouflage tarp, and a mesh vest with a wireless speaker in one of the pockets. She also found a BB gun, a dart gun, and a Nerf Super Soaker that had been painted black, with a flashlight and a laser pointer taped to the barrel. Stuffed in a large duffel bag was a blow-up doll in black clothing, rigged with wiring so that it could be made to sit or stand. The bag also contained a military-style pistol belt, its pouches crammed with two pairs of Speedo swim goggles. Carausu pulled one of them out. Black duct tape covered the lenses. Caught in the tape was a long strand of blond hair.
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-None of the victims in the Dublin home invasion were blond. Neither was the suspect, which Carausu knew because she’d watched officers escort him out of the cabin in handcuffs. He didn’t put up a fight when they burst through the door. He wandered out of a bedroom and obeyed commands to lie on the ground. In his late thirties, tall and fit, the man wore a black athletic shirt and jeans. He resembled Charlie Sheen, with a chiseled jawline and tousled dark hair.
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-“Do you know why we’re here?” a detective asked.
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-“Yes,” he replied.
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-The suspect said nothing else as officers led him to a patrol car. Before they loaded him inside, Carausu told the man to look at her camera. He stared intensely into the lens, his mouth an indecipherable line. Carausu read his name on pill bottles and mail scattered around the stolen Mustang: Matthew Muller.
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-2.
-
-**Muller grew up** in the suburbs of Sacramento, where homes flew American flags, wild turkeys roamed the streets, and fathers took their sons fishing for bass in Lake Natoma. His mother, Joyce, was a middle school English teacher, and his father, Monty, was a school administrator and wrestling coach. The family spent summers hiking in the Sierra Nevada, abalone diving in Bodega Bay, or relaxing at a lakeside cabin in Michigan. Each Christmas they hosted a party on their cul de sac, and Monty dressed up as Santa.
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-Muller was a strong-willed, introverted child. Despite his father’s best efforts, he didn’t take to wrestling or football, preferring to run or ski or walk the dog alone. He played trumpet in the school band and devoured dystopian novels by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Yevgeny Zamyatin. His favorite short story, Ray Bradbury’s “The Veldt,” was about two children who project their fantasies onto the walls of a virtual reality “nursery,” until make-believe lions come to life and eat the siblings’ parents.
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-Muller had a core group of friends at school, but bullies teased him about being overweight. Being picked on fueled his instinct to stick up for underdogs, an impulse he sometimes took to extremes. When his younger brother, Kent, was slow to talk, he appointed himself spokesperson to a degree that concerned their mom. “He’s never going to have a vocabulary if you keep speaking for him,” Joyce recalled thinking. Later, Muller stuffed gum in a girl’s trumpet after she taunted someone at a music competition.
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-During his senior year of high school, Muller learned that his father was having an affair. Monty moved in with the woman he was seeing, and he and Joyce divorced. Muller soon decided to enlist in the Marines, telling Joyce that he needed discipline and wanted to get in shape. In truth, he worried that paying for college would strain her finances.
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-Muller “was a round peg struggling to fit into a square hole” in the Marines, his roommate during boot camp later wrote. In the first 13 weeks, he lost more than 50 pounds. He didn’t join his platoon mates on weekend outings, instead squeezing in extra workouts. For a time he subsisted on Powerade and garlic rice. He earned the nickname Sergeant Mulder, after the FBI agent on *The* *X-Files,* because of his deadpan demeanor. Muller bristled at recruits who preyed on perceived weakness: When some bullied his roommate, Muller stood up for him.
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-Muller spent three years playing trumpet in the Marine Corps band at bases in California and Japan, where he also started a nonprofit to teach locals about the Internet. In 1999, he deployed to train soldiers in the Middle East. He earned several medals and a promotion before being honorably discharged.
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-Back home in California, Muller attended Pomona College, where he threw himself into volunteer work, which included helping homeless people secure government benefits and running an outdoors program. “More than anyone I had ever met, he strived to be noble, to be kind, to be generous,” his friend Eve Florin later wrote.
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-In the summer of 2001, Muller traveled to Prague for an academic program. There he met a driven young woman from Kyrgyzstan with a slight figure and long dark hair. They fell in love. (The woman declined to be interviewed. At her request, *The Atavist* is not using her name.) After Muller graduated from Pomona, they exchanged vows under an arch of white roses on the sun-dappled shores of Donner Lake, about 15 miles north of Lake Tahoe.
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-In 2003, the couple moved to Boston, where he started at Harvard Law School and she attended Boston College. Muller became involved with Harvard’s Legal Aid Bureau, where he represented low-income tenants and immigrants who were victims of domestic violence. On one occasion, a client’s husband found a business card that the bureau’s receptionist had given her and beat her so severely that her jaw had to be wired shut. Muller blamed himself. “Their crisis felt like it was part of my life too,” he said in an interview.
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-After earning his law degree, Muller stayed at Harvard to teach and work in the Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program. Dressing in suits for class, he came across as “very formal,” “intense,” and “guarded,” but also “extremely knowledgeable” and “someone who truly cared about the cause and the immigrant community,” a former student of his recalled. Muller earned near perfect ratings as a lecturer and worked with Deborah Anker, a leading scholar of immigration law, authoring papers and Supreme Court briefs. When Anker went on sabbatical, she tapped him to head the clinical program. “He was warm, caring, earnest, smart, enthusiastic, engaging, thoughtful,” Anker recalled. “He was a super good human being.”
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-Muller was unusually devoted to his clients, buying one a wedding gift and letting another stay at his apartment. Even when he won a case, he couldn’t shake the injustice he perceived in the world. “Part of me would be really sad, because it should not take all this effort just to make something the way it should’ve been,” he said. He likened the feeling to “going into a room and needing to straighten the picture, set it right.”
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-For the program’s anniversary one year, Muller tracked down dozens of alumni and framed their messages as a gift to Anker. His own note read: “Learning from you has been, and I think always will be, the highlight of my legal career.” This struck Anker as odd. “I thought he was going to be a leading immigration lawyer in America,” she said. “This is not the height of your career—this is the beginning.”
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-## Muller scoured the room for anything out of place, anything that could be a bug. Over and over, he searched for answers among the snaking wires and blinking lights.
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-**It came as** a shock to Muller’s parents when, in the summer of 2008, he revealed that he had bipolar disorder. Mental illness ran in Monty’s family, though they didn’t speak of it much. Muller had never mentioned any mental health problems to his parents, beyond sometimes feeling blue during the winter months, and neither had his wife.
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-In fact, Muller had grappled with disturbing thoughts since his time in the Marines. After receiving a series of anthrax vaccines before his Middle East mission, he struggled to get out of bed for weeks, and his performance on fitness tests plummeted. (He later attributed his symptoms to Gulf War syndrome.) For the first time, bleak thoughts took up residence in his mind: *You’re not good enough, you’re the worst person in the world.* He’d been considering a long career in the military, but now he decided to request a discharge.
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-In college, Muller fell into a cycle: Every summer and fall, he was productive and slept little; every winter and spring, he labored to finish assignments and his mood darkened. As the winter chill set in during his second year of law school, negative thoughts cut particularly deep: *You’re not doing enough to help, you’re horrible, the world is terrible*. For the first time, he contemplated suicide.
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-Over the years, Muller saw several psychiatrists. One at Harvard diagnosed him with major depression, noting that he also showed signs of mania. Muller tried medication but stopped each time because he didn’t like the side effects. He took pains to hide his condition from his parents, from his colleagues, and, as much as possible, from his wife, who moved away in 2005 to attend law school. “It felt like a weakness, something I shouldn’t be troubling other people with,” Muller said.
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-He especially didn’t want anyone finding out about the time a delusion took hold of him. It happened while he was working at Harvard, in an office on the fourth floor of Pound Hall, a concrete building at the edge of campus. He began to suspect that the government was tapping his phone and hacking his computer. Officials were after him, he decided, because some of his clients had been accused of having links to terrorists. Nothing specific triggered his paranoia—it began as a feeling and his mind filled in the gaps.
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-Muller frantically inspected wall conduits that held bundles of telephone wires and followed their trail to a server room in the basement. Through a crack between two doors, he glimpsed a mess of equipment. He scoured the room for anything out of place, anything that could be a bug. Over and over, he searched for answers among the snaking wires and blinking lights.
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----
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-**Muller hoped that** escaping New England’s winters and trading asylum law for the tamer world of patent litigation would improve his mood, so in 2009 he and his wife moved to Silicon Valley, where he started a job at a large law firm. But instead of feeling better, he again became suicidal. He agreed to get help, and a psychiatrist prescribed Wellbutrin. The antidepressant quieted Muller’s suicidal thoughts and kept him productive at his new job, but it also prevented him from sleeping.
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-One night, he was tossing and turning on the couch to avoid waking his wife when he heard a distant, muffled voice. Half asleep, he thought the TV had come on. He heard voices again on subsequent nights, closer and clearer this time. At first he told himself he was dreaming, but eventually he was forced to admit that the voices were there when he was awake. They were androgynous, almost robotic. They didn’t tell him what to do; instead, they kept up a running commentary, mostly about his faults.
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-Muller didn’t tell his family, concerned they’d think he was “dangerous crazy.” Nor did he inform his psychiatrist, fearing it would end up in his bar application. He had let his new employer assume that he wasn’t yet licensed to practice law because he needed to retake the bar exam; in fact, he had passed the exam but not yet registered with the California bar, agonizing over what to write about his mental health in the required “moral character” section of the paperwork.
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-In Muller’s telling, to quiet the voices and wear himself out enough to sleep, he went on long walks at night. Often he hiked to the Stanford Dish, a radio telescope along a popular trail near the Stanford University campus. Not long after midnight one Friday in late September 2009, he was returning to his car in College Terrace, a residential neighborhood in Palo Alto, when a police officer stopped him and asked to see his ID. According to Muller, when the officer inquired what he was doing there so late, he said that he was visiting a friend—he was reluctant to admit that he’d trespassed on a trail that was closed after dark. The officer reported that Muller claimed to be a visiting professor at Stanford, which police later determined was false.
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-Three weeks later, a Palo Alto police detective came to Muller’s apartment and left a business card with his wife. When Muller called the number, he learned that police wanted to question him about an attempted sexual assault in College Terrace. His name had come up in recent reports of suspicious persons in the area. He told the detective that he’d read about the incident in the local paper, and he agreed to meet.
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-According to Muller, before he could make it to the station, two detectives showed up at his law firm to question him. The encounter set him on edge. He wondered if the detectives had come to install spy equipment in his office. Recalling his recent asylum cases, he decided that they were conspiring with the Chinese government. (The Palo Alto Police Department declined to confirm that Muller was questioned at his office, citing an open investigation.)
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-Muller already had suspicions about a certain Honda Accord often parked near his apartment. He’d been placing pebbles behind the wheels to check whether it moved and varying his route to work to avoid being followed. Now he memorized exit routes in his office building and worked with the blinds shut. When he became convinced that his pursuers were using a laser microphone to pick up sound vibrations in his office, he decamped to the firm’s library. “It seemed like this was going to rapidly escalate. They were trying to destroy me, because they wanted to make me lose my job, isolate me, make me lose my credibility,” Muller recalled thinking. “At that point, I started getting afraid for my family.”
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-He felt he had no choice but to flee. Muller traded his car, which he assumed was bugged, for his mother’s SUV and stocked up on food and survival gear. A few days later, he disappeared.
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-*Misty Carausu*
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-3.
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-**The day after** the South Lake Tahoe raid, Misty Carausu arrived at her new office on the second floor of the Dublin Civic Center. At the time, the police department occupied half the building, which resembles a ring cut in half and the fragments slid apart. Carausu sat down in an empty gray cubicle in a room with drab carpeting. She hadn’t yet tacked up photos of her teenage son, whom she had at 16 and raised on her own.
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-Carausu didn’t plan on becoming a cop. Pretty and bubbly, with manicured nails and striking hazel eyes, she was in her mid-twenties and working as an assistant manager at a Safeway when a friend’s husband was convicted of sexually assaulting a mutual friend. She joined the force hoping to find justice for rape victims. After a decade as a deputy, Carausu, who fostered bunnies, sometimes compared herself to Judy Hopps, the idealistic rabbit who works as a cop in Disney’s *Zootopia*.
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-As she labeled evidence from the cabin, Carausu couldn’t get the blond strand of hair she’d found in the Mustang out of her mind. “This wasn’t his first time,” she told her colleagues. “We’re going to solve some crimes.” With her boss’s support, Carausu began to investigate whether they’d stumbled onto something larger than a single home invasion.
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-In police databases, Matthew Muller’s name yielded a hit for an unsolved 2009 break-in near Stanford. A 32-year-old woman was sleeping in her apartment in College Terrace when a strange man jumped on top of her. He appeared to be in his twenties and was white, tall, and lean. He wore a mask, black gloves, and black spandex-like clothing. The man tied her hands behind her back, bound her ankles with Velcro straps, and covered her eyes with tape. Then he gave her a choice: drink NyQuil, get shocked with a stun gun, or be injected with what he called “A-bomb.” When she opted for the NyQuil, the man confirmed with her that she wasn’t allergic to any of its ingredients before pouring the medicine down her throat.
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-The intruder gathered personal information and indicated he’d use it to steal her money. At times the victim heard the man whisper to someone, and she would later describe seeing a silhouette in the room, but she never heard a second voice. She reported that the man tried to rape her and she fought back. When she made up a story about having been raped in high school, he stopped, saying he didn’t want to victimize her again. Before leaving, he threatened to harm her family if she called 911, and mentioned that he had “planted evidence” to mislead authorities.
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-Three weeks before the attack, Carausu learned, a police officer had come across Muller walking late at night in the vicinity of the crime. Police later discovered that the College Terrace victim, a Stanford student, had attended an event that Muller organized at Harvard the previous year. Palo Alto detectives identified him as their primary suspect. But DNA recovered at the crime scene wasn’t a match. Ultimately, law enforcement didn’t find enough evidence to recommend charging Muller.
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-Carausu discovered that the home invasion had eerie parallels to two other unsolved crimes in Silicon Valley. Less than a month before the College Terrace incident, a 27-year-old woman in Mountain View woke around 5 a.m. to find a man on top of her. He appeared to be white and slim, about six feet tall, and wore tight black clothing and a ski mask. When she started screaming, he put his hand over her mouth and explained that he was part of a group of criminals that planned to steal her identity and wire money abroad. The man bound her hands and ankles, then placed blacked-out swim goggles over her eyes—she felt her hair catch in one of the straps. He made her drink what tasted like cough syrup before collecting personal information. At one point, he used her phone to send a message to her boss saying that she was sick. Periodically, the woman heard him talking to someone, but she never heard or saw anyone else.
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-Eventually, the man told her, “I have some bad news. I’m going to have to rape you.” According to an account the victim later shared with NBC’s *Dateline*, she begged him not to and he relented. “I can’t do this,” he muttered. “I’m sorry about this.” Throughout the encounter, the intruder was “polite,” the victim recalled. Before leaving, he advised her to get a dog for protection. The woman told *Dateline* that when she called the Mountain View police, they initially suggested she might have had a bad dream. Ultimately, authorities concluded that the person behind the attack had also likely committed the one in College Terrace. (In a statement for this story, the Mountain View police said, “We continue to keep this investigation open and have been and are treating it seriously.”)
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-The final case Carausu learned about happened three years after the other two, in November 2012. A 26-year-old woman who lived just north of the Stanford campus awoke at 2:20 a.m. to see a masked man in gloves and dark clothing at the foot of her bed. He held her down, but she screamed and fought back. Eventually, he fled. The woman later noticed that her computer had been moved and found two “bump keys,” which open any lock from a certain manufacturer, near the front door. In neither that case nor the one in Mountain View was Muller named as a suspect.
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-Carausu stumbled upon an additional clue when she called the owner of the stolen Mustang police had recovered in South Lake Tahoe. He turned out to be a medical student who lived on the edge of Mare Island, 40 miles northwest of Dublin. In early January 2015, he had returned from a trip to find that someone had taken his car keys from his home and driven his Mustang out of the garage. When Carausu told him that her department had arrested someone for a home invasion near where his car was found, he asked if she’d heard of the “Mare Island creeper,” a Peeping Tom.
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-Between August 2014 and January 2015, at least four women in the area had reported seeing a man peering through their windows or climbing on their roof. Two had just taken a shower when they spotted him. One saw him taking pictures, while another saw him descending a ladder. Two of the women lived on the same street: Kirkland Avenue.
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-Some of the women described the voyeur as a white man, 25 to 35, wearing a black jacket. In August 2014, according to a Facebook post later documented in a police report, a Mare Island resident who heard sounds on his roof late one night saw someone fitting a similar description flee with a ladder. The resident encountered a strange man on two other occasions: One night, the man was crouching under the resident’s window; he said he was searching for his puppy, a husky. Another night, the resident found the same man in his backyard, where he claimed to be looking for 531 Kirkland Ave.; the address didn’t exist. The student spotted the man a third time, walking a young husky and a golden retriever. According to a Facebook post, a woman who lived on Klein Avenue, a block from Kirkland, said that her neighbor had a husky and a golden retriever. The owner of the Mustang told Carausu that he’d heard the woman’s neighbor was a former lawyer who had been in the military.
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-Then, as suddenly as the Peeping Tom incidents started, they stopped. “It was about the same time that the Vallejo kidnapping happened,” the Mustang owner told Carausu. *Why does that ring a bell?* she thought.
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-After the Dublin home invasion and Muller’s arrest, a colleague of Carausu’s had put out an alert asking area police departments for information about similar crimes. Vallejo didn’t respond. Online, Carausu found news stories about the kidnapping, which occurred three months earlier. She noted that one of the victims had blond hair. Then she remembered why the case had caught her attention: The Vallejo police had deemed it a hoax.
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-## A blinding light pulsed from the corner of the room, and red dots twitched across the walls—they looked like laser gun sights. “This is a robbery. We are not here to hurt you,” a man said in a businesslike tone.
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-**A mile wide** and less than four miles long, Mare Island is a flat, windswept peninsula within the city of Vallejo. According to legend, it was named by a Mexican general in 1835, after his white mare plunged from a capsized ship into the nearby Carquinez Strait, only to reappear onshore days later. For more than a century, the land was home to a naval base where warships and nuclear submarines were built. After the shipyard closed in 1996, Vallejo launched an ambitious redevelopment plan for Mare Island, hiring a private developer to install quaint residential neighborhoods and millions of square feet of commercial space. But the promise of instant suburbia proved illusory. Amid the Great Recession, both the city and the developer declared bankruptcy. Only around 350 of the 1,400 planned homes were built. A shopping center and a waterfront promenade were never completed. No grocery stores, cafés, or libraries opened. Instead, the landscape remained strewn with rusty railroad tracks and abandoned warehouses, concrete bomb shelters and toxic waste sites.
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-Lined with young ash trees and fluted lampposts, Kirkland Avenue sits at the center of Mare Island, on the edge of a tiny, crescent-shaped subdivision hugging a small park. Construction on the next street over halted so abruptly that it dead-ends after a single block, like a movie set. Most homes on Kirkland border a raised bank that opens onto salt marshes stretching out to San Pablo Bay. At night, pale street lamps strain against the dark, and the air smells of wild fennel.
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-Around 2 p.m. on March 23, 2015, Vallejo police got a call from a 30-year-old man named Aaron Quinn, who lived on Kirkland Avenue in an eggshell yellow house framed by neat hedges and pink rosebushes. At the scene, and later at the station, he recounted a strange story.
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-Quinn said that he’d spent the previous evening with 29-year-old Denise Huskins, whom he’d been dating for around eight months. The pair had met at a hospital in Vallejo, where they both worked as physical therapists. They looked like an all-American couple: He was a former high school quarterback; she had blue eyes and long blond hair. Around midnight, Quinn checked that all the windows and doors were locked and they went upstairs to bed.
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-Three hours later, Quinn started awake. A blinding light pulsed from the corner of the room, and red dots twitched across the walls—they looked like laser gun sights. “This is a robbery. We are not here to hurt you,” a man said in a businesslike tone. He told the couple to lie facedown, but Quinn was too shocked to move. “Aaron, you’re not turning over,” the man said. The intruder knew his name.
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-The man placed plastic zip ties on the bed and told Huskins to bind Quinn’s wrists and ankles. As she complied, her hands shaking, the man reassured her, “You are doing a good job.” He had Huskins walk to the large closet across the room, then helped Quinn off the bed so he could hop over to join her. Quinn kept his head down as instructed, and behind him he heard the crackle of a stun gun. He lay down on the carpet beside Huskins, shivering in his underwear.
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-Through the closet floor, Quinn heard someone downstairs rifling through kitchen cabinets and running a drill; he hoped this was just a twisted robbery. He felt the man put swim goggles with blacked-out lenses over his eyes and headphones over his ears. He heard melodic wind chimes, then a robotic voice. “Stay calm,” it said. “Our motivation is purely financial.” The recording, which at one point addressed Quinn by name, said he would be given a mix of NyQuil and diazepam, a sedative. The man took the couple’s blood pressure and asked if either of them had allergies or were on medications that were “contraindicated.” When they said no, he poured the liquid down their throats. Soon after, Quinn heard the man move Huskins to another room.
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-A new recording played in his ears. “You will be asked a series of questions,” it said. “If we believe you are not telling the truth, your partner will be punished by electric shock, then cuts to the face.” The intruder removed the headphones from Quinn’s ears and recited the address of Quinn’s childhood home. The man also knew where Quinn banked and asked for passwords to his financial and email accounts, his phone and laptop, and his Wi-Fi network.
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-After leaving briefly to speak with Huskins, the man asked Quinn if she looked like a woman named Andrea Roberts. “Yes, they both have long blond hair,” Quinn replied. Roberts was Quinn’s ex-fiancée and one of his and Huskins’s coworkers. She had stayed in a separate bedroom at Quinn’s house after they broke up and moved out around the time he and Huskins began dating. “This was intended for Andrea,” the intruder said. “We got the wrong intel.”
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-The man left the room again for what felt like half an hour. When he came back, he told Quinn that Huskins was being taken, and that Quinn would need to pay a ransom of several thousand dollars. If he complied, Huskins would be returned within 48 hours. The man replaced Quinn’s headphones. A recording explained that the people committing the crime were a “black-market group” who collected “personal and financial debts.” Quinn was to stay in the house, in a marked-off area, and await instructions. If he failed to follow orders or called the police, his partner or family would be hurt. “Waiting will be the hardest part,” the recording said. “You should entertain yourself by reading.”
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-The man cut the zip ties around Quinn’s feet and guided him downstairs, where he again bound his ankles with duct tape and then laid him across the living room couch. He told Quinn to stay put until sunrise, then call in sick for work and text Huskins’s boss that she was dealing with a family emergency. The man said that he would be taking Quinn’s car; he would let him know where it was in the morning so he could drive to the bank.
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-“Are you comfortable?” the man asked. Quinn asked for a blanket. “Oh yes,” the man said. “I forget how cold it is, because we’re wearing wetsuits.”
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-Quinn heard the trunk of his car shut, the engine start, and the garage door open. Using an armrest, he nudged the goggles off. The clock read 5 a.m. Groggy from the sedatives, he felt his eyes grow heavy. For the next six and a half hours, he drifted in and out of sleep. Eventually, he wiggled his wrists out of the zip ties and hopped to the kitchen, where scissors had been left for him to cut his ankles free. A device that looked like a security camera with a motion sensor beeped across the room. Strips of red tape on the floor marked the perimeter Quinn wasn’t supposed to cross. His car, $200 in cash, and his Asus laptop were missing. Huskins was gone.
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-Soon after, Quinn received an email instructing him to take out $8,500 in cash from two different accounts. “We do not wish to trigger the $10000 reporting limit,” it said. If the bank asked why he needed the money, a second email instructed, he should reply that it was to pay for a ski boat. Quinn told police that he’d agonized over whether to contact them at all, because of the kidnapper’s threats. Eventually, he spoke with his brother, an FBI agent, who advised him to call 911.
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-At the Vallejo police station, seated on a swivel chair under fluorescent lights, Quinn gave his statement to a pair of detectives. After a couple of hours, a stocky, balding man walked in wearing a blue T-shirt and jeans and chewing gum. He introduced himself as Mathew Mustard, the lead detective on the case. At first Mustard’s tone was collegial, but he soon made it clear he didn’t believe Quinn’s story. “There ain’t no frogmen came into your house,” Mustard said. “Nobody dressed in wetsuits. It didn’t happen.”
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-Mustard later stated that he thought many details in Quinn’s account sounded fantastical: swim goggles, relaxing music, prerecorded messages, a perpetrator who supplied his victim with a blanket and reading material. The detective probed Quinn for information about his personal life, and Quinn said that he and Huskins had recently hit a rough patch. She’d found texts he sent to Roberts, his former fiancée, asking to rekindle their relationship. The night of the bizarre events Quinn described, Huskins had come over to talk through everything, and the couple had been drinking.
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-As far as Mustard knew, officers saw no signs of forced entry at the house. Upstairs they smelled “a strong scented odor” and noted that the carpets looked freshly vacuumed. Quinn’s comforter was gone from his bed, and the sheet had a small bloodstain. Police found Quinn’s car in a parking lot just three minutes from his house. The emails Quinn claimed were from the kidnappers had been sent from his own account, and he was in possession of Huskins’s phone. After his girlfriend disappeared, Quinn didn’t act as Mustard expected a crime victim would: He took a nap, called in sick to work, and texted Huskins’s boss, ultimately waiting more than eight hours to call 911.
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-At the station, Mustard laid out his own theory. According to Quinn, the detective said he believed something “bad” had happened between the couple. Maybe they were fighting and Quinn pushed Huskins down the stairs, or maybe they were experimenting with drugs or sex and something went wrong. Mustard speculated that Quinn decided to cover up whatever happened with a crazy story. (The Vallejo police referred all questions about the department and individual officers to the City Attorney’s Office. Calls requesting comment were not returned.)
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-Quinn admitted that the whole thing sounded “like a movie,” but he insisted he was telling the truth. More than ten hours into the interrogation, he agreed to a lie detector test. A polygrapher from the FBI, which had been called in to assist with the investigation, told him afterward, “There’s no question in my mind that you failed this test, and you failed it *miserably.*” Aaron gripped his head in his hands. “I don’t know where she is,” he said. Eventually, he asked for a lawyer.
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-As the police department prepared a press release, Mustard seemed convinced that he knew how the story would end. “I’m looking for dead Denise,” he said at one point. According to Quinn, Mustard told him, “There ain’t going to be but one \[suspect\]. It’s going to be *you*.”
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-4.
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-**Joyce Zarback,** Matthew Muller’s mother, had just finished baking a casserole on a Saturday afternoon in November 2009 when she got a call from her daughter-in-law. Usually unflappable, the young woman was sobbing. Muller was gone, and she didn’t know where he was. She was scared something bad had happened.
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-Zarback was stunned. Muller and his wife had just moved to California, and Muller seemed excited about his new job. After revealing his bipolar diagnosis the previous year, he’d assured his parents he was seeing a psychiatrist and taking medication.
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-Zarback called a friend to say she wouldn’t make it to their gourmet cooking club. In her sixties, Zarback was fit, with blue eyes and a crisp blond bob. She tended to power through tough times with a Protestant stoicism. Now she asked her second husband, John, to drive her to Muller’s apartment in Menlo Park, where they met Monty, her ex-husband, and Kent, her other son.
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-Distraught, Muller’s wife relayed what she knew: Around 12:30 the previous afternoon, she’d come out of the shower to find Muller gone, along with his bike and the SUV he’d recently borrowed from his mom. Muller had left a note on a flash drive: “I’m going completely off the grid—no phone, email, credit cards, etc., so please do not try to track me as it will only draw attention.” Later, a scheduled email arrived explaining that he was running from people waging “psychological warfare” against him. “I live in terror most of the time and can’t keep up appearances any longer,” Muller wrote. “This is perhaps the least extreme thing I can do to resolve it that does not also expose everybody to criminal liability.”
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-Nothing Zarback had read in *Bipolar Disorder for Dummies* helped her make sense of the situation. Her concern grew when Muller’s father revealed that Muller had borrowed a pistol, supposedly to take his wife shooting. Muller’s dad and brother drove off to search for Muller in Yosemite National Park, one of his favorite hiking spots. His wife, who had already reported him missing, composed herself enough to call anyone who might know something: Muller’s psychiatrist, Deborah Anker, other Harvard colleagues. No one had any idea where he was or why he had fled.
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-Next, Muller’s wife searched his recent purchases for clues. He had ordered more than 80 items over the previous two weeks. Zarback wrote some of them down: a tarp, a solar shower, water carriers, a survival guide, an axe, a utility knife, mosquito nets. A few purchases had less obvious uses in the wild, such as a laser and a motion sensor. Muller also bought *Knife of Dreams,* a fantasy novel in which one character has a mental disorder that involves hearing voices and destines him for “descent into terminal madness.” It dawned on Zarback that Muller must have spent days or even weeks stashing gear in the garage, hiding traces of a disordered mind in the recesses of his ordinary life. “This was a carefully planned-out thing,” she said. “Here is this person who’s led this model life who’s now just imploding.”
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-Two days after Muller disappeared, his wife received a message from him. He wanted to know if Zarback’s SUV was equipped with LoJack, technology that uses GPS data to locate stolen cars. Eventually, he revealed that he was staying just outside Zion National Park in Utah, not far from the city of Hurricane. He agreed to let his wife pick him up.
-
-## Not long after the divorce was finalized, according to Muller’s ex, her housemate came to her room one night, visibly shaken. She said that she’d woken to find a man standing over her, watching her sleep.
-
-**Muller’s memory** of what happened after he left home is patchy, but he recalled taking a circuitous route to Utah, making reservations at three hotels, and possibly taping his cell phone to a long-haul truck to throw off the Chinese government, which he was still convinced was after him. After hiding supplies in two caches in case he was attacked, Muller hiked for more than a day before setting up camp near a creek. He walled off the site with a tarp and surrounded it with motion detectors and trip wires that would set off alarms attached to his wrists.
-
-At first, encountering nothing alive but the occasional rabbit, Muller felt relieved that he’d shaken his pursuers. But before long the landscape itself seemed to grow ominous. Prickly pears became faces contorting in pain. A mesa menaced him by day and haunted his dreams. He eventually returned to the SUV and contacted his wife on a burner phone.
-
-It was decided that Muller should stay with his mom for a while. When his wife dropped him off, Zarback hardly recognized her son. He’d dyed his hair blond and seemed like an actor who’d taken on a new role, that of a scared and sickly child. During their walks on a nearby trail, his eyes darted feverishly, discerning dark omens in the dry grass and danger in the glassy face of Lake Natoma. For the next nine months, Muller sank into a paralyzing depression. He left his job and moved in with his father, only leaving bed for an hour a day to force down food and guess at the combination of the lock on Monty’s gun safe.
-
-Then Muller began to climb out of the hole. He agreed to see his psychiatrist, resumed medication, and moved back in with his wife. He began volunteering with a legal nonprofit, and in March 2011 he got a job with Reeves and Associates, a firm in San Francisco specializing in immigration. Soon after, Muller registered with the state bar: He was finally able to practice law in California. Steven Malm, an associate who joined the firm around the same time, was impressed by Muller’s intelligence and dedication to his clients, but he sensed something was off below the surface. “There was an angst, a certain energy driving him that was stronger than you’d normally see,” Malm recalled. “It was almost like he was in a different world.”
-
-In fact, Muller was once again losing his grip on reality. Struggling to focus, he stayed in the office overnight in hopes of catching up on casework. After he was spotted on a security camera, some of the firm’s partners asked him to stop. According to Muller, he heard his boss, Robert Reeves, say on one occasion, “We don’t need people here who have to take pills to stay right in the head,” and on another, “It would be nice if we could just chip our associates.” Muller believed Reeves had read an email Muller sent to his psychiatrist and had learned of his bipolar diagnosis, and that his boss was now spying on and plotting against him. (Reeves died in 2016; the firm did not respond to requests for comment.)
-
-Less than six months after joining Reeves and Associates, Muller copied thousands of files from the company’s network onto a flash drive, installed a program that wiped his computer, and sent an email announcing his immediate resignation. Through monitoring software, his employer discovered that he’d taken data, and the firm sued him, assuming that he planned to use it to start his own practice. In fact, Muller had a different motive: to find irrefutable evidence that Reeves was tracking him. “I mostly wanted to prove to myself that I wasn’t crazy,” he said. Muller found no proof. The firm eventually dropped the suit.
-
-Muller got a job with another immigration firm. A burst of manic energy kept him productive at first, but soon he shifted into what he called a “mission from God” phase. On the side, he formed a nonprofit called Immigrant Ability to advocate for immigrants with mental illness. He became consumed with helping a pro bono client named Blanca Medina, a mother who was about to be deported to El Salvador. In mid-2012, Muller filed a legal motion on Medina’s behalf and launched an online petition that gathered 118,000 signatures. As a result, federal officials agreed to halt her deportation at the last minute and reopen her case.
-
-It was a victory, but Muller couldn’t enjoy it. He began to suspect that federal immigration authorities were tapping his phone and retaliating against his other clients, and that his new boss was in on the plot. He didn’t last much longer in the job.
-
-In December 2012, Muller’s wife filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. They soon signed a settlement in which she agreed to pay Muller $3,400 a month in alimony. In later court filings, she stated that she accepted the terms only because Muller “continuously pressured and intimidated” her. She claimed that Muller had told her he’d “hacked into my computer and was using surveillance to keep track of my actions,” and that he “threatened to use his immigration expertise/contacts” to get her and her family deported. She also stated that, during one meeting, Muller grabbed her to keep her from leaving while he checked her car and purse for recording devices. Afterward, her mother and brother reported seeing bruises on her arm.
-
-Muller’s ex also claimed that, during divorce proceedings, she learned that Muller had faked documents while they were married in order to add her as a cosigner on a $50,000 car loan, and that he threatened to “destroy me and my family” if she reported the fraud. She also said that, prior to the alimony settlement, Muller had forced her to lend him more than $22,000. When one alimony check was late, Muller wrote to her, “You are going to be responsible for losing your job, losing your license, and the suffering that will bring your family.” Another time, he sent her an email claiming that, in case of his “disappearance/detention/incapacity,” people with fake names would contact her and an automated “system” would “guarantee you could never take me out without paying a high price.”
-
-In an interview, Muller said, “Unless I was in the middle of some sort of a psychotic episode, I have no memory of anything like that.” He also said that his ex-wife knowingly cosigned for the car loan, and that the $22,000 was an advance on spousal support. Muller denied threatening to get her or her family deported, and said that he didn’t intentionally hurt his ex-wife.
-
-Not long after the divorce was finalized, according to Muller’s ex, her housemate came to her room one night, visibly shaken. She said that she’d woken to find a man standing over her, watching her sleep. The intruder had fled the apartment before she could react. “At the time, I had dismissed it as perhaps a nightmare,” Muller’s ex wrote in a court filing. Her housemate, though, “was absolutely certain and very scared.”
-
-“I did not think it could have been Matthew,” his ex stated. She later changed her mind.
-
----
-
-**Zarback did what** she could to help her son. She gave him money to lease an apartment in downtown Sacramento, where Muller seemed content to spend his days decorating his home, watching movies, and walking Paya, the golden retriever puppy he had adopted. But when Zarback came over, she noticed that one bedroom was “like a garbage can,” so cluttered with boxes, newspapers, and furniture that she couldn’t see the floor. “Everything else would be neat and clean and beautiful, and this one room—it’s kind of like his mind,” she said.
-
-Muller’s traffic citations, overdue bills, and tax notices showed up in Zarback’s mail. She discovered that he’d been pulled over several times for traffic violations and twice arrested for driving with a suspended license. Muller’s bar membership was suspended, initially because he didn’t pay dues, and later based on disciplinary charges stemming from his mishandling of a case in his last job. He would ultimately be disbarred. In March 2014, his landlord sent him an eviction notice, and the following month Muller filed for bankruptcy; the case was dismissed after he failed to submit documents on time.
-
-Zarback drove her son to court, ensured that he renewed his driver’s license, and paid his tickets to keep him out of jail. She made appointments for him with psychiatrists at a veterans hospital but had no way to know whether he was taking his medication. When she or Monty asked questions, Muller assured them he was fine or refused to discuss his illness.
-
-In the summer of 2014, Muller found a job at ThinkTank Learning, an after-school academic program. He also started dating a medical researcher, and they moved into a four-bedroom house with ionic columns on Mare Island, a block over from Kirkland Avenue. In addition to caring for Paya, the couple sometimes dog-sat another golden retriever and a husky. Zarback hoped that her son was rebuilding his life, but when she visited his new home, she noticed that one room was already filling up with boxes.
-
-One day, Muller’s new partner called to tell Zarback that she was concerned about Muller taking long walks around Mare Island at night, dressed in black. Soon after, the couple broke up, and Muller took leave from his job. “After that, something clicked off in him,” Zarback recalled. “He just gave in to whatever illness this was.”
-
-In early 2015, Muller asked his mom if he could stay in the cabin she and her husband owned in South Lake Tahoe. She thought spending time outdoors with Paya would help his mental health, so she said yes. Instead, Muller grew more reclusive, making excuses when Zarback offered to visit and seeming eager to hang up during their weekly calls. When she did see him one day that spring, Muller exploded in anger, because he thought his parents were spying on him.
-
-Zarback felt like there was nowhere to turn as she lost her son to his inner demons. She didn’t think she could force him into treatment, because to her mind, he wasn’t an imminent danger to himself or to others. She once dialed a number the VA had given her to use in a crisis, but the person on the line told her to call 911.
-
-The morning of June 8, 2015, Muller phoned Zarback and asked her to pick him up at a Starbucks in South Lake Tahoe. She asked him why. “Mom,” Muller replied, “can you just come get me?”
-
-After Zarback picked him up, Muller recounted his plans to live like a monk in the middle of the desert. He seemed determined and slightly anxious. Half an hour after they arrived at Zarback’s house, Muller announced that he was borrowing his brother’s car and driving back to the cabin. He wouldn’t explain why. None of it made sense to Zarback.
-
-“Can’t you stay awhile?” she asked.
-
-“No, Mom,” Muller said. “I need to get back.”
-
-
-
-5.
-
-**Henry K. Lee** was one of the first people to report that Denise Huskins had gone missing from her boyfriend’s home on March 23. Forty-one years old, with a receding hairline and black plastic-framed glasses, Lee was a crime reporter for the *San Francisco Chronicle.* He had an enthusiasm for his beat that hadn’t wavered in more than two decades, since he joined the paper as an intern. It wasn’t unusual for him to report while on vacation with his family or to file six stories a day.
-
-The day after Huskins vanished, Lee drove to Mare Island in his aging Crown Victoria. When he arrived at Aaron Quinn’s house, police cars and news vans crowded Kirkland Avenue, and helicopters hovered overhead. Investigators unfurled yellow crime-scene tape and dusted windows for fingerprints. More than 100 search personnel and several police dogs hunted for traces of Huskins around the peninsula, and divers were set to comb the surrounding waters.
-
-Lee was chatting with a group of reporters when his phone buzzed. He saw an email with the subject line “Denise,” sent from the account of A. J. Quinn—he recognized the name of Huskins’s boyfriend, who had reported her missing. Lee stepped away to read the message. Huskins “will be returned safely tomorrow,” it said. “Any advance on us or our associates will create a dangerous situation.”
-
-The message contained a link to an audio clip. Lee heard a woman’s voice: “My name is Denise Huskins, and I’m kidnapped. Otherwise I’m fine.” To prove that the clip hadn’t been prerecorded, the woman described a plane crash in the Alps that occurred that morning. To confirm her identity, she noted that the first concert she went to featured Blink-182 and Bad Religion.
-
-Lee thought the recording was a joke. “You’re inured to what you see on crime shows—someone calls for help or … is clearly being forced to say the words,” he later said. “In this case, she seemed to just be having a normal conversation.” Lee saw no reason a kidnapper would send a proof-of-life tape to him alone. Maybe someone at the scene was messing with him, or perhaps a reader had sent an unhinged missive. Still, he forwarded the email to Vallejo police, asking them to verify its authenticity—“in the event it is not a prank,” Lee wrote.
-
-The next evening, Lee was scrolling through his phone in bed when he read a police press release stating that Huskins had resurfaced that morning in her hometown of Huntington Beach, more than 400 miles south of Mare Island. After initially being “cooperative,” the release said, Huskins hired a lawyer and stopped communicating with detectives. Then Lee read a line that sounded surreal: “Given the facts that have been presented thus far, this event appears to be an orchestrated event and not a kidnapping.” The police would be giving a press conference that night.
-
-Lee bolted out of bed. Careful not to wake his two young kids, he rushed downstairs and turned the TV on low. His face glowed blue in the dark living room as he watched Vallejo police lieutenant Kenny Park address reporters. “The statement that Mr. Quinn provided was such an incredible story, we initially had a hard time believing it,” Park said. “Upon further investigation, we were not able to substantiate any of the things that he was saying.” Park said that Quinn and Huskins had sent authorities on a “wild goose chase” and “plundered valuable resources.” They “owe this community an apology,” he insisted, and could face criminal charges.
-
-Lee was stunned. A *faked* kidnapping? He’d never heard of anything like it. Vallejo police hadn’t replied to him about the proof-of-life recording he’d forwarded, but he figured they knew something he didn’t. “If the Vallejo cops said this was a hoax,” he recalled thinking, “it must have been a hoax.”
-
-## “What do you say when the police say this was a fabrication?” a reporter asked Rappaport. “A lot of people said the world was flat as well,” he replied.
-
-**What the cops** knew was this: Just before 10 a.m. on March 25, Huskins’s father, who’d traveled from Southern California to Vallejo after she was reported missing, notified the police that he’d received a voicemail from his daughter. She said that she was on her way to his home in Huntington Beach, where her kidnapper had dropped her off.
-
-When local officers arrived, Huskins was in a neighbor’s apartment. Like Quinn, she described a bizarre home invasion involving lasers, swim goggles, wetsuits, and prerecorded messages. She said her captor took her in the trunk of a car to what seemed like a secluded location several hours from Mare Island. She was held in a room with a queen-size bed and windows blocked with cardboard. At one point he bound her to the headboard with zip ties and a bike lock.
-
-Huskins told police that she was blindfolded and drugged much of the time, but that she believed her kidnapper was a white man with “brownish red” hair. He claimed to be working with three associates—“T, J, and L”—and said that clients hired them to kidnap people for ransom. After 48 hours, Huskins said, the kidnapper for some reason decided to release her. He chose Huntington Beach, her hometown, because authorities weren’t looking for her there. On the drive south, he let her ride in the front seat; he put blacked-out swim goggles over her eyes, then replaced them with tape over her eyelids and a pair of sunglasses.
-
-Huskins showed officers a pair of tennis shoes and a water bottle that she said the kidnapper had given her. An officer asked what kind of car the man had been driving. She said it sounded like a Mustang. When the officer asked if she’d been sexually assaulted, Huskins said no. All things considered, she added, the kidnapper had treated her well, supplying food and water and letting her shower in private.
-
-Huskins would later elaborate on her captivity, noting that her kidnapper seemed intelligent and socially awkward, and that he told her he’d been in the military and had served in the Middle East. The man said that he’d entered Quinn’s home five times in recent months, even standing outside the bedroom when Huskins was over. She said that he supplied her with toiletries, served her pizza and wine on a formal place setting, and screened a French film. At one point, he showed her a news story that quoted her father, then held her as she cried. “I wish we would have met under different circumstances,” he told her before letting her go. “You are an incredible person.”
-
-When the Huntington Beach police got Mathew Mustard on the phone, Huskins’s cousin Nick, who had come to be with her and was an attorney, offered to take the call. The Vallejo detective had been wrong about Huskins’s fate—there was no “dead Denise,” as Mustard had told Quinn there would be—but he still wasn’t buying the couple’s account. According to Nick, Mustard said he could offer either Huskins or Quinn immunity if they cooperated with police. He implied that it would be first come, first served. (Mustard has denied making this offer.)
-
-Mustard wasn’t alone in doubting the kidnapping story. That afternoon, according to former Vallejo police chief Andrew Bidou, Mustard met with his supervisors and an FBI agent named David Sesma. Several of the men in the room found it suspicious that Huskins had reappeared near her parents’ homes, wearing sunglasses and carrying luggage. She looked “casual, like somebody just came back from a trip,” not like “somebody that just went through a very traumatic incident,” Bidou, who was in the meeting, later said in a deposition. On her face police observed “darker impression circles … consistent with wearing swim goggles,” but they noted that Huskins “did not appear to have any injuries.” When they searched the alley where Huskins said her kidnapper had dropped her off, police didn’t find the tape she said she’d removed from her eyes. Officers asked a gardener who’d loaned Denise his phone, so she could call her father, whether she was “nervous, excited, or scared.” The man said, “No, she seemed completely normal.”
-
-Some of the officers gathered in Vallejo wondered why Huskins hadn’t accepted an offer to return to the city on a flight the FBI had arranged, and why she was now communicating through a lawyer. What’s more, they doubted the supposed evidence of a home invasion. Items from Quinn’s home that he claimed were left behind after the crime—a portable charger, camera, zip ties, goggles, and red tape—“would have been props to promulgate the story,” Bidou later said.
-
-After less than half an hour, according to Bidou, the conclusion in the room was unanimous: “Everyone believed that it was a purposeful act.” At 9:30 that night, less than 12 hours after Huskins resurfaced, Kenny Park was on TV, accusing her and Quinn of perpetrating a fraud.
-
-At a lunchtime press conference the next day, Quinn’s attorney, Daniel Russo, insisted that the Vallejo police were the ones peddling “blatant lies.” Lanky and mustached, with a Bronx accent, Russo explained that Quinn had given detectives his fingerprints and DNA, and that he’d turned over his clothing and provided the police with access to his electronic devices. Quinn had spent more than 17 hours answering questions and agreed to have his home searched. “I don’t know what else he can do,” Russo said. “I guess they can start pulling his teeth.”
-
-At his own press conference, Huskins’s new lawyer, Douglas Rappaport, told reporters that his client had spent more than five hours talking to authorities that day and was “absolutely, unequivocally, 100 percent, positively a victim, and this is no hoax.”
-
-“What do you say when the police say this was a fabrication?” one reporter asked.
-
-“A lot of people said the world was flat as well,” Rappaport replied.
-
----
-
-**On the day** of the press conferences, Henry Lee was nearing the end of his shift in the newsroom when he got another strange email, this time from huskinskidnapping@hotmail.com. “Ms. Huskins was absolutely kidnapped,” the message said. “We did it.”
-
-The author claimed to speak for a group of “professional thieves” based on Mare Island who had been stealing cars prior to kidnapping Huskins, which was a test run for more lucrative crimes. “Until now, this was a bit like a game or movie adventure,” the email read. “We fancied ourselves a sort of Ocean’s Eleven, gentlemen criminals.” But after spending time with Huskins, the criminals developed “a case of reverse Stockholm syndrome.” Ashamed and “unspeakably sorry,” they were upset that she was being “victimized again” by the police. As proof of authenticity, the author attached a photo of the weapon supposedly used during the crime: a Nerf Super Soaker spray-painted black, with a laser pointer and a flashlight affixed to the barrel with duct tape.
-
-Lee couldn’t fathom that genuine criminals would risk getting caught just to defend their victim. When he noticed that the email was peppered with terms like “indicia” and “held in contempt,” he wondered if Huskins and Quinn had asked a lawyer to draft it. Lee replied to the sender with a request for an interview, then passed the email to police.
-
-Two days later, on Saturday, March 28, Lee was hiking in the redwoods with his family when his phone dinged. A longer screed had arrived, this time from the address none@nowhere.com. The author claimed to speak for “three acquaintances” who started stealing cars as a “contrast to the office doldrums,” a mischievous lark “like something out of A Clockwork Orange*,* up to that point without the ultra-violence.” One of the cars was a white Mustang that belonged to a local medical student who had a habit of speeding. “We took it, and maybe saved a neighborhood kid or dog,” the message read.
-
-The thieves allegedly entered homes on Mare Island to steal car keys, personal information, and items they could use to fool investigators, like loose hairs. They were careful to avoid houses with children, seniors, or veterans. The author said the thieves once scared a neighborhood Peeping Tom off a roof, then called the police on him “from a burner phone, pretending to be a resident.” The author also said that the criminals set up electronic perimeters, surveilled homes with drones and game cameras, and wore hairnets and wetsuits to avoid shedding DNA. “I will pause to note how fantastical all of this sounds,” the email read. “Because even I can’t help but think that as I write.”
-
-Eventually, the author claimed, the criminals decided to try their hand at kidnapping for ransom. They experimented with a dog-training collar and a “muscle stimulation device” to subdue victims, but settled on a stun gun that could deliver “a brief shock to the male if circumstances called for punishment.” They got into Quinn’s house by drilling holes around a window to release the lock, then they drugged the couple to “make them more compliant and to make the situation less traumatic.” After the ordeal was over, they’d planned to hand the victims “literature on trauma and recovery.”
-
-The message included a link to photos. One was of gear purportedly used in the kidnapping, including two-way radios, burner phones, gloves, flashlights, license plates, portable speakers, a blood-pressure cuff, and zip ties. Another depicted the bedroom where Huskins supposedly had been held, with cardboard taped over a window and the victim’s glasses on a dresser.
-
-Lee couldn’t understand why Quinn and Huskins would keep sending bizarre emails or go to the trouble of staging photos. Unsettled, he called a Vallejo police lieutenant he knew. Off the record, Lee asked the officer whether he and his family might be in danger. The lieutenant told him not to worry—this must be part of the fraud.
-
-## “They said something along the lines of ‘Oh shit,’ ” Campos recalled, “but in a more professional way.”
-
-**Three months later,** when Misty Carausu read Quinn’s and Huskins’s accounts of what had happened to them, she saw no evidence of deception—she saw parallels to the home invasion in Dublin and to the ones in Silicon Valley in 2009 and 2012. She called the Vallejo police department a handful of times over more than a week before speaking with a detective in late June 2015. “You guys said it was a hoax,” she said, “but it may not be.” Carausu found the detective dismissive. He referred her to the FBI, which had taken over the investigation.
-
-Carausu phoned David Sesma, one of the agents who’d been in the room with the Vallejo police department’s top brass when they decided the crime had been faked. “We never said that was a hoax,” she recalled Sesma saying defensively. Carausu described the Dublin break-in and the suspect they had in custody. “We have all this information—it might be of some use to you,” she said. (The FBI declined requests for interviews with individual agents and said in a statement, which it issued in coordination with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California, that it could not respond to questions. “All investigations are conducted in a manner that is respectful to victims’ right to privacy and court records detail the efforts of the men and women who investigate our cases,” the agency said.)
-
-The Vallejo case was still making headlines. Some outlets had dubbed Huskins the “real-life Gone Girl,” after the antiheroine in Gillian Flynn’s best-selling thriller who fakes her own disappearance to frame her husband for murder, then reappears. The film version of the novel came out less than six months before Quinn reported the crime, and Huskins resembled the lead actress, Rosamund Pike. In the movie, a cable news host obviously modeled on Nancy Grace, the television commentator and self-styled victims’ rights advocate, falls for the ruse, suggesting on the air that the husband is a “sociopath” and “wife killer.” In real life, Grace compared Huskins to the *Gone Girl* character on her program and declared, with air quotes, “Everything about this ‘kidnap’ screams out hoax.”
-
-The media weren’t the only ones comparing the case to *Gone Girl.* According to Huskins’s mother, when she met with Mustard to review the proof-of-life recording sent to Lee, the detective suggested that her family watch the movie to understand the situation. According to Rappaport, Huskins’s lawyer, Sesma at the FBI said the same thing to him after Huskins turned up in Huntington Beach.
-
-That was before Carausu called him. Two days after talking to her, Sesma and fellow FBI agent Jason Walter met with Dublin police to review evidence seized from the cabin and the Mustang in South Lake Tahoe. When the agents saw pictures of the blond hair tangled in blacked-out swim goggles and a Super Soaker with a laser and a flashlight taped to it, they looked visibly shocked, according to Miguel Campos, the lead detective in the Dublin case. “They said something along the lines of ‘Oh shit,’ ” Campos recalled, “but in a more professional way.”
-
----
-
-**The next evening,** Quinn sat across from Sesma and Walter in a conference room at his lawyer’s office. Sesma, the more seasoned FBI agent, looked polished. Walter, who was two years into the job, was brawny, with visible tattoos—Quinn could easily picture him kicking down doors. The agents had asked Quinn to meet because there’d been a break in the case, but he was worried it was a ruse to arrest him. The authorities seemed intent on proving that he and Huskins were liars.
-
-He was skeptical for another reason: Several years prior, Sesma had had a romantic relationship with Quinn’s ex-fiancée, Andrea Roberts—the woman whom Quinn told police the kidnapper said he was targeting—before she and Quinn started dating. It was another strange circumstance in a case full of them. Rappaport had already sent a letter to the Department of Justice arguing that Sesma had a conflict of interest; in a letter included in court filings, a federal prosecutor would later state that “the appropriate offices have found his conduct unproblematic.” When Sesma nodded hello, Quinn had to stop himself from flashing his middle finger.
-
-The agents said they had images of evidence they wanted to show Quinn. Walter slid a photo of an Asus laptop across the table. “It looks like the computer the kidnappers stole, but I can’t say for certain,” Quinn said, according to his account in *Victim F*, a book he and Huskins published in 2021, in which they write alternating chapters. Next, Walter showed him a picture of swim goggles with black tape over the lenses. Quinn said they looked like the ones he’d been forced to wear. Finally, Walter revealed a snapshot of a man Quinn didn’t recognize. He looked like an average white guy, someone who would blend in to the scenery if Aaron passed him on the street—yet his stare felt unnervingly familiar. “We found a long blond hair wrapped around goggles at his place,” Walter said of the man in the photo. “Aaron, we think this is the guy.”
-
-After months of trauma and humiliation, it was hard for Quinn to believe that the authorities were no longer treating him and Huskins as suspects. During his initial interrogation, detectives had asked Quinn to strip naked and change into striped prison pants—they told him it was all they had on hand. They questioned him in a room with no clock or windows. He had felt trapped “in some sort of movie … forced into a character I never wanted to play,” he later wrote in *Victim F*. After investigators spent hours pressuring Quinn to confess, he curled into the fetal position and cried. At one point, he wondered whether he was suffering from a psychotic break.
-
-Huskins had fared no better. When she met with Rappaport the first time, she told her attorney what she’d been too afraid to tell police: The kidnapper had raped her twice and threatened to harm her and her family unless she kept quiet. It wasn’t her first experience with sexual violence. Huskins was molested as a child—a fact that, according to her mother, had prompted Mustard to tell Huskins’s family that people who’d been sexually assaulted at a young age often want to “relive the thrill.” According to Rappaport, when he contacted Vallejo police to request a forensic exam for his client, an officer asked, “Well, how do we know she was raped?” The exam was authorized, but it was conducted 14 hours later. At the hospital, according to Huskins, nurses noticed bruises on her back and elbow. It would be months before the results came back. (Mustard has denied making the comment about sexual-assault survivors, and the Vallejo police have denied second-guessing the request for a rape exam.)
-
-After interviewing Huskins, Sesma told her that it was a crime to lie to a federal agent. Like Quinn, she briefly questioned her own sanity. “Am I schizophrenic?” she recalled wondering. “If all these people are sure about it, is it me who’s wrong?”
-
-While they waited to learn if they would face criminal charges, Quinn and Huskins felt like pariahs. In their telling, the hospital where they both worked launched an investigation of Quinn, and a fellowship Huskins believed she was in line for fell through. (The hospital declined to answer questions for this story. “We have great sympathy for what Ms. Huskins and Mr. Quinn endured and wish only the best for them and their family,” it said in a statement.) Strangers left hateful comments online, calling Huskins names. Some of the couple’s friends and relatives briefly wondered if they were guilty. Even Quinn admitted that he fleetingly considered, while Huskins was missing, whether she might have staged the crime as payback for his attempts to reunite with his ex.
-
-Quinn and Huskins regularly woke at 3 a.m., hearts pounding. Both struggled with PTSD. Huskins, who suffered from panic attacks, became too distraught to return to work and slept with a hammer beside her bed. On days when she came home alone, she checked behind doors and in corners, a knife in her hand.
-
-The couple initially hoped Henry Lee at the *San Francisco Chronicle* would unearth the truth by following clues in the emails he’d received, like reporters in movies do. Instead, journalists like Lee “were blinded by their own assumptions,” Huskins wrote in *Victim F.* They seemed to take the police’s account at face value rather than dig deeper. “It’s easier to believe that there’s two crazy people doing stupid stuff than to think the whole police organization and the media have systematic flaws,” Quinn said in an interview. “A lie repeated over and over eventually becomes the truth.”
-
-Now, suddenly, the FBI agents were more or less telling Quinn that they had solved the crime. His name and Huskins’s would finally be cleared. But Walter gave Quinn a caveat: “You can’t tell anybody about this.” Even though the man suspected of the crime was in custody for another home invasion, the FBI’s arrest affidavit would remain sealed for the time being. For a few more weeks, Quinn and Huskins would have to endure being branded liars.
-
-
-
-Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn
-
-6.
-
-**The day after** Muller drove off in his brother’s car in June 2015, the police showed up at his mother’s front door. Muller was in custody, they told Zarback, arrested that morning at the cabin in South Lake Tahoe for a home invasion in Dublin. Zarback could hardly believe what she was hearing. Her son’s behavior had been erratic, but nothing prepared her for the idea that he could break into someone’s home and commit violence.
-
-Zarback rushed to visit Muller at the El Dorado County Jail in South Lake Tahoe. He was in tears, head bowed, repeating, “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” He didn’t go into details about the crime of which he was accused. Nor did he act surprised about his arrest—to Zarback, he seemed almost relieved. She comforted her son through the bars of his cell. “This is really bad,” she said, “but you just have to go on and take it a day at a time.”
-
-A few weeks later, in late June, Zarback, her brother, and her husband returned from hiking near Lake Tahoe one afternoon to find the cabin surrounded by police and FBI agents. David Sesma approached them and explained that the FBI had a warrant to collect evidence. But this wasn’t about what had happened in Dublin—Muller was being charged with kidnapping a young woman in Vallejo.
-
-The next day, federal investigators searched Muller’s father’s house, where they learned that a wetsuit had gone missing. Agents also combed a storage unit Muller was renting in Vallejo, where they found bedding in a garbage bag, black duct tape, a wireless camera and receiver, and a handful of remote-control drones.
-
-Zarback was horrified by the new revelations. “Nobody had any idea that he was this far gone,” she said of her son. When Zarback visited Muller again in jail, she asked him if he’d carried out the kidnapping alone. According to Zarback, he nodded, then reminded her that the jail recorded conversations.
-
-It would be months before they could speak more freely. By then Zarback saw no point in asking more questions. “What am I going to gain from that?” she said.
-
-## “They could’ve been heroes in this, but instead they put blinders on,” Quinn later said of investigators. “There’s this saying: ‘If you hear hooves, think horses not zebras.’ But zebras do exist.”
-
-**On a Monday** afternoon in July 2015, Quinn and Huskins prepared to face the media. So much had been said and written about them, but this was the first time they would appear before the press. A few hours in advance, they finally saw Muller’s 59-page arrest affidavit, and digested what appeared to them to be grievous lapses in the investigation of their case.
-
-Quinn already knew that, while he was being interrogated at the Vallejo police station, authorities had missed calls from unknown numbers, along with two emails from the kidnapper, because they’d put his phone in airplane mode. Now he read that three calls had come from a burner phone, which law enforcement later traced to within 300 feet of the cabin in South Lake Tahoe. The phone had been purchased at a Target and activated the day of the crime; the store had provided security footage of the customer, a white man with dark hair. The affidavit also revealed that the polygraph Quinn was told he failed had actually yielded “unknown results.”
-
-Quinn and Huskins were equally troubled by what the document didn’t say. It didn’t mention the drill holes Quinn had discovered near a window in his living room, the ripped window screen he found in the garage, or the set of keys he’d told police were missing. There was no indication that Vallejo police had asked other jurisdictions in the area for information about similar crimes, or that law enforcement had looked for surveillance footage or eyewitnesses who might corroborate Huskins’s account of the drive to Huntington Beach. There was no mention of testing results for key pieces of evidence in the investigation, including a stain found on the floor of Quinn’s home and material gathered during Huskins’s rape exam. The stain would later test positive for substances that cause drowsiness; the rape exam would show the presence of DNA from at least one male, based on a sample too incomplete for further testing.
-
-The couple also learned that Lee wasn’t the only person who had received strange emails related to the crime. According to the affidavit, Kenny Park of the Vallejo police received messages stating that the cops had “more than enough corroborative information” to “know by now that the victims were not lying.” Like the emails to Lee, these messages were purportedly from the kidnappers and were sent using anonymous email services based overseas.
-
-Quinn and Huskins wondered if authorities would ever have solved the case if Misty Carausu hadn’t told Vallejo police and FBI about Muller. “They could’ve been heroes in this, but instead they put blinders on,” Quinn later said of investigators. “There’s this saying: ‘If you hear hooves, think horses not zebras.’ But zebras do exist.”
-
-The couple tried to remain stoic as they stood with their lawyers before a scrum of reporters. Quinn, in a blue button-down shirt, had a furrowed brow and haggard eyes. Huskins, in a beige sleeveless blouse, clenched Quinn’s arm as her lips quivered. The couple were “not just not guilty, but innocent,” Rappaport declared. “Today, the Vallejo Police Department owes an apology to Ms. Huskins and Mr. Quinn.” Russo, Quinn’s lawyer, added, “The idea that in a short period of time they decided it was a hoax, that only works in Batman movies.”
-
-For the next several days, Vallejo police refused to retract their claim that the kidnapping was staged. “We don’t know what the final outcome of this case is going to be,” Captain John Whitney told the *Vallejo Times-Herald*. “It’s important that we don’t jump to conclusions.” A week after the press conference, Bidou, the police chief, sent letters to Quinn and Huskins apologizing for “comments” the department had made during the investigation. “While these comments were based on our findings at the time, they proved to be unnecessarily harsh and offensive,” he wrote. The kidnapping, he admitted, “was not a hoax or orchestrated event.”
-
-He promised to apologize publicly when Muller was indicted a few months later. The Vallejo police department would not issue a public apology to the couple for six years.
-
----
-
-**In September 2015,** more than three months after he was arrested, Muller pled no contest to felony charges of burglary, attempted robbery, and assault with a deadly weapon in the Dublin break-in. A few days later, he was moved to the Sacramento County Main Jail to await a federal trial in the Vallejo case. Muller’s attorney, Tom Johnson, initially told Zarback that he would mount an insanity defense but ultimately recommended that he plead guilty. Muller agreed, and he sent his parents a letter asking them to support his decision. “I have some serious health limitations, and it seemed like I was just unable to accept them and kept pushing myself to dangerous places,” he wrote. “I’m much safer now.… There are still things I can do to help people.” (Johnson declined requests for an interview.)
-
-After spending time on suicide watch and at a psychiatric hospital, Muller at first seemed to improve behind bars. On medication and without pressure to live a “normal adult life,” he was “deeply remorseful” yet “more free of suffering right now than I have been for a long time,” he wrote to his parents. “The worst day of jail is better than the best day of feeling like you’re being watched or followed by people with sinister intentions.” He asked Zarback to send him GED books so he could tutor a fellow prisoner, and to add money to other prisoners’ commissary accounts.
-
-But as was so often the case in Muller’s life, the mental upswing was short-lived. According to Muller, by the time he pled guilty in September 2016 to federal charges in the Vallejo case, he’d become so depressed that he developed bedsores from spending too much time on his bunk. When a small earthquake hit the area, he wished the walls would crush him. “I did not care about my future. I just wanted to do what was best for everybody because I had plans to kill myself eventually anyway,” he later wrote in a court filing.
-
-Prior to Muller’s sentencing in March 2017, prosecutors argued in a memo that he should receive 40 years in prison, the maximum term under the plea deal. “There is no expert evidence to support the conclusion that any mental condition makes Muller any less morally culpable for his crime,” the memo stated, or “to support the conclusion that any kind of mental health treatment could ever make Muller any less dangerous.”
-
-Anker and 16 of Muller’s Harvard colleagues submitted a letter of support, writing that he was “a man of integrity, decency and compassion” who “showed a unique kindness and generosity of spirit.” Muller’s parents also wrote to the judge, highlighting their son’s accomplishments and their struggle to reconcile his Jekyll and Hyde personas. They attributed his actions to a disease “like a metastasized cancer” that “eventually took control of him.”
-
-Still, “Matt’s mental health issues do not excuse or absolve him from his actions,” his parents wrote. “We will accept whatever sentence you believe is appropriate.”
-
-## She looked Muller in the eye as she declared: “*I* am Denise Huskins, the woman behind the blindfold.”
-
-**The day of** Muller’s sentencing, Quinn walked to a podium in the center of a courtroom in downtown Sacramento. Reporters packed the jury box to his right. To his left, Muller sat at the defense table in an orange jumpsuit and black-rimmed glasses, with his hands and feet shackled and his hair in a bowl cut. It was the first time Quinn and Huskins had looked him in the face.
-
-Quinn had spent the morning sweating and feeling his stomach turn, but an intense focus came over him as he read the victim statement he’d revised more than 20 times. “You like to feel that you are in power, and the rules do not apply to you,” Quinn said to Muller. “That’s what makes you so dangerous. You are smart enough to manipulate situations to get away with crimes but not humble enough to seek help.”
-
-Then it was Huskins’s turn. She looked Muller in the eye as she declared: “*I* am Denise Huskins, the woman behind the blindfold.” She called Muller “calculated, strategic,” and said that he “kept his true intentions and motivations to himself, knowing how awful they are.” She’d heard his “countless excuses,” including his mental health issues, but her experience made her certain that he had “willingly, thoughtfully participated in this hell we have survived.”
-
-Muller listened impassively. After the couple spoke, he made a brief statement from his seat. “I’m sick with shame that my actions have brought such devastation,” he said. “I hope my imprisonment can bring closure to Aaron and Denise, and I’m prepared for any sentence the court imposes.”
-
-The judge called the crime “heinous, atrocious, horrible” as he issued his sentence: 40 years. Ten of those years would be a concurrent sentence for the Dublin crime. But Quinn and Huskins weren’t done demanding justice. They wanted Muller prosecuted for all his crimes against them, including rape. And they wanted to hold the Vallejo police to account.
-
-But for the time being, they decided to focus on happier matters. Two days after the couple gave their statements in court, at a barbecue with family and friends, Quinn proposed to Huskins. She said yes.
-
----
-
-**Muller got married** the day after his sentencing. He and Huei Dai briefly dated in 2012, after she found his card in an ATM, and they had remained friends ever since. An energetic woman with a wide smile and shoulder-length black hair, Dai had worked as an office and human resources manager and earned a green card after emigrating from Taiwan. After hearing about Muller’s arrest on the news, she visited him every week.
-
-Their wedding took place in a dreary room at the Sacramento County Main Jail. Zarback didn’t approve of the union, lamenting that Dai was signing up for a difficult life, but she attended, along with a few family members; none of Dai’s friends or relatives came. Guards brought Muller out in a jail uniform and shackles and put him inside an iron cage. Dai, in a pretty dress, stood several feet away—she wasn’t allowed to touch her groom. After reciting brief vows before a judge, Muller was whisked away. The whole ceremony lasted five minutes.
-
-Dai sympathized with Muller’s mental health struggles, and she believed he’d been unfairly portrayed in the courts and in press coverage. She became his unofficial paralegal, eventually quitting her job to type emails and file legal paperwork for Muller and for other people in jail he was advising on their own cases.
-
-Dai also helped create a website, Gonegirlcase.com, that told Muller’s side of the story—namely, how severe his illness was when he committed the Vallejo crime. The site, which is now defunct, attributed his “current legal predicament” to “extended psychosis.” But Muller’s perception of what had happened would soon change.
-
-7.
-
-**Henry Lee logged** into a video call and waited for Muller to appear. It was just after 10 p.m. on a Thursday in September 2018, and Lee was staring into a laptop on his cluttered desk at KTVU Fox 2, where he was now an on-air crime reporter. Muller had just been transferred from a high-security federal prison in Tucson, Arizona, to a jail in California’s Solano County, where he was facing new charges for the Vallejo crime, this time from the state: kidnapping and two counts of rape, as well as robbery, burglary, and false imprisonment. He had pled not guilty. For the moment, he was representing himself.
-
-Lee was surprised that Muller had agreed to an interview, and wasn’t sure he would show up. If he did, interviewing him would feel surreal. Reflecting later on how he and other journalists had covered the Vallejo story, Lee said that prior to “the national reckoning over police misconduct,” whenever law enforcement said “something they believe to be true, more or less we treated it … as gospel.” Reporters on the crime beat, he added, often have no choice but to rely on official accounts, at least at first. “The majority of the mainstream media still will say, ‘Police said this, police said that,’ whether or not we know that to be true,” Lee said.
-
-Finally, Muller appeared in a box on Lee’s screen, wearing a gray-and-white-striped jail uniform and gripping a phone receiver. He looked pale, with graying hair and sunken eyes, and greeted Lee with a nod and a flat smile. As Lee began to question him, Muller was cagey. Lee asked why Muller had emailed him to speak up for Huskins. Muller said, “I can’t reply to that without confirming that I’m the person who sent those emails.” (In his own court filings, Muller had once included what he said was an evidence photo of a burner phone Dublin police had seized from his cabin, displaying an email account belonging to huskinskidnapping@hotmail.com, one of the addresses from which Lee had received a message.)
-
-Lee asked Muller about a motion he’d filed a few months earlier challenging his federal conviction. In the document, which Muller drafted on a prison typewriter and ultimately withdrew, he argued that his guilty plea hadn’t been “knowing, intelligent and voluntary,” and that his attorney had provided ineffective counsel. He assured the court that he now had “more accurate insight into his current and past mental states.”
-
-“Are you not guilty, in fact … of the federal kidnapping case?” Lee asked. Muller equivocated: “As a legal matter, yes sir, I think a plea of not guilty in that case would be accurate.” He added that “blameworthiness and dangerousness … are two different things,” and claimed, “I would be the first person who wants me incapacitated to make sure that I could not hurt anybody again if it seems like I’m not going to be able to get ahold of those mental health issues.”
-
-If there was a revelation in the evasive interview, it was that Muller alleged he had been abused in prison. “I just suffered a rape, a beating, and a near suicide,” he told Lee.
-
-A few months earlier, Muller had told his mother that guards placed him in a cell with a violent, schizophrenic man who sexually assaulted him, then with another prisoner who beat him severely. Muller believed this was punishment for his helping a prisoner he believed was innocent. (The Federal Bureau of Prisons declined to comment.) Muller experienced symptoms of PTSD and became suicidal. Zarback later grew so concerned about her son’s mental health that she drafted a letter to Huskins and Quinn, asking them to instruct the district attorney to drop the state case. She knew she’d never send it.
-
----
-
-**On a rainy morning** in February 2019, officers escorted Muller into a Solano County courtroom. Once again representing himself, he wore a baggy gray suit he’d borrowed from his father and shackles around his ankles. For over an hour, Aaron Quinn detailed how he was tied up, drugged, and extorted. He seemed close to tears when he said, “I took a moment before I called 911, because I was afraid that I was killing Denise.” Quinn confirmed that Muller’s voice was the one he’d heard that night. Muller gazed ahead, occasionally taking notes. When the time came, he declined to cross-examine the witness.
-
-After a recess, Huskins took the stand and described being raped twice while a camera recorded it. She said Muller had insisted that the sex look consensual—supposedly for blackmail, which he claimed his associates had demanded. The prosecutor asked Huskins if she recognized Muller’s voice. “Yes. It was the voice that I woke up to, it was the voice I heard in that 48 hours, it’s the voice that raped me,” she said. The judge asked Muller if he wanted to cross-examine Huskins. “Certainly not, your honor,” he replied.
-
-At the end of the hearing, the judge allowed all charges to proceed.
-
-Muller’s parents had left the courtroom before Huskins’s testimony, but Dai watched from the front row. Afterward, she stopped for a few words in front of the news crews huddled outside the courthouse. “No matter what other people say, I know who he is,” Dai said.
-
-Jason Walter of the FBI was also at the hearing. According to Quinn, while Huskins was on the stand, Walter told him outside the courtroom that he never believed the crime was a hoax. Afterward, when Huskins joined them, he said, “You guys are in my mind all day, every day. I’m so sorry.”
-
-## Muller admitted that the conspiracy he believed he was exposing was intricate and well concealed. “The fraud is of such subtlety and sophistication that it deceived even the Movant,” he wrote, referring to himself.
-
-**For a time,** in a series of motions and court appearances, Muller made a number of cogent-sounding arguments. But in mid-2019, his claims took on a bizarre tone. After receiving discovery in the state’s case, Muller advanced a new theory of elaborate subterfuge.
-
-Four days before arresting him, he argued, Dublin officers snuck into his cabin without a warrant and used his email account to send “what appears to be a ‘to-do list’ … in preparation to destroy evidence and flee arrest.” During their official search on June 9, 2015, he said, the police planted his clothing, mail, and driver’s license in the stolen Mustang for them to be “discovered.” As part of their plot against him, Muller insisted, law enforcement agencies had altered police reports and 911 logs, tampered with forensic records, and forged judicial signatures on search warrants.
-
-In particular, Muller zeroed in on the role of Misty Carausu. In March 2019, as the state’s case proceeded, he questioned her on the stand. Later, in court filings, he accused her of illegally accessing his devices and perjuring herself by denying it under oath. He also claimed that she had tampered with evidence. In an interview, Carausu denied Muller’s claims. Campos, the lead detective in the Dublin case, called the allegations “ridiculous.”
-
-Muller soon turned his attention to what seemed to be a weakness in his theory: How could Dublin police, who didn’t yet know details of the Vallejo kidnapping when they searched the cabin and Mustang, install evidence linking him to that case? In a 2020 court appearance, Muller laid out an updated thesis: The FBI had used Photoshop to make “Hollywood-grade edits” to evidence photos, inserting objects in the frame after the fact. In a filing, Muller included screenshots of supposedly doctored images, pointing out what he claimed were differences in embossing and reflection. The FBI had also staged evidence photos, he argued, including the blond hair stuck to the duct-taped swim goggles, and pretended they were taken by Dublin officers in their initial search.
-
-The reason for the fraud, Muller claimed, was to secure a quick conviction and paper over embarrassing facts about the case. He believed authorities didn’t thoroughly investigate a man who Quinn told police Andrea Roberts had had a relationship with while they were engaged. The man, Stephen Ruiz, was a former police officer. He had been fired from his job shortly before the kidnapping, after a criminal investigation that reportedly pertained to allegations he looked up women from dating websites in law enforcement databases. (The agency that conducted the investigation found “no evidence” that he misused internal databases. Ruiz called the investigation “unfounded.”) The real story of the Vallejo case, Muller argued, was that of “an ex-cop staging a crime to scare his girlfriend away from the ex-fiancé she was reuniting with” through a scheme “that put his girlfriend in no danger, but ensured she would hear about it from her coworker who was ‘mistaken’ for her—also making it impossible to overlook that her ex-fiancé was sleeping with the coworker.” In other words, Muller suggested, Ruiz learned that Roberts and Quinn were back in touch over text in 2015, orchestrated Huskins’s kidnapping, and led Quinn and Huskins to believe that the real target was Roberts, all in an attempt to win Roberts back.
-
-Muller admitted that the conspiracy he claimed he was exposing was intricate and well concealed. “The fraud is of such subtlety and sophistication that it deceived even the Movant,” he wrote, referring to himself. “The government’s case included evidence and allegations the Movant did not understand and could not remember. The Movant had believed this was a matter of mental illness…. However, it was federal authorities and not the Movant’s mind that had altered reality.”
-
-According to a letter included in court filings, a federal prosecutor said Ruiz was a “subject” early in the Vallejo investigation, and authorities obtained his bank records. Ruiz denied any involvement in the kidnapping. He and Roberts are now married.
-
----
-
-**Zarback didn’t know** what to believe. Muller’s claims sounded far-fetched, but she’d seen firsthand how authorities had erred in the kidnapping investigation and, in her view, had targeted her son in prison. “I’m sure there’s some truth to it, but also maybe some paranoia to it too,” she said.
-
-She wasn’t the only person doubting whether law enforcement was telling the whole story. Quinn and Huskins still believed Muller had at least two accomplices in the kidnapping. The couple had observed red lasers coming from multiple angles in Quinn’s bedroom when they woke up, and Huskins recalled seeing two people, from the waist down, as she walked to the closet. Alone on the bed, Quinn heard Muller whisper, “Get the cat out of the room,” and felt someone pick up his pet, Mr. Rogers, who had been sniffing his arm. While Muller was physically near both victims, they heard the sounds and felt the vibrations of kitchen cabinets opening and closing and an electric drill humming downstairs. At one point, Quinn heard two sets of footsteps on his bathroom tile and Muller whisper, “Are we doing contingency one or contingency two?” As Muller carried Huskins downstairs, she heard him whisper “no” and then heard someone climb up past them. Before he shut her in the trunk of Quinn’s car, she heard “noises that one person couldn’t make,” like doors opening while a car was being moved.
-
-The couple also weren’t convinced that Muller wrote the emails to Henry Lee—or, at least, that he was the sole author. They noted small errors in descriptions of the crime. They pointed to a paragraph supposedly written by “the team member handling the subjects,” which had a single space after periods, while the rest of the text used two. In an interview, Huskins also said that, given the “obvious arrogance” of the messages, she found it odd that Muller hadn’t taken credit for pulling off the crime by himself: “Why not at that point, if it is just him, be like, these are all the different ways that I made it seem like there’s more people … and look how crafty and awesome I am?”
-
-In a court filing, federal prosecutors insisted that Muller had “used elaborate artifice to convince his victims that he was just one member of a professional crew.” In addition to the blow-up doll and portable speaker found in the Mustang, authorities had discovered audio recordings on Muller’s computer, including one of several people whispering. Moreover, in a jailhouse interview in July 2015, which the FBI later obtained and was mentioned in Muller’s plea agreement, Muller told a local news reporter that he was the only person involved and there was “no gang.”
-
-But to Quinn and Huskins, authorities weren’t paying sufficient attention to their eyewitness accounts. They had listened to some of the recordings in evidence and felt that they didn’t explain all they’d perceived. “It feels like every step of the way they are trying to gaslight us into changing our recollection of events to fit the narrative they’ve created,” Huskins wrote in *Victim F*. Perhaps Muller wouldn’t give up his accomplices because he didn’t want to be known as a snitch in prison or because he feared his partners, Quinn suggested in an interview. Maybe he chose “to fall on the sword,” Huskins told me.
-
-The couple lived in constant fear that a sophisticated group of criminals might come after them or target other victims. “I wish it was just him,” Huskins said in March 2022, but “we trust our memory more than we trust the police work.”
-
-8.
-
-**Quinn and Huskins** publicly praised Carausu, who became a personal friend and is now a sergeant in the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, for doing “the exact opposite of what Vallejo did.” In 2016, the couple sued the city, as well as Mathew Mustard and Kenny Park, for defamation and other claims. They settled the suit in 2018, with the defendants admitting no wrongdoing and agreeing to pay $2.5 million. In June 2021, upon publication of *Victim F*, the city and the Vallejo police department issued a statement to the press calling what happened to the couple during the kidnapping “horrific and evil” and finally extending an apology “for how they were treated during this ordeal.” Later that year, Quinn wrote an op-ed calling for the department to be disbanded over its culture of “opacity and impunity.”
-
-After the botched 2015 investigation, Mustard was voted his department’s officer of the year and promoted to sergeant in charge of the investigations division. He stepped down as president of Vallejo’s police union in 2019, after nearly a decade in the role. In subsequent years, disturbing reports about Mustard appeared in the press: that he had withheld exculpatory evidence in a criminal trial, tried to pressure a forensic pathologist to rule a death a homicide, and cleared officers involved in shootings of any wrongdoing while heading the police union. (The union did not respond to requests for comment.)
-
-In a legal complaint filed in December 2020, former Vallejo police captain John Whitney, who claimed he’d been wrongfully terminated for reporting misconduct, alleged that Bidou, the police chief at the time, changed the department’s promotion exam in 2017 to benefit Mustard. Whitney also alleged that, prior to the press conference where Kenny Park called Quinn and Huskins’s story false, Bidou told Park to “burn that bitch.” Whitney claimed that, after the couple sued, Bidou took Whitney’s phone and “set it to delete messages,” then directed him to order Park to lie under oath, all in order to conceal the comment. Whitney said he refused. In a deposition, Bidou said he “never heard anybody say” the words in question and denied destroying documents relevant to the case. Bidou retired in 2019. Park worked for the department until the following year. (Neither of them could be reached for comment.)
-
-In 2020, the state’s case against Muller stalled as his mental health deteriorated. Muller believed that his parents and Dai had been replaced by imposters and told the judge that a “complicated device” was planted in his body. He claimed to be surrounded “by a bunch of actors, by a bunch of agents, I don’t know, even sort of demon-possessed people,” and called the judge Lucifer. But even in the midst of such outbursts, Muller once raised a relevant legal point that had escaped both attorneys and the judge. “I was quite astounded that he was at least lucid enough to bring that to everyone’s attention,” Sharon Henry, the prosecutor, said in court, suggesting that Muller was “legally competent.” Tommy Barrett, the public defender the court had appointed to represent Muller, criticized Henry for expecting mental illness to present as “drooling, shouting, maybe smearing feces on oneself.… It’s not always a movie-type portrayal.”
-
-That November, the judge ruled that Muller was incompetent to stand trial. The following June, he was moved to a state psychiatric hospital, where he received a new diagnosis: schizophrenia. Citing “a downward spiral of increased mental harm,” in September 2021 the judge signed an order allowing Muller to be treated with antipsychotic medication against his will. “As the Buddhists would say, I have seen the light inside you,” the judge told him. “And I think there is a way for you to get back there.”
-
-In March 2022, Muller appeared before the same judge on Zoom. Seated under a ceiling patched up with cardboard, he wore the khaki uniform of Napa State Hospital. Barrett confirmed that his client had agreed to plead no contest to all state charges, except for kidnapping. The judge, who had deemed Muller legally competent a few weeks earlier, asked him, “Do you feel today as we’re sitting here that your head is in a good place to understand what we’re doing?” In a subdued tone, Muller replied, “Yes, your honor, I’m well enough to proceed.”
-
-The judge sentenced him to 31 years in state prison, to be served concurrently with his existing terms. The next day, Huskins posted on social media, “This is not the end result we had originally sought.” She and Quinn—now married, with a young daughter—still wanted Muller locked up for life. But Huskins also said she and her husband hoped “all involved can find some level of peace moving forward.” Later, Huskins wrote to me, “It is tempting to want to have final explanations and answers that are all tightly wound in a bow … but as in most real-life cases, there are going to be a lot of questions we will never get answers to.”
-
-## “I made a lot of mistakes,” Zarback said. Then again, she continued, “what is that piece of the chain that might have made a difference? I’m not sure I can name one. I’ve come to think we don’t have the power.”
-
-**Among the unanswered** questions that continue to haunt people affected by the events in this story is whether Muller was behind the home invasions and attempted assaults in Silicon Valley in 2009 and 2012. “If you want to ask me do I think it was Matthew? Probably,” his mother said. Muller’s ex-wife said in divorce filings that he once confessed “he had indeed broken into a woman’s apartment in 2009 and that he would do the same to me and people who were close to me.” For this reason, and because of Muller’s crimes in Vallejo and Dublin, she came to believe that her ex-husband was the person who, after their divorce, had terrified her housemate one night. “I was lucky to escape the fate of Matthew’s prior and subsequent female victims who were assaulted and raped,” she stated in a court document.
-
-In a legal filing, Muller denied committing the crimes in Silicon Valley. In an interview, he denied breaking into his ex-wife’s home and said he didn’t recall making a confession to her. He chalked up the fact that one of the victims attended an event he organized at Harvard to “mere coincidence” and said of the police, “Once they fix on you, that’s it. They see everything consistent with that and nothing inconsistent.” As of this writing, the cases remain open.
-
-Authorities never determined how Muller chose his victims. Huskins speculated that “from afar he saw me as a pretty blond girl” and Quinn as “some jock.” She wondered if she “reminded him of someone who was hurtful to him.” Or perhaps Muller really did intend to abduct Andrea Roberts, Quinn’s ex-fiancée. The emails to Henry Lee mentioned that the perpetrators had a “link” to Roberts, and while Huskins was being held captive, Muller asked whether she knew why someone would hire criminals to kidnap Quinn’s ex. When Huskins mentioned that Roberts had had an affair, according to her account in *Victim F*, Muller said, “That sounds right. That must be it.”
-
-Different questions linger for Zarback: What if she hadn’t helped her son get his own apartment? Hadn’t paid his traffic tickets to keep him out of jail? Hadn’t let him stay at the cabin? “I made a lot of mistakes,” she said. Then again, she continued, “what is that piece of the chain that might have made a difference? I’m not sure I can name one. I’ve come to think we don’t have the power.”
-
----
-
-**When I called** Muller recently at Napa State Hospital, he confessed that in the midst of our interviews a few years earlier, he’d come to believe I was a CIA agent. He decided to keep talking to “humor” me. When I asked if he still believed that I worked for the CIA, he said it was “highly unlikely but not impossible.”
-
-Muller was ready to provide answers about his crimes, but only some. He said that, in 2015, he was fixated on the “one percent,” which to him weren’t the world’s wealthiest people, but those “responsible for most of the bad in the world. It was a scienced-up version of demons.” He harbored a “strong feeling” that Quinn, who lived a block away from him on Mare Island, was a member of this sinister cabal. “Obviously he’s not,” Muller added. “It was a product of mental illness.”
-
-Muller’s explanation echoed what he told Sidney Nelson, a forensic psychologist, during an evaluation his parents paid for in 2017. Nelson, who diagnosed Muller with bipolar I disorder “with psychotic features,” noted in his report that in the weeks leading up to the kidnapping, Muller experienced a manic episode, possibly triggered by his antidepressant. Not sleeping much, Muller obsessively watched Batman movies and became entranced by the Dark Knight, who uses his intellect and high-tech gizmos to impose nocturnal vigilante justice. “He began to think of himself as a Batman type of person who was fighting evil, which to Mr. Muller was the 1%’ers,” Nelson wrote. Wearing a wetsuit to resemble the character, Muller said he had plotted a kidnapping for ransom to procure money from those he perceived as “evil wealthy people” in order to give it to the poor, an act he believed was “morally justified.”
-
-Nelson found Muller “extremely remorseful.” His report, which Muller’s attorney at the time did not submit to the court, concluded: “In my opinion, it is extremely unlikely that Mr. Muller would have engaged in such criminal actions if not for the profound impact that his mental illness had on his thinking and behavior.”
-
-Muller told me that he had a different objective in the Dublin crime: to vindicate Huskins. He said that he planned to blindfold, gag, and tie up his captives, then send photographs of them to Nancy Grace, the TV personality who had publicly doubted Huskins’s account of her kidnapping. “It’s your fault that this is happening,” Muller intended to write. “Until you retract what you’re saying about her being the Gone Girl, I might do this again.” (He told me this would have been an empty threat.)
-
-Muller said that he targeted the Yens’ street because, like Kirkland Avenue on Mare Island, it bordered on open space that would make it easy to escape if need be. He settled on the Yens specifically because, still in the midst of a delusion, he decided they were also part of the one percent, so he “wouldn’t feel bad.” Muller said his scheme veered off course when he realized that the Yens’ daughter was home. He placed his cell phone outside her bedroom to play the sound of static, so the noise he made tying up her parents wouldn’t wake her, but he forgot to retrieve it when he fled. That unexpected circumstance ended up being fortuitous, Muller said: “It’s good that I got caught.”
-
-Some mysteries Muller wouldn’t clear up: whether he committed the earlier crimes in Silicon Valley, whether he was the Peeping Tom on Mare Island, whether he wrote the emails to Henry Lee. When I asked whether he had accomplices, Muller said, “I never claimed I had worked with anybody,” but he declined to elaborate, beyond saying this: “Folks who are psychotic I think tend to fit the lone-wolf scenario and would probably have trouble cooperating with others in that sort of state.”
-
-Emerging from his longest psychotic episode yet, Muller told me that he was struggling “to fold reality back” into his worldview. I reminded him of a metaphor he’d used in a previous interview, as he was grappling with paranoia: He’d said it was like he’d started to believe in ghosts after seeing one in a graveyard, only to discover that someone had tricked him as a practical joke. Now, he told me, “I still can’t rule out whether there were real ghosts or not.”
-
-Muller had come to think that delusion and sanity weren’t distinct planes of existence. “When you snap out of it, it’s not like you look back and know, ‘Here’s what’s true and here’s what’s not,’ ” he told me. “You basically don’t know.”
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-Date: 2022-08-21
-DocType: "WebClipping"
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-Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html
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-# A Dad Took Photos of His Naked Toddler for the Doctor. Google Flagged Him as a Criminal.
-
-
-
-Credit...Aaron Wojack for The New York Times
-
-Google has an automated tool to detect abusive images of children. But the system can get it wrong, and the consequences are serious.
-
-Mark with his son this month.Credit...Aaron Wojack for The New York Times
-
-- Aug. 21, 2022
-
-Mark noticed something amiss with his toddler. His son’s penis looked swollen and was hurting him. Mark, a stay-at-home dad in San Francisco, grabbed his Android smartphone and took photos to document the problem so he could track its progression.
-
-It was a Friday night in February 2021. His wife called an advice nurse at their health care provider to schedule an emergency consultation for the next morning, by video because it was a Saturday and there was a pandemic going on. The nurse said to send photos so the doctor could review them in advance.
-
-Mark’s wife grabbed her husband’s phone and texted a few high-quality close-ups of their son’s groin area to her iPhone so she could upload them to the health care provider’s messaging system. In one, Mark’s hand was visible, helping to better display the swelling. Mark and his wife gave no thought to the tech giants that made this quick capture and exchange of digital data possible, or what those giants might think of the images.
-
-With help from the photos, the doctor diagnosed the issue and prescribed antibiotics, which quickly cleared it up. But the episode left Mark with a much larger problem, one that would cost him more than a decade of contacts, emails and photos, and make him the target of a police investigation. Mark, who asked to be identified only by his first name for fear of potential reputational harm, had been caught in an algorithmic net designed to snare people exchanging child sexual abuse material.
-
-Because technology companies routinely capture so much data, they have been pressured to act as sentinels, examining what passes through their servers to detect and prevent criminal behavior. Child advocates say the companies’ cooperation is essential to combat the rampant online spread of [sexual abuse imagery](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-abuse.html). But it can entail peering into private archives, such as digital photo albums — an intrusion users may not expect — that has cast innocent behavior in a sinister light in at least two cases The Times has unearthed.
-
-Jon Callas, a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties organization, called the cases canaries **“**in this particular coal mine.”
-
-“There could be tens, hundreds, thousands more of these,” he said.
-
-Given the toxic nature of the accusations, Mr. Callas speculated that most people wrongfully flagged would not publicize what had happened.
-
-“I knew that these companies were watching and that privacy is not what we would hope it to be,” Mark said. “But I haven’t done anything wrong.”
-
-The police agreed. Google did not.
-
-## ‘A Severe Violation’
-
-After setting up a Gmail account in the mid-aughts, Mark, who is in his 40s, came to rely heavily on Google. He synced appointments with his wife on Google Calendar. His Android smartphone camera backed up his photos and videos to the Google cloud. He even had a phone plan with Google Fi.
-
-Two days after taking the photos of his son, Mark’s phone made a blooping notification noise: His account had been disabled because of “harmful content” that was “a severe violation of Google’s policies and might be illegal.” A “learn more” link led to a [list of possible reasons](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40695?hl=en), including “child sexual abuse & exploitation.”
-
-Mark was confused at first but then remembered his son’s infection. “Oh, God, Google probably thinks that was child porn,” he thought.
-
-In an unusual twist, Mark had worked as a software engineer on a large technology company’s automated tool for taking down video content flagged by users as problematic. He knew such systems often have a human in the loop to ensure that computers don’t make a mistake, and he assumed his case would be cleared up as soon as it reached that person.
-
-Image
-
-
-
-Credit...Aaron Wojack for The New York Times
-
-He filled out a form requesting a review of Google’s decision, explaining his son’s infection. At the same time, he discovered the domino effect of Google’s rejection. Not only did he lose emails, contact information for friends and former colleagues, and documentation of his son’s first years of life, his Google Fi account shut down, meaning he had to get a new phone number with another carrier. Without access to his old phone number and email address, he couldn’t get the security codes he needed to sign in to other internet accounts, locking him out of much of his digital life.
-
-“The more eggs you have in one basket, the more likely the basket is to break,” he said.
-
-In a statement, Google said, “Child sexual abuse material is abhorrent and we’re committed to preventing the spread of it on our platforms.”
-
-A few days after Mark filed the appeal, Google responded that it would not reinstate the account, with no further explanation.
-
-Mark didn’t know it, but Google’s review team had also flagged a video he made and the San Francisco Police Department had already started to investigate him.
-
-## How Google Flags Images
-
-The day after Mark’s troubles started, the same scenario was playing out in Texas. A toddler in Houston had an infection in his “intimal parts,” wrote his father in [an online post](https://googlemessingupmylife.quora.com/Google-incorrectly-judged-my-case-On-February-22nd-2021-Google-disabled-my-account-saying-I-had-seriously-violated-th) that I stumbled upon while reporting out Mark’s story. At the pediatrician’s request, Cassio, who also asked to be identified only by his first name, used an Android to take photos, which were backed up automatically to Google Photos. He then sent them to his wife via Google’s chat service.
-
-Cassio was in the middle of buying a house, and signing countless digital documents, when his Gmail account was disabled. He asked his mortgage broker to switch his email address, which made the broker suspicious until Cassio’s real estate agent vouched for him.
-
-“It was a headache,” Cassio said.
-
-Images of children being exploited or sexually abused are [flagged by technology giants](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-abuse.html) millions of times each year. In 2021, [Google alone](https://transparencyreport.google.com/child-sexual-abuse-material/reporting?lu=total_cybertipline_reports&total_cybertipline_reports=product:GOOGLE;period:2021H1) filed over 600,000 reports of child abuse material and disabled the accounts of over 270,000 users as a result. Mark’s and Cassio’s experiences were drops in a big bucket.
-
-The tech industry’s first tool to seriously disrupt the vast online exchange of so-called child pornography was PhotoDNA, a database of known images of abuse, converted into unique digital codes, or hashes; it could be used to quickly comb through large numbers of images to detect a match even if a photo had been altered in small ways. After Microsoft released PhotoDNA in 2009, Facebook and other tech companies used it to root out users circulating illegal and harmful imagery.
-
-“It’s a terrific tool,” the president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said [at the time](https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/microsoft-tackles-the-child-pornography-problem/).
-
-A bigger breakthrough came along almost a decade later, in 2018, when Google [developed](https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/using-ai-help-organizations-detect-and-report-child-sexual-abuse-material-online/) an artificially intelligent tool that could recognize never-before-seen exploitative images of children. That meant finding not just known images of abused children but images of unknown victims who could potentially be rescued by the authorities. Google made [its technology](https://protectingchildren.google/#tools-to-fight-csam) available to other companies, including [Facebook](https://about.fb.com/news/2021/02/preventing-child-exploitation-on-our-apps/).
-
-When Mark’s and Cassio’s photos were automatically uploaded from their phones to Google’s servers, this technology flagged them. Jon Callas of the E.F.F. called the scanning intrusive, saying a family photo album on someone’s personal device should be a “private sphere.” (A Google spokeswoman said the company scans only when an “affirmative action” is taken by a user; that includes when the user’s phone backs up photos to the company’s cloud.)
-
-“This is precisely the nightmare that we are all concerned about,” Mr. Callas said. “They’re going to scan my family album, and then I’m going to get into trouble.”
-
-A human content moderator for Google would have reviewed the photos after they were flagged by the artificial intelligence to confirm they met the federal definition of child sexual abuse material. When Google makes such a discovery, it locks the user’s account, searches for other exploitative material and, as required by [federal law](https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title18-section2258A&num=0&edition=prelim), makes a report to the CyberTipline at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
-
-The nonprofit organization has become the clearinghouse for abuse material; it received 29.3 million reports last year, or about 80,000 reports a day. Fallon McNulty, who manages the CyberTipline, said most of these are previously reported images, which remain in steady circulation on the internet. So her staff of 40 analysts focuses on potential new victims, so they can prioritize those cases for law enforcement.
-
-“Generally, if NCMEC staff review a CyberTipline report and it includes exploitative material that hasn’t been seen before, they will escalate,” Ms. McNulty said. “That may be a child who hasn’t yet been identified or safeguarded and isn’t out of harm’s way.”
-
-Ms. McNulty said Google’s astonishing ability to spot these images so her organization could report them to police for further investigation was “an example of the system working as it should.”
-
-CyberTipline staff members add any new abusive images to the hashed database that is shared with technology companies for scanning purposes. When Mark’s wife learned this, she deleted the photos Mark had taken of their son from her iPhone, for fear Apple might flag her account. Apple [announced plans last year](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/technology/apple-iphones-privacy.html) to scan the iCloud for known sexually abusive depictions of children, but the rollout was [delayed](https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/15/22837631/apple-csam-detection-child-safety-feature-webpage-removal-delay) indefinitely after resistance from privacy groups.
-
-In 2021, the CyberTipline [reported](https://www.missingkids.org/gethelpnow/cybertipline/cybertiplinedata) that it had alerted authorities to “over 4,260 potential new child victims.” The sons of Mark and Cassio were counted among them.
-
-## ‘No Crime Occurred’
-
-Image
-
-Credit...Aaron Wojack for The New York Times
-
-In December 2021, Mark received a manila envelope in the mail from the San Francisco Police Department. It contained a letter informing him that he had been investigated as well as copies of the search warrants served on Google and his internet service provider. An investigator, whose contact information was provided, had asked for everything in Mark’s Google account: his internet searches, his location history, his messages and any document, photo and video he’d stored with the company.
-
-The search, related to “child exploitation videos,” had taken place in February, within a week of his taking the photos of his son.
-
-Mark called the investigator, Nicholas Hillard, who said the case was closed. Mr. Hillard had tried to get in touch with Mark but his phone number and email address hadn’t worked.
-
-“I determined that the incident did not meet the elements of a crime and that no crime occurred,” Mr. Hillard wrote in his report. The police had access to all the information Google had on Mark and decided it did not constitute child abuse or exploitation.
-
-Mark asked if Mr. Hillard could tell Google that he was innocent so he could get his account back.
-
-“You have to talk to Google,” Mr. Hillard said, according to Mark. “There’s nothing I can do.”
-
-Mark appealed his case to Google again, providing the police report, but to no avail. After getting a notice two months ago that his account was being permanently deleted, Mark spoke with a lawyer about suing Google and how much it might cost.
-
-“I decided it was probably not worth $7,000,” he said.
-
-Kate Klonick, a law professor at St. John’s University who has written about [online content moderation](https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/1598-1670_Online.pdf), said it can be challenging to “account for things that are invisible in a photo, like the behavior of the people sharing an image or the intentions of the person taking it.” False positives, where people are erroneously flagged, are [inevitable](https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/136405) given the billions of images being scanned. While most people would probably consider that trade-off worthwhile, given the benefit of identifying abused children, Ms. Klonick said companies need a “robust process” for clearing and reinstating innocent people who are mistakenly flagged.
-
-“This would be problematic if it were just a case of content moderation and censorship,” Ms. Klonick said. “But this is doubly dangerous in that it also results in someone being reported to law enforcement.”
-
-It could have been worse, she said, with a parent potentially losing custody of a child. “You could imagine how this might escalate,” Ms. Klonick said.
-
-Cassio was also investigated by the police. A detective from the Houston Police department called in the fall of 2021, asking him to come into the station.
-
-After Cassio showed the detective his communications with the pediatrician, he was quickly cleared. But he, too, was unable to get his decade-old Google account back, despite being a paying user of Google’s web services. He now uses a Hotmail address for email, which people mock him for, and makes multiple backups of his data.
-
-## You Don’t Necessarily Know It When You See It
-
-Image
-
-Credit...Aaron Wojack for The New York Times
-
-Not all photos of naked children are pornographic, exploitative or abusive. [Carissa Byrne Hessick](https://law.unc.edu/people/carissa-byrne-hessick/), a law professor at the University of North Carolina who writes about child pornography crimes, said that legally defining what constitutes sexually abusive imagery can be complicated.
-
-But Ms. Hessick said she agreed with the police that medical images did not qualify. “There’s no abuse of the child,” she said. “It’s taken for nonsexual reasons.”
-
-In machine learning, a computer program is trained by being fed “right” and “wrong” information until it can distinguish between the two. To avoid flagging photos of babies in the bath or children running unclothed through sprinklers, Google’s A.I. for recognizing abuse was trained both with images of potentially illegal material found by Google in user accounts in the past and with images that were not indicative of abuse, to give it a more precise understanding of what to flag.
-
-I have seen the photos that Mark took of his son. The decision to flag them was understandable: They are explicit photos of a child’s genitalia. But the context matters: They were taken by a parent worried about a sick child.
-
-“We do recognize that in an age of telemedicine and particularly Covid, it has been necessary for parents to take photos of their children in order to get a diagnosis,” said Claire Lilley, Google’s head of child safety operations. The company has consulted pediatricians, she said, so that its human reviewers understand possible conditions that might appear in photographs taken for medical reasons.
-
-Dr. Suzanne Haney, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Council on Child Abuse and Neglect, advised parents against taking photos of their children’s genitals, even when directed by a doctor.
-
-“The last thing you want is for a child to get comfortable with someone photographing their genitalia,” Dr. Haney said. “If you absolutely have to, avoid uploading to the cloud and delete them immediately.”
-
-She said most physicians were probably unaware of the risks in asking parents to take such photos.
-
-“I applaud Google for what they’re doing,” Dr. Haney said of the company’s efforts to combat abuse. “We do have a horrible problem. Unfortunately, it got tied up with parents trying to do right by their kids.”
-
-Cassio was told by a customer support representative earlier this year that sending the pictures to his wife using Google Hangouts violated the chat service’s [terms of service](https://support.google.com/hangouts/answer/9334169?hl=en). “Do not use Hangouts in any way that exploits children,” the terms read. “Google has a zero-tolerance policy against this content.”
-
-As for Mark, Ms. Lilley, at Google, said that reviewers had not detected a rash or redness in the photos he took and that the subsequent review of his account turned up a video from six months earlier that Google also considered problematic, of a young child lying in bed with an unclothed woman.
-
-Mark did not remember this video and no longer had access to it, but he said it sounded like a private moment he would have been inspired to capture, not realizing it would ever be viewed or judged by anyone else.
-
-“I can imagine it. We woke up one morning. It was a beautiful day with my wife and son and I wanted to record the moment,” Mark said. “If only we slept with pajamas on, this all could have been avoided.”
-
-A Google spokeswoman said the company stands by its decisions, even though law enforcement cleared the two men.
-
-## Guilty by Default
-
-Ms. Hessick, the law professor, said the cooperation the technology companies provide to law enforcement to address and root out child sexual abuse is “incredibly important,” but she thought it should allow for corrections.
-
-“From Google’s perspective, it’s easier to just deny these people the use of their services,” she speculated. Otherwise, the company would have to resolve more difficult questions about “what’s appropriate behavior with kids and then what’s appropriate to photograph or not.”
-
-Mark still has hope that he can get his information back. The San Francisco police have the contents of his Google account preserved on a thumb drive. Mark is now trying to get a copy. A police spokesman said the department is eager to help him.
-
-Nico Grant contributed reporting. Susan Beachy contributed research.
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-Date: 2022-12-04
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-Link: https://magazine.atavist.com/a-matter-of-honor-murders-greece-afghanistan-istanbul/
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-# A Matter of Honor
-
-
-
-*A Matter of Honor*
-
-## Why were three Afghan women brutally murdered at the edge of Europe? A journey from Mazar-i-Sharif to Istanbul to Athens in search of answers.
-
-###### The *Atavist* Magazine, No. 133
-
-[Sarah Souli](https://sarahsouli.com/) is a journalist based in Athens, Greece. Her writing has appeared in publications including *The Economist*, *Vice*, *The Guardian*, *Allure*, and *Travel and Leisure*. She was previously a staff writer at *Colors* magazine. Her work has been supported by the International Women’s Media Fund, Fabrica, and the Alfred Toepfer Foundation.
-
-This story was completed with generous support from the [Incubator for Media Education and Development](https://www.imedd.org/), a nonprofit journalistic organization founded in 2018 with an exclusive donation from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
-
-**Editor:** Seyward Darby
-**Art Director:** Ed Johnson
-**Copy Editor:** Sean Cooper
-**Fact Checker:** Kyla Jones
-**Illustrator:** Oriana Fenwick
-**Researchers:** Khwaga Ghani, Aminullah Habiba Mayer
-
-*Published in November 2022.*
-
-*“Just by being there, the border is an invitation.*
-*Come on, it whispers, step across this line. If you dare.”*
-*—*Kapka Kassabova
-
-Life in a diaspora can have the dull ache of a phantom limb. In the Istanbul neighborhood of Zeytinburnu, in August 2021, the pain was acute. More than 2,000 miles away, the Taliban was starting to take back control of Afghanistan; within days the country would fall to an old regime made new. The events had plunged Zeytinburnu, an enclave of tens of thousands of Afghans displaced from their home country by war, poverty, and other ills, into a state of collective fear and mourning.
-
-The context seemed to render my investigation, now dragging into its third year, futile. What did three dead women matter when a whole nation was having its heart ripped out?
-
-The heat of late summer shimmered off the pavement as I spent long, liquid days moving from one person to another, displaying my phone screen and asking the same question: *Do you know these women?* I approached customers in call centers that promised good rates back home, patrons in restaurants where the smell of mutton biryani filled the air, elderly men sipping tea on wooden benches, and mothers watching children at a construction site that had been turned into a makeshift playground. I lost count of how many people I asked. Everyone gave the same answer: *No.*
-
-On what was supposed to be my last afternoon in Zeytinburnu, I stood outside a café window watching a young Afghan man inside churn cardamom *shiryakh* (ice cream) in a large copper pot. The customers behind him drank fruit juices and devoured frozen treats amid kitsch decor: blue plastic flowers, a glossy relief of the Swiss Alps. The scene felt at odds with the urgent historical moment; in Kabul, as the American military withdrew, the Taliban was shooting people dead in the streets. Still, perhaps my professional defeat, my failure to find answers, would go down easier with sugar.
-
-**\*Names have been changed for individuals’ safety.**
-
-The door to the café jingled as I walked inside with Tabsheer,\* an Afghan journalist and translator who was helping me report. We sat at a plastic table, where a waiter placed a dish of ice cream swirled to a perfect point and dusted with pistachio. After we ate, Tabsheer suggested, “Let’s just ask one more person. We’re here. We might as well.”
-
-We settled on a middle-aged man who, in a pressed shirt and slacks, would have looked the consummate professional if not for the comically large banana smoothie he was drinking. We walked over and introduced ourselves using the same tired script. I took out my phone and pulled up a photo of a woman, her glossy red lips pursed in a coquettish expression that over the course of my reporting had come to signify disappointment—at men, at law enforcement, at me, the journalist trying to unearth her story.
-
-The man looked at the image and put down his smoothie. He furrowed his brow and leaned in slightly. His lips parted and he hesitated a moment, which prepared me for familiar disappointment. Then he spoke.
-
-“Yes,” he said. He cocked his head to the side. “Yes, I know this woman.”
-
-“Are you sure?”I asked, incredulous at the turn the day had taken.
-
-I pulled up another photo—a teenager with dark eyes, her straight hair tucked behind one ear. “What about this girl, do you recognize her?” I asked, holding my breath.
-
-The man narrowed his eyes. “Yes,” he repeated.
-
-I brought up another photo, this time of a young man looking over his shoulder, his mouth firmly set. “I often saw them together around here, but this was many years ago,” the man said. He looked at me quizzically. “What do you want with these people?”
-
-I chose my next words carefully. Few things spook people like the mention of murder. “I’m looking for them,” I replied. “Something bad happened to them in Greece.”
-
-The man held my gaze for a moment and took a sip of his smoothie. Whatever he was weighing, when he set his glass down he seemed to have made up his mind. “I know all these people, and I know their story,” he said. “I will tell you everything.”
-
-**Three Years Earlier**
-
-On the morning of October 10, 2018, a Greek farmer named Nikos Papachatzidis left his house to tend his fields. His land abutting the Evros River had long been a source of pride. This slice of the world, on the very eastern edge of Europe, is fertile, a place where sugarcane, cotton, wheat, and sunflowers grow in abundance.
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-With his snow-white hair blowing in the breeze, Papachatzidis, then in his early seventies, hopped onto his tractor and began tilling the soil. As he drove, he noticed something on the ground: a human hand, bound with a length of rope. He stopped the tractor and climbed down to find a dead woman, her face more or less intact, with a wide wound on her neck. Papachatzidis called the police.
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-Papachatzidis is not a man easily ruffled. When the police arrived, they cordoned off the area around the body, and Papachatzidis went back to work on another part of his land. He stayed out until sundown, at which point he returned home, exchanged his muddy boots for house slippers, and told his wife about the dead woman. At first she was angry—why had he waited all day to tell her? Then she grew so scared that a killer might be on the loose that she spent a sleepless night praying.
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-The next day, the couple received a phone call from the police. The bodies of two other women had been found on Papachatzidis’s land. It was likely that all three were migrants or asylum seekers. They had been murdered.
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-Bodies turn up along the Evros River with morbid regularity. The thin, shallow waterway divides Greece and Turkey for some 120 miles—the countries’ only shared land border—before dumping into the Aegean Sea. The area around Papachatzidis’s farm is a popular gateway for people desperate to enter Europe in search of freedom, safety, and dignity. But while traversing the river is less treacherous than a boat passage across the Mediterranean, it is by no means safe. Between 2018 and 2022, more than 200 migrants and refugees died trying to cross the Evros. Hypothermia and drowning are the most common causes of death. The strong current is challenging even for capable swimmers, and natural debris such as tree branches can snag on clothing and drag people—often children—to the river’s muddy bed. Across the Evros, other dangers await. Smugglers load people into vans bound for Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, with drivers who are often scared and inexperienced, resulting in horrific car crashes along the highway.
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-Murder, though, is a different matter. It is all but unheard of in Evros, the Greek region that takes its name from the river. For locals, the crime on Papachatzidis’s land was the most brutal act in recent memory.
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-Word spread fast, fueling rumors. This was the work of Islamic State operatives, some people said. No, the Turks did it. No, only a Greek soldier could be responsible. Greece, after all, had militarized the border in recent years, in an effort to keep migrants out of the European Union. With support from Brussels, the Evros River was now lined with fences and patrolled by men with guns. Some police officers who intercepted Afghans, Syrians, Somalis, and other migrants after they crossed the river allegedly violated international human rights law by sending them right back to Turkey, a practice known as pushback. (Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Greece denies that it engages in pushback.) Over the coming years, several people would be shot dead trying to enter Evros. In March 2020, as border police and the military fired upon migrants, reportedly killing two, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen thanked Greece for being “a European shield.”
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-A glaring indignity, among many others, is that Europe is not always aware of who dies on its doorstep. Identifying bodies found in Evros is the job of one man: Pavlos Pavlidis, a doctor and forensic scientist. When a migrant dies, the body is taken to Pavlidis’s morgue at University General Hospital in the seaside city of Alexandroupoli.
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-Pavlidis is tall and gaunt, with the stooped demeanor of a man used to doling out bad news. His job often feels Sisyphean: endless and hopeless. Unlike the sea, the Evros River has no salt to preserve bodies, and faces quickly disintegrate beyond recognition. Most identifying documents are lost or heavily damaged during crossings. Pavlidis takes DNA from the bodies and notes potentially identifying clues—tattoos and circumcisions, for instance—as well as material possessions. He sometimes works with the International Red Cross and various embassies to try and contact the families of the deceased. In most cases, the bodies he inspects are never identified.
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-When Pavlidis arrived at Papachatzidis’s farm, a grisly scene awaited him. Two of the women were found on their knees, facedown in the soil. Roughly 330 feet away, the third woman, who looked older than the others, lay sprawled on the ground, as though she had tried to run away and been knocked off her feet. All three had their hands bound, and their throats were cut. Their shoes were laced and their pants were buttoned.
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-Pavlidis is not an emotional man. In the more than two decades he has spent toiling in a hospital basement, he has learned not to think about what the dead were like when they were alive, or what they experienced in their final moments. A morgue is no place to contemplate the immense cruelty of the world if one wants to stay sane. “You get feelings,” Pavlidis said with a firm shake of his head. “I don’t want that.”
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-Pavlidis oversaw the transfer of the women’s bodies to Alexandroupoli, where they were placed on metal gurneys. The sharp chemical smell of the hospital masked the musk of decay. Decomposition had already set in; it appeared that several days passed before Papachatzidis discovered the bodies. Pavlidis noted that the women were dressed like “Europeans,” in tight denim and without headscarves. They had no identifying documents. Pavlidis found no internal bruising or other signs of trauma. No drugs or alcohol were in the women’s systems, and there was no evidence of sexual assault. The younger women were still, at least medically speaking, virgins; the older woman was not.
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-Pavlidis took DNA samples from skin, clothes, and hair. He scraped underneath the women’s fingernails, which were manicured and painted pearly pink. Genetic testing soon illuminated one piece of the story: The women were related. The younger two were sisters, and they had been killed a short distance from their mother.
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-The cause of death in each case was hemorrhagic shock brought on by severe blood loss. The women’s jugular veins had been cut, likely by someone right-handed. In Pavlidis’s experience, wounds of this nature were often sloppy and jagged; slicing someone’s throat is difficult, especially if they’re screaming or moving around. But the wounds on the women were precise. “It was like a butcher cut,” Pavlidis told me, sitting in his office. A cigarette smoldered in a glass ashtray on his desk, and an old PC hummed behind it. “I’ve said from the beginning, this guy is a professional.”
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-Two knives were found at the crime scene: one nine and a half inches long, with a serrated edge, and another, slightly shorter, with a black plastic handle. Both had been wiped clean. Police found a few other items near the bodies, including a water bottle, a bag of almonds, a tube of lipstick, and a soda can.
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-The most important piece of evidence was also one of the luckiest finds: a Samsung mobile phone tucked in the mother’s breast pocket. The local police didn’t have the technology to extract metadata from it, nor the experience to handle what was likely to become an international criminal investigation. The women had been killed in Greece after leaving Turkey, and it was all but certain they’d begun life in a third country. To find out who the women were and who had killed them, someone with resources and connections would have to run the investigation.
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-## In the photos on the phone, the women were suddenly alive. In some images they had their arms thrown around each other. Filters—floating pink hearts, rabbit ears—embellished others.
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-Zacharoula Tsirigoti is short and compact, with small fingers that seem constantly to be rolling cigarettes with the assistance of a little machine she keeps in her purse and reddish hair that, when we met, was cropped close to her scalp. But while outward appearances indicate a woman built for efficiency, during our first interview Tsirigoti called herself “a romantic.” I watched her tear up twice while talking about her work.
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-From the age of 13, Tsirigoti wanted to be a police officer. “Not like the riot police that just beat people up,” she clarified, wagging a finger in the air. She wanted to give back to her community; she was attracted to the ethos of service and protection. After graduating from university, Tsirigoti started off as a constable, then spent 22 years working on relations between the Hellenic police and foreign law enforcement. She eventually became head of the Aliens and Border Protection Branch, and in 2016 was promoted to lieutenant general in the Hellenic police in Athens, making her the highest-ranking female officer in Greece.
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-None of this was without challenges. Greece is the lowest-ranked EU country in terms of gender equality; the Hellenic police is not a bastion of feminism. “The society in Greece is not ready to accept women doing jobs that men used to do,” Tsirigoti said. She sprinkled tobacco onto a rolling paper and looked up at me with a sly smile. “They gave me this branch because they thought I couldn’t manage the situation, but they were wrong,” she said. “A woman is more diplomatic than a man.”
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-Diplomacy was one characteristic needed to helm the investigation into the triple murder in Evros. Another was patience. Tsirigoti knew it might take months, if not years, to make progress in the case. The required paperwork and bureaucratic maneuvering, already Kafkaesque in Greece, would become even more dizzyingly complex when other nations entered the mix. With her commitment to her work and her Rolodex of international contacts, plus her deep understanding of migration patterns between Greece and Turkey from her time in border protection, Tsirigoti was ideally suited to the job.
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-One factor working against the investigation was general disinterest in the victims. In November 2018, a month after the murders, Eleni Topaloudi, a 21-year-old Greek woman, was attacked, gang-raped, and killed on the island of Rhodes. The case mobilized the nation, and police quickly arrested the perpetrators. The following year, when Suzanne Eaton, a sixty-year-old American woman, was murdered on Crete, the crime made headlines around the world, and her killer was brought to justice in two weeks. By contrast, the three migrant women killed in Evros barely made the news.
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-Tsirigoti didn’t just keep law enforcement’s attention on the case—she *was* the attention. “For me as a woman, it was very sad to see a mother with her two daughters killed like this,” she said. “To cross the border to another country there is a cause. They are human beings, not a number. I wanted to prove to the world, to the EU, that the Greek police investigate and care about everything. It was a matter of honor.”
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-The first step in the investigation was to contact Interpol, the international organization that facilitates cooperation among law enforcement in 195 countries. Greek police sent a “black notice” to the agency, an official request for information pertaining to unidentified bodies. They shared fingerprints taken from the three bodies—if the women had been registered as asylum seekers in, say, Turkey, there was a chance Interpol would be able to identify them. “We expected to get an answer from them,” Tsirigoti said. But that route turned out to be a dead end.
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-Tsirigoti hoped that the phone found on the mother would hold clues, so in December 2018 she turned to the Hellenic police’s anti-terrorism unit—not because she suspected that the women had been killed in an act of terrorism, but because the unit is the most technologically advanced in Greek law enforcement. Forensic analysts extracted data from the phone, including 511 contacts, 282 text messages, the dates, times, and numbers associated with 194 calls, and hundreds of photos and videos. Additional messages were found on social media platforms, along with data indicating when and where Wi-Fi was activated.
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-Sifting through the information, Tsirigoti was able to begin piecing together the women’s identities. They were from Afghanistan, and their first names were Fahima, Rabiya, and Farzana. Fahima, the mother, was in her mid-to-late thirties. Rabiya was 17, and Farzana couldn’t have been older than 14. In the photos on the phone, they were suddenly alive. In some images they had their arms thrown around each other. Filters—floating pink hearts, rabbit ears—embellished others.
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-Now that Tsirigoti knew the women’s nationality, her next move was to reach out to the Afghan ambassador in Greece, Mirwais Samadi. In March 2019, she shared the black notice and other details about the case with him. A much needed stroke of luck: Samadi was close with the chief of police in Kabul. He called in a favor to accelerate the process of formally identifying the women.
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-Two months later, in May, Tsirigoti received a document from the Interpol office in Kabul. It stated that Fahima was married with five children: Rabiya, Farzana, and three younger ones, two boys and a girl. The whole family had left their home in Mazar-i-Sharif, in the north of Afghanistan, in early 2018. They had passed through Iran before settling in Istanbul for a few months, where they sought passage to Europe. When the Mazar-i-Sharif branch of Interpol received photos of the deceased women, one of Fahima’s sisters and an uncle identified them; law enforcement was able to corroborate their identities with a brother-in-law of Fahima’s living in Europe.
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-Tsirigoti then turned her attention to Turkey, visiting the country five times as part of the investigation. She worked with the Turkish authorities, trying to track down men who may have come in contact with Fahima and her daughters. Since the women were migrants, they almost certainly had paid smugglers to get them across the Evros River. Those men could be murder suspects or the last people to see the women alive.
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-But that summer, Tsirigoti’s investigation came to a sudden halt. Political allegiances run deep in Greece, and Tsirigoti had been appointed to her post under the leftist Syriza government, which in the July 2019 elections lost power to the center-right New Democracy party. The new government made sweeping changes to police leadership, and on July 23 Tsirigoti, only 54 at the time, was forced to retire. “I didn’t finish the investigation,” she said, “and I feel very sad about it. But the police is a man’s world.” She shrugged.
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-Before vacating her office, Tsirigoti spoke with the officer who would take over the case. She made him swear to God he’d solve it. He promised he would, then handed it off to a small team of young male officers. It soon stagnated as police cooperation along the Greek-Turkish border all but ceased under the new government.
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-Conflict between Greece and Turkey stretches back centuries. After nearly 400 years of occupation by the Ottomans, Greece declared independence in 1821. Four wars followed. In 1923, a forced population exchange of 1.2 million Orthodox Greeks living in Turkey for 400,000 Muslim Turks living in Greece drastically altered the demographic makeup of each country. Refugees came to constitute one-fifth of Greece’s population—among them was Tsirigoti’s grandmother.
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-Another influx of refugees, this time in the 21st century, became a new source of acrimony between Greece and Turkey; both countries are keen to stir the pot of nationalist ideology and point fingers at each other when it suits them. Greece insists that Turkey isn’t doing enough to stop displaced people from crossing into European territory, while Turkey, host to the world’s largest refugee population, accuses Greece of pushback measures. Caught in the middle are migrants and refugees, human beings treated as pawns.
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-With her professional experience and fervent commitment to justice, Tsirigoti had managed to bulldoze through political hostilities to investigate the murders of Fahima, Rabiya, and Farzana. Without her there was a risk that the crime might never be solved. When we first met, in January 2020, Tsirigoti was still keeping an eye on the case, albeit from afar. She also had a theory about what had happened to the women. She leaned in close to tell me. Behind her, cars zipped down a busy Athens street. “It is my belief that this was an honor killing,” Tsirigoti said.
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-It seemed reductionist to assume that foreign women had been killed for foreign reasons, as opposed to a smuggling gone wrong, a mangled burglary, or something else related to the perilous journey they’d made to Europe. A form of gendered violence seen primarily in extremely conservative communities, honor killings usually occur when a woman or girl is believed to have tarnished a man’s reputation. These are not crimes of opportunity—they necessarily involve a perpetrator motivated by a desire to protect what he perceives as his dignity. Who might have had that motive, and why? Tsirigoti didn’t have an answer, but she thought she knew who might.
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-Found on the phone in Fahima’s pocket were photos of a young man who appeared to be in his early twenties, with deep-set eyes and black hair that swooped across his broad forehead. There were images of him with Fahima’s daughters in a park, and one of him sitting on a sofa. In some of these, he had his arms around Fahima; in one, she kissed his cheek. What was his relationship to the women? Could it have been a reason for violence, committed by him or by someone else?
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-Data from the phone indicated that the young man may have been the last person to see Fahima and her daughters alive. Law enforcement had no idea where he was. I told Tsirigoti that I’d try to find him. Then, in a rush of bravado, I went further: I said that I would find out what happened to the three women.
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-“OK,” Tsirigoti said with a chuckle. “Good luck.”
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-Zacharoula Tsirigoti and Pavlos Pavlidis
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-The starting point was easy to see. Authorities had cleared Fahima’s husband of suspicion, but I wanted to speak to him myself. Even if he had nothing to do with the crime, his memories of his wife and daughters could prove invaluable.
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-After a series of phone calls, I met Abdul\* in February 2020, in Victoria Square, a part of Athens’s Kypseli neighborhood that had become a hub for refugees, many of whom would soon be forced into the streets as shelters became overcrowded or shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic. Abdul was a thin, tiny man. He moved nervously, as if he were afraid of taking up space or drawing attention to himself. He seemed suspicious and scared—of me.
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-Abdul and his three surviving children traveled from Turkey to Greece by boat in 2019. They spent a harrowing few weeks at a refugee camp on the island of Lesbos before they were granted temporary asylum and transferred to Athens. Not long after our meeting, the family would be given permanent asylum in another European country.
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-As we spoke, Abdul’s children sat nearby drinking orange juice and coloring in spiral notebooks with abandon. Abdul confessed that he hadn’t explained to them that their mother and elder sisters were dead. He sat with his back to them, to shield them from his tears.
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-“What do you tell them?” I asked.
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-“That they are waiting for us in Germany,” he replied.
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-The first thing Abdul wanted me to know was that he loved Fahima fiercely. He could not even utter his daughters’ names—doing so seemed painful beyond comprehension—so he concentrated on his wife. “We were like Romeo and Juliet,” he told me. Fahima was bigger than him, physically and otherwise, and he was fine to let her take the wheel of their life together. She managed their money, and it was her idea to leave Afghanistan. No one in their extended family supported the decision. Abdul had a mostly steady job and earned enough for the family to rent a small house and enjoy tiny luxuries from time to time. The children were in school. Why risk going to Europe?
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-Fahima wanted her children to grow up free. There was an individualistic component to this—for them to dress as they wished, to have access to technology, to connect with the wider world—but even more important was the chance for her children to live without the looming threat of war. She wanted to ensure that her daughters weren’t forced into marriage or motherhood, or killed at a young age. Fahima was not content with the incrementally better life her family had in Afghanistan.
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-The family left Afghanistan in January 2018. They packed up a few belongings and took a bus from Mazar-i-Sharif to Kabul, then caught another bus to Herat, a popular crossing point into Iran. They spent a few freezing cold days in Tehran before walking across a mountainous border into Turkey with a group of migrants and refugees, led by smugglers. Eventually they made it to Istanbul, settled in Zeytinburnu, and tried to cross into Greece several times without success. That summer, Abdul left Istanbul to find work in another Turkish city.
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-His telling of what happened next was frustratingly vague. Was he aware that his wife and eldest daughters were planning on leaving without the rest of the family? He was not. Why had Fahima taken Rabiya and Farzana alone to Greece? He didn’t know. Wasn’t he concerned when he didn’t hear from them for months? He assumed everything was fine. Did he try to locate Fahima? He trusted that she would eventually reach out to him. When he learned that his wife and daughters were dead—first through the Zeytinburnu grapevine, then officially from the Greek police—did he have any idea who might have wanted to hurt them? No, he said. He had no clue.
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-I spoke with Abdul again after that day, and while his answers became no clearer, what did crystallize was an additional reason for his opacity. Abdul wasn’t just grieving and frightened—he was also embarrassed because his wife had left him for another man. I wondered about the young man in the photos on Fahima’s phone. When I had showed one of the images to Abdul, he paused before telling me that the man was a neighbor in Istanbul, someone he had seen once or twice.
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-After several sad, complicated interviews, it was clear I wasn’t going to get anything more out of Abdul. I turned next to the people who seemed most likely to know Fahima’s secrets, the things she would never tell her husband, no matter how in love he believed they once were. The Greek police had never formally interviewed Fahima’s family. But in Afghanistan, as in many places, women tend to confide in other women. I wanted to talk to Fahima’s sisters.
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-## Hadila thought that Fahima and her daughters had drowned while trying to reach Europe. As I delivered the news of their murders, Hadila began to cry, rocking back and forth.
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-Mazar-i-Sharif is Afghanistan’s fourth-largest city; the wider region where it sits, known as Balkh Province, shares a watery border with Uzbekistan. The city is famous for its blue mosque, which Sunni Muslims believe houses the tomb of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet Mohammed’s cousin. The mosque, with its sea of cerulean tiles that glimmer in the sun, has remained miraculously intact through several military incursions.
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-In the 1980s, Mazar-i-Sharif was a strategic position for the Soviet army, which transformed the city’s airport into a launch point for missiles targeting the mujahideen. For a brief, sweet period in the 1990s, the city was a generally stable proto-state, before the Taliban took over and massacred some 8,000 people. When it entered the city in November 2001, the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance easily captured Mazar-i-Sharif and killed more than 3,000 Taliban fighters, burying them in unmarked graves. For the next two decades, periods of relative peace were punctuated by horrific violence. Still, Mazar-i-Sharif held on to its reputation as one of the more liberal cities in Afghanistan, so much so that when the Taliban seized it in August 2021, its leaders promptly fled to Uzbekistan rather than face imprisonment, or worse.
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-Fahima and Abdul were married during the Taliban era. Their wedding was a simple religious affair, without music or even a wedding dress, and it was marred by tragedy. One of Fahima’s brothers-in-law was in a car accident on the way to the ceremony, and the blame was thrown onto the bride. She’s bad luck, her in-laws said. At the time, Fahima was still a teenager—not much older than Farzana, her middle daughter, would be when she was murdered.
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-Fahima was one of seven siblings, three of whom had passed away by the time she and her family left Afghanistan: One died from a childhood illness, another during wartime, and a third in a gas explosion at home. After Fahima’s death, only three siblings remained—all women—and they lived in or around Mazar-i-Sharif. Rahila was the one who identified Fahima’s body in photographs. Farida had ultraconservative in-laws who wouldn’t permit her talk to her family anymore, let alone a journalist. Then there was Hadila, the eldest sister and the one closest to Fahima. We connected on a video call through WhatsApp in November 2020; the pandemic prevented me from going to Afghanistan.
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-Hadila was 40 at the time, with eight children of her own. A few of them snuggled around her as we spoke, their heads poking out from under a large pile of colorful blankets. It was freezing in northern Afghanistan, and heat was prohibitively expensive, so they had to make do. Hadila was eager to talk. She said that no one ever contacted her about what had happened to her sisters and nieces—not the police, not Abdul, not even Rahila, who after identifying Fahima’s body fell into a deep depression. Hadila thought that Fahima and her daughters drowned while trying to reach Europe. As I delivered the news of their murders, Hadila began to cry, rocking back and forth. She wiped her tears away with the corner of her scarf.
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-When Fahima was a little girl, she would follow Hadila around the house, sucking her thumb and tugging at her elder sister’s skirts, dutifully trotting behind as Hadila milked cows or baked bread. They were close and remained so as they grew up, married, and started families of their own. Fahima was something of a black sheep in the community, Hadila explained—full of life and eager to dress up, wear makeup, and dance. “She was always different,” Hadila said, a touch of pride in her voice. Fahima was a good mother, she added, and close with her children, especially her two eldest girls.
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-Hadila spoke with Fahima on four occasions after she left Afghanistan, and the last two conversations left Hadila feeling whiplash. In the first of those, out of the blue, Fahima announced that she had engaged Rabiya to an older man, an Afghan from Kunduz Province who was well established in Zeytinburnu. This man had connections and promised to provide Fahima and her daughters with documentation to stay in Turkey. The fiancé housed them too. Fahima texted a photo of the suitor to a phone shared by Hadila’s family. Someone later dropped the phone into a toilet, and the photo was lost; police didn’t find it on the Samsung recovered at the crime scene in Greece. The only thing Hadila could remember about the fiancé was his age. He was at least 40, and Rabiya wasn’t yet 18.
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-Fahima had said she left Afghanistan in order to give her daughters a better life, but it was difficult for Hadila to see how marriage to a much older man would help Rabiya, whom she described as quiet and shy. The detrimental consequences of child marriage, including reduced economic and educational opportunities, and exposure to physical and emotional abuse, are well documented. “I was upset with her,” Hadila said, referring to Fahima, “because Rabiya didn’t want to get married.”
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-Political borders are no match for gossip, and in Mazar-i-Sharif, Fahima’s family began to glean more information about the mysterious fiancé. “I would hear all these things about this guy,” Nawid, Hadila’s eldest son, told me. “He was an old man, he had two other wives, and he had more children. I heard that it was something done by force and Rabiya was not happy.”
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-Then, in August 2018, Hadila spoke with Fahima for the last time. Fahima said that she wanted to break off the engagement between Rabiya and the fiancé because Rabiya was unhappy with the match. Fahima didn’t elaborate further. Hadila was relieved for Rabiya, but she also felt a pinch of fear. What if the fiancé retaliated?
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-In a matter of weeks, Hadila’s sister and nieces would be dead.
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-Fahima, and a scene from Zeytinburnu
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-Despite their close bond, there were things that Fahima didn’t tell her eldest sister. Hadila had heard rumors that Fahima was separated from her husband, but Fahima never mentioned it. Until I spoke to her, Hadila didn’t know that Fahima was in a relationship with someone new; the photo of the young man drew a blank stare when I showed it to her. Police in Afghanistan, I soon learned, had identified the man in the picture as Mirajuddin Osman. He was also from Mazar-i-Sharif.
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-For several months leading up to my conversations with Hadila and other sources in Afghanistan, the Greek police hadn’t responded to my requests for an interview. When they finally did, in early 2021, they said they would speak only on the condition that I share my findings about the murders with them—a sign, it seemed, of how little progress they’d made since Zacharoula Tsirigoti’s ouster from the force 18 months prior. Later I would be asked to testify under oath.
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-During the interview, I asked if the police had heard anything about Rabiya being engaged. The officers said no. Then they summarized SMS messages retrieved from the phone found on Fahima’s body. There were exchanges between Rabiya and a friend that lamented a situation involving a man called Saïd. None of my sources had mentioned that name. Perhaps Saïd was the spurned fiancé?
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-The police did confirm what I suspected about Osman—that he was Fahima’s boyfriend. They said they were still looking for him.
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-Certainly, Fahima leaving her husband for a much younger man—and taking two of their children with her—could have given Abdul motive to hurt her. In Afghanistan, divorce at the behest of a woman is extremely difficult to achieve. A woman leaving home without permission from male family members can be criminalized under Article 130 of the country’s constitution, making it a risky prospect. In even the most sympathetic circumstances, a woman ending a marriage is a cultural taboo. Though Fahima and Abdul were in Turkey by the time they split, they were living in a heavily Afghan neighborhood, where cultural norms, while loosened, were still observed.
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-I thought back on my interviews with Abdul. He had seemed devastated by the murders, and so beaten down by life that he didn’t have the heart to reprimand his kids as they clambered, shrieking loudly, over the patio furniture of the café where we talked. I could not imagine him killing or enlisting someone else to kill his wife, let alone the daughters whose names he now found it too painful to speak.
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-The police were equally sure he wasn’t the killer. In fact, they had long suspected that whoever murdered Fahima, Rabiya, and Farzana crossed back into Turkey after committing the crime. Any new leads—about suspects or witnesses, about Osman or the mysterious Saïd—would likely emerge only in Zeytinburnu.
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-## In Turkey all Afghans are treated the same, equally denied health care, employment rights, and formal education. The Turkish government doesn’t recognize them as legal refugees.
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-W
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-hen I arrived in Istanbul in early August 2021, wildfires had broken out across Turkey, and the heat in the city was stifling. I had only one lead to start my reporting: the contact information of a man I’d met on a private Telegram group used by Afghan migrants. The man, who asked that I not use his name, knew Fahima and her daughters in the months leading up to their murders. For a time, he and his wife had lived in the same small, dirty apartment as Fahima, Abdul, and their five children, in a building in Zeytinburnu.
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-A historically working-class neighborhood, Zeytinburnu sits on the European side of Istanbul. Traditionally, it was the leatherworking area of the sprawling city. In 1983 the Turkish government, in an act of political goodwill to assist people of “Turkish origin and culture,” invited a few hundred Turkmen and Uzbek refugees from Afghanistan’s war with the Soviet Union to settle in the neighborhood. Since then, Zeytinburnu has become home to tens of thousands of Afghans, representing the entire range of the country’s many ethnic groups. Over the course of my reporting I met Pashtuns, Tajiks, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Hazara, and Turkmen. Pashtuns make up about 40 percent of the Afghan population, and back home they occupy most of the high-ranking positions in government. But in Turkey all Afghans are treated the same, equally denied health care, employment rights, and formal education. The Turkish government doesn’t recognize them as legal refugees.
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-According to the man I’d found online, for at least a month in the spring of 2018, Fahima and her family lived in a basement room in a blue building where some local smugglers housed their clients. The steps leading to the basement were awkward, requiring a sideways shuffle to descend safely. A naked lightbulb hung from the low ceiling, casting a feeble glow on the grime-covered walls. There was a small landing and three doors, one of which was cobbled together from scraps of plywood and padlocked. A peculiar smell wafted in the air, something unsanitary. I knocked on all three doors, and a young Turkish woman answered one of them, her face half visible through a narrow crack. She had moved in only in the previous year, she told me politely. She didn’t know about any Afghans.
-
-The transitory nature of Zeytinburnu creates a distinct problem for someone trying to piece the shattered mirror of recent history back together. It had been nearly three years since Fahima, Rabiya, and Farzana lived there. The majority of people I talked to on the neighborhood’s streets, along the nearby waterfront, and inside its shops and businesses had arrived in Istanbul within the past year. They could not have known the women whose photos I showed them. Memory loss is a common side effect of trauma, and some of the people I interviewed had trouble recalling events, both recent and long past. One woman I spoke to had been living in Zeytinburnu for four years, but the Taliban had murdered her husband in front of her eyes, and since then she’d had trouble remembering things. “I’ll forget your face as soon as you leave,” she told me, her voice flat.
-
-I had the names and photos of several smugglers who, based on information gleaned from the man I’d found online, I knew had encountered Fahima and her daughters in Zeytinburnu. The women had tried to cross the border into Greece at least four times, racking up debts to their traffickers. I managed to track down some of the smugglers, including one who lived in the same blue building Fahima and her daughters spent time in, but none of them would admit to their line of work, let alone to knowing Fahima, Rabiya, and Farzana.
-
-Turkish law enforcement is omnipresent in Zeytinburnu, and well aware of its smuggling networks. “The police know everything that goes on here,” an Afghan man inside a money-transfer shop told me. He wasn’t the only person to acknowledge the symbiotic relationship that governs the neighborhood: Smugglers pay off law enforcement to turn a blind eye to their business ventures, while also exploiting people’s fear of the who patrol Zeytinburnu threatening imprisonment or deportation. Major disruptions to the order of things are not tolerated. In 2018, the same year Fahima, Rabiya, and Farzana were killed, another Afghan woman, Elhan Atifi, was murdered in Istanbul. The violent husband she’d left behind in Kabul traveled nearly 3,000 miles to strangle her to death. Turkish police quickly investigated and prosecuted him.
-
-I wondered: Had Fahima and her daughters been murdered a few yards into Greece by someone who knew *not* to kill them in Istanbul? Someone who understood that to protect his interests, he needed to avoid making the crime Turkish law enforcement’s responsibility?
-
-It was a logical enough theory for which I didn’t have a shred of proof. Then, on the verge of giving up hope, Tabsheer and I walked into the ice cream shop.
-
-
-
-Mirajuddin Osman
-
-“Zeytinburnu is a place where you can’t hide.” That’s what Mohammed\*, the man we approached in the shop, told me after confirming that he recognized Fahima, Rabiya, and Farzana. We had moved to an area upstairs in the café where we could be alone. Mohammed spread his tanned hands on the plastic table between us and sighed before telling us what he knew.
-
-Back in 2018, he said, he’d seen the women together with Mirajuddin Osman. There was speculation in the local Afghan community that Fahima had left her husband and was dating Osman. “Only God knows what was between them,” Mohammed said with a shrug. He had seen Fahima’s husband once or twice in Zeytinburnu, but always alone.
-
-Mohammed cleared his throat and motioned for me to turn off my recorder before continuing. Here is what I wrote in my notes: Fahima planned to marry Rabiya off to a man whom Mohammed called Hajji Saïd. *Hajji* is an Islamic prefix of respect, reserved for someone who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca. And Saïd was the name the Greek police had asked me about, the man mentioned in Rabiya’s text messages.
-
-Mohammed said that Saïd already had two wives—one in Afghanistan and another in Pakistan. When he decided to marry Rabiya, in early 2018, he also agreed to pay for her: He gave Fahima several thousand euros for his new teenage bride. Around Ramadan, which that year began in May, they were officially engaged, and later they married. Fahima and her daughters then moved into Saïd’s apartment.
-
-Saïd was a man used to getting what he wanted. He had been living in Zeytinburnu for twenty years, and he was a pillar in the community, an important Pashtun smuggler who employed a network of people. In fact, Osman’s brother worked for him at one point. Saïd also owned a *hawala* shop, overseeing money transfers and electronics sales.
-
-And how did Mohammed know all this?
-
-Because, he told me, he and Saïd were related.
-
-The two men had a falling out, Mohammed explained, and weren’t talking by the time Saïd became engaged to Rabiya. In the summer of 2018, Mohammed traveled to Afghanistan. When he came back to Istanbul, Rabiya, Fahima, and Farzana were gone. He still wasn’t on good terms with Saïd, and could only guess that the women had left for a European country, somewhere cold and far away, like Belgium or Germany. That remained his assumption.
-
-I told him about the murders, about the women’s bodies found prone with their throats cut near the Evros River. Mohammed closed his eyes.
-
-“Whoever did this to these girls, God will punish them,” he said.
-
-“Do you think—well, sorry to ask, but do you think that maybe your…,” I stammered.
-
-“You want to know if he killed them,” Mohammed interjected. “I don’t know that. But I believe this is an honor killing.”
-
-Before we ended our conversation, Mohammed gave me an address. If I wanted to talk to Saïd, my best chance was to go there, to his place of business.
-
-## Saïd looked at me hard and said I could come back tomorrow to talk to him. We both knew that if I returned to the store, he wouldn’t be there.
-
-The *hawala* was on a side street near Zeytinburnu’s main drag. It was evening when Tabsheer and I arrived, and the shop glowed in the darkness. Through the window, I could see five-kilo bags of Afghan rice stacked against one wall; across from these was a display of cell phones and accessories covered in a thin layer of dust. A middle-aged man sat behind the counter scrolling on his phone; a younger man was next to him doing the same thing.
-
-I took a deep breath, pushed the door open, and walked in. Saïd was heavyset, with a rounded jaw and drooping features. There was a large birthmark on his right cheekbone, like a smudged thumbprint. He looked up as I walked toward him, extending my phone. Rabiya’s face was displayed on the screen.
-
-“I want to talk to you about Rabiya,” I said, forgoing all formalities, my voice louder than I’d intended.
-
-Saïd jumped up from his seat and rushed out from behind the counter, flapping his hands. At first he denied knowing the women, whose photos I showed one by one. Then he admitted having seen them in the area. He recognized Fahima—but so what? “People come through here all the time, this is Turkey,” he protested.
-
-He swore that he hadn’t been in a relationship with Rabiya. His breathing became ragged, and his hands started to shake—it seemed like he might have a panic attack. As I held up Rabiya’s photo again, he averted his gaze, shaking his head as tears filled his eyes and threatened to tumble down his cheeks. The young man, who had remained behind the counter, interjected. “He doesn’t know these people,” he insisted.
-
-I would later find out that this was Saïd’s nephew. In the moment, I was frustrated that Saïd had an emotional accomplice. I needed to speak to him alone. “Why don’t we go somewhere quieter to talk?” I suggested.
-
-Saïd changed out of his sandals into dress shoes before we stepped into the hot night. He indicated a café nearby, but no sooner had we reached the street than he stopped and asked us to come to his home. It was an odd turn, and one that momentarily made me panic. Tabsheer and I declined the invitation. Saïd then tried to double back to the store—to retrieve his wallet, he said, since he insisted on paying for the tea we would have while talking. But Tabsheer and I encouraged him to continue on with us. We didn’t want to lose any momentum.
-
-As we walked, Saïd stayed a few steps ahead. He called people on his phone—one of his employees, a friend. His voice was muffled, and it was difficult to make out what he was saying. Every now and then he would turn around and implore us to think of his wives, his children. I kept up a steady stream of questions in English, which Tabsheer translated. Soon Tabsheer realized that Saïd had begun muttering under his breath, in Pashto, *“Fuck Rabiya, fuck Rabiya.”*
-
-We reached a small, well-lit square with an empty café off to one side—we could talk there, I said. But the mood had darkened. Saïd raised his voice and pleaded loudly with Tabsheer in Pashto, ignoring me. I pulled my phone out and began recording him, and Saïd smacked my hand, less out of a desire to hurt me, it seemed, and more from uncontrollable desperation.
-
-“My mind is exploding,” Saïd cried. People on the street stopped to stare at us. “I’m going to collapse and die right here!” He clutched the sides of his head.
-
-I could feel my heart beating in my chest. Saïd looked at me hard and said I could come back tomorrow to talk to him. We both knew that if I returned to the store, he wouldn’t be there. As he crossed the street to get away from me, he called out to Tabsheer, who approached him one last time.
-
-“Please, you’re an Afghan,” Saïd begged. He touched Tabsheer’s chin—a deferential gesture in Afghan culture. “Get me out of this situation. Do something about this.”
-
-Then he was gone.
-
-## The people Tabsheer and I talked to would speak only on the condition of anonymity, and they all said a version of the same thing: Saïd was powerful and dangerous.
-
-The following morning, I returned to Saïd’s *hawala*. As expected he wasn’t there, but the shop was open and there was a steady stream of customers. The nephew was working the counter. He stared at me with narrow, glassy eyes and kept repeating the same thing: It was sad what happened to these women, but his uncle was a good man, respected in the neighborhood, with two wives and many children back home. Saïd wasn’t the type of man who would hurt anyone. He was religious.
-
-Tabsheer and I stayed for about an hour, leaning against the scratchy, lumpy bags of rice. At one point Tabsheer called Saïd on the phone—we’d gotten his number from Mohammed. “I don’t need to say anything to that woman,” Saïd said. “She’s a journalist, not the police.” He was right. The trip to Istanbul had cast the limitations of my field into sharp relief. I didn’t have the authority to compel Saïd to talk; only law enforcement did.
-
-When Tabsheer and I left the shop, we crisscrossed Zeytinburnu to find people to speak with. It was a mirror image of the beginning of my trip, but instead of showing strangers pictures of Fahima and her daughters, I showed them a Facebook photo I’d found of Saïd dressed in a white *shalwar kameez* and standing in front of the casbah in Mecca. This time we got the same answer again and again: *Yes*. Nearly everyone we met knew who Saïd was. Mohammed had been right about his stature in the community.
-
-The people Tabsheer and I talked to would speak only on the condition of anonymity, and they all said a version of the same thing: Saïd was powerful and dangerous. He employed a number of men to run his smuggling operation, which passed people through Evros. No one would confirm his relationship with Fahima and her daughters.
-
-Back in Athens, I was asked to give another deposition to the police; it would be submitted to the judge in Evros who would oversee the murder case, whatever shape it eventually took. I told the police what I’d learned about Saïd. It felt like a moral imperative. Ostensibly, the police could share my information with their Turkish counterparts, who could investigate him. There was also a sense of urgency: By September 2021, the Taliban had taken over Afghanistan, and cooperation with many foreign governments had ground to a halt. If Saïd fled to his home country, he would be all but impossible to find.
-
-That’s exactly what happened. Before the Turkish police could get involved, Mohammed, whom I was still in contact with, told me that Saïd had left Istanbul. With Saïd in the wind, the murder investigation once again ran aground.
-
-Then one day in March 2022, I received a phone call. Mirajuddin Osman had been apprehended and was being held at a prison in northeastern Greece. He wasn’t the last puzzle piece in the case—I was coming to accept that I might never find them all—but he was a crucial one. I sent a request for an interview.
-
-
-
-Abdul at the graves of his wife and daughters.
-
-The police investigating the murders should have found Osman earlier—or, more accurately, they should have realized when they first had him in custody. Osman left Turkey in December 2020. A smuggler had promised to take him to Bulgaria, but something went wrong and he entered Europe the same way Fahima, Farzana, and Rabiya did two years prior: over the Evros River. Osman made it to Thessaloniki.
-
-It’s routine in Greece for police to stop foreign-looking people and ask to see identity papers and asylum cards. Those who can’t produce them—and occasionally even those who can—are arrested and may be sent to Turkey. Whether a person gets into trouble with the authorities is a matter of that most cruel mistress, luck. Some people have it, others don’t.
-
-For a while, Osman had it. Then one day he didn’t. He was held in a jail in northern Greece, where his fingerprints and mugshot were taken. It could have been a huge break in the murder case, but due to disorganization among the branches of Hellenic law enforcement, the police in Athens had no idea that their person of interest was languishing in a cell a few hours north. After five days, Osman was released. By the time the Athens police learned that he’d been arrested, he was long gone, absorbed into the underworld that so many migrants pass through. It would be another year before investigators managed to track him down, in Germany. When they did, they extradited him to Greece.
-
-When I met him in March 2022, Osman was incarcerated at a squat yellow prison in Komotini, a small town about an hour from the Turkish border. Komotini has a sizable Muslim population, a demographic relic of the Ottoman Empire. Today it holds the dubious distinction of being one of the poorest and most marginalized places in Greece.
-
-I was shocked by how little Osman resembled the man in the photos I had been looking at for three years. The only thing remaining of his youth was his hairline, still defiantly thick and straight across his forehead. The ordeals of a hard life had been etched into his face and had hardened his gaze. Though he was in his early twenties, he could have passed for forty.
-
-I pressed the plastic phone receiver to my ear and listened to Osman, separated from me by a smudged sheet of glass, tell his side of the story. When he’d first met Fahima, he was barely out of his teens. It happened shortly after she arrived in Istanbul, and the circumstances were surprisingly wholesome: Osman’s mother, who also lived in the city, was very distantly connected to Fahima’s family back in Mazar-i-Sharif. The first time Osman saw Fahima, she was sitting on his mother’s couch, surrounded by all five of her children and her husband. None of those dependents registered as obstacles for Osman. In his eyes, Fahima must have burned as brightly as the Madonna.
-
-Osman became a devout believer, worshipping daily at the altar of his beloved. “It was my first time falling in love,” he said with a thin smile. “Whatever Fahima said, I did without question.” Soon he was spending every free moment he had with Fahima and her two daughters, dedicating the little money he earned working seven days a week on a construction site to small presents and social outings. He felt drawn to Fahima: She was beautiful, sure, but he was particularly attracted to her fierce personality. She was proud, and she knew what she wanted. It was seductive.
-
-By his account, Fahima kept him at arm’s length when it came to decisions in her life. Like Mohammed, Osman told me that Rabiya and Saïd had married, but that he only learned of their engagement on the day of the wedding—Fahima had kept him in the dark until then. The wedding was a proper, quiet celebration, with a mullah reciting words from the Qur’an. Afterward Rabiya, along with her mother and sister, moved into Saïd’s apartment in Zeytinburnu.
-
-Osman claimed that Fahima never told him that she wanted to end the couple’s marriage. He didn’t recall discord of any kind—the couple, he told me, were “fine.” When Saïd was away visiting his other wives, Osman would stay over at the house. “He was always good to me,” Osman said of Saïd.
-
-Near the end of a workday in October 2018, Osman received a call from Fahima. “We’re leaving for Europe. Tonight,” she told him. She meant that he would be coming, too. Ever pliant to her wishes, Osman went to the supermarket, where he picked up a few things to sustain them on the journey: a roast chicken, some hard cheese, a loaf of bread. Like most migrants, they would leave the bulk of their possessions behind.
-
-In Zeytinburnu, he met up with Fahima, Rabiya, and Farzana, and they bundled into a car along with Saïd and three of his associates, including the nephew I had met in Istanbul. The mood was light, Osman recalled. Saïd and his men spoke Pashto, a language Osman was not fluent in, so he focused his attention on the women. The three of them were giddy. After several attempts to cross into Europe, they were finally doing it—they were sure the trip would be a success.
-
-Saïd wouldn’t be coming with them; he would take them only as far as the border. Why would a powerful man smuggle his teenage bride into Europe rather than keep her close by? Did this ring as odd to anyone in the group? If so, Osman didn’t indicate it as he told me his story.
-
-Saïd’s years as a trafficker proved useful: The group wasn’t stopped by the police driving out of Istanbul, and three hours later they managed to evade detection by Turkish border control. Saïd parked the car in a well-hidden spot, and everyone climbed out. It was dark and cold, with only the thin moonlight to guide them. After walking some distance, they reached the Evros River, where a small inflatable boat was waiting for them. Saïd and the smugglers sat on one side, the women and Osman on the other. The lighthearted atmosphere from the car gave way to solemnity.
-
-Once across the river they exited the boat, their feet sinking into the muddy bank. Fahima, Farzana, and Rabiya walked in front of Osman, Saïd, and the rest of the men. They continued for twenty minutes, in an area dotted with watchtowers and crawling with police and patrol cars. The danger of what they were doing must have weighed heavily with each sodden step.
-
-Saïd knew how to remain undetected; he directed everyone through the forest, and the group never met with trouble. Eventually, they reached Nikos Papachatzidis’s fields. Osman claimed that only then did the situation shift—only then did he and the women realize that the real danger came from the smugglers.
-
-The men stopped and opened a backpack that one of them was carrying. Inside were two black-handled knives and rope. The smugglers pulled out the weapons and first used them as a menacing tool to keep the women and Osman in line. According to Osman, the men bound Rabiya’s and Fahima’s hands behind their backs, while he was tied up with Farzana. If the smugglers explained what was happening and why, Osman didn’t recall it. “I don’t know what happened with Saïd that would have made him do this,” he told me.
-
-Saïd pulled Fahima away first, Osman said, dragging her several yards before cutting her throat. He then reached into her jacket and pulled out 2,400 euros, money Fahima had diligently saved to start a new life. Osman said he saw the flash of a knife as it sliced first across Rabiya’s olive neck, then Farzana’s. The women screamed, desperate animal cries that reverberated through the forest, until they couldn’t any longer. No one heard them: The solitariness that had been a source of relief just moments before was now sinister, devastating.
-
-“I was saying my last words,” Osman told me, “because I thought I was going to die.”
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-But he didn’t.
-
-“Why didn’t Saïd kill you, too?” I asked.
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-Osman contemplated the question before answering. Saïd spared his life because the exhaustion of killing the three women was too much, he said finally.
-
-It was far-fetched, like so much of Osman’s story seemed to be, especially since three of Said’s henchmen were there. Surely, he could have ordered one of them to kill a witness to his crimes. Osman rubbed his forehead, thinking. Saïd’s nephew wanted to kill him, he eventually said, but Saïd overruled him.
-
-In Osman’s telling, he walked back to the boat with the other men. Saïd told him to keep his mouth shut or he would meet the same fate as Fahima and her daughters. The intimidation continued once they were back in Istanbul, Osman claimed, which is what prompted him to flee to Europe.
-
-Osman insisted that he had nothing to do with the crime—“I’m innocent,” he said more than once in our conversation. Still, he said that he felt responsible for Fahima’s death. “Nobody spoke against Saïd,” Osman told me. “He was too powerful, and if I had said anything he would have killed me. But I blame myself for not going to the police.”
-
-A guard rapped on the door and shouted brusquely in Greek. My allotted interview time—a little over an hour—was over. I was ushered out of the prison. As I blinked against the strong afternoon sun, I considered everything Osman had told me, and everything he hadn’t. His story was riddled with holes, but it was unclear what was pouring out of them: guilt, cowardice, or something more ominous?
-
-Whether Osman played a role in the killings or was only a bystander as he claimed, the motive for the crime remained unclear. Assuming that Saïd was the perpetrator, I ran through possible scenarios. Rabiya’s autopsy indicated that she probably hadn’t had sex—had she refused to consummate the marriage, angering Saïd? Maybe Rabiya begged her mother to free her from a marriage she didn’t want, and Fahima relented: They would go to Europe and never look back. Still, they’d need Saïd’s help to get across the border. Maybe they assured him that, once in Europe, Rabiya would remain faithful, and that he could visit her like he did his other wives. Saïd, being no fool, would have suspected the truth: that Rabiya had no plans to see him again. Maybe he’d read the texts on the women’s shared phone in which Rabiya told a friend that she didn’t want to be with him, or overheard Fahima talking to Hadila about ending the relationship.
-
-Whatever the case, it’s possible that Rabiya’s desire for a new life in Europe allowed Saïd to devise a plan to enact revenge in a place where he knew he’d get away with it—in a foreign country where migrants’ bodies turn up all the time, where he could slip back across the border with ease. It was an elaborate murder plot, but not an implausible one.
-
-Or maybe the killings were more spontaneous. Perhaps the women said or did something after crossing the Evros River that their smugglers deemed a murderable offense. There were plenty of other scenarios that might fit into the blurry outlines of the truth I’d managed to piece together. Clarity was just out of reach, and the only people who could provide it were either unwilling, on the run, or dead.
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-## The odds of solving the murders of three migrant women committed along one of the world’s most fraught borders were impossibly long. Tsirigoti went looking for a needle in a geopolitical haystack. So did I.
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-As of this writing, Osman is being held in pretrial detention on suspicion of being involved in the murders. According to Greek law, an investigating judge (who declined to provide information for this story) is preparing the case against him. It’s likely to go to trial next year. But even if Osman is convicted, justice will feel at best like a half measure.
-
-According to a police source, a Greek arrest warrant has been issued for Saïd; an international arrest warrant through Interpol is pending. Mohammed told me that since I encountered Saïd in August 2021, he had returned to Turkey on at least two occasions. If only the Greek and Turkish police would cooperate. If only someone would find Saïd and question him, or do the same with the nephew I met at the *hawala*, the one Osman claimed was present during the murders. If only a key thread in the women’s story hadn’t been left frayed and dangling.
-
-It’s a reporter’s job, of course, to manage such threads, and when necessary to learn to live with them. This is never more true than when telling stories about the murk and the ripple effects of conflict. As Zacharoula Tsirigoti knew when she embarked on her investigation, the odds of solving the murders of three migrant women committed along one of the world’s most fraught borders were impossibly long. She went looking for a needle in a geopolitical haystack. So did I. Perhaps disappointment, to one degree or another, was always where this story was going to end.
-
-But there are threads—many, in fact—that have been woven into place in the more than four years since the women’s deaths. Together they reveal three lives shaped in part by circumstances beyond any one person’s control. Three lives that, in spite of everything, were lived with love, hope, and resilience. Lives cut short on the edge of Europe, like more than 25,000 others in the past decade. Lives that, unlike so many of the fellow dead, can be known, remembered, and honored.
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-Outside of Alexandroupoli, there’s a small cemetery for migrants who made it to Europe only to die. It’s located on a plot of land that belongs to a Greek Orthodox church, though most of the people buried there spent their lives praying to a different god than the one worshipped by the church’s congregants. Bodies found at the bottom of the Evros River, in crushed cars on the highway to Thessaloniki, or frozen in farmers’ fields are interred under mounds of dirt topped with simple tombstones, each engraved with a unique serial number. All of the dead here are unidentified, save three. In the middle of the plot are a series of graves with names carved clearly into stone.
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-*Fahima. Rabiya.* *Farzana.*
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-```button
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-# A New Doorway to the Brain
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-The brain’s lifeline, its network of blood vessels, is like a tree, says Mathieu Pernot, deputy director of the Physics for Medicine Paris Lab. The trunk begins in the neck with the carotid arteries, a pair of broad channels that then split into branches that climb into the various lobes of the brain. These channels fork endlessly into a web of tiny vessels that form a kind of canopy. The narrowest of these vessels are only wide enough for a single red blood cell to pass through, and in one important sense these vessels are akin to the tree’s leaves.
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-“When you want to look at pathology, usually you don’t see the sickness in the tree, but in the leaves,” Pernot says. (You can identify Dutch Elm Disease when the tree’s leaves yellow and wilt.) Just like leaves, the tiniest blood vessels in the brain often register changes in neuron and synapse activity first, including illness, such as new growth in a cancerous brain tumor.1, 2 But only in the past decade or so have we developed the technology to detect these microscopic changes in blood flow: It’s called ultrafast ultrasound.
-
-> The images show activity in deep regions of the brain where past imaging couldn’t reach.
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-Standard ultrasound is already popular in clinical imaging given that it is minimally invasive, low-cost, portable, and can generate images in real time.3 But until now, it has rarely been used to image the brain. That’s partly because the skull gets in the way—bone tends to scatter ultrasound waves—and the technology is too slow to detect blood flow in the smaller arteries that support most brain function. Neurologists have mostly used it in niche applications: to examine newborns, whose skulls have gaps between the bone plates, or to guide surgeons in some brain surgeries, where part of the skull is typically removed. Neuroscience researchers have also used it to study functional differences between the two hemispheres of the brain, based on imaging of the major cerebral arteries, by positioning the device over the temporal bone window, the thinnest area of the skull.
-
-But ultrafast ultrasound is exponentially faster, more powerful, and more spatially sensitive than standard ultrasound: It can produce many thousands of detailed high-resolution images per second.3 If conventional ultrasound is like peeking through a keyhole, ultrafast ultrasound “opens the whole door,” says Peifeng Song, who researches ultrasound techniques at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Neuroscientists say it could not only help doctors make much earlier diagnoses of debilitating brain diseases, such as brain cancer or Alzheimer’s, but could also aid neuroscientists working with animal models in solving major research questions and accelerate the development of non-invasive brain-machine interfaces, such as robotic limbs.
-
-“If you talk about neuroscience and how the brain works, there’s a lot of unknowns,” Song says. “It’s the wild west.” Ultrafast ultrasound could trace brain signaling with great precision, documenting how circuits and groups of cells interact as the brain performs functions from perception to decision-making.
-
-Functional ultrasound imaging works by the process of echolocation, the same process bats use to navigate. Too high pitched for humans to hear, ultrasound waves collide with tissues or cells in the body and reflect out. Their echoes can then be captured and used to calculate the locations and velocities of blood cells. The frequencies of the returning ultrasound waves reveal where blood is flowing, supplying oxygen and glucose to brain regions that are working especially hard, or conversely, which parts of the brain are not receiving the blood and nutrients they need. These images allow researchers and clinicians to get a sense of what parts of the brain are active—for example, regions responsible for decision-making—or which ones might be at risk of damage.4
-
-In the last decade or so, advances in computer processing power have allowed researchers to transform ultrasound technology. Instead of emitting individual beams, these newer ultrasound systems send out a series of plane waves—an array of ultrasound beams that together form a plane—that hit their target at different angles. The resulting images are composites that are multiple orders of magnitude sharper than conventional ultrasound, MRI, or CT scans, without the trade-offs faced by other imaging methods. MRI machines, for example, demand hugely powerful and expensive magnets to improve their resolution.5 The new forms of ultrasound can also work up to 100 times faster than conventional ultrasound tools, which is especially useful during medical emergencies, when time is of the essence. Such speeds allow ultrasound to track seizures as they happen, Pernot says.
-
-“Even just a few years ago, that type of data throughput would have just been mountainous,” says Sumner Norman, a postdoc at Caltech. “So you wouldn’t have been able to do much with it.” But as computer capacity caught up with the demand, ultrafast ultrasound became more feasible. In Song’s lab, their 3-D ultrasound imaging requires around 10 terabytes of data to fully image the brain of each lab animal in 3-D—the same amount it would take to stream Netflix in standard definition for 10,000 hours.
-
-
-
-**Bubbles in the Brain:** Ultrasound localization microscopy takes high resolution images of blood flow in the brain by bouncing ultrasound waves off of microscopic gas bubbles injected into the blood. *Credit: Junjie Yao’s lab at Duke University.*
-
-Now that researchers have the computing power to create such high-speed, fine-grained images, they can also track the movement of cells over time. [Research](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-022-01549-5) published in August by the lab of Mickael Tanter of PSL Research University in France depicted activity throughout the rat brain at a microscopic level.6 The images show activity in deep regions of the brain where light-based imaging can’t reach, and in stunning detail—much finer resolution than an MRI or CT scan. The pictures showed activity from second to second down to a scale of a few thousands of a millimeter.
-
-In humans, ultrasound researchers are finding creative ways to work around the impediment of the skull. Fabienne Perren at the University of Geneva and colleagues, including Tanter, used a [contrast agent](https://neurocenter-unige.ch/humain-brain-vascularisation-revealed-by-ultrafast-ultrasounds-at-a-microscopic-level-for-the-first-time/)—microbubbles of gas injected into patients’ blood.7 Some waves still collide with the skull and scatter, but the ones that make it through are more likely to reflect back out when they bounce off the bubbles. Where a CT scan showed only a blob, ultrasound imaging allowed the team to zoom in until they could pinpoint the turbulence inside a bulging blood vessel. Tanter’s lab has also sent ultrasound signals through the gaps between newborns’ skull plates to record [brain activity during seizures and sleep](https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/scitranslmed.aah6756).8
-
-Scientists can also remove a small piece of the skull to facilitate working with ultrasound. Working with monkeys, Norman and his colleagues replaced a domino-sized piece of the skull with an ultrasound device. The images of activity in a part of the brain that plans movement revealed when a monkey intended to move an arm. In fact, they could predict the direction of the movement [about 89 percent of the time](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627321001513?dgcid=coauthor).9 This is comparable to methods that implant electrodes in the scalp, which have been reported to accurately predict direction of movement roughly 70 to 90 percent of the time.
-
-> You can’t wheel an MRI machine onto a battlefield. But you can take a handheld device.
-
-But ultrasound imaging does a better job detecting activity deep within the brain, which is harder for electrodes on the scalp to detect. Electrodes are also far more invasive and can cause tissue damage. And the rapidly accelerating capacities of ultrasound will bring improvements, researchers expect. These findings were published last year in *Neuron* and could pave the way for robotic limbs that translate thought into action: Ultrasound imaging could read brain activity, revealing how a person wants to move their hand to the left, and that data could be fed into a computer that controls a robotic arm, for instance. “We’re already moving toward humans,” Norman says.
-
-Ultrafast ultrasound could also assist surgeons, who often remove pieces of bone before operating anyway. Zin Khaing, an assistant professor of neurological surgery at the University of Washington, is [now testing](https://reporter.nih.gov/search/Woq41Wvmu0mJxWqTQ3QCog/project-details/10179815) enhanced ultrasound on spinal surgery patients. “If I were to get injured today,” she says, “you would do a CT or an X-ray.” Perhaps an MRI, too. But these only produce anatomical images. “It just shows you where all the bits and pieces are, and what’s squishing onto your soft spinal cord tissue,” Khaing says. Imaging that tracks blood flow is not part of the protocol.
-
-In her pilot clinical trial, ultrafast ultrasound is used in the operating room so doctors can follow the movement of blood. Zhaing is aiming to map what tissue still has blood flow, so that doctors can know what will be salvageable, and what areas are still swollen—perhaps where the surgeon should relieve pressure. She hopes ultrasound could guide surgery even in geographies with fewer resources. “You can’t wheel an MRI machine to a war situation, right? But you can have a handheld ultrasound device,” she says. Plus, she imagines ultrasound technology that’s even easier to use than a probe: something more like a bandaid. MIT researchers have already developed [thin ultrasound stickers](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abo2542) that can monitor organs over time without a doctor holding an ultrasound wand.10
-
-At the Physics for Medicine Paris Lab, Pernot is hopeful that scientists will be able to correct for the skull’s effects on ultrasound waves. In the same way that researchers can compensate for a flaw in the lens of a telescope, they could also use an algorithm to adjust for the way the skull scatters ultrasound signals, he says. X-rays that map the exact geometry of a skull can guide a model of exactly how the skull distorts ultrasound waves, says Junjie Yao, a researcher at Duke who develops technology that uses both ultrasound and light-based imaging. And that model can be used to correct ultrasound images so they appear undistorted, as though there weren’t any skull there at all. “I wouldn’t say it’s impossible to overcome the hurdle of the skull, but it will be an engineering challenge,” Yao adds.
-
-Ultrasound imaging is still evolving rapidly. “New ideas are popping up every day,” Yao says. Norman was impressed by how quickly his work progressed—in only a few years, he moved from small animal tests to large animal experiments and showed the potential of ultrasound to read brain activity that could feed into a computer.9 “It was incredible how quickly it moved. Usually when you start a new technology, you’re in for a decades-long slog to make it work,” he says. But when computer processing accelerated, the benefits of ultrafast ultrasound became clear. Now researchers can follow rivulets of blood deep into the brain. “We are going to have an imaging technique to go into another world,” Tanter says. 
-
-*Research into the use of contrast agents in ultrafast ultrasound by Fabienne Perren is funded by the Bertarelli Foundation.*
-
-*Lead image: Paul Craft / Shutterstock*
-
-**References**
-
-1\. Guyon, J., Chapouly, C., Andrique, L., Bikfalvi, A., & Daubon, T. The normal and brain tumor vasculature: Morphological and functional characteristics and therapeutic targeting. *Frontiers in Physiology* **12**, 622615 (2021).
-
-2\. Baloyannis, S. Brain capillaries in Alzheimer’s disease. *Hellenic Journal of Nuclear Medicine* **1:152** (2015).
-
-3\. Deffieux, T., Demené, C., & Tanter, M. Functional ultrasound imaging: A new imaging modality for neuroscience. *Neuroscience* **474**, 110-121 (2021).
-
-4\. Montaldo, G., Urban, A., & Macé, E. Functional ultrasound neuroimaging. *Annual Review of Neuroscience* **45**, 491-513 (2022).
-
-5\. Nowogrodzki, A. The world’s strongest MRI machines are pushing human imaging to new limits. *Nature* (2018).
-
-6\. Renaudin, N., *et al.* Functional ultrasound localization microscopy reveals brain-wide neurovascular activity on a microscopic scale. *Nature Methods* **19**, 1004-1012 (2022).
-
-7\. Demené, C., *et al.* Transcranial ultrafast ultrasound localization microscopy of brain vasculature in patients. *Nature Biomedical Engineering* **5**, 219-228 (2021).
-
-8\. Demené, C., *et al.* Functional ultrasound imaging of brain activity in human newborns. *Science Translational Medicine* **9** (2017).
-
-9\. Norman, S.L., *et al.* Single-trial decoding of movement intentions using functional ultrasound neuroimaging. *Neuron* **109**, 1554-1566 (2021).
-
-10\. Wang, C., *et al.* Bioadhesive ultrasound for long-term continuous imaging of diverse organs. *Science* **377**, 517-523 (2022).
-
-- ###### Elena Renken
-
- Posted on October 11, 2022
-
- Elena Renken is a science reporter focusing on the brain and medicine. Her work has been published by NPR, *Quanta Magazine*, and PBS NOVA.
-
-
-### Published in partnership with:
-
-
-
-#### Get the Nautilus newsletter
-
-The newest and most popular articles delivered right to your inbox!
-
-
-
-
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-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
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-Date: 2022-12-19
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-12-19
-Link: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/31/a-passage-to-parenthood
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-```button
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-# A Passage to Parenthood
-
-The donors all seemed decent in a very calm way. Almost all explained that they had known someone who had struggled with infertility and that they wanted to give couples the opportunity to have a family. A social worker we consulted told us that donors tend to be in the caring professions. My wife had volunteered in orphanages in Romania, and I had known the aides who had come into my parents’ home to help with my brother. The egg donors seemed similar to women we both admired. The young woman my wife and I ultimately selected had been the valedictorian of her high school and had volunteered in a nicu as a baby cuddler. I gave the fertility clinic a deposit.
-
-As soon as I paid the deposit, I began having dreams in which I had cancer and was going to die. In these dreams, a baby existed, and, even in my sleep, my first worry on learning that I was going to die was for Christine and the baby. When I woke up, I retained the sense that I was not as important as they were, that my life was simply a sum of money that was there to be spent on my family. I don’t think of myself as particularly self-sacrificing. It was strange to be responding in a way that seemed so out of character.
-
-Christine had similar dreams of dying. She would wake me in the middle of the night and tell me that she was worried about how I would take care of the child if she passed. I responded that I was going to drop off the child at the nearest fire station.
-
-When I told my mother my joke, she said, “Give me the baby. I will raise it.” She said this immediately, and it was the first time I had heard her speak so forcefully about the child.
-
-During winter break, my wife and I drove to New Jersey to stay with my parents. The goal was to use their house as a base for our appointments at the fertility clinic. Thus started the injections. Every two days, I knelt beside my wife and injected her in the hip. The low table covered with syringes in our bedroom reminded me of the syringes in my brother’s room, the rubbing alcohol, the antiseptic gauze. I was choosing to spend tens of thousands of dollars so we could try to have a baby, but the feelings I had were the old familiar ones of not having a choice, of being in a situation that had been forced on me. At this time, the hormones were making Christine emotional. She would begin crying if the bed was unmade. The sense of emotions being out of scale also reminded me of my childhood, how my mother would call me selfish and worthless for wanting to watch TV instead of reading to my brother.
-
-Once a week, we drove to Connecticut to see the fertility doctor. At the clinic, whose walls were covered with photos of children, I sat in the waiting room as my wife was taken to be examined. During these appointments, and in our bedroom when I knelt beside her and injected her, I felt embarrassed at how much she was doing and how little I could do.
-
-Contemplating the reality of a child made me feel that the passage of time was also real, that death was not theoretical. My mother prays several times a day. Her afternoon prayers are performed in the living room, where she sits on a sofa and rocks slightly as she chants, while reading from various pamphlets. I heard her praying one afternoon, and I went and sat on a nearby sofa. My mother is seventy-nine and has had health problems. Her voice is thin, and her shiny black hair only makes her look more fragile. As I watched her, I understood that she would probably die in five or six years. My normal response to emotion is to veer away from it. I wanted to interrupt my mother and ask what we would have for dinner. Instead, I sat and watched and listened. I became sadder and sadder. She finished chanting and brought the pamphlets to her forehead, as a sign of respect to God.
-
-We received seventeen eggs from our donor in the cycle that we had paid for. To provide sperm, I went into a bathroom with a vial and my cell phone. All seventeen eggs were fertilized. Of the four embryos that survived to the blastocyst stage, only two were genetically normal. One was male and the other female.
-
-Neither my wife nor I wanted the responsibility of picking. To select one would be to not select the other, and who were we to deprive this potential being of the right to move around in the world and experience life’s joys?
-
-All our fantasies had been of having a male child. Now that we actually had to decide, I didn’t want a boy. I tried to imagine the reality of a son, and I felt toward him the impatience that I feel toward myself. My wife had helped raise two nieces and a nephew. She felt that she might be a better mother to a girl than to a boy.
-
-Two weeks after the female embryo was implanted, my wife was sitting in our bedroom at my parents’ house when her phone rang. It was the doctor’s office saying that the hormone tests showed she was pregnant. I had been out getting gas when the call came. When I entered our bedroom, she got up and hugged me. “We’re pregnant,” she said.
-
-[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a24967)
-
-“I saw no shadow . . . only my demons . . .”
-
-Cartoon by Mads Horwath
-
-I couldn’t quite believe it. What did this mean? Despite all that we had done to reach this moment, the news seemed impossible.
-
-“Are you happy?” Christine asked.
-
-“It feels strange.”
-
-We went to find my parents. My mother was in the living room watching “The Great British Baking Show.”
-
-Christine and I sat down on a sofa at a right angle to her.
-
-“Mummy, the news came.”
-
-My mother looked at us silently. She knew that we had been waiting to hear about the hormone tests.
-
-“Christine is pregnant.”
-
-My mother remained silent.
-
-“What are you thinking?” I asked.
-
-“It feels like a shove,” she said. By this, I later learned, she meant a shock.
-
-My father came in. He looked at us and sensed that there might be news. He immediately turned around to leave the room. My father likes to keep the world at a distance and thus tries to get family news filtered through my mother.
-
-“Sit,” I scolded and pointed to the place on the sofa next to my mother. He sat down. My mother sidled up next to him.
-
-“Christine is pregnant.”
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-My father looked at his swollen, arthritic hands.
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-“What do you think?”
-
-“What can I?” he answered.
-
-A few minutes later, Christine and I left the room. My parents’ bodies were pressed together. I had seen them do this only when they were very happy.
-
-And, after this, my parents became very loving toward Christine. Every day, the four of us played ludo, and my father began wanting to let Christine win.
-
-Christine and I returned to North Carolina. There, we started to develop stories about the daughter we were going to have. It was strange to imagine stories for her. Each time we did, we felt we were being disloyal to Suzuki Noguchi. We also felt a sense of loss at letting him go. I had not realized until then that I had begun to love this child we had invented.
-
-Because I am culturally Hindu and reincarnation is part of this culture, it seemed reasonable to me to imagine that our daughter already existed but was in Heaven, waiting to come down. In our stories, our child was in her thirties. She told us about the people she hung out with in Heaven: “Abraham Lincoln is always hitting on me. I tell him, ‘You are the Great Emancipator, but you’re a married man.’ ” Whenever we talked about what our daughter, whom we named Ziggy, for “zygote,” would enjoy about our house—the birds, the squirrels—Ziggy one-upped us: “I have dinosaurs in my back yard.” Like Suzuki Noguchi, Ziggy had a strong mocking personality. She complained about all the Christian martyrs in Heaven: “Never have a martyr over for dinner. Their stigmata start bleeding and your napkins are ruined.” She also had Suzuki’s covetousness. “Do you really need to spend so much money on yourself? Buy some Amazon shares for me.” But, whereas Suzuki Noguchi had been a criminal, Ziggy abided by the law. The fact that women live a life of greater physical risk than men shaped how our imaginations treated her. As did the awareness that our daughter was going to be a woman of color.
-
-The prospect of having a daughter made me realize how little I knew about the experience of women. I began reading biographies of female scientists and politicians. Books on violence against women. Books about how to help young women develop a healthy relationship to their own sexuality. Every time I read news about a strong woman, I began imagining Ziggy like her. I looked up Janet Yellen’s educational history and thought how wonderful it would be if Ziggy ran a major central bank. I called an economist I know who teaches at Princeton and asked him what it would take for Ziggy to run the Federal Reserve. “Are you joking?” he asked. To me, my question seemed quite reasonable: somebody has to run the Fed; why shouldn’t it be my daughter?
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-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-05-22
-Link: https://www.si.com/horse-racing/2022/05/18/kentucky-derby-winner-rich-strike-herbie-reed-eric-true-story-daily-cover
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-```button
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-# A Search for Family, a Love for Horses and How It All Led to Kentucky Derby Glory
-
-Herbie Reed has been fishing, and the catch was plentiful. The 75-year-old pulled in about 30 crappie from a nearby honey hole, a continuation of his family’s recent run of good fortune. It is late afternoon, and he has poured himself a Woodford Reserve on the rocks and sits down at his dining room table with his shirt unbuttoned to his belly, ready to explain how he arrived at this impossibly blissful moment in time.
-
-“I came up by myself,” he starts.
-
-Unwanted and uneducated, Herbert Ray Reed says he walked out of an Appalachian hollow as a child in the 1950s and never went back. His mother had died when he was 5 years old, and the family structure unraveled after that. Hitching a predawn ride on a cattle truck at 9 years old led him away from dark times in Pecks Creek Hollow in rural Powell County to this town of Versailles, where he showed up unannounced at his aunt’s house. “My God, honey,” he recalls her saying to him. “How did you get here?”
-
-
-
-*Pat McDonogh/Courier Journal/USA TODAY Network*
-
-She was one of about a dozen people who took him in at varying points in a chaotic childhood. After settling in this bluegrass region of Kentucky, Herbie lied about his age to get a job riding racehorses. He was 14. He wasn’t a feral child, but in many ways Reed was raised by horses. They gave him an occupation, an outlet, an opportunity to be somebody. Horses became a generational family business—a source of revenue and pride and profound heartache, as well.
-
-Eleven days ago, one horse raised the Reed name to the highest level of the equine game. Rich Strike, trained by Herbie’s son, Eric, [won the Kentucky Derby in breathtaking fashion](https://www.si.com/horse-racing/2022/05/08/in-result-no-one-saw-coming-rich-strikes-kentucky-derby-win-helps-redeem-racing)—with a spectacular late charge down the stretch to collar favored Epicenter before the wire at outrageous odds of 80–1. It was the second-biggest upset in the 148-year history of America’s oldest continuous sporting event.
-
-Eric had Herbie join him at the post-race press conference, even though he had no direct involvement in training Rich Strike. Along with owner Rick Dawson and jockey Sonny Leon, they were such big-race novices that they had to be told to sit down for the interview. Then, Herbie and Eric informed the world about their bond, until there were tears shed in the room and from the podium.
-
-“He’s been going to the track with me since he was 6 years old, and that’s no bull,” Herbie said that evening at Churchill Downs. “He would go every day, and when he was 8, he could put a spider bandage on a horse, and most people don’t even know what it is anymore.
-
-“He said, ‘I know what I want to do. I’m not going to college; I’m going to train horses.’ And if you find something you love to do, you never work. He found something he loved to do, and he’s good at it, and I’m as proud as I can be of him.”
-
-Why did young Eric Reed tag along with Herbie to the barns in the morning?
-
-“It wasn’t so much the horses early on,” Eric says. “I idolized my dad. That’s why I did it.”
-
-Less than 72 hours after that life-altering two minutes in Louisville, Rich Strike is in repose in his stall at Eric Reed’s Mercury Equine Center outside Lexington. The shedrow is quiet, and there is nothing to mark the presence of nascent racing royalty. When Reed approaches, “Ritchie” comes to the stall gate and cranes his neck out, softly trying to playfully bite his hand. The trainer laughs and dodges, patting the chestnut colt’s nose.
-
-This is Reed’s 15 minutes of fame, but he happily steers a reporter toward his dad’s life story—“It could be a Hollywood movie,” he says. Right then and there, standing in the barn where Rich Strike resides, Eric answers a request to interview Herbie by suggesting an immediate road trip. He abruptly jumps in his Chevy Tahoe—with the rusted sideboard and three fishing rods in the back—and heads toward the exit of the farm. He apologetically brushes off a TV reporter waiting for him at the front gate and drives 40 minutes west to meet with Herbie.
-
-
-
-*Rich Strike will skip the Preakness, but he could still race in the Belmont Stakes on June 11.*
-
-Evers/Eclipse Sportswire/CSM/AP
-
-Father and son share a large parcel of land off a narrow strip of blacktop outside Versailles, their houses just a few yards apart. One is something of a luxury log cabin. The other is more modern and serves as a part-time bed and breakfast (“Rabbit Creek”). The two men frequently fish and talk horses together, just as they have for decades.
-
-“Everybody loved him,” Eric says of Herbie’s training days. “He was happy, and people would come to him all the time with questions: *Herbie, help me, I can’t figure this horse out.* It was like he was a guru or something. I remember all the admiration for him. I kept thinking, ‘Man, that’s what I want. I want people to think of me that way.’”
-
-Scroll to Continue
-
-## SI Recommends
-
-The horse racing world is split on how to think of Eric Reed today. Some are disappointed—even angry—that he made the rare and controversial decision [not to race the Kentucky Derby winner this Saturday in the Preakness](https://www.si.com/horse-racing/2022/05/12/kentucky-derby-winner-rich-strike-skips-preakness-no-triple-crown), the second leg of the Triple Crown. Others are lauding his resistance to public pressure, instead choosing what’s best for Rich Strike and what adheres to his own training philosophy.
-
-Rich Strike isn’t at Pimlico Race Course but still looms as the dominant story line in Baltimore this week. He is the horse who shocked the world twice, first in victory and now in absentia. As such, it’s worth remembering where the Reeds came from—specifically, a place where the Triple Crown isn’t even a daydream, much less a consideration. A place where the gift of a big-time horse is to be protected like a Ming vase.
-
-“You know, if you run the Preakness you’ve blown the Belmont,” Herbie says. “That looks like where \[Rich Strike\] wants to go; a mile and a half \[the Belmont distance\] is right up his alley. You hate to \[skip the Preakness\], but like Eric said, ‘I ain’t got but one good horse; I gotta take care of it.’ He’s got to do what’s best for the horse.”
-
-That horseman mantra was handed down from father to son, and it’s why sharing that inconceivable Derby moment with Herbie was the true reward for Eric Reed. He made a lot of money and gained a lot of fame on the first Saturday in May, and felt some validation after working on the margins of the sport for so many years. But mostly Reed is leveraging this pinch-me moment to honor his father, a survivor who started a lineage of perseverance.
-
-“You have to get lucky in life, and I’ve been lucky,” Herbie says, for the moment ignoring the unlucky episodes he’s also endured. “I stop and think sometimes, ‘What the hell made me do all this?’ I don’t know, but I had no fear in me.”
-
-No fear led him to hitchhike around parts of Kentucky in search of something other than a home life he won’t discuss in detail. “I lived in some bad-ass places,” he says.
-
-“At that time, I hated everybody. I’ll take some things to my grave, I guess, because there were people involved who aren’t here to defend themselves. But some bad things happened.”
-
-No fear led to running away from whoever was caring for him multiple times, to skipping school, to giving up on education at an early age, to tattooing his initials into his forearm with a cluster of pins dipped in ink at age 12. “I’d give anything in the world if I hadn’t,” he says. “I hate ’em. It looks terrible.”
-
-
-
-Herbie Reed (left) and son Eric (center) celebrate their shocking Kentucky Derby win with jockey Sonny Leon.
-
-Michelle Hutchins/Courier-Journal/USA TODAY Network
-
-And no fear led him to thoroughbred racing, having seen a friend make up to $16 a day galloping horses. Fourteen-year-old Herbie Reed didn’t just lie about his age when he went to the barn of prominent Kentucky trainer Doug Davis. He lied to one of Davis’s assistants about his experience on horseback in asking for a job breaking yearlings. The fib became obvious to the assistant when Herbie got on the wrong side to mount the first horse they tried to put him on.
-
-“He threw that saddle up and I’m standing on the wrong side,” Herbie recalls. “He said, ‘What are you doing? Boy, look, I know you’re having a hard time, but quit that damn lying. You ain’t 16 and you ain’t never been on no damn horse.’”
-
-Still, they gave him a chance. Herbie climbed aboard four yearlings that day and showed an immediate instinct for the job. That led to becoming an exercise rider for Davis at Keeneland Race Course and subsequent riding jobs for other trainers and breeders. During that time, Davis and other horsemen would eat lunch at a diner in Versailles after the morning work was done. One day, a friend pointed out a pretty waitress who was sweeping around their table so often that “there’s going to be a hole in the damn floor.”
-
-That’s how Herbie met Glenna, his wife since 1964. About nine months after they met, the couple decided to elope. Davis, the trainer, had been saving Herbie’s money for him to make sure he didn’t blow it. He delivered the boy $900 and a warning when he asked for it to get married. “I think you’re making a bad mistake,” Davis told him. Herbie bought a pink ’53 Ford for $50, and he and Glenda ran off to Tennessee to get hitched. He was 16, but once again fudged his age to get a marriage license. They came home and hid the news from Glenda’s family for a while.
-
-Scott Miller, a local horseman who would become mayor of Versailles and gave Herbie a job at a young age, convinced him he had to tell Glenna’s father the truth. “Go out there and be honest with this man,” recalls Stiles Miller, Scott’s son. “Tell him what you did.”
-
-Herbie did. After some immediate blowback, Glenna’s father eventually became a father figure to Herbie.
-
-“Her daddy didn’t want nothing to do with me,” Herbie says. “He knew how I came up. I’ve got to thank her father for everything. I had that monkey on my back. When you come up like that, you just don’t know how to control yourself. Her dad would take me in and we’d talk. I’d get so mad I wanted to kill him. He used to tell me, ‘When you get so mad you want to hurt somebody, start counting backwards from 100 back. By the time you get to 50, you won’t want to do it no more.’”
-
-Wiser but not richer, Herbie doubled down on his efforts to make money. He was galloping horses at Keeneland Race Course in the morning, then working nights at a Texaco near the couple’s apartment six days a week. He was getting by on five hours of sleep a night.
-
-“When Glenda and I started out, we didn’t have a pot to pee in or one to pour it out of,” he says. “Me and her, we didn’t have s---.”
-
-Baby Eric arrived soon thereafter. Meanwhile, Herbie’s horse savvy earned him moves up the ladder from exercise rider to assistant trainer for some prominent Kentucky conditioners before he eventually went out on his own. [Equibase statistics show](https://www.equibase.com/profiles/allStartsPeople.cfm?eID=24614&typeSource=TE&rbt=TB&year=1977) Herbie won 73 out of 707 races from 1976 to 2011, earning total purses of $670,328. Those are modest numbers. Herbie had some success at races on the Kentucky circuit, but resisted overtures from at least one well-heeled owner to take a string of horses to race in Florida for the winter. After the upbringing he had endured, the usual nomadic trainer life held no appeal.
-
-“I didn’t know what a family was,” Herbie says. “When I got married, I couldn’t ever remember anybody putting an arm around me and saying, ‘I love you’ or encouraging me to do better. It just never happened. You know, you don’t miss what you never had. But once I got a family and saw how important it was, you realize.”
-
-Soon enough, young Eric Reed was joining his father at the track. He would never leave it.
-
-
-
-Since the Derby win, Rich Strike has spent most of his time at Mercury Equine Center outside Lexington.
-
-Pat McDonogh/Courier Journal/USA TODAY Network
-
-Nearing the end of his time at Lafayette High School in Lexington, Eric told Herbie that his career plans were set. They didn’t include college. Herbie didn’t like what he was hearing.
-
-“I didn’t want him to do it,” Herbie says. “He was smart. He never did homework, made straight A’s, and I thought, ‘Why waste that? Go to college.’ The one thing I regret is that I don’t have an education. I made it to the ninth grade. I don’t care what anybody says, when you’re around educated people and you don’t have one, you feel inferior. Because you can’t talk on their level. One thing about college, it opens doors you can’t open any other way.
-
-“But he told everybody, ‘I’m way ahead of anybody going to college because I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to train horses my whole life.’”
-
-Eric began by assisting his dad, who offered no shortcuts or favors. One frigid winter night at Latonia Race Course in Northern Kentucky (now called Turfway Park), Herbie dispatched Eric to sit outside a horse’s stall for hours leading up to a race, offering him a blanket and nothing else.
-
-Eventually, Eric started out on his own, navigating the same low-stakes claiming circuit his dad had worked. When he called home once from Ellis Park in Henderson, Ky., to ask his dad for advice, this was the response: “Look, brother, I can’t tell you nothing. You’re training those horses now.”
-
-After plugging along at a modest clip for more than 15 years, Reed started to see an uptick in results in the early 2000s. More wins, more horses claimed, more purse money. The financial backing of a thoroughbred owner for whom he trained allowed him to take a big swing—buying a 60-acre property that would become Mercury Equine Center in 1985. The place had been part of fabled nearby Spendthrift Farm at one point, but had fallen into some disrepair. Reed and his wife, Kay, went to work refurbishing it.
-
-With a ⅝-mile oval for training,160 stalls and plenty of paddock land, they built their dream farm. Within a few years, Reed was winning more races and purse money in a year than his father did in 35 years. He was a tier below the top trainers in the sport, but making a good living and enjoying his life.
-
-Until the phone rang late one night in December 2016.
-
-A thunderstorm had rolled through on an unseasonably warm winter night, and a lightning strike is believed to have ignited one of three horse barns on the property. What ensued was a nightmare. Jumping in the car and rushing from Versailles to the farm, Eric says he could see the glow of the fire painted against the dark sky from more than a mile away.
-
-“It was raining sideways, pouring rain,” Reed recalls. “I told my wife, ‘We’ve lost everything.’”
-
-It turned out not to be the case—by chance of fate, the wind from the storm was blowing the opposite direction from the way it usually blows on the farm, away from the other two barns and the house on the property. But the losses [were still horrific](https://paulickreport.com/news/the-biz/deadly-fire-hits-lexingtons-mercury-equine-center/): 23 horses died, 13 escaped.
-
-The memories are stark and searing: one of his workers, “absolutely naked, no shoes, no underwear, running in and out and pulling horses out”; some horses exiting the barn with their ears or manes on fire; workers having to hold back Kay to keep her from running into the blaze. The fire was put out a couple of hours later and the temperature plunged in the aftermath of the storm. Reed told his staff to go home and return at first light to survey the damage and retrieve the horses that had been let loose.
-
-“We got back here at about 7,” Reed says. “I thought the night was horrible, but then you see the bodies. … I’m telling you, man, nobody deserves to see that. That’s when the worst of it hit me.”
-
-Gutted, Reed and his attorney began the process of calling the horses’ owners to tell them which animals had survived and which had perished. He thought strongly about quitting the business. The voice he needed to hear most was his father’s.
-
-[](https://www.si.com/tag/daily-cover)
-
-“About three days into it, my dad calls me,” Eric recalls. *Hey boy, you still on your feet? You got to get back to training them horses, Eric. People are paying you, and those horses need to get out of the barn. Can’t nobody tell you what to do, but I am going to throw one thing at you: If you quit, them horses died for nothing.*
-
-Gradually, Reed pulled himself and his operation back together. He dabbled in a [YouTube hunting and fishing show](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUfVYCtfx61WIy9-ZBW9_HQ) with a couple of friends, *The Bluegrass Boys Outdoor Show*. But his heart was in training horses, and with the help of friends and family he persevered.
-
-One thing Reed did upon rebuilding the burned-down barn: He left a clearing, surrounded by white split-rail fencing, where part of the carnage had occurred. No one sets foot in there, other than to mow the grass. “This is hallowed ground,” he says. “This ground, we know what happened here and it’s not going to be forgotten.”
-
-Reed was also not forgotten by his clients and others in the industry. In a business where relationships often fracture and owner second-guessing is rampant, Reed maintained good rapport with those who pay the bills. That includes St. Louis businessman Mike Schlobohm, who sent Reed the filly Resurrection Road in 2018 largely because his training fees were affordable for an entry-level owner. Five years later, Resurrection Road has [won five of 21 starts](https://www.equibase.com/profiles/Results.cfm?type=Horse&refno=10126715®istry=T&rbt=TB) and earned nearly $125,000 in purse money for a satisfied owner.
-
-“He just always has been super good to us,” Schlobohm says. “He always wants to do what’s right for the horse. He treats every horse individually, he finds the right spots for them to race, and his horsemanship eliminates a lot of vet bills.”
-
-(Knowing what he did about how Reed operates, Schlobohm said last week, “I guarantee he does not want to run that horse in the Preakness.” The next day, Rich Strike was scratched from the race.)
-
-Reed’s business continued chugging along at a steady but unspectacular pace when he hooked up with Dawson in 2021. An oil and gas guy from Edmond, Okla., Dawson was reentering horse racing after some unspecified bad experiences that Dawson elected not to discuss. Dawson is a small player, having sent three horses to Reed before the two claimed Rich Strike for the paltry sum of $30,000 as a 2-year-old last September. The pair won a five-way “shake” for Rich Strike after he won his second career race by 17 lengths at Churchill Downs. Exciting as that was, it’s hardly a gateway to the Kentucky Derby.
-
-Reed took Rich Strike back to Mercury Equine Center and began prepping him for a race at Keeneland three weeks later. Reed watches his horses’ morning gallops from what is essentially a combination clocker’s stand and office on the turn of his home training oval, a place where he keeps cans of Raid handy to fend off the omnipresent wasps. “With this, I’m Clint Eastwood,” he said, holding a can of the pesticide. “Without it, I’m scared of ’em.”
-
-Coming off that big maiden score at Churchill, Rich Strike was sent off at 4–1 in the race at Keeneland on Oct. 9, but finished a dull third in an $80,000 race. It dampened some of the excitement in the group, but it did not change Reed’s plan.
-
-“I don’t know another trainer in the world that would have run that horse back at a stake after that race at Keeneland,” Herbert says. “I wouldn’t have seen that kind of talent in that horse. He knew he had something. After Keeneland he said, ‘I’m going to tell you, he’s the best horse I’ve ever trained.’”
-
-Eric knew Rich Strike had a troubled trip at Keeneland and figured a little more racing luck would reveal the colt’s talent. But the day after Christmas, he finished fifth at 46–1 odds in a stakes race at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans—14 ½ lengths behind Epicenter. “That would have been the end for me,” Herbie says. “I would have run him for $50,000.”
-
-Still undeterred, Eric pointed Rich Strike toward Kentucky Derby prep races in 2022 at Turfway Park, more familiar territory for Reed and Leon. The horse performed better there, finishing third twice and fourth once in stakes company, earning enough Derby qualifying points to reach the fringe of making the race. Winning was another matter entirely. Since that maiden victory in September, Rich Strike had never led another race.
-
-
-
-Owner Rick Dawson (right of trophy) joined forces with Eric Reed (left) in 2021.
-
-Pat McDonogh/Courier Journal/USA TODAY Network
-
-Rich Strike came to Churchill Downs in late April as a complete afterthought. He had one timed workout at the track, on April 27, and no one cared. It seemed unlikely he would get in the race. He was “in it for the saddle cloth,” as the saying goes, referring to the yellow fabric memento Derby horses wear with their name on it beneath their saddles when they go to the track to train in the morning.
-
-What happened the day before the Derby became part of the instant Rich Strike lore. Seemingly shut out of the 20-horse field, a last-minute scratch cleared the way for him to enter. While the horse’s connections were ecstatic, the outside world yawned. No one gave the horse a chance, and he was sent off at the longest odds in the field.
-
-Eric and Herbert Reed watched the race on the big screen in the Churchill paddock. Taking note of the race leaders blazing through the first quarter mile—the fastest in Derby history at 21.78 seconds—Herbert said to his son, “We might not win it, but I know they won’t.” The half-mile split was less than 46 seconds, still a withering pace that set up the race for a dead closer—Rich Strike’s wheelhouse.
-
-When Derby rookie jockey Leon—himself as big a long shot as the rest of the crew—made a series of bold moves and smart decisions, he put Rich Strike in position for a dash to the finish. When he caught Epicenter and Zandon in the final sixteenth of a mile, almost no one in the crowd of 147,000 knew the horse suddenly stealing the Kentucky Derby on the rail. But the boys watching in the paddock knew, disbelief and euphoria commingling. When Rich Strike crossed under the wire first, Eric Reed collapsed to the ground—a bad back, a rush of emotion, overwhelming shock, whatever the reason. Herbert feared his son was having a heart attack.
-
-“Scared the hell out of me,” Herbert says. “Then he got up from there and I started laughing at him.”
-
-As the ecstatically unruly group howled and hugged and staggered its way toward the Kentucky Derby winner’s circle, Eric Reed’s first thought was who he wanted next to him for this walk of a lifetime. [He called out, “Where’s my dad?”](https://www.courier-journal.com/videos/news/2022/05/08/strike-rich-horse-owner-dawson-kentucky-derby-churchill-downs-winner-reaction/9693184002/)
-
-Herbert Reed was right there behind his son. As he has been across every step of an incredible familial journey.
-
-**[Read more of SI’s Daily Cover stories:](https://www.si.com/tag/daily-cover)**
-
-**• [The Return and Rebirth of the WNBA’s AD](https://www.si.com/wnba/2022/05/05/ad-long-covid-identity-new-york-liberty-daily-cover)
-****• [Does the NBA Have a $@&!\*% Problem?](https://www.si.com/nba/2022/05/11/nba-profanity-problem-daily-cover)
-****• [Sicilian Scrum: One Italian Rugby Club is Standing Up to the Mafia](https://www.si.com/sports-illustrated/2022/05/10/briganti-rugby-sicily-mafia-daily-cover)**
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-```button
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-^button-AVibeShiftIsComingNSave
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-# A Vibe Shift Is Coming
-
-
-
-Meg Yates, better known as Meg Superstar Princess, hangs outside an _Office_ magazine party last week. Photo: The Cobrasnake
-
-This article was featured in [One Great Story](http://nymag.com/tags/one-great-story/), _New York_’s reading recommendation newsletter. [Sign up here](https://nymag.com/promo/sign-up-for-one-great-story.html?itm_source=csitepromo&itm_medium=articlelink&itm_campaign=ogs_tertiary_zone) to get it nightly.
-
-**One morning in June,** while I was puffing away on my stationary bike — fine, a Peloton — pretending I had enough time to get my body ready for the “hot vaxx summer” that never really was, my friend Ellen messaged me: “Okay, please let me know if this person is dumb. But this stressed me out this morning.”
-
-She dropped a link to something titled “Vibe Shift,” an entry from a Substack called [_8Ball_](https://www.8ball.report/?r=zifuc)_,_ which turned out to be the weekly newsletter of a trend-forecasting consultancy founded by Sean Monahan. Previously, Monahan had helped found the now-defunct art collective K-HOLE, known for giving a name to the 2010s [phenomenon of normcore](https://www.thecut.com/2014/02/normcore-fashion-trend.html) and succinctly explaining why all of a sudden everyone was wearing New Balance sneakers and dad jeans. In other words, he’s someone who has made a career of translating cultural trends for a larger audience.
-
-A _vibe shift_ is the catchy but sort of too-cool term Monahan uses for a relatively simple idea: In the culture, sometimes things change, and a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated. Monahan, who is 35, breaks down the three vibe shifts he has survived and observed: Hipster/Indie Music (ca. 2003–9), or peak Arcade Fire, Bloc Party, high-waisted Cheap Mondays, Williamsburg, bespoke-cocktail bars; Post-Internet/Techno Revival (ca. 2010–16), or the Blood Orange era, normcore, [dressing like _The Matrix_](https://www.thecut.com/2018/04/i-dressed-like-i-was-in-the-matrix-for-a-week.html')_,_ Kinfolk the club, not _Kinfolk_ the magazine; and Hypebeast/Woke (ca. 2016–20), or Drake at his Drakest, the Nike SNKRS app, sneaker flipping, virtue signaling, Donald Trump, protests not brunch.
-
-You can argue the accuracy of Monahan’s timeline or spend hours over dinner litigating the touch points of each vibe era — it’s kind of fun debating which trend was peaking when, or which was just for white people — but the thing that struck fear into Ellen’s heart was Monahan’s prediction that we were on the cusp of a new vibe shift. It _is_ unnerving because when you really consider it, you can feel people flocking to a new thing. You can see that he’s right; something has shifted.
-
-None of this would have been particularly distressing (it’s just how time moves), if not for this paragraph explaining what the flocking looks like:
-
-> One day everyone was wearing Red Wing boots and partying in warehouses in Williamsburg decorated with twinkling fairy lights. VIBE SHIFT! Everyone started wearing Nike Frees and sweating it out in the club. Now some did not make it through the vibe shift … ‘Why are you all wearing the same sneakers!’ they would plead. ‘Don’t you care about authenticity? What’s with all this sudden interest in branding!’
-
-This is to say, not everyone survives a vibe shift. The ones still clinging to authenticity and fairy lights are the ones who crystallized in their hipsterdom while the culture moved on. They “bunkered down in Greenpoint and got married” or took their waxed beards and nautical tattoo sleeves and relocated to Hudson. And by that law, those who survived this shift only to get stuck in, say, Hypebeast/Woke — well, they’ve already moved to Los Angeles to houses that have room to display their sneaker collections worth a small fortune.
-
-Unfortunately, I ate this social analysis up with a big-ass spoon. It’s chilling to realize you may be one of the stuck, or if you aren’t, you may be soon. Like Ellen, I haven’t stopped thinking about my own survival odds since.
-
-**This vibe-shift idea landed** right as I was trying to figure out what hot-girl summer — or hot vaxx summer or the whoring ’20s or however you chose to label the expected triumphant return — was supposed to be and who I was supposed to be in it. I was in the middle of attempting to relearn which clothes I wore, how I pursued sex, what drugs I took and with whom, what music I danced to and where. I could accept that some of [my old bars had closed](https://www.curbed.com/article/iconic-nyc-businesses-closed-2020-pandemic.html) (RIP, Frank’s, Kinfolk) and that a bunch of people I knew had babies (RIP, people who had babies), but I also felt that time had stopped in some ways.
-
-It was reassuring to think the pandemic had hit PAUSE on life, or at least put things into slo-mo. That while some of us were inside, or in the world but social distancing, or just keeping to ourselves as best we could, culture wasn’t really moving forward. In therapy, I talked about how, for the first time in years, I didn’t [feel acute FOMO.](https://www.thecut.com/2021/06/the-return-of-fomo.html) It was nice that everyone was sort of stagnant, watching the same trash on Netflix. Sure, some people [were going out “secretly,”](https://www.thecut.com/2020/11/nyc-underground-nightlife-covid-19.html) but we didn’t really know [what those people were up to](https://www.thecut.com/2021/11/nyc-sex-parties.html?utm_campaign=thecut&utm_medium=s1&utm_source=tw), and we didn’t have reason to believe they were advancing any sort of scene. Turns out, two years might have swooshed into a black hole, but I was cocky to think something wouldn’t fill the void.
-
-“Those were still real years. People’s opinions were changing, things were happening. It was just that, you know, culture and pop culture were not really putting out bangers during most of the pandemic,” says Monahan when we speak by phone in an attempt to truly decode the vibe shift.
-
-“There’s been a real paranoia that people have. Everyone coming out of hibernation being like, _What are people wearing? What are people reading? What are people doing?_ And it was different than when everyone had gone into the pandemic. It unsettled a lot of people,” Monahan says, commiserating, I think.
-
-Like me, Monahan is a geriatric millennial, but while it remains to be seen if I will shift, he has already moved forward. It’s his particular skill, after all. His trend-forecasting ability materialized when he was getting his B.F.A. in painting at RISD. Even though he couldn’t get a job after he graduated in 2009, his studies gave him the ability to recognize the “tradition of western image making,” he says. “There are certain patterns that emerge. As soon as you hit modernism, culture starts to go into these kind of, like, patricidal cycles where each generation that comes up tries to refute the past.”
-
-He channeled that into K-HOLE, the collective he started with his friends in 2011. Emily Segal, another co-founder, described K-HOLE to _T_ magazine as “an extreme version of the corporate taste for drawing on youth, drug, and countercultures for lifestyle inspiration.” That is, K-HOLE tried to make trend forecasting into an art project. In 2013, it recognized a specific way that people were “trying to navigate fashion and personal style in a kind of emergent social-media ecosystem that had kind of broken the old script for how to position yourself as interesting,” says Monahan. In short, normcore was a rebuke to being a bespoke snowflake and publicizing it on Instagram.
-
-It’s also a meme Monahan can’t escape, he says with a sigh. Normcore went viral but didn’t make his group any money. “It was never like, _Here’s our exit plans to become millionaires, turn our PDFs into a global creative-services brand or something,_” he explains. K-HOLE dissolved in 2016. He chalks it up to the times, what he calls “the unworkableness” of 2010 culture. “We had a very broad reach but no monetization.”
-
-But brands will always need someone to explain TikTok microcultures to old losers. So even without the collective, Monahan has found success as a consultant for brands, like Nike, that pay him to tell a good story about why a person buys X over Y.
-
-**What’s the new vibe?** Monahan had intended to drop a “Vibe Shift” follow-up on his Substack, in which he would dissect what was percolating (information he deemed so valuable it would require purchasing a $600 annual subscription to access. Now, a year’s subscription is more in line with the market standard of $50). Half a year later, he still can’t quite figure it out. (Delta and Omicron slowed down the shift some, a lucky break for those of us who want a second chance to avoid getting left behind.)
-
-Monahan does have some theories, though: “I feel like the trajectory of the 2010s has been exhausted in a lot of ways. The culture-war topic no longer seems quite as interesting to people. Social media isn’t a place where you can be as creative anymore; all the angles are figured out. Younger people are less interested in things like quote-unquote cancel culture. These were kind of, like, the big pillars we used to navigate pop culture in the 2010s. And we had the rise of all these world-spanning, like, Sauron-esque tech platforms that literally have presences on every continent. People want to make things personal again.”
-
-He thinks the new vibe shift could be the return of early-aughts indie sleaze. “American Apparel, flash photography at parties, and messy hair and messy makeup,” he riffs, plus a return to a more fragmented culture. “People going off in a lot of different directions because it doesn’t feel like there’s a coherent, singular vision for music or fashion.” He sees Substacks and podcasts as the new blogs and a move away from Silicon Valley’s interest in optimizing workflow, “which is just so anti-decadence.” Most promisingly, he predicts a return of irony.
-
-I suggest that the death drive has something to do with it. With the pandemic and climate change, our aesthetic and behavior are certainly shaped by a sense of doom. There’s a nihilism to the way people dress and party; our heels get higher the closer we inch to death. It’s why [people are smoking again](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/12/style/smoking-cigarettes-comeback.html), so says the New York _Times._ “Oh, sure,” Monahan agrees, but not fully. “I think the interest in opulence and the interest in transgression are in some ways just pent-up frustrations from the pandemic where people are like, _I want to have fun._ Also, the 2010s were such a politicized decade that I think the desire people have to be less constrained by political considerations makes a lot of sense.” I can tell he’s theorizing on the fly when he points to the fact that there’s now a bouncer at Bemelmans Bar as evidence of the new embrace of old opulence.
-
-Still, like everyone now exposed to this theory, I have a choice to make: Do I try to opt in to whatever trend comes next, or do I choose to accept that my last two good years were spent on my couch gobbling antidepressants and wearing “cute house pants” and UGGs? How easy would it be to fossilize in my Rachel Comey clogs (2013), holding shallots (2018), listening to 2011 Drake, just being happy channeling my personal style into housewares instead of clothing, as Monahan says my demographic is doing? Or do I batter on, living my life like I’m an extra [on _Euphoria_?](https://www.thecut.com/article/euphoria-cast-interview.html)
-
-Monahan reassured me that it’s okay not to survive the shift. We all have permission to stay stuck at whatever makes us feel comfortable, and if that’s in 2016 or 2012 or 2010, that’s fine.
-
-I decided to poll my friends about what they’re doing, mostly the ones without kids. Do they think they will emerge on the other side of all of this “as adults” who just accept we lost our last few years of socially acceptable freedom? Will they let themselves get stuck?
-
-“I’m writing about a vibe shift,” I wrote in a text to one friend, broaching the topic.
-
-“Are they good or bad? I can’t keep up,” he replies. He also doesn’t really care, as he got engaged and has been going on vacations and calls himself vibe-optimistic. He changes for no vibe.
-
-“Is this about babies? Do you want to have a baby?” asks another friend, who just had a baby and wants company and refuses to understand that this is about vibes.
-
-I could just choose to opt out, but here’s a glimpse of what awaits me if I survive: Late last summer, Monahan was in L.A. hanging out at “this kind of trendy wine bar called El Prado,” where he observed a 21-year-old woman wearing Rocket Dogs, as in the platform shoes, with low-rise, boot-cut True Religion jeans. He noticed how she had a little black leather under-the-arm purse and a cami and a trucker hat. It was as though she had time-traveled from [early-aughts Kitson.](https://www.thecut.com/2021/08/the-red-pilling-of-kitson-fraser-ross.html) He watched as she started talking to an older hipster dude. “He was trying to explain to her what a mosh pit was, and my friend was just kind of cracking up about this weird intergenerational conversation happening, when we were like, ‘This girl looks like she just shifted from, I don’t know, like, 2008 to this bar and is talking to a guy who looks like he never updated his style since 2008.’ And he’s trying to give her more of a POV on crowd-surfing at hardcore shows in the aughts,” Monahan says, laughing incredulously.
-
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-Date: 2022-05-22
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-05-22
-Link: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-05-15/buffalo-shooter-new-generation-white-supremacists
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-# A new generation of white supremacist killer - Los Angeles Times
-
-ATLANTA —
-
-Bored during the early days of the pandemic, Payton Gendron logged on to the 4chan message board website to browse ironic memes and infographics that spread the idea that the white race is going extinct.
-
-He was soon lurking on the web’s even more sinister fringes, scrolling through extremist and neo-Nazi sites that peddled conspiracy theories and anti-Black racism. It wasn’t until he spotted a GIF of a man shooting a shotgun through a dark hallway, and then tracked down a livestream of the [2019 killing of 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand](https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-new-zealand-mosque-terrorist-attack-20190315-story.html), that Gendron appeared to have found his calling: as a virulently racist, copycat mass shooter with a craving for notoriety.
-
-The white 18-year-old from Conklin, N.Y., suspected of [killing 10 people Saturday in a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarke](https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-05-15/buffalo-shooting-that-killed-10-investigated-as-racially-motivated-violent-extremism)t, appears to represent a new generation of white supremacists. They are isolated and online, radicalized on internet memes and misinformation, apparently inspired by livestreams to find fame through bloodshed, much of it propelled by convoluted ideas that the white race is under threat from everything from interracial marriage to immigration.
-
- 
-
-Jeanne LeGall, of Buffalo, N.Y., readjusts a couple stuffed animals at a makeshift memorial near the Tops Friendly Markets at Jefferson Avenue and Riley Street on Sunday in Buffalo.
-
-(Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)
-
-“Now you have this new ironic world of killers,” said J.J. MacNab, a fellow at George Washington University’s program on extremism. “It’s a different world — just a constant flow of bad statistics, bad memes, bad lies about the people they want to hate.… That’s the 4chan way: You say things that are outrageous that you don’t necessarily believe — and over time you come to believe.”
-
-Unlike the white supremacists of old — from the Ku Klux Klan to newer neo-Nazi terror groups such as the Base or the Atomwaffen Division — the new recruits to racist 4chan and 8chan forums are often teenage boys in high school, MacNab said. They act out their rage at a time of dimming economic opportunity for some young people and the changing demographics of a country they have been told no longer has a place for them.
-
-“They piggyback on each other’s crimes and, as each one became more famous, then just absolutely made it more desirable for them to copy,” MacNab said. “The joke is always: Who can beat the kill number? ... To them, it’s like a video game. How do you score better than the last one?”
-
-Armed with a high-powered rifle scrawled with a racial epithet, the suspect broadcast his killing spree live on Twitch, a platform popular among young gamers, and published a 180-page manifesto that espoused the racist “replacement theory,” the idea that white Americans are at risk of being replaced by Jews and people of color.
-
-Identifying as a white supremacist fascist with neo-Nazi beliefs, Gendron wrote that low white birth rates around the world represent a “crisis” and “assault” that “will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people.”
-
-Experts say replacement theory — whose label was first coined in France by the white nationalist writer Renaud Camus in his 2011 book “Le Grand Remplacement” — has inspired a steady stream of violent racist gunmen in the United States in recent years, from the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 to the killing of one congregant and injury of three others at a synagogue in Poway, Calif.
-
- 
-
-An armed police officer closes a gate to Al Noor Mosque after it was officially reopened following the previous week’s mass shooting on March 23, 2019, in Christchurch, New Zealand.
-
-(Carl Court / Getty Images)
-
-While Gendron ultimately was motivated by a mass killing outside the U.S. — Brenton Tarrant’s 2019 massacre of worshipers in Christchurch, New Zealand — he lauded in his manifesto the perpetrators of racially motivated massacres in the U.S. These included Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black parishioners at a church in Charleston, S.C., and Patrick Crusius, who targeted Latinos and immigrants at a Walmart in El Paso. That shooting, which killed 23 people, has been described as the deadliest attack on Latinos in modern American history.
-
-White supremacist and far-right killers have dominated the extremist homicide totals since 2018, said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino. Over the last two years, there was a historic upward shift overall in the frequency of anti-Black hate crime across the U.S., Levin said.
-
-“We saw a concerning historic inflectional spike in anti-Black hate crime and online invective in 2020 and 2021 with increased violence, but without the kind of multi-fatality attacks that previously accompanied such spikes, until now,” Levin said. “This shooting is an extension and return to mass acts of violence.”
-
-The lull in hate-driven mass shootings was partly because the pandemic shut down schools, malls and places where crowds of people congregated, Levin said. But also because federal law enforcement paid closer attention to extremists on online apps such as Telegram after the El Paso shooting in 2019, said Michael Edison Hayden, senior investigative reporter with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.
-
-Although such attacks appear to target specific communities, they are actually driven by a set of larger white power ideologies, said Kathleen Belew, assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago who studies extremism.
-
-Belew, author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America,” said racist radicalization was not a Southern or regional problem. The Buffalo attack was clearly related to racially motivated attacks in the U.S. in recent years, from the Pittsburgh synagogue to the El Paso Walmart.
-
-“Radicalization is happening all the time around our country,” she said.
-
-Running Gendron’s manifesto through plagiarism software, Belew found that significant chunks were lifted from the manifesto of the Christchurch shooter. But Gendron also appeared to have written portions himself, including his support for replacement theory.
-
-“Immigrants are one threat, the presence of African Americans is another one, and Jews who are allegedly controlling these plots to eradicate the white race,” Belew said. “There’s a hyperfixation on the white birth rate and on white women having white children and the violent defense of that system.”
-
-Although white supremacists such as Gendron may become radicalized online, they were also incited by the spectacle of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection: “The Capitol attack was a radicalization action that dramatically increased online activity in spaces like those the Buffalo shooter is believed to have frequented,” Belew said.
-
-Blending the ideology of “great replacement” with ironic symbols and internet in-jokes is a key feature of a new breed of white supremacist mass shooters, Hayden said.
-
-“Dialoguing with people, mass murder as performance is a particular phenomenon of the post-Trump era,” he said. “The manifesto is part of a performance, a physical representation, the bloodshed is taking the memes into real life.”
-
-“These killers don’t have any perception of people being people.” Hayden said. “These are murders presented almost like video games, and they’re actually, for that reason, very, very, very scary.... That mimetic aspect of it — the internet winking and things like that — feels even a step more dehumanized and horrible.”
-
-About 60% of the extremist killings in the U.S. between 2009 and 2019 were committed by people espousing white supremacist ideologies such as replacement theory, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
-
-“White supremacy is the No. 1 domestic terrorism threat in the United States,” according to Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism based in Montgomery, Ala.
-
-Federal law enforcement assessments and studies by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, Beirich said, show far-right plots and attacks have been “exponentially growing” in recent years. In the Western world, she said, the threat of extremism has shifted from Islamic extremists to “ideologically motivated racial extremists.”
-
-But she cautioned: “Within the white supremacy world, there’s a lot of different motives.”
-
-“It’s like he’s fused Dylann Roof’s racism into the great replacement,” Beirich said of Gendron, noting his manifesto links to race science studies and to prominent American white supremacists like [Jared Taylor](https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/jared-taylor). “You realize this guy has immersed himself in this hodgepodge of white supremacist websites.”
-
-Converging online, isolated young men had fewer outlets than their forebears who tend to gather in local groups and meet others in their community.
-
-“When you have groups of people that meet regularly, you kind of have an outlet,” she said. “I think not meeting makes them more dangerous.”
-
-While most of the killers are young males, not all of the new generation of white supremacists or extreme racists are white.
-
-“You can have people of all different colors participate in the white supremacy rally,” MacNab said, noting that Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, the head of the Proud Boys far-right extremist group, is half Cuban, half Black and some of the Oathkeepers who showed up at the Capitol in Washington were not white.
-
-“It’s just a weird world we live in these days,” MacNab said. “A lot of that’s back to the irony. If you’re doing what you’re doing, because you want to make liberals cry, then you’re saying things you don’t necessarily believe. And I think a lot of conservative people of color kind of got caught up in that.”
-
-In his manifesto, Gendron presents himself as a young left-winger who evolved into a fascist, eco-fascist, populist and accelerationist bent on speeding up the collapse of established government, said Alexander Reid Ross, an adjunct professor at Portland State University and a senior fellow at the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right who read the manifesto.
-
-“He kind of provides some reasoning for that toward the end: The left wing has admirable goals, but for that reason it will always set back progress because for him, nonwhite people, except for Asians, are intrinsically inferior, so if you try to help them, you’re impeding the success of white people,” Reid Ross said of the manifesto.
-
-Reid Ross noticed that Gendron highlights his German and Italian roots in the manifesto, yet still believes in the “great replacement.”
-
-“We all tend to think of great replacement as anti-immigrant,” Reid Ross said. “What this killing shows us is it’s more than that: It is targeting anybody who isn’t white. He calls them ‘replacers’ and they have to be slaughtered, expelled or killed.”
-
-Experts who study extremism have made an effort to not circulate Gendron’s manifesto.
-
-“Each manifesto seems to lead to another attack and another manifesto and is a radicalizing force,” Beirich said. “So it’s very important that neither the video — which presents the attack like it’s a first-person shooter game — or the manifesto be circulated because it will inspire further attacks.”
-
-Because Gendron’s manifesto includes detailed tactical advice and instructions, she said, “it’s a plan ... actually even more dangerous than an ideological statement.”
-
-After the Christchurch shooting in 2019, Beirich and other experts formed an advisory panel that worked with a tech company group, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, to more quickly remove content such as attacker manifestos and videos to avoid inspiring further attacks and retraumatizing victims.
-
-Some online critics said those groups didn’t act fast enough to prevent Gendron’s video from being cross-posted on Facebook and other sites, where it lingered for hours. But Beirich insisted that authorities acted more swiftly. And while screenshots of portions of the manifesto are circulating online, Beirich said, all 180 pages are not widely available and “it’s not going viral within minutes” like it did with Christchurch.
-
-While Gendron came from the nation’s extreme fringes, a significant proportion of Americans share some of his ideas. Nearly 1 in 5 Americans agree with at least two key tenets of replacement theory, according to a new [poll](https://apnorc.org/projects/immigration-attitudes-and-conspiratorial-thinkers/) released last week by the Associated Press and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.
-
-Experts caution, however, that belief in those tenets does not necessarily make a person a full-blown believer in the theory, let alone be willing to act violently.
-
-The poll, which surveyed 4,173 American adults, asked about two statements that capture key parts of replacement theory — that there’s an effort to deliberately replace native-born Americans with immigrants for political reasons and that native-born Americans are losing economic and political clout in the U.S.
-
-The survey found that about 1 in 3 Americans agreed that “there is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views.” About 1 in 7 Americans said they “strongly” agree with that.
-
-Late Saturday, Gendron stood in a Buffalo city courtroom, wearing a white paper gown with his hands shackled, as he was charged with one count of first-degree murder.
-
-His court-appointed lawyer pleaded not guilty.
-
-While Gendron probably wanted the public to focus on white genocide after the shooting, Hayden of the SPLC said they should instead focus on the rich donors who sought to profit from radicalizing Gendron and other young men.
-
-“There are very wealthy people in this country who are seeking to keep this radicalization material humming because it benefits them,” Hayden said. “The more chaotic the country is, the more the rich can work for themselves.”
-
-*Jarvie reported from Atlanta and Hennessy-Fiske from Houston. Times staff writer Richard Winton in Los Angeles and senior editor David Lauter in Washington contributed to this report.*
-
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-Date: 2022-02-26
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-# A view from across the river
-
-‘Each of us is an atlas of sorts, already knowing how to navigate some portion of the world, containing innumerable versions of place as experience and desire and fear, as route and landmark and desire.’
-—Rebecca Solnit\[i\]
-
-In Delhi, when you meet someone for the first time, among the first questions you are asked is ‘Where do you live?’ What on the face seems like innocuous small talk is actually a way of assessing class and status. When I reply, ‘Patparganj,’ some say ‘Oh, where is that?’ I say, ‘East Delhi, across the Yamuna,’ and I know from the silence and awkwardness that follows that I’ve already been assessed. If my south Delhi friend happens to be by my side, she will quickly come to my defense, even as I need no such assistance, ‘Oh, she lives in this apartment that has all these big-shot academics!’ My choice of neighbourhood is somehow supposed to be redeemed by the esteemed presence of academics.
-
-The bias against Patparganj or for that matter other localities across the Yamuna is not just limited to my south Delhi acquaintances unfamiliar with this part of the city. Before 2010, when the metro improved interconnectivity of this neighbourhood, whenever I would try to get an auto rickshaw to go to Patparganj from my office in Jai Singh Road in central Delhi, or for that matter from anywhere else in the city, _autowalla_s would blatantly refuse, saying ‘_Jamnapaar nahin jayenge_—we’ll not go across the Yamuna.’ Some would just say ‘Patparganj? Jamnapaar?’ and shake their heads or quickly drive away as if I’d mentioned something horrific.\[ii\]
-
-When I moved to Patparganj, more than a decade back, I was moving from south Delhi, from an urban village called Katwaria Sarai, where I had lived for over seven years in three different houses. Katwaria Sarai, in the 2000s, was a much-preferred locality for students, working professionals, MBA and IAS aspirants, and even young live-in couples. The main source of income for the village’s original inhabitants came from the rent economy, and few questions were asked as long as you could deposit a month’s rent as security and pay the rent more or less on time. Notwithstanding the narrow meandering gullies, dusty run-down parks, dangerously tall, incrementally built houses, with one-room and two-room ‘sets’ and little ventilation, Katwaria Sarai, seemed for me and many other young people as a haven of freedom, mobility and choice. Eating out was the cheapest and most convenient option, and the narrow winding gullies had a large number of _dhaba_s, small restaurants, snack and sweet shops, many with specialized regional cuisine, Mallu, Odia and Bihari to name a few, dishing out ‘home’ food to the different communities of the floating tenant population. Some eateries, particularly _paratha_, Maggi and _chai_ sellers, would remain open late into the night or the wee hours of the morning, which also meant that roaming the streets in the middle of the night was normal and routine, rather than a subversive act of claiming the city.
-
-It was equally easy to roam in the adjoining areas of the neighbourhood, virtually at any time of the day or night, with no closed gates or security guards preventing you from doing so. I could saunter into the adjoining IIT campus, go for morning walks in JNU, spend afternoons studying in the JNU library even though I was not a student there, go for night walks in Sanjay Van—a forest that is part of the Mehrauli South Central Ridge, visit the Friday bazaar in R.K. Puram to buy cheap plastic buckets and pillow covers, and on many occasions even walk further down, covering a distance of over 6 km, to SN Market to window shop and eat _samosa_s, and head back bummed out in Bus No. 615. It was from this affective world, of youthfulness and of an ease in traversing the city, mostly on foot, that I made a move to Patparganj.
-
-When I moved to Patparganj in 2008, it was still considered a ‘backward’ outlier, with no connection to culture, history and ‘modern’ amenities that other parts of the city were marked with. It had, and continues to have, no cafes, bookshops, crumbling or restored monuments, no organic stores or designer shops; even the closest malls in Laxmi Nagar and Ghaziabad are often looked down upon by middle and upper-middle class residents as ‘pedestrian’. Yet, these were hardly the concerns I had at the time of shifting. I found the rows of modernist apartment blocks in Patparganj, many of them with crumbling facades and others that were just plain ugly, disorienting. And I was anxious about how I would transition to apartment living and the codes of gated communities from my peripatetic lifestyle in Katwaria Sarai. It is only in retrospect that I understand that the disorientation and the apprehensions came from my unfamiliarity and lack of relationship with the place, but before I get to that let us take a small detour through the history of this area.
-
-**Does the history of a place matter?**
-
-The word ‘patpar’ means lowland, ruins, an empty, desolate or deserted place, land that is prone to flooding in the monsoons, while ‘ganj’, meaning treasure, is usually used as a suffix with the names of places such as bazaars, _mandi_s, marketplaces and market towns, especially grain markets, thus referring to a ‘treasured place’. The coming together of these two incongruous words, one implying emptiness and the other abundance, can perhaps be resolved by understanding this region as one that was unsuitable for cultivation and yet an important marketplace. A number of historians have mentioned Patparganj as an important suburb of the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad, integrally connected to the city in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In _Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India 1639–1739_, Stephen P. Blake points out to the links of trans-Yamuna suburbs with Shahjahanabad: ‘South and to the East, on the opposite side of the Jamuna, were Patparganj and Shahadra. In these mahallas resided wholesale grain merchants. The grain which they imported from the doab was stored in large walled enclosures, then ferried across the river and sold in Paharganj.’\[iii\] Both neighbourhoods were destroyed in the mid-eighteenth century in the wake of the recurrent invasions of Delhi. The final blow came in September 1803 in the Battle of Delhi that was fought in Patparganj. Fought between the British troops led by General Gerard Lake, on one side, and the Marathas and Mughal troops of Delhi, on the other, the battle lasted just three days, but would go on to secure British control over Delhi and British rule over the subcontinent.
-
-The only material remnant of this history of Patparganj is a pillar, erected in 1916, commemorating the British victory in the 1803 battle, also referred to as the Battle of Patparganj. It is located in what is today the Noida Golf Course and is not open to the public but only to the members of the golf course.
-
-
-
-_Old hand-drawn map of Delhi (1807). The only trans-Yamuna neighbourhood marked on the map is Patparganj._
-
-Interestingly, when the decision was made to build a new imperial capital in Delhi in 1911, Patparganj was also considered as a possible site and then rejected. A July 1912 report of the Delhi Town Planning Committee noted, ‘The land on the east bank of Jumna is hallowed by no historical associations except for the site of Lord Lake’s battle of Delhi.’\[iv\] The report declared the area as unsuitable for the new capital on the grounds that the banks of the river were flat, liable to flooding and ‘unhealthy’, and that it would be too costly to build a new city there, given the terrain. However, the then Government of India was keen to acquire this land as also other land on the left bank of the Yamuna, which came under the United Provinces, and incorporate it within Delhi. The Secretary, Government of India, in a letter to the Chief Secretary of the United Provinces, dated 8 August 1912, proposed the acquisition of the villages of Kotla and Patparganj as ‘an extra grazing area and with the view of obtaining possession of the site of Lord Lake’s battle of Delhi … for historical and sentimental reasons.’\[v\] Land acquisition in south and west of Delhi was expected to displace milch cattle from their grazing areas, and Patparganj and other areas on the left bank of Yamuna were considered as suitable for rehabilitating the displaced cattle, so that Delhi’s supply of milk could be sustained. The pastoral tribe of Gujjars inhabiting these areas was believed to be an added advantage.
-
-That Patparganj has had a historical role in the making of Delhi through the ages perhaps has little bearing on my relationship with this place and how I go about my everyday life in the neighbourhood. But it is highly unlikely that I would have cared to know anything about the history of this place if it were not home for me for so many years. And some historical coincidences tickle me—that the area was central to the city’s milk supply in the colonial times and that in the present times, Mother Dairy (colloquially called Madan Diary), a key supplier of milk in Delhi-NCR, has a factory here, which is also a landmark of Patparganj.
-
-**The social life of cooperative apartments**
-
-Present-day Patparganj comprises the high-rise apartment complexes that were built from the 1980s onwards; the Patparganj Industrial Area that came up in the 1990s, separated from the residential area by the Ghazipur Drain; and Patparganj Village, the area left over from the modern city’s steady encroachment, chock-a-block with shops and incrementally built houses. While technically the area with the apartments is called Indraprastha Extension, it is colloquially referred to as ‘Patparganj Society’, a name derived from the fact that all the apartments here were constructed through cooperative housing group societies. The people who came together through these cooperatives were predominantly the middle class looking for affordable housing or a retirement investment in property. Each cooperative housing society also typically had some other shared background apart from class, whether it was a professional, institutional, regional or caste affiliation, sometimes reflected in the names of the apartments. UNESCO, BALCO and Oxford Apartments were cooperatives of the employees of these respective organizations, Oxford in this case referring to the academic publisher Oxford University Press. Kurmanchal Niketan brought together people from Kumaon, Press Apartments housed journalists, Deshbandhu Society, teachers from Deshbandhu College, Agrasen Awas, the Baniya community, Shree Ganesh Apartment, the Mathurs (a Kayastha sub-caste) of Old Delhi, Vidisha and Sah Vikas, teachers from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University. The cooperative society housing form thus allowed people to choose their neighbours in advance, making possible the stabilization of identities and communities, old and new, even as they transitioned to modern apartment living and moved with the expansion of the city’s limits.
-
-
-
-_An apartment complex in Patparganj._
-
-On the face of it, Patparganj’s apartments appear to be small islands, each holding together a set of people with a shared social background. And there are apartment dwellers, who manage to unlook and avoid the sea of life the islands are surrounded by, through the blinkers of their class and aspirations, shopping for vegetables and eating street food from the evasive confines of their cars or seeking the ‘happening city’ elsewhere. Yet, life here, as I have come to experience over the years, does not inevitably have to be one of isolated living confined to the apartments.
-
-Adjoining and interspersed between the roads lined with apartments are a large number of dense and diverse mixed-use neighbourhoods—Chander Vihar, Joshi Colony, Indira Camp, Hasanpur Village, Mandawali, East Vinod Nagar, West Vinod Nagar and Madhu Vihar—with residences, shops, markets, small workshops, eateries, _haat_s and _mandi_s, mosques, temples and gurudwaras. Many of these are unauthorized colonies that got regularized in 2012, while others are urban villages, jhuggi-jhopri clusters and pockets with ambiguous legal status. Dwelling in these neighbourhoods are local business and shop owners, people servicing the apartments such as guards and domestic helps, street vendors, autowallas, and other working-class families. The apartment folk and the people from these neighbourhoods use the same public parks, streets, markets and weekly bazaars even as this does not in any simple way transform into forms of sociality and intersections between the two.
-
-
-
-_Afternoon in a park in Patparganj, which attracts people from the apartments and from dwellings adjoining the apartments._
-
-You only have to step out of your apartment gate and there are a host of street vendors lining the streets and pavements, selling fresh vegetables and fruits, flowers, street food, potted plants, pottery, brooms and mops or providing services such as tailoring, cobbling, key making, cycle repair and ironing. Apart from these vendors with more or less fixed spots of the street are a large number of itinerant vendors who also ply the streets—pressure cooker repairmen, _kabadiwalla_s, women vendors who will exchange your old clothes for utensils, _charpaiwalla_s, etc. And then there are the weekly bazaars that come up in different parts of Patparganj on different days of the week, which transform the streets into a bustling marketplace and place of leisure for a couple of hours, starting in the evening and carrying on till late at night. Bazaar day draws crowds of people of different age groups, men and women, and different classes to the streets to shop, snack or just roam, making it possible for even those not headed to the bazaar to be out in the streets.
-
-**[Homin](https://chiraghdilli.com/2020/08/07/homing-and-unhoming-taxonomies-of-living/)g in Patparganj**
-
-Just like it is difficult to trace the exact origin of a relationship with a person—it is something that grows gradually and you do not realize when your lives become entwined—it is the same with a place. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when you start to feel at ease and grow roots, and your life’s rhythm and routines get entangled with a place. I do not remember when my misgivings about Patparganj gave way to a quiet love for the neighbourhood. Was it when I discovered the Shani (Saturday) Bazaar and it became part of my weekly routine of buying fresh vegetables, sauntering through the bazaar while munching on roasted peanuts and ending the visit always with some hot _jalebi_s? Was it when I found the tiny Madras store from where I could buy my supplies of _dosa_ batter, _podi_ and banana chips? Did it have anything to do with the roadside second-hand bookstall, where I ended up going almost every evening over the course of two–three years, and managed to fulfil my childhood dream of having my own complete Tintin collection? Did I finally feel at home when I had to stay cooped up in my flat due to a bad typhoid infection and noticed for the first time that my apartment complex had, apart from the ubiquitous blue rock pigeon, quite an assortment of [birds](https://chiraghdilli.com/2017/04/09/its-not-about-birds/)—a majestic barn owl, loud Alexandrine parakeets, squabbling jungle babblers, tailor birds hopping right under my nose among my balcony plants, and many others? Or was it when all the autowallas at the corner auto stand came to recognize me and would never refuse to take me anywhere?
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-
-
-_Alexandrine parakeets hanging out in my apartment complex._
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-While I have no idea when my homing in this neighbourhood began, I started sensing that it had kind of set in when I would suggest a particular place in the locality to a neighbour or friend—a park to walk in, a tiny shop that sold Bengali sweets and _singada_s, a thela that made the best bread–omelette or a mandi where you could buy cheap and fresh seasonal fruits—and they would say ‘How do you know these things, we’ve lived here longer than you have?’ But this also goes on to show that there is nothing intrinsic about how you come to see, know and experience a place. A certain combination of shops, street corners, people, walking routes, daily itineraries, chance encounters and epiphanies, and everyday rituals continuously fold into the making of my relationship with Patparganj. This unique combination, continuously evolving through dropping and adding elements, forgetting and remembering markers of my life, is my personal map of the place, even as it might overlap with or diverge from infinite other personal maps.
-
-For someone who has continuously moved between rented accommodations, homing for me has never been just about settling down in a house, but rather about settling down in a neighbourhood, about the ease of walking in the streets and about being able to dwell outside and discover new things about the place. Patparganj’s streets, forever bustling with traffic, bus commuters, street-vending activities, shoppers, passers-by and loiterers, have provided me with that ease. It is a pleasure to be able to step out of the apartment complex late at night during the summer and become part of the steady stream of loners, couples and families strolling, buying ice cream or _paan_, or walking their dogs till midnight.
-
-**The street as an extension of the apartment**
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-What distinguishes Patparganj from other parts of Delhi NCR characterized by apartment living, say Gurgaon, the newer parts of Noida and Greater Noida, is this dense, vibrant and relatively unregulated street life. In the case of the latter, the apartment complexes are designed to be self-sufficient with gyms, swimming pools, shopping complexes and recreation centres within their walls, outside of which are excessively wide roads, highways and expressways that are only meant for transit and are otherwise dead spaces. The street has been eliminated in these localities not only by making the apartments self-sufficient but also through zoning laws that render street vending activities illegal. In the absence of the street, the world outside the gated complex is not a place you would want to stroll in or, worse, be stuck in with a broken car.
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-The resident welfare associations of Delhi’s middle-class and elite neighbourhoods are known to be notorious for harassing street vendors and restricting their numbers, in some cases clearing entire residential areas of them. The management committees of the housing societies in Patparganj are, however, largely not engaged in controlling street activity, except for taking over parts of the street as parking space or, increasingly, extending temples inside apartment complexes out into the road. Apartment dwellers share a casual intimacy with street vendors, especially the ones in the immediate vicinity of their respective apartments, involving banter, gossip and checking on each other’s family members.
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-
-
-_A street vendor outside an apartment. In the background is Madhu Vihar, one of the many localities interspersed between the apartments._
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-I probably know more people on the street outside my apartment than inside. This is not simply an individual eccentricity, but rather made possible by the culture and materiality of the street here that connects the streets with the apartments, and allows you to be outside because there are others too. When I step out to buy vegetables in the morning, I know I will see these two women in their gym clothes sipping tea at the chai stall I pass by. An elderly man from my apartment who escapes his family everyday to hang out at this chai stall is already there. I know he will be there through much of the day, drinking endless cups of tea, chatting up with autowallas, painters, contractors and others who stop by at the shop for refreshments, often walking up and down the pavement, catching up with others who work on the street. When I step out in the evening, I see he is still there, watching over the chaiwalla shutting his shop. Another permanent fixture at the chaiwalla’s is a kitten from a litter born inside my apartment block. She has adopted the chaiwalla and spends the whole day sleeping around his shop, walking in and out between his legs and drinking the milk he carefully pours out for her. When he packs up for the day, she returns to our apartment to sleep in a corner of the garden.
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-Street dogs and other animals around my apartment are not only fed and looked after by the apartment folk but also the guards and municipality workers. When I walk further down the road towards Madhu Vihar Market, I notice the guard in Natraj Apartments and we nod our heads in silent acknowledgment—we both buy paneer from the same vendor on that road. I get it for my dinner, and he gets it for the three-legged dog that lives outside Natraj. The guard is forever fussing over the dog, and he sometimes updates me on the dog’s mood when I’m passing by, ‘Aaj dukhi hai yeh … kuch kha nahin raha—he’s sad today and not eating anything.’ He tries to cheer up the gloomy dog by feeding him pieces of paneer that the dog quickly devours and then goes back to brooding in his corner.
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-
-
-_A street in the neighbourhood with the three-legged dog in the foreground._
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-These relationships on the street, beyond the transactions of commodities and services exchanged, perhaps do little to transform the various kinds of inequalities that are entrenched in the city, but they do make the city a little less cruel, creating tiny breaks, of possibilities, in structures and trajectories of urban development we would like to believe are invincible.
-
-~
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-I’m doing my night walk in the park behind my apartment complex, and I see the old man sitting on the grass with his seven dogs. The dogs were born outside another apartment close by. Some residents of the apartment complained to the municipality and wanted the pups to be removed. A municipal _safai karamchari_ had got the pups to the old man—I’m not sure if the old man is himself a municipal worker or not. He has been taking care of the dogs since then, shifting from Vaishali where he lived earlier to the municipal shed next to the park. He tells me about the antics of the dogs, who have names like Langdi Lalli, Choti Lalli, Badi Lalli, Chuhiya and Gora, for the umpteenth time, with the same excitement. One of them, he explains, is an ear doctor and he licks the ears of the others and keep them free of dirt and infection; two of them are _lafanga_s who hang out in a disreputable park across the road to eat scraps of meat dropped by the drunkards who haunt the park, and so on.
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-The dogs are a reminder that the callous city and the compassionate city are both here. As elsewhere. Yet, every time I see the old man surrounded by his dogs, relaxing in the middle of the night, in an almost empty park, I know I’m still home.
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-—Samprati Pani
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-All photographs © Samprati Pani.
-Cover image: A view of the Yamuna from its eastern bank.
-
-* * *
-
-\[i\] Rebecca Solnit, ‘Introduction: Centers and Edges’, in Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro (eds), _Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas_. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2016, p. 1.
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-\[ii\] For a discussion on the history of Jamnapaar and how it is entangled with the history and expansion of the city of Delhi, see Samprati Pani, ‘Jamnapaar’, _Motherland,_ issue on the Yamuna, 19 May 2021, [https://www.motherlandmagazine.com/yamuna/jamnapaar/](https://www.motherlandmagazine.com/yamuna/jamnapaar/)
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-\[iii\] Stephen P. Blake, _Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India 1639–1739_, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 58.
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-\[iv\] ‘Report of the Delhi Town Planning Committee on its choice of site for the new imperial capital of Delhi, 13 July 1912’, in Mushirul Hasan and Dinyar Patel (eds), _From Ghalib’s Dilli to Lutyen’s New Delhi: A Documentary Record_. New Delhi: National Archives of India and Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 134.
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-\[v\] ‘Letter from H. Wheeler, Secretary, Government of India, Home Department, to the Chief Secretary, Government of the United Provinces, on land acquisition on the left bank of the Jumna, 8 August 1912’, in Hasan and Patel (eds), _From Ghalib’s Dilli to Lutyen’s New Delhi_, p. 189.
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-
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-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
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-Date: 2022-11-06
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-TimeStamp: 2022-11-06
-Link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/29/us/juvenile-detention-abuses-louisiana.html
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-```button
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-^button-AbuseinLouisianaJuvenileDetentionNSave
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-
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-# Abuse, Chaos and Cruelty in Louisiana Juvenile Detention
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-
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-‘It was inhumane and we were children.’
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-‘It felt like the end of the world.’
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-‘They’re going to find a way to put a bruise on you.’
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-‘I still can’t move forward with my life.’
-
-
-
-## Repeated abuses, overlooked complaints and a surge in suicide attempts at a detention center with powerful allies.
-
-Oct. 30, 2022
-
-*Update: On Tuesday, the Louisiana governor* *[asked for an investigation](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/01/us/louisiana-juvenile-detention-abuse.html)* *into conditions at Ware Youth Center**.*
-
-**COUSHATTA, La.** — The last time Bridget Peterson saw her son Solan was through the window of a holding cell at Ware Youth Center, just two weeks after his 13th birthday. Even for such a small boy — a shade over five feet tall, barely 90 pounds — the cell looked cramped.
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-Four days later, he was dead by suicide. “I remember screaming, ‘My boy is gone,’” Mrs. Peterson said.
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-
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-Solan Peterson in 2018, on his final first day of school. He was sent to Ware Youth Center six months later. The Peterson Family
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-She soon learned that another child at Ware had killed himself two days before. Then she learned that her son had been isolated in that bare cell for at least four days, even though state rules said he shouldn’t have spent a single night there. The guards, who were supposed to check on him every 15 minutes, hadn’t done so for more than two hours, just as they had neglected to check on the other boy, state regulators’ records and surveillance footage show.
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-“It’s like, what on earth is going on?” she said.
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-For a few days in February 2019, the back-to-back suicides flashed across the news cycle around northwest Louisiana. But inside the walls at Ware, one of the state’s largest juvenile detention facilities, children have been trying to kill themselves with stunning regularity.
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-There were at least 64 suicide attempts at Ware in 2019 and 2020, a rate higher than at any other juvenile facility in the state. Children have tied socks, towels and sheets around their necks. They have swallowed baby powder, screws, fluid from an ice pack. Two tried to drown themselves.
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-Escape attempts are surging, too: At least 91 children have tried to flee since the beginning of 2019, a little more than 5 percent of those held at Ware in that period. In June 2020, a girl told staff members that she was going to run away in hopes that the police would take her to “the big jail” rather than back to Ware, records show. A second told staff members at Ware that she would rather be sent to a psychiatric hospital than spend another day there. Soon after, she tried to kill herself by leaping from a roof.
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-Behind any attempt at suicide lies a tangle of factors. But what has happened at Ware has brought into sharp focus pervasive despair among children there that no one is going to rescue them from repeated acts of physical violence, sexual assault and psychological torment, an investigation by The New York Times and the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism found.
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-For years, Ware’s leaders have failed to report complaints of abuse, hired unqualified employees and disregarded state rules. Records offer no evidence that state regulators have ever fined or punished Ware, or threatened its contracts, even as inspectors have documented the same failings year after year. Local law-enforcement officials have been largely dismissive of sexual-abuse allegations at Ware.
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-The Times/Berkeley investigation — based on more than 100 interviews with people previously held at Ware and current and former staff members, thousands of pages of records and court documents, and hours of security footage — reveals how a place meant to offer children care and rehabilitation instead descended into chaos and cruelty. Guards beat and choked their wards. Several forced children to endure sexual abuse as the price for phone privileges. They frequently maintained control by bribing children with food to assault other children.
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-“I used to tell myself I’m not going to ever get through this stuff,” Asia Perkins, the girl who threw herself off the roof, said in an interview.
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-In interviews and documents, 42 people held at Ware over the last 25 years described being sexually abused by staff members. Many accounts were corroborated by relatives, others once held at Ware or court records. In all, they identified 30 staff members who had sexually abused children at Ware; one of the accused, a longtime manager, still works there. Yet many said they had remained silent at the time, out of fear of retaliation or the understanding that others’ complaints had been simply brushed aside.
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-“Basically, you can’t do nothing, you can’t go tell on them,” said Shakira Williams, who spent about a year and a half at Ware.
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-Ware declined to comment for this article.
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-The center may be extreme in some respects, but it embodies the chronic dysfunctions of America’s juvenile justice systems, their stubborn resistance to decades of exposés and waves of reform. In Louisiana, where brutal conditions prompted juvenile justice reform two decades ago, the system is again in crisis. Amid chronic staffing shortages, a succession of headline-grabbing uprisings and escapes is being met with measures once banned, such as arming some guards with Tasers.
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-Ware, in Red River Parish, is also emblematic of the systems’ pervasive racial imbalances. Roughly three-quarters of the children held there are Black, many from urban areas hours away from this part of the state, which violently opposed Reconstruction and fought school desegregation into the late 1970s. Most Ware guards are Black, as well, though nearly all of its leaders are white, as are the local judge, sheriff and district attorney.
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-Yet central to the story of Ware are the politics and protocols of this patch of northwest Louisiana forest and bayou, where a handful of influential men harnessed their power to direct millions of state dollars to the construction and nurturing of what is now a major regional employer, while insulating it from outside intervention. “They had their political ducks in a row,” said Mary Livers, who until 2016 ran the state’s Office of Juvenile Justice. “It was pretty well protected.”
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-At the same time, allegations of abuse at Ware have frequently received superficial scrutiny from the local criminal-justice system. Year after year, records and interviews show, the sheriff’s office conducted cursory investigations, sometimes failing to interview key witnesses or rejecting out of hand allegations from children they viewed as incorrigible criminals. Julie Jones, who has prosecuted three Ware guards for sexual abuse in her 13 years as district attorney, offered each of them plea bargains that kept them out of prison and off sex-offender registries.
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-“I do not like the idea of burdening someone with a charge that they do not deserve,” Ms. Jones said in an interview.
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-Asked if those cases gave her concerns about the safety of children at Ware, she responded: “We’re talking about armed robbers and murderers. And these girls haven’t even hit the age of 18 yet, some of them. Do I worry about their safety? No, I don’t. I think that they’re quite capable of taking care of themselves.”
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-In fact, while some of the children at Ware are held for violent crimes, a vast majority are girls and boys like Solan Peterson, sent there for nonviolent offenses or infractions as minor as skipping school. “We knew there would be consequences,” his mother said, “but my kid didn’t deserve to die because he set fire to a roll of toilet paper in a school.”
-
- 
-
-Joseph Rushmore for The New York Times Joseph Rushmore for The New York Times
-
-### Last Line of Defense
-
-On Thursday nights in the late 1980s, some of the most powerful men in northwest Louisiana — judges, sheriffs’ deputies and politicians from seven neighboring parishes — began meeting at the Catfish Bend restaurant south of town to discuss a shared problem: where to send local children who broke the law.
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-Some of Louisiana’s larger parishes had their own juvenile detention centers. But in small parishes like Red River, officials had to hope they could snag empty beds — at considerable expense — at a center in, say, Lafayette or Baton Rouge, several hours away.
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-One Catfish Bend participant was Donald Kelly, a close confidant of Gov. Edwin Edwards. As the Democratic floor leader in the State Senate, Mr. Kelly wielded significant influence over the state budget; now he would use it to secure funding for a juvenile facility serving all seven parishes. Red River is one of Louisiana’s least populous parishes, but Mr. Kelly said in an interview that he worked to have the new center built there, in the place where he grew up and where his former law partner was the judge.
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-
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-Donald Kelly, former state senator.
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-
-
-Kenny Loftin, director of Ware, 1993-2015 and 2021-22.
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-
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-Richard Ware, Red River Parish district judge.
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-The center would be named for that judge, Richard Ware. Its director would be Kenny Loftin, a 29-year-old child-abuse investigator recommended by Mr. Kelly and voted in by Ware’s founders. As one Catfish Bend participant put it, Mr. Loftin was “Donnie’s guy.”
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-Ware opened in 1993, at a time when Louisiana was earning a reputation for operating one of the country’s worst juvenile systems. A series of scandals led to the closing of all privately run juvenile facilities, and in 2000, the federal government assumed oversight of those run by the state.
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-But Ware was neither private nor state-run. It was a “political subdivision” of the state, created by legislation and overseen by a board composed of many of the men who met at Catfish Bend. This structure offered them and their charismatic new director ready access to tax dollars and far more independence from regulators.
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-Ware began to grow. In addition to the detention center, for children arrested and awaiting disposition of their cases, it added group homes for children with substance abuse and behavioral problems. And with Mr. Loftin working his political connections, Ware won a no-bid contract to house every girl in Louisiana sentenced to secure care — the state’s most restrictive form of detention for children convicted of crimes — along with $5 million to build new girls’ dormitories.
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-One of the first to arrive would be Shakira Williams. On Sept. 30, 2009, nearly 300 miles to the south, Shakira woke up at Florida Parishes Juvenile Detention Center expecting a routine Wednesday. Instead, she recalls, she and about a dozen other girls were shackled and loaded into a van headed for Ware.
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-Shakira, 16 at the time, had entered the juvenile system the year before. Her mother struggling with addiction, Shakira had turned to theft to support her siblings. “I was the oldest, and I had to step up. Or I thought I had to,” she said in an interview. She got caught and was put in a group home. When she was arrested again — for possessing an acquaintance’s gun — she was sentenced to secure care at Florida Parishes.
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-
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-Shakira Williams at 18, soon after her release. She was sent to Ware in 2009, amid the facility’s expansion.
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-
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-Ms. Williams in 2020, age 27. She recalls being locked up for 23 hours a day. Rachel Lauren Mueller
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-There the program was tailored to girls, many of whom had histories of sexual abuse or pregnancy. Florida Parishes is just an hour from New Orleans and Baton Rouge, where most of the girls were from. “We were doing good work with girls,” Joseph Dominick, an administrator at Florida Parishes, said. “Why send them so far up north?”
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-Shakira was struck by the “straight cotton fields” as the van drew closer to Ware, she recalls. “There were a lot of things that would upset an African-American kid,” she said.
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-At Ware — the detention center, school and several group homes surrounded by 125 acres of forest — Shakira found a place that seemed to view her as irredeemable. Training materials in use since at least 2014 teach employees that “society” expects them to serve “as their last line of defense in protecting their community from those deemed unfit to live among them.”
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-At Florida Parishes, days had been carefully structured with school and therapy; misbehavior was met with five-minute timeouts. But with Ware’s new girls’ dormitories still unfinished, Shakira said, she was placed in a cell and put on “23 and 1” — 23 hours a day locked up, with one hour out to shower. She and other girls said they were kept on lockdown until the new housing was ready.
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-Eleanor Morgan, a former supervisor with decades of experience in other juvenile facilities, said she had never seen lockdown used as much as at Ware. Experts have long known that prolonged isolation is harmful to children’s neurological development. In 2013, the state limited lockdown to 72 hours. But Ware continued confining children for far longer, five people held at Ware said. One said she had been kept on lockdown for two months.
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-
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-“Ware is not being held accountable for the staff that they hire, for the lack of training that they give to their staff and the safety of the kids,” said Eleanor Morgan, a former Ware supervisor. Rachel Lauren Mueller and Meg Shutzer/“8 Days at Ware”
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-What made lockdown worse, several said, were psychiatric drugs — common in juvenile facilities — that left them feeling like “zombies.” Forced to take Seroquel and Prozac but fearing their effects, Shakira would hide the pills under her tongue and stow them under her mattress, she said.
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-“I don’t know how they function with the amount of medications some of them were on,” said Janice McCanliss, who worked at Ware until 2019.
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-Ware’s policies prohibit “the inflicting of physical pain on a youth for punishment.” But a majority of those interviewed for this article who had been held at Ware or worked there said guards routinely punished, degraded or inflicted pain.
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-One favored takedown, they said, was “chicken wings”: Guards would cross your arms behind your back, then force them up until it seemed that your shoulders would pop out of their sockets. Patricia Bell, who still works at Ware, said in an interview in 2020 that the technique had been part of the training until 2018. “Now you aren’t supposed to do the chicken wing,” she said. “Of course, they still do.” In reports to the state, Ware’s nurses described carpet burns on children’s faces and head-to-toe bruises from restraints.
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-For Shakira, the abuse didn’t let up once she moved into Ware’s new dormitories. She was no longer locked up all day, but she and others once held at Ware overwhelmingly recalled a staff who tormented them. “They would say my mom didn’t want me for nothing but a disability check,” said Dayja Nixon, incarcerated at Ware in 2017 and 2018. Six women said staff members had withheld sanitary pads as punishment. One recalled a white supervisor who treated Black children differently. “I frightened her; she called me an N-word,” she said.
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-Shakira’s dorm supervisor, Tynica Haskett, inspired singular fear. Nine women once held at Ware said she would often painfully restrain and beat children. “It was like a drill,” said one former co-worker, Tracy Mosley. “She would go into the rooms on a rampage and flip the mattresses, take the kids down.”
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-Ms. Haskett, who no longer works at Ware, declined to comment.
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-Sometimes guards bribed children to beat up other children. “They’d give us a sign” by gesturing toward the designated target, Shakira said. “Then, they’d take your order for shrimp or chicken.”
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-She remembered being constantly hungry, and said that when a female guard came into her room and kissed her, she went along, enduring sexual abuse for weeks in exchange for food. “You’ve got to survive,” she said.
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-
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-“She gave me Laffy Taffy to be quiet,” wrote Cortasia Pree at age 15, in a statement about a guard who she said kissed two of her peers, including Shakira Williams.
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-Not all employees were abusive. Samyra Williams, held at Ware until 2020, recalled that she grew close to her unit’s residential adviser; she called her “the mother that most children wish they had.”
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-But even the best intentions were challenged by Ware’s culture. Precious Sellers said she hoped to be a role model when she started as a guard in 2019. “That was knocked out of me the first time I went into Ware,” she said. She quit after a month.
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- 
-
-Joseph Rushmore for The New York Times Joseph Rushmore for The New York Times
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-### ‘You Don’t Have A Choice’
-
-In separate interviews, 29 people held at Ware over the past 25 years said they had endured sexual abuse by staff members. Incident reports and lawsuits reveal allegations from 13 more.
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-They described a range of abuses, from suggestive comments and lewd gestures to rape. One girl said baring her breasts was quid pro quo for access to library books. Another said a guard forced her to take photos on his cellphone of her touching her genitals. A third said she was 13 when a guard raped her. The next time he tried she fought back, only to be sprayed with Mace. The time after that, she said, she stopped resisting. Boys were abused, too. This past April, a female guard was captured on surveillance video orally raping a boy.
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-In some cases, guards continued to harass those held at Ware after they left. “U can b my boo n I’ll be ur little secret,” one wrote to a 17-year-old on Facebook five months after her release.
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-Yet former residents and employees, in interviews, said Ware’s leaders were largely indifferent, even apathetic, in the face of abuse allegations.
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-In separate interviews, four women said a supervisor named Mallory Parson II had raped them. Another said he would enter her cell and strip-search her. Three others said he had sexually harassed them. Shakira Williams recalled his boasting about sexually assaulting girls — he called it “breathing.” He would say, “I need everyone to go to sleep so I can go breathe,” she said.
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-In an interview, Mr. Parson, who left Ware in 2013, described his accusers as criminals “from the streets” who should not be believed. “I never had intercourse with any of them girls,” he said. “We can’t do that. Too many people, too many cameras.”
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-But the eight women who described Mr. Parson’s conduct said it typically took place in the surveillance system’s blind spots — the nurses’ bathroom, the laundry room, the holding cells. Indeed, records show that abuse has been happening in those places for years.
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-Gabryell Hardy, sent to Ware in 2009 at 14, was often locked in a holding cell where she came face to face with Mr. Parson. Isolated in the cell, she said, her heart would pound at the sound of jingling keys. She would cross her legs as Mr. Parson came in and sat next to her on the concrete bed. “His breath would stink, he would be so close,” she said. She would push him off, but he would not stop.
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-“Sometimes you just let him touch you, you just let him, because you don’t have a choice,” she explained. Reporting him seemed futile, because his conduct was an open secret. “That’s their house,” she said. “Whatever they say goes.”
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-
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-Gabryell Hardy was 14 and an orphan when she arrived at Ware in 2009. “Your life is already hard, then you get to someplace like Ware, and they show you they don’t care,” said Ms. Hardy, now a mother of five, studying to be a chiropractor. Rachel Lauren Mueller
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-She considered hanging herself. “This is your life,” Ms. Hardy, now 27, recalls thinking. “This is it.”
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-Two women who said they had been sexually assaulted by Mr. Parson recalled reporting it to Ware’s administrators. Three employees — a guard, a supervisor and a teacher — said in interviews that they, too, had reported Mr. Parson for inappropriate sexual conduct. None of the five recalled any kind of investigation in response to their allegations, which came between 2005 and 2011.
-
-It is unclear how Ware’s administrators responded to these complaints, if at all. Ware declined to produce records of abuse complaints against its employees. However, Mr. Parson said he had once been suspended while the sheriff’s office investigated a sexual-abuse allegation against him. The inquiry ended in a matter of days, he said, adding that he had never been questioned. There is no record of him being charged.
-
-Among the 30 staff members accused of sexual abuse at Ware — in incident reports that Ware submitted to the state, as well as court files and interviews — was the detention center’s longtime manager, Raymond Lloyd Jr., an imposing man in his 50s who has worked there since it opened. Two women said Mr. Lloyd had groped them; one of them said he had stuck his fingers in her vagina. Four more described physical abuse.
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-Doreisha Martin, incarcerated at Ware more than a decade ago, remembered Mr. Lloyd entering the room as she was being restrained by several staff members. “He actually spat in my face,” she said. He pulled her head back by her hair and then, “Mr. Raymond, he choked me unconscious.”
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-
-
-Doreisha Martin, sent to Ware at 13, said she was physically and sexually abused there. Now 27, she said guards continue to harass her. “I still can’t move forward with my life.” Megan Shutzer
-
-All these years later, she says she still can’t bear to have anyone behind her.
-
-In May 2021, another child told her probation officer that Mr. Lloyd had choked her, an incident report shows. She is one of 15 children who described being choked by Ware employees. That same month, documents show, a third child confided to her probation officer that Mr. Lloyd had told her “he could touch her with one finger and make her melt.”
-
-There is no evidence that any outside regulator looked into the accusations against Mr. Lloyd, who continues to work at Ware.
-
-The Department of Children and Family Services said the May 2021 allegations had been investigated by the local sheriff’s office — which, for its part, said neither accusation had even been reported. “Apparently this was an unfounded complaint investigated in-house,” Suzanne Gallier, chief of criminal investigations and narcotics for the Red River Parish Sheriff’s Office, wrote on an incident report for both allegations. In an email, she said that the Office of Juvenile Justice had also assigned an investigator. But the general counsel for that agency said it would not have had jurisdiction to investigate.
-
-The sheriff’s office would not provide The Times with records of investigations into Ware employees. But Captain Gallier expressed skepticism about the children’s allegations. “You can’t believe what these kids say,” she said, adding, “These kids come from all over the place, from down south, New Orleans, Baton Rouge. They’re different, they’re a lot rougher.”
-
-As the detention center’s manager, Mr. Lloyd was supposed to receive reports of sexual abuse. But former staff members and people once held in the facility described his response as often grudging or dismissive. Mary Ann Wiggins, who taught at Ware for 14 years, said that when a student confided that Mr. Parson had assaulted her, she typed up a report and hand-delivered it to Mr. Lloyd. “I don’t think Raymond appreciated that I believed the girl,” she said.
-
-Former employees said they perceived a culture of “picks and chooses” that protected those with the right local connections, like Mr. Parson, whose father was a longtime Coushatta councilman. At least six of Mr. Lloyd’s relatives have worked at Ware. Ms. Morgan, the former supervisor, had one of his nephews on her shift; she feared retaliation if she reported him for even the smallest infraction.
-
-“Coushatta look out for Coushatta people,” she explained.
-
-Mr. Lloyd declined to comment.
-
- 
-
-Joseph Rushmore for The New York Times Joseph Rushmore for The New York Times
-
-### Malfeasance in Office
-
-In 1997, David Adkins, a Red River Parish sheriff’s deputy, learned that a Ware supervisor, Ronald Peace, had been sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl in the laundry room.
-
-Like pretty much everyone who would be involved in the case, Mr. Adkins was quite familiar with Ware. He was one of its founders and remained a board member.
-
-Ware’s assistant director, Joey Cox, took the victim’s statement. Ware’s director, Mr. Loftin, was permitted to weigh in on what charges to bring.
-
-The judge was another board member, Lewis Sams, and after Mr. Peace’s conviction, he sentenced him to three years in prison. “Ron will be out in one to one and a half years max,” Mr. Adkins wrote in his journal after the sentencing, adding, “It doesn’t help to try to keep kids from being sexually abused in Red River Parish.” In an interview, Mr. Sams said that he had informed Mr. Peace’s lawyer that he was on the board, and that he had later stepped down to avoid possible conflicts. He declined to comment on the sentence.
-
-> DA: Mr. Loftin, after the incident on October 17, were any procedures changed immediately after that?
->
-> Loftin: Yes, sir. There were a lot of procedures changed. One thing, the kids… because of unrest at the facility, the kids were in lock-down for a couple of weeks there until we felt like we had control.
-
-During grand jury proceedings in the case against Ronald Peace, a Ware supervisor, the district attorney questioned Mr. Loftin, Ware’s director.
-
-###
-
-The case would become emblematic of Red River Parish’s handling of allegations of abuse at Ware. In fact, of the four guards convicted of sexually assaulting children at Ware, Mr. Peace would be the only one imprisoned. In interviews with former deputies who investigated abuse allegations at Ware, and in records from their investigations, a portrait of indifference emerges. The sheriff’s office deferred to Ware officials like Mr. Lloyd on what video evidence was relevant. Witnesses were interviewed perfunctorily, if at all. Even the children reporting the abuse were not always interviewed.
-
-“If there wasn’t video or an eyewitness, there wasn’t a lot we could do,” said Johnny Taylor, a former sheriff’s detective. “Most of the girls in there, it’s hard to believe what they say. They’re not in there for going to church on Sunday.”
-
-One case he investigated involved 15-year-old Natalee Brannon. In January 2014, Natalee was sent to Ware after fighting with her mother, who had called the police hoping it would scare her into better behavior. When she came home two days later, she went straight to the shower. “She’s showering over and over and over and over and crying, and I’m just thinking, ‘God, why did I put her there?’” said her mother, Jennifer Denman.
-
-
-
-Natalee Brannon, now 24, was 15 when she was held for two days at Ware, where she says she was raped by a guard. He was accused of raping two other girls and received a plea deal with probation. Rachel Lauren Mueller
-
-Worried, Ms. Denman took her daughter to the hospital, where a nurse told her Natalee needed rape counseling.
-
-That same week, another 15-year-old reported that a Ware supervisor, Christopher Morris, had repeatedly raped her. The detective reviewed video, provided by Ware, that showed Mr. Morris entering a bathroom with the girl, something male guards were forbidden to do. Mr. Taylor soon discovered that Mr. Morris had been alone in the bathroom with a second girl. When he learned of Natalee’s hospital visit, he suspected she might be a third.
-
-Natalee was not ready to talk. (She would later say Mr. Morris had threatened her mother’s life if she spoke.)
-
-There is no evidence that Mr. Taylor looked into whether Mr. Morris’s behavior extended beyond that week or if there were any other victims. Two of Mr. Morris’s colleagues said they were never interviewed, including a guard who took the original complaint against him, and another who remembered his repeatedly taking “private phone calls” in the bathroom. Still, Mr. Taylor believed he had enough evidence to put Mr. Morris away for decades.
-
-Instead, prosecutors offered Mr. Morris two years’ probation, without inclusion in the sex-offender registry, if he pleaded guilty to four counts of “malfeasance in office for sexual conduct” — a charge Louisiana prosecutors often use against prison guards accused of illicit sexual relationships.
-
-The outcome surprised Mr. Taylor. “With someone not from here, you throw the book at them,” the detective said. (Mr. Morris declined to comment.)
-
-Ms. Jones, the district attorney since 2009, said in an interview that in negotiating the plea, she had, among other things, looked to previous cases against Ware employees. Five years earlier, she had negotiated pleas with two other guards, the cousins Chiquita and Laquinta Ware, who were accused of sexually abusing two girls. (One was Shakira Williams.) They pleaded guilty to malfeasance in office and served probation.
-
-“I try, whether it be right or wrong, for first offenders to give them a probationary period, unless there’s an aggravated crime,” Ms. Jones said.
-
-She would not elaborate on why there were no aggravating factors in the cases of sexual assault by Ware guards on incarcerated children.
-
-“What I like to do is to say, ‘Here is your opportunity to do different.’”
-
- 
-
-Joseph Rushmore for The New York Times Joseph Rushmore for The New York Times
-
-### Dog and Pony Show
-
-Two state agencies oversee Louisiana’s juvenile system, and each has had ample opportunity to intervene at Ware.
-
-The Office of Juvenile Justice, which provides much of Ware’s funding, assesses the effectiveness of therapeutic programs and investigates sexual-abuse allegations. The Department of Children and Family Services licenses Ware and is charged with ensuring compliance with state standards. Ware is legally required to notify both of serious incidents of abuse, and both have broad investigative authority.
-
-They can also issue fines or revoke contracts and licenses. Neither agency has taken these steps against Ware. In fact, in audits dating back to 2012, the Office of Juvenile Justice has awarded Ware ratings of “effective,” “highly effective” and in “full compliance.”
-
-Records and interviews offer evidence that state oversight is frequently superficial and easy to manipulate. Inspectors fail to uncover serious problems at Ware, and when they do identify shortcomings — often the same ones over and over — state officials rarely enforce demands for change.
-
-From 2012 to 2019, for example, the Office of Juvenile Justice repeatedly found that Ware’s therapy programs for girls were delivered by untrained staff members, with little regard for girls’ individual needs. Each time, the agency reiterated its recommended improvements, yet as of last year, Ware’s counseling was still rated “noncompliant” with state standards. The agency declined to comment for this article.
-
-Children and Family Services, meanwhile, has consistently found “deficiencies,” such as failing to disburse medication correctly or do timely mental-health evaluations. Each time, Ware has submitted a plan to address the issue; in many cases, inspectors have returned to find the same problems.
-
-The state Department of Children and Family Services has repeatedly cited Ware for failing to disburse medication correctly — a deficiency that is not subject to a fine. Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services
-
-Glenn Holt, a former assistant secretary of the Office of Juvenile Justice, recalled Mr. Loftin saying that state oversight was “a waste of time.”
-
-“He’d make comments like, ‘If at any given point I don’t want to play with these guys, I’m not worried,’” Mr. Holt said. “’Cause if I shut my doors, I guarantee you got sheriffs, you got local law enforcement, you got people, judges that are going to be screaming at D.C.F.S., ‘What the hell are you doing? You’re jeopardizing public safety.’”
-
-When auditors showed up at Ware, Mr. Holt said, the director stage-managed “a dog and pony show.” Mr. Loftin, he said, would give a “big ol’ country boy smile,” and ask, “What can we do for you girls?”
-
-Before inspections, there was a “mad rush to fix everything,” said Janice McCanliss, the former Ware guard. Children had their hair done. New bedding and rugs suddenly appeared. Inspectors often relied on Ware officials to choose which children would be interviewed, current and former staff members said. “They pick someone who is scared,” said Kaley Breaux, held at Ware in 2014 and 2015. “I was that one.”
-
-
-
-Kaley Breaux in 2022. She said that shortly after she arrived at Ware in 2014, five guards painfully restrained her as punishment but that she did not tell state auditors when they interviewed her because she feared retribution. Rachel Lauren Mueller
-
-Dr. Livers, the former juvenile justice secretary, described Mr. Loftin this way: “He thought he was the smartest, most excellent juvenile justice professional in the state of Louisiana. Who the hell has the audacity to tell him how to do anything?”
-
-When Mr. Loftin retired and ran for sheriff in 2015, he was succeeded by his longtime deputy, Mr. Cox. Ware’s relationship to regulators, though, remained consistent. Ware is required by federal law, for example, to submit annual reports documenting all allegations of sexual abuse. In 2014, the year Christopher Morris was accused of sexually assaulting three girls, Ware reported no allegations of sexual abuse by detention center employees. It again reported none in 2018, when another guard was accused of sexually abusing a 16-year-old boy.
-
-Mr. Loftin and Mr. Cox declined to comment.
-
-Regulators had evidence that Ware was being less than candid in reporting “critical incidents.” Between 2017 and 2020, inspectors cited Ware nine times for failing to promptly and accurately report encounters between staff members and children that involved restraints or force. In a 10th incident, Ware reported that a guard had subdued a 13-year-old girl “with her hand in \[the child’s\] neck area.” Video footage, however, showed something different: The guard had choked the girl for 14 seconds, an investigator for the Department of Children and Family Services found.
-
-Surveillance video captured a guard choking a girl for 14 seconds. Soon after, local law enforcement handcuffed the girl and took her to the detention center. Upon a review of the footage, the staff was cleared of wrongdoing. Via Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services
-
-The agency cited Ware for a single “deficiency,” then closed its investigation.
-
-In a written statement, the agency said it had limited authority to issue fines or demand personnel changes. When conducting facility inspections, the agency added, its licensing staff — not Ware administrators — chooses whom to interview. The agency would not say whether it had ever considered revoking Ware’s licenses. “The department works with providers to implement corrective measures designed to alleviate cited deficiencies in order to maintain the providers’ licenses,” the statement said.
-
-Meanwhile, at the Red River Parish Sheriff’s Office, an investigator reviewed the video of the choking incident and cleared Ware’s staff of wrongdoing “due to the juvenile’s size and level of aggression.”
-
- 
-
-Joseph Rushmore for The New York Times Joseph Rushmore for The New York Times
-
-### ‘One of the Safest’
-
-Alora Fountain had been crying all day.
-
-It was March 7, 2017, and a guard had been taunting her that her grandmother didn’t want her anymore, said her friend Keelye Denise. That day, Alora, 16, confided to a counselor that she had begun making herself throw up, and she told her friend that she wondered if her mother would miss her if she were gone.
-
-At around 8 p.m., she wrapped a sheet around her neck. “All you see was her hanging,” Ms. Denise said.
-
-Alora’s death was a prelude to a rising tide of suicide attempts, runaway attempts and general dysfunction that converged the second week of February in 2019.
-
-Jordan Bachman, a 17-year-old from Colorado, had arrived at Ware six weeks earlier, charged with disturbing the peace and resisting arrest while on a road trip with friends in Louisiana.
-
-His mother, Patricia Bachman, drove to Ware to see him. He seemed uncharacteristically sad and subdued, she recalled.
-
-On Thursday, Feb. 7, he was put in his cell after fighting in school, Lawrence Chisolm II, a classmate, said. Before the fight, he had written these words on a piece of paper: “dying inside.”
-
-The shift supervisor that night was Travis Howard, who in the past had been disciplined for failing to report using force on a child; Ware’s leaders had promised regulators that he would be monitored to “ensure appropriate interactions with juveniles.”
-
-It is not known what time Jordan hanged himself. He was found at 11:45 p.m. To this day, Ms. Bachman can hear the coroner’s voice, waking her with the news.
-
-
-
-Alora Fountain died at Ware at age 16. Cristy Fowler
-
-
-
-Jordan Bachman died at Ware at age 17. Tim Bachman
-
-The next morning, Ware’s assistant director, Staci Scott, reported to state regulators that she and Mr. Lloyd had reviewed video, and that room checks had been conducted every 15 minutes as required.
-
-Those assurances were false. When state officials reviewed the footage, they saw that no one had checked on Jordan between 10 and 11:45. They also discovered that guards had falsified the room-check log.
-
-Mr. Howard, the shift supervisor, said in an interview that it hadn’t been his responsibility to check on Jordan. He denied the earlier allegation of assault.
-
-Solan Peterson was at Ware that night — at 13, one of the youngest and smallest children there. Others saw him as the exasperating little brother who never stopped talking, never stopped fidgeting. “We would tell him, ‘Chill out, man, chill out. You just tripping,” Mr. Chisolm recalled.
-
-Solan certainly had his mental-health struggles — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and anxiety, as well as trauma from his early childhood, before he was adopted. But he had never been in legal trouble until the week before, when he lit a roll of toilet paper on fire at school — the police found birthday candles and a lighter — and was sent to Ware. “I was assured that that’s one of the safest facilities around,” his mother said.
-
-Several days later, Solan, a boy who loved to tinker and take things apart, disassembled the light in his cell and picked the lock on the door. When he was caught, he was placed in isolation.
-
-
-
-The cell where Solan was held for four days. State law forbids isolation longer than four hours. Via Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services
-
-Mental-health professionals would likely have warned that putting a child with Solan’s psychological profile in isolation would be a special torment. By then, he should have had a full mental-health assessment. But that didn’t come until three days later, Feb. 8. According to an incident report filed after his death, the social worker who met with him said Solan had been “curious” about Jordan’s suicide but “did not voice any suicidal ideations” and had been “joking and in a good mood.”
-
-At one point — it is not clear exactly when — Cora Sepulvado, a 15-year-old tasked with cleaning the area, overheard Solan in tears, pleading for help and telling a guard that he wanted to die. The guard, she said, “told the boy, ‘If you want to be killing yourself, just do it, because people just be saying that.’”
-
-Under state rules, isolation should not exceed four hours. By Saturday, Feb. 9, Solan had been in isolation for four days.
-
-Though Jordan had died two nights earlier, guards once again skipped the required 15-minute checks. Video shows the shift supervisor, Jhanquial Smith, checking on Solan at 9:13. Then, for more than an hour, nothing. At 10:45, Travis Howard, once again on duty, walked by without checking, records show.
-
-At 11:30, Mr. Smith finally looked in on Solan. He had hanged himself.
-
-Another guard dropped to his knees and sobbed. A distraught boy pounded the walls of his cell. In the background, the YNW Melly song “Murder on My Mind” played from a speaker.
-
-The suicides touched off the usual round of regulatory inquiries. Investigators cited Ware for improper supervision, the seventh time in just over three years. For the third time, the state found a failure to do timely mental-health assessments. Also for the third time, it found that Ware was keeping children in holding cells too long.
-
-But as with all the other citations, these carried no financial penalty or other actions against Ware’s license or leadership. Questioned about the suicides at a public meeting, a senior official with the Office of Juvenile Justice said the state’s investigation “didn’t find concerns.”
-
-Five months after the suicides, the agency awarded Ware a new $450,000 contract — to supervise at-risk youth.
-
-In September 2020, the district attorney brought malfeasance-in-office charges against Mr. Smith and another guard for failing to check on Solan. Mr. Smith is awaiting trial; the other guard has since died.
-
-Ms. Jones said she “did not believe that criminal charges were warranted” in Jordan’s death, despite the video showing that guards had failed to check on him, too. She declined to elaborate.
-
-Ware’s administrators introduced changes, including a system to enforce room checks. Yet children continued to be at risk.
-
-On Christmas Eve 2019, a guard was arrested on charges of battering a child at Ware. In 2020, a guard was arrested on charges of helping children slip out at night to go on burglary sprees. In 2021, a guard was arrested on charges of taking a bribe to help a child escape. This past May, a guard was arrested on charges of sexually assaulting a boy in the laundry room and then helping him and two other boys escape.
-
-But the clearest indicator of crisis at Ware is the number of suicide attempts.
-
-Of the 243 recorded across Louisiana’s juvenile facilities in 2019 and 2020, a quarter were at Ware, though it holds only about 5 percent of the system’s beds. (The state did not provide comparable data for 2021.)
-
-One child who tried to kill herself was Cora Sepulvado. Her breaking point, she said in an interview, came soon after Solan’s death, following incidents of physical abuse and torment by guards.
-
-
-
-Cora Sepulvado, during her incarceration. She said she had often been locked up by herself. Via Cora Sepulvado
-
-
-
-“I just wanted somebody to listen to me,” said Ms. Sepulvado, now 19. Rachel Lauren Mueller
-
-Standing on a chair, in tears, preparing to hang herself, she noticed something odd: a guard holding up a cellphone, recording it all. “I looked at them, like why aren’t y’all stopping me?” she said. Three guards confirmed that their colleague had been filming.
-
-One of those guards walked into the building just as Cora kicked the chair out from under her feet and rushed to take her down. But for Cora, now 19 and trying to complete high school, the sight of the guard filming her answered a question she had often been forced to confront at Ware: Was anyone actually going to help her?
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-“That’s all I really wanted to know — if somebody really cared.”
-
-
-
-
----
-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
\ No newline at end of file
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-Date: 2022-05-26
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-TimeStamp: 2022-05-26
-Link: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/after-christendom
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-```button
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-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-AfterChristendomNSave
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-
-
-# After Christendom
-
-Jean-Luc Marion (b. 1946) and Chantal Delsol (b. 1947) are both prominent French philosophers who are very public about their Roman Catholicism. This alone would put them, in the minds of many of their fellow citizens, into “conservative” political and cultural camps, though the truth is considerably more complicated. This past year saw the appearance in English translation of Marion’s 2017 book, [*A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment*](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo48117802.html), and the publication of Delsol’s *La Fin de la Chrétienté*. Both of these short works grapple with the role of the Church in a dechristianized culture; both show the complex negotiations required to steer between what Marion calls the “twin and rival disasters” of integralism, which seeks to establish a Christian social order, and progressivism, which risks letting any distinctively Christian identity evaporate.
-
-Religion has, of course, played a very different role in modern, highly secular France than it has in the United States (which Delsol calls a *pays biblico-revolutionnaire*—a biblical-revolutionary land), but the differences may not be as great as is sometimes claimed. As shown by the “Quiet Revolution” in Quebec in the 1960s, and by more recent cultural changes in Ireland, the secularization of seemingly robust religious cultures can happen very quickly, and there is reason to think that our own country is undergoing just such a shift. So Marion and Delsol’s books can help us contemplate our own likely more secular future.
-
-Jean-Luc Marion first came to the attention of English-speaking readers three decades ago with the publication in translation of *God Without Being*. This work of philosophical theology embraced the postmodern critique of “onto-theology” while drawing some surprising conclusions from that critique, including a robust defense of that seemingly most ontological of theological doctrines: transubstantiation. Because of its sometimes counterintuitive intellectual moves and its postmodern Heideggerian idiolect, this book helped secure Marion’s reputation as a challenging and highly speculative thinker. But Marion is also a practicing Catholic who cares passionately about the place of the Church in the postmodern world. In *A Brief Apology* he offers what he characterizes as an exercise in practical reasoning in an interrogative mode, pursuing the question of the role Catholics can and should play in French society. (Like Delsol, he makes only passing reference to non-Catholic Christians.)
-
-Marion argues that the situation in France, and the West in general, is so dire that in order to avoid complete societal dissolution, “we must make an appeal to all the resources and all the strengths. Even the Catholic ones.” He chooses to characterize this situation as “decadence,” rather than “crisis.” This decadence is in fact “a crisis of crisis,” by which he means something like what Nietzsche meant by modern nihilism in his *Twilight of the Idols*: “‘I do not know where I am or what I am to do; I am everything that knows not where it is or what to do,’—sighs the modern man.” This also echoes the critique of modernity made over half a century ago by Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of Marion’s intellectual mentors, in *The Moment of Christian Witness*. It is precisely by the infinite deferral of the moment of crisis that the modern world defeats the Gospel, since the Gospel is a call to crisis that demands a decision. The modern allergy to crisis undermines not only Catholicism but also Western society itself. “We are not falling into the abyss, we are suffering from a stagnant decadence.”
-
-Marion employs Augustine’s critique of Rome as a republic that failed to embody true justice, which requires worship of the true God. Marion argues that because divine grace gives Christians access to justice, “they alone can uphold, always only partially, but always effectively, earthly cities to which they fundamentally do not belong.” It is precisely the “outsider” status of Christians in society that allows them to press beyond narrow national interests to true justice and communion. The French Republic’s motto—*liberté, égalité, fraternité*—is realizable only if there is a universal paternity that unites all people: “The only Father conceivable who can ensure just and actual brotherhood, because it ensures union in communion, is found in heaven; only from there can it come to earth.” Marion quickly notes that the Republic, being a secular state, obviously cannot incorporate this into its motto, much less into its constitution, yet “Catholics can witness to this paternity in a society of orphans.”
-
-**Given the strong connection he draws** between Christianity and true justice, Marion’s embrace of the secularity (*laïcité*) of the French Republic might seem surprising. This embrace distances him from integralism and its arguments in favor of a Christian political order, which he dismisses as “an illusion.” But he does it also for positive theological reasons, invoking thinkers such as Ivan Illich and Charles Taylor to argue that first Judaism and then Christianity “desacralize” the world, and worldly politics along with it. His exposition and defense of *laïcité* depend upon a dual use of this term: on the one hand, it can be a neutral word for the secular sphere’s renunciation of competence in religious matters; on the other, it can mean an aggressively secular anti-religion. The more neutral sense of the term simply identifies a realm distinct from the sacred, part of the structure of difference that is integral to the providential order of the world. *Laïcité* in the negative sense is precisely the violation of this structure of difference, an overstepping of the profane into the realm of the sacred, the former banishing and replacing the latter. Marion writes that this sort of *laïcité* could become “a fourth monotheism, like the first monotheism without God, the most abstract and therefore the most dangerous.”
-
-In defending a positive notion of *läicité*, Marion appeals to Pascal’s distinction between the orders of bodies, minds, and charity to argue for the incommensurability of these three orders and for the primacy of the order of charity. This distinction “allows us to identify the neutrality of the state with the first order”—i.e. the state’s proper sphere of concern is the bodily acts of its citizens—“and to validate its *positive* powerlessness to see (and, what is more, to judge) the order of mind (freedom of thought, research, etc.) and above all the order of charity (freedom of conscience, of belief and unbelief, or ‘religion’ and of change of religion).” True *laïcité* requires that the state embrace its blindness and incompetence with regard to religious belief. Marion draws from Pascal here, but an American might be forgiven for hearing echoes of John Courtney Murray.
-
-When Marion turns to the positive contribution the Church can make to society, he points again to the “outsider” or “otherworldly” status of Christians: “They make the world less unlivable, because their aim is not to set themselves up in it in perpetuity, but to begin to live in the world according to another logic, and in fact they already belong to another world.” The Christian orientation toward another logic, another world, and ultimately to a transcendent Other, lies at the heart of Marion’s account of what Christianity offers to the postmodern West. He sees the triumph of the market in the West as a form of practical nihilism that obliterates difference by reducing everything to its economic value: “The economy rests on a possibility of abstraction, which reduces each and every thing to money, and thus establishes equivalence between things that in reality have nothing in common; whence the possibility of universal exchange.” Our mania to put a price tag on everything obliterates difference, reducing it to a monetary sameness in which things are distinguished not qualitatively but quantitatively. Such a reduction destroys our capacity to apprehend a good that is qualitatively other.
-
-This is the societal manifestation of Nietzsche’s will-to-power, the will that wills no good except its own increase. Such a will, Marion writes, makes a person “a slave of the worst of masters, himself,” and to be liberated from this bondage involves “attaining and setting up a thing for a good, a thing in itself, which is a thing outside of me.” This is precisely what Christianity offers: “He alone tears himself from nihilism who, in imitating Christ, succeeds in not willing his own will (to will), in order to will *elsewhere* and *from elsewhere.*” Such a good can become the common good of a society because, while irreducibly other in its transcendence over the world, it is not abstract in the way monetary value is; rather, it is concretely “accomplished in the Trinity and manifested in a trinitarian manner by Christ.” This offers “a political model that is at base non-political…a community that aims at communion, because in fact it comes from communion.”
-
-The appeal to the life of the Trinity and the life of God incarnate provides an opening for Marion to conclude his *Brief* *Apology* with a discussion of the phenomenon of the gift, a theme he has explored in other works. Rejecting the model of “gift-exchange,” which links giving and getting, Marion sees gift as following “the logic of erotic phenomena”: “It creates the eventual conditions of a gift in return, but does not depend on the reality of the return on investment, or expect it.” This erotic logic helps address the issue of the exercise of power by Christians. Because the gift is given without expectation of return, the Catholic citizen can, like Christ himself, offer to the political community his or her gift of witness to true communion without demanding political power either as a precondition or an expected award.
-
-**Unlike Marion, Chantal Delsol is a thinker already known for her political philosophy** and *[La Fin de la Chrétienté](https://www.editionsducerf.fr/librairie/livre/19337/la-fin-de-la-chretiente)* (“The End of Christendom”) continues an already well-developed line of inquiry. Her approach, influenced by her teacher Julien Freund and his appropriation of the thought of Max Weber, is marked by a philosophical anthropology that acknowledges the social and historical construction of human identity without totally abandoning the idea of human nature. In this sense, her project is not unlike that of Alasdair MacIntyre. It leads her to pay close attention to the play of historical contingencies in such notions as human dignity. Rather than a static identity, human nature is a dynamic, evolving reality—indeed, if anything is “essential” to our nature it is our ceaseless desire to exceed that nature. As she writes memorably of the human person in her book, *Qu’est-ce que l’homme?* (“What Is a Human Being?”): “Rooted, he wants to be emancipated from his roots. Put another way, he seeks an inaccessible dwelling place through a succession of temporary way stations.” The result is an Augustinian anthropology of the “restless heart” inflected by postmodern historical consciousness. All of this informs her account of the fate of Christianity in the contemporary West.
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-English speakers might be misled by the title of *La Fin de la Chrétienté*. The term *Chréienté* refers not to what we would call “Christianity,” understood as a community of belief and practice (what the French call *christienisme*), but rather to the socio-political formation that we refer to as “Christendom.” Delsol describes this as “the civilization inspired, ordered, guided by the Church,” which endured for sixteen centuries, beginning with Theodosius’s victory in the Battle of the Frigid River in 394 AD, but which is now in its death throes. Delsol’s book might be thought of as a preemptive autopsy, comparing a dying Christendom with the death of pagan civilization in the late ancient world—a death brought about by Christendom itself.
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-Delsol begins by examining how a Church that so resolutely resisted modernity for two centuries in the name of Christian civilization has since the 1960s come to embrace such modern values as religious freedom—values utterly at odds with Christendom. She offers an analysis of early twentieth-century fascism and corporatism as integralist attempts to save Christendom that “proved to be worse than the disease.” Animated by a utopian nostalgia that proved to be merely the mirror image of modernity’s utopian futurism, these sorts of movements fell prey to those, such as Charles Maurras, who wanted Christendom but couldn’t care less about Christianity itself. In the end, Delsol argues, such movements proved to be nothing but “the convulsions of a dying Christendom.”
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-While both Marion and Delsol see integralism as a doomed effort to resuscitate Christendom, Delsol is less confident than Marion that Christendom can be replaced by a benign form of *laïcité*, in part because she is generally skeptical that any society can in fact be secular. Secularity is a fantasy indulged in by intellectuals, but for ordinary people, “for whom common sense whispers that there are mysteries behind the door,” religion of some sort is unavoidable. Our present moment, she argues, is not one of secularization but of revolution “in the strict sense of a cyclical return.” Ancient paganism is reborn, albeit in new forms marked by the sixteen intervening centuries of Christendom. This revolution involves a kind of Nietzschean transvaluation both in morals (what she calls “the normative inversion”) and in worldview (“the ontological inversion”). Delsol tries to retain a certain analytic detachment in describing these inversions of prior moral norms, casting herself as an observer of this moment of historical transition rather than as a partisan. Still, she insists on the significance of this inversion. She believes that the mores of a society form the basic architecture of its existence, a structure more stable than codified laws, shaping not only the actions of those who belong to it but also their feelings and habits. As any parent will recognize (Delsol is the mother of six), “children are always educated by their times more than by their parents.”
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-**To shed light on our own times**, Delsol looks back to the birth of Christendom, the last great inversion of norms in the West. She insists on two claims that might seem contradictory at first: the advent of Christendom was a radical break with the pagan past, and it was also unthinkable without that past as the basis on which it built. Christians constructed their civilization using elements of pagan culture, in particular Stoic morality, though now “democratized” and reframed within a new system of beliefs that transformed what was appropriated. Like Marion, Delsol sees “otherness” as a key to the innovation of Christianity. In contrast to the profoundly unified religious world of the Romans, in which the gods and humanity were fellow citizens of the cosmos, Christianity “introduced a dualism between the temporal and the spiritual, the here-and-now and the beyond, human beings and God.” The advent of Christendom brought a sharp reversal of societal attitudes regarding divorce, abortion, infanticide, suicide, and homosexuality. Delsol evinces a keen sympathy for those pagan Romans, conservators of traditional values, who felt that with the advent of Christendom they had entered “an intellectual and spiritual world torn apart,” and she shows genuine admiration for those who continued to battle in the face of what was clearly inevitable defeat.
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-So too in our own day the partisans of Christendom fight in service of what is manifestly a lost cause. Delsol points to shifts in both laws and popular attitudes toward divorce, abortion, and assisted reproduction. Though there are pockets of resistance to these developments (particularly, she notes, in the United States), the path of this arc is clear: “Humanitarianism, the morality of today, is a morality entirely oriented toward the well-being of the individual, without any vision of the human person \[*vision anthropologique*\].” What we see is an “inversion of the inversion,” an undoing of the revolution of the fourth century that turned the ideals of Christianity into socially enforced norms. Some would say that this is the result of our progressive realization of the inviolability of individual conscience with regard to ultimate questions, but Delsol resists narratives of progress: “In each era, ‘progress’ consists simply in reconciling realities (laws, customs, mores) with diffuse and sometimes as yet unexpressed beliefs that evolve in silence.”
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-This suggests that human beings are not simply behavers, but also believers. The moral norms of the ancient world changed because the beliefs of Christianity supplanted those of paganism, making long-accepted pagan practices suddenly appear odious. Delsol quotes Tacitus: “\[Christians\] hold profane all that we hold as sacred and, on the other hand, permit all that we hold to be abominable.” Like Marion, Delsol ascribes to Judaism and Christianity a key role in de-sacralizing the world. The dualism of Christianity, with its transcendent God standing over and against the world He created, replaced the “cosmotheism” of antiquity, which saw the cosmos itself as saturated with divinity. Or, more precisely, monotheism was layered on top of cosmotheism, a “secondary religion” covering over (but just barely) the “primary religion” of humanity, which “arises, so to speak, on its own, proliferates without fertilizer, and instantly occupies and reoccupies a place as soon as it is free.” This reoccupation of the space vacated by Christendom is what we face today. Christianity has been replaced not by atheism and secularity, as the Enlightenment *philosophes* foretold, but by a religion “more primitive and more rustic.”
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-Today this primitive and rustic cosmotheism takes various forms, perhaps most powerfully in the emergence of environmentalism as a kind of popular religion. Nietzsche was right in pointing to the “otherworldliness” of Christianity as a repudiation of the ancient world, and the contemporary repudiation of Christendom is fueled by a desire to focus again on this world as our true home. “For the monotheist, this world is only a temporary lodging. For the cosmotheist it is a dwelling. The postmodern spirit is tired of living in a lodging…. It wants to be reintegrated into the world as a full citizen, and not as a ‘resident alien.’”
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-Delsol notes the numerous writers who have described modernity as parasitic on Christianity, but she prefers to speak of modernity as a “palimpsest” written over the Christian text, just as Christianity was written over the text of antiquity. This is always the way that human societies work: “Using all the possible materials” from the past “but depriving them of their meaning in order to reinvent them for the benefit of a new epoch.” Just as Christendom replaced paganism, a religion founded on mythos, with one that claimed to be founded on truth—and persecuted those who denied that truth—so now, in our postmodern moment, “truth” has once again been eclipsed by mythos. Yet this new mythos is ineradicably marked by the Christian appeal to “truth,” for it does not breed tolerance, as the myths of antiquity did, but retains the universalism of the Christendom that it has overwritten. For Delsol, the “woke” have “taken over the concept of dogmatic truth, and excluded their adversaries from public life, just as the Church had excommunicated in times past.” The fate of the West is neither nihilism nor ancient pagan religion, but humanitarianism, “the evangelical virtues…recycled to become a kind of common morality.” But, Delsol asks, “what will become of principles that can no longer permanently replenish themselves, their source having been banished?” We are left with what Delsol calls, invoking Flannery O’Connor’s *Wise Blood*, “the Church without Christ,” and one suspects that Delsol would agree with O’Connor in *A Memoir of Mary Ann* that, in the absence of faith, “we govern by…a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.”
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-Blame for this outcome can be laid at the feet of Christendom itself: “In its pretention to establish itself as a civilization, Christianity ended up producing a monstrous avatar that is at the same time its alter-ego and its mortal enemy.” But, Delsol reminds us, Christendom is not Christianity, and the demise of the former is not the demise of the latter. She is inclined to cast a jaundiced eye at excessive Christian breast-beating over the past, “which can resemble masochism.” We rightly judge aspects of Christendom to have been distortions of the Gospel, but Delsol, the good historicist, sees little point in condemning those in the past who did not have the benefit of our hindsight. Delsol comes neither to praise nor to condemn Christendom, but to bury it.
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-She is concerned, however, that in their reasonable fear of repeating the errors of Christendom, Christians will end up muting their distinctive voice. Late in the book, she shifts from the descriptive to the prescriptive: “To dialogue is not to dissolve oneself in the theses of the adversary, and one does not need to cease to exist in order to be tolerant—in fact, the opposite is the case.” This is not the integralist call for a return to Christendom. It is, as Delsol puts it, a call to “a spiritual revolution,” which by worldly standards might look like defeat. Christians must form their children “to carry themselves like Kierkegaard’s knight of faith: resigned, but also able to walk toward the infinite.” For Delsol, as for Marion, the category of “witness” is key. Christians without Christendom must take up the role of witnesses rather than rulers, and learn the virtues characteristic of a minority: “Equanimity, patience, and perseverance.” Christians must take as their model not Sepúlveda, who justified the conversion by conquest of the Americas, but the martyred Trappist monks of Tibhirine, who died because they would not abandon their Muslim neighbors.
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-**There are clear points of convergence between Marion and Delsol.** They both reject integralism and seek a practical *modus vivendi* within the current socio-political order. Neither thinks that the Kingship of Christ requires Christians to have their hands on the levers of temporal power. And neither wishes to embrace a progressivism that would dilute Christian witness into a vague spirituality. Marion in particular is resolutely Christo-centric in his approach: “In order to understand Catholics, it is first necessary to figure out what makes them tick: Christ.” This is especially the case when it comes to determining the success or failure of the Church: “\[Christ\] never guaranteed it would become a majority, or dominant in the world: he only asked it to pass through the same experience of the cross by which he gained the Resurrection.” It is through witness, not through coercion, that the Church engages the world and seeks to change it. Marion and Delsol are “conservative” primarily in the sense that they seek to conserve the centrality of Christ in the Church’s witness, and to do this in continuity with the saints of the past.
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-But there are also important differences between the two. Delsol’s tone is more combative than Marion’s. This is partly a difference of intellectual style—between a philosopher-theologian who typically operates in a speculative and abstract mode and a philosopher-sociologist who mucks around in the messiness of history. But there is also a substantive difference. Marion still operates within Jacques Maritain’s “New Christendom” model, in which the Church’s public role is to provide the state with the values it needs to sustain what Maritain called “the democratic secular faith.” That faith was, if not Christian, at least “Christianly inspired,” and it formed a people that “at least recognized the value and sensibleness of the Christian conception of freedom, social progress, and the political establishment.” Marion seems confident that “Christians furnish society with its best citizens from the point of view even of the interests of the city of men, because their disinterestedness toward earthly power makes them honest workers who are efficient and reliable in community life.”
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-Delsol explicitly rejects Maritain’s New Christendom model, calling it one of “the last illusions” of the postwar era. This is in keeping with her rejection of the idea that modernity is secular, even in Marion’s benign sense of *laïcité*. Maritain and Marion’s vision of the Church supplying the modern nation with something it lacks is at odds with Delsol’s claim that contemporary society in fact possesses its own moral norms and belief system: neo-pagan cosmotheism. If she is right, then there are no gaps for Christian beliefs and values to fill; the space they would occupy is already filled with alternative beliefs and values. Marion’s *A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment* echoes the title of Richard John Neuhaus’s 1987 book *The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World*. Both of these books see the Church as serving a vital social role within a religiously neutral state. In light of this agreement, it is tempting to cast Delsol in the role of Neuhaus’s friend Stanley Hauerwas, the contrarian insisting on the ineradicable conflict between Church and world, and suggesting that “Catholic moments” may simply be nostalgia for the halls of power. In fact, immediately after her criticism of Maritain, Delsol invokes Hauerwas’s student, William Cavanaugh, as offering an alternative approach, one that focuses on the Church as what Pope Francis has called “a field hospital,” present not to provide values to a secular world, but to bind up its wounds.
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-Finally, we might note how Marion and Delsol address the topic that has been haunting the Church for the past two decades: the sex-abuse crisis. One would expect the counter-witness of this scandal to be of particular concern to thinkers who give primacy to “witness” as the Church’s mode of engagement with the world. But Marion mentions pedophilia only in a brief footnote largely dedicated to pointing out the presence of pedophiles in other communities and organizations. To be fair, his book came out in France several years before the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church issued its scathing report on sexual abuse in the French Church. But something Marion *does* say makes one wonder if his silence on this issue is entirely accidental. At the outset of the book he notes, “Only the saints speak properly of God and are qualified to critique the Church and Catholics.” He then goes on to write a few pages later that “the believer who is serious and practicing the faith *forgets* to occupy himself with the reform of ecclesiastical institutions.” Marion is undoubtedly correct to warn Catholics away from an obsession with ecclesiastic politics and toward focusing on the heart of the Gospel. But this still leaves the question of how reform is possible in a Church with few saints and a hierarchy with a poor track record of policing itself. Over the past few decades, ordinary, non-saintly Catholics—and often, alas, ex-Catholics—played a key role in holding the Church accountable. An idealized ecclesiology that seems to ignore this fact is hardly adequate to our moment.
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-Delsol, unsurprisingly, has little tendency to idealize the Church. Though the Independent Commission’s report had not yet been issued when she wrote her book, it was clearly on the horizon, and she does address the scandal in a few passages. She notes that pedophilia, now criminalized, had once been considered by the Church and society at large “a lesser evil that one bore in order to safeguard families and institutions.” She repeats this point later, noting that what was seen as a relatively minor misstep at one point in time—“collateral damage”—became, at a later point in time, a crime against humanity. All of this fits with her historicist account of moral norms and her tendency, when writing in her analytic mode, of eschewing moral judgements on the past, which had its own very different norms.
-
-But Delsol is also able to step out of that analytic mode and speak more normatively as a member of the Catholic faithful, and here her judgments are sharper. She sees the sex-abuse catastrophe as evidence of the distorting effects Christendom had on Christian faith. “The Church behaves like a governing and dominating institution, believing that everything that is forbidden to others is permitted for it.” Powerful cultural institutions often convince themselves that, in light of their important societal role, they cannot afford the luxury of truth-telling. By the grace of providence and the vicissitudes of history, the Church, freed from Christendom, is now in a better position to witness to the truth, even if it is the truth of her own failures.
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-Both of these brief books are rich in resources for reflection. As the Church in the United States confronts the reality of accelerating disaffiliation among young people, the experience of the Church in France, which has long grappled with dechristianization, acquires greater relevance. Marion and Delsol help us see how Catholics in an increasingly post-Christian society might bear witness to their faith without bitterness or nostalgia—and perhaps even with joy.
-
-*A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment*
-Jean-Luc Marion
-University of Chicago Press
-$22.50 | 120 pp.
-
-*La Fin de la Chrétienté*
-Chantal Delsol
-CERF
-€16 | 176 pp.
-
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-# After the Zodiac Killer's '340' Cipher Stumped the FBI, Three Amateurs Made a Breakthrough
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-**The envelope arrived** at the *San Francisco Chronicle* in November 1969 without a return address, its directive to the recipient, in handwriting distinctively slanted and words unevenly spaced, to “please rush to editor.” The *Chronicle* newsroom had seen the scrawl before, on previous letters sent from the Zodiac, a self-monikered serial killer who threatened to go on a “kill rampage” if the paper didn’t publish his writing on its front page. By the time of the November letter, the Zodiac had already attacked seven people, murdering five. His most recent murder—of a San Francisco cab driver, by gunshot—had occurred just four weeks before this new envelope arrived. The Zodiac had mailed the *Chronicle* a piece of the victim’s bloodied shirt as evidence of the crime.
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-The Zodiac’s letters were replete with grisly imagery. He signed his “name” with a crosshairs symbol. He shared haunting details of his attacks. He promised to blow up buses of schoolchildren and unleash a “death machine” on San Francisco. But in addition to these overt threats, he included baffling ciphers for investigators to crack, troubling grids of symbols and letters that presumably masked a secret about his identity, intentions, or victims (to this day, the killer has never been found). The Zodiac’s first cipher, included in the July 31 letter, had been solved within a week by an amateur husband-and-wife team—but it had only revealed more of the killer’s raving. The second, now known as “the 340” due to the number of characters in it, would prove a much more difficult challenge. It came with a letter for the *Chronicle*, reading in part:
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-*PS could you print this new cipher in your frunt page? I get aufully lonely when I am ignored, so lonely I could do my Thing !!!!!!*
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-The paper’s editors, along with local law enforcement officials, had no reason to doubt the Zodiac’s most recent threat. They published the 340 the next day, hoping it might bring them one step closer to the serial killer’s identity, or lead them to his next victims.
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-But the 340 stumped both amateur and professional cryptographers alike—not just in the weeks following its publication, but for decades. The NSA couldn’t crack it. Neither could the Naval Intelligence Office or the FBI. For more than fifty years, the cipher remained an unsolvable enigma, one that grew to almost mythic proportions among codebreakers and cryptography sleuths. Some speculated that the cipher would never be solved—that it was too sophisticated, too challenging for even contemporary cryptographers.
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-The 340 cipher, above, reached the *San Francisco Chronicle* in November 1969. The killer’s first cipher had been cracked in a week by an amateur husband-and-wife team. Solving this one would require the eventual codebreakers to employ homophonic substitutions, period-19 transposition, the knight’s tour, and other complex cryptology schemes.
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-Getty Images
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-But then, in December 2020, the FBI announced a breakthrough: The 340 cipher had been solved. Not by its crack Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit, but instead by three computer wonks who’d found one another on an obscure online true-crime discussion board and started collaborating during the COVID-19 pandemic. The trio, who had no background in cryptology and no professional codebreaking experience, did what the world’s most powerful intelligence organizations could not. On top of the solution’s haunting opacity, the intricacies of the cipher itself brought fresh layers of insight that, forensic experts say, might help authorities eventually, finally, catch up to the killer.
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-> “There’s not a lot of rhyme or reason to it, which makes it very impressive that anyone solved it.”
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-**Dave Oranchak has** always been a puzzle geek. When he’s not running ultramarathons near his home in Roanoke, Virginia, the 47-year-old computer programmer spends most of his time working out practical solutions to problems, whether in his coding work or his passion for Shinro, a Japanese derivation of Sudoku. Around 2006, Oranchak became intrigued by the 340’s apparent resistance to a solution, a key had eluded the best efforts of professionals and experts. Tempted by the chance to unlock a slate of notorious cold cases, he started nosing around online discussion boards about the Zodiac. Before he knew it, he was down the rabbit hole, immersed in the Zodiac’s story and gaining a reputation as one of the reigning experts on the killer’s ciphers.
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-The Zodiac had a thick case file for amateur sleuths like Oranchak to peruse. Here was a serial killer who had gone out of his way to taunt the police. His handwriting was on file, along with a recording of his voice. Witnesses to his crimes had provided enough information for law enforcement to create a composite sketch of his face. The Zodiac had tallied his victims in marker on the side of a car, drafted homemade ciphers, and mailed scraps of evidence to newspapers. But despite the best efforts of the country’s leading intelligence agencies, no one knew who he was. The 340 cipher was one of the final threads to pull, a puzzle with seemingly no discernible rules, schemes, or internal logic.
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-Oranchak dedicated hundreds of hours to the 340 cipher—“way too many,” by his own measure. As his commitment deepened, he became a respected moderator on the Zodiac discussion boards and the leading authority on the 340 itself. He appeared on TV documentaries and podcasts dedicated to the Zodiac, eventually giving talks at NSA-sponsored cryptology conferences and sitting on panels with FBI agents actively working in the cryptology field.
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-One of the three amateurs who broke the 340 code, David Oranchak did most of his work from his home office, his dog Rosa by his side while he sat at his computer. He detailed his thought processes and methods on his YouTube channel, where he connected with others attempting to crack the cipher.
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-PETER MEANS/VTE
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-The community of amateur Zodiac hunters can be sensationalistic. “There’s a lot of chatter and nonsense and arguing about suspects,” Oranchak says. But one member of the forums struck him as level-headed and critical: Jarl Van Eycke, a reclusive warehouse worker living in Belgium who had gained respect in the cryptology community after developing his own decryption software program. “Jarl was technically minded, and \[he was\] approaching the \[Zodiac\] problem rationally,” Oranchak says.
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-Van Eycke declined an interview request for this story. And he’s never spoken on the record about his decryption software or the Zodiac case. Oranchak has never met him; they’ve corresponded only by email and on forums. Despite Van Eycke’s almost total obscurity, he agreed to work with Oranchak on a solution to the 340. That was a pivotal moment that would add speed to the codebreaking process; Van Eycke’s software could work through multiple solution sequences simultaneously and provide a rating for the correctness of each result.
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-Van Eycke and Oranchak began programming the codebreaking software to work through thousands and thousands of possible solutions to the 340 cipher. During the pandemic, Oranchak launched a YouTube channel dedicated to their work from his home office; his family vacation photos and a watercolor portrait of the late family cat, Peabody, looked on as he issued heady primers about cryptology and codebreaking.
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-Despite the homespun setting, the information in Oranchak’s videos was undeniably sophisticated. He used Scrabble tiles to explain substitution keys and anagrams and gave casual lectures on cipher organization strategies such as columnar transposition, in which messages are first written in columns rather than lines. Before long, videos on his channel had millions of views. Oranchak was sure that certain anomalies in the cipher pointed to a logical organizational strategy. While some dismissed the cipher as an impossible exercise from a deranged mind, Oranchak believed that a valuable solution lay behind the inscrutable symbols.
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-**Oranchak’s belief in** the 340’s logic stemmed from cryptography’s foundational principles. Ciphers date back at least 3,000 years. The earliest known cryptogram is from 1500 B.C., when a Mesopotamian potter devised a code to keep his glaze recipe secret from competitors, but methodologies have diversified and proliferated since then. Ancient Spartans and Chinese military leaders used the “scytale” method, writing messages that could only be read when wrapped around a specific rod, and Julius Caesar popularized the substitution cipher, in which each letter is replaced by another letter that’s a set number of positions away in the alphabet. Sir Francis Bacon favored a “steganographic” approach in which he replaced letters with binaries, and during each of the World Wars, countries used a range of cryptography methods, from simple stencils to the legendary German Enigma machine. All of these cipher varieties employ rotating substitutions that can be “brute forced” by nothing but pencil and paper, says Riad Wahby, Ph.D., whose research at Carnegie Mellon University focuses on proof systems and cryptography. This quality makes them accessible to the public despite their many layers of complexity.
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-By the time the Zodiac began his killing rampage in 1968, ciphers and other cryptograms had invaded pulp crime novels and detective magazines. Readers could learn organizational tricks, such as the knight’s tour or period-19 transposition, and then use them in ciphers of their own. The Zodiac himself likely came of age reading some of those detective magazines and codebooks, says James R. Fitzgerald, a forensic linguist and criminal profiler who spent much of his career at the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. “If Zodiac is ever identified and his house is ever searched, you’re going to find dozens and dozens of other codebooks, other pads of paper with other code written on them,” he says. “He had an extended interest in this kind of language usage.”
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-According to Fitzgerald, the Zodiac’s schematics align with popular cryptology strategies of the time. The first cipher was simple—a substitution code containing 26 symbols, each of which stood in for a letter in the English alphabet. Donald Harden, a high school teacher, and his wife, Bettye, solved it within a week of its publication. The couple estimates that they spent about 20 hours on the puzzle. They zeroed in on easy-to-find words likely to be used by a murderer; “kill,” for example, has repeating letters. Then they followed rules known to any Wheel of Fortune fan: namely, that E is the most used letter in the English language, as are certain letter pairings, such as T-H and Q-U. The solution read, in part:
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-I LIKE KILLING BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH FUN. IT IS MORE FUN THAN KILLING WILD GAME IN THE FOREST BECAUSE MAN IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL OF ALL. TO KILL SOMETHING GIVES ME THE MOST THRILLING EXPERIENCE. IT IS EVEN BETTER THAN GETTING YOUR ROCKS OFF WITH A GIRL. THE BEST PART OF IT IS THAT WHEN I DIE I WILL BE REBORN IN PARADICE AND ALL I HAVE KILLED WILL BECOME MY SLAVES.
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-At first glance, the cipher solution may seem worthless when it comes to catching a serial killer. Not so, says Fitzgerald. Instead, he points to the combination of literary allusion (most notably to Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game”) and colloquial sexual boasts as helpful context for a detailed psychological profile of the killer. So, he says, does the deliberate misspelling of “paradise” and the contrived idea of a specific afterlife awaiting the Zodiac.
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-“He didn’t believe any of it,” says Fitzgerald of the Zodiac’s claims. “Yet it gave him an ostensible rationale behind his killing, so he would not be seen by the public as just randomly and purposelessly choosing his victims.”
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-Donald G. Harden, a schoolteacher living in Salinas, California, broke the Zodiac’s first cipher sent on July 31, 1969, with his wife, Bettye June Harden
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-Getty Images
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-The code wheels and lampboard from a four-rotor German Enigma machine made during World War II, for which the user had to know the specific key settings used by the transmitter to decrypt a message
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-Getty Images
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-**Behavioral criminologists who have** worked the Zodiac case surmise that the 340’s construction was informed by the ease with which the first cipher was solved—a real blow to the killer’s inflated ego. For the 340, the Zodiac increased the number of individual characters to 50 and organized them via a far more complicated cryptogram. The cipher relied upon homophonic substitution, which assigns multiple symbols to a single letter and helps mask common letter pairings. As the cipher’s key—cryptology speak for a solution—continued to elude investigators at the FBI and NSA, cryptanalysts began to suspect that the Zodiac had somehow rearranged the order of the symbols, too, possibly including purposeful mistakes in the cipher that would confuse straightforward solutions—“a code within a code,” says Fitzgerald. He says the Zodiac, in this respect, fancied himself a kind of criminal mastermind. “The true code writer is very rare, even rarer among serial killers or serial offenders. And the ones that are difficult to break are the rarest of the rare.”
-
-The ready solution to the first cipher might have led the killer to overcomplicate the second, including the usage of what Fitzgerald calls “false flag mistakes” to throw off codebreakers. “He wanted to become more of an enigma that he already was,” Fitzgerald says. “He thrived on that. This guy wanted to put himself above and beyond all those pedestrian-type killers.” This egotism might have also informed the Zodiac’s moniker, symbol, and costume, which eyewitnesses said resembled that of a medieval executioner. It’s also why he seemed to thrive on sending mail to newspapers and demanding airtime from TV programs. On one such show, a man claiming to be the Zodiac phoned in to say that his only worry was eventually being taken to the gas chamber, a fear inconsistent with the killer’s supposed megalomaniacal arrogance. Sure enough, the caller was later proved to be a fraud.
-
-The Zodiac affected a persona who not only delighted in taunting authorities, but who also became bored with killing and needed to invent games to keep himself amused. The cipher is the primary symbol of the killer’s paradoxical needs to be both obsessed about and unknowable. That twisted psychology contributed to its immense difficulty, and is one reason why it took decades to unpack.
-
-> “Zodiac killed for thrill, the ciphers only added to the thrill, once the killings became routine.”
-
-**As COVID lockdowns** persisted in 2020, Jarl Van Eycke continued to refine his codebreaking software, AZDecrypt. He reported to Zodiac listserv users that it was becoming faster and more efficient, and he was adding features that allowed users to freeze keywords in the cipher, such as “kill,” while running permutations on the other symbols—a process called “cribbing” that can narrow the number of possible combinations a program needs to try. On his YouTube channel, Dave Oranchak theorized that the Zodiac had probably used a combination of schemes in the 340, including the knight’s move, in which a message is rearranged in a manner following the moveset of a knight in chess, and period-19 transposition, in which each character is moved 19 positions in the cipher before solving.
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-That video caught the eye of Sam Blake, a quantitative analysis researcher at the University of Melbourne. Burned out from his work in computing infrastructure, Blake found Oranchak’s channel a more relaxing way to problem solve. He joined the Zodiac hunt with traditional pen and paper at first, but found it “clunky” for interacting with the more complex schemes AZDecrypt was dealing with. Period-19 transposition in particular, he says, “seemed like a pain in the butt.”
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-
-
-Oranchak began working on the 340 in 2006 and posted his first YouTube video on his efforts in April 2020. That first video debunked writer Robert Graysmith’s proposed solution to the cipher, and in December that same year, Oranchak released the solution that he helped to obtain. That video has over 2 million views to date.
-
-PETER MEANS/VTE
-
-Blake commented on Oranchak’s video that it would be easy to enumerate the geometry of period-19 transposition into a computer program, but by that point Oranchak’s videos received dozens of comments a day and Blake’s mathematical suggestion was lost in the shuffle. But he kept at it until he found Oranchak’s email address and proposed his idea directly. Oranchak was impressed, and invited Blake to join him in the hunt for a solution.
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-Using the University of Melbourne’s supercomputer, Spartan, in conjunction with AZDecrypt, Blake and Oranchak parsed thousands of variations for the 340 cipher. Beyond period 19 and the knight’s tour, they tried other arrangements, such as alternating the cipher’s columns or organizing it along diagonal lines. Each new organization required multiple subvariations, such as moving each character 18 or 20 spaces instead of the traditional 19. It took hours, sometimes days, for AZDecrypt to churn through each possible solution. This methodology would’ve been impossible in 1969. “Homophonic substitution needs a really robust computer program,” says Blake. “I was able to create many different candidate ciphers because I had access to Spartan.”
-
-Nevertheless, despite all the programming power at its gates, the cipher didn’t yield. Occasionally, AZDecrypt would reveal a single word and compel the codebreakers to dig deeper, but everything led to a dead end. The team began breaking the cipher into sections and applying different solutions to different sections, but even that failed. Months passed. The team soon amassed over 650,000 tested variations, but no answers.
-
-While Oranchak and Blake attacked the cipher, Van Eycke kept improving AZDecrypt. Oranchak wondered if they’d actually tried the right variation already but that it just hadn’t been caught by an earlier version of the software. They began rerunning all 650,000 combinations again, with Oranchak hanging out in his wood-paneled office with the family’s Labrador, watching the program and waiting for it to produce a viable solution. About halfway through the rerun, he spotted fleeting words and phrases that hadn’t turned up during the first pass. In one variation, he found this fragment: *hope you are trying to catch me*. That seemed promising. Then he caught another phrase: *gas chamber*.
-
-Oranchak used AZDecrypt’s crib feature to lock in those words, the same phrase the Zodiac impostor had used on TV in 1969, and then continued rerunning the variations. Eventually the program cracked the first section of the cipher. “That’s when I fell out of my chair,” Oranchak remembers. “I think I scared my dog.” The remaining two sections soon followed. They needed to be massaged and corrected in places, but at long last, the Zodiac’s message emerged before the codebreaker’s eyes:
-
-I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME
-THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW
-WHICH BRINGS UP A POINT ABOUT ME
-I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER
-BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE ALL THE SOONER
-BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME
-WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE
-SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH
-I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE IS
-LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH
-
-**Most experts, including** the FBI’s crypto unit, agree that Oranchak and his team cracked the 340. Like the first cipher, it reveals a beguiling combination of high and low diction, spelling mistakes, and vague imaginings of immortality. Also like the first cipher, it lacks a hard clue as to the Zodiac’s identity.
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-But James Fitzgerald says that even the 340’s variations and mistakes hold valuable information for forensic linguists, including possible hints at the writer’s race, ethnicity, age, and gender. Criminals are better at inserting purposeful mistakes than at hiding lifelong linguistic habits. In the case of the 340 cipher, Fitzgerald believes the Zodiac tried to upgrade his language to look more sophisticated than he is, by way of antiquated diction like “all the sooner” and “paradice.”
-
-He also suggests that both ciphers contain contraindicators, or statements that represent the opposite of what is true to the Zodiac. In other words, Fitzgerald asserts that the Zodiac never hunted wild game, never or rarely had sex, and was, in fact, terrified of dying. “Bottom line, Zodiac killed for thrill,” he says. “It was mentally, physically, and sexually empowering for him, all of which were missing from his everyday life. The ciphers only added to the thrill, once the killings became routine.” Fitzgerald predicts that behavioral scientists at the FBI will glean more information through further study of the ciphers.
-
-Jim Clemente, a former FBI profiler, agrees. “Zodiac is nothing more than a vulnerable narcissist,” he says. “He was attempting to show how smart he is \[through the ciphers\], but he’s actually giving us evidence to take him down.”
-
-
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-Materials from Oranchak’s collection of cryptography texts. Oranchak, Blake, and Van Eycke combined their skills in programming and mathematics with their interest in traditional cryptography to solve the 340 cipher.
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-PETER MEANS/VTE
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-
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-After solving the cipher, Oranchak, Blake, and Van Eycke received medals from the FBI’s cryptanalysis unit.
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-PETER MEANS/VTE
-
-> “In his zeal to create a more difficult puzzle, the Zodiac overextended himself and delivered a cipher that was almost impossible to solve.”
-
-The mechanisms of the 340 itself possibly reveal the Zodiac’s limitations as a code writer. The cipher follows a variation of the knight’s tour and period-19 transposition, but the alterations to each of these schemes are idiosyncratic and sloppy. “We almost didn’t find the solution because of them,” Oranchak says.
-
-Francis Heaney, a puzzle expert, calls the 340 a “read-my-mind” puzzle. “Basically, \[it’s when\] you’ve got an idea for a puzzle and there’s no way to solve it unless the person has the same idea,” Heaney says.
-
-For example, the Zodiac altered his diagonal schematic in a seemingly random manner. He intended the six characters in the center-right of the cipher, which spell out “life is,” to be extracted from the diagonal and added to the end of the translated cipher. There’s precedent for that; some puzzles have “meta-answers,” an extra step after computation to reach the complete puzzle’s final conclusion (like when themed crossword clues must be rearranged to solve a riddle). But fair puzzles communicate the need for that extra step through what Heaney calls “breadcrumbs.” The Zodiac left no such instructions. “There’s not a lot of rhyme or reason to it,” Heaney says of the 340. “It’s a little bit free-form, which makes it very impressive that anyone solved it.”
-
-In his zeal to create a more difficult puzzle, the Zodiac overextended himself and delivered a cipher that was almost impossible to solve—not because of any masterful underlying mechanism, but because the cipher lacked a discernible logic and structure.
-
-The best puzzles build incrementally upon themselves, explains Heaney. They may include multiple different steps, but those layers should be iterative. Zodiac’s layers were haphazard at best. Solvable puzzles, even challenging ones, hint at their schematics through “flavor text”—proactive hints at a ski slope if, say, the puzzle follows a diagonal pattern. Heaney says inventive puzzlers also build difficulty through focus. The Zodiac sprawled in his methods, shifting the 340 abruptly between simple and homophonic substitution, utilizing multiple transpositions, and inserted a baseless meta answer. Based on the Zodiac’s profile, particularly his relentless thirst for attention, he wanted his ciphers to be solved and his message of terror out in the world. These inconsistencies, in that context, constitute a failure.
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-Without the computing power of Blake’s supercomputer and Van Eycke’s AZDecrypt to overpower the Zodiac’s unfair schematic, the 340 probably would have remained unsolved. And even though cracking the cipher revealed little biographical information about the killer, Oranchak thinks their methodology can lead to newer, faster ways of enumerating and substituting, which will allow other ciphers to be solved more quickly than under previous methods. “We live in an age of cryptography that is virtually unbreakable,” Oranchak says. “But so are these old-school codes.” Many unsolved puzzles continue to elude simple solutions, and some of these are connected to crime. “We need a better tool that can figure out what bucket a cipher belongs in before putting all that effort into breaking it.”
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-Cryptological progress, Blake says, will require experts and intelligence agencies to think outside the box, collaborate and crowdsource, and be willing to test methodologies developed by amateurs and armchair detectives. That, says Mike Morford, author of *The Case of the Zodiac Killer*, is the single most exciting aspect of the 340 solution.
-
-“It just proves that if you dig at something long enough and keep at it, whether it’s for 40 years, 50 years, there’s a chance that you can be part of the solution. These guys proved that,” he says. “Their work encourages people to keep digging into these old cases and not to give up.”
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-This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io
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-# Albert Camus: The philosopher who resisted despair
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-In March 1946, the French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus sailed across the Atlantic to deliver a speech at Columbia University. It was his first and only trip to America. Camus had achieved worldwide fame with the publication of his 1942 novel, *The Stranger,* and his stature as an artist and a member of the French resistance had grown considerably over the course of the war.
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-The Nazis had been defeated the year before and there was a belief that some kind of final victory over fascism had been achieved. But in his address, Camus did not oblige that sentiment. The philosopher, who was expected to talk about French theater and philosophy, lingered on the pathologies that produced Nazism. He went further, arguing that the postwar world had fallen into complacency. The war was over but a certain kind of plague persisted:
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-> Contemporary man tends more and more to put between himself and nature an abstract and complex machinery that casts him into solitude. … With so much paper, so many offices and functionaries, we are creating a world in which human warmth has disappeared. Where no one can come into contact with anyone else except across a maze of what we call formalities.
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-The point of the talk was to say that the entire Western world lived in a civilization that elevated abstractions over experience — that ultimately removed people from the reality of human suffering.
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-I doubt Camus would change his posture were he to give that talk today. The world of 2022 is different from the world of Nazi barbarity Camus was reacting against, but it’s not as different as we would hope. A great power in Europe is trying to conquer a weaker power driven by some claim to historical greatness and a notion of its geopolitical primacy. It’s hard to look at the images of bombed-out apartment buildings and mass graves in Ukraine and not think of Europe in the aftermath of WWII.
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-Camus’s earlier work, when he was writing books like *The Stranger* and *The Myth of Sisyphus*, was more about the strangeness of the human experience. But his oeuvre took a turn as he witnessed the horrors of the war, his attention fixed on the ways in which people justify violence and lawlessness. Indeed, Camus’s whole philosophy became a response to human brutality, and that’s what makes him such an essential voice at this historical moment.
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-### Against abstraction
-
-Camus was one of the intellectual stars of midcentury Paris. But unlike contemporaries like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, he was always an outsider. Most everyone in that milieu went to one of the elite universities, like the Sorbonne or the École normale supérieure. Camus grew up in a working-class neighborhood in French Algeria and went to a public university.
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-He was raised as a French citizen in Algeria, where most of the inhabitants were indigenous Arabs and Berbers who had lived there for centuries before the French showed up. Living as a French citizen in a colonized state helped give shape to his philosophy and politics. He loved the French people who were born in Algeria and made a home there, but he was also outraged by the treatment of Arabs and Berbers — hundreds of thousands of whom were killed by French forces **—** and spent years condemning it as a young reporter for a left-wing newspaper.
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-The Algerian experience made Camus wary of either-or approaches to politics. Having witnessed the extremism on both sides — French occupiers and their Arab resisters — and the cycles of violence and retaliation, he was determined to find a space for dialogue, or at least impose limits on the killing.
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-No one, he insisted, had a monopoly on truth or justice. “I want Arab militants to preserve the justice of their cause by condemning the massacres of civilians, just as I want the French to protect their rights and their future by openly condemning the massacres of the repression.” He was widely mocked as a moderate for this stance (even as he lobbied behind the scenes on behalf of countless political prisoners during Algeria’s war for independence). I’m not sure Camus ever had an adequate response to the criticisms. The best he could muster was to say that the goal was to stop the spiral of violence and retaliation and that meant condemning the sorts of tactics that made resolution impossible.
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-In the spring of 1940, shortly after Camus had moved to Paris, the Germans invaded France. He tried to enlist in the army but was declined due to an early bout of tuberculosis. He instead became the editor of the French resistance newspaper, Combat, and produced some of his best work as a columnist there. It’s really that period that crystallized so much of his thinking.
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-From the start of the war, Camus was preoccupied with the hazards of ideological politics and abstract ideals. “It was impossible,” he wrote, “to persuade people who were doing these things not to do them because they were sure of themselves and because there is no way to persuade an abstraction, or, to put it another way, the representative of an ideology.”
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-This is what he saw in Nazism: a political plague that obeyed its own implacable logic and destroyed the hosts — and everyone else. Beyond that specter, he could sense the impending battle between capitalist and Marxist ideologies, both of which, in their own ways, were based on unchallengeable ideas of progress.
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-After the war, Camus’s philosophical work became even more political. He published his book-length essay *The Rebel* in 1951, which precipitated his public fallout with Sartre. Camus condemned the excesses on both sides of the Cold War — a stance that alienated Marxists like Sartre — but he was always interested in closing the gap between theory and action:
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-> The purpose of this essay is once again to face the reality of the present, which is logical crime, and to examine meticulously the arguments by which it is justified. ... One might think that a period which, in a space of fifty years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings should be condemned out of hand. But its culpability must still be understood.
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-*The Rebel* is a flawed book, and it does, at times, feel too removed from historical realities. But the weaknesses of the book reflect the doubt at the core of Camus’s political philosophy. It wasn’t about drawing some kind of moral equivalence between fascism and communism. It was an attempt to understand a peculiar form of nihilism that had come to dominate the 20th century.
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-For Camus, nihilism wasn’t so much about belief in nothing; it was about refusing to believe in the world as it is. And killing in service to some idea is just as nihilistic as believing that nothing is true and therefore everything is permitted.
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-### The persistence of compassion
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-That human tendency toward nihilism was on Camus’s mind when he spoke at Columbia in 1946. “Nihilism has been replaced by absolute rationalism,” Camus said, “and in both cases, the results are the same.”
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-The upshot of Camus’s speech at Columbia was to take all the anguish over the atrocities of World War II and turn it into something ennobling. It’s natural to be indignant in the face of such horror, but there was a sliver of consolation here. Camus asks us to reflect on that common outrage, realize what it says about the value of human life, and commit to being a more engaged human being.
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-Camus’s 1947 novel *The Plague* is all about our shared vulnerability to loss and suffering. Something like a pandemic sweeps into our lives and disrupts our reality. The routines, the diversions, the daily comforts — it all explodes under the intensity of emergency. Suddenly, everyone is facing the same situation and there’s nothing to do but resist. “I know it’s an absurd situation,” the protagonist Rieux says at one point, “but we’re all involved in it, and we’ve got to accept it as it is.” The same is true of war (Camus himself insisted that the plague in the novel was an allegory for the Nazi occupation).
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-Camus has been much on my mind these last few months. The great irony of Putin’s war is that it seems to have reinforced the very thing it was [intended to destroy](https://www.businessinsider.com/putin-denies-reviving-russian-empire-says-ukraine-not-real-country-2022-2): the Ukrainian identity. In *The Rebel*, Camus says we can see the roots of human solidarity in moments of crisis, when people have to resist what’s taking place, whether it’s a biological plague or a military occupation. And when that happens, we look around and see others doing the same thing. We see others saying “no” and “yes” at the same time — no to the destruction of human life, yes to the community that emerges out of that refusal.
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-Amid the horror is solace — there’s something deeply satisfying about doing things in the world with other people. The immediacy of a war or a natural disaster collapses the barriers between us because it’s so clear what has to be done. And while nothing redeems a tragedy, there’s at least some comfort in the solidarity that emerges from it.
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-The problem is that solidarity often slips away in the mechanics of everyday life. But the empathy and love fueling that desire to help in a crisis is a constant possibility. Camus thought this didn’t happen automatically — it was a choice we each had to make — and that we could carry the spirit of collective action into the post-crisis world. He also thought that acting with other people, caring about other people, made us happy and was thus an antidote to despair.
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-The striking thing about Camus is that he imagines life itself as a kind of emergency in the sense that it can end at any moment. The decision to live in spite of that awareness carries a moral obligation: to not add to the already random suffering in the world. Seeing that principle transgressed has a way of renewing our commitment to it.
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-### The antidote to despair
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-Camus always said that he was pessimistic about the human condition and optimistic about humankind. Maybe that’s a contradiction. But I always thought the deeper point was much simpler: We’re born into a world that doesn’t seem to have any purpose, that we know will end, and yet we go on living anyway.
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-For Camus, that meant that there is something in humanity that transcends the fact of our condition. That’s the source of our collective dignity — and it’s the part of humanity that always has to be defended.
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-This can all sound a bit abstract from a distance. What’s the average person supposed to do about all the horrors in the world? You can look anywhere — from the conflicts in Ukraine and Yemen and Syria to the barbarity of mass shootings in places like [Uvalde, Texas](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23140441/uvalde-shooting-robb-elementary-school-texas) — and be horrified by the suffering, but you can’t do anything about it.
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-That outrage you feel, though — that’s the spark of common humanity that Camus was always affirming.
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-At the end of his speech, he told the audience that their job was to take that spark and commit to being a more attentive human being. That meant seeing people as people, not as abstractions or obstacles. It meant not letting our ideas about the world become more important than our experience of the world.
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-Camus always returned to the myth of Sisyphus as the model of human defiance. The problem wasn’t that Sisyphus had to roll his boulder up a hill forever; it’s that he had to roll it alone. His point was that we’re all rolling our boulders up a hill, and that life is most meaningful when we push together.
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-# Amateur open-source researchers went viral unpacking the war in Ukraine
-
-Under the pseudonym [Intel Crab](https://twitter.com/IntelCrab), University of Alabama sophomore Justin Peden has become an unlikely source of information about the unfolding Ukraine-Russia war. From his dorm room, the 20-year-old sifts through satellite images, TikTok videos, and security feeds, sharing findings like troop movements and aircraft models with more than 220,000 followers on Twitter. Peden said that his posts have reached 20 million people and his follower count has increased by over 50,000 people over the past month, according to his Twitter analytics.
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-Today, Peden is one of the most prominent open-source intelligence (OSINT) figures on Twitter.
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-According to analysts, OSINT researchers have existed on the fringes of conflicts since at least 2014, working collaboratively across the world to comb through freely available resources like Google Maps and the satellite imagery service Maxar Technologies. They publicly conduct the type of work that intelligence agencies do behind closed doors.
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-As Russia continues its invasion of Ukraine, amateur OSINT researchers have gained a particular mainstream traction. Specialized social media accounts on Twitter, like Intel Crab, [Calibre Obscura](https://twitter.com/CalibreObscura), and [Aurora Intel](https://twitter.com/AuroraIntel), have transfixed an information-hungry public with an analysis of key movements in Russia’s invasion, using newly available technologies to provide [real-time analysis](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/osint-ukraine-war-satellite-images-plane-tracking-social) of key activities, like the supposed withdrawal of Russian troops along the Ukrainian border or the 40-mile Russian convoy outside of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.
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-“It’s easy to overinflate your importance,” the amateur OSINT researcher Calibre Obscura told *Rest of World*. “I wouldn’t put myself on a pedestal.” He does have over 105,000 followers on Twitter and said that he gets contracted by NGOs for his weapons-tracking research. His standing has especially increased during the Ukraine conflict, during which he said his account has grown by about 20,000 followers in the past couple of weeks. He also started a different account with another amateur OSINT researcher called Ukraine Weapons Trackers, which [scaled up](https://twitter.com/UAWeapons) to more than 190,000 followers in less than a month.
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-While some OSINT analysis is [coming from](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/osint-ukraine-war-satellite-images-plane-tracking-social) trained professionals at places like the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, Peden said that OSINT amateurs like him can offer updates on the events of the conflict, thanks to the availability of accessible online information and the prevalence of social media within Ukraine. Their reach has fueled debate about what it means for non-professionals to be at the forefront of the race for information.
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-
-
-[Twitter](https://twitter.com/IntelCrab/status/1497653680924991494)
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-“There will always be a fog of war, but I think it is the thinnest veil of war we’ve ever had,” Peden said, after being taken aback by the increased attention accounts like his have received over the last couple of weeks. “It’s surprising to me because it’s been, for the longest time, so niche on Twitter and the internet as a whole,” he told *Rest of World*.
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-Ciarán O’Connor, an analyst for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said many OSINT amateurs got their start around the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011, and the conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014.
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-OSINT researchers use information freely accessible to anyone, which can include security video feeds and satellite imagery. The community trades tips on where to find information and how to analyze it for identifiable markers like geolocation tags and serial numbers. After using this data to trace anything from military activity to arms flows, researchers publish their findings on social media platforms like Discord, Twitter, and Facebook.
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-There has been a divide in the community between more professionalized outfits, like the investigative outlet Bellingcat founded in 2014, and hobbyists such as Intel Crab, who often lack formal training. Bellingcat often incorporates the work of amateurs into its own investigations.
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-Peden began dabbling in OSINT research as a 13-year-old, after Russia invaded Crimea and war broke out in eastern Ukraine. He created a Twitter account pretending to live in Donbas in order to network with Ukrainians living in the area, who he spoke to using Google Translate. He said the account had under 200 followers.
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-He immersed himself in the sprawling constellation of conflict hobbyists, who congregate on Discord servers like Project Owl, which has almost [30,000 members](https://discord.com/invite/projectowl). According to interviews conducted by *Rest of World* with four amateur OSINT researchers, many conflict hobbyists like Peden have regular day jobs — from IT to selling jewelry on Etsy — or come from military backgrounds. Together, they trade tips on subjects like flight tracking and shortwave radios from Gaza to Syria to Ukraine.
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-“I just thought it was interesting, and I had time to burn,” said [Calibre Obscura](https://twitter.com/CalibreObscura). Like many of the bigger amateur accounts, he insists on anonymity, preferring to separate his personal life as a 20-something IT professional in the United Kingdom from his outsized internet presence.
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-Obscura started in 2017, when he felt frustrated by the lack of attention war zones like Syria got from mainstream media. Obscura focuses on weapon identification and tracking the flow and origin of arms, mainly in the Middle East. He said that “practically nobody” in his offline life knows about his internet-sleuthing alter ego.
-
-> “There will always be a fog of war, but I think it is the thinnest veil of war we’ve ever had.”
-
-Although the field might seem fragmented among different theaters of war and specialization niches, the several researchers that *Rest of World* spoke to saw themselves as part of a broader community.
-
-“Everybody has their own unique understanding of the world … and they all come together and play an important role in creating this collaborative OSINT environment,” said one of the three researchers behind the [Aurora Intel](https://twitter.com/AuroraIntel) Twitter account, which focuses on the Middle East, and recently began covering Ukraine as well. The researcher, whose account has over 209,000 followers, requested anonymity for this story.
-
-For Aurora Intel, the process of OSINT is often more important than the findings. The account lays out findings in tweet threads breaking down their research and deleting any tweets that they later find to include false information. “Showing the digging and the understanding and the working,” the researcher told *Rest of World*, “is the important bit.”
-
-[El Parece](https://twitter.com/ElParece), who tracks cartel conflict in Mexico, understands that much of the content he accesses could be leaked by law enforcement or other actors with ulterior motives. While this informs his own analysis and what he decides to post, his audience might not bring that same level of nuanced understanding, especially given the sensational nature of the subject matter. “Any time there’s men with guns, people are just drawn to it,” he told *Rest of World*.
-
-O’Connor, the analyst from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said that while Ukraine is not the first social media war, the conflict has allowed OSINT research to explode into the public consciousness. “Ukraine is something that seems to have captured the world’s attention, and it’s probably lent itself to people picking up a Twitter account and trying to join the fray.”
-
-He said that because of the high availability of footage of military movement, OSINT communities played a significant role in publicizing it to general audiences, which was then [filtered](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/18/videos-of-russian-military-on-the-move-spread-on-tiktok) into mainstream outlets. “It’s definitely picked up a lot of reach and attention,” O’Connor said. Some analysts [even believe](https://www.vice.com/en/article/3ab4zy/ukraine-weapons-tracker-russian-arsenal-war-crimes) that OSINT work is being utilized by the Ukrainian military.
-
-He nevertheless worries about the potential impact of these accounts. “In the midst of a very active conflict, there’s also an informational tussle that’s going on online as well,” he said. “For accounts that wield enormous followings, if they post and get it wrong, there’s a good chance that it spreads very quickly.”
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-# American Graffiti | New Beverly Cinema
-
-##### American Graffiti \- (1973)
-
-Just as the decade of the seventies was getting underway, still trying to shake off the yoke of the late sixties, two nostalgia-oriented memory pieces were released in 1971 that proved tremendously popular with movie-going audiences. Peter Bogdanovich’s *The Last Picture Show,* based on the novel by *Hud* writer Larry McMurtry, who based the novel on his youth growing up in the small Texas town of Anarene during the fifties. And Robert Mulligan’s *Summer of ‘42,* written as a screenplay by Herman Raucher and based on his own youth growing up in the forties.
-
-The story of *The Last Picture Show* takes place in 1951 in the postage-stamp-size town of Anarene, Texas, and it follows a few of its citizens. *Sam the Lion* (Ben Johnson), the town patriarch.
-*Lois Farrow* (Ellen Burstyn), the trophy wife of the local oil baron.
-*Ruth Popper* (Cloris Leachman), the lonely wife of the local football coach.
-*Genevieve* (Eileen Brennan), the waitress of the town’s favorite diner.
-But both the book and the film focus on two football-playing high school seniors, *Sonny Crawford* (Timothy Bottoms) and *Duane Jackson* (Jeff Bridges) as they chase, court, and fight over *Jacy Farrow* (Cybill Shepherd), the prettiest girl in Anarene and daughter of the richest man in the county (Burstyn’s Lois is her mother).
-
-A description of the plot wouldn’t amount to much more than a *TV Guide* synopsis of an episode of *Peyton Place.*
-
-*Duane and Jacy go on a double date with Sonny and Charlene Duggs (*Sharon Taggart).
-
-*Sonny starts an affair with the football coach’s wife, Ruth Popper* (Cloris Leachman).
-
-*Duane takes Jacy to Wichita Falls for their ‘big date’.*
-
-*Sonny and Duane spend their night together before Duane ships off to Korea. They see ‘The Last Picture Show’.*
-
-In fact, *Peyton Place* was a jumping-off point for novelist Larry McMurtry to write the book in the first place. Except instead of the ivy-covered walls, manicured green lawns, and huge oak trees of *Peyton Place,* you have the dusty, windy, practically deserted Texas town of Anarene, with its limited people living their limited lives. McMurtry writes the book from a more anthropological perspective than most *how I grew up to write the book-*books. Especially a Texas anthropological perspective. As opposed to Bogdanovich’s film, McMurtry’s novel has a decided lack of compassion when it comes to the citizens of Anarene. It’s almost as if McMurtry is saying, *I grew up with these people, I know them, and I know they’re idiots.*
-
-When Peter’s film was first released it was greeted as an instant classic. Not the least because it *looked* like a classic. A problem with shooting period movies in color is the motion pictures’ most vivid visual component could turn out to be the ugly colors of the costumes. A problem Bogdonovich avoided by shooting the film in widescreen black and white (it’s actually closer to black and grey).
-Peter’s picture was the first studio film in years to be shot in black and white, not for financial reasons, but artistic ones.
-While after Bogdanovich, a few other filmmakers shot feature-films in black and white, but with a few exceptions, Bob Fosse’s *Lenny* and Joan Micklin Silver’s *Hester Street,* it was almost always done to better approximate the genre the film took place in. Mel Brooks shoots *Young Frankenstein* in black and white to invoke the Universal monster movies of the thirties. His buddy Carl Reiner shoots *Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid* in black and white to match up with the forties film noir clips they use. Even Martin Scorsese’s *Raging Bull* uses its black and white photography to invoke New York street classics of the thirties, forties, and fifties, as well as classic boxing pictures like *Body and Soul, The Champ,* and *The Set-Up* (*and* to make it look different from *Rocky*).
-Bogdanovich shoots black and white on *The Last Picture Show* to invoke the period, realism, and loneliness of the story. But on the other hand, it’s shimmery monochromatic grey on black photography and classic George Stevens-like framing suggests, like Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s films do, the trappings of a film genre of another time.
-But in this case, it’s not an obvious genre like horror films or private detective movies.
-The look of *The Last Picture Show* suggests a prestige Hollywood picture of the fifties (*From Here to Eternity, A Place in the Sun, Home from the Hills*). The exact kind of film you can imagine *Sonny & Duane* watching at the town’s lone movie theatre. And due to both Bogdanovich and McMurtry’s old soul quality, the movie actually *feels* like a fifties film.
-Yet the material, while never being explicit, deals with its subject of sexual repression and sexual exploration in an upfront straightforward manner that would have been impossible for a Hollywood movie in the fifties (not a Bergman Swedish film, or an Italian Fellini film, but a Hollywood movie? No fucking way). So while *The Last Picture Show* looked like a classic fifties Hollywood film, it didn’t sound like one. When the characters talk about sex it’s not camouflaged in euphemisms. In an Otto Preminger film of the fifties, when Jeff Bridges takes Cybill Shepherd to a motel in Wichita Falls to have sex for the first time, they wouldn’t have announced what they’re going to do (much to Otto’s chagrin). But while the characters wouldn’t just come out and state that they’re going to fuck, Preminger would imply it, and the adults in the audience would know (he hoped) what Preminger intended without it having to be spelled out.
-
-In the fifties, almost everything involving Cybill Shepherd’s character Jacy would have had to be camouflaged.
-But that was Hollywood filmmaking in the fifties.
-All the best sellers and the big theatrical dramas of the day got the sex drained out of them when they inevitably received their big Hollywood screen adaptation (*From Here to Eternity*).
-So, in its own way, *The Last Picture Show* demonstrated both the freedom of *New Hollywood,* but also the promise of what post-war Hollywood *could* have been all along if only Hollywood hadn’t decided to be so stubbornly immature.
-
-*The Last Picture Show* was the critical smash of the year (even more than the eventual Academy Award winner for best picture that year, *The French Connection*) and it did surprisingly well at the box office. While a lot of films in the seventies drew raves from New York and Los Angeles film critics, when they played outside of big cities, they tended to die in the lone small-town movie theatres that Bogdanovich’s film is named after. But *The Last Picture Show* had a rural appeal that *Mean Streets* didn’t. Garnering eight Academy Award nominations and two wins (Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman for best-supporting actor and actress).
-
-Nevertheless, it wasn’t as popular as the other nostalgia-based remembrance of things past, Robert Mulligan’s *Summer of ‘42.
-**Summer of ‘42* floored seventies audiences in a way the more austere *The Last Picture Show* could never hope to duplicate. The film tells the story of screenwriter Herman Raucher’s summer vacation on Nantucket Island in 1942, just as World War Two was heating up for American soldiers. But the young boys vacationing on the Island *Hermie* (Gary Grimes), *Oscy* (Jerry Houser, one of the most beloved characters of early seventies cinema), and *Benjie* (Oliver Conant) have only one thing on their minds, and it isn’t the war. The boys, whose age is never clarified, look to be 15 or 16. And at least Oscy and Hermie are bound and determined to leave their virginity behind by summer’s end.
-No Hollywood film up to that time had ever dealt so frankly with the efforts of trying to get laid. Soon that would become the basic plot of every youth comedy to come out for the next two decades. But in 1971 audiences weren’t used to teenagers talking so realistically about sex. And the comedy exploits of the kids fumbling attempts to lose their virginity brought the house down in cinemas all over America. Audiences laughed uproariously at the naughty goings-on on-screen. At nine (when I saw the film) I was only able to decipher so much of Oscy’s *trim-hunt,* but the huge laughter from all the adults surrounding me clued me into the naughty-by-nature hijinxs (later when I found my stepfather’s stash of filthy porno magazines, and told him about it, he mentioned that was like the scene in *Summer of ‘42* when Hermie, Oscy, and Benjie made the same find).
-For the first three acts, Mulligan’s film is hysterical (then and now). In fact it’s so damn funny, little did audiences suspect the gut-punch waiting for them in the films powerful fourth act.
-While on the island, Hermie becomes infatuated with the young bride of a soldier who has gone off to war named *Dorothy* (radiant Jennifer O’Neill). Dorothy lives in the house she rented with her husband before he shipped out. Like the boys, we never learn exactly what Dorothy’s age is (I’d estimate somewhere between 24-26). But one of the reasons we never learn her age, is because in real life Raucher never learned Dorothy’s real age, later stating she could have even been as young as twenty. Hermie introduces himself to the young (older) woman and a pleasant friendship develops between them. As he makes himself available to lug groceries from the local grocer to her house. And even stops by to assist her in chores that need doing. All the while harboring a fantasy that it will be Dorothy, not the other appropriate aged island pinheads, that will be his first sexual experience.
-This far-fetched fantasy comes to pass, but in a far different context than the boy could have ever imagined. I‘m being cryptic because I want you to see the movie if you haven’t already. The slow dance that Hermie and Dorothy share at the climax of the film is quite simply one of the most devastating sequences I’ve ever witnessed (apparently Kubrick felt the same). In 1971, while the comedy connected with me, the tragedy flew right over my head. I didn’t understand why grown-ups around me were crying. I saw *Summer of ‘42* twice at the theatres when it came out (and later I saw the sequel *Class of ‘44* when it was released). But it wouldn’t be until thirty-five years later, when I screened a 35mm film print I bought, that I would understand the meaning of the films ending. I cry easily in movies. But rarely have I wept like I wept while Hermie and Dorothy slow danced to Michel Legrand’s incredibly beautiful theme music.
-*Summer of ‘42* is quite simply one of the most powerful film experiences I’ve ever witnessed. And that’s with full acknowledgment that Gary Grimes as our young lead is really only *okay* in the role (he’s a far stronger a presence in the sequel *Class of ‘44).* Jennifer O’Neill was so luminous in her role as Hermie’s object of affection, that she parlayed her success in that film to a leading lady career in Hollywood movies that would last till the end of the decade.
-And Jerry Houser’s Oscy *should* have made him – if not a movie star – then at least a popular comedic character actor for the next twenty years. The thing that stands out about Raucher’s screenplay is how achingly truthful it is. You can believe – more or less – that events played themselves out just the way Raucher claimed they did. He didn’t even change the names, Hermie is Herman, Oscy is his best friend Oscar. He kept so much of the story the way it happened, that thirty years later when the film came out and was a hit, the real-life Dorothy saw the film and recognized Raucher’s remembrance. Hermie never saw Dorothy again after she left Nantucket Island. But in 1971 he received a letter from her. In a 2002 interview he said; “*I recognized her handwriting. But we’re talking about 1971, which was almost 30 years after the incident, and I get this letter, and the postmark was Canton, Ohio, and she had remarried. And, interestingly enough, she was worried about what she had done to me and my psyche. And her last sentence was: ‘The ghosts of that night 30 years ago are better left undisturbed.’ She didn’t want to tell me who she was. (But) she was a grandmother. She had remarried. I hope she’s still out there. I’ve never heard from her again.”*
-
-Raucher’s screenplay, *initially,* wasn’t meant to focus so much on the story of Dorothy and Hermie, but instead be a tribute to his best friend Oscy Seltzer – who was killed in action in North Korea in 1952. But the writer in Raucher realized the incident with Dorothy was the real ending of his movie. Because the film was a hit, Raucher was able to write a sequel, *Class of ‘44,* that sees the two young men enter college, and eventually sends Oscy in uniform off to his doom overseas. *Class of ‘44* is pretty terrific, even though it can’t really compete with the first movie’s devastating climax, or its initial sexual humor. In fact, the weirdest thing about the sequel is it doesn’t really end, it just suddenly *stops.
-*But where the film scores is in the more mature rendering of Hermie and Oscy (Benjie’s disposed of almost immediately). Grimes’ performance in the first film may have been standard-issue, but between *Summer of ‘42* and *Class of ‘44,* Grimes had starred in a few movies, including a very good seventies western *The Culpepper Cattle Co.,* and even in movies alongside John Wayne and Lee Marvin*.* So by the time Grimes encores his signature role, it’s a much more mature and confident actor at the helm. And as good as Houser was in the first film, he’s even better in the second one. Herman Raucher’s desire to honor his childhood best friend is beautifully realized in the film’s dramatic climax. Which just consists of Oscy in uniform, ready to ship out overseas in the morning. And the two buddies spend one last night together getting drunk. The devotion that Raucher feels for his long lost friend (Oscy died a hero) makes this sequence one of cinema’s greatest statements on male love. When a drunken Oscy falls out of the passenger seat of a parked car, crumpled on the asphalt, laughing at himself, you realize that this is probably Raucher’s last vivid memory of his old chum.
-
-Heartbreaking.
-
-God knows how many movies have been made that followed the template of boys in various eras trying to get laid. And almost all of them followed the Hermie (the sensitive boy) and Oscy (the more raunchy sexually wised one) dynamic. Even when Garry Marshall’s TV series *Happy Days* first came on the air (before Fonzie took over), it copied the *Summer of ‘42* dynamic, with Ron Howard’s Richie filling the Hermie role, and Anson Williams’ Potsie channeling Oscy (I’m sure Williams was cast due to his slight resemblance to Houser). One of the most successful Israeli movies ever made was Boaz Davidson’s *Lemon Popsicle.* Which basically told the same story of the three boys (the exact same types as *Summer of ‘42*) trying to get laid, only the Israeli film took place in the early sixties, and it didn’t have a Dorothy character. But the film was so successful that there really isn’t any Israeli that hasn’t seen it. So I’m showing my Israeli fiancée my groovy 35mm print of *Summer of ‘42.* And about halfway through I remember the similarities between *Lemon Popsicle* and *Summer of ‘42.
-*So I bring it up to her as she’s watching. And my fiancée (now my wife) said; “*Really? You know, I was just thinking, this is sorta like Lemon Popsicle if Lemon Popsicle was a real movie.”*
-
-But it was three years later when George Lucas would make the nostalgia piece that was to define the seventies, *American Graffiti.* The film deals with a group of teenagers on the last night of summer in 1962. Even though it was the sleeper success of *American Graffiti* that kicked off the whole wave of fifties nostalgia that threatened to overwhelm the entire decade, Lucas’ film was set in ‘62. Even though on the outside the early sixties just looked like *The Fifties Part 2,* underneath changes were brewing. The big cities had all moved on. But small towns, like the one in *American Graffiti,* we’re able to exist in a bubble – at least until Kennedy was assassinated.
-While the movie has a great cast of girls, director Lucas makes it abundantly clear, when it comes to narrative, he’s only following the boys (Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Charles Martin Smith, and Paul Le Mat). Best buddies *Curt* (Dreyfuss) and *Steve* (Howard) are leaving their small hometown of Modesto California in the morning to fly to college back east. So the college that Curt and Steve are supposed to fly off to represents more than just a normal rite of passage for the two young men. The college represents the growing consciousness of the sixties that exists beyond the Brigadoon-ish town they’re escaping.
-But Curt (who is Lucas’ stand-in, he wants to be a writer, and when he grows up he will write *American Graffiti*) is ambivalent about getting on the plane in the morning.
-He’s starting to think he might not go.
-Of all the characters Curt is clearly the most intellectual, so then why is he hesitating going off to college? Usually the budding writer in these types of stories can’t leave their hometown fast enough. But Curt’s ambivalence suggests he’s a deeper sort than just a cocksure kid full of piss and gage who can’t wait to jump ship on his old hometown. Curt’s not really questioning going to college. He’s questioning the idea of leaving all the people he’s ever known. But even more than the humans he leaves behind, Curt’s questioning leaving the rituals of community that the young people of Modesto partake in.
-Hanging out at Mel’s – the curb service diner that is the starting point of every youth in town’s weekend night. Mel’s where the burgers are juicy, the shakes are thick, the neon is pink and green, the music is rock and roll, and the fancy faced waitresses in colorful uniforms wiz back and forth on roller skates, balancing trays of burgers, fries, and milkshakes. Hanging out at high school dances, that even though he’s graduated, he could probably get away with for another year without looking creepy.
-
-What sets Dreyfuss’ Curt apart from his peers and the rest of the cast, is he’s the only one who realizes how temporary these rituals are. Curt knows if he gets on that airplane tomorrow morning – everything that the film so nostalgically celebrates – he can kiss all that goodbye. The town and the life he leaves, won’t be the town and the life he returns to. *If* he even does return, which in all likelihood, he won’t. Curt seems to *know* once he leaves he’s not coming back. Curt knows the boy who exists today will no longer exist even two years from now. That’s why he’s contemplating staying too long at the party. But Lucas balances Curt’s resistance with the cautionary example of *Big John Milner* (Paul Le Mat). Milner *is* the guy who stayed too long at the sock hop. Milner acts and lives as if it’s 1958. He’s a few years older than the other boys. Big John chooses to hang out with kids who were probably freshmen in high school when he was the big shot senior, instead of contemporaries from his old class. He continues to cruise the boulevard on cruise night and try and pick up high school girls. He continues to live off the reputation he created for himself in high school (the fastest drag racer in town). And Lucas gives him a dandy of a dilemma. A new guy in town, Harrison Ford’s *Bob Falfa,* who’s gunning to dethrone the king and take away the only thing Big John has left…his reputation.
-This is a neat twist on the high school football star who always planned on going pro but didn’t have the talent to go all the way, and lives in the glow of former gridiron glory.
-
-In the sequel, *More American Graffiti,* we learn Big John Milner does move on to be a professional drag racer. His storyline in the sequel follows his attempt to secure sponsorship for his racing team and his attempt to romance a beautiful Norwegian girl who speaks practically no English, who he just met. The romance is light, yet meaningful since we in the audience know that Milner will die later that day. Maybe Big John will never experience life, but at least he can experience love.
-
-As Bob Dylan sang, *‘The Times are a Changing’,* but in the first movie Milner rejects even the small changes that have occurred in Modesto so far. When Mackenzie Phillips’ *Carol* asks him; “*Don’t you think The Beach Boys are boss?”
-*Big John proclaims; *“I hate all that surfin’ shit. Rock and roll ain’t been worth a shit since Buddy Holly died.”*
-
-*American Graffiti* made George Lucas a directorial superstar and for good reason. Like a lot of great nostalgia pieces (*Meet Me in St. Louis, Summer of ‘42, Cooley High, New York New York, Dazed and Confused)* it seems to get better the further it gets from its original release date. With *The Last Picture Show* Bogdanovich and *Ben Hur* cinematographer Robert Surtees’ (father of *‘King of Darkness’* Bruce Surtees) silky black and white photography had the effect of draining every modern aspect out of the movie. And in *Summer of ‘42,* the cinematographer *(again, Robert Surtees, in the same fucking year!)* doesn’t just do a great approximation of fifties Technicolor (like Gordon Willis will later do in *September 30, 1955*), he *actually* shoots it in Technicolor (if you haven’t seen *Summer of ‘42* projected in an *I.B. Technicolor 35mm film print,* you haven’t seen *Summer of ‘42*).
-But George Lucas goes the other way when it comes to capturing his memories on film. Lucas invokes the candy-colored pop ephemera of the fifties in *his* visual scheme. The green hues of the fluorescent bulbs that light the liquor stores, hamburger stands, and pinball arcades that the characters loiter around. The bright colors of the jukeboxes, diner neon signs, and the candy apple red and canary yellow of the hot rods that cruise up and down the main drag. Lucas poignantly parades all this in front of us with the added knowledge that all this glorious chrome and paint and pomade is about to go out of style and be replaced by space-age sixties chic.
-
-George fills *Graffiti* with one clever stroke after another. One of the strokes that helped make the movie tremendously popular was the wall-to-wall fifties rock and roll soundtrack that can be heard in the film from beginning to end. Usually emanating from various car radios. Including – in this radio soundscape – the voice of all-night dis- jockey Wolfman Jack, who acts as the film’s de facto narrator. Lucas didn’t invent the radio soundscape. Bogdanovich used it and used it vividly in his first two movies (*Targets* and *The Last Picture Show*), as well as in his new picture that year of ‘73, *Paper Moon.
-*Writer/director Floyd Mutrux would also make the radio soundscape his own in all of his pictures (*Dusty and Sweets McGee, Aloha Bobby and Rose, American Hot Wax,* and *The Hollywood Knights*). And also the same year as *American Graffiti,* Martin Scorsese will create a jukebox soundscape emanating from the Little Italy cocktail lounges and pool halls in *Mean Streets.* But the reason every new movie featuring young people from 1974 to the present features a wall-to-wall soundtrack of pop tunes (not to mention a soundtrack album collection of hits) is due to the influence of *American Graffiti.
-*But even more important to the success of the movie than all that boss radio was the fact that the whole movie takes place during the course of one night. And the film concludes when the sun comes up, Milner races Falfa, Curt finally talks to the blonde in the white T-Bird (Suzanne Somers), and then finally, boards the airplane (minus Ron Howard’s Steve) that will whisk him away from Modesto forever.
-Personally, I think Curt always knew he was going to get on that airplane. He just wanted it to be *his* idea and not some pre-ordained destiny. His wandering around all over town all night was just Curt’s way of saying goodbye.
-
-Many other films would come along that tried to duplicate *American Graffiti’s* one-night structure, telling a story with a gang of characters, and then cross-cutting back and forth between them all picture long. But in other films, the different pockets of characters were usually given proper storylines. But the different vignettes of the shenanigans the *Graffiti* gang gets into never really rises to the level of *story.* It just poses different questions to the audience about what will or will not happen to the different characters as the night progresses.
-
-Who’s the girl in the white T-Bird?
-
-Will Curt finally meet her?
-
-Will Curt leave in the morning?
-
-Will Steve and Laurie (Cindy Williams, who may give the strongest characterization in the whole film) break up?
-
-Will Big John beat Bob Falfa?
-
-Will The Toad get lucky?
-
-At the end of the night, what will Candy Clark’s Debbie do? (Debbie really deserved a closing crawl wrap-up, but the sequel *More American Graffiti* provided Debbie with a ‘67 Haight-Ashbury future).
-All these vignettes play great, and the film seamlessly cross-cuts between all of them. However, the one that’s the least convincing is Curt’s encounter with the street gang The Pharaohs*.
-*It’s the only part of the movie where you feel that the screenplay is going out of its way to create hijinxs for the character. Even the comic vignette of The Toad trying to buy alcohol outside a liquor store seems organic to both the movie and Toad’s rite of passage.
-But the whole gag where the cop car loses its wheels, today, seems contrived (it doesn’t help that a dozen other movies have copied it verbatim). Now if George Lucas is reading this, I’m sure his response would be; “*Sorry, Quentin, if you didn’t care for that gag, but more than any other thing you’ve mentioned, that gag was the reason we were ultimately able to sell the movie and was an audience highlight.”*
-
-Fair enough.
-
-In 1973 the audience needed *that* big laugh at *that* moment in the picture. And the TV spot that sold the picture to audiences *really* needed it. That gag isn’t my problem with The Pharaohs section. My problem is the outrageous miscasting of Bo Hopkins as Pharaohs gang leader *Joe.
-*No don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge Bo Hopkins fan. And I don’t just mean in Peckinpah films. I love him in *White Lightning* (for my money the best country-fried co-star Burt Reynolds ever had), *The Nickel Ride, Posse, A Small Town in Texas,* and *Tentacles.* And during a brief moment in the seventies, when it looked as if Hopkins might pull off a transition from interesting young character actor to interesting young leading man (it was mentioned by some he possessed ‘*a McQueen quality’)*, I was rooting for him and was disappointed when he drifted back into supporting character roles once again (In one of his arcane pop culture references, Dennis Miller once referred to him as, ‘*The Poor man’s Jerry Reed!”).* But in *American Graffiti* the entertaining performer is the one blatantly false note in the picture. The reason Hopkins seems so out of place (aside from the fact he looks like he’s thirty-five) is it’s pretty fucking obvious Joe was written to be Latino. The rest of the gang are Latino (or look Latino at least). What’s cool about The Pharaohs sub-plot, is after watching all these Northern California white boys drive up and down the street in cars their parents (probably) helped them buy, The Pharaohs represent (in what I think is a Hollywood studio movie first) Low Ryder culture.
-The film’s whole cast spends most of their time cruising in cars. And it’s almost cute how squeaky clean they are (their form of juvenile delinquency involves water balloons and cans of shaving cream).
-But as soon as we get in the car with The Pharaohs, out comes the reefer and the forties of malt liquor, and they start riffing and talking shit like it’s *Boulevard Nights.
-*But what the fuck is thirty-five-year-old, blonde hillbilly Bo Hopkins doing in that car?
-Jesus Christ, he looks more out of place than Richard Dreyfuss does.
-I suspect George Lucas was persuaded to make the leader of the gang white so as not to have the only featured minority in the cast be a hood. But the scene when Dreyfuss’ Curt is in the back seat of The Pharaohs car has a definite racial element to it. It’s not just that The Pharaohs are from the wrong side of the tracks (the town seems too small to have different tracks or two competing High Schools). When Curt is trapped in the backseat of their car it’s obvious he doesn’t belong there. And not just because he’s not a street gang type or a tough guy, it’s because he’s white. What saves the scene is Dreyfuss’ bemused reaction to being kidnapped.
-
- *Well, if nobody is telling me that I’m being kidnapped, I don’t really know for sure if I am being kidnapped.*
- *Well…rather than know for sure, let’s just pretend I’m hanging out with these guys because I want to.*
-
-However just because I think Bo Hopkins doesn’t work in *American Graffiti,* I don’t really blame him, it’s Lucas and casting director Fred Roos’ fault for making such a disastrous casting decision (I’d love to know who the second or third choice was? Sylvester Stallone? Henry Winkler? How about Pepe Serna? Or Rudy Ramos? No, hilllbilly Bo Hopkins was absolutely the perfect choice). But I’m happy to report – as a lifelong Bo Hopkins fan – that Hopkins’ character shows up in the sequel during The Toad’s Vietnam sequence. And in *that* setting, Hopkins redeems the miscasting of the first film.
-
-#### Trailer
-
-
-
-
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-Tag: ["🚔", "🤵🏻", "Racism", "🇺🇸"]
-Date: 2022-05-22
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-05-22
-Link: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/american-racism-and-the-buffalo-massacre
-location:
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-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-05-22]]
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-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-AmericanRacismandtheBuffaloShootingNSave
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-
-
-# American Racism and the Buffalo Shooting
-
-On Saturday, in the parking lot of a neighborhood grocery store, an eighteen-year-old armed with a semi-automatic assault rifle, the N-word emblazoned on its front sight, began shooting. Shots cracked in the air, piercing through an unusually warm eighty-degree spring afternoon in Buffalo, New York. The teen-ager, who was later identified by the police, donned military-esque camouflage, was draped in body armor, and wore a camera to capture his bloody rampage. When the shooting stopped, thirteen people had been hit, ten of them killed. Eleven of those shot were Black. The gunman was captured by the police when he left the grocery store, and, by late Saturday night, he was arraigned on charges of first-degree murder.
-
-The shooter is alleged to have posted a hundred-and-eighty-page “manifesto” avowing white-supremacist beliefs. In the hate-filled text, he denounced immigrants and Black people as “replacers” of white people. [The notion that white people are being replaced](https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/making-sense-of-the-racist-mass-shooting-in-buffalo) has recently moved from the fringe of far-right politics to mainstream Republican Party politics. The Fox News personality Tucker Carlson has helped to popularize the ideology, and it has dovetailed seamlessly with the rhetoric of the Republican Party, which has insisted on describing the arrival of migrants at the southern border—seeking entry into the U.S. as asylum seekers—as an “invasion.”
-
-The shooter rationalized his vicious attack by trying to fit it into this grand, esoteric conspiracy of white replacement through immigration. His manifesto, by contrast, is filled with crudely racist memes about Black Americans. In fact, for all his denunciation of “replacers” in the manifesto, an archive of his posts on the messaging platform Discord, from the past six months, barely mentions immigrants. Instead, he writes prolifically and disparagingly about Black people, whom he incessantly describes with racial slurs. In a search of archived posts beginning in 2021, the word “immigrant” appears twelve times, “replacement” eighteen times, “replacer” twenty-two times, but “blacks” and the N-word each appear a hundred times.
-
-The manifesto seems intended to confer a sense of intellectual sophistication on his savage act. But the shooter’s Discord posts are full of sophomoric, even banal stereotypes about Black people—as genetically inferior, as predisposed to crime. The shooter claims inspiration from the white supremacist who murdered fifty-one worshippers at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. The Christchurch shooter also recorded his massacre and left a manifesto. But, for all of the Buffalo shooter’s professed inspiration from [the Christchurch massacre](https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-new-zealand-shooting-and-the-great-man-theory-of-misery), his actions seem to flow primarily from homegrown resentments. He searched by Zip Code for the largest Black population close to where he lived, in order to “kill as many blacks as possible.” His research led him to a grocery store, on the city’s East Side, along the Jefferson Avenue commercial corridor, running through the heart of Black Buffalo.
-
-Once startling and noteworthy, mass shootings have melded into the background of life in the U.S. Since January, there have been almost two hundred shootings involving at least four victims shot or killed, according to the Gun Violence Archive. A recent report published by the C.D.C. showed that, from [2019 to 2020](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7119e1.htm?s_cid=mm7119e1_w), the over-all homicide rate involving a firearm rose by nearly thirty-five per cent. The Buffalo massacre stands out not only because of the number of people killed but because of the political nature of the assault. This must be viewed within the context of the growing normalization of racism and political violence in the U.S. If [Dylann Roof](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/06/inside-the-trial-of-dylann-roof), the white racist who killed nine Black parishioners at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June of 2015, helped to inaugurate the racial grievance at the core of [the Trump Presidency](https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-bitter-fruits-of-trumps-white-power-presidency), then the Buffalo shooter’s killing spree may be emblematic of its still rippling effects. Roof, whom the Buffalo shooter acknowledges in his manifesto as a “freedom fighter,” also penned a manifesto full of deranged ideas, linking Black crime with the decline of white life in the U.S.
-
-In his manifesto, the Buffalo shooter writes, “Blacks are the most privileged race in the US and many western countries. But yet they say they are the most oppressed. What other race is given trillions of dollars of White taxpayer money to succeed, but yet fails and asks for more? What other race actively destroys their communities like they do?” The comments do not sound very different from those [made by former President Trump](https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/donald-trump-elijah-cummings-and-the-definition-of-a-rodent), who tweeted in the summer of 2019, of the late African American congressman Elijah Cummings’s majority-Black Baltimore district, “Why is so much money sent to the Elijah Cummings district when it is considered the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States. No human being would want to live there. Where is all this money going? How much is stolen?” and “Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”
-
-Trump coddled avowed white supremacists during his Presidency, and his open stoking of racial animus unshackled the Republican Party from norms long held in mainstream politics. One day prior to Roof’s mass murder, Trump announced his candidacy for President in New York City and called Mexican immigrants “rapists.” When white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017, screaming “Jews will not replace us,” [Trump claimed](https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson-sorkin/donald-trump-from-his-tower-rages-at-the-other-side-in-charlottesville) that some of the demagogues were “very fine people.” Before the Christchurch shooter carried out his massacre, in 2019, he hailed Trump as a “symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” The President called the attack “horrible” but downplayed the threat of white nationalism in the same breath. Throughout 2020, as historic protests against racism unfolded, and an election loomed, the Republican Party continued to court its right-wing fringe. Seventeen-year-old [Kyle Rittenhouse](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/05/kyle-rittenhouse-american-vigilante) menaced a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin; armed with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle, killed two unarmed men; and overnight became a celebrity within the Republican Party. Trump defended Rittenhouse; Wisconsin’s Republican senator, Ron Johnson, also refused to condemn him. Rittenhouse was eventually acquitted of first-degree-homicide charges, last November, and remains a hero on the right. During [the assault on the Capitol](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/25/among-the-insurrectionists), on January 6, 2021, extremists and the mainstream Republican Party came together in an act of violence intended to overturn the results of the election. This marked a dangerous turning point in U.S. politics, when it became clear that, for the right, anything was on the table when it came to preserving political power.
-
-As the protests of 2020 receded into the background, Republicans went on the offensive. One of Trump’s last initiatives in office was the formation of the 1776 Commission, undertaken as a rebuke to the New York *Times’* 1619 Project. “The crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison, that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country,” he said. This has since evolved into a generalized strategy, intended to shift the conversation away from systemic racism, voting rights, and police reform, and toward a fight over critical race theory. As the culture warrior Christopher Rufo, of the Manhattan Institute, [put it](https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory):
-
-> We’ve needed new language for these issues. . . . “Political correctness” is a dated term and, more importantly, doesn’t apply anymore. . . . It’s much more invasive than mere “correctness,” which is a mechanism of social control, but not the heart of what’s happening. The other frames are wrong, too: “cancel culture” is a vacuous term and doesn’t translate into a political program; “woke” is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. “Critical race theory” is the perfect villain.
-
-
-
-
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-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
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-
-Tag: ["🤵🏻", "🇺🇸", "🇵🇭", "🎓"]
-Date: 2022-10-09
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-10-09
-Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/02/teacher-shortage-bullhead-city-arizona/
-location:
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-
-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-AnAmericaneducationNSave
-
-
-
-# An American education
-
-## Amid a historic U.S. teacher shortage, a ‘Most Outstanding Teacher’ from the Philippines tries to help save a struggling school in rural Arizona
-
-Rose Jean Obreque assists a student during class at Fox Creek Junior High School in Bullhead City, Ariz., on Sept. 13. Obreque is one of several teachers who relocated to Bullhead City from the Philippines to help with a teacher shortage in the school district. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
-
-BULLHEAD CITY, Ariz. — Carolyn Stewart had spent the past five months trying to find teachers for the Bullhead City School District, and now she walked into the Las Vegas airport holding up a sign with the name of her latest hire. The 75-year-old superintendent wandered through the international baggage claim, calling out a name she had just learned to pronounce. “Ms. Obreque?” she said. “Teacher Rose Jean Obreque?”
-
-She saw a woman smiling and moving toward her with a large suitcase.
-
-“Are you our new teacher?” Stewart asked, but the woman shook her head and walked by.
-
-Stewart raised the sign above her head and took out her phone to check in with her office 100 miles south in Bullhead City, Ariz. The 2,300 students in her district had been back in school for several weeks, but she was still missing almost 30 percent of her classroom staff. Each day involved a high-wire act of emergency substitutes and reconfigured classrooms as the fallout continued to arrive in her email. Another teacher had just written to give her two-week notice, citing “chronic exhaustion.” A new statewide report had found that elementary and junior high test scores in math had dropped by as much as 11 percentage points since the beginning of the pandemic. The principal of her junior high had sent a message with the subject line “venting.”
-
-“The first two weeks have been the hardest thing I’ve ever faced,” he wrote. “My teachers are burnt out already. They come to me for answers and I really have none. We are, as my dad used to say, four flat tires from bankruptcy, except in this case we are one teacher away from not being able to operate the school.”
-
-Stewart had been working in some of the country’s most challenging public schools for 52 years, but only in recent months had she begun to worry that the entire system of American education was at risk of failing. The United States had lost 370,000 teachers since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Maine had started recruiting summer camp counselors into classrooms, Florida was relying on military veterans with no prior teaching experience, and Arizona had dropped its college-degree requirement, but Stewart was still struggling to find people willing to teach in a high-poverty district for a starting salary of $38,500 a year.
-
-She’d sent recruiters to hiring fairs across the state, but they had come back without a single lead. She’d advertised on college campuses and at job fairs across the country and eventually come up with a half-dozen qualified applicants for 42 openings. “Basically, we need bodies at this point,” she’d told her school board, and they’d agreed to hire 20 foreign teachers with master’s degrees to move from the Philippines to the desert of rural Arizona.
-
-“Excuse me, Dr. Stewart?” She turned around to see a young woman who at first glance Stewart mistook for one of her students. She was less than 5 feet tall, wearing a backpack, hauling two large suitcases and pointing at Stewart’s sign. “That’s me,” she said.
-
-“Ms. Obreque!” Stewart said, pulling her into a hug. “Your suitcases are bigger than you. Let me help.”
-
-“Thank you, ma’am, but I can handle it. I am very determined.”
-
-Obreque, 31, grabbed her bags, and together they walked across the terminal to meet a few other Filipino teachers who had arrived in Las Vegas earlier that afternoon.
-
-“How was your trip?” Stewart asked, and Obreque explained that she had left home four days earlier, traveled six hours to Manila, waited out a delay with her visa paperwork and then flown another 14 hours to the United States. She held up her phone and took pictures of the airport concourse, the escalators, the fast-food restaurants and a sign that said, “Welcome to Las Vegas.”
-
-“My first international trip, and it is to my dream country,” she said.
-
-“You must be so exhausted,” Stewart said.
-
-“And excited,” Obreque said. “I am very eager to be in the classroom.”
-
-Eleven different teachers had already substituted in what would soon be Obreque’s eighth-grade English classroom at Fox Creek Junior High, including the principal, the vice principal, the band director, a softball coach, a school board member and then finally Stewart, who’d volunteered one day when another substitute was called away to a different class.
-
-Despite the fact that “superintendent” was imprinted on her name tag, some of the students had tested her, folding their handouts into paper airplanes and talking during her lectures. It had taken all five decades of her experience to harness control of the room and successfully complete her lesson, and by the end of the day she was so exhausted that she’d sat through 45 minutes of muscle cramps in the teachers’ lounge before she felt well enough to walk back out to her car.
-
-“We’re very grateful to have you here,” she told Obreque.
-
-“Thank you for the opportunity to teach in America,” Obreque said. “It will be the pinnacle of my career.”
-
-\*\*\*
-
-She left the airport in a car with three other Filipino teachers and pressed her phone against the window to photograph the casino hotels, the downtown high-rises, the glistening pools of the suburbs and the neat rows of palm trees on the outskirts of town. Civilization began to give way to red dirt and jagged rock formations. The car’s thermometer showed an outside temperature of 114 degrees. Obreque put away her phone and watched heat waves rise off the desert.
-
-“I imagined it would be greener,” she said.
-
-“This isn’t like America in the movies,” said Anne Cuevas, a Filipina who’d already been teaching in Bullhead City for four years and had traveled to greet the new teachers in Las Vegas.
-
-Cuevas had been hired before the pandemic as one of the first foreign teachers in Bullhead City, when the school district began to recognize signs of an impending teacher shortage. The Philippines and the United States have similar school calendars, curriculums and grading systems, which is why U.S. schools have hired more than 1,000 Filipino teachers in the past few years. Most Filipino teachers have master’s degrees or doctorates. In the Philippines, teaching is considered a highly competitive profession, with an average of 14 applicants for each open position, and teachers are constantly evaluated and ranked against their peers.
-
-“What were your ratings?” Cuevas asked her passengers, all of whom had arrived in the United States for the first time earlier that afternoon.
-
-“I was rated Outstanding Teacher — top five in my school,” said Vanessa Bravo, a seventh-grade math teacher who’d left behind her husband and three sons, ages 15, 12 and 10.
-
-“Outstanding Teacher as well,” said Sheena Feliciano, whose father drove a bicycle taxi in Manila.
-
-They looked at Obreque and waited for her answer. “It’s okay if you’re too embarrassed to tell us,” Cuevas teased.
-
-“Most Outstanding Teacher,” Obreque said. “Last year, I ranked first of 42 teachers at my school.”
-
-It was something she had worked to achieve for almost a decade, ever since she had earned a master’s degree in education and couldn’t find a teaching job anywhere. She’d worked the night shift at a call center, improving her English as she offered technical support for an American company based 7,000 miles away, until finally her 17th teaching application led to a job at a school in the farmland outside of La Carlota City for the equivalent U.S. salary of $5,000 per year.
-
-Her seventh-grade students there were the children of fishermen and sugar cane farmers. They arrived for school early, even if they had to walk more than a mile to get there. They called her “ma’am.” They brought her homemade lunches. They wrote thank-you notes at the end of each week. They aspired to become engineers or doctors or teachers like her, and they volunteered to stay after school for extra lessons rather than returning home to work in the sugar cane fields. Obreque started an after-school program for struggling readers. She led the school’s innovations club to a regional first-place finish. She recorded daily video lessons during the pandemic and hiked to remote villages to make home visits, until her ambition landed her at the top of the teacher rankings and she began to hear from recruitment agencies around the world.
-
-“Teach the World’s Best in America!” read the brochure from one international teaching agency. Obreque had talked it over with her husband and agreed that the possibility of a $30,000 raise was worth the hardship of living apart. She’d interviewed over Zoom with schools in New Mexico and Arizona and then received an offer to teach in Bullhead City under a J-1 visa, which granted her permission to live in the United States for three years. She’d taken out $8,000 in high-interest loans to pay for the agency fees, a plane ticket, two new teaching outfits and the first month’s rent on a two-bedroom apartment she planned to share with five other foreign teachers.
-
-Now the sun set on the Mojave Desert as they drove over a hill and began descending toward Bullhead City, a town of 40,000 across the Colorado River from the casinos of Laughlin, Nev. They drove by riverside trailer parks and run-down taquerias.
-
-“Welcome home,” Cuevas said, as Obreque stared out the window at the scattering of city lights surrounded by blackness.
-
-“It’s smaller than I thought,” she said.
-
-“Everything here is different from what you expect,” Cuevas said.
-
-\*\*\*
-
-She woke up jet-lagged on a mattress on the floor, changed into one of her new outfits and piled into a car with four other foreign teachers at Fox Creek Junior High to say hello to the principal, who was busy staring at the daily class schedule on his computer, trying to solve the puzzle of another day. Lester Eastman was down to one special-education teacher when he was supposed to have three. He was missing a teacher for five of that day’s art classes, five English classes, 10 math, 10 science and five journalism. All of his available teachers would have to cover an additional class during their planning periods. Eastman would spend his day teaching math. The vice principal would babysit art. “Plugging holes on a sinking boat,” Eastman said, as he finished filling in the daily grid, and then he left his office to greet the new teachers.
-
-“What time is it right now in the Philippines?” he asked, as he shook their hands.
-
-“It’s tomorrow, sir,” Obreque said.
-
-“Well, we’re going to give you a little time to adjust before we throw you in front of a class,” he said, and then he thought about what else he wanted to tell them about Fox Creek, and all the ways he could characterize their new school. There was its F letter grade from the state of Arizona, issued shortly before the pandemic. There were the standardized test scores that showed fewer than 20 percent of students were proficient in either English or math, and more than half were performing at least a few years below their grade level. There were the $4.5 billion in statewide education cuts over the past decade, which had left him with a shortened four-day school week and some of the lowest-paid teachers in the country. There was the fact that many of those teachers in the district were now working beyond retirement age and taking on extra classes because they refused to walk away from a student population that so many others had abandoned. There was the school dining room, where every student qualified for free or reduced-price meals. There was the continued fallout of the pandemic, which had decimated their working-class town of casino dealers and hotel service workers, killing almost 1 percent of the population. There was the scene that moved Eastman each morning, when 600 children from those same families managed to show up on time in matching blue Fox Creek shirts to a school he sometimes worried was failing them.
-
-But for at least the next few weeks, Eastman had decided that he wanted his staff to focus on only one aspect of life at Fox Creek: student behavior. After years of remote and hybrid learning, some of the students had come back to school full time in 2021 with little sense of how to act in a classroom. Disruptions had been constant. Suspensions had nearly doubled. Eleven of his 28 teachers had resigned at the end of the previous school year, and now Eastman had instructed what was left of his staff to avoid teaching any new material until they had established control of their classrooms.
-
-“Rules. Procedures. Classroom management,” Eastman said. “These middle-schoolers can be like the dinosaurs in ‘Jurassic Park.’ They test the fence. They push the boundary. It’s in their DNA.”
-
-“Discipline is crucial,” Obreque said. “Consistency is important.”
-
-“Some of these kids will take timid and quiet and just eat it for lunch,” he said. “Once you win their respect, you’ll all do great.”
-
-He showed Obreque to her classroom, where her job for the day was simply to observe. She wrote notes as she watched a PE teacher silence a class with his whistle. Then Cuevas came in to teach the next class, and she called Obreque to the front of the room to introduce herself.
-
-“I’m Ms. Obreque, and I’m honored to be your new teacher,” she said.
-
-“Miss who?” a student asked. “Can you talk louder?”
-
-She nodded and stepped forward. “Ms. Obreque,” she said again, and several students began to talk at once.
-
-“Are you strict?”
-
-“How old are you? You look like you’re in high school.”
-
-“Are you married?”
-
-“How do you say your name again? Miss teacher something?”
-
-“Raise your hands, please,” Obreque said. “We will be living together in this room for the next year. If you respect me, I will respect you. If you love me, I will love you.”
-
-Several of the boys in the room started to laugh and then shout more questions. “One at a time please,” Obreque said, but a chorus of voices overwhelmed hers, until Cuevas clapped her hands. “Guys, enough!” she said. She handed out their vocabulary work, and Obreque watched and took notes until the final bell.
-
-“How’d everything go?” Eastman asked later, when he saw her in the hallway.
-
-“I’m learning a lot, sir,” she said.
-
-He gave her a thumbs-up, went into his office and opened the class grid for the next day. Twenty-six empty squares. Nineteen overworked teachers left to fill in during their only planning period. One of those teachers had diabetes, and she’d gotten a note from her doctor saying she needed more breaks to recuperate. Another had told Eastman he was worried about suffering a heart attack from stress.
-
-“This is a very devoted staff, but we’ve reached a breaking point,” Eastman said, and he hoped that with some supervision and mentorship, the new foreign teachers could begin providing a little relief. He clicked on a blank square for an eighth-grade English class and typed in a name: “Obreque,” he wrote.
-
-\*\*\*
-
-She stepped in front of the class and clasped her hands together to stop them from shaking. “Let’s start with something easy,” she told the students, as the PE teacher sat in the back of the room in case she needed help. She handed out a blank sheet of paper to each student and explained their first task: to fold the paper into a name tag, write their first name in large letters and copy down a few classroom rules. “See? Simple,” she said, as she held up her own paper and demonstrated folding it into thirds. “Any questions?”
-
-A student in the front row raised her hand: “Can I go to the bathroom?” she asked.
-
-“Of course,” Obreque said, and then another student stood from his desk.
-
-“Me too. Bathroom,” he said.
-
-“Next time please raise your hand,” she said. “But yes. Go ahead.”
-
-The students began to fold their papers as Obreque walked around to check on their work. There were 24 students in the room — half the size of her typical class in the Philippines. They had backpacks and proper school supplies. They had a classroom with state-of-the-art technology and air conditioning. “Wonderful work,” she said, as she watched a student draw hearts to create a border around her name tag, and then Obreque circled toward the back row, where a group of boys were huddled in a circle. “Let’s see your progress,” she said. One boy held up a name tag that read “Donut Man,” as the others laughed. Another student had folded his paper into an airplane. Another had dropped his paper on the floor and was stabbing his pencil into the side of his desk.
-
-“Is everything all right?” Obreque asked. “Why aren’t you participating?”
-
-“’Cause my pencil’s broken,” he said, banging it harder against the desk until it snapped. He picked up the two broken pieces and held them out to her as proof. “What do you want me to do?” he asked, smiling at her, and Obreque looked at him for a moment and then decided that his behavior was her fault. Maybe she hadn’t communicated the assignment properly. Maybe, instead of beginning the class by making name tags, she should have started with the rules so they knew how to behave. She walked back to the front of the room. “Eyes up here,” she said, as several of the students continued to talk. “Five, four, three …” she said, as the students shouted over her, until finally the PE teacher blew his whistle. “Hey! Try doing that to me and see what happens,” he said. “Be quiet and listen to your teacher.”
-
-Obreque nodded at him and then continued. “I want this class to be systematic,” she said. “We are not animals. We are not in the jungle. We should be guided by rules, or we will not be successful in our learning, right?”
-
-“Yeah, guys. We’re not animals,” one student said, and then a few boys began to make jungle noises until the PE teacher blew his whistle again.
-
-“If you want to be respected, show me respect,” Obreque said. “Human beings are supposed to be able to follow simple instructions. You come to school to learn, right?”
-
-“Nah, I come because my parents make me,” one student said, turning to smile at his seatmate.
-
-“Yeah, and because somehow you haven’t gotten expelled yet,” his seatmate responded, shoving his friend in the shoulder.
-
-“And ’cause the girls here are fine as hell,” the student said, punching his friend back in the arm.
-
-“Enough!” Obreque shouted, using a voice louder than she’d ever used in seven years of teaching in the Philippines. “What is an example of behaving with dignity and respect? Please, answer and raise your hand.”
-
-A boy in the front row raised an arm that was covered with tic-tac-toe games played out in marker. “Yes,” Obreque said. “Thank you for volunteering.”
-
-“Can I go to the bathroom?” he asked.
-
-She sighed, nodded and scanned the room for another hand. “Who else?” she asked. “Anybody? Remember, cooperation is very important for a class to be successful.”
-
-“Bathroom?” another student asked, but before Obreque could answer she heard the sound of the bell. The students rushed out. The PE teacher put his whistle in his pocket. “Sorry. They can be brutal,” he told her, and he left to teach his next class as Obreque stood alone in the room, still trying to make sense of what had just happened. Sixteen bathroom trips. Seven completed name tags.
-
-“I am capable of doing so much better,” she said, as another class began to arrive. She would start by going over the classroom rules. She would establish control. She would demand their respect instead of asking for it.
-
-“Can I go to the bathroom?” a student asked, a little while later, and Obreque shook her head.
-
-“Not now,” she said. “We are in the middle of working.”
-
-The student slapped his desk and turned to his friend. “This teacher wants me to pee my pants,” he said, and Obreque told him to move to a desk across the classroom.
-
-“Honestly, this is America. We have a right to go to the bathroom,” another student said, and more students called out in agreement until Obreque was straining her vocal cords to shout over them. “I want you to listen!” she said. “We are not in the jungle. We are human beings, right? We cannot proceed with all this disruption.”
-
-“We cannot proceed!” one of the students yelled out, as if declaring victory, and others started to laugh and yell, too. “Please, have some respect!” Obreque said, but only a few students seemed to hear her. “Five, four, three, two, one,” Obreque shouted, but they weren’t quieting down, and there was nothing but more humiliation waiting for her at zero. She decided to try a tactic she’d used a few times in the Philippines, planting herself quietly at the front of the room, modeling silence, looking from one student to the next and waiting for them to recognize their own bad behavior. A boy was chewing on the collar of his shirt. A girl was taping pencils to each of her fingers and then pawing at the boy next to her. Two boys were playing a version of bumper cars with their desks. A girl was pouring water from a cup into another girl’s mouth, and that girl was spitting the water onto the student next to her. “Ugh, miss teacher lady? Can I go wash off this spit water?” the student asked. A boy was standing up and intentionally tripping over his friend’s legs. A girl was starting a game of hangman on the whiteboard. A boy was walking up to the front of the classroom, holding out a piece of paper rolled into the shape of a microphone, and pretending to interview Obreque. “So, what do you think of life at Fox Creek?” he asked.
-
-“I heard the bell ring!” one student shouted, and suddenly a dozen students were scrambling out of their desks.
-
-“Wait for me to dismiss you!” Obreque said, looking up at the clock, because she hadn’t heard anything, and she wasn’t sure if the class was supposed to be over.
-
-“We heard the bell,” another student said, as he opened the door to leave, and before long the students were gone and the classroom was empty. Obreque held her hand up against her sore throat. She wiped the game of hangman off the whiteboard and started to collect several paper airplanes and notes left behind on the floor. “Can you even understand her?” one of the notes read, and she dropped it into the trash and then took out her phone, where there was a message waiting from her husband. “I’m proud of you,” he’d written. “I know you will impress them.”
-
-She wiped her eyes and put the phone back into her purse, and only then did she hear the bell actually begin to ring.
-
-\*\*\*
-
-She wanted to quit. She wanted to leave Bullhead City, travel back across the desert to Las Vegas and fly to La Carlota City, but she was $8,000 in debt and 7,000 miles from the Philippines, and instead the only safe place she could think to go was a few doors down the hall, into Cuevas’s empty classroom at the end of the school day. Three of the other new foreign teachers were already seated around the room, recovering from their days. Obreque dropped her bag on the floor and walked over to join them.
-
-“I don’t know even what to say,” she said.
-
-“One day teaching here is like a month in the Philippines,” another teacher said.
-
-“Five of these students is like 20 back home,” another said.
-
-“I don’t know how to handle them,” Obreque said. “I can’t connect. I can’t teach.” She looked at Cuevas. “I’m sorry if I am a disappointment, ma’am. What could be a bigger failure than crying on my first day?”
-
-“Oh, I did that every day for six months,” she said, and the other teachers looked at her in disbelief, because they knew Cuevas as the model of Americanized self-assurance, with her own YouTube channel to share teaching tips and a new designation as one of Bullhead City School District’s employees of the month. “I was the worst teacher here for a whole year,” she told them. “The students ran all over me. I lost my confidence. I wanted to go home.”
-
-She told them that it had taken her a year to pay off her debts to the international teaching agency, two years to get her Arizona driver’s license and three years to move out of a bedroom she’d shared with other international teachers and into her own apartment. She’d applied for an extension on her J-1 visa to stay in Bullhead City for two extra years as she continued to figure out how to build strong relationships with her students. “You have to prove that you really care about them,” she said, so she’d gone to the dollar store, spent her own money on art supplies and redecorated her classroom into a movie theater on premiere night, with a red carpet and a VIP door and a banner that read: “Every Student Is a Star.” She started attending her students’ sporting events, staying after school for volleyball and basketball games, and watching YouTube videos to learn the rules for American football. She watched every one of the Marvel movies they talked about during class. She called their parents not just with concerns but also to share praise each time a student impressed her. She gradually moved beyond her Filipino instinct for classroom formality and began asking her students about their lives, and they introduced her to a version of America much different from what she’d first expected: abusive families, homelessness, surging drug overdose deaths, conspiratorial ideologies, loneliness, suicide, alcoholism and poverty every bit as bad as anything she’d encountered in the Philippines.
-
-“In a lot of ways, they are broken and hurting,” she said, and because of that she’d come to admire her colleagues for their dedication and appreciate her students for their resilience, their irreverence, their bravado, their candor and, most of all, for their vulnerability. She’d turned herself into one of the most beloved teachers in a school that couldn’t find enough teachers, and yet she would be legally required to return to the Philippines when her visa expired in eight months.
-
-“The students here are difficult, but they need you,” Cuevas told the other teachers now. “Maybe you can do something to motivate them, to give them more hope.”
-
-“I don’t know if I’m going to be able to help them,” Obreque told her.
-
-“There is literally no one else,” Cuevas said.
-
-\*\*\*
-
-The top-ranked teacher from La Carlota City was standing outside her classroom the next morning, ready to teach her students how to learn. “This is how you enter the classroom,” she said, forming them into a line and leading them in. “This is how you throw away your garbage,” she said, as they walked past the trash can and she dropped a piece of paper directly into it. “This is how you sit and listen,” she said, lowering herself into a desk, demonstrating stillness. “This is how you participate,” she said, raising her right hand.
-
-Their lesson for the day was a three-paragraph reading comprehension exercise, the kind of assignment that would have taken Obreque about 20 minutes to complete with her seventh-graders in the Philippines. But at Fox Creek only 19 percent of her eighth-graders were proficient in reading, based on their state assessments, so she planned to take it slowly using a teaching strategy she’d learned in her master’s program, called higher-order thinking skills, which involved asking a series of simple comprehension questions after each sentence of the story to build confidence and encourage class participation. She handed out the assignment, which came from the school’s preplanned curriculum, and read the title of the story out loud: “Life, Liberty, and Ho Chi Minh.”
-
-“Okay, so the title of our reading today is life, liberty and what?” she asked.
-
-“Ho Chi Minh?” a few students said.
-
-“Yes. Very good,” Obreque told them. She asked for someone to read the story aloud, and when no one volunteered, she pointed to a boy in the front row.
-
-“Seriously?” he said, and she nodded at him. “Fine. Whatever,” he said, leaning down to look at the story. “‘By 1941, Ho was known as a …’ Sorry. I don’t know this next word.”
-
-“Fierce,” Obreque said, reading along.
-
-“Okay. Yeah. Fierce. ‘A fierce supporter of Vietnamese independence. Ho …’ ”
-
-“Ho!” another boy called out, laughing.
-
-“Shut up and let me read,” the student said.
-
-“Whoa. Watch your language, bro. This isn’t the jungle, remember?”
-
-“Yeah, then how come I’m about to punch you in the mouth?”
-
-“Enough!” Obreque shouted, but several students continued to laugh and yell and disrupt the reading, until finally another teacher came into the room from his classroom next door. “You think it’s funny that I can hear you through the wall?” he said. “It’s not funny. It’s embarrassing. Do better.” They’d been working for more than half an hour to read seven sentences, and Obreque was beginning to lose her voice. “Please, I can feel that I’m hurting myself to make you listen,” she told them, putting a hand up against her throat, and then she pointed back at the text and asked another student to read a passage about how Ho Chi Minh had drawn inspiration from the U.S. Declaration of Independence.
-
-“Okay,” Obreque said, once the student had finished. “Ho Chi Minh lived all the way across the ocean. Why do you think he would use America as his example?”
-
-The students stared back at her.
-
-“Why America? What is so special about America?”
-
-“Fast cash and fast food,” one student said.
-
-“Okay, yes. Fast food is an export. But what makes this country great?”
-
-She waited for a moment as the students began to talk to each other, write notes, fold airplanes, bounce in their seats, stare off into space and rest their heads on their desks, until finally one girl raised her hand and stood from her seat. “Bathroom?” she asked, and Obreque nodded and turned back to the class.
-
-“America is a beacon of freedom, is it not?” she asked. “You have education. You have independence. You can achieve anything, right?”
-
-She looked around the room and found no raised hands, no answers, nothing at all to quiet her own rising doubt, so she attempted the question again. “Isn’t America supposed to be a model for the world?” she asked.
-
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-
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-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-AnancientlanguagehasdefieddecryptionNSave
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-# An ancient language has defied decryption for 100 years. Can AI crack the code?
-
-Jiaming Luo grew up in mainland China thinking about neglected languages. When he was younger, he wondered why the different languages his mother and father spoke were often lumped together as Chinese “dialects.”
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-When he became a computer science doctoral student at MIT in 2015, his interest collided with his advisor’s long-standing fascination with ancient scripts. After all, what could be more neglected — or, to use Luo’s more academic term, “lower resourced” — than a long-lost language, left to us as enigmatic symbols on scattered fragments? “I think of these languages as mysteries,” Luo told _Rest of World_ over Zoom. “That’s definitely what attracts me to them.”
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-In 2019, Luo made headlines when, working with a team of fellow MIT researchers, he brought his machine-learning expertise to the decipherment of ancient scripts. He and his colleagues [developed an algorithm](http://people.csail.mit.edu/j_luo/assets/publications/NeuroDecipher.pdf) informed by patterns in how languages change over time. They fed their algorithm words in a lost language and in a known related language; its job was to align words from the lost language with their counterparts in the known language. Crucially, the same algorithm could be applied to different language pairs.
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-Luo and his colleagues tested their model on two ancient scripts that had already been deciphered: Ugaritic, which is related to Hebrew, and Linear B, which was first discovered among Bronze Age–era ruins on the Greek island of Crete. It took professional and amateur epigraphists — people who study ancient written matter — nearly six decades of mental wrangling to decode Linear B. Officially, 30-year-old British architect Michael Ventris is primarily credited with its decipherment, although the private efforts of classicist Alice Kober lay the [groundwork](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-riddle-of-the-labyrinth-margalit-fox) for his breakthrough. Sitting night after night at her dining table in Brooklyn, New York, Kober compiled a makeshift database of Linear B symbols, comprising 180,000 paper slips filed in cigarette boxes, and used those to draw important conclusions about the nature of the script. She died in 1950, two years before Ventris cracked the code. Linear B is now recognized as the earliest form of Greek.
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-Luo and his team wanted to see if their machine-learning model could get to the same answer, but faster. The algorithm yielded what was called “remarkable accuracy”: it was able to correctly translate 67.3% of Linear B’s words into their modern-day Greek equivalents. According to Luo, it took between two and three hours to run the algorithm once it had been built, cutting out the days or weeks — or months or years — that it might take to manually test out a theory by translating symbols one by one. The results for Ugaritic showed an improvement on previous attempts at automatic decipherment.
-
-The work raised an intriguing proposition. Could machine learning assist researchers in their quests to crack other, as-yet undeciphered scripts — ones that have so far resisted all attempts at translation? What historical secrets might be unlocked as a result?
-
-* * *
-
-**British India, 1872-1873.** Alexander Cunningham, an English army engineer turned archeological surveyor, clomped about the ruins of a town in Punjab province that locals called Harappa. On the face of it, there wasn’t much to survey: about two decades earlier, engineers working to link the cities of Lahore and Multan had stumbled across the site and used many of the bricks they found — perfectly preserved, fire kilned — as ballast for nearly 100 miles of railway track, blithely unaware they were remnants of one of the world’s oldest civilizations.
-
-
-
-[Tim Dunk for Rest of World](https://timdunk.com/)
-
-Cunningham didn’t know this either — the Indus Valley civilization wouldn’t be formally “discovered” until the 1920s — but he knew the site had _some_ historical value. Burrowing through the ruins, he and his team chanced upon stone implements they surmised were used for scraping wood or leather. They gathered shards of ancient pottery and what appeared to be a clay ladle. The most striking discovery, though, was a tiny stone tablet, roughly 1.5 inch by 1.5 inch. “On it is engraved very deeply a bull, without a hump, looking to the right, with two stars under the neck,” Cunningham [wrote](https://archive.org/details/report01cunngoog) in his report. “Above the bull there is an inscription in six characters, which are quite unknown to me. They are certainly not Indian letters; and as the bull which accompanies them is without a hump, I conclude that the seal is foreign to India.”
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-I have a cheap replica of that first seal, bought years ago from a museum gift shop at one of the Indus Valley sites: the animal on it has a thick neck, a lumpen torso, and a single swooping horn. Some people insist it is a unicorn. The inscription scrawled above it resembles a string of hieroglyphics; one character looks like a fish. In the century and a half since the discovery of the first seal, thousands more have been unearthed: 90% of them along the Indus River in modern-day Pakistan, the remaining in India or as far afield as modern-day Iraq.
-
-We know now that these tablets, described by one excavator as “little masterpieces of controlled realism,” are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent; researchers believe they were probably [used](https://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/RRbS0YxzQQa88y_xkV1ADg) to close documents and mark packages of goods, which is why they are referred to as seals. In part because of how the symbols in the inscriptions jostle each other at one end, almost as if the inscriber had run out of space, researchers have concluded that the inscriptions are meant to be read right to left. But we still don’t know what they actually _say_.
-
-
-
-[The Trustees of the British Museum](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1912-0507-1)
-
-This isn’t from a lack of trying. Scholars often point out that the Indus script, as the collection of some 4,000 excavated inscriptions, comprising between 400 and roughly 700 unique symbols, is known, might be one of the _most_ deciphered scripts in history. More than a hundred attempts have been published since the 1920s. One theory links it to the _Rongorongo_ script of Easter Island, also still undeciphered; another, offered by a German tantric [guru](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egbert_Richter-Ushanas) claiming to have achieved his solution through meditation, links it to the cuneiform script used to write the Sumerian language.
-
-For some groups in South Asia, the quest to decode the Indus script is almost existential. India and Pakistan, increasingly riven by their respective strains of religious nationalism, have markedly different relationships to their shared ancient past. The Pakistani state, deeply wedded to the idea of itself as a Muslim homeland, largely ignores its pre-Islamic heritage; its Indian counterpart, on the other hand, has taken to scouring history to find justification for the claim that India has always been a Hindu nation.
-
-Up until the discovery of Harappa, the earliest Indians were believed to be people who lived between 1500 and 500 B.C. and composed the Vedas, the Sanskrit texts that form the basis of modern-day Hinduism. The discovery of a civilization of people who lived _before_ the Vedic people upended the story of India. Given that it undermines their claims of indigeneity, proponents of Hindutva — the most mainstream strain of Hindu nationalism — balk at the theory of a pre-Vedic civilization, even as evidence for it accumulates across disciplines, including archaeology, genetics, and linguistics.
-
-The smallest of advances in Indus Valley research, therefore, tends to reverberate far beyond the confines of academics. Attempts to prove that the Indus people worshipped Hindu gods and spoke an earlier form of Sanskrit continue unabated. In 2000, one researcher even digitally distorted an image of an Indus seal to make the animal on it look like a horse, which figures prominently in Sanskrit literature.
-
-Politics aside, it is remarkable how little we know about the original people of the Indus Valley, who at one point constituted nearly 10% of the world’s inhabitants. It is especially galling given how much more we know about their contemporaries, such as the people of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations. Part of the reason for this is the continued elusiveness of the Indus script.
-
-* * *
-
-**Putting machines to** work on the Indus script is trickier than using them to reverse-engineer Linear B. We don’t have a great deal of information about the Indus script: most crucially, we don’t know what other language it may be related to. As a result, a model like Luo’s wouldn’t work for the Indus script. That’s not to say technology can’t help, though. In some ways, computer modeling has already played a crucial role: by showing that the Indus script is a language at all.
-
-For most of the 20th century, the Indus inscriptions were widely accepted as representations of an undeciphered language. Then, in 2004, a group of Harvard researchers — cultural neurobiologist and comparative historian Steve Farmer, computational theorist Richard Sproat, and philologist Michael Witzel — published a [paper](https://crossasia-journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/ejvs/article/view/620) essentially rubbishing nearly all existing research on the matter. The Indus seals, they claimed, were nothing more than a collection of religious or political symbols — similar to, say, highway signs — and all attempts to decipher them as a language were a waste of time. To underscore their point, Farmer offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who could find an Indus inscription containing at least 50 symbols.
-
-Most Indologists and other Indus script researchers dismissed these arguments. One group of mathematicians, however, turned to computers to investigate the claims. Ronojoy Adhikari, a professor of statistical physics at the University of Cambridge, was one of them.
-
-Before Cambridge, Adhikari worked at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, in Chennai. In 2009, he attended a talk by Iravatham Mahadevan, an Indian civil servant turned epigraphist. Mahadevan, who died in 2018, had already cracked Tamil-Brahmi, another undeciphered script, then turned his attention to the Indus script.
-
-
-
-[Tim Dunk for Rest of World](https://timdunk.com/)
-
-Adhikari remembers being fascinated. “I’m a person from the sciences; I don’t have a humanities background,” he said. “But what I found very attractive in Mahadevan’s way of looking at the problem was that he had a very quantitative, almost scientific, approach. He was asking, how many times does a particular symbol occur? What does it occur against? What is the context in which it is occurring? And it appeared to me that because it had already been so quantified, it would be easy to translate this into a formal mathematical analysis.”
-
-A few other data scientists in attendance joined forces with Adhikari. They knew they couldn’t decipher the script. “So the question we asked was: Can we at least tell whether it’s conveying any sort of linguistic information?”
-
-Led by computer scientist Rajesh Rao, the researchers [devised a computer program](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1170391) to see if they could answer this question: Was the Indus script a language? “You can give me any sequence of symbols, I don’t care what they are — hieroglyphics, written language, sheet music, computer code — and I will look at them from the point of view of a mathematician,” explained Adhikari. “Meaning, I will simply count how many times one sign occurs next to another.”
-
-> “So the question we asked was: can we at least tell whether it’s conveying any sort of linguistic information?”
-
-Their program drew on the work of Claude E. Shannon, a mid-century American mathematician, engineer, and decoder of wartime codes, who formulated the notion of information entropy — essentially a mathematical measure of disorder. In linguistic systems, symbols occur with somewhat fixed frequencies. “For instance, I just can’t pick up a letter from the alphabet, string it with another letter from the alphabet, and expect to get an English word,” explained Adhikari. In common English, for instance, the letter “q” is nearly always followed by “u.” This semiflexibility is a marker of all linguistic systems. Computer code, on the other hand, is completely rigid: the slightest deviation, and it falls apart.
-
-
-
-[The Trustees of the British Museum](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1947-0416-4)
-
-The researchers fed their program the 4,000 inscriptions that form the entirety of the Indus script. For good measure, they also ran the program on other linguistic samples (English characters and words, Sanskrit, Tamil, Sumer, and Tagalog) and some nonlinguistic scripts (DNA, protein, Beethoven’s Sonata no. 32, and a computer code called Fortran). The program took about 45 minutes.
-
-“I remember the first time that plot was generated,” recalled Adhikari. On the graph, the curves depicting music, protein, and DNA sequences hovered high, close to the maximum level of entropy, indicating a high level of randomness. Lower down, the known languages are all in a tight cluster. Fortran appears further below.
-
-As for the Indus script, it appears with the other languages, just under Sanskrit and mapping almost cleanly onto Tamil. “It felt fantastic. It really felt very good. It’s nice to have a hunch, but to be able to prove it — I remember thinking, Yes, we’ve really got something here.”
-
-
-
-* * *
-
-**There is a** big difference, of course, between showing that a script encodes a language and decoding what it says.
-
-Bahata Ansumali Mukhopadhyay met Adhikari over a decade ago. At the time, she was a disenchanted software developer looking for an escape route. When Adhikari, who had begun exploring deep learning approaches to work on the script, was in the market for an assistant, she eagerly volunteered.
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-Deep learning is the dominant technique in artificial intelligence today. It is primarily a form of pattern recognition: the more data you feed a machine, the better it becomes at interpreting future data. But the large-dataset approach isn’t particularly useful when it comes to low-resource (to use Luo’s term) subjects, such as the Indus script, where data is limited. Mukhopadhyay was quick to realize this.
-
-“I was supposed to be coding,” she said sheepishly. “But, I spent most of my time reading.”
-
-Mukhopadhyay went down one rabbit hole after another. She parsed Mesopotomian, Akkadian, Sumerian, and Old Persian dictionaries. She taught herself how to read Egyptian hieroglyphics. “I realized just how subtle symbolism can be,” she said. “Like the god Horus, his eye was torn into fragments. Each part is imagined as a fraction — and then from there, the ancient Egyptians created their symbols for fractions.”
-
-> “Here you have to understand the historical symbolism used in India. How will artificial intelligence tackle that?”
-
-Even as she helped build software to aid research on the Indus script, her doubts about the approach were building. “See, if the Indus script were an alpha syllabary \[a writing system split into units of consonants and vowels, as in Urdu/Hindi\], then machine learning and artificial intelligence would have been very suitable,” she explained. But because the inscriptions appear to be pictorial in nature, they posed a greater challenge. “Here you have to understand the historical symbolism used in India. How will artificial intelligence tackle that? How would AI know these symbols represent the fragments of Horus’ eye?”
-
-For the past few years, Mukhopadhyay has been independently researching the Indus inscriptions, focusing on individual symbols. This involves coming up with a particular theory and then testing it — something computers aren’t very good at.
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-
-
-[Tim Dunk for Rest of World](https://timdunk.com/)
-
-Mukhopadhyay’s theory, for which she made a case in a peer-reviewed [paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-019-0274-1) in _Nature,_ is that the Indus seals were used for taxation and trade control — a collector might carry one around, for instance, as a sort of license. In a subsequent [paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-021-00868-w), by examining words used for “elephant” — _piri, piru, pilu —_and “ivory” — _pirus —_ in near Eastern languages at the time of the Indus civilization, she has argued that the Indus people spoke an earlier form of Dravidian, the linguistic ancestor of current languages like Telugu, Tamil, and Kannada. If researchers can successfully identify a contemporary linguistic relation to the Indus script, it could hold the key to deciphering it. As Mukhopadhyay explains her work, her earrings jiggle. They are artsy depictions of elephant heads. “_Pilu_,” she said, smiling.
-
-> “I think there are many aspects of cognition we cannot encode in a convenient framework.”
-
-Current iterations of AI aren’t designed to deploy the sort of approach adopted by Mukhopadhyay. Adhikari, who is now also less bullish about the prospect of machine decipherment, is skeptical it ever will be. “I think there are many aspects of cognition we cannot encode in a convenient framework,” he said. “I wouldn’t hazard a guess, but I don’t see it happening in my lifetime. I think we need to understand our brains much better.” Moreover, he added, not all information is quantifiable in a way that computers can understand. “A machine understands one, two, three very well. Two plus two equals four, yes. But …” His gaze drifted beyond his computer screen. “But that this sunset here looks like a beautiful flame — well, it is this sort of abstraction that holds the key to this script.”
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-* * *
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-**Regardless of the** approach used, AI is dependent on high-quality data being available in a machine-readable format. This remains a key challenge when it comes to ancient texts, given that they often come to us chipped, eroded, or incomplete in some other form. Scholars can spend decades debating the uniqueness of symbols: Is that a scratch next to a known character, for instance, or a new character altogether? Given how little there is to work with when it comes to long-lost languages, noisy or incomplete data can seriously curtail decipherment efforts.
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-For the past two decades, Vancouver-based Bryan K. Wells and Berlin-based Andreas Fuls have been quietly digitizing all known Indus seals and symbols. They append contextual information — such as where they were excavated, when, and alongside what artifacts — and add new ones as they are excavated. The [Interactive Corpus of Indus Texts](https://www.user.tu-berlin.de/fuls/Homepage/indus/menueindus.htm) (ICIT) currently contains information about 4,537 inscribed artifacts, 5,509 texts, and 19,616 sign occurrences, featuring a total of 707 unique Indus symbols — a much higher number than the 417 previously identified.
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-
-
-[The Trustees of the British Museum](https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/272276001)
-
-The earlier corpora were compiled by hand. As a result, Wells argues, they were so limited that they risked undermining script research. “You know the old computer saying,” he said recently over Skype, “Garbage in, garbage out.” Nearly 50 researchers around the world currently use the database.
-
-For now, the mysteries of the Indus script continue to elude decipherment. Last year, in a follow-up paper to their work automating the decoding of Ugaritic and Linear B, Luo and his team made a small but crucial advance: an algorithm aimed at identifying possible related languages of undeciphered writing systems. Potentially, this could help address the problem of deciphering scripts that don’t yet have a known language they can be compared against. When Luo and his team tested their model on the Iberian language, which has historically been linked to Basque, their findings suggested the two languages were not in fact close enough to be related — a conclusion that corroborated recent scholarship on the matter.
-
-But while Iberian, said Luo, has at least 80 unique symbols, the Indus script has at least 400, making it exponentially more challenging. Still, theoretically speaking, modern machines can handle this level of computation. Could it be possible simply to “brute force” a problem like the Indus script — to analyze it against all contemporary South Asian languages and see which emerges as its closest linguistic relation? “That’s a good thought,” Luo said, after pausing to think. “If I had time, I would definitely try that.”
-
-Luo is quick to point out that he doesn’t expect any decipherment of lost languages to be fully automated. “My thinking is: Let the system propose a list of candidates and let the experts see, Okay, maybe this theory is more correct than the other,” he said. “It definitely reduces the effort and the number of hours that experts have to expend.”
-
-Not everyone is willing to entertain help from machines. Before settling on Iberian, Luo and his colleagues had considered tackling Etruscan, an undeciphered script from pre-Roman Italy. “One of our co-authors emailed a bunch of professors working in this field,” recalled Luo, chuckling. One of them wrote back, shooing them away. “He replied in quite angry tones, ‘_machines can never compete with humans.’”_
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-# Ancient Indian texts reveal the liberating power of metaphysics
-
-**Some of the world’s earliest writings** suggest an unexpected goal for ambitious minds. Nearly 3,000 years ago, the ancient Indian authors of certain Upanishads (‘special teachings’) exhorted readers to find a fabled knowledge. When one knows that which is ‘woven upon the Whole – he becomes the Whole’. He ‘thinks of what has not been thought of before, and perceives what has not been perceived before’. Thus, comprehending the widest reaches, he is able to ‘conquer the whole universe’.
-
-To modern ears, these promises sound like esoteric mysticism, and it is true that the Sanskrit writings that have reached us from India in the 1st millennium BCE were full of rituals to harness the universe, hymns to ‘the whole’, and praises of the divine as ‘all of this’. The cosmos was an object of wonder that fascinated Indian thinkers.
-
-But one group of thinkers took a uniquely rational approach, focusing on _knowledge_ of the whole and how it affects us psychologically. Far from being supernatural, this knowledge came from rigorous extrapolation to universal features of the cosmos using rational generalisation based on patterns in the visible world. In short, _philosophy –_ metaphysical truths based on inference – was the key to humanity’s highest possibility and its greatest happiness.
-
-Why this high opinion of metaphysics – surely one of civilisation’s most impractical pursuits?
-
-Early Indians had pleaded with the gods for rain and cattle, sons and warriors, health and wealth; we still have their words in the Vedas, some of the world’s oldest texts. Theirs were precisely the prayers we would expect of any early community struggling to survive. But by around 600 BCE, the ability to perform rituals was no longer enough to win favour at the royal courts of the Gangetic Plain. Atheists, gnostics and sceptics were increasingly vocal in the kingdoms further east. Experts in the old Vedic ritual boasted skills in linguistics, geometry, anatomy, astronomy and poetry, and they had been observing the forces of nature for centuries – but to what end? How could they earn their keep in the new climate?
-
-The answer lay in the public’s growing worry about existential problems. Mortal life seemed little more than a flame struck over the open ocean at night; our minds shine but a brief, faint spotlight on the immensity of the world before sputtering into darkness again.
-
-**As their frustration grew, India’s** ancient inhabitants became obsessed with a new goal: changing our _minds_ so as to alter the very _nature_ of life and improve it from the bottom up. Mental disciplines became all the rage: outsider ascetics developed an arduous new concentration meant to purify the mind into a single, undistracted stream of consciousness… and yoga was born. A young prince named [Siddhartha Gautama](https://aeon.co/essays/was-the-buddha-an-awakened-prince-or-a-humble-itinerant) gave up his inheritance and taught a way to deconstruct the ego and its desires, becoming the Buddha.
-
-Places like Athens and Alexandria, and the Silk Road cities of India and China, were idea-markets peddling possible ways to transform oneself
-
-Even the world of ideas is mostly a mystery: most of life’s potential experiences, stories and ideas pass us by. Ancient Indians were just getting a glimpse of this as they discovered new ways of thinking along the trade routes west to Persia and Greece, or northeast over the Himalayas into China. Perhaps this hunger to know what we will never see with our own eyes is what drives the modern fascination with period dramas and science fiction. Our vast imaginations pull in the opposite direction from our small, frail bodies.
-
-This creates a tension at the heart of humanity. Mostly, we bury our minds in urgent tasks and expend our excess energy in entertainment. Craving more, we create ever-new stories, envisioning experiences we might have had. But could not all perspectives be gathered into an overarching truth? And could we not realign ourselves with the global not the local, the eternal things not the mortal ones? These ancient Indian authors encouraged us to lead life on a larger scale.
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-Breaking out of our mortal cage was a passion for many philosophers of the ‘axial age’ (_c_800-200 BCE). They lived in an era of expanded travel and crosscultural encounter, and had just begun to realise how wide a world was really out there. Places like Athens and Alexandria, and the Silk Road cities of India and China, were idea-markets peddling possible ways to transform oneself_._ Techniques for becoming immortal were in high demand. On the slopes of the Himalayas, Taoist alchemists offered to transmute mortal men into divine beings, while in the temples of Alexandria followers of Isis hoped her mysteries would help them cheat death – at least for a while. If immortality was popular, magic was a close competitor: who would not want to fly with the gods, like the mysterious Késins of ancient India and the Bodhisattvas of Tibet? Or control minds (a useful skill, mastered by Tantric wizards of South and Southeast Asia), or simply make handsome young men fall in love with you – like the wise and witty Socrates?
-
-Other techniques were less spectacular, but more psychologically astute. Both the [Buddhists](https://aeon.co/videos/what-zen-buddhist-riddles-reveal-about-knowledge-and-the-unknowable) and the [Stoics](https://aeon.co/videos/how-the-stoic-embrace-of-death-can-help-us-get-a-grip-on-life) could teach you to curb your instincts and meet life with exquisite equanimity, untouched by the vicissitudes of tragedy or joy. Or if those options didn’t appeal, one could become a god, slip through the door of the sun, or snuff oneself out of existence – a particularly extravagant form of existential suicide [favoured](https://aeon.co/essays/nirvana-can-seem-an-exotic-metaphysical-idea-until-you-look-closer) by certain Buddhists. These and many more ‘technologies of the self’, as the philosopher-historian [Michel Foucault](https://aeon.co/essays/why-foucaults-work-on-power-is-more-important-than-ever) put it in 1982, offered a panacea for life’s fundamental _smallness_.
-
-They believed that reasoned speculation on the fabric of the world has the power to change our lives
-
-But in the ancient Indian Upanishads, we see one of history’s first distinctly _philosophical_ attempts to solve the problem of human finitude. Vedanta’s metaphysical speculations worked as a kind of therapy, because they tried to position human life in fruitful relation to the whole of things. As individuals, our days are dogged by suffering, frustrated desire and death, and all we love is lost in the end. But just as Ecclesiastes observed ‘generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever’, so the Indian philosophers tried to realign themselves with reality itself. What if life didn’t have to be so small? What if we could expand the small flame of consciousness into a bonfire, and that fire into a sun with rays that reach across the universe and down to its foundations?
-
-**The oldest prayers of Hindu culture** included questions of a uniquely philosophical nature. One poem from around 800 BCE lamented: ‘What thing I am, I know not clearly,’ and another demanded to know:
-
-> Why were we born? By what do we live? On what are we established? Governed by what… do we live…?
-
-The rise of systematic philosophy offered a solution. Those who used _induction_ (the process of generalising new information and abstract principles from the visible world) and _deduction_ (discovering unseen truths hidden within our existing knowledge) came to be seen as _rishis_ or seers, with a unique power to look into the heart of reality. The Mundaka Upanishad tells us that the mind is an arrow able to send thought deep into the imperishable nature of reality – ‘Strike it!’ the author says.
-
-But this was not mysticism per se: they believed that reasoned speculation on the fabric of the world has the power to change our lives. So instead of calling for the gods, one Vedic seer asked:
-
-> What was the forest, what was that wood from which heaven and earth were formed? Let the wise seek with their intelligence that place in which all beings are carried.
-
-The wise did just that. One story tells of how the learned man Uddalaka Aruni advised his son to look behind the ‘names and forms’ of the empirical world, ignoring the misleading ‘word handles’ we give individual things. If we can identify the features they all share, then we start to see the underlying fabrics and forces that span time and space. This power to speculate eventually earned a name: the _Samkhya Karaka_, a philosophical text composed _c_350 CE, called it _anumana_ or ‘inference’. Learning to see the world with _anumana_ meant always seeing the unchanging substrate of reality behind its changing identities, and noticing the way that our own existence is taking ever new forms, even as we experience it. The _Samkhya Karaka_’s particularly daring ‘Satkarya’ theory of causation taught that all things, past and present, _always exist_ in a subtle potential form as a power of the material that constitutes it. The present moment is just a spotlight that shines on one small corner at a time – but metaphysics reveals all of reality in its richness.
-
-Humans didn’t need a greater _quantity_ of life. What we really crave is elevation to a higher _quality_ of existence
-
-More than that, it was believed that whatever fills our minds – large ideas or small – that is what _we are._ This meant that philosophy was also a way of curating one’s own mind. So one Upanishad assures us that: ‘Whatever world a man ponders with his mind … that very world he wins.’ When we understand the whole world, it _becomes_ part of us, so that we are no longer isolated.
-
-**Heroes enjoying this exalted state** turn up from time to time in Indian literature. The tale of the liberated sage Shuka is told in the _Mahabharata_. Born enlightened, once he has completed his education, he flies through the cosmos exploring the reaches of time and space. He might put one in mind of those European Renaissance antiheroes of knowledge: Faust and Prospero. But, unlike them, Shuka is unimpeded by the assumption that too much knowledge is a dangerous thing. The idea of a mind stretched to the widest reaches of reality may also remind philosophers of [Baruch Spinoza](https://aeon.co/essays/even-the-anthropocene-is-nature-at-work-transforming-itself)’s concept of an ‘intellectual love’ of the cosmos, unique to sentient beings, in which the universe itself achieves a kind of completion.
-
-In India, the idea of a world-spanning mind was forged in the fire of competition from some of the world’s most radical sceptics, early Buddhists. Their no-self doctrine said that we are here today and gone tomorrow; in fact, we are not even really here today – we are just a cluster of changing elements. But the Hindu schools disagreed, pointing to the mind’s extraordinary capacity to outreach the spatiotemporal bubble in which each person resides. I might live in 2022 in Oxford, but I can share the experiences of persons in Thailand or the US, and imagine different lives I might have lived. With the help of scientists and philosophers, I understand levels of the cosmos that lie beyond the senses, and can access realities, values or ideas that cannot be destroyed with any mere physical body.
-
-In the modern world, we are liable to forget all this. Bodies are real and minds are insubstantial. Ideas seem trivial – barely there. But if, as physics tells us, reality is made as much of waves, patterns and clusters, energy, emergent systems and movement, as of blank blocks of matter, then there is no reason to see ideas as ‘less real’ than physical things. The basic stuff of reality generates atoms, cells, life systems. From these come consciousness, sensations, perceptions, analyses and responses. And from these emerge emotions, concepts, projects, goals, ideals, stories and _meaning_ in all that the word implies. The ‘higher’ levels of reality are not less real – they are just _emergent_.
-
-What is interesting is where this leaves humans, we curious confections of matter-constrained consciousness. We can do something extraordinary: our mental parts can climb out of the window of the body, and up into the higher levels of reality. There we have access to an unconstrained realm of ideas, meanings and values (as Plato agreed). But even more than that, each of us is an undepleting fount of higher realities for as long as we live. Thus, _becoming the world_ means living from the perspective of reality and knowingly contributing to it in all we do. In the phrase of the existentialist Martin Heidegger, we become the ‘Shepherds of Being’.
-
-This is not a goal that promises pleasure or an escape from death. The Indians and the Greeks both believed in reincarnation, so for them humans didn’t need a greater _quantity_ of life. What we really crave is elevation to a higher _quality_ of existence. ‘Becoming the world’ is a kind of immortality that every philosopher, every astrophysicist, and every daydreamer shares in some measure. Not unlike Plato’s path into the timeless world of pure concepts, the ancient Indian discovery of metaphysics charted a way for aspiring minds to spring the lock of space and time – and fly free.
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-# Are Greeting Card Messages Getting Longer? A Very Serious Investigation
-
-The best greeting card Carla Lyles ever received was a homemade Valentine’s Day card made by her six-year-old son Kaleb, in which he asked her to [be his Valentine](https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2021/02/10306920/i-love-valentines-day). “He drew hearts all over it and it read, ‘You’re the best mommy in the world,’’' says the Houston, TX native and founder of the [Carla Sue](https://www.carlasuehouston.com/) card company, choking up a bit at the memory.
-
-I have a card that makes me misty-eyed too: a birthday card my dad wrote to me in 2019, in which he called me “a woman of integrity” — an earnest and uncharacteristically formal statement which melted down my iron heart into a shimmering puddle of sap when I first read it, and every subsequent time I’ve dug it out of my mementos box since then. His is my favorite, but that coffer is full of greeting cards I treasure — all of which contain at least a few lines of thoughtful, handwritten text.
-
-This brings me to an extremely specific and somewhat idiosyncratic “champagne problem” I’ve been complaining about for years: that although most people love cards for the personalized messages inside, many greeting cards these days have far too much pre-written text or design — never seeming to leave quite enough space for the kind of specific note I wanted to write (and read). More and more, I’ve been feeling like every card I pull from the shelves has so much sappy text or… some giant pop-up poodle screaming out at me? This leaves me with little space to pour out my heart and [express my feelings](https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/gratitude-journal-prompt-ideas).
-
-And guys, I have _a lot_ of feelings. As a Cancer who’s constantly “brimming with big emotions,” according to my therapist, I need space to write out my thoughts about my favorite people every now and then — to reflect on our memories together, and to get a little gushy. I want this from the notes I receive too. Not necessarily dossiers of affection, but at least a few meaningful sentences. And I’ve always assumed that I’m not alone in this. Turns out, I’m not. When I said I was writing this story, one of my coworkers joked, “Someone gave me a birthday card this year and only signed it at the bottom, and I almost cried.”
-
-And yet, a recent browse of [the Valentine’s Day cards](https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/funny-valentines-day-cards) at my local Walgreens (and many previous trips to the pharmacy looking for last-minute birthday and holiday cards over the past few years) revealed what seems to me to be a bizarre trend: cards with no room to actually write a personal message. There were cards with paragraph upon paragraph of pre-written text. In one American Greetings card, they couldn’t fit everything they wanted to say on the standard two-page card, so they added an additional inside flap. “In case you’re wondering, I notice. I notice what a difference you make in my life,” another note said. Ugh.
-
-Verna Starling, the founder and creator of [Honest AF Cards](https://www.etsy.com/shop/honestafcards/) in Houston, TX, feels the same way. “Ninety percent of the reason I started my company was because I’m not a long-winded, cheesy person,” she says. “I’d see cards at the store that had so much text, and I thought, ‘Dear God, I would say maybe one sentence of this in real life.’ I could not find any cards that sounded like my voice.”
-
-The hyper-specific, lengthy messages also brought me back to a scene in the film _[500 Days of Summer](https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/500-days-of-summer-revisited-manic-pixie-dream-girl)_, in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt loses it at a meeting at the greeting card company where he works after a bad breakup. “I think we do a bad thing here,” he tells a boardroom of his card-creating colleagues. “People should be able to say how they feel. How they really feel. Not some words that some strangers put in their mouths. Words like ‘love’ that don’t mean anything… Let’s level with America. At least let them speak for themselves.” Even though I find his character in this movie insufferable, I couldn’t have agreed more with Gordon-Levitt on this point. Greeting card companies: Stop speaking for me!
-
-Of course, I wondered if I was being a curmudgeon about an industry that was doing its best to bring people together, in an era where loneliness is standard, connection is fraught, and we're all glued to our phones playing Wordle. Really, were cards the problem — or was I?
-
-Americans spend around $7 to $8 billion purchasing about 6.5 billion greeting cards every year, according to the [Greeting Card Association](https://3a0kd21pd7d82l06sa23dmst-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Greeting-Card-Facts-2020-v4-2020-0914.pdf). That sounds like a lot, but actually, annual growth in the greeting card industry shrank by nearly 4% between 2016 and 2021, according to a recent report from the [market-research firm IBISWorld](https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/market-research-reports/greeting-cards-other-publishing-industry/). With people strapped for cash due to the pandemic, and with cheap e-cards and or even free text messages being increasingly seen as acceptable alternatives to cards (especially among younger generations), the industry has taken a hit.
-
-Card companies, therefore, are trying to adapt and carve out or hold onto their foothold in a shrinking market. Big companies like Hallmark even have dedicated trend teams that research what consumers want and find ways to deliver. For instance, Sarah Tobaben, Hallmark’s writing studio and editorial services director, says the company has tried to make their messages “more casual and conversational” but “less fussy and formal” these days to appeal to the modern consumer. Could that play a role in what I perceive to be more rambling missives?
-
-For what it’s worth, the folks at Hallmark tell me that my perception that the text inside cards is getting longer is in my head, and "that isn’t always the case." A Hallmark spokesperson said: "There is no trend data showing more or less text in cards. The writers focus less on the number of words and more on the authenticity of those words."
-
-But I remain unconvinced. In fact, there’s a track record of greeting card messages getting longer during difficult times. During the 2008 recession, _Business Insider_ reported on [the state of the greeting card industry](https://www.businessinsider.com/2008/12/recession-era-holiday-cards-less-glitter-longer-messages): “The cards themselves are becoming more somber. Which means less glitter (so inappropriate and presumably expensive) and longer messages filled with hope for the new year,” wrote journalist Hilary Lewis. “The text is deliberately long-winded. Before, cards had shorter, snappier messages.”
-
-Rochelle Lulow, then the creative director of American Greetings' editorial studio, told Lewis: "Now people want longer copy… During difficult times, we see people wanting to connect on a deeper, emotional level that goes above and beyond."
-
-Whether the pandemic, specifically, is having a similar effect on card message length is unclear. American Greetings didn’t respond to Refinery29’s request for comment on the topic, and a Hallmark spokesperson only said: "For many people, during the pandemic, greeting cards were the next best thing to being present in person... Cards that [referenced hugs](https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2020/06/9850662/hugging-benefits-social-distancing) became very popular. We also saw an uptick during \[the pandemic\] of 'just because' and 'keep in touch' cards. People also used cards to thank teachers, caregivers, and other people who make their lives better and they’re keeping up the habit."
-
-It's true that the pandemic has seemed to create a stronger desire for connection and authenticity, which trickles down to the card industry. “We’re not holding back as much now,” says Lauren Taylor, who owns the greeting card company [Instead of Ashes](https://www.insteadofashes.com/) in Atlanta, GA, of the pandemic. “Being separated made us miss people, and we’ve realized how important it is to say how you feel. We know now more than ever that life is short.”
-
-But the question remains: Does a lengthy greeting card message create the same sense of connection as a hand-written message?
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-While Taylor says she always leaves plenty of space in her cards for folks to write down their own thoughts and feelings, my reporting revealed that some people are happy to let a pre-printed card do more of the emotional work. “Not everybody feels comfortable expressing themselves through written word, so it’s cool that there are creative people and companies out there who give them that little bit of extra help with the wording,” says Giuliana LaMantia, card-maker and founder of [Serif & Spice](https://www.etsy.com/shop/SerifandSpice) (who, for what it’s worth, says that her cards are blank so that people can share their own creative messages). “At the end of the day, I see sending a card as an act. You’re choosing the card, licking the stamp, and putting it in the mail. Even if you don’t write a message inside, it shows that you’re thinking of them and went out of your way to get it to them.”
-
-Similarly, when asked about whether cards with too much text were putting "words in people's mouths," the Hallmark spokesperson said, "Some people look to Hallmark for the words they are trying to express, others are looking for a blank slate to express their own. Whether the card has many words or only a few, they are helping the consumer say what they would like."
-
-And even people who don’t write their own messages inside cards want to feel like the pre-printed message represents them, says Carlos Llanso, a two-time president of the Greeting Card Association and the CEO of [Legacy Publishing Group](https://www.shoplegacy.com/). When shopping, consumers first pick up a card because of the cover, but the message — or lack of one — is just as important.
-
-Because of that, card companies strive to create a variety of tones, from tongue-in-cheek to sincere. “One \[card\] writer describes herself as a professional empath who feels people’s feelings and then finds and crafts the words to help them connect authentically,” as Tobaben describes it. For some, the gushy card that person creates would be perfect. Meanwhile, I’d probably roll my eyes upon reading it; I like a simple or funny card to offset the soppy, tenderhearted shit I write to my friends and lovers.
-
-While you may not always find them in the card aisle of your local pharmacy, there are plenty of independent card-makers, creating products for just about anyone. The recent NY Now conference in New York City has a huge stationery selection, where I saw everything from simple yet elegant letterpress notes to a whimsical, incredibly unique card featuring a cow that looked like Frida Kahlo ([Frida Cowlo](https://shop.nanustudio.co/products/frida-cowlo)). I saw cards that were charming, plain, effusive, and everything in between. Some were sugary sweet and others were funny and even borderline raunchy.
-
-Starling, the Honest AF Cards creator, notes the tone of her own cards isn’t for everyone: The messages on the front flap are full of humor and wit, sometimes even crossing a line into risqué. “I have a card that says ‘I’m glad your mom didn’t swallow you,’” she says. “That’s not a card you can give to just anyone, but the one person you _can_ give it to will really appreciate it. That’s one thing that sets me apart — I’m not afraid to put it on a card, no matter what it is.”
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-The sheer scope I saw at the conference and while talking to makers like Starling for this story made me realize that my quest to find a blank card was probably a lot more attainable than I'd led myself to believe.
-
-More independent card companies tend to offer blank cards, possibly because it's cheaper but also because they’re selling to a niche community — the types who frequent Etsy or smaller bookshops (and who may be wordier), says Katie Hunt, a card industry expert and the founder of [Proof to Product](https://www.prooftoproduct.com/), a community of business owners, including card and stationery makers. These smaller businesses are also often run by creatives who want to "leave space" for people to express themselves, she adds. Meanwhile, the bigger companies such as Hallmark and American Greetings are often appealing to a wider range of consumers — including people who are grabbing a card on the way to their [Valentine’s Day date](https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/valentines-day-date-ideas-for-couples), perhaps, and who consider it a plus that all they have to do is sign their name.
-
-Even so, representation is an often-overlooked problem when it comes to the greeting card industry on the whole, points out Starling. The industry is overwhelmingly white, and it's common to feel underrepresented as a Black person in it, she says. “We need more voices — there are more stories to be told with cards, because your voice comes from your experience,” Starling says. It might be easier for more folks to find cards on the shelves that speak to them if a more diverse group of makers was involved with creating them, she adds.
-
-Starling is also a strong believer in keeping the insides of her cards blank. “It’s important to me… because I remember needing room to write and having to work around a branding symbol on the back of a card,” she says. “I don’t want people to have that experience. They still need to have their voice, even if it’s my voice on the front of the card. Not allowing them that space is taking away their voice.”
-
-Similar to how Starling is creating something different with her humorous cards, Jessica Walker also strives to fill a gap within the greeting card industry with her card and gift company [Five Dot Post](https://www.fivedotpost.com/). When her husband was diagnosed with cancer in 2017, she found many of the sympathy cards from bigger companies overly sincere or dire. She created Five Dot Post based on the idea that laughter is the best medicine. Walker’s line of cancer and chemo cards include quips like “Big Survivor Energy” and “I’m sorry your boobs are being the worst.”
-
-She hopes her designs help people who want to reach out, but don’t know how. “Sometimes people are so afraid of saying the wrong thing, that they don’t reach out at all,” Walker says. “But the only thing I discourage in that situation is _not_ reaching out." Being able to find the right card — one that feels truly authentic to the giver and the recipient — might help encourage people to go ahead and connect, whether they write a long message inside or keep it brief and to the point.
-
-In the end, my journey into the wild world of cards made me feel justified in my bias that the best cards leave room for folks to write their own messages. But I also came to at least understand, if not appreciate, the advantages and appeal of cards with pre-written messages inside, and that although one person might be into words, another might be charmed by the visuals (perhaps falling in love with fun graphics like the ones on the "Frida Cowlo" card became obsessed with from [NANU studio](https://shop.nanustudio.co/), for example). As LaMantia put it, if [your love language](https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/what-are-5-love-languages-meaning) is “acts of service,” a card is a thoughtful, kind act, no matter how much or how little you write inside.
-
-Although I still have my _feelings_ about overly wordy cards, I now understand the need for having an option for everyone. While I’ll probably always feel endeared by hand-written messages, in a world where we spend much of our days [connecting via screen](https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2020/09/10020972/screen-time-coronavirus), I figure any form of physical connection — cheesy or not — is a plus. A card is a signal of greater connection, whether you turn it into a novella like me, or just write your name at the bottom.
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diff --git a/00.03 News/Are Today's Portraitists Better Than the Old Masters — Evolve Artist.md b/00.03 News/Are Today's Portraitists Better Than the Old Masters — Evolve Artist.md
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-
-Alias: [""]
-Tag: ["🎭", "🎨", "👤", "Contemporary"]
-Date: 2022-02-13
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp:
-Link: https://evolveartist.com/blog/todays-portraitists-vs-old-masters/
-location:
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-Read:: [[2022-02-14]]
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-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-AreTodayPortraitistsBetterThanOldMastersNSave
-
-
-
-# Are Today's Portraitists Better Than the Old Masters? — Evolve Artist
-
-Who's better, today's portraitists or the Old Masters?
-
-Master portraitist Kevin Murphy honors the Old Masters and applauds the contemporary realistic portrait painters and artists of the 21st Century who have taken on the legacy that the old masters left behind.
-
-[](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437394)
-
-_Aristotle with a Bust of Homer_ by Rembrandt, is one of the revered old masters of portrait art.
-
-[](https://www.williambouguereau.org/young-shepherdess/)
-
-The Young Shepherdess by The Young Shepherdess - William-Adolphe Bougereau, painted in 1855.
-
-[](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/12127)
-
-_Madame X_ by the renown portraitist John Singer Sargent.
-
-[](https://artofdarkness.co/post/138844658060/daniel-sprick-ketsia-in-profile)
-
-_Ketsia in Profile_ by contemporary portraitist Daniel Sprick.
-
-We asked Master Portraitist and Evolve Founder Kevin Murphy, “Who is your favorite portrait artist and why?” Here’s what he had to say:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
-"I don't have a favorite. There are so many great portrait painters out there. And not just old masters, but even today.
-
-I would make the assertion that the portrait painters of today are better than the old masters. They may not agree. Because we're not inventing it."
-
-
-
-_Self Portrait_ by Nelson Shanks.
-
-[](https://www.mutualart.com/Artwork/Beauties-on-Promenade/072D55AA1A7CC74E)
-
-_Beauties on Promenade_ by Chen Yifei.
-
-
-
-A portrait of the Grand Master Sardone by Evolve Artist Founder and master portraitist Kevin Murphy
-
-"The old masters did all the hard work and heavy lifting. We stand on their shoulders. But the level of skill and the level to which this craft has been elevated by the current generation is just dizzying. And to be part of that crowd is humbling."
-
-[](https://www.stevenassael.com/workshop-info)
-
-A painting from Steven Assael's workshop.
-
-[](https://rickberrystudio.com/gallery/2012-2016/)
-
-_Prove It_ by Rick Berry.
-
-[](https://www.copronason.com/adamm/pages/x_From%20the%20Depths%2068x422.html)
-
-_From the Depths_ by Adam Miller.
-
-[](https://www.artrenewal.org/14thARCSalon/Artwork/ByCategory/33369)
-
-_Pegasus Befriends the Muses_ by Julie Bell.
-
-[](https://paulshipperstudio.com/star-wars-the-last-jedi/)
-
-_Star Wars The Last Jedi_ by Paul Shipper.
-
-"I think that there are so many great artists, and they're not even necessarily realists. They're in all genres including science fiction artists or doing book covers and movie posters. And they look real. They don't even look like photographs. They look absolutely real."
-
-[](https://www.rupertalexander.com/gallery/)
-
-_Naomi Alexander_ by Rupert Alexander.
-
-[](https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/bp2016/exhibition/exhibitors-entries/laura-in-black.php)
-
-_Laura in Black_ by Joshua La Rock.
-
-[](https://www.davidkassan.com/paint)
-
-_Audrey_ by David Kassan.
-
-[](https://www.lipking.com/workszoom/2606071/autumn-sky)
-
-_Autumn Sky_ by Jeremy Lipking.
-
-[](https://dorianvallejo.com/shop-all/bubble-print)
-
-_Bubble_ by Dorian Vallejo.
-
-"In every corner of this industry, any place where pros are painting faces, the quality of the work is just unbelievable. Yes, we have technology on our side, but the people who are going back and tackling this stuff in a traditional way, they've elevated this craft to a whole new level."
-
-[](https://www.alexvenezia.com/selected-works/2018/10/25/weary-memory-19x30in-oil-on-panel)
-
-_Weary Memory_ by Alex Venezia.
-
-[](https://www.artsy.net/artwork/serge-marshennikov-waves-1)
-
-_Waves_ by Serge Marshennikov.
-
-[](https://arthive.com/es/artists/83574~Roberto_ferri/works/582398~Narciso)
-
-Narcissus by Roberto Ferri.
-
-**Which artists have inspired you to paint like the great masters?**
-
-Conclusion
-----------
-
-There’s your master's take on portrait artists new and old. This is the last post from our Master's Guide to Painting Better Portraits series. Read the previous posts in the series at these links below:
-
-Master's Guide #1: [Where to Start a Portrait](https://evolveartist.com/blog/masters-guide-where-to-start-a-portrait/)
-Master's Guide #2: [Simplicity in Portrait Painting](https://evolveartist.com/blog/how-to-simplify-portrait-painting/)
-Master's Guide #3: [How to Build Confidence in Portrait Painting](https://evolveartist.com/blog/how-to-build-confidence-in-portrait-painting/)
-Master's Guide #4: [How to Capture the Likeness of a Face](https://evolveartist.com/blog/how-to-capture-the-likeness-of-a-face/)
-Master's Guide #5: [The Quickest Way to Improve Your Portrait Painting Skills](https://evolveartist.com/blog/improve-your-portrait-painting-skills/)
-Master's Guide #6: [How to Price Portrait Paintings](https://evolveartist.com/blog/how-to-price-portrait-paintings/)
-Master's Guide #7: [How to Sell Your Portraits](https://evolveartist.com/blog/how-to-sell-your-portraits-and-get-commissions/)
-
-If you found this post insightful and you want to get more content like this, then check us out on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/c/evolveartist) and follow us on [Instagram](http://www.instagram.com/evolveartist).
-
-Happy painting!
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diff --git a/00.03 News/Are the Next Global Tennis Stars Among These Tweens.md b/00.03 News/Are the Next Global Tennis Stars Among These Tweens.md
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-
-Tag: ["🥉", "🎾"]
-Date: 2022-05-08
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-05-08
-Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/01/sports/tennis/img-tournament-tennis-teens.html
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
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-
-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-05-09]]
-
----
-
-
-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-AretheNextGlobalTennisStarsAmongTheseTweensNSave
-
-
-
-# Are the Next Global Tennis Stars Among These Tweens?
-
-
-
-Credit...Myrto Papadopoulos for The New York Times
-
-The search for elite players is so competitive that IMG, the agency that once ruled tennis, is cultivating preteens to find the next prodigy, giving them access to representatives from the pro tours and Nike.
-
-A young player prepares to serve during an IMG Future Stars tournament at the posh Tatoi Club, north of Athens. The event is for boys and girls ages 12 and under.Credit...Myrto Papadopoulos for The New York Times
-
-- May 1, 2022
-
-ACHARNES, Greece — Behold Dominik Defoe. Ten years old and barely taller than the net. Golden brown shoulder-length curls bouncing in the air as he chases and crushes tennis balls, which he does better than just about any kid his age.
-
-Defoe loves to fiddle with the GPS in his mother’s car, so in the morning when they head to school, the phone directs them to Roland Garros, site of the French Open. He does it so often that his mother knows Roland Garros is 2 hours 47 minutes away from their home in Belgium.
-
-Defoe was nearly in tears earlier this year when he received one of the 48 invitations from IMG, the sports and entertainment conglomerate, to attend the first Future Stars Invitational Tournament at the posh Tatoi Club in the northern suburbs of Athens. The event, for boys and girls aged 12 and under, is both a tournament and a weeklong education in the life that might await Defoe and his rarefied peers, complete with seminars led by executives at Nike and the men’s and women’s pro tours, the ATP and the WTA.
-
-The race to find the sport’s next stars has come to this: With eight-figure fortunes potentially at stake, agents and scouts are evaluating and cultivating players even younger than 10 who are just getting started in serious competition. Future Stars is the newest and most extravagant recruitment effort for IMG, the company that essentially invented the sports representation business and dominated tennis for years.
-
-“Nobody wants to have a tournament for 11- and 12-year-olds,” said Max Eisenbud, who leads the company’s tennis division. “I’d rather wait, but the competition forced us into this situation.”
-
-For years, IMG’s agents collected future stars in two ways: Tweens and young teens (Maria Sharapova for example) either showed up at its academy in Bradenton, Fla., once the premier training ground in the sport, looking for one of the plentiful scholarships; or the agents showed up in Tarbes, France, for Les Petit As, the world’s premier tournament for players younger than 14. There, they often had something close to the pick of the litter.
-
-Image
-
-
-
-Credit...Myrto Papadopoulos for The New York Times
-
-During the past decade though, rival academies opened across Europe and IMG’s academy focused more on profiting from families paying tuition rather than making long-shot bets on teenagers. Also, in recent years, when Eisenbud and his colleagues made their annual trips to Les Petit As, they found that nearly all the most promising players had already signed contracts with other management companies, many of them well-funded boutique operations that were offering generous financial guarantees, sometimes stretching well beyond covering the roughly $50,000 annual cost for coaching and travel on the junior circuit.
-
-And so, in a sign of cutthroat times in tennis, IMG is aiming younger, even if prospecting preteen talent can be nearly impossible and highly fraught, risking increasing the pressure on children who already put plenty on themselves and, in some cases, carry the financial responsibilities for their struggling families.
-
-If stars like Naomi Osaka and Bianca Andreescu, Grand Slam tournament champions who are in their 20s, have had to take breaks from tennis to care for their mental health, it’s not a stretch to consider the risks of raising expectations so explicitly for prepubescent children. During a talk for the girls on how to stay physically and mentally healthy, Saga Shermis, an athlete development specialist with the WTA, said she expected to see them on the tour in the coming years. It can be a lot.
-
-“At this age they are still learning,” said Adam Molenda, a youth coach with Poland’s tennis federation, after watching two of his players, Antonina Snochowska and Maja Schweika, rally for an hour on Monday. “You never can say who will make it. Life is full of surprises.”
-
-And decisions.
-
-Grace Bernstein, a young Swedish standout, floated across the court and blasted balls against a boy as her mother watched from the fence. Whether she plays tennis or cards, Bernstein competes relentlessly, said her mother, Catharina, a former player whose singles ranking peaked at 286 in 1991. She plays at an academy run by Magnus Norman, once the world’s second-ranked men’s singles player. She is also a top soccer player.
-
-“She goes back and forth, but for now it’s tennis, so she plays tennis,” Catharina Bernstein said.
-
-Image
-
-Credit...Myrto Papadopoulos for The New York Times
-
-For some, fame and fortune really can seem inevitable. Eisenbud famously signed Sharapova when she was 11 years old after watching her hit for 45 minutes with an intensity and flawlessness he had never before seen. Carlos Alcaraz, who turns 19 on Thursday and is already the hottest young player in the men’s game, was deemed worthy of investment as a can’t-miss 11-year-old, too. Then again, Eisenbud was sure the first player he signed, Horia Tecau of Romania, was destined for greatness. Tecau became a top doubles specialist but never cracked the top 300 in singles.
-
-Eisenbud hatched his plan 18 months ago for a lavish competition with most expenses covered and all the perks of a professional event — ball kids, chair umpires, immaculate red clay courts, Beats headphones and swag from Nike for all the kids.
-
-“We want to treat them like professional athletes,” said Elli Vizantiou, the chief executive of the Tatoi Club.
-
-Not entirely forgetting they are kids, there was also a treasure hunt, group dinners each night and a tour of the Parthenon. IMG brought in Alcaraz, fresh off his win in the Barcelona Open final, to play an exhibition against Hubert Hurkacz, the 14th-ranked men’s singles player.
-
-Assembling the Future Stars field required months of interviews with coaches and tennis federation officials all over the world, evaluating resumes and tournament results, and scouring videos, looking for the magical combination of athleticism and skill. Creating a globally representative field was important, too. Finding a future top 50 player from a country or a demographic group that has never produced a tennis star could be groundbreaking and incredibly lucrative.
-
-Players had to come with a chaperone, which in most cases was a parent, and a coach, giving IMG the chance to build relationships..
-
-Image
-
-Credit...Gary I. Rothstein for The New York Times
-
-Eisenbud encouraged the coaches to pepper the Italian coach Riccardo Piatti, who led a coaching seminar, with questions, describing him as the “best” in the world.
-
-Piatti spent Tuesday morning with an eye on Tyson Grant, a top under-12 player whose family he has been working with for nearly seven years. Piatti also oversees the coaching for Tyson’s 14-year-old sister, Tyra, who is already an IMG client. Tyson and Tyra’s father, Tyrone Grant, is nearly 6-foot-8 and played basketball professionally for a decade in Europe. With good genes, an early start and guidance from a renowned coach, Tyson Grant could be a decent bet.
-
-A few courts over, Haniya Minhas was ripping one of the great young backhands, which she begins with the nub of her racket handle just about resting on her back hip.
-
-“My favorite shot,” she said. “Everyone tells me to extend my arms, but I like the way I do it.”
-
-Minhas, 11, is Pakistani and Muslim. She plays in a hijab, long sleeves and tights, and already looks like a billboard in the making.
-
-She has been winning tournaments since she was 5 years old. Her search for suitable competition has taken her from Pakistan, where there is little support for girls’ sports and where she competed against and beat all of the boys her age, to Turkey. Her mother, Annie, said she and her daughter want to prove that someone who looks and dresses differently from most players and is from a country that has never had a tennis star can beat anyone. They expect to sign with an agent when Haniya turns 12.
-
-“We are trying to change the thinking,” Annie Minhas said.
-
-Image
-
-Credit...Myrto Papadopoulos for The New York Times
-
-Teo Davidov has a neat trick. Davidov, arguably the top boys’ player under 12, lives in Florida. His parents moved from Bulgaria to Colorado a decade ago when his father won the green card lottery. Born right-handed, he hits forehands on both sides and can serve with either hand, too. His father and coach, Kalin, started trying to make Teo ambidextrous in tennis when he was 8 years old because he was hyperactive. Kalin thought that stimulating the right hemisphere of his brain, which controls attention and memory, and the left side of the body, with left-handed exercises, would make him calmer.
-
-“Hopefully it also helps his game,” said Kalin Davidov. The technique is devastating for now, but a top player has never succeeded by playing that way.
-
-The Davidovs first got to know Eisenbud and IMG three years ago, after Kalin posted a video of his son’s double-forehand game on Facebook. Soon, the phone rang. Babolat, the French racket maker, is a sponsor.
-
-Michael Chang, who won the French Open in 1989 at 17, came with his daughter, Lani, who displayed an awfully familiar-looking drop shot and buried her nose in a Rick Riordan novel on the shuttle bus between the courts and the hotel. Chang said the circuit for young juniors has transformed since his childhood, with far more travel and international competition.
-
-“They’re getting a taste of what it’s like,” he said.
-
-Image
-
-Credit...From left: Associated Press; Matthew Futterman
-
-Gunther Darkey, a former middling pro from Britain, brought his son, Denzell, a top prospect and one of the few Black elite juniors for the Lawn Tennis Association. Alcaraz has a 10-year-old brother, Jaime, who was good enough to receive an invitation. So was Meghan Knight, the daughter of a well-known cricketer from England.
-
-“You’ve got to be the kind of person who from 9 years old can improve consistently while taking losses every week for 10 or 15 years,” said Seb Lavie, who brought two players from his academy in Auckland, New Zealand.
-
-Dominik Defoe insisted he is prepared for whatever it takes to make it. He was just about the smallest of the two dozen boys. He still plays with a junior-size racket and struggled to keep up with Grant in his first match. His opponents all try to hit with heavy topspin to bury him in the backcourt. He swats the ball back on a short hop before it kicks above his head.
-
-Image
-
-Credit...Matthew Futterman
-
-Defoe, who is fluent in four languages, promised himself as a toddler that he would win the French Open. He has built his existence around giving himself the best chance to make that happen.
-
-He attends school in the morning for math and language lessons, but he works independently on the rest of his studies to free up more hours for tennis. Studying the pros closely, he decided not to have one favorite but built a composite player who has Dominic Thiem’s forehand, Nick Kyrgios’s serve, Novak Djokovic’s backhand, Rafael Nadal’s attitude, Roger Federer’s net game and Felix Auger-Aliassime’s footwork. He practices mindfulness by writing in a journal.
-
-“He told me when we were coming here that this journey was like a train ride,” said his mother, Rachel, who was his first coach. “This is just one stop, one station. Then the train goes on.”
-
-
-
-
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-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
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diff --git a/00.03 News/As El Salvador’s president tries to silence free press, journalist brothers expose his ties to street gangs - Los Angeles Times.md b/00.03 News/As El Salvador’s president tries to silence free press, journalist brothers expose his ties to street gangs - Los Angeles Times.md
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-
-Tag: ["🤵🏻", "🚔", "🌎", "🇸🇻"]
-Date: 2022-06-14
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-06-14
-Link: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-06-09/nayib-bukele-el-salvador-el-faro-journalists
-location:
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-
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-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-AsElSalvadorspresidenttriestosilencefreepressNSave
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-
-
-# As El Salvador’s president tries to silence free press, journalist brothers expose his ties to street gangs - Los Angeles Times
-
-MEXICO CITY —
-
-Carlos Martínez peered over his brother Óscar’s shoulder as they proofread the investigation they were about to publish, a story they feared could change their lives forever — or perhaps even worse, change nothing at all.
-
-Óscar tapped his foot frantically, rattling the floorboards. Carlos heaved deep sighs, as if steadying himself for a fight.
-
-The brothers, two of El Salvador’s most celebrated journalists, had produced a damning report exposing [President Nayib Bukele’s](https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-el-salvador-election-20190203-story.html) ties to the street gangs that have long terrorized Central America.
-
-The report showed that a [recent historic rise](https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-03-27/el-salvador-declares-state-of-emergency-amid-killings) in homicides was the result of a broken pact between the government and El Salvador’s largest gang. The brothers and their colleagues had previously reported the details of the secret deal, in which Bukele aides gave jailed leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha gang special treatment in exchange for their pledge to reduce violence on the streets.
-
-It was the kind of journalism that has distinguished the Salvadoran press. In the three decades since peace accords ended the nation’s bloody civil war, El Salvador had become a beacon of media freedom in a region where journalists are sometimes jailed and even killed for hard-hitting work exposing the powerful and the corrupt.
-
- 
-
-Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele delivers an annual address to the nation before Congress in June 2021.
-
-(Associated Press)
-
-But everything had changed under Bukele, [a young, image-obsessed autocrat](https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-05-16/nayib-bukele-the-most-popular-president-in-the-world-is-a-man-with-one-ideology-power) who once called himself “the world’s coolest dictator.”
-
-He and the Martínez brothers were from the same generation — all raised amid war by politically minded parents — but they had taken starkly different paths. While the brothers crusaded against power, convinced that strong checks on authority were a precondition for El Salvador’s fledgling democracy, Bukele was intent on acquiring it.
-
-Since taking office in 2019, he has [seized control](https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-04-05/el-salvador-leader-cut-food-for-gang-inmates) of El Salvador’s independent institutions — purging judges, punishing critics and laying the groundwork to remain in office despite a constitutional ban on consecutive reelection.
-
-Bukele, 40, has maintained some of the highest approval ratings on the planet, thanks in large part to his skill at controlling media narratives.
-
-Bukele has built a sprawling state-run media machine that is guided by daily opinion polling while at the same time surveilling independent journalists with spyware and drones, punishing government officials for leaking information, and lobbing tax fraud and money-laundering accusations at El Faro, the investigative news site where the Martínez brothers work.
-
-In April, Bukele [approved a law](https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-04-24/el-salvadors-president-wants-to-extend-state-of-emergency) that threatens any journalist who reports on gangs with up to 15 years in prison.
-
-As soon as the Martínez brothers published their story, they would be vulnerable to arrest.
-
-To protect themselves, they had temporarily decamped with their families to Mexico City.
-
-Working out of a friend’s apartment on that warm evening in May, both had beers cracked and cigarettes lit when Carlos finally clicked a button and the story went online.
-
-The brothers embraced. “Let’s see,” Carlos said, “if we’ve just ruined our lives.”
-
-
-
-Brothers Óscar and Carlos Martínez embrace.
-
-(Lisette Poole / For The Times)
-
-Growing up during the war, the Martínez brothers didn’t have to look beyond their own family to see the country’s bitter divisions.
-
-Their parents were ardent supporters of the left-wing guerrillas fighting the nation’s U.S.-backed military dictatorship. Their maternal uncle, Roberto D’Aubuisson, was the leader of a right-wing death squad responsible for one of the war’s most notorious acts: The assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero while he was celebrating Mass.
-
-The family didn’t shield Carlos, Óscar or their youngest brother, Juan, from the horrors of the conflict, which stretched from 1979 to 1992 and killed 75,000 people.
-
-“They never told us that we lived in a country that was perfect,” said Carlos, 42, who laughs easily, wears a black hoop in one ear and is never without his pack of cigarettes or asthma inhaler. “Since childhood, we understood that it was impossible to understand our country without understanding violence.”
-
-Carlos, the eldest, was still a student when he joined El Faro in 2000.
-
-The site, whose name means “The Lighthouse,” was Latin America’s first digital-only newspaper, and it aimed to hold the new postwar government accountable.
-
-“In El Salvador, there really wasn’t a tradition of journalism,” said co-founder Carlos Dada. “We basically had to invent it.”
-
-With aid from international training programs, nonprofits and foreign governments promoting democracy, El Faro soon became one of the most respected news outlets in Latin America. Along with unflinching corruption investigations, the site was known for its nuanced reporting on a fresh crisis of violence gripping El Salvador.
-
-Powerful street gangs had seized control of parts of the country, trafficking drugs, extorting cash from small businesses and killing with such abandon that El Salvador ranked among the most murderous countries in the world. Gangsters dictated where residents were allowed to work, worship and go to school.
-
-Carlos and Óscar, his intense, tattooed brother, who had joined El Faro in 2007, dived into the criminal underworld, embedding in prisons and safe houses to understand the new phenomenon.
-
-They exposed the origins of the gangs, which were formed by Salvadoran war refugees in Los Angeles in the 1990s and later exported back to Central America through deportations. And they revealed how gang members slain in what authorities described as “confrontations” with police often turned out to be victims of extrajudicial killings.
-
-“We’d finish work and would be sitting around drinking rum still talking about it all,” Carlos said. The conversations often included their brother Juan, an anthropologist who specialized in gang culture.
-
-In 2012 Carlos, Óscar and their El Faro colleagues stumbled onto their biggest story yet: The gangs had discovered that their violence had a political value, which they were wielding to glean favors from the government.
-
-The reporters showed how then-President Carlos Mauricio Funes transferred gang leaders out of high-security prisons on the condition that their foot soldiers put down their weapons.
-
-The resulting decline in homicides ensured that negotiations with the gangs would be a part of Salvadoran political life for years to come: They had achieved what no security strategy could.
-
-In the years since, El Faro has revealed evidence that both of the country’s major political parties negotiated with the gangs for electoral support. Political leaders usually denied the stories, but while they were sometimes hostile, they never sought to silence the journalists.
-
-With Bukele, that was no longer the case.
-
- 
-
-Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
-
-(Associated Press)
-
-Before he was president, Bukele was an advertising executive. Even those who have criticized his authoritarian drift often acknowledge he has a certain genius for self-marketing.
-
-It’s a skill he seems to have inherited from his father, Armando, who was born to Palestinian immigrants and became one of El Salvador’s wealthiest businessmen and the host of a television program where he held forth on history and sympathized with leftist politics.
-
-Nayib Bukele was elected on a populist wave of anger at the two major political parties that emerged after the war, both of which had been embroiled in major corruption scandals.
-
-He presented himself as something different: a modern, forward-looking leader who used Instagram and thought like a tech-disrupter even as he embraced the power-grabbing tactics of Latin American caudillos before him.
-
-He lured popular journalists away from established media outlets to higher paying jobs in the government and launched dozens of new media outlets that claim independence but push government propaganda.
-
-He tweeted dozens of times a day — messages that technology analysts say were amplified on social media by armies of bots — to craft a narrative of an ascendant, prosperous country and of himself as an “instrument of God” sent to lead it.
-
-He went to war with the journalists who dared to contradict him.
-
-The Martínez brothers knew something was deeply wrong last year when a colleague at El Faro told them a source within El Salvador’s government had played her a recording of a phone call between the brothers in which they discussed an investigation.
-
-Each had been alone during the conversation, which they conducted on the encrypted application Signal. They began to suspect that one or both of their phones had somehow been listening in.
-
-In January of this year, their fears were confirmed: An [analysis](https://citizenlab.ca/2022/01/project-torogoz-extensive-hacking-media-civil-society-el-salvador-pegasus-spyware/) by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and digital rights group Access Now found that the brothers and 20 of their El Faro colleagues — as well as at least 15 journalists from other outlets — were surveilled for more than a year with the spyware Pegasus, whose Israeli developer sells exclusively to governments.
-
-“They know the details of my relationships with all the people I love,” said Carlos, who was spied on for 269 days, more than anyone else.
-
-“They know the people who are important to me, and that makes them all vulnerable.”
-
-In the wake of the Pegasus scandal, human rights organizations called for an investigation and Reporters Without Borders further downgraded El Salvador’s ranking on its annual [press freedom index](https://rsf.org/en/index).
-
-Officials in El Salvador said nothing.
-
-Members of Bukele’s party in congress quickly approved a reform legalizing “undercover digital operations” by authorities.
-
-The Martínez brothers were growing more and more stressed. They worried, Carlos said, that the Salvadoran government was “just getting started with us.”
-
-They were right.
-
- 
-
-President Nayib Bukele, right, takes part in a military parade.
-
-(Marvin Recinos / AFP/Getty Images)
-
-Bukele had touted a dramatic reduction in homicides as one of his crowing achievements, celebrating each day that passed without a killing.
-
-In slick promotional videos, he credited the work of police and soldiers. “We Salvadorans are taking control of our future,” he told the Legislative Assembly, as congress is formally known. “We did it without negotiating with criminals.”
-
-But investigations by Carlos, Óscar and their El Faro colleagues had revealed that the government had been in talks with the gangs from the beginning.
-
-They cited hundreds of pages of prison reports that showed that Bukele had granted MS-13 expansive concessions — from permitting fried chicken from a popular restaurant to be sold inside prisons to moving guards that the gangs viewed as aggressive — in exchange for reducing killings and supporting Bukele’s political party in 2021 congressional elections.
-
-Then, one weekend in March, the peace that had helped win Bukele wide support came to an abrupt end.
-
-El Salvador’s gangs went on a killing spree. On a single day, 62 people were gunned down across the country, a level of violence not seen since the war ended.
-
-Humiliated and furious, Bukele and his party declared emergency rule, suspending many civil liberties and easing the conditions for making arrests.
-
-Since then authorities have imprisoned more than 35,000 people whom Bukele describes as “terrorist” gang members. Nearly 2% of the adult population is currently in jail.
-
-Human rights groups say the majority of detainees were arrested arbitrarily and have not been given due process. Amnesty International [says](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/06/el-salvador-president-bukele-human-rights-crisis/) at least 18 people have died in state custody — including from torture and other abuse.
-
- 
-
-Men arrested for alleged gang ties are escorted by Salvadoran police during a government-declared state of emergency on March 31, 2022.
-
-(Marvin Recinos / AFP/Getty Images)
-
-Bukele used the spike in killings to further target journalists — whom he equates with gang members as fellow enemies of the state — starting with passage of the law threatening prison time for those who “disseminate messages from gangs.”
-
-His government is accused of sending drones to spy on several El Faro reporters, and he has launched online smear campaigns against multiple journalists, including a freelance reporter for the New York Times who fled the country after Bukele supporters claimed he was the sibling of an imprisoned gang leader. Never mind that the reporter doesn’t have a brother.
-
-Juan, the youngest Martínez brother, fled too, after Bukele called him “trash” and [tweeted](https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1513591841656127488) a video interview in which he had said gangs sometimes “fulfilled a necessary social function” in El Salvador.
-
-For Óscar and Carlos, the cause of the sudden explosion of violence in March seemed clear: Bukele’s truce with the gang had broken down. The brothers set out to prove it, despite the risks.
-
-“We’re going to do what El Faro has always done,” Carlos said. “When we have information, we publish. It doesn’t matter what happens next.”
-
-Carlos reached out to some of his gang sources, saying he was interested in speaking to high-level Mara Salvatrucha leaders about what had happened. Finally, a gang leader got in touch and turned over audio recordings in which a top Bukele aide [can be heard](https://elfaro.net/en/202205/el_salvador/26177/Collapsed-Government-Talks-with-MS-13-Sparked-Record-Homicides-in-El-Salvador-Audios-Reveal.htm) discussing the collapse of the agreement.
-
-The aide talked extensively about how he had won the gang’s favor, once escorting a gang member wanted in the U.S. out of El Salvador to safety in Guatemala. He repeatedly referred to “Batman,” which the gangsters said was reference to Bukele.
-
-Carlos immediately called his brother. “I have everything,” he said.
-
-
-
-The Martínez brothers decamped to Mexico City to finish the story without fear of arrest.
-
-(Lisette Poole / For The Times)
-
-The next day, El Faro flew Carlos to Mexico City to continue reporting on the recordings without fear of Salvadoran authorities interrupting him. Óscar later joined him.
-
-The story that Carlos wrote and Óscar edited explains that the March gang massacre was retribution for the arrest of a group of Mara Salvatrucha leaders who were supposed to be protected by the government.
-
-Shortly after the story went live, the brothers’ mother, Marisa, called.
-
-“How are you? Happy?” Marisa asked via video chat. “I’m so proud of you.” She, too, had left the country ahead of the publication date.
-
-Soon, friends started coming over to celebrate with beer and mezcal. They included several other Salvadoran journalists who had recently gone into exile abroad.
-
-As drinks were poured and cigarettes were lit, Carlos called out to his brother, who was still hunched over the laptop.
-
-“How many do we have?” Carlos asked, referring to readers.
-
-“3,000,” Óscar responded.
-
-By June that number would reach nearly 200,000.
-
-As the story made the rounds online, Batman memes proliferated, opposition leaders expressed outrage, and the government remained silent.
-
-In some ways, that wasn’t a surprise. Bukele does not always strike back immediately. And he surely understood that if he acknowledged the piece, he would be giving it more exposure.
-
-Instead, over the next few days, Bukele focused on his preferred agenda: He [tweeted](https://twitter.com/nayibbukele/status/1527020263463956483) about handing out digital tablets to schoolchildren and about the “bitcoin swag bags” given to international bankers who had visited the country after Bukele made the cryptocurrency legal tender in El Salvador.
-
-He also tweeted a [sympathetic message](https://twitter.com/LaHuellaSV/status/1527840985035640833?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1527840985035640833%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdiariolahuella.com%2Fpresidente-bukele-a-elon-musk-los-medios-de-comunicacion-una-vez-todopoderosos-han-perdido-su-influencia%2F) to Elon Musk, currently embroiled in a bid to buy Twitter. “Once you denounce the system, they will come after you with everything they have,” Bukele wrote. “They will smear, attack, degrade, try to bankrupt you ... Luckily, we live in evolving times, and their once ‘all powerful’ media outlets have lost their clout.”
-
-More disappointing to the brothers was the fact that some of the country’s biggest media outlets did not acknowledge the story, perhaps because they were afraid of violating the new law threatening prison time for reporting on gangs.
-
-Bukele’s government had not arrested anybody, yet it appeared that his law was having its intended chilling effect.
-
-A few days after the article was published, Óscar returned to El Salvador. He knew he could be detained, but as editor in chief of El Faro, he worried staying abroad would send the wrong message to his newsroom.
-
-There were no police waiting for him as he stepped off his plane. Still, he said he’s watching “day by day” to determine whether he has to leave again.
-
-Carlos remains in Mexico for now. A life in exile is the last thing he wants. He loves his country, and misses the verdant beach that is a short walk from his house. It pains him to think that El Salvador’s relatively new experiment with democracy could end in failure.
-
-Sometimes he wonders: Are we condemned to live with violence?
-
-He is certain now of only two things.
-
-Wherever he is he will keep reporting. And whatever is coming will be harder than this.
-
-
-
-Brothers Óscar and Carlos Martínez.
-
-(Lisette Poole / For The Times)
-
-
-
-
----
-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
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diff --git a/00.03 News/As rents rise, Americans are stuck in homes even when they want to move.md b/00.03 News/As rents rise, Americans are stuck in homes even when they want to move.md
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-
-Alias: [""]
-Tag: ["📈", "🚙", "🇺🇸"]
-Date: 2022-02-27
-DocType: "WebClipping"
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-Link: https://www.vox.com/22939038/rents-rising-home-prices-americans-moving-residential-stagnation-stuck-mobility-freedom
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-
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-
-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-02-28]]
-
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-
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-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-AmericansarestuckinhomesevenwhentheywanttomoveNSave
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-
-
-# As rents rise, Americans are stuck in homes even when they want to move
-
-At the heart of America is a packed bag.
-
-“Go west, young man, and grow up with the country,” newspaper editor Horace Greeley once exclaimed. A proponent of westward expansion, Greeley rightfully struck at the heart of a particularly American brand of freedom: the ability to get the hell out of dodge.
-
-And while freedom of movement has never been equally distributed, potentially the most defining migration the nation has ever seen was the [Great Migration](https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/migrations/great-migration), when millions of Black Americans fled the South, Jim Crow the wind at their backs.
-
-Isabel Wilkerson, the historian and author of _The Warmth of Other Suns,_ captured the essence of this mass movement: “They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.”
-
-But what happens when leaving is no longer an option? In the US, that’s what we’re witnessing right now: “Americans, it seems, are finding themselves increasingly locked into places that they wish to escape,” two psychologists grimly proclaim in a new paper studying the cultural effects of residential stagnation. Study authors Nicholas Buttrick and Shigehiro Oishi [cite](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2332649217728374) [research](https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2015/demo/p70-140.html) showing that when you compare today’s Americans to people in the 1970s, people who said they intended to move from a place are 45 percent less likely to have actually done so.
-
-The paper finds that as residential mobility has gone down, so have “levels of happiness, fairness, and trust among Americans.”
-
-How could declining mobility lead to these changes? Buttrick and Oishi explain that moving to a new place severs social bonds, and in a new town, far from home, newcomers are forced to define themselves with “context-free personality traits (i.e., ‘I am hardworking’ or ‘I am intelligent’)” rather than by their relationships to locals like they might in their hometown (i.e., “my sister owns the butcher shop downtown”).
-
-Importantly, all that researchers have found are correlations: No one has yet established that declining mobility _causes_ any psychological changes. And another caveat — while some [data exists](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/1540-6040.00016) related to how much Americans were moving in the 1700s and 1800s, it is only since 1948 that the researchers have a “reliable annual rate of residential mobility ... mak\[ing\] it difficult to draw strong conclusions regarding the cultural effects of residential mobility in the longer term.”
-
-Another note of caution is that residential mobility is not independent of economic growth, settlement patterns, religiosity, and more. In other words, it could be something else that is driving some or all of this correlation.
-
-The authors are aware of this and note that while things like unemployment and GDP growth have cyclical patterns, mobility rates have been declining steadily since 1948 through booms and busts alike.
-
-And the psychologists’ work builds on a body of economic and political science literature that has raised the alarm for decades about declining interstate mobility and its negative effects on financial and personal freedom.
-
-Buttrick and Oishi delineate the cultural markers of a mobile society (“individualism, optimism, and tolerance”) and a stable society (“security, and a strong sense of the difference between ingroups and outgroups”). This growing shift toward the latter could explain much of what has happened to America’s political system in recent decades.
-
-### What happens when people want to move but can’t
-
-“Unfathomable” — that’s the word Buttrick and Oishi use to describe the rate at which Americans in the 1700s and 1800s exchanged communities:
-
-> Throughout the 19th century, as many as 40% of Americans may have moved year over year. For example, in one Illinois county, only about 20% of households living there in 1840 stayed to 1850; in a different Ohio city, only 7% of people voted in both the 1850 and 1860 elections in the same district; in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston, only half of household heads enumerated in 1880 could be found in 1890; and in New York City, “Moving Day,” the First of May, was an unofficial city holiday (Fischer, 2002).
-
-Today, that’s not the case. While the majority of Americans are happy where they are — according to Gallup survey data in 2016, 74 percent of Americans rated their current residence as ideal — this growing bloc of “trapped” or [“stuck”](https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/10308/DavidSchleicherStuckTheLa.pdf?sequence=2) communities has concerning cultural effects.
-
-Buttrick and Oishi’s big takeaway: When people move less, it affects culture. Less dynamism, increased aversion to risk, suspicion of outsiders, cynicism, unhappiness, and “people who feel less free to live their social lives as they see fit.”
-
-Looking at a survey of 16,000 Americans, the authors find that people who want to move but remain at the same address the following year are more likely to disagree that “hard work can help a person get ahead,” even when controlling for a bunch of factors like socioeconomic status, health, age, race, and more.
-
-“Wanting to move but being unable to leave leads people to wonder about whether their other efforts in life will be rewarded,” the researchers write.
-
-Americans have historically been defined by our willingness to move for greener pastures, and, despite some pessimistic narratives, [Americans are pretty welcoming to outsiders](https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/12/11/america-is-friendlier-to-foreigners-than-headlines-suggest). Buttrick and Oishi cite research showing that Americans are very [individualistic](https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison/the-usa/), [very trusting of strangers](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11205-010-9713-5), [egalitarian](https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison/the-usa/), optimistic, and risk-taking, and “to a degree unmatched by other nations” believe that [technology can solve big problems](https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/utopian-studies/article/28/2/231/197652/Practical-Utopias-America-as-Techno-Fix-Nation). And Americans are “unusually likely to believe that all people [everywhere are essentially the same](https://www.nature.com/articles/466029a).”
-
-But, the authors argue, much of that has been changing in parallel with declining interstate mobility. We could be left with much more stable communities that are much less trusting of outsiders. To put a finer point on it, if you’re stuck in a place where you don’t want to be, it has broader implications for your ability to pick your social networks. You are stuck with the family and friends that you happen to be near.
-
-That, in turn, leads to a lot more loyalty toward one’s in-group. If it’s extremely difficult to make new friends, it’s extremely costly to lose any of the ones you have or alienate them. This increased importance of in-group relations can be accompanied by decreased openness and increased xenophobia, because newcomers simply cannot draw on a reservoir of reputation that they have been cultivating for decades.
-
-### The policies helping kill the American dream
-
-So why is all this happening? What is keeping Americans stuck? Even as localized recessions (that would have previously sent people running for economic opportunity elsewhere) hit, [people stay put](https://economics.mit.edu/files/11560). Even as wage premiums for college degrees and higher-paying jobs concentrate in a handful of cities, low-income workers [remain in stagnating pockets of the country](https://www.nber.org/papers/w17167).
-
-The authors don’t identify any causal factors.
-
-But I, [and](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/12/opinion/biden-infrastructure-zoning.html) [many](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388) [economists](https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-yimbys-are-starting-to-win-a?utm_source=url), argue that this is because of the walls of red tape that states have put up. Specifically, two types of regulations: zoning restrictions on how land can be used, and occupational licensing requirements.
-
-The former severely limits the supply of housing, particularly in in-demand labor markets, driving up the price of housing. New research shows that for many people, moving to many economically flourishing cities could mean taking a financial hit, as the [increased cost of housing dwarfs a substantially larger salary](https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2021/CES-WP-21-32.pdf).
-
-And the latter can discourage people from moving to states where regulations make it costly to keep doing their jobs. According to the [Captured Economy](https://capturedeconomy.com/occupational-licensing/#:~:text=Today%2C%20around%2025%20percent%20of,from%2010%20percent%20in%201970.&text=Although%20these%20regulations%20are%20justified,improves%20consumer%20welfare%20is%20weak.) project at the centrist Niskanen Center, “today, around 25 percent of American workers need a state license to do their job — up from 10 percent in 1970.” These regulations make it really hard for workers like cosmetologists or contractors to move to different states due to the financial and time costs of getting a new license. According to the libertarian [Institute for Justice](https://ij.org/report/license-to-work-2/) (IJ), “on average these laws require nearly a year of education and experience, one exam, and over $260 in fees.”
-
-And while these laws are enacted under the guise of consumer protection, as IJ finds, there are many ridiculous discrepancies that show that reasoning to be a [farce](https://ij.org/report/license-to-work-2/): “\[I\]n most states, it takes 12 times longer to get a license to cut hair as a cosmetologist than to get a license to administer life-saving care as an emergency medical technician.”
-
-And it’s not just the housing costs and occupational licenses that are reducing interstate mobility. As [Yale Law professor David Schleicher details](https://openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.13051/10308/DavidSchleicherStuckTheLa.pdf?sequence=2), “differing eligibility standards for public benefits, public employee pensions, homeownership tax subsidies, state and local tax laws, and even basic property law doctrines” make it hard to move _from_ declining regions as well.
-
-With all of these regulations piling up and increases in the opportunity costs of moving, interstate mobility could continue to decline and the US might reach a damning future where to move, you have to be rich.
-
-### Stability has benefits, too — America just needs to better balance them with the benefits of mobility
-
-Having a preference for stability isn’t bad. In fact, most people, even the individualistic, age into stability. Perhaps when they have children and want to stay put for them to attend school, or when they grow older and change that would have once felt exciting now feels alienating.
-
-Residential stability also provides important bonds. Buttrick and Oishi theorize that “people who have just moved to a place may be less interested in coming together for long-term action and may be less interested in investing in their communities.” So while movers may be optimistic, idealistic, and willing to make friends with new people, the non-movers may promote the type of social cohesion that makes that all possible.
-
-“Areas with more residential mobility tend to have lower levels of social capital,” Buttrick told me. “If you just get to a place, it’s really hard to embed yourself in a community.”
-
-But it doesn’t have to be that way.
-
-“There are some American institutions that are relatively good at getting people integrated into a community,” he added. For example, “megachurches are one of these cultural responses to residential mobility — they’re big, they don’t take a lot of time, and they get you into a deep community quickly without having to incur a lot of costs.”
-
-At the end of the day, it’s about balance. It’s not that everyone should be moving all the time, but that they should always have the option.
-
-If the psychologists are right and individualists overwhelmingly want to leave small towns and rural America, it [could severely unbalance the country](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3321790). And not just unbalance the country because the nonconformists have all fled for the superstar cities, but because it’s often only the better-off mavericks who are able to leave. This type of economic residential segregation can have [serious consequences for the children who grow up in disinvested communities](https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/129/4/1553/1853754).
-
-While stability can sound great in theory, what it means in practice is different depending on the circumstances. A stable white-picket-fence suburb could be great for some people, but if “stable” means trapped in a high-poverty neighborhood, that’s a policy failure. [Research](https://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/attach/journals/jul18srefeature.pdf) has found that while declining interstate mobility may be due to changing preferences for white Americans, Black Americans are increasingly unable to move when they expect to.
-
-And there’s an asymmetry — while being forced to stay somewhere is almost entirely negative, being forced to move can actually benefit those who relocate. One recent [study](https://eml.berkeley.edu/~enakamura/papers/giftofmoving.pdf) by UC Berkeley’s Emi Nakamura and Jón Steinsson and Norwegian School of Economics’ Jósef Sigurdsson, looked at what happened to households that were forced to move after their town was covered with lava.
-
-In 1973 a volcano erupted, causing an Icelandic town’s inhabitants to be evacuated — and while many people returned if their homes were still standing, for those whose homes were destroyed, that was significantly less likely. The authors found that children whose families were forced to leave following the destruction of their homes were more likely to have a “large _increase_ in long-run labor earnings and education ... specifically, we estimate a causal effect of moving of $27,000 per year, or close to a doubling of the average earnings of those whose homes were not destroyed.”
-
-Of course the trauma and shock of having to leave your home behind and the associated economic costs with that are borne heavily by the adults in this situation. Nevertheless, this natural experiment reveals that, on net, the costs of moving, even under traumatic conditions, might be compensated for.
-
-No one is suggesting forcibly moving Americans via strategic lava flows. But there are costs to taking the steps that would allow more mobility: for example, loosening zoning restrictions leads to increased construction and neighborhood change in the places that people want to move to. These costs are unequivocally worth it.
-
-America is aging and biasing our political and cultural institutions against risk-taking, new ideas, and new groups of people. Further tilting the scales against openness and dynamism could mean dwindling social and economic mobility and generations of Americans growing up in a country where freedom of movement belongs only to the rich.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.03 News/As the West takes aim with Russian sanctions, here’s what we know about oligarchs’ secret finances - ICIJ.md b/00.03 News/As the West takes aim with Russian sanctions, here’s what we know about oligarchs’ secret finances - ICIJ.md
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-Date: 2022-03-16
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-TimeStamp: 2022-03-16
-Link: https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/as-the-west-takes-aim-with-russian-sanctions-heres-what-we-know-about-oligarchs-secret-finances
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-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-hereswhatweknowaboutoligarchssecretfinancesNSave
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-
-
-# As the West takes aim with Russian sanctions, here’s what we know about oligarchs’ secret finances - ICIJ
-
-**Update, Feb. 22, 2022:** Russian oligarchs Boris Rotenberg, Igor Rotenberg and Gennady Timchenko have been sanctioned by the U.K., along with five Russian banks, hours after President Vladimir Putin ordered troops into two separatist regions in Ukraine after recognizing their independence. [Read our full story here](https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/uk-targets-three-oligarchs-and-five-russian-banks-in-first-tranche-of-new-sanctions/).**
-
-As tensions continue to rise around the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine, authorities in the U.S. and the U.K. are looking to hit figures close to Russian President Vladimir Putin where it might hurt: in Western safe havens where they keep and spend their money.
-
-Late last month, U.S. and U.K. officials said they [were preparing](https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-u-k-prepare-plans-to-sanction-russian-oligarchs-businesses-11643660794) economic sanctions for possible use against both sectors of the Russian economy as well as wealthy Russian individuals with close connections to Russian President Vladimir Putin and senior Russian government officials. The measures could include family members of the potentially targeted people.
-
-“Sanctions would cut them off from the international financial system and ensure that they and their family members will no longer be able to enjoy the perks of parking their money in the West and attending elite Western universities,” a senior U.S. official [told Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-prepared-sanction-russian-elites-close-putin-if-russia-invades-ukraine-2022-01-31/) late last month.
-
-The sanctions regime that U.K. officials say they are devising may be the most worrying for rich Russians, who have long seen London as a safe destination for storing and growing their wealth.
-
-> ***In elite Russian financial circles, there is always that lingering concern about what U.K. authorities know and what they could do** — Russia expert Alex Nice*
-
-In late January, the U.K. government [said it was](https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-u-k-prepare-plans-to-sanction-russian-oligarchs-businesses-11643660794) working on a new proposed sanctions law that would leverage its status as a major destination of Russian private money in order to place political pressure on the Kremlin. This is a measure that critics have long urged the U.K. to take. “It will be the toughest sanction regime against Russia we have ever had,” the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary Liz Truss [said](https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-u-k-prepare-plans-to-sanction-russian-oligarchs-businesses-11643660794).
-
-“It’s always like the gun you have on the table — it is in the room and gives you leverage without you using it,” Alex Nice, a researcher at the Institute for Government, told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists of the prospect of U.K. authorities going after Russian money. “In elite Russian financial circles, there is always that lingering concern about what U.K. authorities know and what they could do.”
-
-For more than a decade, [ICIJ](https://www.icij.org/) has tracked flows of money globally – stories that have commonly involved wealthy Russians with elite political connections. These projects included the [Panama Papers](https://www.icij.org/tags/panama-papers/), the [Paradise Papers](https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/), [FinCEN Files](https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/), and the [Pandora Papers](https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/).
-
-Here are five oligarchs whose financial dealings have been uncovered by ICIJ investigations – and who have received additional scrutiny from authorities.
-
-## Alisher Usmanov
-
-***Politically connected Uzbek-Russian billionaire***
-
-
-
-Vladimir Putin talks with Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov.
-
-Usmanov has for decades invested heavily in tech firms in Russia and elsewhere while keeping close [connections](https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/senators-urge-adding-usmanov-official-oligarch-list-citing-paradise-papers-revelations/) to the Russian political elite. During the early days of Facebook’s growth as a social media firm, Kanton Services, a firm with links to Usmanov provided a link between Russian state money and [large early investments in Facebook](https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/kremlin-owned-firms-linked-major-twitter-facebook-investments-icij/), according to reporting from 2017 that was a part of [the Paradise Papers](https://www.icij.org/investigations/paradise-papers/kremlin-owned-firms-linked-major-twitter-facebook-investments-icij/). The leaked records reviewed by ICIJ indicate that all of Kanton’s shares were owned as recently as 2009 by an investment manager who is known as an Usmanov business associate.
-
-Rollo Head, a spokesman for Usmanov, said Usmanov “has been a highly successful investor in Russian and international assets utilizing a combination of his own and borrowed funds.”
-
-Usmanov has avoided major rounds of sanctions on wealthy Russians. He appeared on a 2018 U.S. Treasury Department list of Russian Oligarchs. [British MPs recently](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-55844146) called for sanctioning Usmanov over Russian political aggression.
-
-## Gennady Timchenko
-
-***Russian billionaire and oil magnate who is known for his close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin***
-
-In 2010, Timchenko’s investment fund, Volga Resources, became one of the largest shareholders in Novatek, one of Russia’s primary natural gas firms, extending Timchenko’s considerable grip on Russia’s oil and gas industry.
-
-[Pandora Papers reporting from October 2021 reveal](https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/power-players/) a series of massive loans in 2007 and 2008 between anonymous offshore shell companies and a Timchenko firm registered in Cyprus. The Moscow Times reported that the firm, called White Seal Holdings, played a role in Timchenko’s Novatek investment.
-
-The files show that a Cyprus shell company called Vidrio Enterprises Limited loaned White Seal $572 million between 2007 and 2008. Some of the repayment dates were a single year after the loans were made. In 2008, White Seal received an additional $150 million from another anonymous Cyprus company called Bodela Holdings. It is unclear who ultimately owns Vidrio and Bodela Holdings, and Timchenko did not answer questions about the firms’ owners. In 2007, White Seal received a loan of $320 million from a shell company called Lerma Trading S.A., registered in Panama. Lawyers for Timchenko told ICIJ that “our client’s unequivocal position is that he has always acted entirely lawfully throughout his career and business dealings.”
-
-In 2015, the U.S. government sanctioned White Seal and Lerma Trading for “acting for or on behalf of” Timchenko. Timchenko was also director of LTS Holding Limited and beneficial owner of Roxlane Corporate Limited, both of which were registered in the British Virgin Islands.
-
-## Arkady Rotenberg
-
-***Russian businessman, billionaire and former [Judo partner](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/06/world/europe/russian-oligarchs-sanctions.html) of Vladimir Putin***
-
-
-
-Russian President Vladimir Putin and billionaire Arkady Rotenberg attend judo training in Sochi, Russia. Image: Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images
-
-In 2013, one of Arkady Rotenberg’s companies received potentially lucrative [government contracts](http://imrussia.org/en/analysis/economy/765-will-the-south-stream-be-frozen) to work on a proposed $40 billion natural gas pipeline between Russia and Europe. Around the same time, three anonymous companies made huge payments into the Putin network, [records show](https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/20160403-putin-russia-offshore-network/). Two of the shadow companies, and likely all three, were controlled by Arkady Rotenberg, [according to Panama Papers](https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/20160403-putin-russia-offshore-network/) reporting from 2016.
-
-Loans from these Rotenberg companies totaling more than $231 million appear to have gone to a British Virgin Islands-based company called Sunbarn Limited, created by a manager at Bank Rossiya, according to ICIJ’s [reporting](https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/20160403-putin-russia-offshore-network/); The loans had no repayment schedule.
-
-When reached for comment by ICIJ in 2016, Arkady Rotenberg did not respond to a request for comment.
-
-The European Union and the U.S. government [issued sanctions](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26672800) against Arkady Rotenberg in 2014, in retaliation for Putin’s annexation of Crimea. The U.S. also sanctioned his brother Boris.
-
-## Oleg Deripaska
-
-***Billionaire in Russia’s natural resources sector and close ally of Vladimir Putin***
-
-Between 2013 and 2015, compliance officers at the Bank of New York Mellon [flagged 16 transactions as potentially suspicious](https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/confidential-clients/). Each of these transactions involved Mallow Capital Corp., a company registered in the British Virgin Islands that operates as a subsidiary of Oleg Deripaska’s Basic Element Group. Mellon said Mallow Capital appeared to be a shell company operating in a high-risk area with no known legitimate business purpose. In 2012 and 2013, Mallow sent itself nearly $420 million using different British Virgin Islands addresses and different banks. Mallow also sent $20 million to another company with the same name, this one listing an address in Cyprus. The Bank of New York Mellon helped facilitate these transactions through a relationship with Moscow-based Bank Soyuz. Deripaska bought a controlling stake in Bank Soyuz in 2010, according to Reuters.
-
-Banks’ reports of suspicious activity reflect the concerns of bank compliance officers and are not necessarily indicative of criminal conduct or other wrongdoing. Deripaska denied laundering funds or committing financial crimes.
-
-## Yury Kovalchuk
-
-***Russian banker and longtime confidant of Vladimir Putin, who [U.S. officials have called](https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-sanctions-against-russia-bite-putins-personal-banker-1414711043) Putin’s “personal banker”***
-
-Kovalchuk is co-owner of a company, Ozon, that holds the title to what is reported to be Vladimir Putin’s favorite ski resorts, [according to a Panama Papers](https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/20160403-putin-russia-offshore-network/) story from 2016. Beginning in late 2009, Ozon received $11.3 million worth of loans from a key offshore company in the Putin network, the Panama Papers show. The loans carried an interest rate of 1 percent, according to the reporting.
-
-One $5 million loan was revised and extended multiple times and was converted to Russian rubles; the exchange rate and new amendments reduced its value and ultimately, the amount owed, [the leaked documents show](https://www.icij.org/investigations/panama-papers/20160403-putin-russia-offshore-network/).
-
-When reached for comment in 2016, a lawyer for Kovalchuk said information about Bank Rossiya was available from public sources, adding: “We do not understand why your decision was to address these questions to Mr. Yury Kovalchuk.”
-
-At the time, Bank Rossiya did not respond to detailed questions about its role.
-
-Kovalchuk has [previously](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-sanctions-russia/u-s-sanctions-companies-people-over-russia-actions-in-ukraine-idUSKBN1492AH) been sanctioned by the US, who has called him a close adviser to Putin and his personal banker.
-
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-# At 88, Poker Legend Doyle Brunson Is Still Bluffing. Or Is He?
-
-In poker lore, the best stories tend to begin with jackpot wins, steady nerves, or the occasional threat of murder. [Doyle Brunson](https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/playing-no-limit-texas-hold-em/) has all those tall tales—and we’ll get to them in due time. He has won millions while bluffing, stared down killers in parking lots, and pried his chips—quite literally—from the hands of death.
-
-But this saga doesn’t start there. Instead, it starts with Brunson in retreat.
-
-It was May 1972 at Binion’s Horseshoe, in downtown Las Vegas. Tables were jammed together in an improvised poker room to seat eight players who had each bought in at $10,000 for a chance to win the third annual [World Series of Poker](https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/inside-the-world-series-of-poker/). Reporters crowded into the casino with their cameras and tape recorders, but it was nothing like the scene at today’s WSOPs. This tournament wasn’t broadcast on cable TV or treated like a sport. It wasn’t even treated like a game. Texas Hold ’Em, now the most played poker variation in the world, had been in Vegas casinos less than a decade. In 1970 there had been only fifty poker tables in the entire city. This world series was a sideshow meant to drum up business for the casino, and the competitors were as strange as if Mark Twain characters had jumped off the page and found their way to the desert for a piece of the action. An article in the *Fort Worth Star-Telegram* described the event: “In the clockless world of gambling, peopled as it is with optimists, liars, fools and lunatics, it is the lot of the poker player to be set apart and regarded as a curiosity.”
-
-One of those curiosities was Brunson, with his thick-rimmed glasses, his thinning hair, and his gut that hung over the table. He was perhaps the best player in the world, wielding a domineering strategy few had ever seen. Yet even the biggest poker fan wouldn’t have known the name “Doyle Brunson” back then. He tried to avoid the reporters, and when he did speak with them, he used the pseudonym Adrian Doyle and said he came from Texas and that some people called him Texas Dolly.
-
-
-
-Doyle Brunson at his Las Vegas home in June 2022. Photograph by Roger Kisby/REDUX Pictures
-
-The field was whittled down one player after another, and, bit by bit, Brunson amassed a war chest of chips. Three players remained. Soon, a champion would be crowned. The crowd grew. The cameras flashed.
-
-That’s when Brunson started to lose, folding each hand without even trying to win. Jack Binion, the casino’s president, saw what was happening. He paused the game and marched the players into a private office, where he tore into Brunson.
-
-“You’re going to cause a big scandal here,” Binion said. “You just can’t do this.”
-
-“Jack,” Brunson explained, “I just don’t want the publicity.”
-
-Back in Longworth, the tiny, conservative West Texas town where Brunson grew up, most folks thought he made an honest living. They knew him as the son of a farmer, a former state-champion athlete, and a master’s graduate from a Baptist college. If they found out how he really spent his days, if they knew who he spent his time with, well—Brunson was worried that his entire family would be shunned.
-
-And so Texas Dolly walked out of Binion’s office, across the casino floor, and out of the Horseshoe. Here was a man known to boast that he had once played poker for five straight days without sleeping. Now he claimed he was too tired, nauseated, and dizzy to even sit at the table.
-
-As he turned his back on a world title, he told himself there would be other fortunes to win, other chapters of his legend to write. And maybe, one day, they would come without the guilt.
-
-
-
-Brunson with his winnings at the 1977 World Series of Poker.Tony Korody/Sygma via Getty
-
-Early one afternoon this March, Brunson steered a blue Cadillac Escalade off the Las Vegas Strip, skirting the Bellagio’s famous fountain on the way into the casino’s north valet entrance. As he handed his keys to the attendant, the buzz began. It only intensified as he raced his mobility scooter across the marble floors, swerving around slot machines and ATMs and tourists. “I’m afraid I drive like a NASCAR driver,” he says.
-
-Brunson is now 88, with a smooth, bald head under his signature white Stetson and eyes that seem stuck in a squint. He looks his age, but his bright smile still shimmers, and his belly laugh still thunders. He zipped into the poker area, and as he wove through the low-limit tables, players glanced up from their cards. They removed their earbuds, peered over their sunglasses, and gave their tablemates looks that betrayed their poker faces. He sped by them and headed straight into a private space at the back. It’s called the Legends Room, and his picture hangs on the wall. He pulled up to his usual spot and greeted the regulars. He asked to be dealt in.
-
-Here, the buzz crescendoed. You could understand the excitement. Watching Doyle Brunson play poker at the Bellagio is like watching Tiger Woods play Augusta—if you could buy in for a chance to tee off with Tiger at [Amen Corner](https://golf.com/news/everything-you-need-to-know-about-amen-corner-augusta-national/).
-
-Since his exit at the 1972 WSOP, Brunson has become nothing less than the most legendary poker player of all time. Name a seminal moment in the game’s past, and chances are he was sitting at the table. “He is the bridge between history and today,” says Daniel Negreanu, a past WSOP champion. Brunson has starred in just about every [poker TV show](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6htvdsIj9eI) ever aired—*High Stakes Poker,* *Poker After Dark,* and *Poker Superstars,* to name a few—and his how-to book, *[Super/System](https://www.amazon.com/Doyle-Brunsons-Super-System-Brunson/dp/1580420818),* is considered a bible of the game. He played in the very first WSOP, in 1970, just as he did in the event’s fifty-second installment, last year. Over the decades, the WSOP has grown into a massive production that dominates Vegas for six weeks during the summer and features 88 in-person events in multiple variations of poker, with thousands of players vying not only for money and bragging rights but also for the diamond-and-gold championship bracelets that are the game’s version of boxing title belts. The most famous of these competitions is the Main Event, a Hold ’Em showdown that airs on CBS Sports Network. Brunson has won the Main Event twice, in 1976 and 1977, and he’s added eight other bracelets along the way. Only three other players have won multiple Main Events, and Brunson is tied with fellow all-time greats Phil Ivey and Johnny Chan for the second-most bracelets ever earned, with ten, behind only Phil Hellmuth, who has sixteen.
-
-But Brunson’s real reputation was born in games like this one: on a nondescript afternoon, in Vegas, behind closed doors, with as much as a million dollars in the pot. Brunson still plays cash games at least once a week, although many friends try to get him to the tables even more often. Until his eightieth birthday he played three hundred times a year, gambling all night and sleeping when the sun rose. “We used to bet all we had, day after day,” Brunson says in Al Alvarez’s book *The* *Biggest Game in Town*. “And every other day we went broke.”
-
-These days, he tries to make it home before dinner; he says his wife, Louise, has already spent too many long nights worrying about him. Though nothing would be more worrisome than if Brunson quit cards altogether. “I’m telling you, he will *die* if he stays home,” says Eli Elezra, a recent inductee to the Poker Hall of Fame and a frequent tablemate of Brunson’s.
-
-> Brunson has never craved the spotlight, which not only goes against his nature, but also disrupts his strategy at the card table. “If I could, I’d go back to being an anonymous poker player.”
-
-Maybe so. During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Brunson didn’t play for nearly a year. In that time, he was hospitalized with pneumonia and, he says, suffered physical withdrawals from being away from the game. “I played so much that it’s just a part of my life,” he says. Without poker, Brunson felt dizzy, depressed, and lethargic. “Just like a dope fade.”
-
-“He needs the adrenaline. He needs the bad beat,” says Elezra, describing the jolt gamblers feel after their most crushing losses. “He needs it to live.” But Brunson has never craved the spotlight, which not only goes against his nature, but also disrupts his strategy at the card table. “If I could, I’d go back to being an anonymous poker player,” he has said. In tournaments, competitors will go all in against him nearly every time, just so they can return home and tell their garage game buddies that they won a hand against Texas Dolly. “Most people have read \[my\] book,” he says, “and they always think I’m bluffing.”
-
-Brunson claims he’s done playing in the WSOP Main Event, that 2021 was his final run. The crowds have grown so thick and the fanfare so overwhelming that he can hardly get his scooter to his assigned table. But he’s sworn off tournaments before, and that didn’t stop him from joining last year’s contest. It wasn’t his best showing, but expert observers say he did what he could in difficult situations. “Most players likely would have been gone much earlier,” wrote Jon Sofen for PokerNews. So perhaps this semiretirement is just one more bluff.
-
-The public’s embrace of Brunson and of poker writ large is something he could hardly have imagined in 1972. When he sat down with another chance to win the Main Event in 1976, Brunson still coveted the approval of a society that had yet to accept professional gambling as much more than the province of eccentrics and degenerates. But by then he was done hiding. He decided right there to try to change how the world saw poker players. He won that year and the next, and the book, the press, and the TV appearances all followed.
-
-That might have been Brunson’s most impressive wager—as well as his most lasting contribution to the game. His charisma helped lift poker
-from smoky back rooms to stages like the Bellagio: opulent, well lit, romantic, and made for TV. For decades, Hollywood rarely depicted poker outside of gangster movies and westerns; by the time *Rounders* was released, in 1998, *Super/System* appeared in one of the film’s opening shots and the voice-over name-checked Brunson three times.
-
-In the mid-aughts, Matt Damon, the star of that movie, joined Brunson’s game at the Bellagio. He brought a pal: Leonardo DiCaprio.
-As always, the onlookers were there, straining to see. And when a group finally approached to ask for photos and autographs, they ignored the Hollywood celebrities and went straight for Brunson.
-
-
-
-Brunson with Leonardo DiCaprio in Las Vegas in 2005.Denise Truscello/Getty
-
-DiCaprio, Brunson says, “just played real tight,” meaning he wasn’t aggressive. Brunson has plenty of other A-list gambling buddies and a curt scouting report on everyone from Cary Grant (“wasn’t very good”) to Tobey Maguire (“on the professional level, almost”). He has golfed with Michael Jordan and was there when Willie Nelson lost a reported $400,000 in “high-stakes” dominoes. Last August, Senator Ted Cruz played a game with Brunson (“He was very good . . . He really talked to me a lot”). The respect was mutual. “Doyle Brunson is an all-time Texas great and a legendary poker player,” Cruz told *Texas Monthly*. “He’s a man of grace, charm, and incredible savvy insight. It was amazing—truly a bucket-list moment—when I had the honor to sit down and play poker with Texas Dolly himself.”
-
-A few months ago, Brunson transferred most of his money to his children Pam and Todd (both are accomplished poker players themselves). He has earned more than $6 million in tournaments and has won and lost so many millions more in private games that even those who know him best struggle to estimate his career winnings. Poker players are famously tight-lipped when it comes to discussing their net worth, and Brunson is no different. He won’t say why he gave away his fortune or how much remains; he just explains the decision with a shrug: “I don’t know; I just did.”
-
-Now he doesn’t have the bankroll to play in the high-stakes, no-limit games that had long been his bread and butter. Instead, he plays what he calls “cheap poker,” where the minimum opening bet on each hand is $300. During a typical five-hour session, he says, he needs around $20,000 worth of chips just to get started. Cheap poker, indeed.
-
-And yes, he still wins.
-
-Decades ago, Brunson bought land in Northwest Montana, on Flathead Lake, and even when he’s not visiting, he tries to keep the Big Sky with him. His car has Montana plates (along with a “Don’t Mess With Texas” bumper sticker), and his phone number begins with a Montana area code. Just inside his lake house’s entrance are two framed photos of him after his Main Event victories. Between them, a custom-made sign reads “A Long Way From Longworth.”
-
-When Brunson was born, in 1933, Longworth was an unincorporated West Texas town with a population of around two hundred. There was a general store, a one-room elementary school, and two churches. The nearest city was Sweetwater, fifteen miles to the south. His family home didn’t get electricity until after he turned six, and throughout Brunson’s youth, it lacked indoor plumbing. The door to the outhouse creaked every time someone opened it. Railroad tracks cut through the cotton fields in the backyard, and often, around dinnertime, the wall-shaking rattle of a passing train was quickly followed by a knock on the back door. Hoboes knew that Brunson’s mother, Mealia, would feed them a warm supper; all they had to do was jump from the boxcar and cross the rows of crops. After dinner, the next train would carry them along.
-
-Brunson’s father, John, seldom spoke and rarely gave his three children much attention. He ran the family’s farm, and the kids grew up picking cotton by hand. They sold it for a penny a pound. Yet money never seemed to be an issue for the Brunsons. Somehow, John always seemed to have just enough.
-
-Three other children Brunson’s age lived in town, one girl and two boys. The trio of boys spent long afternoons playing baseball with one pitcher, one fielder, and one hitter, using a broomstick as a bat. They shot hoops on a dusty outdoor court where only Brunson appeared to be able to adjust his accuracy when the prairie wind blew. They swam in stock tanks and pretended to be cowboys.
-
-Spend any amount of time with Brunson and it’s clear the man hates losing. That spirit was born on those slow afternoons in Longworth. In his memoir, *The Godfather of Poker*, Brunson calls himself a late bloomer in sports, but by the time he enrolled at Sweetwater High, he was a natural at everything he tried—except football, which his parents forbade him from joining. He was too small, they believed, at just five foot seven and 140 pounds.
-
-In track, his specialty was the mile, and he ran it fast enough to qualify for the state meet, in Austin. Radio stations carried the event live across Texas, and Brunson’s father tuned in from Longworth. His boy would be challenging the previous year’s reigning champion and runner-up, both of whom were favorites to repeat. When the race began, the broadcaster mentioned only those two names, painting the picture of a neck-and-neck battle for first place. John’s heart sank. He would later tell his son, “I just figured you got down to that big meet and got outclassed.”
-
-> The games Brunson frequented in his prime could see each player win or lose half a million dollars only to come back and do it again the next day.
-
-But soon, the voice cut through the radio again: “Well, ladies and gentlemen, it looks like this duel was all for second place. Doyle Brunson, from Sweetwater, is about fifty yards out in front, and it looks like he’s gonna stay there.” Brunson was the 1950 state champion in the mile, with a time of 4:38.01.
-
-But Brunson’s main love was basketball. This was the late forties, shortly after the founding of the NBA, and the sport was so young that high school coaches in West Texas sometimes knew less about the game than their players did. Brunson mostly ignored the coaches at Sweetwater and instead cribbed his moves from the team’s veterans. Before long, he had built himself into a star player—aided by a growth spurt that left him standing six foot two heading into junior year. He played guard and was considered one of the deadliest long-range shooters in Texas. He wore glasses on the court, and when defenders fouled him, the frames dug into his skin, leaving Brunson’s eyebrows dotted with scars.
-
-In 1949 he led Sweetwater to the state tournament, and on the eve of the semifinals, he visited the hotel room of some classmates who’d made the trip to Austin as fans. They were playing poker—Seven-Card Stud and Five-Card Draw—and they offered to teach Brunson. He had seen the game only in westerns. They bet dimes, then quarters, gambling deep into the evening. Brunson won a few dollars and headed back to his room around midnight.
-
-Even now, he can recall specific hands from throughout his life with photographic accuracy, certain cards that won him millions and made him famous. He remembers that first game too. “Easy money,” he says in his memoir.
-
-
-
-Brunson at his Las Vegas home in June 2022.Photograph by Roger Kisby/REDUX Pictures
-
-They say nobody stays lucky in Las Vegas. On a typical day, the cash games that Brunson frequented in his betting prime could see each player win or lose half a million dollars only to come back and do it again the next. A few bad nights could leave anyone—even a champion—with nothing. Brunson says he once lost $6 million to a player named Chip Reese. He’s had hot streaks and cold streaks since then, but if overall winnings are the measure of success, you could say that Brunson has been getting lucky for more than half a century, in card rooms from Fort Worth to Macau and everywhere in between.
-
-“Nobody gets lucky consistently,” he says. You can win a few hands here and there with no real skill. You might even win an entire tournament that way. But grinding at a table day after day and coming out on top is a different story. In all the games he’s played, Brunson has made a royal flush, the best hand in the game, just twice, and still, poker has been his primary source of income for 66 years. Besides the year in which he lost the $6 million, he says, he has never finished in the red.
-
-The keys to his success hearken back to an earlier era of the game. Brunson does not wear dark sunglasses when he plays. He does not wear earbuds to block out noise, like many modern-day players do. Other competitors zip hoodies up to their eyes, hiding as much of their faces as possible from opponents adept at spotting tells—subtle giveaways of a gambler’s mental state. “I think they should outlaw all that,” Brunson says. He prefers a purer game, wearing a button-down shirt, and sometimes a sports coat, with his white Stetson. He talks to others at his table. “I played with him a few months ago,” says Daniel Negreanu. “He feels like, to me, at eighty-eight, sharper than he did five years ago—like, *better*. He’s playing better now than he was a few years ago.”
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-Today, younger players prepare using computer algorithms that help determine exactly which hands to play and which to fold, as well as the precise amounts to bet based on probability. Brunson has studied these methods, but he believes he can beat the opponents who use them, and he’s not the only one who thinks so. He might not win the first game against a new rival. It might take him a month, even a year, but eventually, he’ll find an edge. He has said he can catch opponents bluffing by watching their neck veins for signs of an increased heart rate. Against the new wave of analytical players, he’ll play erratically, betting hands a computer model would expect any sane person to fold just to throw off the competition. Poker historian Nolan Dalla says he’s confident Brunson could beat a table full of amateurs without even looking at his cards. “Poker is a game of people,” Brunson often says.
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-“There’s mathematics, there’s fundamentals, there’s strategic ways to approach different things,” Negreanu explains. “You can be studious and learn the game that way. What Doyle is talking about is adjusting his strategy to the person—playing the player. Understanding what kind of person he’s dealing with, what types of things they like to do. Are they someone who likes to lie a lot and bluff? Or just someone who plays it straight? And when he knows that, he adapts the strategy. So he’s playing the people. He’s always playing tendencies. He’s also adjusting based on ‘How’s that person doing? Are they losing a lot? And if so, are they broken in their mind?’ ”
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-Brunson can’t fully explain the hold gambling has on him, but the attraction has never wavered since that first poker game in an Austin hotel room. The Sweetwater basketball team lost the next morning, but Brunson performed well enough that the University of Texas offered him spots on the Longhorns’ basketball and track teams. Brunson wanted to accept, but he waited too long to fill out the paperwork, and by the time he was ready to apply, UT had allotted all its scholarships. Instead, Brunson landed at Hardin-Simmons University, a Baptist college in Abilene that competed in the Border Conference, which in those days counted Arizona, Arizona State, and Texas Tech among its members.
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-> On weekends he’d travel to college towns to play poker. Lubbock, College Station, Austin—the bigger the school, the more fraternity brothers to fleece.
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-At Hardin-Simmons, Brunson’s athletic scholarship included a $15 monthly stipend, what the school called “laundry money.” He used the cash to stake himself in late-night poker games with other undergrads—and also to wager on just about anything he could think of. He’d turn to friends and bet a dollar that he could throw a rock and hit a telephone pole. Five separate times, the school’s disciplinary board called Brunson in to warn him about gambling.
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-Another student might have been expelled, but Brunson says his status as a star athlete saved him. On the track, his mile time kept dropping—all the way to 4:18. He was more serious about basketball, and in 1953, his junior year, he led the Cowboys to a conference championship over Arizona. That earned the school a spot in the NCAA Tournament and put Brunson on the NBA’s radar. The Minneapolis Lakers sent scouts to Abilene, and they informed Hardin-Simmons’ coach that they planned to pick Brunson in the first round of the following year’s draft. Brunson thought his future was set. (Decades later, while sitting across a poker table from then–Lakers owner Jerry Buss, Brunson asked if the franchise still had any scouting tape of his college games. “No,” Buss replied. “After fifty years, we throw them away.”)
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-The summer before his senior year, Brunson returned home to Longworth and found a job working with Sheetrock at the local gypsum plant. One day, while loading the material from a forklift to a truck, he noticed a stack starting to fall. Brunson rushed over and tried to catch it before it toppled over, but he couldn’t stop the two-thousand-pound pile from falling on him. It crashed directly onto his right shin, snapping both his tibia and fibula. He collapsed, the exposed bone jutting out of his leg. A coworker covered him with a blanket, as if he were already dead.
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-“My God,” Brunson thought. “I’ll never play basketball again.”
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-He couldn’t have known it then, but it might have been the first time in Brunson’s life that he got truly lucky.
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-Brunson with a broken leg during his senior year at Hardin-Simmons University in 1954.Courtesy of Doyle Brunson
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-There was no money in basketball in the fifties; the average NBA player’s salary was a few thousand dollars. If he’d gone on to play professionally, Brunson would have rushed to marry his college sweetheart, and, after basketball, he probably would have returned to West Texas to become a teacher—a principal, maybe.
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-That would have been an admirable outcome, and he probably would have been happy with it, but today, he’s glad his injury sent him down a different path. Though when he was trapped in a white cast from foot to mid-thigh, he struggled to imagine any future at all. While he was still recovering, Brunson and some college friends got to talking about their long-range plans. They spoke of becoming writers and politicians; then they turned to Brunson. He told them he wanted to make a lot of money, and when they asked how, he replied, “I don’t know.”
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-He enrolled in graduate school at Hardin-Simmons to buy some time, earning a dual master’s degree in business and education. Without the distraction of sports, his grades improved, but he was broke. On weekends he’d travel to college towns to play poker. Lubbock, College Station, Austin—the bigger the school, the more fraternity brothers to fleece. Almost always, he rode back to Abilene with their allowance money. “I could see that I was better than most of them,” he says, before issuing a swift correction. “Or all of them.”
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-After graduation, he considered teaching but wanted better pay, given his advanced degree. He took a job selling adding machines in Fort Worth. “I thought I would get a better job,” he says, still miffed that he received no more lucrative offers. “I wasn’t a salesman.” On his first day, he walked up to a potential customer and launched into his pitch. “The guy just looked at me, turned around, and pointed at the door.”
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-In seven months on the job, he failed to make a single sale—a harbinger of a cursed business sense that would follow him for the rest of his life. (Brunson has lost hundreds of thousands on investments over the years, from gold and emerald mines to teeth-cleaning chewing gum to expeditions aimed at raising the *Titanic* and discovering Noah’s ark.) One day, while making his rounds, Brunson ran across a poker game in the back room of a pool hall. The first time he bought in, he “cleared a month’s salary in less than three hours.” It wasn’t long before he ditched sales and decided to play poker full-time.
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-That Brunson had recently moved to Fort Worth was another stroke of fortune. In the mid-fifties, Fort Worth’s Jacksboro Highway and Exchange Avenue were dotted with colorful characters and dark rooms filled with card tables. Poker was illegal, but many of the games’ organizers cut deals with local police to allow them to operate. “Exchange Avenue was maybe the most dangerous street in America. There was nothing out there but thieves and pimps and killers,” Brunson says. “It was amazing.”
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-He started small, slowly figuring out strategies and developing his skills. He bet and bluffed against characters with names like “Treetop” Jack Straus, Corky McCorquodale, and Duck Mallard in games of Seven-Card Stud and Ace-to-Five Lowball. Elmer Sharp ran one game out of his garage near Jacksboro Highway, where he kept a live bear as a pet. When business was slow, Sharp would wrestle the animal. Brunson says he once played five straight days at Sharp’s, stopping only to eat, drink, and use the bathroom. Others drank heavily and popped pills to stay alert during these marathon sessions, but Brunson rarely got drunk and always avoided drugs. He ran on coffee and sweets.
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-Violence was a fact of life in Brunson’s Fort Worth. “You never knew what would happen,” he writes in his memoir, “but you sure as heck knew something would.” He was arrested more times than he can count and carried a pistol with him at all times. When he went out to eat, he sat facing the door. In the middle of one game, near midnight, a man walked up to a player a table over from Brunson, put a gun to the back of the player’s head, and pulled the trigger. His brain splattered against the wall. Brunson still remembers his own cards when it happened—two pair, aces and sevens. He grabbed his chips and ran out the back, afraid not so much of the shooting as of the police, and hid in an ice-cold creek until the situation cooled down.
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-In another incident, while playing a private game of Ace-to-Five Lowball, a poker variation in which the object is to have the five lowest cards, Brunson noticed that every time he [bluffed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFc3rYcKLjI), his opponent, a man named Red Dodson, would fold. Brunson was making a killing, and so, once again, he bet big. Only this time, Dodson bet with him. “I know y’all have been bluffing me all night,” Dodson said. “Let’s see what you do now.”
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-Dodson turned his cards over, grinning. He had the second-best hand in the game: an ace, two, three, four, and six. There was no way he could lose—or so he thought. When Brunson revealed his cards, Dodson stared in horror at an ace, two, three, four, and five—the best hand possible. “Red’s face turned white, his eyes rolled back, and he started turning blue,” Brunson writes. “Red fell out of his chair and was dead before he hit the floor.” While they waited for the paramedics to arrive, Brunson collected the pot. “I felt bad,” he writes, “but that’s poker, and bad beats happen.”
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-When Brunson went home for the holidays in 1957, his father asked him and his brother if they wanted to play some poker. Brunson was surprised. He’d been unaware his father even knew how to play. There was no money on the table—they bet only matchsticks—and Brunson did his best to play like a casual gambler. His competitive side couldn’t take losing, though, and he tried a bluff. His dad saw right through it. “How in the world would you call that?” Brunson asked. Unimpressed, his father replied, “I’ve been seeing plays like that for forty years.” As it turned out, he’d put Brunson’s brother and sister through college with winnings from Sweetwater poker games.
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-Brunson never told his father the truth of what he did for work. He never got the chance. John died just a year after that game, and Brunson still thinks of him. “I was always hoping he’d ask about what I was doing, give me a kind word about something,” he writes. “I suppose I’d even have settled for being yelled at.” Maybe poker could have finally brought them together. He wonders now if he inherited a “poker gene,” something in his blood that calls him to the tables night after night—the same longing that called his father too.
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-Brunson playing in the 1979 World Series of Poker (second from right) at Binion’s Horseshoe.UNLV Libraries Special Collections
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-Nobody is quite sure where or how [Texas Hold ’Em](https://www.pokernews.com/news/2017/04/poker-pop-culture-047-mystery-texas-holdem-history-27558.htm) originated. Some say it was invented by cowboys who were short on cards and had to improvise to include more players. In 2007 the Texas Legislature recognized Robstown, outside Corpus Christi, as the game’s founding place, but reliable details are murky. Dallas gamblers supposedly adopted the variation in the twenties. We do know that in the fifties, Hold ’Em—or, as it was also known, Hold Me Darling or F— ’Em—was hardly synonymous with poker like it is today. In 1958, when he traveled to a private card room in Granbury, forty miles south of Fort Worth, Brunson had never heard of Hold ’Em. But he knew that the man running the game drank too much and bet high. He smelled opportunity.
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-In Granbury, Brunson asked the regulars to explain the rules. “I grasped the correct strategy right away,” he writes. “Play big cards and use position as my two big weapons.”
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-In retrospect, that night might be considered Hold ’Em’s big bang; it’s as far back as the record goes. Still, it would be another decade before Brunson and other Texas gamblers brought Hold ’Em to Vegas, and when they did, it wasn’t to spread the good word about a challenging style of poker. It was to clean out some suckers. The Texans knew how to win at Hold ’Em, and the Vegas gamblers did not. “I went seven years without losing in a big poker game,” says Brunson. “All the wise guys thought I was cheating, which I wasn’t. It was just that the competition was so easy.”
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-As he traveled from game to game, Brunson met fellow gamblers “Amarillo Slim” Preston, a wisecracking rancher, and Bryan “Sailor” Roberts, named for a stint in the Navy. They became fast friends, joining forces to form a barnstorming big three of Texas gambling. They would bet on anything and everything — both with and against one another. During a road trip through Mexico, Brunson looked out of their station wagon at the Sierra Madres. “Doyle,” said Roberts, “how long you think it would take you to shinny up that mountain?”
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-Brunson took stock of the situation. “Oh, I could climb it in two hours easy,” he said. Right then, the car skidded to a stop, they each put up $2,000, and Brunson was off to the races. In Slim’s recollection, Brunson “shinnied up that mountain like a mountain goat on a mission.” Even with his bad leg, he beat the time, and Roberts was so frustrated when Brunson arrived back at the station wagon that he refused to hand Brunson the money. He threw it on the floorboard instead, and Brunson just let it lie there, where it stayed as they drove off in search of their next wager.
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-> When Louise asked Brunson what he did for work, he told her he was a bookmaker. She thought he said “bookkeeper.” It would be months before she realized her mistake.
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-The trio found strength in numbers, playing from a single bankroll so a bad night wouldn’t leave one of them broke. They watched one another’s backs, although they still got robbed occasionally. They arranged themselves throughout the room to spot cheaters, although they themselves never cheated. (“If I needed to, I might have,” says Brunson.) Most important, they helped one another study the game; after long nights of gambling, they would replay critical hands back at their hotel. They’d go through deck after deck, working out a rough understanding of the probabilities that certain hands would lead to wins. Players today use powerful computers; Brunson and his friends grasped the odds through brute repetition.
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-One day, Brunson was with Roberts at the Dixie Club, in San Angelo, when he noticed a woman dancing to country music. He found out she was a pharmacist named Louise. They danced. He asked her to coffee. She said no. The next day, Brunson went to the pharmacy, pretending he needed vitamins, so that he could talk with her. He kept coming back, every time under a different pretense, and he says it wasn’t long before he had bought nearly every item in the store. “She sold me toys, vitamins, multivitamins, aspirin, everything,” he writes. “I bought every contraption she recommended.” He never quite won her over, though, and Brunson gave up until months later, when he saw her out with another man. Brunson winked, and Louise waved back. “Well, maybe I’ve still got a shot,” he thought. So he went back to the pharmacy and asked her to dinner. This time, she said yes.
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-When Louise asked Brunson what he did for work, he told her he was a bookmaker. She thought he said “bookkeeper.” It would be months before she realized her mistake. By then, it didn’t matter. She was in love.
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-They married in 1962 at a funeral home in La Marque, across the bay from Galveston. Brunson’s brother-in-law worked there, and in any case, he says, “the chapel was lovely.” A few days earlier, when Louise was waiting to head to the courthouse for their marriage license, it was Roberts who arrived to accompany her instead of Brunson. Her groom was at a poker game, and he was winning. They figured Roberts could stand in his place. Besides, as Brunson remembers, “we needed the money.”
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-Downtown Las Vegas looks today like something out of *Blade Runner*. Fremont Street, less than ten miles north of the Strip, used to be where the town’s biggest gamblers lorded over the action at casinos like the Golden Nugget and Benny Binion’s Horseshoe. The area has since been redeveloped as an outdoor mall and promenade, where pop music pulses from speakers and a [massive LED screen](https://vegasexperience.com/viva-vision-light-show/) arches over the street like an artificial, electric-pink-and-orange sky.
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-The Horseshoe is still there, although it’s now called Binion’s. Inside, the ceilings are low, and the air is stale with nicotine. The flashing lights and electronic bleeps of slot machines are everywhere, and only three framed photos on the wall behind the cashier’s cage are left to commemorate the casino’s status as the birthplace of the World Series of Poker. Brunson appears in two of them, one that features him and the late poker pro Stu Ungar seated at the 1980 event’s final table and another in which he’s shaking hands with broadcaster Brent Musburger. The poker tables at Binion’s have closed during the pandemic, and as one cashier says, “I don’t know if they’re gonna come back.”
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-Vegas constantly erases its own history. Harrah’s Entertainment bought the rights to the WSOP in 2004, and in doing so, the company acquired the Horseshoe name. This summer’s WSOP has already begun at the Bally’s casino complex on the Strip, which is in the process of being renovated and rebranded as the Horseshoe. The Main Event will start July 3. At the opening press conference, organizers were keen to highlight the old Horseshoe as the WSOP’s birthplace, but the glitzy, corporate air of the endeavor had little in common with the spirit of the original casino or its boss, Benny Binion.
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-Binion was a [Dallas crime boss](https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/benny-and-the-boys/) who had already been convicted of one homicide and charged with two more by the time he moved to Vegas. He left Texas in 1946—“My sheriff got beat in the election,” he said—and headed to Nevada with $2 million stuffed inside a pair of suitcases. There, he bought the Horseshoe and turned it into a no-frills paradise for gamblers. Binion’s casino would take any bet, without limits, and the house always paid. The Sombrero Room restaurant served beef from his ranch in Montana and poured bowls of spicy chili using a recipe that Binion had learned from a lawman who had been part of the team that ambushed Bonnie and Clyde and who used to cook for inmates in the Dallas jail. Binion looked out for other Texans in Vegas, and when Brunson moved to the city, in 1973, Binion took him under his wing. They ate lunch together most days, often with the mayor and other local power players.
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-Brunson’s connection to Binion also gave him protection during a period in which rival syndicates clashed over their cuts of nearly every dollar won, lost, earned, or stolen in Vegas. When Brunson arrived, the city’s most vicious gangster was Tony “the Ant” Spilotro, who, according to some accounts, committed at least two dozen murders and who inspired Joe Pesci’s character in *Casino*. Word eventually reached Brunson that Spilotro wanted 25 percent of his winnings. The next time they saw each other, Brunson asked why he should accept those terms.
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-“If you don’t like it,” Spilotro said, “I’ll stick twelve ice picks in that big fat gut of yours.”
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-“You can’t kill everyone,” Brunson told the mobster at a subsequent meeting.
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-“I won’t have to kill everyone,” Spilotro said. “Just the first one.”
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-Despite the threats, Spilotro never laid a hand on Brunson, who says the only reason he’s still alive is because Spilotro knew better than to cross Benny Binion. For his part, Brunson’s participation helped Binion and his son, Jack, launch the inaugural World Series of Poker. That title didn’t mean much—at the time, demand for the game was so scarce that many Vegas casinos lacked poker rooms. The event wound up being more convention than tournament. The Binions invited the best three dozen players in the world, many of whom were Texan, to play different variations of poker over several days and then vote on the overall champion. It wasn’t until the following year that the tournament adopted an elimination format. The Binions liked the event because it brought people into the casino. Players such as Brunson liked it because it made for easy pickings in side games with tourists who wanted to try their luck against pros.
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-> Brunson got a ten and a two. “It’s one of the worst hands you can be dealt,” Negreanu says. “Absolute trash.” But Brunson sensed that Alto didn’t have anything either.
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-In 1976 Brunson made it back to the final table for the first time since he had conceded the title four years earlier. This time, he played to win. It was down to him and a gambler from Houston, Jesse Alto. Brunson chipped away at Alto’s stack, wearing him down little by little until Brunson finally won a big hand. Brunson knew that Alto tended to get impatient after losing big and thought, “If I can win the next hand, I might break him.”
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-The dealer slid the men their cards, and Brunson turned up a ten and a two. “It’s one of the worst hands you can be dealt,” Negreanu says. “It’s absolute trash.” But Brunson had a feeling that Alto didn’t have anything either. When Alto bet, Brunson called.
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-The flop—three communal cards for either player to use in his hand—showed an ace, jack, and ten, giving Brunson a pair of tens. Alto bet again, and even though Brunson’s pair wasn’t much, he decided to play out his hunch. He called. The dealer turned over a two, giving Brunson two pair. Alto looked across the table, trying to read Brunson’s mind. Brunson stared back and noticed the shadows beneath his opponent’s eyes. He had him.
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-He pushed enough chips into the middle to force Alto to go all in with the rest of his stack. Alto called.
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-“What’ve you got?” Brunson asked.
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-Alto flipped over an ace and a jack, giving him the stronger two-pair hand. Brunson showed his ten-deuce and said, “You’ve got me beat.”
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-But they still hadn’t seen the final card—the “river”—and if that were either a ten or a two, Brunson could still win. The odds against that happening stood at eleven to one.
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-The dealer flipped the card. Ten of diamonds. Brunson had won the Main Event.
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-The next year, he was back at the final table, and the winning hand followed an almost identical script. Brunson had been working his opponent, Gary “Bones” Berland, and figured he had him on the ropes. He started with the same exact hand: ten-deuce. The communal cards gave Brunson two pair, and he bet before the dealer turned over the “river.” Berland went all in. The final card showed a ten, giving Brunson a full house and making the back-to-back champion a bona fide poker superstar.
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-To this day, the ten-deuce is known as the “Doyle Brunson.”
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-Today Brunson’s home office is full of stacks of documents, photos, and books that pile on his desk, around the floor, and under the window. A documentary crew is working on a film about his life, and he’s been sorting through photos for them. In the middle of it all is his computer, where he keeps Twitter open to interact with fans. Early one afternoon this spring, a new tweet popped up on his screen, and he leaned forward in his chair to see it. “Didn’t @TexDolly teach us that \[ace-king\] is a drawing hand?” He smiled as he read it.
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-Somewhere among the papers is an old journal of Brunson’s. He calls it his Book of Miracles, and it contains ten entries, ten moments that he can explain in no other way than divine intervention.
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-Brunson wasn’t always religious. In 1982 his daughter Doyla died from a heart condition at only eighteen years old, and he left poker for a year. He contemplated suicide. Somewhere in the grief, he started to explore spirituality. He studied Buddhism and Hinduism but eventually came back to the Bible. “I could see,” he explains, “ ‘Well, this thing is true.’ ” One of his old basketball teammates had become a minister and flew to Las Vegas to console Brunson. They prayed together, and soon, many of the poker pros in Vegas were joining them. “I’d see poker games just break up with a million dollars on the table,” he says, “and everybody goes, ‘Well, we gotta go to Bible study.’ ”
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-Brunson’s miracles range from the unlikely to the truly inexplicable. One recounts a time Louise was driving in rural Montana and her car broke down. Suddenly, out in the middle of nowhere, a man appeared and fixed the vehicle; when Louise turned around to thank him, he had disappeared. “What else could it have been except an angel?” Brunson says.
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-Another is from 1963. Brunson woke up with a blueberry-size growth on his neck. After a week, it was as big as a lime. His brother had died of melanoma, so Brunson rushed to the hospital. Diagnostic tests confirmed Brunson’s fears, and later, when surgeons operated on him to remove the cancer, they saw that it had spread. They excised everything they could, but they kept finding more. There was no use trying to remove it all; the doctors said he had three months to live. Louise was pregnant with their first child, and she prayed that he’d survive long enough to see the birth.
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-> For all the good fortune recounted in his Book of Miracles, poker doesn’t earn a mention. Brunson never needed luck to win a card game.
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-They sought a second opinion at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where surgeons proposed a potentially lifesaving procedure but warned that Brunson might die on the operating table. He took the bet. Friends visited and said their goodbyes. Louise prayed more. But when the doctors opened Brunson up, the cancer was nowhere to be found. “I don’t know how to explain it,” he says. “I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but the more things that happened that I did start seeing, I went, ‘Well, good night. Maybe there is some kind of calling—I don’t know.’ ”
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-Brunson had told Louise that if he got healthy, he’d stop gambling and find a real job to provide for their daughter. Poker was fun, but if he got another chance at life, he would dedicate it to family. He swore to do something respectable.
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-Once he recovered, though, he felt as if he were living on borrowed time. His brush with death had convinced him that life was too fragile to spend behind a desk. After all, he already knew how to support his family from behind a stack of chips.
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-He kept playing, and his bets grew more aggressive than ever. The strategy worked—he won 54 games in a row. “It was so uncanny it got to be a joke,” he writes in his memoir. That winning streak paid off all of his medical debt.
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-Brunson’s Book of Miracles describes other medical marvels, like when Louise survived a uterine tumor, and when Doyla overcame a debilitating spine condition. Yet for all the good fortune recounted in those pages, poker doesn’t earn a mention. Brunson never needed luck to win a card game.
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-Brunson saluting the crowd after his final hand at the 2018 WSOP.Drew Amato/Courtesy of PokerGO
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-Brunson says he wants to live until he’s 102—his way of honoring the poker hand that bears his name. Around the time he turned 70, though, he realized he’d better get trim if he wanted to last that long. He had grown so heavy that while playing a game in 2003, he struggled to get up from the table. The group he’d been sitting with told him he needed to lose weight, and he replied that he needed to lose a hundred pounds. They asked if he wanted to bet on whether he could do it, and Brunson couldn’t say no to the action. They gave him ten-to-one odds and two years to shed the hundred pounds. Brunson put up $100,000. If he won, he’d be paid back $1 million.
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-The first year, Brunson didn’t lose an ounce. The following year, months passed, and Brunson still hadn’t lost any weight. But then he went on a diet, and the weight flew off. He might have a shot at that million after all. For the remaining months, he stuck to a strict diet of catfish with Parmesan cheese. With a few weeks to go, the group gathered again. Brunson was down 98 pounds by then, so he offered them a deal. He’d give them 2 percent off if they’d pay him two pounds early. That night, they paid Brunson $980,000, and when they all sat down to play poker after dinner, Brunson lost every cent.
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-Weight has been a struggle for Brunson for most of his adult life, made worse by mobility challenges that have hounded him ever since he broke his leg in college. During another weight-loss attempt, he tried detoxing at a health center. On his first day there, the staff drew some blood for testing. The next, they drew some more. When they called him into the doctor’s office on the third day, nearly every professional from the clinic was there waiting. “Your cholesterol is less than one hundred,” a doctor explained to him. “We have people down here that eat nothing but raw vegetables and fruit trying to get their cholesterol down to where yours is. And we were just interested in what you eat.”
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-“I eat everything,” Brunson replied.
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-The doctors were stunned—on top of everything else, Brunson had also won the genetic lottery. “Your body must be programmed to live one hundred and twenty-five years, as badly as you’ve treated it,” they told him.
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-Brunson will keep playing as long as that body will let him. If you ask how he’s done it for so long, he won’t talk about betting strategy or even mention poker at all. “I come from a long line of livers,” he’ll tell you. It’s like an old saying of his, one he repeated in the opening credits of the NBC show *Poker After Dark*: “We don’t stop playing because we get old. We get old because we stop playing.”
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-And so, at least once a week, the excitement begins anew inside the Bellagio. Brunson enters through the north valet and heads straight to the Legends Room. Just outside, on the walls leading to the administrative offices, hangs a painting of a poem with the title “The Legend of Texas Dolly” written across the top. The canvas has been up long enough that many casino employees don’t know who made it or how it got there. “I know it’s not something we’re going to take down,” says Mike Williams, the Bellagio’s director of poker operations. The poem is decorated with playing cards and a photo of Brunson smiling in his cowboy hat. The final stanza goes like this:
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-> In poker games ’cross this land, by golly
->
-> They gun for him, but it’s all pure folly
->
-> For tho he holds only ten-deuce
->
-> All your chips you’ll turn loose
->
-> Because that is the Legend
->
-> Of Texas Dolly.
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-*Joe Levin is a writer based in Austin. He was once the top-ranked amateur competitive eater in Texas.*
-
-*This article originally appeared in the July 2022 issue of* Texas Monthly *with the headline “Original Gambler.”* [*Subscribe today*](https://www.texasmonthly.com/subscribe/?ref=end-article)*.*
-
-
-
-
----
-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
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-Alias: [""]
-Tag: ["🫀", "🤯", "🐣"]
-Date: 2022-02-10
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp:
-Link: https://psyche.co/ideas/babies-and-chicks-help-solve-one-of-psychologys-oldest-puzzles
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
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-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-04-23]]
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-
-
-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-BabiesandchickshelpsolvepsychologyoldestpuzzlesNSave
-
-
-
-# Babies and chicks help solve one of psychology’s oldest puzzles
-
-**What is in our head** before experience begins to shape it through learning? Humans seem to possess an implicit knowledge of physical objects as complete, connected, solid bodies that persist even when they are not visible and that maintain their identity through time. Humans also seem to implicitly know that certain kinds of objects (such as other people or other animals) exhibit actions that are special, in that they are directed towards goals. What is the origin of this implicit and intuitive core knowledge, the sort of things we know about the properties of physical objects (known as naive physics) and psychological objects (naive psychology)? Is it present from birth – a product of evolution – or is it acquired through experience?
-
-Studies on this subject sometimes involve human newborns, though there are limitations to the kinds of research that can be done with them. This is partly because humans’ behavioural repertoire soon after birth is quite restricted. There are obvious ethical limitations as well: one would not think of raising human newborns under sensory deprivation, for example, in order to answer scientific questions. Using animal models in addition to human studies offers a way to address these limitations. When we’re studying the origins of knowledge, the ideal model should combine some degree of sensory and motoric abilities at birth (eg, eyes open, able to walk), to facilitate cognitive testing, in addition to the possibility of accurate control of what the animal experiences before and soon after birth (to better determine whether certain behaviour is innate or learned). Precocial animals such as ducklings or chicks give us such a model.
-
-Chicks need to actively explore and learn about their environment from the moment they hatch. Therefore, they learn very rapidly to identify and attach to their mother and siblings. For a long time, this imprinting process has been considered a form of exposure learning that is devoid of any constraints. In 1935, Martina the goose famously [imprinted](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22363967/) on the zoologist Konrad Lorenz – a very implausible mother. However, more recent research has shown that newly hatched chicks are not _tabulae rasae_: they hatch with predispositions to attend to, and thus to imprint on, particular kinds of stimuli. Before they have ever seen a mother hen, chicks [prefer](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0222079) to approach objects that roughly resemble the shape of a mother hen, as originally [shown](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347288801507) by the neurobiologist Gabriel Horn and his colleagues. In my lab, we [found](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00914.x) that the configuration of the mother’s head features can be reduced to just an ovoid outline that contains three high-contrast blobs arranged as an inverted triangle – a sort of emoticon with eyes and beak/mouth.
-
-Our findings suggest that the cortical route specialised for face processing is already functional at birth
-
-The same kind of preference was subsequently discovered in human neonates, as the cognitive neuroscientist Mark Johnson and colleagues [showed](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0010027791900456?via%3Dihub), based on the newborns’ eye gaze. Recently, my team [used](https://www.pnas.org/content/116/10/4625) EEG to measure electrical activity in the brains of newborns as they saw face-like, inverted face-like, or scrambled face-like configurations, and we found impressive selectivity of response to the first pattern. That is, we observed a significantly stronger change in our measure of cortical activity in response to the upright face-like stimuli, as compared with the other stimuli. We also revealed the involvement of cortical areas that overlap with the adult face-processing circuit. Our findings suggest that the cortical route specialised for face processing is already functional at birth.
-
-Of course, given that the sights and sounds these human infants are exposed to are not controlled _immediately_ after birth (as they can be in the case of chicks), one could argue that quick learning is taking place – namely that just a few hours of exposure to the real faces of the mother and other human beings might suffice to trigger the preference. But I doubt this is so, for we found that the preference is stronger for _younger_ babies than for older ones. Our babies were 70 hours old on average, which means some of them were a few hours old at the time of testing while others were older. The fact that longer exposure to natural faces seemed to, if anything, decrease the preference for face-like stimuli suggests that the preference is elicited based on an abstract template of a face, devoted to attracting the attention of newborns towards this class of stimuli.
-
-
-
-Drawings by Claudia Losi from the book _Born Knowing_ (2021) by Giorgio Vallortigara, published by MIT Press.
-
-These findings make clear the importance of parallel studies in the nonhuman animal model and in humans. Human studies provide evidence that the mechanisms for attending to face-like stimuli are at work in the newborns of our species. And the chick studies provide evidence that animals can possess these mechanisms from the very beginning of life.
-
-**At roughly the same time** that Horn discovered the preference of newly hatched chicks for the head region of the mother hen, I was dwelling on another issue: are chicks attracted by _any_ kind of motion, or do they prefer the motion of their own species for imprinting? With my collaborators, I [used](https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0030208) what are called ‘point-light displays’, stimuli in which only small points of light – representing the joints of an animal – are visible, which disentangles purely motion-related information from shape-related information. Chicks did prove to have a preference for biological motion, but not a species-specific one. For instance, they were ready to approach a display resembling a moving cat (or any other creature), though not a bunch of points of light moving randomly or rigidly.
-
-In further fascinating research, the developmental psychologist Francesca Simion used our stimuli – point-light displays representing walking chickens – and [found](https://www.pnas.org/content/105/2/809), by measuring looking times, that human newborns exhibit a similar preference for biological motion. Note that these babies did not have any experience with moving chickens in the few hours before the test! These results seem to suggest that the ability to recognise biological motion is independent of experience, just as the same seems to be true for the basic ability to recognise face-like stimuli.
-
-It’s interesting to note that these life-detecting abilities appear to wax and wane as babies age. For instance, the preference for biological motion seems to vanish at one and two months of age in human infants, and then to reappear by three months. A likely explanation is that, at birth, animals possess innate mechanisms that act in a reflex-like manner, serving to direct their attention to relevant stimuli in the environment, such as caregivers. Then a second mechanism, based on learning, might take precedence, allowing more specific recognition – ie, the face of Mom as opposed to a stranger, or the movement of one’s own species as opposed to generic biological motion, and so on.
-
-We were able to identify tiny regions selectively involved in the preference for face-like stimuli and for changes of speed
-
-The existence of these mechanisms at birth should influence our understanding of the origins of knowledge, for it clearly challenges the view of our newborn minds as blank slates. This is true for human babies as well as other species. Most young vertebrates appear to be endowed with general mechanisms to detect, at birth, the presence of animate creatures. The ‘animacy detectors’ for which we have found evidence [extend](https://www.pnas.org/content/107/9/4483) to a [preference](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/desc.12394) for self-propelling objects, as opposed to inert objects that move after being hit by another object. Human neonates and newly hatched chicks have also [demonstrated](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-79451-3) [preferences](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027716302049) for objects moving with abrupt changes in speed, and for objects that [move](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-05047-013) along their major (anterior-posterior) body axis – all these characteristics, again, being distinctive features of animate entities.
-
-With newly hatched chicks, we have been able to search for where in the brain these animacy detectors reside, at a level that would be impossible with human subjects. By analysing the expression of so-called early genes (which guide the production of certain proteins that can be made visible by colouring them in the cells) we were able to identify tiny regions selectively involved in the preference for [face-like stimuli](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-46322-5) (the nucleus taenia, which is homologous to the lateral part of the mammalian amygdala) and for [changes of speed](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306452217302804) (the lateral septum, a brain area that has remained mostly the same in different classes of vertebrates such as mammals and birds).
-
-**The animacy detectors we have** identified so far can be considered as the most basic bricks for building up a social brain. The similarities between babies and chicks suggest that these detectors are evolutionarily old, possibly [inherited](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-60154-8) by early social vertebrates. They allow young organisms to learn quickly by canalising their interest towards those portions of the environment that are most important for survival. Consider a young chick out of the egg: there are a variety of moving things around, and, if it were expected to learn simply through exposure, the chance of errors and wasted time would be huge. Instead, it seems that animacy detectors direct the animal’s attention towards things that move semi-rigidly and with abrupt changes of speed, thus favouring learning by imprinting on biological things (hopefully, the mother hen and siblings, and not a passing cat). Similarly, it would take too much time and risk to learn purely through trial and error what is a face and what is not. Thus, organisms are likely endowed by natural selection with a mechanism that directs their attention to face-like stimuli.
-
-
-
-Drawing by Claudia Losi from the book _Born Knowing_ (2021) by Giorgio Vallortigara, published by MIT Press.
-
-What if these animacy detector mechanisms were for some reason diminished or delayed? We know of developmental disorders with genetic bases that might represent such conditions. Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are an example. The diagnosis of ASD cannot be performed before two to three years of age, and we know that an early diagnosis would be extraordinarily valuable, enabling prompt psychological and social interventions. Differences in animacy detection could potentially be of aid in such a diagnosis. Using the behavioural techniques we developed for animacy detection, we tested newborns with an increased likelihood of ASD (ie, those who have an older sibling diagnosed with ASD). We [found](https://www.nature.com/articles/srep26395) that these newborns appeared to have deficits in animacy detectors for face-like and biological-motion stimuli, based on looking time. It seems likely that there is a delay in their appearance, as some [evidence](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95418-4) for canonical preferences does emerge in these babies, but later on, at about four months. A delay in the development of animacy detectors could potentially affect the mutual interaction between an infant and a mother, but more research would be needed to test that hypothesis.
-
-A reasonable interpretation of all these findings is that, although babies can certainly learn a lot about their environment by interacting with objects, both physical and social, they seem to be aided in doing so by inborn mechanisms that guide and constrain their inferences – a form of implicit knowledge about the world. In the absence of inborn guiding mechanisms, learning would likely take vastly too long. So we should expect the operation of such mechanisms from the time of birth, and more of them in those species – such as humans – that depend so deeply on learning.
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diff --git a/00.03 News/Bad Faith at Second Mesa.md b/00.03 News/Bad Faith at Second Mesa.md
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-
-Tag: ["🚔", "🇺🇸", "🦃", "👻"]
-Date: 2022-11-13
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-11-13
-Link: https://www.trulyadventure.us/bad-faith-at-second-mesa
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
----
-
-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-11-15]]
-
----
-
-
-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-BadFaithatSecondMesaNSave
-
-
-
-# Bad Faith at Second Mesa
-
-
-
-
-
-## After swiping sacred American Indian artifacts three archeology thieves believe they are being hunted down by spirits of vengeance.
-
-*Disclaimer: This story contains language sensitive to the Hopi people.*
-
-**Shungopavi, Arizona**
-
-**Summer 1978**
-
-The cave was small, hidden by rocks and the graceful wall of sandstone that climbed toward Shungopavi village. If the sun had been just a little higher in the sky, the two lanky, white men at the base of Second Mesa (the area encompassing three Hopi villages) might have missed it altogether.
-
-They’d been exploring the outskirts of the Hopi reservation for hours, picking their way between cacti and milkweed while avoiding the eyes of any children who might be playing atop the tall, flat-topped hill that sat like an island in the Arizona desert. Rewards thus far had been slim, and they were almost ready to call it a day. But the sun was setting, and its waning light revealed an unnatural divot in the stone.
-
-
-
-“Climb up and see,” Randall “Randy” Morris, age 21, urged his friend James “Jimmy” Lee Hinton. Jimmy, a rangy 22-year-old archeology student at Glendale Community College, braced his hands against the rocks and hefted himself up for a closer look. The stones blocking the entrance had clearly been placed there to deflect attention; Jimmy moved a few aside and nearly stumbled back down the slope.
-
-“Randy,” he called, his gaze still fixed on the cave, heart thudding fast. “We’re going to need the car.”
-
-Inside the cave were four gnarled figurines carved from cottonwood root, each about three feet long. Three lay on a mat of feathers with their heads pillowed by a log, surrounded by braided prayer bracelets and prayer sticks made of cotton twine. The fourth, twisted like a figure eight, leaned against the sandstone wall as if protective of the others. Jimmy didn’t know exactly what he was looking at, except that it was one hell of a find: a hidden kiva, or prayer house, of katsina (pronounced “kah-TSEE-nah”) dolls, the sacred objects carved to represent spiritual beings in the Hopi religion—and in some cases, far more than represent.
-
-But to the two pothunters, these four idols represented something else entirely. Thanks to the growing appetites of museums and private collectors, the antiquities market in the 1970s was booming. Well-decorated Sikyatki pots could sell for thousands of dollars—the equivalent of $50,000 or more today. Whatever these dolls were, Jimmy was confident they’d pay him better than a part time shift on an Arizona ranch.
-
-The idols were large, though, and the cave was awkwardly situated. Shrieks and laughter tumbled down from the village where children played in the fading light. If they looked off the side of the mesa, they’d see him. Jimmy, tan and black-haired, could pass for Hopi at a distance, but Randy was much fairer skinned; anyone who noticed the pair poking around the rocks would likely think they are thieves.
-
-Jimmy skidded back down the hillside and ushered Randy back where they’d left the car. Sweat soaked his headband as he described his find, not lingering on the feather bed or the careful arrangement of the figures. Those details troubled Jimmy a little, and he thought they would trouble Randy more. Bad enough that Randy was traveling with his wife, who’d stayed behind in nearby Winslow; unlike Jimmy’s wife, who at least understood the value of quick cash, she wasn’t a fan of pothunting. The last thing Jimmy needed was more fuel for Randy’s guilty conscience.
-
-Soon it was agreed. They would return later, when Shungopavi was descending into sleep.
-
-
-
-*Second Mesa (photo by Reinhard Schön)*
-
-Only one road cut through the Hopi reservation: Arizona State Route 264, a two-lane stretch of asphalt that ran from Tuba City, Arizona to the New Mexico state line. As twilight approached that evening, Jimmy and Randy parked their Chevrolet Vega hatchback alongside this highway a few miles away from Second Mesa, not wanting their headlights to attract attention.
-
-Northern Arizona by night was a different animal. While not the official Big Sky Country, the sky above Hopi lands stretched out across the state without borders or light pollution. On cloudless nights, sneaking around was nearly impossible unless you kept low to the ground, slipping through the desert like a rattlesnake. But this was not Jimmy and Randy’s first rodeo. The looters brought small flashlights but kept them off on the way to the cave, relying on moonlight to avoid walking into a spiny patch of cholla or tripping on something’s burrow.
-
-When they reached the mesa, Jimmy used his penlight to locate the patch of cliff he’d scrambled up earlier that day. This time Randy went first, Jimmy close at his heels. The cave seemed larger in the dark. Deeper. Their narrow shafts of light illuminated such a tiny piece of that open mouth, casting the idols in blacker shadow.
-
-The standing doll no longer struck Jimmy as vigilant. Now it looked downright baleful to him, glaring at the men as they invaded its peace. Jimmy quickly averted his gaze as Randy grabbed the first of the sleeping figurines and handed it down. (Not sleeping, he told himself. They were only carved pieces of cottonwood root.) Randy saved the standing idol for last, and Jimmy hesitated a moment before taking it. The skin at the back of his neck tightened. Cold sweat collected underneath his arms. Just artifacts. He pulled the final carving from the cave.
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-Together, Jimmy and Randy maneuvered the four idols down to the base of the mesa. It was immediately apparent that carrying all four carvings at once would be difficult, so after a hushed debate, the pothunters hid their treasure underneath a snakeweed bush and went to fetch the car.
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-The walk back up Route 264 was tense. If they were found, they might be arrested. Or shot. Either way they’d lose out on potentially tens of thousands of dollars each. And Jimmy still felt the standing idol’s eyes on him, tiny black holes above a larger slash of mouth. But that was just the hungry night acting on his nerves.
-
-The two men kept their headlights off as they drove slowly and carefully back to Shungopavi village. It was nearly 9 o’clock now, and adrenaline was high. All they had to do was load up the idols and get out of Hopi territory, and then they could find a buyer and relax with their earnings. Jimmy, who’d started his pothunting career in his teens and used the cash to fund his extracurriculars of heroin and cocaine, was already picturing how he’d spend his cut.
-
-But as they stashed the third idol in the back of the car, headlights blared across the desert road.
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-“Hide that,” Randy hissed, gesturing at the last and smallest doll. Jimmy rolled it under a creosote bush, stepping up beside Randy just as the approaching car reached them. The insignia on its side sent a new chill down his spine: a Native game warden from one of the neighboring Hopi villages.
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-“You two out here hunting?”
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-“Coyote,” Jimmy improvised. Coyotes were one of the few animals legal to hunt year-round in Arizona, due to the threat they posed to livestock, and, if asked, he and Randy both had valid hunting licenses. He reached around Randy and popped the hood. “But we ran out of brake fluid.”
-
-“Bad luck. Here, I can help you out.” The game warden turned back to his vehicle.
-
-“Thanks,” Randy said. “We appreciate the hand.”
-
-They accepted a small bottle of brake fluid, assuring the older man they’d be more careful about driving around the mesas at night. Jimmy’s stomach was a mess of nerves, but neither he nor Randy cracked as the game warden climbed back into his car and pulled away, sticking one hand out the window to wave. When the taillights faded into pinpricks in the distance, they collapsed into their own vehicle, half-drunk on hiding four stolen katsina idols right under the official’s nose.
-
-Jimmy wheeled the car around so fast they kicked up a cloud of dust and let out a whoop of victory before stepping on the gas back to Winslow. It was only when Randy’s wife greeted them at the Best Western Motel that they realized the smallest idol was still beneath a bush at Second Mesa.
-
-
-
-Shungopavi village was not doing well in the year since the theft, and the air was thick with suspicion.
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-Neighbor accused neighbor. Priests heard crying in the night, carried to them over the cold winter wind. The three stolen sacred objects, still missing, were an open wound that would not heal—because they weren’t just representations of deities. To the Hopis, they were alive.
-
-
-
-Called taalawtumsi (pronounced “tah-LAO-toom-see”), the four sacred objects were considered living entities, precious katsina friends that were central to the Hopi religion. They were known as Dawn Woman, Corn Maiden’s Husband, Corn Maiden and Corn Maiden’s Daughter, a family of deities that played an essential role in helping young Hopi men transition to adulthood. The ritual of Astotokya took place every four winters, and without participating in this rite, young men were barred from helping with sacred ceremonies to plant corn or draw rain.
-
-With the taalawtumsi missing, not only could that initiation not take place, but the tribe was forced to reckon with a very human loss. These idols weren’t just cottonwood and feathers. They could feel, hurt and cry out for home. Whoever had taken them had committed a crime tantamount to kidnapping, a brutal act that had begun to poison the community at large.
-
-Looting wasn’t an isolated threat. Police Chief Ivan Sidney, a short but broad-shouldered Hopi tribal leader, reckoned that up to a third of their sacred objects lived in museums or with collectors by 1980. Jimmy Lee Hinton and Randy Morris were part of a century-old practice of stealing from the tribe with no regard for the damage they were inflicting.
-
-The Hopi population, already small due to their insular way of life, was declining. Unemployment hovered around 50% in a good year, and alcoholism and drug addiction had been carefully seeded into the reservation for generations. Selling sacred objects from one’s own village was, for some, a way to make desperately-needed cash.
-
-This put the Hopis in an ugly spot when it came to investigating looters—especially because many tribal officials wouldn’t go outside the reservation for help. They believed their spirits would punish thieves far more than any white court of law. But this crime was worse than a missing pot or two: the loss of the taalawtumsi had very real implications for the tribe’s future. In the months following the theft, different factions in the village became convinced that the others were responsible. Chief Sidney smelled violence in the wind.
-
-The protective veil of secrecy around Hopi faith is so strong that Hopi people don’t want to speak about sacred objects with uninitiated children, let alone outsiders. As former Hopi Vice Chairman Herman Honanie put it, “Even talking about these objects feels like \[dissecting our\] religion and eroding \[our\] way of life.” One thing they can say is that any mistreatment of katinsam like the taalawtumsi will be met with force.
-
-“In Hopi religion,” Chief Sidney explained, “there is a penalty for misuse of these idols, death; a prolonged, real painful death.”
-
-
-
-*Hopi rock carving, Arizona*
-
-Although Chief Sidney was a Christian, for him, that penalty was cause for alarm. Shungopavi, home to around 2,000 people in 1978, was one of the last villages where traditional Hopi ceremonies took place year-round. If the more devout members of the tribe decided someone in the village was guilty, they might choose to carry out the sentence themselves.
-
-In order to take the investigation off the mesas and avoid attacks on suspected thieves, in the winter of 1979, the BIA enlisted the help of the FBI. But by the time Alfonso Sakeva, a young Hopi criminal investigator with an easy smile and an eye for art, was joined by FBI agent Steve Lund, the idols could have been thousands of miles away.
-
-Or they might be just down-country, decorating the home of a man with an Indiana Jones look to him and a similar disposition towards sacred artifacts.
-
-Eugene “Jinx” Pyle, a 35 year-old Navy veteran, was certain of two things: God and Arizona. Born and raised in Payson, the town fondly nicknamed “Arizona’s heart” thanks to its geographically central location, Jinx took his birthright seriously. He’d traveled in his youth, but his home state kept calling him back—the dramatic landscapes, the legacy of cowboys of the past. By 1979, he operated a legally questionable trading post in Payson, where fellow collector Arthur Neblett contacted him in August: someone was trying to sell a set of large katsina dolls in Safford, a small city to the southeast.
-
-Jimmy and Randy had been trying to offload the dolls for months. Their initial asking price of $50,000 hadn’t gone over well on the black market, mainly because nobody knew exactly what they were selling. Jimmy reckoned they were only taken out of their storage place once per generation. He didn’t understand that the taalawtumsi were sacred to the Hopi rite of manhood, and that only the initiated Shungopavi elders had ever seen them.
-
-Jimmy did his best to identify the idols, turning to photographer Jerry Jacka and a former curator of the Museum of Northern Arizona, Barton Wright. Jacka took the only known photograph of the taalawtumsi, laid out on an elk hide on his living room floor. Based on that photo, Wright was able to confirm the dolls were likely used in clan initiations but couldn’t provide any concrete idea of their value.
-
-Not only were the dolls not turning into riches the way Jimmy and Randy had anticipated, their status as known local pothunters meant the FBI were sniffing around both young men. They even brought Randy in for an interview. Randy lied about the theft, but enough was enough. He wanted out. He suggested they simply hide the idols, and Jimmy agreed—at least to Randy’s face.
-
-
-
-*FBI Documents obtained by Truly\*Adventurous*
-
-What Jimmy didn’t tell his partner in crime: things were getting strange. He was collecting health problems at a rate that seemed unusual for a 23 year-old, including kidney, liver, and gallbladder failure. He also kept winding up in jail on drug charges, which put his marriage at risk; his wife wanted a baby, not a husband who couldn’t be trusted. Meanwhile, shortly after the theft, Randy crashed his motorcycle and temporarily lost the use of an arm and a leg.
-
-To Jimmy, these disasters were more than a run of bad choices and worse luck. It had to be the idols. He’d started to see katsina faces in his dreams, promising ill fortune. Randy didn’t believe him, but Jimmy didn’t care; there were plenty of other Arizonans who agreed that Hopi objects held supernatural powers. Jimmy also needed money for his soon-to-grow family, and more importantly, he needed to rid himself of whatever curse the stolen idols had laid on his head. Instead of hiding them inside an old refrigerator as they’d discussed, he buried them near an abandoned barn and put out more feelers to the black market.
-
-Finally, almost 10 months after stealing the taalawtumsi, Jimmy got a phone call at the bar he managed in Safford. The buyer didn’t give a name, and Jimmy didn’t ask. He returned to the burial site, alone and almost certainly at night, and unearthed the three stolen idols. Only one more day, he told himself, and stowed the katsinam in a canal ditch bank about a quarter mile into the desert from where he and the man had agreed to meet.
-
-The next day, the buyer found Jimmy behind the country store in Fort Thomas, a small town near Safford. Jimmy drove them to the ditch where he’d dumped the idols the night before, and sold all three for somewhere between $1,000 and $1,600—what would be around $5,800 today. A paltry sum, all things considered.
-
-The man who bought the dolls paid partly in cash, throwing in an extra $50 for an old sleeping bag in Jimmy’s truck in which to transport them. The rest he promised to pay in the form of valuable pots that Jimmy could resell. These pots never appeared, but Jimmy didn’t mind. He just wanted the taalawtumsi gone, and disappeared they did: the last Jimmy saw of the dolls (at least, in person) they were slung over the buyer’s shoulder as he strolled down a desert highway.
-
-The fallout came swiftly. On learning what Jimmy had done, Randy cut ties. He was finished with Jimmy’s lies, his ambition and his insistence that the idols had cursed them both.
-
-Jimmy’s wife, on the other hand, didn’t know what to think. She only hoped this meant they could focus on steady work and trying for a child. Soon enough, she and Jimmy were expecting their firstborn—but the stolen katsinam were not done with Jimmy Lee Hinton. They wouldn’t finish with him for over another decade.
-
-
-
-*Jinx Pyle*
-
-Meanwhile, after purchasing the idols in Fort Thomas, Jinx Pyle planned to sell them in California. He figured that “any old \[katsina\] dolls got to be worth something.” Barely a month after meeting Jimmy, however, word reached him from Second Mesa: the feds were still looking at Shungopavi, and one of Jinx’s former contacts, a man named Eric Talayumptewa, was on their radar for smuggling.
-
-On the one hand, Talayumptewa couldn’t rat Jinx out. He’d died earlier that year, before any concrete evidence confirmed the FBI’s suspicions. On the other hand, he was part of a small ring of Hopis who sold to Jinx, any number of whom might give the feds the link they needed. Jinx hadn’t orchestrated this particular theft, but that wouldn’t matter to the FBI. Once they pinned him as the likely middleman for the stolen taalawtumsi, the rest—search warrant, arrest, prison—would unfurl before him like an Arizona sunset.
-
-“I wasn’t that worried in the beginning,” Jinx allowed. “But I kept hearing that people were out there trying to find them. I was afraid to have them, and afraid to give them back.”
-
-There was only one solution, as far as Jinx could tell. Only one way to guarantee that he and the idols could not be connected in a court of law.
-
-
-
-**Safford, Arizona**
-
-**Three Years Later**
-
-Jimmy Lee Hinton jerked awake. His wife was visiting her parents for the weekend, and the room was dark and empty. The windows were closed. On his nightstand, the alarm clock read 2:00 in the morning. Jimmy focused on that clock, breathing slowly, and listened. At first, only silence. Then the sound came again, faint but unmistakable: wind chimes. But he knew if he went outside to check, he would find nothing and no one.
-
-Jimmy sank lower beneath his blankets. He wasn’t imagining the chimes. Of that, he was certain. Selling the idols hadn’t lifted the curse; it had only condemned him further.
-
-Almost worse than the paranoia was the isolation. Randy hadn’t spoken to Jimmy since the sale in 1979, and he wasn’t about to drag his wife back into this, much less his parents or siblings. The only other person Jimmy might have confided in was his brother-in-law, a man named Mark Brady—except he and Mark weren’t speaking much these days either.
-
-
-
-Shortly after offloading the three stolen dolls, Jimmy had given Mark a map. On it were the directions to the fourth and final taalawtumsi, the smallest sacred object he and Randy had left beneath a creosote bush outside Second Mesa. Mark never found that doll. He was picked up by the cops first, digging in nearby ruins, and traded the idol’s location for his freedom.
-
-Now, almost three years later, Jimmy remembered Mark’s haunted expression as he described that day. How he’d led Hopi tribal police, accompanied by a priest from Shungopavi, to the area indicated on his map—but before he had a chance to point out the bush, the priest walked straight to it and uncovered Corn Maiden’s Daughter. “He just walked right up to it,” Mark said, “then started crying.”
-
-At the time, Mark’s story “gave \[Jimmy\] the heebie-jeebies,” but he was also in the middle of his latest prison stint with no financial prospects on his release. He’d resented, too, how much of his life seemed to be controlled by this one theft. So when Jimmy got out of jail in 1981, he returned to Hopi territory for another dig.
-
-Jimmy and two friends followed classic pothunter protocol. They arrived at night, armed with tiny flashlights and ready to split up. As soon as Jimmy was alone, the dark closed in. His arms ached, remembering how heavy each taalawtumsi had been. How rough the cottonwood against his fingers. He took a breather, closing his eyes and counting to five, then opening and letting his vision adjust again to the night. To the small bright lights hovering several feet off the ground.
-
-Animal eyes, he thought. Not a coyote, too—too tall? As soon as he thought it, the lights vanished. Something cracked behind him, loud as a gunshot but cleaner, sharper, and very close. Like footsteps breaking wood.
-
-Jimmy wanted to call for his friends, but the noise would attract attention. Instead he bit his tongue, using the pen light to pick his way back through what felt like endless desert. More lights dogged his heels, appearing and disappearing too fast to follow, like he was being chased by a swarm of ghostly orbs. By the time he reached the car, the sun was clawing over the horizon. His friends stumbled back with the dawn. Their faces were pale and haggard, and for once, no one bothered with bravado.
-
-“I was a blubbering idiot,” Jimmy later admitted. “We all had the same experiences.”
-
-This was more than drug busts or health problems with reasonable explanations. This was a warning. Jimmy took it seriously. Later that week, he called the FBI and told them what he could.
-
-Unfortunately, that wasn’t much. Jimmy had no idea who’d bought the taalawtumsi or where they’d gone next, and confessing brought no absolution. Now, in 1982, he lay awake in his bed and listened to the wind chimes coming closer.
-
-
-
-**Eugene, Oregon**
-
-**Eight Years Later**
-
-The taalawtumsi had been gone for almost 15 years, but for BIA investigator Alfonso Sakeva and FBI agent Steve Lund, the case was still raw. Shungopavi had been thrown into a forced hiatus, with up to 60 men—some now in their 30s—unable to call themselves adults. The Hopi religion was staggering along, newly wounded every time an elder died without the chance to pass on their knowledge.
-
-So when the name “Jinx Pyle” resurfaced in 1990, it rang a resonant bell. Despite his love for the state, Jinx was no longer living in Arizona; he’d opted for a break from scrutiny and moved to Oregon in the late 1980s. His dealings followed him, though, rumors and accusations drifting after like ghosts.
-
-Sakeva and Lund crossed state lines to interview Jinx about another case that also involved the antiquities black market, but the taalawtumsi were never far from their minds. The unrelated case put Jinx in the right place at the right time, with the right connections to make the sale. If this Arizona cowboy turned Oregon longhorn rancher had played a role in fencing the sacred objects all those years ago, this could be their chance to finally make Shungopavi whole.
-
-They couldn’t just walk up and ask about the taalawtumsi, of course. Jinx might spook, and the statute of limitations made legal options for pursuit uncertain. If Jinx did have the idols and the agents were able to prove it, it was possible no charges would stick over a decade after the purchase. Sakeva and Lund were on delicate ground. They had to do this right, for Second Mesa and all of the Hopi people. That called for a little more legwork.
-
-Before confronting Jinx at the Pantera Ranch in Eugene, the investigators arranged to meet with a pair of U.S. Attorneys, Linda Akers and Rosyln Moore-Silver. They wanted to understand what they could threaten Jinx with in order to make him talk, especially given that in this case, the primary goal of prosecution wasn’t to punish a criminal but to retrieve the sacred objects unharmed. Akers and Moore-Silver armed the agents with a federal grand jury subpoena to get the ball rolling.
-
-When Jinx allowed Sakeva and Lund into his living room to talk, he was shocked at the direction of their questioning. He’d never told anyone about the idols, and “had no idea how the feds ever got \[his\] name.” But they were here now, and in the years between 1981 and 1990, Jinx had undergone a change of heart. When the agents described the artifacts they were really looking for and their importance to the Hopi religion, Jinx couldn’t bring himself to lie.
-
-Instead he told the agents how 10 years ago, in the spring of 1980, he did what he felt was necessary to protect himself from the FBI. He chopped the taalawtumsi into pieces and fed them, one by one, to his woodstove.
-
-The blow was unspeakable. Sakeva and Lund, who had worked on this case for 11 years, were not prepared. Reeling, they left Jinx at the ranch and broke the news to the two attorneys supporting the investigation. “I felt devastated,” Rosyln Moore-Silver said of that call. “Linda and I sat silently for a long time as the enormity sank in.”
-
-Alfonso Sakeva thought of the priests in Shungopavi who still heard the taalawtumsi crying late at night. Steve Lund thought of how, in the eyes of the United States federal law, what Jinx had done was nothing but a black market theft. They couldn’t be certain the rancher was telling the truth—and no one would ever know for sure—but it was hard to imagine why he’d make the story up. Even if he was lying, there were no legal grounds for a search warrant.
-
-
-
-
-Floundering for a way forward, Sakeva, Lund and the attorneys made the only choice that seemed fair. They consulted with the Hopis of Shungopavi to ask them what, if anything, might lead towards spiritual reconciliation.
-
-“\[The taalawtumsi\] aren’t gone,” insisted Hopi artist and silversmith Roy Talahaftewa. “They say, ‘Come and rescue us. Come and get us.’” Others agreed with him. They needed closure. They needed to hear the truth directly from the man who’d gutted their religion.
-
-Convincing Jinx Pyle to travel to Second Mesa and meet with the Hopis in person was easier said than done. Sakeva and Lund knew their case was weak, and that a court would almost certainly dismiss it out of hand based on the statute of limitations. But the threat of prosecution was the only card they had.
-
-With the help of Akers and Moore-Silver, the agents drafted a cooperation order: Jinx would submit to a Justice Department administered polygraph to confirm he’d really burned the sacred objects, and then he would confess his actions in Shungopavi. Otherwise, they’d take him to court. Now in his mid-40s and eager to avoid more attention from the law, Jinx saw little choice. He signed the cooperation agreement on February 12, 1991. Six weeks later he was back in Arizona, standing on the cold, windy top of Second Mesa.
-
-“You guys have a lot of nerve coming up here,” a tribal officer told Jinx and his lawyer as they ate breakfast at the Hopi Cultural Center. “You ever hear of Custer?”
-
-It was too late to retreat, and now that Jinx was here, the full reality of what he’d done was sinking in. Dozens of Hopi men waited for him in the Shungopavi meeting hall, a wide sandstone room that—like the taalawtumsi—had been carved centuries ago.
-
-“If I’d had any idea of how important the idols were,” Jinx told the assembled crowd, “I never would have burned them.” It was small comfort to the Hopis who’d been barred from initiation for over a decade.
-
-“Do you go to church?” one young man asked. Jinx said he did. “Have you told the people in your church that you have destroyed our religion?”
-
-The answer was no. This was not a surprise. Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, former director of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, said bluntly: “To see the art market driving this kind of behavior, it’s not just distressful to the Hopi people, it’s a hurt that I don’t believe people can really understand.” But Jinx appeared to be trying, the guilt heavy on his shoulders.
-
-He wasn’t alone. Back in Safford, Jimmy Lee Hinton heard about the rancher’s trip to Second Mesa. Fifteen years after his crime, nightmares continued to plague him. He’d remarried his first wife and retained custody of his four children, but by 1990 he’d also served three more prison terms and missed huge chunks of their lives. Family members called him beloved but troubled, never fully able to escape his past.
-
-
-
-“Any phrases I could use to describe the guilt would not be enough,” Jimmy said. “To collectors I say, ‘Set aside your greed for a while. It’s not art you’re collecting. It’s life. It’s a people’s soul.’”
-
-Randy Morris felt the weight as well. He still walked with a cane and had limited use of one arm after his accident, but eight months after Jinx met with the Hopis, Randy reached out to Agent Lund to facilitate his own pilgrimage to Shungopavi. He told the Hopi villagers everything he could about the night he and Jimmy took the idols, swearing that he “didn’t find out until later they were so precious.”
-
-“We told \[Randy\] he had nothing to be afraid of,” said Pat Lomawaima of the Hopi mental health office. “No harm was done, except to me.”
-
-It took months of fierce debate for the Hopis at Shungopavi to decide how to move forward in this new world, the world in which their katsina friends were never coming home. Some still refused to believe the taalawtumsi had been burned. Some felt there was no way to perform the initiation rite without all four sacred objects present. Yet they were losing knowledge of their religion. The priest in charge of the initiation ceremony was already 95 years old.
-
-In November 1992, a year after learning the truth, the village made an agonizing choice. They would resume initiations with Corn Maiden’s Daughter presiding. Sixty-three men were welcomed into traditional Hopi adulthood that year, with 60 more ready for the next ceremony in four years. Jinx and Randy would carry their regret with them for the rest of their lives, but at least facing their crimes had paved the way for Shungopavi to heal.
-
-Jimmy Lee Hinton was a different story. Despite his ongoing fear that the idols had cursed him, and his vocal regret for the theft, he couldn’t bring himself to visit Second Mesa. Instead he tried other ways to atone, including apologizing to Native inmates he met in prison. (None of them were Hopi.) Despite his attempts to make up for what he’d done, his belief in the Hopi curse followed Jimmy to his grave. He died in August 1996—exactly 18 years after he and Randy stole the taalawtumsi, and only a few months before the second modified initiation ceremony would take place in Shungopavi. He was 40 years old.
-
-Atop Second Mesa, Shungopavi village salvaged what ancient knowledge they could. The adulthood ritual continued on schedule. “\[The rite\] is like a book is opened up,” said Shungopavi village administrator Ronald Wadsworth. “It \[is\] a very joyous occasion.”
-
-Silversmith Roy Talaheftewa agreed.
-
-“I spoke to my brother-in-law and my nephew, and I asked if they felt the presence of the taalawtumsi in the kiva like I did.
-
-They said yes.”
-
-
-
-
-
-*JAQ EVANS* is a writer based out of Seattle, Washington. She also leads digital engagement strategy for 350.org.
-
-For all rights inquiries, email team@trulyadventure.us.
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-Tag: ["🧪", "🔭", "💫"]
-Date: 2022-10-11
-DocType: "WebClipping"
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-TimeStamp: 2022-10-11
-Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/10/science/black-holes-cosmology-hologram.html
-location:
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-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
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-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-BlackHolesMayHideaMind-BendingSecretNSave
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-
-
-# Black Holes May Hide a Mind-Bending Secret About Our Universe
-
-
-
-Credit...Leonardo Santamaria
-
-The Great ReadOut There
-
-Take gravity, add quantum mechanics, stir. What do you get? Just maybe, a holographic cosmos.
-
-Credit...Leonardo Santamaria
-
-- Published Oct. 10, 2022Updated Oct. 11, 2022, 12:01 p.m. ET
-
-For the last century the biggest bar fight in science has been between Albert Einstein and himself.
-
-On one side is the Einstein who in 1915 conceived general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of space-time by matter and energy. That theory predicted that space-time could bend, expand, rip, quiver like a bowl of Jell-O and disappear into those bottomless pits of nothingness known as black holes.
-
-On the other side is the Einstein who, starting in 1905, laid the foundation for quantum mechanics, the nonintuitive rules that inject randomness into the world — rules that Einstein never accepted. According to quantum mechanics, a subatomic particle like an electron can be anywhere and everywhere at once, and a cat can be both alive and dead until it is observed. God doesn’t play dice, Einstein often complained.
-
-Gravity rules outer space, shaping galaxies and indeed the whole universe, whereas quantum mechanics rules inner space, the arena of atoms and elementary particles. The two realms long seemed to have nothing to do with each other; this left scientists ill-equipped to understand what happens in an extreme situation like a black hole or the beginning of the universe.
-
-But a blizzard of research in the last decade on the inner lives of black holes has revealed unexpected connections between the two views of the cosmos. The implications are mind-bending, including the possibility that our three-dimensional universe — and we ourselves — may be holograms, like the ghostly anti-counterfeiting images that appear on some credit cards and drivers licenses. In this version of the cosmos, there is no difference between here and there, cause and effect, inside and outside or perhaps even then and now; household cats can be conjured in empty space. We can all be Dr. Strange.
-
-“It may be too strong to say that gravity and quantum mechanics are exactly the same thing,” Leonard Susskind of Stanford University [wrote in a paper in 2017](https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.03040). “But those of us who are paying attention may already sense that the two are inseparable, and that neither makes sense without the other.”
-
-That insight, Dr. Susskind and his colleagues hope, could lead to a theory that combines gravity and quantum mechanics — quantum gravity — and perhaps explains how the universe began.
-
-## Einstein vs. Einstein
-
-The schism between the two Einsteins entered the spotlight in 1935, when the physicist faced off against himself in a pair of scholarly papers.
-
-In one paper, Einstein and Nathan Rosen showed that general relativity predicted that black holes (which were not yet known by that name) could form in pairs connected by shortcuts through space-time, called Einstein-Rosen bridges — “wormholes.” In the imaginations of science fiction writers, you could jump into one black hole and pop out of the other.
-
-In the other paper, Einstein, Rosen and another physicist, Boris Podolsky, tried to pull the rug out from quantum mechanics by exposing a seeming logical inconsistency. They [pointed out](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/science/27eins.html "Times article on quantum entanglement.") that, according to the uncertainty principle of quantum physics, a pair of particles once associated would be eternally connected, even if they were light-years apart. Measuring a property of one particle — its direction of spin, say — would instantaneously affect the measurement of its mate. If these photons were flipped coins and one came up heads, the other invariably would be found out to be tails.
-
-To Einstein this proposition was obviously ludicrous, and he dismissed it as “spooky action at a distance.” But today physicists call it “entanglement,” and lab experiments confirm its reality every day. Last week the [Nobel Prize in Physics](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/science/nobel-prize-physics-winner.html) was awarded to a trio of physicists whose experiments over the years had demonstrated the reality of this “spooky action.”
-
-The physicist N. David Mermin of Cornell University once called such quantum weirdness “[the closest thing we have to magic](https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/health/new-tests-of-einsteins-spooky-reality.html).”
-
-As Daniel Kabat, a physics professor at Lehman College in New York, explained it, “We’re used to thinking that information about an object — say, that a glass is half-full — is somehow contained within the object. Entanglement means this isn’t correct. Entangled objects don’t have an independent existence with definite properties of their own. Instead they only exist in relation to other objects.”
-
-Einstein probably never dreamed that the two 1935 papers had anything in common, Dr. Susskind said recently. But Dr. Susskind and other physicists now speculate that wormholes and spooky action are two aspects of the same magic and, as such, are the key to resolving an array of cosmic paradoxes.
-
-## Throwing Dice in the Dark
-
-To astronomers, black holes are dark monsters with gravity so strong that they can consume stars, wreck galaxies and imprison even light. At the edge of a black hole, time seems to stop. At a black hole’s center, matter shrinks to infinite density and the known laws of physics break down. But to physicists bent on explicating those fundamental laws, black holes are a Coney Island of mysteries and imagination.
-
-In 1974 the cosmologist Stephen Hawking astonished the scientific world with a heroic calculation showing that, to his own surprise, black holes were neither truly black nor eternal, when quantum effects were added to the picture. Over eons, a black hole would leak energy and subatomic particles, shrink, grow increasingly hot and finally explode. In the process, all the mass that had fallen into the black hole over the ages would be returned to the outer universe as a random fizz of particles and radiation.
-
-This might sound like good news, a kind of cosmic resurrection. But it was a potential catastrophe for physics. A core tenet of science holds that information is never lost; billiard balls might scatter every which way on a pool table, but in principle it is always possible to rewind the tape to determine where they were in the past or predict their positions in the future, even if they drop into a black hole.
-
-But if Hawking were correct, the particles radiating from a black hole were random, a meaningless thermal noise stripped of the details of whatever has fallen in. If a cat fell in, most of its information — name, color, temperament — would be unrecoverable, effectively lost from history. It would be as if you opened your safe deposit box and found that your birth certificate and your passport had disappeared. As Hawking phrased it in 1976: “God not only plays dice, he sometimes throws them where they can’t be seen.”
-
-His declaration triggered a 40-year war of ideas. “This can’t be right,” Dr. Susskind, who became Hawking’s biggest adversary in the subsequent debate, thought to himself when first hearing about Hawking’s claim. “I didn’t know what to make out of it.”
-
-Image
-
-
-
-Credit...Leonardo Santamaria
-
-## Encoding Reality
-
-A potential solution came to Dr. Susskind one day in 1993 as he was walking through a physics building on campus. There in the hallway he saw a display of a hologram of a young woman.
-
-A hologram is basically a three-dimensional image — a teapot, a cat, Princess Leia — made entirely of light. It is created by illuminating the original (real) object with a laser and recording the patterns of reflected light on a photographic plate. When the plate is later illuminated, a three-dimensional image of the object springs into view at the center.
-
-“‘Hey, here’s a situation where it looks as if information is kind of reproduced in two different ways,’” Dr. Susskind recalled thinking. On the one hand, there is a visible object that “looked real,” he said. “And on the other hand, there’s the same information coded on the film surrounding the hologram. Up close, it just looks like a little bunch of scratches and a highly complex encoding.”
-
-The right combinations of scratches on that film, Dr. Susskind realized, could make anything emerge into three dimensions. Then he thought: What if a black hole was actually a hologram, with the event horizon serving as the “film,” encoding what was inside? It was “a nutty idea, a cool idea,” he recalled.
-
-Across the Atlantic, the same nutty idea had occurred to the Dutch physicist, Gerardus ’t Hooft, a Nobel laureate at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
-
-According to Einstein’s general relativity, the information content of a black hole or any three-dimensional space — your living room, say, or the whole universe — was limited to the number of bits that could be encoded on an imaginary surface surrounding it. That space was measured in pixels 10⁻³³ centimeters on a side — the smallest unit of space, known as the Planck length.
-
-With data pixels so small, this amounted to quadrillions of megabytes per square centimeter — a stupendous amount of information, but not an infinite amount. Trying to cram too much information into any region would cause it to exceed a limit decreed by Jacob Bekenstein, then a Princeton graduate student and Hawking’s rival, and cause it to collapse into a black hole.
-
-“[This is what we found out about Nature’s bookkeeping system](https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0003004.pdf),” Dr. ’t Hooft wrote in 1993. “The data can be written onto a surface, and the pen with which the data are written has a finite size.”
-
-## The Soup-Can Universe
-
-The cosmos-as-holograph idea found its fullest expression a few years later, in 1997. Juan Maldacena, a theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., used new ideas from string theory — the speculative “theory of everything” that portrays subatomic particles as vibrating strings — to create a mathematical model of the entire universe as a hologram.
-
-In his formulation, all the information about what happens inside some volume of space is encoded as quantum fields on the surface of the region’s boundary.
-
-Dr. Maldacena’s universe is often portrayed as a can of soup: Galaxies, black holes, gravity, stars and the rest, including us, are the soup inside, and the information describing them resides on the outside, like a label. Think of it as gravity in a can. The inside and outside of the can — the “bulk” and the “boundary” — are complementary descriptions of the same phenomena.
-
-Since the fields on the surface of the soup can obey quantum rules about preserving information, the gravitational fields inside the can must also preserve information. In such a picture, “[there is no room for information loss](https://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/22/world/about-those-fearsome-black-holes-never-mind.html),” Dr. Maldacena said at a conference in 2004.
-
-Hawking conceded: Gravity was not the great eraser after all.
-
-“In other words, the universe makes sense,” Dr. Susskind said in an interview.
-
-“It’s completely crazy,” he added, in reference to the holographic universe. “You could imagine in a laboratory, in a sufficiently advanced laboratory, a large sphere — let’s say, a hollow sphere of a specially tailored material — to be made of silicon and other things, with some kind of appropriate quantum fields inscribed on it.” Then you could conduct experiments, he said: Tap on the sphere, interact with it, then wait for answers from the entities inside.
-
-“On the other hand, you could open up that shell and you would find nothing in it,” he added. As for us entities inside: “We don’t read the hologram, we are the hologram.”
-
-Image
-
-Credit...Leonardo Santamaria
-
-## Wormholes, wormholes everywhere
-
-Our actual universe, unlike Dr. Maldacena’s mathematical model, has no boundary, no outer limit. Nonetheless, for physicists, his universe became a proof of principle that gravity and quantum mechanics were compatible and offered a font of clues to how our actual universe works.
-
-But, Dr. Maldacena noted recently, his model did not explain how information manages to escape a black hole intact or how Hawking’s calculation in 1974 went wrong.
-
-Don Page, a former student of Hawking now at the University of Alberta, took a different approach in the 1990s. Suppose, he said, that information is conserved when a black hole evaporates. If so, then a black hole does not spit out particles as randomly as Hawking had thought. The radiation would start out as random, but as time went on, the particles being emitted would become more and more correlated with those that had come out earlier, essentially filling the gaps in the missing information. After billions and billions of years all the hidden information would have emerged.
-
-In quantum terms, this explanation required any particles now escaping the black hole to be entangled with the particles that had leaked out earlier. But this presented a problem. Those newly emitted particles were already entangled with their mates that had already fallen into the black hole, running afoul of quantum rules mandating that particles be entangled only in pairs. Dr. Page’s information-transmission scheme could only work if the particles inside the black hole were somehow the same as the particles that were now outside.
-
-How could that be? The inside and outside of the black hole were connected by wormholes, the shortcuts through space and time proposed by Einstein and Rosen in 1935.
-
-In 2012 Drs. Maldacena and Susskind proposed a formal truce between the two warring Einsteins. They proposed that spooky entanglement and wormholes were two faces of the same phenomenon. As they put it, employing the initials of the authors of those two 1935 papers, Einstein and Rosen in one and Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen in the other: “ER = EPR.”
-
-The implication is that, in some strange sense, the outside of a black hole was the same as the inside, like a Klein bottle that has only one side.
-
-How could information be in two places at once? Like much of quantum physics, the question boggles the mind, like the notion that light can be a wave or a particle depending on how the measurement is made.
-
-What matters is that, if the interior and exterior of a black hole were connected by wormholes, information could flow through them in either direction, in or out, according to John Preskill, a Caltech physicist and quantum computing expert.
-
-“We ought to be able to influence the interior of one of these black holes by ‘tickling’ its radiation, and thereby sending a message to the inside of the black hole,” he said [in a 2017 interview with Quanta](https://www.quantamagazine.org/newfound-wormhole-allows-information-to-escape-black-holes-20171023/). He added, “It sounds crazy.”
-
-Ahmed Almheiri, a physicist at N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi, noted recently that by manipulating radiation that had escaped a black hole, he could create a cat inside that black hole. “I can do something with the particles radiating from the black hole, and suddenly a cat is going to appear in the black hole,” he said.
-
-He added, “We all have to get used to this.”
-
-The metaphysical turmoil came to a head in 2019. That year two groups of theorists made detailed calculations showing that information leaking through wormholes would match the pattern predicted by Dr. Page. One paper was by Geoff Penington, now at the University of California, Berkeley. And the other was by Netta Engelhardt of M.I.T.; [Don Marolf](https://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~marolf/) of the University of California, Santa Barbara; [Henry Maxfield](https://inspirehep.net/authors/1272287), now at Stanford University; and Dr. Almheiri. The two groups published their papers on the same day.
-
-“And so the final moral of the story is, if your theory of gravity includes wormholes, then you get information coming out,” Dr. Penington said. “If it doesn’t include wormholes, then presumably you don’t get information coming out.”
-
-He added, “Hawking didn’t include wormholes, and we are including wormholes.”
-
-Not everybody has signed on to this theory. And testing it is a challenge, since particle accelerators will probably never be powerful enough to produce black holes in the lab for study, although several groups of experimenters hope to simulate black holes and wormholes in quantum computers.
-
-And even if this physics turns out to be accurate, Dr. Mermin’s magic does have an important limit: Neither wormholes nor entanglement can transmit a message, much less a human, faster than the speed of light. So much for time travel. The weirdness only becomes apparent after the fact, when two scientists compare their observations and discover that they match — a process that involves classical physics, which obeys the speed limit set by Einstein.
-
-As Dr. Susskind likes to say, “You can’t make that cat hop out of a black hole faster than the speed of light.”
-
-
-
-
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-Tag: ["🥉", "💪🏼", "🚫"]
-Date: 2022-12-11
-DocType: "WebClipping"
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-TimeStamp: 2022-12-11
-Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/bodybuilding-extreme-training/
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-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-BodybuildersdyingNSave
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-
-
-# Bodybuilders dying as coaches and judges encourage extreme measures
-
-Alena Kosinova was hunched over a fan waiting for her spray tan to dry when she realized she couldn’t move. It was hours before the 2021 Europa Pro contest and the Czech bodybuilder was cramping again — just like she had at a contest in Portugal weeks earlier.
-
-Kosinova was known by friends and competitors for embracing the extremes of bodybuilding — the training, the dieting, the drugs. But on that steamy August morning, her voice quivered as she whispered to another Czech athlete, Ivana Dvorakova, “I won’t be able to do it. I feel really ill.”
-
-Dvorakova helped lay her down on the concrete floor as others gathered and gave Kosinova water, packets of salt and sugar. Kosinova answered questions about the diuretics she had taken before convulsing and losing consciousness.
-
-It took nearly an hour for the ambulance to arrive at the venue in Alicante, Spain, according to four people who witnessed or were briefed on what happened. Kosinova, a 46-year-old mother who dreamed of winning the prestigious Olympia, died before the competition was over.
-
-Her American coach, Shelby Starnes, wasn’t there — he rarely attended shows. But shortly after Kosinova died, Starnes received an alarming email from another client, Jodie Engle.
-
-The 30-year-old single mother wrote that she had been hospitalized and might need open-heart surgery. Doctors blamed the diuretics she said she’d been advised to use for more than a week leading into the NPC National Championships in Florida.
-
-Engle won first place in her division and earned a “pro card,” allowing her to compete professionally. But the price she paid was steep: tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills and, doctors told her, she would eventually need a kidney transplant.
-
-Starnes, one of the most popular coaches for female bodybuilders, did not respond to messages seeking comment.
-
-Engle takes responsibility for what happened — no one forced the drugs down her throat.
-
-“I was stupid because I turned over the reins to somebody that was more reckless than myself,” she said.
-
-Bodybuilders around the world are risking their lives and sometimes dying for the sport they love because of extreme measures that are encouraged by coaches, rewarded by judges and ignored by leaders of the industry, according to interviews with dozens of bodybuilders, coaches, judges, promoters, medical professionals and relatives of deceased athletes.
-
-The Washington Post investigated the deaths of more than two dozen bodybuilders, focusing mostly on those who died leading up to or in the aftermath of competitions. A review of hundreds of documents including medical and autopsy records, police reports, 911 calls, emails and text messages, along with interviews with more than 70 people, reveals the devastating consequences of a sport that for years has operated under the halo of health and fitness.
-
-Several of the industry’s top coaches, without formal training or medical licenses, supplied their clients with illegal steroids or other illicit substances; instructed them on dosages for using performance-enhancing drugs; or advised athletes not to seek medical care before competitions, The Post found.
-
-Unlike other professional sports, the IFBB Pro League, the largest professional bodybuilding federation in the United States, does not routinely test athletes for steroids or other performance-enhancing drugs. There’s no health insurance or union to protect athletes. Nearly all steroids are illegal without a prescription in the United States, but bodybuilders say they are easily obtained and widely used by competitors.
-
-Jim Manion, who runs the IFBB Pro and an amateur organization, the National Physique Committee (NPC), declined to answer specific questions and issued a company statement: “The health, safety and welfare of all our competitors has, and always will be, of utmost importance to us.”
-
-But bodybuilders and coaches say the risks have intensified in recent years as contest judges increasingly reward athletes with nearly impossible-to-achieve physiques. Those who’ve warned against the dangers say they have faced pressure to stay silent and suffered backlash from federation officials and coaches after speaking out.
-
-Bodybuilders typically spend months preparing for competitions with strict diets and hours of [workouts often fueled by stimulants](https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/bodybuilding-health-risks/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template). Many add to that a cocktail of performance-enhancing drugs to build muscle and fat burners to get lean.
-
-The grueling days before contests are known as “peak week” — when bodybuilders are at their leanest, most dehydrated state after taking diuretics to remove water so muscles are “dry” and defined.
-
-In the fall of 2021, the coach of 37-year-old George Peterson found his client dead in an Orlando hotel room two days before the Olympia contest.
-
-Police discovered hundreds of pills without prescription labels, including steroids, thyroid medication to speed up metabolism and clenbuterol, a drug that is approved only for horses in the United States but is used by bodybuilders as a fat burner.
-
-Peterson’s coach, Justin Miller, declined to answer questions about his athlete’s use of performance-enhancing drugs.
-
-The lack of safeguards has led to sick and dead bodybuilders in different federations around the world, said Georgina Dunnington, who was involved in the bodybuilding industry for 30 years and judged top competitions such as the Arnold Classic in Columbus, Ohio.
-
-She said the federations and a constellation of businesses around them are profiting off vulnerable athletes who rarely earn enough contest money to cover the thousands of dollars they spend to compete.
-
-“You need to put the athletes before the money,” said Dunnington, who served as the chairperson of the Canadian Bodybuilding Federation until 2020. “We fail the athletes 110 percent on every aspect of the sport. We validated so many wrong things and made them acceptable.”
-
-Those who survived the bodybuilding lifestyle described the [lasting impact](https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/bodybuilding-health-risks/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template): kidney failure, stomach ulcers, high blood pressure, thyroid dysfunction, enlarged hearts, hormonal imbalances, hair loss, infertility, eating disorders, muscle dysmorphia and depression, along with various orthopedic injuries.
-
-Sally Sandoe, whose 31-year-old son Luke died in the United Kingdom in 2020, said it’s inexplicable that so many bodybuilders are getting sick and dying and no one is confronting the problem.
-
-“It is an absolute free-for-all,” Sandoe said. “There’s just real destruction and devastation and destroyed lives. How is that fair? How can that carry on? It can’t. It has to stop.”
-
-##### Dead at 30
-
-Daniel Alexander
-
-Daniel Alexander stood with his hands on his hips as he gazed into the mirror at Crunch Fitness in Northridge, Calif., where he worked as a manager. “It’s almost that time of year I start growing and get to looking freaky,” Alexander posted on Instagram in March 2019.
-
-He’d been training for months with his coach to add muscle after getting feedback from judges that his upper body thickness needed to match his massive 30-inch thighs.
-
-Alexander was planning to compete at Legion Sports Fest that November. But by September, the [contest prep was taking a toll](https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/bodybuilding-health-risks/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) on the 30-year-old. He messaged his coach, Dave Kalick, about “lots of frequently long cramps” after using fat burners and taking steroids.
-
-His coach, a former bodybuilder who described himself as a nutritionist, instructed Alexander to take magnesium for the cramps and detailed six steroid dosages, according to text messages reviewed by The Post. Kalick does not have any medical or pharmacy licenses in California, where he lives. But he does have multiple felony convictions, including for methamphetamine possession.
-
-Alexander was known for being fiercely loyal — to his friends, to his family and to his coach. In a podcast recorded with Kalick in mid-October, Alexander offered advice to other bodybuilders: “Trust the process. If you’re willing to let someone do your stuff for you, you need to trust everything that they’re doing for you. And it’ll work. Every time.”
-
-On Oct. 15, Alexander messaged his coach about the plan to increase his dosages and asked for more steroids and clenbuterol.
-
-“Yes got it,” Kalick texted.
-
-When Alexander’s parents visited from out of town three days later, their son had trouble catching his breath while they walked around a mall. Alexander blamed his intense cardio workouts for heart palpitations and an upset stomach.
-
-His parents had never seen their son so close to a competition, but he assured them it was normal to feel this way before a show.
-
-Alexander consulted his coach and then told his parents the plan: drink a lot of water and kombucha to flush his system and ease his stomach. They stopped at a store to pick up supplies before dropping Alexander at his apartment.
-
-### Text exchange between Daniel Alexander and Dave Kalick
-
-Daniel Alexander
-
-Friday, Sept. 13, 2019
-
-Got liquid and oral clen winny also in the last package
-
-Clen is going good. Body adjusting to it. Very crampy the last 3 days. Lots of cramps. Lots of frequently long cramps.
-
-Dave Kalick
-
-Saturday, Sept. 14, 2019
-
-Take 500mg magnesium with last meal for cramps
-start 200mg inj win 2 days week
-keep primo at 200mg 2 days a week
-mast enanth 200mg 2 days a week
-Start tren ace 100mg eod
-mast prop 100mg eod
-start oral win 50mg with meal 1, 50mg with meal 5
-
-Daniel Alexander
-
-Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2019
-
-Need mast prop, tren Ace and clen
-
-Test will be good through the show
-
-Might need more anavar and winny if we are upping those doses
-
-Daniel Alexander
-
-Thursday, Oct. 17, 2019
-
-We upping winny to 2 tabs 2x a day
-
-Texts edited for length
-
-The bodybuilder also texted a friend who worked as a nurse practitioner: “5% body fat rn. Lots of stims. I have had a very irregular heart beat for over an hour. Becoming painful. Still hard to breathe. Worry?”
-
-She told him to go to urgent care and repeated the advice when he reached out later that evening. “I’m pretty sure I got winstrol in my blood during my shot today. It’s better. Just not gone,” texted Alexander, referring to a steroid injection he’d given himself. “I will go if I feel like I’m dying. But being 23 days away from my show I don’t want to get pumped with fluids and ruin my physique for not a heart attack.”
-
-The next morning, his coach messaged at 5:45 a.m.: “How is your heart rate?”
-
-Alexander never responded. His friends Aaron and Robyn Wyner said they were on the phone with Kalick when the couple found Alexander in the shower with the water running. They performed CPR until paramedics arrived.
-
-Drugs were everywhere, Aaron Wyner said, and Kalick told him to hide anything out in the open and delete Kalick’s messages from Alexander’s phone. Wyner said that without thinking, he brushed some pills off a desk into a drawer before someone told him this was a crime scene.
-
-Police recovered more than a dozen different drugs, and an autopsy concluded Alexander died of steroid-induced cardiomyopathy.
-
-Kalick wanted to hold a memorial at Legion Sports Fest, and he paid for the Wyners and Alexander’s parents, Janine and Michael, to attend. But when they arrived, they said, they were told show organizers wouldn’t let them do anything official. Instead, there was a casual discussion encouraging bodybuilders to get bloodwork done before Kalick spoke briefly about Alexander.
-
-“It felt like we were holding up the show,” Janine Alexander said. “It was more hurtful than it was helpful.”
-
-Kalick did not respond to messages seeking comment. He still features a photo of Alexander on a coaching website under “Transformations & Testimonials.” Alexander is quoted as saying, “Since working with Dave, my body has grown correctly, safely and I have seen nothing but success in the shows I have done. By far the best decision I made in my bodybuilding career.”
-
-But his parents see it very differently. They only learned later, after going through their son’s phone, about the details of Kalick’s prep for Alexander.
-
-“My son paid for his own death, literally,” his mother said.
-
-##### Dead at 23
-
-Brandon Char-Lee
-
-A year earlier in 2018, police found Brandon Char-Lee dead in his Livermore, Calif., apartment four days before a show. They counted more than 100 needles and multiple vials of steroids.
-
-A friend said Char-Lee was on a strict diet for an upcoming bodybuilding show and “was not allowed to consume water during this time,” the police report stated.
-
-At her son’s apartment, Carolyn Char Lunger took photos of the drugs she found, including five types of steroids, clenbuterol, diuretics and a bottle with the label T3 — a thyroid hormone — marked “NOT FOR HUMAN USE.”
-
-A coroner never asked for a full toxicology analysis, according to police records, but concluded the 23-year-old died of cardiac failure and noted a history of using anabolic steroids.
-
-Many coroners and medical examiners do not routinely test for the battery of substances that bodybuilders use, and some don’t request toxicology reports at all.
-
-There is little medical research on bodybuilders, and in particular, the stacking of so many different drugs along with months of intense workouts and severe dieting. So when searching for causes of death, medical examiners say they typically look for well-studied links to cardiac arrest or heart failure, such as the use of anabolic steroids.
-
-Char-Lee’s mother knew that her son was supposed to compete in a bodybuilding contest in Fresno, Calif., and sent photos of the drugs to the show’s promoter. She said she wanted answers but instead got an invite to “complete his journey” and attend the bodybuilding competition.
-
-The promoter, Steve O’Brien, had served for many years as a vice president of the NPC and a contest judge. Problems with drug use were obvious, he told The Post, and he had warned his own children not to compete in the sport.
-
-But testing athletes rarely came up during meetings with federation officials. Instead, O’Brien said, promoters were advised to be prepared at shows with medical personnel.
-
-Bodybuilding has always been a sport of extremes, and the deaths of several high-profile athletes shortly after competing exposed the hazards of diuretics and [steroids in the 1990s](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/sports/1991/04/09/overdoing-the-gyms-and-drugs-a-bodybuilder-kicks-the-habit/e5040275-23ca-4522-ab06-6d5e19d94583/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template).
-
-At the time, the IFBB was lobbying to make bodybuilding an Olympic sport. The organization began testing for steroids at certain competitions and taking away prize money from those who failed.
-
-“It’s not only the image of the sport we’re concerned with, it’s the health of the athletes,” Ben Weider, then president of the federation, told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. “Bodybuilding is not body destruction.”
-
-Manion, who has led the NPC for decades, talked in the 1990s about the importance of testing in a story that appeared for years on its website: “In a sense, because some of them won’t protect themselves, we have to be protectors of their health and protectors of the sports we love.”
-
-But that story eventually disappeared from the website, and the movement for widespread testing dissipated. The International Olympic Committee’s provisional recognition of the IFBB lapsed in 2001.
-
-##### Dead at 49
-
-Terri Harris
-
-In 2013, Terri Harris went into cardiac arrest on a stair machine in the gym two days after making her professional debut at the IFBB Tampa Pro.
-
-Her partner, Hal Swaney, said she spent 16 weeks preparing with hours of daily training, a severely restricted diet and a mix of steroids and clenbuterol. Working with her coach, Harris was the leanest she’d ever been — about 10 pounds less than her typical stage weight.
-
-The night before the show, Swaney said, she was cramping badly, likely because of diuretics.
-
-“I tried to shove Pedialyte in her and she was afraid she was going to spill over … come into the show with too much water,” Swaney said.
-
-An autopsy report concluded the 49-year-old suffered “sudden cardiac death” during exercising and that an “electrolyte disturbance could not be ruled out.”
-
-Today, there is no widespread drug testing at hundreds of NPC and IFBB Pro shows around the world. These are the most popular federations in the United States and are run by Manion as for-profit businesses. Some select shows, branded as “natural,” claim to test athletes for banned substances by a polygraph test or urine sample.
-
-Since 2017, Manion has been included on the [World Anti-Doping Agency](https://www.wada-ama.org/en?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template)’s [Prohibited Association List](https://www.wada-ama.org/sites/default/files/2022-07/asp_list_updated_2022-07.14_final.pdf?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) aimed at those found to be afoul of the agency’s anti-doping code.
-
-The International Fitness and Bodybuilding Federation, a separate organization based in Spain that says it does drug testing, was [sanctioned this fall by the World Anti-Doping Agency](https://www.wada-ama.org/en/news/wada-confirms-non-compliance-international-federation-bodybuilding-and-fitness?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) for failing to implement an effective testing program and devote sufficient resources to testing. A federation official said “the non-compliant situation is a regular procedure among signatories and it is a temporary situation which will be resolved soon.”
-
-The failure to create or enforce protocols has essentially given the green light for bodybuilders, some in their teens, to experiment with a growing number of unregulated substances to achieve the sculpted physiques that are plastered all over social media. Many athletes say they are tracking down performance-enhancing drugs from underground labs on the internet, sourcing them from as far away as China.
-
-##### Dead at 29
-
-Bostin Loyd
-
-Marie Raia spent more than a decade trying to get her son, Bostin Loyd, off steroids after he started competing in bodybuilding contests as a teen. She even sought the help of high-profile health professionals to confront him and expose the industry.
-
-“Today he had surgery to remove water blisters in his arm from injecting too many needles,” she wrote in 2013 to the “Dr. Phil” television show in an email reviewed by The Post. “His doctor warned me that his liver and kidney will fail if he keeps this up … please take another look at this, the public needs to see what is going on with young kids.”
-
-But they never got the chance to go on the show. Raia knew the sport better than most moms: She was a “natural” bodybuilder who enjoyed competing in drug-tested federations. These are smaller and typically offer less prize money.
-
-When Loyd came home at age 21 with a tattoo that read “Get big or die trying,” Raia wondered how long he would last.
-
-Loyd had suffered for years from kidney problems, and in 2020 he was diagnosed with Stage 5 kidney failure after injecting himself with large doses of a peptide that caused weight loss in monkeys, according to medical records. When he shared the news publicly on Facebook, he said: “I did this to myself with a idiotic experiment and it finally all caught up to me. Do I regret anything? Absolutely not.”
-
-Raia said her son struggled with anxiety and depression after realizing he probably would never compete again. This past February, he collapsed at his home and died at age 29, leaving behind a 3-year-old son. Raia said she found syringes on Loyd’s kitchen counter that day.
-
-A private autopsy determined he died of a “dissecting aneurysm of ascending aorta,” and also had a severely thickened heart muscle, a “massively enlarged” liver and significant kidney damage that could have been caused by steroids.
-
-Raia still competes at age 63, but she doesn’t believe the industry will ever put safeguards in place.
-
-“They’ll lose money. It’s the whole thing of bodybuilding — it’s a freak show,” she said. “They want freaks out there. The freakier you are, the more money you make.”
-
-##### Dead at 43
-
-Mariola Sabanovic-Suarez
-
-Anita Suarez had a pit in her stomach when the phone rang and her son-in-law was on the other line: “Please don’t tell me that something’s happened with Mariola.”
-
-It was just days after her daughter, Mariola Sabanovic-Suarez, competed in her first professional bodybuilding contest in the United States. The Dutch athlete had spent about 18 weeks preparing under the guidance of Starnes, the same coach who ended up working with Kosinova and Engle. Starnes was based in Michigan and told clients in emails that he did all of his consulting online.
-
-Suarez knew about the long nights when her daughter stayed awake with hunger pains from her restrictive diet and the hours after hours she trained in the gym. But there were other parts of the contest prep that the 43-year-old kept hidden from her mother.
-
-Three days after the Tampa Pro show in 2019, Sabanovic-Suarez was having trouble breathing in the middle of the night. Hours later, her teenage daughter found her dead in the hotel bed, according to law enforcement records.
-
-Her husband told police that Sabanovic-Suarez had “no existing health concerns” but had been using clenbuterol, along with the steroids Winstrol and Anavar, for the bodybuilding contest. Officers found caffeine pills, and a toxicology analysis also revealed the presence of testosterone and boldenone, a horse steroid that bodybuilders use to build muscle and speed up their metabolism.
-
-The medical examiner’s office concluded that she died of myocarditis, an [inflammation of the heart](https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/bodybuilding-health-risks/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) that “may be related to anabolic steroid use.”
-
-A few days later, Starnes posted a tribute to his client on Instagram: “Rest in peace, Mariola. A mother, wife, and sweet soul that passed away far, far too soon. Life is truly fragile and can be taken from us in an instant.”
-
-Starnes, a former bodybuilder and self-described hermit, has coached hundreds of athletes around the world. He boasted on Instagram about his clients’ transformations, calling them “freak,” “Freak show,” “freakazoid” and “Team Tapeworm.”
-
-Starnes studied psychology in college and has talked repeatedly in interviews about why he almost exclusively coaches women.
-
-“I find that females are a little bit more trusting and just have less of an ego about everything,” Starnes explained in a 2019 interview on the “Revive Stronger” podcast.
-
-### Jodie Engle
-
-Jodie Engle trusted Starnes completely and was pretty much willing to do anything to get that pro card — extreme is how she approached most things in life.
-
-When Engle reached out to Starnes for help in August 2020, she was about 11 weeks away from competition. Her previous coach had gotten sick and a friend had recommended Starnes.
-
-“I’m sure we can get you that pro card :)” Starnes wrote to Engle.
-
-His emails always included a disclaimer that he wasn’t a doctor or registered dietitian. Starnes had learned coaching simply by doing it. “You’re not going to learn this stuff in books or courses,” he said in a 2020 podcast that aired a few months after he started working with Engle.
-
-She said she had taken performance-enhancing drugs for several years after a judge recommended them as a way to build up her physique more quickly. But Engle had never seen such a detailed and aggressive plan as the one Starnes emailed her after she paid him $900.
-
-Starnes instructed her to stay on clenbuterol and T3 for her entire prep, and added estrogen blockers to her list, according to emails reviewed by The Post. Her coach advised her to keep taking four different steroids, and to layer on three other steroids, including 50 milligrams of Winstrol daily for the last six weeks.
-
-Engle, who worked as a finance manager in Louisville, thought it seemed early for some of the steroids and wondered why Starnes didn’t have her cycling on and off clenbuterol the way she normally had.
-
-“I didn’t question it. I was just like, ‘Okay, Shelby makes freaks.’ This is what we do,” Engle said.
-
-She fell off a stair machine and cut her ankle the first week because her blood glucose was too low after her coach slashed carbohydrates. Her cardio doubled from 45 to 90 minutes on some days.
-
-Starnes seemed proud of his new client and posted photos of Engle’s progress almost every week on Instagram.
-
-“Have a very good feeling about this one!” he wrote in September 2020.
-
-### Email exchange between Jodie Engle and Shelby Starnes
-
-**From:** **Shelby Starnes** **To****:** **Jodie Engle** August 31, 2020 Sounds good Get Dyazide- I don’t think the others have Triamterene, just HCTZ **From: Jodie Engle** **To: Shelby Starnes** Ok ill get some! I’ll be 100% ready and on plan tomorrow! Let’s go get a f---ing pro card!!!! 🥳 🥳 🥳 🥳
-
-Emails edited for length
-
-That same day, Starnes was bragging online about another client, the Czech athlete Kosinova, and posted a video of her flexing her biceps: “Would look great on the Olympia stage.”
-
-About halfway through Engle’s training, she started getting fevers and her stomach was bloated. She didn’t worry too much until she got the diuretic protocol that she said started 10 days before the competition. It ramped up to 200 mg of Aldactone, she said, and added Dyazide starting the night before prejudging.
-
-Engle lost more than six pounds in a week from the diuretics and was cramping on the plane as she headed to the show.
-
-At the competition, her skin was gray under her spray tan, and she had to sit on the floor backstage at one point because it was too difficult to stand. Someone was walking around with cups of Pedialyte for competitors. Engle hadn’t drunk for hours — it wasn’t on the plan.
-
-When she finally made it onstage, Engle said she almost fell over because she was cramping so badly. But she kept her feet planted and smiled at the judges.
-
-##### Dead at 37
-
-Ashley Gearhart
-
-Ashley Gearhart was in tears, crying on her hotel bed after she accidentally missed the call to the stage for her division at the Pittsburgh Pro Masters in July 2021.
-
-“This is the worst feeling to put in all this hard work and time, effort and money and to put your body through crazy emotions and symptoms,” Gearhart said in a video she posted on Facebook. “You guys have no idea how hungry you can get and how weak you get, how sore your body is and you still have to push through.”
-
-She had been working for years with one of the industry’s top coaches, Shane Heugly, and earned her pro card under him. Turning pro helped her attract sponsors and build her own business as a personal trainer.
-
-A few days after the Pittsburgh Pro, Gearhart traveled to Mexico for several surgeries to fix her breast implants and remove back skin from a tummy tuck she had done earlier. She hoped the operations would ease some pain and improve her physique for the ever-critical judges.
-
-And when Gearhart visited her family in California this past January, she bragged about how she had lost 10 pounds in a week.
-
-The morning after she flew home, the 37-year-old mother of two was found dead in the basement of her new house in Colorado. Her boyfriend told police that Gearhart was a bodybuilder and had started seriously dieting to prepare for a competition in July, according to law enforcement records.
-
-“It wasn’t unusual for Ashley to wake up in the middle of the night to get something to eat because she was starving,” he told officers.
-
-Heugly, who is listed in the bio on Gearhart’s Instagram profile, said through an attorney that Gearhart “was not a client” at the time of her death.
-
-Renae Wegner, a former bodybuilder who got a stomach ulcer after taking the toxic chemical DNP to lose weight, said judges are fully aware of concerns in the sport about competitors with extremely low body fat. Since Wegner began judging several years ago, she said, officials have talked about rewarding a softer look, but she’s never seen it in practice.
-
-“They do the complete opposite,” Wegner said. “If they didn’t reward it, bodybuilders wouldn’t be doing it. Bottom line.”
-
-Gearhart’s death records reveal just how far she was willing to go. A toxicology analysis turned up positive for the diuretic spironolactone — commonly known by its brand name, Aldactone — and metformin, a diabetes medication that bodybuilders use for weight loss. She had other pills at home, including Bronkaid, an asthma medication, and caffeine pills — which coaches have recommended mixing together for weight loss.
-
-Gearhart had prescriptions for metformin, spironolactone and a thyroid medication from Randolph Whipps, the founding physician of LifeMed Institute in Maryland, which bills itself as the largest concierge wellness facility on the East Coast.
-
-But Gearhart did not have any apparent medical conditions that required the use of those prescription drugs, according to Leon Kelly, the El Paso County coroner whose office reviewed her medical records and interviewed family members.
-
-Whipps declined to comment, citing “privacy concerns.”
-
-The coroner’s office concluded that Gearhart died of cardiac arrest with a number of contributing factors, including caloric restriction, a thickened heart muscle, the use of steroids, diuretics and metformin, along with covid-19.
-
-“You could see clearly the role that the bodybuilding played in all of it,” Kelly said. “It was very clear the impact the training regimen and all the medications had on her death.”
-
-##### Dead at 26
-
-Dallas McCarver
-
-If anyone saw the warning signs of where the industry was headed, it was Guillermo Escalante. He loved bodybuilding and competed at shows in Southern California, not far from Muscle Beach Venice, the place that [Arnold Schwarzenegger](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/09/28/from-pumping-iron-to-pushing-political-ideas/a82d38e7-a92d-47dd-b505-6fc8aa5cda19/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) and other popular bodybuilders had called home.
-
-As an athletic trainer and a professor of kinesiology, Escalante also recognized the dangers. Bodybuilders routinely showed up to contests in distress — cramping, fainting, hearts racing.
-
-He offered to provide basic care for athletes after a competitor collapsed at a 2011 show in Culver City and then died at a hospital.
-
-For years, he spent weekends trekking to contests with his black medical bag. In 2015, at the California State Championships, Escalante said he came across 24-year-old Dallas McCarver struggling with dizziness and cramps — signs of too many diuretics. After checking his vital signs and offering Pedialyte, Escalante said McCarver managed to get back onstage and take first place.
-
-But Escalante was worried again when the young bodybuilder collapsed onstage at the Arnold Classic Australia two years later. After withdrawing from the show in March 2017, McCarver posted on Instagram about a respiratory infection he was fighting along with “being in a depleted/dehydrated state for the past three weeks straight.”
-
-McCarver said in his post that he had discussed pulling out of the competition earlier with his coach, Chad Nicholls. But the two of them decided to press on. Nicholls, who did not respond to messages seeking comment, was a former bodybuilder. He had worked for years in the industry and knew how despondent athletes felt leading up to shows. A bodybuilding client’s friend once called Nicholls because he was worried that the athlete — who was training for the Olympia — was sick and asked if he should take him to the hospital.
-
-“No you shouldn’t take him to the f---ing hospital,” Nicholls recounted in a 2020 interview with the “Real Bodybuilding Podcast.” “I go, ‘This is what he’s supposed to feel like.’ ... At that lowest point you feel like you’re dying, like you feel like your body is just shutting down.”
-
-The fragile state of bodybuilders before contests is a stark contrast to the condition of most elite athletes before competing — at the peak of fitness.
-
-Rumors swirled about McCarver’s health after he was carried offstage. So the bodybuilder posted a video with one of his supplement sponsors, Aaron Singerman of Redcon1.
-
-##### BUILT&BROKEN
-
-A Washington Post investigation into the world of bodybuilding. This multipart series explores the exploitation of women, the health risks to athletes and the man who runs the largest federations in the United States.
-
-Have a tip on the bodybuilding world? Email the reporters at builtandbroken@washpost.com.
-
-“I’m not dying. My kidneys ain’t failing. My heart’s not shutting down,” McCarver said, having trouble catching his breath.
-
-But a doctor’s visit shortly after did confirm he had heart problems, according to autopsy records.
-
-He continued training and posted frequently with Redcon1 about adding more muscle, fueled by the company’s line of supplements.
-
-Most professional bodybuilders can’t earn a living on the limited prize money from contests, so they rely on contracts with companies like Redcon1 to help pay for coaches and travel.
-
-In August 2017, months after collapsing onstage, McCarver was found unresponsive on his living room floor. Police collected pills by the couch, vials of drugs in the refrigerator. They identified steroids, growth hormones, peptides and estrogen blockers, according to law enforcement records.
-
-An autopsy found the 26-year-old had a massively enlarged heart, kidneys and liver. The medical examiner noted that “chronic use of exogenous steroid and non-steroid hormones” contributed to McCarver’s “premature death.”
-
-##### Dead at 31
-
-Luke Sandoe
-
-Just months after McCarver died, Escalante came across a seriously ill Luke Sandoe at a competition in California.
-
-The British bodybuilder had recently competed at the Arnold Classic Australia. His coach, Chris Aceto, proposed Sandoe start using diuretics about a week before the show. The bodybuilder seemed a little nervous.
-
-“That is early lol I’m sure you’ve done it a couple times this way before :)” Sandoe emailed in March 2018, according to messages reviewed by The Post.
-
-“I do everything different,” Aceto responded.
-
-Several days before the Arnold Classic, Aceto emailed Sandoe to take the diuretic Aldactone every 12 hours and discussed adding a second diuretic.
-
-Sandoe made it through that competition in Australia, but he vomited twice during prejudging at the show in California a few months later, according to an email Sandoe sent to contest organizers. Escalante said he saw Sandoe having labored breathing and trouble holding his poses. After taking his vital signs, Escalante told him to go straight to the hospital.
-
-When he followed up with Sandoe a few days later, the bodybuilder messaged back: “Honestly. If I didn’t go in, I would’ve died. My potassium was sky high, so dehydrated my kidneys all but shut down.”
-
-On May 31, Aceto checked in with his client: “Really sorry for way everything went down this last week.”
-
-“We play with fire in this game and sometimes things get burned :)” Sandoe responded.
-
-He was a little more blunt about what happened when he got back home to the United Kingdom. Sandoe said the vomiting, combined with the diuretics he was advised to use by Aceto, put him in a life-threatening situation.
-
-“I think Chris also forgot how much diuretics he was giving me to use. I didn’t use all of what he told me because I just didn’t have them with me,” Sandoe said during a June 2018 episode of “The Size Game” podcast he co-hosted. “I don’t know whether he just forgot what he was doing with me or whether he had too many other clients.”
-
-Sandoe immediately faced a wave of backlash for speaking out and blaming Aceto, one of the top coaches for male bodybuilders. Sandoe emailed an apology to Aceto that August “for the way things spiralled out of control.”
-
-They made amends, and shortly after, Sandoe signed on with Redcon1. As part of the sponsorship contract, Redcon1 agreed to pay Aceto’s coaching fee, which was $3,500 in 2020, according to an email exchange between Sandoe and a company official.
-
-The agreement, which paid Sandoe $12,000 a month, had a lot of stipulations: Sandoe was expected to post at least once a day on Instagram and any other social platforms as directed by the company; be filmed daily for advertising and marketing; and make up to 24 appearances a year, among other requirements.
-
-### Email exchange between Luke Sandoe and Chris Aceto
-
-**From: Chris Aceto** **To: Luke Sandoe** May 31, 2018 Ok. Really sorry for way everything went down this last week **From: Luke Sandoe** **To: Chris Aceto** Thanks Chris. We play with fire in this game and sometimes things get burned :)
-
-Emails edited for length
-
-Sandoe’s family said he built a gym in his home with his own money during the pandemic in part to meet his obligations. And he kept on training, hoping to compete once restrictions were lifted.
-
-But that never happened. Sandoe died in May 2020 at age 31, leaving behind two children. A cardiac pathologist noted in a report that Sandoe had an enlarged heart with acute left ventricular failure and left ventricular hypertrophy.
-
-“The underlying cause of his cardiac enlargement is likely to be his bodybuilding,” the report concluded.
-
-Sandoe’s family said they didn’t know the full extent of performance-enhancing drugs that he used, but emails document him talking with Aceto about insulin injections and purchasing growth hormones from an Austrian pharmacist who instructed Sandoe to delete their emails.
-
-Aceto declined to talk about Sandoe or answer questions about the risks of bodybuilding.
-
-“No, it sounds like a shakedown to me, kind of like a little blackmailing. You’re being recorded by the way,” Aceto told a Post reporter.
-
-Aceto, a former bodybuilder with a bachelor’s degree in health fitness, has worked in the industry for several decades.
-
-When asked about his other former clients who had health issues and died under the age of 50, including Cedric McMillan and Shawn Rhoden, Aceto noted that athletes die in football, too.
-
-Two days before Sandoe died, Redcon1 issued its last check to the athlete. The company had already slashed his pay 40 percent during the pandemic, according to emails.
-
-But Redcon1 did briefly sell T-shirts with Sandoe’s photo on them in the immediate aftermath of his death — as it did with McCarver. The company eventually removed Sandoe’s shirts “to respect Luke’s family and provide them time \[to\] mourn their loss.”
-
-Nearly two years after Sandoe’s death, Singerman, the founder of Redcon1, was sentenced to 54 months in prison for conspiring to sell illegal anabolic steroids and other products marketed as dietary supplements by Blackstone Labs, another business he helped start.
-
-Federal prosecutors said Singerman and other company officials ignored injury reports from consumers and failed to notify the Food and Drug Administration of such complaints. Singerman and Blackstone’s chief executive were also ordered to forfeit $5.9 million.
-
-Redcon1 officials, along with Singerman and his attorneys, did not respond to multiple messages seeking comment.
-
-Prosecutors, in their sentencing memo, referenced Singerman’s lack of remorse during a speech he gave at a holiday party for Redcon1 last December: “The truth is I wouldn’t change anything. I wouldn’t do anything differently.”
-
-Singerman, after serving less than a year, was released from prison last week.
-
-### THE QUESTIONERS
-
-Clarisse began bodybuilding when she was in college, but the contest prep was so intense that she abandoned the sport for several years.
-
-Clarisse, who spoke on the condition that her full name not be used for fear of retaliation, decided to give it another try in 2021.
-
-She said she hired Heugly as her coach — he was everywhere on Instagram getting bikini competitors their pro cards.
-
-Clarisse said that she had wanted to compete naturally but that her body wasn’t responding to her new coach’s plan. She was sometimes working out two hours a day and eating under 1,000 calories.
-
-Early on, Heugly texted Clarisse asking what supplements she was using and whether she wanted to take fat burners, according to messages reviewed by The Post.
-
-“Do you recommend any specific one?” she asked.
-
-“Obviously due to it being an extreme sport most use Clen,” Heugly texted, appearing to refer to clenbuterol. “Some make EC with Caffeine and bronkaid or primatene tablets.”
-
-Clarisse was struggling mentally, too, posting online how she felt like crying for days and wondering if it was because she was always hungry. She could barely get out of bed.
-
-In June 2021, she asked Heugly whether it was possible to add more muscle before the show and her coach texted, “Absolutely. All of our girls do. Obviously anabolics help a lot.”
-
-He later detailed dosages for the steroid Anavar, along with clenbuterol. She said she began feeling even worse and cut ties with her coach in late July.
-
-Justin Heideman, an attorney for Heugly, said the coach has advised certain athletes to do two hours of cardio but “Shane does not sell, distribute, promote or require any PED use. In fact Shane has frequently advised clients to reduce or minimize PED use that the client had previously elected to engage in.”
-
-Heugly, who is based in Utah, listed on his website a bachelor’s degree in exercise sport science as well as a bachelor’s of education in health promotion from the University of Utah. When questioned about Heugly’s academic credentials, his attorney acknowledged that the coach did not have a bachelor’s in exercise sport science and said he has since amended his website.
-
-Heugly is also certified as a “performance enhancement specialist” by the National Academy of Sports Medicine, according to its online directory. The academy said it does not condone the use of performance-enhancing drugs or coaches who advise clients to take them.
-
-Clarisse blamed herself at first for not being one of Heugly’s pro card success stories. But within weeks, she began to question her coach’s methods after other female bodybuilders started talking online about contest prep that they considered dangerous.
-
-One of Heugly’s former clients posted anonymous messages on Instagram that she said came from athletes who had worked with him. Shortly after, Heugly filed a defamation lawsuit seeking $6.8 million in damages. He alleged that the “republished messages” were false and asked a judge for a restraining order to force her to take them down.
-
-Heugly attached exhibits with the lawsuit that included some of the messages: “I’m suffering from noncardiogenic pulmonary edema. Having taken water pills and the use of clen, it just knocked me outta whack.” Another post read: “The peds, the 2-3 hrs cardio, sub 1k cals.”
-
-The posts were voluntarily removed, but Heugly didn’t drop the lawsuit. A judge ultimately denied the restraining order, saying it would be adverse to the public interest and infringe on First Amendment rights. The case is pending.
-
-Clarisse said she was one of the athletes who had their stories reposted, and she watched in dismay as Heugly tried to silence concerns. She had hoped, instead, that he would change his tactics.
-
-“I don’t think that this needs to be something that is this dangerous,” Clarisse said. “I think it can be done in a way that’s a lot more healthy.”
-
-Escalante had tried for years to make bodybuilding safer. He brought his medical bag around to shows and helped dozens of competitors.
-
-For his day job as a professor at California State University at San Bernardino, he researched extreme contest prep measures and discovered cardiovascular abnormalities in the autopsies of bodybuilders who died under age 50. He and his co-authors found that bodybuilders had an average heart weight that was about 74 percent heavier than the typical male.
-
-But he knew that wasn’t enough. He still worried about athletes relying on coaches mixing and matching performance-enhancing drugs without realizing the consequences.
-
-“You’re basically left with somebody who doesn’t understand pharmacology, who doesn’t understand how these drugs interact and this is who you’re listening to,” said Escalante, who still competes in shows. “It’s just a recipe for disaster.”
-
-After the death last year of Kosinova and other bodybuilders within a few weeks, Escalante decided to go straight to the top of the industry. He wrote to the owner of the Olympia contest and to Victor Prisk, a doctor who was friends with Jim Manion, the head of the NPC and the IFBB Pro, according to messages reviewed by The Post.
-
-“I wanted to see if you could help me set up a meeting with Jim and Tyler Manion sometime in the near future,” Escalante wrote in an Aug. 21, 2021, text message to Prisk. “As a physician and bodybuilder, I’m sure you’ve seen the recent tragic deaths of 3 competitors over the last couple of weeks. I want to help make positive changes to make our sport safer as I’m sure you do.”
-
-Prisk later responded that he talked to Jim Manion about several ideas, including putting together a safety guide for judges and creating a panel of physicians to help with blood testing and other possible testing for competitors who feel they are being subjected to unsafe techniques.
-
-Prisk, who has also worked as a contest judge, declined to comment to The Post. Nobody, Escalante thought, wanted to take responsibility.
-
-“It really has to come from a place outside of the NPC/IFBB,” Prisk wrote.
-
-### THE SURVIVORS
-
-For years, Maggy Kheir never questioned anything that Starnes advised. Not the 120 micrograms of clenbuterol the 22-year-old was on days before the first show they did together, according to emails reviewed by The Post. Not the diuretics she said he gave her. Not the increase in thyroid medication he recommended — above the dosage that her doctor prescribed.
-
-“I really think 10mcg daily is really low though,” Starnes wrote in a May 2019 email. “Even 25mcg daily is low.”
-
-“I think my primary doctor started me off on a low dosage because it’s what’s ‘safe,’” Kheir responded.
-
-After that first show with Starnes, Kheir said she struggled with thyroid and hormonal problems, along with depression. In 2021, she felt ready to compete again and signed up for another prep.
-
-In emails, her coach advised her to get the steroid Anavar and detailed dosages. When Kheir tried to get clenbuterol in August 2021 — two weeks before Kosinova died — her doctor’s office said their pharmacy didn’t carry it: “Nor is it one that I recommend for my competitors. It is not a legal medication in the US. It is approved for horses only.”
-
-Kheir stopped working with Starnes shortly after and then left the sport entirely.
-
-She said Kosinova’s death was a wake-up call: “I care about my health. I care about my femininity. I care about being able to have kids one day. It’s just not worth a plastic trophy.”
-
-Kosinova’s son declined to comment.
-
-### Email exchange between Maggy Kheir and Shelby Starnes
-
-**From: Maggy Kheir** **To: Shelby Starnes** August 9, 2018 CURRENT WEIGHT: so 137lbs at home on my scale. Been ages since I’ve seen that number on the scale! Also, thank you so much for the diuretics. I really appreciate it Coach! You’ve been nothing but a blessing& a huge help in my life. **From: Shelby Starnes** **To: Maggy Kheir** Wow! Excellent report Maggy - you’re tightening up very nicely. I don’t want to change anything right now -let’s keep rolling as is and update again Saturday Glad you got the diuretics!
-
-Emails edited for length
-
-But other clients rushed to the coach’s defense after news of Kosinova’s death spread throughout the bodybuilding community. Trisha Vezirian Smick detailed the precise dosages she used to achieve her peak week look with clenbuterol, T3 and diuretics.
-
-“Never pushed — merely presented and accepted BY ME! This has always been MY EXPERIENCE with Coach @shelbystarnes100 `#beresponsible` `#takeownership` `#beaccountable`.”
-
-Smick had been working with Starnes after earning her pro card with Heugly as her coach.
-
-She gave another shout-out to Starnes this past summer when she announced her retirement from bodybuilding: “I will be eternally grateful for all that we have accomplished together as a team.”
-
-The end of her career was unexpected. At first, Smick blamed the fatigue and heaviness in her chest on the stress of contest prep. The 54-year-old was training to make her debut in the bodybuilding division — the most difficult category, requiring intense conditioning and muscle mass.
-
-But it was far more serious: Smick told The Post she visited urgent care in July and was then sent to a hospital, where she went into cardiac arrest. Doctors put her into a medically induced coma.
-
-“They felt like the performance-enhancing drugs definitely led to it,” she said of the doctors.
-
-Smick said she took drugs willingly in her pursuit of getting bigger, getting harder.
-
-“I put all accountability on myself because I was the one who made decisions to do whatever it is I did,” Smick said. “But I was devastated — absolutely still am.”
-
-### Jodie Engle
-
-Engle is also trying to wrap her head around the reality she is now facing.
-
-Weeks after she won her pro card in 2020, the bodybuilder ended up hospitalized. She emailed Starnes that doctors had diagnosed her with rhabdomyolysis, a potentially fatal condition that can be caused by overuse of diuretics.
-
-“They said my kidneys were under more stress than they could handle,” she wrote on Dec. 14, 2020.
-
-Starnes didn’t acknowledge her illness in his response: “Let’s stay on the diet plan (the off day plan) on all days for right now, but cut the carb portions all in HALF. No cardio or training for now. Let’s see how the next handful of days go.”
-
-Engle said she was put on bed rest for six weeks and struggled to get better over the next six months. In June 2021 she started prepping again with Starnes, but her health deteriorated over the next several weeks.
-
-On Aug. 16 — hours after Kosinova died — Engle wrote to Starnes that she hadn’t checked in the previous week because she’d been hospitalized again after having shortness of breath and swelling in her limbs.
-
-“The doctor told me the diuretics are what put the strain on my heart without question.. that apparently my heart never recovered from them,” Engle wrote. “Maybe one day after a potential open heart surgery to get my heart valves pumping properly again I could come back for more lifestyle type things... because my pro career is done before I ever got to start it.”
-
-“Damn, very sorry to hear that Jodie,” Starnes responded that day. “That’s a lot to process :( Why don’t we continue lifestyle coaching for now? Having a goal/ something to work towards would help mentally and physically, no?”
-
-“I just cant even lie when I say I am completely heartbroken over this,” Engle wrote back. “I’ve never felt so low. Like I worked so hard for years on end.. for diuretics to end my career.”
-
-Engle was back in the hospital three days after writing Starnes with chest pains, acute kidney injury, dehydration and cellulitis, among other conditions, according to medical records.
-
-### Email exchange between Jodie Engle and Shelby Starnes
-
-**From: Shelby Starnes** **To: Jodie Engle** August 16, 2021 Damn :( You can still diet and do cardio and some training? Any limitations? **From: Jodie Engle** **To: Shelby Starnes** As of this moment all I can do is diet. I’m allowed zero activity that raises my heart rate. My heart valves aren’t pumping correctly. They are all pumping 3 times the beat of my regular heart which then floods my heart with to much blood and then my heart pours blood into other organs… so anything that raises my heart rate I currently am not allowed to do. **From: Shelby Starnes** **To: Jodie Engle** Ok understood. Let’s do a check in soon - today or tomorrow, and we’ll keep chipping away with diet for now Hey - you achieved IFBB PRO STATUS - that’s something that very few will ever do.
-
-Emails edited for length
-
-She avoided heart surgery, but doctors told her it’s only a matter of time before she will need a kidney transplant.
-
-Now 31, the single mom has a new set of drugs to take, including blood pressure medication, beta blockers and prednisone. She frequently has swelling in her legs and ankles and she is recovering from a shoulder replacement surgery.
-
-Engle said she would give her pro card back in an instant — just for one day to live in her old body.
-
-“My life is worth more than this little card,” she said. “And every single athlete’s life … is worth more than a card.”
-
-*Have a tip on the bodybuilding world? Email the reporters at* [*builtandbroken@washpost.com*](mailto:builtandbroken@washpost.com?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template)*.*
-
-##### About this story
-
-Thessa Lageman, [Alice Crites](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/alice-crites/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template), [Stefano Pitrelli](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/stefano-pitrelli/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template), [Niha Masih](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/niha-masih/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template), Nick Trombola, [Desmond Butler](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/desmond-butler/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template), [Loveday Morris](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/loveday-morris/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template), [Amanda Coletta](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/amanda-coletta/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template), [Helen Fessenden](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/helen-fessenden/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template), [John Sullivan](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/john-sullivan/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template), Yvonne Condes, [Monika Mathur](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/monika-mathur/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template), [Razzan Nakhlawi](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/razzan-nakhlawi/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template), Magda Jean-Louis, and [Claire Healy](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/claire-healy/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) contributed to this report.
-
-Additional contributors from the American University-Washington Post practicum program are Hayden Godfrey, Solène Guarinos, Ron Simon III, Alexandra Rivera, Alexander Fernandez and Lalini Pedris.
-
-Lead editing by [Trish Wilson](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/trish-wilson/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) and [Jeff Leen](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/jeff-leen/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template). Project management by [KC Schaper](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/kc-schaper/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template).
-
-Design and development by [Jake Crump](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/jake-crump/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template). Art direction by [Natalie Vineberg](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/natalie-vineberg/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template). Design editing by [Christian Font](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/christian-font/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template).
-
-Photography by [Marvin Joseph](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/marvin-joseph/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template). Photo editing by [Robert Miller](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/robert-miller/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template). Illustration by Tim McDonagh.
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-Copy editing by [Stu Werner](https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/stu-werner/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) and Wayne Lockwood. Additional editing, production and support by Jordan Melendrez and Jenna Lief.
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diff --git a/00.03 News/Brett Parson, gay D.C. cop arrested in Florida, divides LGBTQ community.md b/00.03 News/Brett Parson, gay D.C. cop arrested in Florida, divides LGBTQ community.md
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-^button-BrettParsongaycoparrestedinFloridaNSave
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-# Brett Parson, gay D.C. cop arrested in Florida, divides LGBTQ community
-
-He had cinched cuffs around hundreds of wrists as a D.C. police officer, but now Brett Parson’s own hands were being placed behind his back.
-
-“So I’ll let you know guys, right now, that until I talk to an attorney, I won’t talk to anybody,” Parson said.
-
-The police in Boca Raton, Fla., guided him toward their cruiser as their body cameras recorded the encounter.
-
-“I think I know exactly what it’s about. It’s a brand-new warrant, right?” Parson guessed. “Brand-new? Issued probably this morning?”
-
-“Yep,” answered one officer. They were outside the condo where Parson’s parents lived. He’d been staying with them to help his father recover from a surgery.
-
-On this February morning, he’d taken the trash out, not knowing detectives were waiting for him outside. They asked for the keys to his father’s red convertible. They asked him to turn over his phone.
-
-Parson, 53, instructed them not to search anything without a warrant.
-
-“I know what it is you’re looking for,” he said.
-
-Around 12:30 a.m. the night before, Parson had been pulled over by officers from Coconut Creek, who’d seen him driving the red convertible near a quiet office park 20 minutes away. Police reported they watched as the convertible followed a gray sedan into a parking lot. Both cars made a U-turn and returned to the road. The gray sedan then pulled into a fenced-off area with an empty field and a Comcast tower. The gate, which should have been locked, was open. What were these drivers doing there in the middle of the night? The officers stopped both cars.
-
-Parson told them they were mistaken. He wasn’t following the gray sedan. He was just lost and looking for Interstate 95.
-
-“I’m a cop from D.C.,” he said. In reality, he had been retired and only a reserve officer for two years.
-
-LEFT: D.C. Police Lt. Brett Parson speaks during a meeting of D.C.'s Hate Bias Task Force in 2019. (Michael E. Miller/TWP) RIGHT: Parson, shown here in 2005, was known nationally and internationally as a pioneer of gay rights in policing. (Carol Guzy/The Washington Post)
-
-They let him drive away. Then they went to talk to the driver of the gray sedan.
-
-The window rolled down to reveal a thin White boy. He said he had pulled over to text a friend. The officer told the boy he didn’t believe him. In his report, he described what the teenager — who turned out to be 16 – did next.
-
-“He dropped his head, took a deep breath, and stated he met the guy who was following behind him online and they were meeting to ‘hook up.’ ”
-
-The teenager began to tell the officers the story he would repeat at least three times that night, including at the sexual assault treatment center where he was taken after his parents were called.
-
-He’d met Parson on Growlr, a dating app for gay men that requires users to be 18. He’d lied about his birthday to use the app, claiming he was 18. He said he and Parson exchanged oral sex in the parking lot of a day care.
-
-He said he knew Parson used to be a police officer.
-
-What he didn’t know was that Parson was not just any police officer. The man who had just driven away was known nationally and internationally as a pioneer of gay rights in policing.
-
-In the nation’s capital, [Parson built an award-winning liaison unit](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2005/03/28/the-stewards-of-gay-washington/c8cfcce2-1376-46c6-aa62-b563d134c50b/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) that investigated hate crimes, befriended advocates and marched in Pride parades, slowly revolutionizing the relationship between the police and the city’s LGBTQ community. People saw him everywhere: dance clubs and book clubs, hospital bedsides and funeral homes, early-morning court hearings and late-night domestic disputes.
-
-The city’s [2019 guide to Pride](https://issuu.com/capitalpride/docs/guide_final_2019?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) called Parson a “living legend.” The Department of Justice, the State Department, Amnesty International, the Southern Poverty Law Center and other police departments relied on his expertise.
-
-Now, he was going to jail. The warrant for [his arrest](https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/02/16/parson-charged-dc-police/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) listed two counts of unlawful sexual activity. If convicted, he could face a prison sentence and a lifetime as a registered sex offender. Under Florida law, claiming to be misled about the age of a victim [cannot](http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&Search_String=&URL=0700-0799%2F0794%2FSections%2F0794.021.html&itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) be used as a legal defense.
-
-Parson’s arrest stunned the legions of people who admired him, leaving them with questions about what exactly happened in Florida and whether it represented some sort of mistake or a serious betrayal.
-
-Months later, they are still without answers. The case, which depends largely on the involvement of a 16-year-old identified only by his initials, is moving slowly. It will be months, and possibly years, before a judge or jury determines Parson’s fate.
-
-While the former lieutenant waits for his future to be decided, those who put their trust in him for so long are revisiting his past. This story is based on public records and interviews with more than three dozen people whose lives and work Parson influenced during his 26-year career. They are grappling with the person they thought they knew — and the power he wielded for so long.
-
-Parson, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges, did not respond to repeated interview requests.
-
-On the morning of his Feb. 12 arrest, Parson frequently reminded the officers taking him into custody that he, too, was a cop. He commented on their equipment, mentioned he was scheduled to teach at the FBI National Academy, mused about what his approach to this kind of warrant would be and joked about his own history of stuffing large men into cramped back seats.
-
-“With all due — we know who you are, sir,” an officer informed him. “Your credentials don’t matter. … It’s nothing to do with how this is being handled.”
-
-“I understand,” Parson said. He thanked them for being caring.
-
-They confiscated his loaded Glock 26, explained to his parents what was happening and slammed the cruiser door.
-
-“F---,” Parson said, “It’s weird being on this side.”
-
-### Ending ‘fairy shaking’
-
-Parson’s reputation as a gay hero began with a scandal. In the late 1990s, while Parson was building a career in narcotics investigations, another D.C. officer was stationing himself outside a gay club in Southeast Washington. He was watching for men leaving the club who were wearing wedding rings or getting into cars with baby seats. He wrote down their license plates, found their contact information and called them. Pay $10,000, he said, or he’d expose them to their wives and employers.
-
-The scheme was known as “[fairy shaking](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/11/30/lt-stowes-sudden-fall-from-grace/a6ac37f2-57d2-47fb-b6da-0f8f6a45dde8/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template).”
-
-It eventually led to an FBI investigation, a nearly two-year prison sentence for the officer and the resignation of the chief of police.
-
-To those in the LGBTQ community, the extortion was just the latest example of mistreatment by a police force with a [decades-long history](http://www.glaa.org/archive/2003/rosendallmpdhistory1119.shtml?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) of targeting [vulnerable queer people](https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/glaa-of-washington-dc/item/1011?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template).
-
-“There was an overall mistrust,” remembers Peter Newsham, who later became police chief. “There was a feeling that they couldn’t call the police and ensure that the police officer who came to the door was going to treat them with dignity.”
-
-The chief installed after the scandal, Charles Ramsey, saw a solution to that problem: bolstering and broadening a newly formed Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit.
-
-Parson, then in his early 30s, had been openly gay since he joined the force. He’d grown up in the area and, after working as a National Hockey League referee, became a police officer in 1994.
-
-He didn’t want the job as head of the unit. But Ramsey, as Parson told the story, didn’t give him a choice.
-
-\[[The victims of D.C.’s record year of hatred](https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/local/dc-hate-crimes/?itid=lk_interstitial_enhanced-template) \]
-
-“I was wearing plain clothes, driving an undercover car, growing my hair out, wearing my gun on my ankle, jumping out on felony drug dealers, and flipping them for homicide cases. It was the assignment of a lifetime,” Parson later told the Community Policing Dispatch newsletter. “I was really, really afraid that my reputation was going to change from being a good cop who happened to be gay, to being a gay cop that used to be a good cop.”
-
-Instead, he became renowned for professionalizing the unit, balancing a law-and-order approach with what was then a relatively new idea: true community policing. Rather than raid gay clubs, Parson and the five to 15 members of his unit would announce themselves over the loudspeaker, then walk around, introduce themselves and pass out refrigerator magnets with their phone number on it. The number was the workaround for those in the community who needed help, but worried about the repercussions of calling 911: a gay man experiencing domestic abuse from his partner or a transgender woman wanting to report a hate crime.
-
-“Nowadays, it’s not appreciated how ground-breaking and innovative it was,” said Kurt Vorndran, who served on the D.C. Police Complaints Board for 15 years. “Those of us who were advocates at the time, we were blown away. And Brett, his personality, his skill and his professionalism was a major factor in all of this.”
-
-TOP LEFT: Parson regularly trained other officers on the force about LGBTQ issues. (Carol Guzy/The Washington Post) TOP RIGHT: Parson, right, walks into a funeral beside then-Chief Charles Ramsey in 2005. (Carol Guzy/The Washington Post) BOTTOM LEFT: Parson joins Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld of Ohev Sholom in Washington for a prayer service in 2018. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post) BOTTOM RIGHT: Parson provides comfort at a memorial service for LGBTQ activist Wanda Alston in 2005. (Carol Guzy/The Washington Post)
-
-Within three years of Parson’s being put in charge, the unit won a distinguished service award from the city’s Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance, an organization formed in part to protest discrimination by law enforcement. [LGBTQ rights pioneer Frank Kameny](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/06/11/from-restrained-to-radical-to-raucous-a-history-of-pride-celebrations-in-the-u-s/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template), who became a national icon after he was fired from his job for his sexuality, handed the award to Parson.
-
-“No longer are the police our enemy,” Kameny [declared](https://www.metroweekly.com/2003/04/shaping-the-city/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template).
-
-In time, the unit and the LGBTQ community worked in tandem to aid the department in solving crimes, including the murders of several transgender women in the city.
-
-“\[Brett\] would call me, you know, I don’t care what time of morning it was,” remembers Earline Budd, a longtime advocate for the city’s transgender and sex worker communities. “He would wake me up and he would say, Ms. Budd, we are on the scene of a double homicide.”
-
-Budd would help identify the victims, then see Parson at every memorial and funeral that followed, and every community meeting about stopping the next act of violence. Though Parson did stints elsewhere in the department, he returned again and again to what was renamed the LGBTQ Liaison Unit, eventually overseeing the department’s entire Special Liaison Branch. He trained recruits, retrained old-timers and consulted with departments across the country trying to replicate what he had built.
-
-“He made me feel safe,” said Kisha Allure, who works in victims services at Casa Ruby, an LGBTQ support center.
-
-But she knew that wasn’t true for everyone.
-
-When Parson walked into a support group unannounced, she saw the uneasiness in the eyes of transgender women, especially women of color, meeting him for the first time.
-
-He looked to many like a TV version of a cop: White and male, big and burly, always armed and always in uniform. Parson boasted that, on a police force with few openly gay cops, his imposing figure earned him respect.
-
-“I’m 6 foot, I weigh about 295 pounds, I have experience in professional athletics and ice hockey — there aren’t a lot of people lining up to f--- with me” he told a podcast interviewer in 2021.
-
-What some took as Parson being direct and authoritative, others saw as arrogant and aggressive.
-
-“He exerted his power. In some cases, he used it to stop hate, harm and death in our community, even when it wasn’t popular to do so,” said June Crenshaw, director of the Wanda Alston Foundation. “But it’s hard to turn that power off.”
-
-Parson was furious in 2017 when, following protests of police participation in the city’s annual Pride parade, the LGBTQ Liaison Unit was asked not to march. He became so heated during a meeting with organizers that Sheila Alexander-Reid, the mayor’s director of LGBTQ affairs, had to calm him down.
-
-“He was hurt that his own community would have the nerve to ask him not to be a part of the parade after all he had done,” Alexander-Reid remembered.
-
-Parson reluctantly agreed to a compromise: He and his officers would wear D.C. police polos instead of full uniforms. But by 2019, he was ignoring the new policy, marching again in uniform down the parade route. That same week, when other members of his unit were asked to leave a Latinx Pride event, Parson returned with them 30 minutes later. He took the microphone and made a speech.
-
-“He just walked up the church aisle, armed, this \[cisgender\] White man, all upset because somebody told his people not to be there,” remembered Nancy Cañas, who organized the event.
-
-Some of Parson’s fellow officers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said they were aware of concerns about his behavior.
-
-An investigative report from the Office of Police Complaints describes a night in 2006 when Parson was monitoring 18th Street NW. A cabdriver did not properly pull over to the curb. Parson’s solution: open the door, grab the driver by his shirt and rip him out of the vehicle. Parson took the taxi and drove it down the street.
-
-“You can’t do that,” the cab’s stranded passengers told him. According to the complaint, Parson replied, “Shut the f--- up, b----, you don’t know what you’re talking about!”
-
-Parson denied using foul language. But when asked by investigators about removing the driver from his cab, Parson replied that he had done this on “hundreds of occasions.”
-
-The investigator found that Parson had engaged in harassment and use of excessive or unnecessary force. His punishment, a D.C. police spokesman said, was a letter in his personnel file.
-
-On another night two years later, Parson stopped by the nightclub Town Danceboutique, where dozens of people were in line to get into what was advertised as “D.C.’s biggest Pride party.” According to a deposition he gave after he was sued for his behavior that night, he was planning to pass out magnets. Instead, he chased down a woman who appeared to be putting something in her mouth. Once he stopped her and her friends, he saw a young White man walking away from the same area.
-
-“Hey partner, come with me for a second,” Parson said, according to his 2009 deposition.
-
-“What did I do?” the man replied as he kept walking.
-
-Parson grabbed his arm. The man yanked it away. Parson grabbed him harder, turned and threw him through a plate-glass window.
-
-Parson’s explanation was that he was trying to pin the man up against a brick wall, and missed. The man, who declined to comment because he did not want to revisit that night, was crouched in the fetal position. He was covered in shattered glass and bleeding from his head. Parson was still trying to put him in handcuffs.
-
-“I’m yelling over and over again, ‘Stop resisting, put your arms behind your back,’ ” Parson stated in the deposition. “The crowd is screaming at me. I can’t hear him, but he’s yelling and I, eventually, use my weight to, kind of, push my body weight down on top of him.”
-
-Parson charged the man with assaulting a police officer.
-
-After a trip to the hospital and a night in jail, the charges were dropped. Records show the city settled the case for $17,500.
-
-But whether Parson was disciplined for this incident — and whether there are other use-of-force incidents are on his record — remains unclear.
-
-Police officials declined to release Parson’s disciplinary record or answer questions about it, citing the former lieutenant’s right to privacy. The department terminated Parson from its reserve force after his arrest in Florida. A spokesman said Parson is not under investigation in D.C., and there is nothing in his record to suggest he had inappropriate contact with anyone in the District.
-
-As Parson’s use-of-force cases were handled by police internally, his profile outside the city grew. He hosted and attended international conferences for LGBTQ law enforcement. He starred in a Justice Department training video on how police should treat the transgender community. He traveled to Vietnam and the Philippines for the State Department.
-
-Eventually, those familiar with his decision said, he realized he could make far more money outside the department than the $121,000 records show he was making annually as a lieutenant. Parson retired in February 2020 to start his own consulting firm.
-
-In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, he began traveling around the country to train police on how to intervene when a fellow officer uses excessive force.
-
-“We’re not just policing others,” Parson [told NBC4](https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/we-have-to-police-ourselves-dc-program-trains-officers-to-intervene-and-prevent-harm/2444012/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template). “We have to police ourselves.”
-
-### ‘I like younger’
-
-The teen messaged Parson first.
-
-“Hey,” he wrote at 10:21 p.m., “how are you.”
-
-Parson’s Growlr profile identified him as a 53-year-old in an open relationship. His job was listed as LEO, an acronym for law enforcement officer.
-
-“I like younger,” Parson’s profile stated. “Just a regular guy looking for the same. Staying in Fort Lauderdale for the week.”
-
-According to screenshots of Parson’s messages with the teenager obtained through public records requests, Parson replied that night: “Good. U?”
-
-The 16-year-old’s profile listed his age as 18. It described him as 5-foot-7 and 140 pounds. From a list of words to describe himself, one he chose was “boy.” The term is sometimes used by adults in the gay community who identify or present as youthful.
-
-Parson and the teenager unlocked the app’s “private media” feature, allowing them to see revealing pictures of each other. Though the boy’s photos are not part of public records, he later told officers that they included pictures of his body and his face. In one explicit text message, Parson commented on how skinny he was.
-
-“You know a place where we can meet that’s not too far from you?” the 16-year-old asked Parson the next day.
-
-We could definitely meet up after work. if you wanted to
-
-I just brought dinner home to my parents. Let me get them fed, then we can chat
-
-Why don’t we meet someplace after your work. We can chat. See if we click. Then, figure out a plan from there. No pressure and no strings.
-
-After a phone call between them, records show that the teen sent Parson the address of a Shell gas station. Around midnight, Parson pulled in driving his father’s red convertible. Its front license plate said “LIFE’S A BEACH.”
-
-Looking for a more secluded place, the pair moved across the street to the parking lot of a day care.
-
-Three hours later, at the county’s sexual assault [treatment center](https://www.broward.org/NancyJCottermanCenter/Pages/Default.aspx?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template), the 16-year-old sat in a room intentionally painted in calming blues. He was handed a brochure that said, “A person 24 years of age or older … cannot receive consent from 16- and 17-year-old minors.”
-
-“Being the victim of a crime can be overwhelming,” it read. “Your reactions are normal.”
-
-On his phone, there was a new text from Parson: “You ok?”
-
-“Yeah I’m good,” the teenager replied. “I’m home.”
-
-Then he started talking to a detective.
-
-“It just kinda happened,” the teenager said, according to a police transcript of the interview. “I don’t really know how to explain it.”
-
-The officer asked if he kissed back.
-
-“I consented,” the boy said.
-
-LEFT: An evidence photo shows the license plate of the vehicle Brett Parson drove to the gas station where he met the teenager. (Coconut Creek Police Department) RIGHT: Police say Parson and the teenager then moved to the parking lot of this day-care center in Coconut Creek, Fla. (Scott McIntyre For The Washington Post)
-
-According to the transcript, the officer did not ask the teenager if Parson knew his real age.
-
-Advocates who work with gay youth say it’s common for teenagers to explore on dating apps that allow them to meet strangers, especially if they don’t feel safe expressing themselves at home or in school.
-
-Some vulnerable kids also use dating apps to seek out adults who will pay them, though minors cannot legally consent to being purchased for sex. The officer questioning this teenager did not ask whether money was exchanged.
-
-The boy described how he and Parson gave each other oral sex, then decided to move to another location because they’d seen someone walking in the distance.
-
-“Did you feel like you wanted to continue what you guys are doing?” the detective asked.
-
-“No,” the teen said. “I also didn’t really feel like saying no either, but I didn’t want to keep going.”
-
-“Okay,” the detective said. “And then …”
-
-“But I didn’t show any signs either of like wanting to stop, so.”
-
-“Okay. Did, um, did you feel scared?”
-
-“I felt uncomfortable,” the boy said. “But I kinda went with it because I was already there.”
-
-He told the detective Parson did not threaten him. And though he never showed him his badge or his weapon, he knew that Parson used to be a cop.
-
-“I just didn’t stop for some reason,” he said. “But I don’t know why.”
-
-After 20 minutes, the interview ended. It was 3:50 a.m. The boy, with his father’s permission, consented to give DNA to investigators. They had everything they needed to ask a judge for an arrest warrant.
-
-### ‘No, not Brett’
-
-Parson sat in a jail cell for nearly a week. He paid $5,000 to A Signature Only Bail Bonds, which insured the rest of his $50,000 bond. A judge ordered him to remain in Florida, stay away from all minors and live at his parents’ Boca Raton condo while he awaited trial.
-
-Meanwhile, his mug shot had hit the news.
-
-“I kept saying no, no, no, not Brett,” recalled Budd, who had helped Parson identify crime victims. “An underage young man? No.”
-
-On Twitter and in text messages, members of D.C.’s LGBTQ community quickly began taking sides. Many pointed out that while the age of consent in Florida is 18, in D.C. it’s 16. Parson could not have been arrested for the same set of circumstances here.
-
-“I don’t think a life should be destroyed over one foolish event late one night, especially when the contact was made on a site where everyone is supposed to be a minimum of 18,” said Rick Rosendall, former president of the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance.
-
-Nothing about the police reports, some argued, indicated that Parson had intentionally sought out a minor.
-
-“To me, there’s no victim, there’s no predator in this story,” said transgender activist Taylor Lianne Chandler, who took to Twitter to defend Parson. “I can’t fathom Brett risking his career for 20 minutes of fun.”
-
-Others were disgusted, saying it was not acceptable even if Parson thought the person he was meeting was 18.
-
-“You’re a police officer, you should know better,” said Tamika Spellman, a transgender advocate who has conducted training sessions alongside Parson. “You should know the differences between a grown-up and a child.”
-
-Impossible to ignore was where the encounter happened: a state then on the verge of passing a bill to ban teachers from discussing sexual orientation and gender identity. Dubbed the [“don’t say gay” law](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/01/what-is-florida-dont-say-gay-bill/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) by opponents, its supporters bandied about terms like “grooming” to create false links between homosexuality and child abuse, which is committed by people of all sexual orientations.
-
-“Something like this just plays right into their narrative,” said John Guggenmos, owner of several gay nightclubs in D.C., including Town Danceboutique, which closed in 2018. “To me, it makes all our community look bad.”
-
-Many who had crossed paths with Parson or invited him to speak at events said they feared that bringing any additional attention to his arrest could hurt LGBTQ progress.
-
-But to those who put their trust in him again and again, the hurt was already done.
-
-“For him to use his power to leave the scene, leaving this vulnerable youth to fend for himself, it’s devastating,” said Crenshaw, of the Wanda Alston Foundation.
-
-Allure, at Casa Ruby, who’d said Parson made her feel safe, couldn’t help thinking of how vulnerable she had been as a teenager.
-
-“You’re a leader. People look at you as a public figure. You have the nerve? The audacity? I can’t. That’s where I’m at,” she said.
-
-Alexander-Reid, who was Parson’s counterpart in the mayor’s office, said she’s still waiting for some kind of explanation, maybe from Parson himself.
-
-“If he’s willing to be vulnerable and open as to what happened, I’m definitely open to listen,” she said. “He’s earned my respect. And if he’s made mistakes? You know what, he’s not the first one.”
-
-And then there were Parson’s colleagues, officers who by training are inclined to believe that police in Florida are justified in the charges they filed.
-
-Newsham, the former D.C. police chief, compared the situation to how he felt as a Catholic to learn of abuse in the church. To those who believed in community policing, he said, Parson was as revered as a priest.
-
-“The trust, I’ve got to tell you, it’s definitely fractured,” he said. “If it’s completely broken remains to be seen.”
-
-### Pride’s missing fixture
-
-On an overcast Saturday in June, D.C. staged its first full-fledged Pride parade since the pandemic began. The city and its people were draped in rainbows, jubilant to see the streets packed again.
-
-On nearly every corner sat a D.C. police cruiser and a few officers, assigned to monitor the event for safety.
-
-“Capital Pride, are you ready?” an announcer called, and onto the parade route walked another group of officers.
-
-They too, were in uniform, wearing bulletproof vests and carrying guns. But the words “METROPOLITAN POLICE” across some of their backs were written in rainbow.
-
-Members of the LGBTQ Liaison Unit walked alongside employees of the mayor’s office, shaking hands and posing for pictures. The officers were scheduled to stop by bars on U Street that night and run a tent at the Pride festival the next day — the kind of events where Parson was always a fixture.
-
-He hadn’t been seen in months. But two days before the parade, a judge granted Parson’s request to leave Florida. As long as he reports to his probation officer by phone twice a week and Zooms into his court hearings, he has permission to spend the summer at his home in Provincetown, Mass. Come September, he told the court, he is planning to move back to the District.
-
-He will return to a city where he is no longer a member of the police reserve force. His many speaking engagements have been canceled. The program that teaches police to stop unnecessary force terminated his contract.
-
-The officers he once led kept moving down the parade route. They handed out rainbow bracelets stamped with a phone number, the direct line to the unit. Anyone who needed their help could call.
-
-Some people slipped the bracelets onto their wrists. Some left them behind on the pavement.
-
-*Razzan Nakhlawi and Peter Hermann contributed to this report.*
-
-*Story editing by Lynda Robinson, photo editing by Mark Miller, copy editing by Thomas Heleba, video editing by Amber Ferguson, design and development by Alexis Arnold.*
-
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diff --git a/00.03 News/Buried gold, vampire graves and lost cities - the year's best ancient finds.md b/00.03 News/Buried gold, vampire graves and lost cities - the year's best ancient finds.md
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-Tag: ["📜", "🏛️", "🏰", "🪲"]
-Date: 2022-12-26
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-12-26
-Link: https://www.9news.com.au/world/the-best-ancient-finds-of-2022-wrap-up/b0330a0f-dd36-4953-828c-dbe04b075d4a
-location:
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-
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-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
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-```
-^button-theyearsbestancientfindsNSave
-
-
-
-# Buried gold, vampire graves and lost cities - the year's best ancient finds
-
-A team of archaeologists discovered an ancient neolithic site, believed to be 9000 years old, in Jordan's remote eastern desert, in February.
-
-The find, made by Jordanian and French archaeologists, is believed to be a ritual complex, located near large structures known as "desert kites".
-
-The structures are believed to be large traps used to lure wild gazelles for slaughter.
-
-Such traps consist of two or more long stone walls converging toward an enclosure and are found scattered across the deserts of the Middle East.
-
-"The site is unique, first because of its preservation state," co-director of the project, Jordanian archaeologist Wael Abu-Azziza, said.
-
-"It's 9000 years old and everything was almost intact."
-
-Within the shrine were two carved standing stones bearing anthropomorphic figures, one accompanied by a representation of the "desert kite," as well as an altar, hearth, marine shells and miniature model of the gazelle trap.
-
-The researchers said in a statement the shrine "sheds an entire new light on the symbolism, artistic expression as well as spiritual culture of these hitherto unknown Neolithic populations".
-
-The proximity of the site suggests the inhabitants were specialised hunters and the traps were "the centre of their cultural, economic and even symbolic life in this marginal zone," the statement said.
-
-The site was excavated during the most recent digging season in 2021.
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-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
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diff --git a/00.03 News/Coffeezilla, the YouTuber Exposing Crypto Scams.md b/00.03 News/Coffeezilla, the YouTuber Exposing Crypto Scams.md
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-Tag: ["📟", "🪙", "♟️"]
-Date: 2022-05-22
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-05-22
-Link: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/coffeezilla-the-youtuber-exposing-crypto-scams
-location:
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-```button
-name Save
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-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-CoffeezillatheYouTuberExposingCryptoScamsNSave
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-
-
-# Coffeezilla, the YouTuber Exposing Crypto Scams
-
-When Stephen Findeisen was in college, at Texas A. & M., a friend pitched him a business opportunity. He was vague about the specifics but clear about the potential upside. “It was, like, ‘Don’t you want to be financially free, living on a beach somewhere?’ ” Findeisen, who is twenty-eight, recalled recently. After attending a weekend presentation, Findeisen realized that he was being recruited to join a multilevel-marketing company. “I was, like, What are you talking about? You’re not financially free! You’re here on a Sunday!” He declined the offer, but a couple of his roommates signed up. They also got a subscription to a magazine about personal and professional development. One day, Findeisen came home to find copies of the latest issue on the coffee table. “I remember clearly thinking, We have four copies of *Success* magazine and no one is successful. Something is wrong here.”
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-Findeisen has been leery of scammers since high school, when his mother was diagnosed with cancer. “She was sold a bunch of snake oil, and I think she believed all of it,” he said. She recovered, but Findeisen was left with a distaste for people who market false hope. After graduating with a degree in chemical engineering, he sold houses for a local builder. In his spare time, he started uploading to his YouTube channels, where he put his debunking instincts to work in short videos such as “Corporate Jargon—Lying by Obscurity” and “Is Exercising Worth Your Time?” Initially, subjects included time-management tips and pop-science tropes, but his content really took off when he began critiquing sleazy finance gurus. These days, his channel Coffeezilla has more than a million subscribers, and YouTube is his full-time job.
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-We live, as many people have noted, in a golden age of con artistry. Much of the attention has focussed on schemes that target women, from [romance scammers](https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/the-worst-boyfriend-on-the-upper-east-side) to multilevel-marketing companies that deploy the language of sisterhood and empowerment to recruit people to sell leggings and [essential oils](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/09/how-essential-oils-became-the-cure-for-our-age-of-anxiety). But Findeisen was interested in the self-proclaimed finance gurus who target people like him and his friends from college—young men adrift in the post-financial-crisis world, distrustful of the traditional financial system but hungry for some kind of edge. In their proprietary courses, the gurus promise, they teach the secret habits of rich people, or the pathway to passive income, or the millionaire mind-set. Watch one YouTube video like this and your sidebar will fill up with suggestions for more: “How I WENT from BROKE to MILLIONAIRE in 90 days!”; “How To MAKE MILLIONS In The Upcoming MARKET CRASH”; “How To Make 6 Figures In Your Twenties.”
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-Coffeezilla became one of the most prominent dissenting voices. Findeisen’s videos featured fast edits, a digitally rendered Lamborghini, and the lingo of hustle culture, albeit deployed with a raised eyebrow. As Coffeezilla—Findeisen kept his real name under wraps for years, he said, after he was subject to harassment campaigns—he dissected the gurus’ tricks: the countdown timers they used to create an illusion of scarcity, their incessant upsells. In one of his most popular videos, he spends an hour interviewing Garrett, a twentysomething man who quit his teaching job to take self-marketing courses from a flashy Canadian named Dan Lok. As he draws out the story of Garrett’s increasingly expensive immersion in this world, Findeisen’s expression shifts from mirth to bafflement to genuine anger.
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-“When I interviewed Garrett, I thought this was an absolute travesty,” Findeisen told me. “And then, when I discovered crypto for the first time, it was, like, ‘Oh, that guy lost, like, five hundred thousand on Tuesday,’ ” he said. “Crypto scams are like discovering fentanyl when you’ve been used to Oxy. It’s a hundred times more powerful, and way worse. And there were just not that many people talking about it.” Findeisen is an inveterate skeptic. “I always want to go where people aren’t going,” he said. “I think, if I was seeing only negative crypto stuff, I’d start a pro-crypto channel. But I’m seeing the opposite.” (Dan Lok’s team said that he “refutes all claims and allegations made against him by ‘Garrett’ on Coffeezilla.”)
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-Last summer, as bitcoin’s valuation approached all-time highs and the world was going crazy for [non-fungible tokens](https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-beeple-crashed-the-art-world), Findeisen spent months unspooling the story of Save the Kids, a [cryptocurrency](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/cryptocurrency) project promoted by a handful of high-profile influencers, some of whom were affiliated with FaZe Clan, the wildly popular e-sports collective. Findeisen’s investigation zeroed in on one of the influencers, Frazier Kay, who promoted the Save the Kids crypto token to his followers, touting it as an investment with a vaguely defined charitable component that would “help children across the world.” Soon after the project launched, the token’s value plummeted. Findeisen heard that a crucial piece of code, meant to protect the project against pump-and-dump schemes, had been changed before the launch. (It is unclear who ordered that change.)
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-In a series of videos, Findeisen pieced together clues, including D.M.s, interviews with whistle-blowers, leaked recordings, and photographs sent by an anonymous source. He tracked funds as they moved in and out of various digital wallets. Wearing suspenders and a crisp white shirt, Findeisen sat in front of what he calls his conspiracy board—a digital rendering of a bulletin board displaying the key players connected by a maze of threads—and made the case that Kay had a pattern of involvement in questionable crypto deals. The Save the Kids series marked Findeisen’s transition from a snarky YouTube critic to something more akin to an investigative journalist. After an internal investigation, FaZe Clan terminated Kay. The collective released a statement saying that it “had absolutely no involvement with our members’ activity in the cryptocurrency space, and we strongly condemn their recent behaviour.” In [a tweet](https://twitter.com/FrazierKay/status/1409221680178909184) posted after Findeisen’s initial investigation, Kay wrote, “I want you all to know that I had no ill intent promoting any crypto alt coins. I honestly & naively thought we all had a chance to win which just isn’t the case. I didn’t vet any of this with my team at FaZe and I now know I should have.” Kay didn’t respond to a request for comment from *The New Yorker*, but, in a message to Coffeezilla, he said that he didn’t profit from the Save the Kids crypto token and explained that the “purpose of the project is charitable giving. It’s in that spirit and with that intent that I was involved and put capital into it.” In a subsequent video, Kay said that he was “tricked” into participating in the scheme.
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-When I visited Findeisen this spring, at the tidy, spare town house that he shares with his wife and two dogs, Barney and Nala, he was preoccupied with another big story. (He asked me to not mention the city he lives in, because he’s been doxed before.) This one concerned SafeMoon, a cryptocurrency token purporting to be a “safe” investment vehicle that would nonetheless go “to the moon,” crypto parlance for a dramatic rise in valuation. After its launch, last spring, SafeMoon was briefly everywhere—on a billboard in Times Square, and tweeted about by celebrities including Diplo and Jake Paul. (Diplo’s team said that the tweet “was a joke.” Jake Paul’s team didn’t respond to a request for comment.) “You have to understand how big it was,” Findeisen told me. “It had a four-billion-dollar market cap within a few months of launching.” Months later, though, SafeMoon had lost a significant percentage of its value. Findeisen made it his mission to understand how that happened, whether it involved anything illegal, and who profited along the way.
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-The day that I visited, Findeisen was releasing a video about Ben Phillips, a former member of SafeMoon’s marketing team. Phillips is a YouTuber whose videos—primarily of pranks he pulls on his half brother (“VIBRATING pants on my bro in PUBLIC \*\*PRANK!\*\*”; “I superglued beer goggles to my bro! PRANK!”)—have more than a billion views. In April, 2021, in [a now deleted tweet](https://web.archive.org/web/20210412092418/https://twitter.com/BenPhillipsUK/status/1381538558226337793), Phillips encouraged his followers to buy him something from Starbucks, linking to what he said was his crypto wallet. Findeisen tracked various wallets’ transactions in the subsequent eight months, and found that, although in public Phillips promoted SafeMoon, in private he appeared to be selling it. (Phillips didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.) Findeisen told me that people think their crypto-wallet transactions are anonymous, but that this is not the case. If you can figure out whom a wallet belongs to, the transactions are easy enough to trace. “You don’t need a subpoena—you can just be some random guy in Texas figuring it out,” he said.
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-Findeisen works in front of a green screen, at a desk crowded with two monitors, a microphone, and a sound mixer. A whiteboard propped against the wall was full of scrawled affirmations: “story is king”; “trust the process.” The shady behavior that Findeisen features on his channel is often abstruse to the point of near-unintelligibility; to make it visually engaging, he works with a graphic designer who creates animations that illustrate funds flowing between different wallets, or money being siphoned out of a liquidity pool. The designer lives in [Ukraine](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/ukraine). When Findeisen was on a call with him recently, they were interrupted by air-raid sirens.
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-“This video has taken longer than I expected,” he said. “I don’t like to upload too late in the afternoon—this is kind of pushing it. But I’ve been putting off this video way too long.” He typed and erased several potential titles. “ ‘I caught this YouTuber pumping and dumping’—do people understand what that means?” he asked. He worried that “pumping and dumping” wasn’t pithy enough to capture a YouTube audience. “ ‘Pump and dumping’—does that work?” he said. “And do you include the amount?” (He ended up going with “I Caught This Youtuber Scamming for $12,000,000.”)
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-As he tweeted a thread promoting the video, Findeisen explained that he has taken to reaching out to the subjects of his videos for comment. Most often they decline to comment; sometimes they deny his accusations; more commonly they make excuses. “They all see themselves as, like, the fifth-worst guy,” he said.
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-I recognized in Findeisen the antsy feeling of sitting in your chair after having posted something big, waiting impatiently for the world to change. He scrolled quickly through the message requests in his Twitter in-box. One was from someone purporting to have information about an employee at a popular cryptocurrency exchange who was allegedly running a pump-and-dump scheme. Findeisen asked for more information. He clicked back to YouTube; his new video already had nearly two thousand views. In the next two weeks, Findeisen released several more videos unspooling the SafeMoon saga. Combined, they have more than two and a half million views.
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-Some of Findeisen’s viewers are dismayed to learn that he actually owns some bitcoin. “I try not to be too negative about crypto,” he told me. “I think about how we can shape it into something better—more like the future that the people making it *say* they want. In that way, we’re on the same side.”
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-So far, there have been relatively few prosecutions in the world of crypto. “The lesson, if you’re a cynical person, is to commit fraud on the blockchain,” Findeisen told me. I asked him whether he considered his videos to be in the genre of white-collar true crime. “I guess I always think of true crime as: the guy gets locked up at the end,” he said. “And a lot of my stories feel incomplete. Because the reporting happens, right? And then they just continue doing what they do.”
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-To keep from being overtaken by cynicism, Findeisen has been allowing himself a bit more creative leeway in his videos. He and his designer have built a number of digital sets that they use as backdrops, or for interstitial scenes: a detective’s office; an Old West-style bar with a robot bartender; a dystopian, near-future cityscape. “The Coffeezilla Cinematic Universe,” Findeisen jokingly called it. The C.C.U. is a world in which the hyper-financialized logic of the cryptosphere has overtaken reality. The video about Ben Phillips ends with Coffeezilla and the robot bartender on a rooftop. They gaze out at a city of great wealth and great poverty, lit up by neon signs: “Timmy Needs Chemo”; “Get Rich Now, Loser!” When I watched the video later, on YouTube, it was interrupted by an ad, for a company urging me to invest in crypto. “Fly me to the moon,” a singer crooned, as a square-jawed man lifted off the ground and floated upward, borne aloft by the magic of it all.
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-# Collections: Why Roman Egypt Was Such a Strange Province
-
-Welcome back! We are back from our November hiatus and thus back to regular weekly posts! This week we’re going to answer the runner-up question in the last ACOUP Senate poll (polls in which you too can vote if you become a *pater aut mater conscriptus* [via Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/user?u=20122096)). The question, posed in two different ways by Tristan and DW Rowlands was “**what made Roman Egypt such an unusual part of the Roman world?**“
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-I’ve mentioned [quite](https://acoup.blog/2021/03/26/fireside-friday-march-26-2021-on-the-nature-of-ancient-evidence/) [a few](https://acoup.blog/2021/07/23/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-iv-the-color-of-purple/) [times](https://acoup.blog/2022/01/28/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-ii-institutions/) here that Roman Egypt is a perplexing part of understanding the Roman Empire because on the one hand it provides a lot of really valuable evidence for daily life concerns (mortality, nuptiality, military pay, customs and tax systems, etc.) but on the other hand it is always very difficult to know to what degree that information can be generalized because Roman Egypt is such an atypical Roman province. So this week we’re going to look in quite general terms at what makes Egypt such an unusual place in the Roman world. As we’ll see, some of the ways in which Egypt is unusual are Roman creations, but many of them stretch back before the Roman period in Egypt or indeed before the Roman period *anywhere*.
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-As always, if you like what you are reading here, please share it; if you really like it, you can support me on [Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/user?u=20122096); members at the *Patres et Matres Conscripti* level get to vote on the topics for post-series like this one! And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings, assuming that, by the time this post goes live, there is still a Twitter.
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-(Bibliography note: Because the evidence from Egypt is so ample, there is a lot of scholarship focused on it, both on the evidence itself and also speaking to the question of how typical that evidence might be. I am not an Egypt specialist (at some point I’d love to get some of the Egypt specialists I do know to come here and chat about it), so this bibliography is only going to hit the high-points, as it were. On Roman Egypt generally, I think C. Riggs (ed.), *The Oxford Handbook of Roman Egypt* (2012) is an excellent starting point. Note also for a developmental history, R.S. Bagnall, *Roman Egypt: A History* (2021), L. Capponi, *Roman Egypt* (2011), L. Capponi, *Augustan Egypt: The Creation of a Roman Province* (2005) and A. Monson, *From the Ptolemies to the Romans: Political and Economic Change in Egypt* (2012). On the demography of Roman Egypt, see R.S. Bagnall and B.W. Frier, *The Demography of Roman Egypt* (2010) as well as W. Scheidel, *Death on the Nile: Disease and the Demography of Roman Egypt* (2001). On the military-social footprint in pre-Roman (that is, Ptolemaic) Egypt, see P. Johstono, *The Army of Ptolemaic Egypt* (2020), and C. Fischer-Bovet, *Army and Society in Ptolemaic Egypt* (2014). On the question of the ‘typicality’ of Roman Egypt itself, see also D. Rathbone, “The Romanity of Roman Egypt: A Faltering Consensus?” *Journal of Juristic Papyrology* 43 (2013): 73-91, which is in turn responding to N. Lewis, “The Romanity of Roman Egypt: a growing consensus,” *Atti del XVII Congresso Internazionale di Papirologia* (1984). As I think this bibliographic selection shows, this is a debate that is still very much ongoing – the consensus, while narrowing is not narrow but very much contested.)
-
-## What Makes Roman Egypt So Valuable To Historians?
-
-I should start by noting that Roman Egypt is not necessarily the only ‘strange’ place in the Roman Empire. Italy, of course, was a unique sort of place on the Roman Empire, but so was Roman Britain – conquered late and less fully urbanized than much of the empire (Dacia, held even more briefly, has the same set of problems). I think Egypt is still probably the *oddest* large region in the Roman world, but it is not the only stand out.
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-**Instead what makes Roman Egypt’s uniqueness so important is one of the unique things about it: Roman Egypt preserves a much larger slice of our evidence than any other place in the ancient world**. This comes down to climate (as do most things); Egypt is a climatically extreme place. On the one hand, most of the country is desert and here I mean *hard* desert, with absolutely minuscule amounts of precipitation. On the other hand, the Nile River creates a fertile, at points almost lush, band cutting through the country running to the coast. The change between these two environments is extremely stark; it is, I have been told (I haven’t yet been to Egypt), entirely possible in many places to stand with one foot in the ‘green’ and another foot in the hard desert.
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-Via [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nile), a view of the Nile in Egypt from space, showing the stark division between the banks of the Nile and the desert. The patch of green just off to the left of the Nile about halfway up the photo is el-Fayyum.
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-That in turn matters because while Egypt was hardly the only arid region Rome controlled, it was the only place you were likely to find very many large settlements and lots of people living in such close proximity to such extremely arid environments (other large North African settlements tend to be coastal). And *that* in turn matters for preservation. When objects are deposited – lost, thrown away, carefully placed in a sanctuary, whatever – they begin to degrade. Organic objects (textile, leather, *paper*, wood) rot as microorganisms use them as food, while metal objects oxidize (that is, rust).[1](https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/#easy-footnote-bottom-1-16240 "Stone is the big exception. People often assume that the ancients built everything in stone, which is really quite wrong: stone was a very expensive building material only used for the most important buildings. However all of the buildings made in wood, mudbrick, thatch and other perishable materials long since vanished (even brick tends to crumble much faster than stone), leaving only the stone buildings behind, a classic case of survivorship bias. Always be suspicious of ‘they don’t make ’em like they used to’ really meaning ‘only the very highest quality products from the past tend to survive to the present.’") Aridity arrests (at least somewhat) both processes. Consequently things *survive* from the Roman period (or indeed, from even more ancient periods) in Egypt that simply wouldn’t survive almost anywhere else.
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-By far the most important of those things is *paper*, particularly papyrus paper. The Romans actually had a number of writing solutions. For short-term documents, they used wax writing tablets, an ancient sort of ‘dry erase board’ which could be scraped smooth to write a new text when needed; these only survive under very unusual circumstances. For more permanent documents, wood and papyrus were used. Wood tablets, [such as those famously recovered from the Roman fort at Vindolanda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vindolanda_tablets), are fairly simple: thin wooden slats are smoothed so they can be written on with link and a pen, creating a rigid but workable and cheap writing surface; when we find these tablets they have tended to be short documents like letters or temporary lists, presumably in part because storing lots of wood tablets would be hard so more serious records would go on the easier to store papyrus paper.
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-**Papyrus paper was lighter, more portable, more storeable option.** Papyrus paper is produced by taking the pith of the papyrus plant, which is sticky, and placing it in two layers at right angles to each other, before compressing (or crushing) those layers together to produce a single sheet, which is then dried, creating a sheet of paper (albeit a very fibery sort of paper, as you can see). Papyrus paper originated in Egypt and the papyrus plant is native to Egypt, but by the Roman period we generally suppose papyrus paper to have been used widely over much of the Roman Empire; it is sometimes supposed that papyrus was cheaper and more commonly used in Egypt than elsewhere, but it is hard to be sure.
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-
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-Via [WIkipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus), a papyrus document from Roman Egypt, in this case MS Gr SM2223 = P.Fay.92, “Bill of sale for a donkey,” dated to 126 AD now in the Houghton Library at Harvard.
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-Now within the typical European and Mediterranean humidity, papyrus doesn’t last forever (unlike the parchment paper produced in the Middle Ages which was far more expensive but also lasts much longer); papyrus paper will degrade over anything from a few decades to a couple hundred years – the more humidity, the faster decay. Of course wood tablets and wax tablets fare no better. What that means is that in most parts of the Roman Empire, very little casual writing survives; what *does* survive were the sorts of important official documents which might be inscribed on stone (along with the literary works that were worth painstakingly copying over and over again by hand through the Middle Ages). But letters, receipts, tax returns, census records, shopping lists, school assignments – these sorts of documents were all written on less durable materials which don’t survive except in a few exceptional sites like Vindolanda.
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-Or Egypt. Not individual places in Egypt; pretty much the whole province.
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-In the extremely dry conditions of the Egyptian desert, papyrus can survive (albeit typically in damaged scraps rather than complete scrolls) from antiquity to the present. Now the coverage of these surviving papyri is not even. The Roman period is far better represented in the surviving papyri than the Ptolemaic period (much less the proceeding ‘late’ period or the New Kingdom before that). It’s also not evenly distributed geographically; the Arsinoite nome (what is today el-Fayyum, an oasis basin to the West of the Nile) and the Oxyrhynchus nome (roughly in the middle of Egypt, on the Nile) are both substantially overrepresented, while the Nile Delta itself has fewer (but by no means zero) finds. Consequently, we need to be worried not only about the degree to which Egypt might be representative of the larger Roman world, but also the degree to which these two nomes (a nome is an administrative district within Egypt, we’ll talk about them more in a bit) are representative of Egypt. That’s complicated in turn by the fact that the Arsinoite nome is not a normal nome; extensive cultivation there only really begins under Ptolemaic rule, which raises questions about how typical it was. It also means we lack a really good trove of papyri from a nome in Lower Egypt proper (the northern part of the country, covering the delta of the Nile) which, because of its different terrain, we might imagine was in some ways different.
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-Nevertheless, it is difficult to overstate the value of the papyri we do recover from Egypt. Documents containing census and tax information can give us important clues about the structure of ancient households (revealing, for instance, a lot of complex composite households). Tax receipts (particularly for customs taxes) can illuminate a lot about how Roman customs taxes (*portoria*) were assessed and conducted. Military pay stubs from Roman Egypt also provide the foundation for our understanding of how Roman soldiers were paid, recording for instance, pay deductions for rations, clothes and gear. We also occasionally recover fragments of literary works that we know existed but which otherwise did not survive to the present. And there is *so much* of this material. Whereas new additions to the corpus of ancient literary texts are extremely infrequent (the last very long such text was the recovery of the *Athenaion Polteia* or *Constitution of the Athenians*, from a papyrus discovered in the Fayyum (of course), published in 1891), the quantity of unpublished papyri from Egypt remains vast and there is frankly a real shortage of trained Egyptologists who can work through and publish this material (to the point that the vast troves of unpublished material [has created deeply unfortunate opportunities for theft and fraud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirk_Obbink)).
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-
-
-Via [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Athenians_(Aristotle)), a scroll of Egyptian papyrus, in this case the Athenaion Politeia or Constitution of the Athenians, potentially by Aristotle. The discovery of a fragment of this work on papyrus discovered in 1879. The information it offers on the structure of government in Athens is invaluable.
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-**And so that is the first way in which Egypt is unusual: we know a *lot* more about daily life in Roman Egypt, especially when it comes to affairs *below* the upper-tier of society**. Recovered papyrological evidence makes petty government officials, regular soldiers, small farming households, affluent ‘middle class’ families and so on much more visible to us. But of course that immediately raises debates over how typical those people we can see are, because we’d *like* to be able to generalize information we learn about small farmers or petty government officials more broadly around the empire, to use that information to ‘fill in’ regions where the evidence just does not survive. But of course the rejoinder is natural to point out the ways in which Egypt may be *unusual* beyond merely the survival of evidence (to include the possibility that cheaper papyrus in Egypt may have meant that more things were committed to paper here than elsewhere).
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-Consequently the *debate* about how strange a place Roman Egypt was is also a fairly important and active area of scholarship. We can divide those arguments into two large categories: the way in which Roman rule *itself* in Egypt was unusual and the ways in which Egypt was a potentially unusual place *in comparison to the rest of Roman world* already.
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-## The Romans Made Egypt Unusual
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-When it comes to Roman governance in Egypt, perhaps the best summary of what we know about how typical it was would be to say that Roman rule in Egypt was somewhat unusual, but rather less unusual than we used to think it was, and it become more typical over time (so the level of unusualness is greatest under Augustus and then declines as a factor of time). Ironically, it has been in no small part coming to understand the wealth of the papyrus evidence that has led to this shift, revealing that our literary sources sometimes *overstated* the degree to which Egypt was unusual.
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-A lot of that comes from how Tacitus represents the structure of Roman rule in Egypt: he describes Augustus as having ‘kept in the \[imperial\] house’ (*retinere domi*) the governance of Egypt, assigning it to an equestrian[2](https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/#easy-footnote-bottom-2-16240 "A member of Rome’s economic elite (the ordo equester or equestrian class) who did not have an independent political career (which would confer membership in the Senate and thus the ordo Senatus in the imperial period). Emperors often employed officials drawn from the equites in various key bureaucratic positions which would either be beneath the dignity of a senator (being functionally secretarial in nature) or which would be too politically sensitive for a senator (who might be a potential political rival for an emperor).") prefect.[3](https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/#easy-footnote-bottom-3-16240 "In contrast to a provincial governor, who would have been a proconsul or propraetor in the provinces still controlled directly by the senate, or by a legatus Augusti in provinces controlled directly by the emperor (most of the provinces with meaningful military forces). Both pro-magistrates and legati were drawn from the members of the Senate who thus kept their traditional perogative of being Rome’s governors and army commanders, even under the empire.") Egypt was a relatively late addition to Rome’s growing Empire; the Ptolemaic dynasty had ruled it since the death of Alexander the Great in 323. From the 160s that Ptolemaic kingdom had become effectively a client of Rome, its independence maintained by the threat of Roman arms (demonstrated vividly in 168 when Rome turned back a Seleucid invasion of Egypt with noting more than a *consultum* of the Senate), but had remained independent until Cleopatra’s disasterous decision to back Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony) in the last phase of Rome’s civil war. After their defeat, Octavian (soon to be Augustus) had in 30 BC after the suicide of Cleopatra, annexed the kingdom, creating the province of Roman Egypt.
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-Tacitus’ description of Augustus keeping the rule of Egypt ‘in the house’ led early scholars to assume that Egypt was taken essentially as the private property of the emperors. This is less crazy than it initially sounds; later emperors administered massive estates through a parallel state treasury called the *fiscus* (distinct from the main treasury of the Roman state, the *aerarium Saturni*; the *fiscus* was the private accoutns and property of the emperor) administered in some cases by equestrian officials, so the idea of running an entire province effectively out of the *fiscus*, with the whole of Egypt effectively the private property of the emperor administered by an equestrian official wouldn’t have seemed impossible and it certainly seems to be what Tacitus is describing.
-
-But as our evidence for the activity of these prefects has improved, what we see are officials who act quite a lot like other provincial governors, despite their non-senatorial origins. *Praefecti Aegpyti* typically served around three years (fairly typical), where generally not from the province they oversaw (also typical), and wouldn’t be reassigned to a post back in that province (also typical). Unlike with the earlier Ptolemaic government, there was no royal court in Egypt, the prefect’s entourage more nearly resembling that of a Roman governor, nor was the emperor personally present. Residents of Egypt who wished to petition the emperor had to do it through the same channels as any other resident of the Roman Empire. The military enforcement forces in the province, too, were typically Roman, drawn (as was normal) from provinces other than where they served. Consequently, as Dominic Rathbone (*op. cit.*) notes, local elites looking to operate with this new form of government found that they had to adjust themselves to a *system* of rule, quintessentially Roman, rather than the more personalistic Ptolemaic regime where favor might be curried with important local figures or the royal court itself.
-
-That said, while we’ve increasingly found that the *Praefectus Aegypti* was more of a normal governor than we thought, vision into the lower levels of the Roman administration in Egypt reveal a complex and in some cases peculiar system. In most of the Roman Empire, Roman governors oversaw largely self-governing communities, run by local elites, which handled most local affairs. Those communities generally delegated governing functions to elected or appointed magistrates who were amateur part-timers drawn from the elite (the *curiales*, [we’ve mentioned these fellows before](https://acoup.blog/2022/01/28/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-ii-institutions/)).
-
-In Egypt, by contrast, while the Romans disassembled the royal Ptolemaic court, **they initially seem to have left much of its administrative apparatus of salaries administrators in place**. The division of Egypt into administrative districts – called nomes – was kept and the seat of government in the province was firmly entrenched in Alexandria (whereas at least in the first two centuries, most Roman provinces had no clearly established ‘capital’). Each of the nomes was governed by a *strategos* (while the word means ‘general’ these were purely civilian officials), typically drawn from the Alexandrian upper-class (rather than being truly *local* elites), assisted by a salaried *basilikos grammateus*, ‘royal scribe.’ Villages also generally had a *komogrammateus*, village scribe, who reported to the *strategos*; these fellows *also* seem to have initially been salaried officials.[4](https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/#easy-footnote-bottom-4-16240 "on this, see Rathbone, op. cit. 84-5. There is considerable uncertainty as to if these lower level officials, often casually called ‘liturgists’ but where we do not necessarily know their jobs were liturgic (that is, assigned to specific rich-people in a non-voluntary way of devolving state action on the wealthy).") Some of these positions gradually became truly liturgic in nature, mirroring more closely systems of local governance in much of the rest of the Roman world, but perhaps only in the late second century.
-
-Similarly, it was often assumed early on that land ownership and tenure would look very different with the emperor maintaining a lot of direct control and nearly all of the land in Egypt being effectively public land. That perspective was potentially reinforced by the evidence out of the Arsinoite nome (again, modern el-Fayyum) because most of the land there under the Ptolemies belonged to military settlers and thus had special obligations placed on it and was thus not truly private land. But what we see under the Romans is that first this military settler (cleruchic or katoikic; the distinctions here are a post for another day) land is fully privatized and taxed like it would be anywhere else. Meanwhile, the evidence from the other nomes on the Nile itself suggest that private land was more common there even under the Ptolemies. That said, the expansion of private land holdings seems to have been a *process* taking place mostly under Roman rule, which in turn meant that in many cases land tenure might look quite different in Egypt (where much land was either public or held by temples) than in the rest of the empire where most land was in private hands (although public and temple lands were also common), though it tended to look more and more like the rest of the empire over time, with the process supposed to be substantially complete by the end of the second century. Scholars broadly seem to still be very much divided on the degree to which late Ptolemaic and early Roman Egyptian landholding was exceptional, but it certainly had its substantial quirks.
-
-**Meanwhile the Romans did another odd thing in that they didn’t change: the currency system.** While the Roman Empire minted its currency in a series of regional mints (not centrally), the Romans almost always brought new areas under their control into the existing Roman currency system (based principally around the gold *aureus*, the silver *denarius* and the copper-alloy *sestertius*). That was both a tool of Roman imperialism, a way to make physical Rome’s notional dominion over conquered lands, but it also served (probably unintentionally) to lower transaction costs and encourage economic interaction between provinces. **But Egypt was not brought into the Roman currency system**, instead maintaining the Ptolemaic currency system based on the silver *tetradrachma* (Egypt was already a very monetized economy under the Ptolemies). That barrier between the economy in Egypt and outside of it can make it tricky to know how representative prices within Roman Egypt were for the rest of the empire. Egypt is only brought into the broader Roman currency system with the currency ‘reforms’ of Diocletian (r. 284-305)
-
-At the same time, Egypt was hardly ‘cut off’ from the broader Roman economy. We have good evidence of quite a lot of trade out of Egypt, particularly in agricultural staples. But here again, Egypt is strange: Egyptian grain was the foundation for the imperial era *annona civilis*, the distribution of free grain to select citizens in the city of Rome itself. That meant a massive, continuous state-organized transfer of grain, specifically wheat grain, from Egypt to Rome. Some of that grain was taxed in kind, but much of it seems to have been purchased in Egypt; in either case transport was essentially subcontracted by the state. Egypt was hardly the only source of grain for the *annona* (the province of Africa, modern Tunisia, was another major source), but few provinces likely saw the *scale* of state-organized goods transfer that Egypt did. And it’s striking that attested Egyptian agriculture is quite heavily dominated by wheat farming, rather more than we might normally expect, which both speak to the high yields the Nile could offer but also Egypt’s role as the breadbasket of the Roman Empire.
-
-## But Egypt Was Already Unusual
-
-At the same time, there are some ways in which Egypt was, or at least we might supposed Egypt to have been, a unique place quite apart from the governmental structures imposed upon it, especially with regard to the rest of the Roman world.
-
-A big part of this has to do with the Nile and the structure of agriculture it creates. Most of the Roman world was reliant on rainfall agriculture, meaning that the all-important moisture which sustained the crops was from rain. This might be supplemented in some cases either by dry-farming techniques (methods of retaining moisture in the soil in areas where rainfall is lower) or by limited irrigation from rivers and streams, but even a cursory glance at Roman agricultural writers (or earlier Greek ones) reveal a focus on the tremendous impact of rainfall on agricultural productivity. And just about everywhere Rome went, that was the system they encountered.
-
-But in Egypt, agriculture is entirely oriented around the Nile; rainfall is functionally a non-factor in ancient Egyptian agriculture. Egypt’s agricultural season was based on that flooding with three seasons, first the flood (Akhet) when the Nile rose and inundated the fields, providing not only the necessary moisture (where water might be channeled and retained using systems of irrigation canals and levies) but also deposited a fresh layer of nutrient-rich silt. Then the next season is Peret, when planting and growing would take place (generally in winter), then followed by the harvest (Shemu) before the cycle repeated again.
-
-This sort of river-valley agriculture wasn’t rare globally; Mesopotamian agriculture worked similarly (albeit with less regular and more destructive flooding), but within the Roman Empire – which despite occasionally *extremely* optimistic maps you may see, did not include any meaningful amount of Mesopotamia proper – this sort of agriculture was rare. **First, it is clear that Egyptian agricultural yields (understood as either production-per-unit-land-area or production-per-unit-seed-sown) were generally higher than what we think to have been the norm for much of the Roman world**. While arguments about yields in Italy and Greece tend to suggest ranges between 4:1[5](https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/#easy-footnote-bottom-5-16240 "These are seed yields, so for every 1 unit of seeds sown (typically measured in dry volume), four units are harvested.") and perhaps 8:1, while as Erdkamp[6](https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/#easy-footnote-bottom-6-16240 "P. Erdkamp, The Grain Market in the Roman Empire (2005), 44-5.") notes yields in Egypt seem to have been *much* higher. Some tax evidence we have suggests normal yields in excess of 16:1 and tax rates high enough that at 7:1 – a *good* yield in Italy – a farmer would be swiftly taxed into starvation. Consequently, it seems like agriculture in Egypt was always substantially more productive than rainfall agriculture in the rest of the Roman Empire.
-
-Meanwhile, river-based agriculture also requires different capital investments: it has to be irrigated through systems of ditches and canals to actually get the water to the fields. This is something that was crucial in Egyptian agriculture but often doesn’t make it into popular representations (e.g. games like *Children of the Nile* (2008), where the flood is important, but the player cannot do anything to shape or channel it), but was extremely important for agriculture around the Nile. Irrigation channels could direct waters towards fields and away from flooding settlements. That mattered because water exposure mattered and indeed a set of tax categories were established based on the water exposure of land: land which had not been flooded for some time was considered inferior (and exempt from taxes), while land which flooded entirely or required extensive irrigation to flood was taxed at lower rates.[7](https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/#easy-footnote-bottom-7-16240 "This is discussed by K. Blouin in C. Riggs, op. cit.)") Those irrigation systems in turn had to be maintained, representing a form of capital investment – with *substantial* labor demands in construction and upkeep – that is much rarer in rainfall agriculture systems. Whereas in ancient Mesopotamia this seems to have been organized by the state, my sense is that irrigation direction in Egypt happened more locally, but I confess I’ve found it hard to find a direct discussion of the matter.
-
-
-
-[Via Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_agriculture#/media/File:Gardens_of_Nakh_1.JPG), laborers working on the Gardens of Amun from the Temple at Karnak, 14th century B.C. Note the presence of water in the scene; presumably these gardens (by which is meant vegetable gardens, not pleasure gardens) were either irrigated or flooded naturally with the rising of the river. Of course we should note that agricultural practices in Egypt did change over time; this is not necessarily what a Roman-period farm would have looked like.
-
-Both those labor demands and the high agricultural productivity around the Nile led in turn to what seem to have been – given the limits of the evidence – substantially higher population density in Egypt than in most other Mediterranean regions. We generally suppose the population of Ptolemaic Egypt to have been *roughly* equivalent to that of Roman Italy, between five and seven million or so. But in Egypt, almost all of those people were living directly along the Nile, on that green strip of land, a dramatically smaller and more contiguous area of settlement than what we see in, say, Roman Italy, much less more sparsely populated provinces like Spain or Gaul.
-
-**And that in turn is tricky because [as we’ve discussed](https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-farmers/), family formation patterns, disease and mortality and lots of other key demographic variables are subject to variation based on settlement patterns and agriculture**. We have a *lot* of data about age distribution, family size, marriage ages and so on from Roman Egypt, but demonstrating that, with its higher yields and higher population density – as a consequence of its unique climate – that these were *typical* in the Mediterranean is tricky. That said it’s not impossible either and some scholars have made careers out of demonstrating the applicability of just such extrapolations (Bruce Frier comes immediately to mind). But one must tread with caution.
-
-And then there is the other major fact about Egypt: **Egypt is really, really, *really*** ***old***. A quick set of date comparisons between Italy and Egypt can make the point. Farming is arrives in Egypt c. 9,000 BC; in Italy that’s c. 6,000 BC (please note those ‘c.’ *circa* indicators are doing a lot of work here). By 4,000 BC in Egypt we’re starting to see the emergence of cities; we won’t see serious urbanism in Italy until the early-to-mid first millennium BC. By 3,000 BC, Egypt is organized into a single state, with large urban administrative centers; Italy’s unification under the Romans won’t happen until the 270s BC.
-
-Or as I put it to my students, **it is the case that the Pyramids (constructed c. 2670-2400) were about as old to Cleopatra and Caesar as Cleopatra and Caesar are to us now** (in fact, if you do the math, the Pyramids were a little older). Now that huge sweep of time should caution us against the sort of ‘eternal Egypt’ assumptions; Egypt in 2300BC was a very different Egypt than the Egypt of 230 or 23 BC.
-
-But it also means we have to be aware that settlement and urbanism in Egypt were long, long settled before the Romans showed up. That’s actually a fairly large contrast to many areas in the Roman Empire (particularly in its western half), where the Romans were themselves a key impetus towards the development of substantial urbanism (although it is important not to overstate this; in a lot of cases Roman rule is causing cities to emerge in societies that already had modest towns. And of course in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean, urbanism was long established.)
-
-At the same time Egypt was ruled from 323 to 31BC by members of the Macedonian Ptolemaic (or Lagid) family, beginning with Ptolemy I Soter, one of the companions of Alexander the Great. Ptolemaic rule itself brought changes to Egypt, many of which persisted into the Roman period. Not the least of this was the establishment and aggrandizement of the Ptolemaic capital of Alexandria, which would remain the political center of the province under the Romans. Ptolemaic pharaohs also encouraged a degree of religious syncretism, particularly through the cult of the god Serapis, though the Greek and Egyptian upper-classes remained largely distinct and non-intermixed under the Ptolemies (with the Greeks ‘in charge’ as it were). One of the impacts of Roman rule is the fairly quick fusion of these two elites now that both were subjects in empires that did not belong to them.
-
-
-
-Via [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serapis), a bust of Serapis, a god whose worship was deliberately spread by the early Ptolemaic kings in order to provide a syncretic religious touchstone which could be appropriately unifying for the kingdom. Here Serapis is sculpted in Greek-style (which was typical of his depictions) but wearing one of his attributes on his head in Egyptian fashion, in this case what is likely a grain measure, signifying his role in providing abundance and agricultural fertility.
-
-Meanwhile, the geography of Egypt has *tended* to somewhat isolate it from the broader Near East and the Mediterranean. Now that word ‘tended’ also does a lot of work because there was almost always significant connectivity between Egypt and the Mediterranean, but at the same time periods of political *unity* involving Egypt and regions beyond it are rare and generally fairly brief, such as periods of Assyrian (670-656), Persian (525-404, 343-332) or Roman rule (31BC-646AD),[8](https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/#easy-footnote-bottom-8-16240 "One of these things is not like the others.") or of course the very brief period under Alexander before his empire fragmented.
-
-Now it’s important to be clear what I’m *not* saying here. **Older scholarship often posited a sort of culturally ‘eternal Egypt’ which resisted the pressures of ‘Romanization’ (itself now a contested term rarely used by scholars); that vision of a total lack of cultural exchange just doesn’t hold up to the evidence**. There is a *lot* of evidence for Roman cultural identity emerging in Roman Egypt as time went on (so more in the second and third centuries AD than the first). And while Latin didn’t catch on, we do see in Roman Egypt a continuation of the process (starting under the Ptolemies) whereby Greek steadily seems to supplant [Egyptian Demotic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demotic_(Egyptian)), bringing Egypt linguistically more into the broader Roman world. **Importantly, that means that Roman Egypt seems to have become a *less* unusual part of the Roman world as time went on**. On the flip side, those were processes which took much of the Roman period to occur. In the meantime, Egypt was a place where Greek and Roman cultural elements coexisted with the worship of indigenous Egyptian divinities *millennia* older than *the city of Rome itself*.
-
-## Conclusion
-
-There’s certainly more we could talk about on this topic and I encourage anyone who wants to know more to browse the bibliography list at the beginning of this post. We haven’t, for instance, talked too much here about the Roman Army in Egypt, in part because of the whole Roman apparatus, the army seems to have been by far the most broadly typical of Roman rule: the Roman army was famously (Polyb. 6.41.10-12) the Roman army wherever it went. This is simply a very voluminous topic.
-
-In no small part that’s because so much research into the Roman Empire makes use of Egyptian papyrus evidence and thus in turn has to address the degree to which that evidence can be generalized. That means there are a *lot* of arguments over that question and I doubt that will change any time soon. That said, it does seem to me that the scholarly consensus on the question of the ‘strangeness’ of Roman Egypt is very slowly narrowing, as both Roman Egypt and also the rest of the Roman world slowly but surely become clearer to us as the body of published archaeological, epigraphic and papyrological evidence grows larger. The great thing is that we are never left with a ‘useless’ discovery: a fact about Roman Egypt which turns out not to be more broadly applicable to the rest of the Roman world is nevertheless something we’ve learned about Roman Egypt, which was itself an important and interesting place!
-
-1. Stone is the big exception. People often assume that the ancients built everything in stone, which is really quite wrong: stone was a very expensive building material only used for the most important buildings. However all of the buildings made in wood, mudbrick, thatch and other perishable materials long since vanished (even brick tends to crumble much faster than stone), leaving only the stone buildings behind, a classic case of survivorship bias. Always be suspicious of ‘they don’t make ’em like they used to’ really meaning ‘only the very highest quality products from the past tend to survive to the present.’[](https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/#easy-footnote-1-16240)
-2. A member of Rome’s economic elite (the *ordo equester* or equestrian class) who did not have an independent political career (which would confer membership in the Senate and thus the *ordo Senatus* in the imperial period). Emperors often employed officials drawn from the *equites* in various key bureaucratic positions which would either be beneath the dignity of a senator (being functionally secretarial in nature) or which would be too politically sensitive for a senator (who might be a potential political rival for an emperor).[](https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/#easy-footnote-2-16240)
-3. In contrast to a provincial governor, who would have been a proconsul or propraetor in the provinces still controlled directly by the senate, or by a legatus Augusti in provinces controlled directly by the emperor (most of the provinces with meaningful military forces). Both pro-magistrates and legati were drawn from the members of the Senate who thus kept their traditional perogative of being Rome’s governors and army commanders, even under the empire.[](https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/#easy-footnote-3-16240)
-4. on this, see Rathbone, *op. cit.* 84-5. There is considerable uncertainty as to if these lower level officials, often casually *called* ‘liturgists’ but where we do not necessarily *know* their jobs were liturgic (that is, assigned to specific rich-people in a non-voluntary way of devolving state action on the wealthy).[](https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/#easy-footnote-4-16240)
-5. These are seed yields, so for every 1 unit of seeds sown (typically measured in dry volume), four units are harvested.[](https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/#easy-footnote-5-16240)
-6. P. Erdkamp, *The Grain Market in the Roman Empire* (2005), 44-5.[](https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/#easy-footnote-6-16240)
-7. This is discussed by K. Blouin in C. Riggs, *op. cit.*)[](https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/#easy-footnote-7-16240)
-8. One of these things is not like the others.[](https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/#easy-footnote-8-16240)
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-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
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diff --git a/00.03 News/Confessions of a Bitcoin Widow How a Dream Life Turned into a Nightmare The Walrus.md b/00.03 News/Confessions of a Bitcoin Widow How a Dream Life Turned into a Nightmare The Walrus.md
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-Tag: ["📟", "🪙"]
-Date: 2022-02-20
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-Link: https://thewalrus.ca/bitcoin-widow/
-location:
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-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-02-21]]
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-
-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-ConfessionsofaBitcoinWidowNSave
-
-
-
-# Confessions of a Bitcoin Widow: How a Dream Life Turned into a Nightmare
-
-It was the fall of 2014. Jennifer Robertson was struggling with the fallout from a messy divorce and juggling weekend waitressing gigs to make ends meet. One night, at the urging of friends, she swiped right on Tinder—and met the love of her life.
-
-Gerald Cotten was a Bitcoin entrepreneur. Robertson didn’t know exactly what that meant, but she didn’t think she needed to. Cotten was smart, successful, and kind. Over the next four years, as his company, QuadrigaCX, expanded exponentially, Cotten and Robertson, twentysomethings in love, became wealthy beyond their wildest imaginings. They acquired property, bought yachts and planes, travelled to exotic destinations. So much money rolled in so fast that they occasionally ended up with huge piles of cash on their kitchen counter.
-
-In November 2018—one month after celebrating their wedding in a Scottish castle and just twelve days after Cotten signed a will naming Robertson his executor and sole beneficiary—they set off on what was supposed to be an extended honeymoon. Instead, suddenly, unexpectedly, almost inexplicably, a seemingly healthy thirty-year-old Cotten died in an intensive care unit in India, of complications from Crohn’s disease.
-
-Overnight, their dream life became Robertson’s worst nightmare. Cotten possessed the only key to the online vaults where his customers’ investments were supposedly stored. No one knew where to find $215 million belonging to more than 76,000 investors.
-
-With investigators unable to trace the money and the company seeking creditor protection, a firestorm of unconnected dots, incendiary innuendo, and wild speculation quickly erupted on the internet.
-
-Robertson, online posters insisted, was conspiring with Cotten, who’d faked his own death and was hiding in some extradition-free backwater until they could rendezvous and live happily ever after. Or Robertson had murdered Cotten and was the real mastermind of a different plot.
-
-Truth didn’t matter much in the months after Cotten’s death, as the trolls began to stalk and threaten Jennifer Robertson.
-
-—_Stephen Kimber_
-
-“TICK-TOCK, tick-tock, tick-tock.” The disembodied voice at the other end of my phone line began in a singsong tone that morphed into what seemed like a death threat. “Time’s up.” _Click_. They—whoever “they” were—had found me.
-
-Facebook had been the trolls’ first, and perhaps easiest, avenue to track me down. Someone must have identified me from photos of Gerry and me on my profile page and then used Facebook Messenger to send chilling messages to my friends. “Our money or violence your choice jen,” declared one sender, who appeared to have experienced losses in the Quadriga debacle and blamed me. “I’m going to take one for the team and kill jen,” wrote another. I soon began receiving puzzled messages from Facebook friends. “What’s going on?” everyone wanted to know. I contacted Facebook. The best the company could suggest was to block trolls from future posts, but of course, the damage had already been done. And what about the next person who found out I was _that woman_?
-
-People did find me. They uncovered my phone number, my email address. Soon, my personal information was all over the internet. I stopped answering the phone. I remember others pretending to be Gerry’s friends, messaging me on platforms like WhatsApp, asking why I hadn’t told people he had died and claiming that they wanted to go to the funeral. After a few such messages, I realized their senders were not who they claimed to be.
-
-I had to change my phone number, shut down all my social media accounts, even get a new email address. It felt like being in a movie: I was no longer the director of my own life story. It had become a horror film with me in the role of both villain and victim. The comments were worst on platforms like Reddit, where I became known as “Dead Jen Walking” and Gerry was “allegedly dead Gerry.” According to someone who called himself Scamdriga, I had “married a scam artist and knowingly \[spent\] money on Fendi and Prada meanwhile hard working canadians get nothing.”
-
-My family and friends warned me not to read what people were writing about me, but I couldn’t help myself. I was like a moth being drawn to the flame and then consumed by it. It hurt in ways it shouldn’t have when strangers not only didn’t like me but appeared to actively hate me. I “deserved to be waterboarded for hours, then crucified.” But not just me—my father as well. “Hang her dad right in front of Jen.” Even my dogs! “How about you give us the location of Gerry’s dogs so that we can light them on fire?”
-
-I should not have been surprised, I suppose, that the story of Quadriga’s missing millions would generate a media feeding frenzy. But I was still shocked to be targeted as someone who should be tortured and then murdered in various horrific ways. I know some were just venting, but others seemed deadly serious.
-
-I became too frightened to even venture outside. After the pictures of our houses in Fall River, Nova Scotia, and Kelowna, BC, were posted online, I spent a few sleepless nights at my mother’s house in Nova Scotia before renting a furnished apartment on a month-to-month basis at Bishop’s Landing, a condominium project beside Halifax Harbour, in the city’s south end.
-
-The harassment got so bad that I called the Halifax police. After that, the number of overt online death threats decreased. But none of it made me feel safe.
-
-I was spending far too much time by myself in the apartment, feeling more alone than I’d ever felt in my life, paying too much attention to my online bullies, and worse, worrying that they might be right. Who was I? Who was Gerry? Was this all my fault? I’d become more scared for my life than ever and yet, in that same contradictory moment, had begun wishing for nothing more than to be dead. I was afraid to die, but I didn’t want to live.
-
-I refused to speak to journalists, partly because I wasn’t emotionally ready and partly because I still didn’t know enough to answer questions on the record. That didn’t stop the press from writing stories featuring a version of me I barely recognized. “A Widow, a Laptop, and $190 Million: What’s Going On with QuadrigaCX?” demanded a headline on a web-based publication called _Finance Magnates_, which catalogued what it suggested was a “flurry of conspiracy theories,” including one that “Cotten’s death was faked as a way to hide the fact that the exchange is insolvent.” Faked by me? By me and Gerry conspiring together? What did they think had happened inside that ICU in India? Did they even care?
-
-_BreakerMag_, another online publication that reported on the cryptocurrency industry, weighed in with a story headlined “11 Fishy Things About the QuadrigaCX Mystery.” “The more ‘facts’ that come to light, the fishier it smells,” declared reporter Jessica Klein. Among the facts that smelled to her: our recent marriage. “You read that right,” Klein continued. “Cotten only got married about a month before his alleged death.” Alleged? Of course.
-
-The _Globe and Mail_ dispatched a team of journalists across Canada and even to India to ferret out every scrap of information they could, “in a bid to better understand how \[Gerry\] died, but also to get a glimpse at how a man who carried the keys to vast sums of other people’s money lived.” Thanks to the posse of reporters, Quadriga creditors, and conspiracy theorists rummaging through the closets of Gerry’s past, I soon began to learn all sorts of things I hadn’t known, and some I hadn’t wanted to know, about Gerald Cotten.
-
-Even before I met him, Gerry was a well-known and sought-after cryptocurrency advocate. He often spoke at financial-technology conferences, was a member of the Bitcoin Foundation, and served as an adviser for a nonprofit called the CryptoCurrency Certification Consortium. He was frequently interviewed about the business of Bitcoin and was shown in a 2014 online video in which he helped two preschool kids insert a $100 bill into an early Bitcoin ATM in Vancouver to demonstrate just how easy it was to convert ordinary cash into cryptocurrency.
-
-Bitcoin, I learned, is a form of cryptocurrency, which exists only in digital form and can be bought and sold and valued in transactions that are beyond the control of banks or governments. It was launched in 2009 by a mysterious and perhaps fictional person (or people) operating under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. The first commercial Bitcoin transaction took place in 2010, when a computer programmer in Florida bought two Papa John’s pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoins. A few months later, in July 2010, the real-world value of a single Bitcoin had rocketed from eight 10,000ths of a dollar to all of eight cents. But its value continued to increase exponentially, if erratically, as Bitcoin was discovered by all manner of investors, from curious financial dabblers to anti-establishment activists and even criminals who found the byzantine world of cryptocurrency an irresistible and convenient means to mask their black market transactions.
-
-The value of a Bitcoin fluctuated wildly. Consider 2013, for example, the year Gerry began Quadriga. At the beginning of that year, you could buy a single Bitcoin for $13.28 (all figures in this paragraph US). In early April, the same Bitcoin was worth $230. A week later, it had tumbled back to $68.36. On December 3, the price peaked for the year at $1,237.55 before dropping, three days later, to $697.02, a collapse of nearly 45 percent. Still, the upward long-term trend seemed clear.
-
-I tried to square the benign man I had known and loved with the shady scam artist described in the media.
-
-The truth is, I still knew very little about Quadriga or how Bitcoin worked. I didn’t even have my own Bitcoin account. Quadriga was Gerry’s business, and that was fine with me. But, after he died, I had to learn quickly. I soon had to look up “Ponzi scheme.” According to reporters, Gerry had been involved in a number of similar frauds and scams before I met him; among them, he had served as a payment processor for a Costa Rica–based digital currency company that, according to _Vanity Fair_, was “used by drug cartels, human traffickers, child pornographers and Ponzis to launder money.” Gerry’s business relationship with his former partner, Michael Patryn, dated back to 2003, to a time before Bitcoin, when Gerry was just fifteen. They had become involved with a website called TalkGold, which _Vanity Fair_ later claimed was “devoted to high-yield investment programs, or HYIPs, more commonly known as Ponzi schemes.”
-
-I tried to square the benign man I had known and loved—the smartest, funniest, kindest person I’d ever met, a man who had taught me so much, the only man I’d ever known who offered me unconditional love, who made me feel like his number-one person always—with the shady scam artist described in the media reports. I couldn’t. Everything kept getting worse. The _Globe and Mail_ tracked down one of Gerry’s subcontractors—“part of a network of entities that helped move millions of dollars around so Quadriga could take deposits and facilitate withdrawals, sometimes in the form of physical bank drafts, for its clients”—to “a rundown, vinyl-sided trailer in rural New Brunswick” rented to Aaron Matthews, one of Gerry’s payment processors, and his wife. The reporter encountered a man on the trailer’s porch who insisted no one by that name lived there. “He begrudgingly says his name is Jim. A short time later, he declines to answer any other questions. Visibly shaking, he demands a reporter and a photographer leave the property.”
-
-There were, to be fair, larger issues at play in all these stories. Even if everything about Quadriga had been above board, the reality was that the company represented a much bigger problem for everyone involved. In less than a decade, cryptocurrency had grown exponentially in popularity, attracting all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons. If no one in authority—no government, no oversight body, no financial institution—seemed able to regulate the industry or protect consumers, that’s because they couldn’t. Cryptocurrencies were devised for the explicit purpose of circumventing the traditional financial world. But, of course, the more disorderly the industry became, the more susceptible it was to manipulation.
-
-According to a financial prospectus I read about later, Quadriga claimed to be processing “between sixty and ninety per cent of the volume of digital currency exchange transactions in Canada” by November 2015. In 2017, Quadriga processed more than $1 billion (US) in trades from 363,000 individual accounts. Each side of each transaction earned revenue for Gerry. Meanwhile, Bitcoins themselves kept increasing in value—from about $400 (US) at the beginning of 2016 to more than $900 (US) by the end of the year and then to an unbelievable $13,000 (US) less than a year later. At one point in 2017, Gerry told me that the price of a single Bitcoin had risen to $25,000 and he was earning $10 million a month.
-
-Although the Quadriga website assured clients that “all funds in the \[Quadriga\] system are highly liquid, and can be withdrawn at any time,” the reality was that clients had no way of verifying those claims beyond taking Gerry at his word. They did. And so did I.
-
-The simple fact is that Gerry should never have been in a position to hold all the levers of a billion-dollar company with no internal or external oversight. I know that now. I didn’t know it then. I didn’t believe I needed to.
-
-When Gerry did mention business problems to me, he was always vague. I knew he was frustrated with conventional banks, which he considered “anti-Bitcoin.” He vented occasionally about finding some way to take Quadriga out of the banking system entirely, but my understanding was that Gerry spoke as a legitimately aggrieved party, an ahead-of-his-time cryptocurrency entrepreneur whose business was being unfairly hamstrung by risk-averse bankers who wanted to control the Bitcoin industry.
-
-I do remember Gerry telling me how careful he was to make sure his business was above reproach. He boasted that Quadriga had been the first cryptocurrency exchange in Canada to hold a money services business licence from the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, the country’s anti–money laundering authority. So I didn’t worry.
-
-In February 2019, soon after Quadriga sought creditor protection, I met with the court-appointed monitor, a serious middle-aged man named George Kinsman. The meeting was suggested by Richard Niedermayer, a lawyer I had hired to help me through the complicated issues involving Gerry’s estate. Kinsman was a Halifax-based partner at Ernst and Young who ran an Atlantic restructuring practice and, according to his LinkedIn profile, had spent “over twenty years providing solutions to corporate entities facing financing challenges.”
-
-“You really should meet him,” I remember Niedermayer suggesting. “You’re someone who wears your heart on your sleeve. Once he meets you, he’ll realize that you’re not capable of anything criminal. Perhaps, if he can put a face to the name, you can build a relationship with him.”
-
-It didn’t work out that way.
-
-Niedermayer and I met Kinsman in a large boardroom at the downtown Halifax law office of Stewart McKelvey. He had a job to do: find out what had happened to the money and then recover as much of it as possible for Quadriga’s customers.
-
-In the weeks and months that followed, I turned over every email, every text message, every electronic device, every scrap of information requested. Even after I’d answered every question about every personal expense for the previous year, for example, the emails kept pushing. Why did you buy this? Why did you do that? I wanted to tell him the truth: “Because we had lots of money. Because we could.” Sometimes, in his zeal, he overreached. At one point, he emailed Niedermayer to complain about a $90,000 payment to what he called a high-end travel company in Kelowna. I had no idea what he was talking about; when I checked, the high-end travel company was a La-Z-Boy store that had supplied all the furniture we bought for our Kelowna home.
-
-On March 5, 2019, the lawyers all trooped back into court in Halifax for a hearing on Quadriga’s request for a forty-five-day extension of its creditor protection while the monitor continued to try to sort out where the money had gone. A few days beforehand, Ernst and Young had released its latest report, documenting its very limited success to date in recovering what it now estimated was $215 million in cash and cryptocurrency that Quadriga supposedly held at the time it stopped operating.
-
-The report did not shine a favourable light on Quadriga—or Gerry. The monitor said it had found one Quadriga account in a Canadian credit union containing $245,000. The account had been frozen since 2017. Ernst and Young also noted that the company had been “unable to locate or provide” formal accounting books or financial records, and the law firm was now trying to determine whether Quadriga had ever even filed any Canadian tax returns. Never filed taxes? I couldn’t believe that. How many times had Gerry railed to me about “Trudeau’s greedy government” or complained about the “millions of dollars” he’d had to pay in taxes?
-
-Another issue involved something called “wallets.” Since you can’t keep cryptocurrency in conventional bank accounts, people use virtual wallets to store and protect their holdings. The wallets don’t contain actual cryptocurrency but are just tools for managing the blockchain—the official record of what’s been bought and sold. “Hot wallets” are connected to the internet and can be used by investors to buy, sell, and trade cryptocurrency with other users in real time. The downside of hot wallets is that, because they’re connected to the internet, they’re vulnerable to hackers. Which is where “cold wallets” enter the picture. They exist offline, often on usb sticks and CDs, so they’re more secure, but that makes it more difficult and time consuming to move them online for buying, selling, and trading.
-
-Ernst and Young had managed to identify six Quadriga cold wallets so far but had found almost nothing inside any of them. In fact, it appeared as though the Bitcoins the wallets tracked had been transferred out in the months before Gerry died. Transferred by whom? To where? Why? “To date,” the report noted, “the applicants have been unable to identify a reason why Quadriga may have stopped using the identified bitcoin cold wallets for deposits in April 2018. However, the monitor and management will continue to review the Quadriga database to obtain further information.”
-
-The monitor had written to ten of Quadriga’s third-party payment processors asking for any funds they were holding on the company’s behalf. So far, that effort had generated a paltry $5,000. “Further relief from the court,” Ernst and Young suggested in legalese, “may be necessary to secure funds and records from certain of the third-party processors.”
-
-Ernst and Young had also contacted fourteen cryptocurrency exchanges where it believed the company—or Gerry—had opened trading accounts. The report noted that those accounts appeared to have been “artificially” created outside Quadriga’s own normal process, using aliases no one could connect to an actual customer, and that these accounts had been “subsequently used for trading.” By Gerry? So far, only four of the exchanges had responded, and only one of those had confirmed that it held even “minimal cryptocurrency” on behalf of Quadriga.
-
-The only bright spot in all of this was that RBC had finally agreed to deposit $25.3 million in court-held CIBC bank drafts into an account for disbursements. (CIBC had held up releasing the money for about a year in a dispute over who owned it.) The problem, as far as Quadriga’s customers were concerned, was how the monitor planned to disburse the initial tranche of the money. Ernst and Young would get $200,000 and its lawyers $250,000. Another $230,000 would go to Quadriga’s lawyers and $17,000 would be set aside to pay Quadriga’s remaining contractors who’d been working with the monitor.
-
-But the biggest single payout listed was a $300,000 “repayment of shareholder advances.” That was to repay me for the amount I’d agreed to put up from my personal accounts to cover costs associated with the company’s initial creditor protection.
-
-The lawyers representing Quadriga’s creditors weren’t happy with any of it, least of all the idea that I was entitled to the largest portion—even though I’d lent the money to the company in the first place. They noted that Ernst and Young had asked for more information from my lawyers as well as an agreement to freeze my assets while it reviewed any information we provided. “The repayment contemplated,” explained the creditors’ lawyers in a letter to the court, “is inappropriate until such time as the monitor has reviewed the requested information and satisfied itself as to the source of funds used to fund the CCA \[Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act\] proceeding.”
-
-In the end, none of the money I lent the company, which totalled $490,000, was ever reimbursed. I’d voluntarily provided the amount from what I thought of at the time as my personal bank account, though my finances had by then become entangled with Gerry’s and Quadriga’s.
-
-I still found it difficult—though no longer impossible—to believe Gerry might have intentionally done something wrong.
-
-By this point, all I wanted to do was wash my hands of the whole thing. In preparation for the hearing, I’d had to prepare yet another affidavit on behalf of the company, recommending the appointment of a new director who could straighten out Quadriga’s tangled affairs and then sell the platform to someone else—anyone else—so I could finally grieve for the man I’d loved.
-
-I continued to find it difficult—though no longer impossible—to believe Gerry might have intentionally done something wrong. I resisted allowing myself to go there. The truth was that I still loved Gerry. Part of me felt as though our life together had been a dream, the best dream you could ever imagine, and now it was time to wake up. But to what? I spent a lot of time thinking, sifting, shuffling, trying to work things out in my head that never worked out.
-
-Richard Niedermayer understood that my mental health depended on putting Quadriga in my rear-view mirror. He suggested approaching Kinsman with a settlement proposal that would allow me to extricate myself from the mire that Quadriga had become, keep what was mine, and get on with making a new life for myself. At the time, I was holding close to $12 million in properties, cash, and other assets on my own behalf and as Gerry’s executor. We already knew that the monitor believed some of those assets might rightly belong to Quadriga. So we proposed that I would keep $5 million, mostly in rental properties from Robertson Nova—the residential property management company I built using Gerry’s capital—while turning over everything else to the monitor and giving up any future interest in Quadriga, including whatever the platform might ultimately sell for. We thought it was a generous offer.
-
-Niedermayer had agreed to work out the details. Now he was on the phone again with what I assumed was an update on the negotiations. That settlement, he told me simply, isn’t going to happen.
-
-Ernst and Young’s investigation, Niedermayer explained, had now concluded that Quadriga’s investors’ money wasn’t just missing. Gerry had stolen it. He’d set up fake accounts using fake names like “Aretwo Deetwo” and “Seethree Peaohh,” filled the accounts with fake cryptocurrency, and then used that to make real trades, gambling that the value of crypto would increase and he would make money. It didn’t. Instead, the value fell and kept falling. Gerry had lost at least $100 million that Ernst and Young had been able to trace so far. Another $80 million remained unaccounted for. Worse, Gerry had mixed Quadriga’s income with his own, using funds that belonged to Quadriga investors to finance his lifestyle. Our lifestyle! Our lives!
-
-“There has to be something they don’t understand,” I remember insisting to Niedermayer. “I mean, this is Bitcoin. They just don’t understand Bitcoin. I don’t understand Bitcoin. And Gerry was great at making trades. He did day trades, Questrade. He made money all the time.” I was babbling. “Seethree Peaohh? Gerry wasn’t even a hard-core _Star Wars_ fan. Why would he? . . . I mean, Gerry loved to gamble. It’s true. We would go to the casinos whenever we travelled, and we had fun, but Gerry was always the one who said, ‘We’ve spent enough. Let’s go home.’” I was almost pleading now. “There has to be a mistake. Gerry’s so smart. If he hadn’t died, he could have explained—”
-
-Niedermayer, I recall, cut me off calmly. “It doesn’t really matter,” he replied, “because Gerry’s not here. If he hadn’t died, maybe none of this would have happened. But he did die, and he left nothing—no instructions, nothing. So now it’s all a matter for interpretation. And the monitor has decided this is the only interpretation that makes sense.”
-
-I got off the phone and tried to fit together all those puzzle pieces I hadn’t been able—or willing—to put into their logical places. I was no longer in denial that all the money the monitor claimed was missing really was. But how had it disappeared? I still couldn’t understand or accept it. And, more importantly, why?
-
-All I knew was that I felt empty, drained. How much worse could it get? And then, in the middle of all that, I thought of how much I missed Gerry, how much I needed him now.
-
-Ernst and Young, appointed by the court to sort out Quadriga’s financial situation, had decided it was time to shift Quadriga from creditor protection to bankruptcy proceedings. Bankruptcy would reduce costs for the company, so there would be more to distribute among Quadriga’s thousands of creditors. Ernst and Young could now move on from its monitoring role to become Quadriga’s trustee in bankruptcy.
-
-The remaining question was how much of Quadriga’s missing funds Ernst and Young could recover. Quadriga had 76,319 registered creditors, virtually all of them clients, who collectively claimed they were owed $214.6 million. So far, Ernst and Young had recovered only $32 million in cash, much of it the formerly frozen CIBC funds. It was tracking another million or so in the hands of uncooperative third-party payment processors, and the move to bankruptcy would give the trustee the “right to compel production of documents and seek examination of relevant parties under oath.”
-
-The only other source of Quadriga funds ripe for recovery, the monitor suggested, was those assets I had believed were legitimately mine. “During the course of the monitor’s investigation into Quadriga’s business and affairs, the monitor became aware of occurrences where the corporate and personal boundaries between Quadriga and its founder Gerald Cotten were not formally maintained, and it appeared to the monitor that Quadriga funds may have been used to acquire assets held outside the corporate entity.” Ernst and Young wanted me to agree, voluntarily, to what is known as an asset preservation order, so that it could do its work “without concern that assets possibly recoverable for the applicants’ stakeholders may be dissipated.”
-
-I had no intention of parting with any of those assets. When I initially tried to sell the plane and the boat after Gerry died, my only purpose was to provide emergency funds to keep Quadriga operating. When I transferred my real estate into a trust, it was at my lawyer’s urging in order to protect what we then genuinely believed were my assets from getting tangled up in Quadriga’s messy business affairs.
-
-But, if I didn’t immediately agree to the asset preservation proposal—under which Ernst and Young would allow me to continue to operate Robertson Nova under its supervision and earn a living, so long as I didn’t try to sell any properties or move their ownership beyond the court’s jurisdiction—Ernst and Young would escalate matters and ask the court for something called a Mareva injunction, a remedy that, as I understood it, would assume I was involved in fraud, freeze all my assets, and put my life under Ernst and Young’s complete control.
-
-I agreed that asset preservation was my best option. Under the terms of the order, I would receive $10,000 a month. That may seem reasonable — and it might have been—except I had to use that money not only to cover my current living expenses but also to maintain aspects of a lifestyle Gerry and I had lived but that I could no longer afford and yet, due to the court order, couldn’t easily dispose of. I was still responsible for the upkeep, insurance, taxes, etc. on our house in Kelowna, for example, but I wasn’t permitted to sell it without the trustee’s permission. It was another asset I was required to preserve—and pay for—until someone other than me decided what to do with it.
-
-I was also still being pilloried regularly in the press and online. Along with Gerry, I remained the villain of this story. In early June, the FBI announced it was trying to identify victims of Gerry’s fraud to “provide these victims with information, assistance services, and resources.” _Coindesk_, a cryptocurrency news site, reported that Australian authorities had even become involved. Australia? I knew I needed to find a way out of this morass. I went to Niedermayer and told him I’d had more than enough. I was ready to write an ending to this chapter of my life. Instead of haggling over the details in court, I wanted to make a deal with the trustee for a fresh start.
-
-At that point, the value of the assets I nominally controlled—all of which were under the asset preservation order—totalled around $12 million. Niedermayer and I talked about how much of that I might be able to keep in a settlement. Not much, he said. The reality was that we’d be negotiating not only with the bankruptcy trustee but also with a committee representing those described as Quadriga’s “affected users”—cheated investors who, understandably, wanted to claw back every penny Gerry had ever taken out of Quadriga. I told Niedermayer that, if it was indeed their money and that had been proven, then they should have it. It should go back to them.
-
-I decided to propose a financial settlement I believed would be enough to satisfy Quadriga’s creditors while -allowing me to press reset. On October 7, 2019, Ernst and Young accepted a deal in which I transferred over all assets including cash, investments, vehicles, loans, and real estate. In exchange, I got to keep what the agreement referred to as “excluded assets”: $90,000 in cash, my $20,000 RSP, my 2015 Jeep Cherokee with a book value of $19,000, my jewellery (including my wedding band and a pink sapphire ring I’d bought in Greece, valued at $8,700, but not my engagement ring), personal furnishings up to a value of $15,000, and my “clothing and similar personal effects.” The trustee justified its decision to give me that much because “the estimated aggregate net realizable value of the excluded assets is likely less than the costs that would have been incurred in pursuing the trustee’s claims against Ms. Robertson, the estate and the controlled entities.”
-
-In other words, it was cheaper for them to settle than to pay lawyers to fight me in court. My own lawyer put it another way: given that the assets I turned over were estimated to be worth $12 million, I’d ended up with slightly more than 1 percent of the total value.
-
-I didn’t fall in love with Gerald Cotten because of his wealth. When we met, he didn’t have that much, at least not by the fairy-tale standards Quadriga would set for us just a few years later. It was a bonus when the value of a single Bitcoin rocketed through the roof and Gerry appeared to be making more money than we could possibly spend in a couple of lifetimes. I won’t lie: I loved being rich. I loved not having to ask, “Can I afford that?” I could—whatever it was. We could buy a house in Nova Scotia, another in British Columbia, even our own island with a yacht—not just a sailboat—to get us there. We could travel to exotic places.
-
-It took me longer than many others to appreciate the extent of Gerry’s deceit. Like much of the rest of the world, I learned about Gerry’s fraud incrementally. It morphed, at first slowly and then suddenly, into a torrent of doubt that became an inexorable flood of accusation and, finally, a tidal wave of irrefutable evidence that almost swallowed me whole. What if Gerry really had been a bad person? Had I loved a bad person? If I had, did that make me a bad person too?
-
-But, even as the evidence piled up daily in front of me, forming the story of a secretive, manipulative, deceitful, even criminal Gerry, I clung to the belief that he must have had a plan. If he hadn’t died, I kept telling myself, Gerry would have been able to solve Quadriga’s cash-flow problems, open the cold wallets, ensure that the company’s investors got what they were owed, and make everything right with our world again. I now know that wasn’t true.
-
-_This piece was adapted with permission from_ Bitcoin Widow: Love, Betrayal and the Missing Millions _by Jennifer Robertson with Stephen Kimber, published by HarperCollins Canada in 2022._
-
-[](https://thewalrus.ca/author/jennifer-robertson/)
-
-Jennifer Robertson is a former HR specialist and property manager. She lives in Nova Scotia.
-
-[](https://thewalrus.ca/author/stephen-kimber/)
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-Stephen Kimber ([@skimber](https://twitter.com/skimber)) is an award-winning writer, editor, and broadcaster and the author of thirteen books. He also sits on the Educational Review Committee at The Walrus.
-
-[](https://thewalrus.ca/author/annissa-malthaner/)
-
-Annissa Malthaner is an artist and illustrator based in London, Ontario. She’s shown work at Mad Ones Gallery, in Toronto, and has illustrated work for _The Logic_ and _Reader’s Digest_.
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-Alias: []
-Tag: ["🧪", "🦠", "😷", "Alzheimer"]
-Date: 2022-02-13
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp:
-Link: https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/could-covid19-and-alzheimers-overlaps-point-towards-a-solution-for-both-diseases/
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-```button
-name Save
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-^button-COVID-19AndAlzheimerOverlapsSolutionForBothDiseasesNSave
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-# Could COVID-19 And Alzheimer's Overlaps Point Towards A Solution For Both Diseases?
-
-The medical community has suggested that calling [Omicron “mild”](https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/is-calling-omicron-mild-misleading/) is folly considering the reach of this most contagious COVID-19 variant, which continues to [hospitalize the unvaccinated](https://www.rivm.nl/en/news/unvaccinated-covid-19-patients-in-hospital-nearly-20-years-younger-than-vaccinated-patients) and move easily among the vaccinated. A leading concern is that surviving COVID infection is only half the battle for some people who can be left with debilitating symptoms, including brain damage that shares [similarities with Alzheimer’s](https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/could-covid19-increase-dementia-risk-in-the-future/). While it’s hard to find a silver lining to the pandemic cloud, that we are learning new insights into “[brain fog](https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/brain-fog-is-afflicting-a-surprising-amount-of-people-after-covid19/)” brings some hope for the improved management of not just long COVID but Alzheimer’s, too.
-
-A recent study published in the [Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association](https://alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/alz.12556) found that patients with COVID-19 and associated neurological symptoms had raised levels of seven markers of brain damage, and that these were higher – in the short term – than those seen in patients with confirmed Alzheimer’s disease.
-
-“Traumatic brain injury, which is also associated with increases in these biomarkers, does not mean that a patient will develop Alzheimer’s disease or related dementias later on, but does increase the risk of it,” said senior author Dr Thomas M. Wisniewski, director of the Center for Cognitive Neurology at NYU Langone, in a [statement](https://nyulangone.org/news/blood-markers-brain-damage-are-higher-over-short-term-patients-who-have-covid-19-people-who-have-alzheimers-disease). “Whether that kind of relationship exists in those who survive severe COVID-19 is a question we urgently need to answer with ongoing monitoring of these patients.”
-
-The connection is perhaps unsurprising in the context that cognitive symptoms reported with long COVID are similar to those of Alzheimer’s disease, including losing train of thought, difficulty grasping words, [brain fog](https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/covid19-brain-fog-may-be-caused-by-bone-marrow-cells-invading-the-brain/), [memory loss](https://www.iflscience.com/brain/covid19-reduces-grey-matter-in-the-brain-beforeandafter-scans-reveal/), and personality changes.
-
-High levels of [beta-amyloid proteins](https://www.iflscience.com/Could%20COVID-19%20And%20Alzheimer's%20Overlaps%20Point%20Towards%20A%20Solution%20For%20Both%20Diseases) could be one explanation for this, as these are known to build up in people who have Alzheimer’s disease. In the above mentioned study, these proteins were found to be raised among COVID-19 patients with neurological symptoms compared to other infected people without (for technical reasons, it wasn’t possible to compare these concentrations to the participants with Alzheimer’s disease).
-
-However, where this theory might fall down is in the result of several Alzheimer’s drug trials for medications that were thought to clear the brain of beta-amyloid proteins that found clearing them did little to improve [patients’ symptom profiles](https://www.biospace.com/article/a-long-line-of-failures-roche-drops-alzheimer-s-drug-trials/).
-
-An alternative theory looks to inflammation in the brain as a possible cause of neurodegeneration, something that can be triggered by viruses, bacteria, or fungi. This approach would tie in with the finding that many COVID-19 patients were struck by something called a cytokine storm, a condition in which the immune system battles infections but essentially goes overboard and begins attacking tissues that don’t contain pathogens.
-
-This kind of autoimmune response has the potential to attack brain cells causing short-term neurological symptoms and possibly increasing future risk of developing a neurological disorder. We need only look to another of Earth’s deadly pandemics for insight here, as the Spanish Flu saw [over a million people](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7393211/) who survived the infection go on to develop post-encephalitic Parkinson’s disease, a harrowing condition depicted in the movie _[Awakenings](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7exeVt7CaE4)_ (a great watch but one for which tissues are a **necessity**).
-
-While the frustrating truth is that finding out [if COVID-19 will lead to future cases of Alzheimer’s](https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/could-covid19-increase-dementia-risk-in-the-future/) is a matter of watchful waiting (at least for now), the more we learn about the overlap of these two diseases, the greater opportunities we have for interrupting the processes that lead to neurodegeneration.
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-Alias: [""]
-Tag: ["🏈", "🚔", "🚺", "🇺🇸", "🚫"]
-Date: 2022-02-20
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-Link: https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/33231841/dallas-cowboys-paid-24-million-settle-cheerleaders-voyeurism-allegations
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-# Cowboys paid $2.4M over cheerleader allegations
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-**THE DALLAS COWBOYS** paid a confidential settlement of $2.4 million after four members of their iconic cheerleading squad accused a senior team executive of voyeurism in their locker room as they undressed during a 2015 event at AT&T Stadium, according to documents obtained by ESPN and people with knowledge of the situation.
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-Each of the women received $399,523.27 after the incident. One of the cheerleaders alleged that she clearly saw Richard Dalrymple, the Cowboys' longtime senior vice president for public relations and communications, standing behind a partial wall in their locker room with his iPhone extended toward them while they were changing their clothes, according to several people with knowledge of the events and letters later sent by attorneys for the cheerleaders to the team. Dalrymple gained entry to the back door of the cheerleaders' locked dressing room by using a security key card.
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-Dalrymple also was accused by a lifelong Cowboys fan of taking "upskirt" photos of Charlotte Jones Anderson, a team senior vice president and the daughter of team owner Jerry Jones, in the Cowboys' war room during the 2015 NFL draft, according to documents obtained by ESPN and interviews. The fan signed an affidavit that he was watching a livestream of the war room on the team's website when he said he saw the alleged incident.
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-Dalrymple, who did not respond to interview requests by ESPN, told team officials he entered the cheerleaders' locker room not knowing the women were there and left right away, a team source said. His account was contradicted by the way multiple sources described the alleged incident to ESPN. On Monday night, Dalrymple issued a statement calling both allegations false.
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-"People who know me, co-workers, the media and colleagues, know who I am and what I'm about," Dalrymple said in his statement. "I understand the very serious nature of these claims and do not take them lightly. The accusations are, however, false. One was accidental and the other simply did not happen. Everything that was alleged was thoroughly investigated years ago, and I cooperated fully."
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-A Cowboys representative said the team thoroughly investigated both alleged incidents and found no wrongdoing by Dalrymple and no evidence that he took photos or video of the women. The team does not dispute that Dalrymple used his security key card access to enter the cheerleaders' locker room while the women were changing clothes.
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-"The organization took these allegations extremely seriously and moved immediately to thoroughly investigate this matter," said Jim Wilkinson, a communications consultant for the team. "The investigation was handled consistent with best legal and HR practices and the investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing."
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-Even so, the team issued Dalrymple a formal written warning in October 2015, a person familiar with the matter told ESPN. A team source declined to provide a copy of the warning or describe what it contained, citing privacy concerns. The team also declined to detail information, including time-stamped data from surveillance cameras and security key cards, that would show precisely when Dalrymple entered and left the dressing room.
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-"If any wrongdoing had been found, Rich would have been terminated immediately," Wilkinson said. "Everyone involved felt just terrible about this unfortunate incident."
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-Dalrymple continued working for the Cowboys, in his same role, for nearly six years after the settlement. On Feb. 2, he told The Dallas Morning News of his immediate retirement after 32 years as Jerry Jones' chief spokesman and confidant. While Dalrymple thanked the team and the Jones family, no one on behalf of the team acknowledged his years of service, and his retirement was not mentioned on the team's website. His retirement came several weeks after ESPN began interviewing people about the alleged incidents and just days after ESPN contacted attorneys involved in the settlement. In his statement, Dalrymple said the allegations "had nothing to do with my retirement from a long and fulfilling career, and I was only contacted about this story after I had retired."
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-A signed copy of the May 2016 settlement agreement obtained by ESPN includes a nondisclosure agreement in which the four women, three of their spouses and Cowboys officials agreed to never speak publicly about their allegations.
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-ESPN knows the identity of the four cheerleaders but does not typically reveal the names of people who have reported allegations of sexual misconduct. The women either declined to comment for this story or did not respond to inquiries.
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-A former cheerleader familiar with the dressing-room incident said it became known among a few fellow cheerleaders.
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-"It hurt my heart because I know how much it affected the people who were involved," the former cheerleader said. "It was a very ... shut the book, don't talk about it, this person is going to stay in his position ... They just made it go away."
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-**DALRYMPLE HAD A** long personal history with the Cowboys and Jerry Jones and was seen by the owner as a member of the extended Jones family. In Dallas, he was the media gatekeeper and the team's high-profile fixer, often responsible for clarifying the owners' public statements. He was once ordered by receiver Dez Bryant in a crowded locker room to "fix this s---, Rich!" after Bryant got angry with a reporter. In 2015 and 2016, a team source said, Dalrymple lobbied football writers to elect Jerry Jones to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
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-On Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2015, the Cowboys held their annual Kickoff Luncheon at AT&T Stadium, the official start of the regular season that helps raise money for charity. Circular banquet tables crowded the field nearly from end zone to end zone. Almost 2,000 people attended, including the Jones family, Cowboys luminaries including Emmitt Smith and Michael Irvin, and, as usual for special events, four Cowboys cheerleaders, clad in their unmistakable blue and white uniforms.
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-After waving their pompoms beside a lectern where several people delivered speeches, the cheerleaders returned to their locker room shortly after noon to quickly change their clothes before attending the luncheon.
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-At least two security guards usually stand outside the cheerleaders' dressing room when they are inside, sources told ESPN. But on this day, only one security guard was present. Inside the back door that was left unguarded was a small nook separated from the dressing room by a partial wall. The sources said the only way to unlock the door is with a security key card that Dalrymple, among other employees, possessed.
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-The women heard the door leading to the nook area open, sources said. "We're in here!" the women shouted. They assumed it was a security guard who immediately left, according to an account from multiple sources and relayed in a letter from the cheerleaders' attorneys to the team.
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-Several minutes later, one of the cheerleaders noticed a man's hand and a black cellphone pointed in their direction, according to several sources. At the time, the women were going "from fully clothed to completely unclothed," a cheerleader later told a Cowboys HR official and the team's general counsel, Jason Cohen. The cheerleader who saw the cellphone was certain the man was lurking and taking photos or video of them, according to multiple sources.
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-That woman ran toward him, shouting, "Hey, what are you doing?" The cheerleader, a veteran of several years on the team, immediately recognized Dalrymple, who she said dashed away, according to the letter. The other women did not see the man, according to the letter.
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-The cheerleaders immediately reported what had happened to a security guard. Three people said the security guard wanted to report the incident to the Arlington police department. If the cheerleaders' allegations were substantiated, under Texas law it could be a misdemeanor to secretly observe someone without their consent and a felony to take a photo or video of "an intimate area of another person" without their consent.
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-The sources said the cheerleaders wanted to have it "properly investigated," but the police were not called. The chaos delayed the four cheerleaders' arrival to the luncheon by nearly 30 minutes. When they arrived, Kelli Finglass, the cheerleaders' director, was sitting at a round table with other people, including several team sponsors, unaware of what had just transpired. "What took so long?" she asked the women, the former cheerleader said. The cheerleaders couldn't answer the question truthfully in that setting and instead simply said they had been delayed, sources said.
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-After the luncheon, the cheerleaders huddled with Finglass, who suggested that the women should report the incident to the Cowboys' HR department, a source said. The source added that all four cheerleaders wanted Dalrymple punished.
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-Wilkinson said the Cowboys' investigation started later that day. Here's how he laid it out: Human resources officials took statements by phone from the cheerleaders, the security guard and two other employees who might have been witnesses. Cohen, the general counsel, confiscated Dalrymple's work-issued iPhone and obtained passwords for his phone and iCloud account. Cohen also conducted the first of multiple interviews with Dalrymple, who acknowledged using his security key card to enter what he thought was an empty locker room. He also denied using his phone to collect images of the women, Wilkinson said. During the security guard's interview, he did not tell team officials that he had wanted to call police. The security guard did not respond to multiple interview requests from ESPN. In the days that followed, Cohen sent Dalrymple a letter ordering him to preserve any evidence related to the allegation, Wilkinson said.
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-It took eight days after the incident for team officials to meet with the women in person. The cheerleaders met individually with the chief of HR and Cohen in a conference room at Valley Ranch, then the team's headquarters, a source said. The source insisted that those meetings were the first time team officials interviewed the women and that any discussions on Sept. 2 were "perfunctory." At those Valley Ranch meetings, team officials told each of the women that they had interviewed Dalrymple, who insisted that he had entered their locked dressing room only to use the bathroom and did not expect to find them there.
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-A source said the women were incredulous for two reasons: One cheerleader said she clearly saw Dalrymple with the cellphone sticking out from beyond a wall pointed at them. And the cheerleaders noted that there was a bathroom across the hall from their dressing room. In notes from one of the HR meetings obtained by ESPN, Cohen told a cheerleader that the team had searched Dalrymple's iPhone and hired a forensics firm to ensure no images had been deleted. A cheerleader asked Cohen whether the team looked into any personal phones Dalrymple might have had. Cohen responded that Dalrymple insisted he had only the phone he turned over to the team; a team source said Dalrymple told the team he did not own a personal phone.
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-"This to me is a grievous offense," the woman said, according to the notes.
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-Cohen told the cheerleader that "\[Dalrymple\] understands he was this close to being fired and still will be fired if anything even remotely like this comes to light," according to the notes, and that Dalrymple did not deny being in the locker room. "At no point did he deny anything up until the video part," Cohen said, according to the notes.
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-"Could he have lied to me? Of course," Cohen told the cheerleader, according to the notes. "But I said to him point blank, 'Is this the phone you had yesterday and he said 'yes.'"
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-The HR chief, the notes said, told the woman the team "examined the phone thoroughly. ... There was no evidence of any videos, there was no evidence of anything that was sent out, no evidence of photographs."
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-Team officials repeatedly assured that they were taking the allegation seriously, according to the notes. "This is a huge deal," the HR chief said, and later, "We care about you guys. We don't want you feeling awkward at work."
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-HR also offered the woman resources, including "professional resources," according to the notes. And Cohen offered to connect the cheerleader with a friend who is an attorney, the notes said.
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-Two sources said the cheerleaders and their lawyers were not told whether images from security cameras, deployed all over AT&T Stadium, had been consulted or might have recorded any of the incident. One said the women were angry because they felt that team officials seemed to have concluded Dalrymple had done nothing wrong before the cheerleaders were formally interviewed eight days after the incident. "It was a 'he said, she said' -- and the team chose to believe Dalrymple's side of things," a source with knowledge of the allegations said about how the cheerleaders' felt. "But four women swore this happened."
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-The cheerleaders were instructed by their bosses not to go public and not to tell their teammates what had happened, multiple sources said.
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-Frustrated and angry, the women hired W. Kelly Puls, a Fort Worth attorney, later that month to represent them in a possible lawsuit against the Cowboys, according to sources. The cheerleaders "were upset and felt certain the team wasn't going to do anything about it," a source added. "They were told to just keep cheering -- and saw Dalrymple often at games and events."
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-Puls sent certified letters to top Cowboys executives, including Jerry Jones, demanding that "all evidence be preserved," including all data on Dalrymple's cellphones, images from security cameras and records from Dalrymple's security key card that would show all the times he had gained access to the cheerleaders' locked dressing room, a source said.
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-At the same time, the cheerleaders and their attorneys also began searching for other evidence of any alleged misconduct by Dalrymple. One of them discovered a curious post on a Facebook page by a Shreveport, Louisiana, schoolteacher and lifelong Cowboys fan named Randy Horton. He posted on a TV station's page that he'd seen something strange while watching a live video feed from the Cowboys' draft "war room" on April 30, 2015, as team officials celebrated their first-round selection of Byron Jones, the University of Connecticut cornerback.
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-Horton also wrote to Charlotte Jones directly on Facebook: "In case you haven't been made aware already, that guy Rich Dalrymple, who was sitting in the back corner of the war room last night, on several occasions reached over and took upskirt pictures with his phone during the LIVE STREAM!! My wife and I watched in amazement. It happened when you guys stood up celebrating when you learned that you would be able to pick the Jones kid. I believe Carolina was on the clock at the time. Go check it out!"
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-A team source said Charlotte Jones did not see Horton's post. "Charlotte is obviously not sitting around reading Facebook," the source said.
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-Horton told ESPN that he saw Dalrymple hold his phone under Charlotte Jones' skirt and several times appear to snap photos.
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-"I'll never forget what I saw," Horton said. "The first time he reached out from a sitting position behind her, and she is standing with her back to him, and did it once ... He looked at the screen, touched the screen and then did it again. The second time, he's sitting in a chair at the corner of the table on the left and he held his phone beneath the corner of the table with the camera side facing up where she was standing. And did it again.
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-"I have no doubt in my mind of what it was he was doing. It was obvious."
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-Horton said he tried and failed to capture the images on his laptop. He then posted a message about what he'd seen to the Facebook page for local TV station KSLA as "something one of your reporters might want to look into."
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-One person replied to the Facebook post to the TV station, saying he'd also seen what Horton saw.
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-The cheerleaders' legal team found Horton's post and obtained a digital copy of the livestream. ESPN was not able to obtain a recording of the war room video. A team source declined to say whether they have it.
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-The Cowboys had been alerted to the "upskirt" allegation in May 2015 -- a few weeks after it happened and four months before the cheerleaders' locker room allegation. A team source said a tipster told HR officials of the "upskirt allegation." The source said HR watched the video and found no wrongdoing by Dalrymple.
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-"The most basic common sense tells you that if Jerry Jones believed in any way that someone had even remotely done something like that to any member of his family, that person would have been fired immediately," Wilkinson said.
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-Although the Cowboys had closed the books on the war room allegation, the cheerleaders' lawyers raised it in a Sept. 30, 2015, letter to Cowboys lawyers that was obtained by ESPN. The letter said attorneys planned to present evidence that the alleged war room incident showed Dalrymple's "vulgar propensities" that should have resulted in him losing access to the dressing room. In their letter, the attorneys questioned why Dalrymple used the cheerleaders' bathroom when "a men's restroom was 20 feet away."
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-While the cheerleaders' lawyers were pursuing their investigation, Dalrymple hired a Dallas attorney, George Parker.
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-"I strongly advised him at the time that if he were fired for this incident, given the lack of evidence and no specific finding of wrongdoing, he would have grounds for a wrongful termination claim," Parker told ESPN via a statement issued by Wilkinson. Parker did not respond to ESPN's request for an interview.
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-The Cowboys issued the disciplinary letter to Dalrymple on Oct. 19, 2015, not long after he hired Parker. And the team revoked Dalrymple's access to the cheerleaders' locker room, sources said.
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-The Cowboys also made sweeping security changes around the cheerleaders' locker room, Wilkinson said. They reconfigured security key card access to locker rooms for all staff and added cameras, new signs and new communications to alert security staff when locker rooms were in use. The source said they also ensured that cheerleaders were aware of HR and legal resources, employee assistance programs and an anonymous NFL hotline.
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-In the weeks after the incident, the four cheerleaders were presented with a difficult choice by their lawyers: Go public with what had happened at a news conference or settle quietly with the team and never speak about the incident. "Wasn't much of a choice," the former cheerleader said. "Neither option was good."
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-**FOR MONTHS, THERE** was an impasse between the two legal teams while the four women continued cheering at games and other events.
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-In the spring, Horton was surprised to be contacted by an attorney for the cheerleaders who met with him in a Shreveport casino. On April 18, 2016, Horton swore to a three-page affidavit about the "upskirt" video. The cheerleaders' lawyer returned to Dallas with the affidavit, which he described to the Cowboys' legal team, sources said.
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-Within weeks, a settlement/nondisclosure agreement was drawn up that bound the women and the team executives to secrecy. On May 16, 2016, the agreement was signed by the four cheerleaders and their spouses and lawyers. The Jones family -- Jerry Jones, sons Stephen and Jerry Jr. and Charlotte Jones Anderson -- and Dalrymple signed soon after, denying any wrongdoing and that the alleged voyeurism even took place.
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-"Instead, this Agreement is to be construed solely as a reflection of the Parties' desire to facilitate a resolution of a bona fide disputed claim and all other potential claims between the Parties through the date this Agreement is executed," the settlement states.
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-The agreement specifically bars the cheerleaders from disclosing any "aspect of the incident regarding Charlotte Jones Anderson," referring to the war room incident recounted by Horton.
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-A team source denied that Horton's affidavit spurred the $2.4 million settlement.
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-ESPN confirmed that the team initially paid the cheerleaders, spouses and their lawyers a total of $1.8 million in June 2016. Each of the cheerleaders was paid $249,523.37, with three law firms getting the rest -- a total of $801,906 in fees and expenses. Another $600,000 was paid by the Cowboys over the course of the next year, with three cheerleaders getting $12,500 a month for a year and the fourth being paid $150,000 after her final season.
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-One of the only exceptions for the cheerleaders to remain silent is if they were forced "to respond to subpoena by federal, state or local regulatory authorities or governmental agencies." The agreement also gives strict instructions on how the cheerleaders and their spouses should respond if asked about their voyeurism allegations: They "may only respond with 'No Comment.'"
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-ESPN attempted to contact more than 100 former cheerleaders and other former team employees and most who did respond to inquiries declined to comment. Dozens did not respond to phone, email and text messages.
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-There was a provision in the settlement agreement for one of the cheerleaders to cheer that fall, and for another to work elsewhere in the organization, according to the agreement. Two of the cheerleaders were eligible to stay on the team for the 2016-17 season but chose not to.
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-Director of cheerleaders Kelli Finglass did not answer questions from ESPN. In a statement released by Wilkinson, Finglass said, "This 2015 incident was taken seriously and immediately reported to HR and legal, who launched a full and immediate investigation. The organization further strengthened the security protocols for the DCC."
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-Wilkinson said, "The cheerleaders are a vital part of the Dallas Cowboys family, and in terms of the settlement, the organization wanted to go above and beyond to ensure the cheerleaders knew that their allegations had been taken extremely seriously, and immediately and thoroughly investigated."
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-Like other professional sports teams and American corporations, the Cowboys have a culture of often asking employees to sign nondisclosure agreements when striking settlements with former employees -- and even current ones -- who allege workplace misconduct or wrongdoing. And as a matter of routine when leaving the team, many former Cowboys employees have signed NDAs, including the hundreds of women who have worked for them as cheerleaders. Asked whether the Cowboys would release the four cheerleaders and their spouses from the NDA they signed, a team source declined to comment. In addition, a team source declined to say whether Dalrymple asked the team's permission to break his NDA connected to the settlement agreement.
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-Six years later, the memory of the incident has not been forgotten by the women impacted by what they say was a violation of their privacy by an influential team executive, a source said: "They are still extremely upset. They saw it as a violation of their privacy that went unpunished."
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-The settlement remained confidential until five months ago, when ESPN received a tip from a former Cowboys executive about the allegations involving Dalrymple. Wilkinson called a reporter in November, offering to answer questions after ESPN began calling dozens of people around the team.
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-ESPN sought interviews with Jerry Jones, along with Stephen, Jerry Jr. and Charlotte, as well as Cohen. Through Wilkinson, they declined to comment. Two attorneys for the cheerleaders who were listed on settlement documents, Carlos R. Cortez of Dallas and W. Kelly Puls also declined comment for this story.
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-**THE COWBOYS' ICONIC** team of 36 cheerleaders are as much a symbol of America's Team as its starred helmets. More than 850 cheerleaders have worn the uniform. They've appeared in a pair of made-for-TV movies and a documentary, and they're always on the sidelines at Cowboys games and during team events at AT&T Stadium and in the community. They have their own popular reality TV show, "Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team," now in its 16th season on CMT.
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-Revelations about the Cowboys come at a perilous time for the National Football League, on the heels of questions about workplace sexual harassment that emerged during the league's inquiry of the Washington Commanders.
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-In October, the leak of a handful of misogynistic, racist and anti-gay emails sent by former Las Vegas Raiders coach Jon Gruden to former Commanders president Bruce Allen got the attention of several members of Congress, who have demanded the NFL release all 650,000 emails gathered during the NFL inquiry into alleged wrongdoing by team leaders. More recently, The Washington Post reported that longtime team owner Dan Snyder had tried to thwart the investigation. Questions about the transparency of the inquiry into the Commanders -- and the NFL's responses to Congress -- have bedeviled commissioner Roger Goodell and other league and team executives all season.
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-Notably, critics have questioned why the league did not release a report by the outside lawyer hired to investigate the Commanders. Documents released this month by the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee, which is investigating the Commanders and the NFL's handling of the inquiry, showed that the league may not be able to publicly release the findings of its investigation without Snyder's explicit permission. A second document showed the Commanders requested a "written investigation" from the law firm the team hired to conduct the probe. Goodell had previously said the league couldn't release the internal investigation because the law firm presented its findings orally.
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-Jerry Jones, the league's most influential owner, was asked in November by HBO's Bob Costas whether Snyder had become "a liability" for the NFL, and he responded simply, "No." He insisted that he welcomes efforts by the committee, which has started to gather information by requesting documents and interviewing former Commanders employees about their allegations of sexual harassment and verbal abuse. "Certainly in every way does the NFL want to cooperate with anything Congress asks of it there," Jones said in the interview.
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-While saying he was satisfied with the NFL's inquiry, Jones also said he would welcome similar scrutiny of the Cowboys' front office and its practices. "As a matter of fact, on a personal basis, the more transparent, the more you're behind the scenes, the more you're involved, to me, the more you enjoy the game," Jones said. "I think when we ask the country to be as interested in pro football as you are, then you should expect those kinds of questions. And certainly, social issues are a huge part of our lives today."
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-_Don Van Natta Jr. is a senior writer for ESPN. Reach him at Don.VanNatta@espn.com. On Twitter, his handle is @DVNJr. ESPN's Terrika Foster-Brasby, Maya A. Jones, Greg Amante and John Mastroberardino contributed to this report._
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-Date: 2022-10-24
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-Link: https://www.deseret.com/u-s-world/2022/10/14/23361485/cuban-missile-crisis-sixty-years-anniversary-don-duff-nuclear-weapons-russia-ukraine
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-# Cuban missile crisis: The man who saw too much
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-Three stories beneath the ground, in a bunker equipped with a thick metal door like a bank vault, a young, blue-eyed Airman 1st Class reported for his usual midnight shift.
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-He knew this night, October 15, 1962, could be consequential, though plenty of others had been, too. As a photo interpreter with the Strategic Air Command stationed at Offutt Air Force Base outside of Omaha, Nebraska, Don Duff had helped discover previously unknown missile sites in Siberia and Mongolia using images from the satellites that constituted America’s surveillance response to the Soviet Union’s Sputnik I — the first successful, Earth-orbiting satellite, which marked the beginning of the space race and a new era of the Cold War.
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-President John F. Kennedy amid the Cuban missile crises, in the fall of 1962.
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-Bettmann via Getty Images
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-Now, five years later, the U.S. remained deeply distrustful of the Soviets. Including the nation’s intelligence apparatus, which for several years had taken a particular interest in Cuba. The 1959 Cuban revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power had revealed its Communist character, and the spectacular failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 had entrenched not only Castro’s government but its alliance with Moscow. And Moscow, it had become clear, was prepared to exploit that partnership.
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-A since-declassified CIA report dated August 22, 1962, detailed a military buildup on the island starting in at least late July. Informants reported that Soviet ships were hauling in huge amounts of military equipment very quickly — a first outside the Soviet bloc. “Clearly,” the report concluded, “something new and different is taking place.” What exactly that something was, though, the U.S. government wasn’t sure.
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-To find out, it began deploying U-2 spy planes to conduct surveillance of Cuba. On the night of October 13, at 11:30 p.m., Pacific Time, U-2 pilot Richard Heyser took off from Edwards Air Force Base in California in a newly modified aircraft and flew over Arizona, New Mexico and Texas en route to western Cuba. With crystal-clear skies, he turned on his cameras as he darted in and out of Cuban airspace, hoping to avoid the deadly consequences of Soviet anti-aircraft missiles. Six minutes and 928 photos later, Heyser turned toward Florida and landed at McCoy Air Force Base. Representatives from the CIA, as well as Strategic Air Command’s director of intelligence, Lt. Gen. Robert Smith, awaited him.
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-> The Cuban missile crisis has renewed relevance this year, with the war in Ukraine arguably bringing the world the closest it’s been to nuclear conflict since 1962.
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-Duff admits this is where the history gets murky. Most textbooks and government reports skip over how what happened next unfolded. But 60 years after those fateful days brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction, Duff, now 83, with a few wispy strands of white hair jutting from his pink scalp and a slight shake in his hands, maintains his place in history.
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-That history has renewed relevance this year, with the war in Ukraine — and Russia not-so-subtly implying its potential use of nukes — arguably bringing the world the closest it’s been to nuclear conflict since 1962. Duff sighs at the prospect. He knows better than just about any living American how close we’ve come in the past, and remains very proud of what he did to prevent such a catastrophe back in ’62. With a navy-blue veteran cap commemorating his service in the Cuban missile crisis perched atop his head — a cap he custom-made himself — the longtime Utah resident repeats what he’s been repeating for decades. He repeats what’s been playing on loop in his mind all that time, something that the authors of history books on the crisis never acknowledge: Don Duff found the missiles. He identified them first.
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-Don Duff grew up in the shadow of World War II — the era of that unique species of hero, the American G.I. Duff was fixated on such heroism from the time he was five or six. “I used to be able to sing all the songs,” he says with pride. Perhaps it started with his older brother, who’d served in the Navy. Perhaps it started by reading American history texts. Or maybe he was inspired by his own family’s history, which he says goes back to the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Civil War. “I had a strong sense of patriotism,” he says, “so I figured it was my duty to enlist and serve my country.”
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-Don Duff in Salt Lake City, July 2022, nearly 60 years after he identified a Soviet missile in an image taken high above Cuba.
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-Laura Seitz for the Deseret News
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-He did so at 20 years old, opting for basic training at Lackland Air Force Base, outside of San Antonio. On the ride down, as far as he could tell, he was the only person in his batch of recruits who’d volunteered; everyone else had been drafted or forced into it by some other means. Perhaps that’s why his drill instructor made him the barracks chief, in charge of 40 soon-to-be soldiers. He didn’t love the idea; he was shy, he admits. But he agreed, and he can’t argue with the results. “The military made me speak out,” he says, “and stand by my values.”
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-When the time came to pick a specialty, the drill instructors recommended he become one of them. But he liked photography, so he opted to specialize in aerial photo interpretation instead. That meant three months at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas.
-
-Once, in the middle of a hot Texas summer, he was standing at the front of a line of stationary soldiers and felt something hit him in the back. The guy behind him had passed out from the heat. Duff tried to help him, but his instructor told him to get back into position. “No sir, I can’t do that,” he remembers saying. “I take care of my men.” Such moments made him confident that should the time arise to say something important — something his commanders, his country or even the world needed to know — he’d be prepared.
-
-“That stuck with me. I didn’t think I could speak out like that,” he says. “But you learn.”
-
----
-
-Duff turned 24 years old on the day Heyser’s U-2 flight snapped the first photos of western Cuba. His birthday party was at a friend’s trailer house, off base, where he enjoyed a home-cooked dinner and a cake. “I guess I’ll head back to the base and get ready for my midnight shift,” he told his friends.
-
-The facility where his unit processed photos was among the most secure in the country. To reach it, he needed to walk into the headquarters of Strategic Air Command and show identification to a watchful guard. That granted him access to an elevator, which he took three floors down into the earth. Another guard waited to perform another inspection, which granted him access to a hallway. Down that hallway, he took a left turn toward the Command Center. The photo interpretation lab was right beside it. To gain entrance, a person needed not only top-secret clearance, but access to a rotating code word. Duff knew this procedure well. One time, while on guard duty inside the bank vault-like door, he heard someone buzzing in from the outside. “Who’s there?” Duff called through a keyhole latch. “This is General Smith,” came the answer — Strategic Air Command’s director of intelligence.
-
-“Oh, good morning general,” Duff called back. “What’s the password?”
-
-“This is General Smith, I don’t need a password,” he answered, followed by a thunderstorm of expletives. “Who the hell do you think I am,” Duff remembers him saying, “Mickey Mouse?”
-
-Duff didn’t budge, and Smith left fuming, promising punishment to come. Duff reported the incident to his commanding officer. “You probably would’ve caught some hell if you’d have let him in,” the colonel told him. “I’ll take care of it.” Duff never heard about it again.
-
-> “That was actually a major motivator for guys like me. ‘If you work hard, you could be a hero like Don Duff.’” — Robert King, retired air force lieutenant colonel
-
-Luckily, no one would bother them as October 14 wore on into the next day. Using machines called “Iteks” — imagine a big-screen TV with a large hand-crank to roll the film through and various knobs and joysticks to zoom in and adjust — two crews pored over Heyser’s snapshots in a cramped darkroom.
-
-Prior to Duff’s shift some lower-resolution film had been sent to Offutt, and one of Duff’s colleagues, a former roommate, had taken a look at the image during the day shift and identified missile trailers. Now Duff instructed the technicians to focus on that particular installation. At around 2 a.m., he noticed something. “Let’s zoom in on this picture,” he told a fellow interpreter. “You see this missile trailer? It looks like part of this missile is sticking out of the trailer. Maybe they’re unloading it.” The missile in question appeared to be covered with canvas, but his eyes were well trained; he could make out the exposed edge. And using knowledge of Soviet weaponry, he identified it as an SS-4 medium-range ballistic missile, capable of delivering a nuclear warhead from Washington, D.C., to San Antonio, and anywhere in between.
-
----
-
-In the immediate aftermath, Duff had no way of knowing what was happening behind the scenes, at the highest levels of American government. He had no way of knowing that, at 8:45 in the morning on October 16 — at least according to the official history — national security adviser McGeorge Bundy informed President John F. Kennedy of the missiles, leading Kennedy to call an emergency meeting of his top advisers in the White House Cabinet Room at 11:45 that same morning. At that first “ExCom” meeting, featuring the secretaries of defense, treasury and state; the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff; and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, among others, President Kennedy decided that the missiles had to be removed, without question. Before long, the rest of the world would know that imperative, too.
-
-On October 22, at 7 p.m. Eastern time, Kennedy [addressed the nation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYVPx3x3oCg) from the Oval Office. “Within the past week, unmistakable evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation on that imprisoned island,” he told the country. “Upon receiving the first preliminary hard information of this nature last Tuesday morning at 9 a.m., I directed that our surveillance be stepped up.”
-
-Duff, watching from a TV in a barracks breakroom at Offutt, seized on “unmistakable evidence” and “preliminary hard information.” He’d spent the past week poring over more photographs from Cuba, identifying more potential missile sites. “We knew it was pretty tense, and we knew that what he (Kennedy) was saying — ‘We have discovered missile sites in Cuba’ — that was our work,” Duff says. In his head, he thought, “We’re the ones who gave him that.”
-
-Over the next seven days, Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev exchanged nine official letters while also sparring through [various backchannels](https://www.cfr.org/blog/twe-remembers-adlai-stevenson-dresses-down-soviet-ambassador-un-cuban-missile-crisis-day-ten). At Offutt and at military bases around the country, the U.S. prepared for war. Offutt had gone to DEFCON 3 on October 20 and to DEFCON 2 on October 24, meaning that nuclear war was near.
-
-Planes were in the air at all times, heading toward Soviet territory, turning back near the border until the order was given to proceed with an attack. Offutt was home to a refueling squadron, and one morning, after Duff had finished his shift at 8 a.m. and was walking the quarter mile to the chow hall, he noticed one of those planes — a massive Boeing KC-135 — rumbling down the 10,000-foot runway. “It was really going,” he remembers. “You could hear the motors.” And it just barely made it off the ground, he recalls, given how heavily loaded it was with fuel. Nuclear war loomed as heavily as it ever had. The Strategic Air Command headquarters, he’d been assured, was very well-built; strong enough, in fact, to withstand a direct hit if you’re underground. “Yeah,” Duff thought, “but how do you get out from underground?”
-
-> “(The CIA) claims credit for everything. The Air Force was never given credit for this stuff, and neither was our unit.” — Don Duff
-
-On October 27, Russian forces shot down Rudolf Anderson Jr.’s U-2 during another reconnaissance flight over Cuba, killing the pilot. To make matters worse, another U-2 flying a mission in Alaska got off course and ended up in Soviet territory, prompting the Soviets to scramble their fighters, and prompting the Americans to do the same. What followed became known as “Black Saturday” — in the words of Kennedy aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “the most dangerous moment in human history.” Kennedy understood exactly what was happening; his experience as a veteran of World War II had taught him that regardless of a commander’s intentions, randomness — mistakes, misfires, disobeyed orders — were endemic to warfare. In this situation, though, the burden of that entropy could mean literal human extinction.
-
-Duff, who believed an invasion of Cuba was imminent, made an unusual request of his commanding officer the following day. With the crisis spiraling out of control, he’d heard rumors that the invasion would take place around 9 a.m. “I know we’re supposed to get off at 8 o’clock,” he said, “but with the tenseness outside, can I stay in and clean the rooms for a couple hours?”
-
----
-
-The Death of Anderson, the U-2 pilot, proved a turning point. Both Kennedy and Khrushchev realized the situation was evolving into something they couldn’t guide. On October 28, they [struck a deal](https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/jfk-in-history/cuban-missile-crisis): Kennedy pledged that the U.S. would not invade Cuba; in exchange, the Soviets would dismantle and remove the missiles. (The U.S. also agreed to remove its own missiles from Turkey at a later date, though that detail wasn’t revealed until decades later.) Duff personally breathed a sigh of relief in early November, as he continued reviewing surveillance footage from Cuba. “We could see,” he recalls, “that they were being dismantled.”
-
-Kennedy visited Offutt that December to thank the Air Force for its contributions during the Cuban missile crisis. “The amount of flights made during that period of time, the amount of men that were involved, was a record unparalleled by any country in the history of air power,” Kennedy said during [his public remarks](https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKWHA/1962/JFKWHA-146-006/JFKWHA-146-006). “There is no doubt that it contributed greatly to the maintenance of the peace and the security of the United States and those countries associated with us. … We are very much indebted to you all.” Duff couldn’t attend himself, but he did earn a special ribbon that he still keeps pinned to his Air Force Blues. And he also heard secondhand that in off-the-record remarks, Kennedy thanked the Air Force for discovering the missiles.
-
-If Kennedy did believe the Air Force first spotted the missiles, that’s not what most history books recount. Most history books on the crisis say that the CIA, not Duff or his beloved Air Force unit, discovered the missiles.
-
- 
-
-Fidel Castro addresses his nation in 1962, warning Cuban citizens of the measures taken by the U.S. at the height of the missile crisis.
-
-Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
-
- Phil Carradice’s book, “The Cuban Missile Crisis,” sums up the question of missile identification in one sentence: “The images were studied by experts at the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Centre.” A book of declassified documents related to the crisis, “The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962,” adds: “By the following afternoon photographic interpreters would notify top CIA officials that the mission had obtained definitive photographic evidence of Soviet medium-range ballistic missile bases.”
-
-It frustrates Duff to no end that his role never became common knowledge. He’s spent decades combing through scholarship and research to find the evidence he needs to prove his place in history, but so far, he hasn’t found it. “(The CIA) claims credit for everything,” he says. “The Air Force was never given credit for this stuff, and neither was our unit.”
-
-Even [the Air Force’s own account](https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/dobbs/SAC_history.pdf) of the situation, “Strategic Air Command Operations in the Cuban Crisis of 1962,” notes that once Heyser landed in Florida, the film from his flight was “immediately unloaded and personally flown to Washington.” Duff doesn’t dispute that; he just insists that there’s more to the story. He insists that Heyser’s film also made its way to Offutt later that day, and that he quickly identified the missile. He insists that Kennedy must have known about them shortly thereafter, given that the CIA didn’t identify the weapons until some 14 hours later.
-
-> It frustrates Duff to no end that his role never became common knowledge.
-
-In his own written recollections of the crisis, Duff said that the official timeline “doesn’t jibe with my recollection of (Strategic Air Command) communications to D.C., on October 14 and 15.” It’s possible that the U.S. intelligence apparatus waited to inform Kennedy until Duff’s finding was confirmed; the spirit of rivalry between the CIA and Air Force intelligence was well known in those days. Regardless, “The CIA and other people deny that it ever happened,” he explains.
-
-“All I can tell you is that this sticks in your mind like anything in life that you remember. At 2 o’clock in the morning on October 15, I saw this missile,” he says. “I was there.”
-
-Since-declassified Air Force photos do [show](https://www.secretsdeclassified.af.mil/News/Photos/igphoto/2000593877/), without question, Strategic Air Command personnel examining reconnaissance photos during the Cuban missile crisis. And Duff’s discovery was at least well known by word of mouth. Robert King, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who served as a photo interpreter at Offutt in 1971 and ’72 and eventually moved to Salt Lake City, explains the potential discrepancy in the official narrative this way: “I can’t tell you who was first or not, because one of the things we did — that was very wise — was to create a competition between the CIA and Strategic Air Command,” he says. “That competition drove guys to want to be the first.” And even if he never got official credit, the airmen who followed Duff at Offutt knew his name and knew what he did. “That was actually a major motivator for guys like me,” says King. “‘If you work hard, you could be a hero like Don Duff.’”
-
----
-
-After retiring from the military, Duff enrolled at Utah State University and began a notable career in forestry and fisheries. Using his skills and Air Force connections, he managed to get U-2 pilots to conduct test flights over mountain ranges in Utah’s desert country; they had to do test flights anyway, he figured, so why not make them synergistic? Using images from those flights, he found isolated streams that he then tested for the presence of certain strains of fish that were thought to be extinct; he found two — Bonneville and Lahontan cutthroat trout. Eventually, his efforts were [recognized](https://www.deseret.com/1988/8/7/18774306/epa-recognizes-4-for-protection-efforts) by the Environmental Protection Agency, and he [won](https://www.makemycontest.com/pcsite/pic/mine/DonaldDuffPDF.pdf) numerous awards, including from the American Fisheries Society and Trout Unlimited. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [touted](https://www.facebook.com/USFWSFisheries/photos/a.119116710534/10159205134435535/?type=3) his achievements on its Facebook page just last year. But despite the notoriety gained via his career’s success, he’s never forgotten his role in the Cuban missile crisis.
-
-Richard Heyser, the pilot whose U-2 photos of Cuba sparked the crisis, feared he would be blamed for it. “I kind of felt like I was going to be looked at as the one who started the whole thing,” he [told](https://www.theledger.com/story/news/2005/10/10/pilot-i-was-afraid-id-be-blamed-for-world-war-iii/25906192007/) The Associated Press in 2005. “I wasn’t anxious to have that reputation.” Perhaps it’s because his name has largely been lost to history, but Duff never felt that way. He was — and still is — happy to have played a role. He did exactly what he was supposed to do, and in so doing helped keep the United States secure.
-
- 
-
-Fidel Castro, left, with the USSR’s General Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev.
-
-Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
-
-Sixty years since his discovery, he’s seated in a small room at a library in Salt Lake City. He splits his time between a home nearby and a cabin in Nevada. He still thinks about the missile crisis often. Still wears the baseball cap he had custom-made, commemorating his service. Still talks about his involvement in the affair. He was once invited to a panel on Kennedy at the University of Utah, where he gave a presentation about the Cold War. He was disappointed by how little the students knew of what happened, even though he could hardly blame them given their dates of birth. But he wants them to know. Especially now, with tensions so high in Ukraine and Russia.
-
-“The younger generation … ought to realize what went on, and that it could happen again,” Duff says, pressing his brown hiking boot up against the foot of a Formica table. “We were this close to World War III.” He holds his trembling fingertips about an inch apart. Duff is not a man who startles easily, but now his blue eyes glance up at the fluorescent-lit ceiling, then back down to offer a warning: “It was scary,” he says. “It was scary.”
-
-Duff doesn’t know how many more anniversaries he’ll be able to mark, but this year, he’ll be traveling to California in October for a 60-year reunion. Surrounded by U-2 pilots at the program’s Beale Air Force Base headquarters, he’s pretty sure he’ll be the only photo interpreter left. He’ll spend the weekend attending keynote breakfasts, presentations, speeches from pilots. Among his own unique species, you can bet he’ll have plenty of stories to share.
-
-And you can bet, too, that he’ll be wearing his custom hat.
-
-*This story appears in the October issue of* [*Deseret Magazine*](https://www.deseret.com/magazine)*.* [*Learn more about how to subscribe*](https://pages.deseret.com/subscribe?utm_source=deseret&utm_medium=deseret_com&utm_campaign=learn_more_subscribe_footers).
-
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-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
\ No newline at end of file
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-# DEA’s most corrupt agent: Parties, sex amid 'unwinnable war'
-
-SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — José Irizarry accepts that he’s known as the most corrupt agent in U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration history, admitting he “became another man” in conspiring with Colombian cartels to build a lavish lifestyle of expensive sports cars, Tiffany jewels and paramours around the world.
-
-But as he used his final hours of freedom to tell his story to The Associated Press, Irizarry says he won’t go down for this alone, accusing some long-trusted DEA colleagues of joining him in [skimming millions of dollars](https://apnews.com/article/colombia-miami-drug-cartels-us-news-ap-top-news-6c490312bef4c0600002c539d8c80cba) from drug money laundering stings to fund a decade’s worth of luxury overseas travel, fine dining, top seats at sporting events and frat house-style debauchery.
-
-The way Irizarry tells it, dozens of other federal agents, prosecutors, informants and in some cases cartel smugglers themselves were all in on the three-continent joyride known as “Team America” that chose cities for money laundering pick-ups mostly for party purposes or to coincide with Real Madrid soccer or Rafael Nadal tennis matches. That included stops along the way in VIP rooms of Caribbean strip joints, Amsterdam’s red-light district and aboard a Colombian yacht that launched with plenty of booze and more than a dozen prostitutes.
-
-“We had free access to do whatever we wanted,” the 48-year-old Irizarry told the AP in a series of interviews before beginning a 12-year [federal prison sentence](https://apnews.com/article/crime-colombia-us-drug-enforcement-administration-bfff536c11d7324af934c5ee003555b9). “We would generate money pick-ups in places we wanted to go. And once we got there it was about drinking and girls.”
-
-José Irizarry accepts that he’s the most corrupt agent in U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration history. But he says he wasn’t alone in conspiring with Colombian cartel members to use the war on drugs to fund a lavish, decadent lifestyle.
-
-All this revelry was rooted, Irizarry said, in a crushing realization among DEA agents around the world that there’s nothing they can do to make a dent in the drug war anyway. Only nominal concern was given to actually building cases or stemming a record flow of illegal cocaine and opioids into the United States that has driven more than 100,000 drug overdose deaths a year.
-
-“You can’t win an unwinnable war. DEA knows this and the agents know this,” Irizarry said. “There’s so much dope leaving Colombia. And there’s so much money. We know we’re not making a difference.”
-
-“The drug war is a game. ... It was a very fun game that we were playing.”
-
-Irizarry’s story, which some former colleagues have attacked as a fictionalized attempt to reduce his sentence, came in days of contrite, bitter, sometimes tearful interviews with the AP in the historic quarter of his native San Juan. It was much the same account he gave the FBI in lengthy debriefings and sealed court papers obtained by the AP after he pleaded guilty in 2020 to 19 corruption counts, including money laundering and bank fraud.
-
-But after years of portraying Irizarry as a [rogue agent](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-dea-special-agent-sentenced-prison-money-laundering-and-fraud-scheme) who acted alone, U.S. Justice Department investigators have in recent months begun closely following his confessional roadmap, questioning as many as two-dozen current and former DEA agents and prosecutors accused by Irizarry of turning a blind eye to his flagrant abuses and sometimes joining in.
-
-With little fanfare, the inquiry has focused on a jet-setting former partner of Irizarry and several other trusted DEA colleagues assigned to international money laundering. And at least three current and former federal prosecutors have faced questioning about Irizarry’s raucous parties, including one still in a senior role in Miami, another who appeared on TV’s “The Bachelorette” and a former Ohio prosecutor who was confirmed to serve as the U.S. attorney in Cleveland this year [before abruptly backing out](https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2022/05/marisa-darden-withdraws-from-us-attorney-position-after-senate-confirmation-before-taking-office.html) for unspecified family reasons.
-
-The expanding investigation comes as the nation’s premier narcotics law enforcement agency has been rattled by repeated misconduct scandals in its 4,600-agent ranks, from one who [took bribes from traffickers](https://apnews.com/article/arkansas-little-rock-be77260621f384e2c979cfd2e41d3810) to another accused of [leaking confidential information](https://apnews.com/article/us-drug-enforcement-administration-florida-miami-conspiracy-082ea2a3edbc347ffa35510cfa636755) to law enforcement targets. But by far the biggest black eye is Irizarry, whose wholesale betrayal of the badge is at the heart of an ongoing external review of the DEA’s sprawling foreign operations in 69 countries.
-
-The once-standout agent has accused some former colleagues in the DEA’s Miami-based Group 4 of lining their pockets and falsifying records to replenish a slush fund used for foreign jaunts over the better part of a decade, until his resignation in 2018. He accused a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent of accepting a $20,000 bribe. And recently, the FBI, Office of Inspector General and a federal prosecutor interviewed Irizarry in prison about other federal employees and allegations he raised about misconduct in maritime interdictions.
-
-“It was too outlandish for them to believe this is actually happening,” Irizarry said of investigators. “The indictment paints a picture of me, the corrupt agent that did this entire scheme. But it doesn’t talk about the rest of DEA. I wasn’t the mastermind.”
-
-The federal judge in Tampa who sentenced Irizarry last year seemed to agree, saying other agents corrupted by the “allure of easy money” need to be investigated. “This has to stop,” Judge Charlene Honeywell told prosecutors, adding Irizarry was “the one who got caught but it is apparent to this court that there are others.”
-
-The Justice Department declined to comment. A DEA spokesperson said: “José Irizarry is a criminal who violated his oath as a federal law enforcement officer and violated the trust of the American people. Over the past 16 months, DEA has worked vigorously to further strengthen our discipline and hiring policies to ensure the integrity and effectiveness of our essential work.”
-
-AP was able to corroborate some, but not all, of Irizarry’s accusations through thousands of confidential law enforcement records and dozens of interviews with those familiar with his claims and the ongoing investigation, including several who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss them.
-
-The probe is focused in part on George Zoumberos, one of Irizarry’s former partners who traveled overseas extensively for money laundering investigations. Irizarry told AP that Zoumberos enjoyed unfettered access to so-called commission funds and improperly tapped that money for personal purchases and unwarranted trips, using names of people that didn’t exist in DEA reports justifying the excesses.
-
-Zoumberos remained a DEA agent even after he was arrested and briefly detained on allegations of sexual assault during a trip to Madrid in 2018. He resigned only after being stripped of his gun, badge and security clearance for invoking his Fifth Amendment rights to stay silent in late 2019, when the same prosecutor who charged Irizarry summoned him to testify before a federal grand jury in Tampa.
-
-Authorities are so focused on Zoumberos that they also subpoenaed his brother, a Florida wedding photographer who traveled and partied around the world with DEA agents, and even granted him immunity to induce his cooperation. But Michael Zoumberos also refused to testify and has been jailed outside Tampa since March for “civil contempt” — an exceedingly rare pressure tactic that underscores the rising temperature of the investigation.
-
-“I didn’t do anything wrong, but I’m not going to talk about my brother,” Michael Zoumberos told AP in a jailhouse interview. “I’m basically being held as a political prisoner of the FBI. They want to coerce me into cooperating.”
-
-Some current and former DEA agents say Irizarry’s claims are overblown or flat-out fabrications. The former ICE agent scoffed at Irizarry’s accusation he took a $20,000 bribe, saying he raised early red flags about Irizarry. And the lawyer for the Zoumberos brothers says prosecutors are on a “fishing expedition” to bring more indictments because of the embarrassment of the Irizarry scandal.
-
-“Everybody they connect to José is extraneous to his thefts,” said attorney Raymond Mansolillo. “They’re looking to find a crime to fit this case as opposed to a crime that actually took place. But no matter what happens they’re going to charge somebody with something because they don’t want to come out of all of this after five years and have only charged José.”
-
-Making Irizarry’s allegations more egregious is that they came on the heels of a 2015 Inspector General’s report that slammed DEA agents for participating in [“sex parties”](https://apnews.com/article/666352da54e04840a37b5da740e1d79b) with prostitutes hired by Colombian cartels. That prompted the suspension of several agents and the retirement of Michele Leonhart, the DEA’s administrator at the time.
-
-Central to the Irizarry investigation are overly cozy relationships developed between agents and informants — strictly forbidden under federal guidelines — and loose controls on the DEA’s undercover drug money laundering operations that few Americans know exist.
-
-Every year, the DEA launders tens of millions of dollars on behalf of the world’s most-violent drug cartels through shell companies, a tactic touted in long-running overseas investigations such as Operation White Wash that resulted in more than 100 arrests and the seizure of more than $100 million and a ton of cocaine.
-
-But the DEA has also faced criticism for allowing huge amounts of money in the operations to go unseized, enabling cartels to continue plying their trade, and for failing to tightly monitor and track the stings, making it difficult to evaluate results.
-
-A [2020 Justice Department Inspector General’s report](https://apnews.com/article/colombia-miami-drug-cartels-us-news-ap-top-news-5b50fd9cb51e5737f78451686d224d8d) faulted the DEA for failing since at least 2006 to file annual reports to Congress about these stings, known as Attorney General Exempted Operations. That rebuke, coupled with the embarrassment brought on by Irizarry’s confession, prompted DEA Administrator Anne Milgram to order an outside review of the agency’s foreign operations, which is ongoing.
-
-“In the vast majority of these operations, nobody is watching,” said Bonnie Klapper, a former federal prosecutor in New York and outspoken critic of DEA money laundering. “In the Irizarry operation, nobody cared how much money they were laundering. Nobody cared that they weren’t making any cases. Nobody was minding the house. There were no controls.”
-
-Rob Feitel, another former federal prosecutor, said the DEA’s lax oversight made it easy to divert funds for all kinds of unapproved purposes. And as long as money seizures kept driving stats higher — a low bar given abundant supply — few questions were asked.
-
-“The other agents aren’t stupid. They knew there were no controls and a lot of them could have done what Irizarry did,” said Feitel, who represents a former DEA agent under scrutiny in the inquiry. “The line that separates Irizarry from the others is he did it with both hands and he did it over and over and over. He didn’t just test the waters, he took a full bath in it.”
-
-Irizarry, who speaks in a smooth patter that seamlessly switches between English and Spanish, was a federal air marshal and Border Patrol agent before joining the DEA in 2009. He said he learned the tricks of the trade as a DEA rookie from veteran cops who came up in New York City in the 1990s when cocaine flooded American streets.
-
-But another key part of his education came from Diego Marín, a longtime U.S. informant known to investigators as Colombia’s “Contraband King” for allegedly laundering dope money through imported appliances and other goods. Irizarry said Marín taught him better than any agent ever could the nuances of the black-market peso exchange used by narcotraffickers across the world.
-
-Irizarry parlayed that knowledge into a life of luxury that prosecutors say was bankrolled by $9 million he and his Colombian co-conspirators diverted from money laundering investigations.
-
-To further the scheme, Irizarry filed false reports and ordered DEA staff to wire money slated for undercover stings to international accounts he and associates controlled. Hardened informants who kept a hefty commission from every cash transfer sanctioned by the DEA also stepped in to fund some of the revelry in what amounted to illegal kickbacks.
-
-Irizarry’s spending habits quickly began to mimic the ostentatious tastes of the narcos he was tasked with targeting, with spoils including a $30,000 Tiffany diamond ring for his wife, luxury sports cars and a $767,000 home in the Colombian resort city of Cartagena. He’d travel first class to Europe with Louis Vuitton luggage and wearing a gold Hublot watch.
-
-“I was very good at what I did but I became somebody I wasn’t. ... I became a different man,” Irizarry said. “I got caught up in the lifestyle. I got caught up with the informants and partying.”
-
-Irizarry contends as many as 90% of his group’s work trips were “bogus,” dictated by partying and sporting events, not real work. And he says the U.S. government money that helped pay for it was justified in reports as “case-related — but that’s a very vague term.”
-
-Case in point: an August 2014 trip to Madrid for the Spanish Supercup soccer finals that was charged as an expense to Operation White Wash.
-
-But Irizarry told investigators there was little actual work to be done other than courtesy calls to a few friendly Spanish cops. Instead, he said, agents spent their time dining at pricey restaurants — racking up a 1,000-euro bill at one — and enjoying field-side seats for the championship match between Real and Atletico Madrid.
-
-Joining the posse of agents at the game was Michael J. Garofola, a then-Miami federal prosecutor and erstwhile contestant on “The Bachelorette” who posted a thumbs-up photo on Instagram standing next to Irizarry and another agent — all clad in white Real Madrid jerseys.
-
-“Soaking up the last bit of Spanish culture before saying adios,” he posted a few days later outside a pub.
-
-Irizarry alleged that Garofola also joined agents, cartel informants and others in the Dominican capital of Santo Domingo in 2014 for a night at a strip club called Doll House. In a memo to the court seeking a reduction in his sentence, Irizarry recalled being in the VIP room with another agent and Garofola, racking up a $2,300 bill paid for by a violent emissary of Marín with a menacing nickname to match: Iguana.
-
-Garofola said the trips included official business and he was told everything was being paid for out of DEA funds.
-
-“There were things about those trips that made me question why I was there,” Garofola told AP. “But Irizarry totally used me to ratify this behavior. I was brand new and green and eager to work money laundering cases. He used me just by my being there.”
-
-When Irizarry was awarded with a transfer to Cartagena in 2015, the party followed. The agent’s rooftop pool, with sweeping ocean views, became an obligatory stop for visiting agents and prosecutors from the U.S.
-
-One that Irizarry recalls seeing there was Marisa Darden, a prosecutor from Cleveland who he says traveled to Colombia in September 2017 and was at a gathering where he witnessed two DEA agents taking ecstasy. Irizarry says he didn’t see Darden taking drugs.
-
-Federal authorities have taken a keen interest in that party, quizzing Irizarry about it as recently as this summer. At least one DEA agent who attended has been placed on administrative leave.
-
-Darden went on to become a partner in a high-powered Cleveland law firm and last year was nominated by President Joe Biden to be the first Black woman U.S. attorney in northern Ohio. But soon after she was confirmed, Darden abruptly withdrew in May, citing only “the importance of prioritizing family.”
-
-Darden refused to answer questions from AP but her attorney said in a statement that she “cooperated fully” with the federal investigation into “alleged illegal activity by federal agents,” an inquiry separate from the FBI background check she faced in the confirmation process.
-
-“There is no evidence that she participated in any illegal activity,” Darden’s attorney, James Wooley, wrote in an email to AP.
-
-A White House official said the allegations did not come up in the vetting process. And U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat who put Darden’s name up for the post, was also unaware of the allegations in the nomination process, his office said, and had he known “would have withdrawn his support.”
-
-Another federal prosecutor named by Irizarry and questioned by federal agents was Monique Botero, who was recently promoted to head the narcotics division at the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami. Irizarry told investigators and the AP that Botero joined a group of agents, informants, Colombian police and prostitutes for a party on a luxury yacht.
-
-Botero’s lawyers acknowledge she was on the yacht in September 2015 for what she thought was a cruise organized by local police, but they say “categorically and unequivocally, Monique never saw or participated in anything illegal or unethical.”
-
-“Irizarry has admitted that he lied to everyone around him for various nefarious reasons. These lies about Monique are part of a similar pattern,” said her attorney, Benjamin Greenberg. “It is appalling that Monique is being maligned and defamed by someone as disgraced as Irizarry.”
-
-Irizarry’s downfall was as sudden as it was inevitable — the outgrowth of a lavish lifestyle that raised too many eyebrows, even among colleagues willing to bend the rules themselves. Eventually, he was betrayed by one of his closest confidants, a Venezuelan-American informant who confessed to diverting funds from the undercover stings.
-
-“José’s problem is that he took things to the point of stupidity and trashed the party for everyone else,” said one defense attorney who traveled with Irizarry and other agents. “But there’s no doubt he didn’t act alone.”
-
-Since his arrest, Irizarry has written a self-published book titled “Getting Back on Track,” part of his attempt to own up to his mistakes and pursue a simpler path after bringing so much shame upon himself and his family.
-
-Recently, his Colombian-born wife — who was spared jail time on a money laundering charge in exchange for Irizarry’s confession — told him she was seeking a divorce.
-
-Adding to Irizarry’s despair is that he is still the only one to pay such a heavy price for a pattern of misconduct that he says the DEA allowed to fester. To date, prosecutors have yet to charge any other agents, and several former colleagues have quietly retired rather than endure the disgrace of possibly being fired.
-
-“I’ve told them everything I know,” Irizarry said. “All they have to do is dig.”
-
-\_\_\_
-
-Aritz Parra in Madrid and Chris Megerian in Washington contributed to this report.
-
-\_\_\_
-
-Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org. Follow the reporters on Twitter: @JimMustian and @APJoshGoodman.
-
-
-
-
----
-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.03 News/Derinkuyu Mysterious underground city in Turkey found in man’s basement.md b/00.03 News/Derinkuyu Mysterious underground city in Turkey found in man’s basement.md
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-
-Tag: ["📜", "🇹🇷", "🏛️"]
-Date: 2022-08-28
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-08-28
-Link: https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/derinkuyu-underground-city/
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
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-
-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-08-29]]
-
----
-
-
-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-DerinkuyuMysteriousundergroundcityinTurkeyNSave
-
-
-
-# Derinkuyu: Mysterious underground city in Turkey found in man’s basement
-
-
-
-A hot air balloon emblazoned with the Turkish flag sailing past some fairy chimneys, a rock formation typical for Cappadocia in central Turkey and one of its main tourist attractions. Another are its ancient underground cities, of which Derinkuyu is the largest. ([Credit](https://www.gettyimages.dk/detail/news-photo/turkis-flagged-hot-air-balloon-the-earth-pillars-on-august-news-photo/179421367?adppopup=true): Murat Asil / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images)
-
-We live cheek by jowl with undiscovered worlds. Sometimes the barriers that separate us are thick, sometimes they’re thin, and sometimes they’re breached. That’s when a wardrobe turns into a portal to Narnia, a rabbit hole leads to Wonderland, and a [Raquel Welch poster](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABpeLNCuE3w) is all that separates a prison cell from the tunnel to freedom.
-
-## A fateful swing of the hammer
-
-Those are all fictional examples. But in 1963, that barrier was breached for real. Taking a sledgehammer to a wall in his basement, a man in the Turkish town of Derinkuyu got more home improvement than he bargained for. Behind the wall, he found a tunnel. And that led to more tunnels, eventually connecting a multitude of halls and chambers. It was a huge underground complex, abandoned by its inhabitants and undiscovered until that fateful swing of the hammer.
-
-The anonymous Turk — no report mentions his name — had found a vast subterranean city, up to 18 stories and 280 feet (76 m) deep and large enough to house 20,000 people. Who built it, and why? When was it abandoned, and by whom? History and geology provide some answers.
-
-## Fantastically craggy Cappadocia
-
-Geology first. Derinkuyu is located in Cappadocia, a region in the Turkish heartland famed for the fantastic cragginess of its landscape, which is dotted with so-called fairy chimneys. Those tall stone towers are the result of the erosion of a rock type known as *tuff*. Created out of volcanic ash and covering much of the region, that stone, despite its name, is not so tough.
-
-
-
-Well-lit interior view of the otherwise dark and gloomy underground city of Derinkuyu. ([Credit](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Derinkuyu_Underground_City_9908_Nevit_Enhancer.jpg): Nevit Dilmen / Wikimedia Commons, [CC BY-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en))
-
-Taking a cue from the wind and rain, the locals for millennia have dug their own holes in the soft stone for underground dwellings, storage rooms, temples, and refuges. Cappadocia numbers hundreds of subterranean dwellings, with about 40 consisting of at least two levels. None is as large, or by now as famous, as Derinkuyu.
-
-## Hittites, Phrygians, or early Christians?
-
-The historical record has little definitive to say about Derinkuyu’s origins. Some archaeologists speculate that the oldest part of the complex could have been dug about 2000 BC by the Hittites, the people who dominated the region at that time, or else the Phrygians, around 700 BC. Others claim that local Christians built the city in the first centuries AD.
-
-
-
-Subscribe for counterintuitive, surprising, and impactful stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday
-
-Whoever they were, they had great skill: the soft rock makes tunneling relatively easy, but cave-ins are a big risk. Hence, there is a need for large support pillars. None of the floors at Derinkuyu have ever collapsed.
-
-Two things about the underground complex are more certain. First, the main purpose of the monumental effort must have been to hide from enemy armies — hence, for example, the rolling stones used to close the city from the inside. Second, the final additions and alterations to the complex, which bear a distinctly Christian imprint, date from the 6th to the 10th century AD.
-
-## Hitting bottom in the dungeon
-
-When shut off from the world above, the city was ventilated by a total of more than 15,000 shafts, most about 10 cm wide and reaching down into the first and second levels of the city. This ensured sufficient ventilation down to the eighth level.
-
-The upper levels were used as living and sleeping quarters — which makes sense, as they were the best ventilated ones. The lower levels were mainly used for storage, but they also contained a dungeon.
-
-In between were spaces used for all kinds of purposes: there was room for a wine press, domestic animals, a convent, and small churches. The most famous one is the cruciform church on the seventh level.
-
-## If buckets could speak
-
-Some shafts went much deeper and doubled as wells. Even as the underground city lay undiscovered, the local Turkish population of Derinkuyu used these to get their water, not knowing the hidden world their buckets passed through. Incidentally, *derin kuyu* is Turkish for “deep well.”
-
-
-
-The subterranean city could house up to 20,000 people, plenty of domestic animals, and enough supplies to wait out an invading army. ([Credit](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reconstruction-Derinkuyu-underground.jpg): Yasir999, [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en))
-
-Another theory says the underground city served as a temperate refuge for the region’s extreme seasons. Cappadocian winters can get very cold, the summers extremely hot. Below ground, the ambient temperature is constant and moderate. As a bonus, it is easier to store and keep harvest yields away from moisture and thieves.
-
-Whatever the relevance of its other functions, the underground city was much in use as a refuge for the local population during the wars between the Byzantines and the Arabs, which lasted from the late 8th to the late 12th centuries; during the Mongol raids in the 14th century; and after the region was conquered by the Ottoman Turks.
-
-## Leaving the “soft” place
-
-A visiting Cambridge linguist visiting the area in the early 20th century attests that the local Greek population still reflexively sought shelter in the underground city when news of massacres elsewhere reached them.
-
-Following the Greco-Turkish War (1919-22), the two countries agreed to exchange minorities in 1923, in order to ethnically homogenize their populations. The Cappadocian Greeks of Derinkuyu left too, and took with them both the knowledge of the underground city and the Greek name of the place: *Mαλακοπια (Malakopia)*, which means “soft” — possibly a reference to the pliancy of the local stone.
-
-Derinkuyu is now one of Cappadocia’s biggest tourist attractions, so it no longer counts as an undiscovered world. But perhaps there’s one on the other side of your basement wall. Now, where did you put that sledgehammer?
-
-**Strange Maps #1139**
-
-*For more underground fun, see also Strange Maps #[119](https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/119-all-elephant-and-no-castle-a-secret-bestiary-of-the-london-tube-map/), #[443](https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/443-secret-caves-of-the-lizard-people/) and #[1083](https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/paris-catacombs/).*
-
-*Follow Strange Maps on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/VeryStrangeMaps) and [Facebook](https://facebook.com/VeryStrangeMaps).*
-
-
-
-
----
-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
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diff --git a/00.03 News/Deshaun Watson’s Massages Were Enabled by the Texans and a Spa Owner.md b/00.03 News/Deshaun Watson’s Massages Were Enabled by the Texans and a Spa Owner.md
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-
-Tag: ["🥉", "🏈", "🚫", "🇺🇸"]
-Date: 2022-06-14
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-06-14
-Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/sports/football/deshaun-watson.html
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
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-
-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-06-18]]
-
----
-
-
-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-DeshaunWatsonsMassagesWereEnabledNSave
-
-
-
-# Deshaun Watson’s Massages Were Enabled by the Texans and a Spa Owner
-
-## How the Texans and a Spa Enabled Deshaun Watson’s Troubling Behavior
-
-Watson met at least 66 women for massages over a 17-month period, far more than previously known. He had help from the Houston Texans, including nondisclosure agreements, in making appointments.
-
-
-
-Credit...Mel Haasch
-
-June 7, 2022
-
-The accusations have been frequent and startling: more than two dozen women have said the football star Deshaun Watson harassed or assaulted them during massage appointments that [Watson and his lawyers insist were innocuous](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/sports/football/deshaun-watson-browns-lawsuits.html).
-
-[Two grand juries in Texas](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/24/sports/football/deshaun-watson-texas-grand-jury.html) this year declined to charge him criminally and, while the N.F.L. considers whether to discipline him, he has gotten another job, signing a [five-year, $230 million fully guaranteed contract](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/sports/football/deshaun-watson-traded-browns.html) to play quarterback for the Cleveland Browns this coming season.
-
-It is time, Watson and his representatives say, for everyone to move on.
-
-Yet a New York Times examination of records, including depositions and evidence for the civil lawsuits as well as interviews of some of the women, showed that Watson engaged in more questionable behavior than previously known.
-
-The Times’s review also showed that Watson’s conduct was enabled, knowingly or not, by the team he played for at the time, the Houston Texans, which provided the venue Watson used for some of the appointments. A team representative also furnished him with a nondisclosure agreement after a woman who is now suing him threatened online to expose his behavior.
-
-Rusty Hardin, Watson’s lawyer, said his client “continues to vehemently deny” the allegations in the lawsuits. He declined to respond in detail to The Times’s questions, but said in a statement, “We can say when the real facts are known this issue will appear in a different light.”
-
-The Texans did not respond to specific questions about Watson’s use of team resources. They said in a statement that they first learned of the allegations against him in March 2021, have cooperated with investigators and “will continue to do so.”
-
-A spokesman for the Browns said the team had no immediate comment. An N.F.L. spokesman declined to comment, saying the Watson matter is under review.
-
-Image
-
-Credit...Ryan Kang, via Associated Press
-
-Watson has said publicly that he hired about 40 different therapists across his five seasons in Houston, but The Times’s reporting found that he booked appointments with at least 66 different women in just the 17 months from fall 2019 through spring 2021. A few of these additional women, speaking publicly for the first time, described experiences that undercut Watson’s insistence that he was only seeking professional massage therapy.
-
-One woman, who did not sue Watson or complain to the police, told The Times that he was persistent in his requests for sexual acts during their massage, including “begging” her to put her mouth on his penis.
-
-“I specifically had to say, ‘No, I can’t do that,’” said the woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect her family’s privacy. “And that’s when I went into asking him, ‘What is it like being famous? Like, what’s going on? You’re about to mess up everything.’”
-
-## An Appointment with an Acquaintance
-
-Before Watson was drafted by the Texans 12th overall in 2017, he was a championship-winning quarterback at Gainesville (Ga.) High School and [Clemson University](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/sports/alabama-clemson-cfp-national-championship.html).
-
-N.F.L. teams widely viewed him as a prospective franchise quarterback with no known character issues, and he seemed to be living up to his billing. When Hurricane Harvey walloped Houston in August 2017, before Watson’s rookie season, he donated his first game check to stadium cafeteria employees who were affected by the storm.
-
-Since the first wave of suits [were filed against Watson last year](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/sports/football/deshaun-watson-sexual-assault-lawsuit-allegations.html), the main allegations against him [have become familiar](https://www.nytimes.com/article/deshaun-watson-sexual-assault-lawsuit.html). Women complained that Watson turned massages sexual without their consent, including purposely touching them with his penis and coercing sexual acts.
-
-It’s not clear when he began looking for so many different women to give him massages. Hardin has said his client needed to book appointments “ad hoc” when the coronavirus pandemic began, though Watson began working with numerous women before then.
-
-Image
-
-Credit...Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle, via Associated Press
-
-Not all of the women who gave Watson massages between October 2019 and March 2021 have detailed their interactions with him. Some who have shared their experiences say they had no problems with him. Others describe troubling — and similar — behaviors.
-
-The 66 women are:
-
-- The 24 who have sued him, including two who filed suits within the last week. In the most recent suit, the woman said Watson masturbated during the massage.
-
-- A woman who sued but then withdrew the complaint because of “privacy and security concerns.”
-
-- Two women who filed criminal complaints against Watson but did not sue him.
-
-- At least 15 therapists who issued statements of support for Watson at the request of his lawyers and gave him massages during that period.
-
-- At least four therapists from Genuine Touch, the massage therapy group contracted with the Texans.
-
-- Five women identified by the plaintiffs’ lawyers during the investigation for their civil suits.
-
-- At least 15 other women whose appointments with Watson were confirmed through interviews and records reviewed by The Times.
-
-
-A deeper look at the civil suits, including a review of private messages entered as evidence, shows the lengthy efforts by Watson to book massages and the methods he used to assure women that he could be trusted.
-
-One woman who sued Watson was a flight attendant who began taking massage therapy classes during the pandemic. She and Watson were in the same social circle, but Watson acknowledged in a deposition that they had never really spoken except to say hello.
-
-### Excerpts From a Deposition
-
-Tony Buzbee, the lawyer for 24 women who have sued Deshaun Watson, questioned Watson about his interactions with a flight attendant who had begun taking massage therapy classes.
-
-> Q. Can you explain why you -- you reached out to her on Instagram rather than just using a therapist you had used before?
->
-> A. Because I needed a massage therapy.
->
-> Q. Okay. You could have just used somebody you used before, right?
->
-> A. Yeah. I could have.
->
-> Q. You could -- yeah. You didn't -- but you didn't, did you?
->
-> A. I did not.
->
-> Q. You could have used the Texans, right?
->
-> A. Definitely possible.
->
-> Q. But you didn't, did you?
->
-> A. I did not.
-
-In November 2020, after a friendly exchange on Instagram, Watson saw that the woman was a massage therapist and sent a message asking for an appointment. As they struggled to work out a time, Watson told her, “Just tryna support black businesses,” a message he repeated later.
-
-Watson regularly presented himself as an ally to businesswomen. In the suit filed this week, the therapist alleged that he told her that he “really wanted to support” Black businesses, and on another occasion, he left a woman perplexed when he purchased 30 bottles of her $40 skin cleanser.
-
-In messages to the woman, whom he knew from his social circle, Watson asked to meet at The Houstonian, an upscale hotel and club where the Texans had secured a membership for him. She said she wasn’t comfortable going to a hotel because she knew Watson’s girlfriend — and indeed had once babysat her and her younger brother. The woman told Watson she wanted to keep things “professional and respectful.”
-
-“Oh most definitely always professional,” he texted. “I even have a NDA I have therapist sign too.” He was referring to the N.D.A. he had received just days earlier from a member of the Texans’ security staff. Watson didn’t explain in the text how the woman would benefit from signing a document meant to protect him.
-
-Finally, the woman suggested they meet at her mother’s home in Manvel, a 30-minute drive for Watson. He responded, “Damn thats far,” but agreed to make the trip.
-
-> Q. Did you even ask her what her experience level was?
->
-> A. No, sir. That wasn't a priority.
->
-> Q. Right. You didn't care, did you?
->
-> A. That wasn't a priority. I just wanted a massage.
->
-> Q. You didn't care what her skill level was, correct?
->
-> A. That wasn't a priority.
->
-> Q. You didn't care whether she was properly trained?
->
-> A. That wasn't my priority, sir.
-
-Watson was questioned about whether he had checked the woman’s qualifications as a massage therapist.
-
-In the civil suit the woman filed against Watson last year, she said she was uneasy with his directions to “get up in there” during the massage, but chalked it up to her inexperience and agreed to work with him again. When he ejaculated during the second appointment and then asked her for another massage later that day at the Houstonian, she first agreed, then told him she could not make it. She eventually blocked his number.
-
-## Initiating Sex
-
-Most of the women Watson saw for massages did not sue or call the police. But even some who did not complain said Watson came looking for sex.
-
-The woman who sold bottles of cleanser to Watson had a few appointments with him during the summer of 2020. This aesthetician, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect her privacy, told Watson when he booked an appointment that she was licensed only to give him a back facial. But she said in an interview with The Times that he got fully undressed and directed her toward his groin. While she said there was no sexual contact, she believed that he was seeking more than a professional massage.
-
-Watson and his lawyers have said he was only seeking massages. The lawyers have acknowledged that Watson had sexual contact with three of the women who have sued him. But the sexual acts took place after the massages, they said, and were initiated by the women. Asked whether he was asserting that Watson never had sexual contact with any other massage therapists, Hardin didn’t respond.
-
-Another woman who spoke to The Times, a physical therapist who did not sue Watson, said he initiated sexual contact in all three of their appointments.
-
-This woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect her privacy, said in an interview she began by working on Watson’s back. But when he flipped over, she said his demeanor and voice changed, and he began aggressively dictating where he wanted her to touch him. In their first session, she said he got into the happy baby yoga pose — on his back with his feet in his hands — and asked her to massage between his testicles and anus. She laughed off the request but said he grabbed her wrist and put her hand there.
-
-The woman said Watson twice initiated sexual intercourse, once by pulling down the scrubs she was wearing. She and Watson knew each other from around town and were on friendly terms, and she admitted she let him proceed with these sexual acts. “I just didn’t know how to tell him no,” she said.
-
-Hardin said in a statement: “It would be irresponsible and premature for us to comment on vague details put forth by anonymous individuals.”
-
-## A $5,000 Payment
-
-In June 2020, Watson began frequenting a spa in a strip mall off Interstate 45, at least a 30-minute drive from his home or work. He had found A New U Spa on Instagram and sent a message. The owner, Dionne Louis, became a resource for Watson, able to connect him with multiple women for massages.
-
-She looked out for him, she said in a deposition, sometimes arranging for a security guard when Watson came in, concerned the expensive cars he drove might make him a target for a robbery. She also got things from him. In November 2020, Watson paid her $5,000 through an app, she said, to buy spa equipment. Louis told one of her employees in a text, “I told you I’ll show you how to get money from men that’s my specialty.”
-
-Image
-
-Credit...Callaghan O’Hare for The New York Times
-
-Louis and her lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.
-
-During the months Louis and Watson worked together, she set up appointments for him with several women who worked there, none of whom was licensed in Texas to perform massages.
-
-One was the woman who said Watson begged her for oral sex.
-
-She described how he tried to build up to sexual acts, starting with his request that she work on his behind and go higher up on his inner thighs, which put her hands uncomfortably close to his testicles. When he flipped over, she said, he was exposed with an erection, but she refused his requests for oral sex.
-
-That woman did not sue Watson, but four other employees of A New U Spa did. They all said in their lawsuits that Louis gave him special attention.
-
-In June 2020, one woman said in her suit, Louis drove her to a hotel to meet Watson for a massage, during which he groped her and touched her hand with his penis. Louis was not in the room, but in text messages she later sent to this woman, she appeared to refer to Watson treating her employees poorly: “I been talking to Deshaun I just told his ass off he got it now.” Louis added in a second message, “I told him he can’t treat us black women any kind of way.” (In her deposition, Louis denied sending these messages, though evidence in the civil suits indicates they were sent from her number.)
-
-Nia Smith, who also worked at A New U Spa, filed a lawsuit against Watson last week, the 23rd of 24 civil cases. Smith said that during their first massage, Watson asked her to put her fingers inside his anus, a request she said she told Louis about afterward. She said in the second session he asked her if she wanted his penis in her mouth, and that he repeatedly requested sex in their third and final massage. Smith also claimed that Louis knew Watson was seeking sex and told her she needed to keep Watson happy. In a deposition, Louis denied she knew anything about Watson’s sexual desires.
-
-In early November 2020, after Smith stopped working at A New U Spa, she posted text messages from Watson along with his phone number and his Cash App receipts on Instagram. She included the message, “I could really expose you,” adding an expletive.
-
-## Help From the Texans
-
-Days later, when Watson went to work at the Texans’ stadium, he found an N.D.A. in his locker. He later said in a deposition that Brent Naccara, a former Secret Service agent who is the Texans’ director of security, put it there after Watson told him about Smith’s Instagram posts.
-
-> Q. Okay. This NDA, you had already gotten from -- you had already gotten this NDA by this point obviously from Brent?
->
-> A. Yes.
->
-> Q. Brent Naccara?
->
-> A. Yes, sir.
->
-> Q. Head of security for the Texans?
->
-> A. Yes, sir.
->
-> Q. He's the guy that gave it to you?
->
-> A. He put it in my locker, yes, sir.
-
-Watson was asked in the deposition about the nondisclosure agreement he received from Brent Naccara.
-
-Watson began taking the N.D.A. to massages that same week, giving one to the woman in Manvel, who signed it, and another to a woman who said in her lawsuit that she ended the session after he suggested a sexual act. Watson told her she had to sign in order for him to pay, so she did, according to her filing. Watson said in a deposition that he used this N.D.A. only for massage appointments because he had lawyers and agents who handled his other business.
-
-It’s unclear whether the Texans knew how many massages Watson was getting or who was providing them. But their resources helped support his massage habit away from the team. Watson acknowledged in a deposition that the Texans arranged for him to have “a place” at The Houstonian. He used the fitness club, dined there and also set up massages in hotel rooms.
-
-At least seven women met him at the hotel for appointments, according to interviews and records, including two who filed civil lawsuits and two who complained to police.
-
-The Texans weren’t aware of the massage appointments at the hotel “that I know of,” Watson said. He also said that his access to the property was not under his name. One woman who gave Watson a massage at The Houstonian said she was told the room was registered to a member of the Texans’ training staff.
-
-## A Well-Connected Lawyer
-
-To preserve his reputation, his career and possibly his freedom, Watson hired Hardin, now 80, a veteran defense lawyer whose clients have included the former pitcher [Roger Clemens](https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/28/sports/baseball/28lawyer.html), the evangelist [Joel Osteen](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/us/15houston.html) and, in the Enron case, the accounting firm [Arthur Andersen](https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/17/business/trial-judge-and-lawyer-for-andersen-tangle-in-houston-courtroom-shouting-match.html).
-
-Hardin has said the women who have accused Watson of sexual misconduct are lying. He had ample opportunity to make his case to the district attorney’s office. Through a public records request, The Times reviewed the communications between Hardin and the prosecutors in Watson’s criminal cases. These messages revealed extensive communication between the two sides and demonstrated, at the least, the value of a well-paid and well-connected lawyer.
-
-Image
-
-Credit...Callaghan O’Hare for The New York Times
-
-In early 2022, Hardin, a former prosecutor himself, began a regular dialogue with Johna Stallings, the Harris County sex crimes prosecutor handling the Watson investigation. In the two months before two different Texas grand juries heard the criminal cases against Watson, Stallings and Hardin met at Hardin’s office, spoke over the phone 12 times and exchanged more than two dozen text messages, according to public records.
-
-Some of their exchanges were peppered with congenial remarks about cases they were trying. Others were more opaque. One day, Stallings asked Hardin if he could chat. He said he was in trial, then asked, “Any problems?” They spoke over the phone twice that day.
-
-The amount of contact between the prosecutor and the defense was noteworthy, said Njeri Mathis Rutledge, a former Harris County prosecutor who is now a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston.
-
-“There are some well-known defense attorneys like a Rusty Hardin that may have gotten a little extra real estate in terms of time, but even given the fact that it was Rusty, that’s still a lot of time,” Rutledge said.
-
-The Times also reviewed communications between prosecutors and the lawyers for the women suing Watson. There was just one exchange: In March 2021, [Tony Buzbee](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/sports/football/deshaun-watson-tony-buzbee-sexual-assault.html), the plaintiffs’ attorney, alerted the district attorney’s office to the allegations in the civil suits. The district attorney asked if his clients had made reports to the police, and eight of Buzbee’s clients soon did. The prosecutors had some direct contact with these women, rather than going through Buzbee.
-
-In a statement, Hardin said it is “a standard practice” for lawyers to work directly with law enforcement and prosecutors.
-
-The Harris County district attorney’s office did not respond to specific questions about their prosecutors’ contacts with Hardin and lawyers for the women. In a statement, a spokesman for Kim Ogg, the district attorney, said prosecutors “vigorously examined all the evidence and spoke at great length with accusers.”
-
-In March 2021, Stallings prepared to present her cases against Watson to the Harris County grand jury. She and Hardin exchanged more than a dozen calls and messages during the week of the hearing. Instead of putting his client in front of the grand jury, Hardin created a slide presentation arguing for Watson’s innocence and gave it to Stallings along with other documents he deemed important.
-
-Image
-
-Credit...Callaghan O’Hare for The New York Times
-
-“We will let our submissions to you on our client’s behalf serve as our presentation to the Grand Jury,” Hardin told her in an email. The grand jury [declined to charge Watson](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/sports/football/nfl-deshaun-watson.html), and a Brazoria County panel [followed suit](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/24/sports/football/deshaun-watson-texas-grand-jury.html).
-
-Amanda Peters, a former Harris County prosecutor who teaches law at South Texas College of Law in Houston, said such submissions, known as grand jury packets, are not the norm for the average person facing charges. They are more commonly introduced in high-profile cases in which the client can afford an elaborate and costly defense.
-
-The N.F.L.’s discipline is likely the next step. Watson has been shuttling between Cleveland, where he is training with his new team, and Houston, where he met with N.F.L. investigators and is giving depositions in the lawsuits. The civil cases, if not settled, will be tried after the football season.
-
-Through it all, Watson has been adamant that he did nothing wrong. In a deposition on May 13, he was asked about the text message he sent to [Ashley Solis](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/sports/football/deshaun-watsons-ashley-solis-lawsuit.html), one of his accusers, immediately after their appointment in March 2020. “Sorry about you feeling uncomfortable,” he wrote to her. Watson acknowledged that Solis was “teary-eyed” at the end of their session, but testified under oath that he still does not understand why.
-
-“I don’t know,” Watson said. “Like I told you at the beginning of this depo, I’m still trying to figure out why we in the situation we are in right now, why I’m talking to you guys, why you guys are interviewing me. I don’t know. Do not know.”
-
-
-
-
----
-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
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-Date: 2022-06-14
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-TimeStamp: 2022-06-14
-Link: https://www.thecut.com/article/dianne-feinstein-abortion-gun-civil-rights.html
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-```button
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-action Save current file
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-```
-^button-DianneFeinsteintheInstitutionalistNSave
-
-
-
-# Dianne Feinstein, the Institutionalist
-
-## Dianne Feinstein fought for gun control, civil rights, and abortion access for half a century. Where did it all go wrong?
-
-*From left,* **1971:** The first female president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. **2022:** The oldest sitting U.S. senator. Photo: Bettmann Archive via Getty Images (left); Philip Montgomery for *New York* Magazine (right)
-
-
-
-*From left,* **1971:** The first female president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. **2022:** The oldest sitting U.S. senator. Photo: Bettmann Archive via Getty Images (left); Philip Montgomery for *New York* Magazine (right)
-
-
-
-*From left,* **1971:** The first female president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. **2022:** The oldest sitting U.S. senator. Photo: Bettmann Archive via Getty Images (left); Philip Montgomery for *New York* Magazine (right)
-
-This article was featured in [One Great Story](http://nymag.com/tags/one-great-story/), *New York*’s reading recommendation newsletter. [Sign up here](https://nymag.com/promo/sign-up-for-one-great-story.html?itm_source=csitepromo&itm_medium=articlelink&itm_campaign=ogs_tertiary_zone) to get it nightly.
-
-**On election night in San Francisco** in 1969, a 36-year-old woman who had run a campaign for the Board of Supervisors that featured the unconventional use of just her first name, Dianne, was waiting anxiously for results in a race she was not expected to win. The local media had barely covered her. She had earned the endorsement of only one elected official, the state assemblyman Willie Brown. She had initially run the race out of her own house and had taken a risky, forward-looking tactical approach: cultivating support from the city’s growing population of gay voters and environmental conservationists.
-
-As the returns began to trickle in, “it soon became clear that a big local story was unfolding,” Jerry Roberts later wrote in his 1994 book, [*Dianne Feinstein: Never Let Them See You Cry*](https://www.amazon.com/Dianne-Feinstein-Never-Let-Them/dp/0062585088)*.* “Dianne was not only winning, she was topping the ticket, an unheard-of showing for a nonincumbent, let alone a woman.”
-
-Feinstein was so reluctant to believe the early returns that she had to be persuaded to go to headquarters on Election Night. When she entered the room, she “was thronged by an emotional crowd,” Roberts wrote. One of her supporters joked about “painting City Hall pink.”
-
-The next day, San Francisco’s daily papers blared news of Feinstein’s stunning upset on their front pages. The press homed in on Feinstein’s “dark-haired, blue-eyed beauty” and made sure to note that the woman who would, as the top vote-getter, soon assume control of the Board of Supervisors was dressed in “a fashionable blue Norell original with a bolero top and a wide white belt.”
-
-It’s hard to read about that night and not think of an evening 49 years later, when 28-year-old [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/aoc-biography-book-excerpt.html) shocked New York City by winning her scrappy primary campaign for Congress, sending a rush of reporters to belatedly cover a phenomenon known as “[AOC](https://www.thecut.com/tags/aoc/),” fetishizing her clothes, her hair, her face. Both women’s entrances into politics were watershed moments. As Feinstein told reporters at the time, her win signaled “a new era, a different kind of politics working strongly for change,” saying of her then-12-year-old daughter’s interest in one day being mayor, “Each generation does better than the one before.”
-
----
-
-## On the Cover
-
-Dianne Feinstein. Photo: Philip Montgomery for *New York* Magazine
-
-Feinstein’s career in American politics, a series of historic firsts that began with her leading the Board of Supervisors, was born in the upheaval of the mid-20th century’s struggles for greater civil rights. There was a conviction that Feinstein’s rising generation of Democrats, more diverse than any that had preceded it, would be the stewards of those hard-won victories. “I was sort of intoxicated with my win,” Feinstein told Roberts of that big night in 1969. “I had done something that hadn’t been done before. I didn’t understand what loss was like in the arena.”
-
-Since then, Feinstein has lost as much as she has won. She has lost two husbands to cancer, two colleagues to assassination, and tens of thousands of her city’s residents to the AIDS epidemic. She served on the Board of Supervisors for eight tumultuous years, and she ran and lost two mayoral races before serving as mayor of San Francisco for nine years. She was considered and passed over as a vice-presidential candidate in 1984, lost a California gubernatorial election in 1990, then won six elections to the United States Senate, where she serves as the fifth-most-senior senator.
-
-Feinstein is now both the definition of the American political Establishment and the personification of the inroads women have made over the past 50 years. Her career, launched in a moment of optimism about what women leaders could do for this country, offers a study in what the Democratic Party’s has *not* been able to do. As Feinstein consolidated her power at the top of the Senate, the party’s losses steadily mounted. It has lost control of the [Supreme Court](https://www.thecut.com/2020/10/amy-coney-barrett-is-confirmed-to-the-supreme-court.html); it is likely about to lose control of Congress. [Children are being gunned down by the assault weapons](https://www.thecut.com/2022/05/these-are-the-identified-uvalde-school-shooting-victims.html) Feinstein has fought to ban, while the Senate — a legislative body she reveres — can only stand by idly, ultimately complicit. States around the nation are [banning books](https://www.thecut.com/2022/04/conservative-backlash-social-emotional-learning.html) about racism as Black people are being [shot and killed in supermarkets](https://www.thecut.com/2022/05/white-male-violence-buffalo-supermarket-shooting.html). Having gutted the [Voting Rights Act](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/06/voting-rights-act-supreme-court-ruling.html), conservatives are leveraging every form of voter suppression they can, while the Senate cannot pass a bill to protect the franchise. The expected overturning of [*Roe* v. *Wade*](https://www.thecut.com/article/future-abortion-access-map.html) this summer will mark a profound step backward, a signal that other rights won during Feinstein’s adulthood, including marriage equality and full access to contraception, are just as vulnerable.
-
-As the storied career of one of the nation’s longest-serving Democrats approaches its end, it’s easy to wonder how the generation whose entry into politics was enabled by progressive reforms has allowed those victories to be taken away. And how a woman who began her career with the support of conservationist communities in San Francisco, and who staked her political identity on advancing women’s rights, is now best known to young people as the senator who scolded environmental-activist kids in her office in 2019 and embraced [Lindsey Graham](https://www.thecut.com/2020/10/amy-coney-barrett-hearings-dianne-feinstein-hugs-graham.html) after the 2020 confirmation hearings of [Amy Coney Barrett](https://www.thecut.com/2020/10/amy-coney-barrett-is-confirmed-to-the-supreme-court.html), a Supreme Court justice who appears to be the fifth and final vote to end the constitutional right to an [abortion](https://www.thecut.com/2020/10/elizabeth-warren-on-amy-coney-barrett-and-abortion-rights.html). As Feinstein told Graham, “This is one of the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in.”
-
-For many from a younger and more pugilistic left bucking with angry exasperation at the unwillingness of Feinstein’s generation to make room for new tactics and leadership before everything is lost, the senator is more than simply representative of a failed political generation — she is herself the problem. After she expressed her unwillingness to consider [filibuster reform](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/joe-manchin-filibuster-democrats-2021-agenda.html) last year, noting that “if democracy were in jeopardy, I would want to protect it, but I don’t see it being in jeopardy right now,” [*The Nation*](https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/dianne-feinstein-filibuster/) ran a piece headlined “Dianne Feinstein Is an Embarrassment.”
-
-Feinstein, who turns 89 in June, is older than any other sitting member of Congress. Her [declining cognitive health](https://www.thecut.com/2020/12/new-yorker-claims-dianne-feinstein-is-seriously-struggling.html) has been the subject of recent reporting in both her hometown San Francisco *Chronicle* and the New York *Times.* It seems clear that Feinstein is mentally compromised, even if she’s not all gone. “It’s definitely happening,” said one person who works in California politics. “And it’s definitely not happening all the time.”
-
-Reached by phone two days after 19 children were murdered in an elementary school in [Uvalde, Texas](https://www.thecut.com/2022/05/how-to-help-the-uvalde-community.html), in late May, Feinstein spoke in halting tones, sometimes trailing off mid-sentence or offering a non sequitur before suddenly alighting upon the right string of words. She would forget a recently posed question, or the date of a certain piece of legislation, but recall with perfect lucidity events from San Francisco in the 1960s. Nothing she said suggested a deterioration beyond what would be normal for a person her age, but neither did it demonstrate any urgent engagement with the various crises facing the nation.
-
-“Oh, we’ll get it done, trust me,” she assured me in reference to meaningful gun reform. Every question I asked — about the radicalization of the GOP, the end of *Roe,* the failures of Congress — was met with a similar sunny imperviousness, evincing an undiminished belief in institutional power that may in fact explain a lot about where Feinstein and other Democratic leaders have gone wrong. “Some things take longer than others, and you can only do what you can do at a given time,” she said. “That doesn’t mean you can’t do it at another time. And so one of the things that you develop is a certain kind of memory for progress: when you can do something in terms of legislation and have a chance of getting it through, and when the odds are against it, meaning the votes and that kind of thing. So I’m very optimistic about the future of our country.”
-
-**It is not a comment on her age** to note the sheer amount of history that has determined Dianne Feinstein’s life.
-
-Her father, Leon Goldman, was born in 1904 to Jewish immigrants. Feinstein’s grandfather had fled pogroms in Russian-occupied Poland and had become a shopkeeper in San Francisco, where the family’s lives were upended by the fire that raged after the 1906 earthquake. The family relocated to Southern California, and Feinstein’s grandfather invested in oil wells. Leon would go on to medical school, becoming the first Jewish chair of surgery at the University of California, San Francisco, hospital and a member of San Francisco’s rarefied social circles.
-
-Feinstein’s mother, Betty Rosenburg, fled the Bolshevik Revolution with her czarist Russian Orthodox father, traveling across Siberia by hay cart. She grew up to be a model, and after marrying Goldman and bearing three daughters, she became alcoholic, abusive, and suicidal. She raged and threatened to kill Dianne and her sisters, calling them “kikes” and “little Jews,” and once tried to drown her youngest daughter in a bathtub.
-
-This instability remained a secret in the upscale circles in which Feinstein’s parents moved. Her father was a workhorse, adored by his patients and his eldest daughter; many think she modeled her workaholic habits and insatiable ambitions on his. “Dianne is really Leon Goldman in the garb of a beautiful woman,” one family friend told Roberts.
-
-Raised Jewish, Dianne was nonetheless enrolled as a teen at the exclusive Convent of the Sacred Heart High School in tony Pacific Heights, where she became quite taken with the aesthetics of Catholic ritual and hierarchy. The school was full of processions and teas and ceremonies. Students were required to wear starched uniforms and white gloves. In his book [*Season of the Witch*](https://www.amazon.com/Season-Witch-Enchantment-Terror-Deliverance/dp/1439108242)*,* San Francisco writer David Talbot reported that young Dianne would occasionally try on a nun’s habit.
-
-Dianne attended Stanford, where she won the highest political position available to female students at the time: the vice-presidency. She got a fellowship the year after her graduation, in 1955, during which she worked on a report about criminal justice in San Francisco. She eloped with the man who would become her first husband and got pregnant, giving birth to her daughter, Katherine, in 1957. Within two years, she would be divorced and a single mother at 26, albeit a very privileged one. In her mid-20s, she briefly entertained the idea of becoming a stage actress, took up sailing, and volunteered for John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign. When, in 1961, a San Francisco real-estate developer refused to show a home to a rising-star Black lawyer, Willie Brown, Dianne brought her daughter to a demonstration for Brown and bumped her stroller into Terry Francois, who was the head of the local NAACP. Both Francois and Brown would become close associates.
-
-That same year, California governor Pat Brown, a patient of Dianne’s father’s, offered her a paid job on the California women’s-parole-and-sentencing board. For six years, she had the power to determine sentence length for women who had been convicted of everything from public drunkenness to violent crimes. She took a reformist approach to criminal justice, calling for rehabilitation rather than long sentences in narcotics cases. Francois, who had become the first African American to serve on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, assigned her to an advisory committee on local jails; she reported on the terrible state of the facilities, the inedible food, the overcrowding, the rampant vermin.
-
-As part of her work with the board, she found herself determining sentences for [abortion providers](https://www.thecut.com/abortion-clinic-near-you). Although she would later strongly support abortion access and often told a story about how, back at Stanford, classmates had passed a plate to pay for a student to travel to Tijuana to end a pregnancy, in the early ’60s the procedure was still illegal in California, and, as she would explain to Roberts, the cases in front of her were “all illegal back-alley abortionists. Many times, the women that they performed an abortion on suffered greatly. I really came to believe that the law is the law.”
-
-Feinstein’s memories of this period remain sharp. “Under the indeterminate-sentence law, most sentences carried a low of maybe six months and a high of ten years,” she told me by phone. “There was one case, her name was Anita Venza. And over and over, she committed abortions on women. I said when we were sentencing her, ‘Anita, why do you continue doing this?’ And she said, ‘I feel so sorry for women in this situation.’ ”
-
-I asked Feinstein whether she had continued to sentence Venza despite this explanation. “Yes.”
-
-But did Feinstein feel for her? “Oh, yes,” she replied. “But she was a dedicated … She was going to continue to do it. There’s no question. She had been in state prison and been paroled and was brought back.”
-
-When I pushed further, asking Feinstein what it felt like now to be on the verge of a future in which providers like Venza could once again be sentenced to prison, and in which *the law* will once again be *the law,* she declined to fully acknowledge the chilling implications of the rollback on the near horizon, retreating instead behind impenetrable platitudes. “Well, one thing I have seen in my lifetime is that this country goes through different phases,” she said. “The institutions handling some of these issues have changed for the better. They’ve become more progressive, and I think that’s important.”
-
-**Feinstein’s 1969 race for** the Board of Supervisors might have found echoes in [Ocasio-Cortez’s groundbreaking 2018 campaign](https://www.thecut.com/2018/06/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-interview.html), but the differences between the two women’s early paths are stark. Ocasio-Cortez ran a low-budget grassroots campaign out of her small Bronx apartment and was outspent by [Joe Crowley](https://www.thecut.com/2018/06/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-beats-joe-crowley-in-stunning-upset.html), her heavyweight Democratic-primary opponent, 18 to one. Feinstein’s friends-and-family campaign, in contrast, was funded by San Francisco’s elite and entailed auctions of Ansel Adams prints and a free surgery by her father. It was what many believed at the time to be the most expensive campaign in San Francisco’s history.
-
-Like a cartoon of efficient, rule-bound, Tracy Flick–style white femininity, Feinstein promptly threw herself into her role as the head of the board, San Francisco’s city council, transforming it from a part-time civic gig into a full-time study in technocratic control. She got there early and stayed late while her fellow supervisors, who needed actual jobs to support themselves, showed up when they could. “She crafted reams of legislation,” Roberts writes, “convened citizen advisory committees, performed ceremonial functions, demanded reports from bureaucrats.”
-
-Feinstein’s profile grew. She ran for mayor in 1971 and lost, and lost again in 1975, but she retained leadership of the board through the ’70s, when things got weird in San Francisco. She believed in law enforcement and institutional control over the uncontrollable impulses of a city that was undulating with change.
-
-In 1973, San Francisco was ravaged by the so-called [Zebra serial killings](https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/Notorious-S-F-Zebra-killer-dies-in-prison-16288120.php). The next year, heiress [Patty Hearst](https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/patty-hearst-speaks-out-against-new-movie-series-on-her.html) was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, whose members had assassinated the superintendent of the Oakland schools. In 1975, the city’s police went on strike, and there was an assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford when he visited the city. Meanwhile, a group called the New World Liberation Front was connected to more than 70 bombings in Northern California, including at the San Francisco Opera House and the homes of some local executives.
-
-Feinstein and several of her colleagues on the board were warned that they were targets. Packages full of dynamite were delivered to two board members, and in December 1976, when Feinstein was caring for her husband Bert Feinstein, then dying of cancer, a bomb was discovered outside 19-year-old Katherine’s window. It would have killed her except that the temperature had dropped that night, leading the device to misfire. The next year, the windows at Feinstein’s vacation home on Monterey Bay were shot out.
-
-In the fall of 1978, Feinstein traveled to the Himalayas with the man who would become her third husband, financier Dick Blum. While there, she contracted dysentery and was forced to slow down, even as discontent grew on the board; one of Feinstein’s colleagues, a former police officer named Dan White, had become frustrated by money troubles, the policies of liberal mayor George Moscone, and the attention-getting successes of Harvey Milk, a liberal activist from the Castro who, in winning a spot on the board, had become the first openly gay man elected to political office in California. In the days that Feinstein had been at home with her intestinal ailment, White had abruptly quit his seat, then changed his mind and asked to be reinstated.
-
-Feinstein advised Moscone to let him have his job back. But Milk despised White, telling the mayor that he would only impede his liberal agenda. Moscone eventually agreed with Milk and denied White’s request to be reinstated. On the morning of November 27, 1978, Feinstein, back to work for the first day after her trip and her illness, had been asked by Moscone to look out for an agitated White and calm him. Casually speaking to reporters as the board waited for the appointment of White’s replacement, she said that she would not be running a third mayoral campaign. While in Nepal, she had decided to leave politics.
-
-“It’s important to remember that she thought her career was over before it even began,” said Cleve Jones, the labor and gay-rights activist who in 1978 was Milk’s student intern. “It was a very polarized city and she, as a moderate, felt there was no place for her. So she was going to give up politics.”
-
-At around 10:30 a.m., Dan White entered through a basement window of City Hall and went to meet the mayor. Afterward, Feinstein heard her former colleague rushing by her. She couldn’t have known he had already shot and killed Moscone. “Dan,” she called to him. “I have something to do first,” White told her as he asked Milk to come into his office.
-
-Feinstein heard the door of White’s office slam and someone shout, “Oh, no!” Then she heard shots and saw White running out of his office. When she entered, she found Milk’s body on the floor, surrounded by blood and brain matter. She reached down to take her colleague’s pulse and put her finger straight into the bullet hole on Milk’s wrist.
-
-Jones arrived to find City Hall in chaos. “Dianne came rushing past me,” he said, “and I could see her hands and sleeves were stained with blood, and then I saw Harvey’s feet sticking out of Dan White’s office. It was the first time I’d ever seen a dead body.” Jones added, “There were many times when she and I disagreed, but I’ve always felt I share a bond with her that kind of transcends all this other stuff, because of what we both witnessed and how that day completely and absolutely transformed our lives.”
-
-Feinstein, her tan suit covered in Milk’s blood, composed though in obvious shock, told the crowd at City Hall that Moscone and Milk had been killed and that the suspect was former supervisor Dan White. As the head of the Board of Supervisors, she then became San Francisco’s first female mayor.
-
-**1970:** Dianne Feinstein is sworn in as a member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors.
-
-Photo: Bill Young/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
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-**1971:** She runs for mayor of San Francisco and loses.
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-Photo: Duke Downey/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
-
-**1978:** At the opening of a tourism center.
-
-Photo: Jerry Telfer/San Francisco Chronicle/Polaris
-
-**1978:** Speaking to the press after the assassination of Harvey Milk.
-
-Photo: AP Photo
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-**1981:** Mayor Feinstein.
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-Photo: © Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS/VCG via Getty Images
-
-Photographs by Bill Young/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images, Duke Downey/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images, Jerry Telfer/San Francisco Chronicle/Polaris, AP Photo, © Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS/VCG via Getty Images
-
-**Feinstein has maintained** that her devotion to centrism was born of the tumult that led to her rise. “It was as if the world had gone mad,” Feinstein writes in [*Nine and Counting*](https://www.amazon.com/Nine-Counting-Senate-Barbara-Boxer/dp/B000HWYMS2/)*,* a 2000 book about the nine women then serving in the U.S. Senate, describing her decisions to pursue the job of interim mayor in the wake of the assassinations and to run for reelection less than two years later. “The city needed to be reassured that there would be some consistency as we put the broken pieces back together … From that nonpartisan experience, I drew my greatest political lesson — the heart of political change is at the center of the political spectrum.”
-
-This does not mean that Feinstein is a centrist, ideologically speaking. She has a solidly Democratic voting record and has occasionally taken positions progressively ahead of her party, though in other instances she has practically acted as a Republican. If she has hopscotched around the middle, it’s because she believes stability and progress — “the heart of political change” — flow from strong, functioning institutions built on consensus. It made Feinstein an odd fit for San Francisco in the late ’70s. As Talbot wrote, “San Franciscans had a fondness for lovable rogues and other colorful characters. But in a city of Marx Brothers, Feinstein was Margaret Dumont, forever distressed and befuddled by the antics around her.” In the wake of the assassinations, however, she became “precisely the right leader for the time.”
-
-In her nine years as mayor of San Francisco, she grew ever more convinced that the balm for social upheaval and partisan protest was a tightening of civic authority. She inaugurated weekly meetings of city department heads, where the police chief always presented first. Just as she had taken to the starched clothes and white gloves and ceremonial displays of order at her Catholic school, Feinstein took up the aesthetics of local governance. She kept a fire turnout coat in the trunk of her car and would appear at blazes dressed like a firefighter; she was photographed in a custom-cut police uniform holding an emergency call radio and would listen to the police scanner while being driven around the city in her limousine.
-
-Her mayoralty would overlap with the worst of the AIDS crisis. On this issue, too, her approach was to seek a middle path by giving and taking in turns. While on the Board of Supervisors, she had cast the deciding vote in support of Willie Brown’s legislation legalizing all private sex acts between consenting adults and proposed an ordinance to ban hiring or job discrimination against gays and lesbians — the first of its kind in the nation. But Feinstein had also spearheaded prim anti-pornography campaigns, and in her early years as mayor, she declined to sign a bill recognizing same-sex partnerships — despite offering her backyard for a same-sex commitment ceremony. She also provoked the fury of gay residents by closing the city’s bathhouses.
-
-“I’m a very far-left union organizer and queer radical,” said Jones. “And buddies and I would go to a bathhouse and sit in that big Jacuzzi and conspire to drive Dianne nuts.” But, he added, “I remember talking with someone about how she was really walking a tightrope, the compassion she showed for people with HIV at a time of incredible stigma and misinformation and hysteria.” Jones’s appraisal is echoed in Randy Shilts’s defining account of the era, [*And the Band Played On*](https://www.amazon.com/Band-Played-Politics-People-Epidemic/dp/0312009941)*,* in which he notes that “of all the big-league Democrats in the United States, Feinstein was undoubtedly the most consistently pro-gay voice.”
-
-Yet decades later she stayed away from the front lines of the movement for marriage equality. In 2004, she would publicly lambaste then-Mayor Gavin Newsom for issuing marriage licenses to gay couples in San Francisco, which she was sure provoked a conservative backlash that helped George W. Bush win reelection. “The whole issue has been too much, too fast, too soon,” Feinstein said after the 2004 election, betraying her tactical distrust of explosive social change. (She has since said that she was wrong on this.)
-
-“It’s not just being in the middle so you can get votes in Fresno as well as Berkeley,” said Jones. “It’s that she believes in the power of the system to protect and manage. She’s all about *order.*”
-
-**After losing a 1990 bid** for California governor, Feinstein ran for a vacant Senate seat in 1992. She, fellow Californian Barbara Boxer, Illinois’s Carol Moseley Braun, and Washington’s Patty Murray all won their races that year, doubling the number of women in the Senate (there had never before been more than two serving at one time). It was dubbed “the Year of the Woman,” part of an election cycle fueled by outrage over the treatment of [Anita Hill](https://www.thecut.com/2021/09/anita-hill-wants-more-than-an-apology-from-joe-biden.html) at [Clarence Thomas](https://www.thecut.com/2018/02/the-case-for-impeaching-clarence-thomas.html)’s confirmation hearings in 1991, in which the all-white, all-male character of the Senate Judiciary Committee had been put on miserable display.
-
-Even during that 1992 race, Feinstein’s willingness to adopt established norms was evident. “Pundits would remark that *if* there was a model for a woman senator, it would look like Feinstein,” recalled Rose Kapolczynski, who ran Boxer’s 1992 campaign. “In other words, a woman who looked and acted like male senators looked and acted.”
-
-Still, it is hard to convey to those who have grown up in a world in which Feinstein and Boxer and Murray and Braun *were* the system, in which [Hillary Clinton](https://www.thecut.com/article/hillary-clinton-life-after-election.html) was considered, twice, the inevitable next president, in which Kamala Harris (the successor to Boxer’s California Senate seat) is now the vice-president, exactly what the victories of Feinstein and other women in her freshman class represented.
-
-“I danced in the streets,” remembered the writer Rebecca Solnit, a longtime San Franciscan. “On Castro Street specifically, with lots of gay men, during the great 1992 election that brought Boxer and Feinstein into office. Feinstein feels like a bridge to me, a fixed point in the landscape that helped us cross out of the old, worse world, in which women were not senators.” But, she added, “we have traveled a long way from that bridge now.”
-
-By its mere presence, the new cohort of women lawmakers was supposed to change how things worked in Congress or at least give the appearance of change. That function was made explicit to Feinstein and Braun, who were asked to do representational repair work on the Judiciary Committee.
-“I walked away from that hearing convicted in the determination that I was gonna get women on that committee,” Joe Biden, who as committee chair notoriously failed to defend Hill from Republican attacks, says in the 2007 documentary *14 Women*. “And I called Dianne.”
-
-If women changed the Senate’s image, they did not always change its character. Political representation is a funny thing. The absence of women and minorities from governing institutions is ghoulish. But the seemingly obvious remedy — putting those people in power — can often involve new participants simply recapitulating the standards set by those who preceded them.
-
-When Feinstein started in the Senate, she enforced its dress code, which reflected her own pearl-wearing respectability: No pantsuits for female staffers; they had to wear skirts or dresses. But even as Senate rules relaxed, Feinstein kept her standards intact. As recently as 2017 it was reported that women in her office were required to wear stockings and skirts of a certain length. Her very first speech on the Senate floor was in support of Bill Clinton’s landmark passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, but when it came to the leave policy in her own office, she was behind the curve. In 2014, Feinstein’s office provided only six weeks of paid family leave, half of what many younger senators were offering both new mothers and fathers. (It’s 12 weeks now.)
-
-Feinstein is, by multiple accounts, a terrifying boss to work for, famously stealing the old line “I don’t get ulcers; I give them.” During her race for governor in 1990, former employees, according to author Celia Morris, “called her imperious, hectoring and even abusive, claiming that she would dress down a hapless victim in front of others and would neither apologize nor admit it if she proved to be mistaken.” Within six months of her arrival in the Senate, 14 of her aides had departed (compared to three for Boxer), with 11 quitting and three fired.
-
-Feinstein’s expectations of her staff have consistently remained sky-high. She has all of her aides — around 70 people — compile a two-to-four-page report of everything they did during the week, every week. Over the weekend, Feinstein reads them and then quizzes individuals on their reports in all-staff Monday meetings. Some saw these gatherings as democratizing. Others found them to be a tortured study in hierarchical protocols. Multiple former staffers spoke of the strict seating arrangements, with senior staffers around a middle table in a giant conference room, their aides in seats in a ring behind their bosses, and the most junior people standing at the periphery. “Everyone there had to be prepared, no issue too big or too small,” said one aide from the 1990s. “So it could be, ‘What is happening with the foreign-aid package?’ Or it could be, ‘I’m looking at a report of how many incoming letters we had and how many outgoing, and why is there such a backlog in responses?’ ”
-
-“If you weren’t good at responding to that kind of Socratic interrogation technique, she didn’t make your job easy,” said the aide. “On the other hand, do I admire a senator who was as focused on how fast constituents got responses as she was on a foreign-aid package? I sure did.”
-
-When a staffer left, if Feinstein liked them and they had served for a long time, she would give them prints of the still lifes she draws. If they were less special to her or had served briefly, she would give them a watch with her signature across its face. It could be difficult to leave her employment, several former staffers told me; she understood it as a slight. One former aide who took another job on the Hill remembered Feinstein saying, “It’s really unfortunate you are leaving; you had great potential.” When new people arrived in Feinstein’s employ, colleagues would surreptitiously hand them [Jerry Roberts’s biography](https://www.amazon.com/Dianne-Feinstein-Never-Let-Them/dp/0062585088), with its details about her troubled, privileged childhood and her political coming of age in the crucible of San Francisco, with a whispered “Read this; it will all make sense.”
-
-When stories have run about her bad behavior, Feinstein has shrugged them off. “When a man is strong, it is expected. When a woman is, it is not,” she told the Los Angeles [*Times*](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-06-07-mn-606-story.html) in 1993. And she told her biographer, “When people act independently of the head figure, it causes conflicts. You can’t let staff run you. The person in charge has to be the guiding post.”
-
-**1982:** As mayor, she makes gun control a key policy issue.
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-Photo: Eric Luse/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
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-**1984:** Answering questions about the possibility of becoming Walter Mondale’s running mate.
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-Photo: Diana Walker/Getty Images
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-**1992:** Feinstein and Barbara Boxer running for the U.S. Senate.
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-Photo: Brant Ward/San Francisco Chronicle/Polaris
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-**1993:** Senators Feinstein, Carol Moseley Braun, and Joe Biden on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
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-Photo: Maureen Keating/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images
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-**1997:** A meeting of the women in the Senate.
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-Photo: CQ Roll Call via Getty Images
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-Photographs by Eric Luse/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images, Diana Walker/Getty Images, Brant Ward/San Francisco Chronicle/Polaris, Maureen Keating/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images, CQ Roll Call via Getty Images
-
-**From the moment Feinstein** got to the Senate, she embraced its rituals and practices, the clubby procedural stuff that at one time brought senators from competing parties together with a sense of their own power and responsibility — and sometimes even enabled them to get things done. “She is a model senator,” said Jeffrey Millman, who managed her 2018 campaign. “She loves this work, and she is really good at it.” But as with so much of her career, Feinstein’s record in the Senate is a mash of righteous fights and dispiriting capitulation, her ideological positioning scattered and her aims pragmatic, geared toward the goal of firm governance above all else.
-
-As a young person reporting on California prisons, Feinstein fervently opposed capital punishment, but in 2004, she created an extremely awkward scene by going off script and making a call for the death penalty at the funeral of murdered police officer Isaac Espinoza. (More recently, challenged from the left, Feinstein has returned to her anti-death-penalty stance.)
-
-She told me in our conversation that the institutions meting out criminal justice have become more progressive in the 60 years since she was on the sentencing board. But that’s not actually true, mostly because the kind of bipartisan cooperation Feinstein values so highly has centered on the expansion of a carceral state, via legislation like the [1994 crime bill](https://www.congress.gov/103/statute/STATUTE-108/STATUTE-108-Pg1796.pdf) authored by [Joe Biden](https://www.thecut.com/2019/04/a-running-list-of-things-joe-biden-hasnt-apologized-for.html) and supported strenuously by Feinstein.
-
-When it comes to foreign policy, Feinstein has been a hawkish defender of drone strikes and expanded surveillance, calling [Edward Snowden](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/06/edward-snowden-life-as-a-robot.html)’s whistle-blowing “an act of treason.” But the pinnacle of her career was her damning 6,700-page [report](https://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=d2677a34-2d91-4583-92a4-391f68ceae46) from 2014, which she commissioned as the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, taking on the CIA’s role in torturing terrorism suspects during the Bush years. In the words of one California political operative, “she was practically melting witnesses with her eyes, just having this steel-trap mind and asking for more details.” It was a moment when even progressive Californians could feel a sense of pride in their unapologetically moderate senator, who may have seen in the CIA’s brutality a breach of the norms she believes in so fervently.
-
-As George Shultz, the former secretary of State, told the [*New Yorker*](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/22/the-inside-war)’s Connie Bruck in 2015, “Dianne is not really bipartisan so much as nonpartisan.” Her devotion is to the system, in which laws are made, regulations are implemented, and oversight is prized. She is stalwart in her conviction that the way to make progress is to maintain open, friendly lines of communication with members of the opposition party, a stance that her defenders argue is crucial to getting anything accomplished in the Senate.
-
-Describing the Ten-in-Ten Fuel Economy legislation passed in 2007 by Feinstein and several colleagues, which ensured that emissions standards grew ten miles per gallon in ten years, Millman said, “Could it have been 20 miles per gallon? Yes, but then the few Republicans wouldn’t have signed on to it, and it wouldn’t have been a law; it would have been a regulation. And when Trump came into power, he could simply have undone it.”
-
-She is probably most famous for her push, as soon as she got into the Senate, for an assault-weapons ban. She had been spoiling for this fight for decades; back when she was mayor of San Francisco, her controversial ban on handguns provoked a recall campaign (she survived it). In 1993, Idaho Republican Larry Craig challenged her by saying, “The gentlelady from California needs to become a little bit more familiar with firearms and their deadly characteristics.” In response, Feinstein said, “I am quite familiar with firearms. I became mayor as a product of assassination. I found my assassinated colleague and put a finger through a bullet hole trying to get a pulse. I was trained in the shooting of a firearm when I had terrorist attacks, with a bomb in my house, when my husband was dying, when I had windows shot out. Senator, I know something about what firearms can do.”
-
-The assault-weapons ban passed in 1994 as part of the crime bill; its 2004 expiration marked the start of our infernal era of near-daily mass shootings. On this issue, Feinstein has been receptive to the activist politics of a younger generation. She appeared in San Francisco with teenage demonstrators in 2018’s March for Our Lives. The footage is kind of heartbreaking from a generational perspective: crowds full of kids who have no idea who the ancient woman on the stage is, what she has lived through, that she has spent decades fighting the battle that has, horrifically, now become theirs.
-
-Feinstein implored her colleagues to act after the murders of 20 schoolchildren in Sandy Hook in 2012: “Show some guts,” she said. She told the New York *Times* that one reason the Senate could no longer pass an assault-weapons ban was the rising abuse of the filibuster. Of course, Feinstein has been unwilling to commit to ending it.
-
-She acknowledges to me that politics have “hardened” around gun laws in recent decades, saying that “everything has become more partisan than it was when I came to the Senate. When I came to the Senate, Bob Dole was the leader, and he stood up and said … What was it? Tom, help me, what was the quote?” Her aide Tom Mentzer filled in that Dole had agreed that the gun issue was too important to filibuster and put it to a vote.
-
-When I suggest to Feinstein that the partisan hardening has been asymmetrical, that her Republican colleagues have grown more radical and rigid while she and many of her fellow Democratic leaders have been all too willing to compromise, she responded, “Well, yes. I think that’s not inaccurate. I think it’s an accurate statement. What did you first say about Democrats moving?” I repeated that it was the right that has gotten more inflexible while the Democrats have been willing to cede ground.
-
-“I’m not sure,” she responded. “But it’s different; there’s no question about it. And I think there is much more party control. When I came to the Senate, we spoke out, and we learned the hard way, and we took action, and it was clear what was happening with weapons in the country. It still is. And in a way, the weapon issue was a good one because we were able to pass the first bill. When was it, Tom?” Mentzer reminded her that the assault-weapons ban was passed in 1994.
-
-When I asked her about her stated commitment to centrism as a reaction to the tumult of her early political life, she began speaking, unprompted, about Dan White, clearly still appalled by his violent transgressions against the respectability politics that have helped her navigate the world. “A former young, handsome police officer who goes in and kills the mayor,” she said. It was the kind of incident that should grab the government’s notice and compel it to “try to fix those things which are wrong.” But the ultimate lesson she derived from the response to Milk’s murder possesses an almost Olympian complacency: “I think one great thing about a democracy is that there is always flexibility, newcomers always can win and play a role, and it’s a much more open political society, that I see, than I hear of in many other countries.”
-
-From her youth, Feinstein has been an institutionalist, with an institutionalist’s respect for structure, management, and hierarchy as means to manage the rabble of activism and protest. She seems unable to appreciate the possibility that partisan insurgents have overrun those institutions themselves. The crowds who came through the door with battering rams in January 2021 looking to kill a vice-president surely had chilling echoes for Feinstein, but days later, in the name of the Senate, she was defending Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley — a man who had offered up a sign of solidarity to the insurrectionists — in their attempts to delegitimize the election of Joe Biden.
-
-“I think the Senate is a place of freedom,” she told reporters. “And people come here to speak their piece, and they do, and they provide a kind of leadership. In some cases, it’s positive; in some cases, maybe not. A lot of that depends on who’s looking and what party they are.”
-
-“She’s like Charlie Brown and the football,” said Dahlia Lithwick, Slate’s senior legal analyst*,* describing Feinstein’s unstinting belief that her institution is still functional. “But she doesn’t see that the whole football field is on fire.”
-
-Long before Feinstein sealed the deal with her embrace of Graham, she and her senior colleagues on the Judiciary Committee were criticized for being passive as Mitch McConnell stole a Supreme Court seat from the Democrats. When Republicans crisscrossed the country bragging about holding on to Antonin Scalia’s seat after his death, Democrats did nothing. When Trump appointed the staunch conservative Neil Gorsuch, Lithwick said there was “a little chatter about boycotting the hearings,” but then Democrats “went ahead and had the hearing and confirmed him.”
-
-Feinstein’s belief in the Senate’s sanctity may mean that the enduring moment of her career will not be the assault-weapons ban or her grilling of CIA torturers but that awkward, notorious embrace of Graham. In seeking refuge in government institutions as the shield against instability and insurrection, Feinstein has been unable to discern that it was her peers in government — in their suits, on the dais, in the Senate, on the Judiciary Committee — who were laying siege to democracy, rolling back protections, packing the court with right-wingers, and building a legal infrastructure designed to erase the progress that facilitated the rise of her generation of politicians. But this is who she has always been.
-
-Of that “appalling moment” with Graham, Cleve Jones recalled thinking, “*Oh my goodness, you just really cling to this notion of civility and bipartisan discourse.* One can marvel at it. But it’s genuine. It’s the core of her.”
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-**2001:** Feinstein and her staff.
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-Photo: Mark F. Sypher/Roll Call/Getty Images
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-**2006:** During Samuel Alito’s nomination hearing.
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-Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
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-**2018:** During Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Brett Kavanaugh.
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-Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Pool
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-**2020:** Her infamous embrace of Lindsey Graham during the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett.
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-Photo: Samuel Corum/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
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-**2021:** Paying her respects to Bob Dole in the Capitol.
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-Photo: Oliver Contreras/Getty Images
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-Photographs by Mark F. Sypher/Roll Call/Getty Images, Joe Raedle/Getty Images, Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Pool, Samuel Corum/Pool/AFP via Getty Images, Oliver Contreras/Getty Images
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-**The Senate rewards** its longest-serving members with power. The most dynamic freshman senator in the world would not have the influence that a senior senator does, which is part of the pernicious trap that has created the bipartisan gerontocracy under which we now wither.
-
-As the senior senator from California on the Appropriations Committee, the temptation to stay forever is great, not just for selfish reasons but for the good of her state. “If we lost her seniority … every other state benefits from California not having seniority, because our appropriations are so much larger,” said Millman.
-
-She has the conviction, held by some in their later years, that she knows better. This is the woman who helped to create Joshua Tree National Park but who also spoke dismissively to the [youth activists from the Sunrise Movement](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/feinstein-fumbles-in-meeting-with-young-climate-activists.html) who came to her office in 2019, telling them they didn’t understand how laws are made. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years,” she said to the group, insisting, “I know what I’m doing.” But now, with age and all its attendant authority and power, comes serious diminishment.
-
-Multiple reports of her failing memory have been rumbling through Washington, D.C. In 2021, Chuck Schumer removed her from that ranking role on the Judiciary Committee. The *Chronicle* reported that “the senator is guided by staff members much more than her colleagues are,” a remarkable change for someone who once said, “You can’t let staff run you.” I had let Feinstein’s staff know in advance that I would be asking her about her record on gun reform, and early in our conversation it was clear that Feinstein had come prepared with notes. “The overwhelming statistic is that we have had 200-plus mass shootings so far in 2022, 230 people have been killed, and 840 injured. These are things that we wanted you to hear,” she said, before adding, “So I have this on a card, but I think those are key features.” The acknowledgment of the card felt like a point of pride: She wanted me to know she was sharp enough to know I was sharp enough to know.
-
-That Feinstein may be wrestling with dementia is in fact among the most sympathetic things about her. Getting very old can be hard, lonely; her third husband died of cancer this spring. It is pretty awful now to watch her tell CNN’s Dana Bash, in 2017, that she will stay in office because “it’s what I’m meant to do, as long as the old bean holds up” — and put her finger to her head.
-
-Why didn’t she decline yet another six-year term in 2018 or earlier, when it was perhaps clear that the old bean was *not* really holding up as she had hoped? Her defenders will lay out all the reasons that retiring in 2017 didn’t make sense, including simply that she won. “Is a diminished Senator Feinstein better than a junior California senator?” asked one of her former staffers. “I would argue, emphatically, yes.” Feinstein’s office released a statement that read in part, “If the question is whether I’m an effective senator for 40 million Californians, the record shows that I am.”
-
-It is also true that she works among plenty of colleagues who are dumb as a box of hammers and have been so since their youth. “I’ve worked in politics my whole life,” said Jones, “and met a lot of politicians who are little more than cardboard cutouts propped up by staff. It’s important to understand that she was never that person.”
-
-But the fact that many of her colleagues, on their best days, are less acute than Feinstein on her worst is exactly the kind of dismal, institutionally warped logic that has left us governed by eldercrats who will not live long enough to have to deal with the consequences of their failures. Feinstein’s defenders argue that there is something gendered about focusing on her overextended tenure, especially when the history of the Senate includes Strom Thurmond, who retired at 100 and was basically not sentient by the end. Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy and Mitch McConnell are all in their 80s. Joe Biden first got to the Senate in 1973, and he’s the president of the United States. But being no worse than Strom Thurmond was not the standard to which we were supposed to aspire at this juncture. And while it may indeed be feminist heresy to expect more from women, in fairness, some of those women told us to expect more from them. They were the ones who cast their own elections as the dawn of a new era. They were the ones who argued that every generation does better than the one before.
-
-Indeed, what may be producing the anger at this generation of Democrats is not just ageism, sexism, or the correct apprehension that America’s governing structures incentivize officials to hold on to power sometimes until they literally die. It is also the smug assuredness with which Democratic leaders, in whatever state of infirmity, can still confidently, in the summer of 2022, tell us to trust them and see themselves as a bulwark against the ruin that is so evidently our present and near future.
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-Perhaps the progress made over several decades in the middle of the 20th century gave Feinstein and her peers an idealized sense of the nation’s institutions as pliable and always improving. She could urge patience and civility because so many structural exclusions had begun to give way. “Women have really grown to the position where their capability is enormous,” she told me. “I see this with great pride: when women come in who are major officers in our military, in uniform, talking about a given problem, and they are articulate, they’re committed, and they make change. And so this is a day that we should not be disappointed in. It’s a day where, if you look back 50 years, it was very different. But progress has been made, and progress will continue to be made. I’m absolutely convinced of that.”
-
-But those articulate women in the uniforms Feinstein fetishizes got there in part because of the social and political upheavals Feinstein has strained so hard to quell. The gains made by women and people of color and gays and lesbians and trans people and immigrants were extracted *by force* from a system that had been built to exclude them. To be on the side of the system in the wake of victories wrenched from that system was not to be at the center. It wasn’t moderate. It wasn’t neutral.
-
-Feinstein doesn’t subscribe to this reading of American democracy. She believes those at the top of institutions can help those at the bottom get what they want. But American government has become *less* democratic in the same years that she and her peers have risen to lead it. A majority of Americans want gun control, but the Senate, whose arcane rules Feinstein still submits to, will not allow it. They want abortion rights, but the Court, which was stolen by Feinstein’s Republican friends, is poised to ensure that those rights are erased.
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-There is a great story in Roberts’s biography about how when Feinstein was on the Board of Supervisors, she got word that the headmistress of her old school, Sacred Heart, had been arrested protesting on behalf of farmworkers with Cesar Chavez. That headmistress, Sister Mary Mardel, told Roberts about how her former pupil had called the jail to speak to her. “Sister, what are you doing in jail?” Feinstein had asked her in alarm. “What about all the white gloves?”
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-Dianne Feinstein, the Institutionalist
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-# Did Jesse James Bury Confederate Gold? These Treasure Hunters Think So.
-
-## What does a search involving possible missing Confederate bounty, the myth of Jesse James, the FBI and a mysterious map reveal about the American psyche?
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-Carrying a metal detector, Chad Somers hops a small creek while hunting for gold outside Zanesville, Ohio. (Dustin Franz/For The Washington Post)
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-I clung to a rope on a nearly vertical hillside in rural Ohio, gingerly inching my way down toward a hand-dug shaft that was said to conceal an enormous cache of solid gold bars. I lost my footing and started to slide, but the rope saved me from rolling 70 feet to a creek below or crashing into the trunks of pines and beeches that towered over the slope. The old beech trees were especially haunting: Their smooth bark was elaborately carved with rabbits, human faces, hearts, letters, a boat and what looked like crude blueprints. The trees told an epic story, according to the treasure hunters I was with.
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-The tale featured the outlaw Jesse James, a powerful secret network of collaborators, and vast quantities of gold they allegedly buried in “depositories” from here to Utah and New Mexico to fund a Confederate uprising after the Civil War. The notorious gunslinger had been a Confederate guerrilla during the Civil War before turning to robbing banks and trains. The treasure hunters were intrigued by a controversial theory that he was part of an underground effort to help the South rise again.
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-It was a Wednesday in mid-March, the fourth day of the expedition. So far, the findings seemed promising. Grainy video from a camera snaked into a tunnel off the shaft showed potentially man-made structures and possibly reflective material. A metal detector capable of penetrating 25 feet was pinging and showing large metallic targets. It was time to call in a track hoe and start major digging.
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-“This is no longer a treasure hunt. This is a treasure recovery,” declared Chad Somers, a wiry former rodeo bull rider who had discovered the site. He was joined by Brad Richards, a retired high school history teacher from Michigan who had appeared in two seasons of the History channel series “The Curse of Civil War Gold,” and Warren Getler, a former journalist and longtime investigator of Confederate treasure claims who had been a consultant on Disney’s 2007 treasure-hunting blockbuster “National Treasure: Book of Secrets.” Somers had invited Getler for his prominence in the field; Getler brought in Richards, a friend from previous historical treasure investigations.
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-My disbelief was suspended as shakily as my body on the hillside. I *wanted* to believe there was gold in them thar hills. But Ohio is one of the last places I would have chosen to dig for treasure buried by Jesse James. History books say he and his brother, Frank, marauded farther west, from the 1860s until 1882, when James Gang traitor Robert Ford shot him in the back of the head in Missouri. During his unusually long career for an outlaw, James cultivated his own mystique, teasing the lawmen on his trail in cheeky letters to newspapers and staging robberies as spectacular, bloody public spectacles. He came to be seen as a noble Robin Hood who was so slick he may have faked his own death. The claim that he buried some of the loot he stole, as well as gold from other sources, was a part of the myth that the treasure hunters hoped to verify.
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-It seemed fitting that this hunt was in a secluded forest about 30 miles northwest of Zanesville, the birthplace of Zane Grey, the prolific popularizer of the Old West in scores of novels. Whether we found gold or not, we were plunging deep into American mythologies of one sort or another: outlaw legends, fables of rebellion, beguiling notions of hidden historical hands operating behind the scenes.
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-Zanesville had been seized by treasure-hunting fever before. In March 1949, a posse of men claiming to be intimates or kin of Jesse James blew into town with a primitive land mine detector to search for $1.5 million in gold that they said was buried somewhere just to the north. In the end, all they dug up was an empty metal box, but they told the local papers they also found carvings on trees that they interpreted as clues. In fact, their failure only validated the almost mystical qualities they attributed to James. One of the treasure hunters told the Zanesville Times Recorder that the outlaw had foreseen the invention of metal detectors but knew “how to cover \[treasure\] with something so no machine will ever locate it.”
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-Treasure hunting maintains its grip on American culture, with at least two dozen reality shows over the past decade devoted to finding everything from the Holy Grail to the riches of the Knights Templar, according to the database [IMDb.com](http://imdb.com/). The predictable, tortured conclusion of these shows is nearly always the same: no treasure — so it must *still* be out there. But I was descending into the mystery anyway, enchanted in spite of myself. I had first encountered Getler’s work on the Confederate underground in 2009, when I interviewed him about the oddly related mysteries of Masonic symbology around Washington that best-selling novelist Dan Brown centered in [his D.C. thriller](https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B002KQ6BT6&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_E6VRG0K3KC6G5TQFM11C&tag=thewaspos09-20) that year.
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-I’d come to see treasure hunting and amateur code breaking as metaphors for our age, when the traditional arbiters of truth — the media, government officials, political parties, religious institutions — have lost some, or all, of their authority. We have to decipher things on our own. The challenge in such a conspiratorial climate is to distinguish truth from speculation: What’s the difference between secret knowledge that guides you to a pot of gold and, say, the signs that lead you to suspect that a presidential election was stolen, or that a deadly virus is fake news? The men I was with were looking for something tangibly precious, sure — but in other ways, maybe they were also searching for something that we’re all missing.
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-At the beginning of the “National Treasure” sequel, Nicolas Cage’s character lectures in Washington about a shadowy fraternity called the Knights of the Golden Circle and a dark secret contained in the missing pages of John Wilkes Booth’s diary. Had the diary pages not been burned, he says, Abraham Lincoln’s “killers may have found a vast treasure of gold, and the Union may well have lost the Civil War.”
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-It sounds like a villainous conspiracy concocted in Hollywood — except that the fiction is spiced with fact. The Knights of the Golden Circle really did exist. According to one of the few mainstream histories of the organization, “[Knights of the Golden Circle: Secret Empire, Southern Secession, Civil War](https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B00B119JF4&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_8BHVFR8F63060AH6J7MK&tag=thewaspos09-20)” by David C. Keehn, Booth and at least one other conspirator in plots to kidnap or kill Lincoln probably were members.
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-The KGC was founded in the 1850s by a Virginia doctor transplanted to — yes — Ohio. It was primarily a Southern group but had plenty of Northern sympathizers, including hundreds in a county about an hour north of Zanesville, according to a news report at the time. The group attracted 50,000 members. Before the war they focused on agitating for secession and building a slaveholding empire in a geographic circle encompassing the southern United States, the Caribbean and parts of Latin America. During the war, they filled the ranks of Confederate forces. After the war, the KGC seemed to melt away, possibly splintering into pro-South successor groups or joining the Ku Klux Klan.
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-This was just when Jesse James was making his own transition from wartime Confederate guerrilla to postwar, politically inspired, anti-Union bandit and killer. Over the next century, legends of the KGC and myths of the outlaw became entwined and endlessly embellished.
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-And Confederate gold did go missing. In the waning days of the war, in April 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis fled Richmond with a trainload of what was left of the Confederate treasury in gold and silver. Some of it was lost or stolen in the chaos, and the case remains a mystery. A popular theory in treasure-hunting circles is that the KGC may have had a hand in the matter, and that the group also buried much more gold from other sources in multiple locations. KGC historian Keehn disagrees: “I never really found anything that supports the treasure-hunting thing,” he told me.
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-James entered the picture in the early 1960s and mid-1970s when a self-styled private detective named Orvus Lee Howk, who claimed to be James’s grandson, wrote a book and contributed to another arguing that the outlaw was a KGC leader who buried gold. Howk presented no evidence beyond his colorful yarns, but he had joined the treasure hunt in Zanesville in 1949. Today, the James-KGC-gold connection forms an active subculture within treasure-hunting culture, spawning books like “[Jesse James and the Lost Templar Treasure](https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B07JYLC1MD&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_70WV9Z755ND9XMCMW058&tag=thewaspos09-20)” and TV movies like “Jesse James’ Hidden Treasure.”
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-T.J. Stiles, author of the groundbreaking biography “[Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War](https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B0047747Q0&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_DJJDQNQAR8A633W7KJW0&tag=thewaspos09-20),” told me that the treasure hunters get at least one important thing right about the outlaw: He was a much more significant political figure than standard accounts portray. “With Jesse, it was crime plus politics,” Stiles says. He and his gang “weren’t modern terrorists, but what distinguishes him from all the other criminals in the 19th century is the way he would use his notoriety to promote a political cause” — namely, the Lost Cause of the South and the maintenance of white supremacy. James was part of a band that targeted banks connected to Unionists and harassed election officials during the midterms of 1866. He decried the postwar Republican party of Lincoln and advocated against the reelection of Ulysses S. Grant in 1872. The treasure hunters, says Stiles, leap “ahead of the evidence” when they extend James’s political program to include burying gold to support a Confederate resurrection or some other mysterious power grab.
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-James roamed as far north as Minnesota to rob a bank, but no deeds in Ohio have been documented. And yet, this is undoubtedly murky territory, which makes absolute proof of anything elusive. James “lived his whole life underground, and there’s no collection of \[personal\] letters from him,” Stiles says. “All the evidence about him personally has to be delivered with a caveat, so that also means that he’s more susceptible to revisions, and sometimes weird revisions. … Somebody is going to study, if they haven’t already, \[the connection\] between this kind of conspiracy theory approach to history in recent decades and people’s willingness to [believe that the election was stolen](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/07/republicans-big-lie-trump/?itid=lk_inline_manual_22), for example — this belief in the sensational and conspiracies and hidden hands.”
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-Getler says he admires the work of Stiles and Keehn but thinks historians’ search for truth doesn’t cover all the ground. “They don’t get their hands dirty in the field as an archaeologist or even treasure people,” he says. “There’s no way to get at this history unless you’re being a guy who’s literally digging in the ground.” Getler insists his speculations are not a conspiracy theory; rather, they are a theory about a known conspiracy — the KGC — and pushing the theory in new directions. “I’m the last person to say this is all neatly integrated, seamless. ... It’s messy. It’s suggestive. Much of it is not definitive. But there’s enough there to make the case.”
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-Each of the trio of treasure hunters in Ohio was after something more elusive than gold. A bit of bullion would be nice, of course. They even discussed how they would document the discovery, should there be one. But any gold they dug up would be a token of something more personally priceless.
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-Getler, 61, a former reporter with the International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal and other publications, was a senior writer for Discovery Communications in the late 1990s when he started researching the history. (Getler is the son of the late [Michael Getler](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/michael-getler-washington-post-editor-who-became-incisive-in-house-media-critic-dies-at-82/2018/03/15/a63d44ac-1fc7-11e8-94da-ebf9d112159c_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_26), who was a deputy managing editor and ombudsman at The Washington Post.) That’s when he met a veteran treasure hunter named Bob Brewer from Arkansas. Brewer, who’d retired from a Navy career including combat service in Vietnam, believed that some elders in his extended family in the early 20th century had been “sentinels” guarding caches of supposed KGC gold. One had showed him a “treasure tree” scarred with strange carved symbols.
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-Brewer taught himself to read telltale signs left in trees and rocks — such as hearts, turtles and turkey tracks — and to follow lines of buried clues for miles through the hills and woods. Using his system, in 1991, in a hilly forest in western Arkansas, he located a cache of gold and silver coins minted between 1802 and 1889, with a face value of nearly $460. Two years later he assisted in another haul in Oklahoma, following a copy of a map with the symbol “JJ” and attributed to Jesse James by other treasure hunters.
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-Getler thought the implications of Brewer’s experiences — the existence of a powerful secret network after the Civil War — could be the biggest story of his career. It would add a missing chapter to American history and would raise the question of what became of the secret network. In the National Archives, Getler found KGC records with examples of the group’s coded symbols. Brewer and he located other markings that old stories tied to the KGC on suspected treasure trails in several states. They also found symbols similar to those cited by Howk as having been left by James. In 2003, Simon & Schuster published their book “Shadow of the Sentinel” (retitled “[Rebel Gold](https://www.amazon.com/Rebel-Gold-Behind-Treasure-Confederacy/dp/0743219694)” for the paperback) with 21 pages of endnotes, about the quest to crack the code of KGC treasure.
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-The work inspired a new generation of KGC treasure hunters; even [the FBI joined the chase](https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/06/28/fbi-civil-war-gold/?itid=lk_inline_manual_29). In 2018, a father-and-son treasure-hunting team said they had detected a large cache of gold in a forest at Dents Run in northwestern Pennsylvania: as much as $50 million in suspected gold stolen from a mule-led Union Army pack train in 1863. Citing Getler’s KGC research, an FBI agent filed an affidavit seeking permission to dig up and seize the gold as stolen federal property. The story of the lost gold, the agent wrote in the affidavit, “fits the description of a KGC ‘waybill’ as it provides a very detailed ‘map’ in its telling of an account, mixing truth and symbols.”
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-In the end, the FBI said it found no gold. But the hunters grew suspicious when the agents wouldn’t let them watch the excavation, and after residents later told reporters they had heard digging at night and seen convoys of FBI vehicles leaving the site. In response to a lawsuit filed by the treasure hunters, the agency has been ordered to start releasing documents related to the dig later this month.
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-Since the early 2000s, Getler has been an entrepreneur and worked in communications for tech companies, including an underground detection technology firm. Periodically in his spare time, he returns to KGC treasure investigations. “He’s got his teeth around the leg of this thing … and he just won’t let it go,” Robert Whitcomb, Getler’s former editor at the Herald Tribune, told me. “He’s always been a very, very persistent writer and journalist.”
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-One of Getler’s closest friends, Andy Secher, a trilobite fossil specialist affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History in New York, says Getler always “had the idea that he had a great purpose. That there was something in his writing, in his future …. that was going to significantly impact a lot of people.” If exposing gold cached by a secret network is that decisive project, Secher says that he, for one, still needs to see proof it’s real. “From the bottom of my heart, I can’t wish him more luck and every good tiding,” he says. “But the question becomes at some point, show me something. And I say that to him all the time.”
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-Getler told me he tries to approach the subject as the journalist he used to be. “I’m not sitting here saying to people, ‘Believe, believe, believe.’ It takes my own skepticism to be overcome to start feeling good about the overall picture,” he says. “You can dismiss it outright. You can chuckle at it. Or you can say, ‘Hmmm, what if there’s something rather profound here?’ And gold bars are a touchstone for it all.” Finding gold in Ohio would be a vindication, a demonstration that his theories are correct and that our understanding of history must be adjusted.
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-“It’s become my legacy, it’s my life’s work,” he says. “You can kick me in the shins a million times: ‘Warren, pull up a damn gold bar and prove it.’ I’m as close as you possibly can be.”
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-Brad Richards, 52, the former history teacher from Michigan, told me that beyond recouping his expenses for two trips to Ohio, the gold means less than the possible contribution to history. “How many untold stories are out there?” he says. “It would be incredibly exciting to be a part of discovering and illuminating hidden history.” He adds that he’s the “skeptical one.” “I’m not big on looking at grainy video footage and being 100 percent certain on anything. ... I’ve got to see it to believe it.”
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-Chad Somers, 43, the former bull rider, was raised in a speck of a rural crossroads called Purity, near the treasure site. When Somers was about 10, a neighbor his grandfather did some work for told the boy there was a rumor that James had buried gold down by a creek where the boy was headed to play. Somers vowed to find it.
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-After his bull-riding days in his 20s, he fell on hard times. He and his girlfriend, Hope Bowser, lived in a mobile-home park and paid the rent by doing maintenance, until they were evicted and lost everything, he told me. One day about four years ago, they found an old portrait at a yard sale that reminded them of Jesse and Frank James. An appraiser cast doubt on it being a photo of the brothers, so Somers started researching to try to authenticate the portrait himself, in order to sell it. “He was going to prove that Jesse James had been in Ohio,” Bowser told me. “That’s what started this whole thing.”
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-Bowser and one of her brothers co-owned about two dozen acres that included the forest on the steep hill overlooking the creek — the same creek Somers had visited as a boy of about 10. Any treasure found could be claimed by them. Local lore held that there had been a gold mine in the area a long time ago, and Somers began to wonder if the rumors of a gold mine and the rumors of outlaw gold were conflations of the same story. One day he announced to Bowser, “I’m going to dig Jesse James’s gold bars out of the side of your hill.”
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-He explored the forest, looking for a place to dig. He took a smoke break at one of the only flat places on the hillside, a narrow ledge beside a tree shaped like a W. Somers suddenly had what he described to me as a kind of vision that featured James, wearing an oilskin duster, smoking a cigar, announcing that he would bury his biggest treasure right here. Somers commenced digging.
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-> “It’s become my legacy, it’s my life’s work,” says treasure hunter Warren Getler about his search to find gold that he believes was buried by Jesse James.
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-People around Purity laughed at him, thought he was wasting his time. When he needed money, he suspended digging to remodel houses or cut firewood. At one point he had made it down 30 feet — I saw a picture of him down there — and stood on what he thought could be the concrete top of a vault. To learn more about what he was looking for, he ordered Getler and Brewer’s book, and it became his bible. He brought it into the field with him every day as he scoured the territory for the kinds of markers and symbols that the authors described.
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-Late last year, he sent Getler a Facebook message about his preliminary findings. Getler had received similar queries and was wary. But when he heard how close Somers was to Zanesville, “He was like, ‘I’ll call you back,’ and we’ve been in very close touch ever since,” Somers says. Getler made an exploratory visit in December.
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-Somers saw the treasure hunt in the largest possible terms. “I think we can all agree that we need a little hope right now,” he told me on the phone, before I went to Ohio. “… I want people that really have nothing … to see what they can do. I’m not saying everybody can go out and find a treasure like this, but I’m saying that with the right mind-set and determination, the things they think are out of reach might be closer than they thought.”
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-Years ago, when I first discovered Getler and Brewer’s book on cracking the KGC code, I read portions of it aloud to my eldest daughter, then age 10. The way the authors described the American landscape itself as potentially being an encoded map, studded with clues that looked ordinary only to those lacking imagination and skill, was magical. My daughter was familiar with scavenger hunts, of course, and together we marveled at the possibility that more than a century ago people laid clues for anyone to find.
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-Now, in Ohio, as a journalist rather than as a dad, I was forced to confront whether the power of this story lay in its truth or its creativity — and I knew my job was to be on the lookout for signs the magic was an illusion.
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-All right, now the adventure begins,” Getler said on the first day of the hunt as we trudged a muddy half-mile across a field and through the woods to the site of the suspected treasure trove.
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-Richards, the former teacher from Michigan, and his son, Bradley, a high school freshman, were taking readings above the shaft with a deep-penetrating metal detector hooked up to a digital imaging system. Bradley tethered himself to a tree to run the machine on the unforgiving incline. “The data will show what the data will show,” Richards said as his son walked grids on the hill.
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-Getler led me down to look at the carvings on the beech trees. He said these offered some of the most promising evidence that this could be a treasure site. On one, hearts and arrows were tilted to point in the direction of the shaft. There were carved rabbits — “rabbit trails” being a reference to paths leading to treasure — and a pair of “Js” carved back-to-back, which, according to Jesse James treasure lore, depicts the outlaw’s initials. There was a diagram that Getler interpreted as a shaft with tunnels, and beside it was a portrait of a man with a broad brim hat and what could be a vault or a chest near where his heart should be.
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-Getler conceded that some of this could be graffiti left by lovers — initials, hearts and arrows — but that’s how KGC treasure hieroglyphics tend to work, he said. Clues are hiding in plain sight, mixed intentionally or coincidentally with red herrings, he said. A further point of validation, he added, is that some of the symbology here in Ohio, such as the hearts and the “JJs,” matched that found at other suspected treasure sites out west.
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-He hurried me on to another elaborately carved tree where he said I would get to see James’s signature. Getler had spotted it on his first visit in December. “When I saw his name on the tree, I trembled and tears came out of my eyes,” he recalled. The tree’s carvings told a story in three acts, he said, depicting how the group brought the gold up the creek, buried it and certified that the outlaw was their leader. But today the signature — “Jesse W. James 1882” — was invisible, and he didn’t have a picture from December. It had been raining. Getler fingered the moist bark. “Damn it,” he said. “It’s too wet.”
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-We returned to that beech each day, waiting for the bark to dry and for the signature to reappear. I was troubled that the symbology seemed so malleable, open to the creation of more than one story. The risk of confirmation bias — fitting the signs to a desired meaning — seemed enormous. But I also found that I was invested, too. One day I suddenly saw a long boat carved across the trunk of the signature tree. Getler hadn’t known what to make of those horizontal lines that converged upward into a prow. He savored my addition to the story. “Maybe they’re saying they came by barge here?” Getler asked.
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-Other evidence that Getler and Somers relied on included a copy of a treasure map attributed to Howk — the alleged confidant or grandson of James’s who had been on the 1949 Zanesville treasure hunt. The map is widely shared on the Internet in treasure-hunting circles, but I couldn’t determine who first posted it, and Getler didn’t know either. He had gone to the trouble of checking signed initials on the map against the handwriting in Howk’s letters in a Texas archive — but Howk’s veracity is dismissed by historians. I wasn’t ready to trust the map, but Getler’s and Somers’s interpretation revealed how they approached the code breaking.
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-The map appeared to show geographical features of the Ohio property. If so, a “Confederate Depository” was indicated at the site where Somers started digging his shaft. But the map was labeled — Getler and Somers would say intentionally mislabeled — as describing a treasure site somewhere in Tennessee. Somers scrutinized faint hand-lettering at the top of the map that appeared to say “Battle Site.” He noticed the stem of the letter “B” was detached from the curves, which could make it “13.” And “attle” was written in such a way that could be read as “oHio.” Rather than “Battle Site,” did it say “13 Ohio Site,” with 13 coinciding with the plat number of the property? In addition, Somers and Getler proposed that when the map was turned to reflect the north-south direction of the creek in Ohio, the “N” in the locational note “From Nashville” could become the “Z” in “From Zanesville.”
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-The treasure hunters also cited a letter from Howk to another participant in the 1949 Zanesville treasure search. It referenced clues including an old shovel, a wagon iron and a wolf trap, and instructed, “Drive a stake at each point until we can run the lines\[;\] then where the lines cross is your solution.” Somers had uncovered a shovel, with the blade pointing toward the shaft, and a wagon axle, also pointing toward the shaft. He had yet to find a wolf trap.
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-> The risk of confirmation bias — fitting the signs to a desired meaning — seemed enormous. But I also found that I was invested, too.
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-I was pulling for Somers, Getler and Richards to be right about all this, despite what the historians said. It would be a more interesting world if they were, and it would give others the courage to challenge conventional wisdom. But before I could become a true believer, I needed to see if their narrative could withstand attempts to poke holes in it.
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-First, the beech trees. Could they really be that old? I had brought a tape measure with me. While the treasure hunters were taking metal-detector readings and exploring related sites, I measured the circumference of the trees that were pillars of their story. Earlier I had called Scott Aker, head of horticulture and education at the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, for a briefing on the age of trees. He told me that, indeed, beech trees can grow to be hundreds of years old. Unfortunately, the surest ways to tell a tree’s age is to cut it down, or bore a hole into it, and count the rings.
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-However, one way some arborists estimate a beech tree’s age is to divide a tree’s circumference in inches by 3.14 (or pi) and multiply by six. By that method, three of the key trees range in age from about 130 to 170 years old, which would date them to the mid- to late 19th century. But the tree where Getler saw the signature would be only about 110 years old. Aker cast doubt on this method because it doesn’t account for local growing conditions; the trees could easily be older — or younger. Results of my tree-measuring test: ambiguous.
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-I looked for neighbors of the Ohio site who might have family lore about James, in addition to the gold rumors Somers had heard. Lavina Nethers, 85, lives a short drive from the dig site. Sitting in her living room, she told me how her late husband, James Nethers, had been named for Jesse James and that his great-great-grandmother had regularly washed the outlaw’s clothes and given him a meal when he passed through the area. One day, “she told Jesse that she wouldn’t be able to wash his clothes or take care of him when he comes through again. And he wanted to know why. She told him that they were going to foreclose on the farm the next day and she wouldn’t be there. And he said, ‘Don’t worry about it; I’ll take care of it. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ He came back the next morning and had the money for her foreclosure. … The next day, the bank was robbed. She got to keep the farm and they got their money.”
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-A potential problem with Nethers’s testimony, though, is that stories about James paying off mortgages are legion. I was reminded of a verse by Woody Guthrie: “Many a starvin’ farmer / The same story told / How the outlaw paid their mortgage / And saved their little homes.” Guthrie was singing about Pretty Boy Floyd, not James, but paying off the mortgages of society’s underdogs is an archetype of American outlaw legends, a refashioning of Robin Hood with a gun instead of a longbow.
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-Later I called Eric James, in Danville, Ky., who runs a Jesse James family website and genealogical database dedicated to documenting the family tree back to Colonial Virginia and correcting what he considers myths about the outlaw. Almost every week he gets a letter or email from people with old family stories about James. What is it about Jesse James that triggers a sense of connection in so many, real or imagined? “People need heroes,” says James, 79, who’s writing a five-volume history of the James family, and whose research shows he’s a distant cousin of Jesse James. “We don’t have heroes today.”
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-To many in the James family, the outlaw’s legend has been a burden — including stories of buried treasure and periodic Hollywood glamorization, such as 2007′s “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” starring Brad Pitt. “It’s been going on ever since Jesse was assassinated,” Eric James says. “And thanks to reality TV, it’s not going to stop in the near future or the next 100 years.” He adds: “The funny part about it is, all the James descendants would love for the treasure hunters to find the gold, because then we could claim the inheritance! … \[Or\] if they could prove it came from a bank or a railroad, that money could be claimed by ... the descendants of those corporations.”
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-I found myself wrestling with the tension between keeping an open mind and not being deluded. “What lies between skepticism and credulity?” I asked one morning, as Getler and I sat beside the shaft Somers had dug, while Brad and Bradley Richards took more detector readings to pick a spot to start drilling. “A straight skeptic might never find gold, and an overly credulous person might be faked out all the time and keep going, wanting to believe. … \[But\] belief is also an important part of the tool kit.”
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-“If you don’t have that, you can’t keep going,” Getler agreed. “That’s where I say ambiguity is our worst enemy. … And the sad part is, until you pull up bars of gold in Dents Run, or Ohio, or \[a third active site in\] New Mexico, it’s just, for some, a lot of hot air, or wild speculation, or some might even say a fool’s errand.”
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-Say what you will about tree carvings and treasure maps; it’s harder to argue with metal detectors. The Richardses had confirmed two fat targets near Somers’s site, and a ground-penetrating radar survey later indicated other possible targets nearby. Getler conceded the devices they were using weren’t as sophisticated as the equipment that the FBI drew upon at Dents Run — he couldn’t afford that technology here — but the Ohio technology *had* obtained readings at Dents Run consistent with the results that convinced the FBI to dig, he said. As I continued my cautious journey down the rope on that hopeful fourth day when digging was to begin and the hill would yield its secrets, my mind was still open to any possibility. Was I feeling treasure fever?
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-The rope delivered me safely to the ledge by the shaft, where I found Somers crouching beside his makeshift tunnel braces. Sun was glinting off the creek, a gossipy circle of wild turkeys faced us on the other side, and Somers was in a pensive mood. He was pretty sure he was about to become a rich man, and he had complicated feelings about that. It would lift him out of poverty and allow him to provide for his family and friends, but he knew gold could also be a curse. “At the end of this thing, I just want everybody involved to be able to sit down and smile and wrap our minds around what we have done … regardless of whether it’s in there,” he said, adding: “I mean, we kind of already know it’s in there.”
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-Somers couldn’t help remarking that for all the fancy technology and theories that had been brought to bear, they were *still* digging right where, in his vision, Jesse James had told him to dig in the first place.
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-Getler hired a local equipment operator who began carving a switchback path that would allow his track hoe to descend the steep grade to the dig site. They worked on the road all day, filling the forest with the grinding sound of human intervention. By nightfall, the path was nearly done.
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-The next day began with two omens, one hopeful, one not so much. As the track hoe operator prepared to fell a dead tree and position the machine for the final assault on the treasure, Somers reached into the dirt at the base of the tree and found a T-shaped piece of metal. It was the same shape as the diagrams carved on two of the beech trees. The operator’s assistant identified it as a portion of an animal trap. Could this be the wolf trap spoken of in the letter between Zanesville treasure hunters in 1949 — or was it meaningless scrap? Any attempts to date the artifact would have to wait.
-
-“Hey, Chad, nice find there, buddy,” Getler said. “After that, I’m one step closer to believing it’s here, and if it’s not, I’ll eat my words.”
-
-Getler made a last visit to the beech trees. I sat with him on the ground and contemplated the carvings, wondering if the discoveries to come would confirm the story he thought the trees told. But Jesse James’s signature was still invisible. Was the bark too wet — or had he even been here?
-
-By day’s end, the track hoe finally reached the site. The sun was about to set, so Getler postponed digging until morning. Given that schedule, I thought I could depart the scene to give Hope Bowser a lift to the gas station because her car had run out of gas. While I was at the pump, I got a text message that the treasure digging had begun anyway — and something dramatic was happening. I was out of position, a reporter’s worst nightmare. I raced back to the site and later reconstructed a few moments that I missed via interviews and video that I reviewed.
-
-Somers rode the excavator’s shovel down into the hole and started opening what he thought looked like a passage deeper into the hill. “Tunnel, tunnel!” exclaimed Getler, standing on a berm above the hole. “If they confirm a tunnel, I’m going to start hugging everyone.”
-
-Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, an angry man stalked onto the scene. He ordered the digging to halt and everyone to leave the property.
-
-Bowser identified him as one of her brothers, though not the one she said co-owned the property with her. But the co-owner soon contacted her as well and let her know he disapproved of digging for alleged gold with a track hoe and cutting a road to get to the site. The brothers had been taken by surprise by the amount of disruption to the property, and it was clear that at least some members of Bowser’s family considered the treasure hunt a deluded fantasy.
-
-We left. I felt as though a spell had been broken. The cold reality of family drama made the treasure hunt seem like a game that made sense only if you were in on it. It dawned on me that, in spite of ourselves, we had arrived at that most predictable juncture in a treasure narrative: the moment of reconciling with the absence of treasure.
-
-But treasure narratives have infinite powers of regeneration. Gold hadn’t been found — but neither had an empty hole. Within several days, after Getler, the Richardses and I had left Ohio, members of Bowser’s family relented. One told me, on the condition that I not publish his name because of his job, that stories of gold on the property go back decades. In the 1950s, a man dug for gold there for years. He probably thought the gold had been buried, because mineralogists have determined the area is not suited for naturally occurring gold, the family member said. But the digger apparently never found anything.
-
-The family allowed the hunt for Jesse James’s gold to continue, on the condition that it be conducted less invasively. Somers began excavating by hand, crawling into tunnels and voids. He snaked a camera deeper into the hill, and as this story was going to press, he was sending back images that he and Getler interpreted as signs of objects and tool work.
-
-For the time being, though, that thing more precious than gold that each of the treasure hunters was seeking continued to elude them. I hadn’t found what I was looking for, either — something solid to hold on to in this swirl of legend, fact and fantasy; a final verdict. These days, certainty may be the most out-of-reach treasure of all.
-
-*David Montgomery is a staff writer for the magazine. Staff researchers Alice Crites, Magda Jean-Louis, Jennifer Jenkins, Monika Mathur and Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this story.*
-
-
-
-
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-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
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-Tag: ["🧗", "🥉", "Accident"]
-Date: 2022-08-07
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-08-07
-Link: https://www.businessinsider.com/inside-a-fall-from-denali-north-americas-tallest-peak-2022-7
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
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-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-08-07]]
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-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-Disasterat18200feetNSave
-
-
-
-# Disaster at 18,200 feet
-
-None of them noticed the fall. One moment, Adam Rawski was with them on the mountain. The next, he was gone.
-
-It was May 24, 2021, around Day 15 of their trek up Denali, North America's tallest peak. There was Grant Wilson and Sarah Maynard, Alaska natives and close friends since high school who were now in their early 20s; Rawski, a 31-year-old clean technology executive from Canada, who had befriended them on the mountain a week earlier; and Dr. Jason Lance, a 48-year-old radiologist from Utah who had paired up with Rawski at the last minute after both of their climbing partners turned back.
-
-The four had hoped to summit that day. But Rawski was exhausted and showing signs of altitude sickness. He couldn't go any further. Just over a thousand feet from the summit, they had no choice but to stop and turn back.
-
-Now on the descent, at around 18,200 feet, they had just crossed Denali Pass, a relatively flat, open snowfield with sweeping views of the Alaska Range and surrounding wilderness. In front of them lay the Autobahn, a notoriously dangerous icy slope that descends 1,000 feet. At least 13 deadly falls have been recorded here since 1980.
-
-The Autobahn's terrain can vary from rock solid ice to several feet of snow. If climbers lose their footing and fall, there's nothing to slow their momentum and prevent a fast and almost certainly fatal tumble down the slope. It's said some German climbers died at this spot years ago, which is how it became known as the Autobahn — as in, Germany's highway with no speed limit.
-
-Perhaps the most dangerous thing about the Autobahn is that it doesn't *look* very dangerous. It's steep enough to cause climbers to fall with great speed, but not so steep that all climbers exercise proper caution. The park service strongly encourages roping up with protection at this spot, but every year, teams ignore that advice. If the slope was just a bit steeper, it's likely fewer climbers would take the risk.
-
-Most falls on the Autobahn happen on the descent, when climbers are exhausted, having just pushed for the summit after two weeks on the unforgiving mountain, perhaps slightly impaired by the effects of altitude, and quite possibly a little cocky from having made it this far.
-
-Despite his condition, Rawski was not roped up. Standing at the top of the Autobahn, the others had scattered a bit. Wilson had stepped out of sight for a bathroom break. Maynard was slightly downhill from Lance.
-
-And then, Rawski was gone.
-
-As Maynard would tell me later, her mind raced through the possibilities: "Is he so hypoxic that he is taking his clothes off and wandering around? Is he so delusional that he's going for another summit attempt? Does his stomach hurt so bad that he's puking somewhere or just huddled up?"
-
-Then she heard Lance: "Oh, fuck." She followed his eyes down to the bottom of the Autobahn, 1000 feet below. There, Rawski's body in his bright blue puffer was lying, motionless.
-
-It was quiet, with no wind. But Maynard hadn't heard a thing. "That's what was so spooky and haunting," she said. "I didn't hear his ice axe hit the ground. I didn't hear his body tumble. I didn't hear a yelp from him."
-
-Maynard and Wilson huddled under a rock, all but certain their friend was dead. They held each other, and cried.
-
-Amazingly, Rawski didn't die that day. He's one of the only climbers known to have survived a fall down the Autobahn. But that's not where the story ends. What none of them knew then was that six months later, one of them would be criminally charged and brought before a judge — and they'd all have to relive the worst day of their lives.
-
-## The Great Outdoors
-
-When throngs of novice adventurers take on challenges without the proper training or expertise, disaster often follows — which is part of the story of what happened on Denali last May.
-
-Visits to America's national parks have exploded in recent years as more and more people seek out wild, majestic places to visit and color their Instagram feeds. More than 600,000 people came to Denali National Park in 2019, a 65% increase from 2000. Things were quiet in 2020 due to COVID-19, but by 2021 the mountain was nearly as busy as before the pandemic, with 1,007 climbers attempting to summit.
-
-Shortly after Rawski's fall, Denali's park rangers, all of them expert mountaineers, took the extraordinary step of publishing a finger-wagging [report](https://www.nps.gov/dena/blogs/troubling-trends.htm). "We have seen a disturbing amount of overconfidence paired with inexperience in the Alaska Range," they said, warning climbers that mountaineering in the Lower 48 doesn't necessarily prepare you for the high-altitude and extreme conditions of the Alaskan wilderness.
-
-
-
-A clear morning view of Denali from inside the national park.
-
-C. Fredrickson Photography/Getty Images
-
-Denali soars 20,310 feet above sea level and, for some mountaineers, is considered a stepping stone to Mount Everest (though without the help of Sherpas). Its official title was changed from Mt. McKinley in 2015, when Denali, the name given to the mountain by Alaskan Natives — meaning "the tall one" or "the great one" — was restored.
-
-The peak is located among 6 million acres of protected wilderness. To reach the mountain, climbers hop on a small plane in Talkeetna, a tiny town south of the park, and fly over 75 miles of terrain that changes from lush greenery to jagged granite and snow-covered slopes.
-
-They're dropped off at Denali's base camp, located on the Kahiltna Glacier, at 7,200 feet elevation — already 1,000 feet higher than Mount Washington, the tallest peak of New Hampshire's White Mountains. From there, the expedition to the summit and back usually takes 17 to 21 days.
-
-Typically only about half of the climbers attempting Denali every year will reach the summit. Determining whether or not a climber is prepared to take on Denali is difficult even for rangers and guides.
-
-Temperatures can dip below -40 degrees Fahrenheit. Climbers face snow storms, freezing rain, 100 mph winds, and blazing sunlight. The gear weighs over 100 pounds and includes clothes, tents, stoves, skis, or snowshoes, crampons, protective equipment, and a sled to haul it all. Climbers take on steep vertical grades and glacier travel, during which they can encounter crevasses that go hundreds of feet deep into the ice — and that's all on top of the sheer physical challenge of climbing a mountain at an altitude few humans ever experience.
-
-
-
-Base Camp on the Kahiltna Glacier in Denali National Park. Mountaineers climbing Denali, the highest mountain in North America, are dropped off here by ski planes, visible in photo.
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-Getty Images
-
-There are specific skill sets climbers should have, like snow and ice climbing, glacier travel, cold-weather camping, and exceptional cardiovascular fitness. But even then, it is hard to gauge if a person is ready.
-
-The most basic measure for whether or not a climber is prepared — physically, technically, psychologically — for a Denali expedition is straightforward: Would you attempt what you are doing if you were alone on this mountain?
-
-If the answer is no, you shouldn't be there.
-
-## A shared passion
-
-Maynard and Wilson teamed up to tackle Denali in late 2020.
-
-The two were high school classmates in Fairbanks, the largest and coldest city in Alaska's Interior region and the closest city to Denali. It's known for being one of the best places to see the northern lights, and for long summer days when the sun never sets.
-
-They both ran cross country, traveling with the team to faraway meets on weekends, and were part of a large friend group of cross country skiers. But they bonded most over their shared passion for mountaineering.
-
-They stayed close even after Maynard moved to Montana to get a degree in exercise science and work as a ski instructor, keeping up with each other's adventures through texts and social media, and planned excursions whenever their schedules aligned. Whenever Maynard returned home to Alaska, she'd check in with Wilson. "I'm always trying to get invited on his adventures because he stays busy," she said.
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-
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-Sarah Maynard and Grant Wilson on Denali. Sarah Maynard
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-Show less
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-Grant Wilson and Sarah Maynard on Denali. Sarah Maynard
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-Wilson has lived in Alaska his whole life. When not climbing, skiing, surfing, or recreating outdoors in some capacity, he worked as a commercial fisherman in Bristol Bay.
-
-"I grew up winter camping with my family and doing wintertime hunting and all these things that I feel like was preparation leading up to this Denali climb," Wilson told me.
-
-They had both skied pristine backcountry landscapes and conquered peaks in Alaska and elsewhere. They had lots of training with rope systems, including on past climbs and through courses. Neither had much experience above 14,000 feet.
-
-But having grown up in Alaska, Denali always loomed large. It's a famously challenging expedition for any mountaineer, but, more than that, it's their home mountain.
-
-"My grandpa used to take me out of school on bluebird days" — clear, sunny days that follow a night of snowfall, Maynard told me. "He's a pilot and he would fly me around Denali."
-
-"One time he got close enough that you could see the climbers. And I remember that moment just being like, 'Wow.'"
-
-## Base Camp
-
-In early May of 2021, Maynard and Wilson finally stepped out onto Kahiltna Glacier.
-
-The plan was to tackle the West Buttress, Denali's most popular, and least technical, route. It's a 15-mile journey to the summit, gaining more than 13,000 feet in elevation along the way.
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-As with the other camps higher up the mountain, base camp has room for dozens of tents but no physical infrastructure.
-
-From camp to camp, climbers make their way up the mountain in strategic bursts. Moving too quickly can be dangerous. Climbers will take full days to wait out bad weather, rest, and acclimatize to the higher altitudes as the air gets thinner and thinner.
-
-There's also some essential backtracking. To lighten the load they're carrying, climbers will bury some of their gear in the snow, marking it with a flag, and then double back for it once they've set up camp higher up the mountain.
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-
-
-A view of Grant Wilson and Sarah Maynard's camp on the Kahiltna Glacier, 7,200 feet, after a late start in the day and poor visibility. Grant Wilson
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-Show less
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-
-A relaxing day at Denali's 14 camp, where elite mountaineers mingle with those rolling into camp with little to no experience. Grant Wilson
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-Show less
-
-When the mountain is busy, especially in late spring when there's near round-the-clock sunlight, the camps come alive, forming makeshift towns. Killing time at the camps is part of the experience, and can involve kicking around a hacky sack, doing yoga, or getting to know other climbers.
-
-One morning, still early on the route, Maynard and Wilson were flying kites when they first met Adam Rawski.
-
-Rawski, tall with dark hair, was about a decade older and lived on Canada's west coast. He worked as the VP of finance at a clean technology company in Vancouver, and spent as much time as he could in the wilderness. "Backcountry skiing, downhill mountain biking, rock climbing, ice climbing," he would tell me later. "You name it, I would do it."
-
-After climbing most major peaks in the Pacific Northwest — including Mount Rainier, which at 14,417 feet, is considered a precursor to Denali — he decided to take on "the great one." He had come to Alaska with a fellow climber from back home.
-
-Rawski was a friendly presence at the camps, going out of his way to meet other climbers. "I would just walk around and say hi to people," he said.
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-
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-Adam Rawski on a prior adventure. Adam Rawski
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-Adam Rawski on a prior adventure. Adam Rawski
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-He and his partner started out around the same time as Maynard and Wilson, so the teams were moving up the mountain at a similar pace. During rest periods, Rawski would join them for a game of cards. One day, when Maynard and Wilson needed butter, Rawski gave them some of his. "We made friends with him pretty quickly," Maynard told me.
-
-When they reached 14 Camp — one of two potential launching pads to take the summit — there was a problem: Rawski's partner had decided to pull out.
-
-## A new partner for the upper mountain
-
-At 14,200 feet — just shy of the height of Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the Lower 48 — 14 Camp marks the start of what rangers call the upper mountain. From here, the weather gets even more unpredictable and climbers are more likely to face relentless whiteout conditions — as well as unbearable wind, altitude sickness, frostbite, or hypothermia.
-
-Many climbers reach 14 Camp and decide not to go any further.
-
-Others, eager to minimize the time spent lugging heavy equipment in this increasingly desolate and punishing environment, store their gear here and — skipping the final resting spot, High Camp, at 17,200 feet — make their final push to the summit.
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-This goes against park rangers' recommendation. Climbers who do not have prior experience above 14,000 feet in arctic conditions have "no real conception of how their body will respond to such stresses," they explained in the report published days after Rawski's fall. "There are very few mountaineers capable of moving fast enough to accomplish this safely."
-
-Setting up camp at High Camp gives climbers more time to acclimate to the higher elevation and makes for a shorter trek to and from Denali's summit. Despite this, the report said, more climbers were choosing the more dangerous route of trying to summit from 14 Camp.
-
-
-
-Sarah Maynard making her way along the 16,000 ft ridge of Denali during an early morning attempt to reach the summit.
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-Grant Wilson
-
-The issue had been compounded, the rangers said, by the reshuffling that's all too common at 14 Camp. Climbers who want to continue even after their teammates bow out end up forming new teams. (The risk of a crevasse fall, sickness, or serious accident are too high to make solo climbing a safe option.)
-
-But team dynamics is one of the biggest factors impacting safety and success on a Denali expedition. Strangers won't know the skill level or risk tolerance of their teammates, or be able to spot when the other person is sick or exhausted. "In many cases, these determined climbers end up forming loose coalitions with other individuals who they have just met for the first time and who are equally summit-driven," the report said.
-
-"Collectively, this is a recipe for disaster."
-
-This was the position that Rawski found himself in that day. He heard that Jason Lance, a military vet who had served in Afghanistan and a father of four from Mountain Green, Utah, was also looking for a partner. The two teamed up and decided to push for the summit the next day. (Lance declined multiple interview requests from Insider and did not respond to a detailed list of questions.)
-
-"It was a very last-minute, hasty decision," Rawski later said.
-
-"In hindsight, probably not the best idea."
-
-## Summit day: 'Push through it and get by'
-
-A few hours after midnight on May 24, Rawski and Lance left 14 Camp and set off for the summit. Aided by the almost constant daylight, they figured the early start would give them enough time to summit and capitalize on the clear weather.
-
-A couple hours later, Maynard and Wilson also set off from 14 Camp. At around 9 a.m., they stopped to rest at High Camp and ran into Rawski and Lance.
-
-Immediately it was clear to them that Rawski was not himself. He was quiet, dehydrated, and had diarrhea. Another team that was staying at High Camp was boiling snow into potable water for Rawski to drink.
-
-Rawski told me he remembers being dehydrated and exhausted, but at the time didn't think his condition was especially worrisome. "I've been tired in that sort of situation before in the past. So I was sort of like, 'Push through it and get by.'"
-
-Maynard and Wilson — who were meeting Lance for the first time — both said they wondered if Rawski was better off turning back, but decided it wasn't their place to push it.
-
-"When somebody's that sick, you don't continue with the original plan." Wilson told me later. "Jason Lance, as his partner that day, should have made some serious adjustments to their plan knowing how dehydrated Adam was."
-
-After some time resting at High Camp, Lance and Rawski resumed the climb, as did Maynard and Wilson.
-
-
-
-Adam Rawski finishing a dangerously exposed portion of the climb known as the Autobahn.
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-Grant Wilson
-
-At 18,200 feet, Maynard and Wilson stopped at Denali Pass and took a minute to enjoy the breathtaking views. "We were kind of geeking out, looking around and going, 'Oh my gosh, there's the Hayes Range' and 'Oh, there's Hunter,'" Maynard said. "It was really cool, being from Alaska, to just kind of be on top and see all the ranges that we recreate in."
-
-A short while later, Maynard and Wilson caught up to Rawski and Lance.
-
-Lance motioned to them to huddle up. Turning to Maynard, he suggested that she and Rawski turn back together, and that Lance and Wilson continue up the mountain as a pair. As Maynard remembers it, Lance said, "Sarah, I see you've slowed down. Why don't you take Adam down? Why don't you guide him down and Grant and I can go for the summit."
-
-She and Wilson were incredulous. This was *their* mountain. Who was Lance, not even an Alaskan, to boss them around, Wilson told me later. "It was like, dude, look, we're young, but we're not idiots here."
-
-But even as they shut the idea down, they were getting increasingly concerned about Rawski. He was clearly out of it but still saying he wanted to keep going. "Was I experiencing symptoms of altitude sickness? Maybe, I just couldn't realize it myself," Rawski told me later.
-
-So, they kept going, letting Rawski set the pace. Wilson later described it as a "zombie march."
-
-Then, according to Maynard and Wilson, Lance started moving faster, slowly pushing ahead of the group. "We stayed on either side of Adam, and Jason just got farther and farther and farther ahead, until he disappeared over a little pass," Wilson said. "It wasn't verbalized. There was no discussion involved. It was quite obvious what was going on."
-
-Lance was ditching them with his partner and going for a solo summit attempt.
-
-Lance later disputed this account, saying he went up ahead in hopes of waving down another team, climbers Maynard knew from Montana. But Maynard said he didn't say that at the time and, in any event, she was in radio contact with her friends.
-
-I asked Rawski about whether or not he felt Lance had abandoned him. "I don't really feel like he abandoned me too much," Rawski said. Lance, he said, "just felt like more of that sort of lone wolf who wanted to make it to the summit, no matter how, whether it be solo or with the group."
-
-At 19,200 feet, .2 miles from the summit, Maynard and Wilson decided they had to turn back. Lance was out of sight, Rawski was in bad shape, and they too were starting to slow down.
-
-But first, the three of them paused to look around and take it all in, their high point on Denali. "For the first time in the day, Adam kind of seemed like himself for a little bit. He asked us to take some videos of him," Wilson said.
-
-Rawski wanted to take a video for his girlfriend. Maynard remembered him playfully shouting out his love from the highest point on the continent.
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-"I was able to look back and see my hometown, where I've seen Denali on the horizon for most of my life," Wilson said. "That was a really amazing feeling."
-
-## The fall
-
-Maynard guided Rawski as the three climbers began their descent. Around every 100 feet, Rawski would have to sit down, and his stomach hurt so badly that he wasn't able to eat or drink anything, Maynard and Wilson said.
-
-By the time they reached Denali Pass, Lance — having apparently abandoned his own summit attempt — caught back up with them. Maynard and Wilson figured they would return to their original configuration: Maynard and Wilson, Rawski and Lance.
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-Ahead of them lay the Autobahn.
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-To catch themselves in the case of a fall, climbers jam long, T-shaped pieces of metal called pickets several feet into the ice or snow. They secure a carabiner to the picket, run a rope through it, and attach the rope to their harness. If they trip, the rope goes taut and breaks the fall.
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-Once again, they were going against the advice of Denali's park rangers. Maynard and Wilson planned to ski down the Autobahn, during which they would not use ropes. But Lance and Rawski planned to down climb it, traversing at a downward angle. They were not roped into protection.
-
-"We had the rope. We had the pickets. We had our carabiners. We had everything," Rawski said. "But from what I recall, Jason was in a bit more of a rush to get down there. So I think we decided to opt out of roping up."
-
-In hindsight, he said, this was clearly a mistake. At the time he weighed the benefits and risks and decided not to waste time arguing.
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-
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-Climbers taking on the exposed headwall above 14 Camp. Rangers and volunteers fix lines for climbers to offer protection. In the event that a climber stumbles, the lines will arrest the fall.
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-Grant Wilson
-
-Ironically, it's the less experienced climbers on Denali who are more likely to descend the Autobahn without the protection of ropes.
-
-Tucker Chenoweth, Denali's South District ranger who oversees rescues on Denali, told me he would never do that section of the climb without protection. In his experience, climbers who have mastered rope skills won't think twice about using them "because it's not a hindrance to them."
-
-"But if you're not good at it, then it's a pain," he said. Indeed, no one who has died on the Autobahn was roped up with protection.
-
-There was also the matter of altitude.
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-"Altitude can give you a somewhat intoxicated feeling, where things don't seem as important as they are," Chenoweth told me. "Even if you're climatized, you're feeling the effects of altitude sickness that challenges not only your physical ability, but your decision-making ability."
-
-At this point, Maynard was positioned slightly lower on the pass than Lance. She clipped herself into a picket before grabbing her skis. Wilson was briefly out of sight after just stepping away from the group to go to the bathroom.
-
-Lance was standing a bit higher and around a slight ledge.
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-Maynard was pulling on her skis when all of a sudden Lance shouted down to her: "Where's Adam?"
-
-"I thought he was climbing up to you," Maynard said. At first they thought maybe he had also gone to the bathroom, but when Wilson returned a few minutes later he was alone.
-
-"That's the hard part about splitting partners," Wilson would tell me. "It's like, 'Whose problem is this incapacitated climber? We're handing him back off now, who's taking care of him?'"
-
-They started calling out for Rawski: "Adam! Adam! Where'd you go?"
-
-Lance was the one who spotted him, lying at the bottom of the Autobahn some 1,000 feet below. It didn't seem possible that he could have survived. Wilson thought he was going to puke.
-
-Lance was carrying Rawski's Garmin inReach, a satellite communications device, and used it to request a rescue crew.
-
-From the top of the Autobahn, there was nothing more they could do for Rawski. And they still had to get themselves down safely.
-
-## A risky rescue
-
-Guides at High Camp who saw the fall alerted the park service within seconds of Rawski landing at the bottom of the Autobahn.
-
-Helicopter pilot Andy Hermansky was sitting at Base Camp, twiddling his thumbs, when he got the call. He wouldn't normally be there. The helicopter would normally be parked in Talkeetna. But he had flown a team of scientists up to take some glacial samples and was just waiting for them.
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-Hermansky made a quick stop at 14 Camp to pick up Chris Erickson, a Denali ranger and law enforcement officer who was on the mountain. In the more than ten years they worked together on Denali, the two teamed up on many rescues. They'd become close friends, hanging out even in the off-season and attending each other's birthday parties.
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-The average response time for a rescue helicopter can be several hours. But between the good luck of Rawski falling in full view of High Camp, the helicopter being close by, and the skilled maneuvering of the rescue team, this rescue happened with extraordinary speed — which is very likely why Rawski is alive to talk about it.
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-
-
-A ranger waiting to be picked up by a helicopter in Denali National Park. Rangers patrol the mountain between Base Camp and the summit. Helicopter rescues are called only if there's a direct threat to life, limb, or eyesight.
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-Menno Boermans/Getty Images
-
-The environment on the upper mountain is inherently dangerous for helicopters, and there wasn't a flat surface close to Rawski to allow for a regular landing. Instead, Hermansky decided to try a high-risk maneuver that's common in snowy mountain terrains.
-
-Hovering near Rawski, Hermansky carefully lowered the helicopter so only the front part of the skids were touching the ground, while the back parts remained in the air. The helicopter blades chopped through the air just a few feet from the ground. Hermansky gave Erickson a quick nod, signaling conditions were safe enough to go through with the rescue.
-
-With the helicopter in that position, Erickson slowly crawled out onto the skids, careful not to make a sudden weight transfer that would cause Hermansky to lose control, and then onto the ground.
-
-Within 30 minutes of Rawski's fall, Erickson was at his side — "frankly shocked," Erickson would tell me later, to find Rawski alive.
-
-"I fully expected him to be dead," Erickson said.
-
-He motioned to a mountain guide — also a friend of his — who had seen the fall from High Camp and trekked over. Together, the two of them did an overhead body press and were able to load Rawski into the helicopter.
-
-Erickson carefully climbed back in, and they were off.
-
-"I've dealt with colder rescues. I've dealt with windier rescues, I've dealt with rescues at a higher elevation," Erickson would say later.
-
-But the thing that made this rescue exceptional? Time.
-
-## 'Can't descend safely. Patients in shock.'
-
-Up at the top of the Autobahn, time was working against Rawski's climbing companions. Around 16 hours had now passed since Maynard and Wilson set off from 14 Camp, which was a long time to spend at such high altitude. They were exhausted.
-
-As Wilson, Maynard, and Lance watched the rescue from atop Denali Pass, they were also in a state of disbelief.
-
-Wilson remembers thinking that the helicopter, hovering so far below, almost looked like a toy. "We were just trying to comprehend that they were loading our friend's body onto a helicopter," he said.
-
-When Lance proposed calling in another rescue — this one for the three of them — Maynard and Wilson said they considered it. "Of course we were like, 'Yeah, I want a rescue. We just watched someone die. Maybe the slope is too unsafe to down climb,'" Maynard said.
-
-But they quickly snapped out of it. "No one's coming for us," she remembers Wilson saying, with so much emotion. "We have to get ourselves down."
-
-Lance was set on a rescue. "I paid the climbing fee. I paid for this rescue," he kept saying, according to Maynard and Wilson. (A permit to climb Denali costs $395. The fee goes towards training and maintaining ranger and volunteer patrols on the mountain, providing critical mountaineering information to climbers, and keeping the area clean.)
-
-Lance sent a message to a third-party emergency response service, saying that, while none of them were injured, they didn't have the necessary equipment to descend. Rawski had fallen with the pickets. (The park service unofficially maintains pickets on the Autobahn, but climbers are told not to rely on them and be prepared to place their own.)
-
-A reply came back, saying he should contact the park service directly. He did that next.
-
-"The helicopter cannot come to your location and is not flying any more tonight," the park service replied. "Do you have a rope with you? Your only option tonight is descent."
-
-Lance persisted. "Cant decend safely," he wrote. "Patients in shock. Early hypothermia. Cant you land east of pass?"
-
-This wasn't true. Neither Maynard and Wilson were in medical shock or hypothermic, and they said they never suggested to Lance that they were. They were getting colder, especially after standing around for so long, and wanted to start descending, but Lance refused.
-
-Maynard and Wilson have estimated that they spent a total of three hours in that spot, trying to convince Lance to down climb with them. When they finally said they were leaving, with or without Lance, he agreed to go.
-
-From High Camp, guides could see the trio descending and radioed Erickson.
-
-Lance's message had in fact gotten the rangers' attention. The park service is explicit that climbers must be self-sufficient and stresses that a rescue should only be requested in the case of a direct threat to life, limb, or eyesight. Even then, a rescue is not guaranteed, as rescuer safety is a top priority. It's not uncommon for the park service to turn down a rescue request.
-
-But Lance's message made their situation sound like a true emergency, since medical shock can be fatal. Lance, a radiologist, would likely know that.
-
-It was too dangerous to attempt a helicopter rescue at the top of the Autobahn, so Erickson had dispatched a helicopter to drop off supplies for them to set up camp where they were.
-
-Unbeknownst to Lance, Maynard, and Wilson, a helicopter was on its way when they finally budged from their location. But since rangers' protocol is that climbers are never told to expect a helicopter — doing so could make a dangerous situation worse, and climbers have died waiting around for a promised rescue — they assumed all they could do was start down climbing.
-
-Maynard and Wilson described the two hours the group spent descending the Autobahn essentially as a rescue of Lance. They both said he didn't appear to have a handle on rope skills, and that he kept leaving far too much slack in the lines in between them. Maynard, concerned for their safety, kept shouting at Lance to keep the rope tight.
-
-When they finally arrived at High Camp sometime after 10 p.m., Denali guides greeted them with food and camping gear. But the next chapter of their ordeal was just beginning.
-
-Maynard and Wilson said they listened, flabbergasted, as Lance told the guides how the two Alaskans had been in serious need of a rescue. But, between their exhaustion and the fact that they still had to share a tent with him that night, they didn't bother correcting him.
-
-
-
-Jason Lance in the tent with mountain guides who had provided him, Sarah Maynard, and Grant Wilson with food and shelter at High Camp after their ordeal.
-
-Grant Wilson
-
-The next day, Erickson met them at 14 Camp and questioned them about what had happened. Maynard and Wilson said they were not in shock or hypothermic on Denali Pass. When Erickson asked Lance about this, Lance — according to Erickson — insisted that as a doctor he would recognize signs of hypothermia before the climbers and that he "did not need to be lectured on hypothermia."
-
-When Erickson asked Lance to hand over Rawski's personal items, including his inReach device, Lance retreated into his tent. It would later be alleged that Lance had used this time to delete the original message where he said the group required equipment, but not medical attention. After several requests from Erickson, Lance eventually handed over the device.
-
-The three were told they were free to return to the base of the mountain. Maynard and Wilson avoided Lance the rest of the descent.
-
-## Lance's story
-
-On November 9 — six months after the climb — Lance was charged with three misdemeanor counts: violating a lawful order of a government employee, interfering with a rescue operation, and making a false report.
-
-The prosecutor said Lance's actions displayed a "selfishness and indifference to the scarcity of public safety and rescue resources that is unacceptable anywhere, let alone on the tallest peak in North America."
-
-In April, in exchange for pleading guilty to the first count, the other two charges were dropped. Lance was banned from Denali for five years and ordered to pay $10,000 — half to the government, half as a charitable donation to the nonprofit Denali Rescue Volunteers.
-
-Appearing in court on the day of Lance's sentencing, Wilson and Erickson both gave extensive testimony about everything that happened that day on Denali — how Lance had pushed ahead, how he'd behaved toward Rawski, despite his fragile state. Even though the charges related to Lance's actions *after* Rawski's fall, it was clear that Lance's behavior throughout the last leg of their climb was of interest to the court.
-
-Finally, it was Lance's turn to address the court. And, naturally, he painted a very different picture of himself than the one the others had presented.
-
-He opened by saying the day's events had been "life-changing" – "You know, life-changing for me and, you know, tragic in Adam's case."
-
-Lance insisted he always had the group's safety at top of mind. When he separated from the others on the ascent, he said he was just trying to get a good vantage point to wave down another team for help.
-
-"I had no intention of summiting and ditching the party," he said.
-
-After Rawski's fall, and as they tried to collect themselves atop Denali Pass, he said that the three of them, himself included, were experiencing emotional trauma. It reminded him of being in Afghanistan during his 14 years in the military.
-
-"We would see people come in being shot or witnessing bombings, IED explosions, and whatnot. And it was not uncommon to see people who had witnessed a traumatic event go into psychological shock. And that's clearly what was going on here," he said.
-
-His immediate concern was that Rawski had fallen with the pickets, and said that was why he had first radioed for help. He said communicating on the clunky satellite device was like typing into a cell phone from the 1990s. As the hours passed, he said, his concerns about shock and hypothermia were genuine.
-
-"I had to make a choice, based on what information we had," Lance said, adding that Maynard and Wilson are the same age as his kids. "If my kids were up here with somebody else, what would I have them do? I was reluctant to make that descent until I had exhausted every other means of getting us safely off there."
-
-Ultimately, Lance realized the helicopter wasn't coming, and that they could either sit there and freeze to death or make a risky descent. "Make no mistake, that descent was unsafe," he said.
-
-When I asked Erickson what he made of Lance's defense, or the idea that his decision-making at that altitude could not be trusted, he didn't buy it. He said rangers work in those conditions everyday, often making high-stakes decisions.
-
-"We're not superheroes," he said. "We don't acclimatize better or worse than anyone else."
-
-As for the charge he pleaded guilty to — violating Erickson's order to hand over the inReach device — Lance said it wasn't clear to him it was an official request and that, either way, he felt he needed it for the remainder of his descent, for safety reasons, even though the device was Rawski's.
-
-Lance claimed his interactions with Erickson amounted to a clash of personalities, and that Erickson simply wasn't interested in hearing his thoughts on how the park service could handle things better. "I was tired. I was stressed. And, frankly, I just — I didn't want to really talk to him," Lance said.
-
-While Lance stopped short of apologizing, he said he hopes in the future in situations like this he "would have kind of a cooler head."
-
-
-
-Early morning sunrise on the Alaska Range. Denali's "summit shadow" (left) casting over the Kahiltna and Mt. Foraker (right), North America's sixth tallest peak.
-
-Grant Wilson
-
-## The aftermath
-
-When they made it off Denali, Maynard and Wilson visited the hospital in Anchorage. Rawski was unconscious in the ICU and it fell on them to tell his loved ones what happened. Instead of flowers, they left a stick of butter at his bedside — a wink at how Rawski had helped them out early in the climb.
-
-Rawski was in a coma for two months. He had broken ribs, collapsed lungs, fractured spinal bones, a broken talus and humerus, and nerve damage in his arm.
-
-When he finally emerged from the coma and learned what happened — he says he can remember everything up to about five minutes before the fall — he felt like he was reading about another person. "You're like, 'Oh, what an amateur. They didn't know what they were doing,'" he told me. "'The Adam I know would never do that.'"
-
-After seven months in the hospital, he was released in December, but the road to recovery is long.
-
-In the months since, his walking has improved substantially, and he can even muster a "very awkward jog." He hopes to get back to being the active, outdoorsy person he was before the fall, but he's not sure what exactly that will look like.
-
-"I think the most difficult thing was, in the past year, my whole identity was changed," he said, again switching into the third person narrator of his story: "The biggest thing was just sort of accepting that changed identity and trying to pretty much redefine who Adam should be."
-
-Maynard and Wilson have also spent the last 14 months working through what went wrong on the mountain that day.
-
-"I was passionate about guiding before and now, more than ever," Wilson said. "I feel called to be on the mountain… making sure that the same things don't happen that happened to Adam."
-
-Maynard went through months of therapy to confront the guilt she felt over not hearing Rawski fall or making sure he was roped up. "Even now, every day I relive it," she said. "It's the exact same moment of clipping myself into the picket at the Autobahn, and then looking over and Adam's gone."
-
-Despite the many things she thinks Lance did wrong, she says she can't help but sympathize with him.
-
-She chalked up Lance's actions to an "ignorance of climber responsibility and his heightened sense of self importance."
-
-"I came across a photo of him in one of the reports that has come out recently and I honestly didn't recognize him without the look of desperation on his face," she said. "He was definitely just trying anything and everything to find the magic words to get off the mountain."
-
-Rawski's fall was just one of about 20 search and rescue efforts the mountaineering rangers completed in Denali National Park in the 2021 season, mostly for frostbite or extreme altitude sickness. Two incidents were fatal.
-
-Chenoweth said the outdoor climbing boom has resulted in a noticeable shift in the types of people arriving at Denali — more summit chasers, fewer wilderness seekers.
-
-It's easy for climbers to forget that in remote corners of the earth like Denali, more often than not, you're on your own.
-
-Though Denali is an extreme example, it highlights a disconnect that often exists when humans flee from the comforts and safety of modern society and head outdoors. The places we visit are still wild. And while that doesn't mean we shouldn't go, we should treat them with the reverence they deserve when we do.
-
-Climbers typically fly to Alaska on a commercial airplane. They take a shuttle to a hotel and go grocery shopping for supplies. They hop on a smaller plane and get dropped off in the wilderness. Even when they arrive, there are other climbers on the glacier, fostering a deceiving sense of safety in numbers. Better and cheaper satellite communications devices have also helped create a "false sense of security."
-
-Most climbers taking on Denali wouldn't be able to get back to civilization if the plane never came back to pick them up, Chenoweth said.
-
-"They lose this sense of scale and I think people don't quite recognize how deep in the wilderness they are."
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-Date: 2022-11-08
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-TimeStamp: 2022-11-08
-Link: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/14/do-we-have-the-history-of-native-americans-backward-indigenous-continent
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-# Do We Have the History of Native Americans Backward?
-
-I remember when I first encountered what must be the best-selling book of Native American history ever published, “[Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee](https://www.amazon.com/Bury-My-Heart-Wounded-Knee/dp/0805086846/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1U87VI4P7VGX5&keywords=Bury+My+Heart+at+Wounded+Knee&qid=1667838820&sprefix=bury+my+heart+at+wounded+knee%2Caps%2C96&sr=8-1),” by Dee Brown. I was twenty years old, and had made my way from the Leech Lake Reservation, in northern Minnesota, where I grew up, to Princeton, in a part of New Jersey that seemed to have no Indians at all. Since “Bury My Heart” appeared, in 1970, it has been translated into seventeen languages, and sold millions of copies. In the opening pages, Brown wrote, “The greatest concentration of recorded experience and observation came out of the thirty-year span between 1860 and 1890—the period covered by this book. It was an incredible era of violence, greed, audacity, sentimentality, undirected exuberance, and an almost reverential attitude toward the ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it. During that time the culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed.”
-
-I read this on the hundredth anniversary of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, in South Dakota. It was the last major armed conflict between an Indian tribe and the U.S. government, and more than two hundred and fifty Lakota men, women, and children were murdered there. Far from my Ojibwe homeland—marooned, I sometimes felt, on the distant shore of a self-satisfied republic—I readily accepted the version of history promoted by Brown’s book: that Native American history was a litany of abuses (disease, slavery, warfare, dispossession, forced removal, the near-extermination of the American bison, land grabs, forced assimilation) that had erased our way of life. And yet my culture and civilization didn’t *feel* gone. When I looked westward and back in time, I couldn’t help think that Brown’s historical record was incomplete—that the announcement of our collective death was rather premature.
-
-Pekka Hämäläinen’s “[Indigenous Continent](https://www.amazon.com/Indigenous-Continent-Contest-North-America/dp/1631496999/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3JORTBATXUQT0&keywords=indigenous+continent+by+pekka+h%C3%A4m%C3%A4l%C3%A4inen&qid=1667838844&sprefix=Indigenous+Continent%2Caps%2C84&sr=8-1)” (Liveright) boldly sets out a counternarrative. In its opening pages, Hämäläinen—a Helsinki-born scholar at Oxford who specializes in early and Indigenous American history—maintains that the America we know was, in its borders, shape, and culture, far from inevitable. Even after the so-called colonial era, tribal nations often played a determining role in American history. In his view, we should speak not of “colonial America” but of “an *Indigenous* America that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial,” and recognize that the central reality of the period was ongoing Indigenous resistance. By 1776, he notes, European powers had claimed most of the continent, but Indigenous people continued to control it. Instead of a foreordained story of decline and victimization, Hämäläinen wants us to see a parade of contingencies, with Native nations regularly giving as good as they got, or even better. The result, he promises, will be a North American history recentered on Native people and their own “overwhelming and persisting” power. Like treaties, though, scholarly promises have often been broken. Is Hämäläinen true to his word?
-
-Throughout the roughly chronological work, Hämäläinen stresses movement. Tribal travellers crossed the Bering land bridge during the last Ice Age, and then, around 1100 B.C.E., traversed an ice-free corridor along the flank of the Rocky Mountains, following game and evolving, culturally, as they went. Hämäläinen notes that other migration waves may have moved, in skin boats, through a maritime route, a seafood-rich “kelp highway,” that traced the Pacific Coast from Alaska to Patagonia. However settlement occurred, it happened quickly.
-
-Hämäläinen spends the opening pages of the book detailing the rise and fall of early empires, in the Southwest and the Midwest in particular. “A distinctive pattern of simultaneous centralization and decentralization,” he says, characterized Indigenous history in the early second millennium C.E. Regional centers of power emerged; subordinate groups would rebel or break off and sometimes create their own centers of power. Some of these societies were highly stratified and hierarchical, with élites and, in certain cases, a kinglike single ruler. Such societies led to the development of Mogollon, Hohokam, and Ancestral Puebloan cultures in the Southwest. An ecological warm period, combined with new food technologies (the breeding and cultivation of corn, beans, and squash), helped give rise to the city of Cahokia, where the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers joined—the site of present-day St. Louis. Cahokia grew in population and size and had hundreds of ceremonial structures in the form of earthen mounds and plazas. At its peak, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, about forty thousand people lived in the vicinity. (It took seven centuries before North America saw a more populous city: Philadelphia, in 1790.)
-
-But political culture was affected by climate. As temperatures dropped during the Little Ice Age, in the fourteenth century, Hämäläinen writes, “everything had to be smaller.” Cahokia’s society fractured into more mobile, less hierarchical groups, with hunting replacing farming as the dominant mode of living, and something similar happened in other dense Mississippian settlements. “Across the eastern half of the continent, people seem to have rejected the domineering priestly class for more collective and egalitarian social arrangements,” he concludes.
-
-Hämäläinen’s broader point is that, long before the Europeans arrived, the peoples of the New World didn’t inhabit the stasis of an ethnographer’s account; they experienced a tumultuous process of continual change, which is to say, they were social and political actors. By the sixteenth century, around five million Native people had inhabited or made use of almost every part of North America. The usual story depicts them as dwelling in harmony with one another and the natural world in some cultural and ecological Eden that was then torn apart by Europeans. In fact, as Hämäläinen shows, they manipulated nature—rerouting water to create gardens in the desert, domesticating cultivars through seed selection—and they projected power, sometimes in violent ways, subordinating or being subordinated to their neighbors. They didn’t live in harmony; they lived in history.
-
-Just as the initial settlement of the New World was marked by movement, so, too, were Indigenous forms of domination. It’s a thesis that Hämäläinen elaborated in an influential previous book, “[The Comanche Empire](https://www.amazon.com/Comanche-Empire-Lamar-Western-History/dp/0300151179/ref=sr_1_1?crid=NK57YH6NVIFG&keywords=The+Comanche+Empire+by+pekka+h%C3%A4m%C3%A4l%C3%A4inen&qid=1667838874&sprefix=the+comanche+empire+by+pekka+h%C3%A4m%C3%A4l%C3%A4inen%2Caps%2C81&sr=8-1)” (2008): where European empires tended to be sedentary, marking power through permanent structures, dominant Native ones were “kinetic empires,” with everything—markets, missions, political assemblies—kept fluid and in motion. From the perspective of their neighbors, who were subject to their opportunistic, long-distance raids, the Comanches were, he noted, “everywhere and nowhere.”
-
-The same kinetic strategy often characterized the Native response to European invasion and settlement—the early Spanish attempts to colonize Florida and the American Southwest, the English efforts to gain a foothold on the East Coast, followed by the French in the north and mid-continent, and the Dutch efforts around New York and the Hudson Valley. Hämäläinen wants us to see these colonial forays from a Native perspective, and to focus on how tribal nations retained their ascendancy.
-
-When Hernando de Soto explored Florida and regions to the north, Hämäläinen recounts, he ventured into the territory of the Cofitachequi Nation, where he met its leader, known as the Lady of Cofitachequi, who was brought to the meeting on a litter. Perhaps sensing a chance to trade, she gave de Soto a pearl necklace; in response, he took her captive. The expedition moved on, in pursuit of even greater wealth. All this could sound like a story of colonial triumph, but Hämäläinen argues that we have it backward: “Soto and other conquistadors believed they were conquering new lands for the Spanish Empire, but in reality, Indians were carefully steering the Europeans’ course, sending them away with fantastical stories of treasures farther ahead.” And that’s a pattern that he regularly lays out: often, when European conquerors thought that they were subjugating tribal nations, the Europeans were actually being manipulated and controlled by them.
-
-And what looked like bold military successes frequently involved a misunderstanding of Indigenous political structures. In the American Southwest, conquistadors such as Juan de Oñate and Vicente de Zaldívar thought they were controlling the so-called Pueblo Empire by decapitating it, as had been done among the Incas and the Maya. Yet the Pueblo communities in the Southwest were a loosely allied network of autonomous towns, rather than a centrally organized kingdom. Massacres at places like Acoma—where, in 1599, the Spanish killed around eight hundred Pueblo in retaliation for the deaths of a dozen Spanish soldiers—didn’t change the balance of power; they merely taught Indigenous people that the Spaniards were to be resisted. By the end of the sixteenth century, after nearly a hundred years of attempted conquests, Spain had failed to establish any serious settlements in North America.
-
-Hämäläinen shows how the persistent power of Indigenous people similarly caused the early collapse of Jamestown. During the “starving time” of 1609-10, the English colonists—unable to hunt and unwilling to farm—ate dogs, cats, rats, horses, and, occasionally, one another. They failed to take the measure of the Powhatans, who had already subjugated a number of rival tribal nations. Now it was the ravaged colonists, Hämäläinen tells us, who were incorporated into Powhatan power structures. Of course, that wasn’t the end of the story. In 1611, three English ships, bearing hundreds of soldiers, showed up; as Jamestown was reoccupied, the English burned Powhatan cornfields and slaughtered entire Native settlements. It sounds like a familiar story of colonial cruelty, and yet Hämäläinen offers a different emphasis: such massacres, he says, were the actions of terrified, isolated, weak, and ultimately unstable communities. In Hämäläinen’s view, the colonial violence “exposed a deep-rooted European anxiety over enduring Indigenous power: the attacks were so vicious because the colonists feared the Indians who refused to submit to their rule.” He notes that into the mid-seventeenth century—a century and a half after Columbus—the coastal settlements established by the English, French, and Dutch colonists remained fragile and hemmed in; most of the continent was effectively off limits to them. The struggle was for survival more than for territorial expansion.
-
-Only in the late seventeenth century did the French and the English begin to push into the heartland, engaging complex configurations of Indigenous power in contending for control of the Great Lakes and the Ohio River Valley. Yet even then colonial gains were precarious and provisional. By the mid-eighteenth century, Indian rebellions had rolled back European incursions; the Spanish, the French, and the English clung mainly to the coasts and rivers. The vast interior of the continent was largely unknown to them, and the tidy lines of the thirteen colonies were more aspirational than actual.
-
-As the Europeans sought to entrench an imperial presence on the continent, many tribes conglomerated into lasting yet plastic empires of their own. The Iroquois Confederacy (made up of the Cayuga, the Seneca, the Mohawk, the Onondaga, the Oneida, and the Tuscarora) was the most significant power in the Northeast; the Three Fires Confederacy (Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi) was largely in control of the western Great Lakes; and, later, the Comanche on the southern Plains and the Lakota (along with the Nakota and the Dakota, who spoke distinct dialects of the same language) had military control of larger sections of the continent than any single European power did. Hämäläinen encourages us to see this time not as a period of colonial conquest but as a clash of empires, some European and some Indigenous.
-
-Indigenous foreign policy among the Iroquois and the Three Fires confederacies had evolved into a kind of kinetic détente. My ancestors kept the French and the British off balance by making and breaking alliances as necessary, preventing both from getting the upper hand and keeping both dependent on Native nations. One of the side effects of this policy was the Seven Years’ War, which can plausibly be regarded as the first world war. The conflict began in what’s now Ohio, where an Odawa-French war chief named Charles Langlade led a coalition of Odawa, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe soldiers against a British fort near Pickawillany. They killed thirteen Miami soldiers and took the British hostage. The attackers executed an English blacksmith, who had been wounded in the attack, and then boiled and ate his heart in front of the horrified garrison. Vignettes such as these make the point that tribal nations, including my own, were shoving Europeans around (and eating their hearts) for quite a long time, and help dislodge the idea that tribes were either passively doomed or ineffectually violent.
-
-In time, the reasons for the clash of Indigenous and European empires began to change: the contest wasn’t simply for resources and the ability to transport them but for land itself. As the colonies expanded, accordingly, the elimination of tribal nations became a goal. By the time of the American Revolution, the French had been almost entirely expelled from what is now the United States, and the British pushed into what is now Canada; the Spanish, meanwhile, had divested themselves of most of their holdings north of the Rio Grande through war, treaties, and trade. Yet many tribal nations remained, too strong to ignore or subdue. Thayendanegea, an Iroquois leader, warned President Washington’s Secretary of War, “You consider yourselves as independent people; we, as the original inhabitants of this country, and sovereigns of the soil, look upon ourselves as equally independent, and free as any other nation or nations.”
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-# Donald Trump and American Intelligence’s Years of Conflict
-
-News Analysis
-
-## The Poisoned Relationship Between Trump and the Keepers of U.S. Secrets
-
-The F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago is a coda to the years of tumult between an erratic president and the nation’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
-
-
-
-Credit...Brittainy Newman for The New York Times
-
-Aug. 11, 2022
-
-WASHINGTON— After four years of President Donald J. Trump’s raging against his intelligence services, posting classified information to Twitter and announcing that he took the word of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia over that of his own spies, perhaps the least surprising thing he did during his final days in office was ship boxes of sensitive material from the White House to his oceanside palace in Florida.
-
-[The F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago](https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/08/08/us/trump-fbi-raid) on Monday was a dramatic coda to years of tumult between Mr. Trump and American intelligence and law enforcement agencies. From Mr. Trump’s frequent rants against a “deep state” bent on undermining his presidency to his cavalier attitude toward highly classified information that he viewed as his personal property and would occasionally use to advance his political agenda, the relationship between the keepers of American secrets and the erratic president they served was the most poisoned of the modern era.
-
-Mr. Trump’s behavior led to such mistrust within intelligence agencies that officials who gave him classified briefings occasionally erred on the side of withholding some sensitive details from him.
-
-It has long been common practice for the C.I.A. not to provide presidents with some of the most sensitive information, such as the names of the agency’s human sources. But Douglas London, who served as a top C.I.A. counterterrorism official during the Trump administration, said that officials were even more cautious about what information they provided Mr. Trump because some saw the president himself as a security risk.
-
-“We certainly took into account ‘what damage could he do if he blurts this out?’” said Mr. London, who wrote a book about his time in the agency called “The Recruiter.”
-
-During an Oval Office meeting with top Russian officials just months into his presidency, Mr. Trump revealed [highly classified information](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/world/middleeast/israel-trump-classified-intelligence-russia.html?referringSource=articleShare) about an Islamic State plot that the government of Israel had provided to the United States, which put Israeli sources at risk and angered American intelligence officials. Months later, the C.I.A. decided to pull a highly placed Kremlin agent it had cultivated over years out of Moscow, in part out of concerns that the Trump White House was a leaky ship.
-
-In August 2019, Mr. Trump received a briefing about an explosion at a space launch facility in Iran. He was so taken by a classified satellite photo of the explosion that he wanted to post it on Twitter immediately. Aides pushed back, saying that making the high resolution photo public could give adversaries insight into America’s sophisticated surveillance capabilities.
-
-[He posted the photo anyway](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/02/world/middleeast/iran-space-center-explosion.html), adding a message that the United States had no role in the explosion but wished Iran “best wishes and good luck” in discovering what caused it. As he told one American official about his decision: “I have declassification authority. I can do anything I want.”
-
-Two years earlier, Mr. Trump used Twitter to defend himself against media reports that he had ended a C.I.A. program to arm Syrian rebels — effectively disclosing a classified program to what were then his more than 33 million Twitter followers.
-
-If there is not one origin story that explains Mr. Trump’s antipathy toward spy agencies, the [2017 American intelligence assessment](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/us/politics/russian-hack-report.html) about the Kremlin’s efforts to sabotage the 2016 presidential election — and Russia’s preference for Mr. Trump — played perhaps the biggest role. Mr. Trump saw the document as an insult, written by his “deep state” enemies to challenge the legitimacy of his election and his presidency.
-
-Image
-
-Credit...Saul Martinez for The New York Times
-
-Mr. Trump’s efforts to undermine the assessment became a motif in the early years of his presidency, culminating in a [July 2018 summit in Helsinki](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/16/world/europe/trump-putin-summit-helsinki.html) with Mr. Putin. During a joint news conference, Mr. Putin denied that Russia had any role in election sabotage, and Mr. Trump came to his defense. “They think it’s Russia,” Mr. Trump said, speaking of American intelligence officials and adding, “I don’t see any reason it would be.”
-
-Mr. Trump often took aim at intelligence officials for public statements he thought undermined his foreign policy goals. In January 2019, top officials testified to Congress that the Islamic State remained a persistent threat, that North Korea would still pursue nuclear weapons and that Iran showed no signs of actively trying to build a bomb — essentially contradicting things the president had said publicly. [Mr. Trump lashed out](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/us/politics/trump-intelligence-agencies.html), saying on Twitter that “The Intelligence people seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong!”
-
-“Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!” he wrote.
-
-Mr. Trump was hardly the first American president to view his own intelligence services as enemy territory. In 1973, Richard M. Nixon fired Richard Helms, his spy chief, after he refused to go along with the Watergate cover-up, and installed James Schlesinger in the job with the mission of bringing the C.I.A. in line.
-
-Speaking with a group of senior analysts on his first day, Mr. Schlesinger made a lewd comment about what the C.I.A. had been doing to Mr. Nixon, and demanded that it stop.
-
-Chris Whipple, an author who cites the Schlesinger anecdote in his book “The Spymasters,” said there is a long history of tension between presidents and their intelligence chiefs, but that “Trump really was in a league of his own in thinking the C.I.A. and the agencies were out to get him.”
-
-The exact nature of the documents that Mr. Trump left the White House with remains a mystery, and some former officials said that Mr. Trump generally was not given paper copies of classified reports. This had less to do with security concerns than with the way Mr. Trump preferred to get his security briefings. Unlike some of his predecessors, who would read and digest voluminous intelligence reports each day, [Mr. Trump generally received oral briefings](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/us/politics/presidents-daily-brief-trump.html).
-
-But for those charged with protecting secrets, there may have been no bigger challenge than the seaside resort where Mr. Trump spent so much of his time as president — and where so many boxes of classified material were stored after he left office. Besides its members, Mar-a-Lago is also open to members’ guests, who would often interact with Mr. Trump during his frequent trips to the club. Security professionals saw this arrangement as ripe to be exploited by a foreign spy service eager for access to the epicenter of American power.
-
-One night during his first weeks in office, [Mr. Trump was at Mar-a-Lago hosting Shinzo Abe](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/11/us/politics/donald-trump-shinzo-abe-golf-mar-a-lago.html), the Japanese prime minister, when North Korea test-fired a ballistic missile in the direction of Japan that landed in the sea.
-
-Almost immediately, at least one Mar-a-Lago patron [posted photos](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/13/us/politics/mar-a-lago-north-korea-trump.html) on social media of Mr. Trump and Mr. Abe coordinating their response over dinner in the resort’s dining room. Photos showed White House aides huddled over their laptops and Mr. Trump speaking on his cellphone.
-
-The patron also published a photo of himself standing next to a person he described as Mr. Trump’s military aide who carries the nuclear “football” — the briefcase that contains codes for launching nuclear weapons.
-
-Just two world leaders responding to a major security crisis — live for the members of Mr. Trump’s resort to watch in real time.
-
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-
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-Date: 2022-08-21
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-08-21
-Link: https://www.newyorker.com/news/american-chronicles/donald-trump-and-the-sweepstakes-scammers
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-```button
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-
-
-# Donald Trump and the Sweepstakes Scammers
-
-It was nighttime in Atlantic City. A man with a tight Afro and a broken ankle hobbled on crutches toward the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino. On the covered driveway, bathed in neon light, sat a Cadillac Allanté convertible—the grand prize in Trump’s 1987 Drive-In Dreamstakes. The contest had been designed by Charles (Chuck) Seidman, a gregarious, boundlessly enthusiastic pitchman who called his business C.B.S.—short for C. B. Seidman Marketing Group—in the hope that the television station would sue him, giving him free publicity.
-
-By the late eighties, America was in the grip of a sweepstakes mania. The industry had grown to an estimated value of a billion dollars, and every company, from Toys R Us to Wonder Bread, seemed to be running giveaways and promotions. Even Harvard University’s alumni magazine was offering ten thousand dollars in Sony electronics. C.B.S. had a unique business proposition: it would come up with the promotion, print the entry forms, and even deliver the prizes. Brands hoping to capitalize on America’s obsession would pay C.B.S. one fee for a turnkey operation.
-
-One of those brands was [Donald Trump](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/donald-trump). To entice larger crowds to his flagship casino, he had built a thirty-million-dollar parking garage. But not enough people were using it. Seidman suggested printing half a million promotional parking tickets. If visitors collected enough validation stickers, in the right combination, they could win prizes, including Walkmans, cash, an “Eternity of Vacations,” or even a Cadillac.
-
-The Allanté cost fifty-five thousand dollars, about as much as a family home in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, where James Parker, the man on crutches, lived. Parker was a hypnotist and a magician, and he spoke with a stutter. He greeted the parking attendant and handed over his ticket. “Look, why don’t you play?” the attendant said. “You only need one more sticker. Who knows. You might win!”
-
-The attendant applied the final sticker, scratched off the gold coating, and offered his commiserations. Then he did a double take—Parker had won. He was ushered into a promotional booth, and, over the next twenty-four hours, Trump’s P.R. machine began to whir. The attendant reappeared wearing a tuxedo. A photographer from the *Trump Today* newspaper popped a flashbulb. Parker held up the key and tried not to overdo his excitement. Those were his orders.
-
-Parker was no lucky winner. He was part of a staggering scam that involved some of the biggest brands of the eighties: Ford, Holiday Inn, Nabisco, Royal Desserts. If you entered a sweepstakes competition in those years, it was likely run by C.B.S. You had no chance of winning—Seidman had built a sprawling network of “paper winners,” including a kung-fu master and a pet psychic, who helped him steal millions of dollars in cash and prizes, pulling off the biggest sweepstakes fraud the country had ever seen.
-
-Chuck Seidman got into sweepstakes because they were the family business. During the sixties, as a teen-ager, he went to work at his father’s promotions company, in Philadelphia. Jack Seidman had been a communications expert with the Army’s Signal Corps during the Second World War, and had pioneered the rub-off game card, using gold leaf to conceal a prize message. His company, Spot-O-Gold, created early lottery games for 7-Eleven and Kellogg’s, and swiftly dominated the sweepstakes market. He hoped to hand down his business to his son.
-
-Chuck Seidman, who had been forced to leave four separate high schools for showing up to class on drugs, was not an ideal successor. He became addicted to heroin and once was arrested during a methamphetamine sale; Jack had to persuade a judge to let him off. “I was in seven detoxes and none of them worked,” Seidman later told a court. In desperation, Jack hired Steven Gross, a friend of Seidman’s in the grade above him, to come work at Spot-O-Gold. “Jack knew that I didn’t drink or do drugs,” Gross told me. “So he asked me if I wanted to come to work with him, to keep his son on the straight and narrow.” But that was impossible. “Chuck was the kind of narcissistic personality—you couldn’t tell him what to do,” Gross said. He added, “Chuck was fun to hang around.”
-
-Gross, who was sixteen years old, discovered that he had a knack for promotions. When he wasn’t looking after Seidman, he worked in the development department, and pitched a “Cone-O-Gold” for Baskin-Robbins, among other campaigns. Spot-O-Gold delivered tamper-proof rub-off cards to supermarkets, in armored Brink’s trucks, but light-fingered Seidman stole piles of two-dollar winners. He spent the cash on the [Atlantic City](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/07/the-death-and-life-of-atlantic-city) boardwalk, hitting on girls. Gross was his designated driver.
-
-Gross eventually left for college, then sold lingerie, and later cars. Back home, Seidman’s addictions consumed him. By twenty-five, he was spending three hundred dollars a day on cocaine. Dealers at a local Lebanese restaurant blackmailed him to steal prizes. “I stole a thousand-dollar game ticket from my father’s company to pay that cocaine debt,” he later confessed. “That was the first time.” In 1984, Jack paid off sixty thousand dollars in drug debt for his son.
-
-The following year, Jack discovered that Seidman, now thirty-four, was regularly stealing winning tickets, and a fistfight broke out. “He went to hit me. I blocked it,” Seidman later recalled. During the spat, Jack crumpled to the ground, cracking his ten-thousand-dollar Rolex. Seidman penned a poisonous letter to his father: “I will fight you with everything and anything I have with a promise to God that whatever happens, you will not walk away from this a very happy man.”
-
-His first act of revenge was to purchase several VCRs and televisions on his father’s charge account, and sell them for cash. “He had no autonomy whatsoever,” Gross told me. “He felt like he was really under his father’s thumb.” Not long afterward, Seidman called Gross to pitch an idea. They would start their own sweepstakes company and beat his father at his own game.
-
-One by one, Seidman lured away his father’s clients with ingenious pitches for new sweepstakes. (He had learned to hide his drug use, and to harness psychedelics for out-of-the-box thinking.) Having grown up coveting his father’s gaudy displays of wealth, he specialized in conceiving elaborate prizes. For Alpo, a dog-food brand, he suggested giving away a luxury holiday to one lucky winner—and forty-nine of their closest friends and family members. He leased a cramped office in the basement of an apartment building, and hired an assistant.
-
-“That’s when we ended up getting company American Express cards,” Gross told me. “I started to see why his father couldn’t deal with him.” Seidman spent thousands of dollars on designer suits and purchased sixteen season tickets for Philadelphia Eagles games. He also opened a distribution arm of the company to handle mail-in promotions for brands. To run it, he hired two teen-agers he had met in the parking lot of a Wawa sandwich shop, Timothy Dagit and Louis Mazzio, and encouraged them to work for little money, calling it “sweat capital.” (Neither Dagit nor Mazzio agreed to an interview.)
-
-Out from under Jack’s watchful eye, Seidman and Gross realized that they could pilfer some of the prizes. Gross conspired to rig a Royal Desserts competition to win ten supermarket-sweep trips to Toys R Us. At the time, there was little regulatory oversight for sweepstakes. No single set of laws governed contests, and the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission couldn’t make up their minds, or work together on enforcement. “To be honest, I looked at it as a victimless crime,” Gross told me. The brands still got their publicity.
-
-Seidman encouraged Gross to buy a limousine so that the pair would “look successful” when they attended meetings. Soon, Seidman co-owned a company, called Ride in Style, that had three. (The limos looked new, but, under the hood, they were falling apart—someone had disconnected the odometers.) Seidman wore cowboy boots and got a Rolex, which he had “won” in a competition, to match his father’s. He had terrible credit; when he wanted a BMW with a portable phone inside, and a luxury Cadillac, Gross signed the leases. Seidman started carrying a .357 Magnum around the office in a holster.
-
-By the mid-eighties, Jack and Spot-O-Gold were in trouble. Competitors had rendered Jack’s patent on the rub-off obsolete. “Somebody worked around it and did the *scratch*\-off,” Fred Sorokin, who worked for Spot-O-Gold, and later for C.B.S., told me. “It’s a different process. I’m sure Jack was furious about it.” This unfortunate turn compounded the pain of losing his relationship with his son. “I think Jack probably had a broken heart,” Sorokin said. In May, 1986, during a walk in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, Jack collapsed and died of a heart attack. Without its charismatic owner, Spot-O-Gold shuttered and Seidman stole its remaining clients.
-
-C.B.S. was taking off. It rented an office in the same luxury tower where Charles Barkley lived. Gross, who took smoke breaks by the pool, would see him lying in the sun. “I got kind of tight with Charles,” Gross told me. Dr. J and the rest of the 76ers often hung out in the lobby. Meanwhile, Seidman’s substance abuse accelerated. “I was on ten Valium pills or Xanax pills a day, and several tranquillizers,” he later recalled. In desperation, his wife, Susan, dialled a random hypnotherapist from the Yellow Pages. It was James Parker. “I get this phone call from this frantic woman,” Parker told me. “ ‘I need you here—it’s an emergency. My husband is on drugs or drinking. He’s so messed up. We are about to lose everything.’ ” Parker had started studying hypnosis after watching a carnival stage show when he was seven years old. (He bought a hypnosis book, hoping to control his parents.) By his early twenties, he dreamed of becoming a famous stage hypnotist. In May, 1987, he arrived at Seidman’s home. Parker put Seidman in a trance; when Seidman woke up, he announced that he was cured. (Susan declined my requests for an interview.)
-
-Seidman promised to make Parker the most famous hypnotist in America. He said that he’d book him on Oprah and Johnny Carson, and even get his image on the front of a Wheaties box. But, before all that, Seidman had a favor to ask. He needed Parker to pose as the lucky winner for the Trump Plaza sweepstakes. According to Parker, Seidman assured him that the scheme, though “not the most ethical,” was completely legal.
-
-Parker had no problem taking from Trump. In the seventies, Trump and his father, who owned an enormous portfolio of rental buildings in New York City, had been accused of refusing to lease apartments to Black people. Parker’s mother was part of an investigative team assembled by the city’s human-rights division to expose the practice. “They would send a Black couple into a Trump property to rent something,” he told me. When the couple were told that there were no vacancies, a white employee would soon follow, and would be welcomed with open arms. Gross also found a way to justify the sweepstakes scheme. He knew that Trump “was screwing over all these people who worked on the casinos, and put a number of small businesses out of business,” he told me. “He was a con man.” (Trump did not respond to numerous requests for comment.)
-
-Seidman sent his mistress, a legal assistant he’d met at a TGI Fridays, to the casino to get the required stickers. “We had to obtain them at different times so that it didn’t look like somebody went in there four days in a row,” Gross explained. They gave the fixed ticket to Parker, but there was a snag—he had crashed his motorbike while performing a skid, and his leg was in plaster. Driving to Trump Plaza would be difficult. Seidman and Gross also worried that his stutter might make him seem nervous. “We told him to act excited, but not to go crazy like people on game shows do, you know, jumping and screaming,” Gross said.
-
-Three days after Parker’s win, a catastrophic stock-market crash sent tremors through the American economy. Gross had instructed Parker to sell the Cadillac and open a new bank account to deposit the proceeds, but, after Black Monday, there were no buyers for a fifty-five-thousand-dollar luxury car, especially one featured in United Press International’s annual list of “ins and outs.” (Donald Trump was in; the Allanté was out.) Eventually, they sold it to a dealer for half off. Parker kept four thousand dollars, but, unbeknownst to him, he was on the hook for taxes on the entire prize value. He booked a flight to Paris, where he had a date with a touring opera singer.
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-Date: 2022-04-25
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-04-25
-Link: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/05/down-the-hatch-on-the-road-with-the-last-american-carnival-sideshow/
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-# Down the Hatch, by David Hill
-
-The carnival midway is anchored at one end by a Ferris wheel, a mainstay since George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. erected the first of its kind at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. At the other end is its antithesis: the Fire Ball, a thrill ride that consists of a single loop, roller-coaster cars rocking back and forth until they gain enough momentum to swirl perilously around the circle. Between the two lies the extent of the Tri-County Fair: a nebula of vivid lights, fried food, and laughter. Driving up to the fairground at night, it appears all at once, lit like a beacon. None of it was here four days ago, and as with any good apparition, none of it will be here tomorrow.
-
-“I can hear you getting restless,” said the Great Gozleone, a large man, tall and round in his sequin-trimmed suit, with a baby face that made him seem younger than his forty years. He was standing on a makeshift stage welded to the side of a tractor trailer parked in a vast field under a massive vinyl tent in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee, next to a long-dormant speedway. Around him hung a row of canvas banners depicting oddly outfitted figures swallowing swords, electrocuting themselves, and otherwise incurring all manner of pain and disfigurement for our entertainment.
-
-“Cat? Did you say cat? Or bat?” Gozleone asked.
-
-A young girl in the audience shouted a word, but nobody sitting on the dirt and cedar chips could hear her above the din of the rides and games. Gozleone was scrawling words on a whiteboard. He wrote “cat.” This was a memory act, in which Gozleone claimed the ability to recall long lists of random objects generated by the crowd. It was one of a number of acts that he and his fellow performers would trot out over the next hour. A “ten-in-one,” in carnival parlance—ten shows for the price of one. The memory act was the opener, the newest addition to the show.
-
-Gozleone finished his list, and strolled to the other side of the stage. He asked the crowd to shout out a number, any number.
-
-“Seven!”
-
-“Seven is keys,” he said, staring off in deep concentration, hands lifted to shield his view.
-
-“Ten!”
-
-“Ten is ice cream,” he recalled.
-
-“Two!”
-
-“Two is,” and here he faltered, “Spider-Man.”
-
-The crowd shouted “*No!”* all together in dismay.
-
-“No?” Two was not Spider-Man. The Great Gozleone shrugged and retreated behind the curtain as the next act, a pickpocket with a curled mustache and round spectacles, came out to hammer a six-inch nail into the center of his head.
-
-Gozleone’s real name is Tommy Breen, and he is the owner and operator of the World of Wonders, the oldest traveling sideshow in the United States. For the past eighteen years, Breen has spent nine months of every year out on the road, traveling the country with the company—first as a sword-swallower, then as a front-talker (never call them carnival barkers), later as a partner, and now as the sole proprietor. His way of life marks him as an endangered species, a relic of another era, hanging on even in normal times by a thread. For seven decades, the World of Wonders has performed at thousands of fairs and carnivals like this one, a perennial certainty in so many small, rural communities in America. But as with any perennial, if they miss one season, it isn’t a certainty they’ll return for the next.
-
-The Tri-County Fair in Atwood, Tennessee, was the first gig of the year for the World of Wonders, and it had been a tough stand for the traveling crew: Earlier that night, the dirt-bike daredevils had crashed inside the Globe of Death. The night before, the sideshow had been cut short by an amateur wrestling exhibition; the audience had rushed out of the tent at the opening bell. Now Gozleone had blown the memory act. To make matters worse, he had blown it every night of the fair so far.
-
-It was an inauspicious start to the cautious revival of the carnival season after the long interregnum necessitated by the pandemic, which presented the outdoor amusement industry with a challenge it hadn’t faced since, say, the Great Plague of London, which led to the cancellation of the Bartholomew Fair in 1665. (The Spanish flu in 1918 stalled some traveling outfits for just six weeks or so.) The modern American carnival business is nothing if not resilient. It has persevered through war, depression, and ecological acts of God. Through it all, it has held its place in the cultural firmament, largely unchanged in form and function from the original carnivals that toured the country following the 1893 World’s Fair. COVID-19, however, put the business on its ass. “We thought it would be three or four weeks,” Greg Chiecko, the president of the Outdoor Amusement Business Association, told me. “Our people are used to working hard. They set up and take down iron and move from city to city. To sit down and do nothing for a year drives them crazy.”
-
-The 2020 season was largely wiped from the calendar. Fairs across the country were postponed or canceled with little notice, including those in three counties surrounding Atwood. Carnival concessionaires depend on a summer season filled with outdoor events to make their living. Realizing the hit his business would take, a local entrepreneur bought a nearby racetrack that had stood empty for four years, and rallied some of the concessionaires and amusement companies that also depended on the fairs. In a matter of weeks, they had organized an event.
-
-Atwood, a community of just under a thousand people, is surrounded for miles in every direction by cotton fields and farmlands. To get there, you have to journey three miles from the nearest major road. It’s not only in the middle of nowhere, that is—it’s also well hidden there. For people in communities like this one, tradition is paramount, and the carnival seemed to do more than just entertain; it reinforced the region’s social connective tissue. Though it may have been a risk, it was a risk the county was willing to take.
-
-My presence in Atwood the following season was no accident. In a sense, it was destiny: I come from carny blood. My grandmother Hazel got hitched to a carnival man named Eric shortly before I was born, and they spent my early childhood traveling the country, fleecing the midway marks with a rigged game called the Razzle. The Razzle men, also known as flat-store operators, were carnival royalty. In Peter Fenton’s industry memoir *Eyeing the Flash,* he writes that they “wore golf hats and silk shirts, and they received pedicures. They could afford a house trailer or a room at the Sheraton.” Eric and Hazel were no “forty milers,” carnival figures who ran mostly hometown shows. And unlike me, they were no “First of Mays,” who joined the show at the start of the season but rarely made it the full nine months. Eric and Hazel spent their lives on the road, so much so that when Eric was arrested for the murder of a fellow carny when I was six, the police listed “traveled with carnival” as his prior address.
-
-In the Seventies, when the two of them were on the road, business was booming. An estimated eighty-five million people went to carnivals each year. The industry employed hundreds of thousands of people, accounting for hundreds of millions of dollars in annual profit. Still, carnival operators were nervous about the future. Fairgrounds were an incredibly valuable real estate development—worth as much as ten thousand dollars per acre—that were only being used less than two weeks a year. The cost of operating a traveling carnival, with its ever-growing collection of massive thrill rides (what carnies call “brightly lighted pig iron”), increased every year, cutting deeper into profits. The carnival historian Joe McKennon, writing in 1972, wondered, “How many fairs as they are constituted today can survive another ten years?” And Ward Hall, the founder of the World of Wonders, in his memoir *Struggles and Triumphs of a Modern Day Showman,* lamented that by the end of the decade, he and his peers felt “a bit depreased \[*sic*\] and uncertain for the future.”
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-There have been some ups and downs since then. Highly publicized accidents on carnival rides have led to stricter safety regulations and higher insurance premiums. And competition from theme parks and other entertainment options has surely cut down on attendance over the years. Still, before the pandemic, the outdoor amusement sector was thriving. According to Chiecko, carnivals are part of a $1.8 billion industry that serves around five hundred million people every year. And the business model looks almost exactly the way it did in 1972, or for that matter, 1932. The carnival midway, with its Ferris wheels and Zipper rides and whirling swings and duck-pond games, has stood the test of time. Perhaps that’s part of the appeal: the midway feels familiar. There’s comfort in seeing the carnival pop up at fairgrounds year after year, and in knowing that this generation will feel the joggle of the Tilt-a-Whirl just as you once felt it, that they will fare no better at knocking over the milk bottles or sinking the basketball in the hoop.
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-That isn’t to say that the carnival hasn’t changed at all. In the Thirties and Forties, what McKennon refers to as the industry’s “golden age,” flat-store operators like Eric and Hazel developed a reputation for not just fleecing the marks, but downright skinning them, leaving angry citizenry to confront the next show that blew through town. It didn’t matter whether a carnival was a “Sunday School”—one free of gambling and bawdy attractions—all were expected to answer for the sins of the show that came before them. As a result, the industry went to great lengths to ostracize any opportunistic or dishonest operators.
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-The Razzle games are mostly gone. The modern midway is free from overt gambling, though sometimes expensive prizes are used to entice attendees to pony up to play something they can never win. The games are more or less fair, the catch being that the prize is usually worth a fraction of the cost to play. Not that this stopped workers from doing all they could to never part with so much as a single teddy bear. I observed a steady stream of camouflage-clad teens try to knock over the milk bottles with a softball to win a Kobe Bryant jersey or a video game console. None of them questioned why the game runner needed to keep a rubber band around one of the bottles so he could tell it from the others, or why it took him an eternity to set them back up after each failed attempt. They merely questioned what was off about their aim.
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-The replacement of gambling games with “slum joints” like these was accompanied by the replacement of so-called freak shows with “working acts”—feats that could be learned by any performer, in contrast to “natural-born acts,” which were once the stars of American midways. Ward Hall’s World of Wonders went through just such a transformation. Once populated by what Hall called his “very unusual friends,” the show adapted to the American public’s cultural sensitivities. By the Eighties, it consisted mostly of working acts like sword-swallowing and stage illusions, the sort of thing you might expect to see at a magic show. Hall fought new laws criminalizing the showcasing of human oddities in court, but he changed the show all the same. He spent his “winter quarters”—the months of the year when carnival operators come off the road to do maintenance and prepare for the next season—developing new acts, reinventing the show year after year to keep up with changing tastes.
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-Today Breen runs the World of Wonders much the same way. Each winter provides him an opportunity to take a hard look at the show and reimagine it. He’s more than a performer—he’s a self-taught engineer, a jack-of-all-trades. Breen had gone from learning how to talk the Bally to learning to weld iron, wire lights, and drive an eighteen-wheeler. “It’s all problem-solving,” he said.
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-I had first seen the World of Wonders years ago at a local fair with my kids, and was enchanted. It wasn’t so much the performances, though I found them charming: it was that the endeavor felt as though it had been transported from an earlier epoch. It felt like a precious, if somewhat sordid, time capsule of lost Americana, held together by duct tape and wire in the back of a truck, reanimated each week in some new parking lot or patch of earth. The carnival was a vestige of a time and place I never knew, but had, in a sense, been steeped in as a child.
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-After my first encounter with the show, I followed the group on social media and caught up with them whenever it was feasible. But in the early days of the pandemic, they announced they’d be taking the show off the road for the time being. When I finally reached out to Breen to ask what was next, he invited me to come see for myself. At the time, I hadn’t left my basement in over a year. But I felt ready to reenter the world. What better way, I figured, than to tour America with the carnival?
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-The fairgoers in the World of Wonders tent were not overly optimistic. Even folks from the smallest of towns know that when you’re sitting on cedar chips watching a show on the back of a semitruck, you should probably temper your expectations. The long-standing bargain the sideshow has made with its audiences over the past century is this: these acts may not be great, but at least there are a lot of them. A svelte young woman who went by Hexli gyrated onstage, performing an eccentric and precise belly dance, then delicately climbed a ladder made of swords. The resident strongwoman, Luella Lynne, dressed like a game-show hostess in a shimmering sequin dress and high heels, proceeded to bend steel bars and break shackles with her bare hands, with nary a bead of sweat. The pickpocket, Les S. Moore, pounded nails into his head through his nose while keeping up a steady stream of jokey patter. (This was the “blockhead,” a sideshow act almost one hundred years old. Despite Moore’s attempts at humor, the audience seemed mostly horrified, shielding their children’s eyes.) Then Gozleone was back to close the show, making good on his earlier failure. After swallowing flaming torches and breathing plumes of fire, he brought out a terrifying array of swords and saws, and began to dip each blade into his stomach. “Down the hatch without a scratch,” he quipped. With each new sword he slid into his throat, he bent over ninety degrees and held his mouth open wide to show the crowd that the blade was truly inside of him. It was, frankly, gross. It was also incredible. By the end of the show, the audience was no longer simply being charitable. They were appalled and amazed.
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-As the last revelers departed the fairground, the performers prepared to disassemble the makeshift venue, load it onto their trucks, and head to the next town. Breen came out in a red apron and basketball shorts, his suit carefully sequestered in his RV behind the tractor trailer. Breen’s partner, the strongwoman Lynne, also came out in an apron and workout clothes, as did Hexli, the belly dancer, and Moore, the human blockhead. The costumes had been replaced by T-shirts and work gloves. For sideshow performers who typically ply their trade in bars and other traditional venues, working the World of Wonders is a badge of honor. It’s the last real sideshow in America, supported by tent stakes that have been part of the operation since the beginning. Any performer who wants an authentic sideshow experience has to hang sidewall and hammer those ancient stakes into the ground. Once the crowd leaves, the performers shed their superpowers and revert to the same status as everyone else on the midway—they become carnies. Everybody has the same job: to tear down the show.
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-At around 10 pm on closing night, as we pulled up the stakes, I began to question whether my carnival ancestry would be enough for me to hack it out on the road with this crew. As Hexli and I rolled up long strips of vinyl tent, I asked her how long she thought it would take, and she said she had no idea how we’d get the eighty-foot-long tent and the forty-four-foot stage, as well as the props, walls, poles, stakes, lights, and banners, all stowed away before sunrise. “It took us days to put this up,” she shrugged. “And it was still probably the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life.”
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-My carny blood would prove insufficient. By 1 am, I was soaked with sweat. By 3 am, I was covered in a film of dirt. As we pried the stakes out with giant nail pullers, I marveled aloud to Breen how the crew had hammered them so deep in the first place. “At least we had dirt,” he replied. “When we get to Louisiana we have to put this thing up in the hottest parking lot on earth.” When I asked how we were supposed to do that, he pointed to the truck, where one wall was lined with about fifteen sledgehammers.
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-“We sling sledge,” he replied. “Same as it always was.”
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-Showmen’s Museum
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-Luella Lynne
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-Rosie
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-The World of Wonders sideshow was started by Ward Hall and his young partner, Chris Christ, in Gibsonton, Florida (known in the carnival business as “Gibtown” or “Showtown, USA”), in 1966. Hall had been touring with a version of the show since he purchased it for a thousand dollars in 1951, and he had been in the business, first as a prop hand, then as a performer, since 1944. His initial foray into owning and selling tickets to his own show was an attraction he made by putting two baby dolls melded together into a jar filled with ink-tinted water, and letting ticket buyers believe it was the genuine article. He parlayed that jar into a vast collection of attractions, illusions, and performers that he took on the road.
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-Hall was a visionary, constantly generating new ideas for the sideshow and ways to keep it fresh from season to season. But he lacked the technical and organizational skills needed to keep the wheels turning as World of Wonders grew. When Hall bought a semitruck to cart around the act, according to Breen, he didn’t learn how to drive it, and eventually wrecked it because he never figured out how the air brakes worked.
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-An enthusiastic performer in Hall’s shows, Christ became the behind-the-scenes showman, doing everything from driving the truck to welding steel to booking dates. Together the two men built the World of Wonders into an operation that would outlast all of their competitors.
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-Breen’s first experience with the sideshow was a “wild man” act at a fair in New York in the Eighties. Wild man shows, also called geek shows, usually featured a man, often someone on the fringes of society—alcoholics were not uncommon—who was paid to wear a costume, grow his hair out, and “perform” several times a day by biting the heads off live chickens and snakes. The Bally talkers—the carnies who persuaded fairgoers to buy tickets—would tell people these geeks were wild men from some faraway locale like Borneo. The shows did impressive business, but by the time Breen visited one as a child, they had already become considerably tamer. Geek shows drew the attention of animal-rights groups as early as 1960, and in time the act was sanitized. The wild men of later years were merely disheveled and loud, and Breen was unimpressed.
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-As a teenager, Breen played in punk bands and was an avid fan of professional wrestling. As he grew disenchanted with his suburban New Jersey adolescence, his thoughts drifted back to the fairs of his youth. “I want to get the fuck out of here,” Breen said, recalling his mindset. “My band’s never going to make it, I’m never going to be a wrestler. It’s like, well, I’ll join the circus.” The trouble was, he didn’t have a talent he could contribute. “I can’t be an acrobat, I don’t like clowns,” he said. So he committed to learning the art of sword-swallowing in his parents’ basement. He experimented with whatever he had, even teaching himself to swallow a necklace and pull it out his nose. But he kept his skills a secret for years, along with his plans to run away.
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-Then, in 2005, Breen saw an ad on Craigslist for a sideshow performer. The ad had been placed by Hall, who was still running the operation, though his show had few of the natural-born acts it had once been famous for. In their place, the lineup consisted mainly of stage illusions. There was the spider girl, a rather ridiculous-looking giant fake spider on a twine web that appeared, with the help of mirrors and optical illusions, to have a woman’s head; and the headless woman, a comparatively impressive effect where a living, breathing woman sat in a chair with metal tubes and wires hooked up to her neck where her head should’ve been. The spider girl dated to the late nineteenth century. The headless woman had been a part of sideshows since the New York World’s Fair, and remains on the World of Wonders roster today.
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-Breen signed on to swallow swords, but Christ told him he’d need to do a lot more than just perform. He’d need to help put the show up and tear it down, just like everyone else. One evening during Breen’s first season, somewhere in upstate New York, after the crew had spent a night tearing everything down and a whole day setting it all back up, Christ told everyone to take a quick dinner break and then get into costume. They were performing that evening. “Are you fucking kidding me?” Breen said. He quit on the spot, climbed a fence, and started walking down the road, hoping he’d find a gas station from which he could call his mother. But he walked and walked and didn’t see anything but trees. Eventually, he turned around. He climbed back over the fence, got into costume, and took the stage.
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-In time, Hall and Christ noticed Breen’s talent and enthusiasm, and realized he was potentially more than just a sword-swallower. Breen had the makings of a showman, a carnival boss. Christ asked him back the next season, and he agreed. A couple of seasons later, Breen was made a partner. By 2017, he had purchased the show from Hall and Christ.
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-If Breen had seen a gas station the night of his aborted escape, the course of his life might have been different. The World of Wonders may not have survived the twentieth century, may have ended up on museum shelves like every other sideshow before it. I understood acutely what an important stroke of luck it had been, because as we tore down the show in Atwood, I wondered more than once how I might gracefully escape. As Hexli and I struggled to carry the twenty-foot steel poles across the muddy midway, I, too, considered giving up on the carny life. But then one of the daredevils from the Globe of Death wandered over to warn us that a cop had pulled him over, and had searched his truck for drugs. We were surrounded on all sides by fields and unmarked police cars. There was no escape. And there would be no rest, either. When we finished at around 4:30 am, exhausted beyond belief, we made a plan to meet up after just a few hours’ sleep for the next jump, more than five hundred miles away in Lafayette, Louisiana.
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-The drive was much longer than anticipated, because the I-40 bridge that crosses into Arkansas was out of commission. We had to caravan down through Mississippi and across the Gulf Coast in unusually heavy traffic. Breen decided to stop halfway and spend the night at a hotel, where he ended up in a spirited argument with the owner, who had told him over the phone that they allowed pets but then balked when he saw that the pet in question was a hundred-and-eighty-pound pig.
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-The first time I saw the World of Wonders show, in the parking lot of a mall in West Nyack, New York, in 2018, they had erected massive metal scaffolding from which a tattooed, blond hula-hooper named Trixie Turvy was suspended high in the air by her ankles while escaping from a straitjacket. To me, it was show business at its most impressive. But to Breen and his fellow crew members, it was a pain in the ass. Putting up the rigging was a lot of work, and there wasn’t always enough room for it on the ground. After that season, he scrapped the act and came up with Texas Tommy’s Wild West Revue, a throwback to Buffalo Bill’s traveling shows. The premise is simple—Breen and Lynne do tricks with whips and lassos and bend horseshoes, all acts they learned during their time off. For the big finale they bring out a potbellied pig named Rosie.
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-“It was Chris’s idea to get the pig,” Breen told me. “I said, ‘Why would I need a pig for a Wild West show?’ He’s like, ‘You need a pig.’ And then I saw Rosie, and I was like, ‘I need this pig.’ ”
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-Rosie is a natural star. Breen wasn’t bad at snapping the tops off flowers with a whip, but Rosie stole the show. Breen got her when she was still a piglet, and has been training her for years. As it turns out, pigs are fast learners. Rosie honks a horn with her snout, dances by weaving in and out of Breen’s legs, high-fives, sits on command, and gives kisses. She closes the show by posing on a podium while her new fans take selfies with her.
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-When we finally reached the hottest parking lot on earth, at the Cajundome in Lafayette, there was a crew of four people to meet us. Breen had placed an ad on Craigslist offering fifteen dollars an hour to anyone willing to help set up, and they had answered the call. Ordinarily the responsibility to set up and tear down the show lies with the performers, but Les and Hexli hadn’t made the jump with us to Louisiana, and their replacements wouldn’t arrive for a few more days. It was just me, Breen, and Lynne.
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-The crew was a piebald assortment of Lafayettans who were down on their luck: a soft-spoken tattooed punk woman from the West Coast, an eager and muscular young man who drove a minivan, a grandmother with a journalism degree who said she wasn’t above “busting ass for cash.” They sweated in the Louisiana heat without complaint for hours, drilling so many holes and hammering so many stakes into the hard asphalt that Breen had to go to a hardware store to replace his drill bit. At one point he climbed into the possum belly of his truck and came back with a jackhammer, which one member of our crew was excited to use. Breen, however, offered it to the Craigslist crew. He preferred the sledgehammer.
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-It struck me that day, watching Breen hammer in one spike after another, that this was an incredibly austere manner in which to be in show business. Over the past two decades Breen had taught himself to swallow swords, eat fire, throw knives, perform illusions, and conduct every other form of stagecraft that his show required. His talent could have landed him on a big stage somewhere, or even on television. Yet here he was, in a parking lot in the Deep South, living in an RV with a pig.
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-Carnival work is difficult by any measure. It’s physically demanding and requires traveling most of the year. And the pay is often less than minimum wage. There aren’t many like Breen who are drawn to the carny life for the sheer romance of it. That’s why amusement workers have come to represent the fifth-largest H-2B temporary guest-worker occupation. These workers are recruited around the world by labor agents. Many of them come from small towns in Mexico. Two thirds or more of all H-2B amusement workers in the United States, in fact, come from a single city in Veracruz: Tlapacoyan, population approximately 60,000. Gold Star Amusements, which operates the rides at the Cajun Heartland State Fair in Lafayette, had thirty-six H-2B visa workers in 2021. Their application stated that these workers were paid less than ten dollars an hour.
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-According to Greg Chiecko, guest workers are crucial to the industry, and the government’s reluctance to increase the number of visas issued every year is hurting business. “It’s a real crisis at this point,” he said. The politics around the program have little to do with low wages or poor working conditions, and everything to do with anti-immigrant attitudes. But Chiecko wonders who else would do the hard work of setting up and tearing down shows. “It’s not a pathway to citizenship. They come to the country, work, pay taxes, and go home. Over the years fewer and fewer Americans want to do certain types of jobs. One of them is working for a carnival.”
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-When the last spike was in the ground and Breen excused the Craigslist crew, the four of them hung around and chatted about where else to find work. Someone suggested they stay and work the carnival. This was quickly dismissed. Whatever the work of pouring funnel cakes or operating Tilt-a-Whirls on the back end of the midway paid, it was not likely to be enough. None of them stayed.
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-The Showmen’s Museum grounds and Tommy Breen’s backyard
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-We retired backstage for the night, sitting around in camp chairs next to Rosie’s pen. Lynne puzzled over a chessboard (she kept a running correspondence game going with her father in Nebraska). Breen fretted about the memory act that had defeated him in Tennessee. “That’s the worst I’ve ever felt,” he said. “Embarrassed and enraged.”
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-Breen had gotten the idea for it while reading a book about mentalism. The book described two methods for reproducing long lists of random objects—one involved trickery and the other required memorization. He wanted the challenge, so he spent his downtime practicing the honest method until he could recall thirty-five objects over and over again, without mistake. But out here on the road, his confidence was waning.
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-“I think I’m nervous,” he said. “It didn’t work the first time, which is fucking me up.”
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-Lynne encouraged him. “You can do it,” she said. “You’ve done it tons of times.”
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-Lynne said the same thing happened to her when she first started tearing decks of cards in half. “One time I couldn’t do it and then it messed me up,” she said. “It’s always in my head that it might not work now.”
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-Breen told the story of a spot one summer in California: During the knife-throwing act, the performer, Sir Kade, accidentally hit the human target, Trixie Turvy, with an errant throw. When someone ran to tell Breen, he asked, “Is she dead?” She wasn’t, but she had been impaled and was bleeding profusely, and the audience was looking on in horror. Someone took Turvy to the hospital as Breen pulled Kade aside. “I know you’re freaked out,” he told him. “It happens.” But, he stressed, the show must go on. To demonstrate his confidence, Breen volunteered to be the replacement target. When the next audience filed into the tent, Breen stood against the board and let Kade throw his knives at him. It was terrifying, but he felt it was the only way for Kade to get his confidence back. “It helped him not get traumatized over it,” Breen said. And when Turvy returned from the hospital all stitched up, she took her place at the board and went back to work.
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-Still, Breen and Lynne brainstormed ways to change the memory act. Perhaps she could come out and get the list from the audience for him so he could concentrate. Perhaps they could have the audience shout all the objects at once rather than one at a time to make it go faster. Eventually the two of them bade me farewell and walked arm in arm through the vast midway, enjoying the peace and quiet one last time before the gates opened and the carnival began.
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-The Cajun Heartland State Fair was a very different scene from the Tri-County Fair in Atwood. Lafayette is an urban center of more than one hundred thousand people, but visitors come from all over Louisiana. “When you talk to individuals who live outside of Lafayette Parish and you talk about the Cajun Heartland State Fair, I mean, you can see their face, like, ‘Oh, that’s the big fair,’ ” said Pam DeVille, the director of the Cajundome. They have held this fair without fail for the past thirty-three years—except for 2020, when it was canceled like most of the others. In 2019, more than forty thousand people were in attendance. As the fair kicked off its eleven-night comeback, nearly two thousand five hundred people showed up, besting the pre-pandemic record for an opening night.
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-The midway felt more than twice as large as the one in Tennessee, with rides that towered above the Ferris wheel and the Fire Ball. At one end was an actual roller coaster, which I had watched workers unpack from trucks and assemble atop wooden blocks and sheets of plywood in a matter of days, with a kind of awe. There was a separate section for the larger thrill rides, where teenagers seemed to congregate. Nearby were the rigged games of chance, where fairgoers tried breaking beer bottles with baseballs, or standing bottles on end with a ring on a string. No matter how carefully they watched the jointee demonstrate how to do it correctly (and this was always done adroitly, and on command), the marks could never quite pull it off. Watching them try, I ate a paper plate of fried alligator, which unsurprisingly tasted like everything else battered and dipped in hot oil. Another mark on the midway, I suppose.
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-Next came the children’s rides, where families gathered, phones aloft, filming their kids spinning round and round on the carousel. There was the entertainment stage where local acts performed, alternating nightly between country, rock, and rap. The sound was loud enough to drown out the nearby twangs of Johnny Cash that soundtracked Texas Tommy’s Wild West Revue, where Rosie danced and peacocked and posed.
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-Despite the competition, the opening-night crowd at the World of Wonders was far from a smattering, and the Great Gozleone, Luella Lynne, and a troupe of performers from New Orleans had the audience eating out of the palms of their hands. When Gozleone swallowed seven swords at once, the audience gasped. When he breathed fire, they cheered. When he chopped off Lynne’s head in his guillotine, they screamed. As he got to the memory act, making his way through the list of twenty objects, a woman standing next to me stood frozen in disbelief. She looked around for some kind of mirror, anything to prove he was cheating. “How?” she asked out loud.
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-Perhaps the crowd was too easy. After all, they had been locked up at home like the rest of us, longing to get back outside and be normal again, to be among their friends and neighbors, to be entertained. Perhaps they were primed for thrilling. Still, there in the floodlights, as Gozleone finished his impressive yet trivial feat without having missed a single item on the list, the crowd was more than thrilled—they were astonished.
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-Date: 2022-12-11
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-Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/interactive/2022/drug-overdose-deaths-fentanyl-greenville-nc/
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-# Drugs killed 8 friends, one by one, in a tragedy seen across the U.S.
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-GREENVILLE, N.C. — On that terrible day nine years ago, Ellie Laughinghouse Crout was running late. The memorial service for her half sister was starting in an hour and she still hadn’t left home.
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-The 5-week-old child, Lacy, just seven pounds, had been found facedown in her crib two days earlier, devastating her half siblings, who had been so eager to welcome the baby.
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-And now Ellie’s phone was ringing. Annoyed, she answered and snapped at her mother, whose tone signaled more calamity. Ellie’s youngest brother, Jackson, distraught over the baby’s death, had gone out with friends the night before. When his mother tried to rouse him from bed that morning, he was gray, with almost no pulse. Tests would show he had four kinds of anti-anxiety medication in his blood. Five days later, just before his 19th birthday, he was taken off life support.
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-“I hate the saying, ‘Everything happens for a reason,’ or ‘It’ll get easier,’ because it doesn’t,” Ellie said. “It doesn’t get easier. Grief and loss never do. I think they just get different. You learn where some days you’re an emotional wreck and others, you don’t think about them as much. Or you think about them with a smile.”
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-Oct. 2, 2013, was not the day the drug epidemic reached Greenville. But beginning with Jackson’s death that day, a group of at least 16 young men and women who grew up together in this small eastern North Carolina city would succumb to overdoses of opioids and other drugs over nine years. More of their peers became addicted or overdosed but managed to survive.
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-“It was almost like a generation that went to war didn’t come back,” said J.D. Fletcher, whose son died in 2019.
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-In a nation that suffered [more than 107,000 drug overdose deaths in 2021 alone**,**](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/202205.htm?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) there are many Greenvilles — places where the powerful opioid fentanyl and other drugs have produced clusters of overdose deaths, or picked off victims one at a time. Here, drugs worked their way inexorably through a group of friends, year after year, for nearly a decade. In one family, loss piled upon tragic loss until almost no one was left.
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-##### Post Reports
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-### What drug overdoses did to my hometown
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-Every time producer Jordan-Marie Smith would visit her hometown, it felt like another kid she knew from high school had died from a drug overdose. She went back home to investigate, along with reporter Lenny Bernstein.
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-The deaths shattered families and shook the worldview of parents who believed the drug subculture affected other people’s children. Many are still mystified at how addiction invaded the fortress they had tried to construct from comfortable homes and good schools.
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-Some have sought to find meaning in their children’s deaths, urging the community to acknowledge the drug crisis in its midst and take steps to prevent more young people from dying.
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-“It was getting to the point that we couldn’t ignore it anymore,” said Maria Rodriguez-Cue, whose son, Mingo, died in 2017, at age 22. “You could pretend that this couldn’t happen to you … \[but\] it could happen to any of us. And it continues to happen.”
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-There is no single explanation for the run of deaths. Each teen seemed to follow his or her own path to substance use, propelled by trauma, depression, boredom, hopelessness or poor self-esteem — lost to the easy availability of drugs and a susceptibility to addiction.
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-The dead are nearly all boys and nearly all White. Eight were good friends, or friends of friends, a typical crowd that coalesced by eighth grade at St. Peter Catholic School, or early in one of two public high schools. They were a few years apart in age, but connected in some way. They palled around, spent nights at each other’s homes, played ball together.
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-When drugs took over their lives, some accumulated criminal records, mostly for charges such as possession and driving under the influence, the kinds of offenses that accompany substance use disorder.
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-In a 2008 photo of the St. Peter seventh- and eighth-grade basketball teams, three of the 18 boys pictured are now dead. Two other teammates not shown also have died.
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-Beyond the core group of friends, Greenville lost eight more to overdoses, including Megan McPhail in 2014; Kennedy Wainright in 2015; Kyle Griffin and Michael Suggs, who overdosed on the same night in 2016. In the months since the reporting for this story began, Haylee McArthur and Raducanu “Ryan” Nease also died after overdoses.
-
-“It came and it took them,” said Joe Hughes, the former St. Peter basketball coach and history teacher who spoke at three funerals and attended five others. “It just, it took them.”
-
-On the Friday of Lacy’s memorial, Ellie called her other brother, Alex, to tell him about Jackson’s overdose. They went to the service to mourn Lacy, making excuses for Jackson’s absence. Numb, Ellie remembers little of the ceremony, where family and friends grieved a tiny newborn they were told had succumbed to sudden infant death syndrome — an explanation that would later become more complicated.
-
-After the memorial, Ellie and Alex told other family members about Jackson. Then they went to the hospital and found their brother with tubes and wires protruding from his body at all angles. Bloody gauze littered the hospital room floor. A priest had been called to administer last rites.
-
-For five days, Jackson’s mother, Fran Laughinghouse, let his friends come say goodbye. She also hoped to scare the hell out of them.
-
-That worked for some of Jackson’s friends, who “realized that it could have also just as easily been them,” and veered away from drugs, Ellie said.
-
-For others, the drugs’ grip was too strong.
-
-Alex Laughinghouse, Ellie’s only surviving sibling, was one of them. Five years after Lacy and Jackson passed away, their father found Alex at his home with a needle nearby, dead from an overdose of heroin, fentanyl and other drugs. He was two days shy of his 25th birthday.
-
-To friends and family, it was unfathomable that someone with Alex’s gifts had died this way. “Alex was the most charismatic person I’ve ever encountered to this day, and I still find myself envious of his ability to connect with people,” said Chase Smith, a friend in recovery from opioid addiction.
-
-But that was not enough to save him. Alex had 11 drugs, as well as alcohol, in his blood when he died, according to the toxicology report that accompanied his autopsy. By then, he had struggled for years with addiction and depression, and been in and out of rehab.
-
-Shortly before the overdose, Ellie recalled, she had told her brother she was pregnant. He was excited. And terrified. ‘I just really hope that she has your blood,’ ” she recalled him saying. “He’s like, ‘I don’t know what’s in my blood, but it’s tainted and I don’t know why I do the things I do.”
-
-“And I remember telling him, ‘Alex, we have the same blood. You’re not bad. You’re still good.’ ”
-
-
-
-## Drugs ‘not hard to find’ in Greenville
-
-Cut from table-flat cotton and tobacco fields, Greenville, a racially diverse city of about 90,000, has grown in recent decades. Its economy is strong, though its poverty rate is higher than the state’s average. There are a half-dozen pharmaceutical facilities in town, along with a medical center and East Carolina University, attended by 27,000 students. But [the university also has a party school reputation](http://www.piratemedia1.com/thehook/article_a05c7ec6-f984-11e8-b4b7-17139607e5c9.html?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) and drugs are easy to come by, many said.
-
-“If you want to be into that kind of stuff, it’s not hard to find,” said Ricky Rodriguez-Cue, Mingo’s younger brother.
-
-Deaths from drug overdoses in Greenville, as in most of the country, have been on a sharp upswing for more than a decade, largely the destructive work of fentanyl and heroin. There were [53 overdose deaths in the city and surrounding Pitt County,](https://www.ncdhhs.gov/opioid-and-substance-use-action-plan-data-dashboard?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) total population about 172,000, in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available, and 64 the year before that. That rate is slightly higher than North Carolina’s.
-
-“For three or four years, it was awful in Greenville,” said Hughes, the St. Peter history teacher and coach. “There were kids dying all over the place. … And when they’re kids that you know, they’re kids that you taught, kids that you have a relationship with, it’s very haunting.”
-
-The Laughinghouse family was prominent in the area for generations. Ellie’s grandfather sold tobacco. Her late father, Bill, ran a sod farm. Bill and Fran divorced when Ellie and her brothers, separated in age by just three years, were adolescents. Bill remarried and had a baby, Lacy, with his new wife, Jennifer.
-
-The three older children spent much of their early years on the farm and were always close. Alex was the smartest kid in every class, Hughes said, and a superb all-around athlete despite his small size. Jackson was the daredevil who suffered three concussions in quick succession, two from dirt-bike accidents and a third in football practice.
-
-They built tree forts, rode dirt bikes, and played football, basketball and video games, one friend recalled.
-
-Ellie, now 31 and married, was like a second mom to the boys. She sometimes wears a bracelet with two tiny compartments that hold bits of their ashes. She also has a locket with some of Lacy’s, and another with more of Jackson’s.
-
-As most remember it, the pills began to show up when the group was in eighth grade or early in high school. It began with prescription opioids, which were in many medicine cabinets at the time, before parents understood how dangerous they could be. Parties were thrown at homes when parents were out of town or at the Laughinghouse farm, friends of the dead boys remembered.
-
-“It was cliche, but it was all fun at first,” Chase said. “You’ve got a problem before you know it — not as a figure of speech, but literally. It wasn’t until I was experiencing symptoms of withdrawal that I realized I had a problem.”
-
-The brothers traveled different roads to the same end. Jackson was a more casual user, their mother said. Alex was more typical of someone with full-blown addiction.
-
-“He got started on the pills and stole from me and sold things, and took my debit card and wiped out my account and took a car,” said Fran, a traveling nurse.
-
-“Jackson was my example of ‘one pill can kill’ kind of thing, which is especially true now with the way fentanyl is.”
-
-
-
-## ‘I want there to be a solution’
-
-Like Fran, other parents confronted the unthinkable. J.D. and Dawn Fletcher, a businessman and teacher**,** found their son dead in his room of a fentanyl overdose in 2019, after he had wrestled for years with addiction.
-
-John Stuart Fletcher III, known to everyone as Stuart, had arrived at St. Peter during the sixth grade after a problem with a bully in public school. He was anxious and badly wanted to fit in at his new school, his mother recalled. A doctor prescribed clonazepam, which she did not realize could be addictive, for his anxiety. By seventh grade, he was also smoking marijuana.
-
-As his addiction grew more severe, Stuart, the older of two brothers, wrecked cars, pawned family possessions and was caught stealing pills from a relative, his parents said. He managed to graduate high school but started using cocaine as well.
-
-When the pills ran out and he couldn’t afford to buy them on the street, he began using heroin, which is much less expensive but must be snorted, smoked or injected. A dealer stuck a gun in his face. He started carrying one of his own.
-
-Once he started using heroin, Stuart survived just four months.
-
-“I laid for 10 years in my bed, not sleeping at night because I knew I was going to get a phone call,” J.D. said. “ ‘Come get him out of jail. Come get him out of the ditch. Come get him out of the morgue.’ ”
-
-“I want there to be a solution to this. I want to be able to figure out one,” said Dawn, who in her grief has attempted suicide. “That’s why we’re doing this interview is because we want to help.”
-
-Stuart and Mingo were close friends, at times inseparable. Mingo was the kind of guy who showed genuine empathy to classmates with a problem, who saw the good in everyone. His mother, Maria, described how he could approach a total stranger just to say how “great” she was. But his own troubles kept multiplying.
-
-Mingo was forced out of a treatment program for breaking the rules just three days before he died of a fentanyl overdose in 2017. Maria had spent those days babysitting her son, afraid to let him out of her sight. She left for a few hours to run errands. Mingo was dead when she and Ricky returned to his apartment.
-
-“His last two years, he was in and out of rehab and trying to get his life together,” Maria remembered. “His friends finished school. So he’s sitting there with this green folder in front of him on the coffee table in this little apartment … and we were going through it, you know, all the things he had to do to get his life back on track. And I can just see how he had given up. He was like it was just too much. It was just too much.”
-
-
-
-## Survivors’ burden
-
-Some of the young men who escaped their friends’ fate have trouble figuring out why, or how. Jacob Harding went to treatment and is now in medical school at ECU. Cole Thomason and Chase Smith found enough strength through faith.
-
-“Chance,” said Chase. He believes his odds of dying were no better or worse than his friends’. “You could easily, accidentally, receive a fatal dose of fentanyl by pure chance.”
-
-Their community has been irrevocably changed by the deaths. Diannee Carden-Glenn opened a harm-reduction program after the overdose death of her son, Mike, part of which she funds herself. She hands out clean syringes, fentanyl test strips and other materials that help keep users alive.
-
-The [Pitt County Coalition on Substance Use](https://www.pccsu.org/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) advocates prevention and awareness of the drug problem. East Carolina University sponsors a [recovery community](https://collegiaterecovery.ecu.edu/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) on campus. The sheriff has a program to treat users who are jailed and keep them sober when they get out.
-
-Maria Rodriguez-Cue, Fran Laughinghouse and other mothers have become activists, refusing to allow their children’s deaths, or Greenville’s drug problem, to fade from the community’s consciousness.
-
-Richardson Sells’ mother and sister, Martha Elizabeth Garrett and Anna Sells, honor his memory by awarding a scholarship each year to a senior at J.H. Rose High School who plans to attend technical college, as Richardson had.
-
-In July, Acadia Healthcare and ECU Health announced they would [jointly open a 144-bed facility](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220719005438/en/Acadia-Healthcare-Forms-Joint-Venture-With-ECU-Health-to-Build-a-Modern-Behavioral-Health-Hospital-in-Eastern-North-Carolina?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) to address a long-standing demand for more mental health beds here. A spokesman said the facility is not aimed at substance use, but would help patients with addiction disorders that sometimes accompany mental health problems.
-
-Still, the burden of survival can sometimes be too much. Jacob, who began medical school this summer at 29, had gone to more than 10 friends’ funerals by the time he was 24. Now, he has lost 20 or 25 friends to drugs. He was particularly close with Alex. Both came from divorced families and were not as affluent as some of the other boys.
-
-“There was one funeral where I just, I couldn’t bear myself to see it … I still feel guilty over that sometimes.
-
-“It’s a lot of weight to carry around, losing so many people,” Jacob added. “I mean, it’s a weight that never really goes away.”
-
-Cole, a close friend of Jackson’s, was with him that night in 2013 when the younger Laughinghouse’s life came to an end. They went out together, took drugs, then bought cheeseburgers at a diner, and collapsed in Fran’s bed for the night, he said. He awakened the morning of Lacy’s memorial service to find that Jackson had choked on his own vomit during the night. Fran began screaming and pumping her son’s chest. Cole ran next door in his underwear to get help from a neighbor who was also a nurse.
-
-At 29, Cole mentors others struggling with addiction and owns an insurance company. But he still has night terrors and insomnia. He can’t sleep with anyone on the left side of his bed, where Jackson was when it happened.
-
-“We all kind of question why we did it,” he said. “Just about all of us were depressed, caught in between, didn’t have a lot of guidance.” The 2008 financial crisis had taught them how quickly their family’s security could disappear, he recalled.
-
-“Why not get high if there’s no hope? … We had no hope for the future. So we had fun with the present.”
-
-Fran keeps a photo on her dresser that shows Alex and three other boys on prom night. Arms around each other’s shoulders, they are grinning, ready for the next chapters of their lives.
-
-Cole is the only one still alive.
-
-Now eight years sober, Cole said he has developed a strong religious faith. “I understand even though they are gone, they are not gone,” he said. “They live through me.”
-
-
-
-## The first drug death?
-
-The death that crushed the Laughinghouse children nine years ago may not have been caused by SIDS, as many first believed. Shortly after Lacy died, the Pitt County Sheriff’s Office received word from the state medical examiner that drugs had been found in the infant’s system.
-
-A detective went to speak with her mother**,** who acknowledged taking prescription drugs during her pregnancy. She told Detective Priscilla Pippins that Lacy was a fussy child, and that she had alternated between breast and bottle feeding.
-
-The autopsy called the cause of Lacy’s death “undetermined,” but noted there was enough anti-anxiety medication in her blood to kill her.
-
-“The child was found face down on her sleeping surface and accidental suffocation cannot be excluded,” it reads. “The presence of alprazolam and diazepam at these concentrations and in the absence of breast feeding indicates improper administration of these drugs. … There is concern that these drugs caused or contributed to this death.”
-
-As a result of that finding, Jennifer Laughinghouse, 38**,** faced a possible charge of involuntary manslaughter, said Sheriff Paula Dance. (Bill Laughinghouse was not home the night the child died. He was jailed under a program that allowed him to serve a penalty for driving under the influence a few days at a time.)
-
-Three days after the report was completed, and with the case unresolved, Jennifer fatally overdosed on prescription drugs. Ellie and Fran believe her death was a suicide, though that is not specified in the autopsy report. Members of her family declined to be interviewed for this story, or did not return phone calls, emails and texts.
-
-“Autopsy examination was remarkable for the presence of a lethal combination of alprazolam, diazepam, oxycodone, oxymorphone, temazepam and tramadol (and metabolites). This represents the cause of death,” Jennifer’s autopsy report reads.
-
-Bill Laughinghouse, who struggled with alcoholism, diabetes and pancreas problems, died in 2020, family and friends said.
-
-The ashes of the three Laughinghouse children, and of Jennifer and Bill, are in five adjacent niches in a columbarium at a local cemetery. Fran visits regularly. In July, she sat on the baking concrete at the base of the column where her children’s remains are stored, spoke to them and wept. “My faith and beliefs are strong that my boys are in a better place,” she said. “ … And I’ll just live out the rest of my days on earth until I can be with them again. But I would never, ever wish for them to come back onto this earth full of pain.”
-
-*If you or someone you know needs help with mental health or substance use issues, you can call the government’s* [*National Helpline*](https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/national-helpline?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) *at 1 800 662-HELP(4357). You can also reach the* [*National Suicide Prevention Lifeline*](http://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) *at 988, or a crisis counselor by messaging the* [*Crisis Text Line*](https://www.crisistextline.org/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) *at 741741.*
-
-##### About this story
-
-Editing by Carol Eisenberg. Photo editing by Bronwen Latimer. Video editing by Jayne Orenstein. Design and development by Hailey Haymond. Design editing by Madison Walls. Copy editing by Thomas Heleba.
-
-*Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report.*
-
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-# E-commerce giants couldn’t deliver. So these islanders built their own online shopping ecosystem
-
-After a morning spearfishing in the lagoon, 20-year-old fisherman Turoa Faura rode home on his red tricycle, carrying his young nephew in the rusty basket affixed to the back. On the patio of his aunt’s house, he shared photos on his phone of his fishing exploits: bright blue parrotfish, yellow-lip emperors, silvery trevallies, and a cooler full of tiny, rose-colored *eina**‘**a* — a seasonal delicacy.
-
-Faura is tall and well-built, with bleached blond highlights in his black hair. When *Rest of World* met him in December 2021, he wore a white T-shirt featuring a large black Adidas logo, which he had recently purchased online using his smartphone.
-
-Shopping online and getting the T-shirt delivered to the island where he lives was a new experience for Faura. “I began ordering online this year,” he told *Rest of World*. “At the start of the year, I still didn’t know that I could order online myself.” He’s also used online shopping to buy fishing gear and sports equipment.
-
-Faura lives in Manihi, a remote coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is one of 118 atolls and islands that make up French Polynesia, an overseas collectivity of France that has its own government and is considered semi-autonomous. The islands are scattered over more than 3,500 square kilometers of ocean — an area [five times as large](https://www.britannica.com/place/French-Polynesia) as the French mainland.
-
-From the air, Manihi looks ephemeral: a tiny ring of sand that might be washed away at any moment, surrounded by endless shades of blue. The atoll, itself made up of many small islands arranged around a lagoon, is just 27 kilometers long and 8 kilometers wide, with its highest point 9 meters above sea level. It has a population of less than 1,000, with most inhabitants, including Faura, living in the main village of Turipaoa. Life here can be difficult. Well-paying jobs are few and far between, and residents are reliant on cargo ships from Tahiti, French Polynesia’s largest island, to bring necessities.
-
-The luxury of online shopping and home delivery, considered indispensable by many in the West, has long been out of reach for remote islanders like Faura. There’s no Amazon same-day delivery or Alibaba shipping to Manihi, and Turipaoa has only three small shops, which mostly sell food and essentials. There are no restaurants, hardware stores, or clothing shops that sell sought-after brands like Adidas.
-
-Until recently, huge distances, a scattered population, and lack of internet access have made e-commerce unviable in French Polynesia. In the last few years, however, a nascent courier scene has taken off, making it possible for islanders to access an ocean of e-commerce products that were previously unavailable. As the global online shopping market continues to grow — a trend that has been augmented by the Covid-19 pandemic — local services are closing the last gaps for those living in some of the world’s most remote places.
-
- 
-
-20-year-old fisherman Turoa Faura lives in Manihi, a remote coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
-
- 
-
-He recently began shopping online, as local couriers started making e-commerce accessible to French Polynesia’s islands over the last few years.
-
- 
-
-“I began ordering online this year,” Faura told Rest of World. “At the start of the year, I still didn’t know that I could order online myself.”
-
----
-
-**In 2017, Moanatea** Henriou was 26 years old and in his sixth year of working as a riot policeman in France. The pay was great, and life was comfortable, but there was something missing. He yearned to be with his children and his family. He craved the warm climes and jagged mountain peaks of his *fenua*, his island home — Tahiti.
-
-And so, in January 2018, Henriou moved back to Tahiti, ready to start his life again from scratch. When his brother suggested he start a small business delivering goods to people on the islands, he went for it. He borrowed some money to buy a cheap motorized scooter, started a Facebook business page, and called his company [HM Coursier Express](https://www.facebook.com/hmcoursier/) – “HM” for his initials, and “coursier” meaning “courier” in French.
-
-On the HM Coursier Express Facebook page, customers can access a list of services and prices, receive updates on special offers, and leave reviews. Facebook was a natural choice for Henriou to reach his market: it is the leading social network in French Polynesia, with 74% of the population [on the platform](https://www.service-public.pf/dgen/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/11/2020-09-26-DGEN-USAGES-MENAGES-LOW.pdf) and half of those using it daily for more than an hour.
-
-To place an order, customers send a request through Facebook Messenger. HM Coursier Express offers to source and deliver anything a customer might want — from fresh fruit and vegetables to clothing or even a car. The company’s couriers shop for the products, package them, and then ship them by air or cargo ship. HM Coursier Express also handles online order deliveries for many local businesses.
-
-When Henriou set up his Facebook page, there were only a couple of other couriers operating in French Polynesia.
-
-“In the beginning, everyone made fun of me, especially my old friends from Pa’ea \[the Tahitian commune Henriou is from\] because I had a good situation before that,” Henriou told *Rest of World*. “When they saw that I was back, they felt sorry for me because I was a delivery man.”
-
-Delivery in French Polynesia poses a particular logistical challenge. But homegrown courier services exist in other hard-to-reach places, particularly in countries where e-commerce giants like Amazon and Alibaba don’t hold much sway. In Fiji, for instance, a Pacific country with over 300 islands, local courier service [All Freight Logistics Fiji](https://www.facebook.com/allfreightlogisticfiji/) offers online door-to-door delivery and other transportation services.
-
-Even within the U.S., delivery to remote areas, such as some parts of Hawai**‘**i, isn’t clear-cut. Amazon does not offer priority shipping to P.O. boxes in Hawai**‘**i and has restrictions on package sizes; some addresses in the Hawai**‘**ian islands are not eligible to receive shipments from Amazon at all. In Alaska, meanwhile, a local courier service called [Eagle Raven Global](https://eagleravenglobal.com/services#f611744a-4194-43f8-8c52-37aa702cd9c9) goes to some of the places the e-commerce giants don’t, using a network of maritime cargo ships to deliver goods to communities in the southeast of the state, such as Hoonah and Gustavus.
-
-> “The courier business exploded, thanks to Covid, because the people didn’t want to leave their houses.”
-
-Henriou’s first client was a small dress business in Tahiti; he delivered dresses and small packages to its customers. Other clients soon began to discover his services through Facebook and word of mouth. Local businesses wanted a middleman to deliver their goods, while families on the islands messaged Henriou with their grocery shopping lists: 1 bottle of ketchup, 4 packets of rice, a carton of frozen chicken. He’d jump on his scooter, buy or collect the goods from the store, then package and take them to the airport or a cargo ship to be delivered to their final destination.
-
-In the early days, Henriou and his girlfriend worked from sunup to late in the night every day — building contacts, promoting their services, and purchasing and delivering goods. “There was no paid leave, no rest, nothing like that,” said Henriou. “I still remember my first month’s pay. It was 20,000 Central Pacific francs, or $200. That’s nothing, nothing at all.”
-
-HM Coursier Express initially delivered anywhere: within Tahiti, to other islands, and also abroad. In the first year, Henriou built up a client base of Tahitians in France, including many serving in the military. They wanted products from home: Arnott’s Sao crackers, canned corned beef, and clothing from Tahitian brands like Hinano and Enjoy Life. Henriou soon realized, however, that sending abroad wasn’t sustainable; the shipping often cost much more than the products themselves, and the fee that HM Coursier Express charged barely covered his overheads.
-
-At first, the business used an honor system for payments. HM Coursier Express would pay for a customer’s order and shipping up front, and the customer would pay it back when their package arrived safely. But after a while, more people started taking advantage: once they had received their package, they’d disappear, and Henriou would be left with a deficit. Now, the company asks for a deposit when customers place their order.
-
-By August 2018, Henriou had scraped together enough money to buy a small pickup truck, and, in December that year, he took out a loan to buy a used van. With an increase in customers, HM Coursier Express was able to hire its first employee, Vatea Fare Bredin, now director of operations.
-
-Then, throughout 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic led to a boom in the demand for e-commerce delivery services. Compared to 2017, the number of internet users in French Polynesia making purchases online at least once a week doubled from 5% to 10%, according to a [2019 report](https://www.service-public.pf/dgen/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/11/2020-09-26-DGEN-USAGES-MENAGES-LOW.pdf) by the Digital Economy Directorate in French Polynesia. In the outer islands, that number rose from 1% to 9%. Henriou expanded HM Coursier Express again and hired several new employees.
-
-“The courier business exploded, thanks to Covid, because the people didn’t want to leave their houses,” Henriou told *Rest of World*. “Everyone stayed at home; they were scared.” Every day, Henriou would work to deliver orders both within Tahiti and to the other islands. “Everyone was scared of catching the virus; but us, we could move; we could deliver, and we were already doing it,” he said. Thanks to a boom in trade, he was able to hire three new team members, who still work for the company.
-
- 
-
-Moanatea Henriou started the delivery business HM Coursier Express in 2018.
-
- 
-
-Customers place orders through HM Coursier Express’s Facebook page, where they also list services, prices, and product updates.
-
- 
-
-The company offers to source and deliver anything a customer might want — from fresh fruit and vegetables to clothing or even a car.
-
----
-
-**In February 2022,** Henriou invited *Rest of World* to join him on a scooter run for HM Coursier Express. Before he left, he met the rest of the team at its base in the backstreets of Fa’a’ā, a busy urban district adjacent to Papeete, French Polynesia’s capital. Two vans and multiple scooters were parked in its concrete lot, alongside a storage area holding some packing materials and a few surplus supplies, like crates of Hinano beer.
-
-Once customers have sent HM Coursier Express a list using Facebook Messenger of items they want and the stores they want them from, HM Coursier offers a quote for the order and asks them to pay a deposit, usually by bank transfer. Payments have posed a barrier to e-commerce in French Polynesia: many physical banks are inaccessible, especially to those living in the outer islands. Even banks that can be reached often charge fees to hold an account. Owning a visa card is expensive and limited to those with comfortable salaries. Instead, many islanders open bank accounts through the post offices, which offer free accounts and are the only banks to have a physical presence on most of the outer islands. HM Coursier Express has a post bank account that allows people to transfer money online from other post accounts.
-
-Once the deposit is received, orders are organized according to destination and passed on to each driver via the iPhone Notes app, which is synced across the team’s devices. One driver usually takes a scooter and specializes in small deliveries, such as paperwork and documents. The other two or three drivers travel from store to store. Customers pay a flat rate of 1,500 francs ($14) per order, which includes a trip to one store; each additional store added incurs an extra fee.
-
-*Rest of World*’s visit in February coincided with the off-season and a slower day than usual for the couriers, so Henriou had only a few small packages to pick up. Heading off on his scooter, he zipped through a traffic jam into town.
-
-The first stop was a women’s clothing store that sold brightly colored outfits covered in tropical flowers. It was located in an area next to the central market, notorious for a lack of parking and one-way streets. Henriou deftly parked his scooter and headed into the store. He then ran on foot to a nearby art gallery to pick up another package and stopped at the Nike store to buy some shoes. It seemed like he knew everyone; at one store, the owner mentioned that a rival courier had come into her shop earlier offering their services at a reduced price.
-
-The shopping done, it was back on the scooter. Henriou made another quick stop at the base in Fa’a’ā to pack the goods in white plastic and mark them with customers’ names. Then, he went straight to the air freight terminal at Fa’a’ā International Airport.
-
-Light orders, such as clothing or perishable items, including fresh fruit and even McDonald’s meals, are sent by plane. HM Coursier Express offers its customers a 30% reduction on the price of air freight, a discount it earned from Air Tahiti, thanks to the volume it delivers. In December, during the holiday period, the business delivers on average 3 metric tons of merchandise by air.
-
-Heavy goods, such as cars, building supplies, and canned food, are sent by cargo ships, which service all the archipelagos. These cargo ships are the lifeblood of French Polynesia, providing remote islanders with essentials, including food, petrol, and building materials. In the last few years, they’ve also been transporting steadily increasing numbers of online orders made through courier services like HM Coursier.
-
-At the docks in Papeete, Viriamu Fougerouse, 26-year-old director of exportation, walks around checking over telescopic forklifts. His team services one cargo ship, the Mareva Nui, which brings supplies to 17 atolls in the Western Tuamotu archipelago (including Manihi).
-
-During the Covid-19 lockdown from late March until August 2020, when international flights and many interisland flights stopped, the cargo ships became even more crucial, Fougerouse told *Rest of World.* “There were no more planes, but the boats never stopped. The boats always kept going,” he said. “If we didn’t have these boats here, the people would die of hunger. At that time \[2020\], we saw that the planes — they might stop, but the boats never will.”
-
- 
-
-Cargo ships are the lifeblood of French Polynesia, transporting essentials such as food, petrol, and building materials.
-
- 
-
-In the last few years, they’ve also been transporting increasing numbers of online orders for companies like HM Coursier.
-
- 
-
-Heavy orders, such as cars, building supplies, and canned food, are sent between the island by those cargo ships.
-
- 
-
-Light items, such as clothing or perishables, are sent between the islands by plane.
-
----
-
-**Today, HM Coursier** Express has evolved to meet the unique needs of the local market: it’s part personal shopping assistant, part Uber Eats, and part FedEx. The business has four full-time employees and three vans. It usually has a minimum of 30 client orders per day, a number that rises to over 100 in the lead-up to Christmas and the New Year.
-
-But building a sustainable business has proved difficult. In 2021, Henriou took a job as an immigrations officer at Fa’a’ā International Airport, a respected position that offered a stable income and regular hours. He still works on HM Coursier when he can but has left much of the business of running the company to Fare Bredin and is hoping to sell the company to a family member. The business had an annual turnover of 5 million francs ($46,000) in 2020.
-
-“At the beginning, I made a lot of money because it was just for me and my girlfriend,” Henriou told *Rest of World*. “Now we employ people … and there’s insurance to pay, telephone bills, and many, many other expenses, in fact. But we’re a company now that promotes local employment. That’s great. At least I’m feeding families.”
-
-John Tehuritaua, head of the international arm of French Polynesia’s Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Services and Trades, said that making e-commerce work on the islands is a challenge, owing to the lack of transportation options, which leads to high costs and delays. “People in other countries wait less than 24 hours to have their goods in front of them,” he told *Rest of World*. “If you send goods to and from Tahiti, it can take two to three weeks. … You can’t confirm to your customer the day they’ll receive the goods.”
-
-> “People in other countries wait less than 24 hours to have their goods in front of them. If you send goods to and from Tahiti, it can take two to three weeks.”
-
-One peculiarity of delivering e-commerce to Polynesia’s islands is market size: while more than two-thirds of French Polynesia’s population live on Tahiti, the rest — fewer than 100,000 people — are spread between the remaining 65 inhabited islands. For most e-commerce companies, delivering to outer islands in French Polynesia just isn’t worth the cost.
-
-But while that kind of geographic distribution may be unworkable for e-commerce giants like Amazon, JD.com, and Alibaba, the lack of mainstream options has allowed small, local e-commerce couriers to fill the void. Across French Polynesia, HM Coursier Express has spawned copycats, and a wider ecosystem of courier businesses has developed. In 2022, there are close to 40 similar courier services, although many pop up and then disappear. One of the attractions of starting a courier business is the low barrier to entry: all you need is a vehicle, an internet connection, and a willingness to put in the hard work. Most couriers function over Facebook or WhatsApp, but many are also exploring other online platforms, such as Telegram and TikTok, to promote their businesses and interact directly with their client base.
-
-Thomas Tihopu, a 26-year-old delivery driver, started rival courier business Caddy Xpress Coursier with a friend, after they both lost their jobs at a car rental company, due to the pandemic lockdown and subsequent tourist ban in 2020.
-
-
-
-Tihopu is often busy handling customer service, packing goods, and filling out freight papers. All the while, he’s also on his smartphone taking pictures of purchases and sending them to customers: a picture at the store, a picture of the receipt, a picture at the docks, packed and ready to go — proof that the merchandise is in mint condition.
-
-By providing constant updates using instant messaging platforms such as Telegram and WhatsApp, as well as offering same-day air deliveries, Tihopu hopes Caddy Xpress will stand out from bigger couriers like HM Coursier Express. “We’re trying to be on top of it by just being more responsive,” he told *Rest of World.* “And trying to do everything live with the customer to make him feel like he’s actually in the shop, doing his own shopping.”
-
-For Tihopu, he’s found work that he really enjoys: “This \[Caddy Xpress\] was the first time we actually worked for ourselves. And it’s a great feeling actually, it’s something that makes me want to keep on doing it. I’ll probably never stop.”
-
-In some of the more remote archipelagos, hyperlocal courier services are emerging to cater to specific islands and their needs. For example, some of the flights that stopped when the pandemic hit still haven’t recommenced. One of the islands affected is ‘Ua Pou, in the Marquesas Islands — some of the most isolated islands in the world, around 1,400 kilometers from Tahiti. Known for their rugged, mountainous landscapes and distinct culture, the islands are serviced by two cargo ships.
-
-Sisters Arlenda and Laina Valentin, who live in ‘Ua Pou, both use courier services regularly. Arlenda, a schoolteacher and mother of two, tends to order school supplies and household goods. Laina, a secretary who recently had her first child, orders baby supplies. Both prefer to order via Facebook Messenger.
-
-The planes that service the Marquesas stop at the main island of Nuku Hiva — not in ‘Ua Pou. In the past, ‘Ua Pou residents would have to travel by boat or helicopter to collect air deliveries, but, in 2020, a courier service called Nuku Transports launched: it operates solely in the Marquesas archipelago, mainly picking up freight from Nuku Hiva and transporting it by boat to the other islands.
-
-The Valentin sisters both agree that courier services have become indispensable. “Yes, they \[couriers\] are so important! Especially for us in the islands. And particularly for us because there’s no more flights coming here,” said Laina.
-
-Arlenda said that she liked using the couriers so that she didn’t have to rely on other people: “It’s important in the sense that I don’t want to disturb my family or friends … that bothers me. That’s why I call the courier.”
-
-> “\[We’re\] trying to do everything live with the customer to make him feel like he’s actually in the shop, doing his own shopping.”
-
----
-
-**Back in Manihi,** at midday, a cargo ship called Dory arrived at the pass. Word quickly spread through the village. People began cruising in on tricycles and on foot to watch the ship drop anchor and begin unloading their wares. Locals sat under a tree, munching on long baguette sandwiches and gossiping. Workers unloaded shipping containers marked “frozen” and “refrigerated”: they held gas cylinders, bottles of water, and even an entire boat. Waiting to be packed back onto the ship were sacks of copra (dried coconut flesh), frozen fish, empty gas canisters, and pearl oyster shells. It was a frenzy of activity, but it worked like a finely oiled machine: the ship’s crew had clearly done this many times before.
-
-A few hours after arrival, the ship’s captain set up a temporary office in an old shipping container in front of the Dory, and people formed a queue to give their names and documents and sign for their packages. They then headed to nearby open shipping containers to wait for their stuff. The most popular container was full of food. A couple of crew members pulled out cartons of Coke, cardboard boxes full of mangoes, and cartons of Hinano beer. They yelled out the names written on them, and a family member, often sent to pick up the groceries, picked up the orders and packed them into their tricycle to finally deliver home.
-
-
-
-
----
-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.03 News/Ego is the Enemy The Legend of Genghis Khan - Farnam Street.md b/00.03 News/Ego is the Enemy The Legend of Genghis Khan - Farnam Street.md
deleted file mode 100644
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--- a/00.03 News/Ego is the Enemy The Legend of Genghis Khan - Farnam Street.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,77 +0,0 @@
----
-
-Tag: ["📜", "Leadership", "Legacy", "🇲🇳"]
-Date: 2022-03-19
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-03-19
-Link: https://fs.blog/ego-is-the-enemy-genghis-khan/
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
----
-
-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-04-16]]
-
----
-
-
-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-EgotheEnemyTheLegendofGenghisKhanNSave
-
-
-
-# Ego is the Enemy: The Legend of Genghis Khan - Farnam Street
-
-**In his book, [Ego is the Enemy](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591847818/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=farnamstreet-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1591847818&linkId=ea6830b2cd6dce2e3b20e3f5becde10b), Ryan Holiday tells the story of Genghis Khan and how his openness to learning was the foundation of his success.**
-
-The legend of Genghis Khan has echoed through history: A barbarian conqueror, fueled by bloodlust, terrorizing the civilized world. We have him and his Mongol horde traveling across Asia and Europe, insatiable, stopping at nothing to plunder, rape, and kill not just the people who stood in their way, but the cultures they had built. Then, not unlike his nomadic band of warriors, this terrible cloud simply disappeared from history, because the Mongols built nothing that could last. Like all reactionary, emotional assessments, this could not be more wrong. For not only was Genghis Khan one of the greatest military minds who ever lived, he was a perpetual student, whose stunning victories were often the result of his ability to absorb the best technologies, practices, and innovations of each new culture his empire touched. In fact, if there is one theme in his reign and in the several centuries of dynastic rule that followed, it’s this: appropriation.
-
-Under Genghis Khan’s direction, the Mongols were as ruthless about stealing and absorbing the best of each culture they encountered as they were about conquest itself. Though there were essentially no technological inventions, no beautiful buildings or even great Mongol art, with each battle and enemy, their culture learned and absorbed something new. Genghis Khan was not born a genius. Instead, as one biographer put it, his was “a persistent cycle of pragmatic learning, experimental adaptation, and constant revision driven by his uniquely disciplined and focused will.”
-
-He was the greatest conqueror the world ever knew because he was more open to learning than any other conqueror has ever been.
-
-Khan’s first powerful victories came from the reorganization of his military units, splitting his soldiers into groups of ten. This he stole from neighboring Turkic tribes, and unknowingly converted the Mongols to the decimal system. Soon enough, their expanding empire brought them into contact with another “technology” they’d never experienced before: walled cities. In the Tangut raids, Khan first learned the ins and outs of war against fortified cities and the strategies critical to laying siege, and quickly became an expert. Later, with help from Chinese engineers, he taught his soldiers how to build siege machines that could knock down city walls. In his campaigns against the Jurched, Khan learned the importance of winning hearts and minds. By working with the scholars and royal family of the lands he conquered, Khan was able to hold on to and manage these territories in ways that most empires could not. Afterward, in every country or city he held, Khan would call for the smartest astrologers, scribes, doctors, thinkers, and advisers—anyone who could aid his troops and their efforts. His troops traveled with interrogators and translators for precisely this purpose.
-
-It was a habit that would survive his death. While the Mongols themselves seemed dedicated almost solely to the art of war, they put to good use every craftsman, merchant, scholar, entertainer, cook, and skilled worker they came in contact with. The Mongol Empire was remarkable for its religious freedoms, and most of all, for its love of ideas and convergence of cultures. It brought lemons to China for the first time, and Chinese noodles to the West. It spread Persian carpets, German mining technology, French metalworking, and Islam. The cannon, which revolutionized warfare, was said to be the resulting fusion of Chinese gunpowder, Muslim flamethrowers, and European metalwork. It was Mongol openness to learning and new ideas that brought them together.
-
-As we first succeed, we will find ourselves in new situations, facing new problems. The freshly promoted soldier must learn the art of politics. The salesman, how to manage. The founder, how to delegate. The writer, how to edit others. The comedian, how to act. The chef turned restaurateur, how to run the other side of the house.
-
-This is not a harmless conceit. The physicist John Wheeler, who helped develop the hydrogen bomb, once observed that “as our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.” In other words, each victory and advancement that made Khan smarter also bumped him against new situations he’d never encountered before. It takes a special kind of humility to grasp that you know less, even as you know and grasp more and more. It’s remembering Socrates’ wisdom lay in the fact that he knew that he knew next to nothing.
-
-With accomplishment comes a growing pressure to pretend that we know more than we do. To pretend we already know everything. Scientia infla (knowledge puffs up). That’s the worry and the risk—thinking that we’re set and secure, when in reality understanding and mastery is a fluid, continual process.
-
-The nine-time Grammy– and Pulitzer Prize–winning jazz musician Wynton Marsalis once advised a promising young musician on the mind-set required in the lifelong study of music: “Humility engenders learning because it beats back the arrogance that puts blinders on. It leaves you open for truths to reveal themselves. You don’t stand in your own way. . . . Do you know how you can tell when someone is truly humble? I believe there’s one simple test: because they consistently observe and listen, the humble improve. They don’t assume, ‘I know the way.’”
-
-No matter what you’ve done up to this point, you better still be a student. If you’re not still learning, you’re already dying.
-
-It is not enough only to be a student at the beginning. It is a position that one has to assume for life. Learn from everyone and everything. From the people you beat, and the people who beat you, from the people you dislike, even from your supposed enemies. At every step and every juncture in life, there is the opportunity to learn—and even if the lesson is purely remedial, we must not let ego block us from hearing it again.
-
-Too often, convinced of our own intelligence, we stay in a comfort zone that ensures that we never feel stupid (and are never challenged to learn or reconsider what we know). It obscures from view various weaknesses in our understanding, until eventually it’s too late to change course. This is where the silent toll is taken.
-
-Each of us faces a threat as we pursue our craft. Like sirens on the rocks, ego sings a soothing, validating song— which can lead to a wreck. The second we let the ego tell us we have graduated, learning grinds to a halt. That’s why Frank Shamrock said, “Always stay a student.” As in, it never ends.
-
-The solution is as straightforward as it is initially uncomfortable: Pick up a book on a topic you know next to nothing about. Put yourself in rooms where you’re the least knowledgeable person. That uncomfortable feeling, that defensiveness that you feel when your most deeply held assumptions are challenged—what about subjecting yourself to it deliberately? Change your mind. Change your surroundings
-
-An amateur is defensive. The professional finds learning (and even, occasionally, being shown up) to be enjoyable; they like being challenged and humbled, and engage in education as an ongoing and endless process.
-
-Most military cultures—and people in general—seek to impose values and control over what they encounter. What made the Mongols different was their ability to weigh each situation objectively, and if need be, swap out previous practices for new ones. All great businesses start this way, but then something happens. Take the theory of disruption, which posits that at some point in time, every industry will be disrupted by some trend or innovation that, despite all the resources in the world, the incumbent interests will be incapable of responding to. Why is this? Why can’t businesses change and adapt?
-
-A large part of it is because they lost the ability to learn. They stopped being students. The second this happens to you, your knowledge becomes fragile.
-
-The great manager and business thinker Peter Drucker says that it’s not enough simply to want to learn. As people progress, they must also understand how they learn and then set up processes to facilitate this continual education. Otherwise, we are dooming ourselves to a sort of self-imposed ignorance.
-
-Source: [Ego is the Enemy](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591847818/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=farnamstreet-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1591847818&linkId=ea6830b2cd6dce2e3b20e3f5becde10b) and used with permission from the author.
-
-
-
-
----
-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.03 News/El Niño Is Coming—and the World Isn’t Prepared.md b/00.03 News/El Niño Is Coming—and the World Isn’t Prepared.md
deleted file mode 100644
index d52a1798..00000000
--- a/00.03 News/El Niño Is Coming—and the World Isn’t Prepared.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,55 +0,0 @@
----
-
-Tag: ["🏕️", "🌡️", "🌳", "🌪️"]
-Date: 2022-12-26
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-12-26
-Link: https://www.wired.com/story/climate-environment-hurricane/
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
----
-
-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-12-29]]
-
----
-
-
-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-ElNinoIsComingandtheWorldIsntPreparedNSave
-
-
-
-# El Niño Is Coming — and the World Isn’t Prepared
-
-In 2023, the relentless increase in global heating will continue, bringing ever more disruptive weather that is the signature calling card of accelerating climate breakdown.
-
-According to NASA, 2022 was one of the hottest years ever recorded on Earth. This is extraordinary, because the recurrent climate pattern across the tropical Pacific—known as ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation)—was in its cool phase. During this phase, called La Niña, the waters of the equatorial Pacific are noticeably cooler than normal, which influences weather patterns around the world.
-
-One consequence of La Niña is that it helps keep a lid on global temperatures. This means that—despite the recent widespread heat waves, wildfires and droughts—we have actually been spared the worst. The scary thing is that this La Niña *will* end and eventually transition into the better-known El Niño, which sees the waters of the equatorial Pacific becoming much warmer. When it does, the extreme weather that has rampaged across our planet in 2021 and 2022 will pale into insignificance.
-
-Current forecasts suggest that La Niña will continue into early 2023, making it—fortuitously for us—one of the longest on record (it began in Spring 2020). Then, the equatorial Pacific will begin to warm again. Whether or not it becomes hot enough for a fully fledged El Niño to develop, 2023 has a very good chance—without the cooling influence of La Niña—of being the hottest year on record.
-
- A global average temperature rise of 1.5°C is widely regarded as marking a guardrail beyond which climate breakdown becomes dangerous. Above this figure, our once-stable climate will begin to collapse in earnest, becoming all-pervasive, affecting everyone, and insinuating itself into every aspect of our lives. In 2021, the figure (compared to the 1850–1900 average) was 1.2°C, while in 2019—before the development of the latest La Niña—it was a worryingly high 1.36°C. As the heat builds again in 2023, it is perfectly possible that we will touch or even exceed 1.5°C for the first time.
-
-But what will this mean exactly? I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the record for the highest recorded temperature—currently 54.4°C (129.9°F) in California's Death Valley—shattered. This could well happen somewhere in the Middle East or South Asia, where temperatures could climb above 55°C. The heat could exceed the blistering 40°C mark again in the UK, and for the first time, top 50°C in parts of Europe.
-
-Inevitably, higher temperatures will mean that severe drought will continue to be the order of the day, slashing crop yields in many parts of the world. In 2022, extreme weather resulted in reduced harvests in China, India, South America, and Europe, increasing food insecurity. Stocks are likely to be lower than normal going into 2023, so another round of poor harvests could be devastating. Resulting food shortages in most countries could drive civil unrest, while rising prices in developed countries will continue to stoke inflation and the cost-of-living crisis.
-
-One of the worst-affected regions will be the Southwest United States. Here, the longest drought in at least 1,200 years has persisted for 22 years so far, reducing the level of Lake Mead on the Colorado River so much that power generation capacity at the Hoover Dam has fallen by almost half. Upstream, the Glen Canyon Dam, on the rapidly shrinking Lake Powell, is forecast to stop generating power in 2023 if the drought continues. The Hoover Dam could follow suit in 2024. Together, these lakes and dams provide water and power for millions of people in seven states, including California. The breakdown of this supply would be catastrophic for agriculture, industry, and populations right across the region.
-
-La Niña tends to limit hurricane development in the Atlantic, so as it begins to fade, hurricane activity can be expected to pick up. The higher global temperatures expected in 2023 could see extreme heating of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico surface waters. This would favor the formation and persistence of super-hurricanes, powering winds and storm surges capable of wiping out a major US city, should they strike land. Direct hits, rather than a glancing blow, are rare—the closest in recent decades being Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which made landfall immediately south of Miami, obliterating more than 60,000 homes and damaging 125,000 more. Hurricanes today are both more powerful and wetter, so that the consequences of a city getting in the way of a superstorm in 2023 would likely be cataclysmic.
-
-
-
-
----
-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.03 News/Elon Musk Got Twitter Because He Gets Twitter.md b/00.03 News/Elon Musk Got Twitter Because He Gets Twitter.md
deleted file mode 100644
index f2049213..00000000
--- a/00.03 News/Elon Musk Got Twitter Because He Gets Twitter.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,87 +0,0 @@
----
-
-Tag: ["📟", "🌐", "🤳", "Musk"]
-Date: 2022-05-01
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-05-01
-Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/27/opinion/elon-musk-twitter.html
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
----
-
-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-05-12]]
-
----
-
-
-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-ElonMuskGotTwitterBecauseHeGetsTwitterNSave
-
-
-
-# Opinion | Elon Musk Got Twitter Because He Gets Twitter
-
-Ezra Klein
-
-April 27, 2022
-
-
-
-Credit...Illustration by the New York Times; photograph by Patrick Pleul/Picture Alliance, via Getty Images
-
-Can Elon Musk break Twitter? I hope so.
-
-I’m not accusing Musk of being a sleeper agent. The man loves Twitter. He tweets as if he had been raised by the blue bird and the [fail whale](https://www.techopedia.com/definition/1987/fail-whale). Three days before locking in his purchase of the platform, Musk [blasted out](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517707521343082496) an unflattering photograph of Bill Gates and, next to it, an illustration of a pregnant man. “In case u need to lose a boner fast,” Musk, Time’s 2021 person of the year, told his more than 80 million followers. He believed Gates was shorting Tesla’s stock, and this was his response. It got over 165,000 retweets and 1.3 million likes. That’s a man who understands what Twitter truly is.
-
-Jack Dorsey, a Twitter co-founder and former chief executive, always wanted it to be something else. Something it wasn’t, and couldn’t be. “The purpose of Twitter is to serve the public conversation,” he [said](https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/os-jdorsey-090518.pdf) in 2018. Twitter began “[measuring conversational health](https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/measuring_healthy_conversation)” and trying to tweak the platform to burnish it. Sincere as the effort was, it was like those [liquor ads advising moderation](https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2014/drink-responsibly-messages-in-alcohol-ads-promote-products-not-public-health). You don’t get people to drink less by selling them whiskey. Similarly, if your intention was to foster healthy conversation, you’d never limit thoughts to 280 characters or add like and retweet buttons or quote-tweet features. Twitter can’t be a place to hold healthy conversation because that’s not what it’s built to do.
-
-So what is Twitter built to do? It’s built to gamify conversation. As C. Thi Nguyen, a philosopher at the University of Utah, has [written](https://philpapers.org/rec/NGUHTG), it does that “by offering immediate, vivid and quantified evaluations of one’s conversational success. Twitter offers us points for discourse; it scores our communication. And these gamelike features are responsible for much of Twitter’s psychological wallop. Twitter is addictive, in part, because it feels so good to watch those numbers go up and up.”
-
-Nguyen’s core argument is that games are pleasurable in part because they simplify the complexity of life. They render the rules clear, the score visible. That’s fine when we want to play a game. But sometimes we end up in games or gamelike systems in which we don’t want to trade our values for those of the designers and don’t even realize we’re doing it. The danger, then, is what Nguyen calls “value capture.” That, he writes, comes when:
-
-> 1\. Our natural values are rich, subtle and hard to express.
-> 2\. We are placed in a social or institutional setting which presents simplified, typically quantified, versions of our values back to ourselves.
-> 3\. The simplified versions take over in our motivation and deliberation.
-
-Twitter takes the rich, numerous and subtle values that we bring to communication and quantifies our success through follower counts, likes and retweets. Slowly, what Twitter rewards becomes what we do. If we don’t, then no matter — no one sees what we’re saying anyway. We become what the game wants us to be, or we lose. And that’s what’s happening to some of the most important people and industries and conversations on the planet right now.
-
-Many of Twitter’s power users are political, media, entertainment and technology elites. They — we! — are particularly susceptible to a gamified discourse on the topics we obsess over. It’s hard to make political change. It’s hard to create great journalism. It’s hard to fill the ever-yawning need for validation. It’s hard to dent the arc of technological progress. Twitter offers the instant, constant simulation of doing exactly that. The feedback is immediate. The opportunities are infinite. Forget Max Weber’s “strong and [slow boring](https://www.vox.com/2016/7/11/12053146/max-weber-hillary-clinton) of hard boards.” Twitter is a power drill, or at least it feels like one.
-
-At about this point, the answer probably seems obvious: Log off! One can, and many do. But it comes at a cost. To log off is to miss much that matters, in industries where knowing what matters is essential. It’s become clichéd to say Twitter is not real life, and that’s true enough. But it shapes real life by shaping the perceptions of those exposed to it. It shapes real life by shaping what the media covers. (It’s not for nothing that The New York Times is now [urging reporters](https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/04/the-new-york-times-would-really-like-its-reporters-to-stop-scrolling-and-get-off-twitter-at-least-once-in-a-while/) to unplug from Twitter and re-engage with the world outside their screens.) It shapes real life by giving the politicians and business titans who master it control of the attentional agenda. Attention is currency, and Twitter is the most important market for attention that there is.
-
-There is a reason that Donald Trump, with his preternatural gift for making people look at him, was Twitter’s most natural and successful user. And he shows how the platform can shape the lives of those who never use it. From 2017 to 2021, the White House was occupied by what was, in effect, a Twitter account with a cardiovascular system, and the whole world bore the consequences.
-
-I am not a reflexive Musk critic. He has done remarkable things. He turned the electric car market from a backwater catering to hippies to the unquestioned future of the automobile industry, and he did so in the only sustainable way: He made electric cars awesome. He reinvigorated American interest in space and did so in the only sustainable way: by making rockets more awesome and affordable. He’s made huge investments in solar energy and battery innovation and at least tried to think creatively about mass transit, with investments in hyperloop and tunnel-drilling technology. He co-founded OpenAI, the most public-spirited of the big artificial intelligence shops.
-
-Much of this has been built on the back of public subsidies, government contracts, loan guarantees and tax credits, but I don’t take that as a mark against him: He’s the best argument in the modern era that the government and the private sector can do together what neither can achieve apart. If anything, I fear that Twitter will distract Musk from more important work.
-
-Nor am I surprised that a résumé like Musk’s coexists with a tendency toward manias, obsessions, grudges, union-busting and vindictiveness. Extreme personalities are rarely on the edge of the bell curve only because of benevolence. But Twitter unleashes his worst instincts and rewards him, with attention and fandom and money — [so much money](https://www.readmargins.com/p/elons-giant-package) — for indulging them. That Musk has so capably bent Twitter to his own purposes doesn’t absolve him of his behavior there, any more than it absolved Trump. A platform that heaps rewards on those who behave cruelly, or even just recklessly, is a dangerous thing.
-
-But far too often, that’s what Twitter does. Twitter rewards decent people for acting indecently. The mechanism by which this happens is no mystery. Engagement follows slashing ripostes and bold statements and vicious dunks. “I’m frustrated that Bill Gates would bet against Tesla, a company aligned with his values,” is a lame tweet. “Bill Gates = boner killer” is a viral hit. The easiest way to rack up points is to worsen the discourse.
-
-Twitter has survived, and thrived, because it has never been just what I have described here. Much of what can be found there is funny and smart and sweet. So many on the platform want it to be a better place than it is and try to make it so. For a long time, they were joined in that pursuit by Twitter’s executive class, who wanted the same. They liked Twitter, but not too much. They believed in it, but they were also a little appalled by it. That fundamental tension — between what Twitter was and what so many believed it could be — held it in balance. No longer.
-
-Musk’s stated agenda for Twitter is confusing mostly for its modesty. He’s proposed an edit button, an open-source algorithm, cracking down on bots and doing … something … to secure free speech. I tend to agree with the technology writer Max Read, who [predicts](https://maxread.substack.com/p/elon-musk-wont-fix-twitter-but-he) that Musk “will strive to keep Twitter the same level of bad, and in the same kinds of ways, as it always has been, because, to Musk, Twitter is not actually bad at all.”
-
-Musk reveals what he wants Twitter to be by how he acts on it. You shall know him by his tweets. He wants it to be what it is, or even more anarchic than that. Where I perhaps disagree with Read is that I think it will be more of a cultural change for Twitter than anyone realizes to have the master of the service acting on it as Musk does, to have the platform’s owner embracing and embodying its excesses in a way no previous leader has done.
-
-What will Twitter feel like to liberals when Musk is mocking Senator Elizabeth Warren on the platform he owns and controls as “[Senator Karen](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1470858546153762819?s=20)”? Will they want to enrich him by contributing free labor to his company? Conservatives are now celebrating Musk’s purchase of the platform, but what if, faced with a deepening crisis of election disinformation, he goes into [goblin mode](https://www.axios.com/musks-goblin-mode-twitter-37ab7dfd-dd34-4494-acf7-5377af463a87.html) against right-wing politicians who are making his hands-off moderation hopes untenable or who are threatening his climate change agenda?
-
-What will it be like to work at Twitter when the boss is using his account to go to war with the Securities and Exchange Commission or fight a tax bill he dislikes? Unless Musk changes his behavior radically, and implausibly, I suspect his ownership will heighten Twitter’s contradictions to an unbearable level. What would follow isn’t the collapse of the platform but the right-sizing of its influence.
-
-Or maybe not. Betting against Musk has made fools of many in recent years. But I count myself, still, as a cautious believer in Musk’s power to do the impossible — in this case, to expose what Twitter is and to right-size its influence. In fact, I think he’s the only one with the power to do it. Musk is already Twitter’s ultimate player. Now he’s buying the arcade. Everything people love or hate about it will become his fault. Everything he does that people love or hate will be held against the platform. He will be Twitter. He will have won the game. And nothing loses its luster quite like a game that has been beaten.
-
-
-
-
----
-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.03 News/Evrard d'Espinque’s Illuminations of De Proprietatibus Rerum (ca. 1480).md b/00.03 News/Evrard d'Espinque’s Illuminations of De Proprietatibus Rerum (ca. 1480).md
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----
-
-Tag: ["📜", "🏰", "Theology", "🎨", "🇫🇷"]
-Date: 2022-10-07
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-10-07
-Link: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/despinque-anglicus-illuminations
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
----
-
-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-10-07]]
-
----
-
-
-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-EvrarddEspinqueIlluminationsNSave
-
-
-
-# Evrard d'Espinque’s Illuminations of *De Proprietatibus Rerum* (ca. 1480)
-
-
-
-Illumination by Evrard d'Espinque for Jean Borbechon's French translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus' thirteenth-century *De Proprietatibus Rerum*, ca. 1480 — [Source](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10532588f/f327.item.r=9140).
-
-[](https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/despinque-anglicus-illuminations#0-0)
-
-Bartholomaeus Anglicus, also known as Barthélémy l'Anglais and Bartholomew the Englishman, was a medieval scholar, monk, and politician. Born near the beginning of the thirteenth century in England (hence his name), he made a career abroad in continental Europe’s institutions of higher learning. Bartholomaeus started out studying and teaching in Paris as a member of an intellectual order devoted to the tradition of Aristotlelian reasoning called Scholasticism. Later, he went into politics, holding serious positions in Bohemia and Saxonia — regions around present-day Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic — during the turbulent period when Mongols were invading Europe and Europeans were once again besieging Jerusalem.
-
-[](https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/despinque-anglicus-illuminations#0-1)
-
-In 1240, Bartholomaeus wrote a book about everything. Titled *De Proprietatibus Rerum* (On the Properties of Things), it was conceived as an encyclopedia of general knowledge. Across nineteen books, he traces the Great Chain of Being, a theory of all things that begins with God and runs through celestial beings, the soul, bodies (both human and heavenly), the elements, rocks and stones of the earth, animals, and the senses. *De Proprietatibus Rerum* is special for the rigor with which Bartholomaeus cites his sources. These include household names in the West like Plato and Aristotle, doctors and mathematicians from the Golden Age of Islam, such as Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi of Persia, and those who translated scientific works to and from Arabic and Latin, like Constantine the African.
-
-[](https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/despinque-anglicus-illuminations#0-2)
-
-The Great Chain of Being was the dominant theory of all creation during the High Middle Ages, and the idea that God’s will permeates its every aspect in an intentional and patterned way was important to Bartholomaeus and his fellow medieval encyclopedists. You can see this patterning most clearly in the lush illustrations that accompany certain manuscripts of Bartholomaeus’ text. Among the loveliest of these is a French translation by Jean Corbechon, illuminated by the masterful Evrard d'Espinque. Made in the later fifteenth century, its heavy leather covers protect 392 leaves of parchment.
-
-[](https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/despinque-anglicus-illuminations#0-3)
-
-Evrard d'Espinque’s illuminations depict the world in a semi-abstracted way — and his simplified designs, as demonstrated by the map above, can be confusing to our contemporary eyes, since the decorative elements on the earth’s circumference (birds and water and ships) are embellishments to an otherwise precise and roughly correct rendering. If you look closely at this image, you will see four rivers flowing down from a glowing spot towards a faint “T”. The orb at their source is Eden, which contemporary scholarship thought was somewhere beyond India (medieval maps oriented the world with East at the top). The four rivers are the Pishon, Gihon, Tigris and Euphrates, which the same sources said flowed out of Eden and into the world. The three radial segments of the “T” represent bodies of water (the Don, the Nile, and the Mediterranean). As boundary lines, these three aqueous bodies divide the landmasses of this circular world. The bottom quadrants are Europe and Africa, with the top semicircle being Asia. The “O” and “T” shapes themselves had a symbolic meaning in this era, standing for *orbis terrarum* — “the lands of the earth”.
-
-[](https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/despinque-anglicus-illuminations#img-0)
-
-Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing.
-
-Illuminations by Evrard d'Espinque for Jean Borbechon's French translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus' thirteenth-century *De Proprietatibus Rerum*, ca. 1480. Left: a T-O map from the book titled *De aqua*; right: a T-O map from the book titled *De regionibus et provinciis* — Source: [left](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10532588f), [right](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10532588f).
-
-[](https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/despinque-anglicus-illuminations#1-0)
-
-Later in the same chapter, we can see the T-O shape repeated in [another illuminated diagram](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10532588f/f351.item), this time of the seven classical planets, distributed in space according to the regions of the zodiac, which are placed in the outer area of the circle. At this map’s center sits the earth. This does not mean that medieval scholars thought that the earth was at the center of our solar system. Instead, the illumination shows the planets as they appear in the night sky, which is the primary datum of western astrology. In Book XI, *De Aere* (“On the air and weather”), the [same little diagram](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10532588f/f420.item) of the world appears again, also against an abstracted blue background that evokes a summer sky, this time illustrating a section of the text about the [four cardinal winds](http://www.imperium-romana.org/uploads/5/9/3/3/5933147/wind-diagrams-and-medieval-cosmology.pdf): septentrio, auster, favonius, and subsolanus. A zoomed-in and more elaborate T-O map is found in Book XIII, *De aqua* (“On water and fishes”). [Here](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10532588f), the abstracted sea areas of the first map we saw have become specific waterways. A [similar symbolic map](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10532588f/f510.item) appears in Book XI, *De regionibus et provinciis* (“On regions and places”). Instead of ships, now d’Espinque shows land masses in and around the waterways — islands, mountains, and cities appear in miniature form as rocks, hills, and houses. These are not labeled or specified geographically, and instead decorate the earth in quick, elegant brushstrokes.
-
-[](https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/despinque-anglicus-illuminations#1-1)
-
-Patterning was inherent to the visual aspect of this kind of scholarship, particularly in the use of these circular diagrams that Naomi Reed Kline calls “rotae” to organize information. On one hand, a two dimensional circle instinctively relates to an orb in three dimensional space, helping medieval geographers to represent real space on the page in intuitive ways. But there’s also a formalism to the circles, which illuminators used to illustrate everything from the zodiac to the clock to the earth to the cycle of Fortune. A bit like Cartesian coordinates for depicting graphs, or the spreadsheets which organize so much of our modern world’s most crucial data, [Kline describes these maps](https://books.google.fi/books?id=pv5Nb7KpWTgC&pg=PA10) as “circular wheels that made understandable, in simplified graphic manner, concepts that explained the way the world worked”. Bartholomeus and other encyclopedists like him, as well as their illuminators, such as the extraordinary Evrard d’Espinque, collaborated to refine and elaborate this understanding of the world’s mechanics. It looks utterly unlike our visual representations of geography, with map keys and GPS coordinates, but these forms lie inside and underneath everything science has visualized since. Our world is still an orb, and we still draw planetary motion using circles and ellipses. Science runs along a Great Chain too.
-
-#### Tags
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-Our latest content, your inbox, every fortnight
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----
-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.03 News/Extreme Heat Will Change Us.md b/00.03 News/Extreme Heat Will Change Us.md
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index 641b4443..00000000
--- a/00.03 News/Extreme Heat Will Change Us.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,733 +0,0 @@
----
-
-Tag: ["🤵🏻", "🌡️"]
-Date: 2022-11-27
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-11-27
-Link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/18/world/middleeast/extreme-heat.html
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
----
-
-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-12-01]]
-
----
-
-
-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-ExtremeHeatWillChangeUsNSave
-
-
-
-# Extreme Heat Will Change Us
-
-**On a treeless street** under a blazing sun, Abbas Abdul Karim, a welder with 25 years experience, labors over a metal bench.
-
-Everyone who lives in Basra, Iraq, reckons with intense heat, but for Abbas it is unrelenting. He must do his work during daylight hours to see the iron he deftly bends into swirls for stair railings or welds into door frames.
-
-The heat is so grueling that he never gets used to it. “I feel it burning into my eyes,” he says.
-
-Working outside in southern Iraq’s scalding summer temperatures isn’t just arduous. It can cause long-term damage to the body.
-
-We know the risk for Abbas, because we measured it.
-
-At these extreme temperatures, normal life is impossible. Ordinary activities can turn dangerous. Work slows. Tempers flare. Power grids fail. Hospitals fill up.
-
-Yet what Abbas was experiencing wasn’t a heatwave. It was just an average August day in Basra, a city on the leading edge of climate change — and a glimpse of the future for much of the planet as human carbon emissions warp the climate.
-
-By 2050, nearly half the world may live in areas that have dangerous levels of heat for at least a month, including Miami, Lagos and Shanghai, according to projections by researchers at Harvard University and the University of Washington.
-
-### Summers in many cities could resemble those in Kuwait City and Basra by 2050
-
-#### Number of days with a heat index above 103°F
-
-
-
-Historic avg.
-
-2050
-
-Kolkata
-
-171 dangerous days
-
-per year by 2050
-
-Karachi 133 days
-
-Delhi 127 days
-
-126
-
-Manila 121 days
-
-Mumbai 109 days
-
-Lagos 103 days
-
-87
-
-Number of dangerous
-
-days historically in Kuwait ...
-
-Guangzhou 83 days
-
-80
-
-and Basra.
-
-Houston 61 days
-
-Dallas 51 days
-
-45
-
-Miami 41 days
-
-39
-
-36
-
-Shanghai 32 days
-
-Rio de Janeiro 23 days
-
-19
-
-Cairo 15 days
-
-Atlanta 11 days
-
-Perth 3 days
-
-Rome 1 day
-
-
-
-Historic avg.
-
-2050
-
-Kolkata
-
-171 dangerous days
-
-per year by 2050
-
-Karachi 133 days
-
-Delhi 127 days
-
-126
-
-Manila 121 days
-
-Mumbai 109 days
-
-Lagos 103 days
-
-Dangerous days
-
-historically in
-
-Kuwait ...
-
-Guangzhou 83 days
-
-and Basra.
-
-Dallas 51 days
-
-45
-
-Miami 41 days
-
-39
-
-36
-
-Shanghai 32 days
-
-Rio de Janeiro
-
-19
-
-Cairo 15 days
-
-Atlanta 11 days
-
-Perth 3 days
-
-Rome 1 day
-
-
-
-Historic avg.
-
-2050
-
-Kolkata
-
-171 dangerous days
-
-per year by 2050
-
-Karachi 133 days
-
-Delhi 127 days
-
-126
-
-Manila 121 days
-
-Mumbai 109 days
-
-Lagos 103 days
-
-Dangerous days
-
-historically in
-
-Kuwait ...
-
-87
-
-Guangzhou 83 days
-
-and Basra.
-
-Dallas 51 days
-
-45
-
-Miami 41 days
-
-39
-
-36
-
-Shanghai 32 days
-
-Rio de Janeiro 23 days
-
-19
-
-Cairo 15 days
-
-Atlanta 11 days
-
-Perth 3 days
-
-Rome 1 day
-
-
-
-Historic avg.
-
-2050
-
-Kolkata
-
-171 dangerous days
-
-per year by 2050
-
-Karachi 133 days
-
-Delhi 127 days
-
-126
-
-Manila 121 days
-
-Mumbai 109 days
-
-Lagos 103 days
-
-87
-
-Number of dangerous
-
-days historically in Kuwait ...
-
-Guangzhou 83 days
-
-80
-
-and Basra.
-
-Houston 61 days
-
-Dallas 51 days
-
-45
-
-Miami 41 days
-
-39
-
-36
-
-Shanghai 32 days
-
-Rio de Janeiro 23 days
-
-19
-
-Cairo 15 days
-
-Atlanta 11 days
-
-Perth 3 days
-
-Rome 1 day
-
-Source: Lucas Vargas Zeppetello, Harvard University; Adrian Raftery and David Battisti, University of Washington Note: Includes the 15 most populated cities in each continent. Historic number of dangerous days is the average between 1979 and 1998.
-
-### Summers in many cities could resemble those in Kuwait City and Basra by 2050
-
-#### Number of days with a heat index above 39°C
-
-
-
-Historic avg.
-
-2050
-
-Kolkata
-
-171 dangerous days
-
-per year by 2050
-
-Karachi 133 days
-
-Delhi 127 days
-
-126
-
-Manila 121 days
-
-Mumbai 109 days
-
-Lagos 103 days
-
-87
-
-Number of dangerous
-
-days historically in Kuwait ...
-
-Guangzhou 83 days
-
-80
-
-and Basra.
-
-Houston 61 days
-
-Dallas 51 days
-
-45
-
-Miami 41 days
-
-39
-
-36
-
-Shanghai 32 days
-
-Rio de Janeiro 23 days
-
-19
-
-Cairo 15 days
-
-Atlanta 11 days
-
-Perth 3 days
-
-Rome 1 day
-
-
-
-Historic avg.
-
-2050
-
-Kolkata
-
-171 dangerous days
-
-per year by 2050
-
-Karachi 133 days
-
-Delhi 127 days
-
-126
-
-Manila 121 days
-
-Mumbai 109 days
-
-Lagos 103 days
-
-Dangerous days
-
-historically in
-
-Kuwait ...
-
-Guangzhou 83 days
-
-and Basra.
-
-Dallas 51 days
-
-45
-
-Miami 41 days
-
-39
-
-36
-
-Shanghai 32 days
-
-Rio de Janeiro
-
-19
-
-Cairo 15 days
-
-Atlanta 11 days
-
-Perth 3 days
-
-Rome 1 day
-
-
-
-Historic avg.
-
-2050
-
-Kolkata
-
-171 dangerous days
-
-per year by 2050
-
-Karachi 133 days
-
-Delhi 127 days
-
-126
-
-Manila 121 days
-
-Mumbai 109 days
-
-Lagos 103 days
-
-Dangerous days
-
-historically in
-
-Kuwait ...
-
-87
-
-Guangzhou 83 days
-
-and Basra.
-
-Dallas 51 days
-
-45
-
-Miami 41 days
-
-39
-
-36
-
-Shanghai 32 days
-
-Rio de Janeiro 23 days
-
-19
-
-Cairo 15 days
-
-Atlanta 11 days
-
-Perth 3 days
-
-Rome 1 day
-
-
-
-Historic avg.
-
-2050
-
-Kolkata
-
-171 dangerous days
-
-per year by 2050
-
-Karachi 133 days
-
-Delhi 127 days
-
-126
-
-Manila 121 days
-
-Mumbai 109 days
-
-Lagos 103 days
-
-87
-
-Number of dangerous
-
-days historically in Kuwait ...
-
-Guangzhou 83 days
-
-80
-
-and Basra.
-
-Houston 61 days
-
-Dallas 51 days
-
-45
-
-Miami 41 days
-
-39
-
-36
-
-Shanghai 32 days
-
-Rio de Janeiro 23 days
-
-19
-
-Cairo 15 days
-
-Atlanta 11 days
-
-Perth 3 days
-
-Rome 1 day
-
-Source: Lucas Vargas Zeppetello, Harvard University; Adrian Raftery and David Battisti, University of Washington Note: Includes the 15 most populated cities in each continent. Historic number of dangerous days is the average between 1979 and 1998.
-
-Just how bad it gets will depend on how much humanity curbs climate change. But some of the far-reaching effects of extreme heat are already inevitable, and they will levy a huge tax on entire societies — their economies, health and way of life.
-
-While people in hot climates can build up tolerance to heat as their bodies become more efficient at staying cool, that can protect them only so much.
-
-We measured heat and humidity for the scenes in this story to broadly show heat exposure. We also recorded other factors that determine physical risk, including sun exposure, wind and exertion. [See full methodology](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/18/world/middleeast/extreme-heat.html#g-endmatter)
-
-As we tracked the daily activities of people in Basra and Kuwait City, we documented their heat exposure and how it had transformed their lives.
-
-What we saw laid bare the tremendous gap between those who have the means to protect themselves and those who do not. We also saw a still more unsettling reality: No one can escape debilitating heat entirely.
-
----
-
-**Basra, Iraq’s third-largest city,** has always been hot. But in the last few decades, Persian Gulf countries have warmed almost twice as fast as the global average, and more than many other parts of the world. The highest heat index recorded last summer was about 5°F higher than the peak value between 1979 and 1998, researchers at Harvard University estimate.
-
-Now, the worst months of the summer are nearly unlivable.
-
-One evening in August, a man rushed into the emergency room of a city hospital carrying his 8-year-old nephew, Mehdi, a diabetic who had collapsed in the street while playing in the heat.
-
-Other families crowded into the waiting area with loved ones suffering from heat-related ailments.
-
-Some had painful bites and stings from snakes and scorpions that had crawled into their houses — or even their shoes — to escape the heat.
-
-Others, like this woman, arrived writhing from kidney stones. Chronic dehydration allows the stones to form more easily, a problem made worse by the high levels of salt in Basra’s drinking water.
-
-
-
-With the heat disorienting laborers, work accidents were also common, including broken bones, cuts and burns sustained when workers fell from scaffolding or mishandled their tools.
-
-As the crowd grew, relatives of the sick and injured shouted, threatened, pushed and begged the policeman at the door to let them see a doctor.
-
-By the time the doctor in charge went home at 2 a.m., the emergency ward had treated about 200 patients just on his shift, nearly all of them affected by the heat.
-
-
-
-II. ADAPTATION
-
-## How Heat Distorts Daily Life
-
-**Not long after** the emergency room doctor finished his shift, the heat roused Kadhim Fadhil Enad from sleep. His family’s air-conditioner had stopped, and he found himself sweating in the dark.
-
-High temperatures would govern the rest of his day. For him and many others in his city, the growing heat has turned workdays and sleep schedules upside down.
-
-When Kadhim, 25, and his brother, Rahda, left for work just after 4 a.m., the air outside was a steam bath, so hot and humid that it felt like 114 degrees.
-
-Kadhim and Radha work in construction as day laborers. In the sweltering summers of southern Iraq, that means racing to finish as much as possible before the sun comes up and ushers in the harshest heat of the day.
-
-Across Basra and the wider Gulf region, people’s lives have been reshaped by the extreme heat.
-
-Even if they can adapt their schedule, as Kadhim has, and start their job in the middle of the night, it is still so hot that exhaustion truncates the workday, reducing productivity and chipping away at earnings.
-
-At a society-wide level, it means every project takes longer to get done.
-
-And it makes doing anything else — from working a second job to going to school — doubly difficult.
-
-Sports and social life start late and end later, meaning that many whose workday begins before dawn struggle with constant sleep deprivation.
-
-The heat also wears on infrastructure, leading to power outages and contaminated water. People get sick. Emergency rooms fill up.
-
-It is not just countries in the Gulf. Extreme heat is altering life across the globe, including in Pakistan, India, Tunisia, Mexico, central China and elsewhere. And the more temperatures rise, the greater the number of workers who will be affected.
-
-Already, the effects of extreme heat add up to [hundreds of billions](https://phys.org/news/2022-01-climate-worsening-toll-humid-outdoor.html) of dollars in lost work each year worldwide.
-
-To survive the heat, Basra residents try to adapt.
-
-The day before, these garbage collectors said, three of their coworkers fainted, and one went to the hospital. All were dehydrated.
-
-One told us he had a headache. Another was dizzy. All three moved as if in slow-motion.
-
-Kadhim returned home around 9 a.m. exhausted and eager to rest in his family’s air-conditioned living room. But as he cooled down, the women in his family began the hottest part of their day.
-
-
-
-In the kitchen, his mother, Zainab, cooked a giant pot of chicken and rice for a religious holiday. The room had neither air-conditioning nor a fan, but she and her daughters-in-law still wore traditional long black dresses that kept the heat in.
-
-The gas flame and the steam from the pot turned the kitchen into a sauna. Zainab cooked in extremely dangerous temperatures — a heat index above 125 degrees — for more than an hour. Her risk of heat stroke was severe.
-
-But Zainab felt obliged to keep cooking for the festival.
-
-
-
-“I told my family I did not want to do the cooking this year,” she said. “But they insisted.”
-
-
-
-III. INEQUALITY
-
-## Money Can’t Save You
-
-**It was 5:30 a.m. in Kuwait City** when Abdullah Husain, 36, left his apartment to walk his dogs. The sun had barely risen, but the day was already so sweltering and the air so laden with vapor that it coated his body in a hot film, sticking his clothes to his skin.
-
-
-
-In the summer, he said, he has to get the dogs out early, before the asphalt gets so hot that it will burn their paws.
-
-“Everything after sunrise is hell,” he said.
-
-Abdullah, an assistant professor of environmental sciences at Kuwait University, lives a very different life from Kadhim in Basra. But both men’s days are shaped by inexorable heat.
-
-Basra and Kuwait City lie only 80 miles apart and usually have the same weather, with summertime temperatures climbing into the triple digits for weeks on end.
-
-But in other ways, they are worlds apart.
-
-Both places produce oil, but in Kuwait it has produced great wealth and provided citizens with a high standard of living.
-
-This vast economic gap is never clearer than when it comes to how well people can protect themselves from the heat, a divide between rich and poor that is increasingly playing out across the globe.
-
-Abdullah makes breakfast in an apartment cooled to 68 degrees. Kadhim’s mother toils in a kitchen nearly twice that temperature.
-
-Abdullah drives to work on broad highways in an air-conditioned car. Kadhim walks to work on streets lined with swiftly rotting garbage.
-
-Abdullah teaches at a heavily air-conditioned university. Even working at night, Kadhim cannot escape his heating world.
-
-Kuwait’s tremendous oil wealth allows it to protect people from the heat — but those protections carry their own cost, crimping culture and lifestyle alike.
-
-So life has moved indoors.
-
-People don’t just shop at malls, they walk around them to exercise. Zoo animals live in air-conditioned cages. Children play indoors, rarely touching trees, grass or dirt.
-
-Many Kuwaitis never step outside for longer than it takes to walk to their cars. The rest of life is air-conditioned: where they sleep, exercise, work and socialize.
-
-That affects their health. Despite the abundance of sun, many Kuwaitis suffer from deficiencies of vitamin D, which the body uses sunlight to produce. Many are also overweight.
-
-By the end of the century, Basra**,** Kuwait City and many other cities will most likely have many more dangerously hot days per year. Just how many depends on what humans do in the meantime.
-
-According to forecasts by researchers at Harvard University, even if humans significantly reduce carbon emissions, by the year 2100, Kuwait City and Basra will experience months of heat and humidity that feel hotter than 103 degrees, far more than they have had in the last decade.
-
-### Higher Emissions, More Dangerous Days by 2100
-
-### Higher Emissions, More Dangerous Days by 2100
-
-Estimates long into the future are inexact, but scientists agree that the situation will worsen — and could be catastrophic if emissions aren’t reined in. In that scenario, Miami, for instance, could experience dangerous heat for nearly half the year.
-
-Source: Em Murdock and Lucas Vargas Zeppetello, Harvard University
-
-Source: Em Murdock and Lucas Vargas Zeppetello, Harvard University
-
-Abdullah, the professor, said most Kuwaitis don’t think about the relationship between burning fossil fuels and the heat.
-
-“People complain about it, but it is not something that registers action or a change of behavior,” he said. “They use it to tan or go to the beach, but if it is too hot, they stay home in the air-conditioning.”
-
-And since atmospheric emissions don’t respect borders, Kuwait City and Basra will continue to get hotter regardless of what they do, unless major emitters like the United States and China change course.
-
-For now, Abdullah, like many Kuwaitis, spends his day moving between air-conditioned pockets.
-
-The apartment he shares with two dogs and two cats is filled with plants that would quickly wither outside.
-
-
-
-He works out in a sleek gym with exposed piping, a juice bar and glass walls that show the desolation outside. In one direction, a lap pool with no one in it because it is too hot. In another, a grassy golf course, also empty. In yet another, an empty tennis court, baking in the sun.
-
-Abdullah spent 13 years as a student in Oregon, and thinks back on all the people spending time outside walking, fishing and enjoying nature. Kuwait, he said, is a place that is much more resistant to environmentalists. He worries that in insulating themselves from the heat, Kuwaitis have lost touch with the natural world.
-
-“No one really cares about what is outside their door,” he said. “And when it doesn't factor into their thought process, it doesn’t even matter. They don't see it.”
-
-
-
-While Kuwaitis with the means can insulate themselves from the heat, their lifestyle depends on a caste system of sorts.
-
-The bulk of the work needed to keep society running is done by low-paid foreign laborers from India, Bangladesh, Egypt and elsewhere. These include gardeners, herders, plumbers, construction workers, airport baggage handlers, air-conditioner repairmen, paramedics, ice cream vendors and trash collectors.
-
-He brings a piece of cardboard to sit on and three frozen water bottles that he holds next to his body to try to keep cool. It doesn’t really work.
-
-“I go home completely finished off,” he said.
-
-IV. THE FUTURE
-
-## Can This Place Still Be a Home?
-
-**Before Abbas,** the welder, was born in 1983, Basra was a greener, cooler city.
-
-Expansive groves of date palms softened the temperature, and canals that irrigated Basra’s gardens earned it the nickname "the Venice of the East."
-
-Many of those stately palm groves were being cut down when Abbas was a child, so many fewer remained when Kadhim, the construction worker, was growing up in the early 2000s. But even then, the city was still dotted with tamarisks, hearty shrubs that erupted yearly with pink and white flowers.
-
-“It was a joy to see the street full of tamarisk trees and flowers,” Kadhim said. “Whenever you see green, you feel at peace.”
-
-Now, most of those are gone too.
-
-Archival footage: Cologne Film Heritage Foundation (Kölner Filmerbe Stiftung)
-
-Without them, Basra has become a drab city of concrete and asphalt, which soaks up the sun and radiates heat long after sundown. Sewage and trash clog Basra’s canals, which now do little to moderate the scorching temperatures.
-
-In the future, many people around the world will migrate to escape the heat. But there will most likely be many others who, like Abbas and Kadhim, lack the resources to make it to a greener country. And richer countries that have already tightened their borders will probably make immigration even more difficult as climate pressures increase.
-
-
-
-
----
-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.03 News/Extroverts destroy the world.md b/00.03 News/Extroverts destroy the world.md
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----
-
-Tag: ["🫀", "🤵🏻", "🗣️"]
-Date: 2022-09-02
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-09-02
-Link: https://nypost.com/2012/02/05/extroverts-destroy-the-world/
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
----
-
-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-09-02]]
-
----
-
-
-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-ExtrovertsdestroytheworldNSave
-
-
-
-# Extroverts destroy the world
-
-**Extroverts are such a pain and a poison that we feel Virgil Starkwell’s agony when, in “Take the Money and Run,” he breaks the rules while working on a chain gang and “for several days he is locked in a sweatbox with an insurance salesman.”**
-
-But in considering the more thoughtful personality type, Susan Cain’s new book, “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” (Crown), demonstrates just how deep and disturbing is this plague of extroverts — the showoffs, risk-takers, salesmen, charmers, charlatans and politicians. They may not be responsible for all the evil in the world, but they did give us such pernicious results as Enron, Hollywood, the financial crisis, Washington, infomercials and Harvard Business School.
-
-Cain traces the birth of the cult of extroversion back to 1913, when Dale Carnegie started publishing his success manuals. Carnegie (born Carnagey — he changed it, with the consummate skills typical of the extrovert, so as to create a spurious association with the tycoon Andrew Carnegie) took advantage of an America that was changing from a nation of farms and small towns, in which people tended to die not far from where they were born and everyone knew everyone. There was no need to sparkle or scintillate.
-
-But big business demanded salesmen (like Carnegie), who hit the road and realized their core product was themselves. By 1920, more than a third of the population lived in cities filled with strangers. Workers realized getting promoted by bosses who didn’t really know them could depend more on making a dazzling impression than the quality of their work. Historian Warren Susman said that a “culture of character” gave way to a “culture of personality” and “every American was to become a performing self.”
-
-Susman noted that the qualities most often lauded in the advice manuals of the 19th century were “citizenship, duty, work, golden deeds, honor, reputation, morals, manners and integrity.” In the post-Carnegie era, these concepts were replaced by words such as “magnetic, fascinating, stunning, attractive, glowing, dominant, forceful and energetic.”
-
-Substance, then, was being replaced with surface, and the era of B.S. had begun. Fast-forward a hundred years and you can see Carnegie’s descendants trained in the highest BS — HBS, or Harvard Business School. Cain visits the campus and discovers an island of the absurdly ebullient — overconfident, tricked-out show ponies born smiling, with business cards in their diapers. The school’s emphasis on networking above studious reflection makes outcasts of, for instance, many brilliant but introverted Asian students who feel out of place in this cheerleader hell.
-
-A student reveals how, at one team-building exercise that involved working on a plan to survive subarctic temperatures, “Our action plan hinged on what the most vocal people suggested. When the less vocal people put out ideas, those ideas were discarded. The ideas that were rejected would have kept us alive and out of trouble, but they were dismissed because of the conviction with which the more vocal people suggested their ideas.”
-
-The HBS creature is both cause and effect of a business world where, Cain reports, a middle manager at GE once told her, “People here don’t even want to meet with you if you don’t have a PowerPoint and a ‘pitch’ for them. Even if you’re just making a recommendation to your colleague, you can’t sit down in someone’s office and tell them what you think. You have to make a presentation.”
-
-Showmanship rules. “We want to attract creative people,” one HR director at a major media company told Cain. Asked to clarify, the HR person said, “You have to be outgoing, fun, and jazzed up to work here.” So: no van Goghs need apply. Who wants to party with that drip?
-
-At the far end of the extrovert pipeline is, for instance, the sludge that trickles out of Hollywood, where jazzed-up HBS-type executives spend millions for scripts that haven’t even been written (reading and writing being for boring, introverted twerps) based on how entertained they feel during a 15-minute pitch delivered by a writer/shill who won’t be appearing in the movie. Back east, at Hollywood for ugly people, vapid politicians who achieved their rank based on their ability to remember the names of everyone they’ve ever shaken hands with prove highly skilled at kicking problems down the road for the next coiffure-and-cufflinks huckster to avoid.
-
-And guess who winds up running Enron, Lehman, Fannie Mae? Financier Boykin Curry described in Newsweek how the 2008 financial meltdown happened: “For 20 years, the DNA of nearly every financial institution . . . morphed dangerously. Every time someone at the table pressed for more leverage and more risk, the next few years proved them ‘right’ . . . The cautious types were increasingly intimidated, passed over for promotion.”
-
-Curry told Cain, “People who are congenitally more cautious and introverted and statistical in their thinking become discredited and pushed aside.”
-
-Maybe we should stop thinking of extroverts as fun, lively enchanters and more as hollow, greasy pickpockets. At least thieves can steal only whatever valuables you have on you, though. Rarely do they clean out your 401(k).
-
-
-
-
----
-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.03 News/First known map of night sky found hidden in Medieval parchment.md b/00.03 News/First known map of night sky found hidden in Medieval parchment.md
deleted file mode 100644
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----
-
-Tag: ["📜", "🏛️", "🏰", "💫", "🔭"]
-Date: 2022-10-19
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-10-19
-Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03296-1
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
----
-
-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-10-23]]
-
----
-
-
-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-FirstmapofskyfoundinMedievalparchmentNSave
-
-
-
-# First known map of night sky found hidden in Medieval parchment
-
- 
-
-The library of St Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt yielded a palimpsest containing stellar coordinates by Hipparchus.Credit: Amanda Ahn/Alamy
-
-A medieval parchment from a monastery in Egypt has yielded a surprising treasure. Hidden beneath Christian texts, scholars have discovered what seems to be part of the long-lost star catalogue of the astronomer Hipparchus — believed to be the earliest known attempt to map the entire sky.
-
-Scholars have been searching for Hipparchus’s catalogue for centuries. James Evans, a historian of astronomy at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, describes the find as “rare” and “remarkable”. The extract is published online this week in the *Journal for the History of Astronomy*[1](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03296-1#ref-CR1). Evans says it proves that Hipparchus, often considered the greatest astronomer of ancient Greece, really did map the heavens centuries before other known attempts. It also illuminates a crucial moment in the birth of science, when astronomers shifted from simply describing the patterns they saw in the sky to measuring and predicting them.
-
-The manuscript came from the Greek Orthodox St Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, but most of its 146 leaves, or folios, are now owned by the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC. The pages contain the *Codex Climaci Rescriptus*, a collection of Syriac texts written in the tenth or eleventh centuries. But the codex is a palimpsest: parchment that was scraped clean of older text by the scribe so that it could be reused.
-
-The older writing was thought to contain further Christian texts and, in 2012, biblical scholar Peter Williams at the University of Cambridge, UK, asked his students to study the pages as a summer project. One of them, Jamie Klair, unexpectedly spotted a passage in Greek often attributed to the astronomer Eratosthenes. In 2017, the pages were re-analysed using state-of-the-art multispectral imaging. Researchers at the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library in Rolling Hills Estates, California, and the University of Rochester in New York took 42 photographs of each page in varying wavelengths of light, and used computer algorithms to search for combinations of frequencies that enhanced the hidden text.
-
-## Star signs
-
-Nine folios revealed astronomical material, which (according to radiocarbon dating and the style of the writing) was probably transcribed in the fifth or sixth centuries. It includes star-origin myths by Eratosthenes and parts of a famous third-century-bc poem called *Phaenomena*, which describes the constellations. Then, while poring over the images during a coronavirus lockdown, Williams noticed something much more unusual. He alerted science historian Victor Gysembergh at the French national scientific research centre CNRS in Paris. “I was very excited from the beginning,” says Gysembergh. “It was immediately clear we had star coordinates.”
-
- 
-
-This cross-fade montage shows a detail of the palimpsest under ordinary lighting; under multispectral analysis; and with a reconstruction of the hidden text.Credit: Museum of the Bible ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)). Photo by Early Manuscripts Electronic Library/Lazarus Project, University of Rochester; multispectral processing by Keith T. Knox; tracings by Emanuel Zingg.
-
-The surviving passage, deciphered by Gysembergh and his colleague Emmanuel Zingg at Sorbonne University in Paris, is about a page long. It states the length and breadth in degrees of the constellation Corona Borealis, the northern crown, and gives coordinates for the stars at its extreme north, south, east and west.
-
-Several lines of evidence point to Hipparchus as the source, beginning with the idiosyncratic way in which some of the data are expressed. And, crucially, the precision of the ancient astronomer’s measurements enabled the team to date the observations. The phenomenon of precession — in which Earth slowly wobbles on its axis by around one degree every 72 years — means that the position of the ‘fixed’ stars slowly shifts in the sky. The researchers were able to use this to check when the ancient astronomer must have made his observations, and found that the coordinates fit roughly 129 bc — during the time when Hipparchus was working.
-
-Until now, says Evans, the only star catalogue that had survived from antiquity was one compiled by astronomer Claudius Ptolemy in Alexandria, Egypt, in the second century ad. His treatise *Almagest*, one of the most influential scientific texts in history, set out a mathematical model of the cosmos — with Earth at its centre — that was accepted for more than 1,200 years. He also gave the coordinates and magnitudes of more than 1,000 stars. However, it is mentioned several times in ancient sources that the person who first measured the stars was Hipparchus, who worked on the Greek island of Rhodes three centuries before, roughly between 190 and 120 bc.
-
-## Location, location, location
-
-Babylonian astronomers had previously measured the positions of some stars around the zodiac, the constellations that lie along the ecliptic — the Sun’s annual path against the fixed stars, as seen from Earth. But Hipparchus was the first to define the locations of stars using two coordinates, and to map stars across the whole sky. Among other things, it was Hipparchus himself who first discovered Earth’s precession, and he modelled the apparent motions of the Sun and Moon.
-
-Gysembergh and his colleagues used the data they discovered to confirm that coordinates for three other star constellations (Ursa Major, Ursa Minor and Draco), in a separate medieval Latin manuscript known as the *Aratus Latinus*, must also come directly from Hipparchus. “The new fragment makes this much, much clearer,” says Mathieu Ossendrijver, a historian of astronomy at the Free University of Berlin. “This star catalogue that has been hovering in the literature as an almost hypothetical thing has become very concrete.”
-
-[
-
-Best map of Milky Way reveals a billion stars in motion
-
-
-The researchers think that Hipparchus’s original list, like Ptolemy’s, would have included observations of nearly every visible star in the sky. Without a telescope, says Gysembergh, he must have used a sighting tube, known as a dioptra, or a mechanism called an armillary sphere. “It represents countless hours of work.”
-
-The relationship between Hipparchus and Ptolemy has always been murky. Some scholars have suggested that Hipparchus’s catalogue never existed. Others (starting with sixteenth-century astronomer Tycho Brahe) argued that Ptolemy had stolen Hipparchus’s data and claimed it as his own. “Many people think that Hipparchus was the truly great discoverer,” says Gysembergh, whereas Ptolemy was “an amazing teacher” who compiled his predecessors’ work.
-
-From the data in the fragments, the team concludes that Ptolemy did not simply copy Hipparchus’s numbers. But perhaps he should have: Hipparchus’s observations seem to be notably more accurate, with the coordinates read so far correct to within one degree. And whereas Ptolemy based his coordinate system on the ecliptic, Hipparchus used the celestial equator, a system more common in modern star maps.
-
-## Birth of a field
-
-The discovery “enriches our picture” of Hipparchus, says Evans. “It gives us a fascinating glimpse of what he actually did.” And in doing so, it sheds light on a key development in Western civilization, the “mathematization of nature”, in which scholars seeking to understand the Universe shifted from simply describing the patterns they saw to aiming to measure, calculate and predict.
-
-Hipparchus was the pivotal figure responsible for “turning astronomy into a predictive science”, agrees Ossendrijver. In his only surviving work, Hipparchus criticized earlier astronomical writers for not caring about numerical accuracy in their visions of orbits and celestial spheres.
-
-He is thought to have been inspired by his contact with Babylonian astronomers, and to have had access to centuries’ worth of their precise observations. The Babylonians had no interest in modelling how the Solar System was arranged in three dimensions but, because of their belief in celestial omens, they made accurate observations and developed mathematical methods to model and predict the timing of events such as lunar eclipses. With Hipparchus, this tradition merged with the Greek geometric approach, says Evans, and “modern astronomy really begins”.
-
-The researchers hope that as imaging techniques improve, they will uncover further star coordinates, giving them a larger data set to study. Several parts of the *Codex Climaci Rescriptus* have not yet been deciphered. It is also possible that additional pages from the star catalogue survive in the St Catherine’s library, which contains more than 160 palimpsests. Efforts to read these have already revealed previously unknown Greek medical texts, including drug recipes, surgical instructions and a guide to medicinal plants.
-
-Beyond that, multispectral imaging of palimpsests is opening a rich new seam of ancient texts in archives around the world. “In Europe alone, there are literally thousands of palimpsests in major libraries,” says Gysembergh. “This is just one case, that’s very exciting, of a research possibility that can be applied to thousands of manuscripts with amazing discoveries every time.”
-
-
-
-
----
-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
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diff --git a/00.03 News/For the West, the Worst Is Yet to Come.md b/00.03 News/For the West, the Worst Is Yet to Come.md
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----
-
-Alias: [""]
-Tag: ["🤵🏻", "🪖", "🇺🇦/🇷🇺"]
-Date: 2022-03-13
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-03-13
-Link: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/03/western-unity-putin-russia-ukraine/627013/
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
----
-
-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-03-20]]
-
----
-
-
-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-FortheWesttheWorstIsYettoComeNSave
-
-
-
-# For the West, the Worst Is Yet to Come
-
-Perhaps the Ukraine crisis has saved the West from its pettiness and division. But the bigger picture is far more depressing.
-
-
-
-Getty / The Atlantic
-
-In the time since Russia [invaded Ukraine](https://www.theatlantic.com/category/russias-invasion-ukraine/), a round of self-congratulation has erupted in the West. Moscow is threatening the liberal order, but in the eyes of leaders in Washington, Berlin, London, or Paris, the West has shown the world just how strong and unified it is. The scale of the [sanctions package](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/russia-sanctions-economic-policy-effects/627009/) is unprecedented, they say; the *idea* of freedom has shown itself to be stronger than Vladimir Putin ever could have imagined; the collective spirit of the liberal order has been restored.
-
-It is easy to get carried away in a wave of awe at what is happening in Ukraine, faced with the patriotic bravery of Ukrainians fighting for the right to be free, the Russian military’s apparent early struggles, and the West’s stronger-than-expected response. Germany has finally awakened; the European Union has risen to the occasion; the United States has rediscovered its moral and political leadership. This is a crisis that has reminded Europe how important America remains *and* how important Europe might yet become.
-
-It is true that the free world has been galvanized, and the fundamental idea of the Western world—individual freedom under democratic law—is still more powerful and righteous than any of the alternatives. But amid all the backslapping, the West has yet to face up to the broader reality of this crisis. The Russian army’s shelling of Ukrainian cities does not mark the last desperate cries of an authoritarian world slowly being suffocated by the power of liberal democracy. This crisis is unlikely to signal the end of the challenge to Western supremacy at all, in fact, for this is a challenge that is of a scale and duration that Western leaders and populations have not yet faced up to.
-
-[Read our ongoing coverage of the Russian invasion in Ukraine](https://www.theatlantic.com/category/russias-invasion-ukraine/)
-
-Perhaps this crisis really has saved the West from its solipsistic pettiness and division. But the bigger picture is far more depressing, whether in the short term for Ukraine or in the long term for the Western order itself.
-
-Many experts have pointed out that Putin might be able to win the war and take control of Ukraine, but he cannot hold on to it for long given the scale of public opposition to his attempted colonization. This is a war that is thus far going badly for Russia, and yet can get worse, perhaps even imperiling Putin’s regime itself. The Russian economy is also at risk of collapse under the weight of the assault that has been launched by the West.
-
-Beyond these sober analyses, however, are more sweeping claims being made in Western capitals about the long-term implications of Putin’s decision and the inevitability of the West’s ultimate victory. In his [State of the Union address](https://www.theatlantic.com/category/state-of-the-union/), Joe Biden quoted approvingly from his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky’s speech to the European Parliament, in which Zelensky claimed “light will win over darkness.” Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor, argued similarly. “The issue at the heart of this is whether power is allowed to prevail over the law,” Scholz told the Bundestag, “whether we permit Putin to turn back the clock to the 19th century and the age of the great powers.” He then added, “As democrats, as Europeans, we stand by \[Ukrainians’\] side—on the right side of history!”
-
-Does light really always win over darkness, though? It can, certainly, and did on many occasions during the 20th century. But just because it triumphed in the Second World War and the Cold War does not mean it necessarily will again now or in the future, or, indeed, that this is a fair summary of history. Just because the Allies forced the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan, and later saw the Soviet Union collapse, does not mean there is, as Scholz declared, a *right* side of history.
-
-Even if Putin is “defeated, and seen to be defeated,” as Britain’s Boris Johnson said he must be, it *still* does not follow that light is destined to triumph in the decades ahead. A quick scan across the world suggests that even just since the turn of the 21st century, the picture is far less rosy than the rhetoric from Biden, Scholz, and others might suggest.
-
-Right now, the world’s second-most powerful state, China, is committing genocide against its own people and dismantling the freedoms of a city of several million, but the West continues to trade with it almost as if nothing is happening. Even as Western governments busily sanction Russian oligarchs, they continue to let Saudi oligarchs buy up their companies, sports teams, and homes, despite the fact that their leader, according to U.S. intelligence, approved the butchering of a journalist in one of his embassies. In Syria, long after Barack Obama declared that Bashar al-Assad “must go” and predicted that he would, the dictator remains in power, backed by Putin. Across the Middle East and North Africa, the Arab Spring has largely petered out into a new set of brutal dictatorships, save for one or two exceptions. In Africa and Asia, Chinese and Russian influence is growing and Western influence is retreating. It may be comforting to say that Putin’s troubles in Ukraine now prove the enduring power of the old order, but it is difficult to draw that conclusion when looking at the world as a whole.
-
-The Western conceits that history is linear and that problems always have solutions make it hard to process evidence that challenges these assumptions. Even if Putin is unable to “win” his war in Ukraine, what if, for example, he is prepared to go further than anyone imagines in suppressing the population in whatever territory he does control? Or what if he is able to take Ukraine by force, declares it part of a Greater Russia, and threatens the nuclear annihilation of Warsaw, or Budapest, or Berlin, if the West intervenes in any way in his new territory? We might have on our hands a Eurasian North Korea, but thousands of times more powerful.
-
-Perhaps Putin is willing to pay a price for this territory that the West finds inconceivable, forcing the U.S. and Europe into a new—and hopefully *cold*—war. This could last for decades: In 1956, Hungary attempted to break away from Soviet rule but was repressed in brutal fashion. It did not win its freedom for another three decades.
-
-Even this is perhaps an optimistic scenario for the world beyond Ukraine. Whether Scholz likes it or not, the West is already in an age of competition in which “power is allowed to prevail over the law.” In fact, it always has been. The law didn’t stop the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe, after all; raw American power did.
-
-Today, the challenge is not power replacing law but power being diffused. Russia, for example, is wielding its power not just in Ukraine but across Central Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Africa. Chinese power today does not just [stalk Taiwan](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/02/vladimir-putin-ukraine-taiwan/622907/) but makes its presence felt worldwide. And then there are all the other states—Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia—that believe the changing balance of global power offers an opportunity to assert themselves.
-
-In his State of the Union address, Biden argued that in the battle raging between democracy and autocracy in Ukraine, the democratic world was “rising to the moment,” revealing its hidden strength and resolve. But is this true?
-
-Biden listed to Congress the sanctions the West had imposed on Russia, including cutting off its banks from the international financial system, choking the country’s access to technology, and seizing the property of its oligarchs. The list is impressive, and one that analysts believe could well asphyxiate the Russian economy.
-
-Yet Western leaders should not flatter themselves just because of the paucity of prior responses: The sanctions that have been placed on Russia might be enormous compared with the meager ones rolled out over the invasions of Georgia, Crimea, and the Donbas, or over China’s genocide of its Uyghur population, but there remain significant holes in the package, through which the West’s moral and geopolitical weaknesses are all too obvious.
-
-Today, the reality is that the Russian state is paying for its war against Ukraine with the funds it receives every day from the sale of oil and gas. Though the Biden administration is taking steps to ban the import of Russian energy, and Britain and the EU have said they will phase out or sharply reduce their dependence on it, each and every day for now, Russia receives $1.1 billion from the EU in oil and gas receipts, according to the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel. In total, oil and gas revenues make up 36 percent of the Russian government’s budget, the German Marshall Fund estimates—money, of course, it is now using in a campaign to terrorize Ukraine, for which the West is sanctioning other parts of Russia’s economy. It is an utterly absurd situation, like something from a satirical novel.
-
-In fact, it *is* from a satirical novel. In Joseph Heller’s *Catch-22*, set in World War II, an American serviceman called Milo Minderbinder creates a syndicate in which all the other servicemen have a share, buying food around the world. One day, Milo comes flying back from Madagascar, leading four German bombers filled with the syndicate’s produce. When he lands, he finds a contingent of soldiers waiting to imprison the German pilots and confiscate their planes. This sends Milo into a fury.
-
-“Sure we are at war with them,” he says. “But the Germans are also members in good standing of the syndicate, and it’s my job to protect their rights as shareholders. Maybe they did start a war, and maybe they are killing millions of people, but they pay their bills a lot more promptly than some allies of ours I can name.”
-
-Today, Europe’s attitude seems not too dissimilar to Milo’s: The Russians may have started a war and may be slaughtering thousands of people, which the West is fighting to stop, but Russian energy keeps European homes warm, and at a reasonable price.
-
-On top of the short-term challenge of the war itself, there is an altogether more difficult long-term challenge to the Western order. Put bluntly, it is possible both to believe that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine will be a disaster for Russia, giving the West a much-needed shot in the arm, *and* to believe that the challenges the West faces from disrupting states like Russia will remain daunting in their enormity.
-
-In some ways, the big picture remains unaltered by the blood-drenched catastrophe in Ukraine: The West faces a Chinese-Russian alliance seeking to reshape the world order, one that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger spent so much political capital to avoid. Only now, instead of this axis being led by an autarkic and sclerotic Muscovite empire, the senior partner is a technologically sophisticated giant that is deeply integrated in the world economy. Furthermore, unlike it was during the Cold War, the United States is now unable to bear the burden of a global confrontation with both China and Russia on its own; it needs the help of partners in Asia to curtail Beijing, and greater resolve from Europe to hold off Moscow.
-
-Yet has the West faced up to the scale of this challenge? Does it collectively even agree what the challenge is? Though there has been a sea change in European thinking toward Russia, it’s far from clear whether there is agreement across the West that a *civilizational* battle is being fought between East and West, between democracy and autocracy, as Biden declared. Europe has united in opposition to Russia’s invasion, but as time goes on, and Europe’s own dynamics change, Europe’s interests may well diverge from those of the U.S. (as they appear to have done over their positions toward China).
-
-For so long, as Noah Barkin [has written](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/03/germany-putin-ukraine-invasion/623322/), Germany has pursued a policy of change through trade, a policy that is now clearly based on a fallacy but that was common wisdom across the West, to the likes of Bill Clinton and David Cameron. In reality, China took the trade but ignored the change.
-
-Germany and others are beginning to shift away from this policy, but that should not blind the West to the challenges that change itself poses. While it is true, for instance, that the war in Ukraine has awakened the EU and its most powerful state, Germany, the bloc’s structural challenge remains the same: It is a force in world affairs without the capacity to defend its members. It remains a construct of the postwar American world, dependent on American power for its defense. Though Germany’s sharp increase in defense spending is seismic, if Europe genuinely wishes to share the burden of American global leadership, it still has much further to go. And even if it did more to share that burden, were Europe to become more powerful in the world, would it really subjugate its interests to the wider American-led West? Why should it when it has different economic interests to protect and enhance?
-
-Whatever happens in Ukraine, it is not clear that the level of Western unity currently on display is likely to last. It is not even clear that such unity could survive another term of Donald Trump, let alone decades of parallel political development, American fatigue over defending Europe, or the need to rebalance the Western alliance to incorporate Asian powers that fear China’s rise.
-
-If 2022 really is a pivot in Western history, like 1945 or 1989, then it is reasonable to wonder what changes we can expect to see to the way the West is structured. The end of both the Second World War and the Cold War produced a flurry of institutional reforms that shaped the new worlds that were being born. In 1951, just six years after the fall of Nazi Germany, six European states, including France and Germany, took the first step on their journey to today’s EU. In the early 1990s, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany was united, and a single European currency was agreed. The following decade, former members of the Warsaw Pact joined the EU.
-
-Where, then, are the modern contemporaries to the grand figures of the postwar West who brought about European integration, economic rehabilitation, and common defense against the Soviet Union? The challenges today are new, and so new institutional scaffolding is required to rebalance the Western world’s share of rights and responsibilities; to unite the liberal democratic world; to ensure its primacy over autocratic challengers. Instead, Western leaders talk about the reinvigoration of the institutions designed in the aftermath of the last world war to ensure a new one did not begin. That war has gone. A new one is being waged.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.03 News/France and PSG star Jean-Pierre Adams was in a coma for 39 years. His wife never left his side.md b/00.03 News/France and PSG star Jean-Pierre Adams was in a coma for 39 years. His wife never left his side.md
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-# France and PSG star Jean-Pierre Adams was in a coma for 39 years. His wife never left his side
-
-**Bernadette Adams remembers** how she felt the first time she and Jean-Pierre danced. She was 24 and he was 19. They met at a local ball in the next town over from hers. She was a rural French girl and he was an African immigrant. They floated across the floor to old-fashioned accordion music like the kind her father used to play in the years between the wars. He had played professionally for a while but gave it up, first for a plow hitch, then a construction job and finally for the furnace of a local factory. The music that night with Jean-Pierre sounded to Bernadette like shaking free, from the prescribed life waiting for her, from taking her place the way her father, and his father, had done. That's what people didn't understand years later when they said she was throwing her life away for Jean-Pierre. They weren't there that first night when those old-timey instruments played. They didn't know there would never have been a life to throw away without him.
-
-Bernadette had no dreams of her own. She can admit that now. Her big plan was to maybe be a hairdresser. Six decades after that dance, most of her siblings live near the house where they grew up. One lives on the same road. Her parents took her out of school at 14 and sent her away for three years to learn how to cook and sew. At 17 she started work in a clothes factory then a radio factory and finally in a store that sold hunting and fishing supplies. Jean-Pierre dreamed big enough for both of them. He wanted to be a professional football player. The first game she ever attended, she arrived late, just in time to see him come out of the locker room with his head bandaged; some opponent had shattered Jean-Pierre's cheekbone jockeying for a ball. An injury couldn't keep him out of the game, which left her in awe. He loved football and she loved him like she'd never loved anything before.
-
-Her brothers and sisters recall clearly the first night he ever came to their small country lane. "One winter, one evening, I can see him!" her sister Yvette says. "He was wearing a long beige overcoat and a cap and he knocked on our door."
-
-"Someone was not happy," her brother François says laughing.
-
-Her father didn't care that Jean-Pierre was Black, but her mother sure did. She made Bernadette choose. Bernadette chose Jean-Pierre. They got married and had Laurent. Jean-Pierre rose level by level in the football world until he found himself a regular member of the French national team and a fierce center-back for Paris Saint-Germain. They went to famous nightclubs. They drank champagne. Their home in the Paris suburbs had a wide balcony. They saw James Brown in Lyon and Aretha Franklin in Paris. They danced. Their lives were filled with music. She can still see Jean-Pierre walking out of record shops with both arms wrapped around his stack of purchases. Frank Sinatra. Lou Rawls. Otis Redding. They watched the sunrise over the south of France. Pastel mornings in Saint-Tropez and Cannes. Her country brothers and brothers-in-law loved going out to clubs with her husband and breathing in the air of his celebrity. Even her mother came around and eventually adored Jean-Pierre.
-
-His career waxed and then waned, sliding back down the league as he'd once climbed it. But that was OK. They moved together into the next phase of life. They bought a sports shop in a quiet little town. He started coaching his son's football team. That's when he hurt his knee. A nagging, relatively minor injury but one he'd need to handle if he wanted to keep running around with kids. He made an appointment at a hospital in Lyon for March 17, 1982.
-
-"It was a Wednesday," she remembers.
-
-At nine in the morning, Jean-Pierre called her and said doctors were on the way to give him the anesthesia. At noon she called the hospital for the first time.
-
-"It should have been over," she thought.
-
-The doctors told her he was still in surgery. She left their sport shop for a lunch break, and in between feeding the kids, she called four more times. Her oldest son, Laurent, started to worry. She calmed him down and took him to football practice and then returned to the store. After reopening around 2 p.m., she called again.
-
-"Something happened," a staff member explained. "We will give you to the doctor and he will explain."
-
-Fred, the 5-year-old, saw her face change.
-
-"What's wrong?" he asked.
-
-"Nothing, nothing," she said.
-
-Finally she heard a doctor's voice.
-
-"It's very serious," he told her flatly. "You have to come right away."
-
----
-
-**It's 39 years** later, and winter has arrived with blowing winds in the south of France. Bernadette Adams is a recent widow. Jean-Pierre died in September. She sits alone in her suburban home. Jean-Pierre's hospital bed was loaded the day before yesterday in Marseille on a cargo ship bound for western Africa. A charity there needed it. Little tasks are how she stitches hours into a day. Right now she's preparing for a long-awaited trip to Paris, where her husband's former professional soccer club, PSG, is planning to honor his memory. She has three days to pack.
-
-She hasn't been to Paris in forever and stands up to go find photographs from that old life of dancing and champagne. Soon she returns with a weathered Air France attaché case, left over from a time when she could just hop an Air France flight. She smiles when she unzips it and lets the photographs spill out onto the table.
-
-One shows Jean-Pierre as a young child, being held by Pope Pius XII. His deeply Catholic grandmother brought him to France, to the healing waters of Lourdes, to meet the head of their faith. She fought her way through the crowd and somehow got an audience. They were close enough to touch the hem of his vestments. The pontiff picked up Jean-Pierre, held him in his holy arms, and blessed him. His grandmother decided that he'd have a better future in Europe than in Africa, so she gave him to the nuns who ran a nearby convent school. She flew back to Senegal without him and he made his way in the world, abandoned by his family, adopted as a teen, then made whole when he met Bernadette.
-
-Another warm smile crosses her face as she holds a photograph of a fun, boozy dinner in Nice, at a restaurant owned by a friend. The owner is eating with them. So is their youngest son's godfather. The waiters and waitresses wear roller skates. A silly, joyous place. Plates of food cover the table, punctuated by glasses and bottles of wine. They all look happy, smiling for the camera. Everybody loved a big night with Jean-Pierre and Bernadette. He was formidable, because of his physical size and the size of his aura. He'd destroy anyone making a run on goal and then outdrink them after.
-
-
-
-The radio in her main living room plays old French love songs. Outside the sun moves slowly across the sky above her house, ducking in and out of the clouds. The house goes from light to dark to light again. She keeps dropping pictures on the table, a pile growing like leaves from a winter tree, Jean-Pierre and his teammates in a bar, Jean-Pierre playing on the floor with their sons, all of them dancing, Jean-Pierre in a beret, Jean-Pierre in a wide-collar open shirt blowing a kiss to her. In one of them, which makes her linger a bit, Jean-Pierre looks directly into the camera while their young son, Laurent, stares up at his father in awe.
-
-"I could look at these pictures for hours," she says.
-
-**\- ESPN+ viewers' guide: LaLiga, Bundesliga, MLS, FA Cup, more
-\- Stream ESPN FC Daily on ESPN+ (U.S. only)
-\- Don't have ESPN? Get instant access**
-
-Her house feels like a shrine to the good years between the night they met and the day he went to Lyon to have routine surgery. She's got her father's accordion stored away, just as she's got Jean-Pierre's record player closed on a shelf across the room. His record collection is put away, too.
-
-"This is the end of dancing," she says.
-
-There isn't a single picture of Jean-Pierre after his accident. That's what she calls it. The Accident.
-
-She looks at a photo of a football team, arm-in-arm before a match. Even all these years later she can reel off the names: Trésor, Bereta, Huck, Floch, Grava, Stefan Kovács the coach.
-
-"How many of these people ever came to visit after the accident?"
-
-She looks down and her voice changes.
-
-"One," she says.
-
-There's the roller-skating restaurant in Nice again, with the same table of friends and their child's godfather. She looks at each face.
-
-"How many of them came to visit?"
-
-"None," she says.
-
-It's hard to know what's real sometimes: the love shown in the photographs, or the abandonment after. Flipping through her old life, the mood in the room changing with the light, she finds another soccer team, once brothers in arms, all young and strong. None of them visited, either.
-
----
-
-**Bernadette hung up** with the doctor that day. She looked around their shop, which she'd soon have to sell. Her parents rushed to be there for Laurent when football practice ended. The neighbors looked after Fred. Two football executives insisted on driving her to the hospital in Lyon. When she arrived the doctors told her to wait. Finally they ushered her into a room.
-
-She saw Jean-Pierre lying on a bed, packed in ice, plugs running out of his mouth and arms. He couldn't speak. His eyes would open but otherwise there was little sign of brain activity. She started asking questions immediately, and the more she asked, the less information the doctors and staff seemed to have.
-
-"We don't know what happened," they told her.
-
-That didn't make sense. How did a healthy athlete go in for minor elective surgery and end up brain-dead? She got no answers, no guidance, and in the absence of information, she chose to believe in the most powerful thing she'd ever experienced: her love for Jean-Pierre.
-
-She sat with him. She talked to him about the kids. She brought his big boxer, Ludo, hoping the dog might stir his consciousness. She made a recording of Ludo barking to play for him. His closest teammate, Jacky Vergnes, came, too. He remembers clearly her almost yelling at her husband, "You WILL come back! You WILL come back!" then wheeling around to Jacky and yelling, "He WILL come back!"
-
-At first, Jacky talked to Jean-Pierre, too. Sometimes Jean-Pierre's eyes would move. Jacky would clap and Jean-Pierre would jump. Maybe he might wake up soon. Jacky sat by his bed and recounted great goals and close games. "The medical people I talked to said that he could hear us, but they didn't know if he could understand," he says. "Or maybe he could understand us but he couldn't communicate with us."
-
-The hospital transferred Jean-Pierre after two months to another facility, far from Bernadette's home. She could only visit on Sundays. Every night she called. She always believed that the next call, the next morning, might bring different news. Each time the doctor reported nothing had changed. One night the doctor blurted out what all the medical experts believed but, until now, couldn't bring themselves to say.
-
-"You know," he said, "his condition won't get better."
-
-Jean-Pierre not only didn't improve but he kept getting worse, little by little. Soon he couldn't breathe on his own. He lost 24 pounds in a month. The doctors started feeding him with a tube. Bernadette believed they were counting the days until he died and his bed freed up. She demanded the doctors remove the feeding tube and she patiently spooned him bite after bite of yogurt. She started working on a little twirling motion to get him to swallow since he still had no voluntary muscle control.
-
-She got him transferred to a different facility, closer to her home. Now she went to see him twice a day, at lunch and before supper. He kept declining. During one visit, the sun bright and warm, she decided to move him closer to the window. When she peeled back the sheet, she saw a huge, dirty bandage.
-
-"Oh," the nurse told her, "he has a bedsore. We forgot to tell you."
-
-Now she can look back and recognize this moment as the point of no return. She felt such anger at this woman, such helplessness, that a desperate idea began to take shape. Other people passing through the medical machine whispered to her that these rehab facilities were where discarded humans were sent to die. As she tried to figure out another way, she got a letter from the French government. Although the football community would continue its generous support, the government would no longer pay for his hospital stay.
-
-On June 13, 1983, Bernadette Adams took Jean-Pierre home.
-
-Before she left, a nurse told her, "You can bring him back."
-
-"Definitely not," she said.
-
-Jacky marveled at Bernadette's belief, because when he looked at his friend, he saw a dying man. He even began to think that death might be a mercy. Over time, he came to hold that belief as gospel. Bernadette looked at the shrinking man in the bed and considered what might be again while Jacky more and more couldn't escape thoughts of what had been lost forever. It was a small fissure, but it spread. During one visit he looked at his frail, comatose friend and something broke. Wherever Bernadette was going, he would not follow.
-
-"My eyes," he told her, "have seen him for the last time."
-
-Jacky kept his promise.
-
----
-
-**He lives now** in a little resort town in southern France, where he bought a small hotel when his football career ended. The ocean rolls up through marshy grass. The town is surrounded by castle walls and he lives upstairs on a quaint dogleg street.
-
-"Thirty-nine years," he says.
-
-His voice cracks. This pain remains fresh and he gets lost for a moment and repeats the number. A lifetime of bouncing soccer balls off his head has left Jacky a little foggy, and so sitting in his living room he sometimes just sort of vanishes.
-
-"Thirty-nine years ... 39 ... 39 years ... 39 ...," he says.
-
-He looks up at his wife, who is hovering.
-
-"I wanted Jean-Pierre's death," he says. "I wanted his death."
-
-"Everyone went through different emotions," his wife says. "And even now, when he talks about it, he's very upset."
-
-"Personally," he says, "I was not in favor for him to stay in our world."
-
-There's a bottle of Ricard in his home bar, and when he pours a glass, at home or out with friends, he toasts his friend Jean-Pierre, the same friend he stopped going to visit. It's complicated. Once he got in a fight with Bernadette over the telephone. He told her Jean-Pierre would be better off dead.
-
-"How dare you say that?" she asked.
-
-"I say it because I see it," he told her.
-
-He turns to his visitors and is serious.
-
-"She was mad at me obviously," he says. "But Jean-Pierre was my brother, so my heart spoke. She was very offended. I want to say that in my mind Jean-Pierre would be better up there, playing football with the good Lord or with the apostles."
-
-Bernadette used to put more trust in God. A few years after the accident, she had Jean-Pierre loaded on a special train and taken back to the miraculous healing waters of Lourdes, where he came all those years before with his grandmother. Every day the nuns lowered him into the water, with doctors overseeing the whole thing. Nothing changed. When Jean-Pierre came home from Lourdes, Jacky gave up the last of his hope that anything would ever change. The Lord had his reasons for not healing Jean-Pierre and for Jacky, that was enough. He made his choice, a way of understanding something as senseless as Jean-Pierre's accident.
-
-"Accident? It was murder!" he says.
-
-Bernadette couldn't see it that way. Couldn't make it make sense, even in the hands of God.
-
-"I wonder," she says. "I ask myself questions."
-
-"What do you think happens to us when we die?" she's asked.
-
-She sits in her chair, still surrounded by photographs and the music coming from the radio, and her voice gets fragile for the first time.
-
-"I don't know," she says at last.
-
-It's a brutal thing to admit, and to force someone to admit, and there's a lingering feeling of pain in the room. She has lost even the ability to believe that life has a meaning, and that we will see the people whom we love again. The constant noise in her house -- often a television and a radio at the same time -- usually holds such thoughts at bay. She keeps talking, a translator relaying her words, until in the middle of an answer she stands up suddenly. She walks a few steps to the radio and turns up the volume. Now she sits back down, looking into the distance, singing along. It's an old love song called "Die Next to My Love."
-
-"This is the song I want to play when I will be put underground with Jean-Pierre," she says.
-
-She starts to cry and seems ashamed of her weakness.
-
-"This always makes me cry," she explains. "It will pass."
-
-Nobody speaks. Her anxiety starts to rise. She needs to make sure everyone knows to play this song at her funeral.
-
-"I have to tell my kids," she says. "I told the chiropractor, but I have to tell them."
-
-She stops talking again, listening to the song, rubbing her thumb on her ring finger, then her pointer, then her middle finger, looking at the radio and then out the window as the light changes from light to dark and back again.
-
----
-
-**When they left** the hospital in 1983, she called their home The House of the Beautiful Sleeping Athlete. She fed him five meals a day, cooking vegetables and meat and blending them into a mush. Every bite she carefully fed him with a spoon. Meals took hours. Each one faded into the next. Sometimes he'd just cough all the food out. Once he coughed so hard he broke a tooth. Then his teeth started falling out. She got them fixed. She persevered. Slowly she trained his muscles to work with her. A little dance, with just the right amount of spoon twirl. He began to put on weight. There were no tubes, no wires, no machines.
-
-She and a helper got him into a wheelchair. He wore diapers. When she didn't have assistants, the boys helped. At first she got his torso and let her sons take the legs but as they got stronger, those roles reversed. She bathed him and talked doctors and therapists through his needs. Seven days a week.
-
-The kids learned to talk to him, to watch football games with him. Every year they got him a cake on his birthday. The kids blew out his candles and the whole family sang. They wrapped presents and then unwrapped them. Everyone always got him the same thing, the only thing he needed: the long-sleeved T-shirts he wore all day. His closet remained trapped in amber, full of 1970s clothes he once wore around Parisian nightclubs.
-
-Bernadette stopped celebrating their wedding anniversary after 1982.
-
-
-
-Somewhere along the way, she stopped eating dinner, too. She rarely attended her children's events, leaving them to basically raise themselves. Resentments built. Fred's judo opponents learned to be careful on the rare occasions she did attend, because he took to the competition mat with fury. Friends slipped away from her.
-
-One afternoon a week, as long as Jean-Pierre felt good, she went to a local dance. For just a few hours, she got to be an anonymous person, to commune with her former self. She even had three boyfriends over the years, all of whom she met dancing.
-
-"Did you tell Jean-Pierre?"
-
-"Oui, oui," she says.
-
-Her siblings think none of these men could stand the knowledge that she'd never look at any of them like she looked at the beautiful, sleeping athlete in his hospital bed.
-
-"She managed to escape, to go dance," Yvette says. "The first one was Gérard. By the by, he's trying to come back!"
-
-"I saw him at the funeral," François says.
-
-"Then there was Roger," Chantal says.
-
-"... and André," Yvette says.
-
-"Which was the good one?"
-
-"Roger!" they all say together.
-
-In the end her schedule came first.
-
-"You and your schedule," one of them sniffed.
-
-"She was strict about something: this is my house, not yours," Yvette says. "She didn't want her friends to let themselves in her life with Jean-Pierre. It was always Jean-Pierre first."
-
-She always treated Jean-Pierre like he could hear and had feelings about what he heard. As she prepared his steak, which she'd then cut into tiny pieces and blend with the vegetables, she'd ask him how he'd like it cooked. That he never answered didn't matter. For her, asking the questions was the defiant act of living and if she believed enough, one day he'd answer.
-
-"I went through every emotion, but I never lost hope," she says. "Never. Never."
-
-All the things they once fought about slipped away. He became perfect to her. Beatific even. When he woke up, they'd have the perfect life. She knew people talked behind her back. Asking why she didn't just put him in a home or let him die. "What was I supposed to do?" she says now, her voice rising. "A shot and good riddance? He needs me to eat, to drink, to be dressed. To abandon him was out of the question."
-
-Her youngest son, Fred, secretly hoped she'd find a way to have a new life of her own but respected her too much to ever say that out loud. Her brothers and sisters worried it was becoming impossible to see where her duty to him ended and her own being began, that she'd tied herself to a sinking boulder.
-
-"She embroidered her life around him," Yvette says.
-
----
-
-**What did he know?**
-
-Did he remember Paris and the champagne evenings? Did he remember chopping down strikers who made runs on his goal? Did he remember Bernadette and the accordion music?
-
-"My dad could feel my mum's presence," Fred Adams says. "I could see it."
-
-He recognized her smell. She and her kids say he'd visibly sniff when she came into the room wearing her perfume. They're certain about this.
-
-"He liked my perfume," she says.
-
-He had good days and bad days. He felt happy and sad. The seasons mattered to him. He liked summer the best. Music relaxed him. When other people sat with him to give Bernadette a break, he got agitated.
-
-"He was there!" Laurent Adams says. "We developed another way of communication."
-
-"He would cry sometimes," Bernadette says. "We could see on his face that he was sad. Was he seeing himself? I don't know."
-
-She tried acupuncture. She took him to see spiritual healers and to Catholic priests. A decade ago she brought in another doctor, named Frédéric Pellas, to run more modern tests than had been available when his coma began. They injected him with dye and scanned his brain. They hooked him up to machines.
-
-"At the hospital, the encephalogram was never flat," she says. "There was always some kind of a brain activity. So to me it meant that one day maybe..."
-
-She cherry-picked information. Often her description of the situation at home appeared more rosy than her siblings' view. Friends and family say they believed, but it is hard to tell if they truly held out hope or if they felt like her sacrifice required their support. In the end, what's the difference?
-
-Dr. Pellas chooses his words kindly.
-
-The first test they did was a classic brain scan.
-
-"I had rarely seen so many lesions in a brain," he says.
-
-Then he did a functional imaging exam. Radioactive liquid is injected to see if parts of the brain lit up when stimulated.
-
-"In Jean-Pierre's case," he says, "this examination did not show any activity translating a minimum perception of consciousness."
-
-The final test was to hook him up to equipment that would measure any activity in the brain after sounds, images or touches, which can tell a doctor if the patient can detect a stimulus, even in a diminished capacity. "In all these examinations," he says, "no level of consciousness, even minimal, was detected."
-
-He knows what he's saying. Bernadette lived her whole life believing that one day Jean-Pierre might awake, and she found examples in other people to justify that faith, but Dr. Pellas says her faith was just a way of getting through the day. After having lost so much of it, after having had it ripped from her, she believed in herself and in their love. This new doctor had knowledge and learning, but so did those doctors in Lyon. Dr. Pellas understands all of this.
-
-"Was there any hope for improvement?" he says. "No, there was not."
-
-His scientific clarity, given to him by years of study and practice, provides much the same comfort that an afterlife gives Jacky and once gave Bernadette. He knew things she can never know, yes, but might the opposite also be true? Stripped of religion and science, Bernadette Adams lived a life of isolation and service. You can probably count on one hand the number of people on the planet who really understand the road she's walked for the past 39 years. In her presence the vapor trails of that journey are palpable, like you're talking to an astronaut, or a veteran with years of hard combat time: someone who has seen a frontier the rest of us can only imagine. All cultures have a tradition, mostly forgotten by the modern world, that speaks of a hidden knowledge. What if Bernadette Adams, a French farm girl with an eighth-grade education, had come to possess that rare knowledge? She *had* been forced to peer down into the darkness. The students of religion told her Jean-Pierre would be better off dead. The students of science told her he was already dead. She believed she knew more than either, that there were third planes, worlds of shadow between light and dark. She settled on the only belief system that made sense: hope. Hope was the secret to going on, to putting one foot in front of the other, which made it something like the secret of life.
-
-She believed he was alive and therefore, in her house, he was.
-
----
-
-**Marius Trésor is** a famous man in France, and when he walks into the chateau-turned-office of his old club in Bordeaux, he is treated like visiting royalty. The secretary hugs him and brings coffee to Marius and his guests. Together he and Jean-Pierre were a stalwart defensive tandem at the back for the French national team. He does the same thing as Jacky, just losing the thread of the conversation and repeating the same words over and over.
-
-"Thirty-nine years ... 39 years ... 39 years ... " he says.
-
-They met for the first time on the pitch in a league game. He remembers it clearly. The second-to-last game of the season. It was May. They both chased a deep ball and ran side-by-side to try to catch it. One of Marius' teammates yelled for him to chop Jean-Pierre down with a hard tackle. When the play ended, Jean-Pierre turned to the teammate and used this beautiful French phrase, "We don't eat that kind of bread," which means neither he nor Marius wanted any part of cheap shot. They became brothers after that.
-
-"He loved playing cards," Trésor says. "He loved playing tarot. Me too. It was at La Voisine, the castle belonged to Ricard. When we would play in Paris, whenever we would be finished, we would go dance. He loved it! Me, too."
-
-He loved his friend. They spent years together before the accident.
-
-"I never went to see Jean-Pierre," Marius says.
-
-He understands the shame of that.
-
-"I always wanted to keep the image I had of Jean-Pierre alive," he says. "So I didn't want to ruin those memories."
-
-Bernadette put on a good face but reports made their way back to Marius.
-
-"I was 5-11 and 181 pounds and Jean-Pierre was 5-10 and 185 pounds," he says. "A journalist once came to do an interview about Jean-Pierre. I gave her Bernadette's number and she went to see her. She called me afterward and she told me that, 'I saw someone who was not more than 110 pounds.' It was about three years ago. So ... no ..."
-
-Tears start to well in his eyes and he fights them back.
-
-"These were hard moments," he says.
-
-Two years ago, his old club threw a party for him. The folks at Bordeaux wanted to surprise him, so they brought in Bernadette, who brought one of her grandsons. Marius didn't know. It was January 2, 2020, and they saw each other across the room.
-
-"We simply fell into each other arms," he says. "It was hard to say one word."
-
-She introduced her grandson, Noah, and the boy wanted to know stories about what his Papy was like in the times before the accident. This brought Marius great joy to remember, and he regaled the boy. He told him that any attacker who made it to his position, after fighting their way through Jean-Pierre, would inevitably be a shell of a man. His Papy was fierce. The boy loved these stories.
-
-Marius and Bernadette finally spoke. She asked him again to come visit his old friend. He said that he would make the time. Neither of them knew then that the coronavirus would lock down the country.
-
-"He promised he would finally come," she says. "He never came."
-
----
-
-**All these years** she searched for answers. The doctors in Lyon insisted they had no idea what had gone wrong. One of those freak things, they said. It happens to a tiny percentage of patients. But Bernadette wouldn't accept that answer. The family was, understandably, suspicious of the entire medical-industrial complex. She'd take Jean-Pierre to doctors for checkups and always refused to leave the room. Her own children didn't trust the doctors, either. When Laurent had surgery on his Achilles, he refused the general anesthesia.
-
-So Bernadette hired a lawyer with no proof, no case, just a suspicion.
-
-"Are you sure something happened?" the attorney asked.
-
-"Yes," she told him.
-
-He agreed to take her case but warned her the odds seemed long.
-
-"I'm not sure we will win."
-
-The French Football Federation hired a lawyer, too, and for the next decade these men fought the hospital. Hearing after hearing, discovery after discovery, the truth came out.
-
-The hospital staff in Lyon had been on strike.
-
-The doctors should have postponed all elective procedures but did not.
-
-The anesthesiologist, because of the strike, sedated eight patients alone.
-
-One doctor monitored everyone in two rooms.
-
-A single nurse monitored Jean-Pierre. She was an intern and such a poor student she'd been forced to repeat parts of her medical training.
-
-It took more than a decade, but Bernadette's lawyers made the hospital admit that the anesthesiologist intubated him improperly. The mistake accidentally cut off his supply of oxygen, and the two doctors and one nurse never noticed. In the criminal case, only the anesthesiologist and the nurse received any punishment: one month in jail, suspended, and a modest fine. They got to continue their careers. When French journalists tracked the anesthesiologist down in Paris, she said, "I don't want to hear about this story anymore."
-
-Bernadette's legal battle was over and, although it took 12 years, she received enough money in the verdict to take care of Jean-Pierre forever. She got to hire some extra help to make her life just a little easier, but she also lost the clarifying purpose of her legal fight. The person she saw in the mirror was a middle-aged woman, with one kid out of the house and another soon to leave, with a husband who wouldn't wake up.
-
-"Until my death," she says, "I will be angry."
-
-She cooked his vegetables and mixed in the meat. She moved to four meals a day. Except for a few gray hairs, he didn't seem to age. His daily life stayed the same. She, however, did not stay the same. She's been abandoned and let down by so many people she came to only truly rely on herself. Everybody else proved themselves, in large and small ways, somehow unworthy. "She was very edgy all the time," her sister Yvette says. "The women who helped her, she couldn't stand them. She became very demanding."
-
-The local nurses didn't like her, either. She developed a bad reputation in their community. When the pandemic hit, getting help became even harder. Fred lived nearby and he helped. Laurent once lived next door but he'd moved to the island of Corsica. Mostly Bernadette managed on her own. Maybe that is why she didn't notice the small bedsore at first. It's hard to know. The mattress had gotten a little worn, and doctors will tell you, it's nearly impossible to keep patients like Jean-Pierre from developing pressure sores.
-
-She asked Fred to call the doctor, who patiently explained that none of the nurses wanted to come help her. So many people had let her down that when she needed someone, she found she'd pushed them all away. The past 39 years taught her that nobody else could be trusted with Jean-Pierre, and that lesson now threatened her ability to keep him alive. Bernadette started crying and yelling and threatening, after all these years, to leave and run.
-
-"She was at the end of her tether," Yvette says.
-
----
-
-**What did she know?**
-
-There must be something. The betrayals she endured were cosmic, pain acute enough to destroy faith in people, in institutions, in civilization, in science, even in God. A teaching pain. The only things that mattered were the promises you made to other people, and whether you kept them or not. Every other test of morality was a lie. You are defined by how you keep the promises you make and so Bernadette Adams did not run, or keep crying and yelling and threatening. She stayed.
-
-"I respected my vows until the end," she says.
-
-She just went back to work, trying to fight the bedsore, feeding him four meals a day, each one down to a half-hour now, them working in concert at last. The bedsore did not heal. Infection set in. Word spread among their old friends that the end was near.
-
-"Finally," Jacky Vergnes thought.
-
-"Finally," Marius Trésor thought, "he is free."
-
-His last six days were in a hospital, but she never left his side, except when she wasn't allowed to watch the nurses beat the mucus out of his lungs. She came into the room after the last attempt, and as she held and encouraged him, Jean-Pierre Adams died in her arms.
-
----
-
-**She didn't do** anything the day after he died. The past 39 years had been a series of tasks, repeated hour by hour, day after day, and now all that just stopped. She told her children she didn't know what to do in her own house. It felt foreign. She tried to find her footing and a purpose. Tasks still mattered to her. They organized her day and protected her from her thoughts. Before the funeral she got all his medical equipment moved out of the house and shut the door to their old room. She looked back and remembered.
-
-"I think I had a beautiful life," she says.
-
-The funeral arrived. She dressed Jean-Pierre in a long sleeved T-shirt for his casket. Friends and family started to make their way south following the highways and railroad lines to her little town. Her children made sure to play a James Brown song. The priest told the mourners that nothing in the world of God is ever completely clear, but those words floated somewhere above Bernadette.
-
-"The few hours I spent with her, I met her at church," Trésor says. "I drove there. I met her but it was almost like she was not there. When you dedicate 39 years to take care of someone, and overnight you are left alone, it is hard to admit. She spent 39 years taking care of Jean-Pierre ... I told that to my wife, 'If something like that happens to me? Let me go.' I think for Bernadette and her kids, too, it is a deliverance. But she doesn't see it that way. Because she took so much care of Jean-Pierre and now there is something missing."
-
-The reporters who covered the funeral all wanted to interview Trésor, the most famous man there, and he simply pointed toward Bernadette and said, "if you want to know what true love is ..."
-
-He said his goodbyes. Bernadette seemed somewhere far away, like she'd died, too.
-
-"She seemed disoriented," Trésor says. "She kept saying, "What am I gonna do now?"
-
-After the funeral the French national team held a minute of applause before their next game, and she sat in front of a television with her youngest son and let memories come back, many of them warm and happy, but tempered by the regret that Jean-Pierre wasn't here to feel all the love. She finds it upsetting to be around people now, to try to rejoin the world after 39 years of solitude. Her children are already looking toward next year, when they can try to help her find a new way of being, but for now she moves uncomfortably around her house, avoiding his old room, visiting the cemetery every day. She takes flowers and talks to him like he's still there. She calls him by her pet name for him. *Ma Biche*. She asks how he's feeling. She tells him about her life now that he's gone. Sometimes she looks at the fresh rise of dirt, still waiting for the marker she has designed, and asks, "Why did you leave me?"
-
----
-
-**The night before** she went to Paris, her oldest son, Laurent, got into town with his partner and son. They all sat around the table, the house blessedly loud and alive with people. When they get together, eventually it always becomes 1982 again.
-
-"It was 2 p.m.," Laurent says, "in the courtyard of Saint-Dominique School."
-
-"I don't think you were at school," Bernadette says, "you were at football practice."
-
-"No," he says. "I was at school, it was 1:45 p.m. Just before school. I knew that something happened because my grandparents were at home. Mémère and Pépère drove me to school and they told me in the car."
-
-"I don't have the same version," Bernadette says. "It was a Wednesday and you were at football practice."
-
-"No ..." he says.
-
-"... And I had Fred at the store," she says.
-
-They are forever comparing memories, which never quite align. It's like each of them has experienced a pain so raw it can't be shared. They've all walked parallel but separate paths away from that hospital in Lyon.
-
-"I remember the place, at school, next to the tree," he says. "Before going back to classes. You were not there. They told me in the car, 'Something happened to Daddy.'"
-
-"It was March 17th, 1982," she says.
-
-"No!" he exclaims. "You knew it on the 17th but I didn't learn it right away. It was hidden. You asked Pépère and Mémère not to tell us. We didn't learn the day of the accident."
-
-The subject soon gets changed to the trip they're going on tomorrow, Laurent and his wife by plane, his son Lenny and Bernadette by train. Lenny has never been to see PSG play live.
-
-"It's my favorite team," he says with a glow.
-
----
-
-**At the station** she learns the team sent her and her grandson economy train tickets. Of course they have no way of knowing what a single game might mean to a woman like her. But what if this whole trip only managed to make Jean-Pierre feel further away? She might arrive and just be a name on a list, a barcode on a ticket.
-
-The train pulls into Gare de Lyon, track 21, in the city where she lived a lifetime ago. The memories start coming as she walks through the station, surrounded by men in fedoras and flat caps, travelers in French navy coats and overcoats, people pushing strollers and walking dogs. The air smells like baking bread. She is dressed for the city: leather pants, silver sneakers, armor against the nerves she'd been feeling all day. What if nobody remembers him? She finds a taxi and heads to the hotel. She changes into something nicer and goes to the game.
-
-A staffer meets them at the stadium door, and her fears about being made to feel small are soon gone. The owner of PSG rolls out the hospitality, spending time with Bernadette and her grandson, making sure they have great seats and a full tour. He presents her with a jersey bearing Jean-Pierre's name and number. After the game, the great Kylian Mbappé comes to meet her grandson, to pass along the condolences of the club and pose for pictures. The owner tells her warmly that she and her family are always welcome. This big glowing stadium will always be a home. Bernadette floats back out into the night, everyone bundled against a cold rain, and she is happy.
-
-She gets to her hotel and slips on the jersey she'd been given, the one with Adams on the back, and falls asleep. Outside the hotel window, the city keeps moving, neon lights and taxi stands, the temperature steadily dropping and a December snow moving in. A journey from a crowded train station to an empty house lies ahead, an empty bedroom and a closet full of faded party clothes.
-
-Soon it will be morning.
-
-
-
-
----
-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.03 News/Google Search Is Dying.md b/00.03 News/Google Search Is Dying.md
deleted file mode 100644
index a7e9d1be..00000000
--- a/00.03 News/Google Search Is Dying.md
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,215 +0,0 @@
----
-
-Alias: [""]
-Tag: ["📟", "🌐"]
-Date: 2022-02-21
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp:
-Link: https://dkb.io/post/google-search-is-dying
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
----
-
-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-02-22]]
-
----
-
-
-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-GoogleSearchIsDyingNSave
-
-
-
-# Google Search Is Dying
-
-_There is good discussion on this article on [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719) and [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/st9ri1/google_search_is_dying/)_
-
-Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit, who can’t be bothered to build a decent search interface. So instead we resort to using Google, and appending the word “reddit” to the end of our queries.
-
-Paul Graham thinks this image means Reddit as a social media site “still hasn’t peaked”. What it actually means is that the amount of people using Reddit as a search engine is growing.
-
-
-
-Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust.
-
-How do we know Google is dying?
--------------------------------
-
-If you’ve tried to search for a recipe or product review recently, I don’t need to tell you that Google search results have gone to shit. You would have already noticed that the first few non-ad results are SEO optimized sites filled with affiliate links and ads.
-
-Google still gives decent results for many other categories, especially when it comes to factual information. You might think that Google results are pretty good for you, and you have no idea what I’m talking about.
-
-What you don’t realize is that you’ve been self-censoring yourself from searching most of the things you would have wanted to search. You already know subconsciously that Google isn’t going to return a good result.
-
-I’m far from the only one who thinks Google is dying:
-
-[Daniel Gross](https://dcgross.com/a-new-google)
-
-> In 2000, Google got popular because hackers realized it was better than Lycos or Excite. This effect is happening again. Early adopters aren’t using Google anymore.
-
-[Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392702)
-
-> The results keep getting "refined" so as to suit the popular 80% of queries, while getting much worse for any technical or obscure queries. Forced synonyms and "people also searched for" are typically useless and almost infuriating. Once you get off the first or second page, the results get even worse-- with pages entirely unrelated to the query (e.g. not even containing the searched phrases). They are probably testing/already implemented some sort of multi armed bandit type optimization like on Youtube's search results where they just show any popular pages (ignoring relevancy) to see if they yield a click.
-
-[Michael Seibel](https://twitter.com/mwseibel/status/1477701120319361026):
-
-> A recent small medical issue has highlighted how much someone needs to disrupt Google Search. Google is no longer producing high quality search results in a significant number of important categories.
-
-> Health, product reviews, recipes are three categories I searched today where top results featured clickbait sites riddled with crappy ads. I’m sure there are many more.
-
-[Paul Graham](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1477760548787920901)
-
-> This may not just be a problem with Google but possibly also the recipe for beating Google. A startup usually has to start with a niche market. Why not try writing a search engine specifically for some category dominated by SEO spam?
-
-Why is Google dying?
---------------------
-
-### Ads
-
-It is obvious that serving ads creates misaligned incentives for search engines. The founders of Google pointed this out themselves when they were just getting started.
-
-[Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (1998)](http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)
-
-> “Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users…we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers…Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results.”
-
-Unfortunately, these thoughts on the failings of ad-based search engines read like an instruction manual for what Google did next.
-
-They’ve dialed it up to the max recently to squeeze out every last cent before their inevitable collapse.
-
-
-
-### SEO
-
-There are tons of people whose sole job is to game their way to the top of Google, so it shouldn’t be surprising when search results deteriorate in quality. To be fair, this would probably be an issue with any search engine, but you’d expect Google to be able to come up with a less gameable algorithm.
-
-Here’s a [fun story](https://alexskra.com/blog/the-mermaid-is-taking-over-google-search-in-norway/) about how one website gamed their way to the top of Google in Norway.
-
-### AI
-
-Google increasingly does not give you the results for what you typed in. It tries to be “smart” and figure out what you “really meant”, in addition to personalizing things for you. If you really meant exactly what you typed, then all bets are off.
-
-Even the exact match query operator (“ ”) [doesn’t give exact matches anymore](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27052634), which is quite bizarre.
-
-Why are people appending “reddit” to their queries?
----------------------------------------------------
-
-There’s a fun conspiracy theory that popped up recently called the [Dead Internet Theory](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-internet-theory-wrong-but-feels-true/619937/). The claim is basically that most of the internet is bots. There aren’t real people here anymore.
-
-[IlluminatiPirate](https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-theory-most-of-the-internet-is-fake.3011/):
-
-> TLDR: Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products.
-
-This isn’t true (yet), but it reflects some general sense that the authentic web is gone. The SEO marketers gaming their way to the top of every Google search result might as well be robots. Everything is commercialized. Someone’s always trying to sell you something. Whether they’re a bot or human, they are decidedly fake.
-
-So how can we regain authenticity? What if you want to know what a genuine real life human being thinks about the latest Lenovo laptop?
-
-You append “reddit" to your query (or hacker news, or stack overflow, or some other community you trust).
-
-Google is dead.
-
-Long live Google + “site:reddit.com”.
-
-_If you are interested in more thoughts and ideas on search and organizing information, you may want to follow me on twitter [@dkb868](https://twitter.com/dkb868)._
-
-Appendix 1: response from Google.
----------------------------------
-
-### Google claims the exact matching feature is merely unintuitive, not broken
-
-[Danny Sullivan (Google's public Search Liaison)](https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/1493702054673485826):
-
-> I work for Google Search, passed your feedback along, thanks. You said in the post that quotes don't give exact matches. They really do. Honest. Put a word or phrase in quotes, that's what we'll match. If anyone has an example where they feel it doesn't, please let me know...
-
-> Here's why people often think quoting with Google doesn't work when it really does (I've looked a huge number of these reports).
->
-> 1. We match ALT text
-> 2. We match text not readily visible, such as in a menu or small text
-> 3. Page has changed since we indexed it
-> 4. Punctuation...
-
-> Punctuation comes into play if you did a quoted search like "dog cat" and there's text that says "dog, cat" then we'll see that without the punctuation. That doesn't seem a major issue but we're looking at if we could improve there.
-
-### And Google seems to be right so far
-
-Every example of exact matching not working so far can be traced back to issues with punctuation, alt text, etc.
-
-For example, one proposed [failing query](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30355528) was "quotes don't give". But HN user [saalweachter](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30356152) has pointed out that it is a very intricate punctuation problem.
-
-> For instances, on the \["quotes don't give"\] example, the first result I get is https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/never-give-up
-
-> If I do a find-in-page for "quotes don't give", I get zero results. Oh no! Perfidy!
-
-> ... but, if you look more closely, you'll find this string waaaaay down at the bottom:
-
-> tags: don-t-give-up, don-t-give-up-on-your-dreams, don-t-give-up-on-yourself, don-t-give-up-quotes, don-t-give-up-the-fight, encouragement, ...
-
-> Thanks to the wonders of tokenization, that "don-t-give-up-quotes, don-t-give-up-the-fight" gives you the string of tokens, "don t give up quotes don t give up the fight", which contains the exact phrase "quotes don t give", which is the tokenization of the phrase "quotes don't give".
-
-[Danny Sullivan (Google's public Search Liaison)](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30356382):
-
-> And...as noted in another reply below, in the first result, if you look at the cached page that shows the ENTIRE page that we indexed (rather than the paginated version you land on), there's this text:
-
-> quotes, don-t-give-up-the-fight
-
-> with when you remove the punctation, is the match:
-
-> quotes dont give
-
-> And I get that this can be frustrating, that we don't consider punctation in a quoted search. That's not a new change, however. It's been that way for ages. But as I also said, it's something we might revisit.
-
-Appendix 2: Google just had record profits, you are obviously wrong, and Google isn't dying.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
-I never said that Google wasn't making money. In fact, if Google really is squeezing every last cent out of ads without regard to search quality, I would expect their revenue to be at an all time high.
-
-I am saying that the quality of search results are declining. This may eventually lead to a decrease in revenue, but has not yet.
-
-Appendix 3: Seriously, what are you talking about? My search results are perfect.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
-If you think your search results are perfect (without appending reddit), then you're probably right. If every single person agreed that Google search results were trash, then Google would already be bankrupt.
-
-Perhaps it is more likely that 80% of people think Google is good enough, and 20% think Google sucks.
-
-I do suspect that the 20% will be growing in number though.
-
-Appendix 4: \*Yawn\*, this is the 87th time someone has claimed that Google search is dying in the last 20 years. This is a big meme in the SEO world.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
-_"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated" - Google, probably_
-
-You're right, there's been a new article bashing Google every few months for the last 20 years straight. It's probably nothing.
-
-Still, it is a bit interesting that this short and simple post is now one of the most upvoted things of all time on Hacker News. There must be a lot of people who resonate with it this time around.
-
-Hard to tell if something significant has changed.
-
-Appendix 5: Random redditor explains it succinctly
---------------------------------------------------
-
-[u/a\_latvian\_potato](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/st9ri1/comment/hx3zubc/):
-
-> I think I understand what this article is trying to say. It's not saying that Google's search technology is worse or that people don't use Google to search. It's saying that people trust less of the results Google shows compared to seeing discussions of it on Reddit.
-
-> For instance, if I'm looking to see reviews of the Honda Civic 2022 or whatever, I actually do find myself typing "Honda Civic review reddit" instead of "Honda Civic review". This is because I want to see what real people and enthusiasts (on r/cars or whatever) are talking about the car, rather than the top results at Google which are basically just paid reviews advertising the car anyway.
-
-> Even though I kinda know people in Reddit are just as capable of spouting BS that are completely wrong, I find the discussions more authentic anyway than the corporate speak the "big websites" have on their articles that Google shows me.
-
-Appendix 6: A fun comic by [@zenacomics](https://twitter.com/zenacomics/)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
-
-
-Appendix 7: More thoughts on organizing information on the internet
--------------------------------------------------------------------
-
-If you want some more in-depth thoughts on this subject, you should check out [this post I wrote a year ago](https://dkb.io/post/organize-the-world-information) about all the different ways we could organize information usefully on the internet.
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-```button
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-^button-H-TownUnitedAnUnlikelySoccerPowerRisesinTexasNSave
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-
-# H-Town United: An Unlikely Soccer Power Rises in Texas
-
-One day last fall, Vincenzo Cox, the boys varsity soccer coach at Elsik High School, was catching up on email when he spotted a message that made him spring to attention. It was from Marlene Acuña, who works in the school’s English as a second language program. Cox makes a point of sending Acuña team T-shirts, as a thank-you for all the times she’s alerted him to new kids who turned out to be good soccer players. Acuña had just met with a seventeen-year-old who had recently arrived from Honduras. He looked athletic and said he loved to play *fútbol*. Would Cox like to meet him?
-
-Elsik is one of three high schools within four city blocks of one another in Alief (pronounced with a long *a*), a southwest Houston neighborhood densely packed with immigrants and refugees from around the world. Students in the Alief school district are native speakers of more than ninety languages. Many arrive knowing little English, and some have had barely any formal education at all. Although the district has programs to bring those kids along academically, Acuña also tries to steer new students toward activities that reflect their interests, “to find something to keep them motivated.”
-
-When Hector Rodriguez showed up a few weeks into the academic year, he told Acuña he’d come to join his dad and uncle, who had migrated to Alief ahead of him, seeking work and “looking for a better future.” In Honduras, gang violence, corruption, and brutal military policing have led thousands to pursue new lives in the U.S., many of them in Alief. Hector’s siblings and mother were still back home, unable to afford the costly and dangerous trip north.
-
-
-
-Vincenzo Cox at practice.Photograph by Arturo Olmos
-
-Later that day, when Cox saw Hector in the hallway, he decided to give him a kind of informal tryout right there on the spot, using a soccer ball he keeps in the classroom where he teaches U.S. government. After juggling the ball for a moment, Cox flipped it over to Hector, who didn’t blink. Compact and sinewy, with a puff of black hair and dangly cross earrings, the teen kept the ball moving with his feet as casually and nimbly as if he were using his hands, confining his movements to a tight, controlled space. He didn’t even take off his backpack—always a good sign, Cox has found.
-
-Experience has taught Cox that muscular kids sometimes turn out to be less skilled on the field, but Hector looked like an exception. Time would tell, but for now, Cox penciled him straight into the lineup.
-
-The coach had reason for such urgency. Over the past decade, the Elsik Rams have grown into one of the best boys soccer teams in the country, thanks in large part to the river of talent that flows into Alief every year. Cox’s 2018 squad won a state championship in Texas’s most competitive division, 6A, and finished the season ranked number one in the nation. But this past fall was different from any other Cox had faced in his fourteen years at the school. COVID-19 and a handful of other bad breaks had depleted the roster and throttled Elsik’s attempts to win another title. Coming into the 2021–2022 season, the program was on unsure footing, and Cox was looking to fill holes throughout his lineup. A powerful new forward would plug in nicely.
-
-About half of this year’s Elsik players were born outside the U.S. In addition to Honduras, they come from El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Nigeria, the Republic of the Congo, Senegal, Vietnam, and Mexico. Many hadn’t played organized soccer before high school. Hector came up playing in the streets of La Ceiba, a port city of roughly 200,000 on the Gulf of Honduras. Senior defender Toliat Ajuwon grew up competing barefoot in Nigeria, braving “no-mercy” pickup games he said were more aggressive than anything he’d seen in the States. Junior midfielder Oumar Berete arrived last year from Senegal, where “nine out of ten kids want to be a soccer player” and where he played informal games on the beach but never had a proper coach.
-
-> “They start to see the good in each other. They start connecting. And once I can get to that point, I can get them to run through a brick wall for each other.”
-
-On the other end of the spectrum, senior team captain Javier Ordonez learned to play in cleats on Texas grass. He was raised in Fort Bend County, twenty miles southwest of Alief, and came to the Rams with years of experience in youth soccer clubs. In some ways, his circumstances reflect the dreams of many of his teammates and their families. His father, an assistant principal at Elsik, came to the U.S. from Honduras at age five, before eventually studying at Baylor University and beginning a career in education. The Ordonezes toiled for years to recapture the success they’d had back home, where Javier’s grandfather had been a physician. Now Javier aims to go into business or medicine, if not professional soccer. He’s on track to be the valedictorian of Elsik’s class of 2022.
-
-Nearly 12,000 students attend the three major high schools in Alief. A lottery determines who enrolls in which school, so each soccer team should draw equally from the same talent pool. Yet Elsik’s neighbors often struggle, while the Rams have been a powerhouse for much of Cox’s tenure. Ask any of the players why Elsik is different, and you’ll get the same answer: “We’re family.” Cox is the patriarch who works every angle he can to get the most out of his crew. Elsik soccer, for the boys skilled enough to make the team, provides a much-needed support network. It’s an alternative to gangs and other neighborhood strife and a potential ticket to college.
-
-On the field, these teens create the kind of magic only witnessed when athletes feed off one another’s strengths and become greater than the sum of their parts. “They steal moves from each other,” Cox said. “Fakes, feints, no-look passes—and then, the next thing you know, they’re perfecting them. They start to see the good in each other. They start connecting. And once I can get to that point, I can get them to run through a brick wall for each other.”
-
-
-
-Elsik players move the goal during practice.Photograph by Arturo Olmos
-
-On a warm mid-November day, just outside the windowless brown-brick Elsik gym, the 49-year-old Cox strode around the practice field shouting numbers from one to ten in English and Spanish. Spread across the pitch were ten numbered orange construction barrels serving as training dummies. Assistant coach Brian Meza, a former Elsik midfielder, had spotted the barrels one day while driving to Galveston for a fishing trip. It looked like they were being discarded, so he called Cox, who hurried down in his pickup. They each stacked a few in their trucks and took them back to Houston. High-end inflatable or steel mannequins can cost hundreds of dollars each, but Cox, with an annual budget of $3,600 to provide uniforms and equipment for the varsity, JV, and freshman soccer teams, has to be scrappier than that.
-
-Whenever Cox shouted a barrel’s number, the players shifted to where they’d need to be if that imaginary player had the ball. After practice, Cox told me the point of the drill was to work on spacing and build awareness of defensive assignments. The best Rams teams function as a unit, he said. When an opponent moves the ball, every player knows what to do and what his teammates should be doing. On offense, it’s the same story. There’s little dribbling. The team’s passes zip around the field, usually a step or two ahead of opposing defenders, always building to an attack. Although Elsik players often possess impressive individual skills and athleticism before they join the team, it’s not easy getting a group as varied as the Rams to play connected, unselfish soccer. Cox’s feat isn’t just assembling all that talent; it’s marshaling it into a system.
-
-As we walked off the field, the coach interrupted his explanation and called over to a student equipment manager: “I need to take those pinnies home and wash them, so once you get them all together, leave them in the office!” Cox cleans the team’s uniforms at home because he worries they might get stolen from the washing machines at school. He tries to stretch each set of game uniforms for four or five years, which can be a challenge, especially for the white jerseys the team wears at away games.
-
-Doing laundry is one of many ways Cox’s job can look as much like parenting as teaching. On game days, he’ll bring fresh fruit for his players, many of whom don’t always get a square meal at home. If a player takes on part-time work at Pizza Hut, Cox might help him find a better-paying gig coaching youth soccer. If a player is struggling in class, Cox will help get him a tutor.
-
-Other challenges that come with the position are more persistent, like the termites chewing up the particleboard gear cabinets. Or the time last fall when the team was reviewing video on a Saturday morning and the players who had cars emerged from the session to find that vandals had smashed the windows of all but one. In that case, senior Erik Andrade posted in the team group chat that he knew a guy who could fix the windows at a discount. (“One of the benefits of Alief,” Cox told me. “You can find cheap work done basically off market.”)
-
-He led me to his crowded office, its cinder-block walls painted Elsik’s bright shade of blue, to continue explaining his system. Bald and round-faced, with a welcoming smile and a teacher’s habit of repeating certain phrases for emphasis—“yes, yes”—he wore black track pants tight around the ankles and a training shirt that clung to his well-muscled chest and arms. For two hours, Cox spoke almost uninterrupted, except when one of the team’s former equipment managers stopped by to ask if the coach would like to see his new truck. One minute Cox would be near tears describing a player’s personal challenges. The next he’d be pulling up game tape to illustrate the finer points of passing strategy or show how hard other teams foul the Rams.
-
-After one video of midfielder Zamir Gonzalez getting the ball and two teammates immediately knowing where to run to create an imbalance for the other side, the coach cut himself off. “Hector doesn’t have a clue about this stuff,” he said, waving his arms for emphasis. Two years ago, he added, Zamir was basically what Hector is today. Zamir came to Texas from Honduras with tremendous raw talent but only street soccer experience. Now he’s one of the team’s key members, a playmaker with masterful ball control who relays passes all over the field.
-
-Normally, it would take a new arrival like Hector a year to get comfortable within Cox’s system, but this season, because of gaps in the roster, he’d be starting right away at center forward. “He came in here, and we showed him a video,” Cox said, standing in front of a big TV he’d wedged into the corner of his office, “and he was like, ‘What kind of place is this, showing videos? Is this like a professional organization?’ ”
-
-
-
-Cox leads a video session.Photograph by Arturo Olmos
-
-Vincenzo Cox grew up the son of an Army sergeant who was stationed in Germany and Italy, where soccer was the dominant sport. He played on a team of American kids who would travel off base to take on German clubs, and he found himself stunned by how disciplined they were, how rarely they were sloppy with the ball, and how hard his teammates had to work to keep up.
-
-After his family moved to Miami, when he was in high school, Cox turned his attention to track and field. He was a promising sprinter, but he remembers vividly the day he was late to a team meeting because he’d stopped at the library to grab a copy of *Track & Field News* featuring Leroy Burrell, then the “world’s fastest human,” on the cover. Cox, an underclassman at the time, was slower than his older, stronger teammates, and as he walked into the locker room, he overheard his coach telling the group, “Vincenzo couldn’t win a race on a motorcycle.”
-
-It was a crushing moment, but he used it to fuel his motivation as he matured physically—not to prove the coach wrong so much as to see how far he could push himself. He also vowed to never put other athletes down. He ended up landing a track scholarship to the University of Houston, where renowned Cougars coach Tom Tellez had trained Burrell, as well as Olympic sprinting legend Carl Lewis. When Cox attended U of H in the mid-nineties, both Burrell and Lewis still worked out at the school’s facility.
-
-Cox didn’t realize it at the time, but his international background allowed him to feel at ease and communicate effectively with coaches and teammates from different backgrounds—not just the Black sprinters who looked like him, but the pole-vaulters, the veterans like Burrell, and the white cross-country runners. “A lot of sprinters are Black, and you get some kids from the hood,” Cox told me. “If they needed to talk to the coach, they’d ask me to do it for them. I was kind of naive and didn’t realize until years later that they weren’t comfortable.” He wound up serving as an interpreter between the different worlds that collided on the team.
-
-Burrell was looking for a new training partner back then, and Cox stepped into the role. It was the beginning of a close friendship that continues to this day. “He’d drag me around the track on the longer stuff, and I’d drag him around the track on the faster stuff,” Burrell told me. “He had the talent and the work ethic that he probably could have gone a little farther if things had fallen his way. But perhaps it wasn’t meant to be, and it put him on the path to where he is now, helping others.”
-
-Cox failed to make the 1996 Olympic team at the U.S. trials, then pursued professional soccer for a few years after college. He tried out for several teams in England and the States but didn’t land a spot, so he joined the Army as a reservist and eventually found work teaching special ed at a Houston elementary school. In 2004 he and seven other members of his reserve unit were called up, and he found himself in Iraq, working in combat medical supply and losing chunks of hair after every low helicopter flight over a combat zone. When he came home in 2006, he figured his old job would be waiting, but instead the district placed him at Elsik for what he thought would be a three-month gig. A year later, he was still there, and the head soccer coach was stepping down. Cox, who’d been volunteering as an assistant, slid into the job of his life.
-
-Elsik has more than four thousand students—of whom almost 60 percent are Latino, 27 percent Black, 10 percent Asian, and 3 percent white. Nearly 80 percent of the students are economically disadvantaged, and a quarter are still learning English. Cox himself is an outsider: a Black American in a school full of Black Africans who don’t always know what to make of him, a Black soccer coach in a country that has relatively few of them. He fit right in at Elsik.
-
-
-
-Hector Rodriguez dribbles the ball during a home game against Shadow Creek.Photograph by Arturo Olmos
-
-Cox spent the bulk of his first year’s budget on new practice uniforms. Suddenly, boys who’d been wearing whatever mesh basketball shorts and T-shirts they could scrounge up from home were given fresh blue-and-white Adidas kits, and not just for game days. “You look better, you feel better, you train better,” Cox said.
-
-During his fourth year, Cox noticed that the team’s Latino and Black players weren’t getting along. One day that season, he arrived at practice and found his players on the verge of a brawl, with several of them holding teammates back from throwing punches. He broke up the fight, and the next day, in the locker room before a game, he wrote the players’ names on the whiteboard, sorted by race, and told them to come up with their own formation. Then he slammed the door and walked to the field without them.
-
-They started the game with a lineup organized around friendships and ethnic groups—Mexicans here, Nigerians there, and so on. Instead of sharing the ball and looking to set one another up for shots on goal, the players seemed to decide where to pass based on whether the teammate on the receiving end looked like them or spoke the same language at home. By halftime, with the team in disarray, the teens were begging Cox to step in.
-
-A few days later, during a pregame meeting, he singled out two leaders, one Latino and one Black. “You want to know something?” he asked them. “Whenever I look over video, I see that when Oscar and Aniekan make connections on passes, the whole team starts playing better.” The two looked across the room at each other—like, *Hey, the game goes through us*—and on the field that day, the rest of the team followed their lead. Cox has a picture saved on his phone of two players from that season hugging after the game. That was the first Elsik team to win the district championship. The next year, the same group won the regional tournament and reached the state semifinals.
-
-Hans Kleinschmidt, who until last year coached against Elsik at the Woodlands High School, credits the Rams’ success under Cox to their combination of different styles of play from different parts of the world. “Generally speaking, the Hispanic players are very creative and dynamic with the ball and take pride in being able to take players one-on-one. And then the population who have ties to Africa and the Caribbean, they’re more athletic. And they kind of meld together. The Hispanic kids become bigger and stronger because they want to match their teammates, and the non-Hispanic kids are like, ‘Hey, I’m going to be just as creative on the ball as you are.’ And so in pregame warm-up, you see them all juggling, taking each other on one-on-one, emulating each other’s moves. They force each other to compete. You hate to play against it, but it’s fun to watch.”
-
-He still remembers the first time the Woodlands scrimmaged one of Cox’s teams: “They show up at the stadium, and they get off the bus, and the discipline that is there, the enthusiasm that is there, the organization, the eagerness—you could just tell there was a different energy. And they were super, super polite.”
-
-As Kleinschmidt sees it, Elsik’s rise rewrote the script for prep soccer, which he told me has typically been considered “a country club sport, like golf and tennis and swimming. It’s generally dominated by the suburban communities, the Woodlands, the Westlakes, the Southlakes”—largely because those kids can afford to play on club teams that provide year-round training, a system that can cost families tens of thousands of dollars annually, depending on flights and hotels for travel tournaments. Not only do Elsik’s players thrive outside that system, they’ve changed how the game is played at the elite high school level.
-
-At the Woodlands, Kleinschmidt said, players almost always come from one club system, with a tendency to play what he jokingly calls “generic suburban soccer.” They’re adept at protecting the ball and passing, “but they don’t want to take risks because they don’t want to mess up,” he explained. “So they play really, really conservatively.”
-
-Then, along comes Elsik, where the players have the dexterity and athleticism to win one-on-one challenges, plus Cox teaching them to move the ball. “He tells them, ‘You win the ball, and then you find a teammate down the field who has space and time and get him the ball as fast as you possibly can. You make your teammate look good,’ ” Kleinschmidt said. “When he has ten guys who can do that, how do you play against that?”
-
-By 2018, Elsik was regularly ranked among the best high school soccer programs in Texas and often alongside the top teams nationally. And the boys’ grades were usually pretty good too. This year’s squad has five seniors in the top 10 percent of their graduating class. But many students in Alief face obstacles that others don’t—language barriers, less family support, more urgency to contribute to the household income. Even with access to ESL programs and help from coaches, “there are always a couple that will struggle, and we’ve got to stay on them,” Cox said.
-
-It’s just another challenge of the job. So is the notoriety that comes with the Rams’ success. Cox showed me video after video of his players being knocked down, fouled, bloodied, sometimes even punched. He knows his boys are perfectly capable of fighting back, but he enforces a strict rule that the Rams do not foul on purpose unless it’s necessary to save a game. They do not slide tackle, even though it’s legal. They do not respond to trash talk, not even the racist kind. Cox told me about a time one of his players had to hold *him* back after an opponent called a teammate a racial slur and told him to go back to where he came from. “He said, ‘Coach, stay quiet. I will get the goal.’ And then he went and scored.”
-
-Despite the target on the team’s back, Elsik kept winning. Success became so routine that a tie felt like a loss and a point scored against Elsik was simply unacceptable. Any result besides a shutout carried a twinge of dissatisfaction. The Rams rolled into the 2018 playoffs with an undefeated record that season. After claiming the regional title, Elsik beat the Irving Tigers 3–1 in the first round of the state tourney to set up a meeting with the San Antonio Reagan Rattlers in the final. The Rams entered that game with a 21–0–2 record and a roster built around nineteen players from eleven countries.
-
-> Even with access to ESL programs and help from coaches, “there are always a couple that will struggle, and we’ve got to stay on them,” Cox said.
-
-After Elsik took an early lead on a penalty kick, the game was locked in a 1–0 stalemate. Then, with 28 minutes left in the second half, the referees gave Elsik senior Daniel Duran a red card for an uncharacteristically aggressive
-tackle—meaning he would be ejected, and Elsik would have to finish the game with ten players on the field against Reagan’s eleven.
-
-The Rattlers began a relentless attack, firing off shot after shot and putting the game’s outcome on the shoulders of Rams goalie Eliaz Zamora. With ten minutes left, he threw himself into the air to punch away a rocket of a strike, a save that newspapers would hail as “spectacular.” He nearly equaled that play on another clutch save with two minutes left. The final score: Elsik 1, Reagan 0. Zamora, who was named the tournament MVP, had six saves.
-
-It was not only Elsik soccer’s first state title, but also the first championship for any boys team in the modern history of Alief’s school district. The achievement was capped off by two national polls rating Elsik number one in the country in their season-ending rankings. Without an interstate tournament for high school soccer, this was as close as a team could come to winning a national title, and the Elsik Rams were suddenly Houston’s unlikeliest hometown heroes.
-
-
-
-Elsik players listen to a halftime speech from Cox.Photograph by Arturo Olmos
-
-Most teams would get championship rings after a run like Elsik had in 2018, but that kind of hardware tends to cost $350 or $400 apiece—more money than most of the players could spare for commemorative bling, even with the principal offering school funds to cover $150 of each ring. Instead, a friend of Cox’s put him in touch with Uptown Diamond, a jeweler in River Oaks that usually serves Houston’s socialites and is the go-to for affluent high school teams and major Texas universities looking to order elaborate championship rings. The owner, the late Rick Antona (he died of COVID in 2021), agreed to make rings for Elsik and price them at $200 each, with the students paying $50 and the school picking up the difference. The rings were silver and blue, with the word “Elsik” in the center and “UIL State–National Champions” around the edges.
-
-After the season, the champs gathered at Pitch 25, an indoor soccer venue, for a ring ceremony. Local news crews showed up, as did Houston mayor Sylvester Turner, who posed for photos with the team and said a few words about resilience and civic pride. But then, three months later, Elsik’s principal determined that allowing the players to keep their rings might run afoul of state rules against athletes receiving gifts. Cox hadn’t gone through official district channels to get approval for the jeweler’s discount. Uptown Diamond had to file a letter certifying that it had taken back the rings. Today, only one ring remains at the school—the one Cox bought. It sits behind glass in a trophy case in the main hallway at Elsik.
-
-By the time of the ring drama, the 2019 Rams season was already underway. Half of the players from the championship team had been sophomores, so this squad was arguably even better—though they ended up losing in the state semifinals after a player on the opposing team caught fire in the second half, scoring two unassisted goals in two minutes.
-
-The next year, 2020, was shaping up to be Elsik’s best yet. The 2018 sophomores were now seniors, and up-and-coming star Javier Ordonez was proving to be, if not the most gifted athlete, perhaps the most dedicated and versatile player Cox had ever coached, a field general who got regular varsity playing time even as a freshman. “We were dangerous,” Javier told me. “The team had been playing together so long, we already knew what each other was going to do. Like, if the forwards lost the ball, they already knew we were going to win it back fast and give it back to them. We were making, like, four hundred, five hundred passes a game. It was crisp.”
-
-The Rams were 21–0–1, their best record ever, with one game left in the regular season, when COVID shut everything down. There would be no regional tournament, no state tournament—no return to glory. The best year ever became a lost year.
-
-By 2021, all those seniors had graduated, and remote classes hit the team hard. Students everywhere have suffered in the pandemic, but the Rams struggled more than most. Without their ever-present coach admonishing them to keep up with schoolwork and checking in on them, eight players missed games because they had failed online classes and were no longer eligible to compete. One stopped going to school entirely and failed every subject. Another, who lives in an apartment complex known to be among Alief’s roughest, was lucky to be alive after a stray bullet whizzed into his car, passed through his seat, and struck his shoulder. Fortunately, the bullet had lost so much momentum by the time it hit him that it caused only a deep bruise, and the player missed just one game.
-
-And yet the Rams almost made it back to the state tournament. They finished the regular season 18–2–4 and headed into the regional championship eyeing another title. On the morning of the game, though, the Elsik goalkeeper complained of severe stomach pain. The first- and second-string goalies were already academically ineligible, and now the third-stringer was too sick to play. It turned out he’d been living on little more than soda and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and now, with postseason pressure thrown into the mix, his guts were striking back. The JV goalie was also out for academic reasons, so Cox was forced to field the freshman team’s fourteen-year-old backup keeper. Elsik lost 2–1 to Jersey Village, and their season ended two wins short of the state final. Cox didn’t allow players to criticize the overmatched goalie’s effort. “He should never have been put in this position,” Cox told the team. “We can’t be mad at him.”
-
-Last December, the rhythmic thunk of soccer balls ricocheting around the Elsik practice field punctuated the thrum of traffic along the nearby Westpark Tollway. It was a couple of weeks before the start of the season, and Cox had broken the team up for a round of silent five-on-five scrimmages, no talking allowed, in order to practice field awareness without giving away information to opponents. The players needed to just know what one another were doing, the way the left hand knows what the right is doing, the way siblings know. (Precisely how Cox teaches them to do that, he said, was a trade secret.)
-
-Nothing gets Cox more worked up than a player making a bad pass or not being situationally aware—say, playing the ball to the left when there’s a clearer route forward to the right. “It makes Coach want to pull out his hair, even though he doesn’t have hair,” Javier told me. Situational awareness is the heart of Cox’s program and a skill that a seasoned player like Javier has mastered—as well as one that, if undeveloped, can keep a gifted but green player like Hector from realizing his potential. Cox doesn’t try to suppress players’ individuality, but he does need it to work in service of the larger system.
-
-Playing for Cox, Javier said, is intense—“because of the pressure, because it’s a tradition that you have to uphold. He’ll make you a winner, but you’re going to have to sacrifice for that. He’ll just tear into you one day, and you’re like, ‘Man, I was already having a bad day of school.’ ”
-
-Cox compares Javier to a basketball point guard, because even though he plays mostly in the backfield, Elsik’s attacks often originate with him. That versatility, combined with his academic standing, has attracted recruiters from several prestigious universities—Johns Hopkins, UCLA, UNC–Chapel Hill. But back in December, he hadn’t committed to any of them. His heart was set on Stanford.
-
-About halfway through practice that day, a man in his early twenties, dressed in dusty work boots, jeans, and blade-style sunglasses, appeared on the sideline. He nodded at the silent drill happening on the field and said he thought Coach Cox had borrowed it from the English Premier League club Manchester City. “It’s like giving them steroids,” he said. “If they can do this, they’re playing with something that other teams don’t have.”
-
-The visitor turned out to be Eliaz Zamora, the goalkeeper who saved the 2018 state championship. That game had been his last as a Ram. After high school, he tried to play soccer at Western Texas College, in Snyder, and then at East Texas Baptist University, in Marshall—but neither stuck. “I fell out of love with the game,” he said. Once he left Elsik, he found himself around players with egos, players who bragged about their accomplishments, players who seemed to be in it for themselves more than for the team.
-
-I wondered, did he think that was a difference between high school and college, or was it a difference between Elsik and elsewhere? “There’s always going to be locker room stuff,” he said, “but it’s different here.” Cox, he said, was that difference. Zamora had decided to leave college and was working on a construction crew for his dad. “Now that I’ve got that part of my life figured out, I have some time, and I thought maybe I could help out around here.” He wondered if Cox might have room for him as an assistant at some point.
-
-That’s how family works, Zamora figured. They welcome you back. He was three years out from Elsik, but he was still a Ram. Cox starts a new group chat for each incoming team and keeps the old ones going. That way, the bond between Elsik players lives on after graduation. When someone needs work or finds himself in a jam, another player or a coach is ready to help. When Gafar Dauda, a defender from Nigeria who had graduated in 2013, moved into a new apartment years later, Cox showed up with his pickup and helped lug furniture.
-
-Zamora’s experience echoed something Javier had told me about transferring to Elsik. “Where I used to go to school, I feel like people are not as genuine,” he said. “People were always fronting, trying to flaunt and show what they had. And here it’s just like, ‘I have nothing. Look at me—this is who I am.’ You get to see who everybody is. When you look at them, you don’t feel played in any way. You’re just like, ‘That’s my friend.’ ”
-
-
-
-Wren and Asa Marsh at practice.Photograph by Arturo Olmos
-
-The first game of the 2022 season, against El Paso Franklin, came on a Thursday in early January, the opener of a weekend-long tournament. (In Texas—as in Florida and California—high school soccer is a spring sport.) The Rams showed up in a yellow school bus, gathered on a practice field, and, a few minutes before kickoff, lined up shoulder to shoulder in two straight rows to enter the stadium. They didn’t smile; they didn’t clown around or strut. They just walked in quietly, to broadcast the team’s discipline—and perhaps to inspire a little fear in their opponents.
-
-Javier told me he felt hopeful the team could win the state championship this year, even given the question marks hanging over the roster after the past two seasons’ hardships. He had suited up and agreed to play in the opener, but he was nursing a niggling thigh injury that he’d suffered over winter break and knew he wasn’t 100 percent.
-
-Zamir Gonzalez, the star midfielder, was recovering from a strained groin, and Cox was planning to keep him on the bench unless things got desperate. And a couple players simply hadn’t returned from winter break, Cox said. It was a type of phone call he’s come to expect. “Out of time,” he calls it —when immigration issues or family circumstances pull a player away from the team. *Coach, I’m not coming back from Mexico*. A few younger players, including Javier’s freshman brother, Jacob, came along to fill in. The fourteen-year-old looked like a child next to the older players, his slender limbs almost flopping around in comparison to the tightly muscled tree trunks that Hector was using to kick goals during warm-ups.
-
-On the sideline, the Rams linked arms in a circle. Cox gave a brief pep talk, then walked away as the boys began to sway back and forth and their voices began a chant that picked up speed with the group’s motion—*uh, uh, uh, uh, ah, ah, ahhhhh!*—until the circle collapsed into a tight cluster of fired-up, shouting teenagers. Javier’s voice rose above the rest: “Family on one . . . Family on one! Three, two, one—”
-
-The group shouted back, in unison, “Family!”
-
-After months of anticipation and practice, Elsik’s season started without fanfare. Suddenly, the players were connecting on passes, and the ball was moving, mostly in the direction of the Franklin goal. The biggest difference, aside from the crisp blue game uniforms, was Cox’s voice on the sideline. In conversation, the coach is soft-spoken and gentle in a way that seems all the more pronounced in contrast to his track star’s physique. In practice, he paces, tightly coiled, and calls out poor decisions with a higher level of intensity. And in games, he transforms into the unforgiving drill sergeant Javier described.
-
-“Why’d you let it *bounce* again?!” “Why’d you *take* so long?” “No foul! No foul!” “Carlos!” “Hector, look! *¡Mira!*”
-
-Within five minutes, Elsik was up 1–0 on a goal by Carlos Benitez, a forward from El Salvador. Ten minutes later, Hector drove in a second goal. Huddled at halftime, Cox told Oumar Berete to stop over-dribbling in the backfield—“You’re trying to do too much! That’s not your position!”—and then addressed the score. “Two-nothing is not good,” he said, his voice now measured. “You make a few mistakes, it’s a whole different game.” He paused to let the boys absorb the fact that they hadn’t put the game away yet. “People have been talking s— about you,” he said. “The only way you prove them wrong is out here on the field.”
-
-Elsik wound up winning 3–0 on an elegant strike by freshman fill-in Jacob
-Ordonez, who arced the ball in from the right sideline, after which his teammates mobbed him. The Rams went on to sweep the tournament, starting the year with four quick wins, two of them close.
-
-“The boys are learning, and hopefully it’ll snowball,” Cox told me the following Tuesday. “We made the games tough. They thought it was going to be easier. But it was good for this group to see what it’s like to be winning.” He’d spent Monday’s practice showing them how they looked on 4K video. “Some of the newer arrivals were in shock. Hector’s never seen himself on-screen like that, and to be under a microscope in front of twenty of your teammates, it’s a lot. Oumar is traumatized by some of the balls he thought were good balls. But it’s a learning curve. I have to be truthful with them, or else we won’t improve.”
-
-
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-The Rams huddle before a game this season.Photograph by Arturo Olmos
-
-There are times when the hurdles life puts in front of his team just break Cox’s heart. When a player has to leave town for a bit because his dad’s been drinking again and it’s not safe in the house. When a kid shows up for high school who doesn’t know his ABC’s. When Cox hears about rival coaches speculating that he has recruiting pipelines to Central America and Africa. When he can’t procure a decent charter bus to take his boys to the state championship and has to show up in a rattletrap with a broken AC unit—while the Elsik football team whisks off to away games in sleek white coaches with tinted windows. The Rams are hardly a football juggernaut—which makes sense in an area that includes many students who didn’t grow up with the sport—but football is a revenue producer that can draw a few thousand paying spectators on Friday nights.
-
-Cox is one of the finest high school coaches in any sport in the state today. He is a mentor to young men who otherwise might not have one. He was a world-class athlete in his own right. And yet there are times when he can’t help feeling like a second-class citizen. Sometimes his efforts fall short, and a kid fails out. Sometimes he wonders how much longer he can do this.
-
-And yet he can’t bring himself to do anything else. About ten years ago, Hans Kleinschmidt tried to hire Cox as his successor at the Woodlands, one of the premier public high schools in Texas. Cox could have taken over a storied team in a prosperous community full of driven, hardworking kids who expect to succeed. Pretty much everything at the Woodlands is like that, from the robotics club to the choir to the soccer team. “I can’t believe I’m saying this,” he told Kleinschmidt, “but I can’t leave. I think I’m building something special here.”
-
-“I can see that,” Kleinschmidt replied. “I’m trying to get you away before you do that.”
-
-He was joking, but he was also right. “Vincenzo saw something in those kids and in that community that fit him and his style perfectly,” Kleinschmidt told me. And today, he knows, it would be even harder for Cox to leave for a similar job in some other community.
-
-Leroy Burrell thinks his friend might have a shot at coaching college soccer. “I do think he has some aspirations, but it’s not an easy path,” he told me. “There are very few coaches who can make that leap. He’s talented enough, but there aren’t that many men’s collegiate soccer programs to begin with, and they each have only three coaches.” That Cox would likely have to find a college job in Texas, where he’s got some name recognition, makes the universe of possible positions even narrower.
-
-Not that he has time to dwell on any of that. His workday starts at 7:20 a.m., and he’s busy teaching government until 10:58. Then he starts getting ready for soccer. Practice ends around 5 p.m., and then there’s homework to grade, game tape to review, college recruiters to deal with, and his team’s dirty laundry to clean. He’s still in the Army Reserve and reports to his post for a few days every month in the off-season. He’s active in his church. Whenever he can, he travels to Georgia, where his parents retired. Each summer, he takes a two-week “sabbatical” at home to recharge. “I just sit in and stay,” he said. “I don’t have to go anywhere.”
-
-He lives alone in a four-bedroom, two-story house in Stafford, fifteen minutes south of Elsik. His bedroom is downstairs, and the three upstairs are unoccupied. “I bought it with the hopes of getting married and having kids and a wife,” he told me. “But I don’t get a chance to, you know, meet that many new people in my life.”
-
-Cox sometimes wonders if he’ll ever have kids of his own. “I always say, when you have a child, you’re building another human being,” Cox said. “And I get to help people’s building projects when the kids are fourteen or fifteen, but I can only imagine what it’s like from zero to twelve or thirteen. I don’t use the word ‘love’ a lot around our program. I tell the whole team I love them, or if someone’s in a bad time, I tell them. But when you look at the root of what we’re teaching them, it’s that. When a kid improves in soccer, it builds so much trust to allow them to drop that teenage-pride guard so they can accept criticism and ask for help when they’re vulnerable. And when you see those moments, you don’t know exactly how, but it’ll end up changing someone’s life.”
-
-Sometimes the boys will give him advice. *Coach, go to a strip club. Coach, go meet somebody at a bar.* He hasn’t taken those suggestions, but he appreciates the sentiment. “I want my own wife. I want my own human building project,” he said. “I want that. I don’t know—I hope it’s in my cards.”
-
-
-
-Elsik’s JP Buitrago looks to pass during a home game against Shadow Creek.Photograph by Arturo Olmos
-
-The night of January 25 brought the kind of damp cold that sneaks into your bones and, if you don’t do something about it quickly, stays there. It was the night of the first district game of the season, against Alvin, a majority-Hispanic school halfway between Houston and Galveston. With Elsik’s next-door rival Hastings using the district’s eight-
-thousand-seat stadium for its home soccer game that evening, the Rams played on a smaller auxiliary field, where a broken floodlight array left a quarter of the pitch blanketed in darkness. Cox prefers the big field, which favors the Rams’ passing game. The shorter and narrower dimensions of the secondary surface would dull the impact of Elsik’s careful spacing.
-
-Elsik was 6–0 coming into the game, although the wins hadn’t all looked easy. Still, according to Prepsoccer.net, the Rams were good enough to be ranked third in the nation, behind two other Texas teams, El Paso Eastlake and McKinney Boyd. “In the past, Elsik won with offense,” the website’s blurb read. “This year, so far, it’s been the defense. Last week, the Rams edged Northbrook 1–0 and pinned a 3–0 defeat on Stratford. In Elsik’s last three matches, five goals have been enough to extend the perfect start.”
-
-Cox doesn’t put much stock in rankings, especially the national ones with fuzzy methodology. But he wants the boys to win, and he asked them early in the season what their goals were. They wanted to go undefeated all the way to a state title, they told him. The Alvin Yellowjackets, with a 2–7–1 record, were by far the inferior team, but Cox has found that everyone brings a little something extra against Elsik.
-
-The game started with a bang, as the Rams got two shots off in the opening minutes, but then, almost out of nowhere, an Alvin player caught the Rams’ defense slacking and placed a shot perfectly in the upper left corner of the goal, the kind of one-in-fifty strike that can’t be stopped once it’s on its way. Elsik 0, Alvin 1.
-
-Cox was beside himself. Teams with losing records don’t score on the Rams—certainly not on Elsik’s home field, in the district opener, and when it puts them *behind*. “Oh my *gosh,* man!” the coach yelled, drawing out the “gosh,” his voice hoarse, his veins popping. “I can’t believe that!”
-
-A minute later, with Cox still pacing and yelling, Hector took a pass and charged right up the middle, his quads pumping and his body hunkering down like a cartoon race car flooring the gas into the final stretch—Lightning McQueen in soccer shorts. He transferred that momentum to the ball, which slammed into the net left of the goalie. The game was tied, thanks to sheer, overwhelming force.
-
-From that point on, the Rams controlled the ball almost entirely. Alvin would make occasional, opportunistic runs at the goal, but Elsik defenders would put a stop to that before anyone got a shot off. Meanwhile, the Rams swung the ball around the backfield, passing it left, center, right, center, until a lane opened to Zamir in the midfield, who would pivot and send the ball up the sideline, where a teammate could run it down and cross it to Hector charging up the middle.
-
-Elsik took shot after shot like that and dominated possession time. Yet on the sideline, Cox grew increasingly irate. No one escaped his wrath. “What are you waiting for?!” he’d shout when someone held the ball a second too long. “What are you thinking?!” when someone passed into traffic instead of to an open player. “Oh man! Oh man!” when a player should have passed instead of shooting.
-
-A couple of minutes into the second half, an Elsik defender scored on a header the one time a play took him far upfield. Hector kept breaking through for chances in front of the goal, but his shots either missed wide or got stopped. With a few minutes left, Elsik led 2–1 and appeared headed toward another hard-fought win over a team they’d expected to blow out.
-
-Then, with less than three minutes to play, Alvin got a free kick right outside the Elsik goal box, and although goalie Luis Hernandez got a hand on the ball, an Alvin player was able to tap in the rebound. Elsik scrambled together two more runs on goal, but both were hectic, failed campaigns. The game ended in a 2–2 tie.
-
-To look at every statistic but points, the Rams crushed their opponent. They attempted a staggering 53 shots to Alvin’s 6. That’s more shots than the Elsik basketball team put up the same night. They completed 543 passes to Alvin’s 170. The problem, Cox told me later, was shot selection. Taking care not to single out Hector, he lamented “wasted chances” and how hard it can be to get kids to listen. “It would be like if someone had a chance to put in an easy layup and they tried a roundhouse dunk instead. You don’t get any extra points for that! Just go ahead and put it in.”
-
-I pointed out that the 2018 championship team had two ties in its undefeated season. “Yes. Yes,” he said. “But I was always hoping for the *one*. Every coach has goals.” He couldn’t bring himself to say it outright. He wants the perfect season—no ties, maybe even no points allowed. He walked back to the locker room, where he told the team the only way they’d meet their goal for the season was one pass at a time.
-
-The Alvin tie dropped Elsik to sixth in the national rankings, but the Rams went on to win their next five games, including a pair of 5–1 drubbings on away fields in Pearland. Meanwhile, Stanford passed on Javier, who eventually chose to attend Johns Hopkins. Wren Marsh, one of the team’s top defenders, committed to play at Howard University, while Cox got busy helping seniors Zamir Gonzalez and Toliat Ajuwon pursue spots at other schools, likely local junior colleges that have come to see Elsik as a gold mine of talent.
-
-Halfway through February, the Rams logged another disappointing tie, this time against archrival Strake Jesuit, a wealthy private school just five miles east of Alief but a world away. Elsik led 1–0 for most of the game, but in the final ten minutes, Strake scored after one of its players got away with an apparent handball. Two Elsik players ended the game with red cards after protesting to the ref.
-
-Later that week, the Rams were scheduled to rematch Alvin on the road. Two days before the game, Cox got word that his mother was gravely ill. He caught the next flight to Augusta, Georgia, leaving assistant coach Brian Meza in charge of the team. During a layover in Charlotte, he learned that his mother had died. Her health had been declining, and he had known this was coming, just not so suddenly. As he wept in the airport and strangers asked him if they could help, his thoughts turned briefly to the Rams, and he realized he would miss an Elsik game for the first time since he’d arrived there.
-
-Meza decided not to try to inspire the players with a rousing speech about winning one for their coach. He didn’t share what was going on, other than that Cox was dealing with a family matter, because he didn’t want players flooding the coach with text messages while he was making funeral arrangements. Instead, Meza told them to block out the noise and focus on this one game. The kids had figured out what was going on anyway. Even the Alvin team knew; their coach sent flowers to Cox.
-
-Elsik won 8–0. It could have been 15–0. About halfway through the second half, the Alvin players essentially stopped trying. For the final twenty minutes, Elsik played keep-away at midfield. It looked like a practice drill, everyone spaced just so, the ball pinging crisply from player to player as seconds ticked off the game clock.
-
-Hector started on the bench and subbed in shortly after halftime. He scored almost immediately and followed his first goal with a second in quick succession, but by then the game was already over. Meza played down Hector’s reduced role—there were simply more experienced teammates ahead of him in the lineup, the coach said—but it looked as if one of the team’s great hopes for the year had been demoted.
-
-Then again, maybe less reliance on raw talent was a sign of the strength of Cox’s system. As the team jelled, it could afford to take some pressure off Hector and offer him more time to learn Elsik’s style of play. After just a couple of months, he was already a better passer, and he was spotting his mistakes on video. His attitude had begun to shift too. “He comes from a tough background, and his instinct is to protect himself first,” Meza said. But now he also looks out for his teammates.
-
-By early March, as the regular season ended, the Rams were 18–0–2 and fourth in the national rankings. They avenged the tie with Strake Jesuit in the final game, winning 1–0. By then, Cox had returned from Georgia, after two weeks of grieving and helping his father adjust. He told me that Elsik’s playoff fate would come down to that old sports truism: They’d take it one game at a time. Or one shot at a time; one pass at a time; one silent, automatic field-position adjustment at a time.
-
-Which they did, winning their first-round matchup against Clear Creek 3–2. The second-round game, at home against Pasadena, remained a scoreless tie through overtime and would be decided by penalty kicks. That’s where the Pasadena goalie cut short the Rams’ title hopes with a leaping save that dealt Elsik its first loss in Alief since 2017. Back in the locker room, Cox reminded the boys to hold their heads high and stay focused on schoolwork, now that the season had ended.
-
-Looking forward to 2023 and beyond, Cox knew that recent arrivals would keep flowing from the rest of the world into this Houston neighborhood. He knew Marlene Acuña would send along more prospects from her office to the hallway outside his classroom. Javier’s freshman brother would graduate to varsity. Hector would probably find his groove and become the unstoppable force Cox knew he could be. And the Elsik wins would continue to pile up. Maybe the state titles too, and someday perhaps even that perfect season—as long as there was someone around to recognize the treasure hidden in plain sight in Alief.
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-*This article originally appeared in the May 2022 issue of* Texas Monthly *with the headline “H-Town United.”* [*Subscribe today*](https://www.texasmonthly.com/subscribe/?ref=end-article)*.*
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-# Hazing, fighting, sexual assaults: How Valley Forge Military Academy devolved into “Lord of the Flies”
-
-Facts matter: [Sign up](https://www.motherjones.com/newsletters/?mj_oac=Article_Top_Support) for the free *Mother Jones Daily* newsletter. [Support](https://secure.motherjones.com/flex/mj/key/7LIGHTB/src/7AHPT01%7CPAHPT01) our nonprofit reporting. [Subscribe](https://secure.motherjones.com/flex/MOJ/SUBS/?p=SEGYJP&c=SEGYJC&d=SEGYJD&f=SEGYJF) to our print magazine.
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-On a chilly evening in September 2020, Jordan Schumacher solemnly patrolled the grounds of Valley Forge Military Academy, near his wit’s end. Weeks earlier, the school’s top brass had elevated the 20-year-old college sophomore to the highest rank available to cadets—first captain. A former Boy Scout who’d joined a junior ROTC program at age 11, he was proud of the promotion and ready to lead. But as he navigated the school’s toxic environment in his new role, he’d been feeling increasingly helpless and depressed.
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-Entrusting students in leadership roles was all well and good, but a dearth of healthy adult oversight and accountability had contributed to a culture replete with assaults, verbal abuse, hazing, and sexual violence that had resulted in police visits, lawsuits, and a cold war pitting recalcitrant trustees and administrators against reform-minded parents, alumni, and cadets. Out on patrol that night, Schumacher told me, he felt on “the brink of darkness.”
-
-The Forge, as insiders call it, resembles a cross between an East Coast prep school and a military installation. Its 100-acre campus is dotted with dormitories and academic buildings, but also with a war memorial, an obstacle course, and a parade field for drill formations. Nestled 20 miles north of Philadelphia, the private institution teaches middle school, high school, and junior college students. Some graduate as commissioned military officers, but all are subject to the customs and courtesies of military life, as well as its trials and traumas.
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-With school leaders doing little to address the fraught campus atmosphere, Schumacher had taken it upon himself to patrol the grounds as often as possible. This evening, walking along a mossy brick pathway, he spotted something suspicious: Behind a storage shed, out of sight of campus surveillance cameras, a group of upperclassmen was tormenting a few shivering plebes.
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-He’d stumbled upon an unsanctioned version of the “cap shield” exam, an induction rite wherein new students are quizzed on the Forge’s nearly 100-year history. The exam is the culmination of a boot camp of sorts for incoming college students. Those who pass are welcomed into the Corps of Cadets, which Schumacher now commanded, and rewarded with the cap shield medal, a brass badge depicting the mythical moment when General George Washington, standing on the Pennsylvania battleground for which the school was named, prayed for the survival of the fledgling American republic.
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-Schumacher had arrived on campus in 2019, excited by the Forge’s time-honored traditions and drawn to its curricula on counterterrorism and cybersecurity. A stocky history nerd with dark brown hair, he spent hours memorizing school trivia and passed his cap shield exam in near-record time. But he soon came to see the exam as an empty ritual. It revolved around lofty principles, yet often culminated in a “cap shield handshake,” wherein plebes point the prick of the badge toward their palm and accept a vigorous clasp. A minor stabbing, perhaps, but telling of more extreme hazing that campus leaders seemed willing to tolerate, and sometimes even take part in.
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-When Schumacher disrupted the hazing session, the plebes were relieved, the bullies annoyed. Afterward, one emailed him a screed claiming he lacked the traits of a US Marine. “That pissed me off,” Schumacher recalls. “These cadets were clearly out of line. They had the wrong idea of what service and tradition really are.” But he was even more frustrated with the school for creating an environment in which college kids were saddled with responsibilities beyond their age and experience. Cadets were meant to be supported by adult TAC (teach, advise, counsel) officers, many of whom are military veterans. Yet in recent years, Forge administrators had laid off some of the best TACs and replaced them with less-enlightened ones. “We were no longer in the military. We were civilians,” notes one Marine veteran who worked as a TAC from 2005 to 2019. “We were there to be a role model for these kids, not a drill instructor. Many of my co-workers didn’t understand that. They ruled by intimidation and fear.”
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-Jordan Schumacher
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-Devin Oktar Yalkin
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-Schumacher and a handful of other cadets thus took it upon themselves to shield fellow students from bullies and twisted TACs alike. They did their best to prevent fights, and would rush injured kids to the hospital. One filled in as school chaplain, holding religious ceremonies and counseling suicidal cadets as young as 13. These self-appointed protectors also stayed with students experiencing mental health crises to ensure they didn’t harm themselves, and organized shifts to track down comrades who had fled the campus—a frequent occurrence. “It’s kind of like prison,” one former student said.
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-Schumacher found respite at the stables, where he and other members of the school’s mounted battalion spent hours each week “dealing with the horses” and “dealing with ourselves.” He almost dropped out when the Forge, to cut costs, abruptly disbanded its cavalry and repurposed the polo arena for paintball. But it was confronting the cap shield bullies a few days later that sent him over the edge. Schumacher stormed back to his dorm afterward, gathered his belongings, and threw everything in his truck, yelling and banging doors as he vented his rage. As he sped off, he began crying. He didn’t know whether he wanted to go on living: “I was just mentally shattered.”
-
-His friends found him later, parked on the roadside in a state of shock, and urged him to come back to campus. (Ten other cadets went AWOL that weekend, some for a temporary taste of freedom, others hoping to escape permanently.) Schumacher returned to the dorms but quit the school for good soon after. Now a bona fide Marine, he believes Valley Forge fashions leaders only insofar as it exposes cadets to behavior unbecoming of an officer. “It brings out the best and the worst in people,” he told me. “I don’t want to say that’s a goal of the school, but it’s something that happens. It showed me who I didn’t want to be.”
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-“Underweight” cadets receive milk and cod liver oil, circa 1933.
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-Bettmann Archive/Getty
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-Valley Forge has long billed itself as the kind of institution that breaks young people down in order to build them back better. Many business, political, and military leaders have embraced that tough-love approach. As alum General Norman Schwarzkopf, architect of the first Gulf War, put it, “West Point prepared me for the military. Valley Forge prepared me for life.”
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-The Forge has churned out other bigwigs, including Gustave Perna, the retired four-star general who led the Operation Warp Speed vaccine push, and General H.R. McMaster, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser. But most famous of all is the novelist J.D. Salinger, whose parents sent him to the Forge in 1934 after he flunked out of a Manhattan prep school. It was here Salinger honed his writing skills—a sentimental poem he wrote about the school is still recited at its gatherings. His masterwork, *The Catcher in the Rye*, opens with Holden Caulfield at Pencey Prep, a fictionalized version of the Forge. Aspects of Salinger’s rendering ring true to cadets today, from the “crumby” food to a culture of bullying and entitlement perpetrated by “phonies” and “crooks.” “It was a terrible school, no matter how you looked at it,” Holden observes.
-
-The fictional Pencey maintained strict rules and excellent academics—virtues, if ones Holden couldn’t live up to. “I got the ax,” he informs readers. “They give guys the ax quite frequently at Pencey.” These parts of Salinger’s depiction no longer seem so apt. According to internal documents, police records, legal complaints, and interviews with more than 50 sources close to the school, including current and former cadets, parents, staff, and board members, campus leaders have allowed an environment of neglect, abuse, and impunity to fester.
-
-While rule breakers once got the ax, staffers have allegedly overlooked serious misdeeds while retaining the offending students and banking their tuition dollars. (Tuition, plus room and board, starts at just under $38,000 per year for middle and high school and $48,000 for college.) One student stabbed a classmate with scissors; another bashed his peer with a baseball bat—neither met serious repercussions. Once a citadel of leadership, Valley Forge today is “basically a sleepaway camp for troubled kids with very little supervision,” says graduate Ray Bossert, a retired Army colonel and former TAC. “It’s more *Lord of the Flies* than *The Catcher in the Rye*.” Walt Lord, a popular but short-lived school president, agrees: “It became ‘Last Chance U,’ which was a revenue driver but also cancerous to the Corps of Cadets.”
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-Amid money woes, administrators have curtailed sports, slashed courses, and assigned teachers to unfamiliar subjects, leading to an academic decline so steep that some Forge cadets complain certain colleges no longer accept transfer credits for many of their courses. The campus is crumbling, too, its barracks periodically infested with rats, cockroaches, and mold—cadets have also complained of burnt and moldy food in the dining hall. Lawlessness is commonplace. Over the last four academic years, the Radnor Township Police Department has responded more than 300 times to incidents on campus. Police reports obtained by *Mother Jones* from the last decade involve cadets as young as 13 experiencing psychiatric crises, including suicidal behavior. In 2016, an 18-year-old cadet took his own life in Lafayette Hall.
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-The police data, and campus security logs, document a litany of allegations, including assault, arson, burglary, larceny, narcotics and weapons possession, stalking, and rape. A recent post on a private Instagram account titled “Valley Forge Sucks” shows two cops peering into a schoolroom, with the caption: “Normal day at the Forge.”
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-
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-Valley Forge administrators declined to respond to detailed questions about the concerns raised in this story, or to make named staffers, administrators, or trustees available for interviews. Citing privacy concerns, retired Marine Col. Stuart Helgeson, the school’s president, said in a statement that the Forge has “zero tolerance for hazing and illegal and inappropriate activity,” “thorough policies and procedures in place to address allegations of wrongdoing,” and “a proven track record of taking action to address concerns quickly and appropriately.” The school, he added, “will continue to manage matters that arise according to law, policy, and the best interest of the cadets entrusted to our care.”
-
-School trustees and senior administrators, according to legal documents and numerous sources, have minimized rather than remediated the problems. An institutional focus on protecting the Forge’s reputation above all else has created, in the words of one former teacher, “a chocolate-covered onion.” Amid a steady drip of scandals, lawsuits, and pissed-off parents, leaders have clammed up, countersued, and compiled a list of perceived enemies who are barred from campus. Officials “constantly worried about themselves and covering their own asses,” says a former longtime TAC. “All they cared about was that there was no negative press, even if it meant that kids were being sodomized or kids were having inappropriate sexual relations, or getting drunk or getting high, or whatever. They didn’t care.”
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-A twisted drill sergeant mentality took root. One TAC extinguished a cigarette in the palm of an underage cadet caught smoking, a former administrator told me. A former TAC said he nearly came to blows with a colleague who’d beaten up a 14-year-old. In 2015, the school’s then–Title IX officer warned of a “‘Gomer Pyle’ method of training,” referring to a character from *Full Metal Jacket* whose brutal hazing by others pushes him to commit a murder-suicide.
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-In addition to recruiting military personnel, the school brought in former cops and prison guards to oversee cadets. A couple of the TACs came from Glen Mills, a Pennsylvania penal school that the state shut down in 2019 amid allegations of child abuse. Bossert and another former TAC singled out one Glen Mills colleague whom the Forge hired in 2016. This officer frequently got physical with students, according to his former co-workers, one of whom distinctly recalls him body-slamming a cadet in the mess hall.
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-Another controversial figure is J.J. Rivera, until recently the school’s commandant, or head TAC, whose verbal attacks on cadets and flirtatious behavior with female cadets raised eyebrows. In a grainy video recently shared on the Valley Forge Sucks Instagram, Rivera, now chief of staff, can be heard screaming “Shut the fuck up!” at a whimpering young cadet. He then grabs the boy.
-
-Schumacher and another former cadet remember Rivera at one point declaring his intent to give cadets an experience the commandant likened to a deployment in “one of the shit-istans.” This consisted of TACs berating and belittling the cadets and robbing them of sleep. “It was, ‘Toughen the fuck up! If I hear you have problems, then fucking leave…I don’t need a broken soldier,’” another former cadet recalls.
-
-Several alumni who serve in the armed forces told me that nothing in their military experience has been as harrowing as their years at the Forge. Young Sheng, a 2015 graduate, recalls a punishing world of sleep deprivation, verbal abuse, and “smoking”—extreme physical conditioning that caused cadets to puke and pass out. The mistreatment “amplified my anger issues,” Sheng said, and led him to abuse others in turn. “It’s extremely negligent to let students have this level of power over each other’s lives,” he said. “The culture was rife with abuse of every part of a person’s being.” Recalls another alum: “I didn’t feel like a human the majority of the time I was there.”
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-A rappel tower the Army constructed on campus for its Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC), a program in which Valley Forge no longer participates.
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-Devin Oktar Yalkin
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-
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-Formal military education emerged in Europe during the 18th century and was embraced by the colonial brass during the Revolutionary War. “We are fighting against a people well acquainted with the theory and practice of war, brave by discipline and habit,” American General Henry Knox wrote in 1776 to John Adams, who then chaired the Continental Congress’ Board of War. Knox argued that the new republic needed to bring its own soldiers up to snuff at any expense.
-
-In response, the Continental Congress promptly developed the first Army academy, West Point. Major Sylvanus Thayer, an early superintendent, set forth the standards by which US military schools would henceforth operate, building fighting men through a curriculum of tactical engineering, physical training, strict rules, and harsh discipline. According to *Cadets on Campus*, a history of military schools, Thayer defended his commandant, Captain John Bliss, after Bliss brutally assaulted a cadet. When cadets circulated a petition demanding Bliss be held accountable, Thayer expelled its 189 signatories and court-martialed the five organizers for leading a “mutiny.”
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-The incident helped codify a punitive atmosphere that has plagued military academics and the armed services they populate ever since. In 1898, a gentle cadet named Oscar Booz was critically injured in West Point’s underground fight club. During a subsequent congressional inquiry, New York Rep. Edmund Driggs described the academy’s hazing culture as “detestable, disgraceful, dishonourable, \[and\] disreputable.”
-
-Military schooling took off nevertheless during the early 20th century, with roughly 280 institutions opening in the United States between 1903 and 1926. The five academies operated by military branches, including West Point, were the elite. The rest—private, religiously chartered, or state-run—attracted a more eclectic student body, ranging from aspiring officers to troubled adolescents whose parents felt they could use some discipline. Enrollment peaked after World War II, but by the end of the Vietnam War, 65 percent of the institutions had closed their doors. Military schools increasingly became associated with discipline for kids with behavioral issues.
-
-Valley Forge was founded in 1928 by Lt. General Milton Grafly Baker, a veteran of World War I and close confidant of West Point graduate Dwight D. Eisenhower. At the height of its enrollment in the late 1960s, Valley Forge had 1,169 cadets—most white and all male. By the time Navy Rear Admiral Peter Long took over as president in 2000, the Forge was down to a few hundred students and on the verge of bankruptcy.
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-A former provost of the Naval War College, Long focused, with some success, on improving academic programs, and he managed to get the school on steadier financial footing, thanks in part to a post-9/11 enrollment surge. But in November 2004, the board of trustees booted Long for an alleged pattern of sexually harassing employees. (Long sued the school, claiming the allegations were cooked up by a trustee who disapproved of his management style. The case was settled out of court.)
-
-The Forge has since cycled through eight presidents. By many accounts, its trustees and administrators—mostly former military men—have downplayed the school’s problems by concocting positive images and suppressing scandals. To close budget gaps, they chopped haphazardly, deferring major maintenance projects, gutting academic programs, and laying off dedicated employees. A few years ago, the school began rationing toilet paper. It also relied on well-to-do foreign students, who pay higher tuition.
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-
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-Cadets listen to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney at a 2012 Valley Forge rally.
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-Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post/Getty
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-Students of color and female cadets were admitted, if not with open arms. In a 2007 racial discrimination lawsuit, Forge teacher Harold Price, chair of the foreign languages department, claimed the school wasn’t painting over racist graffiti—the suit cites one Black cadet who likened the campus atmosphere to a “race war.” Other sources told me racial slurs were common: “15-year-old white boys with silver spoons in their mouths saying the n-word. It was disgusting,” says a 2020 graduate.
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-Last August, a mother sued the Forge, alleging that Black cadets were punished far more harshly than others. Non-Black administrators collectively referred to Black cadets as “a gang,” the lawsuit claimed, and unruly non-Black cadets—one literally spat in the face of a staff member; another elicited a swat response by threatening to “blow up the school”—were allowed to remain on campus, while her kid was suspended over a racially charged fight he wasn’t even involved in. (In a response to the lawsuit, the school disputed her account of the incident.)
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-The decision to admit women into the junior college was made in 2005 by Long’s successor, Charles “Tony” McGeorge, the Forge’s first civilian president. The move evoked a vehement response from powerful alumni (including McGeorge’s son), who complained that Valley Forge was [losing its character](https://www.post-gazette.com/news/education/2005/10/30/Valley-Forge-no-longer-a-males-only-military-college/stories/200510300160). And the female cadets were met with hostility. “The rumors were that we were all sluts, and that we were easy,” one of them told the local paper.
-
-Therese Dougherty, who oversaw student activities and the school’s summer camp for McGeorge’s successors, filed a gender discrimination lawsuit in 2013 contending that administrators treated her in a “condescending and demeaning manner” and showed favoritism toward male employees. In an internal 2019 survey I obtained, cadets complained about inadequate physical security. The school “doesn’t want to deal with sexual harassment,” a female cadet wrote, and students guilty of sexual misconduct saw their behaviors “pushed under the rug.”
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-Another former cadet who attended around the same time told me she was drugged at an off-campus party and then sexually assaulted by a male Forge cadet while unconscious. She shared her story with several friends at the time (I spoke with two who confirmed this), one of whom proceeded to “beat the shit out of” the guy. When the TACs started asking questions and she gave them her account, “one of them said it was my fault.” The alleged assailant was allowed to remain on campus for the semester. “People could do whatever they wanted,” the young woman told me. “Rules weren’t being enforced.”
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-“I felt unsafe,” she added.
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-
-
-The most comprehensive account of abuses at Valley Forge came in 2015, when Robert Wood, the school’s Title IX officer, filed an explosive whistleblower complaint alleging that child abuse and sexual misconduct cases had been mishandled. The still-pending complaint warns of a “propensity” among TACs “for cadet allegations to be covered up and interfered with.” Wood also alleges that his attempts to investigate claims were repeatedly met with implicit threats by top officials, including William Gallagher, a retired Army colonel who held various senior roles.
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-In a contemporaneous memo to the Department of Education, Wood wrote that his efforts to investigate a sexual assault complaint involving two male cadets were impeded by Gallagher, who demanded Wood “cease” his work. During another standoff, Gallagher emailed an HR official asking when Wood’s contract was up for renewal. This prompted the school’s lawyer to warn that firing him would amount to a “retaliatory discharge” based on Wood’s efforts to uncover “serious breakdowns” in how abuse allegations were dealt with.
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-Wood quit the Forge that year, in any case, after seven years on the job. But by the accounts of some cadets, their situation hasn’t improved. Based on the school’s own data, Valley Forge logged at least 30 incidents of alleged sexual misconduct from 2015 through 2020, from stalking and fondling to rape; two ongoing lawsuits claim the school has attempted to impede investigations by its Title IX office. Wood also alleged that middle and high school students were left unattended at night, which he described as “indefensible.”
-
-Other sources back that up. In 2018, one former TAC said he was tasked with a night shift overseeing “four buildings, or 300 kids” by himself. The TACs were willfully “inattentive” to misbehavior, a 2021 graduate said. “There are many fights—I mean *many,* *many* fights I have seen that played out completely,” he added, “where one student was beaten to a bloody fucking pulp before anyone intervened.” (In December, the Valley Forge Sucks Instagram posted a video of two young cadets in camouflage freely pummeling one another in a bathroom.) Supervising officers got burned out, Schumacher told me, and began ignoring even blatant misbehavior: “They’d shut their door to the TAC office.”
-
-While many secondary schools grapple with some amount of egregious behavior, the military model made for a more challenging environment. “When a structure is set up on rank, power, and pain, you’re going to have problems,” a former Forge official explained. Wood’s complaint cites parental concerns about supervision and abuse dating as far back as 1997. In 2004, a 17-year-old cadet was [charged](http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/01/21/military.academy.assault/) with stalking, “involuntary deviate intercourse”—a category of felony crimes ranging from forced oral and anal sex to other forced nonvaginal penetration—and sexual assault against a fellow student, prompting two other cadets to come forward with related allegations against him. This led to further charges, including assault and “terroristic threats.” (According to a local news report, a juvenile judge ultimately convicted the assailant of three lesser counts, and sentenced him to home detention.)
-
-In 2007, two parents [told the *Philadelphia Inquirer*](https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/homepage/20071018_Battle_lines_drawn_at_elite_academy.html) they were pulling their sons from the Forge after one of them, age 16, was brutally beaten by peers, and the other, a 13-year-old, was “repeatedly tormented,” kicked while doing pushups, and branded with a five-pointed star. In 2017, a 16-year-old cadet was allegedly subjected to a sadistic hazing ritual called “tooth-pasting.” The now-former cadet alleges in a lawsuit that fellow cadets hit him with a lacrosse stick, pushed it down his throat, and then tried to shove it into his anus. He was also waterboarded, he claims, and had his head slammed into a wall. The same suit claims that after a 13-year-old classmate reported his own abuse to school officials, his tormentors branded him with a “B”—for “bitch.”
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-Based on the school’s nonprofit tax filings, Valley Forge has spent more than $4 million on legal fees over the last two decades. Perhaps the school’s most formidable foe these days is Stewart Ryan, the Philadelphia-based lawyer who prosecuted Bill Cosby. He now represents the former cadet who filed the tooth-pasting lawsuit, and three others who allege that, as minors, they, too, experienced tooth-pasting and other abuse at the Forge from 2014 to 2018. Additional clients, Ryan says, are preparing complaints that stem from the Forge’s “intentional ignorance.”
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-Ryan Niessner, who submitted a sworn affidavit for one of Stewart Ryan’s cases, told me he was sexually assaulted as a 15-year-old Forge cadet in 2009. As he returned from the shower one night, a door flung open and five cadets dragged him into a room and attempted to penetrate him, first with fingers, then a coat hanger: “I struggled for a little bit, but five, six other people—numbers just kinda won that.” Soon after, he fought off another tooth-pasting attempt. He became withdrawn and depressed, and would eventually require therapy. In junior college, hoping to thwart such attacks, he and some of his Forge classmates took on overnight surveillance shifts. “We were the only adults in the building with high schoolers and middle schoolers,” he recalls.
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-
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-Ryan Niessner
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-Devin Oktar Yalkin
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-In his affidavit, Niessner testified that when he reported his abuse to the TAC office, an officer asked, “Will your parents sue?” (They did not.) “After this meeting,” he wrote, “I was discouraged from reporting this incident to anyone else.” A few years later, he shared his story with the police, who spoke to school officials. Niessner doesn’t know how the Forge responded. But when a former administrator reported a different tooth-pasting attack to her superiors, “they didn’t do anything about it,” she said. Bossert told me that some of the dozen or so cadets thought to have participated in tooth-pasting assaults were dismissed, only to return the following semester. None of them tried it again, to his knowledge. “But think of the type of kids that would do that,” Bossert says. “They are going to do hell across the board.”
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-In another troubling case that Wood discussed with a local newspaper in 2017, four male college cadets conspired with a fifth to covertly film his sexual encounter with a drunk female cadet. A disciplinary board advised that all of the perpetrators be dismissed, but the school’s president ignored the recommendation and allowed three of the five to stay. As punishment, they were ordered to paint the commandant’s house. One of the boys spoke at graduation, and “the young lady who had been assaulted had to sit there and listen,” Wood said.
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-When a former TAC raised concerns about Symantha Hicks—a Forge guidance counselor who, according to police records, was suspected of giving alcohol to minors and performing oral sex on a 16-year-old—a school official allegedly tried to convince him not to go to the cops. Hicks denied engaging in sex with the boy, but was convicted of “corruption of minors.” The Forge had hired her to replace another female counselor whose comportment with students came under scrutiny. But when an administrator raised concerns with the HR office about *that* counselor—who was later convicted of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old at another school—“I was told that it was none of my business, to just stay out of it.”
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-Valley Forge also briefly employed a former soldier named Steve Stefanowicz as a TAC overseeing middle and high schoolers, until staffers discovered he’d been a key player in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.
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-Walt Lord’s appointment as president in 2018 heralded a brief period of reform at Valley Forge. The son of working-class parents, Lord grew up in an Irish Catholic neighborhood in South Philadelphia. He received a full ride as a Forge cadet in the 1980s, and even got married in the school chapel. He ascended through the Army ranks to the position of major general and served in Sarajevo and Afghanistan.
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-Square-jawed and warm, Lord believed the only way to save his alma mater was by listening to people’s concerns. He met frequently with students and staff, snapped selfies with cadets, and cultivated closer relations with alumni and parents. He focused on positive reinforcement, using military challenge coins to reward good behavior. Lord also provided intense guidance to misbehaving cadets and booted a handful whose behavior had become threatening. “He didn’t just kick somebody out,” a former trustee told me. “He had a valid investigation into what the issue was, and the punishment fit the crime.” This new approach quickly netted the school dozens of new students.
-
-Yet Lord felt micromanaged by the trustees, including board chair John English, who served briefly in the Marines before founding a consulting firm. English demanded a say in day-to-day decisions but neglected systemic issues, according to the former trustee, who adds that most board members were disengaged: “Everyone told war stories. We didn’t get anything done.”
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-Former Valley Forge president Walt Lord presided over a brief period of reform before stepping down.
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-Devin Oktar Yalkin
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-These concerns were echoed in an audit undertaken on behalf of a board member by the Healey Education Foundation, which warned that “Valley Forge is not going to survive by looking backwards.” A draft report, leaked to the press in 2019 and cited in a lawsuit that was later dismissed, noted that enrollment had declined 40 percent in the previous five years, and the school was nearly $7 million in debt. The authors laid most of the blame on the trustees’ hasty “Ready, Fire, Aim” decision-making style.
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-Lord felt confident he could tackle the Forge’s cultural issues. He also arranged weekly meetings with Vince Vuono, the chief financial officer, to get a better handle on the money woes. But Vuono would provide only the most basic, generic information: “My biggest point of frustration was the fact that I couldn’t get the CFO to open up and tell me exactly where we stood financially,” Lord told me. “It was the most bizarre thing in the world.” Other administrators were similarly perplexed. “Nobody knew where the money was going,” one recalled.
-
-Lord and others alluded to a multimillion-dollar donation from the family of an alum, the son of Ettore Boiardi, a.k.a. Chef Boyardee, which they believed was intended for building upgrades that were never completed. (The Forge has previously denied that the funds were misdirected.) The school is now being monitored by the US Department of Education for “financial or federal compliance issues,” which may stem, at least in part, from its sloppy handling of Pell grants. The Forge wasn’t adequately communicating with students about the Pell program, and multiple cadets said they never received money they were promised. “I never really felt like they were following financial aid procedures,” one former staffer recalled.
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-Lord resigned in March 2019, after less than a year on the job, citing the board’s incompetence. Trustee Jessica Wright, the former head of Pennsylvania’s National Guard, announced her resignation shortly thereafter in a scathing letter that inveighed against the board’s “reprehensible” apathy toward the school’s challenges. As the news swept the campus, cadets showed up at Lord’s living quarters with cake, cookies, and a teddy bear.
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-Days later, hundreds of alumni arrived from around the country for a tense meeting with school officials at Mellon Hall, a stately building with a checkerboard-tiled ballroom. Nearly 4,000 parents and alumni signed a [petition](https://www.change.org/p/vfmac-bot-increase-transparency-let-general-lord-lead-valley-forge-as-he-sees-fit?recruiter=36177227&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink&utm_campaign=share_petition&fbclid=IwAR2bPnnC8Hr1OAlaxz3KzwBA01f5036HvzTTmsX50CFbECYyjDC3-R8biYk) imploring the board of trustees to work out their differences with Lord so that he could be reinstated. Instead, school officials blacklisted their most vocal critics, Lord included. “We wanted to open up dialogue and fix the school,” said Scott Newell, an alum and parent of a former cadet. “What we got was silence. Parents were blocked on social media, concerns were ignored, and ultimately \[certain\] alumni were barred from the campus.”
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-Less than a month after Lord’s departure, a Forge cadet was assaulted and hospitalized. The local ABC News affiliate [reported](https://6abc.com/valley-forge-military-academy-assault-at-general-walt-lord/5217232/) he’d been “mistakenly targeted as ratting out a group of cadets for underage drinking.” Thus began the latest phase of what the *Inquirer* called a [battle for Valley Forge’s soul](https://www.inquirer.com/business/vfma-valley-forge-military-academy-revolt-alumni-insurrection-major-general-walter-lord-20200726.html). Lines were drawn. On one side were concerned parents and alumni, and Lord; on the other an increasingly bellicose group of trustees and administrators, including Lord’s replacement, current president Stuart Helgeson. “We keep hoping these guys would go away,” Helgeson complained to the newspaper. “They’re weakening the brand.”
-
-Helgeson addressed the budget shortfalls by slashing college sports programs and eliminating the 16-horse cavalry. A prime slice of campus was sold off to developers for $1.6 million. Helgeson also tried some new revenue streams, such as licensing the Valley Forge name to a K–12 school in Qatar and submitting a proposal to the local school board to establish a public charter school on the grounds. (The board rejected the plan, citing trustees’ dearth of educational experience and a lack of competent curriculum guidelines, and accused the Forge of trying “to subsidize its private school with taxpayer dollars.”) Finally, in a decision the cadets would feel acutely, Helgeson promoted TAC J.J. Rivera, a fellow Marine, to the title of commandant.
-
-At least five cadets I interviewed identified Rivera, a former helicopter pilot who didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment, as one of the most abusive TACs. Bossert and another former TAC told me Rivera sometimes slow-walked investigations—including one that involved a rape.
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-As Rivera’s former supervisor, Bossert recalls cautioning him about his demeanor with the young women on campus. One former administrator went so far as to call him a “creepo,” noting that female cadets often complained to her about Rivera’s behavior. Two female former cadets recalled to me how, after they were caught trying to sneak off campus, Rivera threatened to look in on their rooms at night when they slept.
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-Another one recalls Rivera flirting with her repeatedly and saying she reminded him of his wife. That cadet said Rivera once made her remove a shirt that violated the dress code—she had to extract the garment from underneath her sweatshirt: “He was right there, watching me.” A male former cadet told me that Rivera—after learning he’d drilled with an ROTC unit at a base where Rivera also had trained—advised the boy, then still a minor, to check out a nearby strip bar called Club Risqué. (Two of the cadet’s former classmates confirmed that he told them this story shortly afterward.)
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-In 2020, fed up, Schumacher and a dozen or so other cadets created a PowerPoint and presented it to school officials. Titled “State of the Forge,” it detailed squalid living conditions, flawed Covid-19 policies, and ongoing bullying, including an attempted “lynching”—in which Black cadets offended by a white student’s racism allegedly tried to choke the kid with a belt. The presentation claimed that five classmates had either tried to kill themselves or had spoken to leadership about doing so that school year. The cadets I interviewed, along with an internal list of student grievances I obtained, say the Forge frequently minimizes mental health issues, with a school nurse once scolding a student for “sending up red flags that don’t need to be sent up.”
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-Another slide depicted Rivera as particularly abusive, a contention bolstered by numerous staffers and cadets, including one who remembers Rivera routinely ordering Schumacher into his office just to scream at him. Rivera was “well-contained” during the presentation, Schumacher said, but their effort to speak truth to power amounted to naught. “It was a ‘brush off the shoulder’ kind of thing,” he said.
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-
-
-From the early West Point scandals to recent reports of hazing at the Virginia Military Institute, abuses at military schools have been codified in American culture through media reports, literature, and Hollywood tropes. *Taps*, a 1981 movie filmed at the Forge, follows a group of cadets who rebel violently against the proposed closing of their fictional academy. By the accounts of those I spoke with, the Forge has indeed come to mirror many of the worst aspects of military culture—the lies and cover-ups, the unwillingness to deal appropriately with sexual assaults, and the lack of financial transparency. The word “snafu” comes from a military acronym meaning “situation normal: all fucked up.” And that’s a sentiment the Forge and like-minded institutions seem to be imprinting upon the next generation of military leaders.
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-The deliberately punitive ethos of military schools rests on the false assumption that it wrings out bad habits and encourages good ones. But [Michael Karson](https://psychology.du.edu/about/faculty-directory/michael-c-karson), a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Denver who specializes in child abuse, told me that one of the few hard laws in his field is as follows: “Punishment doesn’t work” to change people’s character, he says. It merely “makes them obedient.” This truth helps highlight the moral clarity of dissenters such as Salinger and Schumacher, whose insubordination was a clear-eyed response to abuse, a righteous rejection of bullying masquerading as command and control.
-
-One can reasonably argue that the military must instill compliance and cohesion in its combat units. But the kind of torment Valley Forge kids were subjected to, trauma that can leave psychological wounds as deep as those borne by soldiers on a battlefield, is impossible to justify. Numerous parents have spoken of the ways, large and small, that their children were scarred by the Forge, and many former cadets, Schumacher included, have sought therapy to process their experiences. One mother told me that ever since her boy was raped at Valley Forge, a trauma incurred many years ago, he sleeps with a hunting knife under his pillow. And then there was the 18-year-old cadet who never made it to graduation.
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-Even the famously reclusive Salinger would eventually open up about his ambivalence toward the Forge. In an unpublished 1995 letter to a friend and former classmate, shared with me by the J.D. Salinger Literary Trust, the author, then 76, seemed to regret the untitled three-stanza poem he wrote shortly before graduation, which was placed on display in the school chapel after Salinger got famous. It begins:
-
-*Hide not thy tears on this last day—*
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-*Your sorrow has no shame;*
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-*To march no more midst lines of gray;*
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-*No longer play the game.*
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-“I’ve planned for years to stop by and either tear the exhibit down or at the very least add a little obscene graffiti at the bottom,” Salinger wrote. He reflected, too, on the “interesting collection of misfits” he’d befriended at the Forge, and the memories they shared, bad and good.
-
-But it was escaping the campus that brought him the greatest joy: “Though \[the Forge\], to me, was on the whole a thoroughly bad joke, its pretenses and posturing irreversibly sham, contemptible,” Salinger wrote, “I wonder if I ever again felt as free, as gratefully on the loose, as I did on that pretty walk to Wayne and the diner on a Sunday after signing out.”
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-^button-HeChasedSiliconValleyDreamsAmidtheCannabisBoomNSave
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-# He Chased Silicon Valley Dreams Amid the Cannabis Boom. But Did His Ambition Lead to His Murder?
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-**THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF** Pleasure Point stands on cliffs overlooking one of the more famous surf breaks in California, a menacing swell that locals call Sewers. Some four miles from the Santa Cruz boardwalk, the break takes its name from an old underwater pipe that once disgorged the town's sewage into Monterey Bay. Today, the Sewers can draw a rugged crowd, and woe betide the newcomer who does not pay the proper deference to those locals, for the surfers of Santa Cruz have earned a reputation for being as hostile as they are skilled.
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-A stretch of opulent oceanfront villas also looks out over the surf at Pleasure Point. Ever since San Francisco first got rich--more than 170 years ago, from the California gold rush--the city's elite has treated Santa Cruz as its favored beach resort. But in the past two decades, there has been a wealth invasion unlike any before. Just on the other side of the Santa Cruz Mountains, an easy commuter's drive away, sprawls Silicon Valley. From there, the tech titans have come. When [Reed Hastings](https://www.inc.com/carmine-gallo/why-netflixs-reed-hastings-encourages-candid-feedback-and-gets-it.html) and (rumor has it) [Mark Zuckerburg](https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/facebook-just-had-its-most-disappointing-quarter-ever-mark-zuckerbergs-response-is-1-thing-no-leader-should-ever-do.html) bought glamorous pads in the Santa Cruz area, their hirelings at Netflix and Facebook began snapping up nearby properties in aspirational emulation. The pattern repeated with other tech barons, and other hirelings, until today the median price for a single-family home in Santa Cruz is $1.3 million.
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-The villa at 3034 Pleasure Point Drive has a multilevel deck that's built out over the cliffs. The view from there is a panorama of changeable seas and histrionic sunsets, with the Monterey Peninsula hovering on the horizon like a blue-green mystery. On the night of September 30, 2019, the owner of the home slept alone in his master suite. There and throughout the house, the ocean's waves were soporifically audible, rumbling against the rocks and sliding back again in their lunar rhythms.
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-Two months earlier, the villa's owner, Tushar Atre, had turned 50, though he looked decades younger. He had a beaming, youthful smile and an infectious vitality that charmed almost everyone he met. A keen surfer, mountain biker, and wild-edibles forager, he was in top physical condition. He was also rich. He'd grown up in affluent Westchester County, New York, the son of Indian immigrants, had studied at NYU, and had come west in 1996 in pursuit of the dot-com dream.
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-This, by all appearances, he had unconditionally achieved. The founder of AtreNet, an early corporate web-design firm, Atre, who had never married or had children, was now at the charismatic center of a circle of prosperous friends, many of them Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and executives. The group had become practitioners of a kind of heady lifestyle discipline, a philosophy of hyperfocus, first popularized by the late Hungarian American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, called "the flow." For Atre and his circle, this often meant intense sessions of early-morning surfing, when they would strive to work their minds and bodies into a kind of adrenal rapture. "There was this voracious appetite for work and danger," says a family friend. After surfing, perhaps after meditation, the flow state would be achieved. Then they would retire to their desks and go to work, focused, relentless--hour after hour, without pause--applying their energies to their various business ideas.
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-For his part, Atre had recently shifted his primary focus from [AtreNet](https://www.atre.net/) and turned his ambition toward a fresh field, one he believed held immense potential. One he felt was ripe for disruption. One whose growth opportunities in recent years had lured myriad entrepreneurs to stake their claim--with more than 38,000 U.S. licenses issued, per cannabis data firm Whitney Economics. By the fall of 2019, he'd spent more than a million of his own dollars on the new business and had raised millions more from investors. Atre was building a cannabis startup.
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-At 2:48 on the morning of October 1, 2019, according to the time stamp on surveillance footage captured by a camera on a neighboring home, three men entered the house at Pleasure Point Drive. They appeared to be wearing gloves, baseball caps, and N95-style facemasks. One carried an assault rifle. There were no signs of forced entry; Atre had either let them inside or they knew the passcode. But there was a struggle. At one point, the entrepreneur escaped. The same footage shows a figure running down Pleasure Point Drive, a normally quiet lane ensconced in the force field of its own affluence, his wrists apparently cuffed behind his back. In the video, a man gives chase and brings the figure violently to the ground. An SUV then pulls up beside them, and two men quickly bundle their victim into the passenger seat. Then the vehicle speeds off, disappearing into the night.
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-**THE CITY OF SANTA CRUZ** lies not just on the Pacific, but also in the shadow of the Santa Cruz Mountains, a secluded hinterland of redwood forest and fern canyons, unpaved switchbacks, and remote homesteads. The mountains harbor a swath of rural isolation right at the edge of the Bay Area megalopolis, and it was here that California's counterculture found one of its first bucolic, dharma-bum milieus. Ken Kesey kept a writing cabin in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the '60s, where he threw his wild hallucinogenic parties and incubated the Merry Pranksters. With Kesey's crowd providing the initial demand, some of the earliest commercial (and, at the time, illegal) cannabis crops in the U.S. were planted nearby. Major, now globally famous strains of marijuana--Haze, Blue Dream--were, at least according to legend, first bred by experimental growers on the south-facing slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains above 800 feet, where the marine-layer fogs halt their ascent and ideal growing conditions exist. An outlaw pot-ag culture took hold, hillbilly hippies with dreadlock beards burying safes in the woods containing hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. It was here too, in the 1980s, that the cannabis legalization movement began. Some of the earliest efforts in the nation to create an exemption for the use of marijuana to ease the pain of the chronically and terminally ill were spearheaded by Santa Cruz grower Valerie Leveroni Corral. Her work helped lead to the 1996 passage of Proposition 215, which made California the first state in the country to legalize medical marijuana. This, in turn, led to Proposition 64 and the legalization of recreational cannabis in California, which went into effect on January 1, 2018, and seemed to mark the beginning of a new cannabis boom.
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-For Tushar Atre, Santa Cruz and its environs represented the ideal base from which to make a play for that coming boom. But the boom was not without complication--or danger. In this way, the story of Atre is the story of the vexed conclusion of perhaps the most destructive prohibition in U.S. history. It is a story about the clash of cultures between Silicon Valley and the pre-legalization "traditional" cannabis economy. It is the story of a battle being waged not just between the legal industry and an incumbent black market, but also between the coming corporate behemoths and the independent underground business people who have defined the industry since the beginning.
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-Most of all, it is the story of an entrepreneur--and the ambitions that led him into the hills from which he would never return.
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-**FOUR OTHER PEOPLE** were inside the house at Pleasure Point Drive in the early morning of October 1. Each was Atre's houseguest as well as in his employ. They were engineers and technicians from out of town, contractors Atre had hired to help him build his state-of-the-art cannabis-oil-extraction facility--the gem at the center of Atre's plan to disrupt the cannabis industry. Housed in a refurbished warehouse at 211 Fern Street, on the north side of Santa Cruz, the lab was crammed with expensive equipment, the purpose of which was to transform raw cannabis biomass--harvested marijuana flowers and leaves--into the THC-laden oils, resins, waxes, and cakes that are the main ingredients in today's innumerable marijuana products, including vapes and edibles and beverages and even skin creams. The four contractors were staying in guest suites, semi-separate from the main home, that Atre had built out on the 3034 property. Neil and Diana Ide, a husband-and-wife team of engineers, occupied one of the suites. At the lab, the Ides were in the final stages of assembling a massive, custom-designed machine that would use ethanol to extract oil from cannabis plants. With its stainless steel valves and piping and chimneys, it was like something out of a factory owned by Willie Wonka. Other equipment used hydrocarbons--highly volatile butane, for example--to produce a purer, more potent substance. That equipment was handled by Atre's other two houseguests on the night of his abduction: a woman named Murphy Murri and her assistant, Christopher Berry.
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-Legalization of recreational cannabis in California seemed to mark the dawn of a new cannabis boom.
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-In the official paperwork, Atre's startup was called Interstitial Systems. But the d.b.a. was Cruz Science, and Atre seems to have had visions of creating at 211 Fern Street a kind of R&D unit, a pot skunk works. One of the things that had attracted him to the marijuana business in the first place, he told friends, was the science of cannabis manufacturing. It appealed to his Silicon Valley mind. The extraction and distillation processes, borrowed from the food sciences, had in recent years been advanced by a cadre of THC boffins interested in exploring the unique and seemingly depthless nuances of the cannabis plant. Atre had assembled a team of such experts--including a PhD in organic chemistry--who he hoped would spur groundbreaking cannabis innovations.
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-Some of Atre's team had an air of the mad scientist about them. Neil Ide, for example, had acquired his engineering know-how as a seaman in the U.S. Navy, working in reactor rooms aboard submarines and studying at the prestigious Naval Nuclear Power School. He had dreams of launching a startup of his own, based on a design he'd developed for a new kind of miniature, subsea nuclear reactor.
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-Murphy Murri, meanwhile, had platinum-blond hair and a nose ring and sometimes liked to wear white lab coats at work, rolling up the sleeves to reveal a network of arm tattoos. She was a marijuana chemist who'd made herself into a leading innovator in the preparation of high-quality cannabis concentrates. At about 1:30 a.m. on October 1, she and Berry had returned to 3034 Pleasure Point in a state of exhaustion. They had spent the previous 18 hours at Fern Street, extracting a batch of wax and scrubbing down the lab to a spotless gleam in preparation for a visit from a prospective customer, scheduled for the next day. They crashed in their separate bedrooms. The Ides had returned from the lab a bit earlier and were already asleep. Berry, closer to the main house than the others, had showered and then lain down. Moments later, according to police, he became aware of voices, raised and angry voices. He sat up. He heard someone shout, "Open the safe!" He heard someone shout, "Get on your stomach!" and "Where is it?" and "Where are they?" He heard a male voice like Atre's say, "How can we make things right?" He heard the same voice shrieking in terror or pain or both. Then the voices seemed to move out of the main house and into the street. Too frightened to move, Berry waited until there were no more voices to hear. Then he ran to Murri's room and woke her. She'd been fast asleep the whole time; the Pacific's white noise had soundproofed her bedroom. The Ides, however, had been awakened. A few minutes later, Berry and Murri were at the Ides' door saying that Atre had been abducted. They used one of their cellphones to dial 9-1-1.
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-When deputies from the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office arrived 10 minutes later, one of the things they noticed was a pool of what looked to be blood in the middle of Pleasure Point Drive. They also noticed, lying incongruously on the home's driveway, a digital scale. Later that morning, as cops milled up and down the street, a crowd of worried neighbors came and went from the Point Market, a small food store and café across the road from Atre's house, speculating about what had happened to him.
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-At some point after interviewing the houseguests, sheriff's deputies had made their way to 211 Fern Street, searched the lab, and failed to find Atre or anyone else. Meanwhile, word was trickling out among Atre's other employees: Their boss had been kidnapped. They traded theories, they wondered: Who would want to harm him? Did he owe anyone money? Did he have beefs with anyone? "Shit, man," someone said, "that's like a line around the block."
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-Everyone in California in cannabis knew that a flourishing marijuana black market still existed despite legalization. Everyone knew that taxes and other costs were so high for legal operators in California that they often felt forced to dip into the black market to make ends meet. Had Atre done business with anyone dangerous? Years before, he had told more than one of his employees, he'd worked in what he called a "trap lab," an illegal extraction facility, which, he claimed, occupied a shipping container in some remote California place. Off-the-grid cannabis extraction rooms are known to be more prone to explosions even than meth labs, and the idea of a tech millionaire claiming to have toiled in one, like a character from *Breaking Bad*, had struck his employees as absurd.
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-Several Fern Street staffers had recently visited a piece of property that Atre owned high up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, in an area called the Summit. It was a beautiful parcel, with views stretching in every direction across alpine valleys dense with conifers. At the Summit, Atre and a group of laborers had planted a crop of cannabis. But Atre had not sought a cultivation license from the state's regulatory bodies. Was this black-market weed? And, if so, why? Why would he put his legit startup at risk by growing illegally? As the day wore on, the houseguests became increasingly agitated, their fears maturing as the hours passed into something closer to panic.
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-Then came the terrible news. It was now midafternoon, 12 hours after the abduction. Sheriff's deputies had found a body in the mountains, at the Summit. There was no official word of the identity of the deceased or how the person had perished. But the houseguests knew. The men who had invaded his posh home in the middle of the night had taken Atre to his secret spot in the forest and murdered him amid his marijuana.
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-**THE HISTORY OF CANNABIS** legalization in California has always been characterized by a tension between two strains of American entrepreneur: the idealistic heirs to the 1960s and the bald profiteers. Sometimes those strains exist within the very same person. In November 1996, when the state's residents passed Prop 215, making medical marijuana legal, they had ushered in what came to be known as the 215 era in California cannabis, organized around the concept of the medical collective. To purchase marijuana legally under 215, people with qualifying disorders had to receive a prescription from a doctor and then join one of the proliferating marijuana collectives. Each collective was either a retail outlet--known as a dispensary or a club--or a farm. According to the spirit of the law, the collectives were to be small and not-for-profit.
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-But, soon enough, this lightly regulated market grew and mutated and metastasized. Dispensaries and cultivators came to have hundreds and then thousands of members. Receiving a scrip became pro forma. Collectives morphed into quasi-legal cannabis enterprises. Drug dealers used 215 to go (sort of) legit.
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-"I woke up every morning staring at a 10-year mandatory minimum," says Johnny Wilson (not his real name), who, before 215, was an Oakland street dealer and high school dropout with tattoos up to the base of his skull. After 215, he saw an opportunity. He moved to Humboldt County, purchased tracts of land with his drug-dealer cash, and oversaw a set of clandestine but industrial-size growhouses, camouflaged by redwoods as well as Prop 215. Selling his product directly to a battery of Bay Area medicinal retail clubs, he was 23 years old and clearing $20,000 a week. "It was grossly, grossly profitable," he says. "It was a two-decade gray area when people made tons of money. No one was paying fucking taxes! We were just making money." Men from Brooklyn would fly in on private jets, do deals in motel rooms, and fly out the next morning with hundreds or even thousands of pounds of bags in the hold, worth $1 million, $2 million, $4 million on the streets of New York City. The Emerald Triangle--Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity counties--and the Santa Cruz Mountains, Big Sur, and Calaveras County were together producing a superabundance of pot. All told, California's farms were yielding far more flower than the state's medicinal users could ever hope to consume. And so California became, according to some estimates, the largest exporter of cannabis on earth.
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-This was the situation when, in 2016, California voted yes to Proposition 64, making the state the fifth in the union to legalize recreational marijuana. Sacramento lawmakers and civil servants then set about formulating the regulatory regime that would oversee California's new cannabis industry. They fixed January 1, 2018, as the date for the ribbon-cutting, the first day of legal recreational pot sales in the state.
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-This intermediary period sparked what some have called a green rush. In 2017, many 215-era growers, deciphering the writing on the wall, decided to get out. Sowing their last massive crops, they'd determined that this was their ultimate chance to produce a nest egg. Those harvests would be their retirement plan. The result was an oversupply of such magnitude that by 2018 it had crashed cannabis prices not just in California but throughout the U.S. Other 215-era growers and manufacturers decided to apply for licenses and go legit, joining the new aboveboard cannabis economy. Then there were the newcomers, wealthy entrepreneurs like Atre who'd come from other industries but sensed great opportunity. (Prop 64 itself was, in some ways, a child of Silicon Valley--its language written with funding from entrepreneur Sean Parker, he of Napster and Facebook fame.) The legacy operators even coined a term for these intruders. Because quite a few came from privileged backgrounds and seemed to be named Chad, they were called Chads.
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-And finally, some of the old underground growers and drug dealers decided just to remain drug dealers. No need to go through the costly rigmarole of obtaining licenses and paying taxes. Having been at it for decades, they understood that they possessed a first-mover advantage.
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-**SAM LOFORTI IS** the cannabis licensing manager for the county of Santa Cruz. He's also a surfer and longtime pot user who, before taking a job in government, worked as a consultant for cannabis entrepreneurs seeking to obtain local permits, including Atre. LoForti has a science background. He'd come to Santa Cruz to study geology at the university and started his career in the mining industry, eventually consulting for a copper extractor in Arizona, but the lure of the ocean and the opportunities presented by the coming legal herb industry were impossible to resist.
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-LoForti has thick, dark hair, the build of a long-distance bicyclist, which he is, and an intense, frenetic manner. He immersed himself in the legal and regulatory nuts and bolts of cannabis in California and elsewhere. Appointed licensing manager in December 2018, his education deepened. California's cannabis regulations "are a total calamity," he said recently in his office in Santa Cruz. With disgust in his voice, he explained that the state's policymakers had set taxes too high, and had allowed local jurisdictions total freedom to set their own tax levels. This had given rise, he said, to an absurd, almost satirical state of affairs in which cannabis businesses were taxed on their taxes, and forced to pay fees levied on the very act of paying still other fees.
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-"The way regulations are now, the legal market will never be able to compete with the black market," he said. "The dude on the corner is still on the corner." Unlicensed growers and dealers, easily able to underprice their legal rivals, now dominate the state's business. LoForti noted that illegal weed costs half as much as the branded buds in a licensed dispensary, on average. A recent study reported that the state's black market sold an estimated $8.7 billion in weed in 2019, likely a gross underestimate but still triple the sales of the legal industry. According to one cannabis entrepreneur from Northern California, the black market was more likely twice that size, with most illegal sales going out of state. A kilogram of cannabis oil on the white market in California goes today for about $2,000, he said. On the black market, "I can sell that same kilo in Massachusetts for $30,000," he added. "That's a pretty good delta."
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-"California is the biggest cannabis economy in the world, and the legal market needs to win," LoForti said. "If we do it right, it's going to take a decade to win. If we do it the way we're doing it now, it will take 20 years or longer. We have to lower the regulatory burden."
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-The problems, however, go beyond Sacramento. Since cannabis remains federally illegal, a Schedule I narcotic along with heroin and Ecstasy, national banking institutions largely won't do business with cannabis companies. The cannabis industry, therefore, lacks a coherent way to obtain bank loans or credit lines or even do business using credit cards. Despite a few clever workarounds and a handful of community banks that have stepped into the void, the cannabis business, just like in the old days, is largely conducted in cash--stacks of bills stashed in safes, armored trucks ferrying funds. This carries its own risk and costs, especially in the realms of security and compliance. In sum, it's hard to make money in cannabis--in legal cannabis, that is. Yet optimistic investors and entrepreneurs continue to flood the industry, especially in Northern California, which also happens to be home to the world's largest pool of venture capital. As one Santa Cruz attorney who specializes in cannabis said, "I've seen a lot of people throw a lot of money away trying to make a fortune in this industry."
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-"The way regulations are now, the legal market will never be able to compete with the black market."
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-In his office, LoForti described an increasingly common chain of events. A cannabis startup will take VC funding. The founders soon realize that, with all the taxes, fees, hidden costs, and other frictions, the business is more challenging than they'd realized. The startup finds itself in danger of missing financial targets put in place by its new VC investors. Faced with this undesirable outcome or worse--insolvency--the new cannabis entrepreneur realizes there is a way to remain solvent. They can dip into the black market. A cultivator can grow a little off-the-books poundage and sell it into the black market for instant untaxed profit. A manufacturer of oils can buy cheap off-the-books biomass, widening their profit margins. "I can tell you all the loopholes and weaknesses in the regulations," LoForti said.
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-The situation has given rise to brutal ironies. "I don't even use my license," one longtime California cultivator and activist said, explaining that he now sells every ounce he grows into the black market. "Even though I fought for legalization, I'm forced to be illegal." According to the founder of a cannabis manufacturing startup very similar to Cruz Science, who got into the business partly because he believed strongly in ending the war on drugs, "almost every single legal operator has to have some sort of illicit demand network for their product, or there's simply no way to make a living." He laughed bitterly, then stopped. "It's a fundamentally failed market."
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-Still, though the black-market money might come easy, it also presents dangers. It means dealing with perhaps unsavory elements, including, possibly, organized crime. "Everyone thinks, hey, man, it's the cannabis industry, so it's all rainbows and hippies and hugs," former street dealer Johnny Wilson says. "It's like: No. There's a shady side, too. There are bad people--bad people--because there's lots of money in this." There are stories of Mexican cartels running farms in the Emerald Triangle. There are stories about the Russian mob, the Armenian mob, Hells Angels, the Japanese yakuza. "I know people in cannabis who've had run-ins with criminal gangs," LoForti said. In Los Angeles, for example, the state's largest retail market for cannabis, more illegal weed is sold than legal. According to an analysis by the *Los Angeles Times*, an estimated 220 unlicensed dispensaries--outlets that, to the casual eye, were indistinguishable from their legal counterparts--did business in the county in 2019. Law enforcement agents allege that many such fraudulent dispensaries have ties to organized crime. Legalization, it turns out, has not resulted in legality. It has given rise, instead, to twin sectors, underground and aboveground, in conflict but also in symbiosis.
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-**ONE GRAY MORNING** in November 2019, a soft rain falling, more than 60 surfers paddled out to a tranquil spot off Capitola Beach, not far from Pleasure Point. The party included many of Atre's Silicon Valley and surfer friends. Forming a large circle that rose and fell with the incoming swells, they recited poems and told stories "in fond memory of Tushar, businessman, surfer, and outdoorsman," as his obituary later reported. Earlier that same day, a much smaller group had made its way to a spot in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains called the Land of Medicine Buddha, a peaceful place with a golden statue of the sage sitting inside a varicolored shrine. At the center of this group of mourners were Atre's family.
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-Also in the group at the Medicine Buddha that morning, standing apart and silently observing the ceremony, was a striking young woman. She was known to most of the others, but among Atre's closest friends and relations, she would come to be distrusted, even despised. If Tushar had never met her, some wondered, would he still be alive today?
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-Her name was Rachael Emerlye. And when contacted for this article, this is the story she told: By the time she met Atre, in early 2017, she had been living in California for about five years. She'd gone to college in her home state, at the University of Vermont, where she'd found her place in the local cannabis scene, volunteering as a legalization activist. After college, she'd set out in 2012 for the hippie weed plantations of the Emerald Triangle as a trimmigrant, one of the seasonal migrant workers who harvest the cannabis crop and prepare it for sale, trimming the flowers from the plants. She decided to stay. In the quasi-outlaw era of 215, she wound up leasing several small plots deep in the woods of Trinity County, running her own weed farms and nurturing her entrepreneurial dreams.
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-"Everyone thinks it's all rainbows and hippies and hugs. No. There's a shady side, too. There are bad people."
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-In January 2017, Emerlye, on an extended vacation, rented an Airbnb near the beach in Santa Cruz, one of the many investment properties the Atre family owned. That's where she met Atre; he proposed they go surfing together. Soon enough, at his urging, she was confessing to him her cannabis aspirations. Prop 64 had just passed; true legalization was coming to California. "Nerd boy meets cannabis girl," as one friend described it. They fell in love and together began searching for property to purchase in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Among their ideas, Emerlye said, was to create a small marijuana garden for experimental cannabis genetics and, eventually, a kind of clinic for the administration of a future proprietary marijuana therapy. According to Emerlye, they also thought they might one day build a magical home on this land, where they would live in forever-after bliss. Finally, they found what appeared to be the perfect parcel, 60 undeveloped acres at the Summit. Eventually, Emerlye moved in with Atre at Pleasure Point Drive. As the startup took shape, she contributed "funding, contacts, intellectual property, and cannabis business experience" to the startup, "including investment of over $300,000," according to a lawsuit she filed against the Atre estate after the murder. (The Atre estate, in court filings, has denied her contentions.) But she signed no documents; her name was on nothing. According to Emerlye, she complained repeatedly to Atre about this, and he would promise to follow through, to make her a partner on paper, to include her name on the cap table. But he never did.
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-As time went on, Emerlye's frustration expanded. There were arguments. Then, in early 2019, she went back east, to Massachusetts, which had just legalized recreational cannabis. She wanted some distance but also to pursue the founding of a cannabis startup on her own. According to Emerlye, this was part of her and Atre's grand plan--to prepare for federal legalization by creating a bicoastal cannabis operation. All through that summer and early fall, she said, Atre came to visit her and she went to visit him. But on the night of September 30, Atre slept alone.
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-**THE SANTA CRUZ COUNTY** Sheriff's Office occupies a four-story building right off the Pacific Coast Highway, down the street from the Ding Pro surfboard repair shop, and around the corner from a supplier of equipment for the cultivation of hydroponic marijuana. With its beach enclaves and blissed-out natural settings, the county of Santa Cruz might seem to present to its police a somewhat undemanding constabulary experience. But onto the desks of the detectives posted to the SCSO come case after case of violent incident and mysterious death--and now, despite legalization, a stream of black-market cannabis cases. Like the clandestine extraction lab near Felton that blew up and nearly set off a forest fire. Or the clandestine extraction lab in Loma Prieta that blew up and did. Or the clandestine extraction lab brazenly operating out of an industrial park just outside Santa Cruz city limits. Or the armed home invasion in June 2019 in the Santa Cruz Mountains hamlet of Ben Lomond--where deputies arrived to find two victims bound with zip ties lying on the floor. One was bleeding from the head; he'd been pistol-whipped. It was a black-market weed deal gone wrong. The assailants were drug dealers from Texas who'd come to California to acquire supply.
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-On October 1, 2019, the SCSO caught the Tushar Atre homicide case. Eventually, it would evolve into the most comprehensive murder investigation, as measured by manhours, in Santa Cruz County in 20 years. Dozens of officers would put in time on the case. Almost 200 people would be interviewed, and more than 60 search warrants served. The case was a massive whodunit.
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-Atre had left behind not just a cluster of passionately loyal friends, but also a community of the disgruntled. Again and again, according to later court testimony, detectives heard the same thing. Atre "went out of his way to start fights with people." He was a "hot head" who "left a trail of people who are pissed off with him." Atre, in other words, had made enemies. Not only that, but the nature of the California cannabis market, with its flourishing illicit side, along with Atre's own stories about running a trap lab, had given rise to speculation. If Atre had been engaging in black-market deals, could he have angered some person in the cannabis underworld enough for that person to have him killed? Investigators, in short, had a lot to investigate. As one former Fern Street employee said, "If you're doing ... illegal weed shit in California, there's a whole host of people it probably would not be a good idea to treat the way Tushar was prone to treating people."
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-**OVER TIME, INVESTIGATORS** began to put together a clearer picture of how Atre had built his cannabis startup, how he'd applied the ways of Silicon Valley to an industry emerging from a shadowy past. In late 2016 or early 2017, Atre met a young cannabis extractor. The two hit it off and began working toward the creation of a legal cannabis startup that would take advantage of the end of prohibition. To the extractor, Atre seemed the perfect guy to team up with: a seasoned entrepreneur with decades of experience in Silicon Valley, the major leagues. According to multiple people familiar with the business at the time, Atre and his partner eventually constructed and operated a lab inside a shipping container inside a warehouse Atre had bought near the town of Castroville, in Monterey County. The idea, said a former employee, was to use this lab as R&D, to experiment with new techniques and hone their skills in preparation for the build-out of a fully licensed facility.
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-But this was a risky business. At the time, law enforcement viewed cannabis extraction setups as the equivalent of meth labs. If found guilty of this, the charge, a felony, could have carried up to a seven-year prison sentence. In this, Atre and his partner were far from alone. All over California, others were doing the exact same thing. And so here was another surreal byproduct of the transition from prohibition to legalization: entrepreneurs feeling forced to skirt the law in preparation for operating in accordance with the law.
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-Meanwhile, Atre bought the structure at 211 Fern Street, which he and his partner planned to turn into the company's flagship licensed lab. They began the long process of applying for and obtaining the licenses and permits required for going legit in the new California weed economy, while Atre and Emerlye searched for a secluded property in the mountains where she could cultivate.
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-By all accounts, Atre was a hard-driving boss. In the seemingly laid-back culture of cannabis, his managerial style jarred. It was, everyone realized, classic Silicon Valley, a place where the entrepreneur, the job-creating maverick, is held in exaltation, and where Atre's behavior was standard operating procedure. From his workers, Atre insisted on total commitment, total excellence--feel the passion for our world-changing venture, and do as I say, or get lost. Many did get lost; the startup suffered from constant turnover.
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-By January 2018, Atre had what amounted to an employee revolt on his hands. A kind of intervention was staged. The whole staff sat in chairs in a circle with their boss, airing grievances. In the end, Atre and his partner, the young extractor, agreed to part ways. All of the workers chose to go with the young extractor, not Atre. "We hope you don't make these same mistakes with the next people you work with," someone said, according to a person who was there.
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-Atre, of course, didn't give up. He was able to quickly tap into his network and assemble a second team. He was, after all, lauded in entrepreneurial circles--a "bright operator," a "borderline savant," a "genius," according to other business people who knew him. By early 2019, Atre, a master pitchman, had persuaded an Ohio VC fund called OWC Ventures to invest a sum eventually amounting to $4.25 million in Interstitial Systems, valuing the startup at $10 million. Founded by Jack Heekin and Jeff Walker, both graduates of Miami University in Ohio, OWC stood for OpenRoads Wealth Capital and was focused on cannabis investments.
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-At the same time, Atre appeared to be up to something at the Summit property. Ever since sheriff's deputies' earliest interviews in the homicide investigation, they had known Atre was growing some form of cannabis at his mountain retreat. But there was confusion about this garden. Atre didn't have a cultivation license from the state. Nor was the property eligible for a local cultivation business permit from Santa Cruz County. Instead, Atre told people, he had obtained a hemp "research permit" to run an experimental hemp "breeding program." On August 16, 2019, in fact, he registered the Summit property as an agricultural research center with the agricultural commissioner of Santa Cruz County. Simply by submitting this form, anyone in the county could grow as much hemp as they wanted "for purposes for research," in the words of the registration form. But there was no real application process or oversight of the program by authorities. The term *hemp* refers to a cannabis cultivar so low in THC that its psychoactive impact is imperceptible. By contrast, according to several business associates who saw the plants and spoke to Atre about them, high-THC marijuana had been growing at the Summit. "It was all kush up there. It was all weed," said one person familiar with the purchase of more than 900 seedlings in August 2019, most of which came from a nursery in Humboldt County. In a lawsuit filed by OWC after the murder--the fund is seeking control of the startup and its assets--OWC alleges that Atre engaged in "black-market activities" when he "grew and cultivated marijuana and cannabis, under the guise of a research license, that he and others attempted to sell on the open market." (The defendants in the lawsuit, which include Atre's estate, have denied OWC's allegations.) Whatever the case, Atre expressed to multiple people in the weeks leading up to his murder that he'd undertaken to plant and harvest a cannabis crop at the Summit as a way to win back Emerlye's heart.
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-**ONE MONTH, TWO MONTHS,** four months, eight. In early 2020, as the coronavirus spread and the world shut down, the investigation ground on. In increasing desperation, Atre's friends staked larger and larger sums in reward money for information leading to a conviction--$25,000, $150,000, and then $200,000. Then, at last, the revelation came.
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-On the morning of May 20, 2020, the SCSO announced that detectives had arrested four suspects in connection with Atre's murder. One had been found in Burbank, another in a town just outside Detroit, and the third and fourth in Lancaster, California. They were all young: 19, 22, 22, and 23 years old. Two were brothers: Kaleb and Kurtis Charters. A third was their brother-in-law: Stephen Nicolas Lindsay. The fourth man was a friend of the others: Joshua Camps. All of the accused shared a part of their upbringing in Lancaster, a dusty working-class exurb of Los Angeles about an hour's drive northeast of downtown, basically in the Mojave.
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-To many in the Santa Cruz community, the news was baffling. Who even were these guys? Most of Atre's colleagues and acquaintances did not recognize the names, had never seen their faces. Many people suspected Atre had gotten himself ensnared with dark enemies inside the cannabis black market. Instead, according to the sheriff's office, it had been some kind of inside job: Two of the accused had worked for Atre at the cannabis startup: Kaleb Charters, the 19-year-old, and Lindsay, 22, the brother-in-law. In total, they'd worked for Atre for all of a few weeks. Their last day was near the end of August, about a month before the murder.
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-"Hard-working," "respectful," "well-mannered" is how their co-workers described them. In Santa Cruz, they seemed out of place. They kept to themselves. They didn't go out with others. They didn't even appear to use the product they were in the business of helping produce, according to other Cruz Science employees. They reminded one co-worker of Mormons, which, it turns out, wasn't too far off the mark. Kaleb Charters and his siblings had grown up in a village in Russia and then in a village in El Salvador with their parents, who were fundamentalist evangelical Christian missionaries.
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-At Atre's Summit property, Charters and Lindsay had put in long hours. According to another of Atre's underlings, who got to know them both, they would arrive before dawn and not stop working until the sun had set. They helped put more than 900 seedlings into the ground. Then one day, in a seemingly insignificant moment that would reverberate catastrophically, Charters and Lindsay misplaced a key to one of Atre's trucks, enraging their boss, who refused to pay them their salary.
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-After the lost-key incident, Charters and Lindsay disappeared for a few days, according to co-workers, and then returned to Fern Street to confront Atre. They wanted the wages they were owed. The two had just completed boot camp; they'd joined up as Army Reservists. And so, according to several eyewitnesses, Atre ordered them to demonstrate their penitence by performing hundreds of pushups. They did them, and Atre did in fact pay up. And then Charters and Lindsay left. Almost no one gave them another thought until May 20, 2020, when their mug shots were broadcast across the internet.
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-**THE TAKE FROM** the crime was somewhere around $30,000 in cash, a camera, and Atre's acoustic guitar, according to evidence later presented in a preliminary hearing in the case. Because none of the four defendants have spoken publicly, it's impossible to know if that haul matched their expectations. But the prosecution has alleged, on the basis of the series of events presented in its case, that the plot was likely hatched in North Las Vegas--a place almost identical to Lancaster in its beige stucco sprawl of subdivisions and strip malls laid out like circuitry on the flat desert plain. They had all just moved there, in September 2019, and were living together in the same apartment: Kaleb Charters, his brother Kurtis, their sister Kelsey, and her new husband, Nick Lindsay.
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-In one way or another, they'd all been adrift. By 2018, Kaleb Charters and Lindsay--at one time a star high school football player--had joined the Army Reserve together, gone through boot camp together, and gotten jobs together as telemarketers at a firm in Pasadena. It was also Charters and Lindsay who had gone to work in Santa Cruz the next year for the rich entrepreneur at his new weed business. As part of his telemarketing gig, Charters had called the main Cruz Science number one day and gotten to talking with the intern who'd answered. The intern had said: My boss is building a cannabis company. He needs all the help he can get. You should come up here for an interview. One could imagine Charters and Lindsay thinking that here finally was a great opportunity--a way, on the ground level, into an exciting and explosively growing new industry in which, just maybe, they could rise and thrive.
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-They drove to Santa Cruz and met their funny, cool new boss, Tushar, inside his amazing oceanfront house. He agreed to let them live rent free at a small apartment building he owned in Felton, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. But, according to the case being presented by the Santa Cruz County District Attorney's Office, the adventure quickly spoiled. Atre changed. Charming and generous at first, he became increasingly tyrannical, bringing to bear his Silicon Valley style. And yet they seemed to want to impress him. At first, Atre put them to work in the lab at Fern Street. They did custodial jobs, but they also were learning, helping the extractors, receiving an entry-level education in this wild new marijuana chemistry. For a short time, they were what's known as "sock monkeys," helping technicians feed biomass into the nylon sleeves, or socks, that went into the extraction machines. But then Atre sent them to the place he owned up in the woods to plant cannabis seedlings. First, though, they needed to get them. Three times they drove the more than 300 miles back and forth to Humboldt County in a box truck, ferrying almost 900 seedlings from the Emerald Triangle to the Summit property. For two and a half weeks, 12 hours a day, they planted. But when told by Atre to do the pushups for their paycheck, this was the final straw. After working for Atre for less than a month, they decided to quit. Now they were adrift again.
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-They moved to Las Vegas. Nevada had recently legalized recreational marijuana. As Charters and Lindsay had asked one former co-worker, why not maybe start a legal weed delivery business in Sin City? But things apparently did not go as planned. At one point, they lived in a cut-rate motel. They were living off their Army Reserve pay.
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-One day, according to the prosecution's case, the idea sprang into one of their minds: Go back to Santa Cruz. Go to the rich man's house late at night--they knew the simple four-digit passcode, had overheard Atre saying it one time to another employee--and take some of the wads of cash he seemed to have always around, had to have always around. And maybe also, one of the men thought, they should go to the Summit and take some of those 900 plants they'd plugged into the earth. For their posse, they felt they needed a fourth man, so Kurtis Charters roped in an old friend, Josh Camps, who was living in his mother's house back in Lancaster. A big, strong guy, 210 pounds, he would be the muscle. Even better, he owned guns.
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-**THE SEARCH TO** find meaning in terrible events is a natural impulse, and today in Santa Cruz many of the people who knew Atre refuse to believe that Lindsay, Camps, and the Charters brothers could have acted alone. Some suspect it was a hate crime--White boys who came to resent the ultra-successful Brown man to the point of bloodlust. Others believe the mystery hasn't fully been solved. How could anyone grow angry enough at a boss--no matter how allegedly tyrannical--in the space of just a few weeks to carry out such a sinister act? It is as though something more profound is required to explain the violent extinguishing of such an extraordinary life.
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-As the case has ground through California state court, the district attorney's office has contended that the crime was a planned execution, a premeditated revenge slaying. The defense, meanwhile, has argued that this was a botched robbery--the four defendants intending only to steal from Atre, but then things going madly, murderously sideways. What doesn't appear at issue is whether the SCSO arrested the wrong people. None of their attorneys have brought this forth as a defense. During initial interrogations by detectives after their arrests on May 19, 2020, the Charters brothers and Camps made admissions of guilt. Lindsay said nothing and immediately invoked his right to an attorney. There will possibly come a time when one or more of the four pleads guilty and testifies against the others, but as of presstime, all four have pleaded not guilty. If the case does go to trial, these two competing versions of the story--the planned execution versus the botched robbery--will do battle for the jury's favor.
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-Meanwhile, Atre's family has declined to comment for this story. Even beyond their tremendous grief, one can see why. Atre's complex business affairs at the time of his death have drawn them into a morass of legal actions. Creditors and others have come out of the woodwork to make claims on the estate. Rachael Emerlye is suing the estate for what she claims is her fair share of the business. (The estate denies that she was a partner and "denies that she is entitled to any recovery under the complaint.") The VC fund OWC sued for control of Interstitial Systems; earlier this year, the parties reached a settlement. If there's one thing connecting all the main characters in this drama, it's that each of them--founder, partner, investor, worker, lover--was chasing, in their own way, the same dream.
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-The birth of a legal industry; a thrilling product of historic import, now at last a commodity to be bought and sold on the lighted marketplace--these are the conditions that foment ambition. The legacy players hungry for their chance. The mega-corporations plotting and waiting to pounce. The state and local governments, greedy for their cut, which had engineered a racket of a regulatory regime. The Silicon Valley disrupters, dropping in without deference, with little sense of the dangers that might lie in wait.
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-**THEY GATHERED** in Lancaster on September 30, a Sunday, according to evidence presented at the preliminary hearing, and drove together in Camps's blue Toyota Camry all the way to Santa Cruz. The four men brought with them one of Camps's weapons, a long, black, AR-15 assault rifle. Kaleb Charters, at the wheel of the Camry, dropped the other three off at one end of Pleasure Point Drive at about 2:45 a.m., and then headed to the Summit property, a 20-minute drive away, where he would await his partners. According to a police summary of Kaleb Charters's later statement to detectives, the plan was for the others to find keys to one of Atre's several vehicles and drive that vehicle to the Summit for the rendezvous. Then they would all escape into the night in Camps's Camry with their haul, no one else the wiser.
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-It was a mad scheme, infantile, full of holes. But their brains were likely on fire with the plot they'd concocted. It would be, they believed, according to the defense, an almost victimless heist; they did not believe, for whatever reason, that Atre would be at home. But then they found that the house was not empty, that he was in fact at home, asleep in his bed in the master suite. And so they turned to Plan B.
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-Many who knew him seek something more profound to explain the extinguishing of such an extraordinary life.
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-This was, after all, why they'd brought the rifle. Just in case. This was why they'd brought the zip ties. If he was home, the plan had been to tie him up, as Kaleb Charters later said in his statement. They would give him, perhaps, the fright of his life. Now they zip-tied his wrists behind his back. They yelled at him to tell them where the cash was, where the safe was. One of them shoved a sock in his mouth. But Atre practiced mixed martial arts. Normally strong, he was now likely even stronger, engorged with rage. Somehow he was able to spit out the sock and get out of the house and onto the street, sprinting now, in all likelihood screaming, a banshee, to wake up neighbors, but apparently no one in the other houses could hear him above the surf's roar, and one of the men--according to the police and prosecutors, Lindsay the football star--blazed down the street and tackled Atre headlong and allegedly stabbed him in the side--repeatedly. Fast jabbing motions like punches. There was another scuffle, and perhaps more stabbing, this time allegedly by Camps. And then Atre's white BMW SUV was beside them and they were shoving Atre into the passenger seat, Lindsay now at the wheel, Camps and Kurtis Charters scrambling into the rear. And then they were driving, blood soaking and running out of Atre's shirt as they climbed slowly up the winding road through the dark forest along the route that Lindsay knew to the Summit. No one spoke as Charters tried to stanch the blood.
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-By the time they arrived, Atre was barely conscious. The night was pitch, the dark total. According to evidence presented at court, Camps walked the wounded man down an incline and into a grove of towering cathedral pine. Then there was the crack of gunfire, and Tushar Atre, his mountaintop garden just on the other side of these mighty evergreens that groan and sigh with the wind from the sea, fell to the ground of his final ambition.
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-From the March/April 2022 issue of *Inc.* Magazine
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-# He Had a Dark Secret. It Changed His Best Friend’s Life.
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-The Great Read
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-Tin Chin and Mo Lin were inseparable at the homeless shelter. But one of the men wasn’t who he seemed to be.
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-Adrift in his own life, Tin Chin, left, found purpose in helping Mo Lin after they met at a homeless shelter.Credit...
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-- July 8, 2022
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-### Listen to This Article.
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-*To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times,* [*download Audm for iPhone or Android*](https://www.audm.com/?utm_source=nyt&utm_medium=embed&utm_campaign=)*.*
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-On his first night at the Brooklyn homeless shelter, Tin Chin met his best friend.
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-Estranged from his family, Mr. Chin was alone, stewing in anger and shame over all he had lost and how low he had fallen. The Chinatown restaurants he frequented with his wife and daughter, the elementary school drop-off routine, the friendly neighbors in Queens — these had been the trappings of a middle-class life that once seemed secure. A college graduate and former civil servant, Mr. Chin had to learn his city anew, and now — he could still hardly believe it — as a homeless person.
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-On that evening in 2012 in the Barbara Kleiman Residence in East Williamsburg, he saw only one other Chinese person in the room. The man was skinny, his ill-fitting clothes hanging loosely on his frame. Mr. Chin sized him up with an expert eye: an immigrant, most likely from Fujian Province; no family, no English, no documents.
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-“I’m at the bottom,” Mr. Chin remembers thinking. “But I’m better off than him.”
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-The other man was named Mo Lin. Mr. Chin sensed that if they had met just a few years earlier, they would have had very little in common. “At the beginning, I can’t say I liked him,” he said. “But we are the two Chinese people in the shelter, so we talk.”
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-Mr. Chin possessed little more than his closely guarded secrets, including a criminal record that haunted him. They ran through his mind on a loop, but he divulged them to no one, certainly not this new acquaintance, and instead shared his story in broad strokes — he was born in Hong Kong and had grown up in New York and was new to being homeless.
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-Mr. Lin was hesitant and didn’t say much. It would be a while before he described his years scraping by in New York. He was indeed undocumented, and although he had worked in innumerable Chinatown kitchens, his poor health had long ago made steady work impossible, and he looked far older than his 46 years. He spent his days shuffling along the streets of Manhattan’s Chinatown, smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk, watching staticky TV in threadbare Fujianese community centers.
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-But the men soon began spending so much time together — always chatting in the shelter, strolling downtown streets, sharing plates of noodles — that acquaintances assumed they were family.
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-“We called them brothers,” said Mireille Massac, a Brooklyn food bank organizer who spent time with them. “He took care of Mo. What Mo needed, it went through Tin.”
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-Friendships can be hard to memorialize — relatives, partners, children often take pride of place. But a friendship can be the defining bond in a person’s life, offering a kinship that family cannot, a refuge through lonely, hungry days.
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-And can a friendship offer redemption for your worst mistakes? A decade after their first night in the shelter, Mr. Chin wonders about that.
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-Image
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-Credit...
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-**The shelter rules** said everyone had to be out by 8 a.m., and Mr. Chin and Mr. Lin developed a routine. They headed to Chinatown together, where they would buy dim sum, dumplings — whatever Mr. Chin could afford on the $200 he received through public assistance every month. Mr. Lin’s favorite meal was the fish sandwich from McDonald’s. He had unrelenting dental problems, and the soft filet was easy to chew.
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-They often ate in a leafy park on the edge of Chinatown, sharing a bench and watching the neighborhood swirl. Some days, they went to the library, where Mr. Chin introduced his friend to the internet and the bottomless well of YouTube. Mr. Lin was drawn to old Chinese war movies.
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-Adrift in his own life, Mr. Chin found purpose in helping his new friend. “I’m playing a white knight role here,” he remembers thinking to himself as they became closer. It had been a long time since he had been anyone’s white knight.
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-Over time, it became clear Mr. Lin had hardly explored New York. Mr. Chin appointed himself personal tour guide.
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-Their first outing was Coney Island, Mr. Chin remembered. They took the subway to the end of the line to see the aquarium. Mr. Chin had been there for school trips as a kid, and he took his wife there on a date — sweet memories laced with an acrid burn he kept to himself. Now he focused on Mr. Lin, who had never seen an aquarium before. The sea creatures, the colorful fish, the calming quiet of the underwater world astonished his friend and delighted Mr. Chin. “His eyes were really amazed,” Mr. Chin said.
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-They walked along the boardwalk and bought hot dogs for lunch. For that afternoon, it felt like their lives extended beyond shelter curfews and park benches. They were New Yorkers, this was their city and maybe they would have another hot dog, why not. Mr. Chin was buying.
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-They kept exploring New York, two homeless men in a postcard-perfect montage. They took the Staten Island Ferry, where the view from the deck reduces the skyline to a Tinkertoy city you can scoop into your hands. They tried the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but Mr. Lin grew bored after a couple of floors and they quickly decamped for Central Park. But the Bronx Zoo was a hit.
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- “Especially the tiger,” Mr. Chin recalled. “The tiger really came out, it was the first tiger he ever saw. Everything was the first thing he ever saw.”
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-New York adventures became part of their friendship, which deepened over time. Lawyers, aid workers and friends who met them marveled at their devotion to each other. Extensive details of their years together were also left behind in grainy snapshots, police reports, immigration forms, nonprofit records, court transcripts and old emails.
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-One December, they even went to Macy’s in Midtown to see Santa Claus.
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-They stood in line, two middle-aged homeless men towering above a sea of children. If any parents looked at them sideways, Mr. Chin didn’t notice or care. They finally made it to the front for a photo with Santa. In it, Mr. Chin sits on the right, beaming. On the other side of Santa, Mr. Lin sits more stiffly, his hands clasped in his lap, his puffy coat zipped to his collar. He smiles slightly, unsure quite what to do.
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-Before they left, Mr. Chin translated his friend’s wish for Santa: a green card.
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-Image
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-Credit...An Rong Xu for The New York Times
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-**Over the next two years**, the men settled into life at the homeless shelter. As residents cycled in and out, they moved their cots closer together.
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-By then, Mr. Lin had picked up an old smartphone someone had left behind on a park bench. At night in bed, he used Mr. Chin’s hot spot connection to get online and watch his old movies.
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-Fights and robberies in the shelter were not uncommon, but Mr. Chin managed to deflect attention with a tough-guy mien. But around 11 p.m. on Aug. 1, 2014, while he was talking to a shelter administrator and Mr. Lin slept on his cot, a shelter resident with a history of arrests jumped Mr. Lin and beat him bloody. When Mr. Chin found his friend, Mr. Lin’s left eye was swollen shut, his mouth an open wound, blood trailing from his nose. Mr. Chin went with him to the hospital while the police arrested his assailant.
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-Mr. Lin had broken bones in his face and needed surgery. When he came to, Mr. Chin was by his side, trying to contain an odd, nervous excitement that seemed bizarrely out of place.
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-“I said: ‘Lin! This is a once in a hundred-year opportunity! This is it!’” He knew his friend did not understand, but he didn’t expect him to.
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-For all the time they spent together, Mr. Chin had deliberately kept his past a secret. He spoke of his wife and daughter, but he brushed past his career, and he never mentioned his arrests or the years he spent in prison.
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-Here’s what he never shared: Early in the 1990s, Mr. Chin had been an immigration officer at John F. Kennedy International Airport. His job included interviewing Chinese people seeking asylum, desperate people seeking better lives. People like his own father, people like Mr. Lin.
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-He worked there for five years, through the years following Tiananmen Square, and he saw the surge of migrants that followed. Night after night, he listened to accounts of persecution — many of them surely true, many of them surely exaggerated. He was keenly aware that if his parents’ lives had gone differently, he could well have been one of those people in line looking for mercy.
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-Now, seeing his friend battered, Mr. Chin remembered that there was a special kind of visa — a U visa, was it? — that was granted to immigrant crime victims. He raced to the library, where he used the free computer to research immigration law.
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-It took a few sessions to confirm, but within two weeks, he wrote an email to [T.J. Mills](https://ny-jfon.org/our-team), a lawyer who worked on immigration cases in Chinatown.
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-“I wish that you can look into to see if U visa can work for Mr. Lin,” he wrote on Aug. 13, 2014. “With all due respect, Tin Chin.”
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-**Mr. Chin still** didn’t say anything to Mr. Lin, Mr. Mills or anyone else about his career in immigration enforcement. “My background is ugly,” he said recently. “No need to talk about it.” He sighed. “They said I was a dirty cop.”
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-In 1993, Mr. Chin lost his immigration job when federal agents found $1,700 in his pocket, money he had extorted from a Chinese businessman. The man had landed at Kennedy and claimed political asylum. Mr. Chin said he would send him back to China unless he handed over his money. Hours later, federal agents arrested Mr. Chin. He pleaded guilty and spent nearly a year in prison.
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-Then, years later, he was arrested again, and this time for something far worse. In 2003, he was convicted as the leader of an international plot to swindle dozens of Chinese immigrants out of their life savings. Prosecutors said Mr. Chin set up phony offices across New York and promised visas to immigrants who wanted to bring their relatives to the United States. He claimed that he worked for the government and that through his connections he could get them visas and green cards, for exorbitant fees. Money in hand, they said, he vanished, only to change his name and address and do it all over again.
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-“Chin, a Chinese immigrant, preyed on a group of hardworking and unsophisticated Chinese immigrants who wanted desperately to bring their relatives from China to the United States,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing.
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-He was accused of stealing around $1 million, from grandmothers, farmers, seamstresses, husbands — people risking everything to build new lives in New York. A series of witnesses testified against him in a federal trial, repeatedly identifying him in court as the mastermind. He was the only person connected to the plot to be sent to prison.
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-To this day, Mr. Chin vigorously maintains that he was framed, and that authorities fingered him only because of his previous arrest. Clearing his name remains an animating desire, even as his long, handwritten letters to the judge and other federal officials have yielded no progress.
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-He spent about a decade in prison and was released in 2012. He tried to reunite with his wife and daughter, but it went badly. He washed up at the homeless shelter, desperate to start anew but without a clue how to do it. And then he met Mr. Lin.
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-“God or Buddha above sent me to help Mo,” he said. “He’s undocumented, and I was an ex-immigration officer. It’s not really a coincidence that I met him.”
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-As his battered friend slowly began to recover, Mr. Chin pressed to help him get his visa.
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-Mr. Chin remembered Mr. Mills, the immigration lawyer, from a free legal clinic in a Chinatown church when Mr. Mills had once reviewed Mr. Lin’s case. In a letter sent to Mr. Lin at the homeless shelter two months before the attack, the lawyer had politely told him that obtaining legal status would be virtually impossible. “Since you apparently entered the U.S. with a fraudulent document, your inspection and admission are difficult to prove,” he wrote.
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-Mr. Mills and other caseworkers had nonetheless been struck by the two men’s friendship. They didn’t know about Mr. Chin’s past, but they admired his dedication to Mr. Lin. “Tin has been by his side the entire time,” Mr. Mills said. “Tin is his best friend.”
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-As Mr. Mills looked into Mr. Lin’s case, he quickly agreed that Mr. Chin was right about the U visa, which was created in 2000 to protect immigrants who have suffered abuse in the United States and are willing to cooperate with law enforcement. Mr. Mills began working on an application for Mr. Lin.
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-Mr. Chin became the go-between, helping Mr. Mills gather police records of the assault, hospital documents listing Mr. Lin’s injuries and a blizzard of application forms. The more Mr. Mills worked with Mr. Chin, the more his unusual perseverance and deep fluency in immigration law struck him.
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-“I’ve honestly not known a better friend and advocate than you have been to your friend Mo,” Mr. Mills wrote to Mr. Chin.
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-As Mr. Lin’s case crawled through the immigration system, he eventually recounted his story to case workers.
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-In an interview he gave in 2019 to a volunteer who worked with Mr. Mills, he talked about growing up on his family farm in rural Fujian Province. As a young man, in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests, he went to a rally in Fuzhou calling for more freedom and reforms — and found himself on the authorities’ list as a potential troublemaker. Fearing arrest, he said, he fled his home and began a grueling quest to find safety in America.
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-With the help of a network of sympathizers and a series of loans he couldn’t afford, he ended up at the Thai border, he said, and eventually on an airplane to Los Angeles. When he landed, he retreated into an airport men’s room, where he could be sure no one was watching him. He said he ripped up his passport and headed to customs with two letters memorized: P. A. Political asylum.
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-He was allowed temporary entry, but after a judge ordered his deportation, he spent the ensuing years hiding from the authorities, working grueling jobs for little pay, fearful of being noticed. “I found work in a kitchen and worked as hard as I could to pay for my bed, my debts, my wife,” he said in 2019 through an interpreter. “I did this for eight years and then my body gave up.”
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-He eventually made it to New York and bounced around from shelter to shelter. “I was so scared,” he said.
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-Mr. Mills was haunted by his story. “My whole sense of Mo, even though I didn’t know him well — here’s a guy who the entirety of his life was one of just survival,” he said. “Raw survival and getting beat up constantly.”
-
-It took four years for the visa to come through, but it worked. On April 2, 2019 — 28 years after he first entered the United States — Mr. Lin received his visa. He and Mr. Chin were at their Chinatown park when the document — sent to Mr. Chin’s email address because Mr. Lin didn’t have one — came through.
-
-“Mo had the sweetest smile I ever saw on his face all these years,” Mr. Chin remembered. “He kept on asking me to read over and over every line to him.”
-
-Now that he had a visa, it would be easier for Mr. Lin to visit the dentist and get his teeth fixed. Maybe he could finally get out of the shelter. In three years, as long as he stayed in the United States, he could apply for a green card. And he could finally bring his wife, Huo Mei Li, to New York. He hadn’t seen her in nearly three decades.
-
-“There is so much time we have lost,” Mr. Lin told the nonprofit volunteer in 2019.
-
-Mr. Chin had changed his friend’s life without revealing his own secrets about his years working for the government or his arrests, but months after Mr. Lin got his visa, Mr. Lin confronted him one day with a direct question:Are you an immigration officer?
-
-Someone at the park had clued him in. Now he wanted to know, had Mr. Chin been toying with him all along? Could he have helped secure his paperwork long ago?
-
-As Mr. Chin remembers it, the confrontation quickly became tense. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” he recalls saying to Mr. Lin. “How do you think you got your visa? You should be thanking me.”
-
-An iciness slipped into their friendship, but Mr. Chin says they eventually moved past it. They continued spending time together, and Mr. Chin continued to help Mr. Lin navigate the city and find doctors and dentists.
-
-They had shared countless meals together, and soon they had a third person join. Mr. Lin’s wife had made it to New York, and the pair were beginning to imagine how they could build a life together in America. Mr. Lin still lived in the homeless shelter while she stayed with a family friend, but he had dreams of securing an apartment for them.
-
-“The most important thing is to find a place where we can be together,” he said in 2019.
-
-In March 2020, Mr. Chin took Mr. Lin to Bellevue Hospital Center for treatment for stomach ailments. Doctors kept him overnight and then admitted him to the intensive care unit. It was the beginning of the pandemic, and the hospital had suspended all visits, but Mr. Chin said a social worker regularly called him from the hospital so the friends could chat on video.
-
-Mr. Lin seemed weak and listless during their conversations. Mr. Chin was worried. Within a few days, the hospital said that Mr. Lin had tested positive for Covid.
-
-Then, on the evening of April 17, Mr. Chin remembers the hospital called him. “This is not the usual time they would call me,” he said. “I already don’t like it.”
-
-Mo Biao Lin died at 7:33 p.m., an early victim of New York’s first wave of Covid-19. He was 53 years old.
-
-He was survived by his wife, Ms. Li, and an adult son who forged his own life in another American city. They could not be reached for this article. Mr. Lin is buried in a cemetery in Pennsylvania, near his son’s home. Engraving on his coffin reads “Mr. Mo Biao Lin, 1966-2020.”
-
-On the night his friend died, Mr. Chin stayed up past midnight writing his thoughts in a long email to Mr. Mills.
-
-“Now I ask Heaven, you put me into helping him to get his dream, because I am the right person in this department,” he wrote. “Now you take him away.”
-
-Mr. Chin, who is now 65, regularly flips through photos of his friend on a beat-up old cellphone. He is finally out of the shelter and lives alone in an apartment in Brownsville, Brooklyn, that’s packed to the ceiling with overstuffed boxes and bulging plastic bags. Plenty of it belonged to Mr. Lin. He visits Chinatown regularly and volunteers at a food pantry. He’s fixated on his conviction and spends his nights poring through old transcripts of his trial.
-
-He still sees Mr. Lin everywhere: at the Chinatown park where elderly men walk dutiful laps. On the B60 bus that Mr. Lin used to ride to visit him. In the endless Covid headlines. He sees him in his court case records, where his accusers’ quests for legal status resemble Mr. Lin’s.
-
-Years later, people who spent time with the two friends remember their bond, and remember being struck by its depths.
-
-“I feel like Mo gave him his sense of self back,” said Rebecca Cooney, the nonprofit volunteer who interviewed Mr. Lin in 2019 and spent time with them both. “It was as if Mo was part of his way back to feeling like a human being.”
-
-Mr. Chin revealed almost nothing about his life to Ms. Cooney, but she remembered that both he and Mr. Lin seemed lost. “These are two people who were suffering so much, it’s amazing that they would have the reserves inside to give friendship to each other.”
-
-This April, on the anniversary of Mr. Lin’s death, Mr. Chin took the subway to Bellevue, where he found a park bench nearby. The shared rituals of a close friendship never leave you, even if the friend does.
-
-He lit a stick of incense and laid out a picnic of Mr. Lin’s favorite meal: French fries, Coke and a McDonald’s fish sandwich. Mr. Chin had taken Mr. Lin’s dentures after the funeral — a reminder, no matter how macabre, of his friend — and now he placed them next to the food.
-
-He called his friend’s name aloud a few times: “Lin, Lin, Lin.” Then he ate the sandwich. No one approached him as he finished his lunch — or, rather, Mr. Lin’s lunch.
-
-He made no move to leave the bench.
-
-Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro.
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-Date: 2022-12-19
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-
-# He Planned a Treasure Hunt for the Ages — Until He Went Missing
-
-L et’s start at journey’s end. Some adventures exact a terrible cost.
-
-It’s the last Sunday in January. More than 300 guests walk single file into the Arcata Community Center in far North California. Some wear blazers with sneakers, and some wear gingham dresses with muddy hiking boots. They patiently wait their turn and then sign their names into the guest book.
-
-They are here to celebrate an extraordinary young man. His achievements are perfectly organized and displayed chronologically on a series of tables. There he is as a little boy with his father and grandfather preparing to launch a rocket into the Colorado sky. There are snapshots of a handsome kid with lank hair climbing on rocks, and another where he is playing his guitar. Then a pair of blue canvas shoes with sand still clinging to shredded soles.
-
-You glance up and see someone who resembles the young man. It’s his brother. He’s a different kind of free spirit, with glasses and blond-green hair, his skinny body clad in Doc Martens, a Phish hoodie, and a Bikini Kill T-shirt. He stops for a moment and looks at the different stages of his brother’s travels, and then moves on alone.
-
-The tables continue. The boy grows up and his dreams get more ambitious. There is a ragged copy of *The Fellowship of the Ring.* Then, a list of astronaut requirements scrawled in a teen’s hand. One of the prerequisites is a private pilot license. Magically, the next table features the young man standing outside a plane. He got his license last fall.
-
-And then a treasure hunt. He was an old hand at them. He grew up solving his dad’s hunts with his brother, both in Colorado and down in the caves and cliffs that dot the far Northern California coast, where they played as boys. But this one is different. The boy’s treasure hunt is more elaborate, and it wants the competitors to step out of their comfort zone. There were riddles, keys, ciphers, and a map that, if plotted correctly, would lead you to the final treasure.
-
-For five days, the young man watched with joy as his friends and family raced all over town, rappelling down cliffs and climbing trees in search of answers. Sometimes, the young man would drop in and film his friends as they searched, his all-encompassing laugh occasionally shaking the video. The treasure was his utopian version of life, adventures and risks that pushed everyone’s limits, including his own.
-
-## Editor’s picks
-
-But that is the last table. There is no photo of the man with the treasure-hunt winner. What comes next is not from an epic quest that ends with the knight winning the hand of the fair maiden. Don’t misunderstand. The maiden is here, but she is sitting in the second row wearing a brave smile as her brother and parents wrap her in a group hug.
-
-The reason for her sadness becomes clear once the visitors step beyond the table. On the floor are smashed pieces of green wood twisted in a way that suggests remnants left over from a home demolition. But they’re not. They are the remains of a canoe.
-
-On Dec. 30, Hunter Nathaniel Lewis paddled a lake canoe into the Pacific Ocean. He was maybe 100 yards from Trinidad Beach, a majestic stretch of coast where he and his brother climbed rocks and chased sea and sand as boys. At night, they huddled with their friends as a bonfire blazed near Grandmother’s Rock, where, legend says, a Tsurai woman eternally waits for the sea to return her grandson.
-
-Hunter was seen pushing off from shore around 11 a.m. It was a typical December day, the temperature in the high 40s, matching the cold of the ocean. Where Hunter was going wasn’t clear to a local fisherman shoving off at about the same time. All he saw was a skinny boy in board shorts and a T-shirt, despite the chill, happily paddling without a care in the world.
-
-> “Long ago in your family history lies the fabled pirate legend the Lost Lewis,” Hunter wrote, “who was the last known person to hold the priceless Mayan artifact.”
-
-And then he vanished. Now his smiling face was on a poster next to the word “MISSING.”
-
-Hunter was never found and is presumed dead. He was 21. There will be no more tables with tales of future adventures. Instead, there will be moving boxes holding memories of a life. Right now, there’s just Hunter’s mother sitting on a folding chair and weeping into her hands.
-
-This is the story of how Hunter Lewis became the Lost Lewis treasure.
-
-**Last Christmas morning,** Hunter Lewis sat on his dad’s couch in Blue Lake, California. He wore a T-shirt and pajamas and patiently waited as his two stepsisters opened their presents. He held hands with his girlfriend, Kinsley, an effervescent redhead he hoped to marry after they graduated from college in another year. Someday, Hunter promised, they would have redheaded kids that they would raise on Mars. He was certain he was going to be an astronaut. He watched the kids rip open gifts, and then would lean over and give Kinsley a passionate kiss that didn’t surprise his family, since they had warned everyone that they were strong advocates of PDA.
-
-Hunter handed everyone personalized envelopes once the presents were done. Simultaneously, he emailed the same letter to his mother, Micki, and brother, Bodie, a few miles away, as well as to a dozen friends home for Christmas.
-
-His dad, Corey, opened his envelope and read.
-
-*Dear Mr. Lewis: It has come to our attention that you are of direct descent to the great lost Lewis bloodline. Long ago in your family history lies the fabled pirate legend the Lost Lewis, who was the last known person to hold the priceless Mayan artifact. Lewis shipwrecked somewhere along the north coast, leaving the artifact hidden by secrets known only to him and his relatives. It was believed he died before bearing children, but with recent findings we have found that information to be false. You, sir, are a descendant of that Lewis and are entitled to the legendary Lost Lewis treasure. Sign your name under the dotted line and send back with intent. The Lewis guild will update you on clues to the fabled Treasure. … Good luck, you will need it.*
-
-Included in the letter was a link to a Google Drive with the first round of clues. Corey looked at his son and grinned.
-
-“This is going to be so much fun!”
-
-His son smiled back.
-
-“I hope so; I’ve been working on it for two years.”
-
-
-
-**That was a month ago.** Today, Corey Lewis sits in his tae kwon do studio in nearby Arcata, about a 20-minute drive from the waters where his oldest son presumably drowned. Weak January sunlight filters into the space that doubled as Hunter and his brother Bodie’s favorite place to play endless games of Dungeons & Dragons, with Hunter always serving as dungeon master. Corey is an accomplished martial-arts expert, a former tenured professor, and now a life coach and the author of a handful of self-help books. But right now he looks tired and spent. He grew old the moment he received the call. Still, Corey never grows tired of talking about his boy. He speaks of him in the present tense.
-
-“I always say that Hunter is Corey 2.0.” He smiles. “Like me but without the glitches.” He pauses for a moment. “He was definitely kinder and braver than me.”
-
-Hunter was genetically destined to live like he was the star of his own action film. It was in his blood. Corey’s grandfather was killed in a motorcycle accident when Corey’s father was little. Corey’s mother, Nancy, was a rodeo star back in Cheyenne, Wyoming, during the Sixties. She then married Lon Lewis, a veterinary nutritionist who did triathlons well into his seventies. They still drive every summer with their horses in a trailer from Topeka, Kansas, to their Colorado ranch 12 hours away. Corey met Micki, Hunter’s mother, while he was working on the rugged Pacific Crest Trail. They moved in together in Reno, Nevada, where Corey was working on his Ph.D. in creative writing. They hiked and camped in the desert, going off the grid for days. Micki was always slightly more cautious than Corey, although that is a sliding scale in the Lewis family, as indicated by her swimming from Alcatraz to the San Francisco waterfront in her thirties, after Hunter was born. She loved Corey’s daring side and tolerated the excesses, like the time he was arrested for wandering alone in an Atlanta subway tunnel after a buddy’s kickboxing fight.
-
-“I couldn’t really complain,” Micki tells me. “That kind of behavior is what attracted me to him in the first place.”
-
-When Micki got pregnant in 1999, the couple paused for a second, wondering how a baby would fit into their lifestyle. In the end, they just threw the baby they named Hunter into a sling and kept camping and climbing. Among his first words were “Higher, faster.” Corey obliged and built Hunter a mini roller coaster in their driveway.
-
-
-
-The following year, Corey was offered a professorship at Humboldt State University, and the family immediately fell in love with the area where giant redwoods mesh with jagged cliffs before conceding to wild beaches along the Pacific Ocean. The family embraced the hippie vibe of the unspoiled country and began their exploration on long weekend hikes.
-
-Corey started reading *The Hobbit* to Hunter when he was five, his baby brother, Bodie, sleeping nearby in his crib. Corey’s firstborn was always trying to escape the Lewis backyard, with his mom and dad screaming “Hunter!” Eventually, Hunter met a neighbor who remarked, “So this is the Hunter I’ve been hearing about so much.”
-
-In elementary school, Hunter became obsessed with the treasure-seeking boys in *The Goonies.* He would have fit in well with those fictional lost boys — he already had a reputation at school as a curious kid with a loud laugh that could erupt at any time.
-
-When the boys got a little older, Corey took them to Humboldt State and started teaching them parkour, an athletic endeavor in which you jump from roof to roof or rock to rock, theoretically minimizing the risk by looking before you leap, contemplating all the potential outcomes.
-
-Corey taught wilderness safety to students at Humboldt and urged his boys to take risks but not be reckless. Sometimes it took, sometimes it did not.
-
-There were occasional signposts of the dangers of living an interesting life. When Hunter was 10, Micki and Corey took the boys to Mexico to meet Corey’s parents at a beach resort. Still a daredevil at 70, Corey’s dad was body surfing when a rogue wave slammed his skull into the sand. His mother screamed, and Corey dragged his dad out of the water. He wasn’t breathing.
-
-The family had just lost Corey’s brother to cancer. Corey was certain neither he nor his mother could survive another tragedy. A man on the beach started administering CPR, but according to Corey, his father didn’t come back until he and Micki took over the chest compressions. “I think it was the visceral connection that a father and son have that brought him back,” says Corey.
-
-Hunter watched in silence, telling his scared little brother that everything would be OK. It was Dec. 31, 2009, 12 years before Hunter disappeared.
-
-**Humboldt County is** a loosey-goosey place that fitted the Lewis family well. It often reeks of weed, not because everyone is smoking it, but because the smell wafts out of the redwoods from large farms just a short drive from the coast. On a windy January day, Corey takes me for a drive along the coast and tells me about a man who once owed him $900 for life-coaching sessions. The man said he needed to collect it from a farmer who had bought some property from him and lived outside of town. He asked Corey to come along. Corey agreed, and after 45 minutes of driving, the two found themselves on a remote rural road where he and his friend were met by men on ATVs with rifles on their backs. They left with the money.
-
-“That was not my scene,” Corey tells me as he steers his Jeep down a windy road. “It’s a little bit like the Wild West out here.”
-
-He then slows down to say hello to a haggard but healthy old man in a wet suit, with a surfboard under his arm. The old man tries to find the right words.
-
-“I’m so sorry about Hunter. It is just *. . .*”
-
-He trails off, and Corey looks at the man with kind eyes.
-
-“I know, thank you.”
-
-We drive in silence for a minute before pulling into a beach parking lot. Corey laughs.
-
-“That was the guy who owed me $900.”
-
-We are at Moonstone Beach, and Corey wants to show me where he held a treasure hunt for Hunter on his 10th birthday. It was shortly after Corey and Micki told the boys they were divorcing. On a particularly dark day, Corey wept in front of his boys, and then apologized for breaking down in front of them.
-
-“That’s OK, Dad,” said Hunter. “Everybody has to cry.”
-
-Hunter remained a boy without guile or shame even after reaching adolescence. Micki would sometimes substitute-teach at his middle school, and he’d scream “Hi, Mommy” across the crowded halls.
-
-“Whenever he was leaving the house, he’d circle back for a second hug and ‘I love you,’ ” Corey tells me as we walk in the wind. “It never stopped until he was gone.”
-
-Hunter wasn’t stymied by typical kid problems. His best friend Zane was going to Canada with the school band and Hunter wanted to go, so he learned how to play percussion in six weeks. To him, life was just a riddle to be solved. Corey encouraged his curiosity, constructing clues and maps and leading his two boys on treasure hunts both on his parents’ Colorado ranch and on the beaches of Humboldt County.
-
-> “Hunter wanted people to face their fears and become the person they knew they could be,” his father says. “Whenever he left the house he circled back for a second hug ‘I love you.’”
-
-We step through wet sand, and I follow Corey as he dips his head and enters a cave. It is a dark and serene hole, and the ocean’s thunder melts away. This was where Corey hid the treasure on Hunter’s 10th birthday. We enjoy the respite from the elements, and Corey speaks quietly.
-
-“I had a cigar box I’d had as a kid, and I used it as a treasure chest for the boys.”
-
-Hunter, Bodie, and his friends followed the clues. As usual, Hunter found the treasure that consisted of a few dollars and some chocolate gold coins. A few years later, Corey gave Hunter the box after another treasure hunt at his parents’ Colorado place.
-
-“He acted like the box was a treasure in itself.”
-
-We walk back toward the parking lot and briefly stop at a cliff that played a role in the treasure hunt. One of the clues led Hunter’s friend Michael Santos here to retrieve a clue that was embedded into a crevice. Alas, Santos was afraid of heights and didn’t want to rappel down and grab it. Hunter spent two hours cajoling his friend and taught him how to rappel and grab the clue.
-
-“Hunter wanted people to face their fears and become the person he knew they could be,” Corey says.
-
-I wonder aloud how Hunter had hidden the clue by himself in the first place. Corey sighs.
-
-“He probably came out here and did it by himself. Not the best idea.”
-
-We drive back into town on the 101, shading our eyes from the setting sun flitting through the redwoods. Eventually, Corey mentions that only one other thing washed ashore besides the splinters of the canoe. It was the cigar box turned treasure chest.
-
-**Nothing could stop** Hunter Lewis except for a pandemic. The beauty of California is it’s so big that Hunter could decide to go to college 600 miles away and still qualify for in-state tuition. His boyhood dream of flying and going to space was no longer kid stuff. Cal State Long Beach had an excellent aerospace program and was geographically located in a city that was essential to America’s space industry.
-
-Hunter made friends before his parents had left his dorm parking lot. Home on Christmas break, he talked excitedly about how the Pacific Ocean was 30 degrees warmer in Long Beach than in Humboldt, and wasn’t it weird that it was the same ocean? He began working on his father to let him start taking flying lessons, cagily suggesting a pilot license was one of the prerequisites for aspiring astronauts. Corey told Hunter he would look into it.
-
-And then the plague came. By the spring of 2020, Hunter was back home in Humboldt taking classes remotely and living in the small cottage behind the house that Corey shares with his second wife, Jessica, and her two daughters. Hunter was slowly going bananas, cut off from his future and his new life. It was anathema to everything his father had taught him. “My dad has a saying where if you want to pursue something, don’t do it in the future, do it now,” Hunter told a classmate. “Now’s the time for everything.” To break up the monotony, he went camping in the California mountains with his friends Dakota and Zane, telling his dad that they would figure out how to put chains on his truck when they got there. They returned safely, but the trip only made him more restless.
-
-In the fall, he and his parents decided he should go back to Long Beach, even though his classes would still be over Zoom. He moved into an apartment building and befriended a middle-aged gay man who he referred to as his “guncle.” The man taught Hunter that taking out his stinking garbage was a good thing, and that playing video games at 3 a.m. and laughing loudly above his bedroom was a bad thing.
-
-And he flew. Corey had taken flying lessons and let Hunter tag along, but never got his license. Hunter was different; he felt more alive than he did jumping from rock to rock in the mountains. Once he got his license, he took a classmate, Nathan Tung, along on some flights. Tung shot a short documentary about him. “As soon as I step into the airplane everything else that has been going on in my day just leaves my mind,” says Hunter to the camera. “I’m not thinking about what I need to do tomorrow.”
-
-Tung didn’t mention in his video that his door flew open after taking off and that Hunter gently admonished him to be more careful. Five minutes later, Hunter’s door flew open as well, and they both laughed.
-
-That October, Hunter and a dozen other college students rented a big house outside Zion National Park in Utah. He knew most of the other kids, but not all of them. One of the strangers was Kinsley Rolph, a journalism student and hockey player at Chapman University in Orange County, about 20 miles from Long Beach. She first spotted Hunter paddleboarding near the house, and was immediately taken. She looked forward to watching him and some of the others play music. Before coming down for the show, Kinsley stepped into the bathroom that had been designated for the guys.
-
-She didn’t come out for an hour. She had clogged the toilet and was too embarrassed to tell anyone. Hunter spotted her and asked why she had missed the band. Near tears, Kinsley confessed her sin. Hunter just laughed his big laugh and told her it was no big deal. He got a plunger and fixed the toilet.
-
-
-
-After that, the two were rarely apart. On the second night of their trip, Kinsley froze on a climb, not out of fear — her hands were stiffening because she’d forgotten her thyroid medication. Helmetless, Hunter climbed up and helped her down. It wasn’t long before Kinsley was spending almost all of her nights at his apartment.
-
-“The pandemic was terrible, but it let us spend 24 hours a day together,” Kinsley tells me in a park not far from Hunter’s Long Beach apartment. “We did our classes over Zoom, so we didn’t need to ever be apart.” Our conversation is occasionally interrupted by planes landing at Long Beach Airport. She looks up and smiles.
-
-“Hunter loved to come here and watch the planes,” Kinsley says. “Once, he flew me home from a hockey game in Santa Barbara. I thought my coach would be mad because I didn’t take the team bus, but he was just ‘I’ve got to meet this guy.’ *”*
-
-Most nights they made dinner before retreating to bed, where their vigorous activities broke two bed frames. “After that, we decided to leave the bed on the floor,” says Kinsley. “But now I’m making a bookshelf from the broken parts.”
-
-The two met each other’s families, hers in suburban Boston and his in Humboldt County. On one visit, Hunter took her on a tour of his favorite places, heading up on a deserted road above Trinidad Beach. He parked the car, and they hiked a few hundred yards holding hands until they emerged into a clearing. Kinsley’s jaw dropped. Suddenly, they were looking down on the Pacific Ocean, and he pointed out his favorite rocks and reefs. He sat down and looked out toward the horizon.
-
-“This is my favorite place.”
-
-He wasn’t exaggerating. He often came here to think and draw. Hunter had his senior-year photos taken there, but didn’t tell his parents where they were shot. It was his place alone.
-
-That day, he pulled out a notebook and started sketching, using Kinsley as an easel while he traced the reefs of Bird Rock, Small Rock, and Flat Iron Rock, maybe 500 yards from Trinidad Beach. Kinsley knew better than to ask what he was drawing. She knew he had been working on a big project since a few months into their relationship, but not much more. He kept his ideas in a black notebook that never left his side. Hunter told Kinsley not to guess because it would ruin the surprise. She agreed.
-
-They shared their dreams: Kinsley wanted to be a TV reporter, and Hunter, well, he wanted to do so many things. One time, Kinsley remembers, Hunter began talking about how he wanted to die.
-
-“I want it to be while I’m doing something epic, maybe a plane crash or something.”
-
-**For four days,** Hunter watched with glee as his friends searched the area for clues, roaming from the mud of Humboldt State’s Frisbee-golf course to a crevice in purportedly the world’s tallest totem pole, in nearby McKinleyville. He’d help if the competitors wanted, telling his brother if he was getting hot or cold while searching for a clue on an abandoned railway bridge not far from their boyhood home. But then he’d vanish for hours, hiding the next round of clues all over the county, gunning his red Jeep up and down the 101. At night, he’d sit on the couch at his dad’s house as Kinsley and his father tried to cadge hints out of him. He would just grin and shake his head no.
-
-The hunt grew curiouser and curiouser. One of the second tier of clues was a link to a recording of Hunter playing the *Scooby-Doo* theme song. While Hunter filmed, Corey listened with Kinsley and said he didn’t notice anything strange, but she had heard the song before, and this sounded different. Kinsley is deaf in one ear, so she heard the track in her own version of mono. Using an audio-edit-function app, she was able to isolate tracks and find one on which he had written on the file’s spectrogram “S3 E12 2:00 Blue Lake.” Hunter groaned, he meant for it to take much longer to solve.
-
-Kinsley and Corey had formed an alliance, and they tried to figure out what the numbers meant: a secret code or an important date? They struggled for hours before Kinsley realized they were overthinking things. *Scooby-Doo* was one of their favorite shows. At two minutes into Season Three, Episode 12, Shaggy and Scooby are trying to build a treehouse sandcastle.
-
-She happily shouted at Corey, “I’ve got it.”
-
-In front, shrouded by an evergreen, was an old treehouse that Hunter and Bodie had played in as boys. Kinsley feared the rotten tree, so she waited until morning. After breakfast, she began to climb the tree. Hunter filmed her and shouted encouragement. She entered the treehouse but found nothing.
-
-“Just a little higher,” shouted Hunter.
-
-She stood up and pushed her hand through the rotting treehouse roof and saw a rope with a white key that Hunter made with his 3D printer. She climbed down the tree. Hunter gave her a hug.
-
-“You were so brave. I knew you could do it.”
-
-On the key was a clue written in Braille. Corey and Kinsley went back inside and Googled a Braille alphabet and spent an hour spelling out the words: “From Isaac to Rene.”
-
-They knew Hunter loved science and math, and Isaac Newton and René Descartes were two of his heroes. But they were stuck. What did it mean?
-
-> “Hunter loved these stories of amazing journeys where everyone is a hero and makes a great escape,” his mom says. “But Hunter didn’t escape.”
-
-Meanwhile, Hunter knew it was only a matter of time before the contestants would be closing in on the actual treasure. There was just one problem: He hadn’t yet put it into place. He knew it was time to kick it into gear.
-
-Kinsley and Corey never figured out the meaning of the “Isaac to Rene” clue. There was no one to give them a hint. Hunter was gone by then.
-
-**Kinsley and Hunter** woke up slowly on the morning of Dec. 30. The previous day had been epic. Kinsley had met up with Hunter’s best friend Zane, and they decided to hunt down a riddle that had led them to the Frisbee-golf course on the campus of Humboldt State. Hunter tagged along for filming purposes, and laughed as they tried to decipher six numbers that Hunter had placed on target baskets on the course. Growing frustrated, they headed with Hunter in tow to another friend’s house.
-
-There, Zane looked at clues from the next tier, three pages of text from Hunter’s favorite books: *The Fellowship of the Ring,* *The Martian,* and *Endurance,* the classic retelling of Ernest Shackelton and his crew’s miraculous escape from the Antarctic. Zane remembered that the stranded Martian astronaut was able to communicate with Earth by substituting a series of number patterns for letters and words. He began using the code from the book and realized that the numbers spelled out “Pump Four,” a water station in a dried-up creek at a different Frisbee-golf course.
-
-They drove back, and in the dark walked with flashlights until they found six more numbers posted on the station. Zane deciphered them to mean “Under Four Bridge.” They ran to the fourth hole and noticed a small walking bridge across a creek. Zane slid under and found a Mason jar. In it was a map of Trinidad Beach with a few words written in ornate letters: *Here at our favorite place, we looked out towards the waters*. *Where you held the key to my heart, and with it, unlocked the world beyond*.
-
-It was nearly 10 p.m., so everyone headed back to the house. They would deal with the map tomorrow. That night, they played Hunty-opoly, a version of Monopoly that Kinsley had created for her boyfriend, with his favorite places — like the Long Beach Flying Club — standing in for Boardwalk. Before turning in, Hunter asked his dad if he could borrow his pickup truck in the morning so that Kinsley could drive his Jeep. Corey said sure, and everyone turned in.
-
-In the morning, Hunter said goodbye before circling back to get another kiss from Kinsley.
-
-“I love you.”
-
-She smiled.
-
-“Be safe, be careful. I love you too.”
-
-Hunter walked over to the side of the house, where he lifted up a canoe that he and Corey had used on some river adventures. He walked by the kitchen window, where Corey’s wife, Jessica, saw him load it into his dad’s truck. She didn’t give it a second thought.
-
-Around 10 a.m., Kinsley took the map and met some friends of Hunter’s at Zane’s house. They then headed down to Trinidad Beach. For hours, they trudged along the beach looking at the map, but they didn’t know what they were searching for. Kinsley sent Hunter a playful text detailing their frustration, but, strangely, he didn’t respond. A little later, she and Zane noticed Corey’s truck and decided to leave Trinidad Beach. They didn’t want Hunter to think they were spying on him. After some more wanderings and another unanswered text, they drove back to Trinidad. Corey’s truck was still there. The winter sun was setting, and Kinsley grew concerned. They noticed Hunter’s phone was on the front seat. That’s when Kinsley called Corey and told him she was at the truck but there was no sign of Hunter.
-
-He immediately called the police. Then he asked Jessica if she had seen Hunter that morning. She told him she saw him loading the family canoe into the truck. Corey immediately put it together. He jumped into his car and just kept saying “No, no, no, no.”
-
-**The next two days** were an agonizing blur. An impromptu search crew put on headlamps and scoured the beach in the blackness that first night. Kinsley went back to the house around midnight. She sat on the bed holding one of Hunter’s sweatshirts — she knew he would be cold when they found him — and waited until it was 6 a.m. in Massachusetts, then called her mother. Kinsley’s mom had a hard time understanding her daughter because Kinsley was crying so hard. She promised to get on a flight as soon as she could.
-
-Hundreds of locals mobilized and began scouring nearby beaches and coves, some that could only be accessed with climbing ropes. Helicopters hovered overhead and divers searched the sea. But Corey didn’t have much hope. The day Hunter disappeared had been cold, the water was frigid, and Hunter didn’t take his wet suit.
-
-His last hope was extinguished when another boater reported seeing Hunter paddling out of Trinidad Harbor, turning around the point and heading into unprotected waters. The next day, Corey hired a boat and headed in the direction where Hunter was last seen. The boat bobbed as it approached Flatiron Rock. Corey asked the captain if he could get closer.
-
-“I can’t — there’s rocks just under the water that will tear us apart.”
-
-Later that afternoon, a call came into Corey. Shards of the canoe had been found on an inaccessible beach, about a half-mile away.
-
-Corey and Kinsley talked the next morning. They were exhausted from grief and knew they didn’t want to be the ones who found Hunter if his body washed ashore. Instead they decided to solve the Lewis treasure. But all they had was the map and the key with the Newton and Descartes clue. They walked the hills around Trinidad Beach for hours. Still nothing.
-
-They wandered the beach area for six hours. Then Kinsley remembered the day Hunter took her to his secret place. She told Corey that maybe if they found it, maybe that would help. They drove the back roads for a few minutes before Kinsley told Corey to stop the car. The area looked familiar. They walked on a trail and then tramped through weeds and under trees before emerging at a cliff’s end.
-
-In front of Kinsley was the same view she had seen with Hunter. Kinsley and Corey looked at the ocean, the sun, and three distant rocks a few hundred yards offshore. Instinctively, Corey pulled out the key. He held it in front of him. The key’s nubs lined up with the two smaller rocks. The keyhole gave him an unobstructed view of Flatiron Rock. And instantly he knew what had happened: His boy had paddled out toward the rock to stash the final treasure.
-
-The frail canoe either capsized or broke up on the reefs. Hunter wouldn’t have survived 15 minutes in the icy waters. All Corey could think was “Why?”
-
-“He knew that the area around Flat Iron Rock was dangerous. We’d been talking about how crazy the ocean could turn since he was a little boy,” Corey tells me. “I don’t know why he would take such a risk.”
-
-But Corey also knew what Hunter would say.
-
-“Why not?”
-
-It provided no consolation.
-
-**I almost didn’t** write this story. It was simultaneously too sad and too cinematic. I worried that everyone would concentrate on the ingenious and, yes, the joy of the treasure hunt. They would skim over the fact that a promising young man made a terrible mistake that will forever haunt his family and friends. I talk to Corey about it, and he admits he fell victim to it as well. Friends have asked him who should play him in the inevitable movie version of Hunter’s life.
-
-“It’s fun for a minute,” says Corey. “And then I remember that I won’t ever see him again, and it kills me.”
-
-I had some personal experience with this. My father was a Navy pilot who was killed in a plane crash off the *USS Kitty Hawk* in the Indian Ocean when I was 13. All I heard was that my father died doing something he loved more than life itself. Later, I learned he was probably flying too low and too fast for the conditions. My family was left with nothing but a folded American flag and a marker at Arlington National Cemetery.
-
-Those memories sometimes overwhelmed me as I thought about Hunter. It left me sleepless, obsessing over my eight-year-old son’s safety, and with writer’s block for the first time in my life.
-
-I kept flashing back to the day Corey took me, Micki, and his parents up to Hunter’s spot. We trudged across the same trail Hunter did, pushing the same brush and branches out of our eyes before emerging into his Eden.
-
-We all gasped at the beauty. I held the key up and saw how it aligned with Flatiron Rock. It was a half-mile offshore, but looked tantalizingly close to the beach from here. His grandmother smiled as she gazed into the distance.
-
-“Someone asked me about him taking risks, and I said, ‘Hey, he’s a Lewis.’”
-
-Micki joked that she would come back and hang up a hammock and live there. We made small talk about Hunter, and Micki said she was rereading *The Martian* and *Endurance.*
-
-“Hunter loved these stories of amazing journeys where everyone is a hero and makes a great escape,” Micki said, her voice cracking. “But Hunter didn’t escape, he didn’t come back.” We all fell silent and just listened to the waves and the wind rushing through the trees.
-
-I talked to Corey a couple of weeks after I left Humboldt County. He told me he recently returned to Hunter’s place by himself and had a conversation with his son.
-
-“Hunter, why did you have to go out in the canoe? Why did you have to die? We had so much more to do.”
-
-“*Would you like me to take a year and die from cancer? Or die in a meaningless car crash? Or be a victim and make someone else a villain and ruin their life?*”
-
-“But Hunter, why so soon? We had so many things left to do.”
-
-“*Dad, I went in the most epic, beautiful way possible. And I kept you all in the dark. I kept it all a secret from you. So none of you could blame yourself. And now I am the Lost Lewis treasure forever.*”
-
-Then Corey got into his son’s Jeep and drove home.
-
-
-
-
----
-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
\ No newline at end of file
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-Alias: [""]
-Tag: ["🚔", "🐙", "🇺🇸"]
-Date: 2022-02-06
-DocType: "WebClipping"
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-Link: https://sundaylongread.us9.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6e1ae4ac632498a38c1d57c54&id=8f3244c44e&e=c81182982b
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
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-Parent:: [[@News]]
-Read:: [[2022-02-07]]
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-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-RollingStoneNSave
-
-
-
-# Rolling Stone
-
-We’ll come to the homegrown terrorists he foiled and the race war they tried to foment. To the journalists he saved from assassination and the synagogue marked for carnage in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. To the gun-rights march on the steps of a state capitol, where they planned to pick off cops and rallygoers. There’s time enough to valorize the work of Scott B., an undercover fed who breached far-right death squads and squashed their national web of terror cells. (Scott requested that his surname not be used for the sake of his family’s safety.) Last summer, when he retired at 50 from the FBI, Scott left the bureau as one of the most storied agents since Joe Pistone, the real-life Donnie Brasco. For two-plus decades, he cracked landmark cases and won every laurel they give to undercovers. Months out of the game, though, he can’t stop brooding over the threat he left behind. He knows better than anyone that it’s later than we think, and that each day brings us closer to the next 9/11 — this one launched by our own children.
-
-But first, we need to talk about the ram. Because that ram — actually, a terrified goat with diarrhea — died for all our sins of the past four centuries.
-
-It is Halloween evening 2019, and Scott — undercover coordinator for the FBI and special agent dispatched to its Joint Terrorism Task Force — is shivering in three layers, including tactical gear, in the pitch-black woods of northern Georgia. He has infiltrated a domestic-terror group called the Base, posing as a former skinhead who calls himself PaleHorse and is expert in hand-to-hand combat. Scott and 11 Base members are walking an unmarked path to a clearing above a creek bed. He doesn’t know most of the men he’s with; they’ve come from far distances to this encampment on a farm for a four-day training block on guerrilla warfare. Five of them traveled from Northeast states with assault rifles and armor in their car trunks. Another, a young psycho who calls himself ZoomGnat, has been up for two days straight on Adderall and Red Bull and has driven from Texas without stopping. None of them call one another by their given names, only their noms de guerre: Pestilence, PunishSnake, BigSiege, etc. Several are ex-military with munitions training and the wherewithal to take out power stations. Others are self-taught tactical freaks who shoot and move as nimbly as paratroopers. The internet will teach you anything these days, including how to start a race war in three steps.
-
-The day had broken mild but turned bone-cold later, and was now, after many hours of slanting rain, a misery of mud and wind. When they came to the clearing, the members lit torches and formed a circle around the fire. Incantations were spoken by one of the men, citing the Wild Hunt and other gross misreadings of pre-Christian and Norse mythology. And then — because this was a sacrament not to the gods but to the massacre of Jews, Blacks, and gays — it was time to sacrifice the trembling animal they’d kidnapped from a neighbor’s farm.
-
-The goat, all 80-something pounds of him soaking wet, was shitting and bleating in prostrate fear of these men in death masks and camo. The man leading the ritual — code name: Eisen — swung the machete overhead. He hesitated a moment, then brought the blade down; it bounced off the animal with a whomp. Goats aren’t built for ritual kills, as it happens: The scruffs of their necks are double-reinforced with back straps of gristle and fur. After further attempts at holy butchery, someone had the bright idea to just shoot the thing already. But this, too, quickly became a clusterfuck. Eisen looked away as he pointed the pistol — and the members, after all, were in a _circle_. One of them could have died if he misfired.
-
-And so Scott, who in real life is a sniper-grade marksman and who teaches his fellow agents how to shoot, stepped in to school the young neo-Nazi on the rudiments of gun safety_._ But the goat didn’t die after a single head shot; its legs kept flailing, as if to taunt Eisen for being such a weasel. Finally, Eisen put a second slug in him. Now, the dark sacrament could begin.
-
-Someone slit the animal’s throat and filled a chalice with the blood that came glomping out. The men passed the chalice around the fire, each taking sips from the cup. By the time it got to Scott, though, the blood had somehow chunked into dim-sum lumps of plasma and — oh, hell no, he’s not drinking that mess. He dipped a pinky into the chalice and touched it to his lips as one of the men began to vomit. Not a genteel purge but the full-boat Linda Blair, the contents of his dinner spraying the trees. _Sweet Jesus,_ Scott thought as he looked around the campfire at these misfits in training for mayhem. He was the only Christian at this devil’s mass, and the only functional adult on hand. While some of the others took hits of acid and spooked themselves by talking to the severed goat’s head, Scott stood as close to the fire as he could. “It was so fucking cold, and I couldn’t warm up in my truck: I was taping the whole thing on audio recorder.”
-
-Scott is telling this story in the study of his farmhouse high up a hill in the Appalachians. It hunches like a fort on its timbered perch, with assault rifles and armor in the linen closet and kill-shot sight lines of the unmarked road running past his drive. As he talks, he screens footage that he took of those men through a hidden cam on his person. It was wildly risky work, taping terrorists with long guns in woods miles from his support team. It is no less risky to be showing this film and revealing these details for mass consumption. Scott has never been named in public, even at criminal trials. So thorough was the evidence he gathered covertly that every defendant he ever arrested pleaded out.
-
-But he’s breaking his covenant now for the reason he took that footage: He is haunted by what the people onscreen will do if their movement — and their moment — aren’t thwarted. Over months of interviews with Scott and his former colleagues, hours-long conversations with domestic-terror experts, and wormhole dives down fascist portals on apps like Gab and Discord, a portrait emerged of a nation under threat from a thousand points of hate. “We’ve seen massive increases in plots and acts” committed by domestic terrorists, says Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown professor and counterterror authority whose _Inside Terrorism_ is the master text on the subject. “Me and my team lay awake nights kicking the walls, because there’s a million-and-a-half guys online plotting murder,” says Rita Katz, the founder and director of the SITE Intelligence Group, and the author of the forthcoming _Saints and Soldiers,_ which tracks the rise of far-right terror in the age of Trump. “We’re in a business where we can’t be wrong once,” says Scott. “And there’s way more of them than us undercovers.”
-
-I ask him how he endured those spectral hours in the company of such fools. Scott stiffens and pulls up pictures on his phone.
-
-“This,” he flashes the photo of a teen with a bowl haircut and a sunk-chest, scarecrow build, “is Dylann Roof. He killed nine people in a church.”
-
-“And this,” he flashes the photo of a crew-cut dork in glasses, “is Patrick Crusius. He’s charged with killing 23 at a Walmart in Texas. So don’t think for a second you can read these boys by how they look on Twitter.”
-
-Then Scott fetches up a meme he pulled off one of the apps where rageful kids meet up. It is a viral poster of the so-called saints who inspire white terrorists worldwide. At the top is Saint Breivik — as in Anders Breivik, the Norwegian who slaughtered 69 people at a summer camp for kids, and another eight in Oslo with a van bomb. Just below him is Saint Tarrant — as in Brenton Tarrant, the Australian who murdered 51 people in a pair of New Zealand mosques. Two down from him is Robert Bowers, the Pennsylvania trucker who allegedly slew 11 at a synagogue in Pittsburgh. This meme is a totem pole for Nazi youth in training, the standings in a pennant race of killers. Bracketing their stat lines is a phrase in block chalk: “Will you make it onto the leaderboard … in the fight for white survival?”
-
-
-
-From top, left to right: Scott infiltrated the Klan for Operation Smoking Robes in 2017, which led to the arrest of a man who said he was planning to shoot up a synagogue; for Operation Road Kill, Scott went undercover in 2006 to take down the Outlaw motorcycle gang; graduating from the academy in 1993.
-
-**Scott doesn’t look like any guardian you’ve met,** unless by “guardian” you mean the cooler at a Vegas strip joint who keeps the drunks off the girls with a black-eyed glare. He’s been lifting all his life and has the setup to prove it: mail-box quads and meat-plow arms that dispose him to sleeveless tees. At six feet four and 260 pounds, he fills up a room without meaning to, though he never wastes time trying to merge with his surroundings. He’s funny and profane and could charm a lampshade off its base with his whiskey-sour drawl and Harley swagger. Small wonder that even strangers at the Quik Mart call him Tex, though he’s as much from Amarillo as you or me.
-
-But being a giant with full tat sleeves is its own disguise: No one sees you and thinks “plainclothes cop” hiding cameras in your leathers. That’s the trademark of a crack undercover: a genius for playing yourself. “What I do isn’t acting, ’cause acting’ll get you killed,” says Scott. “I’m just out here being darker shades of me.” He tartly describes his targets — homicidal bikers who beat their victims with hammers; racist gangsters who pimp out their women under the sobriquet “Aryan angels” — as “my ass-out country cousins,” rednecks raised in the same locus he was but who went right when he went left. “If I hadn’t’ve played \[foot\]ball in college and been friends with lots of Black guys, I might’ve shared a few of their views,” he says. Scott drains the last of his third Jack Daniel’s — he drinks the stuff like seltzer — then laughs at the thought of espousing hate. “Yeah, nah, probably not. I ain’t big on stupid.”
-
-Still, playing Klansmen and hired killers, he had the chops to infiltrate homegrown terror. For 28 years in law enforcement — first as an investigator a year out of college at a county sheriff’s office in the Carolinas, then as a shooting star at the FBI — he’s been working his way into, and out of, tight spaces, breaching outfits that chop up cop impostors. Sitting in the crates he brought home when he retired are the field notes and transcripts of every case he’s worked. They corroborate the accounts he’s giving here and chart the plagues of the past three decades — the flood tide of drugs from the five cartels penetrating our southern border; the poisoning of the suburbs by Big Pharma and the opioid mills they helped spawn; and the radioactive gush of white supremacy through the fire hose of social media. Scott seems almost wistful now to recall the Nineties, when the bogeyman in America was crack cocaine.
-
-By his count, there are 600 FBI agents who are certified as UCEs (undercover employees). But some of them do the work of “backstopping” agents: creating false credentials and social media profiles for UCEs working in the field. Of the several hundred people who do face-to-face ops, most have only handled a couple of cases as the primary undercover. “There’s maybe 50 in the country who’ve done five or more ops — and then the rare few who’ve done double digits,” says Shawn McAlpin, a prolific UCE who retired to run a cannabis dispensary. Scott has done dozens, though they tend to run together; he has, after all, a type. “No one’s gonna send me in on corporate crimes; my country ass would be laughed out of the boardroom,” he says.
-
-And so he made his name doing the dirty jobs, often juggling several ops at once. He infiltrated the Outlaws — a national biker gang that rivals the Hells Angels in size — and sent 16 members or their associates to prison for guns, drugs, extortion, and violent crimes. Hours before they swung a huge dope deal one night, they summoned Scott to their clubhouse in Taunton, Massachusetts. Scott was kitted out with his standard trousseau: a tiny camera and a recording chip secreted on his person (it would breach tradecraft to say precisely where). They ordered him — at gunpoint — to get naked.
-
-Scott was stunned; he’d been undercover for 18 months and committed six crimes with them already. (Or so they thought.) “Not gonna lie to you: My asshole was knittin’ a sweater, going chicka-chicka-chicka as I stripped,” he says. They searched Scott and his garments, but missed the microcamera — a providence he chalks up to his god. Later, at one of the strip joints they called home, his adrenaline dump turned to rage. “Fuck you, motherfuckers,” Scott hissed, turning purple. “Tomorrow, before the drop, I’m making all you bitches strip!”
-
-Next up was Operation Poetic Justice: a sheriff’s office in the hillbilly South dealing drugs, untaxed cigarettes, and taking bribes. “There was so much corruption, it seeped into government, because everyone was related up there,” says Mike MacLean, Scott’s FBI supervisor in Knoxville. Before Scott and his team took down 50 people, including cops and their family members, he was sitting with a deputy’s relative one night when the guy pulled a shotgun, hammers cocked. “I find out you the law, you a dead man,” said the relative, baring his toothless gums in a snarl. Months later, after the takedown, Scott sat with the man again, introducing himself as FBI. “Aw, hell, I knew you was law the whole time,” said the relative. “Yeah?” said Scott, who hears that often, post-arrest. “Then why’d you sell me coke for a year?” “Oh, that’s ’cause I like you,” said the man.
-
-Compound that criminal dementia with fanaticism and you get the pretzel logic of white power. In the hate groups that he breached, Scott encountered credos that only cracked-out satirists could conceive. One night, he sat up drinking bourbon with a Klansman who laid out the dual-seed theory. In the Garden of Eden, it was Adam, Eve, and Abel, and Abel, born of Adam, sired the white race. Then came the snake with forbidden fruit — only, the “fruit” was Eve sleeping with the snake. The snake, being Satan, fathered Cain and the mud people, starting off with the Jews. Then, you got your Blacks, gays, commies, and Asians: They’re all the seed of Satan, too. Christians can kill them and it ain’t a sin to do so, since they’re hell spawn who don’t have souls.
-
-The names of the demons changed as Scott roved the racist circuit: lizard people, beasts of the field, short-faced bears. The rules changed, too, even under the same flag. Aryan Nation disciples in the state of Tennessee trafficked dope and guns and pimped their girls on Backpage, often to Black and brown johns. This raised the hackles of the Right Rev. Richard Butler, who’d founded Aryan Nations in the Seventies. From his compound in Idaho, he sent cease-and-desist letters to those crystal-tweaking heathens down South. For months, he harassed them to change their name; they told him to go fuck himself. Finally, Butler capitulated: They could call themselves Aryan Nation if they studied Scripture with him. And so it came to pass: The Tennessee apostates got religion and kept selling speed to all comers. Scott busted that crew in 2018, sending 44 members to the pen. “For all their Christian bullshit, they were moving tons of product,” he says, and using the criminal proceeds to grow their base.
-
-> **“These guys are unstable! People will die if we don’t move,” said an FBI Agent. Well, of course, they’re unstable, Scott thought. That’s what I’m counting on.**
-
-Asked if he’d challenged them to square the contradiction, Scott lets out a snort. “I’m talking to this neo-Nazi and said, ‘Why do y’all hate Blacks so much?’ He goes, ‘They’re lazy, and they mooch off their family and the county.’ I said, ‘OK, so where you living these days?’ ‘Um, well, right now, I’m staying by my girlfriend’s mama’s.’ ‘Right, and what do you do for work?’ ‘Well, I’m kinda between jobs at the moment.’ I just started laughing and said, ‘Is it me, or are you the very thing you just described hating?’”
-
-**If Scott had done nothing** **but “enterprise crimes”** — drug gangs, corrupt cops, human-trafficking cases — he’d have blazed a big trail at the bureau. But he was spinning his wheels working narcotics rips and badly wanted out of that box. So in 2015, he arranged his own transfer to the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Tennessee. Created by the bureau in 1980, JTTFs are regional strike teams blending feds, cops, troopers, and linguists tracking terror threats at home. Back then, no one in Washington deemed the far-right groups a high-priority target. “For several years, our unit had been a lackluster crew, not known for having ass kickers,” says Scott. That changed in a hurry with him around. He built the case on the Aryan Nations that lasted 18 months. The windfall payoff in arrests and seizures showed DTOS — the Domestic Terror command in Washington — “that you could bring major cases against white supremacists, and that we needed more bodies” to do so, he adds.
-
-The bureau soon doubled the size of his team; Scott spread his reach to other states. Posing as an outlaw biker, he infiltrated a Klan cell suspected of making ghost guns for sale. One night in a remote field in Scottsboro, Alabama, they blindfolded him and ordered him to his knees: He was “naturalized,” or inducted, by a green-gowned wizard. For months, he attended their Klan Kraft Klasses and played Lynyrd Skynyrd at their rallies. Scott, who shreds like a poor man’s Dave Mustaine, would get four songs in and run out of suitable numbers. “You can’t rock Hendrix for the Klan,” he says. So he’d wail Southern standards as they doused their 30-foot torch with diesel fuel.
-
-At those Klan meetups, Scott caught wind of a man who was bent on bad intentions. “He’d post pictures of synagogues on his Facebook page and say, ‘I’m gonna do something big.’” Scott arranged to meet the man while posing as a closer. (The closer is the guy who supplies the “iron,” be it a gun or bomb for an attack.) On Jan. 12, 2017, he picked up Benji McDowell at his home in Conway, South Carolina; they drove to Myrtle Beach to talk targets. “This was right around the time Dylann Roof was on trial,” says Scott. “Benji said he wanted to do something in the style of Roof, only on a grander scale.”
-
-Scott wasn’t sure what to make of McDowell, an overstuffed pillow of a 30-year-old stoner who came off as a soft-brained teen. Countless idiots shitpost heinous threats but lack the will or means to see them through. Scott made McDowell for one of those losers, a sense compounded when he sparked up a joint in the back seat of Scott’s sedan. “Put that out!” Scott barked at him, boiling mad. “You don’t know what I got in the trunk, or what my priors are!” McDowell was so scared that he swallowed the joint. He later threw up in a parking lot.
-
-But that night, Scott got a call from Benji: “I want a 40-cal and hollow points.” Scott returned in February to deliver the gun — minus firing pin, of course. “He was good to go in the next week or two,” says Scott. “He had intel on an event at a temple \[in Myrtle Beach\] where lots of kids and families would be present.” The drop-off happened at Scott’s motel. Cops swarmed McDowell in the car park. Later, at the station, he gave a rueful confession. “I’m glad y’all stopped me when you did,” said McDowell. “I was fixin’ to do something bad.” Scott notes that McDowell got a wrist slap — 33 months in prison for an illegal weapon. “The loophole is, there’s no domestic-terror law: You can’t bust a guy for saying ‘All Jews must die.’ So you wind up working whatever charge you can just to get ’em off the street.”
-
-He had no time to brood about sentence guidelines, though: There was another plot afoot at an industrial plant. A white man enraged at his Black superiors sought a bomb to blow up the place. Scott reached out to him through a source, posing again as a closer. But leery of leaving a voice trail, the man declined to talk. Instead, he texted Scott the thing he was after: an emoji of a bomb going _ka-boom_. After months of pinging from his personal phone, the perp switched his aim to the home of his bosses, who happened to be a married couple. Travis Dale Brady was pinched when he took possession of a dummy bomb delivered by the feds. “He was no wiz at op-security,” says Scott, “but stupid people kill people all the time. Like the other guy \[McDowell\], he had the heart and drive to do it. And last time I checked, dead is dead.”
-
-Scott couldn’t have known it at the time, of course, but he was feeling the first tremors underfoot: a wave of white terror that built in 2017 and has been breaking on our beaches ever since. There were horrific hate-based murders in New York and Portland, Oregon, that spring. Then, come summer, the deluge: Charlottesville, Virginia. For two days, men with long guns paraded Nazi flags through the streets of that quaint town. Cops and troopers stood by, watching, as dozens were injured in a festival of hate and horror. But even the footage of James Fields Jr. plowing his Dodge into a crowd, then backing up and hitting even more pedestrians after killing Heather Heyer, didn’t center domestic terror as a frontline threat. “That whole time, I had to fight like hell to keep my Aryan Nation op alive,” says Scott. “The International Terror Section were the big dogs. We in DTOS weren’t deemed as important.”
-
-He and his fellow agents were flummoxed. There were groups at that rally plotting mass destruction, the worst of them the Atomwaffen Division. A global gang of white boys in their teens and early twenties, they’d been baptized in fire by the teachings of James Mason, whose banned book, _Siege,_ is a syllabus for racists. Mason, a graying neo-Nazi living quietly in northern Colorado, has been grooming sociopaths since the early Eighties. He’s one of the founding fathers of the “accelerationist” movement: a ragtag consortium of far-right ragers who think society’s on the brink of full collapse. The job of accelerationists is to speed the plow, springing attacks on people and institutions that set the stage for race war in the streets. In that banquet of blood — the “boogaloo,” as they call it — the ones with the biggest guns will prevail. Then, the terrorists can claim their caliphate: a bone-white ethnostate, armed to the teeth, that is by, for, and about the master race.
-
-But Mason’s goons in Atomwaffen were fuzzy about their targets. One of them, Nicholas Giampa, killed his girlfriend’s parents because they didn’t want her dating a white supremacist. Another, Devon Arthurs, killed his two roommates, both Atomwaffen boys. A third member, Samuel Woodward, stabbed his date to death after a gay hookup in California.
-
-
-
-Neo-nazi group known as the Base.
-
-Those slayings were the stumbles of a lethal bunch. Three members — all Marines in a cell at Jacksonville’s Camp Lejeune — were planning to take out power plants with homemade thermite bombs. They’d already formed a “death squad” and were selling no-trace rifles to conspirators around the state. A member in Las Vegas targeted a local temple; he aimed to detonate an IED, then pick off panicked congregants as they fled. These kids were such bloodcurdling posters on Gab that the feds finally acted in 2018. They sent Scott west, as part of an undercover squad, to the Destroying Texas Fest that summer. Black-metal bands with names like Satanic Goat Ritual were playing at a club in Houston; several Atomwaffen members would be there. One of the plans was for Scott, et al., to stage a “cold bump”: One of them would pick a fight with the leader, John Cameron Denton, then Scott would jump in to “save” him. As it turned out, they didn’t have to fake the brawl. Other agents infiltrated Denton’s cell and arrested him and five others for plots against reporters, Blacks, and Jews. That freed Scott for his biggest case: the seven-month op to smash the Base.
-
-If you’re a top producer for the FBI, your career can take one of two paths. Some time in your thirties, you’re encouraged to climb the ladder by applying for the position of SSA (supervisory special agent). There’s a big bump in salary, you may get home in time for dinner, and it’s a straight shot up to the boss’s job. Alas, the great undercovers shun that route, disdainful as they are of careerist cops. “Guys like us don’t think of climbing the ladder; we crave this shit too much to want to stop,” says McAlpin, the retired UCE. Instead, stars like Scott often stay in their lane and build their brand by becoming master teachers. By the time he switched over to Domestic Terror in 2015, Scott was the tactical instructor of his division, and ran its firearms-qualification courses. He was also a tough-love mentor at the Undercover School, a two-week crucible of stress and sleep loss that breaks some of the candidates who enroll. “It’s a horrific experience because it has to be; we’re preparing you for the worst of the worst,” says Terry Rankhorn, an undercover coordinator and master instructor who retired in 2019. “You’ll have guns at your head, a rope around your neck; we’ve never killed anyone, but we’ve air-lifted students to hospitals.”
-
-Scott was in Phoenix to train online coverts when he ran into a compadre from Ohio. He and “Jim,” a veteran cop assigned to Joint Terror, were the Hans and Franz twins of undercover: two hyper-muscled men with full-dress Harleys and enough tats to start a biker gang. Each of them had heard the buzz about the Base and wanted to get a case going fast. So one night, they bought a fifth of their favorite poison and stayed up building Scott an alias. Using fascist pen names, they made his social media a fount of Holocaust slurs. But try as they might, it proved problematic to get booted off Facebook, or “Jewbook,” as young racists like to call it. A screenshot of your ouster is a very useful chip if you’re seeking instant cred with terror groups.
-
-So Scott took it on himself to just tag the Base directly. He wrote to the web address they posted on Gab, going by WhiteWarrior88. That night, they emailed him a questionnaire. Several days of back-and-forth led to a voice chat with some of the members, including a man calling himself Roman Wolf. Scott was asked about his combat skills and what he was willing to risk for his beliefs. Accelerationists love to boast that they’re leaderless cells, and that their crypto skills shield them from being breached. But it had taken Scott a day to reach the Base online, and a week to speak to their leader directly.
-
-Said leader, Roman Wolf — real name: Rinaldo Nazzaro — was no blood-and-soil warlord whose hateful worldview stemmed from combat horrors. Wolf graduated prep school in New Jersey and dropped out of Villanova, where he presented himself as an anarchist opposed to government meddling. He had nothing in common with the Base kids he exhorted to “finish” what Hitler started. Those boys were dirt-floor loners in the rural South, while Wolf and his wife lived comfortably in Russia after leaving America in 2018. Everything about him sounded gassy and self-inflated, from his credentials as a mercenary in the Middle East theater to his counterterror chops at an intel firm. There is evidence that he worked for the Department of Homeland Security from 2004 to 2006, but he didn’t learn much tradecraft on the job. The firewall he built around his white-terror op has been breached, time and again, by media types. He bought land, for instance, in Washington state to stage hate camps for the Base, but the site was doxxed by a Vice reporter and swarmed by [antifa](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/antifa/) types. The kids in his western cell quickly quit the group, and Wolf had to start all over in the East.
-
-
-
-For his last mission, Scott spent seven months as a member of the Base.
-
-The day after his interview, Scott was asked to join the Base. Wolf put him in touch with the nearest cell leader — a guy in Rome, Georgia, named Luke Lane. “I didn’t know it then, but he was the bastard we’d been hunting under his call name, TMB \[The Militant Buddhist\],” says Scott. “Outta all of ’em in the cell, Lane was the most gonzo. He’d be up till dawn posting seriously crazy shit.” A week or two later, Scott drove to meet Lane near a statue of a — yes, lord — Roman wolf. Lane, 20, and Pestilence, 19, approached Scott in the standard issue of young fascists: black BDUs bloused into combat boots. Lane told Scott to put his cell on airplane mode, then wanded him with a contraption he’d never seen. “It was this detector that picks up waves from any recording device — and my team had put a tracker on my truck,” says Scott.
-
-Two thoughts went through him in a blur: _This’ll be the shortest undercover in history_ (it wasn’t — he’d parked under a power line, fuzzing the rod’s reception), and _How are these kids buying equipment the FBI doesn’t have?_ That question, or something like it, came up again all weekend as he scoped out the armory they’d amassed. Each member of the Base who came to Lane’s place had a kit he could hit the ground with in Tikrit. Set aside their long guns with which they aired out Star of David targets. What stunned Scott was all their ancillary gear: bulletproof vests with ceramic plates that could stop an AK round, and loaded battle-rattles holding gas masks and mag clips and everything you’d need in a firefight. “These boys were tight,” says Scott in grudging awe. “Their shoot-and-move skills, their magazine dumps — for home-schooled dudes, they were pretty squared away.”
-
-Scott says Lane lived on a farm that wasn’t fit for habitation. There was a house on the property encircled by trash, but that was somehow rented to a tenant. Lane and his father bunked in the loft of their converted barn, where they shared a kitchen and bathroom with Lane’s sister. The father worked construction and was gone all day, but neither his son nor Lane’s best friend had a job. Pestilence — real name: Jacob Kaderli — was an unemployed teen who somehow scrounged the cash to pay for combat gear. Helter-Skelter — real name: Michael Helterbrand — was the only Georgia member with a steady check. He worked in IT. Lane was the oddest of the three, though, says Scott: an eighth-grade dropout who’d quit school to read _Mein Kampf_ and trade firearms online all night. Scott never saw his bedroom, but heard from the other members that it harbored an arsenal. “That’s how he had money to buy new gear,” says Scott. “Buying and selling on armslist.com.”
-
-At night, after hours of training maneuvers and honing their Sieg Heil poses, the Base boys would sit beneath an awning by the barn, drinking Jägermeister and trading tin-foil theories. “Pestilence would be talking about the Earth being concave, that Hitler proved it by firing rockets that came down,” says Scott. “Then someone would say, ‘No, bullshit. Hitler’s living in Middle Earth, along with a race of giants.’” And Lane would declaim against the “ZOG,” or the Zionist Occupied Government \[of America\]. For all their pagan bluster and dreams of an ethnostate, Scott couldn’t help but ask these sex-starved boys how they planned to sire the master race. “Oh, that’s easy,” said one of them. “We’ll just kidnap bitches and rape ’em till they give us kids.”
-
-There was a lot of this sort of thing over the next three months. Scott (rechristened PaleHorse) drove to Georgia twice a month and met his support team at their off-site. Installed in a defunct schoolhouse, the feds wired him up to record for two days straight. (They also flew a plane overhead that filmed the group’s movements from four miles up.) For 48 hours, his backups eavesdropped as the Base boys burned Bibles and U.S. flags, cut themselves to bleed on blocks of Norse runes, and raged against Jesus and “the rest of his fucking Jews.” What the feds didn’t hear were the names and dates of targets; the Georgia cell took pains to speak vaguely. Scott sensed they were hatching something, but couldn’t get them to say it. Meanwhile, his case kept getting bigger.
-
-Sometime in August, three other men showed up; one became a fixture at the farm. He had a fringy beard and was evasive about his background, but his Manitoba twang gave him away. Patrik Mathews was a corporal in the Canadian Reserves trained in explosives who’d fled Canada after being outed as a neo-Nazi by a reporter. Half the FBI was looking for Mathews, who’d snuck across the border weeks before. Members of the Georgia cell were awed by his prowess and his commitment to the cause. Lane’s father let him stay at the farm, where, per Scott, Mathews slept in a horse stall for two months.
-
-Then there were the other two who’d come down with him. Can’t-Go-Back — real name: Brian Lemley — was an Army vet and truck driver who’d scooped up Mathews near the border and harbored him for a while in Virginia. Eisen — real name: William Bilbrough — was another middle-earther and self-taught ninja whose martial skills weren’t worth a damn. Those three wanted to start a race war ASAP. Mathews, who’d named himself PunishSnake, had the self-assurance of the psychotic. He was, he said, “invisible,” the perfect killing machine because, as far as anyone knew, he was dead. Drunk or sober, he’d foam at the mouth about downed power lines and poisoned water supplies. That fall, when they formed their own cell in Delaware, Mathews and Lemley built a ghost gun from parts, hatched plans to assassinate cops for their weapons, and roughed out a plot on a gun rally on the Capitol steps in Virginia.
-
-Meanwhile, Scott was under blue-flame pressure to bust the Georgia cell. It is murderously expensive to build a multistate op on a terror group that keeps growing. By October, the feds had dozens of members in their sights, and offices from New York to L.A. were opening cases against suspects in their region. Scott would man the phones once a week at 10 a.m., briefing the other teams about his progress. Sometimes, he says, “there were a hundred people on the line — and a whole bunch of backstabbing” going down. Alliances and antipathies formed between regions: “Some of us divisions were on the same sheet of music, saying ‘Where’s the imminent threat? Just play this out.’ Whereas other teams were like, ‘These guys are unstable! People are gonna die if we don’t move.’”
-
-_Well, of course, they’re unstable,_ Scott thought but didn’t say. _That’s what I’m counting on._
-
-**It is, to corrupt Tolstoy, a truth self-evident**: Every unhappy family is alike. The Base, a paranoid clan with no shared past or people skills, was rigged to explode before it fired the first shot or laid its first bomb outside a church. Scott says Lane, who’d idolized Mathews in August, was plotting to blow his brains out that fall. He’d had it with Mathews’ “fed talk” — the loosey-goosey mentions of murder and mayhem that draw the eyes and ears of the FBI. Also — and this was a problem — Mathews “knew too much,” mostly because Lane had spilled his plans to him.
-
-That Halloween weekend, Lane and Pestilence shared those plans with Scott. Sitting around a campfire after everyone else had left, they told him to put his phone on ice. “We’ve developed targets” we’re going after, said Pestilence. Lane didn’t divulge names, but wanted to know if Scott was up for whatever. “Brothers, you know this,” said Scott. “Just tell me when and where — and give me a couple days to clear the decks.”
-
-Just before Thanksgiving, Scott got a blast on Wire, via a channel used only by the cell. Be back here in mid-December, said Lane, and bring your whole kit “for a family-friendly camping trip.” Scott drove down there on the appointed day, making sure to arrive before the others. “Whattaya got?” he asked Lane, just the two of them by the barn. We’re gonna go whack some people, Lane whispered: an antifa couple living an hour away. “Well, dang,” said Scott, trying to stall for time. “That ain’t nothin’ I want to drive my personal truck to.” He peppered Lane with questions: Who lives in the house with them? Are there children and pets present? How close is their bedroom to the neighbors?
-
-Lane admitted he knew none of those things; he agreed to delay the hit to do recon. “Forget it,” said Scott. “I’ll get the intel myself.” His cover job — site surveying — gave him credentials to pull deeds and housing floor plans. He slow-walked that “research” and took a stealth trip up North, training with Mathews and Lemley in Delaware. The two cells had come to truly loathe each other, and Scott worked the rift on both ends. “I don’t like the way Lane treats you guys,” he said. “We’re supposed to be on the same side.” Mathews entreated him to join their cell, then let him in on the plot.
-
-Sitting in their flat in Newark, Delaware, Scott sipped his whiskey and nodded as they sketched it out. There was a Second Amendment rally in Virginia, they said, that figured to be a powder keg. Democrats had just taken power in the state and were planning stiff gun-control measures. While tens of thousands of people milled the Capitol steps, they’d set up in a tree line a hundred yards back and start picking off cops and troopers. A circular firing squad would spark off: Cops would shoot the gun nuts, gun nuts would shoot antifa, and bystanders would be cut down in the middle. As Scott winked at a wall cam that the feds installed while the two men were off at work, Mathews rambled on about his plans. After the rally, they’d slip away and become a roving death squad, posing as homeless men to stalk their targets. At night, gloved and hooded, they’d follow a reporter to his car, put a couple rounds in the back of his head, then move to the next city and lefty target.
-
-Scott had gotten enough to bag the Delaware cell. But he needed a little luck now to take down the Georgia crew. It doesn’t suffice to tape people talking murder — they actually have to do something to further that plot in order for charges to stick. It was January 2020, and the window was closing fast. If Scott didn’t act before the rally in nine days, the Georgia cell would scatter once Mathews fell.
-
-On Jan. 12, Scott drove back to Rome: Lane announced that the hit was going down. Scott’s pulse raced when he heard what they’d acquired. They had bought catch bags for their brass — sacks that clip to the ejection ports of rifles and catch the expended shells as they pour out. They had drilled a silencer for a pistol, and would go out and buy frog tape to cinch their pant legs so they didn’t leave stray skin cells at the scene. (They also said they’d grab a package of adult diapers, having heard that people shit themselves doing their first murder.) Scott, for his part, produced some images of the house, but couldn’t get the list of current tenants. “Well, whatever,” said Helter-Skelter. “If there’s kids there, let’s whack ’em. I got no problem killing commie kids.”
-
-The original plan was for Helter to drive and the other three to go in blazing. But Helter had changed his mind: He wanted “to pop his cherry” instead of waiting in the truck. Otherwise, the blueprint remained the same. They’d rent a single room at a dive motel; there, they’d shower up, slough their dead skin off, and change into disposable murder gear. Scott would steal a truck with out-of-state plates, and someone would bring accelerants to torch the house. They’d be in and out in minutes, murder everything that moved, and leave behind a fireball for the cops.
-
-On Jan. 15, Scott called on Lane to take him out to lunch. Driving out of the farm, he turned off the dirt road when he heard an odd noise from his pickup. “Fuck!” he said to Lane as he pulled over. “If this truck’s messin’ up on me again…”
-
-He got out and walked to the back of the truck when another pickup passed him on the road. The driver stopped and asked Scott if he needed help. While they talked, an armored BearCat came over the hill, a gunner in the turret with an M-4. Scott and the other driver dove into the truck and tore off. A SWAT team surrounded Lane, guns drawn.
-
-
-
-These undated photos provided by Floyd County, Ga., Police show from left, Luke Austin Lane of Floyd County, Jacob Kaderli of Dacula, and Michael Helterbrand of Dalton, Ga. FBI spokesman Kevin Rowson said Friday, Jan 20, 2020, that agents assisted in the arrests of the three Georgia men linked to The Base, a violent white supremacist group, on charges of conspiracy to commit murder and participating in a criminal street gang.
-
-Floyd County Police/AP Images
-
-A couple of hours later, a team arrested Pestilence at his house two hours south, near Atlanta. His parents feigned innocence about their son’s intentions, but Scott claims otherwise. “Pest said he would show his dad videos of our training sessions; hell, he said his dad used to take him to the gun range.”
-
-At five that afternoon, cops arrested Helter-Skelter as he left his IT job in Georgia. The three cell members were held without bail and booked for a raft of crimes: conspiracy to commit murder, arson, home invasion, and — eventually — animal cruelty to that goat. The next day, Jan. 16, SWAT teams in two cities rolled up Mathews, Lemley, and Bilbrough. BigSiege — real name: Yousef Barasneh — was busted with a second member for defacing houses of worship. Lanzer — real name: Richard Tobin — was charged with conspiracy in those crimes: He was the one who’d planned a nationwide assault on churches and temples. Months later, cops got ZoomGnat — real name: Duncan Trimmell — the deranged kid who’d driven all the way from Texas to take part in the Halloween gore. So, too, Dima — real name: Brandon Ashley; both were charged for beheading a goat.
-
-In all, the bureau snared 11 members, effectively ending the group. So strong was the proof Scott gathered against them that they all took pleas and prison bids. Not so Nazzaro, the leader of the Base, who denies any part in their plots. At this writing, he sits, impregnable, at his redoubt in Russia, far beyond the reach of law enforcement. There, he recruits his next band of racists, protected by the U.S. Constitution. Still an American citizen, he has the First Amendment right to polemicize the slaughter of civilians. Does he crave the fall of government and the erasure of Blacks and Jews, or are those just the tantrums of a middle-age troll from the dark side of the moon? For all anyone knows, he’s an FSB proxy who cares only about planting false flags.
-
-While on the subject of false flags: That antifa couple in Georgia? They were neither antifa nor a couple. Far from living together, they were total strangers who were photographed side by side at a rally. But that is what happens when you recruit child soldiers who can’t read a caption below a picture. You seed the soil for war in which everyone’s a foe, and the killers we fear the most are our own kids.
-
-**They threw a day for Scott in his hometown** when he retired; it was quite the swell affair of state. The mayor and lieutenant governor read proclamations of honor, the Domestic Terror brass flew in from D.C., and one of their senior analysts gave a toast to his heroics. “No one in this room,” she said, “has any idea how many lives this man saved these last five years.” She congratulated Scott on his retirement and presented him a quart of aged bourbon. On the back of the bottle was a ghost engraving: the original G-man in a fedora, toting a tommy gun.
-
-There were a hundred people gathered there to cheer on Scott; naturally, he rocked his own party. He played them “Purple Rain” and “Pride and Joy,” bending notes until they begged for help. And then he did his version of “The Devil Named Music,” because that song caught the blues of the undercover: Yes, I get tired of being alone/I miss my daughter/I miss my wife/But the devil named music is taking my life. For most of three decades, he’d hardly ever been home, spending months on the road as a character with a rap sheet and a convincing cover story. “You can’t play with the devil without the devil bleeding into you — and your family feels it way before you do,” says Dave Redemann, an undercover instructor with 30 years’ experience who trained Scott at UC school. “There’s a guilt he has for not seeing his kids grow up, and he’s one of the very few who’s honest with young agents about the cost he’s paid for doing this.” Scott mourns the missed birthdays and the marital dust-ups, the calls from his sobbing wife “while I was halfway across the country, way overcommitted on a case.” He’s had spinal fusions on a back that broke twice; surgical reattachments of his biceps, knee, and shoulders; and a complete collapse in 2007, “burning the candle till it ran out of wax,” he says. He’d been emptying the ocean of hate with a spoon, he says. “The shit I saw, I’m never gonna unsee.”
-
-And so, because he had to, Scott walked away cold. Closed his laptop, tossed his work phones, and logged off all the platforms: a funeral, of sorts, for his false selves. There’s only so much evil you can will yourself to swallow before it turns to poison in your throat. When the back-taste overwhelms him, he gets on his Harley and rides a twisty pass through the Appalachians. There’s a river up there where he sits and eyes the current, listening to the tree frogs and cicadas. They sing to him, a tune he can’t make out but which takes him somewhere better down the bend.
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-# He was my high school journalism teacher. Then I investigated his relationships with teenage girls.
-
-Something was off.
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-It was a hot July day and the classroom at Rosemead High School should have been empty. But when a security guard swung open the door to let several students in to collect supplies, she noticed the motion-sensor lights didn't turn on. A man's voice called out from the darkness, "Oh, I was just looking for some books."
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-Startled, the guard recognized Eric Burgess, a longtime teacher, kneeling on the floor. As her eyes adjusted from the sunlight outside, she made out the outline of a young girl who appeared to be hiding behind Burgess.
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-The guard whisked the students out of the room and reported what she saw to Brian Bristol, the principal. The line about books made no sense to her. Why would Burgess, who taught advanced English and journalism down the hall, need books from a classroom used for kids learning English as a second language?
-
- 
-
-The Rosemead High School classroom where Burgess was caught having sex with a former student who graduated just weeks before.
-
-(Christopher Vu for Insider)
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-Burgess later offered up another story to Bristol, telling him he had been rearranging furniture with his daughter. But that, too, was a lie.
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-The truth is that Burgess was on the floor that summer day in 2017 with an 18-year-old girl who, just a few weeks earlier, had been his student. The guard walked in on them having sex, I later learned. Burgess was 46 years old at the time.
-
-When the security guard followed up with Bristol later, he told her not to worry. Burgess, he said, had sufficiently explained himself. There would be no investigation; the shifting story was all Burgess needed to return to the classroom that fall.
-
----
-
-Over two decades at Rosemead High, Burgess went from an alum who joined the English department shortly after college to a beloved teacher many on campus referred to as the "Golden Boy." His hallway antics and videotaped pranks often captivated kids, frequently drawing the attention of administrators but rarely resulting in punishment. Burgess relished pushing boundaries and often hung out after school with his students.
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-I should know. I was one of them.
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-Burgess' class, which I took as a senior in 2006, was my introduction to journalism. I remember him as an adult version of a class clown, charismatic and eager to have fun. He was quick to help students with their personal struggles, acting as both teacher and counselor.
-
- 
-
-Burgess, Alex Rai, and Brian Day with their pants off at Rosemead High School prom in 2012.
-
-(Eric Burgess' Facebook)
-
-A decade after I graduated, I found myself mulling this side of Burgess as the `#MeToo` movement took root. I read "[Benefit of the Doubt](https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2017/08/benefit_of_the_doubt.html)," a story about a high school teacher who made sexual advances on his students for years but kept his job while school officials failed to take action. As I read, questions that had swirled around Burgess when I was in school — it was an open secret that he had a child with a former student — came rushing back. Now I wondered whether he, too, had been given the benefit of the doubt all these years.
-
-I put the reporting skills I first learned in his class to use, interviewing more than 40 current and former teachers and students and reviewing hundreds of emails, disciplinary records and internal documents. I found that Burgess repeatedly groomed female students for sex. Two women said they had intimate relationships with him that became sexual soon after they graduated; a third told me it happened while she was still a student.
-
-Despite numerous red flags, school and district officials repeatedly missed opportunities to put a stop to Burgess' behavior. Time and again, these adults failed to investigate disturbing stories and reports of sexual abuse that arose throughout his career. Burgess has not been charged with a crime, and school officials won't say whether they ever notified law enforcement of his relationships with teenage girls.
-
-The district superintendent Edward Zuniga refused to answer a detailed list of questions for this story, telling me [in a written statement](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22011477-district-superintendent-statement-may-5-2022-google-docs) that he couldn't "comment on personnel matters." He added that "ensuring a safe and secure environment for both students and staff is a very high priority" and that employees were expected to "maintain the highest ethical standards."
-
-That Burgess was able to repeatedly groom teenage girls for sex over two decades in the classroom is partly a reflection of how well-liked he was by administrators and students, something I wrestled with again and again. When I thought back to Rosemead and its campus culture, I remembered how boundaries between teachers and students were nearly nonexistent, with most of us content to look the other way. A nagging feeling of guilt occupied the back of my mind as I grappled with whether I'd been a part of a community that allowed troubling behavior to go unchecked.
-
-Why didn't I ask more questions when I was a student? And even if I had, would the teenage version of me have known what to do with the answers?
-
----
-
-Rosemead High is a sprawling public school typical of those serving the suburban communities that form the San Gabriel Valley, just east of downtown Los Angeles. The campus sits at the edge of town, next to a park where kids smoke weed on concrete picnic tables after school. Today, its nearly 2,000 students are mostly Asian and Latino. Many are the children of immigrants, and about two-thirds come from working class families. As at most high schools, they're a mix of academic high-fliers, jocks, nerds, and underachievers.
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-At first, Burgess was one of several teachers I had questions about. As I called old classmates, a list of half a dozen men took shape. Disciplinary records I obtained show that district officials repeatedly allowed these teachers to return to the classroom after their inappropriate behavior surfaced.
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-The district superintendent Edward Zuniga refused to answer a detailed list of questions for this story, telling Insider that he couldn't "comment on personnel matters." (Christopher Vu for Insider)
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-Rosemead High School sits just east of Los Angeles in the San Gabriel Valley. (Christopher Vu for Insider)
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-Take Dwain Crum, for example, a former history teacher who was suspended at least three times during a nearly 30-year career and once grabbed a student by the neck and said, "[I'm going to kill you](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21883868-dwain-crum-disciplinary-documents)." (Crum's attorney, Harold Greenberg, told me, "Yeah, the guy has a high temper.") Or Alex Rai, who chairs the social-science department and [was once reprimanded](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22011668-alex-rai-letter-of-reprimand-redacted-by-rosemead-high) for telling a student that she "must like a mouth full of nuts" as she ate almonds before class. (Rai [told the principal](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22011669-alex-rai-response-to-principal-brian-bristol-as-part-of-his-personnel-file) he had been misunderstood; he later told me he "messed up.") Or Paul Arevalo, a former computer teacher who was placed on leave for a year before he resigned and began teaching at another school in the district, where he verbally harassed a female student and was [ordered not to contact her](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22011711-paul-arevalo-disciplinary-records). (Arevalo told me he was "not allowed" to discuss what happened.)
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-I asked Diane Bladen, Rosemead High's principal until 2007, about these teachers, along with others known for inviting cheerleaders to sit on their lap between classes, attending prom with students who graduated the year before and reserving the front row for girls wearing skirts. In Bladen's telling, the failure to remove these men from the classroom wasn't for lack of trying by administrators, but rather a lack of cooperation from students.
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-"He had kids wrapped around his little finger," Bladen said of Arevalo's tenure at Rosemead. "It was the same with Eric."
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-Bladen was also quick to bring up the union's role in defending teachers accused of misconduct, telling me it was "almost impossible" to fire a tenured teacher in California. A former school union representative pushed back on this, however, and told me that "there tends to be a lack of investigation" into problem teachers at Rosemead.
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-### [Read more: How a southern California high-school shielded a beloved teacher who groomed students for sex](https://www.businessinsider.com/eric-burgess-rosemead-high-sexual-misconduct-district-failures-2022-5)
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-While my reporting uncovered piles of documents about other teachers, school officials kept denying my requests for information about Burgess under California's public records law. After receiving several of the two dozen requests I submitted while reporting this story, an assistant superintendent told me he was surprised to find that Burgess' personnel file was "squeaky clean."
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-It became clear to me that school officials weren't going to provide any answers about Burgess. But the more people I spoke with, the more I realized that he was the story.
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-In late 2017, one Rosemead employee told me, "There's some things you need to know about Eric."
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-Burgess graduated from Rosemead High in 1989, the very picture of SoCal cool, with a shock of bleach-blond hair. His colleagues remember him struggling in college before returning to campus in the fall of 1996 to fill a vacancy in the English department.
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-From the outset, dozens of teachers and students told me, Burgess embraced a carefree attitude. His reputation as a rule breaker made him a favorite among kids, particularly those with a rebellious bent like me. His favorite jokes invariably began with, "your mom." Burgess' students regularly reenacted scenes from the TV series "Jackass" for class video projects. And he often took his favorite students to the movies for all-day marathons, sneaking into one film after another together.
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-Burgess as an upperclassman at Rosemead High School with the former teacher Hugh Zegers, center, and classmates. (Eric Burgess' Facebook)
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-Burgess as an underclassman at Rosemead High School. (Rosemead High School yearbook/Rebecca Zisser/Insider)
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-"He was just kind of a big kid in a teacher role," one Rosemead alum who worked as a teacher's aide to Burgess told me. We swapped stories, remembering how Burgess carried himself with the swagger of a kid who'd gotten away with ditching school for the first time.
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-Burgess frequently documented his antics online. In [one YouTube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rgD9h3r3W0) that a parent complained to administrators about, he sings shirtless in the shower and strolls along the Hollywood Walk of Fame, his midsection blurred out. He once used a student's cell phone to text a classmate, "I love penis!!!!!!!!," a screenshot posted to Facebook shows. And Burgess treated every Halloween as an opportunity to be more daring than the year before, like the time he went to school dressed as Miley Cyrus, wearing shorts and a crop top with the words "TWERK IT!" scrawled across his chest.
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-Eric Burgess Facebook page showing a photo from Halloween of him dressed as Miley Cyrus
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-Eric Burgess' Facebook
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-"I can't tell you how many times I talked with him about things like that," Bladen told me. "I'd always put notes in his box that said, 'See me,' and he'd come to my door and go, 'OK, what did I do now?'"
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-Burgess had a knack for making kids feel comfortable. I knew I could tell him the truth when I got a job at McDonald's and needed to leave his class early every day so I could save enough money to buy my first car. When a dream opportunity came up to interview Rod Marinelli, a Rosemead alum who was then the head coach of the Detroit Lions, Burgess cleared the way for me to skip school and fly to Detroit. His belief in me led to a front-page story for Rosemead High's student newspaper, the Panther's Tale, and cemented my decision to study journalism in college.
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-Burgess influenced my family, too. After I graduated, he helped my youngest brother during a difficult time when he was a student. Years later, after the sudden death of my other brother, Burgess assigned a story in the student newspaper to highlight a scholarship my family set up in his honor. Burgess made an impression on my mom and dad, both teachers themselves, as the type of trusted adult every parent hopes their child will find at school.
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-As I sifted through my memories, it became clear that the Burgess who pursued relationships with teenage girls was the photo-negative version of the Burgess I knew. Child abuse researchers and attorneys I spoke with told me that child groomers often excelled at ingratiating themselves in their community, first gaining the trust of those around them before exploiting it.
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-"Sexual groomers, you don't see them," explained Daniel Pollack, a social-work professor who frequently serves as an expert witness in child-welfare cases. Pollack likened teachers like Burgess to chameleons: "They blend in."
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-The author interviewing Rod Marinelli, a Rosemead High School alum who was then coaching the Detroit Lions, for the Rosemead student newspaper, the Panther's Tale.
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-Matt Drange
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-As much as Burgess' behavior went undetected among my classmates, some adults did see through it. In the spring of 2018, a copy of an alarming memo sent to Rosemead administrators landed in my inbox. The document, written by a campus staffer, detailed sexual relationships Burgess was accused of having with students going back 20 years. It laid out several occasions in which school officials were alerted to inappropriate behavior through eyewitness accounts and complaints from parents.
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-Perhaps most troubling of all, the memo alerted officials to a series of sexually explicit messages that Burgess had exchanged with a student who had graduated the year before, screenshots of which had become gossip fodder on campus. Because the messages were undated, it wasn't clear whether the girl was still a student when they were sent.
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-"I felt compelled to expose this information because I don't want to hear of one more student that Burgess is allowed to take advantage of or one more time that he's allowed to get away with such reprehensible behavior," the author of the memo wrote. "His extensive history of sexual misconduct with students is unforgivable and must end."
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-The document provided a clear roadmap for administrators to follow if they wanted to learn the truth about Burgess. But the alarm bell went unheeded as administrators sat on the information for more than a year.
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-> There's some things you need to know about Eric.
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-As I continued reporting, Burgess heard that I was asking my own questions. He reached out to me on Facebook to deploy his trademark charm, pleading for "any humanity" I could offer him and reminding me of our relationship.
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-"It is disappointing that we are communicating under these conditions considering what you and your family has meant to me over the years," Burgess wrote. "But I suppose a man has to do what a man has to do to make his impact on this world."
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-**T**he students Burgess targeted were similar. Each of the three women who had sexual relationships with Burgess told me they were struggling with challenges at home when they met him as teenagers. One had a baby at 15. Another was sexually abused. The other was abandoned by her father.
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-Two of the women believe they were sexually abused by Burgess. Mia Nakao, who raised a child with Burgess and was married to him for several years, does not. Still, Nakao told me, Burgess' penchant for developing intimate relationships with students, both sexual and platonic, often crossed the line.
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-"Looking back on it, it was highly inappropriate," Nakao said of the after-school trips to local amusement parks and the beach that Burgess took her and classmates on. "He shouldn't have been hanging out with us like that."
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-Mia Nakao as an underclassman at Rosemead High School. She met Burgess the summer before her senior year, much of which she spent living at his apartment.
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-(Rosemead High School yearbook/Rebecca Zisser/Insider)
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-Now in her early 40s, Nakao raised her children in a suburb not far from where she was living when she met Burgess before her senior year at Rosemead High. In 1998, Burgess asked his summer school class whether anyone had an older sibling who needed a place to live. His housemate had moved out and he was looking for a new one, he said.
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-After class, Nakao, who was 17 at the time, asked Burgess whether she could move in with him. Her mother had kicked her out of the house after she gave birth to her first child, she explained, and the rented room Nakao shared with her infant son was infested with cockroaches. It was so bad that she often spent nights with her baby sleeping in a booth at a nearby Denny's.
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-Burgess agreed to let Nakao move into his apartment, where she spent much of her senior year. Two people who spent time at the apartment that year told me they saw Nakao living there.
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-The former Rosemead High School English teacher Lois Heilemann and Nakao. Several people close to Burgess said Heilemann was like a "second mother" to him.
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-(Mia Nakao's Facebook)
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-Lois Heilemann, a former English teacher and longtime mentor to Burgess, said she knew that Nakao was struggling at the time navigating a custody battle with the infant's father. Heilemann told me she wasn't aware that Nakao lived with Burgess when she was a student.
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-"I had the impression he was just trying to comfort her, make her feel better and encourage her in her pursuit of keeping the child," Heilemann told me. "But I didn't know about the roommate thing … Had I known, I would have said, 'I don't think that's a good idea.'"
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-Nakao told me she and Burgess started dating two months after she graduated from Rosemead High, in June of 1999. They later married and had a son. The relationship, which ended in divorce a few years later, raised eyebrows among administrators, who became aware of it after teachers in the English department organized a baby shower for the young couple.
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-A thank-you card that Nakao sent to a Rosemead High School employee following the baby shower that faculty organized for her and Burgess.
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-(Rebecca Zisser/Insider)
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-Larry Callaham, an assistant principal at the time, told me that he and Bladen felt the relationship "was inappropriate" and confronted Burgess about it. Burgess claimed he hadn't known Nakao when she was a student at Rosemead and said they met at the Cal State LA library. Though she said the story made her "suspicious," Bladen acknowledged that she did not investigate it further.
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-Around the same time, Bladen told me, she briefly suspended Burgess after she received a tip that he had been dating another student. Bladen said that she was unable to reach the young woman, who by then was in college, and that her friends insisted the relationship wasn't sexual. While Bladen felt conflicted about it, she told me she had no choice but to allow Burgess back into the classroom. (I wasn't able to locate the young woman, either.)
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-"No one would cooperate," Bladen said. "Kids protect him because they like him."
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-I ran this explanation by everyone I spoke with. Most of my classmates told me they did like Burgess, and couldn't imagine Rosemead High without him. But several school employees who flagged Burgess' behavior to administrators said they didn't buy it.
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-"The kids aren't coming forward because when they have in the past, they were dismissed," said one longtime employee who kept a thank you note Nakao wrote her after the baby shower. "That's our culture."
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-The more I reported, the more that culture began to gnaw at me. Despite Bladen's insistence that she had done all she could, when another former student of Burgess' came forward to her with allegations of inappropriate behavior in 2001, nothing changed.
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-It took months for me to reach the woman, who asked not to be named; I'll call her Catherine. She told me she had a sexual relationship with Burgess while still a student — and that she'd reported it to Bladen. Catherine explained she had been part of a group of kids who sometimes hung out at Burgess' apartment after school. The summer before her junior year, she said, Burgess began to touch her, kissing and fondling her on multiple occasions. She was 16 years old at the time. (In California, molesting a child is a criminal offense.)
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-Like other students who became sexually involved with Burgess, Catherine told me their relationship took root in the classroom. Initially, during her sophomore year, "there was a lot of attention on my schoolwork," she said. She'd spend lunch breaks in his room going over assignments. At one point, Catherine confided in Burgess that her father had walked out on her family. "I told him, 'You'd be a great mentor for my brother. My dad left a long time ago.'"
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-Catherine would skateboard from her mother's house to Burgess' apartment, where they'd discuss books she was reading in English class. Sometimes they'd get Mexican food afterward or go to Tower Records to buy CDs. When she turned 16, Burgess showed up to her birthday party.
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-"In many ways he filled a gap in my life," Catherine told me. "I suddenly felt special."
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-Rosemead High School's nearly 2,000 students are mostly Asian and Latino. Many are the children of immigrants, and about two-thirds come from working-class families.
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-(Christopher Vu for Insider)
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-Catherine grappled for months with the relationship, which she knew had become inappropriate.
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-One day, as Burgess was driving her to school, the urge to get out became too great to ignore. Catherine asked Burgess to stop the car, turning toward him as she opened the door.
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-"I don't think I can do this anymore," she said. Catherine told me that when she brought up their relationship, Burgess said it was important no one found out about it — or he could get into trouble. "I remember the guilt shifting to me."
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-Like other former students I spoke with, Burgess contacted Catherine after he learned I was reporting this story and asked her to call him; she declined. The guilt "worked then," she said. "It doesn't work now."
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-Catherine confided in friends while she was still at Rosemead, two of whom confirmed details of her relationship with Burgess and her initial reluctance to report him to school officials. She also shared what happened with a teacher she trusted, who alerted other faculty members. Catherine decided to come forward and tell Bladen herself after starting college, when she heard that Burgess was becoming close with another student. Bladen, Catherine recalled, assured her that she would investigate her story and be in touch.
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-Bladen never called her back.
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-Callaham, the former assistant principal, told me that he knew about Catherine's "situation" but that Bladen took the lead on investigating it. Bladen, who was later promoted to a job at the school district and has since retired, didn't refute Catherine's account, telling me she couldn't recall specifics of their conversation.
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-She "asked me to share my experience, and that wasn't enough," Catherine said. "I don't know what evidence they needed; it was my word."
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-Once again, Burgess returned to the classroom.
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-Over the next decade, Burgess' stature on campus grew. He became faculty advisor for the student newspaper and the academic-decathlon team while teaching advanced English and helping to shape the department's curriculum. He also went on to marry a woman who taught at Rosemead High in 2004, Terri Amborn. Before they divorced, the couple had a daughter together — the same daughter Burgess used as a shield in his cover story for the sexual encounter with his former student in the darkened classroom.
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-Burgess kissing Diane Bladen, then Rosemead High's principal, at graduation night in June 2007. Several Rosemead High employees said that Burgess became close with several school officials during his tenure, including Bladen.
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-(Eric Burgess' blog)
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-Around the time Amborn started teaching at Rosemead, Burgess spent his summer break with a colleague. Partway through their vacation, Burgess confided that he couldn't wait to get back to Rosemead High, "where I'm a God."
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-The impunity Burgess had enjoyed for so long began to disappear in the spring of 2019. Screenshots of the sexually explicit messages he'd exchanged with a former student — the same messages described in the whistleblower memo — were briefly posted to social media, prompting a wave of harassment against the young woman.
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-Several teachers reported the messages to Brian Bristol, the principal. This time, he took action. He suspended Burgess and the district hired an outside investigator to track down the girl.
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-By that point, I'd spent weeks combing through social media posts and old yearbook photos trying to do the same. When I finally found the young woman, whom I'll call Sarah, she ignored my messages. Eventually, I learned that we had a mutual connection: a fellow alum whom I'd known from our elementary school kickball field and who had been a teacher's assistant in one of Sarah's classes at Rosemead. I called him and told him I needed his help. He agreed to vouch for me.
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-Sarah was hesitant to talk at first, fearful of what would happen if she did. She eventually met with me at a Starbucks near her college campus. By that point, she'd spent more than a year covering for Burgess at his behest and was wrestling with whether to come clean to district investigators. Now she wanted to know what I'd learned about our teacher.
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-I told her about the memo, the complaints from parents and faculty, the lies to school administrators and the girls who came before her. She was stunned.
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-"I was hoping you would say it was just me," said Sarah, who didn't want to use her real name in large part because she feared retaliation from Burgess.
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-Fighting back tears, Sarah finally opened up about her relationship with Burgess. She had befriended Burgess's son, who was a couple of years behind her at Rosemead, as someone she came to see as a little brother. She didn't know that the boy's mother, Nakao, was once a student of Burgess' like her.
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-"I don't even know what to say to that," she said when I told her the truth.
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-Sarah walked me through how Burgess cultivated their relationship in his classroom. That she had at least one class with Burgess in each of her last three years at Rosemead High was by his design, she said. He filled out her schedule for her and suggested she join the student newspaper. "I didn't even know what journalism was," she said.
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-A text-message conversation between Burgess and Sarah.
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-(Insider)
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-She confided in Burgess intimate, traumatic details of her life, including that she had been raped by her stepfather and that when she told her mother what happened, her mother didn't believe her. A suicidal episode prompted regular appointments with the school psychologist, who eventually warned Sarah about getting too close to Burgess. But Sarah brushed the concerns aside, she told me, because she "idolized" him.
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-"He was the closest person for me to a father figure," Sarah told me. "In no way did I think he could be something bad to me."
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-Burgess saw no need to conceal his feelings for Sarah in the [message he penned in her senior yearbook](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22011324-eric-burgess-message-in-sarahs-yearbook-from-june-2017).
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-"You are also a kind and generous person, the type of spirit people try to take advantage of," Burgess wrote. "You are a beautiful and sensuous young woman, the kind any man would thank the gods above for allowing in his life. As with everything else, any man that enters your life must prove his worthiness for you through acts of kindness, generosity and honesty. That, and only that, is when you will give yourself, body, mind and soul."
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-Sarah told me she and Burgess began having sex a few weeks after she graduated in June 2017. She continued to see him on weekends after she left for college that fall.
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-"Anything you want for Christmas?" she texted him in November.
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-"You! And nothing else. Seriously," he replied.
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-Text messages Burgess and Sarah exchanged in 2018.
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-(Insider)
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-That changed a few months later, when the screenshots of their sexually explicit messages first traded hands among students and their relationship became fodder for high school gossip. Sarah said she felt as if Burgess became "ashamed" of their relationship and suddenly cared more about covering it up than he did about her. Soon after, Burgess texted Sarah that he was seeing another woman — someone his age. He told her he had "even dropped some comments about my 'girlfriend' that I'd been seeing for a year" to Bristol, the principal, hoping to conceal their relationship.
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-By the time Bristol suspended Burgess in spring 2019, Burgess' directives to Sarah became more dire. He had heard from former students and colleagues that I was asking questions, too. He was desperate to cover his tracks.
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-Give "just a blanket, 'nothing ever happened between you and me,'" he instructed Sarah in a voicemail in May 2019, dictating the lies he wanted her to tell if she were questioned about their relationship. "That there was some flirting on your part, umm, and that, you know … you weren't a student. And that you were already 18."
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-In the weeks that followed, Burgess called Sarah repeatedly with explicit instructions to obstruct my reporting and the district's investigation. Since he had been ordered by district officials not to have any contact with Sarah while they looked into their relationship, Burgess called her from a cellphone that belonged to his teenage son — the child he had with Nakao.
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-Burgess asked to review the written statement Sarah emailed district investigators denying their relationship, she told me. By that point, Sarah had dropped out of college and was working two jobs to support herself. Some days, she said, her [depression](https://www.insider.com/what-is-depression) was so severe she couldn't get out of bed. But Burgess wouldn't leave her alone.
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-"At this point, I'm not sure when you and I are going to be able to talk until this disappears," Burgess told her in one voicemail. "Everything is falling apart in my life right now, but, you know, I mean, it's my fault."
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-He left her another voicemail four days later. "I'm still trying to make it seem like nothing happened at all after you graduated," Burgess said. He took a deep breath before adding, "My life is imploding."
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-Soon after we met at the Starbucks, Sarah decided she was done lying for Burgess.
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-She contacted the district's outside investigator whose calls she had been dodging and dropped a bombshell: She was the girl the campus security guard had caught with Burgess on the floor of that darkened classroom. The two of them were having sex. She handed over the voicemails of Burgess pressing her to lie, intimate photos of the two of them together and receipts from the Uber rides she took home after late-night visits to Burgess's house, where they'd been careful not to wake his son in the next room.
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-"He was just kind of a big kid in a teacher role," one Rosemead High School alum who worked as a teacher's aide to Burgess said.
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-(Eric Burgess' Facebook)
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-Sarah's cooperation jump-started the district's investigation, which appeared to have stalled. Before she came forward, a class schedule for the coming fall 2019 semester still listed Burgess as the journalism teacher. School staff wondered whether Burgess would once again evade consequences and return to the classroom. This time, he didn't.
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-> Everything is falling apart in my life right now, but, you know, I mean, it's my fault.
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-"I stuck with the script for so long. It felt like I was being brainwashed to say what he wanted me to say and do what he wanted me to do," Sarah told me. "I just want to tell my truth. What's wrong with that?"
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-In the end, it was Burgess's efforts to cover up his relationship with Sarah, rather than the relationship itself, that cost him his job.
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-"His interference with the investigation and other unacceptable actions on his part (unrelated to the allegations of inappropriate relations with female students) is what led the district to pursue his termination," former assistant superintendent Felipe Ibarra, who oversaw the investigation, told me in an email.
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-Listen to the rest of the voicemails Burgess left Sarah
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-Attorneys for the school district refused to release documents from their investigation into Burgess, arguing that "the public's interest is furthered by maintaining the confidentiality" of the records. The district's investigation concluded in December 2019, two years after I began my own, when Burgess signed [a settlement agreement](https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21975097-burgess-settlement-agreement_final_fully-executed) that included his resignation.
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-The settlement Burgess signed that bars him from ever working at Rosemead High School again. The agreement also prohibits district officials from disclosing anything they learned about him during a 2019 investigation into his relationships with teenagers.
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-(El Monte Union High School District/Rebecca Zisser/Insider)
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-I've tried to track Burgess down ever since, hoping he would make good on his promise to sit down with me for an interview once the district's investigation was complete. He never did. When we spoke over the phone while it was still underway, Burgess deflected my questions about his relationships with former students, telling me that he wasn't calling "to plead my case to you."
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-"You and I, we had a relationship that is gone now. It's different," Burgess told me. "You have a job you are doing."
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-Burgess said people on campus had "misconstrued" his behavior. He refused to talk about the teenage girls he'd dated. Instead, he told me about a boy he'd taught as a sophomore who couldn't afford basketball shoes, and how he'd helped him, first by buying him a pair of sneakers and later by recruiting him to the school newspaper.
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-"Try to humanize this," Burgess urged me when I sat down to write this story. "And try to remember who you *know* I am."
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-That Burgess would attempt to charm his way out of trouble as his world collapsed around him is precisely why the young women he groomed for sex stayed quiet for so long. They fear that no one will believe them. That people will dismiss their stories as hearsay about a favorite teacher. And that whatever explanation Burgess gives will be believed, just as it was before.
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-Sarah doesn't have any friends left at Rosemead. The harassment from former classmates who learned about her relationship with Burgess got so bad that she changed her phone number. Following her cooperation with the district's investigation, she received a text message from Burgess' now-wife, who was his high school sweetheart. "I will always wish bad things for you," she wrote. "Be miserable. I truly hope you suffer in your life. You deserve it."
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-Sarah has worked hard to move beyond it over the past two years. She's back in college, has a new job and a boyfriend she trusts. When I called her recently, I was struck by how far she'd come since our meeting at Starbucks.
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-"I feel a lot stronger emotionally about all this now. Before I couldn't talk about it without sobbing," Sarah said. "I still feel like I was manipulated and am disgusted by it. I can't believe that I ever wanted to protect him."
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-She asked me what I thought of our teacher. Before, she'd wanted to know what I'd learned from my reporting on him, which radically changed her understanding of their relationship. Now she wanted to know if the four years I'd spent talking with others who knew Burgess had done the same for me.
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-It had. I told her about the memories that haunt my visits back home to Rosemead. About the strain this story has had on my family. About the sinking feeling of despair I get when I look back at the dead ends scattered throughout my notes and the possibility there might be other girls like her I never found. And how, when I set out to tell this story, I had no idea what our teacher was capable of.
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-> I just want to tell my truth. What's wrong with that?
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-Under the terms of his separation, Burgess was allowed to resign without admitting to any wrongdoing and continued to receive his salary for another six months. The agreement bars Burgess from working at Rosemead High ever again, but does nothing to prevent him from teaching elsewhere. The state agency that credentials teachers in California revoked Burgess' credential "because of misconduct." He will be eligible to apply for reinstatement in August.
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-As part of the settlement, school-district officials agreed that if any prospective employer asked for a reference, they would offer only "content neutral" material, such as Burgess' salary and the years of his employment.
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-The district, at least, would keep the reason Burgess lost his job a secret.
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-The author and a classmate, Amy Julia Harris, beside their journalism teacher Burgess at graduation night in June 2007. Harris was co-editor in chief of the student newspaper that Burgess oversaw, while the author, Matt Drange, was a sports editor.
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-(Eric Burgess' blog)
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-*Amy Julia Harris contributed reporting to this story.*
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-*In 2019, the statute of limitations in California was [expanded](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB218&search_keywords=complaints+verification) for victims of sexual abuse experienced as minors; going forward, survivors now have until the age of 40 to file a lawsuit, or within five years of the discovery of their abuse, whichever is later. The change also opened a three-year window for adults to file civil claims that were previously barred by the statute of limitations; that window ends December 31, 2022.*
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-*If you have a tip, contact [Matt Drange](https://www.businessinsider.com/author/matt-drange) at mdrange\[at\]insider\[dot\]com, or by phone, at +1 (626) 233-1063.*
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-# How Bolivia’s ruthless tin baron saved thousands of Jewish refugees
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-Moritz Hochschild was constantly on the move. In the early 1930s, he could be found in the grand hotels of London, New York or Paris, or on the back of a mule, following rough mountain trails in search of mineral seams in the Bolivian Andes. It was on one of those trips to a remote mountain village, according to family legend, that the mining magnate came across a local man sketching. The artist was afraid to show Hochschild his drawing, which was an unflattering caricature of him. But the magnate found the parody so amusing that he decided to fund a scholarship for the artist to study draughtsmanship in Paris.
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-Hochschild could afford to laugh at his own expense. His shrewd risk-taking had made him one of the richest men in South America in the early 20th century, and earned him notoriety as one of Bolivia’s three “tin barons”. The trio – Hochschild, Simón Patiño and Oxford-educated Carlos Aramayo – had made fortunes trading Bolivian tin which, during the first half of the 20th century, was much in demand for aeroplane parts and food cans, and accounted for more than half of the country’s export earnings.
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-The barons were seen as a cartel: “a circle of oligarchs who negotiated between themselves and had more power than the state,” the Bolivian historian Robert Brockmann told me. Tin was Bolivia’s principal mineral export in the 1930s, and the tin barons controlled 72% of the nation’s tin exports, while paying just 3% of their profits to the government. The three mining barons are chiefly remembered for their ostentatious wealth, their influence over Bolivian politics and their exploitation of mineworkers. “\[Hochschild\] was a cruel businessman; the toughest of the three,” Edgar Ramírez, former union organiser and archivist, told me. “The president of Bolivia wanted to have him shot.”
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-Hochschild, the youngest “baron” by decades, was the only one who was not a Bolivian citizen. A middle-class German Jew born in 1881 in Biblis, a small town south of Frankfurt, Hochschild sought his fortune in Australia and Chile before the first world war, returning to South America as soon as the war ended to build his metals and mining empire. During the 1930s and 40s, Bolivia was swept by waves of social upheaval. Amid mass demonstrations for state control of resources, Hochschild was twice thrown in jail and threatened with execution. He escaped with his life, but fled into exile. As the country hurtled towards the National Revolution of 1952, one of its chroniclers, Augusto Céspedes, described Hochschild as a “grand pirate of mining finances”.
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-But evidence has since come to light that has forced Bolivia to reappraise its view of Moritz, known as “Mauricio” Hochschild. In 1999, several tonnes of rotting papers were found in warehouses owned by the state mining company, Comibol, which had taken over all of Bolivia’s mines when the industry was nationalised following the 1952 revolution. Documents from Hochschild’s companies [were discovered](https://networks.h-net.org/node/23910/blog/research-corner/5679375/el-alto-bolivia-ex-miners-rescue-their-history-part-i-s) piled in cardboard boxes, stuffed into barrels or dumped outside, exposed to the elements. Bolivia’s congressional library recognised the historical value of the archive, and a team was hired to organise the documents under the direction of Edgar Ramírez and the historian Carola Campos, who is now the archive’s director.
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-Get the Guardian’s award-winning long reads sent direct to you every Saturday morning
-
-In 2004, after five years of sorting through thousands of pages of correspondence with consulates, businesses and international Jewish organisations, the team revealed their astonishing discovery. The papers demonstrated that Moritz Hochschild had helped to rescue as many as 22,000 Jews from Nazi Germany and occupied Europe by bringing them to Bolivia between 1938 and 1940, at a time when much of the continent had shut its doors to fleeing Jews. The documents, which included work permits and visas for European Jews, tracked Hochschild’s efforts not only to ensure Jews escaped Europe but also to resettle them in Bolivia, investing his own fortune and using his influence with the country’s elite to secure protection and employment for as many refugees as possible.
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-“This aspect of the man was unknown until we discovered these papers,” Edgar Ramírez told me in October 2020. Ramírez, a union man of 74 who still wore his flat cap and workman’s overalls, grew up in Potosí, a mining town where Hochschild employed hundreds of miners on near-starvation wages. “\[He\] was known in Bolivia as the worst kind of businessman. The worst!” Ramírez growled. “But who was the real Hochschild?”
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-After the first publication of their findings in 2004, Edgar Ramírez’s team of investigators continued to make more discoveries, and in 2005, documents surfaced in warehouses in El Alto, the satellite city of Bolivia’s administrative capital La Paz. In 2009, further south, in the mining towns of Oruro and Potosí, work permits for Jewish refugees were found scattered among the files of Hochschild’s multiple companies. In 2016, Unesco recognised the archive’s historic value and added it to the Memory of the World Register; as a result, Hochschild’s humanitarian work became more widely known. The legacy of Mauricio Hochschild, until then, had been his immense wealth; his villainous reputation, according to Brockmann, had served the architects of the 1952 revolution as a “necessary part of the nation-building myth”.
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-Hochschild was a towering figure. Bald-headed and moustachioed, with bushy eyebrows that framed expressive brown eyes, he resembled an “Old Testament patriarch” according to his employee and later biographer, Gerhard Goldberg. When he first started his mineral explorations, Bolivia was underpopulated and much of the country was not industrialised. Don Mauricio, as he was known, belonged to a generation of early 20th-century Europeans who believed nations could be transformed through capitalism. He mingled with Bolivia’s patrician classes and its military top brass, and sought favour with the clergy by generously donating to Catholic charities. “He possessed enormous charm and a great ability to attract people. Of this he was well aware,” wrote Goldberg. “When there were problems, his favourite reaction was ‘Let me talk to him’, and most of the time he proved capable of persuading people, often against all expectations.”
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-In 1929, Hochschild founded the South American Mining Company. Demand boomed from Europe and the US for metal ores, and by 1937, he controlled around a third of Bolivia’s tin production, and around 90% of lead, zinc and silver exports. He used European connections to push markets in London, Germany and the Netherlands and made frequent trips to the old continent.
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-A disused tin mine on the Cerro Rico mountain, Bolivia. Photograph: Sebastien Lecocq/Alamy
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-As Hochschild’s business went from strength to strength in South America, the systematic persecution of German Jews was intensifying. Between 1933 and 1935, he was approached by international Jewish organisations for help, according to Brockmann, and told them that Bolivia did not have the economic capacity to receive a large number of refugees. The political turmoil in Bolivia at that time was intense, and he may have suspected – as indeed it turned out – that his own position was not secure.
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-But when the young war hero Lt Col Germán Busch took power in a military coup in July 1937, the two men formed a bond. “They met many times. In fact, Hochschild considered him a friend,” said Brockmann. “\[Hochschild\] was a man very close to power. He was sent to the US to negotiate the price of tin, invested with diplomatic status.”
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-By then, much of South America was aligned with Europe’s fascist leaders. Busch, aged just 34 when he became president, was half German, and his father, a German doctor, supported Hitler. Still, Hochschild managed to persuade Busch that Bolivia’s economy could gain from opening its doors to Jewish fugitives – although Busch insisted his country did not need city folk, but farmers. In March 1938, Busch signed a resolution ordering consular officials to allow Jews to enter Bolivia, particularly if they could be “useful to national activities”. Three months later, he issued a decree permitting “all men of sound body and spirit” to enter Bolivia, offering farmland and inviting immigrants to populate its “barren lands”. “In Bolivia, we should not partake in hatred and persecution,” the decree read.
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-“When the news reached the cities of Europe occupied by the Nazis, enormous queues immediately formed outside the Bolivian embassies and consular offices,” said Brockmann. A network of corrupt consular officials, led by the Bolivian foreign minister, took advantage of the wave of Jewish families desperate to leave Europe to charge thousands of dollars for visas and passports. (When the scandal became public in 1940, the foreign minister was forced to resign.) “Between 1938 and the first months of 1940, a breathtaking number of Jews arrived in Bolivia - somewhere between 7,000 and 22,000,” Brockmann added. A letter written by Hochschild to Edwin Goldwasser of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in March 1939 said Busch had agreed to “gradually receive 10 to 20,000 German Jews, with the priority of colonization, on the condition that enough money is made available \[by the committee\]”.
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-Hochschild leaned on Busch to ensure that the visas would be respected once refugees arrived in South America. Ramírez said that the tycoon, who was unable to travel to Europe in person, “bribed \[officials\] to buy blank passports”, and through his links with anti-fascist resistance groups, oversaw the creation of false agricultural work permits and identities for fugitives.
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-Correspondence with Hochschild’s staff in 1939 showed detailed plans for a *Hilfsverein*, or a welfare association for Jewish migrants, and the disposal of $30,000 of company funds for the arrival of an initial 1,000 people. Adding a $137,500 donation from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Hochschild created the Society for the Protection of Israelite Immigrants, known as Sopro in its Spanish acronym. The funds paid for a 20-bed hospital, a children’s home and a kindergarten in La Paz, and even a retreat in Cochabamba for Jews suffering from altitude in the city.
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-[Map of Bolivia and neighbouring countries showing the rail route carrying refugees](https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2022/08/bolivia-refugeesmap/giv-65628pCjnPYSEjdg/)
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-Thousands of European Jews appeared in the steep, narrow streets of La Paz and Cochabamba, where the refugees started businesses selling hot dogs, tailoring or dry-cleaning. When local people found themselves having to compete for jobs, or being priced out of rented accommodation by the new arrivals, an antisemitic backlash began. [Refugees](https://www.theguardian.com/world/refugees) were abused on the streets, and the attacks were fuelled by antisemitic editorials in the press. Under pressure from Busch to ease tensions in the cities, Hochschild bought three agricultural estates in the high jungle region of Yungas, and founded the Bolivian Settlers Society, which managed farming projects for Jewish immigrants relocated to the countryside. The archive contains dozens of work permits registering German and Austrian Jews as agricultural labourers. But many of the new arrivals were merchants, doctors, lawyers, teachers or musicians who had no idea how to farm.
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-Hochschild’s immigrant farming venture was ultimately a failure but it served a short-term purpose – the deliverance of thousands of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Most longed to return to life in the city, and after the war left Bolivia for Israel, the US or cities in Brazil and Argentina. A smaller number of Jews were already working for Hochschild’s mining companies on meagre wages, as León E Bieber, 79, a Jewish Bolivian historian and author of a 2015 book about Hochschild, told me when we met in Santa Cruz de la Sierra. “They worked mostly administrative posts,” Bieber said, “and for Hochschild, this was important because he trusted in these people’s honesty. He paid miserable salaries compared to what he could have paid. This shows he was first and foremost a businessman who wanted to get the best out of his people.”
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-One of the children that Moritz Hochschild saved from the Nazis was Ellen Baum de Hess, now 94. “He was a true hero,” she told me over the phone from Buenos Aires, where she has lived for the past 80 years. In 1938, when she was just 10, Baum de Hess and her mother fled Berlin, having recently witnessed Kristallnacht, the infamous pogrom against Jews, which heralded what the future held for them in Germany. She recalls walking home from school and seeing “a synagogue burning and the broken windows of many Jewish businesses” in Berlin the following day. “That was when my mother realised that we had to get out of Nazi Germany,” she told me.
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-At the time there was a two-year waiting list for US visas, which also required an American financial sponsor, preferably a relative. Baum de Hess’s parents were separated, and all she and her mother were able to get was a tourist visa for Uruguay. In late December 1938, they boarded a steamship, the General San Martín, in Boulogne, in northern France. But when they arrived in Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo, more than a month later, customs officials refused to let them disembark, claiming their tourist visas were fake. Baum de Hess remembers the adults pleading, desperate to be allowed ashore, even though they suspected that the country’s government sympathised with the Nazis, or had been ordered by Nazi Germany to turn back Jews fleeing Europe. “Many of the 28 people \[on board\] wanted to throw themselves into the ocean because we were desperate. We didn’t want to go to a concentration camp,” she said. From Montevideo, they sailed to Buenos Aires, arriving in late February 1939, where they were held in port for three weeks before being sent back across the Atlantic.
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-Ellen Baum de Hess with her family in Mar de Plata, Argentina, 1957. Photograph: Courtesy of Ellen Baum de Hess
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-The ship docked in Lisbon in April 1939, and while awaiting news of their fate, the passengers received reason to hope. There were rumours aboard about a mysterious well-wisher who had managed to get them visas to Bolivia. “People said there was a benefactor,” Baum recalls, “who, through his friendship with the Bolivian president, had managed to get visas for us. We were told that the only one who could have achieved that was Moritz Hochschild.”
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-After another three weeks in Lisbon, the passengers got word that they had been granted safe passage. They were ferried to the Italian port of Genoa and, from there, aboard another ship, the Orazio, set sail once again for South America. The refugees docked at Arica in northern Chile, the main port of entry for landlocked Bolivia, in the middle of June 1939. From there, they reached Cochabamba by train, said Baum de Hess. The rail route into Bolivia became known as the *Express Judío*, or Jewish Express, due to the huge influx of refugees. (Months later, in January 1940, the Orazio – carrying more than 600 mostly Jewish refugees – caught fire and sank in the Atlantic Ocean. Passing ships were able to rescue most of the passengers, but more than 100 died.)
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-Baum de Hess and her mother stayed in a village near Cochabamba for more than a year before making their way to Argentina, where her aunt awaited them. They did not have a visa, but crossed Bolivia’s southern border into Argentina where they boarded a train bound for Buenos Aires in December 1940. Her family could not afford to pay for her schooling beyond the age of 13, but she trained as a secretary and, owing to her command of German, Spanish and English, worked as a translator. “With very little schooling, I became self-educated,” she declared with a triumphant laugh. “I, my mother and the other 26 people owe \[Hochschild\] our lives, although no one knew at the time.”
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-A year after the president had opened Bolivia’s doors to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, as Europe was on the brink of war, Busch and Hochschild’s relationship soured. In June 1939, Bolivia’s mining companies were given four months to hand over their foreign currency reserves to the national mining bank, which would return the funds in local currency. Hochschild, the most stubborn of the tin barons, refused to comply. Busch had an “attack of rage”, according to historian Herbert Klein, and sentenced the tycoon to go before a firing squad, before intercessions from his ministers, the US and Argentina spared Hochschild this fate.
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-Two months later, Busch, who had a history of depression, shot himself. Earlier that night, he had reportedly complained about the number of Jews in the cities when he had expected farmers in the fields, Brockmann said. Busch’s supporters, made suspicious by the violent circumstances of his death, accused Hochschild and the other tin barons of plotting his murder. Half a year after Busch’s death, the country’s immigration commissioner suspended the visas allowing Jews into Bolivia but, despite heated – often antisemitic – debate over their status, the proposal was not ratified in the legislature. As late as March 1943, the government issued visas to around 100 Jewish orphans in France, according to historian [Florencia Durán](https://books.openedition.org/ifea/7298?lang=en), though by that stage, they were unable to get out of Europe.
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-During the war, Hochschild’s metals business became key to consolidating Bolivia’s strategic support for the Allies. He was already a key broker for Bolivian tin with the US, so was well placed when vast quantities of the metal were needed to make ammunition boxes, aeroplane instrument panels and syringes to administer morphine. In 1940, Hochschild brokered a deal between Bolivia and the US Metal Reserve Company to supply tin at 48.5 cents per pound, which boosted production but soon fell below market price. In 1942, the price rose to 60 cents, and Bolivia’s profits fell.
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-Another cache of documents indicates that Hochschild himself was a committed supporter of the Allied war effort. Comibol archivists showed me a blacklist of hundreds of Bolivian-based businesses with German, Japanese and Italian names. Dated from November 1939 to August 1946, the file, labelled “Trading with the Enemy”, compiled by the US embassy and the British legation in La Paz, contained a regularly updated list of firms with possible fascist sympathies or ties. Letters show Hochschild was an enthusiastic enforcer of the veto, writing cordial but forceful letters to trading partners to ensure they upheld the ban or lose his business.
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-In 1943, a pro-fascist military dictator, Col Gualberto Villarroel, took power in a coup, and pushed for Bolivia to switch from supporting the Allies to the Axis powers. One of the reasons Villaroel toppled his predecessor was the unfavourable tin price that the mining magnate had negotiated with the US. Hochschild became one of Villaroel’s “bêtes noires”, said Brockmann, “because he was rich, capitalist, Jewish and foreign”. In May 1944, Villarroel had Hochschild arrested, accused of treason and threatening the stability of the government, and he was jailed for 45 days, along with one of his managers, Adolf Blum. But “even behind bars”, [Time Magazine](https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,850499,00.html) reported, “Don Mauricio was still a power-center of Bolivian politics”. After pressure from the US, Chile and Argentina, he was released. In July 1944, an ultra-nationalist, pro-fascist military faction, known as Razón de Patria, kidnapped him, and Blum, and held them for 17 days. “The rebels were inspired by mixed motives of nationalism and social reform. \[Hochschild\] has been unpopular on both counts,” reported Newsweek.
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-Moritz Hochschild (left) and Adolf Blum after being released by kidnappers in La Paz in 1944. Photograph: Leo Baeck Institute, New York
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-“They kidnapped him with the intention of killing him, to send a message to the world: ‘This is what we do with the Jewish capitalist foreigners’,” said Brockmann. For Hochschild, it was the second time he had faced death after falling foul of a military president. After the kidnappers released him, in August 1944, he fled Bolivia on a Chilean government plane, never to return. A few days later, he told the [New York Times](https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1944/09/06/87467325.html?auth=login-email&pageNumber=11) he could not discuss the details of his release, only that no ransom had been paid. He made a statement to the effect that he had never plotted against the Bolivian government and “he hoped to help Bolivia adjust its postwar social and economic problems”. He also wanted to reassure the US that the kidnapping incident would not interfere with the “steady flow of Bolivian tin from his mines to American smelters”.
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-Hochschild’s company retained control of his Bolivian mines, and his international business continued to thrive. He moved to Chile, where years later he opened Mantos Blancos, a hugely successful copper mine in Antofagasta.
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-“When Bolivia turned against him … it must have been extremely painful,” said his grandson Fabrizio Hochschild Drummond, 59 – a former UN official whose employment recently ended after [allegations](https://apnews.com/article/technology-business-united-nations-antonio-guterres-cb2ccc5bbe049a3fe17c62c026551df0) of bullying – speaking to me on the phone from New York. “He had tried to give his heart and soul in turning this country around and it kicked him out, short of killing him.”
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-When I visited the neat, air-conditioned Comibol archive in El Alto, under a sign reading “Out of the trash, into the memory of the world”, three Bolivian archivists wearing blue rubber gloves and face masks were sifting through hundreds of yellowing pages of typed correspondence in German, Spanish, Hebrew and English. Among them, Ramírez, pointed out a handwritten letter addressed to Hochschild in neat calligraphy from a Jewish kindergarten in La Paz, asking for funds to build a second floor “in view of the number of children who are here and others who want to come”. He was already known to the children as the benefactor: the first floor of the school had been built by his charitable organisation. The letter, which is believed to date from 1944, includes a black-and-white photo of the students and staff, and is signed by “the children”.
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-After years of poring over evidence of Hochschild’s good works, Edgar Ramírez had revised his opinion of Hochschild’s legacy. He told me he now considered Hochschild a heroic figure. It was his view that the tycoon concealed his “true face” – that Hochschild was, in fact, an unsung leader in the international anti-fascist resistance. Months after my visit to El Alto, Ramírez, the driving force in the Comibol archive, died from a Covid-related illness. For more than two decades, he had led the team of archivists that conserved and restored hundreds of thousands of work and personal documents relating to Hochschild, which now fill 50 metres of specially constructed shelves.
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-Edgar Ramírez, then director of the Bolivian mining archive in El Alto, in 2017. Photograph: Dpa Picture Alliance/Alamy
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-Researchers are still puzzling over the apparent disparity between the public businessman and the private humanitarian. Ricardo Udler, a spokesman for Bolivia’s small Jewish community, believes Hochschild deliberately kept his activities quiet in order to operate more effectively. “Many people whose families arrived in Bolivia didn’t know that their benefactor was Hochschild. When the Comibol archive was opened, only then did many people in the community begin to investigate and realise what this figure, Hochschild, had done. He had been working silently, bringing many, many people. By keeping a low profile, he probably managed to get more people out.”
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-Before the second world war, records show there were no more than 100 Jews in Bolivia, yet by the 1940s there were some 15,000, according to Udler, a medical doctor and president of El Círculo Israelita de Bolivia, the association of the once-thriving Jewish community. The country’s current Jewish population stands at little more than 300 and is shrinking, he explained, and there is now just one rabbi in the whole country. “It is important that our children know about one of the great saviours of our history,” said Udler, 64, whose French-Polish mother survived four concentration camps before escaping across the Atlantic to Bolivia.
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-Just down the corridor from the Comibol archive is an imposing mural by local artists William Luna Tarqui and Jesús Callizaya, which commemorates the 1952 Nationalist Revolution. The fresco, which lionises socialist ideals, revolutionary leaders and ordinary workers, follows a Latin American tradition exemplified by the Bolivian *Indigenista* painter Miguel Alandía Pantoja, whose art was, by turns, glorified and vilified by successive dictatorships. The revolution resulted in the nationalisation of the tin barons’ mines – including Hochschild’s – who was compensated with 30% of the company’s prior assets.
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-During the revolution, Hochschild was portrayed in plainly antisemitic terms, cast as the capitalist villain who used “Judaic trickery to stretch his hand over the biggest mines,” in the words of Augusto Céspedes, a writer who championed the upheaval. While Hochschild had “unmatched personal influence with Bolivian authorities in the highest ranks of government and the armed forces”, writes Leo Spitzer, in Hotel Bolivia, a book about his childhood in Bolivia as the son of Austrian Jews, “his foreign birth – and, no doubt, the fact he was also a Jew (albeit a non-practising one) – also generated intense jealousy and dislike among some Bolivian nationals.”
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-A mural depicting Bolivia’s 1952 revolution at the Comibol archive in El Alto, Bolivia. Photograph: Vanett Graneros/Wikimedia
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-Among the hundreds of Jewish families that Hochschild gave new life and hope, many did not realise until recently that they were part of a bigger group of beneficiaries. One of them is Fred Reich, 73, a retired businessman and an important figure in Peru’s 2,500-strong Jewish community in Lima. His father, Kurt Reich, was an Auschwitz survivor from Austria who got his first job, aged 26, as a messenger boy for Hochschild’s company in La Paz, in March 1947. “Only after Mauricio’s death, people have realised the amount of fantastic work he did to save Jews from the horror of Europe,” said Fred Reich at his home overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Lima’s bohemian Barranco neighbourhood. “At that time, to the best of my knowledge, it was only known that he was very sympathetic to hiring Jewish people in Bolivia.”
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-While working for Hochschild, Kurt Reich had discovered that one of the accountants had been stealing from the company, and reported the theft. When he heard about Reich’s action, Hochschild, who was in Paris at the time, invited him for lunch. “Going to Paris would be like going to the moon today,” Fred recounted proudly. “You have to imagine: La Paz to Rio, Rio to Casablanca, Casablanca to Lisbon, Lisbon to Paris – in small planes!” Hochschild was impressed that his father had survived the camp, said Fred. “At one point he \[had\] weighed 32kg, so it was quite a miracle for him to be alive.”
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-Hochschild promised to pay for Kurt Reich’s son’s education anywhere in the world, and Kurt went on to have a long and successful career at the company. Hochschild’s pledge was fulfilled after his death when Fred went to study at Alfred University in New York state. Fred Reich still has the letter Hochschild wrote to his father in German, telling him of his plans to visit the family in Arequipa, Peru. But Fred never got the chance to thank the man he calls the “Bolivian Schindler”. Hochschild died alone aged 84 in June 1965 in Le Meurice, a five-star hotel in Paris. His remains were interred in the Père Lachaise cemetery.
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-Even Hochschild’s family did not seem to have made much of his humanitarian work. Growing up in wealthy circles between London and Santiago de Chile, Fabrizio Hochschild Drummond remembers his grandfather’s achievements on the mining front were vaunted, but what he had done on behalf of the Jews was “really barely mentioned”. “I had heard stories of how he brought Jews from Germany,” said Hochschild Drummond, “but it was always presented to me, when I was a child, that it was more \[for\] self-interested business reasons rather than \[something\] altruistic and praiseworthy. So when the story came fully to light about five years ago, I was taken aback, not by the fact but by the scale.
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-“I remember in Chile coming across many strangers who, once they had my surname, would tell me how my grandfather had helped them at this or that time in their life.” He believes his grandfather’s deliverance of thousands of Jews from the Nazis was a “great act which has never fully been recognised”.
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-Follow the Long Read on Twitter at [@gdnlongread](https://twitter.com/@gdnlongread), listen to our podcasts [here](https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/the-long-read) and sign up to the long read weekly email [here](https://www.theguardian.com/info/ng-interactive/2017/may/05/sign-up-for-the-long-read-email).
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-This article was amended on 12 August 2022 to revise reference to the allegations against Fabrizio Hochschild Drummond.
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-Date: 2023-05-14
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-Link: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/mexico-drugs-chapitos/
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-# How El Chapo’s sons built a fentanyl empire poisoning America
-
-CULIACÁN, Mexico
-
-In January 2017, days after Mexico extradited the notorious drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán to the United States, local cops in his home state of Sinaloa fell under attack.
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-Some were shot dead in broad daylight. Others vanished and were never found. In all, 13 police officers died or disappeared in the months that followed.
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-That spree was the start of a shift in tactics within Guzmán’s Sinaloa Cartel, according to four intelligence and security officials, one that signaled the arrival of a new force inside one of Mexico’s most powerful drug syndicates: the kingpin’s four sons.
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-Collectively known as Los Chapitos, or “the little Chapos,” the four siblings were once mocked by adversaries as entitled princelings more concerned with flashing their wealth on Instagram than the grubby work of moving tons of cocaine into the United States. Yet the brothers have resuscitated a drug empire teetering after their father was locked behind U.S. bars and diversified the business by embracing a new line of synthetic drugs.
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-Their early bet on fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times more powerful than heroin, helped supercharge an opioid epidemic that has placed them squarely in the crosshairs of American anti-narcotics agents.
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-Last month, U.S. authorities laid out extensive new charges against the brothers in indictments filed in multiple jurisdictions, and upped bounties for two of the siblings to $10 million apiece, cementing their status as some of the world’s most powerful and wanted drug lords. U.S. officials portrayed them as the face of a highly addictive poison that’s killing nearly 200 Americans daily.
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-The U.S. government has advertised hefty rewards for information leading to the arrest of “Los Chapitos,” accused drug traffickers and sons of famed Sinaloa Cartel kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. One of the siblings is currently in custody in Mexico. The others remain at large. U.S. State Department/Handout via Reuters
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-“The Chapitos pioneered the manufacture and trafficking of the deadliest drug our country has ever faced,” Anne Milgram, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) chief, said at an April 14 press conference in Washington. “They inherited a global drug empire and made it more ruthless, more violent and more deadly.”
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-On Tuesday, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned one of the brothers, Joaquín Jr., for his role in the Los Chapitos fentanyl network, alleging that he is involved in the management of “super labs.” His three siblings had been sanctioned previously for purported trafficking.
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-Los Chapitos, for the first time ever, released a public letter last week denying claims that they traffic fentanyl and rebutting allegations made by U.S. officials in the Washington press conference.
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-“We have never produced, manufactured or marketed fentanyl or any of its derivatives. We are victims of persecution and they made us a scapegoat,” the brothers said in the letter. Mexico’s Milenio news channel aired its contents on May 3, along with an interview of Guzmán family lawyer José Refugio Rodríguez, who provided the broadcaster with the document.
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-Denying that they head the Sinaloa Cartel, the brothers said drug traffickers and the media have exploited their father’s fame to implicate them in crimes of which they are innocent.
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-El Chapo is serving a life sentence in a “Supermax” prison in Colorado. Mariel Colón Miro, Guzmán’s U.S.-based attorney, said her client was unable to comment due to restrictions barring him from speaking to the media.
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-The four brothers, two born to El Chapo’s first wife, the others to another, range in age from 33 to 40, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Headed by Iván, El Chapo’s oldest son, the siblings have emerged as key figures in the Sinaloa Cartel, U.S. and Mexican anti-narcotics officials said. While the syndicate is a loose confederation of trafficking factions that cooperate on logistics and security, the Guzmáns’ bloc is a pillar of the organization, the officials said, and Los Chapitos have quickly consolidated power within it.
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-To chronicle the rise of this new generation of “Narco Juniors,” as children of established traffickers are known in Mexico, Reuters spoke with four Sinaloa Cartel operatives and visited a house where gang members assembled pills stuffed with methamphetamine, another cash cow. The news agency also interviewed dozens of sources, including law enforcement, intelligence and government officials in Mexico and the United States, as well as local residents who’ve witnessed the changing of the guard.
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-The rapid ascendancy of Los Chapitos, many details of which are told here for the first time, shows how authorities may have underestimated the former party boys.
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-> “This new generation is more violent. Before, they would interrogate and then kill you. Now they kill and ask questions later.”
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-A 2019 showdown with Mexico’s Army in Culiacán, Sinaloa’s capital, already has cemented their place in narco lore. Soldiers captured Ovidio, the youngest of the four siblings, then quickly released him on the orders of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador after cartel foot soldiers fought troops in shootouts that killed 14 people, including several bystanders.
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-“This new generation is more violent,” said one retired Mexican police officer in Sinaloa. “Before, they would interrogate and then kill you. Now they kill and ask questions later.”
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-Within the cartel, the brothers have battled elders opposed to them assuming their father’s mantle, including El Chapo’s former right-hand man Dámaso López, according to U.S. and Mexican security sources.
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-But these young guns have also built a reputation as sharp businessmen. They’ve helped transform Mexico from a transit country for Chinese-produced fentanyl into a major production hub, half a dozen U.S. officials and DEA sources said. To do that, they said, Los Chapitos built a network of clandestine laboratories across Sinaloa and ramped up smuggling of precursor chemicals from China.
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-The earnings have been astronomical. The cartel can turn $800 worth of precursor chemicals into fentanyl pills or powder that reap profits as high as $640,000, according to one of the April indictments, which was filed in the Southern District of New York. That cash, U.S. prosecutors say, has bankrolled a war chest used by the brothers to bribe politicians and cops, and finance an ever-growing army of *sicarios*, or hit men, to protect their interests.
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-The impact on U.S. streets has been devastating. One American dies from a fentanyl overdose almost every eight minutes, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco said at the Washington press conference. U.S. overdose deaths, the lion’s share due to fentanyl, surged to nearly 107,000 in 2021.
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-Los Chapitos’ ascent, U.S. and Mexican officials say, has coincided with a decision by López Obrador to turn away from the aggressive anti-narcotics policies of his predecessors.
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-After assuming office in December 2018, López Obrador restructured Mexico’s security forces, eliminating teams that were once at the forefront of probing cartel activity, U.S. and Mexico security sources said. They say the president also curbed security cooperation with the United States and largely eschewed the so-called kingpin strategy that led previous administrations to arrest El Chapo and other high-profile traffickers.
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-Instead, the president has vowed to concentrate on social programs to tackle crime and violence at a grassroots level, a policy dubbed “abrazos, no balazos” or “hugs, not bullets.”
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-Mexico’s presidency did not respond to a request for comment about López Obrador’s crime fighting approach. He has repeatedly touted his strategy on multiple visits to Sinaloa. “Nothing can be solved with the use of force. You can’t put out fire with fire,” Lopez Obrador told residents in 2019. His supporters note that murders nationwide have stabilized since he took power.
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-The president’s critics say the number of homicides – above 30,000 a year – is still extremely high, and the production and smuggling of drugs into the United States have increased.
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-Mexico’s Army did ultimately apprehend Ovidio Guzmán earlier this year by sending hundreds of troops to raid one of his homes in rural Sinaloa. He’s now in a maximum-security lockup near Mexico City. But that arrest had more to do with the Army trying to restore its battered prestige rather than a shift in López Obrador’s thinking, four U.S. and Mexican officials said.
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-Ovidio’s lawyer and López Obrador’s office did not respond to requests for comment. The Army did not comment about its motive for the arrest.
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-U.S.-Mexico security ties have frayed. López Obrador called the recent U.S. indictments against the four younger Guzmáns an “abusive, arrogant interference that should not be accepted under any circumstances.” The Mexican leader said the case was built by DEA agents operating in Mexico, which he has deemed a violation of sovereignty.
-
-While he has not booted the agency from the country, DEA operations have been hobbled on his watch. Mexico in 2021 [](https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/exclusive-us-anti-drugs-agency-pulls-plane-mexico-fresh-cooperation-blow-2022-05-11/)[disbanded an elite police unit](https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/exclusive-us-anti-drugs-agency-pulls-plane-mexico-fresh-cooperation-blow-2022-05-11/) that worked closely with the DEA for a quarter of a century; [amended a national security law](https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/mexican-lawmakers-pass-law-change-restrict-foreign-agents-despite-us-pressure-2020-12-15/) to make it harder for foreign agents to operate inside Mexico; and slow-walked visa approvals for DEA agents, [CNN reported](https://edition.cnn.com/2021/10/06/politics/biden-us-mexico-state-department/index.html).
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-Those measures were widely viewed as retaliation for the [2020 arrest](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-politics-idUSKBN271099) of former Mexican Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos in Los Angeles on drug trafficking charges, a move that angered López Obrador. U.S. prosecutors later [](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-corruption-usa-idUSKBN27X314)[dropped the charges](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-corruption-usa-idUSKBN27X314), pointing to sensitive foreign policy considerations.
-
-The Justice Department declined to comment. The DEA did not respond to a request for comment. Rafael Heredia Rubio, a lawyer representing Cienfuegos, said he was not authorized to comment. Cienfuegos’ attorneys previously had denied that he was involved in drug trafficking.
-
-Ferraris and pet tigers
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-Born into one of Mexico’s most storied outlaw families, Guzmán’s five sons – Edgar, Iván, Jesús Alfredo, Joaquín Jr. and Ovidio – grew up in luxury once unimaginable to their father, a semi-literate farm worker from Sinaloa’s mountains before becoming the head of a drug empire. (El Chapo fathered more than a dozen children, according to local media, not all of whom are reputed to be involved in drug trafficking.)
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-Minor social media celebrities, they flaunted their pet tigers, Ferraris and a golden AK-47 on Instagram and Twitter. Those accounts were never verified by those platforms, but a social media analyst familiar with cartel communications and two security sources told Reuters they believed the accounts were authentic.
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-Early on, “the general perception was that Los Chapitos were spoiled brats,” said Mike Vigil, former head of DEA’s international operations.
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-After El Chapo’s escape from a maximum-security prison in 2001, reportedly in a laundry trolley, the brothers took a hands-on approach to the family business, security sources said.
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-Edgar blazed a trail for his brothers by building his own contacts and doing his own deals, the sources said. But he was killed in 2008 in Culiacán in a hail of bullets amid infighting between warring factions of the Sinaloa Cartel.
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-His four surviving brothers filled the void, U.S. and Mexican security sources said.
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-Starting in 2009 with Jesús Alfredo, the brothers all have been indicted by U.S. authorities multiple times for alleged offenses including money laundering, possession of machine guns and trafficking of fentanyl, heroin and cocaine. The U.S. State Department in 2021 put $5 million bounties on their heads, a figure recently doubled for Iván and Jesús Alfredo, while the DEA set up ChapitosTips@dea.gov to encourage snitches to rat them out. The agency in April placed Iván on the list of its 10 Most Wanted Fugitives, joining Jesús Alfredo and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a Sinaloa Cartel legend and El Chapo’s alleged former business partner.
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-Washington has taken note of Los Chapitos’ entrepreneurial flair. The State Department in its 2021 bounty notices said Ovidio and Joaquín Jr. began smuggling chemicals from Argentina in 2008 to launch experiments in Mexico on how to produce methamphetamine.
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-As they built their own crew, the brothers purportedly discarded the shibboleth that Sinaloa kingpins should only sell drugs to foreigners. Los Chapitos placed pushers on street corners in Culiacán, according to cartel members and Mexican media reports.
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-In what would prove another consequential move, Ovidio in 2014 began to tinker with manufacturing fentanyl in Mexico, according to one of the indictments unsealed last month.
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-That same year, the brothers faced another major test: Their father was nabbed again, this time by Mexican marines working with the DEA. The sons helped El Chapo stage yet another audacious escape in July 2015 by organizing the construction of a mile-long tunnel to his Mexican prison cell, according to testimony that would emerge later at the elder Guzmán’s 2019 drug trafficking trial in New York.
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-Following the tunnel caper, Mexican authorities recaptured El Chapo in January 2016. He tapped his sons to head his portion of the trafficking empire, triggering a power struggle with López, who had run the business during the boss’s previous incarceration, according to 2017 Mexican military intelligence documents viewed by Reuters.
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-Los Chapitos and their posse squeezed López’s crew by crimping his finances. Near a Sinaloan dam where both groups filched water to feed their clandestine drug labs, the brothers cut off López’s access to this critical resource, crippling his manufacturing capability while keeping the taps open for themselves, according to three serving Mexican marines who spoke with Reuters.
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-“Los Chapitos had an advantage as they kept the production of drugs. They had money to pay *sicarios*, buy arms,” said one of the men, who had worked with the elite Navy unit that helped capture El Chapo in 2016.
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-The feud escalated into all-out war following Guzmán’s 2017 extradition to the United States. El Chapo’s sons targeted the 13 Sinaloan police officers for execution because they were on López’s payroll, according to prosecutors and former cops in Sinaloa, as well as military officials and intelligence documents reviewed by Reuters.
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-Police in Sinaloa did not respond to claims that the targeted officers were in league with López.
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-One of the U.S. indictments unsealed last month details other grisly violence allegedly meted out by Los Chapitos. Their henchmen allegedly kidnapped two officials from the federal attorney general’s office in early 2017, torturing one by inserting a corkscrew into his muscles, ripping it out, then “placing hot chiles into his open wounds and nose.”
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-Iván finished off the victims with gunshots, with Jesús Alfredo pitching in to shoot one in the face, according to the indictment, which said the two brothers also killed some enemies by feeding them alive to the pet tigers they kept at their ranches.
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-The brothers, in their public letter, denied killing or torturing the officials or feeding people to tigers.
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-“A tiger may kill a person, but eat him? We do not have nor did we have tigers,” the letter stated.
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-Los Chapitos prevailed in their struggle with López, who was arrested in Mexico City in 2017 by the Mexican military and subsequently extradited to the United States. A star prosecution witness in El Chapo’s 2019 trial, López got his own life sentence for drug trafficking reduced. In 2021, his name disappeared from the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ public registry of inmates, fueling media speculation that he entered witness protection. López, through his lawyer, declined to comment.
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-On their turf in Culiacán, meanwhile, the brothers quickly solidified their grip on the local drugs market, a local trafficker told Reuters.
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-Jesús, an independent operator in Culiacán who ships fentanyl and heroin to the United States with the help of the syndicate, said gunmen working for Los Chapitos told street dealers they had to purchase product from their cartel faction exclusively and pay protection money. He said several friends and family members who were slow to comply were kidnapped and beaten.
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-Los Chapitos made it clear that “now the market belongs to them,” Jesús said.
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-Showing who’s boss
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-On Dec. 1, 2018, López Obrador took office after winning Mexico’s presidency in a landslide. Within months, members of UNOPES, the Navy’s elite special forces unit that had pursued El Chapo and other traffickers, were ordered by superiors to leave Sinaloa and shut down their temporary bases there, according to the three marines and three ex-DEA officials.
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-The president’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
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-In October 2019 came the Mexican Army’s first capture of Ovidio Guzmán in Culiacán. Recalling that day, two Sinaloa Cartel members told Reuters that, within minutes, encrypted radios carried by fellow gunmen began to buzz with the news: “The boss has fallen! The boss has fallen!”
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-Footage released by the Mexican government shows the first arrest of Ovidio Guzmán on Oct. 17, 2019, in Culiacán, Mexico. Gunfire can be heard in the background as Sinaloa Cartel hitmen clashed with federal forces. Guzmán is seen speaking by cell phone with his brother asking that cartel soldiers be withdrawn to prevent “chaos.” Guzmán was quickly released on the orders of Mexico’s president after the violence left 14 people dead, several of them bystanders. Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional/Handout via Reuters
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-Hundreds of gang fighters armed with military-grade weapons rushed to the scene, firing on government troops and barricading key city streets to trap them. They also kidnapped eight soldiers and surrounded military housing where wives and children of Mexican soldiers lived, Mexican officials said.
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-With the pop-pop-pop of gunfire echoing in the background, encircled Mexican troops put Ovidio on the phone with his brother Iván in an attempt to get Los Chapitos to call off their gunmen. “Tell them to stand down…I don’t want chaos,” Ovidio said in video footage released by Mexico’s government.
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-“Hell no, we are coming to rescue you,” Iván responded, according to Sinaloan newspaper Ríodoce.
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-Hours later, with Culiacán resembling a war zone and scenes of pandemonium being broadcast across the globe, López Obrador ordered the army to free Ovidio.
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-The day of terror shocked Sinaloans, whose relationship with the cartel is complex. El Chapo had the reputation of being ruthless to those who crossed him. But locals say he provided jobs, handouts and security by punishing hoodlums preying on poor communities.
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-“It was the first time we saw the Sinaloa Cartel use their armed power to generate…chaos and fear to try to achieve their goals,” said Adrian López, publisher of the Sinaloan Noroeste newspaper.
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-For the brothers, it was a turning point. Mexico’s military and its president had bowed to them in front of the entire world. “It showed who has power,” a cartel member said.
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-Still, they set out to burnish their public image. One such charm offensive took place in December 2020 in San Diego, a village about 60 kilometers south of Culiacán that is home to several high-ranking cartel *sicarios*, a resident told Reuters. There Los Chapitos staged a music concert and raffle, whose prizes included new cars, washing machines and refrigerators, all bearing stickers emblazoned with El Chapo’s initials – JGL for Joaquín Guzmán Loera – that person and two other locals said.
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-A fourth declined to answer questions, saying “I don’t want them to disappear me.”
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-During COVID-19 lockdowns, the brothers doled out food parcels and built an outdoor school in rural Sinaloa, and they have maintained the tradition of punishing common hoodlums, Sinaloa residents and cartel members said.
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-Taking control
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-But like their father, Los Chapitos are at heart violent businessmen with a drive for manufacturing and moving drugs, security officials and cartel members said.
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-A gang soldier calling himself Güero, a silver pistol tucked into his waistband, last year gave Reuters a tour of a cartel safe house on the edge of Culiacán. There, two young men in white surgical gloves sat at a brown lacquered table carefully stuffing white powder into transparent capsules – methamphetamine samples for a new client looking to ship in bulk to the United States, Güero said.
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-As fentanyl and meth production have soared, U.S. seizures have likewise skyrocketed. Interdictions of fentanyl alone on the U.S.-Mexico border hit 14,104 pounds (6,397 kilograms) in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2022, up more than 400% since 2019, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
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-Inside Mexico, meanwhile, the Army had a grudge to settle.
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-In early January of this year, the Army told López Obrador it planned to mount a top-secret operation to recapture Ovidio, according to a then-senior government official with direct knowledge of the events. The president approved the mission but was not informed of the date and time, the source said.
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-Mexico’s Army and the presidency did not respond to requests for comment about the official’s account.
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-As hundreds of soldiers encircled Ovidio’s rural Sinaloan compound in the pre-dawn assault, a helicopter strafed targets from the air, video of the incident showed.
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-Cartel gunmen went on a rampage again, setting cars on fire, blocking roads and forcing Culiacán’s airport to shut by shooting at passenger jets. The violence left 29 people dead, including 10 armed forces personnel. But the *sicarios* were too late – a military chopper had already whisked Ovidio out of Sinaloa.
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-Despite that blow to the Sinaloa Cartel, fentanyl keeps flowing north. In February and March, U.S. border agents seized a combined 5,130 pounds (2,326 kilograms) of fentanyl in two of the biggest monthly hauls ever.
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-*Editor’s note: This story was updated after publication to add news about fresh U.S. sanctions on Joaquín Guzmán López.*
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-**Narcos Inc**
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-By Drazen Jorgic
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-Photo editing: Tomas Bravo
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-Graphics and art direction: John Emerson
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-Edited by Marla Dickerson
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-Link: https://www.lamag.com/article/will-smith-johnny-depp-tom-cruise-eddie-murphy-robert-downey-jr-how-hollywoods-blockbuster-golden-boys-went-weird/
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-# How Hollywood’s Blockbuster Golden Boys Went Weird
-
-Hollywood has developed a leading man problem. And not just because the archetype—at least that singular, dashing, charismatic man we came to know on the silver screen—seems to have all but disappeared. The Chrises (Hemsworth, Pratt, Pine, Evans) of the world are just fine, but they work more as plug-and-play movie stars. As audiences have shifted mostly from multiplexes to streaming, today’s male leads are no longer larger than life, and they just don’t hold the same sway over the movie industry and wider culture that big-time blockbuster heroes did as recently as 10 years ago.
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-And it was the final generation of these Hollywood leading men, whose career peaks came at the turn of the millennium, that truly defined that type. Their outsized power and influence seemed to make them untouchable, especially to the Gen-Xers and older millennials who filled movie theaters back when these stars’ careers felt unstoppable. Will Smith, Tom Cruise, Eddie Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., and Johnny Depp—all in their 50s or early 60s today—consistently put butts in seats while starring in unique and (mostly) non-comic-book-based intellectual properties. Smith’s charm, from his start as a goofy-cool rapper and on a hit sitcom to an action star is undeniable; Cruise was magnetic, the model of both white American handsomeness and competence; Murphy’s teeth-baring standup translated perfectly into credible action-comedy roles; Downey, a truly talented young thespian, combined humor and pathos—often in the same scene; Depp’s beauty and cool belied darkly chameleonic energy that ushered some twisted and brilliant material to the mainstream.
-
-Yes, these actors are still Hollywood giants, and all five are still banking checks from the various franchises that cemented their careers: Smith in *Bad Boys 4* (though that production is on [pause](https://view.email.hollywoodreporter.com/?qs=717632777c77b6910bbefcd7ced908efc3e38000f8bdc4a818e52086e286b00c43d7008aedbca6b14d9329cb7d8169b53761a9144797e246bad84156a09ca6207563dcf9f3eaee11) after The Slap); Cruise as the star and producer of the perpetually relevant *Mission: Impossible* franchise (the seventh film is set for release next year); Murphy returning as Axel Foley in *Beverly Hills Cop 4*; Downey rounding out his *Sherlock Holmes* trilogy; and Depp… well, actually, he’s been largely excommunicated by Hollywood—but more on that later.
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-These actors’ imperial phases are decidedly behind them—with the exception of Cruise, who may pull off a magic trick in reviving his Navy aviator for *Top Gun: Maverick* on May 27—and their projects just don’t afford them the outsized status that they once did. Meanwhile, reality has caught up with these men and exposed their not-so-nice sides. Bluntly, years and decades at the top may have led them to go a little bit cuckoo. Here’s a look back at how these five Hollywood golden boys became the eccentric men we know today.
-
-**Will Smith (53)**
-
-
-
-(Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)
-
-**Highlight:** Parlaying his boundless lovability on *The* *Fresh Prince of Bel-Air* into a reign as the movie star to beat after 1996’s smash hit *Independence Day* brought in $817 million at the box office.
-
-**Lowlight:** It has to be slapping Chris Rock on stage earlier this year at the Oscars over his dud of a joke about Jada Pinkett-Smith’s bald head resembling Demi Moore’s in *G.I. Jane,* then yelling, “Keep my wife’s name out your fucking mouth”—twice—on live TV. That [video of him](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8FtuVN48z4) dancing to his own 1997 hit “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” at an Oscars afterparty wasn’t great, either.
-
-**Statement of Defiance:** Still [not apologizing](https://pagesix.com/2022/04/25/will-smith-still-hasnt-apologized-to-chris-rock-for-oscars-slap/) to Rock man-to-man—even as he travels to India for a “spiritual journey” amid the controversy.
-
-**Tom Cruise** **(59)**
-
-
-
-Tom Cruise
-
-Tom Cruise attends as Paramount Pictures presents the Los Angeles Premiere of "Star Trek Into Darkness" at The Dolby Theater in Los Angeles, CA on Tuesday, May 14, 2013 (Alex J. Berliner/ABImages)
-
-**Highlight:** Starring in the *Mission: Impossible* films while also producing installments of the hit franchise—his dedication behind the camera here goes largely underappreciated. *M:I* has become one of Hollywood’s all-time reliable crowd-pleasers, thanks in no small part to the incredible stunts Cruise performs himself (like literally [hanging from a plane, mid-air](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afS5ks54tms)). Today, the franchise remains as strong as its star’s rippling physique.
-
- **Lowlight:** His notorious 2005 Oprah appearance made that moment of [manic](https://www.today.com/video/10-years-ago-tom-cruise-jumps-oprahs-couch-449205827898) couch-jumping an uncomfortable meme that became one of [YouTube’s first viral hits](https://www.wired.com/story/tom-cruise-viral-video-fallout/). And then [there’s](https://www.businessinsider.com/tom-cruise-dancing-scientology-retreat-video-2011-12) that other [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSgMrrf5QzQ) of Cruise thrashing to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll” as he and his fellow Scientologists celebrate his birthday aboard a boat, as was seen in HBO’s exposé documentary *Going Clear*.
-
-**Statement of Defiance:** As Covid-19 was killing thousands and putting the country in lockdown**,** [Cruise was berating](https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/tom-cruise-covid-19-rant-1104720/) the production crew of the latest *Mission: Impossible* installment for breaking protocols. “We are not shutting this fucking movie down. Is it understood?,” Cruise was heard [barking at them](https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/tom-cruise-covid-19-rant-1104720/)**.**
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-**Eddie Murphy (61)**
-
-
-
-Eddie Murphy performs at Madison Square Garden in 1987. (Getty Images)
-
-Getty Images
-
-**Highlight:** An 80s hot streak like no other: *48 Hrs. (*his [stunning feature debut](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3s13jbmrn0))*, Trading Places, Beverly Hills Cop* (as well as the hit sequel)*,* and *Coming to America*. Murphy basically owned the decade.
-
-**Lowlight:** [Getting caught](https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/9716859/eddie-murphy-comeback-prostitute-fortune/) with a transgender sex worker in 1997 while married to model Nicole Mitchell is just one moment in a string of failed relationships (Murphy has [10 kids by five women](https://www.the-sun.com/entertainment/2443917/eddie-murphy-wives-girlfriends-ten-children/), including Spice Girl [Mel B](https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/inside-mel-b-eddie-murphys-22960499)).
-
-**Statement of Defiance:** “Faggots were mad,” he unapologetically said of his homophobic jokes in his 1987 standup film, [*Raw*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQBLzotAn3M). He would later apologize in a 2019 [*New York Times* interview](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/movies/eddie-murphy.html), conceding that he was “kind of an asshole” during this period.
-
-**Robert Downey Jr. (57)**
-
-
-
-Robert Downey Jr.
-
-California Department of Corrections
-
-**Highlight:** After an enviable early career that catapulted him to the A-list by his mid-20s, Downey fell hard, weathering a deeply troubled [period](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/us/robert-downey-jr-is-pardoned-by-california-gov-jerry-brown-for-1996-conviction.html) of drug use that led to him losing his reputation in Hollywood. Then in 2008, a cleaned-up Downey helped launch the biggest franchise of all time, portraying Tony Stark in *Iron Man.* A total of nine Marvel movies now grace his resume and he held the title of Hollywood’s [highest-paid actor](https://variety.com/2015/film/news/robert-downey-jr-highest-paid-actor-world-1201557060/) in 2013, 2014, and 2015—reportedly banking [$75 million](https://www.indiewire.com/2019/07/robert-downey-jr-avengers-endgame-salary-1202156978/) for *Avengers: Endgame* alone.
-
-**Lowlight:** Spending [1996](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/us/robert-downey-jr-is-pardoned-by-california-gov-jerry-brown-for-1996-conviction.html) to [2001](https://edition.cnn.com/2001/LAW/07/16/downey.drug.charges/index.html?related) in jail, prison, treatment, and on probation because of his continued heroin and cocaine addiction, which made Downey uninsurable as an actor. “It’s like I’ve got a shotgun in my mouth, my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of gunmetal,” he [told](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-aug-06-me-63303-story.html) one judge of his addiction.
-Bonus low: Following up his run as Tony Stark/Iron Man with the forgettable big-budget [flop](https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2020/08/15/box-office-robert-downey-jr-dolittle-is-both-one-of-this-years-biggest-bombs-and-biggest-hits/?sh=6291d19f689e), 2020’s *Dolittle,* wasn’t so hot for his career, either.
-
-**Statement of Defiance:** Swiping at Marvel when in 2019 [he told](https://people.com/movies/robert-downey-jr-not-defined-by-what-i-did-with-marvel-iron-man/) *Off Camera*’s Sam Jones of [moving past Iron Man](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4FQI2BI3hw&t=138s), “I’m not what I did with that studio.”
-
-**Johnny Depp (58)**
-
-
-
-ohnny Depp (Photo by Michael REYNOLDS/POOL/AFP)
-
-**Highlight:** Nabbing his first [Oscar nomination](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000136/awards) in 2004 for his unforgettable Keith Richards-as-vaguely-queer-freebooter performance as Jack Sparrow in *Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl* (but really, all the *Pirates* movies in which he appeared are career highlights for Depp).
-
-**Lowlight:** A messy ongoing legal battle with ex-wife Amber Heard, who has accused him of sexual assault. Depp is now [suing](https://www.thedailybeast.com/johnny-depp-takes-the-stand-in-dollar50-million-defamation-civil-case-against-amber-heard) her for [$50 million](https://deadline.com/2022/04/johnny-depp-trial-starts-amber-heard-defamation-countersuit-domestic-abuse-1234999738/) in a nasty defamation [trial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWvBDYcWaug) [that’s being](https://nypost.com/2022/04/25/live-updates-johnny-depp-amber-heard-defamation-trial/) viewed live [around the world](https://nypost.com/2022/04/28/johnny-depp-amber-heard-trial-live-updates-and-coverage/). Depp is also [suing](https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/celebrity/johnny-depp-spent-3m-blast-hunter-s-thompsons-ashes-out-n715231) his former business managers for allegedly mishandling his funds; this has brought a countersuit in which the managers have said he blew his fortune on unnecessary purchases—including $3 million to blast the ashes of his late pal Hunter S. Thompson out of a cannon.
-
-**Statement of Defiance:** “It’s insulting to say that I spent $30,000 on wine because it was far more,” [Depp told](https://people.com/movies/johnny-depp-managers-claim-spent-30k-wine-insulting-far-more/) [*Rolling Stone*](https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-trouble-with-johnny-depp-666010/) in a 2018 trainwreck of a profile.
-
----
-
-***Stay on top of the latest in L.A. food and culture.*** [***Sign up for our newsletters today.***](https://www.lamag.com/newsletters/)
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-Date: 2022-11-27
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-TimeStamp: 2022-11-27
-Link: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/12/paying-for-pet-critical-care-cost-health-insurance/671896/
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-```button
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-^button-HowMuchWouldYouPaytoSaveYourPetLifeNSave
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-# How Much Would You Pay to Save Your Pet's Life?
-
-For $15,000, you can get your pet a new kidney.
-
-By [Sarah Zhang](https://www.theatlantic.com/author/sarah-zhang/)
-
-Photographs by Caroline Tompkins for *The Atlantic*
-
-
-
-Sherlock donated a kidney in 2019. (Caroline Tompkins for The Atlantic)
-
-*This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from* The Atlantic*, Monday through Friday.* [*Sign up for it here.*](https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/sign-up/one-story-to-read-today/)
-
-When I first met Strawberry, age 16, she was lying on her back, paws akimbo. Her cat belly was shaved bare, and black stitches ran several inches down her naked pink skin.
-
-A radiologist squirted ultrasound goop on her abdomen while two veterinary students in dark-blue scrubs gently held down her legs—not that this was really necessary. Strawberry was too tired, too drugged, or simply too out of it from her surgery the previous day to protest. In the dim light of the radiology room, her pupils were dilated into deep black pools. She slowly turned her head toward me. She turned away. She looked around at the small crowd of doctors and students surrounding her, as if to wonder what on God’s green earth had happened for her to end up like this.
-
-[](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2022/12/)
-
-## Explore the December 2022 Issue
-
-Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
-
-[View More](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2022/12/)
-
-What had happened was that Strawberry had received a kidney transplant. A surgical team at the University of Georgia had shaved off patches of her long ginger fur, inserting catheters in her leg and neck to deliver the cocktail of drugs she would need during her hospital stay: anesthesia, painkillers, antibiotics, blood thinners, and immunosuppressants. Then a surgeon named Chad Schmiedt carefully cut down the midline of her belly—past the two shriveled kidneys that were no longer doing their job and almost to her groin. Next, he stitched into place a healthy new kidney, freshly retrieved from a living donor just hours earlier.
-
-Schmiedt is one of only a few surgeons who perform transplants on cats, and is therefore one of the world’s foremost experts at connecting cat kidneys. When he first greeted me with a broad smile and a handshake, I was struck by how his large, callused hand engulfed mine. In the operating room, though, his hands work with microscopic precision, stitching up arteries and veins only millimeters wide. This is the hardest part, he told me, like sewing “wet rice paper.” Once the donor kidney was in place, it flushed pink and Schmiedt closed Strawberry back up. (As in human transplants, the old kidneys can stay in place.) It was then a matter of waiting for her to wake up and pee. She had done both by the time of her ultrasound.
-
-Not that Strawberry could understand any of this—or that any cat understands why we humans insist on bringing them to vet offices to be poked and prodded by strangers. But without the transplant, she would die of kidney failure, an affliction akin to being gradually poisoned from within. Other treatments could slow her kidney disease, which is common in older cats, but they could not stop it. This is why Strawberry’s owner decided to spend $15,000 on a kidney—a last resort to save her life, or at least extend it.
-
-I didn’t meet her owner in the hospital that day. Strawberry would need to be hospitalized for at least a week after the surgery, and cat owners—who come from all over the country and even the world for kidney transplants; Schmiedt’s farthest patient traveled to Athens, Georgia, from Moscow—cannot always stay the entire time, because of work or family responsibilities. Strawberry’s owner had dropped her off right before the surgery and would pick her up after she recovered.
-
-But also, the owner didn’t want her name in a magazine article about $15,000 kidney transplants. (That’s the cost of the surgery at UGA; with travel and follow-up care, the total can be two or three times that amount.) She wasn’t alone in not wanting to be named. In the course of reporting this story, I spoke with more than a dozen owners, several of whom were wary of going public about their cat’s transplant. Others were happy, even eager, to share the experience, but they too sometimes told me of judgment radiating from family or acquaintances. “I wouldn’t think of saying to somebody, ‘Wow, that’s an expensive car,’ ” one owner told me. “But people seem pretty free to say, ‘Wow, you spent a lot of money on a cat.’ ”
-
-[From the March 2012 issue: How your cat is making you crazy](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/how-your-cat-is-making-you-crazy/308873/)
-
-And it *is* a lot of money. For decades, Americans’ collective spending on veterinary care [has been rising](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/05/americans-are-spending-more-money-on-their-pets-during-the-pandemic.html)—it exceeded $34 billion in 2021—a sign of a broader shift in how we think about pets. Our grandparents might have found it indulgent to allow pets on the living-room couch, let alone the bed. But as birth rates have fallen, pets have become more intimate companions. (In my own household, our cat Pete is really quite insistent on taking up the full third of the bed that he believes is rightfully his.) Cats and dogs now have day cares; health insurance; funerals; even trusts, should an owner die an untimely death—a proliferation of services that implies new obligations to pet ownership, turning it into something more like parenthood.
-
-
-
-Chad Schmiedt, a surgeon who performs kidney transplants on cats, with his own cat, Marigold (Caroline Tompkins for *The Atlantic*)
-
-This is, in fact, why $15,000 for a kidney transplant provokes so much judgment, isn’t it? The unease with the money is an unease with the status of pets. Our very language is inadequate: They are not simply property, as *pet owner* implies, nor are they fully equivalent to children, as *pet parent* implies. They occupy a space in between. What do we owe these animals in our care—these living creatures that have their own wants and wills but cannot always express them? And what does what we *think* we owe them say about us?
-
-Strawberry’s kidney transplant took place at the University of Georgia’s Veterinary Teaching Hospital, a sprawling medical complex several miles outside downtown Athens. My first impression was how much it looked like a human hospital. There were, however, occasional reminders of more unusual goings-on: a horse turd on the sidewalk, a golden retriever trouncing through the glass atrium.
-
-The teaching hospital had long outgrown its first building, a former livestock-judging pavilion. When UGA’s vet school was founded in 1946, it was, like all vet schools at the time, focused on training students to care for farm animals. Its large-animal department still sees livestock; when I was there, a pig was having surgery and a foal was getting an MRI. But over the decades, vet schools have shifted their focus to “small animals,” a.k.a. pets. Vet students graduating today overwhelmingly go on to treat dogs and cats. Dogs make up the largest share of the patients that come to UGA’s hospital, with cats a growing second. (There is also the occasional exotic pet. A few years ago, doctors removed a fatty tumor from a prized koi fish, running water over its gills during the surgery.)
-
-The hospital’s layout reflects the evolution of veterinary care. It’s divided into departments, each dedicated to a different specialty: cardiology, dermatology, orthopedics, oncology, ophthalmology, and more. Schmiedt himself rotated through these departments as a UGA vet student in the late ’90s; he then did two surgical internships followed by a residency at the University of Wisconsin, where he learned to perform kidney transplants—a trajectory of advanced training and specialization not unlike that in human medicine. Others at UGA specialize in total artificial-hip replacements or minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery.
-
-Cats in particular have been beneficiaries of this evolution. “When I was growing up, it was, *Why would you take your cat to the vet? If your cat’s sick, you get another cat*,” says Drew Weigner, a veterinarian and former president of the nonprofit EveryCat Health Foundation. Cats lived outside; they came and went. Even in the late ’80s, when he opened a practice specializing in cats in Atlanta, the idea struck others as “hilarious and crazy.” But cats by then were coming indoors. That physical closeness turned into [emotional closeness](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/09/why-cats-purr-vocalization-science/671358/). Weigner’s practice thrived.
-
-[Read: Purring is a love language no human can speak](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/09/why-cats-purr-vocalization-science/671358/)
-
-In the oncology department at UGA, when pets finish chemotherapy, the staff have a tradition adopted from human cancer wards of ringing a celebratory bell. Back in the ’60s, Weigner points out, your cat wouldn’t have gotten chemo. It probably wouldn’t even have been diagnosed with cancer. More likely, a sick cat would just go off by itself and die. But an owner nowadays can bring their cat in for biopsies, X-rays, and ultrasounds—followed by chemo, radiation, and immunotherapy. The list of options is long, the sums of money to spend very large. You can go to great lengths to treat an ailing pet, even if how far you should go isn’t always so easy to answer.
-
-But among all of these treatments, cat kidney transplantation poses a unique ethical dilemma. The kidney has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere—or do we say *someone*?—is another cat.
-
-Even among cat people, kidney transplants are controversial. One owner told me she was called a “kidney stealer” by fellow cat owners in a Facebook group for those with pets suffering from chronic kidney disease. In the U.K., the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons [has explicitly come out against](https://www.rcvs.org.uk/setting-standards/advice-and-guidance/code-of-professional-conduct-for-veterinary-surgeons/supporting-guidance/miscellaneous/) using living donor cats in transplants, arguing that the surgery inflicts pain and discomfort on an animal that derives no benefit. A cat, after all, cannot consent to giving away a kidney.
-
-To be clear, the donor cats are not killed. Like humans, cats can survive with one kidney. When Clare Gregory and his colleagues at UC Davis pioneered cat kidney transplants in the late ’80s, he made sure that owners adopted the donor—a policy that all three hospitals performing cat kidney transplants in the U.S. continue to uphold. No other types of organ transplants are done in cats, because they would involve killing the donor, which the vets and ethicists I talked with universally condemned. (Gregory tried doing kidney transplants in dogs first, but the canine immune system is unusually reactive, leading to kidney rejection.)
-
-Strawberry’s donor was a one-year-old male tabby with a white chin. He was already up and about the morning after his surgery, keen to receive chin rubs; the young and healthy donor cats [tend to bounce back faster](https://www.petmd.com/blogs/thedailyvet/dr-coates/2016/february/cat-kidney-transplant-health-both-recipient-and-donor-matter-33544) than the older and sicker recipient cats. He’d be ready to go home with Strawberry’s owner in a matter of days.
-
-In a previous life, he was destined to be a lab cat. UGA bought him from a commercial breeder that sells cats for use in medical or veterinary research. Numbers tattooed into his ears attest to his former fate. The University of Wisconsin buys research cats to use as kidney donors, too, and the University of Pennsylvania, which [runs the third and largest cat-transplant program](https://www.vet.upenn.edu/veterinary-hospitals/ryan-veterinary-hospital/about-ryan-hospital/news-press-releases-events/ryan-stories/the-nearly-lethal-lily) in the country, keeps a small colony of donor cats sourced from a shelter.
-
-[Read: Cats give the laws of physics a biiiiig stretch](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/09/falling-dropped-cat-reflex-physics/671424/)
-
-This is where the blanket assertion that donor cats gain nothing from the transplants gets more complicated, says James Yeates, CEO of the nonprofit World Federation for Animals, who has written about the ethics of these surgeries. Had these particular cats not been chosen as donors, they may well have lived out the remainder of their life in a lab or shelter. Losing a kidney does come with risks, as well as a lot of pain and discomfort. But most of the donors go on to live long, healthy lives—in many cases, very cushy lives with extremely devoted owners. Schmiedt told me of one owner whose cat died of heart failure right before the transplant but who decided to adopt the prospective donor anyway. Another asked for the exact dimensions of the cage in the hospital, so they could build the cat a shelter of the same size to ease the transition home.
-
-In a way, Yeates says, kidney transplants simply lay bare the extremes in how we treat animals. In America, a cat can be a cherished pet that feasts on pasture-raised chicken or a lab subject deliberately infected with pathogens or an unwanted animal euthanized because no one will pay to save its life. Simple dumb luck separates one cat’s fate from another’s. But, for the price of a kidney, a cat can ascend into the tier of beloved companion.
-
-This summer, I visited Kassie Phebillo, a self-proclaimed “cat lady” whose cat Banquo got a kidney transplant at UGA in 2019. Her house outside Austin looked like every other beige house in every other beige Texas subdivision—but I knew I had arrived at the right one when I spotted a sign declaring Black Cats Welcome Here. (Banquo is a black cat.) Kassie and her husband, Taylor, had just moved in a few months earlier; they’d designed the house in part to accommodate their entire animal family. Banquo lives in the large master suite because the Phebillos like to keep him separate from the others due to his regimen of immunosuppressant drugs. Bia, their oldest cat, has a bedroom and bathroom upstairs that they added just for her. George, their dog, and Sherlock, the donor cat, have the run of the rest of the house. They have become best friends.
-
-Sherlock, a sandy tabby with white paws, was sprawled on the kitchen table with his toys when Kassie opened the door. There was no trace of the surgical scar that once ran down his belly. I scratched his head—he too has numbers tattooed into his ears—and he immediately started to purr. When Kassie and I moved to the dining-room table, George, “a big rescue mutt,” followed us and Sherlock in turn followed him. Kassie told me she’d grown up with cats in rural Indiana. After college, she adopted Bia, a sickly calico kitten that she bottle-fed back to health, and then her vet told her about a black kitten in need of a home. That was Banquo. Bia and Banquo were the two constants of her itinerant 20s. They were with her through crappy jobs and bad breakups. She’s known them longer than she’s known her husband.
-
-In the spring of 2019, when Banquo was about eight years old, a vet at a routine checkup noticed that his kidneys felt swollen. An ultrasound revealed that they were riddled with cysts. His diagnosis was polycystic kidney disease, a genetic disorder with no cure. Kassie could give him comfort care, but nothing would ultimately stop the cysts from taking over his kidneys. He did not have long to live.
-
-But there was one last possible option—a kidney transplant. Kassie was referred to another vet at her practice, Melena McClure, who had gotten a transplant for her own cat. McClure was frank about what that had entailed. Her cat had needed a second surgery to deal with complications, and then tons of blood work and follow-ups to fine-tune the dosage of immunosuppressants, which prevent rejection. The drugs can have their own unpleasant side effects. “I swear he had diarrhea for four months straight,” McClure told me. He eventually got back to his playful old self. But he still needed immunosuppressants twice a day every day for the rest of his life. “I have to be there every 12 hours, or else he dies,” she said.
-
-The Phebillos slowly took this all in. The diagnosis had come at an especially difficult time. Kassie suffered from anxiety and depression, and the stress of her then-job had sent her down a spiral even before Banquo’s diagnosis. Compared with losing him, the complete lifestyle shift of having a transplant cat didn’t seem so daunting. And they could afford it; Taylor had just gotten a signing bonus from his new tech job. But still, they agonized. “Are we making his life worse or better?” she wondered. She considered how Banquo genuinely seemed to love spending time with humans. In contrast to Bia, a high-strung cat that needs anxiety medication, he sought out cuddles. He liked to play. He was enjoying life. He would want to live, she decided. The surgery was worth a shot.
-
-I better understood why Banquo inspired such dedication when I finally met him. A regal cat with a smoky black mane and golden eyes, he carries himself with the self-possessed air of a wild creature, as if you would be lucky to have his attention bestowed upon you. This is, I think, the particular appeal of a certain kind of cat. Whereas humans have bred dogs to dutifully attend to our every grunt and point, cats have retained that streak of independence, that touch of wildness. To gain a cat’s affection is to be chosen. “Watch,” Kassie said, after she’d opened the door to the master bedroom and lain down on the bed. She stretched out her arms. Banquo fell into them, purring.
-
-His preternatural ability to calm her is what persuaded Taylor to go forward with the transplant. Whenever things get bad, Kassie will lie down, and Banquo will come to her.
-
-Banquo is also just a generally chill dude, which is in fact an important consideration for a kidney transplant. Cats that hate vets, that hate pills, or that hate car rides—if you know cats, you know this is a lot of cats—simply would not be able to handle a long hospital stay and drugs twice a day. When the time came for Banquo’s evening medication, I watched Taylor casually pop a liquid capsule into the cat’s mouth. And then Banquo sauntered over to his wet food. (As someone who has had to force—yes, *force* is unfortunately the only correct word here—my own cats to take medication, I admit to watching this scene with some envy.)
-
-This fall, though, Kassie told me that Banquo had become precipitously ill again. At first, they didn’t know what the problem was. Sepsis? Cancer? An emergency vet recommended euthanasia. If it was cancer, Kassie wasn’t sure Banquo could make it through chemo with his existing health issues.
-
-He turned out to have cysts on his liver, which McClure assured her were very treatable with surgery, but Banquo has had his ups and downs since that operation. Kassie told me she would now be at peace if Banquo’s time came. She didn’t want to do anything that would extend Banquo’s life without improving it. “I didn’t want to be selfish,” she told me. “There’s just a fine line between doing what you can for your pet and being selfish.”
-
-The median survival time for cats that get kidney transplants is about two years—though I did speak with one owner whose cat survived 12 years. This means that many owners who have recently gone to the extreme to save their cat’s life find themselves once again on the brink and asking when to let them go.
-
-Melena McClure—Kassie Phebillo’s vet in Austin, whose cat Beaker got a transplant in May 2017—noticed signs of diabetes about three years after his surgery. He suddenly dropped two pounds and started peeing a lot. McClure started him on insulin, shaved a patch between his shoulders for a continuous blood-sugar monitor, and stopped giving him the steroids that were pushing him into diabetes. This came with a trade-off: Keep him off the steroids and he could tip into organ rejection. Put him back on and he could tip into diabetes. Then Beaker was also diagnosed with suspected lymphoma in his intestines, which required chemo, which gave him nausea, which in turn required anti-nausea medication and appetite stimulants. At one point, he was on 12 or 13 different medications.
-
-
-
-*Left*: Zorro, an English bulldog, waiting for an appointment with the UGA Veterinary Teaching Hospital’s orthopedics service. *Right*: The UGA Veterinary Teaching Hospital’s exotic-animals service evaluates Bunny, a rabbit, for sinus issues. (Caroline Tompkins for *The Atlantic*)
-
-I met McClure and her husband, Jon Twichell, over coffee one morning in Austin after her overnight shift at an emergency animal hospital. She struck me as particularly no-nonsense, a vet who would not sugarcoat your cat’s bad diagnosis. To her, Beaker’s health problems were a challenge to solve using her considerable expertise. “Okay, here’s a problem; I can fix this. Let’s go,” is how she described her thinking. That’s how it was when Beaker’s diagnosis was chronic kidney failure and the solution was a transplant. “But once you start hitting multiple problems,” she told me, “it’s like a giant game of whack-a-mole.”
-
-By then, Beaker was wobbly and not eating. He wasn’t himself anymore. She did what she tells owners to do in this situation: Pick two or three of your pet’s favorite activities. If they do those things, mark it in a calendar as a good day. If not, a bad day. When the bad days outnumber the good ones, it’s time. “I was doing it with a colored pencil,” Twichell told me. “Bad days, red square on a calendar.” It was red, red, red. In January, almost five years after his transplant, they decided to put Beaker down. He was just shy of 17.
-
-Peggy Cochrane’s cat Petey started to decline a year and a half after his surgery. When he was first diagnosed with chronic kidney disease, she had already watched three of her other cats die of the same affliction. “I couldn’t bear not to try to do something,” she told me. “I promised myself I’d do anything I could.” For two and a half years, she managed Petey’s illness as she had her other cats’, by giving him fluids to deal with the consequences of his failing kidneys. But he kept getting worse and by the time she decided on a transplant, she says, he was very sick, probably sicker than he should have been to qualify. Petey did well after his transplant—until one day he didn’t. He was in so much pain, he didn’t want to be picked up.
-
-Petey ended up spending several days in an animal ICU, part of that time in an oxygen tent. “We were taking some pretty extreme measures,” she said. It was time. She had him put to sleep. “To see a little kitty die like that, it tortured me,” she said. She still thinks doing the transplant was the right decision. But she recognized all that she had put him through. “It wasn’t easy for him,” she said. “And then to see it not work. And just to see him die.”
-
-I could tell this still weighed on her, because she turned the conversation around on me: What about the other owners I’d talked with? she asked. Were they mixed on whether they would do a transplant again?
-
-The owners I talked with who had gone ahead with a kidney transplant almost universally impressed upon me that their cat was special—exceptionally affectionate, unusually loyal. Many had had multiple cats, but the one that got the transplant was unique: “Cat of a lifetime.” “My soulmate.”
-
-Most of the owners were well-off enough to afford the transplant outright. They had jobs that paid good money; one cited the hot stock market in 2021. And most did not have children.
-
-But some struggled to pay for the surgery. I spoke with one owner who started a GoFundMe for her cat’s transplant; she failed to raise enough money, and her cat died of kidney failure. Another took out a line of credit on her house to pay for the surgery. In 2015, Andre Gonciar, an archaeologist in Buffalo, New York, used the money he and his wife had put away for a down payment. It didn’t feel like a sacrifice, Gonciar told me, because he couldn’t conceive of trading their cat Oki’s life for a house or a car or just more money in the bank. He said that the bond he felt with Oki was as intense as the bond he felt with humans, if not more so. “There is no inherent badness in the soul of a cat or a dog,” he said. “Their soul will never be mean or treacherous. They will not hurt you.” The psychologist John Archer writes that pets provide people with “the type of unconditional adoring relationship that has eluded them (and indeed most of us) when other human beings are involved.” Money may not be able to buy happiness, but it can, possibly, delay the end of such a relationship.
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-“You go buy your cars and your trips,” as another owner, Jason Matthews, put it. “I’m going to save my best friend in the world.” Several cat owners I interviewed asked rhetorically how spending tens of thousands of dollars on a cat was any different from spending tens of thousands of dollars on a luxury that nobody needs.
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-And it is seen as different. In America, the allure of material comfort is accepted without a second thought. But the yearning for a deep emotional bond with an animal is not.
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-In his classic 1986 treatise on human-animal relationships, [*In the Company of Animals*](https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9780521577793), James Serpell described a “vague notion that there is something strange, perverse or wasteful about displaying sentimental affection for animals.” The ascendancy of pets engendered, as change so often does, a degree of suspicion about some new moral rot in society.
-
-Serpell traces the modern history of pet-keeping in the English-speaking world back to medieval Britain, when lapdogs became fashionable among noble ladies. For everyone else, domesticated animals still served a utilitarian purpose: Oxen plowed, pigs became meat, cats caught mice. The lapdogs were too small, too useless for any work, but ladies liked to pamper them. In the 16th century, Mary Queen of Scots had a coterie of tiny dogs that she dressed in blue-velvet suits. A book of British history from around that time derisively described lapdogs as “instruments of follie to plaie and dallie withall, in trifling away the treasure of time, to withdraw their minds from more commendable exercises.”
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-Pet ownership eventually trickled down to the growing middle class, but perhaps it never quite shook the sense of frivolity associated with the aristocracy and with women. In the 20th century, newspapers highlighted sensational stories like that of a “millionairess” who spent ₤8,000 to buy out the entire business section of a jet for her dog. Tales about the fabulously wealthy indulging their pets seem to imply a dark underside to caring so much about animals: an indifference to the suffering of fellow humans. How many starving orphans could that money have saved instead? Of course, you could lob the same critique at spending ₤8,000 on jewels, which some surely have, but pets are not simply property. They have just enough humanlike qualities—pluck, loyalty, affection—that actually treating them as humans touches a particular nerve.
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-When Serpell looks beyond the English-speaking world, the history of animal companionship gets more complicated. In Indigenous societies around the world, stories of intense emotional bonds between humans and animals are common. In Australia, Aborigines kept dingo pups that slept inside their huts. “He caresses it like a child, eats the fleas off it, and then kisses it on the snout,” wrote one 19th-century chronicler of a man with a dingo. The Kalapalo people of Brazil tamed birds that they buried near their houses after death. It was not unusual, across many cultures, for women to feed baby animals from the breast: dogs, monkeys, pigs, deer, even bear cubs. In the Colombian Amazon, women suckled puppies and pre-chewed bananas to feed their parrots and macaws, as they would for a human baby.
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-In other words: Sentimental attachments to animals are not at all an invention of modern Western decadence. Instead, Serpell argues, it is the impulse to see something “strange, perverse or wasteful” about anthropomorphizing pets that is born out of modern Western society—specifically, the need to justify the mass exploitation and slaughter of other animals like cattle, pigs, and chickens. How can we treat some animals so lovingly as pets and others so cruelly as livestock? The “least painful solution” to this paradox, according to Serpell, is to denigrate the emotional relationship with pets.
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-In the long and broad view of human history, Serpell told me, there is nothing unusual about personifying animals or extending our most human instincts toward them. “I think it’s, in one sense, completely natural to do so,” he said. It is only human.
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-Over the centuries—and even since the 1980s, when Serpell was writing—the quantity of material affection one can shower on pets has gone up and up. A casual perusal of a pet store will turn up toys, beds, fountains, strollers, human-grade treats, snuffle mats, thunder jackets, teethers, playpens, vitamins, pet monitors, calming collars, toothbrushes, diapers, and pet-birthday gift sets. But it is in the life-and-death decisions of veterinary care that the question of how much money can buy becomes the most fraught.
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-Veterinarians, too, often find themselves struggling with how far to go for an ailing patient. In a recent study, 98.5 percent of the nearly 500 veterinarians in the U.S. who participated said pet owners [had asked them to provide futile care](https://avmajournals.avma.org/view/journals/javma/260/12/javma.22.01.0033.xml#d54832520e317) for their dying animals. “They were a nearly daily feature of my life when I was an ICU vet and palliative-care vet,” says Lisa Moses, a veterinarian and bioethicist at Harvard and a co-author of the study. She regularly saw dogs with end-stage metastatic cancer whose owners wanted yet another round of chemo or cats with heart failure that were hospitalized and sedated, again and again, to have fluid temporarily removed from their lungs. “The staff are just beside themselves, because they don’t want to keep doing it to just buy them another couple of days.”
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-In times when he’s provided futile care, says Nathan Peterson, a veterinarian at Cornell and the lead author of the study, he has done it for the sake of the owner, not the pet. Advancements in medicine have opened up a gap between what is possible to do for a pet and what might be best to do for them.
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-Attitudes about this are neither universal nor static. Robert Hardie, who performs kidney transplants at the University of Wisconsin, told me he was surprised at how different norms were in the U.K. when he practiced there back in the late ’90s. “People really love their pets, and most pets were actually insured”—so cost wasn’t a major concern. Still, some owners turned down straightforward procedures, where good recoveries were likely. “When it came to doing something like, say, ‘Well, we can fix this fracture; we can do this thing,’ the default was often, ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to put her through that,’ ” he said. “It’s just a cultural mindset.”
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-Sherlock, originally destined to be a lab cat, lounges at his home near Austin, Texas. (Caroline Tompkins for *The Atlantic*)
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-This question of how much to put a patient through is everywhere in human medicine as well, but Moses points out a fundamental difference: Vets are trained to view euthanasia as a humane way to prevent suffering. Doctors are not. And to vets, delaying euthanasia is seen as prolonging suffering. “Veterinarians became veterinarians because they didn’t have tolerance for animal suffering,” she says. “We want to relieve it as part of our oath.” This constant moral distress, she believes, contributes to the extraordinary level of burnout in veterinary medicine. Turnover in the field is high, much higher than in human medicine. [Suicide rates also are high](https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2018/p1220-veterinarians-suicide.html): Female veterinarians are 3.5 times as likely to die by suicide as the general population; male vets are about twice as likely. So many people are now leaving the profession that some [emergency animal hospitals have had to curtail their hours](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/07/not-enough-veterinarians-animals/661497/) and turn away sick patients.
-
-[Read: The great veterinary shortage](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/07/not-enough-veterinarians-animals/661497/)
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-It’s common, too, for vets to face owners who cannot afford a procedure. Many veterinary practices have been consolidated in recent years, Peterson says, and large corporate practices are more likely to have expensive equipment for procedures such as MRIs, laparoscopic surgery, and laser therapy. Whereas an owner might once have exhausted their options at a small family practice and gone home knowing they did everything they could, now their pet might be recommended for another scan, another test, another procedure—racking up more bills along the way. This does mean better medical care, but only if you can pay. It’s not unusual, vets told me, for distressed owners to lash out when they hear the costs.
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-This June, a Maine veterinary hospital found itself at the center of a firestorm after an upset owner [went to the local news](https://fox23maine.com/news/i-team/mvmc-responds-to-i-team-investigation-maine-veterinary-medical-center-jaxx-german-shepherd) about her German-shepherd puppy’s $10,000 emergency surgery. She didn’t have the money for a 50 percent deposit, and she didn’t immediately qualify for a loan; she surrendered her dog to another owner to pay for the surgery. When the story aired, irate viewers swarmed the hospital’s Yelp page. They accused the vets of stealing a dog and of caring about money over animals’ lives. According to the hospital, angry callers jamming the phone lines blocked emergency calls from getting through. Threats to burn down the hospital and kill the staff came in by the hour. Multiple veterinary staffers around the country brought up this incident to me unprompted in conversations this summer. It unnerved them because they had all encountered similarly upset owners. “Their expectations are unrealistic sometimes,” said one vet in Rhode Island. “They want treatments without spending any money.”
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-Even in the U.S., a human ER wouldn’t ask for a deposit before operating on a dying human. The sanctity of human life, which we universally accept, means human medicine has at least some safeguards to remove cost from the equation. Veterinary care is not like that. It isn’t a right, but should it really be a pure consumer good? The answer might depend on what you think about the sanctity of pet life.
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-In school, Schmiedt told me, he had considered becoming a doctor, but he worried about the emotional toll. “I just didn’t want to be the one that has to tell a mom that her daughter was dying,” he said. “I didn’t want that.” So he became a vet, only to find out that telling owners their dog is dying is sometimes almost as painful. And telling them that the dog will die unless they cough up $5,000 can be especially so.
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-Pet insurance is on the rise in the U.S., and a couple of cat owners told me that their insurance company had actually paid for most of their cat’s kidney transplant. One of these is Holly, a graduate student who has studied, ironically, inequalities in health care. (She asked that we not publish her last name for privacy reasons.) Her cat was diagnosed with kidney failure in the summer of 2021. When she first heard about the possibility of a transplant, her initial reaction was, “I don’t have that kind of money lying around, so fuck no.” Her dad has a blue-collar job and her mom is retired, so they weren’t in a position to help. But then she remembered that her cat had pet insurance, which would cover 90 percent of the costs.
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-It took a heroic bureaucratic effort—familiar to anyone who has dealt with human-insurance companies—to go from vet to vet gathering all of the medical records and then arguing for coverage. The company didn’t want to pay for any of the donor’s surgery or care, which amounted to thousands of dollars. Holly couldn’t afford it, but her cat obviously couldn’t get the transplant without it. She pushed back. The company relented. “I would not have been able to save this cat had I not been a grad student who was intimately acquainted with health care,” she told me.
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-She couldn’t help but see her cat’s experience refracted through the inequality in human health care. Take even the specific example of kidney disease. Holly, who is Black, points out that kidney disease disproportionately affects Black Americans, including her own family. “It is the most bourgeois bullshit \[that\] I was able to get a kidney transplant for my cat,” she said, “and one of my family members passed because he couldn’t get a transplant.”
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-Holly was aware, when she took her cat to UGA, that she was unlike the other owners who typically fly their cats to Georgia for kidney transplants. She was aware of how fortunate her cat was. And she was aware that her cat was getting better medical care than many humans. “I am doing all of this for one cat,” she said, “and people are still out there dying.”
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-About five years ago, my husband and I decided to adopt a second cat to keep Pete company. One snowy morning, we drove to an adoption event in the suburbs, where we found that the number of prospective owners far outnumbered available cats. As we surveyed the human competition, a volunteer came over to hand us an intake form. It asked, among other things, the maximum amount we would spend on our new pet’s veterinary care. There is no wrong answer, the volunteer assured us, but I found myself unwilling to believe her. Write down too few zeros, the anxious voice inside my head whispered, and I’d out myself as heartless and miserly. Too many, and I’d be self-absorbed and extravagant.
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-We scribbled a hypothetical amount—maybe three zeros? I don’t quite remember but I guess it wasn’t a wrong answer, because they let us adopt a one-year-old cat we named Wiley. In the years since, I’ve wondered how I could possibly assign a monetary value to his—or Pete’s—continued presence in our lives. They are each in their own way essential, members of our household. Whereas Pete is cool and composed, if secretly affectionate once he warms up to you, Wiley is exuberant and clumsy. He will jump into a lap without calculating how far to leap, only to backslide, butt first, onto the floor. And he is always quick to pounce on a new toy, while Pete hangs back—not wanting to seem too eager, but also a bit jealous at having to wait his turn.
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-Watching our cats’ divergent personalities has helped shape the relationship between my husband and me. In the cats, we see our own foibles—how Pete’s reservation holds him back, how Wiley’s spirit gets him into trouble. There are times when we identify most with Pete, others with Wiley. We might just be projecting. We most definitely are. But the intimacy of the modern pet-human relationship means that they reflect an image of ourselves back to us.
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-Our cats have taught us about being human. I don’t know how much that is worth.
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----
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-***Editor’s Note:** After this article went to press, Banquo’s health continued to decline and Kassie Phebillo had him put down.*
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-*This article appears in the* [*December 2022*](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2022/12/) *print edition with the headline “What Is a Cat’s Life Worth?” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting* The Atlantic.
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-# How Noah Baumbach Made ‘White Noise’ a Disaster Movie for Our Moment
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-Credit...Sharif Hamza for The New York Times
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-When the world shut down in 2020, the filmmaker found solace in Don DeLillo’s supposedly unadaptable novel — and turned it into a film that speaks to our deepest fears.
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-Credit...Sharif Hamza for The New York Times
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-- Published Nov. 23, 2022Updated Dec. 2, 2022
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-### Listen to This Article
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-*To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times,* [*download Audm for iPhone or Android*](https://www.audm.com/?utm_source=nytmag&utm_medium=embed&utm_campaign=mag_baumbach_disaster_artist)*.*
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-The filmmaker Noah Baumbach started hurtling through Hollywood’s award season in late 2019 in tandem with his partner, Greta Gerwig. Baumbach’s 10th feature film, [“Marriage Story,”](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/movies/marriage-story-review.html) and Gerwig’s second, an adaptation of [“Little Women,”](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/23/movies/little-women-review.html) were both radiating with acclaim, and the couple spent that December, January and February attending event after event. Everywhere they went, they shook hands and hugged and scrunched close together for group photos. They leaned in, nearer to people’s faces, to hear better in noisy rooms. They breathed in, breathed out. They dined indoors. Along the way, they were informed that the Chinese theatrical releases of their films were being pushed back, then canceled altogether.
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-After the Academy Awards — where “Marriage Story” and “Little Women” were each nominated six times — the actress Laura Dern, a close friend of Baumbach’s and Gerwig’s, who appeared in both films and won an Oscar for Baumbach’s, wanted them to join her on a vacation in Santa Barbara, Calif., to decompress. Baumbach, who by nature seems quite compressed, just wanted to fly back home to New York and sit around watching movies. But Gerwig persuaded him to go. One morning, Dern found Baumbach sitting by the pool with The New York Times open on his phone and a copy of [Don DeLillo’s “White Noise”](https://www.nytimes.com/1985/01/13/books/white-noise-by-don-delillo.html) in his lap. Baumbach hadn’t read the book since he was a teenager, shortly after it came out in 1985, but picked it up again, on a whim, several weeks earlier. He’d been carrying the novel with him as he flew from place to place. “I remember it so specifically,” Dern said. Baumbach began to describe the book’s plot to her, “and then he read to me aloud this article about Covid, and he was like: ‘We are about to lock down. This is really happening.’”
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-“White Noise” is narrated by Jack Gladney, the head of the Hitler studies department at a small Midwestern college and the originator of Hitler studies as an academic discipline. (“You’ve established a wonderful thing here with Hitler,” an admiring colleague tells him.) Jack lives with his fourth wife, Babette, who teaches posture to seniors at a local church and reads National Enquirer-style tabloids to the blind, and four children from his and Babette’s six collective previous marriages. Their household is frenetic, cerebral and tender. Babette exercises and cooks frozen vegetables. The kids move through rooms in a whirl of rapid-fire chatter, incorrectly correcting one another’s facts, while the television, always on and internet-like, murmurs brand names, rumors and breaking news underneath their conversations: “A California think tank says the next world war may be fought over salt.”
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-Life is discombobulated but good — good enough that Jack and Babette don’t want it to end. They’re both afraid to die, each privately tormented by the same knowledge of mortality that everyone else seems to walk around effortlessly suppressing. They want to suppress it, too. “Let’s enjoy these aimless days while we can, I told myself, fearing some kind of deft acceleration,” Jack says, early in the book. But then, the deadpan absurdity of DeLillo’s novel inflates into mortal danger: A train derails and disgorges a cloud of toxic chemicals outside of town, what authorities label an “airborne toxic event.” The Gladneys must evacuate — frantically, haplessly — and Jack and Babette are knocked further off balance. The disaster has brought death closer, made it louder, made it real.
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-The novel is a lot of things: an affecting meditation on middle age and family life; a wry sendup of academia; a campy disaster movie; a brassy, preposterous satire of a world that, even by 1985, felt swollen with consumerism and mass media, disorienting signifiers and unmanageable facts. DeLillo’s characters cope with all the information coming at them by compulsively scrutinizing it, scraping philosophically under its surface, desperate to discover something resonant and true. They are people who rhapsodize about the supermarket as a spiritual experience (“all the letters and numbers are here, all the colors of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases”) and who cannot open their freezer without sensing, in the quiet crackling noise the plastic wrap makes while hugging half-eaten leftovers, “an eerie static, insistent but near subliminal, that made me think of wintering souls, some form of dormant life approaching the threshold of perception.”
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-Baumbach, like DeLillo, is an obsessive stylist, though his style is naturalism. He is known for writing and directing deeply personal films in which the stories that characters depend on to understand their lives turn tenuous or unravel. (His movies include [“Kicking and Screaming,”](https://www.nytimes.com/1995/10/04/movies/film-festival-review-graduates-whose-hero-could-be-peter-pan.html) [“Frances Ha,”](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/17/movies/frances-ha-with-greta-gerwig.html) [“The Meyerowitz Stories”](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/movies/the-meyerowitz-stories-review-noah-baumbach.html) and his breakout movie in 2005, “[The Squid and the Whale.”](https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/05/movies/growing-up-bohemian-and-absurd-in-brooklyn.html)) A persistent note-taker, Baumbach regularly lifts anecdotes or lines of dialogue straight from life and reworks everything else until it sounds like he might have done so. Alan Alda, who played a memorably low-rent divorce lawyer in “Marriage Story,” recalled Baumbach pulling him aside during a scene in an opposing lawyer’s fancy conference room and saying, “Maybe it would be good if you walk over there by the table where the coffee and the doughnuts and muffins are and pick at the crumbs.” It was a tiny but meaningful discovery about his character, Alda said. “A movie is made up of little moments like that, and the more they seem like reality, growing like crab grass in a lawn and spreading chaotically, the more they give a sense of reality to the entire film.”
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-“White Noise” reminded Baumbach of a different kind of movie, though, the kind he loved as a teenager and imagined he would make when he started out — films by David Lynch, the Coen brothers or Spike Lee, which unfold in their own “elevated reality,” as Baumbach calls it. Their crab grass is just as closely packed and carefully cultivated but slightly unreal: a mutant strain.
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-As Baumbach reread the book in fits and starts on the road that winter, he underlined energetically. He frequently read passages to Gerwig aloud. He couldn’t stop fantasizing about how great it would be to one day make something like “White Noise”: “Not this,” he said, “but something like it.” But it wasn’t until the following month, back home in Manhattan, that Baumbach managed to finish the novel and take it all in. A short time later, he and Gerwig celebrated their son Harold’s first birthday with Baumbach’s mother and stepfather. No one wanted to cancel, but everyone seemed to feel it would be reckless to hug. It was mid-March 2020. After the birthday party, Baumbach would barely leave his apartment for eight weeks.
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-Credit...Wilson Webb/Netflix
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-“I didn’t know if I should or shouldn’t feel safe,” he said. He knew he was lucky and wealthy and insulated from danger, but it was nearly impossible to gauge in those early weeks how insulated anyone really was. Every morning, Baumbach would check the news “to see how scared I should be. I felt ready to accept any authority on anything.” At one point, a friend explained that he’d procured a special chemical solution developed by NASA and was using it to clean his blueberries, individually, before eating them. Baumbach was both dismissive and anxious, then dismissive of his anxiousness, but not entirely: He’d already eaten so many blueberries, rinsed only with water.
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-Surveying the confusion unleashed by the airborne toxic event in “White Noise,” DeLillo writes, “In a crisis, the true facts are whatever other people say they are.” And as the Gladneys evacuate, passing the fully lit windows of a furniture store, then a motel, Jack is unnerved by all the unconcerned patrons, staring at them from inside. “It made us feel like fools, like tourists doing all the wrong things,” he says. “We were a parade of fools, open not only to the effects of chemical fallout but to the scornful judgment of other people.” Baumbach marveled at how accurately the book depicted what was happening now: the triple-guessing and self-consciousness, the ridiculous ways we are left to triangulate our fear in a catastrophe. And yet, he said, “the book wasn’t going through the pandemic. The book was written during sanity.” It had a clarity about this new reality, which he otherwise couldn’t apprehend.
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-He started in the middle of the book, just as an experiment — to see whether he could translate the most cinematic section, the evacuation sequence, into something scriptlike. Until then, the most actiony thing to happen in one of his films was arguably Ben Stiller running down a street in Brooklyn because he thinks someone has mistakenly left a restaurant with his father’s coat. To make “White Noise,” he would have to shoot a miles-long traffic jam, an attempted murder; a station wagon jumping through the air, Evel Knievel-style; and a mammoth C.G.I.-enhanced toxic cloud swallowing the sky. But Baumbach felt something as he worked on the adaptation in isolation that spring — momentum — and just kept going. His copy of “White Noise” was always there, after all, open on his desk, telling him what happened next.
-
-The project was big and aspirational. It was also a life raft. Baumbach, Gerwig pointed out, was drawn to “White Noise” amid a “feeling of total uncertainty: Are movies going to get made again? Are people going to come? Are we just going to live off the fumes of the world that used to be? It allowed him, I think, to write something that, in other circumstances, would feel too big, too scary, too unwieldy, too much. It was almost like this dare: If they ever let us do it again, this is the one I want to do.”
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-**Baumbach is 53** and speaks in long, looping stops and starts and carefully considered multipoint turns, like a man trying to parallel park his consciousness into an impossible spot. We met for the first time in May in London, at a house in Notting Hill where Baumbach and Gerwig were staying while Gerwig shot her next film, “Barbie.” She and Baumbach wrote the script together, once he’d wrangled “White Noise” into shape. “We got into ‘Barbie’ mid-pandemic,” he said.
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-Baumbach was editing “White Noise” in a stand-alone building behind the house, set up with a workstation for his editor, Matthew Hannam, and a huge L-shaped couch facing a large screen. On the wall were three long rows of stills from “White Noise,” each about the size of a Polaroid, which they taped up, one by one, to track their progress. I spotted a close-up of Jack Gladney’s wife, Babette — an aloof-seeming but equally disquieted character whose own fear of death drives her to seek out a mysterious medication. Gerwig had pitched herself to Baumbach for the role after getting to a moment in the script when another character tells Jack that his wife has “important hair.” “I saw her incredibly clearly in my mind,” Gerwig said. “I saw her hair. I saw her glasses. I saw her acrylic nails.” Now, there she was on Baumbach’s wall, face suspended inside a permed, blond cumulonimbus: part lioness, part aerobics instructor.
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-Baumbach finished an initial cut of the movie about two weeks earlier. (The finished film comes out this month.) Now, while making a second, even more meticulous pass, he and Hannam were fixated on a long sequence that followed Jack, played by Adam Driver, around the Boy Scout camp to which people evacuated during the airborne toxic event. Driver, who has been in four of Baumbach’s previous films and has become a close friend, is 39 but appeared on the screen as a beleaguered man at least a decade deep into middle age. He’d raised his hairline with a wig, wore a chunky leather jacket and gained a proud, round paunch by drinking lots of beer. Driver, as Jack, walks through a crowded field of evacuees, buzzing with cross talk, when a colleague from the college appears: Murray Jay Siskind, played by Don Cheadle, a transplanted New Yorker and cultural-studies professor who doesn’t so much experience everyday life as improvise a scholarly monograph about it in real time. Flagged down by Jack, Murray exclaims, “All white people have a favorite Elvis song!” I laughed out loud. That’s what’s on his mind — how Murray chooses to greet his friend under the eccentrically apocalyptic circumstances.
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-Credit...Wilson Webb/Netflix
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-This is the idiom in which DeLillo’s novel unfolds. Characters’ interior monologues come spilling out of their mouths, everyone speaks in an absurdist, hyper-intellectual register and conversations overlap or trail off, as if people are too overwhelmed or distracted to follow their own thoughts. Baumbach took a lot of his dialogue directly from DeLillo and told me, “I find a lot of his language very playable.” But Driver confessed that it wasn’t until he and his wife, the actress Joanne Tucker, got together with Baumbach and Gerwig to read an early version of the script aloud that he started to hear its musicality: “Twenty pages in, it all clicked.” The lines felt like theater, he said: elevated, concentrated. He and the other actors learned to play Baumbach’s script as quick and constant patter, just like the TV that’s often on behind them. “There’s this constant rumble of dread, a constant motion,” Driver said, “a constant anxiety that they’re not dealing with, and it’s coming out in all this weird behavior.”
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-Everything that Baumbach loved about the novel — not just the headiness of its language but also the density of its ideas, the archness and unreality of its world — had given “White Noise” a reputation in Hollywood as unadaptable. But to Baumbach, the core of the book always felt vivid and real. He was 15 when “White Noise” came out in 1985. His childhood was shaped by the same forces of consumerism and mass entertainment that DeLillo was writing about. He was also the son of Park Slope writers and intellectuals and recognized the Gladney household as a lot like his own. But it also reminded him of his friend’s, in a brownstone one block over, which was everything the Baumbach household wasn’t — which had sugar cereals and Stouffer’s French-bread pizza instead of whole-wheat bread and bruised fruit; copies of The New York Post slung over the arm of the sofa, instead of The New Yorker; and a television that was always on.
-
-As “White Noise” came alive in Baumbach’s imagination, it lived in these familiar spaces and also in the vernacular of movies of that time — the movies that made Baumbach fall in love with movies, that consumed him as a kid. By now, those films had fused together tightly with his own memories into a map of his youth: the year he took his friends to see “Stripes” for his birthday; the evening his parents told him to come straight home after “Romancing the Stone,” then announced they were getting divorced; the ritual weekend drives into Manhattan with his father, to see whatever just opened. “The way my mom tells it is that my dad didn’t know what to do with me until he could take me to movies,” Baumbach said. “In a way, that made it more privileged for me: I’m finally with my dad in his world.”
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-Adapting “White Noise,” it occurred to Baumbach that he could make a movie not just set in that era but of that era, borrowing exuberantly from the visual tropes he absorbed as a kid and delighting in its own entertainment value. Some of DeLillo’s scenes leaped out at him as Spielbergian. Others felt like noir. One of the first aha moments Baumbach had, he told me, was recognizing that even amid the tension and distress of the evacuation, there was a very “National Lampoon’s Vacation” feeling running through the action. “Jack is like Clark Griswold,” Baumbach said. “The kids are yammering in the back seat, and the father’s just trying to drive the car.”
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-In the scene at the Boy Scout camp, Baumbach was paying homage to the chatter in Robert Altman films, mic-ing dozens of background actors to capture comically catcalling prostitutes and crusty-voiced men trading buffoonish rumors and conspiracy theories about the toxic cloud. Now, he and Hannam were delving back into those tracks, to see how much they could make audible while Driver and Cheadle walked and talked: how much auditory confusion the scene could bear. At one point, Baumbach seemed elated by the sonic muddle they were constructing but then, second-guessing himself, turned to me and my notebook and said, effecting a narrator’s voice: “As I watched Baumbach slowly make his movie worse. ...” In fact, relatively little of this cross talk would be noticeable in the final cut of the film.
-
-Still, that’s how he spent the day and many afterward: rejiggering receding degrees of nuance. Was the sound of a fluorescent light flicking off a touch too sharp? Should it be sharper? By the third hour, with Baumbach and Hannam still tinkering in the same scene, Baumbach’s small shaggy dog, Wizard, had hopped into my lap and fallen asleep.
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-“I’m dying, Murray,” Driver told Cheadle onscreen. His character, Jack, had been briefly exposed to the toxic event when he stopped to put gas in the family station wagon, and now, at the Boy Scout camp, a government-agency computer system informed him that this was very bad. (“I’m getting bracketed numbers with pulsing stars,” a technician warns him.) And yet the effects of the chemical in the cloud, Nyodene D., on humans were extremely long-term; the poison would take decades to cook up its lethality inside him. So, “even if it doesn’t kill me in a direct way,” Jack explains to Murray, “it will outlive me in my own body. I could die in a plane crash, and the Nyodene D. would be thriving as my remains are laid to rest.”
-
-Baumbach loved this moment in the story: how severely destabilized Jack is by the news that he will definitely die sometime. “I find it so amazing,” Baumbach told me; it was “funny and horrifying at the same time.” This epiphany will drive the entire plot through the third act, and yet all that Jack’s brush with the airborne toxic event has done, really, is to crystallize for him that he’s mortal.
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-Rereading “White Noise” in 2020, Baumbach understood that the pandemic seemed to be throwing people into that same head space. And it wasn’t so different from what Baumbach felt when his father died the year before the pandemic, either: something more than grief, but nameless. “It’s physical,” Baumbach told me; you can feel its weight in your body. It involved a sudden recognition that, as Driver’s character later puts it in the film, fidgeting with dread, “I am tentatively scheduled to die.”
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-“That’s where we all are,” Baumbach pointed out. “But we don’t think of it that way.”
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-Image
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-Credit...Sharif Hamza for The New York Times
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-**Baumbach’s father,** Jonathan, was the author of 12 novels and head of the graduate creative-writing department at Brooklyn College. He was also the basis for Jeff Daniels’s character, Bernard, in Baumbach’s “The Squid and the Whale,” a film that draws from the story of Baumbach’s parents’ divorce when he was 14. Bernard is a self-absorbed, self-defeating, low-status Park Slope novelist who tells his sons to “care about books or interesting films” so they won’t be philistines like their mother’s new boyfriend. (“Your mother’s brother Ned is also a philistine,” he adds.) After Bernard dismisses “A Tale of Two Cities” to his teenage son as “minor Dickens,” the son tries to impress a girl at school by dismissing the F. Scott Fitzgerald book she’s reading as “minor Fitzgerald.” The gag didn’t stretch the truth of Noah and Jonathan’s relationship too far; Noah often tried to earn his dad’s approval by becoming him. Noah’s childhood friend Bo Berkman, who co-wrote “Kicking and Screaming” with him (and lived in the brownstone with the awesome snacks), told me that, as kids, “Noah talking to me about books or movies often involved, ‘My father said ...’ or ‘My father thinks ...’”
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-Jonathan was, loosely speaking, part of the same movement of New York postmodernists as Don DeLillo, though his work tended to be more experimental and didn’t sell nearly as well. “It was sometimes hard for my father to like his successful contemporaries,” Baumbach said. “He wanted a bigger readership than he had.” Still, Jonathan adored DeLillo’s “White Noise” when it came out, which was unusual. It was one of the few contemporary novels that Baumbach could remember bonding over with his dad.
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-As a moviegoer, Jonathan could be more open and forgiving. Sure, when Baumbach discovered “The Graduate” or “Bonnie and Clyde,” his father would make certain he understood the debt those movies owed to the superior films of Godard. “But with me, he’d go to anything,” Baumbach said. “He just loved going to movies.”
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-For years, Jonathan wrote film criticism and regularly took Noah with him to press screenings. In 1982, when Baumbach was 12, he accompanied his father to an early showing of something called “E.T.” “I can remember what shirt I was wearing, because I had to put it over my face, I was crying so hard,” he said. (A Vassar College T-shirt with Snoopy on it.) Afterward, on the drive back to Park Slope, Jonathan turned to Noah and explained that E.T. had taken the place of Elliott’s absent father, after his parent’s divorce — and how, once E.T. goes home in the film’s denouement, Spielberg hints that Peter Coyote’s scientist character may step in as a kind of surrogate father too. “I remember being so moved by that idea,” Baumbach said, plus stunned that this movie could communicate on such a level. Was that why he cried?
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-The next day at school, trading on his cred as a 12-year-old Hollywood insider, Baumbach told his friends about a new movie called “E.T.” that was about to blow their minds. “And then, aping my father, I told them, ‘You know, the alien really becomes a surrogate father.’” Simply saying it out loud left him shaken all over again. “I couldn’t control it,” he said. He burst out sobbing in front of his friends. The odd thing is, Baumbach wasn’t even a child of divorce yet himself. But he must have sensed a rift. It’s obvious to him now that his father was taking him to so many movies as a substitute date for his mom.
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-Many years later, in the spring of 2019, Baumbach was sitting in a hospital room in the middle of the night while Gerwig lay asleep on a cot next to their newborn child, Harold. Harold was awaiting corrective surgery for a medical issue, and Baumbach — a wreck — was the only one awake, scrolling anxiously on his phone. He refreshed at one point to discover that a [New York Times obituary for his father](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/obituaries/jonathan-baumbach-dead.html) had just been posted online. His dad had died a week earlier, three weeks after Harold was born. “When I read the obituary, I thought, I wish my dad could read this,” Baumbach told me, “because it turns out he was a success!” Part of Jonathan’s feeling of being chronically underappreciated had to do with The Times seldom reviewing his books. It was agonizing for Noah not to be able to call up his dad and tell him: “When you die, you should see this. Quite a nice mention in The Times!”
-
-Early in our first conversation, Baumbach noted that “White Noise” was the first movie he made since his father died, but the full significance of this seemed to be dawning on him in real time as we spoke. Jonathan was 85 when he died. And though dying isn’t an extraordinary thing for an 85-year-old man to do, this didn’t diminish the force of the actual event. It still hasn’t. “It feels shocking that everyone’s parents die,” Baumbach confessed. “It’s shocking that it happens at all, and now it’s shocking that it’s not happening more often. We’re all so vulnerable. Why is it that, when this happens to you, it feels so lonely and isolating? Why aren’t we talking about this all the time?”
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-**One morning in** mid-July, Baumbach was back in New York City, scoring the movie at a recording studio in Hell’s Kitchen with the composer Danny Elfman.
-
-Elfman has estimated that “White Noise” was the 110th film he scored, and it was impossible not to register his mastery of the gig. He sat at the mixing console, his head swiveling in several directions as he worked: watching Baumbach’s movie on the wide screen above him, reading a printed copy of his score and monitoring video feeds of the conductor, string players and percussionists performing the music on the soundstage downstairs. He spoke mostly in measure numbers and musical shorthand — “More fingernail on the pizz!” — while also seeming to track, with nearly equal intensity, a set of printed timetables and schedules to cost-effectively game out the musicians’ union’s mandated breaks. “We have four minutes left?” Elfman asked at one point, dead calm, weighing whether to add a 15-minute increment of overtime for the players so he could nail one more take. It was like watching a man in a movie defuse a bomb.
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-Credit...Wilson Webb/Netflix
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-Baumbach sat a few feet behind Elfman, offering encouragement and approval more than input. “I can’t speak their language,” he said. This was his first collaboration with Elfman, and Baumbach appreciated the composer’s sense of adventure and kindred obsessiveness. There were times, working remotely together on the phone, when Elfman, in the middle of a conversation, would tell him, “I don’t mean to be rude, but I have to hang up” then later send him something he just composed. “For me,” Elfman explained during a break in the recording session, “film composing is getting sucked into a vortex, or another world, and inhabiting that world until suddenly it ends.” Then, often without even taking a day off, Elfman plunges into the next film. There’s no interval of disorientation, of realizing “Oh my God, it’s over. I better do something quick!” he said. Elfman looked at Baumbach and said, “I don’t know if you’re like that.”
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-Baumbach was like that. “Normally, I have some other thing already going,” he said. “But after ‘Marriage Story,’ for the first time in my career, I didn’t know what I wanted to do next.”
-
-“Well, I’m the luckiest guy on the planet,” Elfman went on, “so of course I picked 2020 as the year to do no film work.” For the first time since 1985, Elfman decided to focus solely on performing and on premiering new orchestral work around the world. “So my whole year imploded! It became the first year of my adult life that I didn’t have a deadline.” He wound up writing and recording an album at home: a collection of swirling, furious, menacing songs that he titled “Big Mess.” It was an amazing sensation, he said: “It was like: Nobody knows I’m doing it. Nobody’s expecting it.”
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-“That’s a freeing feeling,” Baumbach said. “I made a movie like that. ‘Frances Ha.’ I didn’t tell anyone I was doing it. I made it so far under the radar.” He and Gerwig wrote the script for “Frances” together and fell in love during production. Baumbach shot the film on a consumer-grade digital camera, moving around New York with a stripped-down crew of a half dozen people.
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-“Was that liberating?” Elfman asked.
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-“Yes, completely!” Baumbach said. “It was fun.”
-
-“The liberation of being under the radar is always —”
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-“Well, that’s why I brought it up,” Baumbach said. It was that same feeling, he told Elfman: “No one knows you’re doing it.” It did not seem to occur to him that the movie they were working on now originated the same way.
-
-Baumbach’s friend, the movie’s music supervisor, George Drakoulias, broke into the conversation from the couch. He said something about colonoscopies — an inside joke that Baumbach helpfully turned to interpret for me:
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-“I was telling George that when I got my colonoscopy” — Baumbach had just hurried home from working with Elfman in Los Angeles to make his appointment — “I had that thing where you count down after getting the sedative, and I said: ‘Hold on! I think I might be waking up.’ I said, ‘Yes, I don’t think I’m totally out.’ And they said, ‘The procedure is over.’”
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-“And I was joking with Noah,” Elfman interjected, “that I woke up from my last one and evidently was babbling to my wife something like” — here he did a gentle, spacey voice, like a child in an old holiday movie seeing angels in a snowy sky: “ ‘So, so delightful.’” Elfman had no memory of this — that’s what made it extra-funny to him. But for Baumbach, the phenomenon was unsettling: being aware, in retrospect, that you weren’t aware. “It made me anxious in advance,” he said.
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-That’s when I said, “As long as we’re talking about our colonoscopies. ...” and told a story of my own.
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-I recently had my first one, after a health scare in my family, and had suppressed my anxiety about the event and its potential results so fully that I resisted learning anything about what I should expect. I assumed that the address they gave me was some kind of clinic or specialist’s office and didn’t understand that I would be fully knocked out. It was a surprise, then, to find myself in a full-blown hospital, with an IV in my arm, lying flat on a hospital bed in a hospital gown, overhearing doctors a few curtains over talking to patients about the quantity and locations of their tumors. My experience with hospitals was limited — this was the most “in the hospital” I’d ever been — and I was astonished by how briskly the transformation happened. It felt as if I’d been shucked of my identity and reduced to “patient” within seconds of stepping out of the elevator.
-
-As I waited to be rolled toward whatever was next, a profound feeling of helplessness destroyed me. I experienced a flood of tightness — a panic attack, presumably. I could not move my legs. I could not move my jaw to speak.
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-Even in the moment, I knew it had everything to do with my dad. Twenty years earlier, I watched him be rolled out of his hospital room, on a bed just like this one, only to reappear hours later in an I.C.U. on a ventilator and never get up. Now I was being held in a room where such things happen — where stories swerve from life to death. They would put me under, and when I woke up, they would tell me some new information about myself, potentially catastrophic information: bracketed numbers with pulsing stars. There was nothing I could do, and no amount of positive thinking could change the course of the conveyor belt I’d stepped on. I could still picture my father’s left arm extending off the hospital bed, as he was pushed down the hall, to flash us a thumbs up.
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-It was total chance that I wound up reading “White Noise” a few weeks after he died. I had just graduated with a degree in English from a small liberal-arts college and was a 22-year-old male who liked to write. That is, I was the sort of person who was frequently told to read Don DeLillo but never had. I’d heard “Underworld” was his masterpiece, but “Underworld” was 800 pages long. Looking for something to distract me at a bookstore near my mother’s house one evening, I picked out something slimmer by the same guy.
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-I had no idea what the novel was about, so I was stunned to meet characters who were as cognizant of death as I suddenly was, and as Baumbach would describe himself being after his father died: who had understood death as a fact but now awakened to its absoluteness and proximity. “Death is in the air,” Murray tells Jack during the airborne toxic event. “It is liberating suppressed material. It is getting us closer to things we haven’t learned about ourselves.”
-
-But what material? What things? Did any of these long-winded sad sacks have something to teach a young man who just lost his dad? I only knew I enjoyed their company. I fell into a habit of rereading the novel every summer when the anniversary of my father’s death rolled around. After learning that the toxin is inside him, Jack says: “I wish there was something I could do. I wish I could out-think the problem.” And that was apparently my approach to mortality, too — until, having failed to think my way to any answers with that novel for five or six consecutive summers, I grew exhausted with “White Noise” and stopped. Then again, I obviously hadn’t given up on the book entirely, because, well, here I was.
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-I didn’t divulge all of this at the recording studio that morning — that would have been weird. The salient point, I explained to Baumbach and Elfman, was that it only took relinquishing control at the hospital momentarily to trigger that kind of anxiety. “I realized this is how it happens,” I told them: how death makes its entrance. “You’re in a hospital bed one minute, and then. ...”
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-“The idea that you’ll be out, and you’ll wake up with news — ” Baumbach said, “that’s very scary.”
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-We all paused to consider it. We’d hit on something resonant but overlooked.
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-“There’s no great literature of colonoscopies,” I said.
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-“But there should be,” Baumbach said.
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-Elfman had been interjecting and signaling intense agreement all along, so I turned to him now and asked, “What’s your vibe with death, Danny?”
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-Quickly, and in all seriousness, he responded, “I’ve been in the shadow of the angel of death, feeling the wings beat, since I was 18.”
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-Elfman explained that he always assumed he wouldn’t make it to 40. When he did, he assumed he wouldn’t make it to 50. And so on. Now he was 69 and deep into physical fitness.
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-“I’ve just always felt that presence,” he said — the presence of death. He described a ceremony his family does at every one of his birthdays. “It’s a big \[expletive\] you to death,” he said. “I kill the cake” — reaching in with his bare hands to pull out its center like a beating heart. “And whatever age I am, if I’m 60, I’ll scream out: ‘\[expletive\] you, 60!’ And the whole family will yell, too. All my little nephews and nieces — they’re allowed, once a year, to scream out ‘\[Expletive\] you, 60!’ Then I kill the cake and move on. But one moment a year, I get to say ‘\[Expletive\] you’ to death. I’m not going anywhere, OK? I’ll have my day, but it won’t be today. Try for next year, \[expletive\].”
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-There was a beat of silence. Then Baumbach — perfect timing, deadpan delivery: “And death is saying, ‘Just eat more of that cake.’”
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-**In London, Baumbach** tried several times to break down for me how he conceived of the movie’s three-act structure. It was hard to articulate, and I appreciated his persistence. In the middle of one attempt, he excused himself to use the bathroom but then stood in the doorway talking for a couple of minutes more, his head cocked in deep concentration, his eyebrows straining upright, seemingly unsure how many more fitful sentences he might have committed to producing before he could let the subject drop.
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-The first act of the film, Baumbach told me, luxuriated in all the superficial stability of normal life: a portrait of a madly distracted American family at home and at work, during outings to the supermarket or tenderly sharing Chinese takeout in front of the TV. “It’s the ritualization of everything,” he said, “the way we organize our lives, the illusion that we’re keeping ourselves safe.” But that’s obliterated in the second act by the airborne toxic event. “The middle part is, Here it is: death, danger,” Baumbach went on. “It’s in the cracks at the beginning, pushing its way through. But now it comes for you, and it’s this monster, essentially. Then the third part is — ”
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-The third part was where, for me, Baumbach’s explanations seemed to flag. In the third part of the movie, he said, “you’re back in those familiar environments, but you see it differently. Or do you?” He said the third part was about “acceptance,” but “it’s not acceptance even. Well, it’s partially acceptance.” He added, “This will make more sense when you’ve seen the movie.”
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-Credit...Wilson Webb/Netflix
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-Back home, two weeks later, I was reading a book by a Yale sociologist named Kai Erikson as background research for another article for this magazine. Throughout the 1980s, Erikson chronicled communities faced with what he saw as an emerging and distinct class of man-made disaster. These included an underground gasoline leak in a Colorado suburb and the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island — events that, unlike an earthquake or a flood, are often undetectable by the ordinary people living nearby and do damage to our bodies that’s just as stealthy: slowly making us cancerous or infertile, say, instead of instantly breaking our bones. The trauma these catastrophes create is of a different nature, too — chronic, even endless. If you’re not sure that you’ve been harmed, you can never truly know you’re safe.
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-Erikson titled his book “A New Species of Trouble.” In it, he quotes residents of Three Mile Island who are unsure whether there’s radiation lingering in their homes or if the food in their refrigerator is safe to eat; who are compelled to leave the radio on all day, so they’ll know right away if another invisible disaster is afoot.
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-“One of the crucial jobs of culture,” Erikson concludes, “is to help people camouflage the actual risks of the world around them,” to allow them to edit reality “in such a way that the perils pressing in on all sides are screened out of their line of vision as they go about their daily rounds.” He writes:
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-This kind of emotional insulation is stripped away, at least for the moment, in most severe disasters, but with special sharpness in events like the ones we have been considering here exactly because one can never assume that they are over. What must it be like, having just discovered through bitter experience that reality is a thing of unrelenting danger, to have to look those dangers straight in the eye without blinders or filters? ... People stripped of the ability to screen out signs of peril are not just unusually vigilant and unusually anxious. They evaluate the data of everyday life differently, read the signs differently, see patterns that the rest of us are for the most part spared.
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-When I got to that part, I texted a photo of those pages to Baumbach right away.
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-“That’s amazing,” he replied. “Uncanny.”
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-The next day, Baumbach called and told me that before I showed up in London, he hadn’t had to explain his movie to anyone, and it was pretty difficult to explain — in part because the movie was an amalgam of his instincts, and his instincts were all extensions of his feelings, and he experienced so many unfamiliar feelings in the last few years that he was only just starting to put them into words. But, he said, “I’m understanding it better now.”
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-The final act of the movie, he went on, was about recognizing that all that emotional insulation we put in place, as Erikson calls it, isn’t cheap or trivial. It includes art, marriage, parenthood, love — stuff that’s no less real than the darkness we’re using it to repress. “There is joy in that, too — in what we invent out of this mess,” Baumbach said.
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-It made him think of a line from the very end of his movie, taken almost verbatim from DeLillo’s book: “Out of some persistent sense of large-scale ruin, we keep inventing hope.” It’s Jack Gladney who says this, and right after, Baumbach shows the entire Gladney family stepping through the sliding doors of the supermarket, where they’ve returned to shop throughout the film. This time, music blares — a new song by LCD Soundsystem — and suddenly they are dancing, shuffling and striding through the grocery aisles, lofting packaged products about them like holy objects. Soon, everyone in the store is dancing — the entire cast of the film. They dance through the produce and meats, the cleaning solutions and cookies. They dance at the checkout lines. They dance until the last credit rolls.
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-Speaking to [Rolling Stone in 1988, DeLillo](https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/qa-don-delillo-69452/) described his book as fixing attention on “the importance of daily life and of ordinary moments.” Like his characters, who can’t help scrabbling for specks of the sacred in everything they observe, “I tried to find a kind of radiance in dailiness,” he said. “This extraordinary wonder of things is somehow related to the extraordinary dread.” That’s what Baumbach seems to be celebrating in the dance sequence, what propels everyone’s bodies through the supermarket, what makes their faces glow: the radiance of dailiness, the extraordinary wonder of things that is somehow related to extraordinary dread.
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-I still hadn’t seen the film when Baumbach and I talked on the phone that morning, though, and he was growing concerned. Look, he told me, the two of us spent so much time talking about the pandemic and death, about his father, about the routine trauma of losing a parent and the keen awareness of mortality that swells up as an outgrowth of that grief. And that’s all vital and resonant — all embedded somewhere in the movie he made. But the film was also funny. It was loopy. It was full of affectionate energy for the movies of his childhood. It was fun. And now, here I was, texting him pages from obscure sociology tracts about nuclear accidents? (Baumbach didn’t say that last part but I think it was implied.) He worried I was getting the wrong impression, imagining his “White Noise” as unbearably heavy and unbearably grim.
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-He assured me, again, that I would understand what he meant once I saw the movie. And it’s true: I did. In the meantime, he could only keep saying what he’d already said, what I still hear him saying, what on occasion I repeat to myself: “I also want to acknowledge the joy.”
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-**Jon Mooallem** is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of a new book of essays, “Serious Face.” [He last wrote about his resemblance to the famous bullfighter Manolete.](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/03/magazine/manolete-matador-face.html) **Sharif Hamza** is a photographer based in Brooklyn. The son of two immigrants from the Philippines and Egypt, he focuses his work on youth culture that is marginalized, underrepresented or misrepresented in the arts.
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-# How Owamni Became the Best New Restaurant in the United States
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-In the summer of 2021, Sean Sherman, a forty-eight-year-old Oglala Lakota chef, opened a restaurant called Owamni, in Minneapolis. Nearly overnight, it became the most prominent example of Indigenous American cuisine in the United States. Every dish is made without wheat flour, dairy, cane sugar, black pepper, or any other ingredient introduced to this continent after Europeans arrived. Sherman describes the food as “decolonized”; his business partner and Owamni’s co-owner, Dana Thompson, calls it “ironically foreign.” In June, the James Beard Foundation named Owamni the best new restaurant in the United States.
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-One evening in May, I met Sherman outside Owamni, which is situated in a park on the Mississippi River. Across the street, water plummeted fifty feet down St. Anthony Falls. The area was once the site of a Dakota village known as Owamniyomni—the place of falling, swirling water. Sherman pulled out his phone and showed me an eighteenth-century drawing depicting tepees on the shore of the falls. “There was clearly a village here. People everywhere,” he said. “But the Europeans were, like, ‘You are now called St. Anthony!’ ”
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-Inside, the dining room was flooded with light from a wall of windows. A bartender named Thor Bearstail delivered glasses of red wine. (Owamni breaks its decolonized rule with beverages, serving coffee, beer, and wine.) Bearstail, like the rest of the staff, wore a black T-shirt that read “#86colonialism” on the back. Eighty-six, in kitchen slang, indicates that a dish is sold out. A month earlier, Bearstail, who is a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, in North Dakota, had moved from Fargo to Minneapolis to work at Owamni. His previous job was at a Red Lobster. “Sometimes I have to pinch myself,” he said.
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-American carnivores tend to think in terms of beef, pork, and chicken. Owamni reminds them that picture-book farm animals are not native to this continent. My first plate was raw deer, or “game tartare,” listed under a menu section titled “Wamakhaskan,” the Dakota word for animal. The dish was a study in circles: the meat pressed flat and dotted with pickled carrots, moons of sumac-dusted duck-egg aioli, microgreens, and blueberries. A blue-corn tostada served as a utensil. One bite was a disco ball in the forest.
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-Other wamakhaskan dishes were served: a puck of duck sausage, with watercress purée and roasted turnips; ground elk, served on a pillowy corn arepa; and a maple-chili cricket-and-seed mix. “We go through fifteen pounds of crickets a week,” Sherman said. He is solidly built, with big, dark eyes, and he wore a black chef’s jacket, an Apple watch, and a bear-tooth necklace; his hair hung in a braid to his waist. “It’s a lot,” he said. “Crickets don’t weigh that much.”
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-[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a26906)
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-“I’m going to go do some laundry, exercise, and shower.”
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-Cartoon by Jared Nangle
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-The gastronomy touted by auteur chefs during the past two decades is, Sherman often says, how Indigenous people ate for millennia. Ingredients are local, seasonal, organic. The traditional preservation methods that Owamni features—smoking, fermenting, drying—are au courant. But the restaurant does not provide a museum meal; the food is simultaneously pre-Colonial and modern. There are maple-baked beans, and cedar-braised bison with maple vinegar. Wojape, a Lakota berry sauce, is served with a tepary-bean spread and smoked Lake Superior trout. A bowl of char-striped sweet potatoes, doused in chili oil, is Sherman’s favorite dish. “It’s so homey,” he said. “I was eating mostly plant-based last year, so that was my go-to.”
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-I ordered a bowl of manoomin, a hand-harvested wild rice. The only place in the world where manoomin grows is around the Great Lakes. It forms part of the origin story of the Ojibwe people, who migrated inland from the East Coast centuries ago, following a prophecy to travel west until they found “the food that grows on the water.” Manoomin is harvested from a canoe, its grains knocked from the heads of rice stalks that grow in shallow waters. Winona LaDuke, an Ojibwe activist, wrote that manoomin is the “first food for a child when they can eat solid; the last food eaten before you pass into the spirit world.”
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-At Owamni, it was fluffy and a tad chewy, with a sweet, earthy aroma. I could almost smell the lake. Sherman sources as much of Owamni’s food as he can from Indigenous producers. The rice comes from a young Ojibwe couple who own a small farm in northern Minnesota. “I had them drop off seven hundred pounds of rice the other day,” he said. “Just stuffed in their car.”
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-Around 7 *p.m.*, two men and a woman, all with little wires behind their ears, filed across the dining room. Behind them was a familiar face: Deb Haaland, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, and the first Native American Cabinet member in U.S. history. She was dining with Minnesota’s lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, a member of the White Earth band of Ojibwe and an Owamni regular. (“I want to think it’s like my Cheers,” Flanagan told me.) Sherman said hello to the Secretary, then stopped back by my table. “It’s wild,” he said. “She’s eighth in line for the Presidency.”
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-Some two-thirds of Owamni’s staff identifies as Native, as do many of its guests. The novelist Louise Erdrich, who owns a bookstore in Minneapolis, is a repeat visitor. Several cast members from the FX series “Reservation Dogs” ate at Owamni this past summer, including D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, the show’s star, who was accompanied by the model Quannah Chasinghorse. Leaving, I passed colorful bouquets of wildflowers placed on the long bar facing the open kitchen. A neon sign at the entrance reads “You Are on Native Land.” Outside, Sherman demonstrated a set of switch-on fire pits and noted that the surrounding park harvested rainwater. Next door, the ruins of the Columbia flour mill were lit in amber light. When I remarked on it all, Sherman shrugged, and said, “Different than the church basement, right?”
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-I first met Sherman on a freezing night in 2017, when he and Thompson hosted a dinner at the First Universalist Church of Minneapolis. Back then, they were business partners and romantic partners. They ran the Sioux Chef, a food truck and catering operation, which now owns Owamni. When I arrived, Thompson, a tall, animated woman, greeted me with cedar-maple tea. “It’s full of flavonoids!” she said.
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-The purpose of the dinner—a five-course meal prepared by M. Karlos Baca, an Indigenous food activist from the Southern Ute Nation—was to announce the launch of a nonprofit called *NATIFS*, or North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems, which promotes culinary solutions to economic and health crises. Roughly a hundred people sat at folding tables. Between courses, Sherman delivered a slide presentation. “Food is a language,” he said. “To understand Indigenous food today, you need to know how we got here.”
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-For millennia, Indigenous people across what became North America cultivated high-yield, climate-specific varieties of plants, including sunchokes, lamb’s-quarter, gourds, knotweed, and goosefoot. By the thirteenth century, domesticated maize and sunflowers had spread in a green-and-yellow blaze from Mexico to Maine. “We still have Hidatsa shield beans and Arikara yellow beans,” Sherman told the diners. “There’s a Lakota squash—the awesome one with the orange flame—and gete okosomin,” a squash that looks like a lifeguard buoy, which Baca used for the soup course.
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-[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a26486)
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-“After these rapids comes the really hard part—a bunch of guys we don’t know talking about crypto at the same time.”
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-Cartoon by Lars Kenseth
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-Native Americans hunted game like bison, which roamed as far east as Buffalo, New York. They harvested fish and shellfish. Tribes in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere employed controlled burns, creating meadows among redwood groves where desirable plants would thrive and animals would graze. Everywhere, the people told stories and sang songs about their food; in many Indigenous languages, plants and animals are referred to as persons. “The diet of our ancestors, it was almost a perfect diet,” Sherman went on. “It’s what the paleo diet wants to be: gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free.”
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-Raiding Europeans were in awe of the abundance. In 1687, after the Marquis de Denonville, the governor of New France, attacked Seneca villages, he wrote that his army “destroyed a vast quantity of fine large corn, beans, and other vegetables.” In 1779, George Washington ordered an offensive against the Iroquois Confederacy, writing, “It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” Afterward, one officer wrote of beans, cucumbers, watermelons, and pumpkins “in such quantities” that “would be almost incredible to a civilized people.”
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-In the first half of the nineteenth century, Andrew Jackson forced more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand people—from the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole Nations—to walk to present-day Oklahoma, along the Trail of Tears. Thousands died of starvation. Not long afterward, when the U.S. failed to beat back the Great Sioux Nation, it tried a different tactic: a government-funded campaign to kill buffalo herds. Before 1800, more than sixty million buffalo roamed the country; by 1900, only a few hundred were left. As the White Mountain Apache chef Nephi Craig has said, “You want to attack a people and wipe them out? Attack their food.”
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-In 1883, the U.S. Department of the Interior established the Code of Indian Offenses, banning all Native traditions. Cooking a ceremonial feast could land you in prison. Four years later, the government passed the General Allotment Act, which forced private ownership on tribal land, allowing white settlers to steal vast acreage. Tribes, now sequestered on reservations, relied on treaty-provisioned rations, then on government-issued commodities: bags of flour, powdered milk and eggs, blocks of lard and orange American cheese, and, as Sherman recalled from his childhood, cans of beef and salmon “with juices.” “This was not a nutritional program—this was a farm-supplement program,” he told the attendees. “This food was never, ever designed to be healthy. It’s high in fat, in sodium, in sugars—just over-processed food made by the lowest bidder for the government to hand out en masse.”
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-Sherman clicked to a slide depicting fry bread, also known as Indian tacos, which is like unsweetened funnel cake, served with toppings such as cheese and ground beef. Fry bread, a powwow staple, may be the best-known Native American food today. It was invented in the mid-nineteenth century, when the U.S. military forced the Navajo from Arizona to arid, infertile land in New Mexico. To prevent starvation, the military supplied people with sugar, salt, lard, and sacks of white flour—the makings of fry bread. Today, the food is a symbol of resilience and Native pride. In “Reservation Dogs,” one character pays homage to it with a music video titled “Greasy Fry Bread.”
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-Native Americans have now lacked access to their ancestral foods for many generations, leading, in part, to what Elizabeth Hoover, an environmental-studies professor at U.C. Berkeley, calls the “grim statistics.” Native Americans have the highest rate of diabetes in this country. Compared with white adults, they are sixty per cent more likely to be obese; compared with all other ethnic groups, they die much earlier from heart disease.
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-But, among the country’s five hundred and seventy-four federally recognized tribes, knowledge has survived. Women sewed seeds into the hems of their skirts before being forced to walk hundreds of miles from their homes. Recipes were scattered across reservations, then tucked away in grandparents’ kitchens. They contained methods for brewing sofke, making pemmican, and nixtamalizing corn—an ancient cooking technique in which the grain is simmered in an alkaline solution, making it, among other things, rich in protein. “There wasn’t even tooth decay back then,” Sherman said to the church audience as we spooned up poached quail eggs, preserved cholla buds, and huitlacoche—a funky corn fungus.
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-Before the penultimate course was served, Baca told the crowd about its ingredients, which included blue corn and grits made from bear root, the first thing his grandfather taught him how to forage. Hunting parties used to travel with sun-dried cakes made from blue-corn mush and from bear root, which was valued for its antimicrobial properties. “But people don’t eat these things anymore,” Baca said. He later told me, “With traditional dishes, people don’t always like it—it’s not what they grew up with. They grew up eating shit like every American. And the Colonial mind frame has captured their taste buds.”
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-Sean Sherman, a co-owner of Owamni. “The diet of our ancestors, it was almost a perfect diet,” he says.
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-The plate of grits, with smoked trout, smoked ramps, and pine-needle syrup, was dainty and delicious. Seated across from me was a man named Daniel Cornelius, a member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. Cornelius worked for the Intertribal Agriculture Council, which promotes Native farming. He expressed admiration for Sherman and Baca, and for their effort to reclaim Native cuisine: “The culinary approach has such a role to play, to get people excited about these foods, to show they can taste good.” Still, he said, “there’s this idea, like, ‘Oh, people have healthier food and a bunch of vegetables, they’re gonna be healthier and really happy,’ but that’s bullshit. The issues go a lot deeper. There’s a lot of intergenerational trauma.”
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-Sherman lives a few miles from Owamni, in a modest, pale-yellow Colonial, with a fire pit in the back yard and a black Ford F150 in the driveway. When I visited in the spring, the kitchen table was covered in seedlings, and the dining-room table was covered in vinyl LPs—mainly jazz, blues, and rock and roll—which he was in the process of sorting. Sherman told me that, when he was a kid, growing up on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in South Dakota, “TV wasn’t really a thing. So my mom would just put on a record and I’d lie on the floor listening.”
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-The Pine Ridge Reservation, where forty-three per cent of the population lives below the poverty line, is a small fraction of the land that once belonged to the Great Sioux Nation, an alliance of seven tribes from across the Upper Midwest and the Plains who spoke Siouan-language dialects—specifically, Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota. Sherman has deep roots in the area. His great-great-great grandparents helped raise Crazy Horse, who was an Oglala Lakota warrior. His mother and father were born on Pine Ridge, and Sherman spent his childhood on his grandparents’ cattle ranch, surrounded by sandhills and prairies. Although there was just one grocery store on the reservation, and government commodities were the family’s main source of food staples, they had fresh garden vegetables and their own beef. They hunted pheasants, antelope, and deer. Sherman’s grandfather showed him how to dig for timpsila, or wild turnip; his grandmother gathered chokecherries to make wojape. By the age of seven, Sherman had his own .410-gauge shotgun, and he spent his days roaming the hills with his cousins. The dog was their nanny, Sherman’s mother, Joan Conroy, told me. “If they ventured too far, the dog would come home to let me know.”
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-Sherman’s father, Gerald, was barely around. He had been a U.S. Army gunner in Vietnam. “It’s amazing he survived,” Sherman told me. Back in the States, he’d reënlisted, gone *AWOL,* and eventually turned himself in. He did time in the Presidio stockade, in San Francisco, and returned to Pine Ridge with a drinking problem. “So then my mom was, like, ‘Well, here’s a good catch,’ ” Sherman said. (Gerald told me, “I was a mess back then.”)
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-We were seated in Sherman’s living room. He had taught himself to paint in oils during lockdown, and three of his canvasses—evocative Western landscapes—hung on the wall; along the bottom edge of one, depicting a ceremonial dancer, he had written, “Be the answer to your ancestors’ prayers.” Sherman picked up a Rubik’s Cube and started turning the squares. He told me that his parents divorced when he was twelve, and his mom took him and his younger sister to Spearfish, South Dakota. They lived in a trailer park. Sherman was a minority for the first time in his life, in a white, conservative, “Bible-thumping” town, he said. “I still had a fairly thick rez accent.”
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-After school, he would spend hours in a library at Black Hills State University—where his mom was taking classes—reading history, sci-fi, and fantasy. “Lord of the Rings” was a favorite. “I didn’t have any girlfriends, because I was shy,” he said. He listened obsessively to rock and punk—the Smiths, Dead Kennedys, the Replacements—and skied and drank in the hills above the nearby city of Deadwood. He did well academically, accruing all the required high-school credits by the end of his junior year. Conroy modelled a good work ethic. In three years, she got a college degree in political science while working multiple jobs—a cashier in a Deadwood casino, the proprietor of an art-framing shop. She even ran for a county seat. Off and on, she worked as a staffer for Tom Daschle, the South Dakota senator. When Sherman was eighteen, on a trip to Rapid City, he met Bill Clinton.
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-Sherman’s cooking career started because of his mom’s hectic schedule. “We were obviously super latchkey,” he said. As the older sibling, he was responsible for putting meals on the table. “I was playing with flavor, but we didn’t have any spices, so I was learning how to make, like, sloppy joes with just ketchup and mustard.” He got his first restaurant job when he was thirteen, prepping salads at a tourist spot called the Sluice. The next summer, he worked at a resort, where he was promoted to the grill. The cooking staff lived in a dorm in Custer State Park and experimented with recipes for rattlesnake and beaver, which Sherman found thrilling. “I also remember becoming more aware of racist things,” he said. Ku Klux Klan propaganda was displayed in a Spearfish gas station.
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-Cedar, squash, and beets at *NATIFS*’ Indigenous Food Lab.
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-Throughout high school, he continued working in restaurants—Burger King, Pizza Hut, a golf club—but it wasn’t until his senior year that he found something he loved. For a school project, he interviewed a member of the town’s volunteer fire department, who also worked for the U.S. Forest Service. She invited him to apply to be a field surveyor. “It was a dream job,” Sherman said. He learned to identify plants in the Black Hills, then document their size and location. He kept a journal, in which he drew the plants he saw. He started making block prints, too, and decided that he wanted to attend art school. He moved to Minneapolis, and got a job at the California Café, in the Mall of America. “I was thrown on sauté,” he said. “It was in public, in front of everybody. I learned really fast.”
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-In 2000, he took time off to travel around Europe, eating and drinking his way through England, France, and Italy. He dressed in black, wore small, rectangular sunglasses, and smoked cigarettes. (It was around this time that he made “Sioux chef” his AOL e-mail address.) He had decided to shelve art school; instead, he procured a copy of the Culinary Institute of America’s “The Professional Chef.” “I still did some art here and there,” he said. “But then I found art through food.”
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-He admired the Italian cookbook author Marcella Hazan for her devotion to simplicity, precision, and balance. He read about Ferran Adría, the Spanish chef who is considered the godfather of molecular gastronomy. “And, obviously, everybody then was super into ‘Kitchen Confidential,’ ” Sherman said. “All the line cooks suddenly wanted to be drunken pirates.”
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-In his living room, Sherman, lounging comfortably on a beige sofa, leaned forward and set down the Rubik’s Cube on the coffee table, solved.
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-One day, in December, 2017, Sherman told me that, the night before, he’d dreamed that he was on a pirate ship. “We’re out at sea, with a troupe of circus performers aboard,” he recalled. “We’re all Native.”
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-We were at a beach bar in San Pancho, a small town in Mexico. Sherman was barefoot, seated facing the Pacific Ocean. The following night, he would be co-hosting a dinner at Cielo Rojo, a local boutique hotel, where he had worked a decade earlier. The event was a fund-raiser to help the Huichol—the people indigenous to the region—stop the development of a resort, Punta Paraíso, on the beach’s turtle-nesting ground. Sherman ate a spoonful of ceviche and finished describing the dream: “We’re on a voyage. We didn’t know where, but we were going to take back what was ours.”
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-By then, Sherman’s career had taken a number of unexpected turns. He landed his first head-chef job, in 2001, at a Spanish-Italian restaurant called La Bodega. The following year, he had a son, Phoenix, and soon married the child’s mother, a lead server he’d once worked with, named Melissa. To devote more time to his family, he sought a job with better hours. Nothing stuck. He managed a gelato shop. He tried to open an Irish café, inspired by Darina Allen and her Ballymaloe Cookery School, but the deal fell through. His marriage started to falter, and he took a summer gig at a resort in Ely, near the Canadian border, leaving his wife and young son behind. “As soon as I left, I started finding out about infidelities that kind of broke me emotionally,” he said.
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-He returned to Minneapolis and, in the interest of good benefits, took a job at a nutrition-and-wellness corporation called Life Time Fitness. At one point, Sherman was writing recipes for dozens of the company’s cafés across the country and helping run three restaurants, including a sushi spot called Martini Blu. “That’s when I hit the burnout,” he said.
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-In 2007, Sherman quit and headed south, to San Pancho. Melissa and Phoenix soon joined him. Although Sherman doesn’t like to swim, he spent a lot of time on the beach, contemplating the ocean. He befriended some fishermen, and started “hustling sushi” for tourists, turning one fresh, twelve-dollar mahi-mahi into five hundred dollars’ worth of sashimi. San Pancho is a hippie town, with tourists searching for authentic experiences. Sherman relished the local Huichol food: the nixtamalized-blue-corn masa and handmade tortillas, the salsas and seasonings—chilis, hoja santa, achiote—and the fresh produce. “I had this bolt, an epiphany,” he told me. Why wasn’t there any Indigenous food up north? “In Minneapolis, I could find food from all over the world,” he went on. “But nothing that represented the food or the people that were there before, which is completely insane.”
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-Owamni’s maple-chili cricket-and-seed mix. “We go through fifteen pounds of crickets a week,” Sherman said.
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-After lunch in San Pancho, we went to a gallery featuring Huichol art. “This could be Lakota,” Sherman said, pointing at beadwork depicting peyote flowers and an eagle. “I felt so comfortable among the Huichol. There are so many commonalities between tribes. They use sweat lodges, they have corn culture.” We stopped in a wine-and-spirits shop; Sherman loves mezcal. On a case was a sticker that read “I Stand with Standing Rock.” Sherman told me, “I thought I could focus on Indigenous peoples across North America, look at the whole big picture. I saw the whole path.”
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-In 2008, Sherman moved his family to Red Lodge, Montana, on the edge of Yellowstone National Park, where his father’s wife, Jael, owned a dude ranch. Sherman cooked meals for guests, experimenting with local plants and game. Jael’s aunt, who happened to be named Julia Childs, took Sherman foraging and asked for his help with her big garden. Sherman reconnected with his father, Gerald, who had got sober, gone to business school, and started the Lakota Fund, one of the country’s first micro-loan initiatives. “It was good inspiration,” Sherman said. “Despite a rough start, he switched gears and did something that affects other people on a large scale.”
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-Two years later, Sherman and his wife separated, and mutually agreed that Sherman would raise Phoenix in Minneapolis. He began working at Common Roots, a farm-to-table restaurant, and hosting pop-up dinners that featured Indigenous cuisine. Around this time, he attended a gathering in Arizona of the Native American Culinary Association, founded by the chef Nephi Craig, who gave a presentation about ancestral foods. “That really helped solidify what I was doing,” Sherman told me. “That it’s not just about the cooking.” He was thirty-nine and raising a son as a single parent on less than fifty-five thousand dollars a year. But he was intent on launching something of his own. “I was just trying to figure out how and when,” he said. “I was really feeling a need to do this work. It was starting to consume me.”
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-In Minneapolis one evening, I went for a drink with Dana Thompson at Spoon and Stable, a French-inflected restaurant with a mostly white, male kitchen. Thompson, whose grandfather was part Dakota, is an effusive conversationalist. Her focus at both the Sioux Chef and *NATIFS*, the nonprofit, she said, apart from “just running the thing,” is mental health: “My true heart is in how these food systems are actually a healing mechanism for ancestral trauma.” Last year, she contracted a psychologist, who is available one day a week to the staff at *NATIFS*. “Suicidality, chemical dependency, dysfunctional conflict—it’s how this stuff manifests,” she said. “We’re not going to succeed if we don’t acknowledge what’s right there in your face.”
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-Thompson uses herself as an example. “I had a terrible childhood,” she told me. Her father, a police officer in a small Minnesota town, was suspected of having an inappropriate relationship with the family’s babysitter, a fifteen-year-old girl. The girl ran away from home and was killed attempting to jump onto a train. Thompson’s father was later arrested on felony-theft charges—their garage was filled with stolen electronics. The family relocated to Hibbing. Thompson moved out at the age of fifteen, eventually making her way to Minneapolis, where she pursued a career as a folk musician. She had a daughter at twenty-seven and continued playing in a band throughout her thirties, while working in music management and consumer-goods marketing.
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-In October, 2014, she attended an event called Dinner on the Farm, where Sherman prepared the meal and spoke to the guests. “It was like I’d been struck by lightning,” Thompson recalled. Sherman had created the Sioux Chef the previous April, and had been catering his own Indigenous dinners. A week later, Thompson met him for coffee, and offered to be his manager. “I didn’t have the funds,” Sherman said. “But I hired her.” Soon, they were inseparable.
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-With Thompson’s help, Sherman quickly gained wider recognition. In addition to hosting dinners on reservations, he spoke at the Culinary Institute of America, the United Nations, and Oxford University. In 2017, he published “The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen,” which won a James Beard award for best American cookbook. That same year, he was invited to participate in the Catastrophic Meal, in Denmark, an event where ten chefs presented either utopian or dystopian dishes. Sherman, who was assigned utopian, used some nixtamalized corn he had brought, and foraged the rest of his ingredients: rose hips, wild greens, and blue crabs. “It was just being aware of where we are, the seasons, using extreme local foods,” he said. “And making people feel good. That was my statement of the future.” Not long afterward, he was cast in a Hyundai commercial.
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-Meanwhile, Sherman and Thompson had entered into a partnership with the Minneapolis Parks and Recreation Board to open a restaurant in a new riverfront park. Initially, it was conceived of as a small café with grab-and-go items, but, as construction proceeded, the concept began to shift to something grander. At the time, there were almost no Native American restaurants in the country, apart from Tocabe, a beloved fry-bread joint in Denver, and the Mitsitam Native Foods Café, in Washington, D.C. In the fall of 2016, Francis Ford Coppola had opened a Native-themed restaurant in Sonoma called Werowocomoco, which was widely accused of cultural appropriation and closed a year later. Loretta Barrett Oden, a Potawatomi chef who ran a pioneering Native American restaurant, in Santa Fe, in the nineties, had been brought on as a consultant. “I caught a lot of flack from Indian Country for it,” she said.
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-Duck sausage with watercress purée and roasted turnips.
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-Construction on Owamni was completed in July of 2021. The restaurant is situated on the second floor of a park pavilion built from tan bricks, white pine, reclaimed wood beams, and old stone walls—remnants of the area’s abandoned mills. A large terrace outside the entrance, which doubles Owamni’s size in warmer months, has a lawn of thick grass. “When we were first starting, the park’s developers were calling it the Columbia terrace,” Sherman said. “And we were, like, ‘We are not going to name our terrace after Columbus.’ ”
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-Thompson worked with an interior designer, ordered equipment and furniture, and arranged press coverage while simultaneously leading *NATIFS*. Sherman hadn’t planned on being Owamni’s executive chef, but once the restaurant opened he was in the kitchen eighty hours a week. “Dana is the glue,” Dawn Drouillard, the nonprofit’s culinary director, told me. “Sean is the face of the organization, but Dana plays a crucial role in everything we do.”
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-Their romantic relationship ended soon after Owamni opened. “The breakup didn’t happen in the right way,” Thompson said. “It was really cruel.” Within weeks, Sherman was dating Mecca Bos, a local chef and food writer. The day I met with Thompson, Sherman had posted on Facebook a series of romantic photos with Bos, writing, “This has been such an amazing and whirlwind past few months finding and being with the best adventure/cooking/romantic partner ever.” Still, Thompson told me that the split had been necessary: “We had this kinetic, incredible, rare energy together. It was like a rocket ship taking off—then we ran out of fuel.”
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-Despite the breakup, neither Thompson nor Sherman has any intention of leaving behind what they have built. Thompson, who owns forty per cent of the Sioux Chef, shares equal governance over the company with Sherman—a fact that Sherman didn’t quite register when they signed their partnership agreement, in 2015. “That basically locked me from making any decision without Dana’s blessing,” he said. “I had no idea that that was such a serious piece.” Sherman now hopes to put Owamni under the control of *NATIFS*, to use the restaurant’s success to fuel the mission of the nonprofit. “That’s always been my vision,” he said. But Thompson sees no reason to combine the Sioux Chef, a for-profit company, with *NATIFS*. “I’m not going to change it,” she said. “So there’s no way it’s going to happen.”
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-Sherman told me that Thompson needs the money from the Sioux Chef to augment her livelihood. “She believes the Sioux Chef still has a lot of potential, and of course it does,” he said. “She wants to get rich.” When I relayed this to Thompson, she laughed. “I just want to make back our loan payments,” she said. “I just want to be out of debt.” She added, “I think that time is going to calm Sean down.”
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-Despite their querulousness, Sherman and Thompson both acknowledge that they would not have reached this point if not for their relationship. “She made it so I didn’t have to negotiate for myself,” Sherman said. “She helped me grow.” Thompson told me, “I mean, he’s the visionary. He’s the rock star.”
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-The day after my drink with Dana, I met Sherman at *NATIFS*’ Indigenous Food Lab, the organization’s culinary-training center, in the Midtown Global Market. *NATIFS* moved into the space in January, 2020; that May, eight blocks away, a police officer murdered George Floyd. (Thompson, Sherman, and members of their staff participated in the protests.) During the pandemic, the kitchen was used to prepare ten thousand meals a week for nine of the state’s eleven reservations, which were devastated by *COVID*\-19.
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-Sherman ducked under a construction curtain. On the other side was a half-built gleaming stainless-steel kitchen. “This is gonna be a community classroom,” he said. “We’re investing in all this camera equipment, so down the road we can do V.R. classes.” The kitchen pantry was full of items like Labrador tea, strawberry popcorn, wild mint, juniper, and homegrown tobacco. Off to the side, there was a pink-and-yellow vintage pinball machine called Totem, depicting a mashup of various tribes’ heritage: tiki totems, Iroquois-style clubs, art work from the Plains. “It’s so wrong,” Sherman said. “I had to get it.”
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-Manoomin, a wild rice found around the Great Lakes, is hand-harvested from a canoe.
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-Sherman went downstairs to a freezer and returned pushing a cart filled with frozen rabbits. He is no longer Owamni’s head chef, but he still oversees the kitchen’s operations, planning menus and sourcing ingredients. “My role is just called ‘vision’ now,” he said. “I like to move fast and say yes to lots of things.” Thompson told me, “We’re being careful about where we spend our resources, and saying no a lot. But Sean is a people pleaser, so then I have to go back and be the bad guy.”
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-On my last afternoon in Minneapolis, I sat at Owamni’s bar with Sherman and ordered lunch. Sherman wasn’t eating; he was planning to smoke meat at home later. He still loves to cook, but he has no intention of returning to Owamni’s kitchen. “It’s not the best use of my time to be chopping carrots and telling teen-agers what to do,” he said. After Owamni opened, Sherman hired a chef de cuisine: “He was not Native, and he was clashing with some of the staff, and one night it hit a stress point. He said out loud, ‘There’s just too many chiefs in the kitchen.’ Everyone’s jaw dropped.”
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-The chef wasn’t Sherman and Thompson’s only controversial employee. In July, the operations director for *NATIFS*, Shane Thin Elk, resigned, after his ex-wife posted on Facebook tribal court documents detailing incidents of domestic abuse. Thin Elk, a recovering alcoholic, maintains his innocence. But the episode caused a scandal among some members of the staff. “It is part of our culture, shared by the *NaTIFS* workplace and our Indigenous community, to hold on to a restorative spirit, a belief that any of us—no matter how lost we are—can find our way back,” Sherman wrote in an online statement. “Just as strongly, it is a part of our culture that violence is never acceptable.”
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-Staff turmoil and turnover have been constant issues at Owamni. Two general managers have left. Earlier this year, Sherman had promoted Joatta Siebert, a twenty-nine-year-old from North Dakota who had done an internship at Noma, in Copenhagen, to chef de cuisine. “She’s a really hard worker,” Sherman told me, in May. “She’s got creativity down. Now she’s learning how to deal with people.”
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-In August, Siebert left Owamni. Some employees felt that she hadn’t been the right fit—that she pushed specials featuring colonized takes on Indigenous ingredients. “I do have a European background in cooking, but so does Sean,” Siebert said. “He taught himself how to decolonize his own food, and I was still in the process of that.” Soon afterward, a bartender was fired, in part for drinking on the clock. One employee said that, though the dismissal might have made sense at another restaurant, Owamni was supposed to be different: “What are we here for if we’re not helping this person?”
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-None of these issues was apparent in the dining room. More often, complaints were about patrons. Servers have heard “funny things” from diners, Sherman told me. He called over a hostess named Malia Erickson, who recounted that a woman had asked her if she was Native, then if she was Sioux; Erickson had nodded and tried to finish explaining the menu. “Then she takes out her phone and asks me to pull down my mask so she can take a picture of me,” Erickson said. “I told her, ‘Not today. No, that’s not O.K.’ ”
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-A man from New Jersey, then a woman wearing a sparkly elephant pin approached Sherman to offer praise. Sherman is now co-writing a cookbook, which will showcase Indigenous cuisine from the Arctic to Belize. He is talking to television producers about a spinoff—an Indigenous-foods roadshow. His vision on the beach in Mexico had become a persona, in the form of the Sioux Chef.
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-The attention is not always easy to navigate. Baca, who prepared the meal in the church basement, has been critical of the ways in which Sherman appeals to the mainstream public. At a food-sovereignty summit in Madison, Wisconsin, he said, “A reporter asked me, ‘Will there ever be an Indigenous Thomas Keller?’ But that’s not how we work. It’s all about community. When you focus on one person, you already got it wrong.” Nephi Craig, who now runs Café Gozhóó, on the White Mountain Apache reservation, in Arizona, said, “The standards of the Michelin star are not the standards in traditional Native communities. It’s not our goal to get attention.”
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-Sherman told me he’s not concerned with whether he gets any attention. “But I get the attention, so it’s easy for me to say,” he added. He’s also quick to help other Indigenous chefs. Crystal Wahpepah, a member of the Oklahoma Kickapoo tribe, met Sherman at a cooking workshop in 2015, and appeared as a contestant on the Food Network reality show “Chopped” the following year. When her catering business dried up during the pandemic, she began to think about opening her own restaurant. Sherman flew Wahpepah and her team to Minneapolis to spend a few days at Owamni; in November, she opened Wahpepah’s Kitchen, in Oakland. “Sean is my mentor,” she said. “He’s opened many doors.”
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-Elena Terry, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation who founded the nonprofit catering company Wild Bearies, and is a good friend of Sherman’s, told me that she values his role in the wider food-sovereignty movement. “I think that a lot of people appreciate the face that Sean puts out front,” she said. “He’s the epitome, right? Long braids, a powerful man who represents decolonization.”
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-At Owamni that afternoon, the staff was preparing for dinner. A manager named Teddy gathered everyone for a meeting. He reviewed some timing kinks from the previous night while a server lit a bundle of sage in a big clamshell. The staff smudges before every shift. Someone struggled to unstick a meat grinder. A waitress waved the sage over her face and passed the shell to a young cook. “The patio is gonna be bumping tonight,” Teddy said. “I appreciate you all. Let’s crush this.”
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-Sherman left, and walked up the hill to his truck. He is setting up Indigenous Food Labs in Anchorage and in Bozeman. This month, he’s at an Arctic-foods summit, in Norway, then at Terra Madre, a gathering of the Slow Food community, in Italy. Between events, he wants to visit the archives at the Vatican. “They stole everything,” he said. “They have to be sitting on a huge wealth of Indigenous stuff. I want to see what they have.” He could feel his attention moving away from the restaurant: “I don’t like being trapped in a box.” His eyes darted to the waterfall. “It’s hard for me to sometimes stop and be in the moment,” he said. “I feel like I’m just starting.” ♦
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-# Exclusive: how PM’s former aide had to ‘nanny him’ through lockdown
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-Photographs by Morgan Roberts, Styling by Lydie HarrisonMorgan Roberts
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-I recently read that it took Jim Carrey more than eight hours in hair and make-up to transform into the title role for *How the Grinch Stole Christmas*. In order to cope, he was taught special mind techniques by a former CIA operative on how to withstand torture.
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-It’s led me to wonder what Zen training Sir Kenneth Branagh went through to become Boris Johnson in *This England*, the new Sky drama about the early stage of the government’s Covid response. I’ve been astonished by the photos of him on set: the posture, the hair, the beaky nose and the basset-hound-like cheeks are uncanny.
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-Boris, meanwhile, is looking all the more hangdog now. I always thought it would come to this: people would realise who he really is. He’s never exactly been the commitment type – except in this case, his reluctance to leave did seem a bit ‘let’s storm the Capitol, chaps’.
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-I’ll confess I’ve also been thinking about what the rest of the cast have gone through in order to look the part, particularly Greta Bellamacina, the actress playing the prime minister’s deputy chief of staff: me, as I then was. When news of the production was announced, *The Mail on Sunday* breathlessly included the detail that Greta, 31, is a model as well as an actress. Imagine finding out that a muse for fashion brand The Vampire’s Wife is going to play you on screen. Extremely satisfactory.
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-*The FT*, meanwhile, has described her as a ‘cultural Trojan horse’. That’s all very well, but can she be an ‘elegant gazelle’? That is how I was described by the press in my final year at No 10 and I try not to dwell on it much. I certainly didn’t like it, but compared to something actively mean like ‘Duchess of Pork’, as Fergie was dubbed, I feel I should be grateful.
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-Cleo Watson leaving 10 Downing Street
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-PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo
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-The quality of Greta’s ethereal beauty is hard to describe, as is her punky, romantic, sepia-toned coolness. It makes me blush to picture her walking into wardrobe and being asked to shed her Dior chicness in favour of a sad pencil skirt and Musto anorak. I imagine the costume designer advising her: ‘The trick is how you wear it, darling. Think Sandra Bullock pre-makeover in *Miss Congeniality*, or Allison Janney in *The West Wing* – but only the episode where she has root canal…’
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-This is the first time that the Covid response in Downing Street will be examined through film, and I’m sure that Michael Winterbottom et al will handle it with the care, sensitivity and truthfulness that it requires. If they’re able to capture even half of the horrific out-of-body experience of standing outside the PM’s office, watching live news footage of stretcher-filled car parks in Lombardy hospitals, or the sheer bravery of Carrie heavily pregnant and reckoning with the possibility that she might be about to lose the father of her imminent firstborn child as a nation watched on, then it should be a fruitful awards season for all concerned.
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-A drama it will be. And rightly so. Yet, when enough time has passed, there is also room for a comedy of some sort. Because among the gruelling 18-hour days – horrible days when we thought the virus had won, that we had acted too late and that our measures weren’t working – there was some light relief. And I’m not talking about Partygate. It amazes me now that I thought proroguing Parliament, de-whipping a load of our MPs and working on a general election would be my toughest time in government.
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-My trajectory had been a strange one, driven largely by luck. At Cardiff University, I got the chance to study for a year in America and ended up working on President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. Back home, after a spell working in branding, I joined the Vote Leave referendum campaign in 2015. Next came the Tory general election campaign and a role in Theresa May’s political office. And then, in 2019, when May stepped down, I wondered what to do next. I didn’t wonder for long. When Boris Johnson announced that Dominic Cummings would be going to Downing Street, Dom called me up and asked if I wanted to join.
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-Photographs by Morgan Roberts, Styling by Lydie HarrisonMorgan Roberts
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-My role at No 10 sounds fancy, but a lot of the time I was much closer to being Boris’s nanny. At the start of the pandemic, testing was limited so, like everyone else, the PM regularly had his temperature taken to check for symptoms. This was generally done by me, towering over him (with or without heels – I generally found it useful to be physically intimidating in the role of nanny), one hand on a hip, teapot-style, and the other brandishing an oral digital thermometer. ‘It’s that time again, Prime Minister!’ I’d say. Each time, never willing to miss a good slapstick opportunity, he dutifully feigned bending over.
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-This, plus the constant questioning about whether or not he’d washed his hands (‘What do you mean by “recently”?’), the hand-wringing about his hair, which made him look even more like one of those troll toys from the ’80s at the daily televised press conferences, and the frequent scolding about making gags such as ‘Kung-Flu’ and ‘Aye! Corona!’, characterised much of the pre-terrifying brush-with-death era in the nursery. During his recovery, the nannying came on in leaps and bounds: my insisting that he drink vitamin-filled green juices from Daylesford instead of his usual Diet Coke; trying to find diary time for his naps or very gradual exercise; even forcing him to have a sit-down once he got to the top of the famous yellow Downing Street staircase to catch his breath before a meeting. I alternated between stern finger-wagging and soothing words in response to his regular ‘I hate Covid now. I want everything to go back to normal. Why does everything happen to meeeeeee?’ temper tantrums.
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-His strength returned, but the need for nannying remained. I remember a midsummer meeting at Chequers (falling between lockdowns one and two), when he called a group of political advisers together to think about what the autumn would bring. We made our way upstairs to be greeted by an appalling smell and what I took to be a small fig under the table. ‘Oh dear,’ the PM said, looking at me expectantly, ‘Dilyn’s done a turd.’ I adopted the exasperated-teapot pose. ‘Well, you’d better pick it up then,’ I said. And he did.
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-Dogs were a bit of a theme, actually. Obviously Dilyn was on the scene, and it was common to see him dashing around the garden, pursued by a gaggle of harried civil servants. On the odd Friday, I would bring in my own dog – an English bulldog puppy called Hippo. On one such occasion, Hippo and I were returning from a quick loo break (his) in the garden when a press officer asked to ‘borrow’ the dog. I’d forgotten it was VE Day. Downing Street was decked out in Union Jack bunting and an official photograph of the PM needed to go out. What could be more appropriate than a bulldog? The photo was dutifully taken in front of a portrait of Churchill. Very patriotic, but the common chord between the three subjects wasn’t exactly a quintessential Britishness – it was a near-identical hunched, potato-sack posture and a jowly, grumpy tolerance of the whole blasted enterprise. We all agreed it was too much.
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-Dominic Cummings and Cleo Watson
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-Bloomberg/Getty Images
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-The PM himself was subject to a fair amount of house-training. Like many, he was ‘pinged’ a couple of times and insisted on working from his downstairs office while isolating. Very soon, this required setting up chairs as barriers in the doorway, as he couldn’t resist stepping over the threshold into our adjoining room to peer over shoulders at what people were working on (invariably in a pair of someone else’s reading glasses he’d found lying around). So the prime ministerial ‘puppy gate’ was created. He’d kneel on the seats, his elbows propped over the top, like a great unruly golden retriever, howling for attention.
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-I don’t blame him. That area outside the office was a fun place to be (when it wasn’t pulsating with adrenaline and panic in response to the latest crisis). Several large television screens filled one wall, usually showing a combination of news channels, Parliament TV (if either House was sitting), Covid statistics and a Twitter word bubble to see what people ‘out there’ were talking about. For some reason, the televisions would switch back to their default channel – something to do with animals – if they hadn’t been tinkered with for a while, so it was fairly common to walk in and find the PM in his signature pose (hands on hips, feet well apart), straining his eyes to make out a basketful of kittens playing with a ball of twine.
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-The occupants of this area were a group of extremely dedicated civil servants, in the office long before and long after the PM made his presence known each day. A couple of special advisers (spads, for short) sat out here with me, including Sir Eddie Lister (now Lord Udny-Lister), who might be one of those most game people I know. He once spent 20 minutes making phone calls to captains of industry at his desk right outside the PM’s door wearing a veil I brought in to lend a friend for a wedding. Another time, he agreed to wear the foil wrapper from a Terry’s Chocolate Orange atop his crisp white hair, like the Pope. I can’t remember what we were doing at the time but it wasn’t very important. Probably just listening in to a Trump call.
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-Commuting became very difficult, so Dominic Cummings and I took to driving into Downing Street together in a car I hired. It was my first experience of what it must be like driving a grumpy teenager to school: I’d sit in the front, trying to make conversation or tapping my fingers against the wheel to Heart FM. Dom sat in the back, headphones on, laptop open. On one occasion, he had to run ahead to a meeting, leaving me to park near the Foreign Office. Unfortunately, I was singing along to the radio and misjudged a really quite big wall, skewering the car up against it. This coincided with the moment that the shift was changing for a large group of police officers, who clapped and cheered as I climbed out of the vehicle. Luckily, at that point, there were questions about Dom’s eyesight, so everyone thought it was him who’d had the scrape.
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-Dom’s ‘eye test’ itself led to moments of strange humour as we struggled to respond to the public anger it caused. Remember his press conference in the rose garden? What you didn’t see was the group of advisers loitering behind the cameras, clutching ourselves with worry. Dom’s natural sunny attitude seemed to be waning, so halfway through I took to standing directly in his eyeline, bent over like a tennis linesman, gesticulating for him to sit up straight and, if not smile, be tolerant and polite when responding to the repetitive questions being fired at him. As so many in politics know, the end comes sooner or later – generally sooner, if you’re employed by this prime minister. (Although I suppose he’s had karma returned with interest recently.) The end for me came in November 2020, about two weeks after Dom’s hurried departure. The PM had been isolating after his latest ‘ping’ and he and I finally reunited in the Cabinet room, where we had an exchange that I am sure may have been familiar to many of his girlfriends. Him: ‘Ho hum, I’m not sure this is working any more.’ Me: ‘Oh, OK, you seem to be trying to break up with me. I’ll get my things.’ Him: ‘Aargh… I don’t know… yes, no, maybe… wait, come back!’ I suppose it went a little differently. He said a lot of things, the most succinct being: ‘I can’t look at you any more because it reminds me of Dom. It’s like a marriage has ended, we’ve divided up our things and I’ve kept an ugly old lamp. But every time I look at that lamp, it reminds me of the person I was with. You’re that lamp.’ A lamp! At least a gazelle has a heartbeat. Still, he presumably knows better than most how it feels when a marriage breaks up.
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-So I left No 10 – without a leaving party, contrary to what has been reported. What actually happened is that we agreed to go our separate ways and I went to the press team to say goodbye. The PM, unable to see a group of people and not orate, gave a painful, off-the-cuff speech to a bewildered clutch of advisers and I left shortly after.
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-I was asked to work on the COP26 climate change summit (quite cleansing for the brand after Vote Leave and Johnson’s No 10), which took place in Glasgow in November 2021. It was a brutal year, no less dogged by Covid than the previous one, and I was lucky enough to top it off with a recovery holiday in Barbados in December.
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-The sun, the sea, the cocktail bar… Welcome to paradise. Except something was off. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but whenever I was indoors at Cobblers Cove, the lovely hotel my husband, Tom, and I were staying at, I had a strange, uneasy feeling that I’d been there before. Where had I seen muted green print on jolly green print on rattan before? The place had been revamped by none other than Lulu Lytle, of the Downing Street flat fame. Is there such a thing as interiors-induced PTSD?
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-What has been extremely cathartic on the stress front is writing my first novel, hopefully out next spring, which is about sex and skulduggery in Westminster, set during a leadership contest. I like telling people it is the ‘Matt Hancock arse-grab’ of debut novels, which is to say truly cringeworthy, but nonetheless gripping.
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-It’s often the way that looking at a period of your life later on can frame it as much happier than it really was. It’s like remembering the good times with an ex. You’ll smell or hear something that nearly knocks you over with a wave of nostalgia and before you know it, you’re thinking: ‘I wonder what they’re doing now…’
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-I’m very fortunate in that I know exactly what they’re doing and what I’m missing out on. Yes, you get the chance to serve the country and on an individual level you can change people’s lives. But there is also the constant work that gets gobbled up by the news cycle. The gut-busting effort behind every speech that flops. The policy that gets torn to shreds. The constant lurk of an MP rebellion. From the moment you’re awake, you’re on your phone(s).
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-These days I’ll be walking my dog (far too big to be used as a handheld prop now) and delighted – literally delighted – to be picking up after him rather than dealing with the latest catastrophe I can see playing out just a couple of miles away.
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-I’ve weaned myself off my phone, cancelled my newspaper subscriptions and studiously avoided social media. I’ve really understood what burnout means. It has taken months to recover, long Covid or not, and I feel we all deserve some decent telly, so I look forward to watching *This England* – albeit with trepidation.
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-*Whips! by Cleo Watson will be published by Corsair in May 2023.*
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-*This article was first published in the September issue, on sale 4 August.* [*Subscribe now*](https://www.tatler.com/subscribe) *to get 3 issues for just £1, plus free home delivery and free instant access to the digital editions.*
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-# How Putin’s Oligarchs Bought London
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-Roman Abramovich was thirty-four years old—baby-faced, vigorous, already one of Russia’s richest oligarchs—when he did something seemingly inexplicable. The year was 2000. Abramovich, an orphan and a college dropout turned Kremlin insider, had amassed a giant fortune by taking control of businesses that once belonged to the Soviet state. He owned nearly half of the oil company Sibneft, and much of the world’s second-biggest producer of aluminum. A man of cosmopolitan tastes, he favored Chinese cuisine and holidays in the South of France. But now, he announced, he was going to relocate to the remote Chukotka region, a desolate Arctic hellscape, where he would run for governor.
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-Chukotka, which is some thirty-seven hundred miles from Moscow, is comically inhospitable. The winds are fierce enough to blow a grown dog off its feet. When Abramovich arrived, the human population was meagre, and struggling with poverty and alcoholism. After he was elected governor—he got ninety-two per cent of the vote, his closest challenger being a local man who herded reindeer—he was confronted with the baying of his new constituents: “When will we have fuel? When will we have meat?” There was no Chinese food in Chukotka.
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-“People here don’t live, they just exist,” Abramovich marvelled. Shy by nature, he was not a natural politician. He pumped plenty of his own money into the region, but appeared to derive no pleasure from his new job. Nor could he explain, to anyone’s satisfaction, what he was doing there. When a reporter from the *Wall Street Journal* trekked to Chukotka to pose the question, Abramovich claimed that he was “fed up” with making money. The *Journal* speculated that he was working an angle—did he have a lead on some untapped natural resource beneath the tundra? Abramovich acknowledged that his own friends “can’t understand” why he made this move. They “can’t even guess,” he said.
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-Three years after gaining his governorship, Abramovich leapt from wealthy obscurity to tabloid prominence when he bought London’s Chelsea Football Club. In 2009, he settled into a fifteen-bedroom mansion behind Kensington Palace, for which he reportedly paid ninety million pounds. His mega-yacht Eclipse featured two helipads and its own missile-defense system, and he took to hosting New Year’s Eve parties with guests like Leonardo DiCaprio and Paul McCartney. It was a long way from Chukotka. Indeed, that unlikely interlude seemed mostly forgotten, until the publication of “Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West” (2020), a landmark work of investigative journalism by the longtime Russia correspondent Catherine Belton. Her thesis is that, after becoming the President of Russia, in 2000, Vladimir Putin proceeded to run the state and its economy like a Mafia don—and that he did so through the careful control of ostensibly independent businessmen like Roman Abramovich.
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-When Abramovich went to Chukotka, Belton tells us, he did so “on Putin’s orders.” The first generation of post-Soviet capitalists had accumulated vast private fortunes, and Putin set out to bring the oligarchs under state control. He had leverage over government officials, so he forced Abramovich to become one. “Putin told me that if Abramovich breaks the law as governor, he can put him immediately in jail,” one Abramovich associate told Belton. A “feudal system” was beginning to emerge, Belton contends, in which the owners of Russia’s biggest companies would be forced to “operate as hired managers, working on behalf of the state.” Their gaudy displays of personal wealth were a diversion; these oligarchs were mere capos, who answered to the don. It wasn’t even *their* wealth, really: it was Putin’s. They were “no more than the guardians,” Belton writes, and “they kept their businesses by the Kremlin’s grace.”
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-Belton even makes the case—on the basis of what she was told by the former Putin ally Sergei Pugachev and two unnamed sources—that Abramovich’s purchase of the Chelsea Football Club was carried out on Putin’s orders. “Putin’s Kremlin had accurately calculated that the way to gain acceptance in British society was through the country’s greatest love, its national sport,” she writes. Pugachev informs her that the objective was to build “a beachhead for Russian influence in the UK.” He adds, “Putin personally told me of his plan to acquire the Chelsea Football Club in order to increase his influence and raise Russia’s profile, not only with the elite but with ordinary British people.”
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-The stark implication of “Putin’s People” is not just that the President of Russia may be a silent partner in one of England’s most storied sports franchises but also that England itself has been a silent and handsomely compensated partner in Putin’s kleptocratic designs—that, in the past two decades, Russian oligarchs have infiltrated England’s political, economic, and legal systems. “We must go after the oligarchs,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared after the invasion of Ukraine, doing his best to sound Churchillian. But, as the international community labors to isolate Putin and his cronies, the question is whether England has been too compromised by Russian money to do so.
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-For the past several years, Oliver Bullough, a former Russia correspondent, has guided “kleptocracy tours” around London, explaining how dirty money from abroad has transformed the city. Bullough shows up with a busload of rubberneckers in front of elegant mansions and steel-and-glass apartment towers in Knightsbridge and Belgravia, and points out the multimillion-pound residences of the shady expatriates who find refuge there. His book “Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Oligarchs, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats, and Criminals,” just published in the U.K., argues that England actively solicited such corrupting influences, by letting “some of the worst people in existence” know that it was open for business.
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-Invoking Dean Acheson’s famous observation, in 1962, that Britain had “lost an empire but not yet found a role,” Bullough suggests that it did find a role, as a no-questions-asked service provider to the crooked élite, offering access to capital markets, prime real estate, shopping at Harrods, and illustrious private schools, along with accountants for tax tricks, attorneys for legal squabbles, and “reputation managers” for inconvenient backstories. It starts with visas; any foreigner with adequate funds can buy one, by investing two million pounds in the U.K. (Ten million can buy you permanent residency.)
-
-London property is always an option for such investments. After King Constantine II was ousted in the wake of a military coup in Greece, in 1967, he moved into a mansion overlooking Hampstead Heath; ever since, global plutocrats have sought safe harbor in the city’s leafy precincts. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian buyers raced into London’s housing market. One real-estate agent described his Russian clients “gleefully plonking saddlebags of cash on the desk.” According to new figures from Transparency International, Russians who have been accused of corruption or of having links to the Kremlin have bought at least 1.5 billion pounds’ worth of property in Great Britain. The real number is no doubt higher, but it is virtually impossible to ascertain, because so many of these transactions are obscured by layers of secrecy. *The Economist* describes London as “a slop-bucket for dodgy Russian wealth.”
-
-Bullough has made a careful study of this process. In an earlier book, “Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back” (2018), he explained that, for moneyed arrivistes in the U.K., a glamorous new home is the first step on a well-established pathway for laundering reputations. Next up: hire a P.R. firm. “The PR agency puts them in touch with biddable members of parliament,” Bullough says, “who are prepared to put their names to the billionaire’s charitable foundation. The foundation then launches itself at a fashionable London event space—a gallery is ideal.” Ultimately, the smart billionaire will “get his name on an institution, or become so closely associated with one that it may as well be.” Major gifts to universities are popular. So are football clubs.
-
-What’s most apt about Bullough’s butler analogy is the appearance of gray-flannel propriety, which can impart an aura of respectability to even the most disreputable fortune. The mercenary grubbiness of Britain’s role might be “hard to comprehend,” Bullough suggests, “because it is so at variance with Britain’s public image.” Yet Belton and Bullough are joined in their dispiriting diagnosis by Tom Burgis, the author of the excellent book “Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World” (2020). And by Britain’s National Crime Agency, which found that “many hundreds of billions of pounds of international criminal money” is laundered through U.K. banks and subsidiaries every year. And by Parliament’s own intelligence committee, which has described London as a “laundromat” for illicit Russian cash. And by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Commons, which declared in 2018 that the ease with which Russia’s President and his allies hide their wealth in London has helped Putin pursue his agenda in Moscow.
-
-
-
-
----
-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
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diff --git a/00.03 News/How Saudi Arabia Sees the World.md b/00.03 News/How Saudi Arabia Sees the World.md
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-Date: 2022-11-06
-DocType: "WebClipping"
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-TimeStamp: 2022-11-06
-Link: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/saudi-arabia/how-saudi-arabia-sees-world
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-```button
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-# How Saudi Arabia Sees the World
-
-On October 5, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its ten partner states agreed to slash oil production by two million barrels per day. The decision was at once predictable and shocking. It was predictable because OPEC+, under the leadership of Saudi Arabia, had previously telegraphed plans to reduce oil production. But it was shocking because Saudi Arabia and the United States are close security partners, and top U.S. officials had made repeated personal pleas for the Saudis to keep production up. Many of these officials had hoped that the Saudi government would cooperate, especially in light of rising gasoline prices and broader inflationary pressures. Indeed, according to a recent *New York Times* report, top aides to U.S. President Joe Biden even thought Washington had reached a private deal for Saudi Arabia to increase supply. When the Saudi energy minister instead gathered with U.S.-sanctioned Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak to announce cuts, the White House was stunned.
-
-U.S. policymakers and analysts have responded to the Saudi decision by criticizing Riyadh for its surprising independence—and Biden for his inelegant attempt at dealmaking. During his campaign for president, Biden often denounced Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, for his poor human rights record, only to meet with him in July. To some American analysts, Saudi Arabia’s decision to cut production after the president’s about-face was evidence that Riyadh was never going to be a reliable (or pliant) partner and that it was a political mistake for Biden to visit MBS. Other analysts, by contrast, argued that Riyadh’s move was, in fact, Biden’s fault: the predictable byproduct of the administration’s hubris in asking Saudi Arabia to put U.S. interests ahead of its own.
-
-U.S. observers are right that Washington has made decisions irritating to the Saudis. But there is also a lack of understanding inside Washington about how Saudi Arabia formulates its economic and foreign policy. Put simply, Saudi Arabia, under the direction of MBS, is preparing for a global political economy that is markedly different from the one the [Biden administration](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/topics/biden-administration) envisions. In its newly released National Security Strategy, the White House focused on how to win a managed competition with China and outlined a preference for dividing economic and political partnerships into two tracks: one with democracies and one with nondemocracies carried out through a framework of international institutions. Given the dearth of enthusiasm in the United States for international frameworks, membership in the second track will likely entail a downgrade for authoritarian states, and governments like Saudi Arabia have already noticed.
-
-Although both Democrats and Republicans have been growing less supportive of the U.S.-Saudi bilateral partnership, [U.S. foreign policy](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/topics/us-foreign-policy) may not be the main reason that relations are fracturing. They are fracturing because of changes in Saudi Arabia’s own domestic and foreign policy. MBS doesn’t envision his country as a second-tier player in a bifurcated international system akin to the one that existed during the Cold War; he sees the emerging geopolitical order as malleable, made up of a set of interlocking parts, and he believes Riyadh has the right to work with a shifting constellation of partners to move markets and shape political outcomes. He believes that Saudi Arabia will have to vigorously protect its own economy as the world’s energy and oil demands fluctuate but that if it succeeds, no one can stop it from carving an independent path and pioneering a different kind of economic development. This vision is a 1970s dream Non-Aligned Movement, except the unifying feature is nationalist opportunism rather than a postcolonial awakening.
-
-MBS may be right. The world is entering a period of energy insecurity, and hydrocarbons will consistently be in demand for at least the next 20 years, a situation that could give Saudi Arabia more power. The international system is becoming more fluid. Emerging market economies in general, and [Saudi Arabia](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/regions/saudi-arabia) in particular, could develop a more substantive role in global affairs.
-
-### **THE WORLD IS YOURS**
-
-In Riyadh’s view, the future belongs to emerging markets. From 2011 to 2021, these economies accounted for 67 percent of global GDP growth, and today they account for 49 percent of overall global GDP. Over the next four years, emerging economies are projected to grow at an average of 3.9 percent annually—faster than those in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—and make up an increasing share of global trade volume.
-
-This bloc of states includes Saudi Arabia. Indeed, according to its leaders, Saudi Arabia is one the world’s most important emerging markets. The country is home to a large economy with a high GDP per capita, and it exports enough oil to influence global energy prices. It hosted the G-20 in 2020 (albeit virtually) and, four years before that event, unveiled its Vision 2030, which offers an aspirational future in which the country stops relying on carbon fuels and builds futuristic cities that can survive all climate risks.
-
-This plan has filled Saudi citizens and government officials alike with newfound confidence. The country—and other Gulf states—now see themselves as models of growth and development. And they sense a need to reorient their alliances to prepare for a less stable global order, perhaps even a post-American era. Riyadh’s 2016 decision to have OPEC coordinate with non-OPEC states, forming OPEC+, is exactly this kind of policy planning. OPEC+ is neither ideological nor treaty bound. Rather, it is an alliance of countries that are willing to do business with each other when it suits their shared interests. They are even willing to challenge the United States to achieve their goals.
-
-The Russian-Saudi partnership, launched as part of OPEC+, is especially emblematic of Riyadh’s new view of foreign policy. For Saudi Arabia, it was not just a matter of business; it was also an act of self-preservation. In the 2010s, the United States began producing larger and larger quantities of oil from its shale, flooding global markets and causing prices to drop. This challenged Saudi Arabia’s traditional role as the dominant source of spare capacity in oil markets and undermined Riyadh’s ability to control global supply. But by partnering with Russia, Saudi Arabia could create a more controlled lever to force oil prices lower, starving its American competition of investment by making it hard for U.S. companies to make a profit. (National oil companies under state control can more easily afford to operate at a loss). The Russian-Saudi partnership was less natural in March 2020, when the Asian market for oil collapsed under the weight of the pandemic, putting both states in fierce competition. Yet Moscow and Riyadh still saw coordination as the best way to navigate a global economy that needs oil but—thanks to the energy transition—is increasingly reluctant to invest in it. As a result, they have stuck together.
-
-> The United States is not the security partner that it was in the past.
-
-From a business perspective, Russia’s [invasion](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/tags/war-ukraine) of Ukraine has given the Saudis more reason to keep up the partnership. Riyadh sees the West’s coordinated actions to control and suppress Russian energy imports, including a planned price cap on Russian oil, as a buyers’ cartel that threatens the Saudi economy. In the views of Saudi Arabia and other members of OPEC+, this cartel could eventually brand crude oil by point of origin, method of extraction, and degree of carbon intensity—and then price it accordingly. This practice would seriously undermine their control over global supply.
-
-Washington, of course, has little patience for Riyadh’s business calculations. It views the Saudi government’s oil cuts as a slap in the face and a rejection of the U.S.-Saudi partnership. But in MBS’s worldview, with its moving constellations, what the United States thinks is not determinative. Riyadh can work with anyone when it is convenient, and that means Saudi Arabia can balance its business partnerships—including with [Russia](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/regions/russian-federation)— alongside its security needs, for which it relies heavily on the United States.
-
-Many U.S. policymakers have called on the White House to show MBS that his balancing can’t work by threatening to end or reduce U.S. arms sales. But although Riyadh would certainly rather keep purchasing U.S. weapons, MBS may not see this threat as especially concerning. The defense industry is influential in Congress, in part because it has production lines that support thousands of American jobs. Its long-term service contracts for weapons and equipment are not impulse purchases, and the industry would likely lobby aggressively to prevent any pause in manufacturing for the Saudis.
-
-More important, the Gulf is already recalibrating its security relationship with Washington. This move is not about declining weapons sales, but rather about waning U.S. willingness to use its own forces to protect Gulf states. The United States is not the security partner that it was in the past. U.S. President [Barack Obama](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/topics/obama-administration) made this clear when he stated that Saudi Arabia would have to “share the neighborhood” with Iran. President [Donald Trump](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/topics/trump-administration) cozied up to the Saudis rhetorically, but he, too, made Washington’s disinterest apparent by refusing to respond to the 2019 attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure. Biden’s downgrading of the partnership is only the latest in a broader U.S. foreign policy trend.
-
-Saudi Arabia knows that it has no single alternative if the United States cuts off weapons supplies. (Russia is certainly incapable of providing what Riyadh needs.) It is therefore trying to accelerate an economic transformation that connects its economy more closely to key markets, an effort that has already shown some success. Washington has accused the Gulf states of being too friendly with Putin, but their behavior hasn’t stopped European governments from flocking to the region’s energy markets—including Saudi Arabia’s. Since Russia’s invasion began, energy-desperate European states have signed long-term liquified natural gas, hydrogen, and energy [cooperation](https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/saudi-arabia-agrees-memorandum-cooperation-with-britain-energy-sector-spa-2022-10-04/) agreements with Riyadh and other Gulf state governments. Critically, European governments have also agreed to export new weapons to the Saudis. Even Germany, which had [banned](https://www.dw.com/en/german-government-approves-arms-exports-to-saudi-arabia-reports/a-63288334) arms sales to Saudi Arabia in 2018, is embracing the kingdom and selling it defense equipment. For all the handwringing in Washington, Riyadh could be correct: the international order is fluid enough, and the kingdom is important enough, that it doesn’t have to pick one side.
-
-### **BRACING FOR IMPACT**
-
-Saudi Arabia’s oil decisions aren’t driven by international affairs alone. Just as the Biden administration wanted the Saudis to move the OPEC+ production cuts away from the U.S. midterm elections (a request that now seems transactional and ill advised), Saudi oil policy is also driven by domestic calculations. MBS likes to set targets and then exceed them, including when it comes to OPEC+ decisions. His government had indicated that there would be a production cut in the range of one million to 1.5 million barrels per day. The eventual, higher target seemed almost tailored to showcase MBS’s power: an illustration to his people that, despite external pressure to keep production high, he could cut production to levels even below those that were expected.
-
-The West’s uproar over the announcement of a two million barrel per day cut was unwarranted. Most OPEC+ states were already producing oil at daily rates below the new reduced quotas, and so the cut announcement was in some sense symbolic. Despite the outrage, the OPEC+ decision has so far had a small impact on oil supply to markets. Prices were back to their early October averages within two weeks. (The embargo and price cap on Russian oil exports is a much more significant threat to market supply.)
-
-But the OPEC+ decision does serve a tangible purpose for the Saudi economy. A cut in production creates spare production capacity for Saudi Arabia, giving it room to temporarily increase output should the global economy see a sudden decrease from another supply source, such as Russia. It also signals to investors that the Saudi government is committed to keeping oil profitable or at least to creating a floor for prices, encouraging firms to spend more on the petroleum sector.
-
-Most important, the decision was intended to help prevent wild volatility in oil prices. Despite high present demand, the Saudi government is worried that the world’s desire for oil could drop steeply if the global economy were to dive into a deeper and more widespread recession. Saudi Arabia’s fiscal policy has been cautious for the same reason. The country’s [pre-budget report](https://www.mof.gov.sa/en/mediacenter/News/Pages/news_30092022.aspx#:~:text=His%20Excellency%20expected%2C%20according%20to,in%202025%3B%20pointing%20out%20that) for 2023 is likely based on oil prices of $76 to $78 per barrel, with average oil production hovering at roughly 10.6 million barrels per day. The price is just a slight increase from 2022, during which oil has been conservatively priced at closer to $70 per barrel. The windfall Saudi Arabia has received this year has not translated into a spending spree, at least not yet.
-
-> For Saudi Arabia, less power over oil means less power in general.
-
-Instead, Saudi Arabia is bracing for impact, either from collapsing demand or from an unexpected need for new oil supplies. It has reasons to get ready. As the war in Ukraine continues and Russia targets civilian and energy infrastructure, the threats to global energy security will grow. As sanctions on Russia increase, the world may have less spare oil capacity and pressure on refined oil product supply. The energy policies under consideration in the White House for export bans on U.S. oil and congressional legislation (called “NOPEC”) that would allow the Justice Department to sue sovereigns over price fixing will have a chilling effect on any new investment in the oil and gas sector and will further disrupt oil refining and product deliveries. Saudi Arabia’s most important export market, [China](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/regions/china), has increased its imports of Russian oil, threatening Riyadh’s market share. And China is now buying in smaller volumes, thanks to both the country’s sluggish growth [outlook](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/how-china-trapped-itself) and Beijing’s continued commitment to its zero-COVID [policy](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2022-05-17/collateral-damage-chinas-covid-war). All these signs are worrying for the Saudis, threatening oil revenues as well as Riyadh’s legitimacy as a force for global oil market stability.
-
-For Saudi Arabia, of course, less power over oil means less power in general; oil is a key tool the country uses to influence international affairs and command global attention. Responding to these threats has therefore become a defining moment for Saudi Arabia’s young leadership and technocratic elite. By working with Russia and deprioritizing the United States, they hope to protect their country’s power over oil prices and, with it, their plans for and vision of the future.
-
-It is unclear whether these elites will succeed. But it is clear that their country and the United States are preparing for two different global economies. One sees a more powerful role in international politics and trade for emerging markets. The other sees states taking something of an inward turn and focusing on its domestic energy independence, while emphasizing values-based engagement when interacting with the international system. Oil will continue to be a part of foreign policy for both countries. But they are certainly headed in different directions. Riyadh and Washington may soon find that they are more often competitors—in oil markets and models of economic development—than partners.
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-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
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-Date: 2022-03-19
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-# How The Inca Used Knots To Tell Stories
-
-The Inca are most often remembered not for what they had but for what they didn’t have: the wheel, iron, a written language. This third lack has given rise to a paradox, the Inca paradox. Could it be that the largest pre-Columbian empire in the Americas existed without a jot of linguistic notation? Could someone have created the magnificence of Machu Picchu without a single sign to describe its beauty?
-
-The answer is yes, it’s possible. And if it’s true that the Inca Empire is the only primary state not to have developed a writing system like the ones we’ve seen thus far, it’s also true that it has left us something that perhaps exceeds them in technology and imagination. It’s time we start thinking outside the box, looking beyond the same old flat signs. It’s time we let our imaginations roam—at least for a bit.
-
-The Inca left behind a three-dimensional system, a 3D “script.” And I use quotation marks here because we shouldn’t be thinking about it in conventional terms: not as simple signs engraved or inscribed or stamped on a flat surface. No. The Inca speak to us through objects. They left us a corporeal system, an extension of their fingers: long, colored cords made of the wool of alpacas or llamas. Rows and rows of cords, all strung together like charms on a necklace, all covered in knots. Picture thousands of strings, and tens of thousands of knots, a rainbow filled with messages. These are quipu.
-
-To fully understand quipu, we must shed our preconceived notions of what defines writing.
-
-Up until the calamitous arrival of Francisco Pizarro, quipu were used to govern an empire. For nearly two hundred years, during the 15th and 16th centuries, mathematical notations, calculations, calendars, taxes, censuses—all were tied up rationally and precisely using these Technicolor cords. And there may have been narrative works, too. Getting a firm grip on just how these quipu function linguistically, however, is no small task. There are innumerable knots that we must analyze, tied by different people, for different purposes, and spread across a vast region situated in the middle of the Andes. To get a clear sense not just of the details, but the reasoning behind them, is extremely difficult.
-
-The most popular theory, at least up until recent times, is that quipu are mnemonic devices and nothing more, no different than the way we use rosary beads to count prayers. Quipu masters (or *quipucamayocs*) used them as a means of refreshing their memory, to keep track of the information they were recording. Or so the theory goes. Seen in this light, they would appear to be closed systems, comprehensible only to the quipu wizards who created them. But what would be the point, if it were such a hermetic device? We’d end up right back in the barren stretches of Hildegard and Voynich Manuscript territory.
-
-Maybe there’s something more behind them.
-
-To understand how quipu function, we have to go back to being children. In school, we learn to count by using the objects around us—wood blocks, Lego, a toy abacus. We learn addition and subtraction by adding and removing objects from a pile, and by staring at our ten fingers. Then, when we learn to write and do arithmetic, we immerse ourselves in written numbers, which are abstract and two-dimensional. And this moment, though you’ve probably forgotten it, is the moment we lose our sense of a number’s concreteness. We come to realize that 10 means “ten units of something,” in a dimension with no physical objects to represent them. Abstraction takes hold of us. Without even noticing it, we all at once become platonic observers of the “idea” of number. Counting with your hands starts to feel like something primitive, infantile. Go figure.
-
-\*\*\*
-
-The quipu system has the enthusiasm of a little kid, because it’s still attached to its wood blocks, its Lego pieces. Though for all its concreteness, it’s anything but primitive. The knots are used to tabulate data, following a base-ten system: the number 10, in this way, is a physical, tangible, multidimensional thing, made up of ten knots. Which makes a quipu something like an Excel spreadsheet: rows and columns and numbers, sums and totals. Not a mnemonic system, but a physical system of data representation. Not a rosary to help us rattle off mechanical litanies, but an abacus with thousands of beads, to count, to move, to manage. A physical, concrete system. Though, while Excel is fairly easy for us to read, the quipu system is, in short, another story.
-
-The Inca speak to us through objects.
-
-Because quipu aren’t limited to numbers. A third of these knotted necklaces are narrative. It’s hard even to imagine that a story could be told using a series of colored knots that represent numbers, but it is so. Names, places, genealogies, songs—all are recited like so many zip codes, credit-card numbers, telephone numbers, yellow, green, and blue numbers. Because numbers, for the Inca, speak not only of quantity but of quality. I know, it’s not easy to grasp, but let your imagination run free a little.
-
-The knots are 3D, so they have form, direction, relative position, color, thickness, multiple configurations. Each element carries a different meaning: far from the body, close to the body—these distances affect what quantity is recorded. A three-dimensional Sudoku. Multivalent, multi-referential, and yet at the same time precise. According to Spanish accounts from the mid-16th century, quipu were on par with the Old World’s most complex scripts. One Jesuit missionary tells of an Inca woman who brought him a quipu bearing her entire life story. In knots. Incredible.
-
-Indeed, the details of how this could have been possible are lost to us, since we don’t have the legend that reveals the links among these elements (dimension, thickness, color, number, direction, etc.) and their precise meaning. We’re in need of a decoder, an Inca Rosetta stone to unveil the correlations. But even without it, with this partial view of things, we can still draw a few conclusions.
-
-\*\*\*
-
-Have you seen the movie *Arrival*, where Amy Adams plays a linguistics professor employed by the U.S. government to translate an alien language and its enigmatic script? The aliens use a peculiar communication system, which involves squirting out circular figures like cuttlefish ink. Evanescent and ethereal, these figures quickly dissolve, leaving no trace of the message. Amy Adams studies them, and eventually comes to understand them. She deciphers their cuttlefish clouds. The film is much better than my description of it, with its muted, rainy-day tones and its almost dreamlike rhythm. There’s one thing that’s of interest to us, however: the aliens’ signs are semasiographic.
-
-Semasiography is a system of conventional symbols— iconic, abstract—that carry information, though not in any specific language. The bond between sign and sound is variable, loose, unbound by precise rules. It’s a nonphonetic system (in the most technical, glottographic sense). Think about mathematical formulas, or music notes, or the buttons on your washing machine: these are all semasiographic systems. We understand them thanks to the conventions that regulate the way we interpret their meaning, but we can read them in any language. They are metalinguistic systems, in sum, not phonetic systems.
-
-Could someone have created the magnificence of Machu Picchu without a single sign to describe its beauty?
-
-There are those who argue that semasiography should not be considered a form of writing in the strictest sense. If that’s true, does it mean that we should be thinking of the quipu as a kind of beta software, a rough draft, prehistoric, the first phase in the development of alphabetization? Do the quipu, in other words, make the highly civilized Inca somewhat less civilized, with their roads that stretch for miles, their majestic buildings, their territorial conquests?
-
-Absolutely not—and I don’t just say that because I’m victim to the Freudian defect of overvaluing a beloved object. Strapped with governing such a vast population, taking a census of so many individuals, managing so many public affairs—because of all these necessities—the Inca decided to use an open system, one that transcended a single language, that could be most widely understood. A system that could unite them as a group.
-
-Nevertheless, the jury’s still out. And in all honesty, there simply aren’t enough quipu experts to reach a definitive verdict. We scholars, too, like the Inca half a millennium before us, must come together as a group. Several digital catalogues have been created, which may one day lead to a breakthrough. Harvard’s Gary Urton, with his Khipu Database (KDB), seems to have pinpointed the name of a village, Puruchuco, represented by a sequence of three numbers, like a kind of zip code. We can’t rule out the possibility that this is a richly phonetic system, but we’re still a long way from proving it.
-
-To fully understand quipu, we must shed our preconceived notions of what defines writing. And stop mistaking our lack of imagination, our bias toward the “already seen,” for the gaps in our knowledge of the civilization we’re studying. We must keep an open mind with quipu. It may well be our limited sense of imagination that’s blocking us from understanding them. Whatever the case, for all its ingenuity, the quipu system bore no offspring. It died recording its tabulations of the Inca people, giving its last few kicks in the years after the Spanish conquest.
-
-And that’s where its circle closed. Who knows if it would have had a future, if it would have become a clear, true script, had Pizarro not razed everything to the ground. I wouldn’t put my money on it, but you never know.
-
-\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_
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-*Excerpted from* [The Greatest Invention: A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374601638) *by Silvia Ferrara. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a division of Macmillan. Copyright © 2019 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore s.r.l. Translation copyright © 2022 by Todd Portnowitz.*
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-# How Ukrainians Are Protecting Their Centuries-Old Culture From Putin’s Invasion
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-November 3, 2022, 12:01 AM EDT
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-
-
-During the past eight months of attacks on Ukraine, more than [6,000](https://www.ohchr.org/en/news/2022/10/ukraine-civilian-casualty-update-3-october-2022) civilians have died, [7.7 million](https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine) people have sought refuge abroad and another [6 million](https://data.unhcr.org/en/country/ukr/751?secret=unhcrrestricted) have been displaced internally, according to United Nations estimates. Shelling continues in major cities, leaving many without access to power or [running water](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/majority-of-kyiv-residents-without-water-after-barrage-of-russian-strikes).
-
-#### Hundreds of Cultural Sites Damaged Since February
-
-Grassroots efforts by Ukrainians have documented the atrocities of the war, as well as damage to the country’s monuments and cultural landmarks, while also preserving and protecting significant pieces of cultural identity.
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-“Since the beginning of the war, each of us has been looking for an answer to the question, ‘what form of resistance can I choose?’” said Yuriy Savchuk, director of The National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War, in Kyiv. Savchuk has taken shelter in the museum since the start of the war.
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-“My choice was simple — either take up arms and defend the country, or fight in another form,” Savchuk said. “The museum is also a public platform for conveying information, it is also a form of struggle.”
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-
-
-According to Volodymyr Sheiko — director general of the [Ukrainian Institute](https://ui.org.ua/en/), an organization that promotes knowledge of Ukrainian culture and language internationally — more than 550 cultural sites, buildings and monuments of cultural importance have been damaged or destroyed since the full-scale invasion began.
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-The defense of Ukrainian cultural sites has taken many forms. Curators have removed precious collections from museums and hidden them elsewhere. They wrapped statues that can’t be moved in sandbags or flame-retardant blankets. [Volunteers](https://www.sucho.org/) around the world have helped protect digital records from cyber attacks or other damage to servers and infrastructure caused by missile strikes or fire.
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-“It was the first day of invasion when many cities were bombed,” said Iryna Voloshyna, a PhD student in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington. Voloshyna led an effort to provide terabytes’ worth of cloud-based server space to Ukrainian academics after some folklore researchers and historians contacted her through Facebook Messenger seeking places to store digital archives outside of Ukraine.
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-“They were hiding in the shelters, and worried about their work and the future of Ukrainian heritage, which was amazing,” Voloshyna said. The American Folklore Society, a nonprofit membership organization, presented an inaugural award to Voloshyna for her meritorious service in October.
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-For sites that have been lost, Ukrainians at home and abroad have rallied to record evidence of destruction that will help local governments rebuild, and could even be used as evidence of war crimes in international courts. Sergey Revenko, an architect based in Kyiv, builds 3D models of such sites.
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-Others, like Kharkiv-native and recent University of California, Berkeley, graduate Karina Nguyen, are raising awareness on social media. She has been collecting photographs, articles and evidence of destruction of landmarks, assembling a dataset of their location and what happened, which she shared with Bloomberg CityLab.
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-We asked Karina how and why she got started:
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-Kharkiv, 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the Russian border in eastern Ukraine, is one of the cities that has suffered some of the heaviest damage, and is still under repeated shelling. It’s the second-largest city in Ukraine, with a population of about 1.5 million, and was once the capital of Soviet Ukraine. Kharkiv is known for its educational and research institutions as well as its modernist architecture.
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-According to Iryna Matsevo, an architect and professor at the Kharkiv School of Architecture, the city has been shaped by its proximity to and relationship with Russia, but it has been pushed to further developing its own distinct identity in the years since Moscow’s illegal annexation of Crimea.
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-The Kharkiv Freedom Square (or Maidan Svobody), in the city center, is home to a concentration of its cultural landmarks. Many were destroyed or damaged, as revealed by photographs.
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-About two weeks after the invasion started, with shelling falling regularly on Kharkiv, Nguyen and her sister persuaded their mother to flee. She’s now in San Rafael, California, after a long journey through Lviv in western Ukraine, to Poland, Germany and eventually the US. Nguyen’s mother speaks mostly Vietnamese. She immigrated from North Vietnam to the Soviet Union in 1986 when she was 17 years old.
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-
-
-Ukrainian culture and identity has developed despite a history of suppression. As early as the [19th century](https://guides.library.illinois.edu/c.php?g=347563&p=2344192), Russian Emperor Alexander the Second banned Ukrainian language in schools, books, theater and songs. That forced Ukrainians to form secret societies, underground schools and printing presses to preserve the language and culture. [In 1933 Joseph Stalin](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-11-30-mn-107-story.html) barred the letter “g” from the Ukrainian alphabet, declaring it was too nationalistic since it had no equivalent in the Russian language. It was only reinstated in 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine became independent.
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-“The widespread preconceptions of Ukraine, worldwide, include that it is a relatively new country with no significant history or cultural contributions to the world, which, of course, is a false myth propagated by Russia” said Sheiko, the Ukrainian Institute director general. Sheiko says many Ukrainian artists and intellectuals are incorrectly identified as Russian. “That’s how an imperial culture like Russia acts to subdue neighboring countries,” he said. “\[They\] take the best of Ukrainian artists and make them known worldwide as Russian.”
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-
-
-Because of this precedent, the attacks on buildings that hold cultural significance appear systematic to many in Ukraine.
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-“Very often, it’s not just collateral damage, it’s intentional destruction by targeted weaponry, missiles, of Ukrainian cultural and religious and sacred sites” said Sheiko. The Ukrainian Institute has been collecting photographs and documenting sites of cultural importance across Ukraine, creating [before and after “postcards.”](https://ui.org.ua/en/postcards-from-ukraine/)
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-With Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent annexation decree, many museums in occupied areas of Kherson, Donetsk and Luhansk are also being forced to cede control of their collections to Russia. In Melitopol, for example, the mayor reported that Russian soldiers had overseen the looting of [2,300-year-old gold artifacts](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/world/europe/ukraine-scythia-gold-museum-russia.html). In Mariupol, Russian agents reportedly [stole paintings, icons](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/world/europe/ukraine-scythia-gold-museum-russia.html) and sculptures from a local museum.
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-Memorials, like the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center outside of Kyiv and the Drobytsky Yar Holocaust Memorial near Kharkiv, commemorate lives lost in two massacres during the Holocaust by German forces in Ukraine, are also vulnerable. Both Babyn Yar and Drobytsky Yar were damaged by Russian airstrikes.
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-Even online, attacks on Ukrainian heritage appear widespread. Back in March, Toronto-based Ukrainian ethnomusicologist and musician Marichka Marczyk realized [the web archive](https://folk-ukraine.com/) she had spent a year building, with the help of Ukraine-based web-developers, no longer had music available when it should have contained hundreds of Ukrainian folk songs. Musicology teachers, who use the website as a resource for in class tests and exams, alerted her to the issue. The Ukrainian web-developers believe that Russian hackers tried to destroy the site. They have reuploaded the songs around 20 times, said Marczyk, but attacks seem persistent.
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-“You’re trying to destroy this website of 500 songs, and it’s very sad because it was a very good resource, but I will try to do it again,” Marczyk said. “You can’t stop it, you can’t stop me, you can’t stop other people to share it as much as we can.”
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-“It’s not about shooting people only, it’s also about trying to destroy all our connections to our culture, our traditions, our ancestors.”
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-
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-Some of the grassroots efforts to record the damage demand deep technical knowledge and are supported by Ukraine’s robust tech industry. IT exports brought in [$6.8 billion](https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraines-booming-tech-outsourcing-sector-at-risk-after-russian-invasion-11645749755) to the country in 2021, and tech accounted for [4% of the country’s GDP](https://open4business.com.ua/en/share-of-it-industry-of-ukrainian-economy-is-4-of-gdp-economy-minister/) in the same year. Vitalii Lopushanskyi, head of a mapping project called [UADamage](https://uadamage.info/), has been working in software development and artificial intelligence for years. When the war started he had just founded his own company, NeuroMarket, specializing in providing custom neural networks – algorithms that mimic the human brain, and enable a computer [to learn to recognize patterns](https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/neural-networks).
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-“We realized that we should use our expertise somehow to help our country, help our government,” he said. “There was a need to analyze all the destruction because \[...\] months after the war started, destruction was horrible everywhere.”
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-His team and over 20 contributors from the IT community developed a neural network algorithm that can analyze the extent of the damage done to a building using satellite and drone imagery. This can be turned into a map layer that can help assess damage along with the steps needed towards rebuilding.
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-#### Building Damage Across Mariupol
-
-- Unclassified
-- No detected damage
-- Minimal damage
-- Major damage
-- Destroyed
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-Note: Data processed through April 29, 2022. Buildings labeled unclassified when the algorithm is unable to identify the type of damage.
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-Sources: UADamage, Maxar Technologies
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-“Having good data, our neural network can run very fast and efficiently,” Lopushanskyi said. “For example Mariupol is 150 square kilometers, this area we can run in 24 hours. This is very fast and repeatable. But if people were to do this, it would take three months and five people, so this is a great acceleration.”
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-Lopushanskyi and his team have so far processed 47 cities and towns, and are aiming at having all of Ukraine processed by the end of winter.
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-“It’s not only a question of killing as many Ukrainians as possible,” said Emily Channell-Justice, anthropologist and director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at Harvard University. “It’s about destroying a record of Ukrainian identity and Ukrainian language.”
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-Numerous Ukrainian villages and towns have their own museum of local lore, places that store artifacts of the region and pay tribute to its well-known artists, intellectuals and historical figures. Some date back to the 19th century or earlier, built during Russian imperial control.
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-“The regional museum is a kind of Soviet legacy,” Channell-Justice said. “It’s this idea of creating an alternative identity that is not a national identity, because that would be too threatening for the Soviet identity, but it’s about this saying ‘we accept a certain amount of diversity within the Soviet Union, friendship of the people. And we’re going to recognize this identity but also make sure that nobody does anything too dangerous with it.’”
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-In Ivankiv, a town located about 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Kyiv, the museum of local lore, a rectangular building painted in a bright shade of honey, used to sit on Shevchenko Street, near the shore of the Teteriv River. It opened in 1981 as home to multiple artifacts and regional symbols. In 2005, head of culture of the Ivankiv Council, Nadiya Biryuk, helped create an exhibit of 14 paintings by Maria Prymachenko, a well-known local folk artist.
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-Prymachenko was a prominent painter whose work was influenced by Ukrainian folklore and motifs. She was awarded the People’s Artist of Ukraine title in 1988. In addition to Prymachenko’s works, the Ivankiv museum’s collections included works from other Ukrainian folk artists like Hanna Veres and her daughter, Valentina.
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-When Revenko, the Kyiv-based architect, visited the Ivankiv site to take the thousands of photographs necessary to develop this 3D model, the effects of the occupation were apparent.
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-
-
-The Russian invasion of Ukraine is ongoing, and so are bombings and airstrikes on cities, with critical civilian infrastructures such as power plants targeted. At the same time, many reflect on what the invasion means for the future of Ukraine’s cities, people and culture.
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-At an Architecture Foundation event in London, in October, professors from the Kharkiv School of Architecture joined architects from Beirut, Belfast and Sarajevo, who reflected on the impacts that conflicts in the 20th and 21st centuries had on their cities, and about the challenges that the reconstruction of Ukrainian cities will present.
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-The Kharkiv School of Architecture relocated to the western city of Lviv early in the war. “Our mission on the frontline is to stay in Ukraine and continue our work educating this future generation of architects responsible for the future building of Ukrainian cities,” said Daria Ozhyhanova, one of the professors from the Kharkiv School of Architecture who spoke at the event.
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-“Educating this new type of architect becomes crucial to Ukraine,” she continued. “As not only the question of what exactly to reconstruct or rebuild is important, but how to organize these processes, taking into account different actors in a society that is traumatized.”
-
-Hiba Bou Akar, an architect, planner and assistant professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, outlined the common themes facing many in her hometown in Beirut, as well as in Ukraine, as the invasion and destruction of so many sites and buildings changes the country’s landscape.
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-“What do you reconstruct?” she asked the audience. “Which and whose memory do you reconstruct? What are you choosing to erase? Which vision is implemented? Whose vision is implemented?”
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diff --git a/00.03 News/How a Chinese American Gangster Transformed Money Laundering for Drug Cartels.md b/00.03 News/How a Chinese American Gangster Transformed Money Laundering for Drug Cartels.md
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-# How a Chinese American Gangster Transformed Money Laundering for Drug Cartels
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-ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive [our biggest stories](https://www.propublica.org/newsletters/the-big-story?source=www.propublica.org&placement=top-note®ion=national) as soon as they’re published.
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-This is part one of an investigation into a revolutionary money laundering system involving Chinese organized crime, Latin American drug cartels and Chinese officials, and how one major figure in the scheme managed to meet former President Donald Trump. Read part two: “[The Globetrotting Con Man and Suspected Spy Who Met With President Trump](https://www.propublica.org/article/liu-tao-trump-meeting-china-investigation).”
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-In 2017, Drug Enforcement Administration agents following the money from cocaine deals in Memphis, Tennessee, identified a mysterious figure in Mexico entrusted by drug lords with their millions: a Chinese American gangster named Xizhi Li.
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-As the agents tracked Li’s activity across the Americas and Asia, they realized he wasn’t just another money launderer. He was a pioneer. Operating with the acumen of a financier and the tradecraft of a spy, he had helped devise an innovative system that revolutionized the drug underworld and fortified the cartels.
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-Li hit on a better way to address a problem that has long bedeviled the world’s drug lords: how to turn the mountains of grimy twenties and hundreds amassed on U.S. streets into legitimate fortunes they can spend on yachts, mansions, weapons, technology and bribes to police and politicians.
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-For years, the Mexican cartels that supply the U.S. market with cocaine, heroin and fentanyl smuggled truckloads of bulk cash to Mexico, where they [used banks](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hsbc-probe/hsbc-to-pay-1-9-billion-u-s-fine-in-money-laundering-case-idUSBRE8BA05M20121211) and exchange houses to move the money into the financial system. And they also hired middlemen — often Colombian or [Lebanese](https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/manhattan-us-attorney-announces-102-million-settlement-civil-forfeiture-and-money) specialists who charged as much as 18 cents on the dollar — to launder their billions.
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-Those methods were costly, took weeks or even months to complete and exposed the stockpiled cash to risks — damage, robbery, confiscation.
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-Enter Li. About six years ago, federal antidrug agents in Chicago saw early signs of what would become a tectonic change. They trailed cartel operatives transporting drug cash to a new destination: Chinatown, an immigrant enclave in the flatlands about 2 miles south of the city’s rampart of lakefront skyscrapers.
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-Agents on stakeout watched as cartel operatives delivered suitcases full of cash to Chinese couriers directed by Li. Furtive exchanges took place in motels and parking lots. The couriers didn’t have criminal records or carry guns; they were students, waiters, drivers. Neither side spoke much English, so they used a prearranged signal: a photo of a serial number on a dollar bill.
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-After the handoff, the couriers alerted their Chinese bosses in Mexico, who quickly sent pesos to the bank accounts or safe houses of Mexican drug lords. Li then executed a chain of transactions through China, the United States and Latin America to launder the dollars. His powerful international connections made his service cheap, fast and efficient; he even guaranteed free replacement of cartel cash lost in transit. Li and his fellow Chinese money launderers married market forces: drug lords wanting to get rid of dollars and a Chinese elite desperate to acquire dollars. The new model blew away the competition.
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-“At no time in the history of organized crime is there an example where a revenue stream has been taken over like this, and without a shot being fired,” said retired DEA agent Thomas Cindric, a veteran of the elite Special Operations Division. “This has enriched the Mexican cartels beyond their wildest dreams.”
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-As they investigated Li’s tangled financial dealings, U.S. agents came across evidence indicating that his money laundering schemes involved Chinese government officials and the Communist Party elite. China’s omnipresent security forces tightly control and monitor its state-run economy. Yet Li and others moved tens of millions of dollars among Chinese banks and companies with seeming impunity, according to court documents and national security officials. The criminal rings exploited a landscape in which more than $3.8 trillion of capital has left China since 2006, making the country the world’s top “exporter of hot money,” said [John Cassara, a former U.S. Treasury Department investigator](https://ag-pssg-sharedservices-ex.objectstore.gov.bc.ca/ag-pssg-cc-exh-prod-bkt-ex/341%20-%20002%20J.%20Cassara%20-%20Final%20Statement%20to%20the%20Cullen%20Commission.pdf), in testimony to a Canadian commission of inquiry.
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-Adm. Craig Faller, a senior U.S. military leader, told Congress last year that Chinese launderers had emerged as the “[No. 1 underwriter](https://www.southcom.mil/Media/Special-Coverage/SOUTHCOMs-2021-Posture-Statement-to-Congress/)” of drug trafficking in the Western Hemisphere. The Chinese government is “at least tacitly supporting” the laundering activity, testified Faller, who led the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees military activity in Latin America.
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-In an interview with ProPublica, the now-retired Faller elaborated on his little-noticed testimony. He said China has “the world’s largest and most sophisticated state security apparatus. So there’s no doubt that they have the ability to stop things if they want to. They don’t have any desire to stop this. There’s a lot of theories as to why they don’t. But it is certainly aided and abetted by the attitude and way that the People’s Republic of China views the globe.”
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-Some U.S. officials go further, arguing that Chinese authorities have decided as a matter of policy to foster the drug trade in the Americas in order to destabilize the region and spread corruption, addiction and death here.
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-“We suspected a Chinese ideological and strategic motivation behind the drug and money activity,” said former senior FBI official Frank Montoya Jr., who served as a top counterintelligence official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “To fan the flames of hate and division. The Chinese have seen the advantages of the drug trade. If fentanyl helps them and hurts this country, why not?”
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-More than half a dozen national security veterans interviewed by ProPublica expressed similar views, most of them speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive subject. But they acknowledged that the alleged state complicity is difficult to prove.
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-Beijing [rejects such accusations.](http://us.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/sgxw/202109/t20210903_9015585.htm) And the question of whether China actively supports money laundering and the flow of fentanyl and other drugs to the U.S. remains a matter of debate in the U.S. national security community.
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-“There is so much corruption today in mainland China it becomes hard to distinguish a policy or campaign from generalized criminality,” said an Asian American former intelligence official with long experience on Chinese crime and espionage.
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-The Chinese embassy in Washington did not respond to a detailed request for comment for this story.
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-The takeover of drug-related money laundering by Chinese organized crime has drawn global attention. In Australia, [authorities are investigating a Chinese syndicate](https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/police-probe-into-chinese-money-laundering-syndicate-headquartered-in-australia-20220608-p5as2t.html) that allegedly moved hundreds of millions of dollars around the world for clients, including a cousin of Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to news reports. (Xi’s cousin has not been charged with a crime, and the Chinese foreign ministry has dismissed reports about inquiries into his activities as “gossip.”)
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-Europol has warned that Chinese money laundering groups “present a growing threat to Europe.” The U.S. State Department estimates that $154 billion in illicit funds a year passes through China, calling it “of great concern.”
-
-“We used to have a regular dialogue with the Chinese specifically on things like money laundering, counternarcotics policies,” Assistant Secretary Todd Robinson, who leads the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, said in an interview. “And since that has stopped, it has not been clear, we’ve not really been able to get a handle on how much of this is criminal organizations and how much of it is criminal organizations connected to or suborning Chinese government officials.”
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-Xi has led a well-publicized crusade against corruption, [but it has been mainly a purge of rivals](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/xi-jinping-china-weakness-hubris-paranoia-threaten-future?utm_medium=newsletters&utm_source=twofa&utm_campaign=The%20Weakness%20of%20Xi%20Jinping&utm_content=20220909&utm_term=FA%20This%20Week%20-%20112017), according to U.S. national security officials and Chinese dissidents. In fact, they said, Chinese intelligence services have quietly expanded their ties with Chinese mafias, known as triads, for mutual benefit.
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-“There is no question there is interconnectivity between Chinese organized crime and the Chinese state,” said Montoya. “The party operates in organized crime-type fashion. There are parallels to Russia, where organized crime has been co-opted by the Russian government and Putin’s security services.”
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-The Li case led federal agents in an unexpected direction: an investigation of a possible Chinese covert operation to penetrate American politics. The DEA agents stumbled across Li’s enigmatic associate, an expatriate Chinese businessman named Tao Liu. After moving from Mexico to New York, he launched a [high-rolling quest for political influence](https://www.propublica.org/article/liu-tao-trump-meeting-china-investigation) that included at least two meetings with President Donald Trump.
-
-
-
-Xizhi Li’s associate, Tao Liu (right), met twice with President Donald Trump in 2018.
-
-Both the DEA and FBI pursued Liu, suspecting he had ties to Chinese spy agencies. They wanted to know how and why a wanted Chinese criminal had gained access to the president of the United States.
-
-Although authorities convicted Li and Liu of money laundering and other crimes, the political and diplomatic aspects of the groundbreaking investigations of them are still largely secret. Citing open investigations, the DEA declined to discuss the case or even the general issue of how Chinese organized crime launders profits for the cartels. The Justice Department and FBI declined requests for comment. Lawyers who represented Li rejected requests for interviews with them or their client.
-
-To explore the full dimensions of the case, ProPublica interviewed more than two dozen current and former national security officials, as well as lawyers and others involved. ProPublica granted some of them anonymity, either because they were not authorized to talk publicly or because of concerns about their security. ProPublica also reviewed court files, social media, governmental reports and other material. Many details — about the suspected role of Chinese officials, the hunt across the globe, the links to U.S. politics — are being reported for the first time.
-
-### The Aura of Juan Lee
-
-In 2008, Rigo Polanco met a cocaine trafficker who called himself Juan Lee. It was one of 17 aliases that Xizhi Li accumulated in a criminal career that was just getting started.
-
-Polanco, a California anti-drug agent, had spent weeks undercover stalking Li, who was looking for a high-volume supplier. But the guy was a ghost. He used multiple phones. He hid behind intermediaries. Finally, he agreed to meet Polanco at a Denny’s by the Pomona Freeway in the suburban sprawl of the San Gabriel Valley.
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-Credit: For ProPublica
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-On June 24, Polanco’s Los Angeles County task force deployed surveillance around the diner. Polanco introduced himself as Alfredo, a corrupt Customs and Border Protection officer with access to cocaine. He sat down with Li, Li’s 25-year-old Mexican American wife and her brother.
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-At 35, Li stood 5-foot-7 and weighed about 135 pounds. But he was imposing. He spoke fluent, Mexican-accented Spanish, wore a Rolex and emanated menace.
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-“The aura of Juan Lee among the people around him was, ‘Don’t cross this guy,’” Polanco recalled in an interview. “There was some sense of fear of him among his associates.”
-
-Li grew up in a unique subculture where crime spoke many languages and crossed borders with ease. The experience served him well.
-
-He was born in a rural area of Guangdong province in 1973. About 10 years later, the family migrated to Mexicali, a Mexican city on the California border that is home to a large Chinese community. Chinese restaurants fill La Chinesca, the Chinatown. In the early 20th century, an underground tunnel complex was a refuge from the desert heat — and a site for gambling and cross-border crime schemes.
-
-Li attended school and worked long shifts in a family restaurant. But one of his close relatives smuggled migrants and contraband into the United States, former investigators say. When Li was about 16, his family migrated to Southern California. He slid into crime in the 1990s and with help from relatives became an associate of the 14K triad, a Chinese criminal organization, according to law enforcement documents and former investigators.
-
-Li obtained U.S. citizenship and had four children with a Chinese-born woman. In 2005, he opened the Lucky City Restaurant in the suburb of Monterey Park in Los Angeles County. The restaurant quickly became a den of drug trafficking and human smuggling, according to an affidavit written by a DEA investigator and sources familiar with the case.
-
-By then, Li’s triad and family connections had helped him cultivate relationships with Chinese officials with diplomatic status in the United States, according to former investigators. He also recruited a corrupt U.S. border inspector to help with smuggling, according to law enforcement documents and former investigators.
-
-Li’s hectic life bridged the Latino and Asian communities. He had two children with his Mexican American wife, whose family had useful cartel connections, according to interviews and court documents.
-
-At the same time, Li maintained ties to his birthplace. Around 2007, he took Chinese relatives to Guangdong for the Qingming Festival, when families clean the tombs of their ancestors. Basking in the role of benevolent immigrant, he “funded the renovation of our village, transforming the muddy land into streets,” his sister wrote to a federal judge years later.
-
-Back in the smoggy San Gabriel Valley, his prolific criminal activity drew investigations by the DEA and FBI. But Polanco’s team of Los Angeles County officers didn’t know about those open cases when they went after him in 2008.
-
-During a second meeting at a seafood restaurant, Li told Polanco that he was smuggling 30-kilogram loads of cocaine through Mexico to Hong Kong, making $60,000 a kilogram. He also sent cocaine to Canada. And he had a sideline smuggling Chinese migrants through Cuba.
-
-
-
-Credit: For ProPublica
-
-This is no run-of-the-mill thug, Polanco thought. Mexico was violent. Cuba was a police state. Canada and Hong Kong were hotbeds of Chinese organized crime. You needed well-placed allies to navigate among those cultures and countries.
-
-“It all added up to this picture of a very shrewd and cautious and sophisticated operator,” Polanco said. “There was a lot of sophistication in what he was doing, even then.”
-
-After negotiations with the undercover agent, Li agreed to buy an initial 20 kilograms of cocaine. On July 14, he sent a young Asian man in a Mercedes to a supermarket parking lot to deliver $200,000. Polanco’s team captured the bagman and other accomplices. The bagman and Li’s brother-in-law pleaded guilty to drug trafficking offenses, while charges against the wife were dropped.
-
-But Li fled south across the border. He soon proved Polanco’s instincts correct.
-
-### Chinaloa
-
-In Mexico City, Li rebounded fast.
-
-Qiyun Chen was from his hometown and worked in her family’s retail business. Only in her early 20s, she became his romantic and criminal partner, according to court documents and former investigators. Her charm and intelligence impressed gangsters and cops alike. (Chen could not be reached for comment.)
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-Chen introduced Li to her own network in the Chinese Mexican community, including a formidable trafficker known as the Iron Lady. In her online communications, Chen called herself Chinaloa. The alias fused the words China and Sinaloa, the state that has spawned many drug lords. It baptized her as a player in a multilingual subculture that she and Li created. Their text messages combined Chinese and Spanish. Li used the online handles JL 007 and Organización Diplomática (Diplomatic Organization).
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-The couple divided their time among luxurious homes in Mexico City, Cancun and Guatemala, making good money smuggling drugs and migrants. But they saw a new opportunity in money laundering.
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-Credit: For ProPublica
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-In 2011, Li went to Guatemala City to buy a casino. Located in a Holiday Inn, it had a ’90s-era decor that didn’t exactly conjure images of James Bond in Monte Carlo.
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-Nonetheless, Li struck an all-inclusive deal with the owner. He bought his casino, his casino license — and his identity. The U.S. fugitive became a Guatemalan gambling entrepreneur, according to court documents.
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-Along the way, Li had developed a complementary racket: selling fraudulent documents. Li himself had five passports from three countries. The fake papers were professionally done. Li infiltrated corrupt Latin American bureaucracies that sell real passports, identity cards, even birth certificates. He also had a government-connected source for passports in Hong Kong. Li charged about $15,000 per document, according to interviews and court files.
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-The same year Li bought the casino, a cafe owner in Mexico City introduced him to a wealthy Chinese expatriate who wanted a Guatemalan passport. The new arrival was a portly, baggy-faced 35-year-old named Tao Liu. It proved a providential encounter.
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-Li took his client in a private helicopter to the southernmost Mexican state of Chiapas. They landed in the jungle and trudged across the border into Guatemala.
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-
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-Credit: For ProPublica
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-“Bodyguards with weapons and vehicles were waiting on the other side,” said Liu’s lawyer, Jonathan Simms. “They take them to Li’s mansion in Guatemala. Li leaves him there and goes to get the passports. Tao spent time in that mansion waiting with other Chinese clients for Li to bring back the documents. He got to know the other people there pretty well.”
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-While at the safe house, Liu met a senior Chinese military officer who also bought a fraudulent document from Li, Simms said. Years later, Liu identified the officer in a photo shown to him by U.S. agents.
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-Investigators say that episode contributed to evidence that Li provided fake papers, and other criminal services, to Chinese officials in Latin America, where China is an economic and diplomatic power. Foreign passports and multiple identities enable Chinese operatives overseas to engage in covert activity, launder money or take refuge from their government if accused of corruption.
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-The national security threat posed by Li’s passport racket later caused the DEA to bring in the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service to conduct its own investigation, which continues today.
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-After the Guatemala expedition, Liu and Li became friends. They gambled at the casino and took women to the Bahamas. Although Liu had access to money and power, he was also an admitted brazen lawbreaker. Sometimes his dubious immigration status forced him to enter Mexico by car or bus, and he bragged about bluffing or bribing border officers, according to court documents, his lawyer and law enforcement officials.
-
-The two men did not seem like kindred spirits. Li was thin; Liu was obese. Li was reserved; Liu was gregarious. It is hard to find photos of Li; Liu bombarded social media with scenes of his extravagant lifestyle.
-
-But they were both globetrotting outlaws. And Liu played a crucial early role in building Li’s empire, according to current and former law enforcement officials and other sources. A U.S. indictment later alleged: “TAO \[Liu\] worked with LI to begin money laundering in locations including Mexico and Guatemala.”
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-In later conversations recorded by the DEA, Liu described himself as an influential mentor who taught Li how to launder money, according to court documents and interviews. Liu’s lawyer argued that his client’s admissions were exaggerations. But the investigators tended to believe Liu’s account.
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-“The DEA thought that they were partners in the money laundering,” a former national security official said. “And they were definitely working closely together.”
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-Investigators believe Liu used his connections in China and the diaspora to recruit rich people who needed U.S. dollars. A sign of Liu’s access to that underworld: he had another associate in Hong Kong, known as “the queen of underground banking,” who provided black market money services to the Chinese elite, according to Chinese court documents and press reports.
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-Stocked with cash and guns, Li’s Guatemalan casino became a base of his emerging venture. He started bringing Chinese nationals to the casino: some of them politically connected, others corrupt officials, others expatriates, according to interviews and court documents. They mingled with Latin American drug traffickers, the second essential element in his scheme. The casino was a showcase to demonstrate to both sides that Li could deliver, court documents say.
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-The wealthy Chinese “had a need,” Simms said. “The cartels had a need. Li put it together.”
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-
-
-Credit: For ProPublica
-
-### Mirror Transactions
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-Many ethnic diasporas have developed informal systems for moving money and funneling cash — earned honestly or illegally — into the legitimate international economy.
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-For decades, underground banking systems served the elite of the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, especially after the totalitarian regime opened its command economy to global capitalism. Starting around 2013, Xi’s anti-corruption crusade pushed the elite to spirit more money overseas. A yearly limit of $50,000 on capital flight increased a demand for U.S. dollars.
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-“The underground banking system in China was pretty much self-sufficient just dealing with Chinese criminal organizations and the Chinese diaspora,” said John Tobon, the Homeland Security Investigations special agent in charge in Honolulu, [who has written on the topic](https://ipdefenseforum.com/2022/03/black-market-foreign-exchange/). “And it was then when all of these restrictions came in, when the CCP members could no longer count on doing it the easy way ... that the supply of dollars became an issue.”
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-Li and other enterprising criminals identified a seemingly limitless source of dollars: the Latin American drug trade. To amass the cash, Li offered the cartels unheard-of money laundering deals.
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-“With the Colombians, it had been an 18% to 13% commission,” said Cindric, the retired DEA agent. “The Chinese are doing it for 1 to 2% on average. And the speed at which they do it is unbelievable. The Chinese absorbed the risk. You know it will get paid.”
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-Li deployed dozens of couriers from Los Angeles to Atlanta. Just two couriers in Chicago picked up more than $10 million from cartel operatives in a seven-month period between 2016 and 2017, according to law enforcement documents.
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-“We saw the Chinese enter the market,” said Daniel Morro, a former senior HSI official in Chicago. “It was super-intriguing. We had never seen it before.”
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-If the couriers delivered, they collected a 1% fee. If not, they were on the hook with Li.
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-On March 11, 2016, Nebraska state troopers stopped a rental car on a desolate highway. They confiscated $340,000 and released the two couriers, who were driving from Chicago to Los Angeles. A courier called Li, who called a cartel representative in Mexico and sent a bank transfer to replace the lost load. The courier and his relatives rapidly reimbursed Li by depositing money in U.S. bank accounts, court documents say.
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-“He was a hard-ass,” said Michael Ciesliga, a former DEA investigator. “No nonsense. All business. Very strict, very hard even on his family.”
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-Li’s system generally worked like this: Cartel operatives in the United States would arrange a “contract” with him, often to launder about $350,000, a quantity of cash that fit into a suitcase.
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-Cartel transporters handed over the dollar loads to Li’s couriers, who sent Li or his lieutenants a photo confirming the handoff. Li then delivered the sums in Mexican pesos to drug lords from safe houses in Mexico stocked with that currency. The first stage, providing swift service to the cartels, was complete.
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-Li’s profits came from other players in the scheme: rich Chinese willing to lose money in order to obtain dollars outside China and Latin American import/export firms needing Chinese currency to do business in China.
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-Li’s couriers often drove loads of cash to New York or Los Angeles, which have large Chinese immigrant populations. Li “sold” the currency to wealthy Chinese clients or their expatriate relatives or representatives. As part of the deal, Li himself would sometimes turn the dollars into deposits in bank accounts or use front companies to issue cashier’s checks.
-
-But the Chinese clients often had their own options, such as small businesses that handled cash without questions. Another method was gambling at casinos, which readily turned cash into chips. Many clients bought homes or paid U.S. university tuition.
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-In testimony to a Canadian commission of inquiry in 2020, Cassara, the former investigator at the U.S. Treasury Department, described the frequency of laundering in the U.S. real estate sector.
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-“Almost 60% of purchases by international clients are made in cash,” Cassara said, citing a report by the National Association of Realtors. “Chinese buyers have been the top foreign buyers in the United States both in units and dollar volume of residential housing for six years straight. ... In the United States, there is little if any customer due diligence by real estate agents.”
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-The next step in Li’s system took place beyond the sight and reach of U.S. authorities. He directed his wealthy clients to transfer equivalent sums from their Chinese bank accounts to accounts he controlled in China. Known as “mirror transactions,” these transfers enabled Li to “sell” the same money again — this time, as Chinese currency to the Latin American exporters.
-
-How Xizhi Li Used “Mirror Transactions” to Launder Millions of Dollars Across the World
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-The transactions allowed Li to move millions among Mexico, the United States and China while evading law enforcement and charging steep commissions.
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-Credit: Graphic by Lucas Waldron, ProPublica
-
-There were variations on the system. Li sometimes washed funds through companies owned by confederates in the United States and Latin America who sold seafood and other goods to China. Taking advantage of the $80 billion in trade between Mexico and China, launderers also sent goods from China to Mexican front companies connected to drug lords. Those companies would sell the products for pesos, creating a legitimate paper trail for money initially earned from the sale of drugs.
-
-Li’s network used Chinese banks including the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and the Agricultural Bank of China, court documents say. Those state institutions were among the banks that moved millions around the world with little apparent scrutiny in this case and others, according to court documents and interviews. Prosecutors did not accuse any bankers of wrongdoing. But investigators suspect that some bankers looked the other way. (The banks did not respond to requests for comment.)
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-“They had to know it was illegal,” Ciesliga said. “Just the sheer amount of money, and the volume and consistency and frequency, there’s no legitimate businesses that are moving that kind of money. Any alert anti-money laundering investigator would have detected this kind of activity.”
-
-In other cases, authorities have sanctioned Chinese banks for offenses related to money laundering. In 2016, New York state regulators [fined the Agricultural Bank of China](https://www.dfs.ny.gov/reports_and_publications/press_releases/pr1611041) $215 million for anti-money laundering violations. A [Spanish court in 2020 convicted four Madrid executives](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-icbc-spain-investigation/fines-short-jail-terms-for-four-ex-icbc-spain-employees-in-laundering-case-idUSKBN23N2Q6) of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China of a brazen setup in which they received tens of millions of euros in cash day and night, and moved the funds illegally back to China. The Bank of China has paid fines and endured criminal penalties in [Italy](https://www.reuters.com/article/bankofchina-italy/bank-of-china-pays-600000-euros-to-close-italy-money-laundering-case-idUSL8N1G25RB) and [France](https://complianceconcourse.willkie.com/articles/news-alerts-2020-01-january-20200130-france-sanctions-bank-of-china-for-aml) for the alleged illegal repatriation of proceeds from tax evasion and customs fraud.
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-On the streets of the Americas, turf wars and rip-offs were rare among the money laundering crews. But for Li, reality intruded eventually.
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-In 2016, gunmen ambushed Li near his casino in Guatemala City, shredding his armored Range Rover with more than 20 rounds. He survived unscathed. The attackers got away. Li suspected rival Asian gangsters, according to former investigators and others familiar with the case.
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-He was deep in treacherous territory.
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-
-
-Credit: For ProPublica
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-### The Streets of Memphis
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-By 2017, Li’s empire had grown to span four continents. It operated below the radar, with startling impunity. A Memphis-based U.S. drug agent was about to change that.
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-Peter Maher was a sharp, voracious investigator who had only been with the DEA a few years, colleagues say. (Maher declined an interview request.) He teamed up with Ciesliga, a Tennessee state agent assigned to a federal task force. As they traced drugs on the streets of Memphis back to their source, they discovered that the Sinaloa cartel of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was supplying cocaine to a major Memphis drug crew. Markings on cocaine packets pointed at Marisela Flores-Torruco, now 52, a Mexican drug lord known as the Iron Lady.
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-Maher’s team learned that, because Flores had a Chinese grandparent, her organization was known as “Los Chinos,” or the Chinese. Based in Chiapas, she imported tons of cocaine from Colombia for the Sinaloa cartel, interviews and court documents say. (Flores could not be reached for comment.)
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-Soon, the agents identified a woman in Mexico who was one of the Iron Lady’s “principal coordinators of illicit money laundering operations,” court documents say.
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-It was Chen, Li’s paramour, using the handle Chinaloa. The DEA Special Operations Division, which specializes in international cases, began intercepting her communications, according to court documents and interviews. The agents figured out that Chen had introduced Li to Flores, who encouraged other traffickers to launder their money with his organization.
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-Chen’s communications led the DEA to Li, who was laundering for the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels. Tracking his U.S. couriers, agents picked off loads across the country.
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-In May 2017, agents arrested one of Li’s trusted money managers, a Brooklyn-based mail carrier and Chinese immigrant who had lived in Belize. He recorded about $2 million in illicit transactions in a ledger and sometimes received cash deliveries in his U.S. postal uniform, court documents say. The mail carrier pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder money and got a 60-month sentence.
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-
-
-Credit: For ProPublica
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-The Memphis agents toggled between leads in the U.S. and Mexico as the Iron Lady’s ferocity kept them on alert. When Flores ordered her enforcers to kidnap the family of a man who owed her money, the agents warned Mexican counterparts. Later, she threatened to kill rivals with a bombing at a racetrack, Ciesliga said. DEA agents hurriedly obtained an Interpol warrant, and police arrested Flores in Colombia in July 2017.
-
-Later that month, the agents captured Chen during a visit to Los Angeles. They seized five phones from her, along with airline tickets to visit accomplices in Portland, Oregon, who oversaw more than 251 Chinese bank accounts, according to interviews and court documents.
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-The next morning, Maher and Ciesliga drove to the Santa Monica Pier. Sitting in their rental car by the Pacific, they scoured Chen’s phones. They hurriedly took screenshots, worried that an accomplice could remotely erase the contents at any moment.
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-Looking at Chen’s smartphones, the agents were able for the first time to read the suspects’ most sensitive conversations on WeChat, an application for messaging and commerce. WeChat is ubiquitous in China and the Chinese diaspora and impenetrable to U.S. law enforcement. Because it uses a form of partial encryption allowing the company access to content, WeChat is closely monitored by the Chinese state, according to U.S. national security veterans.
-
-U.S. officials view the brazen use of WeChat for money laundering as another suggestive piece of evidence that authorities in Beijing know what is going on.
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-“It is all happening on WeChat,” Cindric said. “The Chinese government is clearly aware of it. The launderers are not concealing themselves on WeChat.”
-
-Chen’s arrest was a devastating blow to Li. Agents mapped out the structure of his organization and sifted through a global labyrinth of transactions.
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-“It made us realize how big Li really was,” Ciesliga said. “He was definitely one of the first. We were talking to 40 different agents around the country and around the world, and for them it was a new thing what he was doing.”
-
-### The Fall of the Boss
-
-The investigation gathered momentum as the DEA launched Project Sleeping Giant, a campaign against [China-connected drug activity](https://www.reuters.com/article/mexico-china-cartels-idLTAL8N2I34RV).
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-The agents dug through phone data and old cases to find Li’s ties to the 14K triad. That all-important discovery helped explain his “sprawling spider web of connections” in Asia and the Americas, Ciesliga said.
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-The 14K connection also pointed at the Chinese power structure. The triad’s former boss in Macao, Wan Kuok Koi, allegedly mixes crime, business and politics to advance China’s interests overseas, according to public allegations by the U.S. government. He is an influential member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference of the Communist Party, according to [Treasury Department anti-corruption sanctions](https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm1206) filed in 2020. A former senior State Department official, David Asher, described him as “an ambassador of organized crime.”
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-Wan and a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson have denied the U.S. allegations.
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-
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-Credit: For ProPublica
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-The alleged state-underworld alliance surfaces elsewhere. In [Hong Kong](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinas-backers-and-triad-gangs-have-history-of-common-foes-hong-kong-protesters-fear-they-are-next/2019/07/23/41445b88-ac68-11e9-9411-a608f9d0c2d3_story.html) and [Taiwan](https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/18/nice-democracy-youve-got-there-be-a-shame-if-something-happened-to-it/), triads attack political rivals of Beijing. [Canadian national security chiefs](https://globalnews.ca/news/8922745/cullen-commission-findings-report-bc-money-laundering-inquiry/) have [warned for years about an alliance of Chinese spies](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/china-set-up-crime-web-in-canada-report-says/article4163320/), triads and oligarchs. U.S. gangsters assist the Communist Party’s overseas intelligence and influence arm, the United Front, according to national security experts.
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-The party “uses organized crime-linked money laundering networks to get money to United Front actors and to help them fund their activities,” said Matthew Pottinger, who served as U.S. deputy national security adviser from 2019 to 2021. In return, triads gain “a sense of political security,” he said.
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-In the Li case, agents learned that clients for his money-moving services included powerful figures in the party, the Chinese government and the diaspora, according to Ciesliga and other former law enforcement officials and people familiar with the case. But it was hard to gather evidence because, as prosecutors said in a court filing, “United States law enforcement rarely, if ever, obtains assistance from Chinese officials in criminal investigations.”
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-Chinese authorities permit criminals like Li to operate because dark money benefits the elite, strengthens China’s economy and weakens the West, U.S. national security officials say.
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-“There is a strategy; it’s not individuals acting on their own,” Tobon, the Honolulu HSI chief, said. “The amount of money coming out of China via the underground banking system is so significant that it would be virtually impossible for a government that has as much control of their people as the government of China to not be aware of how it's happening.”
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-Some critics of Beijing say that analysis applies to another threat: fentanyl. China is the top producer of the lethal drug that has killed tens of thousands of Americans. Although pressure by the Trump administration caused Beijing to reduce the direct flow of the drug to the U.S. in 2019, China’s pharmaceutical sector still sells fentanyl precursors and analogues that reach Mexico, where cartels produce opioids — and work with Chinese money launderers.
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-In late 2019, Li finally fell. Making him think he would meet an associate, the DEA lured him to Merida, Mexico. Mexican federal police captured him and delivered him to DEA agents at the Houston airport, court documents say. He spent four and a half hours answering questions in English, admitting to “financial transactions involving ‘bad money,’” prosecution documents say.
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-Prosecutors charged him with leading a conspiracy that washed at least $30 million, a number backed by direct evidence. The full amount was likely in the hundreds of millions, according to law enforcement documents and interviews.
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-
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-Xizhi Li Credit: Alexandria (Virginia) Sheriff’s Office
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-Li pleaded guilty and received a 15-year sentence, according to court records. Chen and half a dozen others also pleaded guilty and went to prison. Colombia extradited Flores, who pleaded guilty and got 16 years.
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-Li’s high-powered connections put him at risk. His old friend Liu feared for his safety, Simms said, because Li “was involved in Chinese organized crime, in Mexican money laundering, in activity in China that goes to higher levels of the power structure.”
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-And in this case, the fall of the boss was not the end of the story.
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-Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.
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-Got a story we should hear? Are you down to be a background source on a story about your community, your schools or your workplace? Get in touch.
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-[Expand](https://www.propublica.org/article/china-cartels-xizhi-li-money-laundering#)
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-[Jeff Kao](https://www.propublica.org/people/jeff-kao) and [Cezary Podkul](https://www.propublica.org/people/cezary-podkul) contributed reporting.
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-# How a billionaires boys’ club came to dominate the public square
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-Placeholder while article actions load
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-The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, attacked a publication owned by the world’s third-richest man, Jeff Bezos, last month for reprinting a column published by the world’s 13th-richest man, Mike Bloomberg.
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-The Bloomberg opinion article, posted by The Washington Post, asked whether Musk’s recent investment in Twitter would endanger freedom of speech. “WaPo always good for a laugh,” Musk [wrote](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1511418378057142275) in a tweet, with smiling and crying emoji.
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-The jab underscored an unusual and consequential feature of the nation’s new digital public square: Technological change and the fortunes it created have given a vanishingly small club of massively wealthy individuals the ability to play arbiter, moderator and bankroller of not only the information that feeds the nation’s discourse but also the architecture that undergirds it.
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-Musk’s agreement Monday to [purchase Twitter](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/25/twitter-elon-musk-deal/?itid=lk_inline_manual_8) for $44 billion — a number slightly larger than the [gross domestic product](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?most_recent_value_desc=false) of Jordan — will allow him to follow through on his stated desire to loosen restrictions on the content that crosses the fourth-largest social media network in the United States. He joins Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, No. 15 on the [Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest](https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#1423ebe83d78), who has autonomy over the algorithms and moderation policies of the nation’s top three social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram and Facebook Messenger.
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-Twitter accepted a $44 billion takeover offer from Elon Musk on April 25. Why did he want to buy the social media giant? (Video: Hadley Green, Julie Yoon/The Washington Post)
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-The information that courses over these networks is increasingly produced by publications controlled by fellow billionaires and other wealthy dynasties, who have filled the void of the collapsing profit-making journalism market with varying combinations of self-interest and altruism. It is a situation that has alarmed policy experts at both ends of the increasingly vicious ideological and partisan divides.
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-“This is almost becoming like junior high school for billionaires,” Brookings Institution scholar Darrell M. West said of the new information magnates. “The issue is we are now very dependent on the personal whims of rich people, and there are very few checks and balances on them. They could lead us in a liberal, conservative or libertarian direction, and there is very little we can do about that.”
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-Nearly all of these executives, including Musk, claim benevolent motivations, and many, like Bezos who owns The Post, have established firewalls of editorial independence that protect against their direct influence on articles such as this one. But the power to fund, shape and hire leaders that decide what is shared and what is covered has nonetheless become the subject of its own political conflict. Partisans find themselves celebrating the autonomy of the rich men who they see as serving their interests, while simultaneously objecting to the unchecked power of those who don’t.
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-Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) — who has for months railed against the dangers of what he has called “overlords in Silicon Valley” censoring conservative news and views — called Musk’s Twitter purchase this week “without exaggeration the most important development for free speech in decades.” Liberal activists and [even some Twitter employees](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/25/twitter-employees-musk/?itid=lk_inline_manual_16), meanwhile, reacted with fears that more disinformation and hate speech, which is largely protected under federal law, might soon be coursing at greater volume through the nation’s intellectual bloodstream.
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-“I don’t think it’s a great commentary on the state of affairs that we are relying on a billionaire oligarch to save free speech online,” said Jon Schweppe, the policy director of the American Principles Project, a conservative think tank pushing for less moderation of conservative views on social networks. “It’s unfortunate that we need to have a hero. But we do.”
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-Musk has not been specific about what he plans to do with Twitter, although he has dropped a steady stream of hints, including his objection to private “censorship that goes far beyond the law.” He has suggested new monetization strategies and less reliance on advertising, while sharing memes that irreverently describe Twitter’s “left wing bias” and dismisses as extreme the views of “woke” progressives.
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-“The far left hates everyone, including themselves!” he [tweeted Friday](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1520017094007476224). “But I’m no fan of the far right either. Let’s have less hate and more love.”
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-Ironically, his moves have been endorsed by former Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey (No. 396 in the Forbes list) — one of the “overlords” who Cruz attacked — who has argued that freeing the company from the burdens of a public company will allow it to better serve as a public utility.
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-“Taking it back from Wall Street is the correct first step,” he tweeted Monday. “I trust \[Musk’s\] mission to extend the light of consciousness.”
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-Activists on the left, who have a different vision of public square moderation, have scoffed at the notion that any individual — White men who dwell in bubbles of limitless luxury, no less — should be able to filter information for the country’s voters.
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-“Even if Elon Musk was the smartest person on earth, had the best heart, had been touched by God, I wouldn’t want him to have that much power,” said Robert McChesney, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has advocated against concentration in media ownership. “It is antithetical to democratic political theory.”
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-Other billionaires, in the meantime, have been branching out to fund broader parts of the nation’s democratic process, moving beyond even their outsize role as donors to political campaigns and organizations. Zuckerberg spent $419.5 million to fund election administrators during the 2020 elections, sparking outrage among Republicans and cheers among Democrats. “I agree with those who say that government should have provided these funds, not private citizens,” Zuckerberg said in a statement at the time.
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-Many of his billionaire peers have been expanding investments into journalism and punditry, aiming in many cases to shape voter understanding of their place in the world. Laurene Powell Jobs (No. 111) bought a majority stake in the Atlantic in 2017. Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff (No. 309) bought Time magazine in 2018.
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-Microsoft founder Bill Gates (No. 4) has spent tens of millions of dollars through his foundation to directly fund journalism at outlets such as NPR that cover issues he cares about, such as health and the environment. Others have funded more narrow publishing efforts. The wealthy Chinese exile Guo Wengui has worked on [media ventures](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/17/guo-wengui-disinformation-steve-bannon/?itid=lk_inline_manual_34) with Stephen K. Bannon, who was an adviser to President Donald Trump.
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-But these are merely the most recent forays by the uber-wealthy into traditional media ownership. Rupert Murdoch (No. 85) made his first purchase in the United States in 1976 when he bought the New York Post before launching Fox News and expanding to the Wall Street Journal, while Bloomberg created Bloomberg LP in 1981.
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-Both Murdoch and Bloomberg have invested heavily in opinion-driving journalism, through Fox News and Bloomberg Opinion, respectively. They follow in the tradition that emerged in the last century when wealthy families and scions, such as William Randolph Hearst and the Sulzberger family that owns the New York Times, came to dominate the largest newsgathering organizations.
-
-The role of social media networks, which have [largely replaced print newspapers](https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/news-platform-fact-sheet/) as the way most Americans get their information, has complicated the issue, in part because so few networks are so dominant. A 2019 poll [by the Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2019/10/02/americans-are-wary-of-the-role-social-media-sites-play-in-delivering-the-news/) found 62 percent of Americans felt that social media companies have “too much control over the news people see.”
-
-Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political scientist who has studied misinformation and its effect on democracy, said social media allows Zuckerberg and Musk to have “greater influence over the flow of information than has been possible in human history.”
-
-Of particular concern to Nyhan is the lack of transparency over the way these platforms control the information on them. Democrats and Republicans have recently expressed interest in increased antitrust enforcement, as well as new legal restrictions that condition the immunity social networks enjoy from civil lawsuits on their agreement to properly moderate debate. There are, naturally, deep divisions about what that moderation should look like.
-
-In the European Union, lawmakers have been pushing forward laws that require social networks to crack down on speech illegal in Europe that is generally protected by the U.S. Constitution. The proposed laws also require algorithmic transparency and give consumers more control how their own information is used.
-
-“The best way to articulate this is: A recalibration between these big tech companies and the oligarchs and the American people is warranted,” said Kara Frederick, the director of tech policy at the Heritage Foundation, who has been critical of the European approach but supports more regulation in the United States. “We can strip immunity from tech companies if they censor political or other views protected by the constitution.”
-
-Ben Wizner, the director of the ACLU’s speech, privacy and technology project, said the key challenge presented by individual control social media and journalism is, at root, about scale.
-
-“We are talking about a small handful of people who now exercise extraordinary control over the boundaries of our discourse,” Wizner said. “The importance for media and journalism is that there be a diverse ecosystem that represents the interests of many, not just of the few.”
-
-Of course, billionaires with an ax to grind don’t need media ownership to change the information landscape. PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel (No. 552), who has given millions to GOP candidates this cycle, famously ran the gossip site Gawker out of business by secretly funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the site after it had published a recording of Hogan having sex with a friend’s estranged wife.
-
-For his part, Musk appears to be enjoying the public focus on his enormous new power. He recently tweeted an insult directed at fellow billionaire Gates, in apparent retaliation for Gates having shorted Tesla’s stock. Musk posted a photo of Gates wearing a blue polo shirt stretched across his stomach next to an emoji of a pregnant man, and captioned the images with a crass observation about Gates’s girth.
-
-When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) posted a tweet Friday criticizing when “some billionaire with an ego problem unilaterally controls a massive communication platform and skews it,” Musk responded by suggesting the congresswoman had a romantic interest in him.
-
-“Stop hitting on me, I’m really shy,” he tweeted.
-
-Ocasio-Cortez replied, “I was talking about Zuckerberg but ok.”
-
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-# How an Ivy League School Turned Against a Student
-
-In the winter of her sophomore year of high school, Mackenzie Morrison sat in her bedroom closet and began a new diary. Using her phone to light the pages, she listed the “pros of telling”: “no more physical/emotional attacks,” “I get out of this dangerous house,” “the truth is finally out, I don’t have to lie or cover things up.” Under “cons of telling,” she wrote, “damaging mom’s life,” “could go into foster care,” “basically I would probably lose everything.” After she finished, she loosened the screws of a vent panel on the wall outside her closet and slipped the notebook behind it.
-
-Mackenzie went to Whitfield, a private prep school in St. Louis, where the school’s wellness director, Ginny Fendell, called her the “queen of compartmentalization.” She got A’s, served in student government, played varsity soccer, managed the field-hockey team, and volunteered for the Special Olympics. She was five feet ten with long curly blond hair—“the picture of Americana,” as one friend described her. Mackenzie’s parents had separated when she was six, and Mackenzie lived with her mother, Carrie Morrison, the director of breast imaging and mammography at St. Luke’s Hospital, in Chesterfield, a wealthy suburb of St. Louis. They liked to imagine themselves as the Gilmore Girls: the single mother and her precocious daughter, so close they were nearly fused. But Mackenzie’s friends and teachers noticed that in her mother’s presence Mackenzie physically recoiled. Lisa Smith, the mother of one of Mackenzie’s best friends at Whitfield, said that her daughter once asked why Mackenzie was always injured: “My daughter kind of looked at me funny, and I looked back at her and said, ‘What are you trying to say?’ ”
-
-When Fendell asked Mackenzie about her bruises, Mackenzie offered vague comments about being clumsy. Fendell told her that, if she couldn’t talk about why she was injured, she should write it down. “I don’t ever want to cause her any pain or anything, which is why I’ll probably end up burning this,” Mackenzie wrote in the journal. “I wish that I had the courage to tell someone. Or even to write everything down in here. Because if I’m being honest, there are things that I’m too ashamed to even speak of.”
-
-Mackenzie began documenting her life with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, Henry Lovelace, Jr., a personal trainer who had won the Missouri Strongest Man Championship in his weight group. Two days after starting the journal, in March, 2014, she wrote an entry about a head injury she’d suffered three months earlier. She had been hospitalized for four days at St. Luke’s, where her mother worked. “Mom heard her tumble, thought maybe tripped going up the stairs,” the medical records said. Mackenzie told the hospital staff that she didn’t remember what had happened. A consulting physician said that Mackenzie “most likely fell down the steps at home and hit her head.” He observed, “She appears scared.”
-
-In the months since her head injury, Mackenzie had regained memories from the weekend before her fall, and she recalled that she and her mom had been fighting about Lovelace. “Did she actually have something to do with it? God, I don’t know,” she wrote. Eventually, the theory became impossible to avoid. “If I look back at all the signs, at the days leading up to and proceeding my ‘accident,’ ” she wrote, “the signs all seem to point in the same direction. The one that I feared most.” She didn’t elaborate on the thought, because, she added, “I’m literally getting nauseous thinking about it.”
-
-\[*Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. [Subscribe today »](https://subscribe.newyorker.com/subscribe/splits/newyorker/NYR_Generic?source=HCL_NYR_IN_CONTENT_SUBSCRIBE_0_ZZ)*\]
-
-Her mother was a respected figure in the St. Louis medical community, and, when Mackenzie was injured, she saw doctors affiliated with her hospital. “She is brilliant and can charm anyone,” Mackenzie wrote. “She’s pretty much invincible.” Mackenzie felt certain that, if she shared details about her mom or Lovelace, her mother would convince people that she was lying, or crazy. “She is just so amazing at getting people to think, feel, and do what she wants,” she wrote. “*She lies better than I can tell the truth.*”
-
-A month after beginning the journal, Mackenzie came to school with a black eye. She’d tried to cover it up with concealer, but her teachers noticed, and Fendell pulled Mackenzie out of her Spanish class. “I went with the story my mom told me to tell, which is that I was playing with my dogs in the living room and I tripped and fell into a table,” she wrote in her journal. Fendell did not accept the explanation, and she later told Mackenzie that she was legally obligated to notify Missouri’s Department of Social Services.
-
-Mackenzie stayed at school late that night, rehearsing for a musical. When she got home, a caseworker was at her house, chatting with her mother. “They were talking about work and school and whatever else and having a great time just like they were old friends,” Mackenzie wrote. White, upper middle class, and in a position of power, Mackenzie’s mother was demographically dissimilar to most parents who come to the agency’s attention. Interviewed in her mother’s presence, Mackenzie repeated the story about falling into a table. Before leaving, the caseworker, who was white, explained that “she didn’t really need anything else from us and she was sorry to bother us, but was glad everything worked out,” Mackenzie wrote.
-
-After the caseworker’s visit, Mackenzie was “on high alert, trying not to set anyone or anything off,” she wrote in her diary. During conversations with her mother in the kitchen, she made sure “to keep the kitchen island in between us,” while also “bracing for impact.” She thought about running away, but she didn’t have anywhere to go. She had become estranged from her father, a former soap-opera actor, against whom her mother had filed an order of protection, alleging that he posed a physical threat to Mackenzie; a guardian ad litem had been appointed to protect Mackenzie’s interests during the custody proceedings, which were prolonged and bitter. “Thinking about existing in a world where I had no parents just couldn’t be a possibility in my mind,” she told me.
-
-After Lovelace bought Morrison a gun for her birthday, Mackenzie wrote, “If I’m being perfectly honest, I’m terrified.” She described an incident, a year earlier, when she had fallen asleep watching a movie in her mom’s bed and woke up to Lovelace on top of her, “feeling my boobs, running his hand around my inner thighs & exploring other places.” She got out from under him, ran into her own room, and eventually called her mother, who wasn’t home, and related what had happened. “She just bursts out laughing,” Mackenzie wrote. Her mother told her that it was an accident, saying, “I’m flattered that he got me mixed up with my 15-year-old daughter.” In the year since the episode, Mackenzie said, Lovelace had continued to sexually assault her. She felt as if her mother were both sanctioning his abuse—“offering me up to him on a silver platter,” as she later described it—and punishing her for attracting Lovelace’s attention. “I still just don’t understand why she won’t protect me,” Mackenzie wrote. “Did I do something wrong to make her not want to?”
-
-In her journal, Mackenzie described her mother as having two faces, one manipulative and aggressive, the other nurturing and kind. She wondered if the kind face was a type of “ego defense mechanism” that her mother would use in an attempt to “ ‘undo’ the wrong she has most recently done.” Sometimes, in the journal, Mackenzie used the word “family” in quotes. “Family is not the people you are related to by blood,” she wrote. “They are the people that support you, look out for you, & love you unconditionally.” She went on, “By those standards, the standards of *real* family, not one person I’m related to by blood meets those requirements or even comes close.”
-
-Still, she was sometimes hopeful that the kind face her mother presented could actually be real. “I know that good part is still there somewhere,” she wrote. “There just might be a small part left that loves me in some way, at least I hope.”
-
-In September, 2014, early in her junior year, Mackenzie drove to school and looked for her history teacher, who had become one of the few people in whom she felt comfortable confiding. “She showed up at my classroom door with a bloodied and battered face and then fainted,” the teacher wrote. An ambulance was called, and Mackenzie was taken to Mercy Hospital, in St. Louis, and admitted into the pediatric intensive-care unit. Sherry McLain, a nurse assigned to her, told me, “She had two black eyes, and her hair was full of blood. She had bruises all over her body in different stages of healing—an obvious sign of child abuse.”
-
-Within a half hour, police officers arrived at the hospital. They learned that, the previous day, the history teacher had called Missouri’s Child Abuse and Neglect hotline, because Mackenzie had revealed details to her about being sexually abused by Lovelace. (A hotline caseworker had notified the police.) When Mackenzie had come home that night, she said, her mother told her, “I know you have been talking,” and pushed her down their staircase and struck her several times in the face. A detective named Carrie Brandt had been planning to follow up with Mackenzie at school that day, but instead she came to the hospital. Brandt stood beside Mackenzie’s bed and asked who had hurt her. “My mom,” Mackenzie responded. Then she grabbed Brandt’s hand and asked her to keep Morrison out of the hospital room.
-
-That morning, Brandt and an investigator with the Department of Social Services (D.S.S.) interviewed Morrison in a waiting room of the hospital. They asked how Mackenzie had been injured. According to Brandt’s report, Morrison replied, “Well I guess either she did this to herself or someone broke in and did it to her.” Morrison also said that, the night before, she had helped Mackenzie get gum out of her hair; they had been at the top of the staircase, and Mackenzie had fallen two steps but had not been hurt. Brandt later noted that Morrison had not “asked how Mackenzie was doing or showed any emotion.”
-
-[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a26400)
-
-Brandt also asked Morrison about the episode, which Mackenzie had reported the day before, when Mackenzie had woken up to Lovelace touching her breasts. Morrison said that Lovelace had made an innocent mistake. “She thought it was funny that \[Lovelace\] mistook her”—Morrison—“for a 15 year old girl,” Brandt wrote. (In a separate interview, Lovelace, who had been the subject of complaints to the police by Morrison and two other women with whom he’d been romantically involved, denied ever touching Mackenzie.)
-
-Brandt read Mackenzie’s diary and interviewed her principal, her soccer coach, and her teachers. One of Mackenzie’s tenth-grade teachers shared that Mackenzie was afraid to talk about her home life, so the teacher had begun asking her if the weekend had been “cloudy” or “stormy.” Fendell, the wellness director, said that she had seen text messages in which Morrison had lashed out at Mackenzie, calling her “a fucking piece of shit” or telling her, “Get your fat ass home.” Brandt also spoke with Mackenzie’s pediatrician, who felt guilty that, at Mackenzie’s annual physical a month earlier, she hadn’t X-rayed a large bruise on Mackenzie’s arm. The pediatrician felt “awful for not pushing the issue,” Brandt wrote.
-
-The D.S.S. determined that it was not safe for Mackenzie to return home and placed her in protective custody. “It’s hard to breathe because my ribs are so severely bruised, and I can’t laugh, smile, or chew without it hurting,” Mackenzie wrote in a journal she kept at the hospital. She had a feeding tube inserted, and was given a diagnosis of “post-concussion syndrome.” Molly Mudd, a nurse assigned to her case, told me, “There was the physical component happening with her head injury, but there was also the emotional component of someone who has been fearful for a long time and has tried to push it down, and all of a sudden it catches up to her. I just remember her being fixated on worry that her mom was going to come into the hospital.” At the nurse’s station, a small picture of Morrison was taped to the wall, so that, if she entered the building, nurses could alert security.
-
-After Mackenzie had been in the hospital for a week, Brandt met Morrison at the police station and asked again about the circumstances of Mackenzie’s fall. Brandt wrote, “The only thing she can think is Mackenzie did this to herself.” When Brandt asked why Mackenzie would accuse her of such a thing, Morrison replied, “I guess she has more problems than I thought.” Brandt placed Morrison under arrest.
-
-An article in the St. Louis *Post-Dispatch* announced that Morrison had been charged with [felony child abuse](https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/st-lukes-physician-charged-with-felony-child-abuse/article_4f4ca39b-3859-55d0-bd3b-bb803692d437.html) and misdemeanor assault, running a picture of her wearing a pearl necklace and a white lab coat, with a breast-cancer-awareness ribbon pinned to her chest. She had straight blond shoulder-length hair, and her teeth were impeccably white. In comments online, the *Post-Dispatch’s* readers seemed almost uniformly outraged at the arrest. “Bet the daughter is an entitled brat,” one said. “Such a shame this angry teenage girl just destroyed her mothers career,” another wrote.
-
-While Mackenzie was in the hospital, Morrison was released on bond, and she began calling people close to Mackenzie to tell her side of the story. Rachel Webb, one of Mackenzie’s teachers from elementary school, said that Morrison left a message on her voice mail. “She said, ‘You know me—I would never hurt my beautiful girl. Mackenzie is making this all up. As you know, she’s mentally ill.’ But here’s the thing,” Webb said. “We had never talked about her being mentally ill.” Webb had hoped that the elementary school would rally around Mackenzie. But, she said, “I think they didn’t want to make our school look bad, like we had missed anything when Mackenzie was with us. Because Mackenzie had always been kind of trotted out by our school as this shining example of a successful alumna.”
-
-After three weeks at the hospital, Mackenzie was discharged into a foster home. The D.S.S. had considered placing her with one of Morrison’s sisters, but the Whitfield principal had called the D.S.S. to express “grave concerns” that Mackenzie would not be protected there. Parents and teachers from Whitfield gave her new clothes and school supplies. She showed up at the foster home, where three other children lived—one was a foster child and two were the foster parents’ biological children—carrying clothes in a plastic bag. “I felt like a passenger in my own body,” she said.
-
-When Mackenzie returned to school, she learned that her mother had hired William Margulis, who had sent four children to Whitfield and later served on the school’s board of trustees, as her defense attorney. Margulis’s son was in Mackenzie’s math class, and she worried that, if she did anything out of the ordinary in the boy’s presence, her behavior could be used against her. “It felt like such a calculated move to exert power over me,” she said. Margulis told me, “I spent a lot of time meeting with the prosecutor and convincing him that the daughter had no credibility and made all of this up.”
-
-There were only seventy-one students in Mackenzie’s grade, and soon everyone seemed to have an opinion about her life. Mackenzie’s friend Kate Minorini told me, “Mackenzie’s mom was using the Whitfield buzz book”—the school directory—“to plead her case, so the rumor mill would have happened regardless, but a lot of the hearsay seemed to be based off the defense arguments of our classmate’s dad.” There were rumors that Mackenzie’s bruises were self-inflicted, that she had thrown herself down the stairs to get attention. Some people said that she had been inspired by the movie “Gone Girl,” about a woman who stages her own murder.
-
-Lisa Smith, the mother of Mackenzie’s friend, said that Morrison called and “tried to be really sweet with me and get me to change my mind about what had happened, but when I said, ‘I’m not interested in hearing what you have to say,’ she got ugly.” Once, at the airport, Smith ran into another Whitfield parent, who commented that “Mackenzie wanted to go to an Ivy League school, and this was her way in.” Smith said, “I was, like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. This girl is traumatized. She cries, she doesn’t eat, she doesn’t sleep. And why would an Ivy League school say, “O.K., you’ve been abused—we’re going to let you in.’’ That’s not even a thing.’ ”
-
-Before Morrison’s case could go before a grand jury, the St. Louis County assistant prosecuting attorney dropped all the charges. A spokesperson for his office said that new evidence had been uncovered. Brandt demanded an explanation. “He was not able to provide a direct answer,” she later wrote. “We argued about the case, I advised him that this was ridiculous, and this had to be a ‘status thing.’ ” A few weeks later, the prosecuting attorney decided not to press charges against Lovelace, either, citing a lack of evidence.
-
-Morrison petitioned the St. Louis County Circuit Court to expunge her arrest record. According to a one-page form signed by a judge, there was no probable cause “to believe that the petitioner committed the offense.” The arrest had been “based on false information.”
-
-Once the charges were dropped, Mackenzie’s Spanish teacher, Catalina Martinez, sensed that community sentiment toward Mackenzie had shifted. “When you’ve grown up with privilege—and everything around you is pretty and pristine and predictable—your tolerance for anything outside that world isn’t very high,” Martinez said. “People didn’t want to deal with it anymore. People who had once supported her were finding excuses to turn their backs or walk away.”
-
-Mackenzie moved into a second foster home, because the first was chaotic; while she was there, the other foster child had attempted suicide. The second arrangement fell through, too, and she was moved into a third foster home, with a young couple. (She also spent long stretches sleeping at friends’ houses.) During her free period at school, she roamed the halls looking for teachers who might be willing to chat. “I just wanted some sort of closeness with an adult,” she said. In a psychological evaluation administered by the D.S.S., she was asked to share anything about her life that she wanted others to understand. She wrote, “DNA doesn’t make a family.” When asked to respond to “what I want most,” she replied, “To have a family of my own someday and to be a great mom.”
-
-Whitfield gave Mackenzie a full scholarship for her senior year. She had not seen her mother in private since the day she was hospitalized—a court had ordered family therapy, but Mackenzie was terrified—and had no financial support from her family. Her college counsellor recommended that she apply to universities through a nonprofit, called QuestBridge, that matches exceptional students facing financial challenges with schools that will fully fund their tuition. In an evaluation for QuestBridge, Mackenzie’s history teacher wrote that Mackenzie, after escaping her “wealthy but abusive parent,” was “on her own in every way.”
-
-Mackenzie explained in a biographical essay that her private school was among the most élite in St. Louis. “Nobody fits into a certain mold or stereotype, just like I do not,” she wrote. For her personal statement, Mackenzie responded to the prompt “Describe an experience which caused you to change your perspective” with an essay about finding herself in the pediatric intensive-care unit and looking at her bruised face in the mirror. She described “the one who almost killed me . . . the one who is my mother. *She* broke me.” She concluded, “I was never broken. She was.”
-
-Mackenzie was admitted to the University of Pennsylvania with a full scholarship, facilitated by QuestBridge. She imagined that “starting over would be the easiest thing b/c I wasn’t leaving behind a regular family like so many others,” she wrote in her journal, two weeks after arriving at Penn. “Yet, I was wrong. So, so wrong.” Some of her high-school teachers had reassured her that she was part of their family—their “bonus child.” But they stopped calling. Her foster parents had had a baby, and Mackenzie felt increasingly peripheral to their lives. She was struck by the way other students relied on their parents, consulting them even about small choices, such as how to phrase an e-mail to a professor. She was ashamed to tell people that she’d been in foster care; she felt so alone that she thought about dropping out. But, she wrote, “if I truly can’t do this, where am I supposed to return to?”
-
-Holiday breaks were a source of panic. “It felt like an equation of where I would feel the least uncomfortable and the least excluded,” she said. When she visited friends and former teachers, she tried to take up as little space as possible. Lisa Smith, her friend’s mother, recalled that, whenever Mackenzie stayed at her house, “she would meticulously clean stuff. She was trying so hard to please, to get acceptance.” At Penn, Mackenzie began to realize, “Oh, I actually have no idea who I am.”
-
-When Mackenzie had applied to Penn, the university’s automatic coding system had categorized her application as “first generation,” because she had not filled in personal data about her biological parents. Mackenzie said that her college counsellor had told her that, as an independent student estranged from her family, this information was not required. Mackenzie had been invited to a pre-orientation program for first-generation and/or low-income (F.G.L.I.) students, and, though she didn’t attend the program, she began going to events hosted by Penn First, an F.G.L.I. student organization. Anea Moore, then a sophomore, had helped found the group the previous year. “We wanted to push the university to understand: if you’re going to accept more and more high-need students, you have to be prepared to sustain them throughout their time here,” she said. “You have to become a caretaker.” Moore didn’t think it was right, for instance, that universities commonly closed many dorms and cafeterias during the holidays, leaving vulnerable students feeling displaced. Mackenzie said that Penn First was “one of the first spaces on campus where I felt, These are my people. There was commonality in the fact that a lot of us had different relationships with home or family.” When she got into Penn, she said, “I had never heard of F.G.L.I., but these labels resonated with a story I was still trying to process.”
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-Mackenzie was one of fifteen freshmen selected for Penn’s Civic Scholars, a program for students committed to social justice and community service. Walter Licht, the faculty director of the program, described Mackenzie as the sort of student who “asks a question that makes everyone stop and brings the quality of conversation to a different pitch.” The Civic Scholars were encouraged to analyze how their identities intersected with systems of oppression and privilege. In a letter to herself, an exercise assigned to all the scholars, Mackenzie wrote, “I know that my first 18 years on this planet will always be a part of who I am, but how do I move on and start this new chapter of my life without pretending like it never happened?”
-
-Elizabeth Cannon, the senior associate director of Civic House, where the program is based, sensed that Mackenzie was more vulnerable than she acknowledged. “She was working multiple jobs, and she owned almost no personal or material items,” she said. “She was walking around in the smallest, lightest winter coat.” When, during her freshman year, Mackenzie had surgery for a bone infection, Cannon offered to pick her up from the hospital. “I could tell that she was embarrassed, and she didn’t want to be a burden,” Cannon said. As Mackenzie recovered, a friend, Ayah El-Fahmawi, stayed with her and made her food. El-Fahmawi told me, “I was genuinely worried and surprised—she was completely on her own.”
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-During her sophomore year, Mackenzie decided to apply for a master’s at Penn’s school of social work—she could begin the program while completing her undergraduate degree—because she wanted to help young people who had aged out of foster care. One question on the application asked, “Are you the first generation in your family to attend college?” The Web site of Penn First Plus, a university program founded in 2018 to support F.G.L.I. students, defines “first generation” broadly, including students who have a “strained or limited” relationship with a parent who has graduated from college. This definition resembles the one used in the federal Higher Education Act, which says that first-generation status depends on the education level of a parent whom a student “regularly resided with and received support from.” (A spokesperson for the university said that Penn First Plus’s definition is designed to be inclusive and is not the institution’s official definition.)
-
-Mackenzie said her reaction to the question about family was “Fuck that—I don’t have one of those.” Without providing context, she marked that she was the first in her family to go to college. “I had so much anger and grief, and I didn’t want them to be affiliated in any way with this new life I was building,” she said. “I wanted so deeply for people to understand what it means to not have a family, and I had this fear of people being, like, ‘What happened to you—that doesn’t count.’ ”
-
-Although all criminal charges against Morrison had been dropped, the D.S.S., which has its own procedures for assessing guilt, substantiated Mackenzie’s allegations. Morrison challenged this decision, but the Missouri Child Abuse and Neglect Review Board, an independent panel appointed by the governor, upheld the finding. Morrison’s name was entered into a state registry for perpetrators of abuse and neglect. After Morrison’s arrest, St. Luke’s announced that it no longer employed her, but within a year she had been granted privileges by another local hospital. She petitioned a circuit court in St. Louis to remove her from the registry, arguing that the board’s finding was based on insufficient evidence and would compromise her employment. The court agreed to hold a trial reviewing the evidence against her.
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-At Mackenzie’s request, Penn had not listed her contact information in its online directory. Nevertheless, strange packages were occasionally delivered to her dorm: a pair of sneakers, which she assumed came from Lovelace, who used to act as her personal trainer, helping her stretch; a bracelet with an inscription about finding the truth. She met with the associate director of special services within Penn’s Division of Public Safety to share her fear that her family had discovered where she lived. Jane Dmochowski, a faculty member at Penn who had become close with Mackenzie and often had her over, said that in the months before the trial Mackenzie got several hang-up calls: “She would get so upset, and I never pried and asked who it was, but it was hugely concerning.”
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-Morrison’s trial was held during the spring of Mackenzie’s junior year. There were only four witnesses: a psychologist, a D.S.S. investigator, Mackenzie, and her mother. Morrison denied that she had ever hit her daughter, whom she described as emotional and intense. “We read, you know, enumerable books on the difficult child, the spirited child, the willful child,” she said. She described in detail how she had been at the top of her carpeted staircase trying to tease gum out of Mackenzie’s hair with a comb: “She immediately screamed, ow, jerked her head back,” and, after stepping back two or three stairs, stomped off to her room and slammed the door. The next morning, Morrison left the house before seeing her daughter’s face, she said.
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-Mackenzie testified that her mother had pushed her down the stairs and that, after she had fallen, “my mom was on top of me and she was striking me in the face.” One of the next things she remembers is waking up in her bedroom early the next morning. Her mom knocked on the door and told her, “I’m taking your keys and I’m calling you in sick to school.” When Mackenzie heard her mother leave the house, she got a spare key and drove to school, though she had no memory of doing so. She did recall that, once she was inside, there was a “kind of commotion, and eventually, like, a bunch of administrators kind of rushed into the room, and somebody said, ‘Call 911.’ ”
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-Morrison’s lawyer, Allison Schreiber Lee, had obtained a personal statement that Mackenzie had written to get a scholarship, which was nearly identical to her college essay, and she interrogated Mackenzie about differences between her medical records and her rendering of the experience. “It says that ‘your facial features are so distorted and swollen that I cannot tell them apart’—did you write that?” she asked.
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-[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a26110)
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-Mackenzie said yes.
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-“Well, you could tell them apart, right?”
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-“I had bruising around my face,” Mackenzie replied.
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-“It says that ‘your hair is caked with dried blood.’ That didn’t happen, did it?”
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-“I remember there was some blood with my lip, yeah,” Mackenzie said.
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-In the essay, Mackenzie referred to the “metallic taste of the feeding tube.” Lee asked her, “It was metallic?”
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-“That’s what I tasted, yeah,” Mackenzie responded.
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-Lee informed Mackenzie that the tube was plastic.
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-“It’s what I tasted, though,” she said.
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-A month after the trial, the judge concluded, “While it is possible that Petitioner was the cause of the alleged injuries, the court cannot make that finding by a preponderance of the evidence based on the evidence presented.” The judge ordered that Morrison’s name be struck from the state registry. In an e-mail, an attorney for the D.S.S. notified Mackenzie’s lawyer of the decision, writing, “I am very saddened by the result in this case as I have always believed Mackenzie 100% on everything and I always will.”
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-Morrison declined to speak with me on the record, except to write, “Our greatest desire is that Mackenzie chooses to live a happy, healthy, honest and productive life, using her extraordinary gifts for the highest good.” Speaking for her side of the family, she added, “We will always be here for her.”
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-After the trial, Mackenzie decided to change her last name. She wanted to sever her remaining ties with her biological family, and she hoped a new name would make it harder for her mother to find her. After filling a notebook with lists of surnames that she thought sounded bold (Fairstone, Stronghill, Silverfield), she submitted a petition with the Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia County, changing her name to Mackenzie Fierceton. In January, 2020, the winter of her senior year, she wrote in a Facebook post that the process of choosing a name had been about taking “ownership of my identity” and exerting “agency in a way I was never able to growing up.”
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-Two months later, as *COVID* hit the Northeast, Penn urged students to leave campus within a week. One of Mackenzie’s professors, Anne Norton, who teaches political science, checked in on students who she suspected might be stranded. Norton said, “Mackenzie always tried to say, ‘I’m fine, I’m fine’ ”—after she and her roommates gave up their apartment off campus, she lived with a roommate’s family in Ohio and then stayed at a classmate’s home in Philadelphia—“but eventually it became clear she was just couch-surfing at friends’ houses, and you can’t couch-surf in a pandemic.” In late May, Norton invited Mackenzie, who had just graduated with a B.A. and had one more year until she completed her M.S.W., to move in. Norton and her partner, Deborah Harrold, live in a large house in northwest Philadelphia. Norton said, “I told Mackenzie, ‘You don’t have to spend any time with us if you don’t want to, but you need to be safe.’ ”
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-That summer, Mackenzie decided to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship, to get a Ph.D. at the University of Oxford. Her friend Stephen Damianos, who had just been chosen for the scholarship, had told her she would be an ideal candidate. “She was tireless—she seemed to be fighting the world’s fight and really engaged in the struggle for a more just world,” he said. In addition to having an excellent academic record, Mackenzie was a policy fellow for a Philadelphia City Council member, a volunteer birthing doula with the Philadelphia Alliance for Labor Support, and a social-work intern at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
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-Mackenzie talked with Cannon, her mentor at Civic House, about whether to apply. “It was a pretty emotional conversation, because of her fear that, if she did get the scholarship, there would be press, and her bio family could find her and tear her down,” Cannon said. But she said that Mackenzie concluded, “I’m going to continue to try to move forward in my life.”
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-In a form that Mackenzie submitted to Penn, which formally nominates students for the Rhodes, she described her sense that students applying for scholarships “sometimes felt confused and pressured to be someone they were not amidst their application process.” In an interview with a writer working on a guidebook for F.G.L.I. students, she had expressed a similar concern about the sorts of personal statement expected from disadvantaged students: “The expression that comes up is ‘poverty porn’—continually being pressured by your school, when you get to a higher-education institution, or even in high school, to share your story—and thank donors, and whatever the case is.” (Penn said that it doesn’t pressure students to tell their stories but supports them when they choose to do so.)
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-In her Rhodes application, Mackenzie proposed studying the entanglement between the child-welfare and juvenile-justice systems (the subject of her undergraduate thesis, too)—a project she hoped would “uplift the voices of my foster peers.” But, in two paragraphs that drew connections between her personal background and scholarly interests, she took some liberties, such as describing a kid at one of her foster homes as a foster child, even though he was actually her foster parents’ biological child. Mackenzie told me, “I wish I had taken more time to precisely describe the nuances of their lives—it was a simplification of a complex story.”
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-A letter of endorsement from Penn, signed by Beth Winkelstein, the deputy provost, said that “Mackenzie understands what it is like to be an at-risk youth, and she is determined to re-make the systems that block rather than facilitate success.”
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-The sixteen-year tenure of Penn’s president, Amy Gutmann, had been defined by her efforts to position Penn as a school that addressed inequality rather than perpetuating it—a pivot that many élite universities have attempted. Gutmann more than doubled the number of Penn students from low-income and first-generation families, her faculty biography explains. In an interview, she described how she, too, had been a “first-generation, low-income student.”
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-Universities didn’t start regularly tracking first-generation status until the early two-thousands, and there has never been a clear definition of the term, which emerged in part because it was a more politically digestible label than race. In a 2003 ruling regarding race-conscious admissions at the University of Michigan Law School, the Supreme Court narrowly upheld affirmative action but wrote that the practice should not continue indefinitely. Universities began looking for other ways to encourage diversity. The number of first-generation students on campus became a new benchmark, a sign that a university was fulfilling its social contract. But institutions used different definitions of the term; one study analyzed eight definitions of “first-generation” commonly used by researchers and found that, in a sample of more than seven thousand students, those who qualified as first-generation ranged from twenty-two to seventy-seven per cent, depending on which definition was used.
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-In November, 2020, the Rhodes Trust named Mackenzie one of thirty-two scholar-elects from the United States. Penn seemed to embrace Mackenzie’s story as evidence of its commitment to promoting social and economic mobility. In a press release, Gutmann expressed pride that the award had gone to a “first-generation low-income student and a former foster youth.” After the announcement, Wendy Ruderman, a reporter from the Philadelphia *Inquirer*, interviewed Mackenzie for roughly twenty-five minutes. That day, the *Inquirer* published an article that began “Mackenzie Fierceton grew up [poor](https://www.inquirer.com/education/rhodes-scholar-university-of-pennsylvania-mackenzie-fierceton-lafayette-20201122.html?utm_medium=social&cid=Philly.com+Facebook&utm_campaign=Philly.com+Facebook+Account&utm_source=facebook.com&fbclid=IwAR35-vSiER9UGXxn4K-e9T5WD2YMaMEHJ5YXkrYIKx83EFwgMusi_2rTzXI).” Mackenzie says that she never described her childhood this way. Ruderman acknowledged that Mackenzie didn’t use those exact words, but she said that Mackenzie did describe herself as an F.G.L.I. student—an abbreviation that may invite confusion, because it can refer to people who are either low-income or first-generation, not necessarily both. The *Times* columnist Nicholas Kristof tweeted the *Inquirer* article, saying it was thrilling that a Rhodes Scholarship had gone to “a first-gen low-income foster youth,” and Mackenzie retweeted what he wrote. She told me that she wished she’d pushed back harder on the way she was characterized. “I just kind of crumbled behind the pressure,” she said.
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-The father of one of Mackenzie’s high-school peers reached out to a Penn official, to explain that the news coverage about Mackenzie was inaccurate. (A former classmate had also sent an anonymous e-mail to Penn’s news office.) The father’s message was shared with Penn’s general counsel, Wendy White, who asked to be put in touch with Mackenzie’s mother. Morrison and White spoke on the phone. Three days after the *Inquirer* story was published, Morrison wrote White an e-mail, thanking her for the conversation and explaining that Mackenzie “has been loved and cherished every moment of her life.” She said that “when Mackenzie imploded”—at the time of her hospitalization—“she had just failed the first AP Chem test and was overwhelmed with work load in other classes.” (Mackenzie said she didn’t fail any chemistry tests; her transcript shows that she earned a B-plus in the class.) Morrison continued, “She was falling apart under the academic stresses at school and was exhausted, and I believe looking for an out.”
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-A few days later, Mackenzie received an e-mail asking her to meet with Winkelstein, the deputy provost, to address questions that had “arisen from an anonymous source.” Sensing her mother’s involvement, Mackenzie asked a university staff member to attend the meeting as her informal adviser. According to a detailed reconstruction of the conversation, composed by Mackenzie and the staff member soon afterward, Winkelstein asked why, in Mackenzie’s application for the school of social work, she had categorized herself as first-generation.
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-“When you are in foster care, your legal guardian is the state,” Mackenzie responded, according to the reconstruction. “I was considered the only generation at this point.” She went on, “I legally did not have parents and never considered them as such to begin with.”
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-After asking about Mackenzie’s time in foster care, Winkelstein moved on to her college essay. “You describe an experience,” Winkelstein said. “And ultimately you say it was your mother. If we review your medical records, is it going to show broken ribs and injuries to your facial area?”
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-“Yes,” Mackenzie said.
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-“And you reported this to your school?”
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-“Reported what?”
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-[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a26301)
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-“What was going on.”
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-“Um, eventually, yes,” Mackenzie said. She took a sip of water and began crying.
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-“What happened after that?” Winkelstein asked.
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-“After what?”
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-“After you talked to the school. And this next question may be tough. How did you get to school the next morning?”
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-“I don’t remember, but I was told I drove,” Mackenzie said.
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-Winkelstein asked what happened the night before she was hospitalized.
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-Mackenzie took another sip of water. “It was bad,” she said.
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-“What happened the night before?”
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-Mackenzie was crying, and Winkelstein asked again, “What happened?”
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-Sobbing, Mackenzie responded, “My mom tried to kill me.”
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-Winkelstein paused, so that Mackenzie could catch her breath, and then asked, “Do you think these documentations were an accurate representation of your experiences?”
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-“Yes,” Mackenzie replied.
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-After the meeting, Walter Licht, the faculty director of the Civic Scholars program, said that the staff member—who didn’t want to use her name, because her job at Penn is not secure—called him distraught. “She said she had never been party to such an interrogation,” he said. “She said it felt like an attack on a student.” Licht was disturbed that the conversation appeared to have been provoked by “a mother possibly seeking vengeance.” (The university has said that Winkelstein’s questions were appropriate and that her manner was not aggressive. At the end of the interview, she offered to connect Mackenzie with support.)
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-Mackenzie did not know that anyone at Penn was communicating with her biological family. But her mother and Wendy White apparently stayed in touch—in an e-mail after Mackenzie was questioned, Morrison said that she was saddened to learn that “M stuck to her story.” She wrote, “She has become emboldened over time, and has been successful with her evolving tale for 6 yrs.” She offered that White or her staff could visit her home, in St. Louis. “We would never have believed any of it if we weren’t living it,” she wrote, adding that Mackenzie had “directed her masterpiece perfectly.” One of Morrison’s sisters also wrote White an e-mail, saying that Mackenzie “deliberately tried to frame Carrie and planted ‘evidence’ around the house, including her own blood.”
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-The week after the meeting, Winkelstein sent a letter to the Rhodes Trust expressing concern that Mackenzie (whose birth name and place of birth she got wrong) may have misrepresented her childhood. She wrote that Mackenzie, in her application, had failed to “acknowledge her upper middle-class upbringing and provides a description of a life of abuse that the judicial process concluded could not be substantiated.” Winkelstein attached orders showing that a circuit court had reversed the D.S.S.’s finding of abuse, and that Morrison’s arrest had been expunged.
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-A month later, the Rhodes Trust informed Mackenzie that it was launching an investigation into her personal history. “I really don’t have words,” Mackenzie wrote in an e-mail to a mentor at the Penn Women’s Center. “It is seven years later, and I am still having to prove and prove and prove what has happened to me.”
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-Anea Moore, who helped found Penn First, wrote the Rhodes Trust a letter about Mackenzie. “When I founded Penn First, it was for students just like her, and her membership and leadership in the club was welcomed with open arms,” she explained. “FGLI kids can go to private school and/or college preparatory school just as Mackenzie did. We are not all inner-city children who live in filthy ghettos and attend crumbling, rat-infested public schools as the wider media may portray us to be.”
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-Moore, who had been chosen to become a Rhodes Scholar two years earlier, had been surprised to see how her personal story was packaged for the media. Both her parents had recently died, and she was going through a severe depression, but, she told me, “Penn dragged me to every single news outlet that asked for an interview and sent a Penn communications person with me to make sure I said the right things. It was, like, ‘Oh, yay, Penn has a Black Rhodes Scholar with dead parents who grew up working class.’ ” (Penn says that Moore was never made to do an interview or told what to say.) With Moore’s permission, her story was put on fund-raising material sent to alumni, and Gutmann summarized Moore’s life story in a commencement address. “To be fair, I was using Penn, too—it gave me economic and social capital,” Moore said. “But one young Black lady with dead parents using a multibillion-dollar Ivy League institution feels entirely different than the institution using her.”
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-Mackenzie understood that her abuse allegations would be investigated all over again, and she found two lawyers who agreed to help her pro bono. Knowing that Penn had already spoken with Morrison, they asked her for a meeting, too. Michael Raffaele, one of the attorneys, said that Morrison presented herself as a model parent who didn’t understand why Mackenzie wouldn’t accept her love and come home. Raffaele was reminded of a line in the space movie “Serenity,” in which an agent called the Operative advises that, in order to trap a rival, one should “leave no ground to go to.” Raffaele said it seemed as if Morrison were “trying to manufacture a situation in which Mackenzie must go home to her mother, because she has no ground to go to—if she’s personally ruined.”
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-Mackenzie’s lawyers learned that the university was considering initiating a process in which Mackenzie’s bachelor’s degree could be revoked. The university offered her a deal: as Raffaele described it to Mackenzie in an e-mail, the university would “take no action against your undergraduate degree,” if she gave up the Rhodes, along with her Latin honors (she’d graduated summa cum laude). In addition, she would have to take a mandatory leave—“to get needed counseling and support”—before the university would grant her M.S.W. degree. When White learned that Mackenzie had been telling professors that she felt the university was threatening her, she added a new requirement. In an e-mail, she said that Mackenzie would have to write a statement saying she’d agreed to withdraw from the scholarship “voluntarily and without pressure.”
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-Mackenzie rejected the offer. She sent the Rhodes Trust medical and family-court records, along with letters from twenty-six people in her life. A teacher from Whitfield wrote, “While her mother used her wealth to evade conviction, there was never any doubt in my mind that she abused her child and is diabolical in having no remorse.” A childhood friend wrote that Mackenzie had confided at the time that “her mother’s boyfriend would come into her bedroom at night and how her mother would do nothing about it.” (Morrison did call the police when he came to their house to show Mackenzie pictures of his new gun.)
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-Three of the people who had written Mackenzie recommendations for the Rhodes composed new letters affirming that she had never misrepresented her life to them. In another letter, Mackenzie’s lawyers argued that she had not constructed a narrative about herself to deceive anyone, but instead had tried to build a new identity after a trauma that had made her question nearly every aspect of her life. Mackenzie told me, “I have heard people describe sexual assault as a kind of erasure of self,” but she said that, because her abuse occurred when she was so young, “it felt like there was not a self to begin with.”
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-If trauma creates a kind of narrative void, Mackenzie seemed to respond by leaning into a narrative that made her life feel more coherent, fitting into boxes that people want to reward. Perhaps her access to privilege helped her understand, in a way that other disadvantaged students might not, the ways that élite institutions valorize certain kinds of identities. There is currency to a story about a person who comes from nothing and thrives in a prestigious setting. These stories attract attention, in part because they offer comfort that, at least on occasion, such things happen.
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-In April, 2021, an investigative subcommittee for the Rhodes Trust issued a report recommending that Mackenzie’s scholarship be rescinded. The report acknowledged, “This is a tragic story,” but said that truthfulness “cannot be overridden by appeal to trauma.” It referred to childhood pictures—enclosed in a twenty-two-page letter written to the Rhodes Trust, in mid-December, by an anonymous sender who displayed a great deal of familiarity with Mackenzie’s childhood—that showed Mackenzie engaging in “typical upper middle-class childhood activities,” like horseback riding and going to the beach. Though the Trust said that Mackenzie’s abuse allegations were beyond the scope of its investigation, it repeated an argument originally advanced by Morrison’s lawyer at trial: that there were discrepancies between Mackenzie’s medical records and an essay she’d written to get into college—evidence, it said, of a broader pattern of misrepresentation. The Trust determined that, in Mackenzie’s medical records, “there is no reference to dried blood, distorted facial features, or cessation of breathing.” The report also pointed to inconsistent descriptions of the length of time Mackenzie had spent in foster care. In her applications to college and to social-work school, she had written that, in 2014, she had become a ward of the state “once again”—Mackenzie said that she was referring to her involvement in the family-court system as a child but acknowledged that the phrase was confusing. (A spokesperson for the Rhodes Trust wrote, “Fairness to all our applicants demands that if any issues or allegations arise, we consider them carefully,” adding, “We provide applicants multiple opportunities to respond, correct inaccuracies and share information.”)
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-Mackenzie wanted to submit a response to the Rhodes report, but Raffaele warned that her case could be referred to federal prosecutors, on the ground that she had misrepresented her finances in her application for federal aid—a possibility that he said White had raised. The questionnaire for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid asks, “At any time since you turned age 13, were both your parents deceased, were you in foster care or were you a dependent or ward of the court?” Mackenzie had correctly answered “yes,” which put her in the category of an independent student. Nevertheless, Raffaele encouraged her not to take any risks. “If the U.S. Attorney’s Office is getting their information from general counsel at the University of Pennsylvania,” he told me, “they might act differently based on where they are getting that tip, and there is no quick way out of a federal criminal prosecution.”
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-Mackenzie agreed to withdraw from the scholarship. Norton, with whom Mackenzie had been living for nearly a year, told me, “I cannot avoid the sense that Mackenzie is being faulted for not having suffered enough. She was a foster child, but not for long enough. She is poor, but she has not been poor for long enough. She was abused, but there is not enough blood.” Penn had once celebrated her story, but, when it proved more complex than institutional categories for disadvantage could capture, it seemed to quickly disown her. Norton wrote a letter to Gutmann, Penn’s president, warning that the university had been “made complicit in a long campaign of continuing abuse.” Norton says that Gutmann did not respond.
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-[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a24874)
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-In April, 2021, six days before Mackenzie gave up the Rhodes Scholarship, she got a letter from Penn’s Office of Student Conduct (O.S.C.) notifying her that the university had requested an investigation because of “concerns that you misrepresented and/or embellished your background.” She was supposed to receive her social-work degree the following month, but the letter said that her records would “automatically be placed on hold until this matter is resolved.”
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-Norton asked Rogers Smith, a colleague in the political-science department, if he would serve as Mackenzie’s adviser for the disciplinary proceedings. A professor of constitutional law and a former associate dean, Smith had previously worked at Yale, where he chaired the school’s undergraduate student-disciplinary committee. It quickly became clear, he said, that “this was a very unusual process, and my knowledge of standard disciplinary processes was of limited relevance.” O.S.C. investigators were reviewing e-mails between Mackenzie and Penn faculty, presumably to see if she had portrayed her life accurately; they also interviewed Morrison and the St. Louis prosecutor who dropped her criminal case—without telling Mackenzie. When Smith realized this, he wrote the O.S.C., “I am profoundly ashamed of us all.” (The university says the O.S.C. doesn’t recall Mackenzie asking for witness names before it issued its report, and that it is standard practice not to identify witnesses.)
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-After investigating Mackenzie for more than three months, the O.S.C. released a report on its findings. “Mackenzie may have centered certain aspects of her background to the exclusion of others—for reasons we are certain she feels are valid—in a way that creates a misimpression,” the report concluded. Her case was referred to a panel of three faculty members in the social-work school. Smith was hoping that the panellists would consider how Penn’s F.G.L.I. programs had affected Mackenzie’s understanding of the concept of first-generation, but the panel determined that Mackenzie should be disciplined—with a four-thousand-dollar fine and a notation on her transcript that she’d been sanctioned—for misrepresenting herself on her application to the school of social work. Mackenzie appealed the decision, arguing that the first-generation question had not felt straightforward. When concerns were initially raised about her first-generation status, Mackenzie had e-mailed the associate director of admissions and recruitment at Penn’s social-work school to ask how former foster youth should answer the question. “I personally believe the education level (or/and financial status) of the biological parents would be irrelevant,” the associate director responded. “The youth should select into the option that provides them access to the most funding—which would be to indicate that they are a first-generation college student.”
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-Anthony Jack, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who studies low-income and first-generation college students, told me that he would not consider a student like Mackenzie first-generation. But he was troubled that her status as a low-income student had ever been challenged. “When we allow stereotype to be our stand-in for disadvantaged groups, we are actually doing them a disservice,” he said. “That’s what scares me about this case. It’s, like, ‘You’re not giving us the right sob story of what it means to be poor.’ The university is so focussed on what box she checked, and not the conditions—her lack of access to the material, emotional, and social resources of a family—that made her identify with that box.” He went on, “Colleges are in such a rush to celebrate their ‘first Black,’ their ‘first First Gen’ for achievements, but do they actually care about the student? Or the propaganda campaign that they can put behind her story?”
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-When Mackenzie initially contemplated applying for the Rhodes Scholarship, she asked Moore and Damianos, the recent Rhodes Scholars, if they thought it would be a problem that she was involved in a wrongful-death lawsuit that a family had filed against Penn. Damianos said, “She asked me, ‘I wonder if this litigation will come back to bite me.’ ” Damianos and Moore both assured her that institutional endorsement for scholarships was handled by an office that was not likely to be concerned with lawsuits against the university.
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-Mackenzie had been an organizer on campus for a variety of causes—she advocated for the university to defund campus police and to reimburse public schools for unpaid property taxes—but in the months before she applied for the Rhodes she had been involved in a more straightforward matter: improving building safety. In the winter of 2020, she’d had a seizure in the basement of the Caster Building, where classes in the school of social work were held. According to her classmates, she was unconscious and intermittently seizing for roughly an hour, because it took emergency medical personnel that long to extract her from the building, as they struggled to fit a stretcher into the elevator or the stairway.
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-Mackenzie was in an intensive-care unit for three days and was given a diagnosis of epilepsy. (Her doctors said that her head injuries in high school may have put her at greater risk for the disorder.) After she was released, her classmates told her how long they believed she had waited for medical care. Mackenzie remembered that, two years earlier, a student named Cameron Driver, a thirty-eight-year-old Black man, had had a medical emergency in the Caster basement. He had died. She interviewed Driver’s classmates about what had happened to him, and she and another student, Kate Schneider, took photographs of the building’s entryways. Schneider told me, “We wanted to document everything, because we were, like, ‘This is a pattern. One student died, and another could have died, because of issues of access in this basement.’ ” Mackenzie wrote letters to the social-work school and to Gutmann, the university’s president, expressing her concerns. (Penn denies that there are accessibility problems with the Caster Building which contributed to Mackenzie’s medical emergency or to Driver’s death.)
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-Mackenzie also sent a note to Driver’s widow, Roxanne Logan, offering to share the details she’d gathered. “The thought that this information may have been withheld from you felt utterly horrifying,” Mackenzie wrote.
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-According to Mackenzie, Logan, who had been pregnant when her husband died, asked her to meet. Logan hadn’t known that her husband and emergency responders had allegedly waited for almost an hour together before he was taken away in an ambulance—twelve minutes later, he was declared dead. In August, 2020, Logan filed a lawsuit, asserting that her husband’s death was owing to “system-wide logistical and structural failures created by the negligence and recklessness” of the university. Her complaint described “another Penn student”—Mackenzie—whose medical crisis in the Caster Building had exposed nearly identical problems. Mackenzie was deposed in Logan’s lawsuit in March, 2021, a month before she gave up the Rhodes.
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-Some Penn professors have wondered if Mackenzie’s role in the lawsuit might have bearing on the university’s scrutiny of her credibility. Amy Hillier, a faculty member at the social-work school, took a sabbatical from Penn because she was so disillusioned by Mackenzie’s treatment. She wrote to the dean of the social-work school with a list of concerns, including the “appearance of retaliation against Mackenzie for giving a deposition in wrongful death lawsuit against the University.” (The university has denied that its dealings with Mackenzie had anything to do with the lawsuit.)
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-Logan said that her lawyers did not want her to talk with me. “I’m a Black woman, I’m middle-aged, I’m a single parent of a special-needs child, and I can’t do anything that would jeopardize the lawsuit,” she said. “But I’m thankful that Mackenzie came forward.”
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-Last fall, Mackenzie began the sociology Ph.D. program at Oxford, which had admitted her before she withdrew from the Rhodes; she’d lost her funding, but a professor at Penn offered to pay for her first year. Two months later, in December, 2021, she filed a lawsuit against Penn, accusing it of retaliating against her and discrediting her “for Penn’s institutional protection.” By then, Gutmann had been appointed the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, a position she began last month, and Winkelstein had been promoted to interim provost.
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-In talking about her childhood, Mackenzie was fragile, sometimes narrowly avoiding tears, but when she reflected on how her life intersected with her political ideals she became focussed and self-possessed. She has been in therapy since she went into foster care, and she attributes her capacity to heal, at least to some degree, to her sense of fellowship with other children and women who have not been believed. “I’m telling my story because I think it’s a microcosm of how institutions of power can manipulate truth,” she told me.
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-At the time that Mackenzie filed her case, the *Chronicle of Higher Education* was finishing an article about her lost Rhodes Scholarship. The university had thirty business days to answer Mackenzie’s suit, but it produced a hundred-and-thirty-page response in nine business days, during the Christmas holiday. The university’s pleading portrayed Mackenzie as a discredited person who cannily concocted a tale of abuse: as a child, she had “regular temper tantrums, beyond the normal range for an adolescent.” Then she had “claimed to fall ill” at school and presented a “fictitious account of abuse by her mother.” According to the pleading, her claims of abuse kept her family “muzzled,” leaving her “in control of her narrative.”
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-Four days after the response was filed, the *Chronicle* published its [article](https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-dredging), giving ample weight to each side and quoting from the university’s pleading. The story was quickly picked up by other news outlets. “ ‘Rhodes Scholar’ claimed she grew up poor and abused—then her story started to unravel,” the New York *Post* wrote. A student publication at Oxford declared, “A privileged student faked being poor to get into Oxford Uni.” A morning radio show, syndicated to some hundred stations in the U.S., named Mackenzie its “donkey of the day.”
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-Norton felt that Penn was defaming its own student, and in a grievance she accused White and Winkelstein of violating university procedures with “arbitrary and capricious” conduct. “This is not simply a matter of believing survivors or showing a decent deference to a person’s understanding of their life experience,” she wrote. “It is a deliberate indifference to evidence.” Smith and Hillier signed the grievance, too. In a supplement to the grievance, Smith wrote that Penn’s disciplinary procedures “served to shelter the University from review of its role in encouraging the decisions for which it is now punishing her.”
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-Mackenzie’s social-work degree is still being withheld. She learned last week that she had lost her appeal. Her degree will not be granted until she submits a letter of apology, a requirement imposed by an appeals panel. (Her fine was withdrawn, because the university’s charter says that financial restitution cannot be imposed in cases involving academic integrity.) After finishing her second term at Oxford, she had returned to Norton’s house for a few weeks. She felt relieved to be back in Philadelphia, where Norton and a handful of friends and professors constitute what she calls her “chosen family.” “I don’t want to be gone from them too long, because then, like, they might move on,” she told me. “It’s just difficult to describe what it’s like to go through the world feeling like you don’t have some sort of anchor.”
-
-Mackenzie moved around Norton’s house lightly and with deference. She, Norton, and Harrold sat down for family meals, but Mackenzie almost never had people over; when she did, she hosted them on the front porch. Her room, on the third floor, was mostly bare, though she had hung seventeen photographs, mostly of college friends. Norton has tried to create new domestic routines—doing puzzles; watching rock-climbing movies, a shared interest—so that, she said, “it’s not about her fitting into our life. It’s about trying to construct a common life together.” Occasionally, Mackenzie has a painful longing for the mother she remembers as a young child, but “it is not her that I am grieving,” she said. “I am grieving the idea of her—the idea I had once created for her.”
-
-Mackenzie told me that, in the past year, she’s experienced a state of self-doubt that she hadn’t known since high school: “There have been moments of almost panic where I am just cognitively questioning myself, like, ‘Did I misremember something?’ It’s easy to slide back into that state, because I want anything other than the reality—that it is my bio family who has caused so much harm—so I will do backflips to try to make it not true.” In her high-school journal, she had described this cycle of doubt. “You start to think that maybe you had it wrong and that maybe it actually did happen the way that they say it did,” she wrote. “And then you just throw away the real memory, the true one, and replace it with the one that they have fed you a million times, until that is the only thing you can remember.” ♦
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-# How did people sleep in the Middle Ages? - Medievalists.net
-
-***It seems normal that people go to sleep for seven to nine hours (or at least we hope we can sleep that long), straight from evening to morning, but was that always the case? A recent book on the history of sleeping shows that during the Middle Ages people typically slept in two periods during the night.***
-
-Roger Ekirch’s book, [***At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past***](https://amzn.to/1R9AV2j), reveals that until modern times, when artificial lighting allowed us to stay awake longer, most people would go to bed around sunset. The actual time spent sleeping was split into two phases – known as first sleep and second sleep.
-
-Ekrich writes:
-
-*Both phases of sleep lasted roughly the same length of time, with individuals waking sometime after midnight before returning to rest. Not everyone, of course, slept according to the same timetable. The later at night that persons went to bed, the later they stirred after their initial sleep; or, if they retired past midnight, they might not awaken at all until dawn. Thus, it ‘The Squire’s Tale’ in The Canterbury Tales, Canacee slept “soon after evening fell” and subsequently awakened in the early morning following “her first sleep”; in turn, her companions, staying up much later, “lay asleep till it was fully prime” (daylight).*
-
-In between the first and second sleep the person would be awake about an hour – enough to say prayers during Matins, which would typically fall between 2 am and 3 am, study or even have sex. The French physician Laurent Joubert (1529-1581) even advised that couples have intercourse during this period, because “they have more enjoyment” and “do it better.”
-Ekrich adds:
-
-*Although in some descriptions a neighbor’s quarrel or a barking dog woke people prematurely from their initial sleep, the vast weight of surviving evidence indicates that awakening naturally was routine not the consequence of disturbed or fitful slumber. Medical books, in fact, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries frequently advised sleepers, for better digestion and more tranquil repose, to lie on their right side during “the fyrste slepe” and “after the fyrste slepe turne on the lefte side.” And even though the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie investigated no further, his study of fourteenth-century Montaillou notes that “the hour of first sleep” was a customary division of night, as was ‘the hour halfway through the first sleep.” Indeed, though not used as frequently as expressions like “candle-lighting,” the “dead of night”, or cock-crow,” the term “first sleep” remained a common temporal division until the late eighteenth-century. As described in La Demonolatrie (1595) by Nicholas Remy, “Comes dusk, followed by nightfall, dark night, then the moment of the first sleep and finally dead of night.”*
-
-Not everyone slept in two periods – Ekrich cites some people from the pre-modern period who note that they would sleep throughout the night. But does seem to have been common practice for people, dating back to ancient times. In this interview on *The Agenda*, the author reveals more about the practice.
-
-
-Meanwhile, Jean Verdon, author of [***Night in the Middle Ages***](https://amzn.to/1R9B6L2), notes that some medieval people had different sleeping patterns. Children, for instance, were advised to sleep the entire night, for nine or ten consecutive hours. However, for the very young, this task might be tricky. The fifteenth-century story *La Farce du Cuvier*, offers this verse on the troubles of getting one’s child to sleep – something that every parent nowadays can relate too:
-
-*At night, if the child awakes*
-*As they do in many places,*
-*You must take the trouble*
-*To get up to rock him,*
-*To walk, carry, and feed him*
-*In the bedroom, even at midnight.*
-
-[](https://www.patreon.com/medievalists "Support Medievalists on Patreon")
-
-Medieval monks were also required to sleep differently – according to the Rule of St.Benedict, they would go to bed about 7:00 pm, and then wake up for Matins around 2:00 in the morning. While other monastic rules allowed for a second sleep, the Benedictine monks would continue to stay awake (they might be allowed to have a nap during the day). Some monks were tempted not to get out of bed – Raoul Glaber, who lived during the 11th century, wrote that he was plagued by a demon, who whispered to him:
-
-*I wonder why you are so eager to jump so quickly out of bed, as soon as you’ve heard the signal, and to interrupt the sweet rest of sleep, while you could give yourself up to rest until the third signal.*
-
-[](https://www.medievalists.net/2016/01/03/how-did-people-sleep-in-the-middle-ages/sleeping-monk/)
-
-Devil tempting a sleeping monk – from British Library Royal 10 E IV f. 221
-
-[](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393329011/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0393329011&linkCode=as2&tag=medievalistsn-20&linkId=80913cab1b00bee71eb8cb6883ee5bc7)Verdon adds that medieval people could have the same problems related to sleeping that we do, including insomnia, sleeping too much, and even sleep-walking. The chronicler Jean Froissart heard the story of a noble named Pierre de Béarn who had a traumatic experience when he killed an exceptionally large bear in hand-to-hand combat. Afterwards, during his sleep he would rise, grab a sword and swing it around at the air. If he could not find his weapon, Pierre “created such noise and clamor that it seemed like all the demons of hell were there with him.” Eventually, his wife and children would leave him over the problem.
-
-See also [**Sleepwalking and Murder in the Middle Ages**](https://www.medievalists.net/2014/09/08/sleepwalking-murder-middle-ages/)
-
-See also: [**The Medieval Sleeping Beauty**](https://www.medievalists.net/2015/06/18/the-medieval-sleeping-beauty/)
-
-[](https://www.karwansaraypublishers.com/combo-subs/medievalists-special.html)
-
-[Click here to get two great magazines – Medieval Warfare and Ancient History](https://www.karwansaraypublishers.com/combo-subs/medievalists-special.html)
-
-*Top Image: A sleeping man in a medieval manuscript – from British Library Royal 19 D III f. 458*
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-# How the Dez Bryant no-catch changed the NFL forever
-
-**WE ALL SAW IT.** It happened right before our very eyes.
-
-Fifty-two point three million of us watched it live on television. Untold millions have watched it since, in its YouTube afterlife. And to watch it once is to watch it many times, almost by definition -- nobody even had the chance to watch it just once, since the replays started rolling as soon as the ball was whistled dead. The play itself took about seven seconds, snap to signal. The ensuing deliberation took another four minutes, give or take, and the controversy the play generated has lasted for nearly eight years and counting.
-
-It was a catch, of course. It was ruled a catch on the field at 3:58:43 p.m. on Jan. 11, 2015, and it remained a catch until 4:02:29, when the referee announced the reversal by the letter of the law. Then three years later, it became a catch again, when the NFL changed the rules to accommodate its brilliance. Now every time we watch an NFL game we witness some aspect of its legacy, because one of the greatest catches in the history of the game was ruled, "after review," incomplete.
-
-There have been other catches that have, in the space of a few seconds, caused football empires to rise and fall. Bradshaw-Swann, 1976; Montana-Clark, 1982; Manning-Tyree, 2008; Roethlisberger-Holmes, 2009; Brady-Edelman 2017: these are catches that have changed games, careers, fortunes and lives. But they all counted. The pass that Tony Romo threw to Dez Bryant in a playoff game between the Dallas Cowboys and Green Bay Packers in 2015 -- or, in its enduring social media afterlife, `#DezCaughtIt` -- did not, and yet it has changed the way we watch football.
-
-This Sunday's game between the Cowboys and Packers allows us yet again to think about a play that has changed our expectations and our perceptions, the leaps of imagination we once thought impossible and the rounds of on-field litigation we now accept as inevitable. It brought football into its modern era, when we can scarcely believe what we have just seen and then can expect to be told we have not seen it. There was a before and there was an after, and if we wonder why in 2022 we live in a time when nobody can agree on anything, when unlimited scrutiny and maximum technological expertise have combined to produce an age of endless uncertainty, all we have to do is watch, once again, these teams play in January 2015, and try to tell each other, what happens when Tony Romo throws the ball down the sideline and Dez Bryant goes up to get it.
-
-The play was the play because the moment was the moment. It was a divisional playoff game. It was in Green Bay, on an afternoon that was 24 degrees at game time, and though the tundra remained unfrozen, it was a game with a Lombardi-era pedigree as well as high stakes for the outcome of the 2014 football season. Both teams had finished 12-4; the Packers, with an unjaded Aaron Rodgers at quarterback, were 6½-point favorites, but the Cowboys had gone unbeaten on the road, and at least three of their players, Tony Romo and Dez Bryant and DeMarco Murray, were having career years. Dallas had gone ahead by eight points midway through the third quarter, but Green Bay had scored two touchdowns and now Cowboys coach Jason Garrett's team faced the moment that would decide if this was *their* moment.
-
-"It was a special group of guys," Garrett says. "And we'd been building our team over the course of the last three years -- really rebuilding our team. And this was kind of becoming the culmination of that. And we're right there. The message for our team was fight and finish the fight, and we're about to finish the fight."
-
-The score was 26-21. The offense had taken the kickoff with 9:10 left in the game and had spent five minutes grinding it down to the Green Bay 32. Now it was fourth down, 2 yards to go, four minutes and 42 seconds left. Garrett didn't call the play -- Scott Linehan, the associate offensive coordinator, did. But both men remember it with eerie specificity.
-
-The play had a name -- gun empty right java right 929 F post H flat. According to Garrett, "it was one of the most basic concepts we had on our offense, one we tried to dress up in any number of ways. The concept was that the outside receivers were going to run go routes. And the inside receiver on the strong side was going to run what we call a post route. The tight end's going to run a drag and the inside receiver on the weak side is going to run a flat route. You do that from so many different formations and variations. But when you're in empty, like we were, the concept is alive inside but you also have opportunities to throw the go routes on the outside."
-
-The Cowboys had a little less than 2 yards to go for the first down. But two things became clear as soon as they lined up "gun empty," with Tony Romo alone in the backfield. First, they weren't about to run the ball. And second, they might have had Cole Beasley running the shallow post and Jason Witten running the drag, but split left, all alone with Packers' cornerback Sam Shields III up close in press coverage, was Dez Bryant.
-
-"To be honest, the play was for Beasley and Witten," Linehan says. "But they ran a blitz for the empty and one of the options when you're in what we call the 'gold zone,' just outside the high red zone, is that if you got one-on-one to the guy -- and for us, at Dallas, the guy was Dez -- you take a shot. I mean, you ask Tony, he's going to say, 'I don't know when I'm going to get this kind of matchup for Dez again, one-on-one without any help. I'm going to win this game *now.*'"
-
-It is the biggest moment in arguably the biggest game of Romo's career, and all of them -- Garrett, Linehan and Tony Romo himself -- agree that he responds with the best read and the best throw of his 14 years in the NFL. In the face of the Packers' blitz, he displays all the compact eccentricities of his talent, taking a little hop-step and releasing the ball with his short, abrupt, hitch-free motion. The ball travels 31 yards down the field and goes up, in a steeply pitched arc. And then so does Dez Bryant.
-
-He's squeezed against Sam Shields, the two of them jostling one another in the same crowded elevator, but on the jump he gains a foot on Shields, maybe two or three, and seems to grab the ball before it has the chance to come down. He begins his leap at the 10-yard line, and then he's at the apogee of everything -- his ascent, his talent, his career -- with the ball in his outstretched hands. "It's one of the greatest catches in NFL history," Garrett says, and that's the thing; he *has* it. He has it, but of course having gone up he must come down.
-
-
-
-He returns to the ground at about the 5-yard line, and the NFL, as it happens, has something to say about the ground and its relation to what constitutes a catch. It's in the 2014 NFL Rulebook. It's in Rule 8, Section 1, Article 3, and its scholarly addenda, Items 1 and 4.
-
-"Item 1: Player Going to the Ground. If a player goes to the ground in the act of catching a pass (with or without contact by an opponent), he must maintain control of the ball throughout the process of contacting the ground, whether in the field of play or the end zone. If he loses control of the ball, and the ball touches the ground before he regains control, the pass is incomplete. If he regains control prior to the ball touching the ground, the pass is complete."
-
-"Item 4: Ball Touches Ground. If the ball touches the ground after the player secures control of it, it is a catch, provided that the player continues to maintain control."
-
-The NFL Rulebook is simultaneously literal and obscure -- an engineering textbook that doubles as a Christmas Eve instruction manual, with some assembly required; an attempt at the American Constitution that gives way to French Structuralism. Here, it goes to great lengths to explicate the subject of the earthbound.
-
-But it doesn't begin to anticipate the possibilities of the airborne.
-
----
-
-**IN DAYS GONE** by, it was the football pass that was suspect, not the catch. The forward pass, the glory of the modern game, was considered vaguely dishonorable. The catch? The catch was simply the opposite of a drop. It was binary, so self-evident a feature of the American playground and sandlot that no one bothered to define it. "Reading the newspapers from the '20s, I had the impression that they understood what a catch was, even if the rulebook wasn't explicit about it," says Joel Bussert, a retired senior VP of player personnel and football operations for the NFL and now a football historian.
-
-That informal arrangement ended in 1938, when an associate of George Halas named Hugh L. "Shorty" Ray took it upon himself to standardize the NFL's officiating by codifying its rules. "He was the guy who wrote the catch into the rulebook," Bussert says. "He didn't create a new concept. He just expressed the existing concept of possession, which was important." The idea, in those days, was to use the rulebook to distinguish professional football from the college game, and in 1949 came the rule that generations of American fans committed to memory as evidence of the NFL's higher standards.
-
-"In the late 1940s, teams were starting to develop sideline passing routes, at which time the 'one-foot or two-feet' question became pertinent," Bussert says. "The league had to address it, and the sideline catch became one of the signature plays of the NFL in the 1950s and '60s." The catch rule remained stable for decades, written, like most everything else in the NFL rulebook, for the official on the field. It was not easy to enforce -- nothing is easy to enforce in a league as fast and as violent as the NFL -- but it was easy enough to interpret, because the rule itself encourages a certain amount of discretion.
-
-"When I was on the field it was simple," says Mike Pereira, who officiated games for both the NCAA and the NFL, moved into the league office, and then joined Fox as a rules analyst in 2010.
-
-"The thing that the league drilled into our heads was 'no cheap turnovers'" -- nobody wanted a bobbled catch confused with a fumble. "So it was, 'when in doubt, it's incomplete.' Everything happened so fast because everything happened in real time, right on the field -- we used to call them 'bang-bang plays.' And you'd ask, 'Did the receiver have a possession? Did he get his second foot in? If the answer was yes and yes, it was a catch. If the answer was no, it wasn't. But a lot of it was instinct. And 99 percent of the time, you were right. A few times, you weren't. But either way, the game would go on."
-
----
-
-**IT SOUNDS LIKE** a framework for chaos and confusion. But Hall of Famer Steve Largent began playing for the Seattle Seahawks in 1976 and retired in 1989, and what he remembers about the act of catching the ball in that era was its clarity. "Well, it was have control of the ball and two feet in bounds -- those are the only two prerequisites for a throw to be determined a catch. To be honest with you, I played 14 years and caught 819 footballs. And I can never remember complaining to an official that I caught a ball that they said I didn't or that I didn't catch a ball that they said I did. Or that I didn't have two feet in bounds when I did. I don't remember that happening. The officials were that good, then."
-
-They are that good now -- "better," says Largent. But something happened in 1999 that redefined their relationship to the catch and therefore the catch itself. Instant replay had been used to review on-field rulings from 1986 to 1991 and had been voted out by NFL owners as intrusive and distracting. It returned seven years later, as a competitive feature of the game -- to give coaches the option of throwing a red flag and challenging a bad call.
-
-Plays could be reversed if "indisputable evidence" could be found that a mistake had been made. And the catch rule stayed the same, at least at first. But the catch didn't. Catches and rulings had taken place nearly simultaneously on the field, as irrevocable as they were live. Now the most dramatic rulings came as a result of referees availing themselves of the technological resources of the replay booth, under hoods yet, like druids.
-
-They watched replays at multiple angles and in slow motion, and then emerged with rulings that were more like decrees ... but without the certainty that fans expected. It wasn't simply that the catch became synonymous with televised second thoughts. It was that something two-dimensional -- control, two feet -- had become three-dimensional, and the added dimension was the one most perplexing.
-
-"Replay tried to define the element of time, and that changed everything," Mike Pereira says. Or, as Joel Bussert says, in gnomic utterance: "Time is the variable."
-
----
-
-**GARRETT WAS THERE.** He was on the sideline, wearing headphones. He watched it live and in person. He watched from about 20 yards away. He watched it on whatever screens were handed to him as well as on the Jumbotrons. He watched from every possible angle and at every possible speed, and he kept on watching long after the officials made their call and the game ended and the Cowboys flew home.
-
-He has probably watched it as many times as any human being alive, so yeah, Jason Garrett can probably tell you what happened when Dez Bryant grabbed the ball from the air in Green Bay and what rules were in play.
-
-It was the rule about time. It was Article 3, Item 1 in the 2014 NFL Rulebook, which establishes that "a forward pass is complete" when a player "secures control of the ball in his hands or arms...touches the ground inbounds with both feet or with any part of his body other than his hands "..and then "maintains control of the ball long enough...to enable him to perform any act common to the game...." And that's where Garrett takes issue, because to his mind the act that Dez Bryant performed was so uncommon to the game it not only satisfied but exceeded any possible conditions the NFL could dream up.
-
-
-
-"I know everyone's going to say you have to 'survive the ground,'" Garrett says. "That's the bailout everybody uses. But if you watch Dez, he catches the ball on the 5-yard line. And the number of times I've heard Dean Blandino and Gene Steratore and many others say, Well, when you're talking about whether or not it's a catch, you simply need to have time enough to make a football move or, as they sometimes say, a move common to the game. They're quick to say, You don't have to make a move -- you just have to have the time to make it. Right? So let's evaluate what Dez did. He catches the ball at the 5-yard line 13 feet in the air. He takes one step, he takes two steps, he takes a third step. He takes the ball and he switches hands. On his third step he squats and lunges and extends the ball. Think about all those football moves he made. Think about the three steps. They've subsequently put in a three-step rule -- three steps and it's a catch. But this idea that he had to have time enough to make a move common to the game? Here's this guy catching it 13 feet in the air on the 5, taking three steps, lunging, extending the ball, and they don't give him a catch after it's been ruled a catch on the field? And we're going overturn that? We're going to take away one of the most iconic plays in NFL history?"
-
-Garrett gets it right. But let's look at it again. Let's look again because that's what we do these days -- we look at catches over and over, particularly that one. Now let's slow it down. You can look at it frame by frame, even on a smartphone, each frame counting for about a second and each one telling its own story.
-
-The first: Romo receives the snap, drops back two steps.
-
-The second: Romo takes a step, flings the ball before the blitzing corner reaches him, the camera losing track of the ball as it soars.
-
-The third: The camera finds Bryant and Shields running together at the 20, Bryant about a half-step ahead and Shields at his inside shoulder.
-
-The fourth: They see the ball. At the 15, Shields extends his left arm even as Bryant starts gathering himself. Halfway through the frame, Bryant raises his arms. At the 10-yard-line he begins to, well, ascend, and his leap lasts from the middle of one frame to the middle of the next.
-
-The fifth: He is at the apex, and it is no exaggeration to say that the tips of his fingers are 13 feet off the ground. Shields reaches for the ball but can't get there. He comes down first, bracing himself for the ground, dogged but mortal. Bryant is behind him, his hands holding the ball at the level of his face mask. His left foot touches at the 5. his right foot at the 4, his left knee inside the 2. But both players are still falling, and when Bryant holds the ball in his left hand, the full length of his body has still not met the ground.
-
-The sixth: Shields is face down at the 1, his forward motion expended, but Bryant has not stopped moving, even when he hits the ground, his face at the goal line, the bottoms of his cleats raised toward the sky, the ball pinned underneath him.
-
-The seventh: Now he's rolling, his momentum sustained by the forces he has unleashed; he's on his back as he rolls over the goal line and the ball flips out of his hands. For a fraction, it floats over him, but he grabs it, and the side judge crouching behind the pylon trots toward him.
-
-Frame by frame, it looks like a ballet, but that's a distortion. It's all a distortion. It looks like a catch, but as Joel Bussert says, "in slow motion, almost everything looks like a catch. Frame by frame, everything *is* a catch." There are others who contend the opposite -- that what officials discover when they scrutinize catches in super slow motion is that nothing is a catch, because the pigskin suddenly looks like a greased pig squealing to escape capture.
-
-It wiggles, it wobbles, and even on replays of confirmed catches it's surprisingly unsteady -- as Galileo is supposed to have told the Inquisition, "and yet it moves." And that's what you see in slow motion. The ball moves in Bryant's hands as he falls, and so the question is whether it's already a catch when he is in the air, when he's landing, when he's taking steps and lunging -- whether it's already a catch before he lands on the ball and the ball becomes momentarily untethered. Jason Garrett, on the sideline, thought it was. But up in the owner's box, Stephen Jones, Jerry's son and the COO of the Cowboys, was a member of the NFL's rule-making body, the Competition Committee.
-
-"I actually told my father and my brother -- because they said, 'That's a catch' -- I actually go, 'I'm afraid it's not gonna be. I think he was going to the ground.' They go, 'What do you mean?' And I go, 'I think he was going to the ground from the time he secured the ball. I think this thing can get reversed.'"
-
-At the time, what most people, even Jason Garrett, thought they knew about the replay review was the stringency of the standard necessary for a call to be overruled. But that, too, turned out to be up for grabs. When Romo let go of the ball, the NFL official who bore the most responsibility for determining its fate was Dean Blandino, the VP of officiating, and as he says now:
-
-"We used to say, 'indisputable visual evidence.' That was the basic premise of replay. But we changed that to 'clear and obvious.' Because what's indisputable today? There are people who still think the world is flat."
-
----
-
-**HERE'S A STORY ABOUT UNCERTAINTY. I**n the early 20th Century, technology kept improving and the instruments kept improving and the instruments used for scientific measurements kept growing more precise. So did the clocks, to the extent that train schedules could finally be synchronized across Europe. That different trains in different places could leave their stations at the same time -- well, that was very important to the patent office in Bern, Switzerland. But it was also very curious to a clerk who worked there.
-
-"Albert Einstein said, we used to think we knew what 'at the same time' meant," says Hans Halvorson, a professor of philosophy at Princeton. "It meant 'simultaneous.' And the whole relativity revolution was Einstein saying, 'Wait, when we have really precise measurements, what we thought of as being the same time breaks down.' We don't really know what it means to say something happened in New Jersey at the same time as something happened in Sydney, Australia."
-
-It turns out to be the driving force of the breakthroughs that define modern physics. "What happened," Halvorson says, "was that experimental techniques kept getting better and better so they could pin down things more and more. But what they were finding was that as one thing was pinned down more and more precisely, it was making other questions harder and harder to answer."
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-
-
-This seeming paradox -- more knowledge leading to less certainty -- pertains more to quantum physics than it does to relativity. But according to Halvorson, the underlying philosophical questions have never been settled, "because there are people who very much hope that this is a temporary thing and we'll eventually figure out how to beat it and others who think it's telling us something about how we're embedded in our reality. We have to figure out what it is about human beings that makes us think we can without limit make our knowledge more precise. Because that turns out not to be true."
-
----
-
-**WHAT IS A catch?** The members of the Competition Committee thought they knew. Rich McKay, the Falcons' president and CEO who has been on the Competition Committee since 1992 and is now its chairman, thought he knew. Then they saw it in slow motion and freeze frame, like Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looking at the world for the first time through a microscope. "This play had been very well-officiated on the ground," McKay says, meaning the catch. "The officials had done a really good job. They didn't make many mistakes. But it was such simplistic way they did it, which was 'bang-bang, incomplete.' It wasn't that hard. We made it hard, when we went frame by frame.
-
-"All of a sudden replay came in, and it was, 'Hey, hold it -- the ball moved a little bit in his hand.' 'What? I don't see that.' So what we did for many years was just continue to tweak the rule. And then one day we woke up and said, 'Let's just rewrite it.'"
-
-There had been controversy from the start of the instant replay era. There had been uncertainty. There had been controversy born of uncertainty, catches that weren't and non-catches that were, so McKay and his confreres at the committee did something unprecedented. They had rewritten rules before. But the catch rule was "the first that I've deal with on the committee that we literally had to rethink and rewrite it because of replay. Since the beginning of time, since people began writing rules for our game, they were written for on-field officiating. And suddenly we had to take a rule that was an on-field officiating rule, not a replay rule, and rewrite it to deal with replay. And that was hard for some of us."
-
-The challenge was to come up with language that described what they saw -- so somehow account for the distortions basic to the replay review. They had to figure out a conceptual solution to a perceptual problem, or, as McKay puts it, they had to "put some objective criteria in there and live with the fact that we're rewriting this language for replay, not on-field officiating." But, short of Einstein's theory of General Relativity, what's the objective criteria for the element of time?
-
-In rewriting the rule for replay they had also rewritten it for the audience witnessing the games on television and indeed McKay was at home, watching the playoffs with his wife, when Dez Bryant snatched the ball from the air. He had been working with his boss, Falcons' owner Arthur Blank, to hire a new coach, and decided to take a break. "I came home and the game was on," McKay says. "I saw the play. And I said, 'Terrin, sweetheart, I hate to tell you this, but it's going to be a long offseason.' I knew that was coming. You could see it."
-
-The guy on the field used to be responsible for the call, the referee, the guy wearing the white hat. He'd go under the hood and confer with the replay official up in the booth and he'd come out and announce his ruling. That changed in 2014 when final authority for the reviews went to New York -- to the Art McNally Gameday Central at NFL headquarters on Park Avenue. "It was for consistency," says Alberto Riveron, who was league's top official from 2017 to 2021. Instead of 16 different referees making calls from 16 different officiating crews, there was one guy, the head guy, with his finger on everything.
-
-On Jan. 11, 2015, the head guy, the VP for officiating, was Dean Blandino, who had never worn a striped shirt -- who had never been an on-field official in the NFL. He had come up in the league as a replay official, and he was used to watching games in terms of their most dramatic and most contested plays. When late in the fourth quarter the Cowboys lined up "gun empty" on fourth-and-2 from the Green Bay 32, his instincts told him what he was seeing before he saw it.
-
-"As soon as Romo dropped back and the ball is in the air, I'm going OK, this this has the potential to be a big, big play," says Blandino, who has been the rules analyst for Fox since 2017. "And I saw it right away. I saw the ball pop up and I saw the guy kind of grab it as he's rolling in the end zone and I knew there was what we call replay smoke. Something looks a little off, we've got a little indication that we might have an issue. I hadn't had a chance to analyze the play, but I was kind of watching the broadcast.
-
-I was watching the Packers' sideline -- it was a wide shot, I remember -- and I'm watching Coach \[Mike\] McCarthy, and I'm saying he's going to challenge this and then the red flag came out and I knew that whatever happened, this was going to be controversial. I said to the room, 'Get ready, because the s--- is about to hit the fan.' Sometimes there are those calls that are just so big, so close and in such significant situations, and I felt that this was going to be one of those. And then Gene came over and we started it talking it through."
-
-Gene was Gene Steratore, the striped shirt and the white hat, now a rules analyst for CBS. He had been on the field or in the arena for the past 18 years, as an official for both the NFL and NCAA basketball. But he was already associated with the controversy over the catch rule because he was already associated with a controversial catch *ruling* \-- he was the ref who ruled that Calvin Johnson of the Detroit Lions had not "completed the process of completing the catch" back in 2010, an originalist reading of the rulebook that served as prelude for mystifications to come.
-
-He had made that call, he says, "with no backup from New York," and now, even though he was collaborating with Blandino, here it came again, the strange rule that would, as he would later say, "define my career."
-
-He had not seen the catch that Bryant had made up the sideline. As a referee, it was his job to keep an eye on the trenches and the quarterback. But he had a process for replay reviews -- he insisted on first watching the play in real time, and when he watched he was not immune to the glory of what he had seen or its persuasive power.
-
-"When Dez Bryant possessed that football at the 4- or 5-yard line, he was and is such great athlete that in Dez's mind, whether he had come back down to earth or not, he was finishing the catch while he was airborne and also reaching and turning his body airborne and reaching for the goal line. And so in Dez's process, for an athletic and human perspective, 'I'm finishing this process up here, at 13 feet, and before I land I'm going for the end zone -- that's who I *am*, that's what I *do*.'"
-
-So it was a catch then, right? Not so fast. Steratore had to go under the hood and confer with Blandino, and there it no longer mattered that he couldn't quite get over what he just saw Dez Bryant do -- "you have to leave that on the field at Lambeau. You're under the hood, and when you're under the hood it's an inanimate situation where we have to start defining and categorizing and concurring. And we go right back to, 'We have an airborne receiver possessing the football.'"
-
-And the league has rules about airborne receivers possessing the football. And the rules don't really take into account the startling abilities of a receiver like Dez Bryant, whose airborne status is treated as a liability upon reentry, the steps that he takes of no account unless he stands up and turns himself into a runner.
-
-Sure, he took three steps -- as Steratore says, "three *good* steps, one of those steps so good that it was pushing the turf of Lambeau Field backwards." But he was falling, and when he landed the ball popped up between his arms, and "when that occurred I had a falling receiver who never maintained full control of his body upright. I had a falling receiver who reached as he fell and the ball disengaged from his possession and the ground caused that. And the rule, as written on that time and on that day, said the receiver has to survive the ground."
-
-If the language of the catch rule makes philosophers sounds like NFL analysts, it also makes NFL analysts sound like philosophers. The concept of the catch if bound up in the question of "possession," which is nine-tenths of the law everywhere but on a football field. The concept of "surviving the ground" has never appeared in the NFL rulebook but it was somehow considered inherent to the text. Steratore and Blandino might have used a philosopher's stone to solve the problem of what they saw in review, but they never had a moment of disagreement.
-
-"We looked through all the angles," Blandino says, "and we were on the exact same page." When Steratore left the hood and returned to the field, Scott Linehan saw him walk over to Mike McCarthy and then saw McCarthy make an entry in a notebook and knew the Cowboys were in trouble. "After review," Steratore announced, "it has been determined that the receiver did not maintain possession of the football."
-
-Bryant had raised his arms when he returned to the sideline, but he hadn't started celebrating. Now, with his helmet off, he responded with strained pleas to the side judge, as if he were defending himself from an unjust accusation. "I tried to reach over the goal line! How was that not a catch? I tried to reach over the goal line..." But the side judge turned his back on him, and tended to his duties on the field against a soundtrack of Bryant's disheartened protest. What could Bryant say? That the catch didn't survive the ground because the catch didn't take place on the ground? That his failure to maintain possession on the ground was matched by the officials' failure to imagine a catch in the air?
-
-After the game, he will tell Garrett and Stephen Jones that he has caught thousands upon thousands of passes, and he knows it was a catch. At his locker he will tell reporters, "never seen nothing like it; can't believe it. That's all I have to say on it."
-
-But Steratore will meet with reporters and explain why, in his reading of the rules, the ruling was clear: "Although the receiver is possessing the football, he must maintain possession of that football throughout the entire process of the catch. In our judgment he maintained possession but continued to fall and never had another act common to the game."
-
-It is a perfect match of style and subject. We can watch Bryant go up for the ball 100 times without knowing for sure if he came down with it; we can read Steratore's ruling 100 times without knowing for sure what it means.
-
----
-
-**BEFORE REPLAY REVIEW** Steve Largent caught the ball 819 times without contention, crisis or complaint. He was one of the greatest receivers the game has ever seen, but the lack of controversy generated by his body of work has as much to do with the nature of his catches as it does with their number. Though prodigious, his talent was largely linear and horizontal. His catches challenged defenders but not our credulity.
-
-They did not occur 13 feet in the air. What Dez Bryant achieved -- and then did not achieve -- at Lambeau Field in January 2015 is a milestone in NFL history because it was literally unbelievable, occurring at the edge of human perception as well as of human capacity. His talent was exponential and vertical, and it came to the NFL just as the NFL's replay technology was establishing its on-field dominion. It is no surprise that he caused a crisis.
-
-The crisis was about the catch -- not Bryant's catch, but the catch itself, as interpreted by replay review and reinterpreted by Bryant's generation of receivers. The NFL's main attraction, the completed forward pass, had become a source of uneasiness and an object of doubt, even derision. Its fans weren't just doubting the officiating; they were doubting themselves. How can you watch the NFL when the NFL itself can't say what a catch is? But the league didn't act right away, because the league is the league and to correct a mistake it has to admit it made one.
-
-"I think they recognized they screwed up," Jason Garrett says. "But it was hard for them to admit that. We had all these plays where guys were literally stumbling 20 yards across the field and then falling down. The ball would come out and people were like, 'Is that a catch? He's falling -- did he survive the ground? And when you went to owners meetings, that's what everybody is talking about -- the rule. The line that everybody uses is, Hey, there's 100 guys at a bar -- what do they make of it? Well, 100 guys at a bar think Dez Bryant caught it. But the league was trying to justify the call. And that went on for three or four years."
-
-Eventually, the Competition Committee began calling around. It began bringing people to New York for input, for help. "We brought in NFL legends like Ozzie Newsome and Michael Irvin and Cris Carter to give us their opinion of what a catch is," says Alberto Riveron, the NFL senior director of officiating at the time. "We brought in coaches, we brought players, we brought Hall of Famers, we brought presidents, we brought owners, we listened to everybody and anybody. And finally, this is how we came to a decision. And we tried to make it as simple as possible. One of the things that the things brought to us by the legends was that the rule, the previous rule, did not allow for some of the great catches being made. And when we looked at those great catches -- well, I remember Jim Zorn saying that under our rule, this is no longer a catch. And we wanted the best athletes in the world to be rewarded for what they're doing."
-
-Stephen Jones had been an emotional proponent of changing the rule, because he, as part of Cowboys ownership, had been an emotional proponent of `#DezCaughtIt`. But he was also a believer in the proverbial wisdom of the hypothetical NFL audience -- "one of the things you do pay attention to is if you've got 100 guys at the bar and 99 of them say that was a catch or 99 of them say that was roughing the passer, you kind of want to get the officiating to the point where if 99 people say that's the way it is, then that's the way it should be. You don't want to let your fans dictate your rules. But you want to understand what most fans think is important."
-
-And so the rule changed in 2018. What is a catch? "A catch is made when a player inbounds secures possession of a pass, kick, or fumble that is in flight." "A forward pass is complete...if a player, who is inbounds...secures control of the ball in his hands or arms prior to the ball touching the ground...and....performs any act common to game (e.g., tuck the ball away, extend it forward, take an additional step, turn upfield, or avoid or ward off an opponent, or he maintains control of the ball long enough to do so. ... Movement of the ball does not automatically result in loss of control."
-
-No longer did the catch have to survive the ground. Dez caught the ball at last, securing the ball while still aloft, extending it forward and taking an additional step, though, for all the world to see, it moved. But there is something else that happened at league headquarters, which is that the league finally completed its own process -- that of centralizing control of on-field officiating.
-
-The catch rule hadn't changed all that much, after all; but the technology brought to bear upon it has been nothing less than transformational. On game day, there are 18 stations at the Art McNally Game Center, and each of them has full access to the feeds from every single camera at every single field, all of them synchronized by the same proprietary Hawkeye software that has all but eliminated argument in professional tennis. There are a lot of cameras -- 36 of them, for example, at ESPN's Monday Night Football broadcasts, 20 on periphery of the field and four at each pylon -- and so there is a flood of information available to the hall monitors at Park Avenue that officials on the field can't access, at least not live.
-
-"It's always been two worlds colliding," says John Parry, who retired from officiating in 2019 and is now ESPN's rules analyst. "It's been the art of officiating and the science of replay." But that distinction is breaking down under the onslaught of data. The officials at the Game Center increasingly make their presence felt outside the apparatus of challenge and review, speaking to officials on the field through their earpieces, correcting obvious mistakes, changing the spot, opting for "expedited review," all of which makes the old standard of "indisputable evidence" beside the point. "The question, Parry says, "is are we moving towards reviewing the action based on video, regardless of the ruling on field, and just going with the technology?"
-
-The answer, of course, is yes, to the extent that Gene Steratore compares officiating under the influence of the Art McNally GameDay Central to "driving with GPS." And yet what's amazing, on the field as in life, is that there are still accidents. What's amazing is that despite the attention paid to the language of the catch rule and the technology marshaled for its enforcement, the fundamental uncertainty never really goes away. The technological monitoring of the catch takes place in real time but the catch itself no longer does, and so there is no catch without a question, and the question is always the same.
-
-For example, earlier in the season when the Kansas City Chiefs were playing the L.A. Chargers, Patrick Mahomes threw across the middle and Asante Samuel Jr. cut into the path of the ball.
-
-Here is Al Michaels' call: "Mahomes backs up, steps up, fires -- and that's nearly picked. Maybe -- Samuel -- Does he come up with it? Did it hit the ground? He thinks he's picked it. The question is, did it hit the ground or not? Mahomes is walking away as if, 'I know it's an interception' and it is. What a play by Asante Samuel."
-
-Actually it's not an interception. In the replay, Samuel leaps, extends himself, grabs the ball in his hands and with the ball to his chest falls on top of it. He possesses it, but does he catch it?
-
-"It's an incomplete pass," Terry McAulay says. "He didn't control the ball before he hit the ground." And in fact, after review, the pass is ruled incomplete. It did not survive the ground, and Samuels did not make another move common to the game. A video of the play went to YouTube where fans continue to debate whether it was a catch or not. Like all of the catches that become non-catches, it lives on in the minor celebrity of uncertainty.
-
----
-
-"**HERE'S AN IMAGINARY** story about two sets of rules you could have for the high jump," says Adam Elga, a philosophy professor at Princeton and a colleague of Hans Halvorson. "The great thing about the high jump is that it's very easy to judge -- the bar either falls off the uprights or doesn't. But imagine another world in which there's a different set of rules, where the question is not whether the bar falls off but some vague notion of does it fall hard or how much it wobbles. And so people now look in a different way -- they start saying, 'It wobbled, it wobbled!' So that's a bit of uncertainty, and it has nothing to do with how good the video cameras are. It has to do with the concept."
-
-Where the video cameras come in, Elga suggests, is that they can't clear up your uncertainty about the concept -- they can only feed your uncertainty more information.
-
-"They're a factor, because if they're not good enough to get you into the zone of uncertainty, it won't matter." Where does the catch come in? "Maybe previously we had some uncertainty about the catch but we didn't have any information about what was actually happening. Now we do."
-
-There is a Venn Diagram between the limits of human perception and the promise of technological prowess. Catches take place there; so do a lot of the other confusions of our culture. "I think the thing we're talking about with the catch rule is happening for a lot of non-football stuff too," Elga says.
-
-"When we talk about scrutinizing replays frame by frame, I can't help but think of the defense in the Rodney King trial, going through the video and unsuccessfully trying to justify each strike frame by frame. And that's another thing, where if there's just not that much footage out there, there's just no opportunity to do that. Suddenly, you have this zillions of footage and so you have this zillions of dentists in their spare time scrutinizing this thing and thinking they know the answer."
-
-If this sounds like a stretch, consider why we watch football games. Consider how many of us watch football games. Consider how much we talk about the football games we watch. Now consider the catch -- how we experience it, as an audience; how the experience has been technologically remade. Something happens on the field of play; someone then tries to tell us what happened, the catch itself is a prelude to what comes next. Not every catch is challenged; not every catch is subject to official review. But nearly every catch is replayed, and therefore subject to debate.
-
-Nearly every catch is scrutinized; slowed down; frozen; discussed forensically. The television analysts ask their producers for the best angle, the highest resolution, the decisive frame; at last, one of the 20 or 30 cameras on hand gives it to them. The ball moves or it doesn't. It's a catch or it's not. But what we see in isolation on our televisions is not actually what happened on the field, and the simplest thing in the world -- a question schoolchildren resolve without much difficulty -- becomes a little lesson in epistemological doubt.
-
-We invest endless faith in the power of technology to deliver clarity. But what it delivers is uncertainty, along with the prayer that better technology might yet yield better results.
-
-
-
-It is part of the game now, of course -- the cycle of replay, review, doubt, debate. It's fun, it's captivating, and the ensuing controversies often linger in our memories longer than the final scores. The question of what constitutes a catch has not only become part of football's present; it also figures to become an integral part of its future, as NFL football continues to evolve into a kind of parimutuel sport and gambling apps encourage fans to bet not just just on final scores but on individual performances. If you think the question of whether Dez Bryant survived the ground generated controversy eight years ago, just imagine what that controversy will sound like when millions of dollars have been wagered on the answer.
-
-Is it so much of a stretch, then, to see, in Romo-to-Bryant, a symptom of something else, a condition much larger than Cowboys' failure to get a crucial first down? We watch football because the questions it requires us to answer are much easier than the questions required by politics and religion and law and science, not to mention real life. But the questions are increasingly becoming the same. How do we know what we know? How can we believe what we see? In football as in politics and in politics as in football, we come for the game; we stay for the replay. We watch the replay over and over, in the hope of resolution, but resolution is as hard to come by now as it was in the first instant replay, the one filmed by Abraham Zapruder in 1963. And that's why we have no choice but to keep on watching.
-
----
-
-**NO MATTER HOW** many times you look at it, it's beautiful. Once, twice, 300 times -- every time, it's perfect. He goes up and he might as well never come down. You've never seen a person go so high. The ball moves once he touches ground, but that's what makes it so hypnotic. The play ends in perfect ambiguity. Once, twice, *3,000 t*imes, and you can't really be certain if `#DezCaughtIt`. That's why you remember it.
-
-That's not why they remember it, though. Jason Garrett remembers it because it represented the best of everyone he had. They came through, they executed, they made the play at the very biggest moment. And then it got taken away. "The biggest issue for me in a landslide -- in a landslide -- was that it was ruled a catch on the field. They overturned it. This idea of indisputable evidence, clear and obvious, whatever language you're using, you can't tell me that play was worth someone coming in and overturning it. You can't tell me that Dean Blandino and Gene Steratore got together and said, 'This is indisputable.' We're still disputing it." He lost his job as head coach of the Dallas Cowboys in 2020 and works as a commentator for NBC
-
-Tony Romo remembered it enough to decline comment for this story. But his wife, in the documentary "Tony Romo: A Football Life," cries about it, bitter tears. Her husband had his career year in 2014. In the 2015 season, he was hurt. He was never really healthy again. He retired in 2017 and headed for his new life as a predictive analyst for CBS. As a quarterback, his biggest moment turned out to his last.
-
-As for Dez Bryant, he also declined to speak, saying he had plans of his own for the story of `#DezCaughtIt`. If you follow him on Twitter, you'll find out he's trying to start a platform of his own, Personal Corner, and is all about controlling his own narrative, by athletes for athletes. It makes sense, given what he lost, what was taken from him. And so look at it one more time, for good measure. Look at what happened on Jan. 11, 2015, when the Cowboys played the Packers at Lambeau Field.
-
-It was the best team Jason Garrett ever had.
-
-It was the best throw of Tony Romo's career.
-
-It was the best catch of Dez Bryant's career.
-
-The ball came at him over Sam Shields' shoulder; he timed his jump and grabbed it.
-
-There was still 4:06 left in the game.
-
-They lost the ball on downs.
-
-They never got it back.
-
-
-
-
----
-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.03 News/How the NYPD Cracked the Michael K. Williams Overdose Case.md b/00.03 News/How the NYPD Cracked the Michael K. Williams Overdose Case.md
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-Tag: ["🚔", "📺", "💉", "TheWire"]
-Date: 2022-02-06
-DocType: "WebClipping"
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-Link: https://sundaylongread.us9.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6e1ae4ac632498a38c1d57c54&id=33c227f416&e=c81182982b
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
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-Parent:: [[@News]]
-Read:: [[2022-02-07]]
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-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-HowtheNYPDCrackedtheMichaelWilliamsOverdoseCaseNSave
-
-
-
-# How the NYPD Cracked the Michael K. Williams Overdose Case
-
-Any fan of _The Wire_ would recognize [Michael K. Williams](https://www.thedailybeast.com/emmy-nominated-actor-michael-k-williams-dead-at-54-report-says) in the video as he strode up to a group of men outside a Brooklyn tenement.
-
-Only the 54-year-old actor was not playing the fictional Omar when he handed something to a thin man in light blue pants after a brief verbal exchange.
-
-And the video was recovered by NYPD detectives from a building surveillance camera outside 228 South 3rd Street in Williamsburg after his Sept. 5 death. They believe this is the moment that Williams bought the heroin laced with fentanyl and carfentanil that killed him.
-
-After Williams’ fatal overdose, Deputy Chief John Chell had instructed the 90 Precinct Detective Squad and Brooklyn North Narcotics Group 2 83/84/90 to treat it as a homicide.
-
-“Treat this case as if Michael K. Williams was hit by a bullet,” Chell remembers telling the detectives. “Make believe he got shot.”
-
-They made good on that. And the result was seen on Tuesday, when four men were arrested on federal charges of distributing the narcotics that resulted in Williams’ death.
-
-The essential evidence is the only footage of Williams that no fan of the actor would ever want to see.
-
-
-
-Williams as Omar Little in “The Wire”
-
-#### HBO /Everett Collection
-
-Just as they might after a fatal shooting, the detectives of the 90 squad used the city’s network of license plate readers to backtrack Williams’ movements that day, pinpointing when he drove from Manhattan over the Williamsburg Bridge. The reader hits indicated that he was minutes into Brooklyn when he rolled onto South 2nd Street a quarter block beyond Havemeyer Street. He double parked, as someone might when figuring they can run a quick errand and be back before they get a ticket.
-
-As detailed to The Daily Beast by investigators who pieced together video from the surrounding surveillance cameras, Williams walked back up the block and turned right onto Havemeyer. He had on a black baseball cap and a black jogging suit with white stripes along the legs and sleeves. He was loose-limbed, but he was striding in his black-and-white Adidas shoes with more purpose than if he were just out for a Labor Day weekend stroll.
-
-He proceeded past a gentrified pizzeria with an outdoor eating enclosure and a Jamaican restaurant and an old-school barbershop and a vape store. None of the people he passed appeared to recognize the man who brought Omar Little and Chalky White to life.
-
-Up ahead on the left was a public middle school with a huge mural depicting historical and neighborhood figures along with a famous declaration by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the final word in huge, cursive letters.
-
-“The Arc of the Moral Universe is long, but it bends toward JUSTICE.”
-
-
-
-“The set” where Michael K. Williams bought drugs the day of his death.
-
-#### Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty/Screenshot/Google Maps
-
-The assembled footage shows that Williams turned right on the far side of the next corner and started down South 3rd Street. He came to five figures a third of the way up the block. He may have simply surmised that the man in light blue pants was the one to approach. Detectives would later identify that man as a 38-year-old alleged dealer named Irvin Cartagena, known on the street as Green Eyes.
-
-“We don't have the dealer contacting him beforehand,” Det. Mark Gurleski of Group 2, the lead investigator on the case, told The Daily Beast. “It looks like he didn't even know these guys beforehand.”
-
-But one of the other men seemed to recognize Williams and became suddenly animated, placing his right hand on the actor’s shoulder. Green Eyes’ demeanor was unchanged and he appeared to be all business as Williams handed him what proved to be folded bills.
-
-
-
-#### Handout/U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York
-
-Green Eyes quickly checked the bills and stuck them in his right front pants pocket as he started toward six garbage cans to the left of the building entrance, just inside a low wrought-iron fence.
-
-Green Eyes bent to retrieve something from a paper bag stashed beside a blue recycling can at the end. He then stepped back over to Williams and handed him what detectives believe was at least one glassine envelope stamped AAA Insurance and containing traces of what the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner would rule as the cause of death: heroin laced with fentanyl and carfentanil. The official finding would also list cocaine, but Williams is believed to have taken that independently from the lethal mix.
-
-One difference between a hand-to-hand drug sale depicted on television and this one on the surveillance video is that Green Eyes did not look around or give any other indication of being concerned the police might be watching.
-
-While an episode of _The Wire_ shows a drug crew throwing rocks to break a surveillance camera, Green Eyes and those with him seemed not at all worried that the transaction was being recorded.
-
-“The building has these cameras pointing directly on them the whole day long,” Gurleski later noted.
-
-
-
-#### Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
-
-And even though Green Eyes had been busted at this very spot six months before, he did not hesitate to conduct this exchange with Williams in plain sight. The whole scene appeared as relaxed as if dealing dangerous narcotics were as completely legal as selling milk at the Alegria Grocery next door.
-
-Williams and Green Eyes were so at ease that they paused to take out their phones to exchange numbers, Green Eyes dialing first. Williams showed him his screen and Green Eyes pointed to it, apparently confirming his number.
-
-That done, they pocketed their phones. The detectives later found a sent call on Williams’ phone that matched the corresponding moment in the surveillance footage. The camera’s time stamp proved to be accurate.
-
-“Which is rare,” Gurleski said. “Usually, you pull surveillance video from any of the bodegas, the dates could be… anywhere.”
-
-Video showed Williams returning to his car. The detectives used other surveillance footage and license readers to follow his four-minute drive from there to his residence atop a 25-story luxury building at 440 Kent Ave. He made no stops along the way.
-
-“There's no gaps from the set to the apartment,” Chell later noted, “set” being the cop term for the location of a drug transaction.
-
-Detectives watching the video saw Williams pull in behind several other cars in an area by the building entrance marked by a sign reading “PICK UP AND DROP OFF ONLY.” He left the keys in the ignition when he strode inside, carrying a liter-sized bottle of water in his right hand.
-
-“He parked his car in a place where you're not supposed to park and he just left it there with the keys,” Chell said.
-
-And that was not in keeping with someone whom other residents describe as responsible and considerate.
-
-“Very uncharacteristic,” Chell said.
-
-
-
-#### Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
-
-Williams greeted the concierge in the lobby and continued on to an elevator. He pushed a button and stepped back, leaning against a wall and cradling the water bottle in both hands as he waited.
-
-Detectives said an elevator arrived and the lone passenger exited, pausing to hold the door for Williams as he entered. Williams pushed one of the buttons with his knuckle and a digital display showed the floor numbers during his 84-second ascent.
-
-His last recorded image came as he stepped off at Penthouse 3. He missed an appointment the following morning and his nephew, Dominic DuPont, went to check on him just before 2 p.m. DuPont found him on the living room floor, unresponsive. On a table in the kitchen was a glassine envelope stamped with the AAA Insurance logo.
-
-The car was still parked in the loading zone and its license plate number led the 90 Squad to the video of Williams making the exchange with Green Eyes. They noted that Williams was wearing the same black tracksuit as when he was found dead.
-
-The 90 Squad told Group 2 about the AAA Insurance stamp, and Gurleski heard on the street that it was being sold in Williamsburg. He was also informed that dealers were trying to get rid of it because of Williams’ death.
-
-When the Group 2 team saw the footage retracing the actor’s day, Det. Ramon Rodriguez recognized Green Eyes as quickly as a fan of _The Wire_ would have recognized Williams. Rodriguez had arrested him for selling heroin at this same location at 4 p.m. on Feb. 10. Group 2 had targeted the location after receiving a “kite,” a police term for a complaint about drug dealing.
-
-The court papers say on that day Green Eyes was found in possession of a dozen crack vials and heroin in a glassine envelope stamped MOBIL. He was surrounded by empty envelopes apparently left by customers.
-
-“There were just hundreds and hundreds of wet glassines… everywhere on the sidewalk, on the snow, on the garbage cans,” Sgt. Mark Bourbeau of Group 2 recalled.
-
-
-
-Williams as Chalky White in “Boardwalk Empire”
-
-#### HBO/Everett Collection
-
-With the arrest, the residents who made the complaints might have anticipated an actual improvement in the quality of life on their block.
-
-“There was a lady walking by, she was on her phone, she said in Spanish, ‘Oh look, they finally got the guy,’” Rodriguez recalled of the moment he took Green Eyes into custody last February. “The block was probably like, ‘Thank God.’”
-
-The top charge at Green Eyes’ arraignment the day after that bust was criminal sale of a controlled substance. That is a B felony in the same class as rape, attempted murder, and armed robbery. It technically carries a maximum sentence of 25 years.
-
-Nobody expected Green Eyes to get more than a fraction of that. But it seemed reasonable to expect _some_ time behind bars. He had been collared less than 1,000 feet from Middle School 50 and the Success Academy grade school. State statutes consider that to be the same as selling on school grounds.
-
-And at that time, Green Eyes was already charged with another B felony, having been arrested for a drug sale and weapon possession on Aug. 27, 2020.
-
-The bail reform provisions of that year required the courts to release him on his own recognizance after the earlier arrest and after the February bust. He was soon back by the garbage cans and among people on South 3rd Street who had been calling in complaints.
-
-“To see him go through the system and come right out—they're probably saying the cops didn't even do anything,” Rodriguez told The Daily Beast.
-
-On Aug. 26, 2021, the two outstanding drug cases were combined. Green Eyes was allowed to resolve them by pleading guilty to disorderly conduct, not even a crime, but a violation in the same category as loitering or making undue noise or drinking beer in public. He returned to the block having served not a minute of jail time.
-
-And 10 days later, Green Eyes was videotaped standing by the trash cans with four other men—two of them alleged dealers—when Williams approached.
-
-“It’s just crazy that a guy with that much money and that many connections is buying on the street from these old bums,” Gurleski said.
-
-After Williams’ death, the team met his nephew at the actor’s residence, calling it “the crime scene,” as they would if he had been shot there. The nephew, Dominic DuPont, had seemed to be a serious physical presence.
-
-“He's jacked, he’s in shape,” Bourbeau said. “He’s not letting \[Williams\] go anywhere near drugs. So that’s why he had to go outside.”
-
-In an interview with NJ.com back in 2012, Williams described his battle with his demon and his resolve to beat it.
-
-_"No one who was in my circle, who knew me as Mike, was allowing me to get high,” he told the news outlet. “I had to slip away to do drugs. I had to hide it. I'd be gone for days at a time. I was lonely in that part of my life. I was broke, broken, and beat up. Exhausted. Empty. I finally said, 'I can't do this no more.' I didn't want to end up dead."_
-
-
-
-Williams as Omar Little
-
-#### Nicole Rivelli / HBO /Everett Collection
-
-Williams had said on several occasions that he was speaking publicly about his fight to stay clean with the hope it would help others in their struggle. He had also been working to improve police and community relations, a Brooklynite in the fullest, best sense. And, on a personal level, the actor had been warm and immensely likable when Chell would see him over the last couple of years at Bamonte’s, an Italian restaurant in Williamsburg.
-
-“He went there for the meatballs,” Chell reported.
-
-An outside observer would have thought that Williams was at a high point in his life.
-
-“He was making money, he was making a movie, he was moving north,” Chell said. “And then something, I guess we’ll never know, set him off. And here we are. He was the best of the best who just had a problem. A great guy battling a demon and lost. That’s really what it is.”
-
-The detectives noted that overdose deaths are at a record high in America, just under 100,000 year to year. And fentanyl is a factor in more than half of them.
-
-“It’s happening all over the place,” Capt. Kevin Cain, commanding officer of Group 2, said. “It's in the drug areas, it’s cities, it’s in the suburbs.”
-
-Cain noted that a drug user may not even know they are taking fentanyl.
-
-“It’s in a powdered form, it can go into any other mixture,” he noted. “The dealers… fentanyl, for them, it’s cheap and strong, so it’s perfect for them.”
-
-Surveillance showed that Green Eyes vanished from “the set” soon after news broke that Williams had died of an apparent overdose. The detectives say that the three others in what they describe as a four-man drug operation—70-year-old Carlos Macchi, 57-year-old Hector Robles and 55-year-old Luis Cruz—continued on as before, right down to stashing the merchandise by the recycling can.
-
-“Obviously they weren't that concerned because the rest of them stayed out there and didn't change anything,” Gurleski said.
-
-The detectives say they observed the rest of the crew continue to make exchanges nonchalantly in front of youngsters who came and went from the building. They said the video shows that legitimate people who proceeded along the block to work or school had to pass through the crew’s booming business.
-
-“When we were pulling the videos, right after it happened on the block, everyone that we went and talked to, they’d pull us to aside and be like, ‘Hey, you know, these guys are doing this all day, you know, all day long, right?’” Gurleski recalled.
-
-The detectives recovered drugs from subsequent sales and noted that the crew continued selling its wares in glassine envelopes stamped “AAA Insurance” until the inventory apparently ran out. The crew began selling envelopes stamped “CONOCO,” then a pack of Marlboro Red, followed by “HESS” and “BALMAIN PARIS.”
-
-But if Williams’ death had prompted a rebranding, there was no change in the mix of heroin, fentanyl, and carfentanil, even though it had proven deadly.
-
-“The chemical makeup, you could stamp it 15 different ways, but it matches up,” Chell said.
-
-
-
-#### Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
-
-To make a state case against the crew for death by dealer, the detectives would have needed to prove that the crew was aware that the particular dose sold to Williams would likely be fatal. Federal law, on the other hand, requires only proof that the user died as a result of what the dealer provided. So the detectives went to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, which had successfully prosecuted a number of such cases.
-
-The federal prosecutor asked the detectives what they wanted to call the investigation and they were careful not to make any reference to _The Wire_ that might prompt people to guess it involved Michael K. Williams. They decided on one inspired by the “AAA Insurance” stamp.
-
-“Insurance Fraud.”
-
-With the abundant surveillance video and the accurate time stamp and the exchange of phone numbers and the chemical evidence, the detectives developed a strong case and secured arrest warrants for Green Eyes and the three others in the alleged crew on charges of Conspiracy to Commit Narcotics Trafficking in violation of Section 846, Title 21 of the U.S. Code. Green Eyes was alleged to have violated a subsection that carries a minimum 20-year sentence for selling narcotics that result in a death.
-
-The detectives said Macchi, Robles, and Cruz were still operating by the trash cans and they figured they would be easy to grab any time.
-
-“They're out there from the sun-up until sundown,” Gurleski said.
-
-But Green Eyes was down in Puerto Rico, staying out of sight, so the arrests were on hold until he was located. U.S. Marshals set up surveillance there and arrested him around noon on Tuesday. They immediately notified Group 2 83/84/90 in Brooklyn.
-
-“As soon as they grabbed Green Eyes, they called Detective Gurleski and he basically rallied the troops, got his team together,” Cain, the Group 2 commanding officer, told The Daily Beast.
-
-Gurleski, Lt. Terrence McDowell, Bourbeau, and the others headed out to arrest Green Eyes’ alleged accomplices. They came upon Robles a short distance from the block where Williams had bought the fatal dose.
-
-The detectives then executed a search warrant at an apartment on the block alleged to have been selling envelopes stamped AAA Insurance. Gurleski had already been working on a more general tip about the location when Williams died, and that is why he became the lead investigator. He and the team arrested Luis Cruz there. The fourth and final man, Carlos Machi, was picked up at a residence near the set and the school whose mural quotes King’s declaration that the long arc of the moral universe bends towards JUSTICE.
-
-“It’s a perfect end to a tremendous amount of work,” Cain said.
-
-On Wednesday morning, the team members who were not busy with post-arrest details attended the second of the two funerals for two cops who were murdered in Harlem on Jan. 21. They and the rest of the NYPD then resumed risking the same fate.
-
-The United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced the arrests in the afternoon. The NYPD also issued a statement as the process to return Green Eyes from Puerto Rico was underway.
-
-With the collars, the team hopes the threat of serious prison time—there is no parole with the feds—would give them leverage in going up the supply chain. They know it will be difficult.
-
-“That’s like cartel stuff,” Gurleski said.
-
-He recalled one cartel-level case where a supplier faced 12 years.
-
-“He’s like, ‘They’ll just kill my family, I'll take the 12 years,’” Gurleski remembers.
-
-In the meantime, the detectives had received another kite from the block, this one from a man who called in and said somebody had sold drugs in front of his daughter.
-
-“If you guys don't do something about it, I'm gonna take it into my own hands,” the man said in his complaint.
-
-The detectives will respond to that kite as they do all the others, with the same dedication depicted by the best cops when Michael K. Williams was on _The Wire._
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diff --git a/00.03 News/How the Record Industry Ruthlessly Punished Milli Vanilli for Anticipating the Future of Music.md b/00.03 News/How the Record Industry Ruthlessly Punished Milli Vanilli for Anticipating the Future of Music.md
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-# How the Record Industry Ruthlessly Punished Milli Vanilli for Anticipating the Future of Music
-
-
-
-
-
-Milli Vanilli, a pop duo act from Munich, will never enter the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. They were hot back in 1990, and even won the Grammy for Best New Artist. Their debut album eventually sold ten million copies. But Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, the two musicians who performed as Milli Vanilli, are remembered today as a scandal and blot of shame on the music business.
-
-What terrible thing did they do to get blacklisted and cancelled? You may already know, and if not, I’ll tell you.
-
-> #### “Milli Vanilli’s Grammy was rescinded—the first and only time that has happened in the history of the award. I note that Bill Cosby still has his eight Grammy Awards. Even after Phil Spector’s murder conviction, nobody took away his prizes and honors.”
-
-But allow me to put matters in context first.
-
-Looking back on the music stars of that era, it would be hard to create a greater scandal than, say, Michael Jackson. He was eventually arrested and charged with child molestation. Although Jackson never got convicted, the [cumulative evidence is very troubling](https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/michael-jackson-child-sexual-abuse-allegations-timeline-785746/)—even so, he gets plenty of airplay nowadays and is still lauded as the *King of Pop*. A high-profile musical celebrating his artistry opened on Broadway earlier this year.
-
-The songs are great. I won’t deny it.
-
-Jackson escaped a prison sentence, but many other music stars have served time for high-profile crimes without losing their fans. When R. Kelly recently got convicted of kidnapping, sexual exploitation of a child, and racketeering, his [sales soared 500% in the aftermath](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/r-kellys-sales-streams-guilty-verdict-1239159/). I’d prefer to disagree with those glib experts who claim “all publicity is good publicity”—but it’s hard to argue with those numbers.
-
-Just a few weeks after the Milli Vanilli scandal, Rick James was charged with kidnapping and sexual assault—and then got arrested *again* for similar abuses three months later while out on bail. He continued to make recordings after his release from Folsom Prison, and returned to the *Billboard* chart. Health problems, not James’s criminal record, finally curtailed his career. And in 2020, his estate got a big payday by selling his masters and publishing rights to the Hipgnosis Song Fund.
-
-Other music industry legends have committed murder or manslaughter. Suge Knight won’t become eligible for parole until 2034, and Phil Spector died while incarcerated for murder in 2021. The latter was widely praised in published obituaries, and his recordings remain cherished by fans.
-
-And now let’s turn to Milli Vanilli.
-
-
-
-
-Milli Vanilli with their Grammy Awards (Ron Galella/Getty Images)
-
-Milli Vanilli haven’t fared so well. You might even say they have been wiped out of pop music history, lingering on merely as a joke or worse. But no one got raped or murdered by their antics. They didn’t even trash their hotel rooms or get arrested buying weed.
-
-So what did they do that led to permanent cancellation?
-
-Their crime was posing as vocalists on their recordings, when they didn’t actually sing. When they went on the road, they lip-synced on stage. And—if I can be blunt—their greatest transgression was making the people who vote on Grammy awards look foolish.
-
-
-
-Producer Frank Farian came up with the name Milli Vanilli for Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus—who really were aspiring singers. Farian didn’t think their vocal work was strong enough for his project, but he liked the way the duo looked on stage. Strutting around in colorful outfits with their long braided hair swinging in time to the beat, Morvan and Pilatus captivated audiences. And they looked very cool in music videos.
-
-Fans should have been suspicious as early as July 21, 1989, when a hard drive malfunction at a Milli Vanilli concert caused the music to skip, with part of a line from their trademark song (“Girl, you know it’s”) repeating over and over. Nowadays we might call it a *sample* or a *loop*, but in that time and place it was an embarrassment.
-
-"I knew right then and there, it was the beginning of the end for Milli Vanilli," Pilatus later remarked. Even so, the duo kept their career going another 16 months before the scandal broke. In the meantime, their breakout single, “Girl You Know It’s True” became a genuine hit, and their debut album sold six million copies.
-
-It was too late to change course now—and at every concert they continued to lip-sync to pre-recorded tracks. Until the truth came out. . .
-
-The media was shocked—shocked!—to learn that pop video stars had been selected just for their charisma, dance steps, and looks, not their music abilities. Here’s what the *LA Times* had to say:
-
-“Words like *embarrassment* or *sham* or *hoax* were too mild. Milli Vanilli was a scandal fueled, like most scandals, with ambition, greed and mendacity….” The same article breathlessly quotes Pilatus stating: “We sold our souls to the devil.”
-
-The sad fact is that the two performers wanted to sing their own songs. Their producer was the skeptic, preventing the duo from contributing to their own album. And what recourse did they have. "We lived in a project,” Pilatus explained. “We had no money. We wanted to be stars."
-
-Tensions caused by the deception soon reached a breaking point. Farian fired the duo when they demanded that he let them sing on their next album. In the aftermath both producer and singers shared all the messy details of their deception.
-
-“Rob and I never meant for it to go this way,” Morvan later explained. “Our producer tricked us. We signed contracts as singers but were never allowed to contribute. It was a nightmare. We were living a lie. The psychological pressure was very hard. It was like we were trapped in some golden prison.”
-
-“They can sing up to Pavarotti’s high C,” insisted vocal coach Seth Riggs. “Not as well as Pavarotti, but they did do it.”
-
-Clearly the songs sound the same, no matter who is singing the vocals. If the album was great, why does it matter who does the singing? Back in the 1960s, the Archies had the bestselling hit single of the year, and they were just cartoon characters. The Monkees are acknowledged nowadays as cultural icons and innovators, although much of the heavy lifting was done behind the scenes by studio musicians and songwriters Boyce and Hart—Mike Nesmith even announced in an interview: "Tell the world we don’t record our own music."
-
-But Milli Vanilli’s music is judged by different standards—without the nostalgic adulation enjoyed by those other artists. Yet just consider how much they anticipated the music scene of the current moment.
-
-The notion of studio musicians actually performing hit songs for make-believe stars, so unusual back at the time of the Archies, is now a big business. The Japanese pop star Hatsune Miku is just a hologram, and anime pop singers are a major cultural trend—they have fans clubs and social media accounts just like flesh-and-blood performers. In other instances, holograms now replicate actual human musicians, but perhaps with even more duplicity than Milli Vanilli.
-
-The holograms are often constructed using stand-ins as models—because there simply isn’t precise enough biometric data from dead pop stars. So the end result is actually a computer-built simulation of an impersonator. Milli Vanilli, by comparison, are paragons of authenticity. At least they *appeared* on stage and in video.
-
-I’m no fan of lip-syncing—the worst crime committed by Milli Vanilli—but it’s naive to claim it isn’t pervasive in the music business. And I feel sorry for anyone who thinks music videos provide an accurate documentation of how a song is performed in the studio. They would do better to put their faith in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Hit videos are created by large teams, and the musicians often engage in the most ludicrous play-acting. No one expects otherwise.
-
-And then consider all the recent algorithm-driven attempts to recreate the voice or instrumental sound of a dead star. Kenny G actually released a duet with Stan Getz in which the latter’s sax work was a computer construct. (And I wrote about it [here](https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/should-kenny-g-make-a-record-with).)
-
-That’s an extreme case, but even conventional pop and EDM albums nowadays are created and ‘enhanced’ with so much technology, that it’s hard to say whether you could ever really witness an authentic *live* performance. Some hit stars merely show up on stage with a bank of sound equipment in front of them, and work the technology.
-
-But I’m especially puzzled by the aftermath of the Milli Vanilli scandal. According to Pilatus and Morvan, the head of their record label—the *esteemed* Clive Davis—knew they weren’t singing on the tracks. But Davis’s career didn’t suffer from the fraud. Producer Frank Farian, the mastermind behind the fiasco, went on to enjoy an amazing career—his Wikipedia page boasts that he has “sold over 850 million records and earned 800 gold and platinum certifications.” It mentions in passing that there has been “controversy during his career,” but the general tone is adulatory and respectful. He even has a [fan club](http://frankfarian-info.narod.ru/).
-
-> #### “Back then it was fraud. Nowadays it’s a winning formula for Instagram and TikTok.”
-
-Milli Vanilli have no fan club. Their [Grammy was rescinded](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-11-20-mn-4948-story.html)—the first and only time that has happened in the history of the award. I note that Bill Cosby still has his eight Grammy Awards. Even after Phil Spector’s murder conviction, nobody took away his honors and prizes. You can display those statuettes in your prison cell, as far as I know—perhaps some artists have actually done that.
-
-As for Milli Vanilli, the duo actually got more press coverage as fraudsters than they ever received as musicians. The scandal totally eclipsed the renown, and still does today.
-
-The two singers tried to recover their degraded careers under a new name, Rob & Fab, and they did a credible job on stage. But the music industry and fans were not in a forgiving mood. Their new album only sold around two thousand copies.
-
-Another comeback attempt, with the support of Farian, came to a sudden and tragic conclusion when, right before the tour, Pilatus died of an overdose in a Frankfurt hotel room. He was just 32 years old.
-
-Morvan has lingered on at the fringes of the entertainment business. He has worked as a DJ, rapper, singer, dancer, fashion designer, even a [motivational speaker](https://collectivespeakers.com/speakers/fab-morvan/). He is now in his fifties, with time to reinvent himself again, but that can’t change the past—he will always be best known for a scam that someone else plotted, and he supported reluctantly.
-
-If I were in a particularly cynical mood, I might claim that Milli Vanilli anticipated the future of the music industry better than any other new act from that era. Even the sound and ambiance of their old videos would fit in nicely with the songs on current rotation. True, they put more faith in technology than authenticity, but couldn’t you say the same for the algorithm-crazed music business of the current moment? By the same token, they knew how to act the part of celebrities, with the right attitudes and moves, while relying on a team of helpers to fill in the gaps—much like most superstars do today. Most important of all, they had more skills as influencers than vocalists, but that too shows how much they were ahead of their time.
-
-Back then it was fraud. Nowadays it’s a winning formula for Instagram and TikTok.
-
-After considering all this, many of you will decide it still was wrong. Musicians ought to possess musicianship, you will tell me. Record labels should reward talent, you insist, not just looks. The Grammy Awards should celebrate performers of impeccable artistry, who can deliver the goods live in concert, without manipulation and fraud. The whole industry needs to embrace honesty and ability.
-
-But if you believe those things—and maybe I do too—we have much bigger problems than Milli Vanilli. If it were up to me, I’d give them back their Grammy. We need more forgiveness in our society, and a good place to start is with these two poor performers. Then we can move on to the larger tasks at hand.
-
-That’s how the industry should have responded to the scandal thirty years ago. But it’s not too late to start now.
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diff --git a/00.03 News/How the enigmatic Nefertiti came to be locked away in Germany Aeon Essays.md b/00.03 News/How the enigmatic Nefertiti came to be locked away in Germany Aeon Essays.md
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-# How the enigmatic Nefertiti came to be locked away in Germany | Aeon Essays
-
-Almost 3,400 years ago, the sculptor Thutmose said goodbye to the extensive compound – a warren of workshops, courtyards and living accommodation for artists and apprentices – that had been both his home and his workplace for more than a decade. He had once managed a highly prestigious business, creating many of the stone images of the royal family that decorated Egypt’s newest royal city, Amarna. But now King Akhenaten was dead and his young successor, Tutankhamen, had decided to relocate the royal court back to Thebes. On the verge of becoming a ghost city, Amarna no longer had any need for royal statues, so Thutmose – the king’s chief of works, and entirely dependent on royal patronage – had no choice but to seek employment elsewhere. Packing his goods and chattels, he sailed away, abandoning objects that he did not want or could not move. Among this heap of castoffs was an uninscribed bust of a woman whose distinctive tall, flat-topped crown identified her as Akhenaten’s consort: Nefertiti.
-
-Akhenaten, who reigned _c_1352-1336 BCE, had been a remarkable king. For almost 1,000 years, Egypt’s monarchs worshipped the multiple gods of the long-established pantheon. Turning his back on this tradition, Akhenaten had dedicated his life – and the lives of his family and followers – to the service of an ancient solar deity known simply as ‘the Aten’. Akhenaten’s god was a genderless, faceless disk that hung in the sky emitting powerful rays: when depicted in two-dimensional art, these long, thin rays end in tiny human hands that allow the Aten to offer the ankh, symbol of life, to the royal family. Akhenaten’s Aten represented the power of the Sun, or the light of the Sun, and, because the Aten was also associated with ideas of divine kingship, admitted the possibility that the king himself might be a living god to be worshipped by his people. Inspired by the Aten, Akhenaten founded a city on virgin land, halfway between the traditional capital cities of Thebes (in southern Egypt) and Memphis (in northern Egypt), where his god could be worshipped without interference from any pre-existing cult or priesthood. Akhet-Aten (literally ‘Horizon of the Aten’) is today better known as Amarna.
-
-In 1714, the French Jesuit priest Claude Sicard became the first European to record details of a visit to the ruined city of Amarna. From that time onwards, there were sporadic Western visitors and occasional archaeological missions until, in 1907, the French-run Egyptian Antiquities Service granted the Berlin philanthropist James Simon, founder of the German Oriental Society (Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, or DOG), permission to survey and excavate the site. The work was to be done by a team of archaeologists led by the German Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt. A local workforce would do the actual digging.
-
-In December 1912, the team was working in the Thutmose compound, recovering high-quality sculpted pieces, sculptors’ tools, stone chips, gypsum plaster artefacts and flakes of gold foil that confirmed the presence of a sculptor’s workshop. On 6 December, they discovered a collection of more than 50 artefacts made from limestone, quartzite and gypsum plaster, stored in the ruins of Thutmose’s own luxurious villa. These included the Nefertiti bust, a similar but badly damaged bust of Akhenaten, several unfinished stone sculptures, and a unique collection of plaster heads.
-
-Amarna had been a city filled with carved and painted images of the royal family: the king, his consort Nefertiti and their six daughters. These images were not merely decorative. In the absence of the now-banned traditional gods, they served as a focus of worship for the Amarna elite who were forbidden to communicate directly with the Aten. Prominent citizens furnished their homes and gardens with statues of the king and queen, or with scenes depicting the royal family going about their daily business beneath the Aten’s rays. These images were a conspicuous means of demonstrating loyalty to the regime.
-
-Ancient Egypt’s most talented sculptors – those given access to first-class resources – were employed by kings and temples. They worked to official rules of composition and presentation, and their completed art was placed in specific locations to fulfil particular functions. This lack of freedom of expression has led to the suggestion that they should, perhaps, be classified as craftsmen rather than artists. However, all high-ranking artists carried an additional, priestly responsibility that gave Thutmose an important role in supporting Akhenaten’s theology. The Egyptian word for sculptor literally means ‘the one who makes live’, and the sculptor was recognised as having a quasi-divine ability to release the shape hidden inside a featureless stone block, and in so doing create a latent form capable of sustaining life. Ritually activated, any sculpture could become a substitute body to house the soul of its deceased subject, should the mummy of the deceased be destroyed.
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-The belief that the soul might need to live in a statue made the bust an unpopular art form: no one wanted to run the risk of spending eternity trapped inside a bodiless head. Why, then, did Thutmose depict Nefertiti and Akhenaten this way? The presence of finished shoulders, the absence of tenons for attachment, the integral crowns and the smooth bases that allow the busts to stand firm, all allow us to be confident that each is indeed a complete artefact. These are not heads that have broken off larger statues, and nor are they body-parts intended for insertion into a composite statue.
-
-Most likely, the busts were created to be used as studio models. By providing his workers with approved images and colour-schemes to copy, Thutmose could be confident that all the Nefertitis and Akhenatens leaving his workshop would look alike, and that all would be acceptable to the king. At the same time, the two busts could serve as objects of worship for both Thutmose and his workers. This would explain why, unlike other works completed by Thutmose and his team, the Akhenaten and Nefertiti busts never went on public display.
-
-Some have wrongly assumed that she must have had white skin and therefore must been a foreign-born queen
-
-The Nefertiti bust is the only substantially completed and undamaged sculpture recovered from Thutmose’s compound. Standing 48 cm tall and weighing 20 kg, it was carved from limestone, coated with a plaster ‘skin’, and painted in bright colours. It shows the upper part of the queen (head, neck and an area extending from the clavicle to just above the breasts); her head is topped by a tall crown and a colourful floral collar encircles her neck. Her crown is painted dark blue and encircled by a multicoloured ribbon (a snake, now missing, once reared over her forehead). Two more colourful ribbons hang from the nape of her neck. Beneath the crown, Nefertiti’s head is hairless, giving her an almost contemporary look. Her eye sockets are symmetrical, and rimmed with black kohl. The right eye is created from a ball of black-coloured wax placed in the white-painted eye-socket and covered with a thin rock-crystal lens engraved with the outline of the iris. The left eye socket was empty when the bust was discovered, and it seems likely that the lens fell out prior to excavation. An examination of the socket has revealed no obvious trace of glue, but scratch marks on the lower lid could have been caused when an inlay was inserted.
-
-
-
-_Photo by Michael Sohn/Reuters_
-
-Her smooth gypsum plaster ‘skin’, just 1-2 mm thick over her face, allowed the ancient artist to model the muscles and tendons in Nefertiti’s neck, to add creases under her eyes and around her mouth, and to emphasise her cheekbones. This realism was then enhanced by the skilful use of pigments to create a pink-brown skin tone, deeper red-brown lips, and dark eyebrows. We cannot accept this colour scheme literally. Egyptian art followed colour conventions that decreed that most elite men would be depicted with a red-brown skin and most elite women with a paler, yellow-white skin. This was not intended to be an accurate reflection of daily life, but simply a means of allowing the viewer to make an easy distinction between males and females. We have no idea of Nefertiti’s actual skin tone and yet, influenced by the bust, some observers have wrongly assumed that she must have had white skin and therefore must been a foreign-born queen. Others have equally wrongly assumed that the bust must be a crude modern fake, either because it does not have dark skin, or simply because it is painted. We have become so accustomed to seeing Egyptian sculpture stripped of its original vibrant colour and the once-hidden stone exposed, that Nefertiti can appear modern rather than ancient.
-
-Most observers, irrespective of age, gender, race or culture, agree that the Nefertiti bust represents a beautiful woman. This may in part be due to expectation – Nefertiti has been promoted as a beautiful woman for so long that we automatically see her as such – but it is also a natural response to the unusual symmetry of her face. However, just as we should not accept the skin-tone of the bust as being true-to-life, so we should not accept the bust as an accurate portrait of Nefertiti herself. Egyptian royal art was not primarily intended to be portraiture: it was the name and regalia rather than the likeness that allowed the observer to identify the subject.
-
-Akhenaten’s determination that his people should access the Aten via images of his family has left us with more 2D and 3D representations of Nefertiti than of any other Egyptian queen, and these allow us to see that her face and body are represented in different ways at different times and, presumably, by different artists throughout the Amarna Period. Generally speaking, earlier representations of Nefertiti are more angular and exaggerated, with a thin body and prominent jaw that mirrors Akhenaten’s own, while later representations appear more natural, with emphasised cheek bones, rounded cheeks and straighter lips. We can no more assume that Nefertiti looked like her bust than we can assume that she looked like any of her other representations. All that we can safely say is that this is the image of Nefertiti that Akhenaten wished to promote.
-
-At the time of Borchardt’s excavation, non-Egyptian archaeological missions were entitled to claim and export half the artefacts, or ‘finds’, recovered during each season’s excavation. Sharing of the finds was closely monitored by Egypt’s Antiquities Service, with an official ‘division of finds’ designed to ensure that no items of great archaeological or commercial value left the country. Today, the division is recognised as a bad system that broke up groups of artefacts, turned scientific excavations into treasure hunts, and perpetuated the idea that the proper home for an ancient Egyptian artefact is a foreign museum. In 1913, however, the division was seen as a fair reward for those who invested their money in excavating Egypt. (Today, it is illegal to export antiquities from Egypt.)
-
-On 20 January 1913, the French Egyptologist Gustave Lefebvre, the antiquities inspector for Middle Egypt, agreed to the division of the Amarna finds. Borchardt had listed his discoveries, splitting them into two find lists of equal value. One was headed by a small carved scene showing Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their family sitting beneath the rays of the Aten. The other was headed by the Nefertiti bust. Inexplicably, Lefebvre selected the scene for the Cairo Museum, so ownership of the Nefertiti bust, and all the other artefacts on that list, fell to the aforementioned James Simon, official holder of the Amarna concession. On 7 July 1920, Simon donated his entire collection to the Neues Museum in Berlin, transferring ownership of the Nefertiti bust to the State of Prussia.
-
-To many, Lefebvre’s failure to select the Nefertiti bust for Egypt is so inexplicable that it cannot have simply been the result of indifference or incompetence. Claims that Borchardt abducted Nefertiti have been so rife that even in Germany many accept that the bust was stolen. While the more sensational claims against Borchardt – that he smuggled the bust out of Egypt in a basket of fruit, for example – can be dismissed, it is clear that he did nothing to help Lefebvre make the right decision.
-
-It is particularly striking that the official division protocol listed Nefertiti as a ‘bust in painted plaster of a princess of the royal family’. It is not clear who created this description, but it contains two obvious errors. It is odd that Nefertiti is listed as a princess rather than a queen, given that she is wearing her trademark crown, though the distinction between Nefertiti and one of her daughters would have meant less in 1913 than it does today (Akhenaten’s mother, Tiy, was then regarded as the dominant Amarna female). The fact that the bust is described as being made of plaster is more significant. The outer layer of the bust is indeed plaster, but its core is limestone. Is this a simple mistake, or is it possible that the piece was deliberately misdescribed? After all, Lefebvre had agreed in advance that all the _plaster_ heads recovered from the Thutmose workshop should go to Germany.
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-He asked for the return of the bust on the grounds that there had obviously been a mistake
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-In April 1924, the Nefertiti bust went on permanent display in the newly opened Amarna Courtyard at the Neues Museum. The general public, whose interest in ancient Egypt had been stimulated by the discovery in 1922 of Tutankhamun’s near-intact tomb in the Valley of the Kings, flocked to the museum in ever-increasing numbers. Nefertiti was a beautiful enigma. She fitted perfectly with the colourful, geometric style that was starting to represent Western postwar opulence and glamour (in 1925, this would be named the Art Deco style). Yet she was the creation of a sculptor who had lived and died in Africa, thousands of years ago. Germany, a land so recently stripped of its royalty, acquired a new queen to admire.
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-While some travelled to Berlin to see her, others were able to find Nefertiti closer to home. The Neues Museum had commissioned the sculptor Tina Haim-Wentscher to make an exact copy of the Nefertiti bust, and this had been used as the model for a series of replicas sold to museums and private collections worldwide. Many of the high-quality Nefertiti replicas displayed in museums today are painted plaster-casts taken from Haim- Wentscher’s sculpture. Other replicas, slightly different in appearance particularly with regard to their treatment of the eyes, are based on later models created either freehand or, more recently, from laser scans. While Tutankhamen remained frustratingly invisible, sealed in his nest of coffins in the Valley of the Kings, replica Nefertitis travelled the Western world. She existed, simultaneously, across innumerable museum galleries.
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-Soon after Germany had somehow managed to acquire a great Egyptian treasure, Pierre Lacau, the head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service and a French veteran of the First World War, took action. While acknowledging that Borchardt had met all legal requirements relating to the division, he nevertheless asked for the return of the bust on the grounds that there had obviously been a mistake. The museum was not prepared to cooperate and so, in 1925, Lacau withdrew Borchardt’s permission to excavate until Germany either returned the bust or agreed to arbitration. When Borchardt retired as director of the DOG, there was a sense that a deal might now be possible. Lacau travelled to Berlin to negotiate with the museum.
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-Initially, he suggested a straightforward swap: the bust for the painted stela (the small carved scene) plus a few objects of lesser value. But the Neues Museum was not happy with this suggestion. Berlin already owned a carved stela depicting the royal family, and it didn’t need another. It was then proposed that Berlin should receive two statues of acknowledged artistic and historical merit: a life-sized statue of the Old Kingdom high priest Ranefer and a seated statue of the New Kingdom architect and priest Amenhotep, son of Hapu. Egyptologists were agreed that this was a reasonable exchange but public opinion, roused by the press and enthralled by the queen, quashed the deal.
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-‘The colourful queen’ was moved first to the vault of the Prussian bank and then to a bunker near the Berlin zoo
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-As the former owner of the bust, Simon was happy to make his own views on the matter clear. On 28 June 1930, he published an open letter addressed to the Prussian minister of culture, reminding him that the museum’s directors had promised that the bust would be returned to Egypt should the authorities ever request it. As a businessman, he felt that this promise should be honoured. An exchange for items of equal worth would be a sensible solution that would save face, and would allow the DOG to continue its valuable excavation work. His letter was ignored.
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-In October 1933, Hermann Göring, Minister President of Prussia, agreed to give back the Nefertiti bust to King Fuad, to commemorate the anniversary of the king’s accession to the Egyptian throne. Hitler, however, disagreed and personally intervened to block Nefertiti’s return. The Amarna artefacts remained on display until August 1939, when Berlin’s museums were forced to close with the coming of war. The collections were packed up and transferred to secure locations. This was to prove a wise precaution. All the buildings on Museum Island suffered war damage; more than a third of the Neues Museum was destroyed. The bust, stored in a crate labelled ‘the colourful queen’, was moved first to the vault of the Prussian governmental bank and then to a bunker near the Berlin zoo. Shortly before the Red Army took Berlin in 1945, the bust was hidden alongside Germany’s gold and currency reserves in a salt mine in Thuringia. Five months later, the Allied forces captured the mine, and the bust passed to the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives branch of the Allied armies.
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-In 1946, in order to show the German people that the bust had survived the war unscathed, the US Army put Nefertiti on public display in Wiesbaden. That same year saw a request for the repatriation of the bust, addressed by the Egyptian government to the Allied Control Commission in Germany and reminding them that the return of the bust had previously been agreed, only to be thwarted by Hitler. Now that Hitler was dead, surely there was no reason not to right this historic wrong?
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-But this request was refused on the grounds that the commission had authority to repatriate only objects looted during the war. As Nefertiti had arrived in Berlin in 1913, this was a long-standing legal matter between the Egyptians and the Germans, and in the meantime Nefertiti should return to her prewar home. However, there was a further problem: by now, Berlin had become a divided city, and the Neues Museum lay in the communist-controlled eastern sector. In 1956, the bust was sent to West Berlin where Nefertiti was exhibited first in the Dahlem Museum and then in the Egyptian Museum. Not unexpectedly, the German Democratic Republic tried to claim the bust on the grounds that the Neues Museum was located in East Berlin. They were unsuccessful.
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-Following the reunification of Germany, the Nefertiti bust returned to the Neues Museum, home of Berlin’s Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection. There have been repeated requests for its return to Egypt. In 1984, for example, the ‘Nefertiti Wants To Go Home’ movement suggested that the bust be displayed alternately in Cairo and Berlin, while in 2005 Egypt appealed to UNESCO to resolve the dispute – but the German authorities have stood firm. Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities (a successor to the Antiquities Service) continues to press for the return of the bust, to no avail. Nefertiti remains on display in Berlin.
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-# How the story of soccer became the story of everything
-
-Fight disinformation: [Sign up](https://www.motherjones.com/newsletters/?mj_oac=Article_Top_Fight_Disinfo) for the free *Mother Jones Daily* newsletter and follow the news that matters.
-
-One afternoon last October, thousands of fans began gathering outside St. James’ Park, the 130-year-old home of the English soccer club Newcastle United, to celebrate a new beginning. Some sported the club’s traditional black-and-white striped jerseys. Others toted cases of booze. There was no match that day, but that only improved the mood. In seven games that season, the team had yet to record a win. Newcastle, once one of the best sides in England, had endured years of mediocrity under the ownership of a miserly local sporting-goods magnate. Magpies supporters resorted to [stockpiling cans](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://theathletic.com/1782804/2020/04/30/cans-newcastle-takeover/&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1668349445587306&usg=AOvVaw2QjKHsfdE8baCCCeaY6Qwn) of beer for the day their fortunes changed. That day had come at last.
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-The key acquisition who would turn Newcastle around wasn’t a new midfielder or a manager; he was a murderer. The club had been sold for $409 million to an investment group led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, an almost endless reserve of cash [controlled](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-07/making-saudi-inc-how-mbs-drove-the-sovereign-wealth-fund-s-oil-fueled-takeover#xj4y7vzkg) by Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s de facto head of state. In 2018, according to the US government, MBS had [personally approved](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/26/us/report-jamal-khashoggi-killing.html) an operation to assassinate a *Washington Post* journalist. But as the news of the takeover sank in, the dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi with a bone saw was the last thing on the minds of these supporters. To some, MBS seemed to be a point in *favor* of the deal. Outside the stadium and [on social media](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/newcastle-saudi-takeover-how-fans-reacted), fans added a new flourish to the team’s uniform—they donned red and white head coverings, in imitation of the Saudi ruler. “We’re richer than you,” the crowd sang. One supporter [wore](https://twitter.com/BillEdgarnews/status/1446142274027638784?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) an MBS mask.
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-The fans in Newcastle were unsubtle, but hardly unique. Soccer is undergoing a financial and geopolitical shake-up that has ushered in a gilded age of excess, dirty money, and inequality. Fueled by Wall Street and petrostates, the sport is more profitable than ever. But the consequences of consolidation and unchecked money have become clearer, too. The story of how teams like Newcastle win is also about what fans, institutions, and governments lose to get there. To watch the Premier League on Saturdays, or the World Cup this November, is to experience a crash course in capitalism and power today.
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-Just as the *Moneyball* era produced a generation of baseball fans who talked like Nate Silver, soccer’s age of decadence has turned fans into current-affairs obsessives. Sovereign wealth funds, sanctions, and debt seep into Saturday-morning chatter with the same frequency as counter-pressing or expected goals. The forces shaping modern soccer into something bigger, better, and more morally bankrupt than ever are the same ones that have blown up everything else. Following the sport is an education in oligarchs, oil, corruption, media, partisanship, politics, and the financialization of everything. You don’t even have to like soccer to learn from it—because in a lot of ways, the story of the sport’s last two decades hasn’t been about soccer at all.
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-Soccer has always been a mirror of the larger world, but the image it’s reflecting back is decidedly new. In 2004, Franklin Foer published [*How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization*](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/how-soccer-explains-the-world-franklin-foer?variant=32117543895074). It was a canonical text for Americans who took an interest in European soccer in the early 2000s, coinciding with the US women’s World Cup victory and the men’s unlikely run to the quarterfinals; the movie *Bend It Like Beckham*; the actual David Beckham; and the emergence of satellite TV and illegal streaming. You used to have to travel abroad to access this world; now anyone could tune in.
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-The book’s title is a kind of carbon dating. Everyone had an unlikely theory of globalization back then; if you took too long in the McDonald’s drive-thru, Thomas Friedman would burst through a wall to tell you about “[Golden Arches Theory](https://www.nytimes.com/1996/12/08/opinion/foreign-affairs-big-mac-i.html).” Foer’s subjects trended toward the nationalistic—a Serbian fan club whose members formed a paramilitary unit; the Catalan identity of FC Barcelona. It makes for a terrific travelogue. But it also reads like a story from before the Flood. The forces and characters that have reshaped European soccer over the last two decades hardly show up. You won’t find any reference to Qatar, Vladimir Putin, leveraged buyouts, or the Super League. There’s an “oligarch”—but it’s Silvio Berlusconi.
-
-That’s because something monumental happened just after the book came out: the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich won his first English Premier League title with Chelsea, the club he’d purchased a couple years earlier after [15 minutes](https://www.theguardian.com/football/2005/oct/17/newsstory.sport5) of negotiations. The arrival of a [Kremlin-linked](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/abramovich-and-deripaska-among-seven-oligarchs-targeted-in-estimated-15bn-sanction-hit) oligarch in London presaged a gusher of money that transformed the sport. It changed how the sport was funded, how it was organized, and where and when it was played—and in turn, it changed how people talked about the finances of the sport, or how they rationalized not talking about them.
-
-The story of soccer’s glittery transformation, and the fight over what it will become, is fundamentally rooted in how the continent’s marketplace is structured. In England, and in each of the 54 other nations that constitute European soccer (with the exception of Liechtenstein), teams are organized into pyramids of leagues. There are 92 professional men’s teams in the English league system, split into four tiers, with a vast array of professional, semiprofessional, and amateur leagues below that. These pyramids are a bit like [American professional baseball](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/12/monsters-of-2020-the-people-who-gutted-minor-league-baseball/), but unlike it in a key way: Membership in the top flight—whether it’s La Liga in Spain or the Kategoria Superiore in Albania—isn’t fixed. Teams can be promoted to the league above them, or relegated to the league below them, at the end of each season. (Women’s soccer is similarly organized, with men’s and women’s teams often operating under the umbrella of the same clubs, but the sport’s benefactors have historically lavished their resources [on the men’s game](https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/jun/05/liverpools-relegated-women-underfunded-and-in-disarray), so unless otherwise specified, those are the teams and competitions I’m referring to.) The teams at the tippy-top of each nation’s pyramid qualify to play in European tournaments the next season, of which the most prestigious is the Champions League. In 2020–2021, the 32 teams that participated in the final rounds of the Champions League split $2 billion in prize money. The winner, Abramovich’s Chelsea, took in $126.5 million. The top of the pyramid is where the money is—but it’s a long way down if you fall.
-
-
-
-Roman Abramovich celebrates Chelsea’s Club World Cup victory in Abu Dhabi in February. In March, the UK froze his assets.
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-Michael Regan/Getty
-
-For most of its history, the English pyramid was provincial, ugly, and unprofitable. Although the country had invented the modern version of the sport, its clubs were money pits, the domain of businessmen more interested in a good time than in a good investment. The action on the field was only slightly more refined than the action in the stands, where violence and hooliganism were so rampant that English sides were [banned](http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/may/31/newsid_2481000/2481723.stm) from competing for European cups for much of the 1980s. Between the rugged play and scant TV coverage, it was hard to watch, in every sense. But in 1992, the 22 biggest clubs [broke away](https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/jul/23/deceit-determination-murdochs-millions-how-premier-league-was-born) from the rest of the English pyramid and formed the Premier League. They would still have relegation, but they would no longer share TV revenues with everyone else. And they granted exclusive rights to a media mogul with the ability to make them famous and rich: Rupert Murdoch.
-
-By the time Abramovich came calling in 2003, the Premier League had emerged as an enticing global product. But teams were still largely owned by the same local lads. Chelsea’s English owner had [made his money](https://www.independent.ie/business/chelsea-sale-leaves-ken-bates-anything-but-blue-26232969.html) in concrete, purchased the club for £1, and racked up substantial debt. The club’s savior appeared out of a fog. Abramovich’s biographers called him “[the billionaire from nowhere](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6531278-abramovich).” A Russian news outlet once offered a million rubles to anyone who could produce a photo. After the fall of the USSR, when Boris Yeltsin [sold off](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/may/08/russia.football) state assets in exchange for political support, Abramovich acquired a state-owned oil company for a fraction of its value [with the help](https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/01/world/europe/russian-tycoon-loses-5-8-billion-case-against-ex-partner.html) of a fellow oligarch. Later, he’d branched out into metals, emerging not just alive but richer after a period of violent market consolidation known as the “[aluminum wars](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/abramovich-tells-of-role-in-aluminium-wars-6256950.html).” When Putin reined in the oligarchs, Abramovich avoided the same fate, serving [as governor](https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/07/world/europe/07iht-russia.2726925.html) of the Siberian region of Chukotka. In 2003 Forbes called him the second-richest man in Russia, with a $5.7 billion net worth—a figure that would grow fourfold within a few years.
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-He had worked hard, and now, Abramovich announced, it was time to play hard. “There are lots of rich, young people in Russia,” he [told the BBC](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3039750.stm) in his first public comments in London. “We don’t live that long, so we earn it and spend it.”
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-Abramovich redefined what it meant to spend it. After paying $230 million for the club, he shelled out another $195 million on new signings in a matter of weeks. He molded the club in his own image—an unthinkably wealthy organization that gobbled up assets and widened the gap between the haves and have-nots. In two decades he won five Premier League titles and the Champions League twice—and [spent $2 billion](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/24/sports/soccer/chelsea-sale-abramovich-boehly.html) to do it. But he wasn’t just having fun. If you were following Chelsea, you might have noticed something else: This wasn’t just about what Abramovich could do for soccer—it was also about what soccer could do for Abramovich.
-
-In 2021, Abramovich sued the investigative reporter Catherine Belton for defamation over quotes she included in an explosive book called [*Putin’s People*](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374712785/putinspeople). According to [court filings](https://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/format.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2021/3154.html&query=(Roman)+AND+(Abramovich)+AND+(v)+AND+((1))+AND+(HarperCollins)+AND+(Publishers)+AND+(Ltd)), his attorneys took issue with comments from a former Putin ally turned dissident, and several other sources, speculating as to whether the Russian president had directed the purchase of Chelsea in order to gain new influence in the UK. When Belton agreed last winter to add new language emphasizing Abramovich’s strenuous denials and the lack of clear evidence for the claim (it “was never intended as a statement of fact,” [she said](https://twitter.com/CatherineBelton/status/1473606001970528262) at the time), Chelsea issued a triumphant [press release](https://twitter.com/ChelseaFC/status/1473611728177008643).
-
-Getting a soccer team to celebrate your settlement, though, reinforced a larger point: This was Abramovich’s foothold; he was the English gentry now.
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-“There’s this Russian word *krysha*, which literally means roof, but in reality means ‘protection’—every businessperson has to have an appropriate krysha, which would be a policeman you’re paying off or a politician. His krysha was London,” says Oliver Bullough, a [British journalist](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250208705/moneyland) who guides Kleptocracy Tours through the city’s richest neighborhoods.
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-Chelsea’s owner had arrived as the vanguard of a new era. Oligarchs [ingratiated](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/28/how-putins-oligarchs-bought-london) themselves into the UK’s most prestigious cultural and political institutions, which took their money without asking too many questions about its provenance. Abramovich spent more than a [quarter-billion](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/21/roman-abramovich-uk-property-portfolio-chelsea-fc-owner-sanctioned) dollars to acquire dozens of UK properties. He paid rent [to the queen](https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-news/roman-abramovich-owes-queen-10000-23422150), purchased an [investor visa](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-44197798), hired expensive lawyers, and, according to [tabloids](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3423687/Billion-pound-daddy-s-girl-flew-school-helicopter-Britain-s-richest-teen-parties-Beckhams-boys-beware-father-s-Roman-Abramovich.html), sent his daughters off to school in a helicopter. When the Isle of Jersey invited Abramovich to dock his billions in the offshore tax haven, it [pointed to Chelsea](https://www.wsj.com/articles/roman-abramovich-moved-assets-to-an-island-in-the-english-channel-now-he-faces-a-probe-11653403549) and his UK visa as proof of his good standing.
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-But Abramovich kept his options open. His visa renewal application was delayed in 2018, after the UK started scrutinizing Russian investor visas following the poisoning of a Russian dissident in Salisbury—so Abramovich [acquired](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/28/roman-abramovich-granted-israeli-citizenship-tel-aviv-chelsea) Israeli citizenship. Later, he became an EU citizen by claiming Sephardic ancestry [in Portugal](https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/sports/chelsea-owner-abramovich-gets-portuguese-citizenship-2021-12-18/), where he had been a generous [supporter](https://www.israelhayom.com/2021/12/23/abramovich-the-israeli-lithuanian-and-portuguese-jew/) of Jewish causes. Chelsea was another passport, for a man who collected them.
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-At no point was Abramovich’s geopolitical value clearer than when he helped Russia win the rights to host the 2018 World Cup. Would the president of FIFA, the sport’s international governing body, have taken a private meeting with just *any* survivor of the “aluminum wars”? Well, it’s FIFA. But owning the English champions opened doors. (Abramovich’s spokesperson has said there was nothing “untoward” about his support for the World Cup bid.) Later, Putin told reporters that he thought the oligarch might “[open his wallet](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-12-03/putin-tells-abramovich-to-open-wallet-for-world-cup-stadiums)” to help pay for the tournament. Abramovich, who was already [spending millions](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/05/abramovich-putin-world-cup) on the country’s national-team manager and staff, soon did just that. The team spearheading England’s World Cup bid, desperate to understand their competition, [hired a retired British spy](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/opinion/sunday/world-cup-fifa-corruption-russia.html) to prepare an investigative report, which he gave to the FBI and which sparked dozens of criminal cases against soccer bureaucrats. This was Christopher Steele’s *first* Russia dossier.
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-Abramovich showed not just that you could buy success, but that you could buy a lot more than that. Status, security, strikers—there was a price tag on everything. He once, in a rare interview, [asked](https://www-lemonde-fr.translate.goog/culture/article/2008/05/26/roman-abramovitch-l-art-du-secret_1049742_3246.html?_x_tr_sl=fr&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=op,sc) a *Le Monde* reporter what the difference was between a hamster and a rat. “No difference,” he explained. “Just a matter of public relations.” To supporters of rival clubs, Abramovich, with his Kensington manse and private jets and gigayachts was a great villain—mysterious, foreign, nouveau riche. They referred to the club as “Chelski.” But Chelsea fans loved the success his money bought. Supporters raised a banner from the stadium’s upper level, with the owner’s face over a Russian flag, celebrating “[The Roman Empire](https://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/news/chelsea-roman-abramovich-banner-newcastle-26455562).” In March, a week before the UK government [froze the assets](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/abramovich-and-deripaska-among-seven-oligarchs-targeted-in-estimated-15bn-sanction-hit) of Abramovich and other Russians “whose business empires, wealth and connections are closely associated with the Kremlin,” Chelsea’s owner announced he was selling the club. At the team’s next game, fans interrupted a show of solidarity with Ukraine to [chant](https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/sports/chelsea-fans-chant-abramovichs-name-during-ukraine-solidarity-gesture-2022-03-05/) Abramovich’s name.
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-Foer wrote about how soccer showed the resilience of community in the face of globalization. FC Barcelona’s motto was “More than a club.” Even as it attracted global superstars like Diego Maradona, the team was fundamentally for and of Barcelona the place. But the response from Chelsea fans to Abramovich’s departure took things to a new level: They were *so* intensely provincial about a sports team that they were shilling for a sanctioned Russian national. This was the kind of soft power only winning can buy.
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-The deluge of wealth that inundated real estate markets and eroded civic guardrails threw the soccer world out of sorts, too. Chelsea drove up the cost of everything—if they wanted a player, they could always just add another zero to the offer. But as Abramovich’s team racked up trophies, rival fans didn’t want to just beat Chelsea; they wanted to *be* Chelsea.
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-Abramovich “scared the shit out of everybody else,” says James Montague, who profiled the sport’s new breed of super-rich owners in his book [*The Billionaires Club*](https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/billionaires-club-9781472923127/). “They had to find somebody who could compete. Clubs went trawling into this pretty murky world of recently ennobled, recently enriched billionaires, looking for someone who might have the wherewithal and the bottomless pits and the naivety to pump the same amount of cash into *their* club.” The ensuing arms race would make some clubs very rich and leave many others behind.
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-There’s a reason I’m writing about soccer and not, say, the NFL. American leagues are self-contained and highly regulated. Membership is fixed. They impose caps on how much teams can spend and redistribute profits from big teams to small ones. Taxpayers [help pay for](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/27/nyregion/buffalo-bills-stadium-hochul.html) stadiums. Teams are all but guaranteed to make money. Your team might not win, but it can never really lose. In soccer, when you fall off the top of the pyramid, the TV money and sponsorships that make owning a team potentially lucrative disappear. If the revenues aren’t there or the players aren’t good enough, a club can keep falling until it collapses.
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-The Premier League, like the UK itself, became a magnet for the ill-gotten spoils of the rest of the world. But finding another Abramovich carried obvious risks. The Russian mining oligarch Alisher Usmanov pumped tens of millions of dollars into Everton, until the UK [froze](https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-announces-sanctions-against-russian-oligarchs-alisher-usmanov-and-igor-shuvalov) *his* assets in March. Portsmouth experienced a brief period of success after the arrival of a French-Israeli investor, hailed as a “[mini Abramovich](http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/eng_prem/6216545.stm).” But his money disappeared, and the club was sold to a Dubai businessman who hosted an [*Apprentice* knockoff](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1189159/Arab-billionaire-Sulaiman-Al-Fahim-dubbed-Alan-Sugar-Dubai-set-buy-Portsmouth.html) and financed the purchase by stealing money [from his wife,](https://www.portsmouth.co.uk/news/crime/sulaiman-al-fahim-handed-jail-term-dubai-stealing-aps5m-his-wife-buy-pompey-1047699) and eventually the team fell into the hands of a Russian banker who was later [convicted](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-47609147) of fraud. Portsmouth ended up in the fourth tier—England’s Chukotka.
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-Wealthy Americans, less interested in winning than in engineering a world where they don’t have to, tried to export their own style to Europe, a blend of cravenness and soggy nepotism familiar to anyone who follows politics or the NFL. These newcomers weren’t looking for a golden passport; they wanted to generate income by capitalizing on marketing opportunities and the TV money available to teams that could consistently qualify for the Champions League. When the Glazers, owners of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, took over Manchester United in 2005 (Moammar Qaddafi’s bid [reportedly](https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/colonel-gaddafi-a-whisker-away-14214468) fell through), they did so via a leveraged buyout—a [financial engineering practice](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/05/private-equity-buyout-kkr-houdaille/) in which the acquisition’s own assets are used as collateral. Since then, the family has accrued dividends from the United brand, but the club itself is still more than a half-billion dollars in debt and hasn’t won a title in 10 years. This past spring, anti-Glazer protesters, angry at the perceived mismanagement, stormed United’s field before a game, forcing a postponement. When a McKinseyite and a corporate raider bought Liverpool in a similar fashion, it ended with the latter’s son telling a fan to “[blow me, fuck face,](https://www.theguardian.com/football/2010/jan/11/tom-hicks-jr-quits-liverpool-email)” and the Royal Bank of Scotland forcing them to sell the team.
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-Because the European soccer landscape naturally produces distressed assets, it also, increasingly, attracts the kinds of entities that feast on them—American hedge funds and private equity firms, swooping in with infusions of cash. The fleece-vest brigade can bring new ideas and a threshold of competency. But a bunch of MBAs taking a stake in your team, fans quickly learn, is not quite as fun as Roman Abramovich buying it. This kind of financialization introduces a new dimension fundamentally different from what the purpose of a soccer club traditionally was—some calculation other than wins and losses upon which every season might be measured.
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-The archetypes of modern wealth—oligarchs, sheikhs, grifters, hedge-funders, Americans named “[Stan](https://www.skysports.com/nfl/news/34697/12542110/stan-kroenke-can-arsenal-owner-replicate-his-super-bowl-success-with-los-angeles-rams-in-the-premier-league)”—are constantly colliding with one another, so that on any given weekend you get a feel for each of them in turn. Following the money has become its own sport. This year, in lieu of a traditional preview, the [*Financial Times*](https://www.ft.com/content/010aa3a3-6b96-4970-8667-4bccfb6e5603) rated Premier League teams by how likely they were to be seized by the UK government.
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-Lisa Sheehan
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-There was one kind of money that no one else could match—a marriage of sorts between the world of investment funds and the world of geopolitics—and it shattered what Abramovich first cracked, and rattled the bones of the sport.
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-In 2007, when everyone was in the market for suitcases of nonsequential bills, Manchester City, United’s rival—beloved by Oasis, uncool in a cool kind of way, very New York Mets-y—was purchased by the recently deposed prime minister of Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra. But Shinawatra, whose assets in Thailand had been frozen, soon offloaded City to another buyer: the emirate of Abu Dhabi.
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-Technically, it was a private investment fund controlled by Sheikh Mansour, a member of the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, which effectively rules the United Arab Emirates. Mansour is a deputy prime minister of the UAE. His brother, the ruler of Abu Dhabi, is also the UAE’s president. Mansour quickly turned the club over to [Khaldoon Al Mubarak](https://www.ft.com/content/2bfccf2a-14d8-11ea-8d73-6303645ac406), who runs one of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth funds and the office responsible for the emirate’s image. The ownership has always denied any link to Abu Dhabi or the UAE and insisted the purchase was just good business. Which it has been—Mansour’s City Football Group has total or partial ownership of a dozen clubs, with [outposts](https://www.cityfootballgroup.com/our-clubs/) in India, China, Australia, and the United States; in 2019 an American private equity firm [paid](https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/27/business/manchester-city-silver-lake) $500 million for a 10 percent stake.
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-But it is almost impossible to separate the fortunes and finances of Manchester City from the goals of Abu Dhabi because so many of the same people are involved in both. Etihad Airways sponsors the jersey and the stadium. Abu Dhabi buys advertisements at the games. Mubarak himself once [told](https://www.theguardian.com/football/2009/sep/18/manchester-city-abu-dhabi-mubarak) a reporter that “there is almost a personification of the club with the values we hold as Abu Dhabi.” By “values,” he’s not referring to the [alleged torture](https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/12/22/uae-unrelenting-harassment-dissidents-families) of dissidents or [crackdown](https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/12/20/uae-release-imprisoned-jordanian-journalist) on journalists in the UAE; through City, the emirate, and by extension the nation, projects an image of a moderate and stable oasis. After Russia invaded Ukraine, the UAE emerged as a [refuge](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/07/rich-russians-fleeing-sanctions-are-pumping-up-dubais-property-sector.html) for oligarchs. But City drew praise for a minute-long tribute to Ukraine at the Etihad stadium.
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-What Abu Dhabi got out of City—besides six Premier League titles and very expensive advertising—was both an earnest embrace and a purchased loyalty, from fans and suits alike. Supporters were so thankful they celebrated their absentee owner with a song. (“[Sheikh Mansour, my lord, Sheikh Mansour](https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/51566859).”) At the same time, the UAE’s billions in economic investment in places [like Manchester](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/21/sports/soccer/manchester-life-manchester-city.html) and [New York](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/jul/09/sovereignwealthfunds.usa) gave the regime political capital, which it wasn’t afraid to use. In a 2012 memo [obtained](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/06/uae-told-uk-crack-down-on-muslim-brotherhood-or-lose-arms-deals) by the *Guardian*, an [English PR maven](https://medium.com/@NcGeehan/the-men-behind-man-city-a-documentary-not-coming-soon-to-a-cinema-near-you-14bc8e393e06) who serves as both a board member of City and a consultant to Abu Dhabi advised the emirate’s crown prince (and the country’s effective ruler) on how to negotiate with Prime Minister David Cameron. Given the money the UAE was pumping into the country, and the fighter jets it was prepared to purchase, Downing Street should “help” make the BBC more critical of the Muslim Brotherhood, which the UAE considered an “existential threat.” The flack suggested telling Cameron the BBC was compromised by Islamists. Mubarak, the City chair, separately lobbied the UK on foreign policy.
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-Soccer’s soft-power politics took different forms. Russia’s state-funded energy company Gazprom began spending [$45 million](https://www.sportico.com/business/sponsorship/2022/uefa-drops-gazprom-after-russia-invades-ukraine-1234666739/) a year to sponsor the Champions League and poured hundreds of millions of dollars into [propping up](https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/17/sports/17iht-soccer.3194585.html) a prominent German club as part of Putin’s quest to tighten his influence not over just the sport, but also the German economy. In 2011, the sovereign wealth fund of Qatar [purchased](https://www.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-57398420110531) the French club Paris St.-Germain, which had sputtered for years under the control of an American private equity firm.
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-Qatar’s money turned PSG into a French dynasty and a global brand, and the Gulf state used television as a beachhead to the rest of the continent. Its state-owned network, beIN Sports, has [spent billions](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/sports/bein-sports-qatar-beoutq.html) to obtain the broadcast rights to leagues from Spain to Turkey. This dependence on Qatar’s money has given the country an [incredible amount of influence](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/24/sports/soccer/champions-league-psg-nasser.html). PSG’s president is the chair of beIN, sits on the board of the sovereign wealth fund, and serves on the executive committee of the sport’s European governing authority—alongside [the chair](https://www.uefa.com/insideuefa/about-uefa/news/0268-12163b1d0543-7ab0ff2e27b1-1000--alexander-dyukov/) of a Gazprom subsidiary.
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-As autocratic regimes softened their images by sponsoring soccer clubs, human rights groups coined a new term for the PR makeover they were getting: “[sportswashing](https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/01/05/human-rights-abuses-will-taint-olympics-and-world-cup-its-time-end-sportswashing)”—using the global game to clean up their reputations. PSG has won eight French titles in 10 years and boasts some of the world’s biggest stars, including Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé—the kinds of players you’d make your soccer-hating friend watch to show them [what they’re missing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSanJ5swYBM). It wouldn’t be sportswashing if it sucked.
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-Unlike Abu Dhabi, Qatar wasn’t just interested in building a club empire. It wanted the same spectacle of legitimacy Putin had wanted for Russia—a World Cup. There were some complications to the country’s bid. Qatar didn’t, as yet, have any stadiums that could accommodate a World Cup. It has [criminalized](https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/10/24/qatar-security-forces-arrest-abuse-lgbt-people) homosexuality. It is 110 degrees in July. There is only one major city. And in order to build the infrastructure that a World Cup would require, it would rely on a migrant-labor system known as [*kafala*](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/why-kafala-labor-rules-are-an-issue-in-persian-gulf/2020/09/17/dee277a4-f8e7-11ea-85f7-5941188a98cd_story.html), which, in the words of [Amnesty International](https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2019/02/reality-check-migrant-workers-rights-with-two-years-to-qatar-2022-world-cup/), “traps migrant workers in a cycle of abuse” by legally binding them to employers, who often [confiscate passports](https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/08/02/migrant-workers-and-qatar-world-cup) to prevent laborers from leaving. But Qatar, like Russia, exploited the system’s vulnerabilities. Although both countries have denied wrongdoing, in 2020, the Justice Department [accused](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/sports/soccer/qatar-and-russia-bribery-world-cup-fifa.html) them of bribing FIFA officials to win their bids. The rest could all be smoothed out. Qatar circumvented the heat by moving the event to November. It is managing the intake of fans by limiting the number of people allowed into the country. Qatar resolved concerns about LGBTQ rights by—well, it [has not](https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/nation-world/lgbtq-qatar-world-cup/507-2b3af17c-3520-4496-8d0f-69c1352d32f4) resolved those concerns. It [abolished](https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/sep/01/new-employment-law-effectively-ends-qatars-exploitative-kafala-system) the kafala system, at least [on paper](https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/12/18/qa-migrant-worker-abuses-qatar-and-fifa-world-cup-2022#Q3), in 2020, and talks up the [legacy](https://www.concordia.net/press/hassan-al-thawadi-transformational-2022-world-cup-has-accelerated-social-and-labour-reforms-in-qatar/) of the tournament, as if the mass death accompanying it—more than one migrant worker was dying every day, [according to](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/14/qatar-admits-deaths-in-migrant-workers) a 2014 report by a law firm commissioned by Qatar itself—was a kind of adversity that Qatari elites and South Asian workers mutually endured, for mutual benefit.
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-“It’s a very well-funded narrative and a very well-resourced narrative,” says Nicholas McGeehan, a co-founder of the human rights nonprofit [FairSquare](https://fairsq.org/), of Qatar’s World Cup PR offensive. “The Qataris are saying all the right things, doing all the things, having all the photo opportunities that they could possibly have about all the various initiatives. None of it really changes the reality that what came was far too late, wasn’t serious enough, hasn’t gone far enough, and any progress that was made may just unravel as soon as the spotlight’s over.”
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-But Qatar’s friends are happy to spread the word. FIFA president Gianni Infantino, who now lives in Doha, recently [told](https://www.smh.com.au/sport/soccer/world-cup-workers-in-qatar-get-dignity-and-pride-from-hard-work-infantino-20220503-p5ai1r.html) an audience that Qatar had given migrant workers “dignity and pride” despite the “hard conditions,” while [downplaying](https://www.si.com/soccer/2022/05/02/gianni-infantino-fifa-president-2022-world-cup-qatar-migrant-worker-death) the reported death toll—the actual number of deaths at stadiums, he said, was three. In April, he [expressed](https://www.fifa.com/about-fifa/president/news/fifa-president-calls-for-a-fifa-world-cup-of-unity-and-peace-at-final-draw) his hope that the tournament will be “the World Cup of unity and the World Cup of peace.”
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-This is the language of sportswashing, but it is fundamentally the language of well-compensated corporate bullshitters everywhere, seeking redemption from the damage they enable without ever acknowledging what really happened; make enough people money and enough people complicit and you never have to say you’re sorry. That flack who suggested smearing the BBC? City hired him from a firm that repped Union Carbide and Blackwater. David Beckham, who ended his career at PSG and officially serves as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, recently [signed](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/qatar-beckham-ambassador-deal-slammed) a $200 million deal to promote Qatar. You could catch him at the Doha Forum in March, posing for photos with Malala.
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-Newcastle United fans prepare to watch their first game following the purchase of their team by the Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.
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-Ian Forsyth/Getty
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-In June, a soccer fan tweeted at the account of Venezia, a famously stylish but not famously good Italian club that was recently relegated to the country’s second division. A team with such a stunning location and high-fashion uniforms deserved to be in the top tier of the sport, the supporter said. It needed “an oil money takeover.”
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-“Appreciate that this was meant as a compliment,” the club [replied](https://twitter.com/VeneziaFC_EN/status/1542540628982202368). “\[B\]ut if that’s what people have to root for at this stage, then we’ve fully normalized a perverse paradigm shift in modern football.”
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-Or maybe we passed that point a long time ago. This spring, while the UK government was putting the final touches on the $3.1 billion sale of Chelsea (if you guessed “to a consortium backed by an American private equity firm,” congratulations), Newcastle fans were feeling better than ever about their own moral compromise. The Saudi money had allowed the club to bring in enough talent to keep it in the Premier League. At first, the new owners rebuked the fans who had cosplayed as Arabs. Then they [changed their minds](https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11661/12442324/newcastle-backtrack-after-asking-fans-to-not-wear-arab-style-clothing-to-matches-following-saudi-backed-takeover)—like the banners at Chelsea, or the tourists flocking to Doha, this is how the Saudis win. The new owners [promised](https://theathletic.com/3525276/2022/08/21/newcastle-women-ownership/) to finally invest in the women’s team, which had hovered in the fourth division. Some Newcastle supporters have pointed to the fact that a British woman owns a stake in the club and is part of the executive team and its avowed support for LGBTQ rights as proof that soccer [has the capacity](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tyne-58826839) to influence Saudi Arabia. The illusion of a give-and-take is part of the product—they are selling their capacity for change so that they don’t actually have to. One of the sport’s biggest institutions did briefly attempt to hold up the sale, though; Saudi Arabia, Qatar complained, [had enabled](https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/apr/22/bein-sports-asks-premier-league-to-block-saudi-newcastle-deal-over-piracy) the pirating of beIN’s broadcasts for years. While the Premier League and Newcastle continued to [insist](https://twitter.com/robharris/status/1446149572393373696) that MBS’ Public Investment Fund had no connection to MBS’ Saudi state, Newcastle [unveiled](https://theathletic.com/news/newcastle-to-wear-change-kit-in-same-colours-as-saudi-arabia-next-season/bY0hrv5Aig0R/) a green-and-white jersey that bore an uncanny resemblance to that of the country’s national soccer team.
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-When I caught up with Foer recently, he was still thinking about those fans, “dressed as Arab sheikhs out of the ‘Rock the Casbah’ video.” The sport’s evolution had brought the sort of geopolitical backdrop he’d gone hunting for into the foreground.
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-“I think the bizarre way in which authoritarian regimes have tried to latch onto the tribal particulars of Western Europe really only proves my point,” he says. “Sport is a very convenient thing for the world’s goons because it allows them to attach themselves to institutions that essentially immunize them against criticism from fan bases.” It still explained the world; it was just explaining it in a radically different way.
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-No one was safe from the temptations or pressures of money. In its quest for revenue, Barcelona went from having no sponsor on its jersey, to offering free advertising for UNICEF, to signing a nine-figure deal with Qatar Airways—the Full Beckham. It lost its greatest player [to PSG](https://www.espn.com/soccer/barcelona-espbarcelona/story/4713258/lionel-messis-barcelona-exitone-year-later-the-impact-of-superstars-move-to-psg-on-both-clubsand-on-him), and its manager to Munich. The club’s new defining feature was its [incredible debt](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/03/sports/soccer/barcelona-laporta-de-jong.html). “It just feels like they’re kind of mortgaging the soul of their club,” Foer says. Without oil reserves of its own, the club was [giving](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-21/fc-barca-is-said-to-sell-more-tv-rights-stake-to-sixth-street) a San Francisco private equity firm ever larger stakes in future TV revenues in exchange for cash upfront. The press began calling it “[Goldman Sachs FC](https://twitter.com/migueldelaney/status/1550422695539625984).”
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-There was a cumulative effect from all of this, beyond just turning title races into liquidity tests. The life force of the pyramids was this notion of upward mobility—that you would move up if you played well or go down if you didn’t. But the ultra-wealthy, and the speculators looking to profit off the game, are rewriting those rules.
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-In the spring of 2021, as lower-level clubs stared at their post-Covid bank accounts and wondered how they’d get by, a dozen of Europe’s biggest clubs (including Chelsea, Barcelona, and the Manchester rivals) announced plans for a breakaway “[Super League](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/04/soccers-richest-clubs-tried-to-create-a-world-where-they-could-never-lose/),” with fixed membership, like the NFL, and financing [from JPMorgan](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/sports/soccer/jpmorgan-super-league.html). Such a plan would be enormously profitable for member clubs, but ruinous for everyone else—domestic competitions, and the Champions League, would become irrelevant. In their hunt for inefficiencies, they’d zeroed in on the pyramid itself. These clubs had come to the same realization American owners—and indeed, tax-dodging, citizenship-shopping, yacht-owning elites the world over—have come to: Wouldn’t it be better if they could just silo themselves off from everyone else?
-
-The move triggered a wave of protests from fans and players, including those whose teams were included in the deal. PSG read the room and opposed the move. According to a German newspaper, the Russian government was [reportedly](https://web.archive.org/web/20210601024604/https://amphtml.sueddeutsche.de/sport/super-league-politik-1.5273477) concerned that the move would undercut Gazprom, the country’s soft-power vehicle in the Champions League. The deal fell apart. A few executives and owners even apologized.
-
-“That was a significant failure, but the conditions that created the impetus for it remain in place,” says Tariq Panja, who covers soccer’s muddy finances for the *New York Times*. Or maybe we should just accept that what Murdoch set in motion 30 years ago has reached its final form, that the league that broke away from everyone else is breaking away, financially, from everyone else again. English clubs spent more money on players this summer than the next three biggest leagues combined. “You’re looking at the Super League—it’s already here,” Panja says. “I believe it’s the Premier League.”
-
-As the World Cup approached, the off-field action captured all the vagaries of modern soccer’s long game. PSG opened a flagship store near 30 Rock. Elon Musk set off speculation that he was [buying](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1559691922725281800?s=20&t=i9lOLkAE4vCIxz4aEotLvQ) Manchester United (he isn’t). FIFA’s president was [spotted](https://twitter.com/philippeauclair/status/1561125036991430659) attending a boxing match with MBS—who is [angling](https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/saudi-arabia-to-launch-2030-world-cup-bid-alongside-egypt-and-greece-cqwwnv9m7) for a World Cup of his own. While European leagues put on their best show of Ukrainian solidarity, Russians cheered on the war at the stadium that hosted the 2018 World Cup final. The Premier League [hinted](https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/mar/03/premier-league-considers-adding-human-rights-to-new-owners-test) that it might consider a “human rights component” for new owners, but hasn’t raised the issue since. Even the old faces look a bit different. Silvio Berlusconi [was back](https://www.sportbible.com/football/monza-owner-silvio-berlusconi-introduces-bizarre-physical-rules-20220707) with a new Italian team; his old one was acquired by private equity.
-
-Soccer’s gilded age is intensifying, for now, without the man who kick-started it with hundreds of millions of dollars of spending and a new understanding of what winning could buy. But Abramovich appears to be landing on his feet. His gigayachts made it to Turkey. His American real estate remains untouched. In March, his Boeing 787 Dreamliner took off from an airport outside Moscow and landed in a safe refuge, thousands of miles to the south. With London no longer hospitable, he was [reportedly](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-03-25/roman-abramovich-eyes-sanction-free-dubai-property-as-russians-flock-to-uae) looking for a new home in the UAE.
-
-*Update, Nov. 14: This article has been updated to more accurately characterize Süddeutsche Zeitung’s reporting on the Super League.*
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-# How to get the excitement back | Psyche Guides
-
-## Need to know
-
-A married couple I worked with recently, Chris and Jonathan – both in their 40s, together for more than 15 years – once shared intense mutual attraction and physical chemistry, but for the past few years their sexual relationship had been stalling. Sex had become rote; Jonathan often found a to-do list of other things, such as the laundry, took precedence over sex.
-
-Chris was increasingly frustrated and perplexed. He couldn’t stop thinking about, and missing, the sexual intensity he used to share with Jonathan. Chris was particularly distraught after he planned a sexy birthday weekend for Jonathan at a pricey hotel in the Bahamas, and brought along sex toys and jockstraps (their version of sexy lingerie), only to find that Jonathan was sullen, grumpy and uninterested in sex.
-
-We had two or three counselling sessions together, yet the needle wasn’t moving much. Jonathan was still attracted to Chris, but he just wasn’t feeling aroused, and was also starting to worry about his ability to muster an erection. Maybe this was just middle age, he thought. There were tears and apologies, and they both wondered what they could do, if anything, to rediscover their earlier passion.
-
-**Sexual boredom is normal but reversible**
-
-I’ll return to Jonathan and Chris but, as a long-term couple, their predicament is far from unique. At the start of a romantic relationship, you don’t need to suggest something new to try in bed – everything is new. Novelty, unpredictability and spontaneity abound and, along with a dopamine-driven neurochemical cocktail, help keep the sexual excitement on tap. But, as time goes on, relationships often become more companionate, as sex takes a backseat to parenting, work, chores, in-laws, you name it.
-
-About 10 years ago, together with Kristen Mark, who was then based at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University (she’s now at the University of Minnesota), I surveyed nearly 3,500 people in the United States and Canada about their sex lives. Most of them were heterosexual and all were in a committed relationship. More than 50 per cent reported being either bored or on the brink of boredom. In relationships of less than a year, women were twice as likely as men to be bored; by the three-year mark, it was men who were more likely to be bored. That’s a whole lot of boredom on both sides of the bed, and speaks to a problem I see in my practice all the time: boredom, sex ruts, low-pleasure/low-desire relationships are all too prevalent and often bring dire consequences – in our study, 24 per cent of participants also reported having engaged in infidelity, with boredom as one of the contributing factors. But the good news is that a majority also told us they were interested in trying something new that their partner suggested.
-
-A useful way to understand your libido and the difficulties of sustaining it in a long-term relationship is in terms of the ‘dual-control model’ [developed](https://kinseyinstitute.org/pdf/Janssen_Bancroft_2006.pdf) by the sex researchers Erick Janssen and John Bancroft at the Kinsey Institute. It’s based on the idea that our sexual arousal and associated behaviours depend on the balance between two systems: a sexual excitation system (SES) and a sexual inhibition system (SIS). Some experts [propose](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15483367/) that we think of these two systems like a car that has an accelerator and a brake. Your SES is all the things that turn you on and heat you up sexually, for example: your attraction to your partner, a particular body part, a fantasy, a memory of hot sex, being touched in the right places, a particular sexual behaviour (such as oral sex) and feeling desired over others. Your SIS is the brake and is triggered by all the things that turn you off, such as: feeling exhausted, feeling full after eating, being angry at your partner, being anxious about some aspect of sex, or the resonance of trauma.
-
-A particular challenge of being in a long-term relationship is that, as time passes, the sexual inhibitors start to stack up and the exciters start to lose some of their erotic potential. The sex educator Emily Nagoski, who has both expanded upon and popularised the dual-control model, wrote in her book *Come As You Are* (2015): ‘The process of becoming aroused is turning on the ons and turning off the offs.’ In a long-term relationship, even as you work as a couple to eliminate those turn-offs, you and your partner mustn’t forget about the turn-ons.
-
-**Sexual arousal is as much psychological as physical**
-
-When it comes to maintaining and promoting those turn-ons, one of the biggest problems I see in my work with long-term couples, regardless of gender and orientation, is that very often sex has become reduced to a series of predictable physical behaviours that might or might not generate pleasure to varying degrees. That’s why I always ask couples: ‘So what did you do to create arousal with your minds?’ The question is purposefully a bit vague and I’ll go on to say that we know, for example, that some women can fantasise their way to orgasms without even touching themselves. Additionally, when I’m working with men who have problems gaining and/or maintaining erections, I’ll often ask them to go home and watch porn (or whatever it is they masturbate to, which just so happens to always be porn) without touching themselves, so they can find out the extent to which their erection difficulties are physiological or psychological in nature. Most report back that they were able to gain robust erections in a matter of minutes, such is the power of mind-based arousal. This suggests that, if you wish to reawaken a long-term sexual relationship, you and your partner need to learn to share more of this psychological arousal with each other, rather than each individual keeping it to themselves.
-
-**This is about having fun together**
-
-Most of the time, couples come to see me with a predominantly relational view of sex, meaning they generally conceptualise sex in term of intimacy, affection and emotional closeness, with its apotheosis being passionate lovemaking. I often emphasise to them the recreational aspects: sex as a source of fun, pleasure, adventure and play. As you experiment with the following steps in this Guide, please try to keep this in mind. Too often, in my experience, many couples in committed relationships have lost the recreational aspect of sex, or perhaps never had it in the first place. If they are having fun sexually, it’s often when they’re on their own and accessorising their masturbation with newfangled sex toys and porn, or reading some hot erotica; or they’re enjoying the recreational aspects of sex extra-relationally, in an underground shadowland they are hiding from their primary partner. Remember, both aspects of sexuality – the relational and the recreational – are crucial to a healthy sex life, especially for couples in long-term relationships, and that’s why I encourage you to think of sex as a ‘rec-relational’ experience.
-
-With all this in mind, and in the spirit of making everything old new again, here are some of my essential practical suggestions for ways you can begin to rekindle your sexual connection.
-
-## What to do
-
-**Know your desire framework, understand your partner’s**
-
-Although desire is highly variable (from person to person and even day to day), sex researchers recognise that people can broadly be placed into two categories based on how they tend to become aroused – spontaneous vs responsive. Inevitably, in many relationships, one partner is generally in a spontaneous (also known as highly reactive) desire framework, while the other partner may often be in a responsive (also known as deliberative) desire framework. Becoming more aware of these differences in your relationship is a useful first step toward reigniting passions. The following descriptions will give you an idea of which camp you fall in:
-
-- Do you tend to always initiate sex? If so, it’s quite possible your experience of sexual desire is clear, palpable and forthright. You experience a sexual cue, which metabolises very quickly into arousal to create a strong subjective feeling of desire. This is what’s known as **spontaneous desire**, and it’s what we see everywhere in the media: two strangers make eye contact across the room, cut to them passionately ripping each other’s clothes off; sex on the beach; sex in a stairwell. Spontaneous desire is passion unbridled. Desire is depicted as a need, a craving, a wanting, a drive, an urge that’s easily triggered.
-- But many people don’t experience desire in a spontaneous or highly reactive manner. If you’re in this category, desire for you doesn’t have an instant onset; getting in the mood happens gradually. Desire isn’t the first thing you feel, it’s more like the second, third or fourth down the line. If you’re someone with this more **responsive-desire** framework, it can take multiple prompts unfolding over time to generate arousal, and you need to be in a context in which exciters are high and inhibitors are low.
-
-Misunderstandings can easily arise when partners have different desire frameworks: spontaneous-desire partners may be wondering why they’re always initiating and not feeling their desire reciprocated, and the responsive person might wonder why their partner isn’t more concerned about the background context, such as romance, emotional connection or the effects of stress and anxiety. Those in a responsive-desire framework are much more vulnerable to the effects of stressors (both situational and global). Ideally, you and partner will work together to create a shared framework, one in which the spontaneous-desire partner manages their arousal while the responsive-desire partner expresses a willingness to cultivate arousal.
-
-The ‘willingness window’ is a homework assignment I often give couples, which involves them scheduling a window of time (usually 20-30 minutes) in which they agree to show up regardless of their own desire and to engage in some sort of arousal-generating activity to see if responsive desire emerges. I don’t expect couples to show up at the scheduled time with both partners brimming with desire, but I do ask them to show up with the willingness to engage. Some people balk at the idea of scheduling sex – they think it should just happen spontaneously – but when one partner is in a responsive-desire framework (which is often the case), sex needs to be more deliberate. If you and/or your partner are both in the responsive framework, you will need to work together to create a context in which any inhibitors are pushed aside so the exciters can take over. This also means talking about what exciters are going to create a runway into arousal. Try to schedule two willingness windows a week, with one window focusing on an activity that is physical/sensual in nature (a massage, for example, or making out) and the other window centred around an activity that is more psychological in nature. Speaking of which…
-
-**Generate mind-based arousal**
-
-I’ve mentioned a few times the importance of generating psychological arousal as well as physical. Most couples I work with want to do this, but they often don’t know how. Broadly speaking, there are two ways to do it, **face-to-face** and **side-by-side**. Face-to-face arousal involves activities such as sharing a fantasy, role-playing a sexy scenario, engaging in sexual power dynamics – activities that can be done between two people with just their imaginations.
-
-But that’s easier said than done. With so much shame and inhibition around sex, generating face-to-face arousal takes willingness, vulnerability and courage. So, I suggest you start out by trying the other way. A side-by-side experience is less pressured, such as: reading some literary erotica aloud together, listening to a sexy podcast, or watching ‘ethical porn’ (the kind where the performers actually want to be there – see the Links & Books section at the end of this Guide for some suggestions).
-
-Remember Jonathan and Chris? In one of our counselling sessions, Chris revealed that he fantasises about dominating Jonathan in roleplay. This piqued Jonathan’s interest and he admitted that he fantasises about being ‘arrested by a hot cop’ and getting ‘interrogated’ and body-searched in every imaginable nook and cranny. Chris said he would be totally into that, yet neither of them felt ready yet to dive in face-to-face. So I encouraged them to start with a side-by-side approach, to watch some ethical porn together that explored the scenario, and later, only once they were ready to transition to face-to-face, I encouraged them to go get some costumes and accessories, and give the roleplay a whirl. It took a lot of reassurance from me for them to move forward, but what ensued was the beginning of a reparative journey in their shared sex life.
-
-**Make sure there’s enough ‘outercourse’**
-
-Many couples, especially heterosexual partners, focus too much on intercourse at the expense of other forms of sexual activity. According to a [study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21029390/) by Debby Herbenick at Indiana University and her colleagues, only about 10 to 15 per cent of heterosexual couples did not include intercourse the last time they engaged in sexual activity together. In my clinical experience, most couples get to intercourse in as little as seven minutes, often sooner than that. What this means is that a lot of pleasure is getting left off the table, especially for the many women who do not orgasm consistently from intercourse.
-
-What else could you be doing? Some ideas come from a major [study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21883941/) published in the *Journal of Sexual Medicine* involving 25,000 gay and bisexual men in the US, approximately 65 per cent of whom said their last sexual experience did not involve intercourse. They engaged in many outercourse behaviours, such as oral sex and manual stimulation of the genitals, hugging and kissing. There were 10 discrete outercourse behaviours in all, but the gay and bisexual men in this study put them together in more than 1,300 combinations, with most sexual events involving five to nine different outercourse behaviours. That’s 1,300 personalised paths to pleasure and all outercourse based. So my message to you and your partner is to experiment with turning foreplay into ‘core-play’ and to plan an outercourse-based sexual event from start to finish.
-
-**Create an erotic thread between sexual events**
-
-For many couples, there just isn’t room in their busy lives for sexual energy to emerge. To engage in quality sex, you have to be in the sort of quality relationship that inspires you to have sex in the first place, and that means maintaining the erotic thread between sexual events: those moments when you can spontaneously express desire, or feel desired, and pivot in and out of a quick sexual charge without a feeling of pressure to do more. Most of the couples I work with are in egalitarian relationships that are free of traditional gender roles. When I’m talking to these couples, I can hear an egalitarian language in how they speak to each other. I can hear a desire to be respectful, fair and considerate, to collaborate. This kind of language serves people well in most aspects of their relationship, but is it an erotic language? Is it sexy, raw and primal? Is it coming from a place of lust or arousal? How, when we’re leading these egalitarian lives, do we give ourselves and each other the necessary permission to slip into language that’s erotically intentional and might be coming from a place that’s anything but egalitarian – a desire to eroticise, objectify, use and possess?
-
-If you and your partner find it difficult to make this switch and need some help breaking the ice, try something simple, such as telling your partner, at an opportune moment, that you had a sexy dream about them. You could say something such as: ‘I don’t know what my subconscious was up to when I was dreaming about you last night, but, boy, was it hot…’ Hopefully, that will pique a partner’s curiosity, and then there’s an opportunity to describe something sexy, or a sexualised way of seeing your partner, without feeling judged.
-
-**Picture the sex life you’d like to have together**
-
-By the time couples make it into my office, they generally have a lot to say about their sex life, but it’s usually in the form of a complaint. Generally, after hearing about the problem that brought them in, I want to get them thinking about the solution. So I’ll ask them a future-oriented question: ‘Tell me,’ I’ll say, ‘if we were to work together for a relatively short period of time, maybe just a couple of months, meeting every other week or so, with homework assignments in between sessions, and you were actually able to get on the other side of this problem and put it behind you, what would that look like? How would you know things were better? If I were a fly on the wall, what would I see?’ What I’m doing with these questions is asking them to imagine, in very positive terms, a vision of future sex. I’m asking them to reframe a negative – the problem – into a positive: the solution. Once I ask for that future vision of sex and encourage them to elaborate, I start to hear about their sexual hopes and dreams, of how they just want to be wanted, or the languorous kissing they crave, or the sensual oral sex, or the overwhelming power they want to submit to, or the trembling into each other during orgasm, or all of the above! Suddenly, the language has shifted into a vocabulary that’s not only positive, it’s sexy. They’re actually generating the face-to-face arousal I discussed earlier. Sometimes I can even feel the heat in the room rise!
-
-## Key points – How to get the excitement back
-
-1. **Sexual boredom is normal but reversible.** To reignite the spark, you need to eliminate the turn-offs and ramp up the turn-ons.
-2. **Sexual arousal is as much psychological as physical.** You need to move past the same old predictable physical behaviours.
-3. **This is about having fun together.** Many long-term couples become overly focused on the procreative and relationship aspects of sex, forgetting the fun side of it.
-4. **Some people get aroused easily, others need a while to get warmed up.** Acknowledge your differences and agree to ‘willingness windows’ where you’ll both agree to show up and see if desire emerges.
-5. **Generate mind-based arousal.** Start with a side-by-side experience (such as watching porn together) and warm up to face-to-face experiences, such as engaging in roleplay.
-6. **Make sure there’s enough ‘outercourse’.** There are many paths to pleasure beyond basic intercourse.
-7. **Create an erotic thread between sexual events.** Practise communicating in more erotic language outside of the bedroom.
-8. **Picture the sex life you’d like to have together.** If you reignited the spark, what would your sexual relationship look like?
-
-## Learn more
-
-**The eight components of magnificent sex**
-
-For more than 15 years, my colleague, the clinical psychologist Peggy Kleinplatz, has been co-leading the Optimal Sexual Experiences Research Team at the University of Ottawa, including conducting what might very well be the largest in-depth study of people who claim to be having magnificent sex. She and her team have distilled their findings into eight core components, each of which could give you further ideas for how to rekindle your sexual relationship.
-
-**Be completely present in the moment, embodied, focused, absorbed**
-
-Many of Kleinplatz’s participants cited the feeling of being present and absorbed as the major difference between great sex and merely good sex. ‘Being present during magnificent sex means being focused on all levels – mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually,’ she and her co-author Dana Ménard wrote in their [book](https://www.routledge.com/Magnificent-Sex-Lessons-from-Extraordinary-Lovers/Kleinplatz-Menard/p/book/9780367181376) *Magnificent Sex* (2020). ‘This means slowing down and being fully conscious, “inside the moment”.’ Of course, it can be challenging to get lost in the moment when thoughts of outside stressors – work, kids, schedules – interfere. It’s no wonder that the study participants who were able to achieve this total immersion also reported having learned skills to cope with such distractions.
-
-You and your partner will need to find your own ways of achieving absorption. One of my patients felt strongly that both giving and receiving a massage was his way of getting absorbed; another said taking a bath or shower together was important to him. Many of my female patients say that sex toys, particularly clitoral vibrators, help with absorption at various points during a sexual event. Another client told me about fooling around in complete darkness.
-
-**Connect, align, be in sync, merge**
-
-Many of Kleinplatz’s participants also said that being present and feeling connected to their partners inside and outside of the bedroom was what made sex magnificent. Some described this sensation as feeling like one entity rather than two separate people. Through my client work, I’ve heard of many different reactions and approaches people have to making a connection with their partner and getting in sync, such as changing kissing from light to deep, dancing, cooking together, mutual masturbation, and complimenting each other physically and erotically.
-
-**Aim for deep sexual and erotic intimacy**
-
-Do you feel emotionally safe during sex? Do you feel like you can be totally vulnerable – naked from the inside out? Kleinplatz found that, for some participants, magnificent sex is inseparable from the relationship in which it happens. ‘This component of magnificent sex is characterised by deep feelings of mutual respect and trust for their partners,’ she and Ménard explained in their book. ‘People talked about caring, valuing and liking their partners.’ When I talk to my clients about intimacy, what usually comes up is a sense of closeness and trust, feeling truly seen and known by a partner in ways that nobody else does. For example, one of my clients talks about cuddling after sex (spooning, being tightly held) as the most intimate part of sex. Another client talks about deep conversation. Some couples talk about rituals they have that are just about the two of them; others talk about being able to be totally silly and dorky and feeling appreciated; yet another couple talks about power-play with ropes as the ultimate intimacy. Kissing comes up a lot. One client talks about letting a guy go down on her; another mentions being able to share his performance anxiety and potential erectile impairment as a form of sexual intimacy.
-
-**Extraordinary communication and deep empathy**
-
-Magnificent sex involves communication between partners, whether verbal or nonverbal. Many of Kleinplatz’s participants said they found sex extraordinary when it allowed them to completely share themselves with their partner, especially if they revealed more personal or hidden aspects of themselves. So, think about the way you communicate about, during and around sex. What behaviours and activities promote extraordinary communication and empathy? Some of my clients have cited knowing what their partner likes and just doing it; or being able to say that some part of sex hurts or doesn’t feel good without repercussion; or being honest about not having an orgasm; using dirty talk and language that normally makes them blush; not feeling judged; feeling able to initiate or take a rain check on sex; and using pet names.
-
-**Be genuine, authentic, transparent**
-
-For many people, magnificent sex also involves the opportunity to be completely uninhibited, unselfconscious and trusting. ‘Many \[of our participants\] described the pleasure of being totally transparent and available with a lover; they also talked about the joy at receiving such revelations from their partners,’ wrote Kleinplatz and Ménard in their book. ‘Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable may be an important skill for developing the capacity for magnificent sex.’
-
-Think about the behaviours that could help you feel genuine and authentic. Is it sharing a fantasy, or being able to moan as loud as you want? One client told me that being genuine meant sharing his gender-fluid fantasies.
-
-**Be vulnerable and surrender**
-
-Shared vulnerability and trust can be a powerful aphrodisiac, yet feeling vulnerable during sex is far from easy. One of my patients, who has struggled her whole life with body issues, talks about being naked and having ‘lights-on’ sex as the epitome of vulnerability. In a similar vein, a male client of mine, who suffers from a lack of genital self-esteem and has always felt that his penis is extremely small, similarly talks about being seen naked, especially when flaccid, as being extremely vulnerable. Being physically naked isn’t the only source of feeling vulnerable; it is also brought on by being emotionally exposed. Sometimes our vulnerable emotions – such as fear, loneliness, sadness – reside behind a wall of shame, or are shielded by protective emotions such as anger, disgust or jealousy. But allowing your vulnerabilities, physical or emotional, to be seen and soothed during sex can create a sense of emotional safety and connection that is truly magnificent. Participants in Kleinplatz’s latest research used phrases such as ‘letting go’, being ‘swept away’, or ‘taken’ and ‘going with the flow’ to describe this kind of surrender. Many of my clients who explore BDSM talk about both submission and domination in terms of vulnerability, the trust they have to have for a partner in their respective roles, and how that can fuel intimacy and desire.
-
-**Explore, take risks, have fun**
-
-‘Interpersonal risk-taking’ was another feature of magnificent sex uncovered in the research. It doesn’t mean sex without a condom. Instead, it refers to sex that involves shared emotional and erotic exploration, play, fun, humour, and pushing personal boundaries. ‘Magnificent sex is a way to relax, experiment and not worry about making mistakes,’ Kleinplatz and Ménard wrote.
-
-When I talk to my clients about exploration, fun and adventurousness, many of them mention the erotic themes and the fantasies they’d be open to or curious to explore. These can include BDSM, swinging, group sex, going to a sex party, bringing home a third person to have fun with, taking a risk with exhibitionism (for example, sex on the beach), opening up a relationship and [exploring](https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-explore-ethical-non-monogamy-with-care-and-kindness) consensual non-monogamy, exploring a fetish, or masturbating under the watchful eyes of a partner. Whether adventurousness for you is some sort of shared adventure happening out in the world, or simply you and your partner continuing to expand the possibilities between you, try to make some move into uncharted territory.
-
-**Transcend and transform**
-
-‘Magnificent sex is described as a combination of heightened states – mental, emotional, physical, relational and spiritual,’ wrote Kleinplatz and Ménard. Participants in their studies said that, because magnificent sex allowed them to be their true and authentic selves, it was ecstatic, otherworldly, timeless and out-of-body. Some talked about experiencing alternative realities, being in a trance or a deep meditative state, or feeling ‘high’. Magnificent sex is ‘not frivolous – it can be life-altering,’ wrote Kleinplatz and Ménard. ‘Sex is not just some bonus activity in life. It can define who we are, where we’re going and what we’re capable of becoming.’ This rings true in my work. Some of my clients tie sex to their spiritual or religious [beliefs](https://psyche.co/ideas/from-sexual-union-to-the-divine-the-teachings-of-ibn-al-arabi) and a feeling a connection to a higher power; others talk about the out-of-body experience of [orgasm](https://aeon.co/essays/delayed-orgasm-the-sexual-technique-thats-better-than-sex); others about the [afterglow](https://aeon.co/essays/why-post-sex-cuddles-and-pillowtalk-count-for-more-than-orgasm) of sex, and just feeling incredibly alive and connected to their partner.
-
-## Links & books
-
-The sexuality [app](https://getcoral.app/about) Coral is designed for individuals and couples looking to improve their sexual knowledge and connection.
-
-The educational [website](https://www.omgyes.com/) OMGyes (one-off payment required) is a terrific science-based website developed to help women learn to masturbate, and it is great for couples to watch and learn from.
-
-Erika Lust Media Centre is the eponymous [website](https://erikalust.com/erika-media-centre) of a leading director of indie erotic films and a great introduction to the world of ethical porn.
-
-The audio subscription [site](https://www.dipseastories.com/) Dipsea provides a wide variety of sexy audio stories.
-
-The online [store](https://www.babeland.com/) Babeland is my favourite sex-positive outlet for a wide range of toys, accessories and sexual inspiration.
-
-To stay on top of sexual trends and insight into the latest research, the Sex and Psychology [blog](https://www.sexandpsychology.com/), by the social psychologist Justin Lehmiller, is a good option.
-
-The [book](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Come-As-You-Are-Revised-and-Updated/Emily-Nagoski/9781982165314) *Come As You Are* (2015) by Emily Nagoski will give you more background on spontaneous and responsive desire and the dual-control model.
-
-My [book](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/she-comes-first-ian-kerner?variant=32207941861410) *She Comes First* (2004) provides more advice on outercourse, sexual ‘cliteracy’ and bridging the orgasm gap (the tendency for women to experience fewer orgasms than men in heterosexual relationships).
-
-My most recent [book](https://www.grandcentralpublishing.com/titles/ian-kerner-phd-lmft/so-tell-me-about-the-last-time-you-had-sex/9781538734858/) *So Tell Me About the Last Time You Had Sex* (2021) is an in-depth guide to constructing highly personalised paths to pleasure.
-
-The [book](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-erotic-mind-jack-morin?variant=32128771457058) *The Erotic Mind* (1995) by Jack Morin will give you more information on fantasy, psychological arousal and exploring core erotic themes.
-
-The [book](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/mating-in-captivity-esther-perel?variant=32122437468194) *Mating in Captivity* (2006) by Esther Perel provides more information on maintaining desire, attraction and sexual unpredictability in the context of predictable relationships.
-
-The erotic [anthologies](https://cleispress.com/author/21/rachel-kramer-bussel/) from Cleis Press, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel, provide a wide variety of erotic lit to suit all tastes.
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-# How ‘The Bear’ Captures the Panic of Modern Work
-
-Screenland
-
-You don’t have to work in a kitchen to recognize the chaos and precarity the show depicts.
-
-
-
-Credit...Photo illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban
-
-Published Aug. 3, 2022Updated Aug. 11, 2022
-
-### Listen to This Article
-
-*To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times,* [*download Audm for iPhone or Android*](https://www.audm.com/?utm_source=nytmag&utm_medium=embed&utm_campaign=mag_screenland_the_bear)*.*
-
-The Original Beef of Chicagoland is the fitting name of the restaurant at the heart of the acclaimed FX series [“The Bear,”](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/dining/the-bear-fx-hulu.html) which stars Jeremy Allen White as Carmy, a world-class chef who returns home to run his family’s sandwich shop after his older brother’s suicide. Of all American cities, Chicago is the one whose mythos is most closely associated with a particular kind of work: honest, meaty, broad-shouldered labor that forges you into something bigger, nobler. Like the city it’s set in, the restaurant in “The Bear” is an unpretentious place, humbly catering to “the working man.” But “the working man,” we soon learn — as a young, Black, female sous-chef mocks an older, white, male manager’s use of the label — is a contested term, especially in an environment where nobody does anything but work, and pretty much nobody has anything to show for it.
-
-It’s unclear, at first, why Carmy, once named one of Food & Wine’s “Best New Chefs,” has come back to the sandwich shop, but we’re gradually made to understand that he is returning, compulsively, to a traumatic site. Food was the thread that connected him to his brother, but his brother wouldn’t let him in the kitchen, and so off to Sonoma and New York he went, to make something of himself. The Original Beef of Chicagoland is also *Carmy’s* original beef — the core wound that ignited his ambition, the site of his connection to his family as well as his estrangement from it.
-
-The story of the prodigal son returning from some summit of achievement to his salt-of-the-earth hometown is a beloved American narrative, most often seen in Christmas movies about frazzled executives returning to their roots. They are intended to reify the comforting notion that work isn’t everything — that the real America is slow, simple, cozy and (above all) fair, a place that rewards you for your efforts, full of wise, avuncular coots and simple, patient girls who’ve been waiting all along. But when Carmy returns to Chicago, he finds his elders are either absent or trying to exploit him, and the only girl who’s interested in his feelings is his sister. Just as success failed to save him, honest work won’t either; it won’t even generate enough money to get by. The Original Beef may signal noble, can-do labor, but it’s also a decompensating system on the verge of structural collapse. A few episodes in, the toilet explodes, unleashing a geyser in Carmy’s face. An industrial mixer blows a fuse, knocking out the power. The gas goes out, forcing the kitchen staff to build makeshift grills outside. They have no choice; one missed lunch service could take them out. A 1980s arcade game called Ball Breaker blares stupidly, violently from one corner, handily summarizing the experience. “Your balls have been broken!!” its screen announces. “Continue?”
-
-**“The Bear” has** been praised for its visceral depiction of the stress of a professional kitchen, but you don’t have to have done restaurant work to recognize the chaos, panic and precarity the show captures so convincingly. In “The Bear,” work is a dumb, sadistic game that has left Carmy with unchecked PTSD. Intrusive thoughts and flashbacks fracture his consciousness; he even cooks in his sleep, almost setting his house on fire. Richie, the restaurant’s manager, takes Xanax because he suffers from “anxiety and dread.” (“Who doesn’t?” Carmy snaps.) Sydney, the sous-chef, has a cabinet stuffed with medication for heartburn and ulcers, problems that may have been sparked by a failed attempt to run her own business. (“It was the first time I didn’t have a complete and utter psychopath behind me screaming,” she says. “And I thought I wanted that, you know? But look where that got me.”) The restaurant is drowning in bills. When the characters aren’t yelling at one another at top volume, they’re often shutting down to cope with all the yelling. Their customers are like kids stuck in a car with warring parents. The word you see most frequently in writing about the show is “stressful,” but it’s often accompanied by descriptions of the workplace as “soul-crushing,” “toxic” or “abusive.” All this is intended as praise — the idea is that, despite its occasional excesses, the show has captured something relatable and true.
-
-Hustle has always been romanticized in American culture, which promises that nobly sacrificing yourself on the altar of endless work will pay off in the end. But it’s increasingly clear that for most people, it won’t. Twenty-two years ago, when Anthony Bourdain published “Kitchen Confidential,” he glamorized the kitchen as a kind of foxhole, populated by wild, dysfunctional hard-asses yelling profanities at one another while managing to crank out hundreds of plates every night. This may once have seemed exotic or picturesque, but that pressure-cooker environment has come to feel familiar to more and more workers in more and more industries. The American economy soared over the past decade, but life for most became harder: “In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry by landlords, hospital administrators, university bursars and child-care centers,” [Annie Lowrey wrote in The Atlantic in 2020.](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/great-affordability-crisis-breaking-america/606046/) “For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible.” “The Bear” is compelling not because of how it recreates a kitchen but because it captures something about modern work in general.
-
-> ## ‘The Bear’ is compelling not because of how it recreates a kitchen but because it captures something about modern work in general.
-
-Carmy and Sydney work insane hours, rising at dawn and waiting for ‘L’ trains on dark platforms, too exhausted to think about anything else. At times it seems as if work is how they escape from having to think about what is happening to them. Sydney tells someone her goal is simply to do her job and live her life, but it’s abundantly clear that, outside her job, she has little life to speak of. These conditions don’t spur creativity; on the contrary, they’re counterproductive. Carmy can’t spare time to listen to Sydney’s ideas about the dinner menu or encourage the pastry chef’s experiments with doughnuts. Exploring your talent, in this environment, might turn out to be another luxury the “working man” can’t afford, something that belongs exclusively to narcissists with financial backing. This inequality comes into focus early in the show: We see Carmy abused by an arrogant chef and, in Chicago, paid a visit by his mobster uncle, who talks down the restaurant — the place is unfixable, he says — before trying to buy it for himself.
-
-Carmy is furious to learn that Richie has been dealing cocaine in the alley behind the restaurant to keep it afloat, but Richie justifies his actions by co-opting the language of entrepreneurship, crediting this side hustle with getting the place through Covid. “That’s the kind of stick-to-it-iveness and ingenuity and out-of-the-box thinking that we look for in employees,” he says. “But that ship has sailed, my friend.” This is the startling milieu and message of “The Bear,” the thing that has struck a chord. The notion that hustle will eventually pay off is an insidious pipe dream. Everyone is in survival mode all the time. The system has failed. The place is unfixable.
-
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-
-Source photographs: Screen grabs and photographs from FX
-
-Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.
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-# If they could turn back time: how tech billionaires are trying to reverse the ageing process
-
-In the summer of 2019, months before the word “coronavirus” entered the daily discourse, Diljeet Gill was double-checking data from his latest experiment. He was investigating what happens when old human skin cells are “reprogrammed” – a process used in labs around the world to turn adult cells (heart, brain, muscle and the like) – into stem cells, the body’s equivalent of a blank slate.
-
-Gill, a PhD student at the Babraham Institute near Cambridge, had stopped the reprogramming process midway to see how the cells responded. Sure of his findings, he took them to his supervisor, Wolf Reik, a leading authority in epigenetics. What Gill’s work showed was remarkable: the aged skin had become more youthful – and by no small margin. Tests found that the cells behaved as if they were 25 years younger. “That was the real wow moment for me,” says Reik. “I fell off my chair three times.”
-
-A lot has happened since then. Last summer, Reik resigned as the director of the Babraham Institute to lead a new UK institute being built by Altos Labs, a contender for the most flush startup in history. Backed by [Silicon Valley](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/silicon-valley) billionaires to the tune of $3bn (£2.2bn), Altos has signed up a dream team of scientists, Gill and numerous Nobel laureates among them. They will start work in the spring at two labs in the US and one in the UK, with substantial input from researchers in Japan. Their aim is to rejuvenate human cells, not with an eye on immortality – as some reports have claimed – but to stave off the diseases of old age that inexorably drive us to the grave.
-
-“This is a field whose time has come,” says Prof Dame Linda Partridge at University College London’s Institute of Healthy [Ageing](https://www.theguardian.com/science/ageing). “I think what Altos will do is hugely accelerate the process of finding out whether it is going to deliver or not. We need to see some clinical success stories.”
-
-
-
-‘If nothing else, Altos is good news for over-the-hill rodents.’ Photograph: Thomas Leirikh/Getty Images/iStockphoto
-
-Prof Janet Lord, director of the Institute for Inflammation and Ageing at the University of Birmingham, is enthusiastic, too. “This is not about developing the first [1,000-year-old human](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/aug/01/aubrey-de-grey-ageing-research); it’s about ensuring old age is enjoyed and not endured. Who wants to extend lifespan if all that means is another 30 years of ill health? This is about increasing healthspan, not lifespan.”
-
-It is not the first time Silicon Valley billionaires have thrown their wealth at the ageing problem. In 2013, Google launched Calico – the California Life Company – with its own high-profile hires. With $1bn to burn, the secretive firm began studying mice, which have an average lifespan of six years, and naked mole rats, which, with a lifespan of 30 years, appear to have traded good looks for longevity. The company aims to map the ageing process and extend healthy lifespan, but has yet to produce any products.
-
-Not that this has dampened Silicon Valley’s expectations. In a microcosm shaped by big tech, ageing is framed as code to be hacked, with death merely a problem to be solved. [Peter Thiel](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/peter-thiel), co-founder of PayPal and the big data analyst Palantir, has poured millions into anti-ageing research, notably the Methuselah Foundation, a non-profit that aims to make “90 the new 50 by 2030”. As powerful computation is brought to bear on biology, Thiel has claimed it will be possible to “reverse all human ailments in the same way that we can fix the bugs of a computer program. Death will eventually be reduced from a mystery to a solvable problem.”
-
-There is more to death than old age, of course. From the moment Homo sapiens arose, we have been cut down by acts of violence, accidents, starvation and disease. To solve death would take far more than putting an end to ageing, but the billionaires seem less fired up about solving poverty, war, famine, infant mortality, drug addiction and so on.
-
-Partridge finds phrases such as “solving ageing” and “solving death” wrong-headed. “Apart from being silly at the moment, it raises all kinds of societal issues. I think it’s morally dubious. Huge things would percolate through society with a substantial increase in life expectancy brought about by human intervention,” she says. “We’re living longer and longer already. People are suffering from disability and loss of quality of life because of ageing. That’s what we should be trying to fix. We should be trying to keep people healthier for longer before they drop off the perch. Stay healthy then drop dead, die in your sleep. I think that’s what most people want.”
-
-Thiel, who hopes to live to 120, is one of the more adventurous advocates of anti-ageing therapies. One that caught his eye – although it is unclear if he has tried it – stems from a series of [macabre experiments](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/04/can-we-reverse-ageing-process-young-blood-older-people) that found the muscles, brains and organs of old mice were partially rejuvenated when they shared the blood of a young animal. (The younger animals, in return, appeared to age.) Scientists are still trying to establish which blood components are behind the effect, with a view to slowing dementia and other age‑related diseases. But that didn’t stop a number of US firms from offering young blood transfusions for thousands of dollars – until [the US Food and Drug Administration intervened](https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/safety-availability-biologics/important-information-about-young-donor-plasma-infusions-profit#:~:text=The%20Food%20and%20Drug%20Administration,normal%20aging%20to%20memory%20loss.), warning consumers that there was “no proven clinical benefit”.
-
-Another approach that has pulled in private funders aims to flush worn cells from the body. When cells are damaged – for instance, by toxins or radiation – they can switch into a zombie-like state known as senescence. The process has benefits: senescence can shut down cells with mangled DNA and prevent them from becoming tumours. But senescent cells cause trouble, too: they accumulate in our bodies like junk and release substances that ramp up inflammation. This, in turn, drives diseases of old age.
-
-In 2016, a Silicon Valley startup called Unity Biotechnology raised $116m from investors including Thiel and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to create therapies that flush out senescent cells. Unity’s co-founder, Ned David, [believes the drugs](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/silicon-valleys-quest-to-live-forever) could “vaporise a third of human diseases in the developed world”. The evidence so far is encouraging. In 2018, James Kirkland, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, showed that “senolytic” drugs that destroy senescent cells not only [improved the physical capabilities](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29988130/) of aged mice, but also extended their lifespans. [More than a dozen clinical trials](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=&term=senolytic&cntry=&state=&city=&dist=) are under way in humans, targeting osteoarthritis, Alzheimer’s and frailty.
-
-In case death turns out to be a hard nut to crack, Thiel and others have hedged their bets and signed up with the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which has been freezing bodies and brains of the dead [since 1976](https://www.alcor.org/library/alcors-first-cryopreservation-fred-chamberlain-jr/). For about $200,000 and annual dues, the Arizona-based firm (motto: “A fulfilling life doesn’t have to end”) will keep your corpse on ice until science can reanimate you. For those of more modest means, Alcor will freeze your dead head for $80,000. Lord, at the University of Birmingham, describes the procedure as “total nuts”.
-
-Altos emerged from stealth mode last month, with the Russian-Israeli tech billionaire Yuri Milner a confirmed backer. Bezos is rumoured to be involved, too. Clearly, they mean business. The chief scientist and co-founder, Rick Klausner, is the former head of the US National Cancer Institute, while the chief executive, Hal Barron, left a role at GlaxoSmithKline [that paid more than £8m a year](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jan/19/gsks-top-scientist-jumps-ship-in-new-blow-for-pharmaceutical-firm).
-
-* * *
-
-But what is it with middle-aged male billionaires and anti-ageing research? Has the penny dropped that they, too, will one day fade away? Is rejuvenation science poised to swell their fortunes further? Or – and humour me for a moment here – could this be about the greater good?
-
-Asked about the trend after Calico launched, Bill Gates was scathing: “It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer,” he told an [“ask me anything” forum on Reddit](https://www.businessinsider.in/bill-gates-took-a-shot-at-googles-immortality-company-it-seems-pretty-egocentric/articleshow/46048324.cms). Perhaps the motivation doesn’t matter. Lord says: “We’ve got an ageing population, but we are living longer without living healthier. If you are going to do something with your squillions, it’s as good a target as any.”
-
-Prof Lorna Harries, a molecular geneticist at the University of Exeter’s medical school, agrees. “There’s nothing like increasing age to make you aware of your own mortality. I think the urge to extend your life as long as possible is something that’s behind a lot of this,” she says. “But I’m glad they’re putting their money into something that I think will have very tangible benefits down the line. If you are really deadly serious about getting things into the clinic, this is not something we are going to be able to do on academic grants.”
-
-Altos’s Cambridge Institute of Science is under construction at Granta Park, a landscaped 120 acres south of the city that is home to AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Illumina, a gene-sequencing firm. The first researchers are due to arrive in May. Two more institutes are being set up in San Diego and the San Francisco Bay Area, with further support coming from Prof Shinya Yamanaka, a Nobel prizewinning stem-cell scientist at Kyoto University in Japan.
-
-
-
-Skin cells can be ‘reprogrammed’ into stem cells, the body’s equivalent of a blank slate. Photograph: GrafiThink/Getty Images/iStockphoto
-
-One area Altos will explore is called the integrated stress response (ISR). When cells in the body become stressed by, say, a viral infection, a lack of oxygen, or the buildup of malformed proteins, the ISR can reboot the cell’s protein-making machinery. It is the biological equivalent of the IT department’s “turn it off and on again”. If this doesn’t work, the ISR tells the cell to self-destruct: the biological equivalent of chucking your laptop in the bin.
-
-In the past decade, scientists have discovered that the ISR is involved in a host of age-related diseases, including Alzheimer’s. In December 2020, Peter Walter, who will run Altos’s Bay Area institute, showed that drugs can retune the ISR and rapidly restore youthful [cognitive powers to aged mice](https://elifesciences.org/articles/62048). If nothing else, Altos is good news for over-the-hill rodents.
-
-Another area in which Altos hopes to make headway is rejuvenating the immune system. As we age, our immune system weakens, leaving us more prone to cancer and infections. Part of this is driven by changes in the thymus, a gland the size of an oyster that sits between the lungs. The thymus is where the immune system’s protective T cells go to mature, but from puberty onwards it shrinks and is steadily replaced by fat.
-
-Steve Horvath, a human-genetics professor who is moving to Altos from the University of California, Los Angeles, found evidence in a [small clinical study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31496122/) that a growth hormone, taken with two anti-diabetes drugs, can regenerate the thymus and reverse a person’s biological age. A therapy based on the work might help prevent cancer and make eldery people more resilient to infections.
-
-Central to Altos’s vision is a procedure called cellular reprogramming. With every human birth, biology demonstrates its rejuvenative powers by turning the old cells from parents into the youthful tissues of a newborn. In 2006, Yamanaka created a similar effect in the lab. He found that activating four genes in skin cells transformed them into an embryonic state, from which they could grow into the body’s numerous tissues. The work fuelled a wave of interest in growing [spare parts](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/26/muscular-dystrophy-therapy-breakthrough) for patients, but the procedure has its risks: activate the “Yamamaka factors” inside living animals and they can develop teratomas – tumours made due to a grim confusion of different cell types.
-
-13:50
-
-The people on a mission to live for ever – video
-
-Scientists are refining the procedure, winding back the clock just enough to make cells youthful, but not cancerous. In one landmark study, Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a developmental biologist who will lead the Altos institute in San Diego, showed that switching on Yamanaka factors for a six-week burst [rejuvenated old mice](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/dec/15/ageing-process-may-be-reversible-scientists-claim) and extended their lifespan by nearly one-third. “With careful modulation, ageing might be reversed,” he says.
-
-The same trick would be hard to pull off in humans. Instead, the hope is to find new biological pathways that, when targeted with drugs, rejuvenate old or senescent cells without causing cancer. Scientists such as Reik and Gill plan to explore these mechanisms in detail, drawing on sophisticated biological clocks to measure how much they turn back time on aged cells. The beauty about targeting ageing itself is that a therapy that helps to prevent one disease might well do the same for others.
-
-“If you’ve got the rights to something that works for dementia, a huge public health problem, which you can then turn around and apply to cardiovascular disease, or stroke, or osteoarthritis, that is going to make someone a lot of money,” says Harries, who is also the director and co-founder of [Senisca](https://www.senisca.com/), a biotech spin-off of the University of Exeter that is developing “senotherapeutics” to reverse senescence.
-
-There are no guarantees of success, of course, but that is the nature of medical research. “What excites me about Altos is that it’s a new way to do science,” Reik says. “It appeals to me because you can achieve so much more in a bigger team. We want to knuckle down.”
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-# Imagine Scythia’s fierce warrior women, the real Amazons | Aeon Essays
-
-The year is 700 BCE, the place is the Black Sea. You find yourself in land east of ancient Greece. To your right lies the tumultuous sea, to your left a mountain range. In between: fertile lands where hazelnuts grow, berries, wild sage and oregano. You are riding through the shallow marshes along the coast, with no more than the occasional heron, wild horse or hawk crossing your path. When suddenly, you are attacked by a fierce band of warriors on horseback.
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-According to the Greek scholar Herodotus, this is what happened to a tribe of Scythians. They were a community of nomadic horse-archers living on the Black Sea around the 7th century BCE, who one day found their horses seized by a mysterious fighting force. Only once the young men had engaged and killed some of them, did they realise that their opponents were women. Female warriors called Amazons, who ‘had nothing beyond their weapons and their horses’ and ‘devoted their lives to hunting and raiding’.
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-According to Herodotus, the young men of the Scythians quickly decided to change tactics. They did not kill their opponents, they even ceased all further attack. Instead, they offered themselves up for sex.
-
-The Amazons were very taken with the idea, Herodotus tells us, and soon the two camps merged into one. ‘The men found the language of the women impossible to learn, but the women managed to get to grips with that of the men,’ he goes on to say. Once they could communicate, the men told the Amazons that they would like to go home now: ‘We have parents, and we have our own belongings.’
-
-The reply of the Amazons? ‘We would never be able to settle down with your women. We have no customs in common with them … We shoot arrows, throw javelins, ride horses. But what do your women do? None of the things we just listed. They only ever do women’s work! They do not go off hunting, or anywhere at all, in fact – they just lurk inside their wagons. So you can see, it would be quite impossible for us to get along.’
-
-The Amazons had an alternative suggestion to make, though: ‘But if you really want us as your wives, and be seen to behave with complete honour as well, go to your parents and take the due share of your possessions. Then, on your return, we can go and set up home together of our own.’
-
-The young men agreed, and together they settled in a new place, to the great happiness of both parties. The descendants of this union were called the Sauromatians. Herodotus tells us that ‘from that time to this, the Sauromatian women have kept to their primal way of life: they go out hunting, whether their husbands are with them or not, they go to war and they dress exactly like the men.’
-
-What Herodotus tells us here is astonishing: at a time when the women of ancient Greece were not even allowed outside the house on their own, women among the Sauromatians were the equals of men, riding, hunting, fighting from dusk till dawn. Who were these people, and what truth is there to Herodotus’s account?
-
-The Sauromatians were part of the Scythians, a Greek umbrella term for a variety of culturally similar, yet distinct, nomadic and seminomadic communities who lived, rode and fought for centuries in the direct neighbourhood of ancient Greek settlements on the Eastern Aegean Sea, in modern-day Anatolia. The Scythians lived on a territory stretching from the Himalaya and Altai mountains in modern-day China to the Black Sea in today’s Georgia and Turkey. Accounts of them are given by ancient Greek historians and philosophers, such as Plato or Herodotus, the latter assuring us that, among some tribes, women came to wield ‘a power no less than that enjoyed by men’.
-
-More recently, the historian Adrienne Mayor has rediscovered these independent warrior women for us. As a research scholar in Classics and the history of science at Stanford University, she followed the archaeological and literary traces of the mythical Amazons – and identified as their historical counterparts the female horse-archers of Scythia and Sauromatia, [writing](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691147208/the-amazons) up her findings in _The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World_ (2014). Fierce, independent female warriors had long been believed to be a mere figment of the ancient Greek imagination. The evidence that Mayor has pieced together tells a different story: these women were real.
-
-Mayor’s findings suggest that women in Scythian societies led much freer lives than their Greek contemporaries. Imagine an ancient society where there was no need to perform a gender binary that equipped men with power and prestige, and demanded from women passivity and servility. Girls could grow up to be whatever they wanted to be: a hunter, an artist, a bard, a gardener. A leader, a mighty warrior, a heroine, a traveller. At least, that is what the names of these women suggest. Mayor collected an extensive list of Amazonian female names, most of them painted onto Greek vases, a widely popular artform at the time. Here is just a sample:
-
-> Alkaia – _mighty_
-> Kheuke – _one of the heroines_
-> Euryale – _far-roaming_
-> Molpadia – _death or divine song_
-> Khasa – _one who heads a council_
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-The hopes the parents in these societies had for their daughters are obvious: they wanted them to travel widely, to be political leaders, to be mistresses of their own fate. Passiveness, modesty, beauty? From the evidence we possess today, none of these traits were important or cherished in women among the nomadic and seminomadic horse-archers on the Scythian steppes. They did not leave us written records, at least none that we can understand, but their material culture, and what we know of them from other cultures with written sources, allows us to piece together what the life of a warrior woman in Scythia may have looked like.
-
-The year is 600 BCE, the place is Scythia. Imagine, once again, that you find yourself to the east of ancient Greece. On your right, the Black Sea; on your left, a mountain range; in between, the lands where hazelnuts grow. You are a woman who has been up since dawn, hunting game on horseback on the marshes for yourself, your family and friends. Your name is Kheuke, given to you by your mother and father, who were certain that you would be one of the heroines.
-
-
-
-Gold ring depicting a deer hunt, 450-400 BCE. _Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston_
-
-You would be feeling some chafing from half a day of riding, but not as bad as it could be: you are wearing padded trousers. As Mayor tells us, the ancient Greeks credited barbarian women in the east with the invention of trousers, which seems plausible when much of your life is spent on horseback. According to one ancient source, the historical Queen Semiramis of Babylon invented trousers and long-sleeved shirts, and personally led a group of rock-climbers to attack the citadel of an enemy. Many Amazons portrayed in Greek art wear patterned trousers and tunics and high caps.
-
-And so are you: riding along on a chestnut horse in warm trousers and a long-sleeved wool tunic with colourful zig-zag patterns in green and red, as well as a high cap to protect you from the rain. You live in a temperate climate, with frequent rain even in the summer, making the land fertile. Besides, your clothes protect you against the elements – and cover the tattoos on your arms and legs, of all the wild animals that you’ve hunted, and still wish to hunt, such as stags, boars and the mythical griffin guarding mountains of gold somewhere to the east.
-
-A deer on your right shoulder, a series of dots on your left wrist – you enjoy tattoos. You may have heard of the Greeks living in the west, who tattoo only prisoners and criminals. What a waste of an artform! Besides, the Greeks do not wear trousers at all, or so you’ve been told, neither man nor woman. What an entirely impractical way of life. Semiramis could never have scaled those rocks in a tunic.
-
-
-
-Scythians with horses under a tree. Gold belt plaque. Siberia, 4th-3rd century BCE. _Courtesy and © The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, 2017. Photo: V Terebenin_
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-As you have already been hunting for a few hours, a few birds dangling from your horse, you call out to your fellow hunters when you spot a cluster of tall trees, perhaps black pines, dark green, smelling of resin. Along with the other hunters – among them your friends and family, your partner or lover – you would ride up to the trees and dismount your horses to rest for a while. Taking off your _gorytus_ – the splendid leather and gold sheath holding your bow and arrows – you might sit with your back to the trunk of a pine tree, resting your stiff legs, looking at yourself in the mirror you always carry with you. It is the only tool that allows you to communicate over great distances on the steppes. Women and men alike will be buried with their mirrors when the time comes to go to the land where nothing moves.
-
-It is also practical for checking the set of your braid as you rest – or, as a man, the look of your beard. Indeed, your fellow hunter Thulme is doing just that right now. He has taken the hand mirror from a pocket on his chest belt and is inspecting his reflection. He also seems very taken with his gold and blue earrings. So are you, as a matter of fact. You spend the break with his head in your lap, idly stroking his hair. Every now and again, you see a grey heron gliding silently over the water.
-
-Scythian women enjoyed a sexual freedom that would have been unthinkable for Greek women
-
-After the break, you get back to hunting. Everything you bring back will be shared with the community upon your return to the camp. And, if hunting was not to your liking, you could just as well spend the day out foraging to collect berries and nuts, or ensnare little animals, in all likelihood contributing many more calories to the camp than the hunters – and much more reliably. Or grow vegetables and fruits in small fields as a hoe farmer, with many other women, each of whom would own their own field, but the reapings would go to everyone. Whether hunter, forager or hoe farmer, poet, healer or ironworker, you, Kheuke, would be considered to be one of the heroines.
-
-You might still want to hold on to your quiver, though, whether you like the hunt or not. According to Herodotus, Sauromatian women and men did form couples of two, the way Kheuke has with Thulme, who is the father of her children. But they also had ways of communicating to each other if they needed to have a bit of fun outside the partnership: ‘The sign for sex in progress was a quiver hung outside a woman’s wagon,’ Mayor tells us. In the Caucasian Nart sagas, she explains, ‘the signal that a woman had a sexual guest was his lance stuck in the ground outside her abode’.
-
-So as Kheuke, you may let your eyes wander as you sit under the tree with Thulme’s head in your lap. If you have an interest in Beyrek from Thrace, or indeed your fellow huntress Euryale come down the Red River from the mountains, looking like the goddess Cybele, whether you want to act upon it or not would be entirely your choice. The ancient Greek commentators are unanimous in their assessment that Amazons and Scythian women enjoyed a sexual freedom that would have been unthinkable for Greek women. You have heard of their astonishment, but you can hardly credit it. It must be an exaggeration – just like the other rumour you’ve heard, that among the Greeks, fathers and husbands control the sexuality of their daughters and wives. Surely, that must be an invention. No one would be so barbarous.
-
-
-
-Gold plaques showing Scythians drinking. _Courtesy and © The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, 2017. Photo: V Terebenin_
-
-After a day out hunting, you would return to the camp or settlement with Beyrek, Thulme, Euryale and the other hunters. As David Graeber and [David Wengrow](https://aeon.co/users/david-wengrow) lay out in their [book](https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/314/314162/the-dawn-of-everything/9780241402429.html) _The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity_ (2021), it would not have been atypical for your community to change shape and tactics over the course of a year, especially with the change of seasons in temperate climates. Disbanding into smaller hunting parties during the winter, for example, and erecting larger though temporary settlements for hoe farming during the summer, or vice versa. Let us say it’s summer, and that you are returning to your settlement in the evening. You check on your children with Thulme, who have been watched over by the settlement during the day. Then you walk into the hut you share with Thulme and reach for your halinda oil. As you rub it into your thighs and arms, sore from a day’s riding and shooting arrows, you feel its hot, relaxing sensation. If you feel so inclined, you could ask Thulme to apply it where you cannot reach: your lower back and shoulders. You might also return the favour.
-
-Tomorrow, you will go out to hunt, or forage, or farm again
-
-When you go back outside, a central fire has been lit and the scent of roast bird meat seasoned with oregano and sage fills the air. The hunters, foragers and hoe farmers pool the food they have found. With your meal – beside the meat, it might be fresh berries, goat’s cheese, honey and nuts – you are drinking fermented mare’s milk, washing down the food, the sweet taste of honey and cheese on your tongue.
-
-As you keep drinking the milk with your friends, you are growing increasingly tipsy. Mare’s milk may have been used among the Scythians in the same way as watered-down wine in ancient Greece. The stars come out above you. Thulme has his arm around you, your daughters and the other children are begging the bard for a story. You let your head fall back onto Thulme’s shoulder and look up at the stars, the fire warming your sore muscles and cooling skin. Owls might be hooting nearby while the bard takes out her instrument, perhaps not unlike an oud or a lyre, and begins to tell the old myth of the Narts, of the hero Warzameg and the heroine Psatina who tricked Death in the shape of the giant Arkhon Arkhozh. Your daughters are settled around the fire, entranced by the bard and her song and story. You watch them with pleasure, excited to see them grow into women, day by day, and do great things in their life.
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-As the night grows darker, you might be able to spot your friend Euryale with her dark hair and brown eyes across the fire. She is setting up a small tent, just large enough to put your head in. Inside, hemp seeds will be burnt over a fire. You give Thulme a kiss, get up and go over to join Euryale. With a grin, your best friend allows you to put your head in first and breathe in the fumes produced by the burning hemp seed. It puts your mind at rest. When you pull your head out from the tent, you are perfectly content to listen to the story of the bard for another while before going to sleep. Tomorrow, you will go out to hunt, or forage, or farm again. To make leatherwork or build bows and arrows, come up with stories or works of art, craft gold and precious stones, haggle with merchant colleagues from Babylonia, Egypt or Miletus, take care of your family or head the council that decides matters of the settlement, not unlikely to be led by an old woman, probably even an outsider. Who knows, one day, that woman might be you.
-
-If we allow our imagination to take flight, based on the available evidence, this is what the day of an adult woman among some of the Scythian societies may have looked like. The Scythians encompass a very diverse cultural continuum, some of which may have been much more patriarchal. But as Graeber and Wengrow point out in _The Dawn of Everything_, it is very likely that myriad forms of social and political organisation have coexisted for most of human history. It certainly is likely among the Scythians.
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-Whichever Scythian culture you were part of, your life as a woman could not have been more different to the typical day of an ancient Greek wife or daughter, confined to the household, under the control of her father or husband. In many ways, the life of a Sauromatian woman was much more similar to the life of a woman today: our Sauromatian foremothers were much more likely to be independent women who were in control of their fate and sexuality, free to choose their romantic partners, friends, profession and abode, living life to the fullest of their tastes and abilities.
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-This begs a question: why do we not remember these women today? Why have we forgotten Kheuke and Euryale, Khasa and Alkaia, and all of our other heroic foremothers?
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-Women ‘have no past, no history, no religion of their own’, wrote [Simone de Beauvoir](https://aeon.co/videos/im-against-all-forms-of-oppression-simone-de-beauvoir-in-her-own-words-from-1959) in her groundbreaking feminist study, _The Second Sex_ (1949). She argued that ‘there have always been women’, that ‘as far back as history can be traced, they have always been subordinate to men.’ _This_ is how we remember the past: a place where women have always been oppressed by men, from ancient Greece to the latter half of the 20th century, even to the present day. In our foundational stories, the mythical pasts on which we base our cultural understandings, women are the servants and slaves of men: from the biblical story of Adam and Eve to the ancient Greek tale of the Trojan War.
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-The ‘mythical past’ provides us with our norms in the present, our cultural memory
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-‘I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labour you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you,’ God says to Eve after she has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. The story of the Trojan War holds a similar fate for its women: ‘The Greeks, our masters, are taking me away … I want to die, / I can’t control this longing,’ says Andromache, wife of Hector, prince of Troy, in the play by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides. And her mother-in-law, Hecuba, the former queen of Troy, replies: ‘This is our fate, sad one, this anguish.’ Two tales with two suspiciously similar outcomes for women: a sad life of servitude and suffering.
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-Put succinctly: we remember the past as a place of the patriarchy. Beauvoir sums it up neatly in _The Second Sex_ when she asks_:_ ‘Why is it that this world has always belonged to men and that only today things are beginning to change?’ This is our memory of the past from which we come, the ‘mythical past’ that provides us with our norms in the present – what among researchers is called our cultural memory.
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-As the bones of warrior women show, what we remember is wrong. From female warriors fighting with the Roman army near Hadrian’s Wall in Great Britain and Viking warriors in Sweden to the Scythian warrior women who were the historical counterparts of the Amazons from ancient Greek myth, their burials make it clear that women have not always been subordinate to men. In places such as Scythia, they lived a free life.
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-What we remember matters. We turn to the past to conceive of who we are – and, more importantly, who we think we should be. As humans, we mine our mythical past for norms to guide our behaviour in the present and the future, as memory scholars such as Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann have [shown](https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501742439/is-time-out-of-joint/#bookTabs=2).
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-Today, we have reached a state where our cultural memory no longer matches what we experience in the present. Some of us live in societies where women and men are equal before the law, and where the gender binary is being roundly challenged, even beginning to dissolve. Already, modern-day memory professionals such as historians, archaeologists, novelists, filmmakers, museum workers and journalists are updating our cultural memory, turning to the archive to take out elements of our past that have hitherto been overlooked, to rewrite and integrate them into the canon. Examples include the historian Judy Batalion, author of _The Light of Days_ (2021), a major [study](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-light-of-days-judy-batalion?variant=32201589391394) on Jewish female resistance fighters in the Nazi ghettos; the journalist Danielle Paquette who wrote about the 19th-century all-female army of West Africa’s Kingdom of Dahomey for _The Washington Post_; and the scholar Marylène Patou-Mathis, who has explored the egalitarian role of women in prehistoric societies.
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-These professionals ensure that the norms we take from the past match what we want to be in the present, and what world we want to pass on to our children in the future. If we wish for an egalitarian future, it is time for us to remember the warrior women of Scythia, these equals of men. And it is time to follow the call to action sent out by Sappho, a female poet from the island of Lesbos, some 2,500 years ago:
-
-> I declare
-> That later on,
-> Even in an age unlike our own,
-> Someone will remember who we are.
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->
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-
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-Detail from an oil flask showing a tattooed Thracian woman killing Orpheus, _c_450-440 BCE. _Courtesy the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston_
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-# In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Yeshivas Flush With Public Money
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-New York’s Hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from $1 billion in government funding in the last four years but are unaccountable to outside oversight.
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-Credit...
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-[Eliza Shapiro](https://www.nytimes.com/by/eliza-shapiro) and [Brian M. Rosenthal](https://www.nytimes.com/by/brian-m-rosenthal)
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-Photographs by Jonah Markowitz
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-Over more than a year, the reporters interviewed more than 275 people, translated dozens of Yiddish-language documents and analyzed millions of rows of data on failing private schools in the Hasidic Jewish community.
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-- Published Sept. 11, 2022Updated Sept. 12, 2022
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-### Listen to This Article
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-*To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times,* [*download Audm for iPhone or Android*](https://www.audm.com/?utm_source=nyt&utm_medium=embed&utm_campaign=failing_schools_money_shapiro)*.*
-
-The Hasidic Jewish community has long operated one of New York’s largest private schools on its own terms, resisting any outside scrutiny of how its students are faring.
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-But in 2019, the school, the Central United Talmudical Academy, agreed to give state standardized tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students.
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-Every one of them failed.
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-Students at nearly a dozen other schools run by the Hasidic community recorded similarly dismal outcomes that year, a pattern that under ordinary circumstances would signal an education system in crisis. But where other schools might be struggling because of underfunding or mismanagement, these schools are different. They are failing by design.
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-The leaders of New York’s Hasidic community have built scores of private schools to educate children in Jewish law, prayer and tradition — and to wall them off from the secular world. Offering little English and math, and virtually no science or history, they drill students relentlessly, sometimes brutally, during hours of religious lessons conducted in Yiddish.
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-The result, a New York Times investigation has found, is that generations of children have been systematically denied a basic education, trapping many of them in a cycle of joblessness and dependency.
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-Segregated by gender, the Hasidic system fails most starkly in its more than 100 schools for boys. Spread across Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley, the schools turn out thousands of students each year who are unprepared to navigate the outside world, helping to push poverty rates in Hasidic neighborhoods to some of the highest in New York.
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-The schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education. Even so, The Times found, the Hasidic boys’ schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone.
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-Image
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-
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-Credit...Jonah Markowitz for The New York Times
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-Warned about the problems over the years, city and state officials have avoided taking action, bowing to the influence of Hasidic leaders who push their followers to vote as a bloc and have made safeguarding the schools their top political priority.
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-“I don’t know how to put into words how frustrating it is,” said Moishy Klein, who recently left the community after realizing it had not taught him basic grammar, let alone the skills needed to find a decent job. “I thought, ‘It’s crazy that I’m literally not learning anything. It’s crazy that I’m 20 years old, I don’t know any higher order math, never learned any science.’”
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-To examine the Hasidic schools, The Times reviewed thousands of pages of public records, translated dozens of Yiddish-language documents and interviewed more than 275 people, including current and former students, teachers, administrators and regulators.
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-The review provided a rare look inside a group of schools that is keeping some 50,000 boys from learning a broad array of secular subjects.
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-The students in the boys' schools are not simply falling behind. They are suffering from levels of educational deprivation not seen anywhere else in New York, The Times found. Only nine schools in the state had less than 1 percent of students testing at grade level in 2019, the last year for which full data was available. All of them were Hasidic boys’ schools.
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-Girls receive more secular education because they study fewer religious texts. But they, too, are struggling: About 80 percent of the girls who took standardized tests last year failed.
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-The boys’ schools cram in secular studies only after a full day of religious lessons. Most offer reading and math just four days a week, often for 90 minutes a day, and only for children between the ages of 8 and 12. Some discourage further secular study at home. “No English books whatsoever,” one school’s rule book warns.
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-Often, English teachers cannot speak the language fluently themselves. Many earn as little as $15 an hour. Some have been hired off Craigslist or ads on lamp posts.
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-During religious study, teachers in many of the boys’ schools have regularly smacked, slapped and kicked their students, records and interviews show, creating an environment of fear that makes learning difficult. At some schools, boys have called 911 to report being beaten.
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-Still, Hasidic leaders have opened more than 50 new boys’ schools in the past decade, and they have received increasing amounts of government money, records show. One city child care program for low-income families sent nearly a third of its total funding to Hasidic neighborhoods last year.
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-Hasidic boys’ schools are not a monolith. Their attitudes toward nonreligious education can vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. A few schools in Brooklyn’s Borough Park have held science and social studies fairs. One has an annual spelling bee. But those schools are the exception, The Times found.
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-For many, the consequences of attending Hasidic schools can ripple across time. Students grow up and can barely support their own families. Some leave the community and end up addicted to drugs or alcohol. Others remain and feel they have little choice but to send their children to the schools.
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-“My biggest fear is that my sons are going to get engaged, get married, start having kids,” said Shlomo Noskow, 42, whose children remained in Hasidic schools after he got divorced, left the community and struggled to earn a medical degree. “And the cycle just repeats itself.”
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-There are about 200,000 Hasidic Jews in New York, making up roughly 10 percent of the state’s Jewish population. They are distinct from modern Orthodox Jews and others who strictly follow religious law but also integrate their lives with contemporary society. Hasidim wear the same modest dress as their ancestors did, and most live in largely insular enclaves devoted to preserving centuries-old traditions.
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-For many Hasidic people, their schools are succeeding — just not according to the standards set by the outside world. In a community that places religion at the center of daily life, secular education is often viewed as unnecessary, or even distracting.
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-Some parents told The Times they know the limits of the schools, but they enroll their children nonetheless because they believe the educational system instills the values of their community.
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-Approached by The Times on dozens of occasions over the past year, by telephone, email and in person, the leaders of the largest Hasidic boys’ schools have declined to answer questions.
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-But over the last week, after The Times sent the schools a summary of its reporting, several Hasidic groups have publicly defended the way they educate children, writing opinion articles and issuing statements.
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-The groups all emphatically said Hasidic schools operate independently of each other, not as a network. They denied some of The Times’s findings, including that the schools do not provide an adequate education and that teachers regularly use corporal punishment. They also noted that the schools receive far less taxpayer money per pupil than public schools do, and they said Hasidic neighborhoods were not as impoverished as government data might suggest.
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-“The Hasidic community is proud of the education that it provides to its students — all of whom attend at their parents’ choice for a religious education — and has many, many accomplished and successful graduates,” wrote J. Erik Connolly, a Chicago lawyer representing the Tzedek Association, a group that works with Hasidic schools, in a letter to The Times.
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-Another spokesman for Hasidic schools, Richard Bamberger, denied that graduates of the schools were unable to speak or write in English and said the schools are safe and “have zero-tolerance policies against any violence.”
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-Mr. Bamberger and Mr. Connolly also said that Jewish schools, known as yeshivas, in general perform well on standardized tests for high school students, a point that Hasidic leaders have often argued. In fact, very few Hasidic students take those tests, and the results almost entirely reflect the performance of students at the yeshivas that provide robust secular education, including modern Orthodox schools.
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-In other parts of the world with large Hasidic populations, including in [Britain](https://www.yahoo.com/now/proposed-change-law-takes-aim-135706454.html), [Australia](https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-714925) and [Israel](https://www.timesofisrael.com/liberman-no-reason-to-fund-haredi-institutions-that-teach-idleness/), officials have moved to crack down on the lack of secular education in Hasidic schools. But that has not happened in New York, despite a state law requiring private schools to offer an education comparable to the one provided in public schools.
-
-Bill de Blasio, the former mayor of New York City, began an investigation into the schools after receiving complaints in 2015, but his administration put it on hold when the pandemic hit. Mayor Eric Adams has not intervened in the schools — and has touted close ties to Hasidic leaders. In Albany, Gov. Kathy Hochul has taken a similarly hands-off approach, as did her predecessor, Andrew M. Cuomo.
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-Image
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-Credit...James Estrin/The New York Times
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-State education officials have spent years drafting new regulations for enforcing the law but have watered them down amid opposition from the Hasidic community. A state education board is scheduled to vote on the new set of rules this week.
-
-In statements, New York elected officials deflected blame. Representatives for Ms. Hochul and Mr. Cuomo each said it was the state education department’s responsibility to oversee the schools and noted that the agency does not report to the governor. A spokeswoman for the department said every student “is entitled to an education that allows them to fulfill their potential” but did not comment specifically about the Hasidic schools.
-
-Through a spokesman, Maxwell Young, Mr. Adams said for the first time that his administration would complete his predecessor’s investigation. He added that he believed schools should be culturally sensitive and meet high standards.
-
-Mr. de Blasio said in an interview that he had taken complaints about the Hasidic schools seriously.
-
-“Had it not been for the demands of Covid, we would have finished the investigation, put the willing schools on a corrective action plan and urged the state to sanction the unresponsive schools,” Mr. de Blasio said, referring to a few yeshivas that did not allow city inspectors into the buildings. “And that’s what needs to happen now.”
-
-## A guard against assimilation
-
-Almost all of New York’s Hasidic Jews live in a few Brooklyn neighborhoods and a handful of towns in Rockland and Orange Counties. In those areas, storefronts are emblazoned with Yiddish, roads are packed with yellow school buses and sidewalks bustle with families. People distinguish themselves through volunteering, and the community looks out for its own, sharing meals to ensure no one goes hungry.
-
-Hasidic people follow strict rules aimed at recreating a way of life that was nearly wiped out in the Holocaust.
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-Their leaders, the grand rabbis, wield significant power, and breaking the rules they set can carry serious consequences. That point was underscored by the more than 50 current Hasidic community members who spoke to The Times only on condition of anonymity, for fear of being exiled and barred from seeing family and friends.
-
-Since arriving in Brooklyn in the 1940s, Hasidic rabbis have relied on religious schools to propel the community’s growth and maintain its continuity. Amid [growing antisemitic violence](https://nynj.adl.org/news/2021-audit-ny/), the Hasidim have been particularly vulnerable to attacks and harassment.
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-Image
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-Credit...Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images
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-Image
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-Credit...Irving I. Herzberg, via Brooklyn Public Library — Center for Brooklyn History
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-Image
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-Credit...Irving I. Herzberg, via Brooklyn Public Library — Center for Brooklyn History
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-There is no unified Hasidic school system. More than a dozen Hasidic groups each run their own schools. Just one, the Lubavitch movement, encourages followers to speak English, so they can proselytize.
-
-The largest group, the Satmars, is made up of two competing factions led by the grand rabbis Aaron and Zalman Teitelbaum. They each run branches of the United Talmudical Academy, a network of dozens of schools that also owns a large real estate portfolio. Last year, audit records show, they controlled more than $500 million in assets.
-
-The U.T.A. helps set the tone for other schools in the community, including those run by the Bobov, Skver and Viznitz groups.
-
-As the internet has become more widely available, many schools have grown more restrictive, even barring students whose parents are caught with smartphones. At least one U.T.A. campus has established a “committee of responsible parents” to enforce rules; some other schools now prohibit students from speaking English at home.
-
-In some respects, the U.T.A. and others have rigorous curriculums, teaching students to parse complicated texts and legal principles in Yiddish, Hebrew and Aramaic. Some community members said that religious lessons can incorporate elements of math, history and other subjects.
-
-But even some who are committed to the community said they wished Hasidic schools taught more secular subjects.
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-“They could have education and still have the religion. But they don’t, and the people are suffering so much,” said Hilly Rubin, 28, who attended a Hasidic yeshiva in Borough Park. Mr. Rubin said he left and tried to go to community college but could not keep up. He is now in debt and trying to stay afloat, he said. “It’s really inhumane.”
-
-## ‘They knew nothing’
-
-Hasidic yeshivas, like all private schools in New York, are not required to administer state standardized tests in reading and math, and most do not.
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-But some Hasidic schools give the exams as a condition of receiving public funding. In 2019, when nearly [half of all New York students passed the tests](http://www.nysed.gov/news/2019/state-education-department-releases-spring-2019-grades-3-8-ela-math-assessment-results), 99 percent of the thousands of Hasidic boys who took the exams failed, a Times analysis found.
-
-The poor performance could not be easily explained by the community’s poverty or language barriers.
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-Statewide, the public schools that served only low-income students all scored exponentially higher than the boys’ yeshivas did, the analysis found. The same was true for schools that overwhelmingly enrolled nonnative English speakers.
-
-In the schools that do not administer tests, it has been difficult to measure how much the students are learning. But hundreds of interviews and a review of student work show that those students are struggling, too.
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-Nearly three dozen current and former teachers across the state’s Hasidic yeshivas said most of the thousands of boys who passed through their classrooms over the years left school without learning to speak English fluently, let alone read or write at grade level.
-
-Another former teacher provided hundreds of pages of work sheets from the past five years that showed that 12-year-olds — in their last year of English instruction — could not spell words like “cold” and “America.” One boy, in response to a prompt about what he liked, wrote: “To cee wen somone pente.”
-
-Boys perform slightly better in math. Most can add and subtract, and some can multiply and divide, but few can do much more, teachers said.
-
-Yaakov Bressler, who taught reading and math at a U.T.A. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, from 2016 to 2019, said the parents cared about secular education, but their sons were hopelessly behind. Many did not know their ABC’s.
-
-“Even in the older grades, I had to assume they knew nothing,” he said, “because they did.”
-
-In a letter to The Times, the school said, “U.T.A. Williamsburg is dedicated to passing on the traditions and beliefs of the Satmar Orthodox Jewish Community, consistent with the desires of the Satmar parents who choose it for that purpose.”
-
-Some teachers at Hasidic schools said they had become convinced that their yeshivas discouraged learning English because it was seen as a dangerous bridge to the outside world.
-
-Teachers said they have encountered obstacles for many years.
-
-Greig Roselli was a graduate student in philosophy with no experience teaching young children when a U.T.A. in Williamsburg hired him off Craigslist in 2010. On his first day, he had planned to test his students’ skill levels. But when he arrived at the yeshiva, in a large Gothic-style former public school building, all his students were hiding in a closet.
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-Herding the boys to their seats, he said, he started reading from his lesson plan, but the students interrupted him, giggling and shrieking. One scowled and said: “Go home, teacher.”
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-Soon, Mr. Roselli, who knew no Yiddish, realized he had signed up for an impossible task: teaching rambunctious 11- and 12-year-olds who barely spoke his language and were not eager to learn it. He quit after a year.
-
-More than a decade later, the secular education in many Hasidic schools has grown worse, according to dozens of recent students, parents and teachers.
-
-Some Hasidic boys’ yeshivas do not offer any nonreligious classes at all. Others make attending the classes optional. Yeshivas that provide secular education now mostly hire only Hasidic men as teachers, regardless of whether they know English.
-
-One former student said he once had a secular teacher who doubled as the school cook. Another said one of his instructors repeatedly wrote the word “math” on the blackboard as “mathe.” Many young men said their English teachers spoke to them only in Yiddish.
-
-Secular textbooks are either censored with black marker to blot out images of girls and pigs and words like “library” and “college,” or specially printed to omit such content altogether.
-
-Pages from a censored textbook used in a Hasidic yeshiva in Brooklyn show that boys cannot see images of girls or read the names of many non-Jewish holidays.
-
-Chaim Fishman, 24, who attended Yeshiva Kehilath Yakov in Williamsburg, said that when he asked English teachers the meaning of words, they often said they did not know them. The school did not respond to a request for comment.
-
-Like others in the community, Mr. Fishman tried to learn English on his own, in part by secretly listening to the radio. After managing to leave his yeshiva, he enrolled in public school and was embarrassed at how little he knew.
-
-“I’m the third generation born and raised in New York City,” he said, “and, still, when I was 15, I could barely speak English.”
-
-## Private schools, public money
-
-Despite the failings of Hasidic boys’ schools, the government has continued sending them a steady stream of funding.
-
-Tax dollars are not supposed to go toward religious education. But public agencies pay private schools to comply with government mandates and manage social services. Hasidic boys’ yeshivas, like other private schools, access dozens of such programs, collecting money that subsidizes their theological curriculum.
-
-Officials have sent money to Hasidic schools for decades but have never provided a full public accounting. To create one, The Times identified dozens of federal, state and local programs and analyzed how much they have given to yeshivas, looking most closely at the last year before the pandemic.
-
-The analysis showed that New York’s Hasidic boys’ schools received more than $375 million from the government in that period.
-
-Hasidic boys’ yeshivas receive far less per pupil than public schools, and they charge tuition. But they appear to get more government funding on average than other private schools in the state, including other religious schools, the analysis found. And the money is flowing as New York City [is cutting public school budgets](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/10/nyregion/school-budget-cuts-new-york-city-appeal.html).
-
-Some government programs provide a disproportionate amount of aid to Hasidic schools, The Times found. The city voucher program that helps low-income families pay for child care now sends nearly a third of its total assistance to Hasidic neighborhoods, [even while tens of thousands of people have languished on waiting lists](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/nyregion/child-care-vouchers.html). The program provides more than $50 million a year to Hasidic boys’ schools that claim the end of their regular school day as child care, records show.
-
-Yeshiva Imrei Chaim Viznitz in Borough Park had 735 boys enrolled in 2019, state records show, and collected funding from 650 vouchers that year, city records show. Parents there said administrators coached them on applying for vouchers and other programs.
-
-Mr. Connolly, the lawyer who represents some of the Hasidic schools, disputed the accuracy of the city data.
-
-Hasidic boys’ schools also received about $30 million from government financial aid programs, which they access by counting their older students as pursuing higher education degrees in religious studies.
-
-The schools got roughly $100 million through antipoverty programs to provide free breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks every school day to virtually all Hasidic boys, including during the summer. At least one school network, the U.T.A., uses the money to buy food from retailers it owns, using the profit to support its budget, interviews and records show.
-
-The Times review also found that Hasidic boys’ schools benefit from about $100 million annually from federal Title 1 programs and other sources of funding for secular education. The money pays yeshivas to administer tests, check attendance, report enrollment data and buy instructional materials.
-
-Hasidic boys’ schools received roughly $30 million in the last year before the pandemic to transport students, through a program [created exclusively for yeshivas](https://www.nysenate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/simcha-felder/140-yeshivas-attend-felder%E2%80%99s-transportation-workshop) by state lawmakers in 2013.
-
-And they collected about $200,000 in federal money for internet-related services, even though they forbid students from going online.
-
-## Hard lessons
-
-The money is subsidizing instruction that has regularly involved corporal punishment.
-
-One recent graduate, Chaim Wigder, said he remembered the first time his religion teacher at U.T.A. of Borough Park decided he had stepped out of line. Angry that Mr. Wigder, then 7, appeared not to be following along with a Torah reading, the teacher ordered him to the front of the classroom and smacked his hand, hard, with a ruler wrapped in electrical tape. “Do you think that’s enough punishment?” he asked in Yiddish, and then struck the boy even harder. More than a decade later, Mr. Wigder still remembers crying out in pain.
-
-The school did not respond to a request for comment.
-
-More than 35 men who either attended or worked at a Hasidic school in the past decade told The Times they saw teachers hit students with rulers, belts and sticks.
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-State law allows for corporal punishment in private schools, but there are no clear rules regarding its use. Hasidic yeshivas have integrated it into rigid religious instruction.
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-Six days a week, often before the sun rises, boys file into classrooms and spend up to eight hours a day studying the Talmud and other ancient texts.
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-Beyond memorizing religious passages, graduates said they learned logic, critical thinking and how to stay focused. Many said they strained to pay attention, afraid of being beaten if they did not.
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-At Avir Yakov Elementary, in New Square, north of New York City, one man recalled being kicked by a rabbi so hard that he flew under a table. He was 4 at the time. The school did not respond to requests for comment.
-
-A recent graduate of Yeshiva Beth Hillel of Williamsburg said he once saw a teacher knock a classmate to the ground and stomp him repeatedly.
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-And at Bobover Yeshiva Bnei Zion in Borough Park, a young man said when he was 11, a teacher dragged him across the room, and his head banged on a locker and started to bleed.
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-Mr. Connolly, the lawyer for some Hasidic schools, said neither school had any record of incidents the men described.
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-“The attitude was constantly that you could get hit,” said Ari Hershkowitz, who went to U.T.A. in Williamsburg. “We were constantly under threat of that.”
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-Mr. Hershkowitz said he left the community and turned to drugs, eventually overdosing on cocaine. Now, at 25, he is rebuilding his life.
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-In the past few years, some Hasidic schools have asked teachers to be less violent in disciplining students.
-
-Still, virtually all of the dozens of parents of current students interviewed by The Times said their sons had been hit at least once. Several said they had sought to protect their children by “tipping” their teachers, usually about $100 a year.
-
-Over the past five years, the New York City Police Department has investigated more than a dozen claims of child abuse at the schools, records show. It is not clear whether anyone was charged in the incidents.
-
-In April 2019, a 10-year-old at Yeshiva Chsan Sofer, in Borough Park, called 911 and said a rabbi had jumped on him and beaten him, according to a police record obtained by The Times. Within moments, the report said, a principal got on the phone and said the boy had not been beaten. The authorities responded anyway, and the boy left school in an ambulance. A lawyer for the school, Y. David Scharf, said the school cooperated in the resulting investigation, and the allegation was unfounded.
-
-Mr. Bamberger, the yeshiva coalition spokesman, said even one violent incident was too many. “But a dozen alleged incidents across hundreds of yeshivas over a five-year period is comparably a far better safety record than most schools,” he said.
-
-## ‘No point of advantage’
-
-After attending Hasidic schools, men are often not equipped to live outside the community.
-
-Joseph Kraus learned that firsthand.
-
-Soon after turning 17 in Kiryas Joel, in Orange County, Mr. Kraus decided to run away — from his overbearing teachers, his parents and five siblings and the cramped cul-de-sac on which he had grown up, tending tomato and cucumber plants to stave off boredom.
-
-He took a taxi to a local mall, where he bought jeans and T-shirts, and then to a youth shelter. On his first weekend there, in the fall of 2020, he felt astonished when he realized he had not marked the Sabbath for the first time in his life.
-
-Over the next 18 months, he enrolled in remote public school classes but was barely able to use a computer or understand his teachers. He drifted from a shelter in Florida to a foster home in Texas to a job training program back in New York.
-
-For much of this year, he shared a subsidized room with another homeless man in a Knights Inn on the edge of Liberty, a Catskills town dotted with boarded-up storefronts just an hour from his childhood home.
-
-He spent his days walking the 30 minutes to and from the local library, where he searched for jobs without much success. He said he was recently fired from a diner because he could not write down orders. He lives off food stamps but skips many meals.
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-“I feel like I have no point of advantage,” said Mr. Kraus, now 19. “I have big hopes to be really successful. I feel like at this point it’s really stupid to talk about.”
-
-Community leaders said that cases like Mr. Kraus’s are the exception.
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-“Perhaps The Times should tell the stories of some of the many Hasidic school graduates who are highly successful entrepreneurs, businessmen and professionals — and who attribute their success to a rigorous yeshiva education that trained their minds to think,” said David Zwiebel of Agudath Israel of America, an Orthodox Jewish group that advocates for Hasidic schools.
-
-But in interviews, dozens of men described profound struggles. Some said they remained in the community, awash in debt and supporting their families with government welfare. Several said the only job they could find was at the yeshiva they attended. Others spoke while unloading trucks or stocking shelves and choked back tears as they described what their lives had become.
-
-Mendy Pape said he left a Hasidic neighborhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, for Montreal in 2010. He got a job at a bagel factory, but, unable to afford an apartment, he slept on park benches. Despairing, he tried to take his own life.
-
-After six months in a psychiatric hospital, Mr. Pape said he recovered enough to find work and an apartment. A neighbor started to teach him English in her spare time, he said, and gave him his first secular book: “Green Eggs and Ham” by Dr. Seuss. He was 28.
-
-Now a nursing school graduate, Mr. Pape said he believes his Hasidic education was designed to keep him from leaving the community.
-
-“I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have a bank account, I didn’t have references. I didn’t have any of that because I didn’t even know what any of that was,” he said. “I had no knowledge really of how to speak to people. I thought I was all on my own. That’s the idea I was given in school.”
-
-## ‘We will not comply’
-
-Warnings about the Hasidic yeshivas have circulated for years, aired at news conferences, litigated in court and outlined in a formal complaint. One yeshiva graduate, Naftuli Moster, even formed an advocacy group in 2012 to press the issue.
-
-At the state education department, three employees have raised red flags, The Times found. One former official, who worked on private school licensing, visited some Hasidic yeshivas and was unsettled to see that many seemed to operate entirely in Yiddish. Another, who processed funding requests, learned that some yeshivas offered only an hour of secular studies a day. That person started making notes in the margins of requests, questioning the wisdom of sending money. The employees said they were ignored by their superiors.
-
-A spokeswoman for the department did not respond to a request for comment about the employees’ concerns.
-
-Politicians who might have taken action have instead accommodated a Hasidic voting bloc that can sway local races.
-
-“There’s a significant population that you ignore at your peril,” said Evan Stavisky, a veteran political consultant. “They are part of the fabric of New York politics.”
-
-Yeshivas play a central role in getting out the vote. Before elections, teachers often give students sample ballots with names of the grand rabbis’ chosen candidates filled in, parents and former students said.
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-At some yeshivas, students who bring in their parents’ “I Voted” stickers win rewards. The Central United Talmudical Academy recently took children with stickers on a trip to Coney Island, two parents said. The other children had to stay behind. Mr. Connolly, the lawyer for some Hasidic schools, disputed the parents’ account.
-
-Mr. Bamberger, the yeshiva coalition spokesman, said the Hasidic community’s large turnout should be applauded.
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-Over the past few years, rabbis have made keeping government out of the schools their central political priority.
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-“The truth is, we either had very little secular studies or none at all,” Satmar Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum told followers in Yiddish in 2018, adding: “We will not comply, and we will not follow the state education commissioner under any circumstances.”
-
-Shortly before winning an endorsement from one faction of the Satmar group, Mr. Adams released a video showing him [scooting down a slide](https://twitter.com/ericadamsfornyc/status/1369393649080008704) at a Hasidic yeshiva. After that hourlong visit, he [said](https://forward.com/fast-forward/465460/after-visiting-yeshiva-eric-adams-impressed-by-secular-education/) he was “really impressed” by what he saw. Speaking for Mr. Adams last week, Mr. Young said the mayor’s decisions are not influenced by political support.
-
-Mr. Cuomo rarely shied from using his bully pulpit during nearly three terms as governor. But when it came to yeshivas, he told Satmar Rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum in 2018 that he would not crack down, according to [the Hasidic press](https://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/general/1585335/photos-gov-cuomo-visits-satmar-rebbe-of-williamsburg-promises-not-to-interfere-with-yeshiva-education.html). He won the group’s endorsement shortly thereafter and [did not deny](https://nypost.com/2018/09/04/cuomo-dodges-questions-about-endorsement-deal-with-rabbi/) the report.
-
-Hasidic leaders said the current governor, Ms. Hochul, made a similar pledge. While campaigning this year, she met with Hasidic leaders in Williamsburg. It was not clear what they discussed, but afterward an official Satmar Twitter account posted photos with a caption that read: “The Governor promised that she will fight any changes to the Yeshiva’s curriculum.”
-
-The tweet was deleted soon after.
-
-## A plea for help
-
-Perhaps no situation captured the government’s inaction more clearly than the de Blasio administration’s response to a complaint it received in 2015.
-
-That year, a group of former yeshiva students — who did not want their children to get the same deficient education they believed they had received — asked City Hall for help.
-
-Top city officials debated how to proceed with an investigation. Mr. de Blasio and others argued the inquiry could backfire if it was too aggressive. That concern touched off a series of compromises that led to the city’s showing extraordinary deference to a lawyer representing the yeshivas, according to 10 former officials.
-
-The lawyer, Avi Schick, was a former deputy state attorney general who had gained a reputation as a formidable litigator.
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-Mr. Schick insisted on being present for the inspections, which were scheduled in advance, some of the former officials said. He steered the city toward the better yeshivas named in the complaint, and he delayed visits to some of the most troubled schools.
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-Still, the inspectors observed scenes that concerned them. At one yeshiva, the children had their English books open to different pages and were not following along as a teacher read aloud. At another, a teacher did not appear to know his students’ names.
-
-Image
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-Credit...Richard Drew/Associated Press
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-City officials, who had not been trained to conduct private school inspections, said they received little help from the state. Once, as the city was preparing to send a letter requesting guidance, top state education officials asked them not to, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.
-
-Frustrated, a senior city education official in 2018 proposed creating a team to tackle problems in private schools, the official said. The plan went nowhere.
-
-Ultimately, the city Department of Investigation [found](https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doi/press-releases/2019/dec/DOISCIJointStatementRelease12_18_19.pdf) that the mayor engaged in “political horse-trading” by delaying publication of an interim report on the schools, and The New York Post [obtained emails](https://nypost.com/2020/05/09/internal-emails-reveal-mayor-bill-de-blasio-helped-stall-yeshiva-probe/) showing that a top administration official promised yeshiva leaders the findings would be “gentle.”
-
-Even so, the report said that only two of 28 yeshivas were offering an adequate education. But ahead of its release, just before Christmas 2019, Mr. Schick and others made sure the report did not specify by name which schools were deficient, three former officials said. Through a spokesman, Mr. Schick denied that account.
-
-For their part, state officials have tried to enact rules that would have held yeshivas accountable by requiring a minimum amount of secular education. But a judge tossed out the rules over a procedural issue in 2019, and, in 2020, the state withdrew another plan after an outcry from Hasidic leaders. In March, they released another proposal with fewer requirements and muddier consequences for flouting the law.
-
-Once again, Hasidic leaders have mobilized to block it.
-
-“Now is our opportunity and sacred duty to try to stop the guidelines before they go into effect,” they wrote this spring, in a Yiddish-language flier urging a flood of letters to oppose the plan. “The future of your generations rests in your own hands.”
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-To guarantee their followers would answer the call, the leaders turned to a reliable tactic.
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-They sent it home through the schools.
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-Reporting was contributed by Alex Lemonides, Marcela Rodrigues-Sherley, Alyssa Lukpat and Bianca Pallaro. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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diff --git a/00.03 News/In Kashmir, indigenous Muslim healers cure broken bones with spirituality — and science.md b/00.03 News/In Kashmir, indigenous Muslim healers cure broken bones with spirituality — and science.md
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-# In Kashmir, indigenous Muslim healers cure broken bones with spirituality — and science
-
-Ali Muhammad Chopan has been cracking other people’s [bones](https://www.inverse.com/science/61034-bone-regeneration-aerogel) back into place since he was 15 years old.
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-“During the last over 50 years, I have entirely dedicated my life for the people to serve them in every situation,” Chopan says.
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-Now in his 70s, Chopan is the fourth generation of his family to practice bonesetting, an [indigenous healing practice](https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/microbiota-vault-dissapearing-microbiome) performed throughout his native Kashmir that is as guided by [spiritual belief](https://www.inverse.com/gaming/uncharted-3-iram-ubar-city-of-brass-quran) as it is anatomical knowledge.
-
-Chopan lives in the Kochipora neighborhood of Tangmarg village, located near to a famous ski-resort, Gulmarg, in north Kashmir’s Baramulla district. At Gulmarg, rich Indian and international [holidaymakers](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/travel/a-family-ski-adventure-in-the-himalayas.html) zip up and down the slopes of fresh powder in winter or embark on treks in the summer, surrounded by breathtaking mountain terrain in the foothills of the Himalayas.
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-Despite living so close to the resort, Chopan’s lived experience is a world away from the patrons at Gulmarg. As he dons a traditional winter cloak known as a _pheran_ to stave off the bitter winter chill outside his home, Chopan explains how 150 years of indigenous knowledge has enabled him to heal people’s [orthopedic problems](https://www.inverse.com/innovation/tiny-structures-can-rebuild-a-broken-face) — broken hands, feet, legs — for more than half a century without any formal medical training or special equipment.
-
-Ali Mohammad Chopan aka Ali Kaak (60 years old) poses for a photograph outside the entrance of his house in Kunzer village of north Kashmir.Adil Hussain
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-Chopan’s father taught him how to set people’s bones. In today’s world, where science has revolutionized medicine so profoundly, there are still many people living in Chopan’s home, Kashmir, an Indian-administered territory, who still believe in a more spiritual form of treatment for orthopedic injuries.
-
-But times are changing, and a new generation of bonesetters are taking this indigenous knowledge and fusing it with modern medicine to keep the tradition alive as an increasing number of people turn to the bonesetters — including some who might not have in the past.
-
-> Some people call it a **God-given** healing ability
-
-For centuries, traditional bonesetters like Chopan have been famous for their abilities. Known as _watangor_ in the local dialect, these healers don’t attend medical school or earn professional degrees. Rather, their position is founded on tradition and belief. In Muslim majority Kashmir, bonesetters are believed to have spiritual powers of healing that transcend modern medicine.
-
-The bonesetters are able to assess the injury using a trick they learned from their ancestors: They place their thumb on the broken bones and press, assessing the intensity of the fracture or the injury by touch alone. Some people call it a God-given healing ability. The current practicing generation of bonesetters also takes advantage of science to treat patients by asking them to see their medical reports.
-
-Chopan applying surgical tape on the feet of Sadia, a seven-year-old girl who has recovered fracture on her fourth visit to the faith healer. Accompanied by her parents, Sadia traveled almost 25 kilometers on a cold wintery morning at a village Kunzer in north Kashmir’s Baramulla district.Adil Hussain
-
-Now, in the time of [Covid-19](https://www.inverse.com/covid-19), hospitals remain no-go zones for many — in Kashmir, many are closed to contain Covid from spreading. In turn, Chopan and other bonesetters are seeing an increase in the number of patients they treat every day, leaving them overburdened.
-
-There are more than one hundred hospitals across Indian-administered Kashmir, but specifically for bone and joint-related issues, the region is dependent on a single health care facility called the Government Hospital for Bone and Joint, Barzulla, located in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir.
-
-The sole orthopedic hospital was closed as a result of Covid-19 emergency regulations imposed by Jammu and Kashmir officials in 2020. Time and again, with the surge in Covid cases during the second wave in 2021, the facility remained shut. With nowhere else to go, people turned to the bonesetters for treatment.
-
-> Cracked bandages, pieces of cloth, cotton, and hard paper are the only equipment
-
-In the time of Covid-19, Chopan says he has witnessed an increase in the daily rush of patients. He says the number of people he treats each day has jumped from 10 to 30 patients. During a Covid-19 surge in his area, the number increased even more.
-
-Unlike hospitals, Chopan and other bonesetters don’t charge a fixed fee — he says he has never asked for a fee but says his patients pay him what they feel like at the time — and he doesn’t have to close every time the government orders a shutdown.
-
-A boatman rows to ferry clients on Dal Lake as the weather improves in Srinagar following heavy Snowfall amidst the harsh winter period in Kashmir.Adil Hussain
-
-As he lives close to the famous Gulmarg ski resort, Chopan has also started treating non-local skiers who suffer orthopedic injuries on the slopes in the winter season. According to Chopan, as many as ten skiers visit him every winter season, which lasts for three months in Kashmir.
-
-Chopan claims bonesetters never receive complaints, although, of course, it is hard to know for sure. Cracked bandages, pieces of cloth, cotton, and hard paper are the only equipment available to him and his peers to treat their patients.
-
-Bonesetters typically don’t recommend any medicines to their patients and rely on their own treatment only. But at the same time, many bonesetters — and particularly those in the fourth and fifth generation of their families who practice this kind of healing — believe modern medical training will be mandatory to take their work forward.
-
-Ghulam Nabi Bangoo, a degree holder in acupressure and a faith healer, observing a patient at his clinic on the outskirts of Srinagar.Adil Hussain
-
-Ghulam Nabi Bangoo, 45, is a bonesetter like Chopan. But unlike Chopan, Bangoo has a master’s degree in acupressure, which is similar to a Japanese therapy called shiatsu and involves the application of pressure (as with the thumbs or fingertips) to the same discrete points on the body stimulated in acupuncture to achieve the same therapeutic effects — like relieving tension or pain. He got his degree three years ago at a college in Jodhpur, a city some 750 miles away in Rajasthan, India.
-
-Bangoo also received training in bonesetting from his father, just like Chopan, but he decided that in order to be a better healer, he needed to pursue a master’s in acupressure, which he believes boosted his skills.
-
-> “This profession is **sacred**.”
-
-Most of the people visiting him have problems with their back and fractures. He also sees people with hip problems, but he tells them to go to the hospital, considering such issues beyond his powers of healing.
-
-“My forefathers were associated with this profession from the past one century, but I am the only one who decided to continue this profession with a professional degree to understand things more stoutly,” Bangoo says. He is the fifth generation of his family to practice bonesetting.
-
-Haji Noor Mohammad Bangoo (left) and his relative Ghulam Muhammad (right), both the practitioners of traditional bone setting art devote Friday to attend people with broken bones or aching bodies in an alley outside the market of revered Muslim shrine and mosque of Dargah Hazratbal in Srinagar.Adil Hussain
-
-Bangoo wants the profession to be carried forward by his next of kin, too, but not without professional training. He believes that two years of medical training is a must for the next generation to learn the skills and meet modern demands.
-
-Haji Noor Muhammad, 50, another Muslim bonesetter from Habak Shahanpora, a neighborhood on the outskirts of the summer capital of Kashmir, Srinagar, has been practicing bonesetting for at least 30 years. He too believes a modern education will help this profession survive for future generations.
-
-One way science can help bonesetters like Muhammad is to identify which bones are injured, and the damage done. You need years of experience in bonesetting to intuit this information using just touch, Muhammad says, but X-rays and other modern equipment can reveal the injury fast. For Muhammad, such training and resources are turning out to be good business. Patients are starting to expect the bonesetters to incorporate modern technology into their practice, and the customer is always right.
-
-> The most **crucial part** of this profession is spirituality
-
-Like other [bonesetters](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C578704AzS8), Muhammad claims to have healed people from all over the world, saying his door has never been closed to anyone and he has never asked for payment.
-
-“This profession is sacred,” he says.
-
-In the ancient Aali Kadal area of the city of Srinagar, Ghulam Muhammad, a 60-year-old known as “Papa” among the locals, has also been practicing bonesetting for the last 30 years. Like Muhammad, Papa believes bandaging up the patient is not the only treatment that can help them heal the most crucial part of this profession is spirituality. It is this element that truly heals people, he says.
-
-‘’A piece of cloth, adhesive surgical tape, cardboard sheet, and cotton,’’ this is what I use to treat people with different injuries and fractures, says Ghulam Muhammad.Adil Hussain
-
-Papa has been training his son for the last eight years to become a bonesetter and ensure their forefathers’ traditions do not end with him. In his time as a bonesetter, Papa says he has made few changes to his practice, however.
-
-In the past, turmeric and ghee were among the ‘ointments’ bonesetters used to heal patients. But now, Papa and other bonesetters don’t believe in these materials’ healing powers. Papa actually thinks these substances are more of a hinder to healing than a help.
-
-As Covid-19 forced more people to visit these indigenous healers, the need for more support — technology, medical supplies, and more — has become increasingly acute. Papa, for his part, has had to set up a three shifts-a-day schedule to attend to everyone who comes to him now.
-
-Mrs. Hameed is freed from treatment on the fourth day as Papa removes applied cloth from her hand at his clinic in Old Srinagar.Adil Hussain
-
-But as more people turn to the bonesetters, it begs the question: Do they truly heal people?
-
-> A future where **science and belief** blend together
-
-Farooq Ahmad, 40, who hails from north Kashmir’s Baramulla district had an accident two years ago and injured his leg. He went to the hospital and was told to undergo surgery, but decided to leave the hospital and visit a bonesetter instead.
-
-“I didn’t undergo the surgery, but was treated successfully by the bonesetter,” Ahmad says. “Since then, I have never complained of any pain in my leg.” Since then, he and his family members have never visited the hospitals for treatment whenever they suffer any injury.
-
-Ghulam Muhammad gives a massage to Farooq Ahmad on his third weekly visit to treat his twisted wrist near the Hazratbal shrine on the outskirts of Srinagar.Adil Hussain
-
-Traditional bonesetters have always served the people when they are most in need, according to Ghulam Muhammad Latto, a 48-year-old man who lives in the Gulab Bagh area of Srinagar.
-
-He recalls an accident his father had some 35 years ago, claiming that his father was taken to the hospital where he was treated for many weeks, but didn’t heal properly.
-
-“We took him to the bonesetter here, who miraculously treated him within a short span,” Latto says. He adds that his son sustained a grievous hand injury and was also treated by Papa, too.
-
-Kashmir has a fraught history: It’s stunning landscape is a site of geopolitical tension resulting from the strained relationships between India, Pakistan, and China, which all govern different regions of Kashmir. Throughout this troubled valley, the bonesetters’ healing hands continue to provide succor to many. But as modernity slowly creeps in and the pressure on their practice mounts, they are looking toward a future where science and belief blend together for the better.
-
-> There is something that modern medicine cannot offer... that the bonesetters can
-
-As the bonesetter Bangoo, who pursued a degree as part of his practice, says: “I believe modern technology is a must to treat the patients and I believe that a professional degree is a must to carry forward the profession in the presence of modern technology.”
-
-As the pandemic wanes, health infrastructure in Kashmir has also improved. But there is also a dearth of doctors, medical staff, and paramedics, which affects patient care on the ground. And because there is only one orthopedic hospital in the whole of Kashmir, people will continue to visit indigenous healers for treatment, both to avoid any delay as well as to avoid spending hefty amounts of money on hospital care.
-
-A Kashmiri Sufi preacher distributes sweets and dates to women devotees at a shrine in the Khanyar area of Srinagar.Adil Hussain
-
-In turn, there is something that modern medicine cannot offer the people in Kashmir that the bonesetters can: a spiritual connection to their past. [Kashmir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir_Valley) is one of the few Muslim-majority regions in India and is known as the land of Sufi saints. Sufism is a form of Islam known for its almost mystical qualities and the belief that one can have a personal connection with God.
-
-This kind of spirituality has been passed down by these saints — and people living in Kashmir today strongly believe in these ideas. Bonesetters are an embodiment of these spiritual ideals — and that will always draw patients to them.
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-# Inside a $4-billion family feud
-
-As a boy, Teodor Libfeld seemed destined for success. His parents ran a prosperous hardwood flooring company in Kielce, a small city in southern Poland, and his family was a pillar of the local Jewish community. There was always food on the table for Teddy and his five siblings. If Teddy was so inclined, there was also a future for him in the family business.
-
-That future was stolen from him. In September of 1939, when Teddy was a boy, the Nazis bombed Kielce and then stormed the city. They shuttered synagogues, closed Jewish schools and businesses, and eventually forced the Libfelds into a ghetto surrounded by guards and barbed-wire fences, crowded in with 27,000 other Jews. The Libfelds, whose factory sat in the centre of the ghetto, were ordered to stop manufacturing floors and start making bunk beds instead.
-
-The family was violently torn apart as the war dragged on. Teddy’s parents and three of his siblings were herded into cattle cars and taken to Treblinka, where they were murdered. He and his two remaining brothers, Morris and Abram, were sent to Auschwitz. In January of 1945, as Russian troops neared the camp, Teddy was forced to walk in a death march. He managed to flee into the Polish countryside, hid the number tattooed on his forearm, and pretended not to be Jewish. His survival was a miracle mired in tragedy. When the war ended months later, he and his brother Morris were the only ones left.
-
-Morris moved to Chicago, and Teddy ended up in Canada, eventually settling in Thornhill, then a sparse and sleepy community north of Toronto. He had little education and spoke almost no English, but he was tenacious. Throughout his 20s, he tried his hand at cattle trading and rent-to-own furniture. Nothing stuck until he cobbled together a small network of partners and built a handful of houses. When he sold those, he used the profits to build more. Teddy was a charmer; he grew his operation by striking business alliances. Before long, Teddy was boldly scooping up swaths of undeveloped land. Once, when a parcel of 200 lots went up for sale in Markham, one of his associates recommended they start by purchasing 25. Teddy bought all 200. “They don’t kill you in this country for going bankrupt,” he’d say. After enduring the horrors of the Holocaust, he had nothing left to fear.
-
-As he built houses, Teddy also built a family. He married a young woman named Lorraine Kornblum and, in 1959, they had their first son, Sheldon, followed by Mark, Jay and Corey over the next 11 years. Sheldon grew up to be the tallest, with the same knowing smile as his dad. Mark, bespectacled and stern, was the proverbial middle child, indifferent to his older brother’s authority, whereas Jay, the prim peacemaker, admired Sheldon. Corey was a wild card, the short-tempered baby of the family with something to prove. Sheldon called him _boychik_—a Yiddish term of endearment—perhaps with a touch of belittlement.
-
-For Teddy, raising kids and building the business were the same activity. When Corey was still in diapers at home with Lorraine, Sheldon began accompanying his dad to the office, sales centres and construction sites. As they got older, Mark, Jay and Corey tagged along. In high school, the boys spent their summer vacations and winter holidays working for their dad. Teddy kept his boys close for both personal and professional reasons. Not only had he developed a yearning attachment to family after losing his parents and siblings; he also wanted his boys to run the business one day.
-
-In the 1980s, Teddy dissolved his existing partnerships and started working exclusively with his sons. Technically, Mark was the first hire—brothers remember details like that. But Sheldon, who joined after studying business at York, was the only one with a degree. Jay did a few years of commerce at York before coming on board, and Corey got in at 17. In the mid-’80s, Teddy built his first condominium, a high-rise development in Thornhill called the Conservatory, so he christened his new family business the Conservatory Group.
-
-Teddy was an adoring father and a demanding boss. He had secret handshakes with his sons and frequently told them he loved them, but on the job he expected excellence. He’d hand them architectural drawings with one instruction: build it. The boys wanted to impress him, and they were careful not to let him down. In the boardroom, Teddy could huff and puff. But when his sons made mistakes, he was patient and encouraged them to work together to course-correct. “All of us have this admiration for him—almost hero status,” Jay has said.
-
-Teddy and his boys were prolific builders of detached homes, townhouses and condo units. They were inventive marketers, among the first developers in Ontario to offer pre-construction sales and rent-to-own models. They were also philanthropists, donating millions to hospitals and serving on the boards of Jewish charities, and in hard times they provided zero- and low-interest mortgages out of the company’s coffers to help new buyers into the market.
-
-Over the years, the Libfelds bought more and more land and broadened the properties in their portfolio—not just single-family homes, but also apartment buildings, offices, retail plazas, and industrial buildings. They’ve created more than 75,000 units of housing across Canada, the U.S. and Israel, though Toronto is home to the majority of their projects. Back when the land between the Gardiner and the train tracks was still a barren void, the Libfelds built the Infinity condos a block east of the Rogers Centre, setting off a concrete-and-glass building boom in what’s now known as the South Core. They’ve erected 30 condo buildings in the GTA, including the Milan in midtown, the Pearl in North York, Altitude in Scarborough and the Cove in Etobicoke. Libfeld isn’t a household name in Toronto, but chances are most people in Toronto know someone who lives or works in a Libfeld building, if they don’t live in one themselves.
-
-The Libfelds’ accomplishments have earned them a fortune—the Conservatory Group is now worth as much as $4 billion—and the social clout that often comes with it. They’re fixtures in Toronto’s real estate scene and Jewish community, serving on the boards of industry associations and hobnobbing with titans like the late Barry Sherman at splashy galas. The family also enjoys strong political ties. Sheldon recently took part in one of John Tory’s business missions to Israel, and the boys all donated as much as legally permitted to Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives. Controversially, the premier has used ministerial zoning orders to grant the Libfelds, among other builders, the ability to fast-track development on certain parcels of land without any municipal or environmental consultations.
-
-* * *
-
-###### **THE LIBFELD FOOTPRINT**
-
-_Over four decades, the family built a vast real estate empire of 75,000 residential and commercial units across the globe, but the majority of their projects are in and around the GTA_
-
-
-
- 
-
-* * *
-
-Teddy did not last long enough to see all the fruits of his labour. In June of 2000, he died of heart disease. He was 72 years old, and he had never prepared a succession plan for the business. He didn’t dictate how decisions should be made after he was gone, nor how much money the brothers should earn. He didn’t consider what his boys ought to do if one of them wanted to leave the business, because that was inconceivable to him. They were family. They would argue and annoy each other, but they would stick together. Teddy told his sons about second generations that squandered their parents’ legacy and wealth, and how sad those stories made him. But he was sure his boys would not fail or falter. When Corey asked his dad what they should do if they couldn’t see eye to eye, Teddy responded, “You’ll fight it out.”
-
-In an old photograph of the Libfelds, Sheldon lurks just behind Teddy. He bobs up eagerly, not so much photo-bombing his dad as waiting in the wings. After Teddy’s death, Sheldon was the obvious successor. As the oldest brother, he became the group’s president and assumed most of his dad’s executive roles: he negotiated with the bankers, dealt with the paperwork, handled the money. Mark took over the low-rise business, looking after the construction and marketing of suburban homes and townhouses. Jay was the high-rise guy, responsible for all things condo. And Corey dealt with after-sales service and ran the group’s 10,000-square-foot decor centre, where homebuyers could order tiles, faucets and other finishings for their new homes.
-
-In Teddy’s absence, his boys became equal partners, each owning 25 per cent of the Conservatory Group. Though Sheldon emerged as the de facto leader, no brother had more power than another. They made decisions—about buying land, entering joint ventures, taking loans—by consensus. No one had a veto, but when they couldn’t agree, they typically deferred to whoever was closest to the problem; if it was a condo issue, for instance, Jay held rank. The brothers worked together like a choir without a conductor. They knew their roles, took cues from one another and figured it out, just as their dad had envisioned. In 2012, Sheldon told the _Toronto Star,_ “Brothers are brothers. We all have our issues. But by and large I’m really blessed. I don’t think the business could have grown without the fact that we are brothers working together in this.”
-
-Every year or two, the Libfeld boys met to try to formalize the group’s succession plans, cash distribution policy and exit strategies. They found common ground on some issues but always got stuck on others. At the end of each of their sessions, they couldn’t get an agreement down in writing, much less a document that all four brothers would sign. For years, the conversations continued in the background, a distant asterisk to the brothers’ everyday work. But in 2013, Mark, then in his early 50s, had a heart attack, and questions of retirement and estates took centre stage. He thought his corporate life insurance policy was insufficient to cover what would be a massive tax liability after his death, and he didn’t want his wife and four kids to bear the financial burden. He petitioned his brothers to increase their collective policies, which were bundled together in a family-owned holding company. Sheldon and Jay thought the policy was just fine.
-
-Thanks to the unusual structure of the family business, this seemingly benign disagreement would have catastrophic consequences. The Conservatory Group is not a single company. It is a collection of 350 businesses. Every time Teddy or his sons started a new project—a row of luxury estates, a suburban housing development, a waterfront condo tower—they incorporated a new business. By keeping every project separate, they could work a bit of creativity when it came to tax. They exploited the fact that many of their companies had different financial year ends, and moved income from one entity to the next in an effort to defer paying taxes as long as possible. The Libfelds could, for example, make money in 2002 and not pay tax on it until 2006. (While technically legal, this scheme doesn’t follow the spirit of Canadian tax law. In 2017, after a years-long audit, the Conservatory Group paid hundreds of millions of dollars in outstanding taxes to Revenue Canada.) With larger cash reserves, they were nimbler and more powerful. The brothers could finance their own projects instead of taking loans and paying interest. They could afford to time their transactions to the ebbs of the market, buying lumber and land when it was cheap, building when other companies were idle, and selling their inventory when prices soared. In one instance, the brothers held on to a row of $1.8-million ravine houses for five years, eventually fetching $3 million apiece. To keep their reserves flush, the brothers always funnelled their earnings back into the business.
-
-Well, not all their earnings. Every year, each brother received a tax-paid salary of $240,000. Between 2004 and 2020, they received approximately $125 million each in cash and financial benefits, including $10 million per brother that they used to buy the top four floors of a Conservatory Group condo at Yonge and Church. They drew pieces of paper out of a hat to decide who got which floor, but they spent 18 months arguing over who would get dibs on which parking spot. Those penthouse suites are the brothers’ second and, in some cases, third multi-million-dollar properties. (Mark’s Lake Simcoe cottage cost $7.5 million.)
-
-Still, Mark wanted more money. Because of the Conservatory Group’s structure, the tax bill payable on each brother’s death could total as much as $250 million. Mark wanted to increase his life insurance policy to pay out $100 million to his wife and kids to help them pay it off. Corey—younger and healthier, and therefore cheaper to insure—protested. Historically, the brothers had evenly split the total cost of their policies, and Corey didn’t want to pay more to accommodate a spike in Mark’s premiums. Sheldon demurred too. He thought it was unwise to take any more money out of the Conservatory Group’s cash reserves, the secret sauce of their operation. Besides, he said, the brothers had always agreed that they would cover each other’s tax bills in the event of one of their deaths. He told Mark that the life insurance payout would go to the estate, and the remaining brothers would loan funds to cover the tax bill until Mark’s family could repay the loan—with interest.
-
-Even as they argued over insurance, the brothers ran a tremendously successful business. Every year, the Conservatory Group’s development footprint expanded, and its profits grew. But that only gave them another reason to spar. They had never formalized how money should flow out of the business and into their wallets. They all wanted a fair and reasonable cash distribution policy, but they couldn’t settle on the details. Mark suggested that each brother should get 2.5 per cent of the company’s net book value once a year. Jay proposed divvying up the Conservatory Group’s rental income among the brothers. Corey also liked the idea of a little extra cash, however it arrived. But Sheldon shut it down. He thought payments should be tied to specific events, like the closing of a deal, not perpetual handouts. The business isn’t a piggy bank, he would tell his brothers.
-
-At an impasse, the brothers agreed to attend mediation sessions with the Williams Group, an American consultancy that helps high-net-worth families better manage their businesses and pass wealth down peacefully. The mediation was a flop. During one meeting, a mediator asked Mark and Corey to pick photos from a pile and talk about them—an exercise designed to get the brothers to open up about their feelings. Mark chose a picture of two child soldiers behind barbed wire. Corey claims that Mark told him he chose the image because he felt like he was stuck in a concentration camp, saying, “Shelley is Hitler and I feel like we can’t get out.”
-
-It wasn’t long before the Libfelds’ quarrels spilled over into the everyday operations of the Conservatory Group. In September of 2015, the brothers met at the group’s office—an unremarkable two-storey building at the end of a cul-de-sac in Markham—to discuss the future of their partnership with an American builder who was constructing suburban homes in Philadelphia and the Carolinas. The deal was supposed to be the Libfelds’ avenue into a new market, but it had gone awry for reasons the brothers couldn’t quite agree on. By the time of their meeting, the Libfelds stood to lose $12 million.
-
-* * *
-
-###### Corey supposedly called Sheldon “Hitler.” He claimed Sheldon got in his face, saying, “Hit me,” at which point the Covid consultant shouted, “Guys, six feet apart!”
-
-* * *
-
-Sitting around a table in a second-floor boardroom, the brothers debated what to do. Sheldon wanted to put more money into the suburban project; he thought they needed to build more houses to turn a profit. Mark, on the other hand, wanted out. “Why are we here to invest more money in something that’s not doing well?” he asked. And if Sheldon was so reluctant to increase cash distributions to his brothers, why was he so eager to funnel funds into a losing venture? Sheldon and Mark argued until things got heated, the two of them standing on either side of the table trading barbs. “We have to do it,” Sheldon yelled. But Mark was firm. There was no way he would agree. Eventually, Sheldon declared, “If you don’t want to do the financing, fuck you, I’m going to do it anyway.”
-
-The brothers all have different versions of what happened next. Mark claims Sheldon rushed at him. Sheldon says he did no such thing. Jay attempted to break it up. Whatever happened inside that boardroom, Mark left and drove home, furious, and later installed a lock on his office door. Meanwhile, Sheldon gave more money to the suburbs project. When the investment ended up losing even more money, Mark was irate. For 15 years, the brothers had operated by consensus. But now Sheldon had gone rogue.
-
-About a year later, Sheldon came up with a verbal agreement to settle at least a few of the brothers’ issues. He called it the “interim arrangement,” and it dictated that any brother could opt out of a deal and receive a lump-sum cash payment equal to the amount invested by each of his siblings. If, for example, three brothers were interested in purchasing and developing a $30-million plot of land, they would each chip in $10 million, and the final brother would get a $10-million payday. By taking the money, the odd brother out would remove himself from the project, reaping no rewards and suffering no losses. Sheldon saw it as a win-win: Mark, who had long agitated for increased cash distributions, would make some money, and he would no longer be able to hold the business hostage. The agreement was never put to paper or signed, but Mark decided to give it a try—he couldn’t see Sheldon surrendering a penny any other way.
-
-In October 2016, the brothers put the interim arrangement into action. Sheldon, Jay and Corey wanted to purchase $45 million worth of land in Caledon. Mark wasn’t interested. They agreed that the trio would pay $15 million each and Mark would receive the same amount in cash. The arrangement fell apart almost immediately. Sheldon, Jay and Corey decided—without telling Mark, he alleges—to finance most of the purchase with a bank loan and thereby reduce their direct contributions to $5.7 million each. Since they were each contributing less, they felt, Mark’s payout ought to be reduced as well. That December, Mark was told that he’d receive less money than anticipated.
-
-He was incensed. It wasn’t just the dollar figure. It was the fact that, 17 years after their dad’s death, the brothers were still bickering. They were at odds over their inheritance, their insurance premiums, their taxes, even their parking spots. They’d met with lawyers, accountants, consultants, mediators and rabbis, but nothing had worked. They couldn’t even agree on an interim arrangement.
-
-So, Mark enlisted Peter Griffin, a veteran Bay Street litigator, to help bring the dispute to an end. Under Ontario’s Business Corporations Act and Partnerships Act, businesses such as the Conservatory Group can ask the courts to intervene when a partner acts improperly or when relationships break down. In early 2017, Mark filed a lawsuit to wind up the business, requesting that the court find a just and equitable remedy to their problems. It was clear to Mark that, contrary to what Teddy had always believed, the boys couldn’t settle their squabbles on their own. A judge would have to do it for them.
-
-Family-run businesses are a powerful force in the global economy. The world’s 500 largest family businesses—including Walmart, Porsche and IKEA—generate $7 trillion in revenue every year and collectively employ more than 24 million people.
-
-For every family firm that succeeds, there are many more that don’t. Thousands of them fold every year. The reasons are obvious. When parents pass down organizations to their kids, the heirs must grapple with an emotionally charged cocktail of familial factors: sibling rivalries that date back to childhood, the looming question of what mom or dad would have done, the guilt associated with abandoning the business. Succession fails so frequently that several languages have idioms to capture grandkids’ penchant for squandering their ancestors’ wealth. In English, it’s “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” a phrase often credited to Andrew Carnegie, the American steel tycoon who chose not to risk it; he donated most of his riches before he died.
-
-* * *
-
-###### Baby Boomers have amassed more wealth than any generation in history. They’ve now begun handing trillions down to their kids, but no one is sure how to do it in a way that avoids toxic infighting
-
-* * *
-
-In Canada, dysfunctional dynasties abound. The Bronfman, Asper and Eaton businesses all collapsed or fragmented in the hands of their inheritors. Brothers Harrison and Wallace McCain duked it out over who should take over their french fry empire. Auto parts mogul Frank Stronach groomed his daughter Belinda to take over his empire, only to accuse her of incompetent leadership and launch a $520-million lawsuit. And most recently, Ed Rogers waged war against his mother and sisters over the fate of his father’s telecom business.
-
-The Libfeld saga is not an anomaly. It’s a sign of things to come. As they enter their 70s and 80s, a new generation of entrepreneurs and self-made millionaires will find themselves in Teddy’s position. The Baby Boomers, known for their discipline and work ethic, have amassed more wealth than any generation in history, and they have begun handing trillions down to Gen X-ers and millennials. According to a 2018 study by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, nearly three quarters of Canadian small business owners plan to leave their companies by 2028, and roughly half of them want to place their legacies in the hands of family members.
-
-There is now an entire industry eager to assist them. The Big Four accounting firms all offer succession-planning services. Alternatively, family businesses can seek guidance from boutique wealth-transfer consultancies like the Williams Group, the Libfelds’ firm of choice. The Exit Planning Institute, an American organization that helps leaders leave their businesses, even offers a professional credential for succession consultants; to date, there are more than 2,600 certified exit planning advisers worldwide. For DIYers, there’s a wealth of literature about passing the torch, including _Business Succession Planning for Dummies._ One recent academic report about succession cites more than 100 other papers on the topic, some of them sourced from journals entirely dedicated to studying conflicts in family businesses.
-
-Yet, despite all the attention given to the issue, foolproof succession strategies remain elusive. When a team from Deloitte surveyed hundreds of business executives about picking future leaders, one respondent told them, “Boards and senior executives don’t know how to succession plan. If you ask them about financial oversight or executive compensation, they’re clear on how it works. But ask them about succession planning and you get blank stares.”
-
-On family day in 2017, Sheldon, Jay and Corey met to discuss Mark’s legal action. They talked about running the business without him, but, with a trial on the horizon, it was too late—they needed to lawyer up. Sheldon hired David Chernos, an experienced specialist in family businesses gone sour. Jay opted for Gary Luftspring, who had firsthand knowledge of business breakdowns—he was a partner at Goodman and Carr LLP when the troubled law firm dissolved itself in 2007. And Corey chose Ian Hull, an estate litigator who had founded a family business with his father and managed not to muck it up.
-
-The lawsuit cleaved the Libfelds into two warring factions. Previously, the brothers talked incessantly, a free-flowing exchange of phone calls, texts and in-person conversations. But after Mark filed the paperwork, he started communicating with his siblings mainly through their lawyers and email exchanges. The tension extended beyond the brothers. Mark’s relationship with his elderly mother grew strained, and some of the brothers’ wives and adult children froze each other out.
-
-
-
-The suit also halted the growth of the Conservatory Group. With litigation pending, the brothers weren’t able to acquire any new land. As they continued to manage their respective corners of the business, their lawyers built their cases. Financial analysts attempted to calculate how much the Conservatory Group was worth, how much cash they had on hand and how much tax they owed—fundamental matters on which the brothers, of course, could not agree. There was no centralized budget, data room or profit-and-loss statements, just a tangled web of stand-alone projects, inter-company loans and numbered holding companies. One expert who was asked to appraise the business concluded, “Never in an assignment have I had to work with less.”
-
-Amid preparations for trial, the case took an unexpected turn. Thanks to a conflict between Corey and the Conservatory Group’s go-to architect, the three-brother alliance began to splinter. At the time, Corey was building a new house for himself, a mansion that sprawled across two adjoining lots in Forest Hill. (During the build, he lived in a $6.3-million home nearby.) By August 2017, he’d gone through three architects and fired them all. Sheldon suggested that Corey hire Sal Vitiello, who had designed countless buildings for the Conservatory Group over the decades. Jay voiced his reluctance: he worried Corey would butt heads with Vitiello, too. But Corey hired Vitiello anyway.
-
-As Jay suspected, the two men were soon squabbling over architectural details, and Corey withheld $75,000 that he owed Vitiello. (When Sheldon found out, he discreetly paid the amount, hoping to preserve the working relationship.) Corey was also doing some decor work on Vitiello’s house, thought to be free of charge. But Corey then invoiced Vitiello for $56,000, which Vitiello paid. Eventually, Vitiello decided to cease working with Corey, and Corey began lobbying his brothers to stop hiring Vitiello’s firm.
-
-In May of 2018, Vitiello visited the Conservatory Group offices to discuss a project with Sheldon and Jay. While he was there, Corey stuck his finger in Vitiello’s face and said, “Everyone in the industry hates you.” At that, Sheldon ordered Corey to reverse the invoice for the work he did on Vitiello’s house, to which Corey replied, “You’re not the boss.” In response, Sheldon yelled, “You’re going to ruin the business.” Corey says Sheldon then ripped his shirt and injured his knee. Sheldon admits there was a scuffle but claims he was only trying to de-escalate the situation.
-
-In retaliation, Corey spurned Sheldon and Jay and joined Mark’s side of the litigation. Like Mark, Corey had begun to chafe at the increasing level of control that Sheldon was exercising over the business. Mark and Corey were unlikely allies. They hardly spoke. But they were united by their resentment of Sheldon, and they shared a common belief that he was attempting to push them out of the business. To them, it seemed obvious that Sheldon wanted to take full control of the Conservatory Group with his loyalist little brother, Jay.
-
-
-
-Convinced of this narrative, Corey attempted to cancel Conservatory Group cheques made out to Vitiello and, after discovering he didn’t have the authority, began obsessing over cheque-signing privileges in general. He asked one of the group’s IT workers to code a program that would allow him to surreptitiously monitor every cheque issued by the business; the employee seemed to agree but later reported the request to Sheldon. When another long-time Conservatory Group employee emailed Jay and Corey asking only for Jay’s signature on a cheque, Corey wrote back several times, angrily asking why she hadn’t asked him to sign it. She didn’t reply, so he went to her office and followed her around the building—up and down a flight of stairs, to Sheldon’s office—until another employee escorted her out of the office. She was one of several employees who complained to Sheldon about Corey’s behaviour. “There is no doubt under the current toxic environment of the Conservatory Group it is impossible for me to return to work,” she later wrote to the brothers, requesting a temporary leave of absence. “I find it very difficult to have to write this, but I feel that Corey has left me no alternative…I feel I’m at my breaking point.”
-
-The Libfelds’ court date was initially scheduled for June of 2020, but when the pandemic hit, the date was postponed, allowing more time for their falling-out to fester. That July, the brothers gathered for a rare in-person meeting to consider reopening the Conservatory Group office after the first pandemic wave had passed. It went predictably poorly. Mark walked in 10 minutes late. His face mask was upside down, and one of the straps was broken. Mark claims Sheldon noticed and ridiculed him in front of several employees. Sheldon says he was simply pointing it out. As the brothers toured the office with a health and safety consultant, examining plexiglass dividers and sanitizer stations, they argued over whether they were ready to reopen. The consultant gave them the green light, so Mark and Corey voted yes. But Sheldon and Jay said no, citing the group’s several senior employees—veterans from Teddy’s day—and the possibility of infecting their mother. That minor difference of opinion set them off. Again, the brothers’ recollection of what followed differs. Sheldon and Jay claim that Corey, who accused them of being rude to the consultant, called Sheldon “Hitler” and Jay “a liar and a snake.” Corey says Sheldon got in his face, saying, “Hit me,” at which point the consultant shouted, “Guys, six feet apart!” The office did not reopen.
-
-The trial of Libfeld v. Libfeld commenced on a chilly Monday morning in November of 2020. Normally, the proceedings would have taken place in an Ontario Superior Court of Justice courtroom on University Avenue, next to city hall. Owing to Covid, however, the hearing unfolded on Zoom. The crowded grid of screens included the four brothers, 14 lawyers, two legal clerks, a court reporter, a registrar and Justice Thomas McEwen, a no-nonsense judge tasked with hearing the case. The fate of the Conservatory Group was now in his hands.
-
-The trial pitted Mark and Corey against Sheldon and Jay, with each side trying to convince McEwen of their preferred remedies. Mark and Corey wanted the court to order a modified restructuring protocol, a fancy term for a four-way split. In that scenario, a neutral referee would divide the business into four separate and equal pieces, one for each brother, and they would go their separate ways. But Sheldon and Jay didn’t want to dismantle the family business. Not only was it their life’s work, but it had also been successful for decades, and they believed they could return it to its former glory if Mark and Corey got out of their way. They asked the court to mandate a structured buyout, which would allow them to purchase their brothers’ interest in the group. Technically, that arrangement would also permit Mark and Corey to buy out their brothers, but that was an unlikely prospect. They had no desire to work together, and neither believed they could raise the $3 billion or so in financing they would need to purchase the entire business.
-
-There was one more opinion for McEwen to consider: Lorraine Libfeld’s. As 10 per cent owner of one of the family’s holding companies, Teddy’s widow was dragged into her sons’ litigation. She didn’t take a side but pleaded for the business to stay in the family. Her lawyer, Glenn Solomon, told the court, “Mrs. Libfeld asked me to convey to you the Conservatory Group really represents the legacy of her late husband, a legacy that he was very proud of, and I guess recently her sons were as well. That now appears to have changed.”
-
-* * *
-
-###### The lawyer asked Corey why he wanted more money, on top of the $125 million he’d received and his regular $20,000-a-month salary. “It’s $240,000 a year,” said Corey. “How do you buy a house? How do you live?”
-
-* * *
-
-The trial lasted 21 days. Each brother spent a few days on the virtual stand as a parade of lawyers examined and cross-examined them. Mark, who was up first, was dire and direct. “I don’t want anything to do with my brothers for business after this,” he said. “Anything that we have to do with each other, it’s going to be trouble.” Sheldon was collected, denying all wrongdoing and telling the court, “I love my brothers, which means I would come to their aid no matter what, but I don’t like them very much right now.”
-
-Corey was combative, speaking over opposing counsel and responding to straightforward questions with nonsensical tangents. He was also responsible for the trial’s most memorable exchange. Luftspring questioned him about why he wanted more money taken out of the business, on top of the $125 million he’d received since 2004 and his salary. “I get $20,000 into my personal account from the business \[every month\],” Corey said. “It’s $240,000 a year. How do you buy a house? How do you live?” Luftspring then reminded Corey that he owned two properties in Forest Hill and a 7,500-square-foot cottage on Lake Joseph with 750 feet of waterfront.
-
-Throughout the trial, the Libfelds agreed on virtually nothing: not how much money they had, not who said what, not the sequence of events that led them to court. The only thing that united them was the shared belief that their relationship was beyond repair. They could no longer work together.
-
-In June of 2021, four months after the trial concluded, McEwen issued a scathing 67-page ruling. He dedicated five of those pages to explaining why he found none of the Libfeld brothers to be credible or reliable. After weeks spent listening to them bash each other and obsess over inconsequential slights, he sounded exasperated. “It is not sensible or reliable to ask this Court to make findings with respect to every petty quarrel between the brothers,” he wrote, noting the hours he and the legal counsel had already spent poring over the minutiae of their email exchanges and boardroom brawls. “Much of this evidence simply underscored the fact that they cannot meaningfully co-operate with themselves or others, treat each other with mutual respect, or work together to implement a remedy that involves their ongoing co-operation.” Their relationship, he concluded, was terminal.
-
-For that reason, McEwen rejected both Mark and Corey’s restructuring proposal and Sheldon and Jay’s buyout idea. Instead, he decided that the Conservatory Group needed to be taken out of the Libfelds’ hands, placed in the care of a court-appointed officer, wound up and sold. “This is the only reasonable option given the extreme dysfunction that exists, both personally and professionally, between the Libfeld brothers,” McEwen wrote.
-
-The brothers will surely disagree over which of them is principally responsible for losing control of the family business. Certainly, they all bear some blame. And the fact that the entire fiasco spilled into the courts, making it a public spectacle, will surely make it harder for the Libfelds to repair their broken relationships. Jay put it succinctly while giving his evidence before the court. “It’s very sad to be sued by your brothers,” he said.
-
-McEwen gave Ernst and Young the task of conducting the wind-up and sale process. The firm will decide whether to sell the Conservatory Group as a whole, in chunks or as 350 separate entities. Given the complexity of the business that Teddy and his boys built, it may be years before the matter is settled. By that time, the Libfeld brothers will have spent millions of dollars on consulting and mediation, lawyers’ fees and EY’s services. They will have occupied the courts and a provincial justice for months. When the process is finished, Sheldon, Jay, Mark and Corey could each walk away with as much as $1 billion. Through their lawyers, they all declined interview requests, but they have each stated in court their desire to keep working in the real estate business, and they will have ample opportunity to get back in. When the business they have spent their entire lives building finally goes on the market, all of them will be allowed to bid.
-
-* * *
-
-_This story appears in the March 2022 issue of_ Toronto Life _magazine_. _To subscribe for just $24.99 a year, click [here](https://secure.torontolife.com/subscribe.php?key=C2018ARTC)._
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-```button
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-
-# Inside the Case Against General Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda
-
-
-
-Credit...Illustration by Francesco Francavilla
-
-## The Cienfuegos Affair: Inside the Case that Upended the Drug War in Mexico
-
-A Times Magazine-ProPublica investigation reveals how the U.S. painstakingly built a case against a Mexican general suspected of links to organized crime — and then decided to let him go.
-
-Credit...Illustration by Francesco Francavilla
-
-- Published Dec. 8, 2022Updated Dec. 9, 2022
-
-### Listen to This Article
-
-Audio Recording by Audm
-
-*To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times,* [*download Audm for iPhone or Android*](https://www.audm.com/?utm_source=nytmag&utm_medium=embed&utm_campaign=cienfuegos_affair_golden)*.*
-
-## 1\. THE ARREST
-
-When the Cienfuegos family landed at Los Angeles International Airport on Oct. 15, 2020, they looked excited and maybe a bit relieved. With the pandemic still ravaging Mexico, they had come to vacation in Southern California. Arranging such a visit wasn’t a problem, even on short notice: The patriarch, retired Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, had made powerful American friends during his six years as Mexico’s defense minister. When he needed a favor — like visas for his wife, daughters and granddaughters — he could still call someone at the Pentagon or the C.I.A.
-
-But as the family approached the passport line, an immigration officer waved them to one side. A trim, middle-aged man — dressed, like the general, in a blue blazer and jeans — stepped forward and introduced himself in Spanish as a special agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Could he speak with the general privately? he asked.
-
-The two men crowded into a small office with several other law-enforcement officers. “There is a warrant for your arrest, sir,” the agent said. “This is a copy of [the indictment](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18573415/3/united-states-v-cienfuegos-zepeda/) against you.”
-
-Cienfuegos wore a face mask with a clear plastic shield over it, but there was no hiding his confusion and anger. There must be some mistake, he insisted. “Do you know who I am?”
-
-The agents did. For years, U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence agencies had been watching Cienfuegos as he rose through the Mexican Army to become defense minister in 2012. Since late 2015, the D.E.A. had been investigating what it believed were Cienfuegos’s corrupt dealings with a second-tier drug gang based in the small Pacific Coast state Nayarit. In 2019, he had been secretly indicted on drug-conspiracy charges by a federal grand jury in Brooklyn.
-
-“I have worked with your C.I.A.,” Cienfuegos protested. “I have been honored by your Department of Defense!”
-
-“I understand,” the D.E.A. agent said. “But you have still been charged.”
-
-In the tumultuous days before the 2020 election — with Covid cases surging, President Donald Trump barnstorming and Senate Republicans rushing to confirm a Supreme Court justice — the jailing of a retired Mexican general didn’t make the front pages, even in Los Angeles. It did make headlines in Mexico City. But President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, who had long promised to vanquish the country’s deeply rooted corruption, seemed to take the news in stride. “It is a very regrettable fact that a former defense secretary should be arrested on charges of having ties to drug trafficking,” he said the next morning. “We must continue to insist — and hopefully this helps us understand — that the main problem of Mexico is corruption.”
-
-U.S. law-enforcement agencies had gone after Mexican officials before. There was the first drug czar, Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, hailed in Washington for his “unquestioned integrity” before he was convicted in Mexico of taking a trafficker’s bribes. Or the smuggler-friendly Gov. Mario Villanueva Madrid, known as the Crooked One, who charged [$500,000 for drug shipments](https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/former-governor-mexican-state-sentenced-manhattan-federal-court-131-months-prison-money) through his state on the Yucatán Peninsula. In 2019, the D.E.A. arrested a once-powerful former security minister, Genaro García Luna, who worked closely with the agency for years.
-
-Cienfuegos, though, was the most consequential Mexican official ever charged in a U.S. court. Nearly two years into his retirement, he remained unusually influential, having groomed a generation of army leaders. His rise also tracked the Mexican military’s transformation from a largely apolitical force with a limited role in national life into the essential institution it would become under López Obrador. Beginning in the 1990s, with strong U.S. support, the [armed forces moved to the front lines of the drug fight.](https://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/29/world/dangerous-allies-special-report-us-helps-mexico-s-army-take-big-anti-drug-role.html) Under the current government, they have expanded their control over federal law enforcement while assuming a raft of other, previously civilian responsibilities.
-
-So when the high command voiced its outrage over Cienfuegos’s arrest, the president was quick to take up his cause. Military leaders complained privately to López Obrador that the Americans had conducted a secret and possibly illegal investigation inside Mexico, besmirching the entire armed forces. López Obrador’s tone shifted abruptly. “In other administrations, they came into Mexico like this was their home,” he said of the D.E.A. “They even operated here. That’s not happening anymore.”
-
-For more than a decade, the United States and Mexico resolved such tensions within the framework of the Mérida Initiative, a landmark 2007 agreement to combat the criminal violence then convulsing Mexico. The plan has funneled more than $3.5 billion in U.S. aid to Mexico, helping the military and the police take on criminal gangs while working toward ambitious long-term reforms of the justice system. But López Obrador had always been skeptical of the partnership. An old-school nationalist, he saw the D.E.A. as a symbol of gringo arrogance. What the Mérida deal brought Mexico, he argued, was more weapons, and those weapons brought more violence.
-
-Yet even with tensions rising sharply, U.S. prosecutors and agents were stunned by what happened next. Barely two weeks after Cienfuegos’s arrest, Attorney General William P. Barr told the Mexican foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, that he would drop the charges and send the general home. Barr later suggested that Cienfuegos wasn’t such an important target and that Mexican officials promised to investigate his case themselves. Barr was acting to protect “the United States’ relationship with Mexico and cooperative law-enforcement efforts” related to “narcotics trafficking and public corruption,” the chief prosecutor in the case said.
-
-In fact, the episode led to a near-collapse of law-enforcement cooperation between the two countries. Emboldened by what Mexicans saw as the D.E.A.’s humiliation, [López Obrador accused the agency of “fabricating” its charges](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/amlo-attacks-dea-salvador-cienfuegos-mexico-defense-minister/2021/01/15/3f6aad0c-573f-11eb-acc5-92d2819a1ccb_story.html) against the general. At the president’s behest, the Legislature imposed crippling new restrictions on U.S. agents’ ability to operate in Mexico. A Mexican police drug unit that worked with U.S. officials on sensitive cases was disbanded. For months, Mexico refused even to grant visas to dozens of D.E.A. agents assigned there.
-
-Last year, López Obrador’s government declared the Mérida partnership dead. In its place, the two governments put forward a new [“bicentennial framework”](https://www.gob.mx/sre/documentos/fact-sheet-the-mexico-u-s-bicentennial-framework-for-security-public-health-and-safe-communities) that emphasized reducing violence and cracking down on the flow of illegal U.S. guns into Mexico. But joint law-enforcement operations — considered critical to building bilateral trust and strengthening Mexican policing — were barely mentioned. “The success of this agreement will not be measured by how many drug lords we put in jail and how many press conferences we hold,” Ebrard said at a news conference.
-
-With Cienfuegos’s arrest, the investigators believed that they had finally exposed the high-level corruption that has long sustained organized crime in Mexico. Instead, they say, the episode is likely to define the limits of U.S. security policy in Mexico for years to come. “If we had to pay a price in Mexico to finally prosecute someone like Cienfuegos, we were all willing to pay it because it would have made a difference,” one veteran D.E.A. agent said. “But instead, we paid the price and got nothing.”
-
-**As a strategy** to stanch the flow of illicit narcotics into the United States, the drug war in Mexico has always been a lost cause. After billions of dollars spent fortifying the Southern border, the two governments still interdict only a fraction of the drugs shipped to the United States. Mexican traffickers have grown into a pre-eminent force in the global drug trade, dominating U.S. markets for cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and synthetic opioids. The flood of fentanyl from Mexico is fueling what is now the deadliest drug epidemic in U.S. history. Drug overdoses killed some 107,000 people last year, more than double the number who died in 2015.
-
-Still, the more significant challenge for the United States is arguably the national-security threat posed by Mexico’s ever-more-powerful criminal organizations. According to U.S. intelligence estimates, the gangs’ annual illicit revenue has risen sharply, from perhaps $2 billion in the mid-1990s to tens of billions today. Mexican criminals have also diversified aggressively, moving from traditional sidelines like migrant smuggling and kidnapping to illegal logging and oil theft. Systematic extortion has become a fact of life for everyone from businessmen to avocado farmers.
-
-In recent months, criminal gangs have temporarily [paralyzed several Mexican cities](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/31/world/americas/mexico-cartels-violence.html) with explosions of insurgent-like violence. The murder rate, which dipped slightly during the pandemic, has rebounded to historically high levels — more than double what it was at the outset of the Mérida deal. Thousands of impoverished Mexicans continue to be terrorized and displaced by gangs, which operate with near impunity across large swaths of the country. As in Central America, the violence appears to have contributed to new waves of emigration to the United States.
-
-Before López Obrador came to power in late 2018, he campaigned for years on promises to reduce the violence and return the armed forces to their barracks. His fuzzy slogan — “*Abrazos, no balazos,*” or “Hugs, not bullets” — called for social programs that would address the roots of criminality. But those programs have made little impact on the violence. Mexican law enforcement, while more militarized, is less effective — especially in the investigation of crimes. López Obrador’s new, army-run National Guard, with nearly three times the size of the disbanded federal police, arrested only 8,258 criminal suspects last year — just 38 percent of the 21,702 that the police detained in 2018.
-
-The Biden administration has mostly tried to look the other way. Mexico’s control over the flow of undocumented migrants, which began as a humiliating concession to tariff threats by President Trump, has given López Obrador as much leverage in the bilateral relationship as any Mexican leader has had in decades. With a modest movement of the troops guarding Mexico’s southern and northern borders, he can release enough migrants to set off a political crisis in Washington. Such is the deference to Mexican sensitivities that D.E.A. officials were at one point warned not to use the phrase “Mexican cartels” in public statements.
-
-Fifteen years after the two countries declared a hopeful end to the conflict that marked their fight against the drug trade, the Cienfuegos saga has laid bare the fragility and failures of their partnership. Yet the fuller story of the Cienfuegos case — the long investigation leading up to the general’s arrest, as well as its aftermath — has remained largely secret. In the terse explanations that U.S. officials offered after Cienfuegos’s arrest, they described the prosecution as an offshoot of a routine case against Mexican traffickers. That was narrowly true. But it was also part of an ambitious effort by agents and prosecutors who resolved to pursue the corruption they saw as critical to the traffickers’ power. This account is based on interviews with dozens of current and former officials. It also draws on thousands of pages of court files, government documents and contemporaneous notes taken by officials involved. Some sources would speak only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case; others spoke about it publicly for the first time.
-
-Image
-
-
-
-Credit...Illustration by Francesco Francavilla
-
-## 2\. THE INVESTIGATION
-
-**As agents led** General Cienfuegos off to jail, one detective from Las Vegas took particular satisfaction in the moment. The detective, Timothy Beck, drove the investigation from its first days, when he knew little about Mexico, spoke no Spanish and could not imagine where the case might lead. It had taken so many twists and turns that by the time Cienfuegos booked his tickets for Los Angeles, Beck had been assigned to other work. But his D.E.A. boss had little choice but to send him to Los Angeles. If the general decided to talk, the agency needed someone who knew the right questions to ask.
-
-Beck never worked too hard to fit in on a D.E.A. squad that was heavy with strait-laced Mormons. He eventually gave up the mutton-chop sideburns he grew while fronting a local alt-rock band but kept the spiky black haircut and zombie tattoo. Supervisors generally tolerated Beck’s idiosyncrasies because he delivered. After nearly a decade on the drug unit of the Las Vegas police force, Beck earned a spot on a federal task force that brought state and local narcotics enforcement together with D.E.A. agents to hunt down the biggest traffickers they could find. In Las Vegas, that meant Mexicans.
-
-By the early 2000s, the city had become a distribution hub for drugs going in every direction — Portland and Chicago, North Carolina and New York. Mexican traffickers had always come to Vegas to party and gamble and see the fights. As they muscled aside Colombian gangs and other wholesalers to take control of U.S. drug distribution, they recognized Las Vegas as the sort of place — busy and well connected, with a large community of law-abiding Latino immigrants — where they could operate without drawing much attention.
-
-As in many other American cities, the D.E.A.’s prime targets were distributors working with the Sinaloa Cartel, then the dominant drug organization in western Mexico. While Sinaloa was a more functional alliance than others, it wasn’t much of a cartel; its leaders used violence to impose cooperation whenever necessary. The best-known among them, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, became a major target of U.S. investigators in 2001, when he escaped from one of Mexico’s maximum-security prisons the day after Mexican inmates became eligible for extradition.
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-When Beck joined the D.E.A.-led task force in late 2009, Guzmán was expanding his network of smuggling tunnels beneath the U.S. border and shipping liquid methamphetamine in soda bottles. A street informant of Beck’s in Las Vegas pointed him to a meth distributor with good Mexican connections. Beck’s squad began wiretapping their way from one drug trafficker’s phone to the next, eventually reaching traffickers tied to some of Guzmán’s most-hated rivals, the Beltrán Leyva brothers.
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-The four brothers were key figures in the Sinaloa federation until a bitter split with Guzmán in 2008. The war that followed scattered bodies all over Mexico. Sinaloa was bigger and stronger, but the brothers were resourceful, enlisting the Zetas, an especially ruthless criminal gang that included Mexican Army veterans, in their fight. The Beltrán Leyva Organization, or B.L.O. in the inevitable D.E.A. shorthand, also did its best to outbribe its former partners.
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-Over time, the Sinaloans wore the B.L.O. down. After the 2014 arrest of Héctor Beltrán, the last brother to lead the organization, it was unclear what might remain of the gang. The Las Vegas agents found an answer in the cellphone calls they were intercepting: a group that called itself “the H’s,” after Héctor Beltrán, who was known as El H, or “the H.” In the pseudomilitary style of the Zetas, Beltrán assigned numerical handles to his subordinates. The leader of the gang, Juan Francisco Patrón Sánchez, was called H-2.
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-H-2 was a volatile, moon-faced man scarcely known outside the regional underworld. Growing up on the outskirts of Mazatlán, the Sinaloa beach city, he became a *sicario*, or hit man, for the Mazatlecos, a local gang closely allied with the Beltráns, and later emerged as a lieutenant to Héctor Beltrán. After the capo’s arrest, H-2 and his men “were like orphans,” a former Mexican official told me. H-2 gathered his forces in Nayarit, a state wedged among the narco strongholds of Sinaloa, Durango and Jalisco. He procured opium gum from Nayarit’s eastern highlands and used B.L.O. connections to ship heroin and other drugs into the United States. As far as Beck and his team could tell, the H’s seemed to have no trouble with the Nayarit authorities.
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-The task force acted cautiously on what it learned. The agents seized one big drug shipment but held back on actions that might jeopardize their surveillance. They sensed that they were onto an unusually good case. The H’s were moving a lot of drugs and killing a lot of people. They were also careless in their communications. Even their “dirty calls” — those in which they discussed criminal activities — were rarely hard to decipher.
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-Beck and his D.E.A. supervisor, Scott Cahill, presented their case to the U.S. attorney’s office for Nevada, but the prosecutors there weren’t interested. The agents’ targets were far away, and the lawyers thought federal judges might balk at authorizing wiretaps that originated in a state court. The Justice Department’s Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Section also passed on the case.
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-Cahill urged his team to keep pushing. Then, in the summer of 2015, the agents got another chance to shop their case: The D.E.A.’s Special Operations Division invited them to a closed-door gathering of federal agents and prosecutors in San Diego. The meeting was focused on Guzmán and Sinaloa, but Beck and the intelligence analyst on his squad made a brief presentation about their little-known gang from Nayarit. As soon as they finished, a tall, broad-shouldered man hurried up to them. Cahill thought he looked like a college kid. He introduced himself as Michael Robotti, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, the high-profile judicial district based in Downtown Brooklyn.
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-Robotti was in his early 30s and had already distinguished himself among the hard-charging young prosecutors of the Eastern District. He was smart, organized and a glutton for long hours. Colleagues affectionately nicknamed him the Robot, but they saw him as more than just a grind. After joining the international narcotics unit in early 2015, he was assigned a stack of Sinaloa files, including Guzmán’s. But after Guzmán was recaptured by an elite team of Mexican Marines, President Enrique Peña Nieto insisted that the trafficker would be prosecuted in Mexico. Robotti needed other work.
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-“Who’s doing your case?” he asked Cahill and Beck. “I want it.”
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-**Investigators would soon** begin to see Nayarit as a microcosm of the narcostate that U.S. security officials had long feared Mexico could become. Its telegenic young governor, Roberto Sandoval Castañeda, came to power in 2011 as a standard-bearer of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or P.R.I. The party, which dominated Mexican politics until 2000, still held Nayarit in a tight grip. Sandoval’s campaign promised a return to the stability of the past and an end to the violence that had turned the sleepy state capital, Tepic, into one of the most dangerous cities in the world.
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-Nayarit was then awash in the bloodshed of the Sinaloa-B.L.O. war. The mangled bodies of combatants, cops and innocent bystanders turned up on street corners and hung from highway overpasses. Sandoval made contact with the Beltrán brothers, before securing the P.R.I. nomination, one of the governor’s former aides would later tell investigators. They had had a presence in the state for years, but Sandoval, who was then Tepic’s mayor, offered to let them operate freely if they helped finance his campaign. They just had to keep their violence to a minimum.
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-As governor, Sandoval entrusted Nayarit’s pacification to his acting attorney general, Edgar Veytia. A dual citizen of Mexico and the United States, Veytia grew up between San Diego and Tijuana, before moving to Tepic to study law. Whether he completed his degree is disputed, but he soon married into a family that was prominent in local P.R.I. politics. With help from his new father-in-law, he began to build a small fortune as a bus operator.
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-Short and stocky with a walrus mustache, Veytia had none of the governor’s cowboy charisma. But he quickly figured out how politics in Nayarit was played. During Sandoval’s mayoral race, Veytia lent him buses and cash; when Sandoval won, Veytia reaped a graft-rich post as Tepic’s transportation director. Later, he served briefly as the state police chief.
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-Once Sandoval took over as governor, he anointed the B.L.O. as Nayarit’s authorized criminal organization. The state police, which he controlled, went after drug dealers and gunmen linked to the Sinaloa Cartel but left the Beltrán forces alone. If a B.L.O. gang member was arrested, he could say he was “of the people” — the password — and walk free. After the Beltráns’ demise, H-2 took over the arrangement.
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-The violence soon began to ebb. Veytia gained enough attention as a supposed crime fighter to dream of one day running for governor himself. He sometimes had to remind H-2 to refrain from killing or kidnapping ordinary civilians. But Veytia could also take advantage of those transgressions, arranging with H-2 to “rescue” the kidnapping victims, and then bask in the publicity. Sympathetic news outlets (which he paid off) called him the Iron Prosecutor.
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-Besides his government phone and personal cellphone, Veytia carried two unregistered “burner” phones — one that he used to text H-2 and another for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or C.J.N.G., a powerful drug mafia that brokered a similar deal in southern Nayarit. In Veytia’s communications with H-2, he went by the code name Diablo, or Devil. In the press, he portrayed himself as a cheerleader for Mexico’s transition to a modern, adversarial justice system under the Mérida plan. “We have been preparing this road for four years,” Veytia said, “and that is going to involve fighting crime at all levels.”
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-As comfortable as Veytia and Sandoval had made things for the H’s in Nayarit, H-2 also wanted protection outside the state. He knew how the system worked: The H’s could pay off one police or military force only to find that another was working against them on behalf of rivals. The federal police routinely used information from one set of traffickers against another. The military and the police spied on each other. The Mexican Army spied on the D.E.A., and corrupt Mexican officials betrayed sensitive U.S. information to the traffickers who paid them. If the H’s wanted to expand, they would need allies at the national level — people who could warn them about what might be coming.
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-Image
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-Credit...Illustration by Francesco Francavilla
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-## 3\. THE GODFATHER
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-**To investigate the** H’s from 2,500 miles away, Robotti and the task force set up a “wire room” in Tucson, Ariz., where the F.B.I. was investigating another B.L.O. affiliate. Spanish-language interpreters worked around the clock to decode the traffickers’ communications. Beck and other agents took turns flying to Tucson to supervise the agents, poring over the text messages and sending daily updates on the traffickers’ activities back to Las Vegas and Brooklyn.
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-A disproportionate number of Mexico’s best-known traffickers. including Guzmán and the Beltrán brothers, grew up among the drug-farming *campesinos* of the western Sierra Madre. Their communications technology tended to be less than state of the art, and they had a special devotion to BlackBerry phones and the BlackBerry messaging app, Canadian products that they believed were beyond the reach of American surveillance. For a time that was true, but BlackBerry’s parent company, responding to U.S. requests, eventually moved one of its servers to Texas. American investigators were then able to tap into the company’s Mexico traffic with a U.S. court order. To propagate the legend of the BlackBerry’s impenetrability, the D.E.A. also sent drug informants back to their gangs. By the time traffickers realized their mistake, some had surrendered years of incriminating information.
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-The H’s were especially careless. [H-2 and his henchmen texted like teenagers,](https://www.gob.mx/cms/uploads/sre/informacion_recibida_por_la_sre_sobre_el_caso_del_general_retirado_salvador_cienfuegos_zepeda.pdf) allowing the task-force officers to monitor their activities almost in real time. The conversations were usually coded — sometimes carefully, but often just filtered through inside jokes, atrocious spelling and doper slang. They especially liked to use photographs: a pointed gun that might signal a planned job, or an image from a map to show where a trafficker might be headed. Deciphering their messages was hardly cryptography.
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-> ## ‘The godfather is a different deal. He is the second president.’
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-On Dec. 9, 2015, Beck and other agents were sitting at their cubicles in the D.E.A.’s warehouselike offices in downtown Las Vegas when they saw a long exchange of messages between H-2 and one of his top lieutenants, Daniel Silva Gárate, a flashy, 38-year-old trafficker known as H-9. The agents knew that H-2 had sent Silva to Mexico City to meet a contact and that the meeting seemed important: H-9 was updating his boss with every move he made.
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-“We’re heading off,” H-9 wrote. “To see the godfather.”
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-The trafficker sent his boss a screen shot of a message he received from someone he referred to as “Zepeda.” It advised H-9 not to be startled by the fleet of unmarked S.U.V.s that was headed his way. “I’m going to send 5 trucks, or 3 and keep 2 for myself,” Zepeda wrote. “They will be black with tinted windows.” Moments later, H-9 reported that he was in a convoy of vehicles roaring through the Mexican capital with a motorcycle escort. “They’re going like crazy,” he texted.
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-When the ride ended, H-9 found himself inside what he called “the ministry of defense,” surrounded by men with shaved heads wearing berets. “The godfather is a different deal,” he wrote. “He is the second president.”
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-The lieutenant described meeting an older, light-skinned officer and then being driven to a home in an upper-class neighborhood. As he and the officer sat down to dinner, H-9 continued texting. “Hey, this is the man who appears ... on tv,” he wrote. “And he tells me ... ‘You haven’t seen me.’ There is no problem. But we should erase from our memories that I am eating with him.”
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-That was understood, H-2 answered. They would dump their phones right after the meeting. “Tell him he will never have any problems from me,” he wrote.
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-H-9 passed along what appeared to be a promise from the officer “that they will never take you out with marines or the military and starting tomorrow not with the PFP” — the Federal Preventive Police.
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-The meeting seemed to go splendidly. H-9 texted that he met a man named Virgilio Daniel Méndez Bazán, whom he described as “the No. 2 of the godfather.” General Méndez Bazán had been under secretary of defense and worked closely with Cienfuegos for years. (Méndez Bazán has denied ever having dealt with traffickers.)
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-The agents presumed that H-9 had been chosen for the mission because he was more sophisticated and presentable than other H-2 lieutenants. Still, he was notably ignorant of who led Mexico’s defense establishment. “Godfather gave me the name of Salbador Sinfuego Sepeda,” he wrote, seemingly misspelling Cienfuegos’s name. “Something like that.”
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-H-9 began to relay messages from the godfather directly: “He says he wants you to make money, that money is power. You should say where you want to work.”
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-H-2 answered that he had designs on his hometown, Mazatlán, and other aspirations as well: “That God willing I dream of becoming big, but I also want to change the history of the mafia so that they are not going around looking to kill me,” he wrote. “I want to do everything in the best way so they will love me.”
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-In Las Vegas, Beck and other agents began searching the internet for the names on the transcripts. It didn’t take long for them to surmise that their Nayarit traffickers were negotiating with Mexico’s defense minister. The investigators were already confident they had an exceptional case against the H’s; now they were seeing evidence that the traffickers might be soliciting protection from some of the country’s most powerful officials. “You had a cartel member, who didn’t know he was being intercepted, saying on the wire, ‘This is who I’m meeting with,’” Robotti recalled.
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-Why Mexico’s powerful defense minister might be working with some midlevel traffickers wasn’t clear. Behind the scenes, officials said, Cienfuegos had been supportive of a secret C.I.A. program that trained an elite Mexican Army unit to disrupt trafficking operations. But the Americans also saw Cienfuegos as a reluctant ally in the drug fight — an ardent nationalist who was openly hostile to the D.E.A. According to several current and former officials, U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence files also indicated that Cienfuegos was suspected of protecting drug gangs while he commanded military regions that overlapped with traffickers’ strongholds. One of those regions included Nayarit.
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-In messages to H-9, the person he called “Zepeda” — the general’s second surname — appeared to allude to a previous relationship with the Beltrán brothers. Over the following months, he asked the H’s for money with shameless frequency, explaining that he needed to share it with like-minded collaborators in the government, including at least two civilian cabinet members whose names or nicknames appeared in various messages.
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-A month after H-9’s visit to Mexico City, the task-force agents saw new evidence that seemed to confirm who the godfather might be. On Jan. 8, 2016, the news broke that Guzmán — after a second dramatic escape from one of Mexico’s high-security prisons the year before — had been recaptured. Once again, it was U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence agencies that tracked him to a Sinaloa safe house, though the public heroes of the operation were Mexican Marines from a special-operations unit that worked closely with the Americans.
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-That night, as the H’s texted giddily with one another about the Sinaloa dogs getting their due, H-9’s BlackBerry pinged with a message from Mexico City. The godfather wanted money again. Hours later, one of H-2’s brothers, Jesús Ricardo Patrón Sánchez, or H-3, texted H-2 a screen shot of a televised news conference about the capture of Guzmán. In his message, H-3 identified a man in the photograph as the H’s “*padrino*,” or godfather.
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----
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-**What we consider before using anonymous sources.** Do the sources know the information? What’s their motivation for telling us? Have they proved reliable in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with these questions satisfied, The Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The reporter and at least one editor know the identity of the source.
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-From his cubicle at task-force offices, Beck saw the messages as they came in. Sifting through Mexican television stations online, the agents found a news clip that matched H-3’s screen shot. The video showed General Cienfuegos and other ministers announcing Guzmán’s capture to an audience of foreign diplomats. Elated by the news, Cienfuegos and the other officials embrace as the crowd breaks into applause.
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-“That has *got* to be our guy,” Beck said.
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-**Beck and his** colleagues watched as the Nayarit gang’s war with the Sinaloa Cartel intensified in the wake of Guzmán’s capture. The battle was over turf, but it was also personal. H-2 was by all accounts obsessed with reconquering Mazatlán, a onetime B.L.O. bastion. The drive-bys, torture and street-gang skirmishes turned the Vegas task force “line sheets” into a ticker tape of the gang’s murderous ways, illustrated with cellphone photographs. At one point, its *sicarios* sent a picture of dismembered limbs formed into the letter H.
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-The intercepts suggested that H-2 was also growing paranoid. The task force had identified multiple cells around the United States that were distributing the gang’s drugs. H-2 knew the growing network made him vulnerable, and he worried especially about his chief wholesaler in Southern California, a 31-year-old trafficker known as Paisa. The task force did in fact hope to flip Paisa, whose name was Cristian Aranda González. But when they sent a D.E.A. squad to arrest him in Los Angeles, Aranda escaped back to Nayarit.
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-H-2 had another reason to suspect a *sapo*, or toad — slang for an informer. His lieutenant H-9 was receiving disturbing messages about a U.S. investigation of the H’s from their godfather in Mexico City. “They don’t have an extradition order yet, but it’s headed that way,” “Zepeda” texted on Aug. 8, 2016. H-2 “should be very careful,” he said. “They have protected witnesses \[and\] these people are pointing the finger at him. ...”
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-The task-force agents were stunned. If they still could not prove conclusively that “Zepeda” was Cienfuegos, they now had evidence that the gang’s guardian was leaking information known to only a very small number of American officials. How even the Mexican defense minister could have learned details of the case was a mystery. Before they could untangle it, though, the agents had to scramble to respond to information coming over the wire indicating that the H’s were threatening to kill Aranda. They found a phone number for him and asked a Spanish-speaking agent to call right away. A man answered. “This is the D.E.A.,” the agent said. “We want you to know there is going to be an attempt on your life.” If Aranda received the warning, he apparently ignored it. He was murdered days later.
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-The agents were monitoring the wires again on Feb. 9, 2017, when an elite team of Mexican Marines descended on Tepic. The operation produced some of the more memorable images of the country’s drug war: Videos taken from the shaky cellphone cameras of frightened neighbors show a U.S.-supplied Blackhawk helicopter gunship hovering in the night sky. Its spotlight beams down into the walled courtyard of an upscale home. Suddenly, the [Blackhawk opens up with its miniguns,](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A33jZ-btUvs&ab_channel=2012mx) the bursts lit up by tracers. Gunmen fire back but are decimated.
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-In a statement, the Mexican Navy said that “federal forces” pursued the criminals to their safe house and “repelled aggression” when they attacked. Juan Francisco Patrón Sánchez, H-2, was killed along with seven others, the navy reported. Daniel Silva Gárate, H-9, died in a separate shootout the next day, although the man driving him in a compact Nissan sedan somehow managed to escape. At a stilted news conference, Sandoval — flanked by Veytia and military officials — cast the operation as a victory for justice. “In Nayarit,” he said, “there is room only for the rule of law, respect for the law and peace.”
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-The story of the H’s might have ended there. The gang splintered. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel moved in almost instantly, recruiting an old *sicario* for the H’s to help run the territory.
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-But weeks after the deaths of H-2 and H-9, the case suddenly came back to life. While crossing the border to visit his family in San Diego, Veytia was arrested by federal agents. The task force had been intercepting his phones for almost a year, and the F.B.I. had been investigating him even longer. The Eastern District and the Justice Department’s drug section indicted him in early March on drug-conspiracy charges. Facing the possibility of decades in prison, Veytia told his lawyers he wanted to cut a deal. Prosecutors and agents scrambled to San Diego; the Justice Department’s narcotics chief, Arthur Wyatt, flew out from Washington himself.
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-> ## Even some of the agents with long experience in Mexico were struck to see the curtain pulled back.
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-Veytia did not disappoint. On Governor Sandoval’s orders, he told the investigators, he drew most of the state’s law-enforcement apparatus into a far-reaching partnership with the H’s. “The purpose of the agreement was for the drug traffickers to do what they needed to do but to leave the civilians alone,” a summary of his first debriefing states.
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-Veytia admitted that he even tortured rival traffickers on the gang’s behalf. He and his police commanders generally used tasers for such interrogations. But just as Mexican traffickers took cues from Al Qaeda and ISIS, terrorizing civilians and beheading their enemies on video, Veytia and his commanders seemed to take a page from the C.I.A. Sometimes, with criminal suspects they considered important, they waterboarded them, he said.
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-Veytia claimed that he didn’t do it for the money, but he made lots of it. The H’s paid him between 1.5 million and two million pesos a month (upward of $100,000, depending on the exchange rate). He kicked most of the money down to police commanders, judges and others, he said, but kept a portion for himself. He also took cuts of the bribes paid to the prison warden and from the drugs, vehicles and other property that the state police seized from criminal suspects and then sold off — usually to other criminals. In addition to his regular bribes from the H’s and the Jalisco cartel, Veytia received gratuities of cash, cars and jewelry from various traffickers. Each year, his state police commanders also chipped in to buy him an expensive watch.
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-Even some of the agents with long experience in Mexico were struck to see the curtain pulled back. Veytia gave a full accounting of his illicit gains. They included 28 buses he owned outright (he was still paying off five others), three bus stations, four tow trucks and a parking lot. He owned an office building in Tepic, a lucrative notary business and a cattle ranch. His other properties included five homes in Nayarit, two houses and three apartments in San Diego and a home in Guadalajara. There were bank and trust accounts, a stash of gold bars and a dozen Rolex watches. He kept $40,000 in cash hidden under his bed.
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-Sandoval had grown even richer. The governor now spent his free time on sprawling ranches, riding purebred stallions, and was also accused of taking funds from an aid program for poor farmers. He had other homes as well, and millions of dollars stashed around Mexico — more than enough to forgo the bribes he was taking from the H’s.
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-As the violence escalated, Sandoval told Veytia the H’s were more trouble than they were worth. It was time to move on. “They were out of control,” Veytia later told me. “We had to solve that problem.”
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-**More shocking to** the prosecutors and agents than the details of Nayarit’s corruption was the story Veytia told them about the government’s takedown of the H’s. The Americans knew the operation had been carried out by the marines’ special-operations unit. For years, the unit had worked more closely with U.S. drug fighters than any other Mexican force. Its commander, Adm. Marco Antonio Ortega Siu, kept a deliberately low profile in Mexico. But the admiral, a tough, white-haired former helicopter pilot, was a legend among U.S. law-enforcement officials, who credited him with hunting down Guzmán (twice), dismantling the Zetas and destroying the B.L.O.
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-It was Ortega Siu who set up and oversaw the assault on the H’s, Veytia told investigators. It was well known that the [Mexican Marines had a long-running blood feud with the B.L.O.](https://insightcrime.org/news/brief/death-blo-leader-illustrates-marines-decisive-role-underworld-fight/) After the marines killed the gang’s leader, Arturo Beltrán, in 2009, their first major action with the D.E.A, the gang retaliated by murdering relatives of a marine who died in the operation. But Ortega Siu seemed concerned with more than revenge, Veytia said in his debriefing.
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-Veytia told investigators that Ortega Siu said the H’s were paying high-level army officers for protection. The H’s had told Veytia the same thing many times. Ortega Siu did not say who those officers were, but he made it clear that the relationship was a problem, Veytia said.
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-With Veytia’s help, Ortega Siu’s marines planned their operation for several months. Assigned to work with Veytia was a navy captain who went by the call sign Tigrillo, meaning Ocelot or Little Tiger. They traced H-2’s movements, cased the gang’s safe houses and assembled a fleet of pickup trucks and cars collected by the state authorities. Finally, Veytia called the drug boss and set up a meeting. Early in the evening of Feb. 9, H-2 hopped into the prosecutor’s car, leaving his bodyguards behind.
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-Veytia drove to a home in Tepic where they had met before. As H-2 walked inside, Tigrillo’s marines set upon him, dragging him upstairs. Over the next hour, Veytia waited downstairs as the marines tortured and interrogated the trafficker. “Veytia heard H-2 crying,” the notes from one debriefing say. When the marines brought H-2 downstairs, he was bleeding but able to walk.
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-The marines bundled H-2 into the back of a pickup truck and drove him to a block near the gang’s walled safe house, where a larger marine force was already deployed. After the *sicarios* were wiped out, Veytia told investigators, Tigrillo’s marines pushed H-2 out of the pickup, handed him a gun and told him to run. Veytia could not see the trafficker as he hobbled away. But he heard distinctly what H-2 shouted back at the marines: “*¡Soy gente de Cienfuegos!*” he cried. “I am one of Cienfuegos’s people!” The marines shot him dead.
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-The next trafficker on Tigrillo’s list was H-9, Veytia said. He was spotted the next day and captured along with another of H-2’s lieutenants. Veytia and the marines began driving H-9 around Nayarit in a burgundy Nissan sedan, pressing him to point out safe houses where they might find the gang’s gunmen or weapons. After a while, H-9 got angry. He was going to contact his *padrino*, he warned. His godfather would “fix the situation.” Veytia told Tigrillo of the threat. Shortly after, he heard gunfire. H-9 lay crumpled on the ground, killed by the marines.
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-Veytia told the investigators that Ortega Siu had monitored the operation and that he believed Ortega Siu had given Tigrillo the order to execute H-2. “The admiral told Veytia that H-2 should die because he had too much information on the governor and some people in the army,” the notes from one debriefing state.
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-In the interview room, prosecutors and agents glanced at one another uncomfortably. Veytia was accusing the D.E.A.’s most-trusted Mexican partner of ordering the torture and execution of a trafficker who was the subject of a major U.S. investigation — possibly to cover up for corrupt officials at high levels of the Mexican Army. “Everyone recognized what it meant,” one person involved in the case said.
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-Veytia’s debriefings continued for more than 100 hours over 10 sessions. (ProPublica and The Times obtained copies of many of the summaries of these sessions.) His accusations reverberated through the Justice Department. Though his statements were closely held, D.E.A. officials got wind of them and pushed back vehemently. Ortega Siu and his marines had made extraordinary sacrifices in the drug fight, they said; in a government riddled with corruption, they had been almost uniquely trustworthy. “On the one side you had the admiral and Mexican Navy, who had been heroic in their service and proven honest and reliable over many years,” said Paul Craine, who was then the D.E.A. chief in Mexico City. “On the other, you had Veytia, who had used the entire state apparatus of Nayarit to corruptly support a murderous drug trafficker.” (Ortega Siu, who is now retired, could not be reached for comment. A spokesman for the Mexican Navy declined to answer questions about the marines’ actions in Nayarit, saying that such operations needed to remain confidential for reasons of national security.)
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-In the months after the H’s were wiped out, the task-force agents and prosecutors pieced together their own picture of the events — which closely tracked Veytia’s version of what happened. Based on their intercepts and other information, former officials said, the agents confirmed that H-2 had planned to meet Veytia when he was seized. Then the trafficker’s phones went dark. Some of his lieutenants, including H-9, quickly concluded that Veytia had betrayed their boss and set up the gunmen at the safe house.
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-The Mexican Navy’s account of H-9’s killing was even more at odds with the evidence that U.S. investigators gathered. From intercepts and informants, the agents learned that the day after the helicopter assault, the state police had indeed located H-9 at a hotel in Tepic, along with the gang’s chief *sicario*. But the message traffic and other information largely backed up Veytia’s claim that he let the gunman go free and delivered H-9 to the marines.
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-The Nayarit authorities apparently invited local news photographers in Tepic to record the scene of H-9’s body slumped over the seat of a shot-up red Nissan Sentra. That image alone was hard to fathom. The trafficker — who referred to himself as the Tank Man for his love of armored S.U.V.s — had to flee in a cheap sedan? To the agents in Las Vegas, almost everything about the crime scene looked crudely staged. “It looked like your standard lay-out-the-bodies setup,” Cahill, the task-force supervisor, recalled. “It was farcical.”
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-The acting chief in the Justice Department’s criminal division, Kenneth A. Blanco, was concerned enough about the matter to fly to Mexico City in the fall of 2017. In a meeting with the Mexican attorney general, Alberto Elías Beltrán, officials said, Blanco laid out what the Americans had heard and asked the Mexicans to investigate the actions of Ortega Siu and his marines. Until they could clear the marine team of wrongdoing, Blanco told officials of both countries, U.S. agencies would not be able to collaborate with them again. “We were not going to be working with a unit that engaged in extrajudicial killing,” a State Department official said.
-
-**American officials** **generally** found good reasons not to prosecute cases of high-level drug corruption in Mexico. The allegations they heard were often dated. Corroboration was almost always difficult to come by, in part because Mexican property and financial records were easy to obscure. Washington officials were also reluctant to go after suspect officials whose prosecution might destabilize the multilayered U.S. relationship with Mexico. The drug problem mattered, but it often mattered less than other things, like Mexico’s allegiance during the Cold War or the North American Free Trade Agreement.
-
-Robotti had just begun to consider how such issues might figure in a potential case against Cienfuegos when he was assigned to work full-time on the prosecution of Guzmán. It was a plum assignment but an all-consuming one. In preparing to try Guzmán, the prosecutors identified roughly 100 prospective witnesses, interviewing dozens of them, including high-level traffickers extradited under the Mérida accord. It was a huge task, but one that yielded a remarkable new chapter in the government’s secret history of the Mexican drug trade.
-
-As the trial finally got underway in Brooklyn in November 2018, the Justice Department tried to block some witness testimony about official corruption, arguing that it would deflect attention from the defendant’s crimes. But some breathtaking evidence was admitted. One trafficker told of delivering two suitcases, each stuffed with at least $3 million, to a former security minister, García Luna. Another drug lieutenant said his boss told of [paying a $100 million bribe to former President Peña Nieto.](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/15/nyregion/el-chapo-trial.html) Both former officials denied the allegations, and the scandal soon blew over in Mexico. But within days of the traffickers’ testimony, the Eastern District drug prosecutors received a message from their boss, Richard Donoghue: They needed to start making cases against the corrupt Mexican officials working with the drug gangs. “Rich was very gung-ho about it,” one of his former aides said.
-
-In Mexico City, the D.E.A. chief, Matthew Donahue, had a similar thought. Donahue had been skeptical of López Obrador even before he took office. Then the new president shut down the D.E.A.’s relationship with the Mexican Marines, sidelined a federal police team that worked with U.S. agencies on drug cases and slowed the pace of extraditions. The army generals running López Obrador’s new National Guard declined a series of offers of training from the U.S. Embassy, making it clear that the old security relationship was over.
-
-If his agents could no longer hunt big traffickers in Mexico or hope to have them extradited, Donahue thought, they would need a new strategy. He and his deputy began recruiting a small team of experienced agents from Mexico and the United States. They started making target lists — ministers, governors, former police commanders — and soon they had 35 names. They eventually settled on about 20 they considered especially promising. Donahue asked the D.E.A. chief in New York where they might take their prospective cases for prosecution. He suggested Brooklyn.
-
-Image
-
-Credit...Illustration by Francesco Francavilla
-
-## 4\. MAKING THE CASE
-
-**In February 2019,** Guzmán was convicted of drug trafficking and murder, and he was later [sentenced to life in prison.](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/nyregion/el-chapo-sentencing.html) Robotti turned to the next big Mexican target: Cienfuegos. He and the other prosecutors on the case knew it would be challenging. Two years had passed since the marines wiped out the H’s. But despite the trove of messages between H-9 and “Zepeda,” they still needed to prove definitively that the gang’s protector was Cienfuegos himself. Strong witnesses had always been hard to come by; now the best candidates were dead. Mexico had just arrested H-2’s brother, Jesús Ricardo Patrón Sánchez, or H-3, but whether he might be extradited was anyone’s guess.
-
-Veytia had given the investigators some important leads, revealing the gang’s connections with another army general and a P.R.I. politician in Sinaloa. But Veytia’s information about Cienfuegos came almost entirely from H-2. While the prosecutors believed it would be admissible in court, officials said, it was still secondhand testimony. There was also the substantial problem of the prosecutors’ fight with the D.E.A. over Veytia’s credibility.
-
-The Mexican investigation of Veytia’s allegations against Ortega Siu went nowhere, several officials said. The D.E.A. sent agents from Mexico to Washington to review intercepts in the H’s case but continued to argue that Veytia’s account was suspect. “There was some degree of corroboration that something bad had happened in that operation,” a former justice official who tried to reconcile conflicting accounts told me. “The question was whether there was corroboration of what Veytia was saying about Siu.”
-
-In Brooklyn, two prosecutors working with Robotti on the Cienfuegos case prepared a lengthy memorandum based on the evidence gathered by the Las Vegas task force. The memo argued that there was extensive support for many of Veytia’s key assertions, including his planned meeting with H-2, the trafficker’s subsequent capture and the capture of H-9 the next day. Although there was a longstanding rivalry between the Eastern District and the Justice Department’s narcotics section, Justice Department officials agreed with the Brooklyn prosecutors. “Everything we had on this corroborated Veytia,” one official said.
-
-In August 2018, the new chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division, Brian Benczkowski, met with top Justice Department, D.E.A. and F.B.I. officials to discuss the matter. He decided he needed more information. U.S. diplomats followed up repeatedly with the Mexican attorney general’s office but were put off each time, officials said. “We went back to them a few times and said: ‘What are you doing? This is a problem,’” one former embassy official said. Two of Benczkowksi’s deputies returned to Mexico and met again with the attorney general, but nothing they heard suggested that the Mexicans ever really investigated the marines’ action. Benczkowski decided it wasn’t up to him to “tell D.E.A. who they could or couldn’t work with,” a former Justice Department official said.
-
-Justice Department officials eventually decided that the D.E.A.’s attack on Veytia’s credibility would have to be disclosed to defense lawyers in any trial in which he might testify. “Once the D.E.A. concluded that Veytia was not to be believed, we were stuck,” one official said. “Our conclusion was that Veytia was done as a potential witness.”
-
-Robotti and his colleagues faced other obstacles as well. U.S. investigators could search databases for investments or assets that Cienfuegos or his close relatives might have in the United States or Europe, but they could not readily examine Mexican property archives, which were mostly in paper files in Mexico. Any records they wanted to use in court would have to be requested under a bilateral legal treaty. Prosecutors asked for such information on Guzmán right after his extradition. They were still waiting for Mexico’s response.
-
-Nonetheless, the politics of the case were looking more hopeful. As Robotti and his colleagues worked to lay out the prosecution’s case against Cienfuegos in the spring of 2019, Eastern District prosecutors were invited to brief the new attorney general, William P. Barr, on a Mexico case. Donoghue, the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, was a political conservative in a generally liberal office and was already emerging as a Barr favorite. The meeting included one of Donoghue’s former deputies, Seth DuCharme, who had just moved to Washington to serve as a counselor to Barr. “It felt like we were all very much on the same team,” one participant recalled.
-
-In Barr’s first stint at the Justice Department, he dealt with the case of Enrique Camarena, a D.E.A. agent murdered in Mexico in 1985. Decades later, the episode remained a touchstone for the agency, a symbol of Mexican injustice and corruption. Barr especially wanted to know what could be done about Rafael Caro Quintero, a fugitive trafficker who was convicted years earlier of organizing Camarena’s kidnapping and murder. After being freed from a Mexican prison on a technicality in 2013, Caro Quintero was believed to have returned to the drug business. U.S. agencies had no trouble locating him in Mexico, but their efforts to have him recaptured failed again and again. “Barr was obsessed with R.C.Q.,” one participant said, referring to Caro Quintero.
-
-According to one lawyer’s contemporaneous notes, Donoghue spoke again with Barr that July about “the secretary of defense.” They now had new witnesses who could describe the operations of the H’s and testify about the gang’s relationship with Cienfuegos and decided to put the case before a grand jury, calling Beck in from Las Vegas to help present it.
-
-D.E.A. investigations that may get the agency in trouble are governed by detailed rules. When agents want to launder money to gain criminals’ trust or investigate high-level foreign officials, they are generally required to submit their plans to a Sensitive Activity Review Committee, or SARC. The panels typically include D.E.A. and Justice Department lawyers, along with representatives of other agencies. They sometimes take foreign-policy concerns into account, but mostly they focus on keeping agents from doing anything improper. The Cienfuegos investigation was just the kind of case that typically prompts a SARC review. But neither the D.E.A. chief in Las Vegas nor his superiors in Los Angeles ordered one, officials said. The agents and prosecutors felt that they had good reason to keep their case quiet; it was a leak by “Zepeda” to the traffickers that helped get Cristián Aranda González killed in 2016.
-
-Even the D.E.A. chief in Mexico, Donahue, only learned of Cienfuegos’s indictment by a New York grand jury on Aug. 15, 2019, the day after it happened. Donahue and other U.S. Embassy officials were still trying to grasp the details when their new ambassador, Christopher Landau, landed in Mexico City the following day. Before he could unpack, Landau was ushered into a meeting on the embassy’s fifth floor. The indictment was a huge step, his new aides warned; the general’s arrest could seriously damage the relationship between the two countries. A lawyer who specialized in appellate litigation, Landau had left his $3 million-a-year law partnership to follow in the footsteps of his late father, a career diplomat who served in several Latin American posts. Although he had not practiced criminal law, Landau’s first request was to see the evidence. His next thought was to insist that Cienfuegos not be arrested if he happened to travel to the United States — at least not until they could review the case.
-
-Landau and some of his aides soon gathered for the first of several secure video conferences with D.E.A. officials and the Brooklyn prosecutors. Early on, the D.E.A. chief in Los Angeles acknowledged that a SARC review should have been done and promised to start one immediately. But in Brooklyn, Donoghue pushed back against the idea that his prosecutors might have overreached. If the judge would allow Landau to review the sealed evidence, the ambassador would see for himself.
-
-As D.E.A. officials began putting together the SARC review, the prosecutors returned to court for Veytia’s sentencing. Despite his extensive cooperation, Justice Department officials finally deferred to the D.E.A. and its defense of Ortega Siu, officials said. They considered trying to use Veytia as a witness against Sandoval but decided against it. (Sandoval was arrested in Mexico on corruption charges two years later.) In the absence of the standard letter from prosecutors attesting to his substantial assistance, [Veytia was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment](https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/former-mexican-state-attorney-general-sentenced-20-years-prison-participation) — more than some notorious Mexican traffickers. “We were essentially choosing sides as a government, and we supported Ortega Siu,” one former Justice Department official said.
-
-Image
-
-Credit...Illustration by Francesco Francavilla
-
-## 5\. THE UNRAVELING
-
-**As the Cienfuegos** case moved slowly ahead, it became increasingly apparent that President López Obrador’s crusade against corruption was falling short of his campaign promises. Although the government made a flurry of accusations against former officials, many of them political enemies of the president, almost none were successfully prosecuted. Government actions against the traffickers also fell sharply. One of the few notable operations was an attempt, in October 2019, to capture Ovidio Guzmán López, the 29-year-old son of El Chapo. With the Mexican Marines sidelined, former officials told me, U.S. Homeland Security agents turned to the C.I.A. station in Mexico and a secretive Mexican Army unit that the agency had trained and equipped for counterdrug operations.
-
-U.S. intelligence officers tracked Guzmán López to an upscale home in the Sinaloa capital, Culiacán, and the Mexican team managed to lure him outside. But the Mexicans had failed to obtain the necessary warrant for his arrest, officials said, forcing them to wait with Guzmán López at the house. As they did, dozens of Sinaloa gangsters rallied to their young boss, laying siege to the city in a live-television event. After they threatened a group of military families, the army freed Guzmán López on the president’s orders. Lawyers for the Guzmán family thanked him publicly for his consideration.
-
-If President Trump had not been particularly focused on the Mexican drug fight until then, the Culiacán debacle got his attention. A few weeks later, Mexican gunmen killed nine Americans — three mothers and six children — from a fundamentalist Mormon community in the northern state Sonora. Trump exploded, tweeting, “This is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth.”
-
-Not long after, Barr was on a plane to Mexico City and found officials there outraged by what they viewed as a threat of U.S. military action. The attorney general presented himself as a sympathetic intermediary: He would try to calm Trump down, he said, but he needed help from the Mexicans. Barr wanted to quicken the pace of extraditions of Mexican traffickers, do more to disrupt their finances and intensify efforts with the Mexican Navy to interdict drug shipments at sea. Barr also emphasized Washington’s great desire to see Rafael Caro Quintero back in prison.
-
-Before his trip, Barr was briefed on the Eastern District’s sealed indictment of General Cienfuegos, according to two former officials familiar with the discussions. “We explained to him that it was a U.S. case, that none of it had been done in Mexico,” one official involved in the briefings said. “We also talked to him about the magnitude of the case. We thought that it could change how things operated in Mexico.” Through a spokesman, Barr declined to comment on the briefing or other aspects of his involvement in the Cienfuegos case.
-
-Two days after Barr’s trip, on Dec. 9, the D.E.A. arrested Genaro García Luna, the former security minister, outside a luxury apartment in Dallas. García Luna’s indictment was unsealed in Brooklyn the next day. The charges related to claims that he took millions of dollars in bribes to protect the illegal operations of the Sinaloa Cartel. Donoghue said there would be more indictments to come.
-
-On Feb. 25, 2020, officials said, the embassy finally approved the SARC. The ambassador had been considering the matter for months. He asked prosecutors whether they were certain Cienfuegos had been dealing with the H’s directly. They told him that they could not be sure, but that there was strong circumstantial evidence that Cienfuegos and some of his close aides had been. Landau also wanted to know why investigators hadn’t found solid evidence of Cienfuegos’s supposed riches. The prosecutors said that such wealth was easy to hide in Mexico but that agents would most likely be able to investigate more fully if the general were ever arrested and his case became public.
-
-Despite his qualms, Landau did not consult with other foreign-policy officials about the potential consequences of a Cienfuegos arrest. He told me that grand-jury secrecy prevented him from discussing the issue, and despite possible national-security exceptions to these rules, Justice Department officials did not raise it with their counterparts, either. As a result, the State Department and the Pentagon remained almost entirely unaware, officials said, that Mexico’s former defense minister could be arrested the moment he set foot in the United States.
-
-Some of Landau’s concerns were assuaged by Mexico’s reaction to the arrest of García Luna. López Obrador seemed almost to celebrate the prosecution of a high-profile figure close to his hated rival, former President Felipe Calderón. Diplomats thought the arrest also made it less likely that Cienfuegos, if he had been in league with traffickers, would dare to visit the United States.
-
-Then, on Oct. 14, an alarm went off at the Las Vegas office of the D.E.A. task force. General Cienfuegos was booked on a Delta flight the next day from Mexico City to Los Angeles, apparently the start of a family vacation.
-
-**Days after** Cienfuegos’s arrest, Mexico’s foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, summoned Ambassador Landau to his office high above the ancient center of Mexico City. Ebrard had earned a reputation for pragmatism in working with Trump officials on immigration and trade. He was also well known for being unflappable, which made his fury with Landau all the more striking.
-
-“I had never seen Marcelo so up in arms,” Landau told me. “We had been through some tricky negotiations — the beginning of the pandemic, the ‘Return to Mexico’ policy — but I’d never seen anything like this. They took it much worse than we had expected.”
-
-Ebrard might have been turning off the charm for effect. Mexican officials had made similar threats in the pre-Mérida days, and they had rarely been taken at face value. But this time, Ebrard informed Landau, the D.E.A.’s presence in Mexico was “decidedly at risk.”
-
-“I told the ambassador that the arrest had destroyed any basis of trust, any basis of cooperation,” Ebrard told me. “They acted deceitfully and with absolutely no consideration for the weight of Mexico. I asked him, ‘Would you act that way with France or some other ally?’” The ambassador seemed “very shaken” by the meeting, another U.S. official said. Back at his office, Landau called Barr on a secure line. Ebrard was furious, he said. The military was in an uproar. “This is a very big deal to them,” he said. Barr’s push to improve counterdrug cooperation was in jeopardy. Even though Landau had agreed to Cienfuegos’s arrest and approved the SARC review, now he harbored doubts about the strength of the evidence against the general. He told Barr he wasn’t sure if the prosecution was worth the potential cost.
-
-Barr said he would speak with Ebrard directly. First, though, his aides hurriedly arranged a conference call. Seth DuCharme, who had returned to the Eastern District as the interim U.S. attorney after working as one of Barr’s counselors, offered a powerful defense of the prosecutors’ case. DuCharme, Robotti and others emphasized that the case had grown stronger since it was first filed, with new witnesses and other evidence that backed up the story told in the task-force intercepts of the Nayarit gang and its godfather.
-
-“Is it worth it?” Barr asked at one point, according to one official’s notes of the meeting. Barr did not raise the possibility that he might drop the case. Nor did he ask the prosecutors and other officials on the call what they thought might happen if the U.S. government retreated from its public promises to hold corrupt Mexican officials accountable.
-
-According to current and former Justice Department officials, Barr later asked one of his aides for an evaluation of the evidence against Cienfuegos. That assessment, they said, echoed the critique that some D.E.A. and narcotics section officials had made about the Eastern District’s case since it was first summarized in the initial SARC document: To prosecute a suspect as powerful and high-profile as Cienfuegos, those officials argued, the government needed strong proof of his culpability. “It’s not that they didn’t have any evidence,” one official familiar with the case said. “But the best evidence they had were messages between two dead people.”
-
-Barr spoke with Ebrard the following Monday, Oct. 26. He apologized that “the arrest had not gone through the normal process, and that neither I nor the head of the D.E.A. was aware of it beforehand,” he wrote in his memoir. Others said that was misleading. The Eastern District and D.E.A. had briefed the attorney general about the case at least three times since 2018, former officials said. The prosecutors also sent an alert about the general’s planned arrest to Barr’s office and others in the department leadership, officials said. Timothy Shea, the D.E.A. administrator, happened to be in Los Angeles on the day Cienfuegos was arrested there, and officials said he was informed about it in advance by the D.E.A. agent in charge, whose agents helped make the arrest. (Shea declined to comment.)
-
-Ebrard told Barr he wanted to see the evidence against Cienfuegos. On Barr’s orders, Robotti and other Eastern District prosecutors hurriedly assembled a file of more than 700 pages of intercepts. They had no illusions that the information would remain secret, and they did not make any mention of the new witnesses they had found, who, officials said, included at least two traffickers who told of face-to-face meetings with Cienfuegos. In a cover letter, Shea emphasized that Cienfuegos “was never a direct investigative target of the Drug Enforcement Administration.” As the intercepts showed, he said, Cienfuegos’s name had surfaced during a routine narcotics investigation.
-
-Ebrard read the dossier over the weekend. Before he had a chance to pick apart the evidence in his next conversation with Barr, the attorney general told him he was ready to drop the case. “I made it clear that I was willing to return Cienfuegos and was taking care of the formalities necessary to do that,” Barr wrote in his memoir. “Personally, I felt that Cienfuegos’s case was not worth scuttling any prospects of broader cooperation with the Mexicans.”
-
-According to two officials briefed on the call, Barr asked the Mexicans not to publicly disparage the D.E.A.’s evidence against Cienfuegos and expressed his hope for the capture of Rafael Caro Quintero. But he did not receive any formal agreement on either point. “He didn’t nail down any commitment from the Mexican side,” one official said. “There were no real conditions imposed on the return.”
-
-In Mexico City, López Obrador began to talk about the case with newfound equanimity. He was prepared to wait to resolve the situation until after the U.S. elections in November, he told reporters. But he also issued a warning: The Mexican government was still going to reconsider its counterdrug cooperation with the United States and reassess how U.S. agents were allowed to operate in Mexico.
-
-The Eastern District prosecutors learned of Barr’s decision days after the Mexicans. They were blindsided, Robotti and others said, but were told the decision was not open to discussion. The move was announced publicly on Nov. 17 in a [joint statement by Barr and his Mexican counterpart, Alejandro Gertz Manero.](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/joint-statement-attorney-general-united-states-william-p-barr-and-fiscal-general-mexico) The Justice Department was seeking the dismissal of its charges against Cienfuegos “so that he may be investigated and, if appropriate, charged, under Mexican law,” the statement said. “Our two countries remain committed to cooperation on this matter, as well as all our bilateral law-enforcement cooperation.”
-
-The federal judge in the case, Carol Bagley Amon, ordered DuCharme to appear in court and explain the attorney general’s extraordinary reversal. Because of the pandemic, the towering federal courthouse in Downtown Brooklyn was almost empty. There were no spectators; Robotti and other prosecutors listened over the telephone. An attorney for Cienfuegos, flush with excitement, sat at the defense table. Cienfuegos, now wearing a dark suit, sat beside him, beaming behind his mask.
-
-DuCharme told the court that the Justice Department had no doubts about the strength of the evidence against the general, but that its “broader interests” in preserving cooperation in the drug fight had been deemed more important than his prosecution. DuCharme told me later that he was disappointed by Barr’s decision but not altogether surprised. “That was my experience with Barr,” he said. “He just jumped on hand grenades and pulled the pin — if it wasn’t out already.”
-
-Judge Amon seemed skeptical. “The old adage ‘a bird in the hand’ comes to mind,” she said in her ruling. But, she noted, she had little authority to override the decision. She also underscored the Justice Department’s assurance to her “that the Mexican prosecuting authorities sincerely wish to pursue an investigation and possible prosecution of this defendant.”
-
-**The Mexican** government announced the conclusions of its investigation of Cienfuegos in January 2021, just days before Trump left office. It was evident that the Mexican authorities had barely gone through the motions. Mexican investigators said they found no evidence that the general did anything wrong. They released a lengthy file of investigative documents, which were heavily redacted. It appeared that they had not even questioned key aides to Cienfuegos. Nor had they bothered to interview H-2’s jailed brother, H-3, or sought out any of dozens of other potential witnesses.
-
-On López Obrador’s instructions, a senior Mexican official told me, Mexican prosecutors made public the confidential file of D.E.A. intercepts that Robotti and his colleagues compiled. U.S. officials were furious. In remarks that might at another time have prompted a diplomatic confrontation, López Obrador said the U.S. authorities should investigate the D.E.A. agents who tried to frame an innocent, respected military leader. He later called the charges “garbage, garbage.”
-
-(Cienfuegos could not be reached for comment, but in a statement, his lawyer said: “General Cienfuegos never should have been charged. And no dismissed indictment or newspaper story will ever change that. The fact is, General Cienfuegos remains as American jurisprudence presumes him: innocent.”)
-
-Joint operations against drug traffickers came to a standstill. U.S. agents reported being followed by what appeared to be Mexican Army surveillance teams. In the new bicentennial framework for security cooperation put in place after Mexico’s unilateral abandonment of the Mérida pact, joint operations against organized-crime groups were scarcely mentioned.
-
-The Biden administration had other priorities. “The agenda consists of immigration, immigration and immigration,” one senior Mexican official told me. That suited López Obrador fine. His challenge to U.S. law-enforcement goals was met with silence in Washington.
-
-What neither government has acknowledged publicly is that Mexico’s national security — and that of the United States — may be more seriously at risk than ever from organized crime. The Mexican government has backed away from confronting gangs without reducing their power or violence. The loss of trust between the two governments has undercut already troubled efforts to reform the Mexican justice system. Many Mexican analysts saw Cienfuegos’s exoneration as an especially powerful message of impunity to the military just as it was taking even greater control of law enforcement.
-
-General Cienfuegos did not wait long to retake his place among the Mexican elite. On March 21, when López Obrador inaugurated the new Felipe Ángeles International Airport, which army forces helped build outside Mexico City, Cienfuegos arrived in a starched dress uniform, his chest stacked with ribbons, and sat prominently among other senior generals. Earlier, he joined officers at a national journalism awards ceremony, where he bantered with a group of reporters. “Now I’m just in the custody of my wife,” he said.
-
-Soon after Cienfuegos’s repatriation, Beck was moved off the D.E.A. task force for good. He returned to the Las Vegas police, after being called into a D.E.A. internal investigation, where he was questioned about problems with the Cienfuegos case. “It was mind-boggling to us,” Robotti said. “Beck took a street case and built it into something very important. If the politics had gone a different way, he would have been a hero.”
-
-Robotti left the U.S. attorney’s office to join a New York law firm. He had personal reasons for the move but acknowledged that the Cienfuegos case left a bitter taste. “We let a guy we think is guilty go free,” he said. “We have spent all this money and effort down there, but if, at the end of the day, we’re not willing to try to tackle the corruption problem, what’s the point?”
-
-The Eastern District is pressing ahead with the case against García Luna, who is scheduled for trial in January. But the broader effort that agents and prosecutors imagined — to take on Mexican drug corruption wherever it might reach — now seems impossibly remote. Biden officials insist that they are still trying to tackle the drug problem. But if they want to get anything done with the Mexican government, they say, they need to avoid confrontation.
-
-A few months into the Biden administration, some of the Eastern District prosecutors proposed reindicting Cienfuegos on new charges. They had pulled together some important new evidence: They now had at least three traffickers who claimed they had met directly with Cienfuegos, at different times and in different parts of Mexico, to discuss his protection of their drug operations. They had other witnesses who could illuminate the general’s reputed dealings with the H’s. But Justice Department officials rejected the idea of a new grand jury.
-
-In July of this year, López Obrador visited President Biden at the White House, and a few days later, officials of both countries found a familiar way to deflate the tensions that had been rising, as fentanyl deaths in the United States continued to climb. In Mexico City, the authorities announced they had finally caught the fugitive Rafael Caro Quintero. They were guarded about the details of the operation, insisting that the Americans had not been involved.
-
-It turned out that Caro Quintero had been captured in something that resembled a joint operation, U.S. officials said. The Americans shared intelligence with the Mexican Marines, who had begun operating again in a limited way. The triumphant capture squad was made up of commandos who served in the U.S.-trained special-operations unit — the same one that took down the H’s.
-
----
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-**Tim Golden,** a former senior writer for The Times, is ProPublica’s editor at large. He has shared two Pulitzer Prizes, including the International Reporting award for coverage of drug corruption in Mexico in 1998. **Francesco Francavilla** is an artist known for a neo-pulp style in his comics. He is an Eisner and Eagle Award winner and worked on the horror series “Night of the Ghoul.”
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-Link: https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a41083545/adhd-in-adult-women/
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-```button
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-^button-InsidetheSilentADHDEpidemicAmongWomenNSave
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-# Inside the Silent ADHD Epidemic Among Women
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-Anna Ostoya
-
-I quit drinking cold turkey when I found out I was pregnant. Alcohol had been my main coping mechanism for 15 years, but I didn’t replace it with anything except magical thinking. Motherhood would surely transform me into a woman with all her little ducks in a row, I thought. A few months after my daughter was born in 2019, I realized that other moms seemed to have mastered the everyday organization of early motherhood in a way that eluded me: the planned-out schedules, structured days, sleep training. All of that completely overwhelmed me. This feeling of not quite knowing how to perform adult life was familiar, but combined with the guilt inherent to motherhood, it became unbearable.
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-Uneasiness has been a constant in my life. As a teenager, I wanted to be confident, do my homework early, keep my bedroom tidy, and stick to a budget so I could buy Angel by Mugler, my teen dream perfume. Instead, I hated myself, rarely did my homework on time, cleaned my room only when it reached hazmat status, and smelled like Skittles, courtesy of Sunflowers by Elizabeth Arden, because I blew my Angel budget on weed and McDonald’s. Adult me was the same, but with debt and clinical depression. I chalked up my personal and professional disasters to a deep personality flaw that left me feeling like a frightened clown trying to blend in at a cocktail party.
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-One year into the pandemic and two into motherhood, I sought help and luckily found a supportive and astute therapist. She suspected in our first sessions that I had—and have always had—undiagnosed ADHD. A psychiatrist confirmed it a few months later. I was 39.
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-Turns out, my diagnosis was on trend. Thanks to a convergence of new research, changes in how doctors diagnose and treat neurodivergent people, and maybe even TikTok, where the tag #adhd has more than 13 billion views and counting, there’s been an enormous uptick in adult women getting diagnosed with ADHD. The Attention Deficit Disorder Association, a nonprofit organization for adults with ADHD, has noted that its membership more than doubled between 2019 and 2021. While pandemic isolation may have contributed to that rise, a study published in 2019 found that the rate of annual adult ADHD diagnoses increased 43 percent between 2007 and 2016, and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed a 344 percent increase in women between the ages of 15 and 44 filling ADHD medication prescriptions from 2003 to 2015. Similar ADHD med trends were seen in Canada and in the U.K. Clinical Partners, one of the U.K.’s leading mental-health-care providers, reported that some 254,400 women took its online ADHD test in 2021—33 times the 7,700 women who self-assessed in 2019.
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-> > This feeling of not quite knowing how to perform adult life was familiar, but combined with the guilt inherent to motherhood, it became unbearable.
-
-But women aren’t suddenly waking up with a neurological disorder. It’s likely been there all along, masquerading as low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, “she’s difficult,” “she’s an airhead,” “she’s unlucky,” “she’s lazy,” and other labels that tend to mark a girl as she moves through her life.
-
-Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, is a neurodevelopmental condition that usually manifests in early childhood. The main areas of the brain impacted by ADHD are the prefrontal cortex, which controls attention and organization, and the limbic system, which regulates our emotions, memories, autonomic functions, and behavioral responses. ADHD brains have low levels of norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter associated with dopamine, which helps control the brain’s pleasure and reward center. This is why so many people with ADHD respond well to medications like Adderall and other amphetamines, which boost dopamine levels.
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-There are three main types of ADHD: hyperactive-impulsive, inattentive, and combination, which contains elements of both. “Hyperactive” has been the dominant ADHD stereotype for decades—and one that has been applied, for the most part, to boys. “You get a lot of the squirming, fidgeting, running-around-the-room behaviors,” says Stephen P. Hinshaw, distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Hinshaw has studied ADHD for four decades and has worked to correct the assumption that it doesn’t affect girls and women, including writing *Straight Talk About ADHD in Girls,* a guide for those raising girls with the disorder, which was published this summer.
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-Girls are more often diagnosed with inattentive ADHD, meaning they struggle with focus, sensory overload, disorganization, and executive functions like planning, remembering instructions, and juggling multiple tasks successfully. It is much harder for women with inattentive ADHD to process information, especially if they’re not interested in it, which might explain why I did poorly in math.
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-“ADHD typically presents in women or girls as less severe but more pervasive than in males, and it tends to become more obvious with age,” says psychiatrist Uma Naidoo, director of Nutritional and Lifestyle Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and a faculty member at Harvard Medical School.
-
-Hinshaw says that as people with ADHD age, inattentive symptoms generally seem to stick around, while hyperactive symptoms tend to subside. He also points out that the “deficit” part of ADHD is a misnomer. Rather than being unable to pay attention, people with ADHD lack the ability to make good choices about how and when to pay attention.
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-Like height, ADHD can be passed down from parents to their children. Heritability is roughly 80 percent, Hinshaw notes, which means that if one or both of your parents have it, there’s a chance you could too. There is no singular cause, but it has also been linked to premature birth, low birth weight, exposures in early childhood to environmental toxins like pesticides and lead, and physical differences in the brain.
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-Since women with ADHD and women in general are often socialized to act pleasant, be accommodating, and handle stress quietly, many girls with ADHD aren’t diagnosed until adulthood because we develop coping mechanisms to mask our challenges.
-
-“Many women compensate by working overtime or late at night,” Naidoo says. This, combined with the tendency to internalize our symptoms, can make ADHD both hard to spot and easy to mistake for the overwhelming emotions it causes. Naidoo adds, “ADHD is often misdiagnosed in women because it comes comorbid with, or is misperceived as, depression or anxiety.”
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-> > The more I understand about how ADHD works, the more I see it as the primary reason for my many struggles rather than an excuse for them.
-
-Women with ADHD are often diagnosed with anxiety or depression long before ADHD is discovered. Psychiatrist Lidia Zylowska, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School and the author of *The Mindfulness Prescription for Adult ADHD,* adds that for women, the impulsive emotions associated with ADHD, like anger or enthusiasm, might be exhibited in ways we don’t recognize as impulsivity. “The latter can make you say yes to too many things and then feel overwhelmed later,” she says.
-
-Getting diagnosed with ADHD on the cusp of 40 brought my personal history into sharp focus. My past struggles in school, in relationships, with friendships and work, and in processing traumatic events, plus the many questionable choices I’ve made, all became part of a much larger story. And considering the disorder’s inheritability, I realized that story included my family members. The parallels between me and my dad’s younger sister Tina, who was diagnosed a decade ago, at age 54, became abundantly clear. We are separated by a generation, but the similarities in our individual histories, along with our shared family history, contained the clues I needed to trace the story of my ADHD.
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-As a little kid in the early 1960s, my aunt Tina was sent to a Catholic school for a year that wasn’t only strict, it was severe. The girls and boys were kept separate and forbidden from interacting, and the teachers regularly scolded the children in their care. Students ran the risk of being beaten with a leather strap for infractions as minor as turning around to smile at a friend.
-
-“I felt like I was in prison,” Tina tells me. The environment would prove too traumatizing—and distracting—for any productive learning to take place.
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-Tina wasn’t entirely new to stressful surroundings. Like the classroom, her home life was tense, as was her father, Dante. He grew up in Mussolini’s Italy, the eldest son of authoritarian parents who used torture as punishment. At 20, Dante fought in World War II, was captured by the Germans, and was sent to the gulags. When he came home to Italy, he quickly married, started a family, and boarded a boat to Canada. All of his pain was buried in an untouchable part of him, and it tore him apart quietly. “He was very, very strict,” Tina says, and although he was violent toward only his son (my father), his austere manner kept the whole family on edge. “He didn’t really talk to us,” she recalls. That could’ve been, in part, because he had a stutter, which research has also linked to ADHD.
-
-A stressful home environment like the one my aunt Tina experienced can directly affect one’s trajectory with the condition. “ADHD can change fairly drastically, and its symptoms and impairments are contingent on a very sensitive teacher or a warm and supportive home versus an argumentative home,” Hinshaw says. “It’s really sensitive to context and structure.”
-
-My father’s family moved a year later and enrolled Tina in the local public school. She benefited from a happy accident that can sometimes change the course of a neurodivergent child’s life: an amazing teacher.
-
-“She just turned my life around completely,” Tina says of her fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Cigagna, who coached after-school sports and introduced Tina to softball and track and field. Being coached was a dream: “She was encouraging and would celebrate every little success with me.”
-
-Having a teacher demonstrate belief in her and offer ways to build confidence and focus through sports was the key to Tina learning how to thrive at school. To this day, she uses exercise to manage her ADHD symptoms.
-
-Who falls through the cracks and who learns a way out is often unfairly dependent on access, privilege, and chance. If a girl with ADHD is never exposed to what researchers call “motivation and compensation”—or positive feedback and encouragement around interests or subjects she’s drawn to—she’s at increased risk for a litany of complications, including low quality of life, substance-abuse disorders, educational underachievement, and unemployment.
-
-
-
-Courtesy Carla Ciccone
-
- My early childhood might’ve featured less fear than Tina’s, but suffering still found me. Severe asthma had me in and out of the hospital. At six years old, I was referred to an inpatient asthma program and lived there for six months, monitored continuously. It was in both having asthma attacks and living in the hospital that I became familiar with fear. I felt it somatically; it lived in my stomach.
-
-Less than a year later, when I was seven, my family moved from Toronto to Calgary, an arid city near the Rocky Mountains that was supposed to be better for asthmatics, but my asthma followed me. I was picked on for it and for being Italian.
-
-Finding good childcare was always difficult for my parents. One summer evening, my mom was getting ready to go out when the babysitter she had lined up called her to say she’d fallen ill but could send her teenage brother in her place. Soon after I went to bed, with my little sister asleep beside me, he sexually assaulted me.
-
-I’d go on to tell of this assault many times over: to a friend who convinced me to tell my parents, to police, to doctors, and, finally, in a juvenile courtroom in front of the assailant as testimony.
-
-I went to a robotic place when I did. I had learned about the liminal space between earth and ether, where you could exist without feeling, in the hospital. But dissociation is a quiet practice, and I had to speak, so I forced my heart out of my body in order to describe what he did to it. He got community-service hours, and a few years later I would become a “troubled” teen.
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-
-
-Courtesy Carla Ciccone
-
-When the biological risk for ADHD is present, experiencing early traumas is a key indicator for developing the condition. Studies have shown that children with ADHD often have more adverse childhood experiences (ACE) than those without. Not only that, but the association between a higher ACE score and moderate to severe ADHD is significant, meaning trauma makes ADHD symptoms worse. My acceptance of the genetic component of the disorder was relatively straightforward—you can’t change your genes—but the influence of early trauma on ADHD was harder to process because it meant I had to feel the pain I buried as a kid.
-
-Sometimes the symptoms of early trauma can mimic those of ADHD, making diagnosis difficult, especially after childhood. Hinshaw cautions that while there is overlap in their manifestations, the disorders are both valid and separate, even when they’re concurrent. “You can have both together. You can get them each treated,” he says.
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-My adolescence was a time of major depression, which studies have found is more than twice as common in teen girls with ADHD than in those without. I was friends with a popular girl who called everyone “loser” and often meant it. Older boys taunted me—calling me “Chewbacca.” One of them threw a bucket full of liquid on me that I realized was bleach when my clothes changed color and my skin started burning. While alone that evening, I lowered the cherry of a cigarette to my hand and pushed it in slowly, surprised by the crackling sound of melting flesh.
-
-I couldn’t articulate or escape from the pain I was in, but hurting myself was a way to channel it into something visible. This was one way I dealt with rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD), the emotional overload that affects many with ADHD. It makes rejection, even perceived rejection, excruciatingly painful.
-
-I struggled to pay attention in class and was committed to skipping school to smoke weed. My hyperfocus was deployed in other ways typical of a teenage girl with a trauma history: studying liner notes of CDs instead of studying history, bleaching my hair and eyebrows to look less like myself and more like Courtney Love, and self-harming when I needed a release.
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-
-
-Anna Ostoya
-
-Life changes combined with societal pressures were tough for both me and my aunt Tina. Tina, a generation earlier, went to university, studied abroad in France, and became the first person in our family to complete a post-secondary degree. Despite these successes, she felt ostracized. Today, her decision to follow her own interests in the face of peer and maternal pressure to settle down seems brave. But at the time, her siblings and friends were all meeting the traditional benchmarks of young-adult life in the early 1980s by getting married and starting families.
-
-In contrast to my aunt Tina’s high achievements, my high school graduation was less of a celebration than it was a sigh of relief. I longed for escape, but I was more afraid of leaving the relative comfort of my parents’ home than I was aware of the dysfunction there exacerbating my ADHD.
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-At community college, I got lucky: A group of English professors helped me see myself not as the fuckup I’d been but as someone who could write. I hadn’t heard I was good at anything before then, and I was skeptical to believe it, but I went from barely graduating high school to getting scholarships and awards a couple years later.
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-Despite these triumphs, the transition to adulthood was destabilizing and included extracting myself from a troubling relationship. I self-medicated, floundered in friendships, relationships, and work, and changed cities yearly for more than a decade.
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-> > For grown women who find out we have ADHD, releasing ourselves from the shame of our fraught histories might not happen overnight, but we can reframe the way we see ourselves
-
-The impact of hormones on ADHD is underresearched, but the studies that do exist show that transitional life phases like puberty may make ADHD much worse. For pubescent girls and women with ADHD, our monthly cycles welcome an ongoing ebb and flow of estrogen and progesterone, and these ever-fluctuating hormones can complicate the disorder. “We often link these hormones with mood changes,” says Jessica Agnew-Blais, a lecturer in psychology at Queen Mary University of London who is studying the role of hormonal fluctuations in adults with ADHD. “But they may also affect more ‘cognitive’ functions, like working memory and executive functioning.” Research that suggests estrogen can boost dopamine levels and cognition was conducted primarily on rats; however, Agnew-Blais notes that a 2018 study tracking menstrual cycles of women aged 18 to 22 found ADHD symptoms like impulsivity tended to increase after ovulation, when estrogen declines. “Many women struggle more with focus and motivation \[when they have\] PMS or during perimenopause,” says Zylowska. Puberty, pregnancy, early motherhood, and menopause can also exacerbate our symptoms.
-
-As much as my ADHD diagnosis made sense, at first it seemed too convenient: a fast way of absolving myself for my many mistakes without recourse. This feeling is common among women with my trauma history. “You had very low self-compassion,” Hinshaw says. “You probably felt that somehow you deserve this because you’ve internalized a lot from the years of missed and untreated ADHD and from trauma.”
-
-The more I understand about how ADHD works, the more I see it as the primary reason for my many struggles rather than an excuse for them. I know the disorder varies from person to person and that there’s no one-size-fits-all fix for it. “If you want to increase your focus and decrease your impulsivity, about 80 percent of people with ADHD respond to medication,” Hinshaw says. “But if you want to develop better interpersonal relationships, better academic and vocational skills, it takes a combination of the medication with behavioral and cognitive behavioral and family therapies.”
-
-One of the first books I bought after my diagnosis was Naidoo’s *This Is Your Brain on Food,* which blessedly asserts that dark chocolate is a good snack for those with ADHD. She also recommends establishing a breakfast routine, especially since psychostimulant medications can diminish appetite. “When the morning meal is full of brain-healthy nutrients, our ability to focus and cognitively perform throughout the day is enhanced,” Naidoo says.
-
-My aunt Tina, the first person in our family to start cooking with whole-wheat pasta, naturally follows Naidoo’s healthy-eating advice. She didn’t love the psychostimulants her doctor prescribed her, so instead she manages her ADHD with exercise, calendars, lists, and time to herself to recharge. For me, the meds have been a life-changer. The combination of Vyvanse, therapy, and self-compassion (and chocolate) contributed to huge improvements in under a year.
-
-Long before I met her, I’d committed to raising my daughter differently. I decided that the heavy emotional prices my grandparents, parents, and I paid to the intergenerational trauma gods were now settled, with no tab left for my kid. But I didn’t know then what I know now: No matter how hard I try to heal history, there’s a good chance my beautiful daughter might face some of the same struggles I did as a child. According to Hinshaw, the antidote to raising a girl with the disorder is the same as the one for learning as an adult that you’ve always had ADHD: forgiveness, acceptance, and support.
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-The future of ADHD, like so much of mental health, looks vastly different from its past. For grown women who find out we have ADHD, releasing ourselves from the shame of our fraught histories might not happen overnight, but we can reframe the way we see ourselves, our pasts, and the diagnosis that eventually makes it all make sense.
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-Link: https://www.thedailybeast.com/irans-women-are-once-again-the-vanguards-of-a-revolution
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-```button
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-# Iran’s Women Are (Once Again) the Vanguards of a Revolution
-
-I was visiting the main [Tehran](https://www.thedailybeast.com/irans-president-warns-protesters-after-mahsa-amini-died-in-custody-after-arrest-for-wearing-hijab-too-loosely?ref=topic) bazaar one sticky hot summer in the early ’90s, when an older woman shrouded head-to-toe in black chador loudly accosted me with a wagging finger and branded me a prostitute. I was around 7 years old, dawdling in the doorway of one of the many stalls inside the cavernous marketplace waiting for my mom, wearing a long-sleeved thick cotton shirt [from the Gap](https://www.thedailybeast.com/kanye-west-walks-away-from-gap-deal-after-vowing-to-drop-grudges), and a heavy checked skirt that grazed my calves.
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-But my inky, unmistakably [Persian hair](https://www.thedailybeast.com/irans-leading-lady)—with a mild frizz that would remain untamable well into my teens—was bereft of a silk cover. (At the time it wasn't strictly required for girls under 12, though it was encouraged by the religious zealots in charge). The visible wisps even pulled back into a scrunchie were somehow viscerally offensive to this stranger.
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-She screamed that my mother—herself clad in black baggy garb, her short blonde curls tightly covered—should be ashamed of herself for raising such a whore of a girl. Then, as abruptly as she came, the woman—this unwanted and [unofficial morality overseer](https://www.thedailybeast.com/irans-hardline-fashion-and-morality-police)—walked away, seemingly satisfied that she’d corrected a moral ill.
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-I couldn't articulate it properly at the time. I was young, heavy tears hot on my cheeks, with no idea what a prostitute was, or how my sex could be considered threatening. Later, I realized how utterly incongruous the moment was.
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-How could my appearance be so enraging to a stranger? After all, the women who attended the mehmoonis (parties) thrown by my grandparents were all legs, bare arms, and fresh highlights—their headscarves and chadors consigned to a spare bedroom just off the hallway, religious garb strewn in haphazard piles.
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-But living in between the lines of incongruity, misogyny, and anachronism has long been par for the course for women in Iran. Now those lines are being stamped out by the soles of their feet and strands of their shorn hair.
-
-The violent death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, who was beaten by so-called morality police in Tehran last week for “improper hijab” and [died](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/9/19/irans-police-denies-women-who-died-in-custody-was-beaten) in police custody, has been the touch paper that’s set off thunderous protests against mandatory hijab laws in nearly all corners of the country. (The Iranian authorities deny any role in her death.)
-
-The [unofficial flag](https://twitter.com/LeenaManimekali/status/1573022390241689601?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1573022390241689601%7Ctwgr%5Eb0898f1ad537aa2299e60c406269d011d82a8f4c%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.huffingtonpost.co.uk%2Fentry%2Fwhy-women-are-cutting-their-hair-for-iran_uk_632d6a27e4b05db5206d2a88) of the 2022 movement protesting Amini’s murder is arresting in its dangerous simplicity: chopped black hair hoisted high, dancing in the breeze, wild and natural. It’s an emblem of the fierce power, innate to Persian women, that has for decades terrified the ruling classes of the country.
-
-
-
-Nasibe Samsaei, an Iranian woman living in Turkey, cuts her ponytail off during a protest outside the Iranian consulate in Istanbul on Sept. 21, 2022, following the death of Mahsa Amini after her arrest by the country’s morality police in Tehran.
-
-#### Yasin Akgul/AFP via Getty
-
-Women have always been the drivers of modern revolution in Iran. That’s why they’re punished.
-
-In 2009, the world was outraged by the murder of another young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, who was [shot in the chest](https://www.thedailybeast.com/neda-agha-soltans-blood-stained-the-ground-where-iranians-protest-today) during the Green Revolution—when Iranians protested against a rigged national election where reformist candidates were shut out in favor of a hardliner.
-
-The viral video of Neda screaming as she perished—a moment widely shared during the infancy of social media—[galvanized a generation](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jun/22/neda-soltani-death-iran) of Iranian activists pushing for change. Her death was captured in real time and sparked mass defiance.
-
-But change, at least the change many hoped for, didn’t come.
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-Instead, after some initial [admonishing](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/us/politics/24webobama.html) from the U.S.—and protracted years attempting to solidify a nuclear deal (that ultimately was [reneged upon](https://www.reuters.com/world/irans-raisi-questions-worth-nuclear-deal-without-an-end-iaea-probes-2022-09-22/) by the West, playing into the hands of hardliners who continue to warn citizens against trusting devilish Americans)—Neda’s generation was left languishing.
-
-Now, over a decade later, a new generation of Iranian women have come of age. And where Neda’s face was once the image that encapsulated a nation’s struggle, Mahsa’s has now taken on that unwanted mantle.
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-
-
-A person lights a candle in front of a picture of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young Iranian woman whose death during protests in Iran made her a symbol for the opposition, during a vigil in Dubai on June 25, 2009.
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-#### Marwan Naamani/AFP via Getty
-
-Young women and their male allies (the median age in Iran is 32 years old) have been bravely taking to the streets in face of violence. They’ve been met with [bullets, clubs, and fists](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/21/world/middleeast/iran-protests-mahsa-amini.html). The government has [suppressed internet](https://www.wired.com/story/iran-protests-2022-internet-shutdown-whatsapp/) access, doing its best to muzzle any protest and extinguish any dissent.
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-“Women have always been the drivers of modern revolution in Iran. That’s why they’re punished.”
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-As their attempts to express themselves have escalated, so too has the brutality against them. Where protesters have cellphones, the forces of the regime have guns. At least [41 people](https://www.ft.com/content/c2e002bf-296f-48fe-b928-64b866fbb4b1) have died in the protests this week, according to [reports](https://www.ft.com/content/c2e002bf-296f-48fe-b928-64b866fbb4b1) from human rights groups and verified international reports.
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-With the government on the defensive, it’s hard to get truly independent verification of the number of people injured in the fracas that have been a mainstay of streets across cities and towns. Journalists have been targeted; Nilufar Hamidi, [the reporter who exposed Amini’s killing](https://www.voanews.com/a/journalists-arrested-in-iran-warned-about-protest-coverage/6760774.html), has herself disappeared.
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-
-
-Iranian demonstrators taking to the streets of the capital Tehran during a protest for Mahsa Amini, days after she died in police custody.
-
-#### AFP/Getty
-
-Thanks to social media and a tech-savvy generation familiar with VPN, TikTok, and censor-dodging, images of defiant women looking directly into the camera—[hacking their hair off in](https://twitter.com/KhosroKalbasi/status/1571421269303906306) solidarity and whipping in the air headscarves they’ve lit on fire—have been shared widely around the world. I cannot underscore just how brave these acts are. It’s also heartening to see so many people I know—and prominent people in positions of influence and leadership—attune to the plight of a people I love.
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-But what happens next is hard to predict. So what I offer instead is context, and hope.
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-**Protests Are Self-determination**
-
-Perhaps the most important thing to understand is that such uprisings in Iran are usually never about just one thing. What started out as protests over Mahsa Amini’s killing and against mandatory hijab have since morphed into the desperate, furious, and existential. Modern Iranian protest is always, at its heart, about self-determination.
-
-People are fed up with years of faux piety from hypocritical leaders who continue to deliver [rotten economic prospects](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-25/a-sick-economy-is-forcing-tehran-s-hand-in-nuclear-deal-talks), a mismanaged [pandemic](https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/08/19/iran-government-mismanagement-compounds-covid-19-crisis) response, and draconian social repressions.
-
-The Iranian middle class has been shrinking for some time now. Indeed, Mahsa Amini’s family came from the northwestern Iranian province of Kurdistan, miles away from the relative economic prosperity of the capital Tehran, where she was killed.
-
-
-
-Iranian morality policeman talks to a woman in Tehran.
-
-#### Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty
-
-Inflation in the country hovers around 40 percent (and you thought it was bad here in the U.S.). The new hardliner president, Ebrahim Raisi, who was handpicked by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, has [fancifully promised](https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/19/iran-revolution-leaders-undermine-regime/) 8 percent economic growth and 2 million more jobs to be created in the next two years. These promises are hard to believe for even the most ardent revolution devotee. Iran has been experiencing a [brain drain](https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/iran-brain-drain-emigration) of talented and highly educated citizens for decades, a pattern that’s only been exacerbated by years of corrupt governance and shallow social mobility.
-
-“Iran has been experiencing a brain drain of talented and highly educated citizens for decades; a pattern that’s only been exacerbated by years of corrupt governance and shallow social mobility.”
-
-These economic realities aren’t meant to discount the very real struggle for personhood that women have faced since the 1979 revolution (a revolution that was hijacked by fanatics and zealots, and started out as an attempt to overthrow an American-backed monarch, who lest it be forgotten, had [blood-soaked hands](https://lailalalami.com/2003/07/marjane-satrapis-persepolis/) of his own).
-
-But it tempers what we can and should expect of them in terms of being able to deliver a nation from the grips of a multi-faceted mire of problems that range from social to structural. What victory looks like next is untidy, and painful.
-
-**Change From Within**
-
-There are some well-meaning but ill-informed people on my social media feed who are calling on foreign governments to intervene in this moment, a particularly understandable impulse when we see military responses against weaponless protestors.
-
-But the history around Western meddling is painful, and not at all water under the bridge.
-
-It was, after all, less than a decade ago that CIA documents were unsealed to reveal the [U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup](https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/690363402/how-the-cia-overthrew-irans-democracy-in-four-days) that unseated the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and routed Iranian democracy—perhaps for another century.
-
-The Iranian government this week has seized upon this anti-Western sentiment by once again peddling a narrative that these uprisings are all directly attributed to foreign interlopers [meddling](https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2022/09/20/Iran-says-it-arrested-foreign-nationals-during-Tehran-protests) in Iran’s affairs, and sowing seeds of discontent that wouldn’t otherwise exist.
-
-Freedom for Iranian women, and the nation, can only come from within. But we can continue to write and amplify their struggle. There are voices in the diaspora who have been working tirelessly in the last few days to offer support, including [compiling lists](https://medium.com/@SherryH/help-iranians-in-iran-c8a5955c4a57) of ways to become a signal proxy and donate to bona fide organizations bolstering human rights in the country.
-
-**Inextricably Linked**
-
-I often think about what it would have been like to have been born and raised in Iran, rather than having been born in London and visiting the country during school holidays. Living in the diaspora, I live between the two worlds; deeply and proudly connected to the culture, but disconnected from the innate struggle of Iranian women in the country. Empathy doesn’t mean full understanding—how can it?
-
-Any admonishments I experienced during childhood visits to Tehran, like public shamings in bazaars for bare hair, were localized and typically brief. As soon as we flew out of the country, and our airplane left Iranian air space, hair coverings around the economy class cabin were swiftly tossed aside, physical signs of relief at the freedoms we were able to experience simply because of geography.
-
-But I am inextricably linked to the women of the country. I look like them. My daughter looks like them. We are them, if not for a quirk of birthplace. May they flourish and may their hair fly free.
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-Link: https://nonzero.substack.com/p/is-everything-falling-apart
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-# Is Everything Falling Apart?
-
-[](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7549d687-b50d-4ef6-b4e0-f96d5bc1164a_1307x588.jpeg)
-
-The psychologist Jonathan Haidt has bad news for us. In a much discussed Atlantic piece called “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” he lays out a view of our situation that’s grimmer than that grim title suggests—even if you throw in the grim subtitle: “It’s not just a phase.”
-
-Haidt opens his piece (which is in the actual physical May issue of the magazine, as well as [online](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/)) by invoking the biblical story of Babel—in which God sees that humans are building a tower to heaven and decides to teach them a lesson: He makes them speak different languages so that coordinating on future projects will be hard. Haidt reminds us that in some versions of the story, though not the biblical one, God destroys the tower, leaving people to wander through the ruins, “condemned to mutual incomprehension.”
-
-“The story of Babel,” Haidt writes, “is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.”
-
-Wait. It gets worse.
-
-Babel, he writes, is “a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families… After Babel, nothing really means anything anymore—at least not in a way that is durable and on which people widely agree.”
-
-There are three main culprits in Haidt’s story, three things that have torn our world asunder: the like button, the share button (or, on Twitter, the retweet button), and the algorithms that feed on those buttons. “Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people.”
-
-I would seem uniquely positioned to cheer us up by taking issue with Haidt’s depressing diagnosis. Near the beginning of his piece, he depicts my turn-of-the-millennium book *Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny* as in some ways the antithesis of his thesis—as sketching a future in which information technology unites rather than divides. He writes:
-
-“President Bill Clinton praised *Nonzero*’s optimistic portrayal of a more cooperative future thanks to continued technological advance. The early internet of the 1990s, with its chat rooms, message boards, and email, exemplified the Nonzero thesis, as did the first wave of social-media platforms, which launched around 2003.” Thereafter, it would seem, history was less kind to the Nonzero thesis.
-
-Well, two things I’m always happy to do are (1) cheer people up; and (2) defend a book I’ve written. I’d like to thank Haidt (who is actually a friend—but whom I’ll keep calling “Haidt” to lend gravitas to this essay) for providing me the opportunity to do both at once.
-
-But don’t let your expectations get too high about the cheering people up part—because, for starters, the book I’m defending wasn’t *that* optimistic. I wrote in *Nonzero*, “While I’m basically optimistic, an extremely bleak outcome is obviously possible.” And even if we avoid a truly apocalyptic fate, I added, “several moderately bleak outcomes are possible.”
-
-Still, looking around today, I don’t see *quite* as much bleakness as Haidt seems to see. And one reason, I think, is that I don’t see the causes of our current troubles as being quite as novel as he does. We’ve been here before, and humankind survived.
-
-[Share](https://nonzero.substack.com/p/is-everything-falling-apart?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share)
-
-By “here” I mean a time when a big change in information technology has implications for social structure too dramatic to play out without turbulence. In *Nonzero* I discussed a number of such thresholds, including the invention of writing and the invention of the printing press.
-
-Some of these thresholds look more like the current era than you might think. Though my book is often depicted (accurately but incompletely) as Haidt depicts it—as emphasizing the tendency of information technology to unite people—it also emphasizes the tendency of information technology to divide people, to deepen the bounds between tribes of various kinds, and to facilitate the creation of new, narrower tribes.
-
-Consider Protestants, and the process by which they cleaved off from the Catholic church in the early 16th century and started a new tribe. They couldn’t have done it without the printing press, invented half a century earlier. Before the advent of printing, you needed legions of scribes to publish lots of copies of anything, which is why there was so much power in the hands of kings and popes. But then came printing. As I wrote in *Nonzero*:
-
-“Martin Luther, a theologian of modest prominence, affixed his critique of Catholic doctrine to the door of Wittenberg’s All Saints Church on October 31, 1517, and within weeks three separate editions were rolling off the presses in three cities.”
-
-Haidt’s piece notes that new digital technologies have eroded the power of traditional gatekeepers and made it easier for extremists to find voice. Well, Martin Luther bypassed the ultimate gatekeeper—the Pope—and he wasn’t exactly a moderate. He said, for example, “Heretics are not to be disputed with, but to be condemned unheard” and should “perish by fire.” As for Jews: “Burn the synagogues.”
-
-As Luther’s fame grew, and eager printers published his books, and the reception they got encouraged him to write more of them, he seems to have deployed the basic tricks now practiced by social media potentates to expand their followings. Let us count the tricks:
-
-*1) Push emotional buttons.* The historian Craig Harline writes in *A World Ablaze,* his book about Luther and the Reformation, that Luther “dug right down into his readers’ (and listeners’) emotions and fears and hopes.” Unlike most theologians of his day, he wasn’t “just formal and rational and detached.” (Criticized for sometimes going low brow, Luther said that he wasn’t “ashamed in the slightest” to appeal to the uneducated—and that other clergy would have been wise to do the same rather than put out “those heavy, weighty tomes.”)
-
- 2) *Be willing to antagonize people if you can capitalize on the notoriety by expanding your following.* Harline writes, “Even if some friends abandoned him and new enemies attacked him, he could always count on his ‘fast hand and rapid memory’ that allowed him to write so much, and on his good friends the printers, who sent his writings into the world.”
-
-3) *Strengthen your appeal within your own tribe by playing to its hostility toward enemy tribes.* Harline writes: “Sometimes he was a little sharp, but he always figured that it was better to upset a few people than to upset God by not speaking the truth, and besides his supporters liked it when he was sharp to people they wanted him to be sharp with.”
-
-4) *When forced to choose between strict adherence to truth and viral potential, go with viral potential.* “Sometimes he exaggerated,” Harline writes, but “that helped him attract certain readers.”
-
-5) *Demonize leaders of the other tribe.* Luther did this more literally than most. He said, for example, “After the devil himself, there is no worse folk than the pope and his followers.”
-
-Haidt, summarizing research on the effects of social media, writes that, “on balance, social media amplifies political polarization; foments populism, especially right-wing populism; and is associated with the spread of misinformation.” Well, Luther was a polarizing populist who spread misinformation—and the printing press strengthened his incentive to be exactly that. The positive reinforcement didn’t come as often as it comes when you can check your retweet numbers every few minutes, but it came—when sales numbers rolled in or when readers gave him feedback—and he followed its guidance.
-
-[Share](https://nonzero.substack.com/p/is-everything-falling-apart?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share)
-
-I’d love to be able to end this piece here, with the reassurance that there’s no more reason to worry about the impact of social media than there was to worry about the impact of the printing press. There are two reasons I can’t do that.
-
-1) *There was plenty of reason to worry about the impact of the printing press.* The “wars of religion” that punctuated the 16th and 17th centuries weren’t *just* wars of religion, but they certainly drew fuel from the tensions between Protestant and Catholic that Luther, via the power of printing, helped create and then amplified. So if we could do a better job this time around of minimizing the blowback from a new information technology, that would be great.
-
-2) *Social media does pose new challenges.* I agree with Haidt: Though social media provides some great new things, it’s also an unprecedentedly powerful accelerant for antagonism and misinformation, and it strongly encourages explosively reflexive judgment. Some kinds of social media do seem, as Haidt puts it, “almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves.”
-
-So, all told, I can’t in good conscience tell you to calm down and rest assured that the future will be fine. What I can do is give you my idea of the most productive way to frame the challenge of making the future fine. And I can give you the view of a fine future that I laid out in *Nonzero*.
-
-The framing begins with appreciating how closely intertwined the divisive and unifying effects of information technology can be. New information technologies so often have both effects at once—fragmenting social groups while integrating social groups—that in *Nonzero* I invoked the term *fragmegration* (coined by the scholar James Rosenau, though not in a context of information technology) to emphasize this fact.
-
-So, for example, even as Martin Luther was severing some Christians from other Christians, he was also integrating a bunch of Christians into the new Protestant tribe, a tribe that would extend across national borders (and that would subdivide into cohesive border-crossing tribes: Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, etc.). And both sides of this dynamic—the *fragme* and the *gration*—were facilitated by the printing press (which would eventually help Protestant denominations cohere across long distances via things like standardized hymnals—and for that matter would allow the Catholic Church to standardize its liturgy internationally).
-
-As I emphasized in *Nonzero*, the digital revolution—even before the internet age dawned, and certainly after that—did what the printing press did: It made promulgating information cheaper and easier. So more and more people could try to be like Martin Luther and start a new tribe, even an international tribe. And these tribes could be narrower than ever: as technology marches on, it becomes feasible to sustain groups with fewer and fewer members over long distances.
-
-Social media takes this to a new level, making it easier than ever for people with common interests, even obscure ones, to find each other and cohere. (My wife visits a Facebook page whose multinational membership is interested in the health benefits of a certain kind of smoothie-based diet.) So expect to see more and more narrow communities of interest, many of them international—people with certain ideologies, certain hobbies, certain illnesses, whatever. All of which can be a great thing; narrow tribes can provide people with fun or enlightenment or solace—and, of course, with a sense of community.
-
-And when tribes are international, there can be other benefits. Given that wars and lesser conflicts often happen along national borders, it’s probably good to have tribes of shared interest cross those borders—slender threads of transnational concord. And certain kinds of international tribes—vocational ones, for example—can join in the dialogue that shapes the policies of international bodies like the World Trade Organization. This capacity of digitally-organized tribes to help consolidate global social organization is a development I highlighted in *Nonzero;* the book is in no small part about the drift of history toward global community—and is an argument that, though crossing the threshold to true global community isn’t inevitable, it’s the only alternative to catastrophe.
-
-However, international integration, for all its virtues, can entail national fragmentation. One grievance that drove support for Donald Trump in 2016 was that American coastal elites felt more connected to elites in other countries than to their fellow Americans in the heartland. And there was some truth to that! There’s also truth to the European version of it—that some elites in France and Germany and Britain feel closer to one another than to the working stiffs in their own countries.
-
-Interestingly, there have been [attempts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Movement_(populist_group)) to counter this international network of elites with an international network of Trumpist nationalists (however ironic that may sound). I can actually imagine this kind of international populist tribe becoming a stable part of a global community—but this isn’t the place to elaborate on that long-term scenario (which I’ve done [elsewhere](https://www.wired.com/story/trump-style-nationalism-make-globalism-great-again/)). My main point is that one big development of recent decades—the formation of international tribes whose cohesion sometimes comes at the expense of national cohesion—was bound to happen, given the direction of technological evolution; and it was bound to be turbulent.
-
-And, leaving aside the inherent tensions of moving toward a global level of social organization, there are lots of other digital-technology-abetted (and sometimes specifically social-media-abetted) problems to worry about. Like QAnoners and other conspiracy theory tribes. And violent political extremist tribes. And intense animosity among even less extreme ideological tribes. And so on.
-
-So, all told, I agree with Haidt: We face a big challenge! If I’m slightly more optimistic than he is about meeting the challenge, I think it’s because I see the problem as less radically new than he does.
-
-By that I don’t just mean that I see social media, and the internet broadly, sustaining a trend we’ve seen at earlier technological thresholds, such as the print revolution—a trend toward more tribes, often narrower tribes, and sometimes more intensely combative tribes. I also mean that the prime mover of the antagonism now emanating from some of the tribal boundaries is the same as it ever was: the psychology of tribalism. Martin Luther pushed the buttons that are being pushed now.
-
-The psychology of tribalism is an extremely hard thing to grapple with. But at least grappling with it is a single, identifiable challenge. Having a big and difficult challenge that’s the key to curing epic troubles is probably better than having a zillion little challenges that are the key—and is way better than not being able to figure out what the key is.
-
-Haidt certainly isn’t oblivious to this challenge. He’s spent a lot of time on the psychology of tribalism in the past, and in the Atlantic piece he mentions the problem of confirmation bias—which, in [my conception](https://nonzero.substack.com/p/what-is-tribalism?s=w) of the psychology of tribalism, at least, plays a big role, along with some other cognitive biases. Still, he seems to want to view the problems he’s describing as not fundamentally rooted in this psychology. Near the outset of the piece he tells us that “Babel is not a story about tribalism.”
-
-But his logic here doesn’t make sense to me. It’s in elaborating on this assertion that he says Babel is “a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.”
-
-Yes, I’m familiar with divisions within families; three of my four siblings voted for Trump. But this intra-family division is fundamentally tribal—not just because it’s a red-blue division, but because it activates, and is sustained by, the same mental mechanisms that mediate bitter tribal conflict broadly. When, in November of 2016, I was walking down a bucolic street screaming at my brother over the phone, the psychology of tribalism was at work.
-
-So too within “universities, companies, professional associations, museums.” If they’re divided, then they’re probably divided by something that is in some sense ideological—a tribal boundary that cuts through the university or company or whatever but extends beyond it. And the psychology of tribalism is what keeps that boundary tense.
-
-Haidt works at a university, and universities have been the scene of some rough battles over issues he cares deeply about, such as cancel culture. I suspect that if you’re in the middle of that war it can seem pretty crazy—as if you’re trying to reason with people who evince no signs of reason, who have succumbed to flat-out delusion; as if humankind has been afflicted by a wholly new malady.
-
-But from where I sit, what looks like delusion (and may in some cases *be* delusion) is just the operation of some of the cognitive biases that constitute the psychology of tribalism. Tribalism-related delusions have always been with us. They may be worse than usual now—that’s what a revolution in information technology can do to people—but they’re still part of the psychology of tribalism.
-
-So I guess that I, more than Haidt, have a grand unified theory of the problem he’s worried about. My theory in a nutshell: The inexorable march of information technology, combined with the psychology of tribalism, has heightened turbulence, loathing, and delusion before, and it’s doing that now.
-
-And it’s doing *a lot* of that now—in part because of how rapidly the information technology is evolving, in part because of the forms it’s assuming (most notably social media), but also, I think, because of the magnitude of the attendant change in social structure: a movement from national toward international social organization.
-
-In underscoring the importance of working to erode the psychology of tribalism (a challenge approachable from various angles, including one I wrote [a book](https://www.amazon.com/Why-Buddhism-True-Philosophy-Enlightenment-ebook/dp/B01MPZNG63/ref=sr_1_1?crid=248V6S94MQHDO&keywords=%22why+buddhism+is+true%22&qid=1651159723&sprefix=why+buddhism+is+true+%2Caps%2C71&sr=8-1) about), I don’t mean to detract from the value of piecemeal reforms. Haidt offers worthwhile ideas about how to make social media less virulent and how to reduce the paralyzing influence of information technology on democracy. (He spends a lot of time on the info tech and democracy issue—and, once again, I’d say he’s identified a big problem but also a longstanding problem; I wrote about it in 1995, in a Time magazine piece whose [archival version](http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,163516,00.html) is mis-dated as 2001.) The challenge we face is too big to let any good ideas go to waste, and Haidt’s piece includes some good ones.
-
-Still, I do think that stepping back and looking at the trajectory of history lets us assess the current turmoil with less of a sense of disorientation than Haidt seems to feel. At least, that’s one takeaway from my argument in *Nonzero*, which chronicled how the evolution of technology, especially information technology, had propelled human social organization from the hunter-gatherer village to the brink of global community—a threshold that, I argued, we will fail to cross at our peril.
-
-This isn’t the place to try to recapitulate that argument in compelling form. (There’s a reason I devoted a whole book to it.) So there’s no reason the argument should make sense to you right now. All I can say is that if you do ever have occasion to assess the argument, and it does make sense to you, the turbulence we’re going through will also make more sense to you.
-
-[Share](https://nonzero.substack.com/p/is-everything-falling-apart?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&action=share)
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-*Image: Detail from The Harrowing of Hell by Hieronymous Bosch*
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-# Is There a Future for Late-Night Talk Shows?
-
-Big changes are coming to the longtime staple of television programming, as the genre struggles to make the leap to the streaming world.
-
-
-
-Credit...Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times
-
-Published Oct. 9, 2022Updated Oct. 10, 2022
-
-Trevor Noah is [leaving “The Daily Show](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/29/arts/television/trevor-noah-daily-show.html)” next year. James Corden, the host of CBS’s “The Late Late Show,” will depart his show then as well. TBS canceled “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee” this year.
-
-And at NBC, executives are mulling giving up the [10 p.m. hour to local stations](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/26/business/media/nbc-prime-time.html). If they make that move, “The Tonight Show,” for the first time in its seven-decade run, could begin as early as 10:30 p.m.
-
-All of this has unleashed a big question inside the television industry: What is the future of the late-night talk show?
-
-For decades, late-night shows have been an enormously successful franchise for network television. The costs of the shows were relatively low, and the number of programming hours they offered, as well as the profits they kicked off, was enormous.
-
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-Credit...Terence Patrick/CBS via Getty Images
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-But as streaming has ascended, and network TV audiences and advertising revenue has dwindled, worries that late-night shows could be the latest genre affected by sweeping change are hitting virtually every corner of the entertainment world.
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-Streaming services like Netflix and Hulu have taken a crack at talk shows, but with little success. The shows — whether through an opening monologue or an interview with a celebrity who has a movie premiering soon — depend on topicality, something that has not quite translated to streaming.
-
-“It’s a weird transition time,” said Gavin Purcell, a [former showrunner](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/business/media/jimmy-fallon-tonight-show.html) of “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” “There’s nothing about this that feels normal for the late-night world.”
-
-Viewers used to have a “deep bond” with late-night hosts, said Rob Burnett, the former executive producer for “The Late Show With David Letterman,” in part because there was little else to watch at that hour.
-
-“I do not think that will ever exist again,” he said.
-
-More moves could be afoot. NBCUniversal executives, as part of their discussions about the 10 p.m. hour, are also weighing the future of the network’s 12:30 a.m. show, “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” according to three people with knowledge of the discussions, who were not authorized to speak about them publicly.
-
-Executives have discussed a wide range of possibilities for Mr. Meyers’s show, including moving it to another time slot, reducing the number of people on its staff and shifting it to the Peacock streaming service or to MSNBC, two of the people said.
-
-Image
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-Credit...Bryan Derballa for The New York Times
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-“In every scenario that we’re discussing right now, both ‘The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon’ and ‘Late Night With Seth Meyers’ remain on NBC,” the network said in a statement.
-
-Some executives have concluded that the cost to produce some late-night shows, particularly at 12:30 a.m., is no longer feasible in an era of sinking ratings.
-
-Revenue has fallen for the late-night shows. Through the first six months of 2021, the four late-night shows on network television took in a total of $301 million in advertising revenue, according to Kantar. Through the first six months of this year, that figure fell 16 percent, to $253.6 million. Mr. Meyers’s show generated $24.6 million in advertising revenue through the first six months of 2021, compared with $19 million in the first six months of 2022, Kantar said.
-
-Indeed, ratings for the late-night shows have been falling so much that the political comedy show “Gutfeld!” on Fox News at 11 p.m. frequently draws more viewers than any of the longstanding network late-night franchises.
-
-Late-night shows have also struggled to make the transition to streaming video, another consideration weighing on executives. The topical opening monologue, a staple of the genre, has virtually no shelf life in streaming libraries.
-
-Image
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-Credit...Lloyd Bishop/NBC
-
-Netflix tried to make talk shows work over the years, giving shows to hosts like Chelsea Handler, Hasan Minhaj, Michelle Wolf and Joel McHale. [All of them were canceled](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/business/media/netflix-talk-shows.html), and Netflix executives have moved on from the format. Likewise, Hulu attempted a talk show with Sarah Silverman, which was canceled after 21 episodes. Jon Stewart has a show on Apple TV+, which struggled to garner much attention during its first season.
-
-The current crop of late-night network hosts don’t seem to want a lifetime appointment, also hastening the changes.
-
-Mr. Noah said he wanted to “carry on exploring” another part of his life. His announcement surprised much of his staff and even top executives at Paramount, Comedy Central’s parent company.
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-Mr. Noah will continue to host for the next few months. A spokeswoman for Comedy Central said, “We’re excited for the next chapter.”
-
-When Mr. Corden announced his departure, he also said he wanted to “see what else might be out there.”
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-Mr. Burnett, Mr. Letterman’s former executive producer, said there were more opportunities now than there were 20 years ago.
-
-Image
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-Credit...NBC Television/Getty Images
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-“I think the Carson playbook of 40 years talking to celebrities is probably a thing of the past,” he said, referring to Johnny Carson’s longtime run as host of “The Tonight Show.” “It’s not just that the audience doesn’t want it. It’s also that I think the hosts want more than to sit behind the same desk for 40 years.”
-
-Conan O’Brien, a late-night host for nearly three decades, saw his audience figures falling each year before leaving his TBS late-night show last year. He has found success in an entirely different medium: podcasting. Mr. O’Brien’s company recently sold his podcasting company to SiriusXM. Jeff Ross, Mr. O’Brien’s longtime executive producer, said that, in their nearly three decades in late night, “we saw a lot of changes.”
-
-“It just felt like a good time to move on and try some different things, and that’s what we are doing,” he said.
-
-Image
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-Credit...Michael Nagle for The New York Times
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-The host behind the desk is not going to go away immediately. Jimmy Kimmel recently re-signed his contract, keeping him on [ABC through 2026](https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/jimmy-kimmel-signs-year-extension-abc-late-night-90223639). Stephen Colbert, the most-watched network late-night host, is signed through next year, and Mr. Fallon signed a contract extension in late 2020.
-
-The shows may take on new forms, though. Executives at CBS have said the late-night show that will succeed Mr. Corden’s program will not be a replica of what’s come before it. George Cheeks, the president of CBS, [said](https://deadline.com/2022/05/the-late-late-show-cbs-looking-to-experiment-in-late-night-slot-james-corden-exit-1235026760/) this year that he was considering a “replacement format” for the show, adding, “I don’t believe that we’ll just be putting out another host there.”
-
-Mr. Purcell, the former “Tonight Show” showrunner, said he could imagine a kind of late-night show existing on a streaming service, appearing after something like Amazon’s broadcast of “Thursday Night Football.”
-
-“That could bring back these shows eventually,” he said. “I think the broadcast TV model going away is what stops people from watching them as much.”
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-/
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-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
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diff --git a/00.03 News/Is tech gentrifying Latin America’s cities.md b/00.03 News/Is tech gentrifying Latin America’s cities.md
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-Alias: [""]
-Tag: ["📟", "✈", "🌎"]
-Date: 2022-02-20
-DocType: "WebClipping"
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-```button
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-```
-^button-IstechgentrifyingLatinAmericacitiesNSave
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-
-
-# Is tech gentrifying Latin America’s cities?
-
-A non-negligible contingent of _Rest of World_’s U.S. team was in Mexico City recently, and I was faced with an unexpected problem: masses of fedora-donning foreigners on their laptops, sitting at café tables that I needed for my own laptop-wielding team of foreigners. (Sadly, my crew wasn’t wearing fedoras.)
-
-Just last week, Mexico City’s Twitter was abuzz, debating the influx of digital nomads from the U.S. (I’m going to avoid using [the g-word](https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2011/01/24/133117715/is-the-word-gringo-offensive-or-just-distracting)). While some tweets supported the good work (and money) that devs, VCs, and Mex-curious tech people were bringing to the city, others decried the beginning of a San Francisco–like colonial effect, where locals were priced out by (among others) rich foreigners.
-
-Of course, tech-driven influxes aren’t new, and gentrification itself has been a part of life long before the tech industry. But the pandemic has thrown things out of whack.
-
-You could argue that the foreign diaspora in Latin American cities will subside if and when people are forced to return to offices in their home countries. But Mexico’s laissez-faire approach allows some to collectively pretend that the pandemic isn’t over: No shoes, no shirt, no PCR? No problem!
-
-More than people, it’s the [flow of foreign money](https://restofworld.org/2022/latin-america-startup-developer-scarcity/) that threatens/promises to make the biggest difference. Even if Americans flock back home or to other destinations, Latin America’s time zone alignment with the U.S. will always make it an attractive destination.
-
-Moreover, the nature of perpetual crisis in the region makes the temptation to hire Latin Americans an ever growing one. Inflation and currency devaluation are making the region more affordable to U.S. dollar holders by the day. Slumping job markets put a highly skilled workforce out of work. Countries like Chile and Argentina have long been rejigging universities and accelerators to focus on STEM, R&D development, and entrepreneurship, and these people make for attractive remote employees.
-
-Couple that with the obscene amounts of money VCs are trying to invest across less saturated markets around the world, and what we may be witnessing isn’t so much “gentrification” of Latin American cities but the newest iteration of the brain drain: one which works in reverse. Now, the educated and skilled do not leave for greener pastures, but rather stay put and price everyone else out of tech hubs like São Paulo, Mexico City, Santiago, Buenos Aires …
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diff --git a/00.03 News/It was a secret road map for breaking the law to get an abortion. Now, ‘The List’ and its tactics are resurfacing.md b/00.03 News/It was a secret road map for breaking the law to get an abortion. Now, ‘The List’ and its tactics are resurfacing.md
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-Tag: ["🤵🏻", "🇺🇸", "🚺", "❌"]
-Date: 2022-07-17
-DocType: "WebClipping"
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-Link: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/The-List-abortions-before-Roe-17291284.php
-location:
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-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
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-```button
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-id Save
-```
-^button-ItwasasecretroadmaptogetanabortionNSave
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-
-# It was a secret road map for breaking the law to get an abortion. Now, ‘The List’ and its tactics are resurfacing
-
-1. She flew to San Francisco in June 1968 to meet a friend who knew someone who knew someone. Karen L. was 24 and eight weeks pregnant, arriving from Los Angeles. The woman picked her up at San Francisco International and carefully explained what to do next. There was a phone number; there was a code phrase. From the friend’s apartment, Karen dialed the number and spoke the phrase:
-
-A female voice greeted her.
-
-Karen was determined to end her pregnancy. A fifth-grade teacher with red hair and an allergy to birth-control pills, she had been practicing the rhythm method of contraception with her boyfriend, Erwin, who had studied to be a dentist. Though he’d offered to marry her when they found out she was pregnant, Karen did not believe in “shotgun marriages,” as she told him, and she did not want a child right then. She wasn’t ready, mentally or financially. She had grown up in a liberal Jewish family that believed abortion was an individual’s choice, in line with Jewish law and tradition.
-
-But this was five years before Roe v. Wade held that the Constitution protects the right to choose abortion. The procedure was banned or heavily restricted in most states, including California. Typically, according to the legal system, a person seeking an abortion, a person like Karen, was a person plotting a crime.
-
-On the phone at her friend’s apartment, Karen was afraid to give her name, and the voice on the other end did not ask for it. The woman simply gave her an address — 30 Clement St. — and a set of instructions: Ring the bell four times. Mention “Patricia Maginnis.” Then proceed to the second floor.
-
-Karen and her friend soon found themselves at a Victorian house divided into apartments in San Francisco’s Inner Richmond neighborhood. Up a steep flight of stairs, the landing gave way to polished wood floors and a living room and dining room that contained little else but tables and some bookshelves. They saw piles of literature and some women quietly stuffing envelopes with papers.
-
-The women told the two L.A. visitors to join them. Karen didn’t look too closely at the literature, only noticing that it mentioned political efforts to make abortion legal. After two hours, a woman beckoned Karen into a smaller room, telling the friend to stay behind.
-
-The woman gestured toward a set of photocopies in neat stacks, numbered pages of a single long document. This was the “Specialist Listing,” or simply “the List.” It contained the names and phone numbers of dozens of abortion providers in Mexico and Japan, along with tips about selecting a provider in those countries, preparing for the surgery and — if necessary — dodging the police.
-
-It was a road map for breaking the law to get a safe abortion.
-
----
-
-Now Playing:
-
-In 1968, at 24 years old, Karen L. needed an abortion, which was illegal in the U.S. She relied on an underground network of activists in San Francisco to obtain the surgery. Video: Reshma Kirpalani Special to The Chronicle
-
-2. “No law can stop a woman,” Karen L. recently told The Chronicle, which is identifying her by first name and last initial, as she requested for privacy and safety reasons. “I was going to risk my life,” she said. “But I was still going to do it.”
-
-The day 54 years ago when she visited the apartment on Clement Street and read the List, she realized she could be thrown in prison, or worse. She carefully folded a few pages of the List into an envelope, left the activists’ apartment, flew back to L.A. and began planning a trip to Mexico.
-
-Polls show that a majority of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases. More than two dozen leading medical associations say abortion is a safe and essential part of health care. But the GOP-appointed majority on the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe last month, calling the precedent “egregiously wrong from the start” and claiming the Constitution does not protect the right to abortion. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote separately that he would not go as far, upholding an Mississippi abortion ban while calling the majority’s decision an “unnecessary” and “dramatic” one that guts Roe “down to the studs.”
-
-The decision paves the way for states or the federal government to ban abortion. Eight states have now made it illegal in all or most cases, with more states moving to pass bans. Some Republican Party officials are going further, crafting state laws to stop patients from traveling to other states for abortion care. In the meantime, Democratic Party leaders like Gov. Gavin Newsom say they’ll defend abortion access and offer sanctuary. On Friday, President Biden signed an executive order that takes small steps to protect some abortion patients and providers.
-
-Years of scientific studies show that restrictive laws don’t stop abortions, but drive them underground instead. Women will still get abortions, and so will transgender and nonbinary people, who face additional barriers and stigmas. Abortion-rights advocates are telling people on social media to delete their period trackers and start using secure-messaging apps. Some activists are already preparing patients to evade surveillance and break the law to get care.
-
-In other words, they’re doing what the List’s architects were doing more than half a century ago.
-
-Created in San Francisco by a former U.S. Army nurse named Patricia Maginnis, the List was merely the visible component of a well-organized and efficient clandestine network that sprawled across multiple countries and incorporated the wisdom of thousands. It guided about 12,000 people to safe abortions before Roe, evolving into one of the biggest feminist projects in the country — comparable in scope to Jane, a similar group in Chicago and the subject of a recent [HBO documentary](https://www.hbo.com/movies/the-janes).
-
-But the List is not as well known today. Even Maginnis, who died last summer at 93, is hardly a household name, despite the fact that her radical approach transformed the abortion debate and inspired the creation of NARAL Pro-Choice America, the prominent national advocacy group. “She deserves to be much more famous than she is,” said Lili Loofbourow, an Oakland-based staff writer for Slate who [profiled Maginnis in 2018](https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/12/pat-maginnis-abortion-rights-pro-choice-activist.html). “The debate still has not caught up to where she was.”
-
-The Chronicle recently spent three days at the Schlesinger Library in Massachusetts, part of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, examining hundreds of manila folders full of files that Maginnis donated. These are records from the two groups she co-founded in the mid-1960s: the Society for Humane Abortion, or SHA, which published educational materials and sponsored public talks about the need for safe abortions, and the Association to Repeal Abortion Laws, or ARAL, which dealt in underground activities and maintained the List.
-
-The records document every aspect of the List’s creation and upkeep. They are both meticulously detailed and secretive, marked everywhere with code numbers that ARAL employed to preserve the privacy of doctors and patients in an era when police and prosecutors sought to expose them.
-
-While many of these files have been available since the late 1970s, some were sitting in Maginnis’ East Oakland home until 2017. These particular folders have received little attention.
-
-They are full of letters that women and their loved ones wrote to her, begging for help.
-
-Some are neatly typed, others handwritten on pink or purple or white or yellow paper. Drawings of flowers peek out from the edges of custom stationery. Almost all are redacted, with names and addresses blacked out or excised with scissors. They vary in length from an index card (“I NEED HELP!!”) to an eight-page missive written “in the middle of the nite (sic).” The postmarks are from every corner of California and all over the country: Michigan, New York, Florida, Ohio, Alaska.
-
-The common thread is a tone of urgency, often bordering on desperation:
-
-*“Since I am 6 weeks pregnant, every day is quite important to me, so please act accordingly.” (woman in Elgin, Ill.)*
-
-*“I have almost reached the state of panic.” (college student, L.A.)*
-
-*“This is an S.O.S. letter.” (27-year-old divorcee, San Francisco)*
-
-*“I can’t have it, but don’t want to kill myself. The boys need me. But I’m going crazy trying to figure a way out.” (44-year-old widow and mother of three sons, Florida)*
-
-There are hundreds and hundreds of these letters.
-
-As might be expected, many of them concern young women who, like Karen L., had never been pregnant before. High school students, college students, office workers. They told Maginnis they wanted to finish school; they were broke or in debt; they couldn’t afford a kid; they just weren’t ready.
-
-However, a substantial number of letter-writers said they were already mothers, raising children in stable marriages or as divorcees. The Supreme Court had affirmed the legal right to contraception only in 1965, and it was still not widely available. Wives shared stories of failed IUDs and adverse reactions to birth-control pills. “I wish you every success in your crusade against our present laws,” wrote a Long Beach woman in January 1968, signing the letter with her husband’s name and a “Mrs.” in front. “Women like myself who are married and cannot take the ‘Pill’ for medical reasons are really trapped.”
-
-Strikingly, the medical establishment offered little comfort to women in that era. Over and over in letters to ARAL, women said they had already asked their usual doctors for help but had been turned down. “Our family doctor … told us he was sorry, understood our plight, but could not help,” wrote a mother of five in Westminster (Orange County) in early 1967.
-
-Doctors found themselves in positions they found nearly impossible. Philip Darney, a longtime obstetrician at San Francisco General Hospital, was a UCSF medical student training there in the late 1960s. “We didn’t learn anything about abortion in medical school,” he recalled in an interview. But his teachers spoke about being haunted by “the carnage” that resulted from botched abortions and people who tried to end their pregnancies themselves: wreckage to internal organs, gory infections. A California public health official estimated in 1962 that between 18,000 and 108,000 illegal abortions were performed *annually* in the state. In 1965, there were about 200 deaths in the U.S. from such surgeries.
-
-Sometimes individual doctors did flout the law in private, performing abortions for longtime patients — Darney said the medical students heard occasional “whispers” of abortions at S.F. General — but it was a huge professional risk. Physicians could be prosecuted, their patients interrogated and dragged into court. In 1966, after nine UCSF gynecologists performed abortions for women infected with rubella, which could cause severe birth defects, the state medical board accused them of “professional misconduct” and threatened to pull their licenses.
-
-Starting in late 1967, California law changed to allow abortions to be performed in a hospital, but only in severely limited cases and subject to approval by male-dominated hospital boards. Such restrictions continued to drive patients toward illegal providers, despite the notorious medical risks.
-
-And there were all kinds of scary outcomes of illegal abortions that fell short of long-term injury or death. In 1968, 15-year-old Wendy Winston of Los Angeles learned she was pregnant by her high school boyfriend. Her family hired a nurse practitioner to perform an at-home abortion when she was about three months along, Winston said.
-
-
-
-Wendy Winston at home near Los Angeles. She got pregnant at age 15, and had a frightening experience with an at-home illegal abortion.
-
-Brontë Wittpenn/The Chronicle
-
-The teenager was overwhelmed; the nurse, who seemed anxious, explained little. Winston remembers that the nurse inserted a plastic tube into her vagina, which soon caused contractions and lots of bleeding, which the nurse tried to slow with gauze. She gave Winston thick period pads to put in her underwear, then left the home. Winston bled through the night with her mother at her side. The next morning, she felt the fetus pass.
-
-Without an abortion, “I wouldn’t have been able to finish high school, since both my mom and my dad worked and my grandmother was too old to take care of a baby,” Winston, who is now 69 and still lives in the L.A. area, recently told The Chronicle. But at the time, she found the experience terrifying.
-
-
-
-Pls combo caption here: A 1990s photo of then 43-year-old Wendy Winston after she graduated college at Loyola Marymount University can be seen in her home in Venice, Calif. on Wednesday, June 29, 2022. When Winston was 15 she became pregnant while dating her high school boyfriend. When a doctor said he couldn’t perform an abortion, Winston’s mother, Patricia, hand-wrote a letter to an underground, feminist healthcare network that existed in the 60s that helped women and their families get connected to providers to obtain abortions. The organization, Society for Human Abortion, was able to connect Winston with a nurse who performed the abortion at her home. After the abortion and two decades later Winston went on to have two daughters of her own, graduated college as a single mother and ran several businesses.
-
-Provided by Wendy Winston / Provided by Wendy Winston
-
-
-
-A photo of Wendy Winston’s mother Patricia Anne Luer with her grandchild and Wendy’s daughter Analisa Curzi in 1994. Provided by Wendy Winston
-
-Left: Wendy Winston in a photo taken when she graduated from Loyola Marymount University at age 43 in the 1990s. Right: Winston’s mother, Patricia Anne Luer, with her grandchild, Winston’s daughter Analisa Curzi, in 1994. Photos provided by Wendy Winston Top: Wendy Winston in a photo taken when she graduated from Loyola Marymount University at age 43 in the 1990s. Above: Winston’s mother, Patricia Anne Luer, with her grandchild, Winston’s daughter Analisa Curzi, in 1994. Photos provided by Wendy Winston
-
-Foreign abortions introduced yet more unknowns. While the rich could get care in countries where abortion was legal, like Japan, many people could only afford a trip to Mexico. The procedure, banned there, was widely available through illegal providers, but few patients knew how to navigate the Mexican abortion landscape. For instance, Winston’s mother, Patti, had initially considered taking her across the border for an abortion but decided against it, as she explained in a letter to ARAL in September 1968. “I hate to do that for fear of falling into the hands of someone who is not a reputable doctor,” Patti wrote.
-
-Now Playing:
-
-Wendy Winston said that her mother, Patricia, hand-wrote a letter to an underground, feminist healthcare network that existed in the 60s that helped women and their families get connected to providers to obtain abortions. Video: Bronte Wittpenn The Chronicle
-
-Patients during those years were so demoralized by the lack of safe options that many told ARAL they wanted to kill themselves. “Please I’m so scared I don’t know what to do,” a young woman in Daly City typed in April 1968. “Sometimes I think it would solve everything if I were dead.” Men often reported that wives and girlfriends were uttering disturbing comments. “I am afraid for her welfare,” a 20-year-old UC Santa Barbara student wrote that year. “She would kill herself rather than tell her parents.”
-
-Some of the most desperate situations involved rape. Multiple letters in the ARAL archive mention rape victims who had been too afraid to tell police and were now carrying their rapist’s baby. In 1968, a Chicago man told Maginnis about the recent rape of his fiancee. “She was to (sic) terrified to tell anyone, including myself,” he wrote. “When her period did not materialize when it should have, she broke down and told me the entire story.”
-
-Regardless of age or circumstance, most everyone writing to San Francisco asked for the same thing: Names of competent abortion providers. They wanted a copy of the List.
-
----
-
-
-
-Patricia Maginnis at a 1971 Women’s Abortion Action Coalition conference and demonstration.
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-Bob O’Connor / Special to The Chronicle 1971
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-3. The List began with an act of civil disobedience. On June 16, 1966, Patricia Maginnis carried a shopping bag full of yellow leaflets into the Financial District. A slender woman of 38 in an overcoat and dark pumps, she spent the day handing the sheets to passersby in front of office buildings, as well as at the Federal Building and UCSF, where the state medical board was meeting.
-
-“At the entrance to the campus,” a Chronicle reporter noted at the time, “she gave a leaflet to a priest, who returned a few minutes later and gave it back.”
-
-“ARE YOU PREGNANT?” one of the leaflets read. “IS YOURS A WANTED PREGNANCY? IF NOT, WHY NOT SEE AN ABORTIONIST.” It went on to give the names and contact information of 10 abortion providers in Mexico, one in Japan and a clinic in Sweden.
-
-It was the first draft of the List.
-
-Maginnis actually hoped the act of circulating it would get her arrested. California law at the time forbade “soliciting” an abortion or “providing and supplying” the means for procuring one — felonies punishable by up to five years in prison. She wanted to challenge the law in court, which could only happen if she were first handcuffed and charged. But no police intervened that day, likely fearing the very publicity she was trying to spur: Maginnis was fast becoming one of the most influential abortion-rights activists in America.
-
-Raised in a strict Catholic home in Oklahoma, she’d been radicalized by her experiences as an Army nurse in the 1950s, stationed at bases in Panama and the U.S. and caring for women in obstetrics wards. She saw a lot of forced birth there — women made to deliver babies they had already tried and failed to abort by their own hands, or non-viable babies with severe birth defects. Once she saw doctors place a wire cage over the bed of a screaming woman during a delivery, “as if she were an animal,” Maginnis later told a reporter for Los Angeles FM & Fine Arts magazine.
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-It wasn’t enough to relax or “reform” abortion laws, she felt; they all just had to go. After leaving the Army and moving to San Francisco, Maginnis met two friends who felt the same — Rowena Gurner, a Palo Alto electronics designer, and Lana Phelan, a Long Beach legal assistant — and they formed SHA and ARAL to spread the message. “We regard abortion as a simple surgical procedure and not a criminal offense,” SHA literature declared: Abortion was medicine, and it should be available to anyone, at any time, without apology, ideally for free.
-
-“She’s really the first one who starts to write that way: The laws are wrong,” said Leslie Reagan, professor of history at the University of Illinois, who has studied ARAL and wrote the book “When Abortion Was a Crime.” “She’s not afraid of what anyone thinks of her.”
-
-Their entire budget for 1966 was less than $10,000, supplemented by whatever Maginnis earned from working weekend shifts at a hospital lab. Their headquarters was her walk-up apartment in the Richmond. “She said, ‘We’re going to do this with Scotch tape and Xeroxes, and pick up clothes off the street and wear them,’” said Loofbourow, the Slate writer.
-
-That intensity drew people to Maginnis. She worked with Black organizers in San Francisco to advocate legalization and printed leaflets in Spanish. Along with Gurner and Phelan, she taught abortion classes in the Bay Area and on trips to the Midwest. The classes usually began with an overview of female reproductive anatomy, then reviewed various abortion techniques, including surgical procedures such as dilation and curettage (D&C ) and a do-it-yourself technique that involved direct manipulation of the uterus with a finger or a saline wash.
-
-Most patients, she stressed, would be better off with a D&C. It was several times safer than childbirth if performed by a professional, and by the mid-1960s, abortionists in Mexico were doing D&Cs with modern suction equipment. “So *please* won’t you go to Mexico if you possibly can?” Maginnis implored a group of Palo Alto women who gathered to hear her speak in 1967.
-
-ARAL believed that despite its considerable risks, Mexico was the best option for many patients. Though Mexican police did routinely arrest or harass abortion providers, they had no power to chase anyone back into the U.S., which gave visitors some protection. And it was close, of course, which reduced the time and expense of the journey: A woman in California, Arizona, New Mexico or Texas could cross the border in the morning and be home that night.
-
-After June 1966, when Maginnis put abortionists’ names on leaflets as a form of protest and California media covered it, demand for the information grew quickly. Soon Maginnis was answering 75 phone calls a week at Clement Street, dozens of letters arrived each month requesting copies of the List, and patients and their partners began streaming across the border into Mexico, seeking out the highlighted abortion providers.
-
-Naturally, the activists felt responsible for the safety of those patients, so the women of ARAL began to formalize and expand the List, building a system to ensure its accuracy. The system depended on a number of checks and balances, including in-person tours of the clinics by ARAL volunteers, exchanges of letters with the doctors and a paper-and-pencil form of crowdsourcing. Altogether, it amounted to nothing less than “the first open (and illegal) abortion referral service in the United States,” Leslie Reagan wrote in [a 2000 historical study of ARAL](https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178537).
-
-Jane, the abortion underground based in Chicago, also helped women get illegal abortions, but the bulk of their work was training activists to perform secret abortions themselves, instead of pointing people to medical specialists abroad. The List was more like an “underground feminist health agency,” in Reagan’s description: Within a year or two of the first draft, by summer 1968, a couple of women on Clement Street were basically running an international public health department.
-
----
-
-4. In the third week of June 1968, Karen L. packed a Spanish-English dictionary, an oral thermometer, sanitary napkins and “sturdy walking shoes,” as the List advised. A “neat, conservative appearance will make you inconspicuous. If questioned, say you are a tourist.”
-
-She picked Ciudad Juarez, a short taxi ride from the Texas border. It seemed as good a place as any. The first several doctors on the List were all located there, and a few seemed to have positive reviews. On a scrap of paper, she wrote down the phone numbers of the three most promising specialists. One was “a busy family doctor.” Another ran a “large sanitorium” that provided care ranging from “unbelievably excellent to poor.” A third was a highly praised female provider.
-
-In an excess of caution, before getting on the plane to El Paso, where she and her boyfriend would cross the border, Karen scribbled a fourth number, of a male doctor whose description was shorter, with few reviews. She tucked the paper in her bag, leaving the List pages at home.
-
-A few days later, she and Erwin arrived in El Paso.
-
-At a bar pay phone, she unfolded the scrap of paper and plunked in some change. She began to sweat as, one after another, the voices on the other end told her the same thing in halting English or in Spanish, which Karen spoke: They could not help her right now. The first doctor “had to leave to take care of a sick family member”; the second number had been disconnected; the third doctor was not taking patients for two weeks. Please call back then, or in a month.
-
-Panicked now, and feeling weak in the knees, she looked again at the crumpled sheet. The only number she hadn’t tried was for the doctor with the most minimal entry on the List.
-
-Dial tone.
-
-Karen punched in the fourth and last number.
-
-“Patricia Maginnis sent me,” she said.
-
-“Yes,” a woman answered, “I’ll get the doctor.” Moments later, a man greeted her in smooth English and told her exactly what to do next.
-
----
-
-
-
-A leader in the movement for unrestricted abortion, Patricia Maginnis stands next to a bulletin board full of abortion information in Sausalito, Calif. in the 1960s.
-
-Bettmann Archive / Getty Images
-
-5. The abortionists on the List were an eclectic mix. Most, but not all, were licensed physicians. ARAL referred to them broadly as “specialists” and kept a detailed file on each, keyed to a code number.
-
-According to the files, No. 26, a Tokyo doctor, was “a stocky, kind-faced man with very sure hands.” No. 39 was a middle-aged Spaniard with an anxious demeanor and a clean Mexicali clinic two blocks from the U.S. border. No. 8, in San Luis Rio Colorado near Yuma, Ariz., stocked the antibiotic Terramycin and was “highly recommended.” No. 43, in Juarez, “may act as if he doesn’t speak or understand English. Don’t believe it.”
-
-Maginnis brokered informal deals with the specialists. She promised to direct patients to their clinics and avoid exposing the most sensitive details about their practices to law enforcement. In exchange, the specialists agreed to treat the referred patients kindly and charge a reasonable fee. The price of an illegal abortion in Mexico, always paid in cash, ranged widely, from $150 to $700 U.S. ($1,250 to $6,000 in today’s dollars). Cost depended on the provider, the size of his staff and his ethics; Maginnis often haggled the providers down and even negotiated free abortions for patients who could not afford them.
-
-ARAL insisted, too, that providers allow inspections of their facilities. The author Susan Berman visited an abortion clinic in San Luis in 1970 on ARAL’s behalf, filing a colorful dispatch to Clement Street:
-
-More on Roe v. Wade Overturned
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-*The clinic was in a brand new tract type house on the outskirts of San Luis. … The operating room had a table with a clean piece of paper over it, stirrups and a leather cut out for the ass. … The clinic had no thermometers, nor blood pressure taker. Dr. (redacted) said they were probably there but he couldn’t find them. ... Dr. (redacted) said he had been to a private high school in Ohio and to the University of Mexico Medical School. I asked to see his credential but he said he didn’t bring them in case he was busted.*
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-At times, ARAL’s files read more like the records of a democratic resistance movement than a health bureaucracy. Police surveillance was a constant threat, particularly on the Mexico side, requiring the activists and doctors to switch phone numbers, speak through intermediaries and mail each other from hotels. There were times when police pressure forced specialists to lie low for months; their nurses would tell patients the doctor was “on vacation.”
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-Occasionally, ARAL received allegations that a specialist had committed fraud or misconduct, requiring them to scratch a name from the List or append a warning. For example, in October 1967, an 18-year-old college freshman from Palo Alto told Maginnis in a letter that a male provider in Agua Prieta had botched her abortion, damaged her uterus and then tried to rape her. After interviewing the traumatized woman, Gurner wrote to the doctor directly.
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-“Words will not describe how horrified we feel,” she said, demanding that he refund the girl’s $300. “We shall have to warn people who contact us about your unprofessional conduct.” Gurner photocopied the letter, marked it with the specialist’s code (No. 53), and tucked it in his permanent file.
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-Crucially, the activists included a survey form with each copy of the List, asking patients to fill it out and send it back after their surgeries, “for the sake of the next woman,” as Phelan put it once. These accounts, many of which are preserved at the Schlesinger Library, allowed ARAL to incorporate feedback in close to real time.
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-“The operation was carried-out in the strictest hospital way,” a 29-year-old San Francisco woman wrote to Maginnis in 1966 about a San Luis abortion. “I was swabbed liberally with antiseptic liquid — pink — and shaven naked as a babe!!!” The boyfriend of one patient reported that “the whole thing took 20 minutes” in a “spotless” Nogales clinic where “an old mamasita (sic) type” tended to his partner after the procedure.
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-Many patients were so pleased with the care in Mexico that they mailed long narrative accounts of their abortions to Maginnis in addition to filling out the standard ARAL survey. A common theme in these letters is surprise — at how easy it all could be.
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-“The whole experience was completely rewarding and not at all terrifying in any respect to any of us,” wrote a woman who traveled to a Juarez clinic with three other patients in 1967. One woman who went to Nogales for an abortion marveled, “It’s such a simple procedure the most difficult thing is the expense and breaking the law!” Another wrote, “I had my abortion and lived happily ever after.”
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-The more people used the List, fact-checking it as they went, the more reliable it became. A new version was printed most every month, with “Supplements” issued in between on a near-daily basis. Swelling from the original one-page flyer to eight pages to 20, the List ebbed and flowed with the experiences of women and the struggles of providers as they all tried to live their lives and stay out of jail.
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-As well as this system worked most of the time, the fact that it worked at all was a minor miracle, requiring significant effort, luck and trust. Patients relying on the List needed to know that ARAL and the specialists would keep their secret. And there were massive risks inherent to an abortion referral service that ARAL lacked the power to eliminate. All they could do was be as blunt as possible:
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-*WARNING. ABORTION IS ILLEGAL IN MEXICO. DO NOT CARRY THIS LIST INTO MEXICO. The ARAL cannot guarantee refunds in cases of incomplete abortions, nor can we guarantee bail funds in case of arrest …*
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----
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-In 1968, at 24 years old, Karen L. needed an abortion. She traveled to Ciudad Juarez to obtain one.
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-Reshma Kirpalani/Special to The Chronicle
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-6. The morning of Karen’s appointment in Juarez, she and Erwin followed the instructions given over the phone by the doctor. They took a taxi to a fountain in the city’s downtown. Waiting for them there was a handsome, dark-haired man in his 30s: Specialist No. 55. The couple hugged him, pretending they were all old friends. The Americans climbed into his silver car.
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-According to ARAL’s archives, No. 55 was a bit of a mystery at that point. He first appeared on the List in 1967. For unclear reasons, his name had been crossed out in early 1968, months before Karen met him in Juarez. “We do not know if he is a physician,” ARAL had written, and, worse, “We do not trust him.” But then the group toured one of his offices and confirmed his medical credentials — he was an M.D. who had trained at St. Luke’s Hospital in Massachusetts as well as a Juarez hospital — and he was re-added to the List by the time Karen picked up her photocopies at Clement Street.
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-Departing from the city’s fountain, No. 55 drove Karen and her boyfriend through the streets of Juarez, doubling back a few times, before stopping in an alley next to the back door of a building.
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-*Here it is, the proverbial back alley*, Karen remembers thinking. But then the doctor ushered her inside, where she saw “a small, spotless office with two rooms, one for the procedure and one for recovery,” she wrote a few months later in an essay about her abortion. “Instruments were laid out on a shelf behind glass cabinet doors. ... A nurse or assistant greeted us, I changed into a gown, and that’s all I remember before the anesthesia put me out.”
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-She awoke feeling fine, other than some grogginess and slight discomfort. An hour later, she dressed and left with Erwin, who took her back to the hotel. Later that evening the couple went to dinner with the doctor at Martino’s, a Juarez restaurant popular with tourists and featuring a menu of French and Spanish specialties.
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-The next day, Karen threw the crumpled slip of paper with the providers’ names into a trash can and crossed back into the U.S. feeling “huge relief,” she recalled. “I was alive.”
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-An appointment with her L.A. gynecologist a few days later confirmed that she was healthy and the Mexican doctor had done a “good job,” the obstetrician told her. Karen moved on with her life. “I had no regrets of any kind,” she recently said. “I just felt lucky.”
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-Soon after the surgery, Karen remembered her duty to update the List and wrote Maginnis an eight-page letter, a copy of which exists at the Schlesinger Library. Though it contains no name or address — it is signed “A Grateful Soul” — The Chronicle was able to identify Karen’s letter by the date (June 26, 1968) as well as some details, and when emailed a copy, she confirmed it was hers.
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-“Your list was complete and served as a bible in these past few troubled and desperate weeks,” Karen had written, thanking Maginnis and describing Specialist No. 55 as kind, “very polite” and “extremely capable.”
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-Images from events related to abortion rights, including demonstrations in support of legal abortion and women’s rights in San Francisco in the 1970s and ’80s; and the 1935 removal of a woman (top right) from a San Francisco apartment in which illegal abortions were performed.
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-Collage by Daymond Gascon / The Chronicle from elements by Bettmann Archive / Getty Images and The Chronicle
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-7. As the feminist movement gained momentum through the late 1960s, and people kept dying from forced births and botched abortions, public opinion shifted and laws began to change. In 1970, New York legalized abortion up to the 24th week of pregnancy; Roe v. Wade followed in 1973.
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-American doctors were finally able to perform abortions in the open, and the impact was profound. The first full year after Roe, 1974, at least 900,000 patients received legal abortions in 2,000 U.S. hospitals and clinics. Medical schools began teaching the procedure, and abortion was integrated into medical practice. With safe abortions now available, maternal death rates plummeted, and care kept getting better.
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-In the 50 years since Roe, “We have improved abortion techniques and learned an immense amount,” said Darney, who became chief of obstetrics at S.F. General. He and his wife, the psychologist Uta Landy, went on to build what is now the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at UCSF, which pioneered a multidisciplinary model for sexual health. Today, medical research shows that legal abortion in the U.S. is safe and effective — 14 times safer than childbirth, according to a 2012 study, and safer even than colonoscopies and some dental procedures, according to a comprehensive 2018 review.
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-Maginnis and her co-founders never claimed that the List was any substitute for a legal and regulated system of professional medicine. As Rowena Gurner wrote in a 1967 letter, “Some day, we hope the cruel abortion laws will be repealed and that women will be able to go to their own physicians for proper abortion care.”
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-The activists disbanded SHA and ARAL in 1975. But they had achieved something remarkable: Between 1966 and 1970, they had transformed a yellow leaflet into a health service of last resort, helping thousands who had almost nowhere else to turn. Like Karen, who never met Maginnis or gave ARAL her real name, the users of the List were able to preserve their privacy while contributing to an analog database of enormous power, which they used to shape their own fates.
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-After 1968, Karen left teaching and became a social worker, helping Spanish-speaking families. She wanted to work in the field of family planning; the experience in Mexico had convinced her that the right to choose was fundamental. Over the decades, though, she didn’t really talk about her own abortion. Karen is now in her 70s and runs her own company. And it was only a few months ago, hearing that the Supreme Court was poised to reverse Roe, when she dug out the essay she’d written back in the summer of 1968. It had been sitting in a cabinet all this time. The title was “Odyssey Into the Abortion Underground When it was a Crime.”
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-Now there will be “undergrounds everywhere,” Karen said. Yes, they’ll be different, relying on digital tools instead of the Postal Service, and they’ll face new challenges: electronic surveillance, aggressive state bans, vigilantes empowered by law to sue patients and anyone assisting them. But, “If you don’t know about the past, you cannot learn from the past,” she said. “This is what we had to go through.”
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-The List didn’t just change people’s lives by leading them to medical care. It gave them a glimpse of a world that seemed kinder and saner and very much within reach. Over and over, in their post-abortion letters to ARAL, women said their experiences with safe, medical abortions in Mexico had shown them that the United States could easily provide such care. Criminalization was senseless, they said in those letters from the 1960s; it couldn’t possibly last much longer.
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-Many expressed an earnest desire to support the cause of repeal. They told ARAL that if they couldn’t afford to donate money — several apologized for being broke — they would write letters to Congress, tell friends, tell their stories.
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-“Am very grateful for such an organization as yours,” a San Francisco woman wrote to the group in 1968, describing a successful surgery in a small, tidy clinic and a comfortable recovery during which the doctor brought her Pepsi and a light Mexican meal on a tray. “The change in abortion laws shall be accepted before long I’m certain. I shall come in and help when I can.”
-
-*Jason Fagone (he/him) and Alexandria Bordas (she/they) are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: [jason.fagone@sfchronicle.com](mailto:jason.fagone@sfchronicle.com), [alexandria.bordas@sfchronicle.com](mailto:alexandria.bordas@sfchronicle.com) Twitter: [@jfagone](https://twitter.com/jfagone), [@CrossingBordas](https://twitter.com/CrossingBordas)*
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-# It’s 10 PM. Do You Know Where Your Cat Is? | Hakai Magazine
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-Domesticated cats are among the world’s top predators, implicated in the decline of many species. Will a night curfew keep them in check? Photo by Konstantin Zaykov/Shutterstock
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-## It’s 10 PM. Do You Know Where Your Cat Is?
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-## In Iceland, traditionally a land of cat lovers, bans and curfews are redefining the human relationship with domestic cats.
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-### Article body copy
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-In the early months of the coronavirus lockdowns, my wife shared with me a daily dose of cat videos. By shared, of course, I mean she flipped the screen of her phone and thrust it at me across the table: “Look!” And for the next 10 minutes, we’d scroll—cat taking a bubble bath, cat robbing a fishmonger, cat playing the piano to an audience of two cats and a dog. One afternoon, as I came in the door, covered in snow, she greeted me with “Cat Lawyer”—a video of a Texas lawyer stuck on kitten filter during a court case on Zoom. The snow melted off my hat, all over the mobile screen, but we kept watching.
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-“Cat Lawyer” went viral in February 2021, a year into the pandemic, when we had tried for several months to get an actual cat to live with us in northern Iceland. Animal shelters were empty, with hundreds of disappointed people yearning for the comfort and joy of a feline friend. Icelandic cat breeders did not answer their phones, and the local veterinary authority cracked down on illegal kitten dealers for the first time. Cats were having the best year since the invention of the internet—it seemed.
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-Today, as Icelanders embrace freedom again, Icelandic cats are fighting for theirs.
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-In April, Akureyri—the largest municipality in the country’s north, with a population of 19,000 people and some 2,000 to 3,000 cats—decided to ban their feline residents from night roaming outside. Neighboring Húsavík banned cats several years ago from going outdoors day and night. Other Icelandic towns are considering bans as the issue of free-roaming cats increasingly makes its way from online forums to local politics, with the arguments generally falling into two categories. Some people—the “no animals in my backyard” or NAIMBY-ists—proclaim free-roaming cats are nuisances that should be confined like any other pet. Others think beyond the anthropocentric: cats kill birds and disrupt ecosystems.
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-Domestic cats are rarely part of an ecosystem, and despite thousands of years of domestication, cats still prefer their food at 38 °C—the lukewarm temperature of fresh blood. They are far more similar to their ancestors, African wildcats, than dogs are to wolves. Their ear flaps, with 32 muscles to rotate, are extraordinarily quick at picking up high-pitched sounds like a mouse’s squeak. Their eyes are enormous on a petite head and adjust to available light like the aperture of a camera. Whiskers give them a three-dimensional sense, their sheathed claws ensure silence, and they can jump vertically, up to five times their own height without effort.
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-Introduce this elegant assassin to places where migratory birds have adapted to a land free of natural predators and the damage can be irreversible, with some alarming examples worldwide. The International Union for Conservation of Nature Invasive Species Specialist Group lists cats as one of the 100 worst invasive species in the world. Their paw prints are all over the scene. Numerous studies have implicated cats in the global extinction of at least 63 species—40 birds, 21 mammals, two reptiles—and contributed to the endangered status of another 587 species. And nowhere do cats, particularly unowned cats, cause more damage than on islands: free-roaming cat islanders are linked to at least 14 percent of global bird, mammal, and reptile extinctions. In Iceland, a country with only one native terrestrial predator, cats have contributed to the dramatic decline of seabirds and have preyed on off-shore bird colonies.
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-Perhaps pandemic fatigue addled my brain, but only the positives—lower stress levels, for one—associated with pet ownership resonated with our family. Through a series of lucky breaks, we finally found a tabby cat we named Ronja, after the forest-dwelling Astrid Lindgren character. She is adorable but, frankly, a menace to all things living, and my ankles: whenever my feet hang off the bed or sofa or a chair, Ronja takes it as an invitation to attack. Death first came on the inside. Our houseplants died. Window flies she swallowed whole. Once the snow melted, I opened the window. And out she went.
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-[](https://hakaimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/ronja-freedom-from-cats.jpg)
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-Ronja, the author’s cat, has the personality of a serial killer. Photo by Egill Bjarnason
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-In a world where we divide ourselves into cat people or dog people, Iceland has traditionally been the land of cat people. The city of Reykjavík banned dogs for much of the last century, until 1984, based on the idea that they were farm animals. The city’s bourgeoisie cats nap on geothermal-heated sidewalks and befriend world-famous guests—in 2011, the *New Yorker* published Haruki Murakami’s short story “Town of Cats,” probably inspired by his visit to the Reykjavik International Literary Festival, where he noted the lively cat scene. But the felines’ chef-d’œuvre is inducing humans into an annual display honoring the power of cats: each December, the city plants a gigantic metal cat statue downtown at Lækjartorg square opposite the prime minister’s office to celebrate the folkloric Yule Cat, a monster-sized creature who—in the spirit of Christmas!—torments children and eats them alive, specifically those not wearing new clothes for the festivities.
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-This cat companionship is as old as the country itself. The Norse who mastered sailing from northern Europe to this middle-of-nowhere island some 1,150 years ago likely had cats on board their ships. The first cat to put its paws on the stony beach—let’s call him Henry the Viking Cat—had places to raid. Iceland is, in basic geological terms, a volcanic hotspot turned bird colony turned country. When cats arrived, along with livestock, the only other terrestrial mammal was the Arctic fox, which had traveled via sea ice from Greenland, Russia, or North America at some point before written records.
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-[](https://hakaimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/yule-cat-freedom-from-cats.jpg)
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-Christmas celebrations in the Icelandic city of Reykjavík include a giant cat that’s mean to kids. Photo by Arctic Images/Alamy Stock Photo
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-Few wild animals consciously opt for a domestic life. At the dawn of agriculture, the cat agreed to kill a few rodents in exchange for leftovers and—assuming ancient cats were as somnolent as modern cats—places to nap for 12 to 18 hours of the day. Yes, cats played social companions to needy humans in ancient times—killing a cat was punishable by death in ancient Egypt—but their role was farm work. And this wonderful arrangement lasted, roughly speaking, for 10,000 years.
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-Now we want them to stop.
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-Surveys suggest Icelanders’ support for cat curfews is highest in regions with private homes and private gardens. Their reasoning is predominantly idiosyncratic, likening roaming cats to visits from rowdy town drunks. To paraphrase some online comments about cat visitations: “cat urine sprayed the patio,” “challenged another cat to a 3:00 a.m. duel and killed the yellow daffodils,” “last week he came into the house, and the pharmacy is out of pet-allergy drugs.” Cat supporters reply along the lines of, “Get a life and try to tolerate the outside world; cats are a delight and have roamed Iceland as long as we have.”
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-The ecological impact appears secondary to public policy, evident when Húsavík, made famous by the Netflix comedy *Eurovision Song Contest:* *The Story of Fire Saga*, became one of the first European towns to impose a total cat curfew. Back in 2008, the debate began when a local feral—domesticated and unowned—population became troublesome, perhaps because their population hit a tipping point. Cats get pregnant as early as four months old, with one to six kittens per litter. A single female can get pregnant three times a year, and have over 150 descendants within two years. The growing band of unowned cats in Húsavík began to hang out next to a fish farm by the edge of town, snacking on land-grown char. At the same time—a happy accident for the cats—a geothermal drilling project’s runoff water created a permanent wetland for coastal birds to nest in. Spring came, nesting began. Trouble started.
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-[](https://hakaimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/husavik-freedom-from-cats.jpg)
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-The city of Húsavík in northern Iceland, known for its starring role in the movie *Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga*, banned cats from outside in 2008. Photo by Della Huff/Alamy Stock Photo
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-Studies in the United States suggest feral cats cause some 70 percent of bird mortality, which is blamed on cats in general. The most obvious solution to these Húsavík bandits would have been to cull unowned cats and, further, ban all felines in rural parts of the municipality with the largest nesting sites. That would have upset farmers. Instead, local people, who seemed to largely oppose cats as nuisance animals, used the opportunity to impose a cat curfew solely *within* town limits.
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-Menja von Schmalensee, an expert on invasive species at the West Iceland Nature Research Centre, says the ongoing cat wars are often based on idiosyncratic preferences, not science. “There are places where feral cats should absolutely be banned outside, if not cats entirely,” she says. “In other areas, such bans are overly drastic. My worry is that each community will follow the loudest group regardless of facts.”
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-All over the country that same story echoes—particularly from cliffs where birds nest.
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-In 2007, Yann Kolbeinsson, armed with a laptop and a camera mounted on a bendable rod, conducted an annual summer survey of Manx shearwaters on Heimaey, in Iceland’s Westman Islands archipelago. The seabirds are ground nesters on capes and cliffs and spend daytime hours at sea. Kolbeinsson would look for signs of a nest and push the camera down a tunnel until it stopped at a burrow.
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-As he peeked inside, via the black-and-white live stream of his camera, Kolbeinsson would write down brief observations, one after another. Most days, entries went like this: empty, egg, empty, bird, egg, egg, egg, bird, empty, empty. One day, he recorded something entirely new: cat eyes.
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-Four kittens stared straight into the camera. A little feral family was living in a raided home just over one kilometer from the island’s settlement of 4,300 people.
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-This was not good.
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-[](https://hakaimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/westman-islands-freedom-from-cats.jpg)
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-Seabirds, such as Manx shearwaters, nest on capes and cliffs in Iceland’s Westman Islands archipelago. Photo by Michal Hykel/Shutterstock
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-On these 15 dome-shaped islands that make up the Westman Islands, the Manx shearwater created its largest colony in Iceland. A 1990 study indicated a population of 6,000 breeding pairs, which now appears to be on the decline, though recent research is murky. Seabird populations in the region are going down, but researchers consider the changing ocean food web the most vexing problem. Still, in many places, feral cats are exacerbating the decline by attacking and eating chicks.
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-Birds nest on offshore colonies precisely to avoid land predators and take precautions to avoid bigger birds. The storm petrel, for instance, stays out at sea during daylight hours to avoid attack; cats have night vision and are active at night, especially unowned cats. Kolbeinsson points out that removing cats is not always a simple solution since it can in turn make rats and mice*—*which can attack eggs and chicks*—*more prevalent.
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-And then there is toxoplasmosis, a disease caused by a parasite few have heard of but many already have in their bodies. While the majority of human transmissions result from eating raw meat, cats can also spread toxoplasmosis. Cats that hunt wild prey (meaning indoor cats are innocent) are the only animals capable of transmitting the *Toxoplasma gondii* parasite through their feces. Healthy people rarely have symptoms, but the parasite can harm human fetuses if a mother is infected during or right before pregnancy. (Advice for cat owners: clean out the litter box daily. The *T. gondii* parasite does not become infectious until one to five days after it is shed.) About 10 percent of Icelanders have the parasite based on a 2005 study, as do some 40 million Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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-[](https://hakaimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/toxoplasma-gondii-oocyst-freedom-from-cats.jpg)
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-The *Toxoplasma gondii* parasite’s robust oocysts—eggs—easily travel in fresh water and the open ocean. Photo by TGPhoto/Alamy Stock Photo
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-Wild and domestic cats are the only definitive hosts for transmission from the terrestrial environment to the marine environment; without them the organism can’t complete its life cycle. The parasite’s robust oocysts—eggs—easily travel in fresh water and the open ocean. Toxoplasmosis infections have killed endangered Hawaiian monk seals and California sea otters. The parasite affects birds, too, causing anorexia, diarrhea, respiratory distress, and possibly death. A study of 10 species of seabirds in the western Indian Ocean found that 17 percent of them carried antibodies against toxoplasmosis. The ʻalalā, Hawai‘i’s native crow—which survives in captivity but is extinct in the wild—also carries antibodies against the parasite. It’s possible toxoplasmosis arrived in Hawai‘i with Europeans and their domestic cats.
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-Disease aside, it was feral cats’ murderous natures that inspired local exterminator Asmundur Pálsson to act following Kolbeinsson’s discovery. Pálsson began shooting feral cats and laying traps by the foot of the bird colonies, “all to protect our Manx shearwaters,” he says.
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-Pálsson killed about 40 animals the first year but eventually gave up: some people in town kept sabotaging his effort by putting rocks in the traps. Two years earlier, Pálsson, armed with a .22-caliber rifle, had wiped out invasive bunnies—the European coney, native to France, Spain, and Portugal—but when it came to cats, animal welfare appeared to outweigh ecological impact.
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-[](https://hakaimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/bird-in-mouth-freedom-from-cats.jpg)
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-[](https://hakaimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/european-coney-freedom-from-cats.jpg)
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-Which one deserves to die more? Photos by Losonsky/Shutterstock (cat) and Mike Lane/Alamy Stock Photo (rabbit)
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-Instead, a group of volunteers on the island set up a shelter for feral and stray cats, practicing a technique known as trap-neuter-release. But cats are solitary hunters that roam large territories: it takes time and effort to bring a single animal into a shelter, and it’s practically impossible to keep up with population growth. Plus, once released back into the wild—now neutered *and* well nourished—the cat is the same predator, and all feral cats hunt.
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-Solitary habits also make cats hard to count and explain why global cat population estimates range *somewhere* between 500 and 700 million and why estimating the ecological damage of cats has a huge margin of error. Cats kill between 1.3 and four billion birds annually in the United States alone (excluding Hawai‘i and Alaska). The numbers are based on meta-research pulling big-picture data from previously published articles estimating the number of free-roaming cats and their appetite for birds, such as by using stomach and scat analysis. A Canadian study, applying a similar formula, estimates that cats kill between two and seven percent of birds in southern Canada, where most residents live. The first-ever study estimating the problem in China, published in 2021, blames cats for the annual death of 2.9 billion reptiles, four billion birds, and 6.7 billion mammals, on average, in addition to a staggering number of invertebrates, frogs, and fishes.
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-These findings implicate cats as the single greatest source of anthropogenic mortality for birds—a bigger threat than window and building collisions. Even worse than cars and poisoning? The cuddly, cuddly cat.
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-Why are cats so cuddly to humans? They rub against our legs, lick our noses, and knead our stomachs. It’s as if we are another cat to them—and by one theory, that is what we are. Cat behavior researcher John Bradshaw claims that cats see humans as bigger cats. Based on how smaller cats rub on bigger cats when living together, they probably see us as slightly superior kitties but rather clumsy, by cat standards. Bradshaw, in his book *Cat Sense*, rejects the notion that cats bring their prey inside as a gift. Cats, rather, have the tendency to bring prey to a place where they feel safe, but once the feeding begins, they remember—ah, wild meat tastes worse than the chicken-based cat food in the next room.
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-Cats kill far more birds than most people imagine, and their owners appear to often hold the denialism of a parent unable to accept *their* cat as murderous. In one 2013 study, researchers in the US Southeast affixed “kitty cam” body cameras to cats to monitor their hunting: they returned only 23 percent of prey to the house. As a cat owner, I had assumed the six or seven birds Ronja brought inside her first summer was all she had caught. Each time, I was shocked, but it took a wounded whimbrel, a shorebird, fighting for its life on the living room floor for me to accept the problem. Ronja has the character of a serial killer. About one-third of pet cats, mind you, are like the comic strip character Garfield. For the Garfields, hunting is not worth the effort, or only for the rare occasion. Some breeds are more dangerous than others. But for most cats, either they’ve got a killer personality or not: among owned cats, only around 20 percent are considered super hunters, so good at their craft that a single bell around their neck will do little to kill their ambition.
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-[](https://hakaimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/bird-on-floor-freedom-from-cats.jpg)
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-Domestic cats kill between 1.3 and four billion birds annually in the United States alone (excluding Hawai‘i and Alaska). Photo by Rodger Tamblyn/Alamy Stock Photo
-
-At the pet store, the shopkeeper told me a single bell merely showed effort on the owner’s part; at best a bell the size of a marble reduces the cat’s effectiveness by half, but several studies suggest next to no effect. Larger bells work better but they also make noise if the cat is wandering like a Swiss cow around the house at night, causing stress to the hyper-hearing cat. The shopkeeper told me to try a ruffled collar in addition to a bell. The colorful fabric collar, resembling that of a clown, is the antithesis of camouflage and makes the cat, at least in the springtime, 19 times less effective than an unencumbered cat. In the fall, however, the ruffled collars make the cat only 3.4 times less effective. And the collars sometimes fall off. Another option worn around the neck is a long, colorful plastic bib. This contraption is a “pounce protector,” preventing cats from lowering their heads to the ground. The keto diet is another possible solution. A controlled 2021 study of 355 cats in England found that cats on a grain-free, high-meat-protein diet hunted about 40 percent fewer birds than those eating the low-end dry food.
-
-But none of those strategies prevent cats from attacking bird nests. Friends suggested leashing Ronja in the yard. The American Veterinary Medical Association endorses a policy that encourages cat owners to limit outdoor life to outdoor enclosures, such as cat patios—so-called catios*—*or to being on an *attended* leash, effective if training starts when a cat is young. Icelandic veterinary colleagues have spoken out against cat curfews. “Although some cats, who do not know anything else, accept being indoor cats, there are others who do not handle it and confinement can lead to stress and aggressive behavior,” the Icelandic Veterinary Association wrote in a statement last year. The association does, however, support nighttime curfews, especially in the spring when birds nest, since that’s when cats are most effective as hunters. (Research suggests the nocturnal behavior applies more strongly to unowned cats.)
-
-[](https://hakaimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/catio-freedom-from-cats.jpg)
-
-In Húsavík, where pet cats are banned from being outside, a one-year-old named Freddie Mercury enjoys his cat patio—a catio. Photo by Egill Bjarnason
-
-We decided to keep Ronja inside completely during the nesting season and stopped tolerating her admirable escapes. I bought lots of delicious fish jerky for treats and told her that, in fact, some indoor cats live almost four times as long. She put on excessive weight to prove us wrong.
-
----
-
-We have always loved and loathed cats. The Japanese maneki-neko—the beckoning cat, with one paw raised and “waving”—symbolizes luck; a run-of-the-kitty-mill black cat signifies ill fortune. Catholic priests burned cats alive during the European witch-hunt era; Islam admires them for cleanliness. Surveys suggest that in parts of Iceland about 50 percent of residents want cats banned from outside. The debate itself is new. People accepted roaming neighborhood cats, never questioning the wisdom, until others began questioning the, pardon the pun, catus quo.
-
-An attitude shift is happening. “The cat curfew has changed the way people think of cats,” says cat owner Röðull Reyr, who has lived in Húsavík most of his life. “When a teenager sees a cat outside today, they appear provoked, as if they’ve spotted an unwanted guest in their neighborhood.”
-
-In Australia, two municipalities in Melbourne introduced cat curfews: Monash in 2021 and Knox in 2022. Earlier, in 2015, the country embarked on a mission to cull two million feral cats. From mid-2015 to mid-2018, Australia killed 844,000 feral cats with poison and traps. In Europe, two Dutch law professors, writing in an environmental law journal, argued that allowing free-roaming cats violates the Nature Directives, the oldest European Union legislation on the environment. Citing studies of cats’ impact on birds, the authors conclude that cat owners must manage their free-roaming cats and “stray and feral cats … must be removed or controlled when they pose a threat to protected species.”
-
-Your browser does not support the video element.
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-In Japan, the maneki-neko—the beckoning cat, with one paw raised and “waving”—symbolizes luck. Video by VideoLand/Shutterstock
-
-Last November, the town of Akureyri voted to ban outdoor cats entirely as of 2025. Outraged cat supporters all over the country threatened to boycott the town’s famous dairy products in protest. A local artist rallied support for the Cat Party ahead of local elections scheduled this past May. So, four weeks before election day, the ruling majority softened the total ban to a nighttime curfew, and the debate keeps going, defined by idiosyncratic fervor.
-
-Environmental protection agencies in Iceland have, so far, avoided the debate publicly, perhaps explaining why the issue remains underexplored. The estimated number of cats roaming the country remains a question mark. In Akureyri, in accordance with local laws, pet owners have registered only 200 cats, a fraction of the total population. Stronger data helps understand the most fundamental questions: by banning cats outside, will the population of birds in Iceland increase? Experts are unsure of the answer, since most cats roam within towns and most birds nest outside them. Will Icelanders enjoy more birds in their backyard without cats? Quite possibly, and that is when the question comes down to our values: a 2021 paper in *Ecological Economics* based on economic data from 26,000 Europeans found neighborhood birds make people as happy as money. A 10 percent increase in bird species in the environment raised life satisfaction about 1.53 times more than a similar proportional rise in income. On the other hand, we release the soothing “cuddle chemical”—oxytocin—when petting a cat, the same enjoyment we get from social bonding with our own kind. Cat ownership is also a proven method for helping the growing number of lonely people to feel connected.
-
-Ronja was the third word my one-year-old son learned to speak after mama and dudda (baby-Icelandic for pacifier). When the cat disappeared one day in December, the family was devastated: there had been a bad snowstorm, and I had closed the window before going to bed, assuming the cat was asleep in the living room. The next morning, there were paw prints in the snow, going in circles below the shut window. After two days Ronja-less, I began leaving work early to walk around town, following cat steps through the snow, like a cartoon detective, into private gardens and parks. Twice, I asked homeowners with an open basement window to go downstairs and check for her. I alerted all community Facebook groups and recruited children to help me. I began assuming she was dead, and was already working on my grief.
-
-I love birds, so maybe Ronja’s loss would leave me free of guilt. But I also love Ronja, and I was ecstatic six nights after she went missing, around 2:00 a.m. when she leaped through an open window and strolled into our bedroom. She allowed us to greet her with awkward enthusiasm before moving to *her* corner of the bed. So now, like many cat owners, I exist in a state of cognitive dissonance when it comes to my cat and my environment. But I do keep her inside at night.
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-# Jackass oral history
-
-On Oct. 1, 2000, _[Jackass](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/t/jackass/)_ debuted on MTV with a shot of [Johnny Knoxville](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/t/johnny-knoxville-0/) being fired out of a cannon to the now-familiar strums of “Corona” by Minutemen — and the world would never be the same.
-
-Born out of skate-culture shock videos, _Jackass_ featured a lovable gang of ne’er-do-wells — including clown-college grad [Steve-O](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/t/steve-o-1/), thong-loving exhibitionist Chris Pontius and occasional Oompa Loompa impersonator Jason “Wee Man” Acuña — performing a three-ring circus of _Candid Camera_\-style pranks, gag-inducing dares and flat-out lunatic stunts. Something about its bum-fights-meets-_Three Stooges_ energy instantly clicked with MTV audiences, giving the network its highest ratings in history (2.4 million among 12-to-34-year-olds) while sending lawmakers like Sen. Joe Lieberman into apoplectic fits. Knoxville pulled the plug on the show after just three seasons and 25 episodes, but corporate sibling Paramount Studios found a way to keep the money-minting franchise alive in the form of three feature films: 2002’s _Jackass: The Movie_ (which grossed $80 million worldwide); 2006’s _Jackass Number Two_ ($85 million); and 2010’s _Jackass 3D_ ($172 million).
-
-Along the way, there has been sadness and tragedy: In 2011, _Jackass_ performer Ryan Dunn, 34, and production assistant Zachary Hartwell, 29, died in a drunk-driving accident with Dunn behind the wheel. Dunn’s childhood friend and co-star Bam Margera has struggled with alcoholism and in January 2021 said on the _Knockin’ Doorz Down_ podcast that Paramount would not allow him to perform in future _Jackass_ films. (Earlier this year, Margera was served with a three-year restraining order from _Jackass_ co-creator Jeff Tremaine; Margera has responded by suing the _Jackass_ creators and Paramount for wrongful termination. The topic of Margera remains off-limits pending litigation.) But the show goes on. On Feb. 4, the fourth film in the _Jackass_ saga, _Jackass Forever_, premieres under the strangest set of circumstances yet: exclusively in theaters during the third year of a global pandemic. Will the boys’ legions of die-hard fans brave omicron to cheer on their favorite antiheroes getting slapped at full force in the testicles with a flip-flop? The answer remains to be seen.
-
-But first, the founding fathers — Knoxville, 50; Steve-O, 47; Pontius, 47; Acuña, 48; and Tremaine, 55 — convened with _THR_ for an aptly outrageous retelling of the story of _Jackass_.
-
-**STEVE-O** It all started with skateboarding. And in the 1980s, the skateboard industry was really at the mercy of the approval of mothers. So all the skateboard videos that came out in the early 1980s were very careful to be sugar-coated, not scare off Mom. Like they wouldn’t show very violent falls off of skateboards. But then came this guy named Steve Rocco, and he said, “Fuck that. We’re not going to kiss Mom’s ass anymore.” And he made the first video to properly embrace skateboarding being criminal and reckless and it was gnarly: _The Rubbish Heap_.
-
-What’s notable about that video is that it was the first video project of Spike Jonze, who at the time was a photographer for Steve Rocco’s skateboarding company. Back then, Steve Rocco was like the Bill Gates of the skateboarding industry. He had this conglomeration of companies, and he was just a fucking madman. And he would run these ads to promote his companies that were just out of control. And one of them for his company called World Industries was a photo of a little kid with a gun in his mouth. And it said, “World Industries: Kill yourself.”
-
-The two biggest skateboarding magazines, _Thrasher_ and _TransWorld_, both sent his ad back. They said, “There’s no way we’re going to print this.” So Steve Rocco said, “Oh, you don’t like my ad? Then fuck you. I’m not going to run any more ads in either of your magazines. And I’m going to start my own magazine.” And that’s how _Big Brother_ started. The only purpose for _Big Brother_ was to be a forum for filth that would never be allowed on the pages of _Thrasher_ or _TransWorld_.
-
-**JOHNNY KNOXVILLE** I didn’t know any of this when we started shooting _Jackass_. I didn’t know this was our history.
-
-**CHRIS PONTIUS** _Big Brother_ attracted all the misfits in skateboarding. Steve-O, for example, lived in New Mexico at the time. \[_Jackass_ producer\] Dimitry \[Elyashkevich\] worked for _Big Brother_. Me and Jason \[“Wee-Man”\] were skateboarders in California.
-
-**JEFF TREMAINE** We hired Jason just to put \[_Big Brother_\] subscriptions in bags and take them to the post office. \[Tremaine was editor-in-chief of the magazine.\]
-
-**PONTIUS** I got interviewed in _Big Brother_, like a skateboarding interview. And then when my interview came out, it kind of ruffled some feathers. \[Pontius appeared fully nude in the spread, swinging his penis around for something he called “the whirlybird.”\] I’ve always been free my whole life to say anything I want. And the guy who interviewed me, Thomas Campbell, told me I should probably call up Jeff and get to know them because I should probably work for them.
-
-**TREMAINE** We were much more about big personalities than we were about great skateboarding. And we put out a video in 1995 that had lot of crazy shit in it, plus some skateboarding, and that did really well.
-
-**STEVE-O** In 1997, I was living in New Mexico and _Big Brother_ came through Albuquerque, where I lived. They would go on tours with skateboard companies. In this case, it was DuFFS shoes. I was just so in love with _Big Brother_ that I made it my mission to track them down. And I found them at a skate park, and I went up to Dimitry and basically said, “I don’t care if you guys like me or like what I’m just telling you right now, I’m going to get fucking gnarly tonight and I’m going to be in _Big Brother_ magazine.” And I ended up in the hospital that night with second-degree burns on half my face.
-
-**TREMAINE** Tell what happened.
-
-**STEVE-O** I was working with this pro skateboarder. I was like, “OK, this is going to be great. I’m going to spray hair spray all in my hair and light my head on fire, and that’s the torch. And you’re going to have a mouthful of rubbing alcohol, and you’re the fire-breather. So you’ll use my head as the torch, but I’ll have my own mouth full of alcohol, then I’m going to stick my hand into the fireball that you blow. So then everything’s on fire, and then I’m going to do a backflip and simultaneously breathe fire.”
-
-But the thing was that the skateboarder blew the fireball point-blank into my face, so my entire head was on fire from the shoulders up. And my best thinking in that moment was, “I better hurry up and do this fire-breathing backflip.” So I do the fire-breathing backflip, and I come up short and my face is just fucking burning. I ended up with all the skin on my face rolled up like a joint in my hand. It was a pretty gnarly situation. But I got my article. It was a little sidebar called “The Burning Boy Festival.”
-
-I had just applied to \[Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey\] Clown College. And I would wake up and have to peel my pillow off. Then I got called from the Clown College that I’d been accepted. And I thought, “Am I even going to be able to go?” But I just have crazy healing powers. I healed up in time, and I was in Clown College when the magazine came out. It was actually the first issue of _Big Brother_ to be published by Larry Flynt. At the end of the little article, it said, “Steve-O just got into Clown College. Way to go, Steve.” And they got a kick out of the fact that I was in Clown College. I became a recurring character in the magazine.
-
-
-
-“In between \[movies\] two and three, I was doing drugs and trying to become a rapper. I’ve always had hustle,
-but at times I’ve hustled in the wrong direction.” Photographed by Beth Saravo
-
-**PONTIUS** The first time they shot with Steve-O in Florida, we met him for 10 minutes, and Jeff was like, “Let’s lose him.” Before we even shot anything. They were driving through red lights and stuff, but they couldn’t lose him. He was just dying to perform.
-
-**TREMAINE** Thank God we couldn’t lose him.
-
-**KNOXVILLE** His personality wasn’t as refined as it is now.
-
-**STEVE-O** These guys pushed the boundaries to such absurd extremes. Every issue of _Big Brother_ had a different theme. One of the covers was a professional skateboarder holding a pitchfork dressed up as Satan with horns, like doing a kick-flip over a stack of burning Bibles.
-
-**KNOXVILLE** Issue 666.
-
-**STEVE-O** What actually got Larry Flynt interested in owning _Big Brother_ was the Kids Issue. They were featuring the youngest skateboarders in the industry. And on the cover of that issue was an 8-year-old Ryan Sheckler, who now is probably 32 or something like that. … _Big Brother_ had flown under the radar for years at that point, actually having, like, fairly graphic nudity in the magazine.
-
-**PONTIUS** I was nude and in _Big Brother_ before I was even 18.
-
-**STEVE-O** And this is a magazine that was targeted toward kids. But when the Kids Issue came out, there was outrage on a national level. It was on the news.
-
-**PONTIUS** Another controversy with _Big Brother_ was, when Larry Flynt owned it, something went wrong in the subscription department, and the people that got one of his magazines called _Taboo_ received _Big Brother_, and _Big Brother_ subscribers received _Taboo_. So all these moms were furious. “They’re sending my kids porn!”
-
-**KNOXVILLE** And all the perverts were upset they got _Big Brother_.
-
-**TREMAINE** So we were starting work on the second video, and that’s when I met Knoxville. He was trying to write articles for us.
-
-**KNOXVILLE** The first one was the self-defense equipment article.
-
-**TREMAINE** He was going to test out all the self-defense equipment on himself.
-
-**STEVE-O** Knoxville’s story is basically if you take the Bad Company song “Shooting Star” and switch “guitar” with “video camera.” Graduated high school, he is 18 years old. He says to his mom, “I’m going out to be a big star.” And 18-year-old Knoxville moves to L.A., and he is trying be an actor. And he’s having some success in television commercials. But years are going by, and he really wants to make his mark. And he’s starting to approach 30 years old. And he says, “I’m sick and tired of fucking waiting to be picked at an audition. I’m going to fucking force people to recognize me.” So he pitched this self-defense thing. He pitched it to every media outlet.
-
-**KNOXVILLE** My then-girlfriend got pregnant, and I was like, “I’ve got to do something quick.” And this was my best guess. Like try to make something happen for myself and our family. I pitched it to Howard Stern and some magazines. And Stern thought I was crazy. Some magazines wanted it, but they didn’t want to support me because I didn’t have any money. So I needed a bulletproof vest, I needed to buy pepper spray, the stun gun, the Taser gun.
-
-
-
-“_SNL_ was going to give me, like, five minutes each week to do what I do, but that would just be me. And I couldn’t do both.” Photographed by Beth Saravo
-
-**STEVE-O** He says, “I want to mace myself with red pepper spray. I want to get stunned by a 50,000-volt Taser gun. And then I want put on a bulletproof vest and shoot myself with a .38-caliber handgun. I just need the bulletproof vest, and it’s like $5,000.” Nobody would have anything to do with it, except Tremaine.
-
-**KNOXVILLE** Mom gave me $300 for Christmas that year. And I found the cheapest bulletproof vest they had on the market. Nowhere close to $5,000. Tremaine bought the stun gun, the pepper spray and the Taser. But my mom, unbeknownst to her, bought the bulletproof vest.
-
-**TREMAINE** How much did we end up paying for that?
-
-**KNOXVILLE** You guys paid a lot better than _Bikini_ magazine. They gave me 10 cents a word. You guys gave us, like, 50 cents a word.
-
-**TREMAINE** When Knoxville did the self-defense thing, I convinced him he needed to film it because we were starting work on the second video. And then we started getting cold feet about the bulletproof vest. That was so scary to me, especially because he got the cheapest one on the market. Luckily, at that point, Larry Flynt had bought the magazine. So I also gave him a big stack of porn magazines, at least four or five inches thick, that went under the bulletproof vest.
-
-**KNOXVILLE** At one point I’m standing there with the gun in my hand, trying to shoot myself, and all the porn magazines fall out.
-
-**STEVE-O** Knoxville thought that it would be safer to have somebody else shoot him from 12 feet away. But nobody was willing to do that because they didn’t want to be the one who killed him. So he’s in the footage, turning the gun on himself, and he’s saying, “Man, I wish somebody would shoot me.”
-
-**TREMAINE** I don’t think Johnny did it on purpose, but there’s one bullet in the chamber.
-
-**STEVE-O** So it’s like, “Click.”
-
-**TREMAINE** Everyone’s getting more stressed. Every time he clicks it, the cameraman is like, “Come on, dude. Let’s just go home.”
-
-**STEVE-O** And it finally goes.
-
-**KNOXVILLE** It’s like someone took a shovel and hit you in the chest as hard as they could.
-
-**STEVE-O** The gun went flying out of your hand, like 12 feet toward the camera. And I think that took a lot of heat off the impact.
-
-**KNOXVILLE** Thank God I’ve got limp wrists.
-
-**TREMAINE** The footage came back so compelling. We edited it together, and it was like, “Holy shit, this was incredible.” And we put that in the second video.
-
-
-
-Jason “Wee Man” Acuña Photographed by Beth Saravo
-
-**STEVE-O** There were VHS tapes which were distributed in mom-and-pop skate shops. By the time the third one came out \[in 1999\], these _Big Brother_ videos were a cult thing. So then Jeff Tremaine reaches out to Spike Jonze, and he is like, “Hey dude, there’s something about these videos that people are really fucking loving, but I just don’t think they care about the skateboarding.”
-
-**TREMAINE** I went to high school with Spike, and I worked with him on _Big Brother_ and _Freestyle_ magazine before that. So after that second video came out, I had a light-bulb moment where I’m like, “Man, we can make a TV show out of this.”
-
-**KNOXVILLE** You and I called Spike together.
-
-**TREMAINE** Spike fully knew what we were up to and totally agreed.
-
-**STEVE-O** To make our \[reel\], they just used the _Big Brother_ videos and subtracted the skateboarding. We took it to HBO first.
-
-**KNOXVILLE** Oh man, that went terrible.
-
-**TREMAINE** Our plan was to just let Spike do the talking. He was the only legit one that everyone was interested in anyway. \[Jonze, then a successful music video director for bands like Beastie Boys and Daft Punk, had released his first feature, 1999’s _Being John Malkovich_.\] So we showed it with these two women, I don’t even remember their names.
-
-**TREMAINE** They were offended and just disgusted by what we had just shown them. And I went, “Oh well, fuck, man. Good thing I didn’t quit _Big Brother_ yet.” And our second pitch was at MTV — and it was the exact opposite. We showed them the sizzle tape, and they were just dying laughing. And they wanted it right away.
-
-**KNOXVILLE** _SNL_ wanted me to be on the show. They were going to give me, like, five minutes each week to do what I do, but that would just be me. And I couldn’t do both. Our show was about to go. So I kind of bet on us as opposed to on myself. I was really flattered that Lorne Michaels asked me to have lunch with him at the Polo Lounge, but I said, “No, I’m going to do this instead.”
-
-
-
-Chris Pontius Photographed by Beth Saravo
-
-**STEVE-O** Within two weeks, it was officially the highest ratings MTV had ever had, outside of VMAs or anything. It shattered all their records and presumably with less of a budget than they were used to. And they were running reruns at 5 p.m. It was crazy. By the time the second season was underway, maybe a few weeks in, little kids were showing up in hospitals all over the place. Because they were inspired to be doing stunts on their own. And this scared the shit out of MTV. Then Joe Lieberman was lobbying against MTV. There wasn’t ever an actual big lawsuit, but there was just the fear of one, and MTV was in this position of, “Well, fuck, this is our biggest profit margin we’ve ever had, but there’s all this liability.” So their reaction was to start not approving shit for us to film.
-
-**TREMAINE** The MTV solution to keep us safe was to assign an OSHA representative to follow us around and shoot with us. We had shot this bit called “The Vomelet.” That was so funny.
-
-**KNOXVILLE** It was raining in Florida. So we didn’t have anything to shoot.
-
-**STEVE-O** So \[_Jackass_ performer Dave England\] eats all the ingredients of an omelet and then barfs it into a frying pan and then feeds it to me.
-
-**TREMAINE** So we film that great bit, and it was fucking hilarious, and then MTV sees it, and they’re like, “Well, it doesn’t show that it was cooked at a temperature of 160 degrees.” I’m like, “What do you fucking mean? It’s an omelet. It was fine.”
-
-
-
-From left: _Jackass_ stars Steve-O, Jason “Wee Man” Acuña, Chris Pontius and Johnny Knoxville were photographed Jan. 11 at Electric Pony Studios in Los Angeles. Photographed by Beth Saravo
-
-**PONTIUS** They said it could spread “blood-borne pathogens.” I remember that was the big phrase.
-
-**KNOXVILLE** And we had to wear hazmat suits, too.
-
-**TREMAINE** Although that was funny, the fact that we had to redo it, it lost a lot of the spontaneity. OSHA is designed to keep factory workers safe. We’re trying to do a show where we’re getting hurt. It just didn’t make sense to have OSHA working with us.
-
-**STEVE-O** So Knoxville quit. He said, “Hey, I’m not going to do a watered-down version of _Jackass_.” And when we, all the supporting castmembers, learned of this, we were like, “Um … what do you mean, Knoxville? What are you talking about?!”
-
-**KNOXVILLE** In an interview with my hometown newspaper, I said, “I quit.” And then everyone learned of it. MTV was upset, obviously. Understandably. So there’s a lot of back-and-forth between our agents and attorneys and MTV. Because technically we were still under contract. What’s going to happen? And I think Jeff and Spike came to me and said, “Why don’t we do a movie version?”
-
-
-
-2002’s _Jackass: The Movie._ Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection
-
-**TREMAINE** In the middle of us making this second season, the guy who ran MTV Films, David Gale, came over to me. He’s like, “You can make a movie out of this.” And I’m like, “I don’t even know how to make a TV show.” But when Knoxville quit, David popped up and said, “Why don’t you guys make a movie?” Spike had thought that could work. I didn’t believe. It didn’t seem like it was possible to turn this stupid little TV show into a movie, but we agreed we’d give it a try.
-
-**KNOXVILLE** I was against the movie because in my head I was like, “What, are we going to act? Is this a scripted thing?” They’re like, “No. It’s just like a naughtier version of what we do.” I’m like, “That’s a good idea.”
-
-**TREMAINE** It didn’t make sense until it became “Just do the TV show, but do it on a crazier level.”
-
-**KNOXVILLE** For the first movie, they insured per bit. They didn’t insure the whole movie. So, some bits were cost-prohibitive to do. There was one bit we wanted to do with Pontius dressed as the devil in a Pentecostal church handling snakes. And that was going to be, like, $5 million to insure. Our first entire movie cost $6 million. But after that, the movies were insured like a regular film.
-
-**TREMAINE** On the first movie, Paramount wanted us to make it, but it was a negative pickup. They didn’t fully put their name on it.
-
-**STEVE-O** They shuttled the money through a ghost company. If anybody died, they wouldn’t even be affiliated it with it. And then, once we were done, they “found out about it” and bought it.
-
-**KNOXVILLE** That said, Paramount’s been a great partner all these years.
-
-
-
-Johnny Knoxville (left), Jeff Tremaine and Steve-O at L.A.’s _Jackass 3D_ premiere in 2010.
-
-**TREMAINE** Sherry Lansing was the head of Paramount when we did the first movie, and she pulled me aside, and I didn’t even know anything about her or how to make a movie. And she’s like, “Just make sure it’s crazier than anything you do on TV.”
-
-**KNOXVILLE** She was great. She really supported us when some people at the studio saw the first cut and didn’t want any part of it.
-
-**STEVE-O** I remember the first creative meeting we had — it was the very beginning of 2002. We went into this new office, and Tremaine says, “All right, it’s not a TV show anymore. Now it’s a movie and it’s rated R. So don’t fucking give us any half-ass ideas. Think big.” And I remember I was indignant. Like, “Oh, like I would present you a half-ass idea. Come on.” And my immediate first thought, I said, “Oh, yeah? How about if I get a tattoo of myself on myself and it’s bigger than myself?” Because the face of my back is substantially bigger than my actual face. That one never became a trend. But getting “YOUR NAME” tattooed on my butt cheek so I could tell people, “I have your name tattooed on my butt cheek” became a trend. There’s thousands of people out there with “YOUR NAME” on their butt cheek. I see them all the time. When the last bit in the first movie was being shot, putting a toy car up your butt, I backed out of it because my dad was just so disappointed in the idea. I explained the idea to him and the way my dad said, “Oh, no.” I heard it in his voice and I couldn’t do it.
-
-**JASON ACUÑA** Ryan Dunn did it. He backed it right in. He was good in that one.
-
-**PONTIUS** We’re not afraid to have fun. Especially at that time, people were really afraid of anything they’d be called gay for, and there are people who put gay people in the same category as child molesters and perverts. And we never bought into that. We just wanted to have fun and push our own envelopes and shock ourselves and make ourselves laugh. Before _Jackass_ even premiered, we were filming something where I was Rollerblading on the promenade at Hermosa Beach with a jockstrap on. And people actually wanted to beat me up for that. Like yelling names at me. Once it came out on TV, they would all be wanting to get my autograph and bro down with me, those same people that wanted to beat me up.
-
-**STEVE-O** Looking back on this whole history, this unbelievable legacy and this franchise, I really feel so much gratitude and such a sense of pride in how I view the franchise as wholesome. And I know that’s counterintuitive to think of _Jackass_ as wholesome, but it’s the spirit of it. It’s so warm, like there’s nothing hateful, there’s nothing negative. We give each other and ourselves a hard time, but we can handle it, and we love it. And just the spirit of it is so positive. I’m really proud and grateful for that.
-
-**KNOXVILLE** “Everything I wrote was true. Because I believed in what I saw.” — Jack Kerouac, _On the Road._
-
-**PONTIUS** I think _Jackass_ came out when the world needed it. And it brought that underground skateboard, silly culture to the world. I think a lot of people gravitated toward it because it reminded them of having fun with their friends growing up. More than the stunts and everything, it reminds a lot of people of hanging out with their friends and having fun. I think the characters on it are things that appeal the most. It wasn’t planned out to have a little guy and a fat guy and a naked guy …
-
-**ACUÑA** And a clown guy. It just all meshed together.
-
-**STEVE-O** Knoxville was determined to go out on top, and he declared that _Jackass_ was finished after the first movie. And then Chris and I got to work on our homoerotic nature show, _Wildboyz_. Knoxville joined us for a while. We were on this trip in Russia at this counterterrorism training camp. Knoxville says, “Have the dog bite me and shoot me with the 9mm gun while the dog’s biting me.” And Tremaine says to Knoxville, “Hey, whoa, let’s not do this for MTV2. If you have that in you, let’s make another movie.” And Knoxville had it in him. And that was _Number Two_.
-
-**KNOXVILLE** _Number Two_ was everyone on their worst behavior.
-
-**PONTIUS** _Number Two_ was amazing.
-
-**KNOXVILLE** Everyone was out of control onscreen and off.
-
-**PONTIUS** It was awesome.
-
-**STEVE-O** _Number Two_ was the masterpiece in my view. In between one and two, we were doing _Wildboyz_. In between \[movies\] two and three, I was doing drugs and trying to become a rapper. I’ve always had hustle, but at times I’ve hustled in the wrong direction. After _Number Two_, Knoxville once again declared that the franchise was over. I had my downward spiral and subsequent time in rehab. I was still living in a halfway house, newly sober, when I found out that these guys were talking about potentially doing a third movie.
-
-**TREMAINE** Me and Spike and Knoxville went out to dinner at the Chateau Marmont, and we discussed whether or not we were going to make a third movie \[_Jackass 3D_\]. We all agreed at that point to make the third movie at this dinner. And as we were walking out, we’re walking down to Sunset Boulevard, and Knoxville pulled out a huge dinner plate that he had stolen from the Chateau Marmont, this really thick dinner plate, and he smashed it over Spike’s head.
-
-**KNOXVILLE** It powdered over his head.
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-**TREMAINE** There was blood running down his head, and we’re like, “Holy shit.” And that just sort of cemented like, “All right. I guess we’re doing this.” For _Jackass 3D_, we were actually shooting it in 3D versus converting it to 3D. So we had these big cameras that weren’t mobile, so everything was kind of happening in front of them.
-
-**STEVE-O** And the production got big. It started out just like a shoestring and a handheld video camera. Now there’s semi trucks and all these trailers.
-
-
-
-In a scene from _Jackass Forever_, Ehren McGhehey (seated left) and Compston “Darkshark” Wilson each attempt to blow a spider into the other man’s face. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures
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-**KNOXVILLE** The first movie was a punk show. _Jackass Forever_ is like a Rolling Stones concert.
-
-**PONTIUS** Plus the challenges of filming with COVID going on and somehow not stopping it.
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-**KNOXVILLE** Filming a very dangerous movie in the safest way possible. “Don’t cough on the bull.”
-
-**STEVE-O** And with all the `#MeToo` stuff so fresh in everybody’s consciousness. And then we bring on this girl …
-
-**TREMAINE** Rachel Wolfson. Knoxville followed her on Instagram. She’s just a hilarious stand-up comedian. So we brought her out, and she fit right in.
-
-**STEVE-O** And now we’ve got the human resources giving us the seminar about sexual harassment. And then after that, we walk in front of the cameras, and everyone’s just got their dicks out.
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-**PONTIUS** They’re like, “Unless you’re shooting, you can’t have your penises out.”
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-**KNOXVILLE** After one, we said we weren’t going to make another. After two, we said the same. So I don’t know about a fifth. We may, we may not.
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-**TREMAINE** I wouldn’t be surprised if we never made another one. And I also wouldn’t be surprised if we did.
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-**KNOXVILLE** You go into each one accepting whatever happens. But _Jackass Forever_ features by far my gnarliest bull hit. I spent the rest of the weekend in the hospital with a broken wrist, broken rib, concussion and brain hemorrhage. It took a little while to recover from that. So whatever the future holds, this is probably my last time with a bull because you can only take so many chances before something forever happens. After the brain hemorrhages and everything, the doctors were like, “You can’t have any more concussions.”
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-**STEVE-O** You don’t have to be a doctor to know that.
-
-_Interview edited for length and clarity._
-
-_This story first appeared in the Jan. 26 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. [Click here to subscribe.](https://subscribe.hollywoodreporter.com/sub/?p=THR&f=saleb&s=IH1402HR20)_
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-```button
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-^button-JavankainExileNSave
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-
-
-# Javanka in Exile
-
-**The beachfront in Surfside, Florida,** is one of the more peaceful and unexploited stretches of public sunning space in the entire sprawling South Florida metropolis. Nobody is hawking kitschy T-shirts (advertising and vending are verboten), and you can’t fish on the shore during daylight. Grass-topped sand dunes and sea-grape trees hem the length of the beach and separate it from the town’s semi-famous “hard pack”: a serene one-mile pathway of compressed sand beloved by runners.
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-One sunny day last June, a Surfside resident spotted a tall blond woman on the hard pack, with a little white dog on a leash. She watched as the woman led the dog off the pathway toward the beach, right past a sign that clearly said dogs weren’t allowed.
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-The resident, a beach activist who finds high purpose in protecting Surfside’s loggerhead sea turtles during nesting season, mobilized. “I was speed-walking at her and yelling at her,” she recalls. “I just opened my mouth and said, ‘You can’t go out there with the dog!’”
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-When the startled owner turned around, her face was immediately recognizable. It was Ivanka Trump—accompanied by her ten-year-old daughter, Arabella, and their ultra-white, blue-eyed pooch, Winter.
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-“Oh-uh, I didn’t realize,” Trump said.
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-The resident was a bit flummoxed herself; this was her first face-to-face encounter with the former First Daughter. “She’s well put together,” the neighbor remembers. “She’s had a lot of work done, and it’s good plastic. It’s Miami, and there’s a lot of bad plastic here. She has good plastic.”
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-The women were adjacent to the seaside condo building where Ivanka and Jared, their three children, and Winter (believed to be a Pomeranian mix) had resettled after their inglorious exit from Washington five months earlier—and just steps from the large beach-rules notice that Trump surely must have passed scores of times by then.
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-“You’re standing right next to the sign,” the neighbor told Ivanka. “Look, it says ‘No dogs.’”
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-“Oh,” Ivanka said again, retreating.
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-
-
-The Kushner family are by far the most well-known residents of Surfside, a town that’s as polarized as America. Photograph by SplashNews.com.
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-A few months later, the woman bumped into the family once more—a rare kind of happenstance since the Kushners had sought exile in the Sunshine State.
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-Ivanka and Jared were out at the ocean’s edge with their five-year-old son, Theodore. He walked up to the neighbor (who asked to remain anonymous because she continues to live near the family) and talked about a fish he’d caught. The neighbor reminded Jared, in swim trunks, and Ivanka, in a “cute ruffled outfit,” to watch out for jellyfish. Ivanka indicated she wouldn’t be swimming, but Theodore hurried into the ocean. The neighbor was immediately concerned.
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-“I’m thinking, _Why is this boy in the water alone on a boogie board with this moderate rip current?_ I’m a mother, and I would never let my child alone in the water like that.”
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-Sure enough, young Theodore began drifting from shore, prompting Jared to run in after him.
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-“Slenderman moves quick,” the neighbor quips.
-
-Her encounters with Ivanka only reinforced a long-held impression: “She seems to be about . . . ‘I live in this little cocoon where the rules don’t apply to me’ . . . in her own little world.”
-
-Ivanka’s world has certainly gotten smaller. She’s out of politics at the moment, out of her former executive job at the Trump Organization, out of the womenswear brand that bore her name, out of high society in New York, and cast out of Washington, too. Although once viewed as a potentially tempering force on her demagogic dad, Ivanka never did find her footing in the White House or in DC society; January 6 was the final rupture. Ivanka reportedly spent hours that day pleading with her father to call off the mob at the Capitol. When she tweeted for an end to the violence herself, she addressed the rioters as “American Patriots,” before admitting that they weren’t patriots at all and deleting the tweet.
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-Since that traumatic day, Ivanka has largely been silent. Her farewell tweet from the West Wing didn’t mention her father by name, wished Joe Biden success, and urged the nation to find “common ground.” A previously prolific Instagram and Twitter user, she has posted only twice in the year since—both posts commemorated her jabs of the Covid vaccine—and she hasn’t made any public-speaking appearances. While her brothers didn’t have much of a public brand before their ascendance to right-wing demigods, Ivanka’s reputation plummeted in the absolute opposite direction, from haute to hated, fashionista to plain old fascista.
-
-
-
-Now the Kushners have sought refuge in Surfside, a town of only 6,000 people that’s hardly immune from Trumpian divisiveness—the former President lost to Joe Biden in the Surfside precinct by 69 votes—yet one that previously managed to stay off most people’s radar. Which was just fine with plenty of residents.
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-Eliana Salzhauer, a town commissioner, likens her reaction upon hearing Javanka was arriving to a scene in 1980’s _The Jerk_ in which Steve Martin’s absurdist character is ecstatic to find his name listed in the phone book while an unhinged killer picks Martin’s name randomly from the same directory.
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-“It was, ‘Oh, good, the town is getting recognition,’ ” says Salzhauer, a Democrat. “Then it was, ‘Oh, no, the psychos are coming.’ ”
-
-The last thing Salzhauer wants is to become an enabler of the couple’s reinvention act in South Florida, which makes the whole situation rather frustrating. As she puts it, “What are they doing in our town?”
-
-* * *
-
-**Surfside is a quaint (by Florida standards)** hamlet wedged between Bal Harbour to the north and north Miami Beach to the south—“Miami’s Uptown Beachtown,” as they say, with an uptowny history befitting a couple worth an estimated $800 million. The town was incorporated in 1935, when 35 members of the exclusive Surf Club—a secluded hangout for Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, Winston Churchill, and other A-listers—wanted to prevent the land around their club from being annexed by Miami. They pooled $28,500 and established their own little burg, thereafter known as Surfside.
-
-The town is only a mile—eight blocks—long, a sliver of land sandwiched between the Atlantic and the Intercoastal Waterway, with high-rise beach condos on one side and single-family homes on the other. According to the Census Bureau, 54 percent of residents are white, 45 percent are Latino (many of them affluent immigrants from South American countries), and a virtually unheard-of zero percent of the population is Black. The old Surf Club is now a Four Seasons, one block over from the Arte, the spectacular new glass pile where Ivanka and Jared have been living for the past year (and where the rent can come in at $40,000 a month). Designed by an Italian architect and reminiscent of a pyramid, their 12-story building has 16 residences with floor-to-ceiling windows, plus a clutch of in-house amenities that sound perfectly suited for sheltering in place and shaking off the chill of Washington (beachfront meditation pond, anyone?).
-
-
-
-The Kushners have been renting in the luxe Arte building on the beach in Surfside, but barely showing their faces.
-
-Still, Surfside has little of the glitz of Palm Beach and Mar-a-Lago, the former President’s home base, or even the cachet of nearby Jupiter, where Don Jr. and Eric Trump both purchased multimillion-dollar mansions in the spring of 2021. What it does have is a significant Jewish population.
-
-In Washington, Jared, an Orthodox Jew, and Ivanka, who converted after their 2009 wedding, prioritized walking proximity to their synagogue when they chose Kalorama for their home. Post-administration, they picked what may be South Florida’s closest facsimile to a Little Israel. The heart of Surfside’s two-block downtown strip is a collection of kosher restaurants and stores. (One Javanka sighting put them at the since-closed Koshertown grocery.) Town life tends to center around its two synagogues: the more conservative Shul, which bills itself as “one of the most unorthodox, Orthodox synagogues,” and the smaller Orthodox Young Israel—“Judaism to fit modern times,” as one resident describes it. It’s from the latter that the Kushners have been seen walking home from Shabbat services, security guard trailing behind them.
-
-“If you’re looking to escape New Jersey and New York, \[Surfside\] is where you’re going to end up,” says Salzhauer, the town commissioner. “Once they built the Shul and then Young Israel, it was open season on real estate.” The synagogues serve thousands of congregants from four neighboring communities, but “everybody wants to live within walking distance, if you’re Orthodox, to the temple.”
-
-The Kushner kids attend a private Hebrew school nearby. (And so far, the family has avoided the public drama that chased them out of DC’s Milton Gottesman Jewish Day School, when Ivanka and Jared’s failure to follow Covid safety protocols at work—remember the Amy Coney Barrett swearing-in superspreader?—caused an uproar among fellow parents.)
-
-“This is like a warm version of New York—the same pace, the same driving, the same kind of brusque attitude about things,” says Salzhauer. “It’s the same people, but it’s warmer, so everyone’s a little happier because everybody’s not freezing their asses off and having to dig their cars out of the snow.”
-
-Salzhauer and Jared actually both attended the Frisch School, a yeshiva in Paramus, New Jersey, for high school. (At 40, Jared is 11 years Salzhauer’s junior.) Not that the two have had occasion to trade any glory-days yarns about their alma mater. Javanka aren’t only the town’s most well-known inhabitants—_Wonder Woman_ actress Lynda Carter is a fairly distant third—they’re also among its most invisible.
-
-The couple is rarely seen outside the Arte, and only the occasional paparazzo has published pictures of their doings (jogging on the hard pack, relaxing on a yacht in Biscayne Bay). One of the few times they seemed to be telegraphing more than proof of life was shortly after their former colleague Stephanie Grisham published her tell-all about the Trump White House. Jared and Ivanka—who, Grisham revealed, had been known around Melania Trump’s East Wing as “ ‘the interns’ because they represented in our minds obnoxious, entitled know-it-alls”—showed up at a Miami water park with their children and kissed for the cameras in their matching black bathing suits, as if to say, “I really don’t care, do u?” Later, after a November outing to a Louis Vuitton show in Miami, leftie Twitter exploded and _Vanity Fair_ followed up with a gleeful hate-read headlined JARED AND IVANKA TRY TO REENTER POLITE SOCIETY, ARE PROMPTLY TOLD TO F–K OFF.
-
-Last June, when the Champlain Towers building in Surfside collapsed in the middle of the night and killed 98 people—and TV screens around the world were zooming in on the town—Ivanka and Jared donated to the search effort for victims of the building located two blocks from theirs, according to the local NBC affiliate. But even then, they made no statement. Perhaps they worried their disgraced brand would distract from the incredible tragedy. On the other hand, it might have been an opportunity to suds up their image.
-
-Still, Surfside hasn’t completely sheltered them from the bitter political storm they helped create. The House’s January 6 Committee is pointing to Ivanka’s futile pleas for her father to halt the insurrection as further evidence to implicate the former President. And on December 1, New York’s attorney general subpoenaed Ivanka for testimony in its continuing Trump Organization fraud investigation (the company has pleaded not guilty), which she and her father are fighting together in court.
-
-The town of Surfside, meanwhile, is itself America writ small, all too familiar with the festering division fostered by Javanka’s White House.
-
-* * *
-
-**One Surfside resident who has been tickled** about Javanka taking up in South Florida is Charles Burkett, the town’s mayor. “They’re not just here passing through,” he tells me, playing the role of town pitchman to the hilt. “I believe they want to make this a big part of their life, this part of the state of Florida generally, and specifically Surfside.”
-
-There are certainly more politically friendly communities the couple might have sought out. Burkett, a 60-year-old Miami Beach native, edged out his 2020 rival, the progressive incumbent, by just 50 votes. Then again, while the unvaxed Trump voter didn’t really curry favor with the base during the race, since he’s been in office his Trumpian tactics and talking points may have felt second nature to Javanka.
-
-
-
-Democratic town commissioner Eliana Salzhauer, on the left, went to the same New Jersey high school as Kushner.
-
-In 2020, when there was talk of reducing Surfside’s law-enforcement budget—the town goes years without seeing a murder—Burkett blamed Salzhauer for wanting to “defund the police” and surfaced an incriminating (he said) photo of her at the 2017 DC Women’s March, in which Salzhauer holds an anti-Trump sign, while a friend’s placard reads HEY IVANKA—WE’RE HOLDING YOU ACCOUNTABLE. “This town is full of nutty right-wing supporters with alcohol issues and easy access to firearms,” Salzhauer later complained in an email to county ethics officials. “His published call to action that ‘It must be clearly demonstrated to politicians’ along with my photo is a clear dog-whistle threat to my physical safety.” Burkett responded in turn on his personal website, calling Salzhauer’s statement an “unforgivable attack on the integrity and character of the very people she has been elected to represent.”
-
-
-
-Dem commissioner Salzhauer flipped the double bird at GOP mayor Charles Burkett (top row, middle) after he muted her during a Zoom meeting.
-
-During a town meeting over Zoom that same year, Burkett, a Catholic, complained that a Salzhauer-supported resolution to condemn discrimination against Asians and Jews during the pandemic was unfair to evangelical Christians. When Salzhauer interrupted him, he muted her. She responded by flashing him the double bird, blurry screen grabs of which made the rounds on the local news. Not surprisingly, they disagree about Javanka.
-
-The tall, slender Burkett is out on the hard pack most days, jogging in a ball cap and mini-shorts, his shirtless trunk spit-roasting brown in the sun, and it was on one of his runs that he first met Ivanka. “It was almost like a collision,” he recalls. “Ivanka was walking out of the gate of her building, and I was jogging by.”
-
-Burkett stopped and introduced himself. She suggested they continue their chat at a later time, and what do you know, Burkett got a follow-up call with an invite to meet the Kushners at home at the Arte.
-
-Ivanka and Jared greeted him as their kids bustled about the condo. The conversation, as Burkett describes it, was “very generic,” with no discernible agenda on the Kushners’ side. “It was not unlike a conversation I would have with any other resident,” the mayor says. “It didn’t touch on any specific politics. It was a chance for them to educate themselves on their new home.”
-
-Perhaps the couple just wanted a friend in the mayor’s office. Burkett, who resides in a $4-million oceanfront house, does happen to be an heir of a significant South Florida real-estate family. And actually, the Kushners did ask him to do what he could to protect Surfside—which has a 12-story building-height limit—from the kind of overdevelopment that plagues much of the Miami-Dade coastline. “They, like everyone else that I talk to, want to make sure we don’t turn into Miami Beach or Sunny Isles,” he says—never mind that the Trump name is on several gaudily oversize beachfront skyscrapers in the area.
-
-Jared’s family business, the Kushner Companies, is busy in South Florida at the moment, involved in an estimated billion dollars’ worth of local development projects. Chaired by Jared’s father, the Trump-pardoned felon Charles Kushner, the company is building two large apartments in Miami-Dade and another nearby in Fort Lauderdale. (Jared’s Democrat brother, Joshua, a venture capitalist, last year bought a $23.5-million mansion on Miami Beach.) Jared himself started a venture-capital firm in Miami called Affinity Partners, where he’s hiring executives. He’s reportedly courting investments from Saudi Arabia, which is notable given his cozy and controversial White House relationship with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. (MBS communicated solo with Jared on WhatsApp and reportedly boasted he had the First Son-in-Law “in his pocket.”) Jared has his own tell-all in the works for HarperCollins’s new conservative imprint, Broadside Books, scheduled for early this year.
-
-Ivanka, meanwhile, has zero publicly known endeavors at the moment. Evan Ross, a Miami Democratic political consultant, says that when some “major Israel backers” in South Florida recently tried to arrange a meeting with her, Ivanka sent back word that she was declining for personal reasons. “It wasn’t that she didn’t want to meet with them specifically—it was that she just wasn’t taking any meetings,” says Ross. “That she’s leading a private life right now.” Officials in area GOP circles likewise report that Ivanka hasn’t “made a peep,” as one puts it—unlike her brothers, who continue to stir up the base on Fox News and social media (and who remain VPs of the Trump Organization).
-
-Although there was talk at one point of Ivanka challenging Marco Rubio for the Senate, her father plainly admitted that his daughter didn’t see any benefit to getting into electoral politics herself. “She doesn’t really like the concept of running for office,” Donald Trump complained to a crowd in Georgia early last year. “She says, ‘What do I need it for, Dad?’ ” That was January 4, the last time Trump and Ivanka shared a stage together. Some weeks later, she reportedly called Rubio to say she had no designs on his seat and would support his campaign.
-
-
-
-The Kushners have bought a waterfront mansion on an exclusive neighboring island, Indian Creek. Photograph by SplashNews.com.
-
-Ivanka turned 40 in October and celebrated with girlfriends over “two days of boating, beaches and bubbly . . . champagne toasts, cake, and caviar,” including at the Surf Club, per the _New York Post’s_ Page Six. An unnamed source told the paper that Ivanka and Jared “love it down there \[in South Florida\]. It really suits them.” Indeed, the Kushners have reportedly purchased a $24-million home on neighboring Indian Creek Island: an 8,510-square-foot neoclassical mansion with eight and a half bathrooms, a sprawling double staircase rising up from the great room, and a white-columned facade that gives off strong _Scarface_ vibes.
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-> “I’ve lived in town for 16 years now—I’ve never been to Indian Creek, and it’s a couple of feet from my house. You can’t get there unless you’re invited. It’s like a fairy tale.”
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-With fewer than three dozen waterfront homes built around a golf course, Indian Creek is an infinitely more private setting than the Arte. It’s accessible for the yachtless only via a bridge that extends from Surfside—yet close enough for a family like the Kushners to walk to the Surfside synagogues for Shabbat services. The island’s single entrance is heavily guarded, and it has a private police force.
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-“I’ve lived in town for almost 16 years now—I’ve never been to Indian Creek, and it’s a couple of feet from my house,” says Salzhauer. “You can’t get there unless you’re invited. It’s like a fairy tale.”
-
-Investor Carl Icahn, ex–Sears CEO Eddie Lampert, and singer Julio Iglesias all own homes on the island, along with Gisele Bündchen and her husband, Tom Brady. The quarterback has had a famously hot-and-cold relationship with Donald Trump the last several years. But by and large, Indian Creek’s politics run red. According to Miami-Dade voting records, nearly 80 percent of the 53 votes in the 2020 election cast by the islanders went for Trump.
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-* * *
-
-**On Friday, October 29, Surfside decked** itself out for Halloween. Town officials had hundreds of hay bales delivered to the 96th Street Park, where a maze for children was built. There was a petting zoo, dozens of pumpkins, a DJ, bounce houses. They called the event the “Spooktacular.”
-
-Back in Washington, the House’s January 6 Committee was sparring with former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, growing frustrated as he stalled on their subpoena. Up in New York, news had just broken that the Westchester County district attorney’s office was investigating a Trump golf club there, compounding the Trump family’s problems in the state.
-
-But at the Surfside Spooktacular, two former top White House aides were just two parents out for an unusual night of fun with their kids and 750 or so others. Young Theodore was dressed in a ninja outfit, while Ivanka and Jared came as themselves, she in a very plain black knee-length dress, he in designer jeans and a neatly pressed T-shirt. Jared spoke with Mayor Burkett and the police chief about how much he liked the town. (The Secret Service had been impressed with Surfside cops, he told them.) Ivanka was off following the kids.
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-“The most striking thing about it was that they were like anybody else and blended in with the crowd,” Burkett told me afterward.
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-Even Commissioner Salzhauer was pleasantly surprised by how the family did, for a short period of time, mix in seamlessly with the townsfolk. “At least the kids had a brief, fun taste of a normal childhood for Halloween,” she says.
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-As the Kushners were leaving the event, Ivanka bent down to pick a large pumpkin off the ground and started to walk off with it. Families were allowed to take one gourd home with them. Ivanka handed hers to Jared, who carried it the rest of the way. Their bodyguard, who followed Ivanka, also walked out with one.
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-The double-pumpkin takeaway may not have fallen strictly within the rules, but what’s a pumpkin or two in the scheme of things? This was Ivanka and Jared attending not some White House event or private-school recital or exclusive soiree in the Hamptons. It was just small-town life in South Florida, where they could easily slip out with their pumpkins and disappear into the night.
-
-_This article appears in the February 2022 issue of Washingtonian._
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-Link: https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/06/20/jeff-bezoss-next-monopoly-the-press/
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-# Jeff Bezos’s Next Monopoly: The Press
-
-When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought *The Washington Post* in 2013, he quickly became aware of a longtime problem hobbling the entire news industry: The technology that news organizations employed to publish and make money from their content online was wildly inefficient and inadequate.
-
-Bezos also found a chief information officer at the *Post*, Shailesh Prakash, with ambitions larger than his budget. Bezos solved Prakash’s budget problems, and the *Post* built what has over time become a best-in-class platform, conveniently hosted on Amazon’s own cloud computing servers. The *Post* started licensing its technology to other news organizations in 2016, and its digital publishing division, Arc XP, is now a booming business employing a staff of 300 that is continuously rolling out new functionalities. It powers more than 2,000 sites for media organizations and non-media brands that can afford its hefty price tag.
-
-Together with its affiliated ad buying and ad rendering platform, Zeus Technology, Arc addresses the entire range of technology needs for digital publishers, from production to monetization. It is precisely the kind of infrastructure the industry needs to get back on its feet after two decades of losing every conceivable battle—and a staggering [80 percent](https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers/) of its advertising revenue—to Big Tech companies like Google, Facebook, and, yes, Amazon.
-
-News organizations today have a wide variety of options when it comes to technology, and other companies—including Brightspot, Contentful, and RebelMouse—also offer cutting-edge solutions. *The New York Times*, *The Wall Street Journal*, and the biggest chains have built their own.
-
-> *The dilemma we face is that one of the best answers to the news industry’s technology woes is in the hands of a man who has repeatedly proved that he cannot be trusted.*
-
-But nobody is devoting the resources that Bezos is to Arc, making it a dominant player particularly for legacy print publications transforming to digital first. “We looked at others,” says Tom Shaw, vice president of Shaw Media, whose print and online publications in Illinois and Iowa [switched to Arc in 2020](https://www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/shaw-media-creates-digital-news-network-for-northern-illinois,188311?newsletter=188315). “We were seeing the companies we looked up to getting in on this,” he told me. “Arc was the one that everyone was jumping in on. It seems like it’s the one that’s growing.” Of the 20 largest American newspapers (by print publication), eight use Arc.
-
-According to a recent [article in Axios](https://nam11.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.axios.com%2F2022%2F06%2F14%2Fwapo-arcxp-not-selling-tech-business&data=05%7C01%7C%7C7c91798dad714511fd2208da4fb6e70e%7C6d6846dc48a94d88b48b2454ae0b6d9e%7C1%7C0%7C637909944222982952%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=OOUgvqx1QEmjSSeR3%2BFHq%2B4%2F%2BmUlKHQ5kjCq5Jncsik%3D&reserved=0), Bezos has rejected offers to buy Arc that valued the operation at north of $100 million—because he’s thinking bigger than that. “We are not a capital-constrained company,” Prakash told Axios. “It’s never a question of funding, it’s always a question of, is it the right thing to do?” And the right thing to do, ArcXP President Miki King said, is “creating more of a velocity in revenue growth.”
-
-Bezos’s control of Arc and Zeus give him significant power over the news industry. They both allow him to harvest vast amounts of cash from competitors, even as he makes them increasingly dependent on his technology. We know, based on past experience with Amazon and its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing subsidiary, that being dependent on Bezos’s technology comes with serious consequences—often including manipulation, predatory surveillance, and unfair practices. What initially appears to be a benign solution becomes exploitation of a trapped client base.
-
-Bezos’s outsized investment means that he could soon control the backbone of most of the large newspaper markets in America. Meanwhile, Arc’s high cost creates a barrier to entry for new news organizations that can’t afford it. It further accelerates the cleavage of the industry into haves and have-nots. The have-nots—including most small local and ethnic publishers—often struggle with inferior technology that stifles both editorial and revenue ambitions, at a time when local news is increasingly recognized as an essential and endangered public good.
-
-Conversely, if Bezos were to suddenly drop the price of Arc XP and Zeus Prime, he could potentially drive other platform providers out of business, allowing him to take a cut of the entire industry’s revenues right off the top.
-
-“You look at Jeff Bezos and his history and his behavior and how he’s gone about building total domination of e-commerce, and you realize: He could do the same thing to media as he’s done to retail,” says Daniel Williams, the CEO of BlueLena, a company that helps develop revenue models for news organizations. “And I think media is likely to become another instrument of the Amazon empire.”
-
-There is an alternative scenario. Rather than continuing his every-person-for-themselves path to dominance, Bezos should make Arc XP his gift to the news community. Bezos says he bought *The Washington Post* because of his “[support of American democracy](https://www.bezosdayonefund.org/2018).” Having stepped down as Amazon CEO, he says he is now devoting himself to “[improving civilization](https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-jeff-bezos-ceo-amazon/).” He could live up to those words by turning Arc XP over to a mission-driven nonprofit entity that could make it open-source, accessible, and affordable to all qualifying news organizations.
-
-Just as the 19th-century industrialist Andrew Carnegie made a seminal contribution to the free exchange of information by building more than 1,600 public libraries across the United States, Bezos could turn Arc into public infrastructure for a public good.
-
----
-
-For a news organization to thrive online these days, it needs to overcome massive technological barriers. Reporting, writing, editing, and then publishing to many platforms in an attractive, engaging, and efficient way is an enormous challenge. And that’s just for starters. Sustainability also requires the ability to convert readers into subscribers, sell and serve targeted ads, optimize for search, market on social media, and create must-read email newsletters.
-
-American newspapers mostly started publishing online in the late 1990s, often by cutting and pasting copy from their print production systems. For the next decade and a half, news organizations largely remained technological backwaters. Even the biggest publishers suffered from inflexible and unreliable content management and publishing systems. The corporate culture of print newsrooms had prioritized stability—in particular, avoiding a system crash on deadline—over new features. Publishers were slow to realize the need to invest in new technology, even as hot programmers at start-ups came up with ways to steal their readers and revenue with commodity news, free classified ads, search functions, and social networking.
-
-News technology has improved dramatically over the past 10 years—particularly for the major players. But many small newsrooms still depend on wheezing, legacy production systems that are a major drain on resources even while producing terrible user experiences on the web and mobile apps—with poor visibility on search engines, and only token revenue from online subscriptions. Plummeting returns on web ads have forced some smaller publications to junk up their sites with so many ads, many of them intrusive and slow to load, that they are virtually unreadable. “I think the most messed-up part of the system, especially for the local publishers, is the user experience,” Jim Friedlich, CEO of the Lenfest Institute, a nonprofit trying to help save local news, told me. “That last foot is often pretty horrible. And that’s an area where a lot of people could use a lot of help.”
-
-It’s a constant source of frustration for the industry. “All the pieces should be there, but they’re not there yet. They’re too expensive or too complicated, or both,” says Chris Krewson, executive director of the nonprofit Local Independent Online News Publishers (LION). “CMS is destiny,” is how the University of Missouri journalism professor Damon Kiesow put it in an [interview with Poynter.org](https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2020/heres-what-you-need-to-know-before-moving-to-a-new-cms/), using the common abbreviation for “content management systems.” “Pretty much everything you do in your entire organization, be it newsroom, advertising, subscriptions, video, AR \[augmented reality\]—whatever the new thing is or the old thing is—that’s all constrained by the capacity or lack thereof of your content creation and publishing systems.”
-
-Arc XP offers vastly more complexity than a small or even medium-sized news organization needs. And integrating it currently requires a fairly high level of in-house technical expertise. But one can easily imagine stripped-down, open-source versions of Arc that still offer small organizations a standard, basic editing suite, reliable web hosting, improved ad serving—and the benefits of updates and new ideas from an ever-growing community of users.
-
----
-
-Starting around 2010, large news publishers finally began to put more effort into creating efficient, reliable systems that reflected the new workflows and demands of digital publishing. One trailblazer was Shailesh Prakash, the chief information officer for *The Washington Post*. And in 2013, he had the good fortune to get his newspaper bought by one of the world’s richest men. Bezos liked Prakash’s vision. So Bezos did what Bezos does: He supported the building of the best-in-class system for himself, then found other people to pay for it.
-
-From the very beginning, Bezos focused his attention not on the *Post*’s content, but on its technology. In *Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire*, the author Brad Stone recounted that Bezos “obsessed over shaving milliseconds from the time it took web pages and complex graphics to load. He also asked for customized metrics that could measure the reader’s true interest in stories, and whether an article was truly ‘riveting.’ ” Bezos showered Prakash with money. Soon there were some 200 engineers, designers, and project managers at the *Post*, building what is now called Arc XP.
-
-“The original driving force was to solve technological and newsroom problems that we faced at *The Washington Post*,” Matthew Monahan, one of Arc’s creators and now its vice president for product, [told a media trade group](https://www.fipp.com/news/matthew-monahan-arc-publishing-washpo-speed-innovation-newsroom/) in 2018. “The whole reason we built Arc was that so many of the vendor-provided solutions we found on the market had serious constraints and were often tied to non-digital workflows,” he said. “More modern solutions didn’t necessarily scale to the needs of large newsrooms. And many of the solutions out there didn’t take digital speed as seriously as we did.”
-
-Although Arc wasn’t Bezos’s idea, his money and the cultural shift that came in the wake of his purchase of the *Post* were major factors in its success. “I think it made a huge difference when Jeff bought the *Post* because it allowed the people at the *Post* to view the technology a bit differently,” says Jeremy Gilbert, who was director of strategic initiatives at the *Post* before joining the faculty at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. “You can’t be owned by a billionaire who made his fortune in technology and not realize that technology has to be part of your job.”
-
-> *Amazon leverages the fact that so many sellers depend on it to get to market—basically extorting them to pay for advertising in order to be seen.*
-
-Word of mouth about the *Post*’s new technology spread, and other news publishers decided they wanted in. “Bezos loved the idea of supplying that technology to other papers and encouraged Prakash to license it to broadcasters and any company that needed publishing software,” Brad Stone wrote in his book.
-
-*The Globe and Mail* in Toronto was an [early adopter](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/community/digital-lab/globe-to-adopt-the-washington-posts-technology-platform/article30229099/), in 2016. Jason Chiu, a former senior manager at *The Globe and Mail*, told me it was clear by then that “the biggest challenge for us was the CMS. It was holding us back.” The newsroom was still following its age-old print workflow, and articles were still being cut and pasted into the digital publishing system.
-
-Arc was transformative, Chiu said. Where before, people had to struggle to produce a page that “looked remotely interesting,” Arc made it easy to customize and preview pages on the web and the mobile app. Editors could plan, track, and edit seamlessly. “It eliminated a lot of extraneous work,” he said. “Arc can consolidate tons of systems and workflows like no other CMS before it. Social. Publishing. Editing and copyediting. Video. Photos. Alert notification. Home page management. Arc did it all. There was no system that could do that before it.”
-
-*The [Dallas Morning News](https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/wp/2018/09/05/arc-publishing-to-license-technology-to-the-dallas-morning-news/)* started using Arc in 2019, after abandoning its own CMS. “We invested several millions of dollars in that, and then *The Washington Post* went out and invested hundreds of millions of dollars, and you could see the difference and we were in the wrong business,” Mike Orren, the *Dallas Morning News* chief product officer, told me. Prior to Arc, the newsroom was using “wonky” home-grown technology, Orren said. “We were managing our own DevOps \[development and operations\], and our own servers, so if we got a traffic spike of like 20 percent the whole thing would come down.” The newsroom had a huge list of unfulfilled requests. Arc changed all that. “Generally, at this point, if we’re down, the internet is down,” according to Orren. The bandwidth and content delivery network alone make it worth the investment, he said.
-
-> *“That’s the business model. It’s not screwing you from day one. It’s getting you fully bought in and unable to escape and* then *screwing you.”*
-
-Today’s Arc XP consists of a suite of products for every step of the digital news process. The *Post* expects that it will soon be taking in $100 million a year. The company plans to add another 100 staffers in the next year. And Bezos is now making a big push beyond news, into the hugely lucrative space of selling the CMS to major brands and corporations. BP was Arc’s first corporate client.
-
-Arc’s major U.S. newspaper clients include *The Boston Globe*, *The Philadelphia Inquirer*, and Tribune Publishing—including the *Chicago Tribune*, the *South Florida Sun-Sentinel* and *The Baltimore Sun*. The broadcasting giants Gray Television and Cox Media Group use Arc, as do several major international news organizations, including *Infobae* in Argentina and *El País* in Spain.
-
-It does not come cheap. Arc XP does not make its fee structure public—in fact, it insists on nondisclosure from the organizations that use it—but a recent [Forrester Consulting report](https://go.arcxp.com/tei) commissioned by Arc indicated that a regional media company with 500 employees—which is quite large—would pay a one-time implementation fee of $500,000, and almost that amount again as an annual subscription fee. Among the four organizations Forrester examined, the report said up-front fees ranged from $50,000 to $3 million.
-
-But Forrester also concluded that based on increased revenues and efficiencies—including a 50 percent “improvement to the editorial team’s productivity”—and cost savings from decommissioning legacy systems, the four organizations on average found that Arc XP paid for itself in 14 months.
-
-Many smaller news organizations have historically used WordPress or Drupal, two hugely popular open-source publishing platforms. But trying to keep sites on those platforms state of the art requires serious technical expertise. And with Google search results now favoring good “page experiences,” slow and jerky downloads can mean a stark drop in traffic.
-
-In an attempt to make news publishing on WordPress more efficient and effective, Kinsey Wilson, a digital publishing veteran and president of WordPress.com, [founded](https://newspack.pub/about/) Newspack in 2019. “There is absolutely no economic value in everyone repeating the same technological exercise over and over again,” he told me. Newspack, which is open-source, is for smaller publications (the *Washington Monthly*’s website utilizes Newspack). It gets support from the Lenfest Institute, the Knight Foundation, and the Google News Initiative, and is still considered a work in progress.
-
-And just like Arc is now marketing its platform outside the news industry, companies in the broader market like Brightspot and Contentful are contenders for news publishers. *The New York Times*, a leader in news technology, uses a proprietary system called Scoop that is not available for licensing. A *Times* spokesperson told me the investment and effort necessary would “detract from our strategy of investing in our journalism.”
-
----
-
-The dilemma we face is that one of the best answers to the news industry’s technology woes is in the hands of a man who has repeatedly proved that he cannot be trusted to have anyone’s best interests at heart other than his own, and whose MO includes ravaging the competition.
-
-Jeff Bezos has a history of monetizing surveillance and exploiting workers and partners. As [PBS *Frontline* reported](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/amazon-empire-documentary-jeff-bezos-key-takeaways-where-to-stream/), from the very first days of Amazon Bezos has “treated the site as a laboratory where customer behavior could be studied, predicted, and potentially influenced.” A 2021 [Open Markets Institute report](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e449c8c3ef68d752f3e70dc/t/60eee57a56b0254d2f05a6b8/1626269051310/AmazonSurveillance_Report_2021_Final.pdf) revealed that Amazon has routinely engaged in a “vast range of unfair, predatory, and exclusionary practices.” The report’s author, Daniel Hanley, explained: “Amazon is a surveillance company, first and foremost. Surveillance of all parties—from workers to competitors to consumers—is a fundamental aspect of the corporation’s operations. It uses invasive surveillance tactics to enable and facilitate its predatory conduct and fortify its monopoly power.”
-
-Amazon’s hugely successful AWS subsidiary is in some ways the model for Arc. AWS came about because Bezos built a huge and resilient cloud network for Amazon’s use, then started charging others to use it as well. Now it’s the most profitable part of Amazon’s business, indispensable to many modern internet companies. AWS also serves Amazon in other ways, notably by boosting the corporation’s already-unparalleled view of commercial flows on the internet to outcompete rivals and to manipulate and exploit the companies that depend on Amazon’s platform to get to market. In a seminal *Yale Law Journal* article about “[Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox](https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox)” in 2017, then Yale Law student Lina Khan warned, “Amazon enjoys receiving business from its rivals, even as it competes with them. Moreover, Amazon gleans information from these competitors as a service provider that it may use to gain a further advantage over them as rivals—enabling it to further entrench its dominant position.”
-
-And as *The New York Times* [reported](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/technology/amazon-aws-cloud-competition.html) in 2019, Amazon indeed turned out to be using AWS “to copy and integrate software that other tech companies pioneered.” Even some Amazon competitors have ended up being dependent on AWS. Netflix is entirely based on AWS, despite the fact that AWS, as the *Harvard Business Review* [reported](https://hbr.org/2022/03/how-to-choose-the-right-ecosystem-partners-for-your-business), “developed the knowledge to read and analyze content consumption data and in 2016, Amazon launched its own streaming service, Amazon Prime.”
-
----
-
-Arc has plenty of competition for now—especially in the corporate CMS market, where it remains a relatively small player. Nevertheless, it raises all sorts of anticompetitive concerns.
-
-Arc, just like AWS, is designed to make it hard for clients to leave. “Once we have a customer, and it’s taken a while to get it all sorted out and integrated, the switching costs are also high,” *Post* CIO Prakash [said in a 2021 talk](https://productsthatcount.com/washington-post-cpo-cto-on-building-a-technology-startup-within-a-non-tech-company/) with project managers. “You don’t rip out a fundamental publishing system and e-commerce system overnight.”
-
-Arc also brings clients to AWS, which Reuters [called](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-aws-washington-post/washington-post-software-deal-a-double-win-for-bezos-idUSKBN16M04B) “a double win for Bezos”—while AWS clients are encouraged to use Arc, which is an “advanced partner within the AWS Partner Network.” “This is classic antitrust,” Sascha Meinrath, a Penn State professor and digital rights activist, told me. “*The Washington Post* locking another newspaper into AWS via this platform? What ridiculousness is this?”
-
-“Bezos builds tight, vertically integrated businesses, then rents out capacity in every part of his stack,” the digital consultant Austin Smith [wrote in a 2018 report](https://narrowpathforlocalnews.org/) for the Lenfest Institute about the future of local news. Arc, he predicted, “will not outcompete other news products simply because its technology is superior or because \[the *Post*’s\] reporters are better. It will outcompete other news products because its integration is tighter—and many of its competitors will subsidize its operating costs by leasing its technology.”
-
-Meanwhile, Arc XP already effectively [drove its chief competitor out](https://digiday.com/media/cms-war-vox-media-washington-post-heating/) of the news platform business: Vox Media is no longer licensing its full-service CMS, which had attracted news clients including the Minneapolis *Star Tribune*. Vox simply didn’t have the resources to keep up with Arc, and made what a spokesperson called a “strategic decision” last year to focus instead on moving forward with Concert, its ad stack, and its Coral commenting component. Chase Davis, the deputy managing editor of the *Star Tribune*, told me that with all the resources Bezos has put into Arc, “it’d be tough, I think, for other people to come in and compete with them in that space.”
-
-People advocating for affordable and sustainable technology solutions for the entire news industry are deeply uneasy about Bezos and Arc, even in the short run. Daniel Williams, the CEO of BlueLena, told me he worries about Bezos’s ability to sustain losses in order to drive out competition. Williams said Bezos could potentially decide to offer Arc free of charge—as long as subscription revenue passed through Amazon or Bezos retained the rights to some data. Bezos could then leverage the data for his algorithms. “Hopefully I’ll be able to retire before Bezos comes along and takes it all away,” Williams said. “But they could do it instantly—and very well may.”
-
-> *From 2004 to 2020, the U.S. lost 2,100 newspapers—about one in four—often leaving communities without access to reliable local news. Those that still exist are often ghosts of their former selves.*
-
-On the all-important revenue side of the equation, Bezos’s *Post* has taken [aggressive steps](https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2020/12/02/how-jeff-bezos-washington-post-is-taking-google-facebook-with-insanely-unique-ad-technology-publishers/) to erode Google and Facebook’s domination of the online advertising market. The *Post* led the movement away from Google’s accelerated mobile pages framework, which has been accused of [discriminating](https://searchengineland.com/google-throttled-amp-page-speeds-created-format-to-hamper-header-bidding-antitrust-complaint-claims-375466) against non-Google-served ads. And the Zeus Prime platform, which can be used with or without Arc, is specifically intended to challenge Google and Facebook by creating an alternative market of publishers where ads are easier to buy and target, and render more quickly.
-
-But Amazon itself has become a major player in the ad market, [taking in](https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/03/amazon-has-a-31-billion-a-year-advertising-business.html) $31 billion in 2021 for placing ads in its own product listings and search results. That was more than a quarter of Facebook’s ad revenue that year and fully 15 percent of Google’s. Their business models are different: Facebook and Google divert advertisers away from traditional publishers; Amazon leverages the fact that so many sellers depend on it to get to market—basically extorting them to pay for advertising in order to be seen. But turning a duopoly into a triopoly, one of which is an extortionist, is hardly doing the news industry a favor.
-
-With 2,000 sites globally, Arc is already taking advantage of network effects—enjoying benefits that would, ideally, redound to the entire industry, and making it that much more powerful. “The bigger the platform gets, the more useful feedback we get from our customers and the better the platform becomes,” Arc’s Matthew Monahan told a trade group.
-
-> *The idea that journalism is a public good that we as a society should find some way to support and protect seems, at this point, like a no-brainer. And the future—if there is a future—is online.*
-
-Thus far, at least, there’s no evidence that Arc XP developers sift through their clients’ data to get a leg up. In fact, news customers who were apprehensive were assured that this would never happen. “That was a concern when we negotiated the deal,” *The Dallas Morning News*’s Orren said. “But it is very clear in our agreement with them that neither Arc nor Amazon have any access to our data for tracking or monetization; it’s expressly forbidden. They are not allowed to use that data for any purpose other than keeping us online.”
-
-And yet, Bezos wouldn’t be who he is today without his exploitation of customer data, cutthroat approach to competition, and ruthless attitude toward suppliers and employees. “Look, he’s not abusing this power right now,” Meinrath, the Penn State professor, said. “But historically, you give away the software, you do something real nice for a while, everyone jumps on this platform. And then you start doing evil shit and everyone’s like, ‘Well, crap, we can’t leave it?’ That’s the business model. It’s not screwing you from day one. It’s getting you fully bought in and unable to escape and *then* screwing you. And that could be via pricing models, that can be via data extraction—any huge array of different things.”
-
----
-
-From 2004 to 2020, the U.S. [lost 2,100 newspapers](https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/reports/news-deserts-and-ghost-newspapers-will-local-news-survive/the-news-landscape-in-2020-transformed-and-diminished/vanishing-newspapers/)—about one in four—often leaving communities without access to reliable local news. Those that still exist are often ghosts of their former selves, and the decline appears to be [accelerating](https://www.cislm.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2020_News_Deserts_Report_Final-Version-to-Design-Hammer-6-23-1.pdf). One statistic tells most of the story: In the past two decades, advertising revenue for the newspaper industry plummeted, from $49 billion a year to less than $10 billion a year, with those dollars effectively shifting from news publishers to the targeted, surveillance-fueled high-tech digital advertising machines of Google and Facebook.
-
-America’s Founding Founders recognized the crucial role of journalism in a democracy, and came up with several ways to strengthen what was then a nascent journalism industry. As the historian and journalist Rick Perlstein [emphatically explained](https://twitter.com/rickperlstein/status/1370204949502701569?s=11) on Twitter, “the Founders of the U.S. ALREADY \[F\*\*\*\*\*\*\] FIGURED OUT THIS PROBLEM. They financially subsidized newspapers with cheap postage and by giving printers lucrative government contracts. They made it nearly impossible for them to fail as businesses.”
-
-The idea that journalism is a public good that we as a society should find some way to support and protect seems, at this point, like a no-brainer. And the future—if there is a future—is online. As Nic Newman [wrote in a major report](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/journalism-media-and-technology-trends-and-predictions-2022#conclusion) for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, “Less digitally advanced parts of the news media may struggle in the years ahead.” Scholars like Ethan Zuckerman [envision](https://www.journalismliberty.org/publications/what-is-digital-public-infrastructure) public digital infrastructure that includes “public service digital spaces, tools and resources.” For any news organization that wants it, Arc could be that kind of public (or nonprofit) digital infrastructure.
-
-“It would be nice to be able to have a cheap or free or even revenue-generating tech stack that newsrooms could use,” Chris Krewson, the director of the LION publishers’ group, told me. “Because if technology becomes like water in this field, it’s going to irrigate the field. We’ll be able to plant more seeds and have more things grow.”
-
-The nonprofit expert Steve Waldman, president of Report for America and a *Washington Monthly* contributing editor and board member, told me he believes that the best path forward would be for Bezos to turn Arc over to a new, independent nonprofit with public service–minded journalists on the board of directors and a clear mission to help local news through technology. One model could be the Mozilla Foundation, an independent nonprofit that manages the free, open-source Firefox and Thunderbird software while, through its for-profit arm the Mozilla Corporation, also charging for its premium products.
-
-One essential part of this transition would be to make Arc open-source. That means literally making the code public, so anyone can inspect, modify, enhance, and share it. After making sure that no back doors or other security issues are exposed, that can be as simple as putting it on the internet host and software provider GitHub. “Having a process of opening up source code is a standard procedure within this realm,” Meinrath said. “And there are best practices that one can follow that make that a very graceful glide path.”
-
-Making software open-source promotes collaboration and means that every improvement benefits the public. One particularly welcome modification, for instance, would be to create a vastly simplified version for small publishers. Being open-source does not, however, mean that you can’t charge money to clients. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is now owned by IBM, has a mostly open code base, but makes several billion dollars a year. If a nonprofit acquired Arc, it could support its mission by continuing to charge non-news clients top dollar. Storage and traffic fees could be on a sliding scale.
-
-Meinrath also noted that transferring Arc to a nonprofit would significantly minimize the current risk for publishers. “They’re all relying upon the goodwill of Jeff Bezos—they’re relying on one guy to continue this project,” he said. “But billionaires aren’t exactly known for their long-term commitment to pretty much anything. And who’s to say that when Jeff Bezos dies, whoever’s next in line is going to want to keep maintaining this? And you can imagine this disruption to a realm that’s utterly reliant upon this singular code base. So why not make a transition to a sustainable, nondependent business model gracefully and over time, rather than wait for what I would declare to be the inevitable crisis point?”
-
-Jim Friedlich, the Lenfest CEO, said his advice to Bezos would be to “define news as a public good and Arc as a public service and use your technology and your engineering capability as a gift to the rest of the news industry.”
-
-Even competitors like Kinsey Wilson, the CEO of WordPress.com, say Bezos turning over Arc to a nonprofit would be good for the industry—although Wilson cautioned that he’d want to see Arc guarantee data portability and ownership. “You don’t want to put publishers in a position where their entire business is dependent on a proprietary system,” he said.
-
-And the nonprofit would need to offer extensive customer support. “Simply throwing tech at something in journalism has proven over and over again not to be the solution,” Mary Walter-Brown, CEO of the News Revenue Hub, a nonprofit organization that helps digital news outlets develop stronger business models, warns. “Don’t just give the tool,” says Erika Owens, the director of OpenNews, a nonprofit that encourages collaboration between technologists and journalists. “Give the tool and … three years of developer support and training support, of developers working with journalists to tell stories in ways that are only possible with the Arc platform.”
-
-Much like postal subsidies, a subsidized Arc would have to be available on a content-neutral basis—to all news organizations that meet certain structural requirements, whether or not what they publish is objectionable to some. “My honest answer is that we’re going to have to tolerate some bad guys using this,” Steve Waldman said. But, as he pointed out, “scurrilous Federalist newspapers printing lies got postal subsidies too.”
-
-Some observers are skeptical that Bezos would entertain any such idea. “That would be fantastic,” Williams of BlueLena said. “But we’re talking about appealing to the altruism of a guy who has a $400 million yacht and managed to get a government to [tear down a bridge](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60241145) so he could get his yacht out of the port.”
-
-> *Donating his publishing technology to the American people might be just what Bezos needs to repair his plutocratic image while we are still asking nicely.*
-
-Yet Bezos has spoken in heroic terms about his personal ambitions. He [told a reporter](https://www.wired.com/story/plaintext-jeff-bezos-ceo-amazon/) back in 2018, “I’m not going to work on something that I don’t think is improving civilization. Why would I?” When he stepped down as Amazon CEO, Bezos [wrote](https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/email-from-jeff-bezos-to-employees) to the company’s employees that he would now “have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions.” That presumably means fighting climate change, alleviating poverty, colonizing space—and helping the news industry. He did save the *Post*, which had been sloughing off staff and drifting toward irrelevance. In a [*Medium* post](https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr-pecker-146e3922310f) in 2019, Bezos wrote about his purchase: “The Post is a critical institution with a critical mission. My stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life, if I’m lucky enough to live that long.”
-
-Waldman sees Bezos in a position to create a lasting legacy “akin to Carnegie building a thousand libraries … If he basically made Arc an open platform, that could be an incredible gift.”
-
-And if Bezos doesn’t feel so charitably inclined? He shouldn’t forget that Lina Khan, who laid out a legal battle plan for breaking up the whole of Amazon in *The Yale Law Journal*, is now the head of the Federal Trade Commission. Donating Arc to the American people might be just what Bezos needs to repair his plutocratic image while we are still asking nicely.
-
-*(Editor’s note: After this story was published, a Washington Post spokesperson emailed that Jeff Bezos “is not involved in Arc’s day-to-day operations and strategy.”)*
-
----
-
-*This article was produced in association with the Open Markets Institute’s Center for Journalism & Liberty.*
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-# Jeff Zucker Scandal: Inside the CNN President's Downfall
-
-On the rainy morning of March 28, 2020, President Trump addressed a phalanx of journalists outside the White House following a call with New York Gov. [Andrew Cuomo](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/andrew-cuomo/). “There’s a possibility that sometime today, we’ll do a quarantine — short-term, two weeks — of New York, probably New Jersey, and certain parts of Connecticut,” he said while clutching his umbrella. “This would be an enforceable quarantine. You know, I’d rather not do it, but we may need it.”
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-Hours later, Cuomo was asked during his daily press conference about Trump’s comments. “From a medical point of view, I don’t know what you’d be accomplishing,” he offered with a shrug.
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-But as sunset approached, the governor appeared on [CNN](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/cnn/) with a much more forceful assessment, predicting that a quarantine would unleash “chaos and mayhem” in the tristate area, and homing in on the financial implications of such a move. “I think it would paralyze the economy,” he said. “I think it would shock the economic markets in a way we’ve never seen before.”
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-CNN anchor Ana Cabrera teed up a seemingly tailor-made question: “What would this mean for the stock market? Would it have to shut down?”
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-“Oh, it would drop like a stone,” Cuomo insisted. “That would drop this economy in a way that wouldn’t recover for months, if not years.”
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-What viewers did not know is that in the hours between Cuomo’s Albany press conference and his CNN dinner-hour appearance, he corresponded directly with CNN leadership. Firing off a text to the network’s top marketing and communications executive, [Allison Gollust](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/allison-gollust/) — who had also been his own publicist a few years prior — Cuomo wrote, in an apparent reference to CNN President [Jeff Zucker](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/jeff-zucker/), “Ask Jeff to call me plz.” Zucker’s representatives say he has “no record” of speaking to Cuomo that day. Regardless, Cuomo landed on a talking point sure to grab Trump’s attention. And Zucker certainly knew exactly which levers to pull when it came to the president, given their long and lucrative relationship via the reality show *The Apprentice.*
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-About 30 minutes before Cuomo appeared on CNN by remote feed, Gollust emailed a programing staffer, cc’ing Zucker, and offered the governor as a last-minute guest to talk about Trump’s proposed quarantine. She then told Zucker that the governor would like to speak with him. When the segment ended, Gollust texted Cuomo: “Well done . . . Cuomo-W. Trump-L.”
-
-A representative for the former governor declined to comment. Risa Heller, a spokeswoman for both Zucker and Gollust, says in a statement that “Jeff never advised Andrew Cuomo,” and that the notion that Gollust was “laundering advice to the Governor” was “far-fetched” and “patently ridiculous.” But two sources familiar with the matter dispute this. To observers both outside and inside CNN, the network brass’s interactions with the governor represented the worst kind of journalistic lapse — “one of the most clear-cut ethical breaches you could think of,” says University of Missouri journalism professor Ryan Thomas. News outlets are supposed to expose the wrongdoings of politicians, not serve as their publicists. That’s especially true for the network that bills itself as “The Most Trusted Name in News.”
-
-**Zucker was ousted from CNN** on Feb. 2, 2022, citing a previously unreported affair with Gollust. The relationship was unearthed amid an internal investigation into CNN anchor [Chris Cuomo](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/chris-cuomo/), who was fired last December for helping his brother navigate sexual-misconduct allegations. But, as was revealed days later in a statement by WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar, that probe turned up not only Zucker and Gollust’s affair, but also violations of journalistic best practices around the couple’s cozy relationship with the governor. The initial suggestion was that these failings were recent — lapses that took place during the extraordinary times of the pandemic. But according to dozens of former colleagues who spoke with *Rolling Stone,* they marked the culmination of Zucker’s three-plus decades spent in a craven pursuit of ratings and power, a career that would foster a toxic culture at two networks and fan the flames of the disinformation age along the way.
-
-At NBC, Zucker put Trump in front of millions of American eyeballs for 14 seasons, positioning him as a lovably irascible titan of business and effectively turning *The Apprentice* into a shadow campaign for the future leader of the free world. It was a union spawned in 2003, when Trump was a semifailed businessman looking for an image overhaul, and Zucker, then president of NBC Entertainment, was apparently eager to acquiesce. To cross-promote that show, he installed Trump as a regular guest on *Today,* where he was exalted like a Nobel laureate before an audience of America’s stay-at-home moms. And, of course, Zucker presided over Matt Lauer’s heyday, when the *Today* anchor preyed on vulnerable young staffers, seemingly with no fear.
-
-> “Jeff and Trump are essentially the same person — the ability to self-promote and be wildly duplicitous. They are very similar. And vindictive. They’re not gonna forget anything.”
-
-By the time he got to CNN, Zucker was both kingmaker and king. He brought in on-air talent like Clarissa Ward and, more recently, Chris Wallace; launched landmark docuseries like *Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown*; and turned a moribund digital news operation into a scoop machine. He also made a $6-million-a-year star of his close friend Chris Cuomo, who has since been accused of sexual misconduct in addition to journalistic missteps. (Cuomo denies the sexual-assault and harassment allegations, and maintains that any ethical transgressions were sanctioned by Zucker and Gollust.) Zucker bucked conflict-of-interest protocol to have Chris interview his brother, shamelessly capitalizing on Andrew’s rising national profile during the pandemic. All the while, sources say, Zucker was conducting his affair with his subordinate, Gollust, in plain sight, bringing her from one network to the other, promoting her — and approving her compensation — at every stage of his ascension. She was a key player in Cuomogate, providing talking points to the governor — for whom she worked briefly between stints with Zucker — and relaying his preferred topics to CNN producers, including on that day in March 2020. It was all, sources say, part of a pattern of behavior Zucker had been nurturing for years.
-
-“Jeff will do anything for good ratings and buzz, journalistic ethics be damned,” says one former NBC comrade. “He’s like, ‘Everybody’s talking about it. It’s great TV.’ But great TV doesn’t always translate to great journalism.”
-
-Tom Touchet, who was a successor to Zucker as executive producer of *Today* from 2002 to 2005, often collided with Zucker and Trump during the early years of *The Apprentice* on NBC. His assessment of Zucker is more pointed: “Jeff and Trump are essentially the same person — the ability to self-promote and be wildly duplicitous They are very similar. And vindictive. They’re not gonna forget anything.”
-
-**Zucker and Gollust’s March 28 communications** with Gov. Cuomo may be among the 100,000 texts and emails swept up in CNN’s investigation into Chris Cuomo’s journalistic processes, conducted by the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore. When the probe wrapped on Feb. 13, Kilar’s statement called it “comprehensive and definitive,” noting that the investigators had “found violations of Company policies, including CNN’s News Standards and Practices, by Jeff Zucker, Allison Gollust, and Chris Cuomo.”
-
-
-
-Gollust (far right), with Zucker and Tom Brokaw in 2016, was promoted at every stage of Zucker’s ascendancy at NBC and CNN. Their affair came to light last year.
-
-Jared Siskin/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images
-
-While Zucker had maintained his resignation was a result of the exposed affair, plot twists abound. First off, both parties claimed their relationship had only recently turned romantic. (“Jeff and Allison have had a professional partnership for over 22 years. It evolved over time and became romantic during Covid. Any speculation to the contrary is false,” Heller says.) But multiple colleagues say it began decades ago.
-
-According to one source familiar with the CNN investigation and another who is a Democratic operative, Gollust’s ongoing connections to Gov. Cuomo also raised eyebrows. Two sources familiar with the matter say Gollust and the governor exchanged texts in which they agreed to meet up for drinks on multiple occasions in 2019 and 2020. In early 2020, several months after his split from partner Sandra Lee, Cuomo asked Gollust, “You don’t want to see me now that I’m single?” She replied, “A drink with you would be the best date I’ve had in a while.” Four months later, he fired off a text to Gollust suggesting he be her “pool boy.” She responded that she’d welcome that scenario, and they set up a call. When their texting resumed, Gollust wrote, “That was fun. Sleep well.”
-
-(“It’s no secret that Allison and Governor Cuomo had a friendly relationship after Allison briefly worked for him in 2012,” says Heller. “For Rolling Stone to suggest through innuendo and creative syntax — and no evidence — that there was a sexual relationship between the two in 2020 is disgusting, sexist, and patently false. In fact, Allison was never in the same room as the governor during 2020.” A representative for Cuomo adds, “Allison and the governor were former colleagues and friends, never had a romantic relationship, and it is impossible to have two sources saying otherwise because it is a total fabrication.”)
-
-Gollust’s texts went beyond friends’ banter. When a rumor circulated that Trump was about to shut down New York City, Gollust invited the governor to come on CNN’s *New Day* the next morning and “squash it.” She quipped to her former boss, “I’m pretty sure I stopped being your publicist 8 years ago, but apparently I still am.” On another occasion, he asked her to critique his press conference.
-
-Heller says, “These are innocuous, mundane conversations that are being spun into a nefarious tale.” But she acknowledges that Gollust asked the governor to help her friend cut through bureaucratic red tape to open a birthing center in Manhattan. Months later, Heller also confirms, Gollust hit up Cuomo with a request involving Billy Joel, who’d once hosted a Cuomo-campaign fundraiser. She prefaced it with “I never ask you for favors, but . . .,” to which Cuomo replied, “Yes, u do ask me for favors, and that’s okay. It’s mutual.”
-
-“It was clear that she leveraged the relationship \[with Andrew Cuomo\],” says the Democratic operative. “There was a consistent exchange of favors between them.”
-
-The inappropriate relationship, coupled with clear signs of collaboration, sealed Gollust’s fate. On Feb. 15, she was cut loose from CNN. (WarnerMedia declined to comment on questions about Gollust and Cuomo’s relationship and all other matters, pointing to Kilar’s statement regarding the investigation. Heller insists that CNN’s characterization of Gollust’s journalistic integrity is a “retrofitted justification for an unmerited dismissal.”)
-
-**If it all seems too incestuous** to be true, it was hardly unusual within the culture that followed Zucker wherever he went. For all his many journalistic wins, a brazen disregard for workplace ethics seemed to envelop his newsrooms — a function, perhaps, of his early successes and the privileges he enjoyed along the way.
-
-Raised by a cardiologist and a schoolteacher outside of Miami, Zucker graduated from Harvard in 1986, and three years later became a field producer for *Today.* Andrea Smith, a then-producer of the show who had been with the network since 1975, trained the new recruit on how to produce and edit a story. “I saw what salary they were giving him right out of the gate, and it was like 10 times what I was making, maybe more, and here I was being his tutor,” the Emmy winner recalls. “Men were treated so much better than women in those days, because that’s just the way it was.”
-
-Just three years after his auspicious start, Zucker became the boss when he was named executive producer of *Today* at the age of 26. The producers bought him a kids’ lunchbox because he was so young, and he was quickly dubbed a wunderkind. His arrival ushered in the golden era of the morning show. “He was the best producer I ever worked under,” says Smith. “He was unparalleled at motivating the producers under him, and just knew how to manage a show, and knew how to get people to do their best.”
-
-His Midas touch included helming production in the now-iconic streetside studio, and assembling a killer team that included Katie Couric and Matt Lauer. A key addition off-camera was Gollust, who, according to her bio, joined the network in 1996 — the same year Zucker married another NBC employee, Caryn Nathanson — and made her leap to senior publicist within a year. It was well-known that Gollust and Zucker were more than colleagues, NBC alums say. They frequently flew on the NBC private jet together with another *Today* colleague, who sources say was also involved in a barely hidden relationship with a married top news executive. It was around this time that Lauer, the rising star, began targeting young, vulnerable women, particularly assistants, temps, and receptionists.
-
-
-
-Matt Lauer’s relationships with vulnerable young staffers were said to be a well-known secret throughout Zucker’s tenure at NBC.
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-Robin Platzer/FilmMagic
-
-Addie Zinone was one of those women who came forward with accusations against Lauer in 2017. When she began interning at *Today* in 1999, the show was at the height of its popularity. Still, there was a much darker side. In 2000, Zinone was a production assistant and Lauer a newly married superstar when he first hit on her. They began a consensual relationship that she now attributes to that gross imbalance in power. The affair included encounters in Lauer’s office, a now-familiar MO for the anchor.
-
-While Zinone describes Zucker as “nothing but professional” toward her, she is skeptical that he didn’t know about his star employee’s reputation. “Matt’s behavior was despicable and ongoing, and that doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” she says today. “A lot of what we’ve heard about Matt was in-house, meaning he had to feel protection from those above him.”
-
-“It was totally an old-boys’ club,” says Smith. “Everybody knew about the affairs and everything going on. The idea that \[network brass\] would say, ‘Oh, we had no idea \[about Lauer’s conduct\]’ is very funny. Everybody talked about it. All of the highest-up executives at NBC knew.” (Heller strongly denies this, saying Zucker “was entirely unaware of Matt Lauer’s behavior while the two overlapped at NBC. If he had been, he would have taken action immediately.”)
-
-By the time Tom Touchet arrived in 2002 from ABC News, the atmosphere was “like *Mad Men,*” he says. Zucker had become president of NBC Entertainment a couple of years prior, and with another promotion in 2003, was in charge of the news division, too. Touchet goes on to describe the Athens Olympics in 2004 as “the weirdest melting pot of everybody sleeping together.”
-
-Lauer in particular acted more boldly as time went on. In 2005, Smith sent the anchor a thank-you note via an internal communications channel after he’d handled a particularly tricky interview. His response took her by surprise. “Are you buttering me up?” Lauer wrote, according to Smith. Then he began detailing where he wanted to spread butter on her body, including her thighs. He ended the message with a demand: “Wear that skirt. It’s easy to get off.”
-
-Smith was confused. She looked down at the leggings she was wearing like she did most days. Skirts were not exactly a staple of her wardrobe. She quickly figured out that the message wasn’t meant for her. Instead, she realized, it was intended for a young receptionist who had a similar name.
-
-Smith says she felt it was a professional “death knell” that she’d found out about the affair. In the environment cultivated under Zucker, according to Smith, Touchet, and others, it was unspoken but understood that powerful men were making moves on underlings who would be committing career suicide to report them. Lauer’s reputation was well-known internally by then, yet he continued to be put on the highest pedestal at the network. (Even powerful women lost if they crossed him. In 2011, NBC executives gave Ann Curry the boot just a year into her stint as *Today* co-anchor reportedly in order to entice Lauer, who’d made his disdain for her clear, to re-up his contract.) Smith says she was pushed out in 2006, after more than 30 years with NBC. She believes the “dangerous” information she’d acquired about Lauer could have been a factor. (NBC vehemently denied knowledge of Lauer’s conduct at the time.)
-
-While doubt remains about what Zucker knew of Lauer’s behavior, NBC’s top dog offered a clue at a 2008 Friars Club roast of the anchor that was dubbed “three hours of dick and pussy jokes,” many at the expense of Curry. “It’s just good to see Matt up here and not under my desk,” Zucker cracked. “I don’t want to say Matt’s a germaphobe, but he’s the only guy I know who uses Purell both before *and* after he masturbates.”
-
-Even after all that later became public about Lauer, Zucker remained friendly with the `#MeToo` pariah. In 2019, he and Gollust attended Zucker’s 54th-birthday party at New York’s McKittrick Hotel. Couric’s tell-all 2021 memoir, *Going There,* describes the threesome palling around at Don Lemon’s 2019 engagement party in the Hamptons.
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-“I think Jeff probably would have hired Matt \[at CNN\] if there hadn’t been so much blowback,” says one on-air personality who worked with both. “Jeff likes to repay loyalty by hiring people.”
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-**Lauer wasn’t the only bad actor** Zucker enabled. His bromance with Trump was in full swing in the mid-aughts, their co-dependent lust for ratings fueling noxious behavior. On Feb. 3, 2005, Trump settled into a plush chair at Studio 1A in Rockefeller Plaza, ready to cross-promote *The Apprentice* alongside that show’s producer, Mark Burnett, who was appearing remotely from L.A. Lauer affectionately referred to Trump as “the Donald,” while the guests prattled about the series’ soon-to-be-launched spinoff with Martha Stewart. Then Lauer did the unthinkable: Noting that *The Apprentice’*s audience numbers had been on a downward trajectory after a smash-hit first season, he asked Trump, “Why do you think that is?”
-
-Trump spun the truth — claiming the ratings were actually up, and “in the number-one demographic, are very substantial” — but Lauer pushed back. “The information I have is \[that\] in the premiere the ratings were better, but since then they’ve been down about 20 percent. That’s not what you have?”
-
-
-
-Zucker and Trump were friends for two decades leading up to Trump’s presidency. As recently as 2017, Zucker told a journalist, “I like Donald.”
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-Nick Hunt/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images
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-After the segment, Trump stormed into the control room, orange face turned red, “and had a hissy fit,” according to Touchet, who was then running *Today.* Zucker followed, and, at first, commended Touchet in front of the staff for pressing their guest on a difficult question. Then, Touchet says, Zucker pulled him aside and — borrowing a line from Trump — told him, “You’re fucking fired.”
-
-“Trump was the worst guest we ever had to deal with, and he was serially abusive to my staff,” Touchet says. “I heard from Jeff and Mark Burnett daily. Trump was on the show constantly.”
-
-Within a few months, Touchet says he was officially shown the door with years left on his contract. (“Tom Touchet was not fired because of any interview with [Donald Trump](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/donald-trump/),” Heller says.) Later that year, *Today* literally rolled out a red carpet for Trump before one of his appearances on the show, playing “The Imperial March” — Darth Vader’s theme from *Star Wars* — as he walked on, with Al Roker introducing him as the “king of the universe.” Jokey though it may have seemed, gambits like this helped to burnish the image of Trump created via *The Apprentice*: that of an accomplished, authoritative leader to be both feared and lauded. For millions of Americans outside New York City — where Trump was largely viewed as nothing more than a carnival barker — the cartoon character that Zucker and Co. had drummed up to goose ratings was becoming real.
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-Given that Trump had previously expressed political ambitions (including a brief presidential run on the Reform Party ticket in 2000), this TV-star glow-up was dangerous enough. But the reality behind the scenes was even worse: Trump’s growing stardom seemed to amplify some of his most insidious qualities. Already a reputed racist who decades earlier had been sued for housing discrimination against Black renters and had called for the death penalty against five Black and Latino teens wrongly accused of rape in the notorious Central Park Jogger case, Trump reportedly used the n-word liberally on the set of *The Apprentice,* according to sources in former contestant Omarosa Manginault Newman’s book about her time in the Trump White House, *Unhinged.* It was also around this time that the infamous *Access Hollywood* tape, where Trump casually bragged to host Billy Bush (during an interview for one NBC program about his guest spot on another NBC program, the soap *Days of Our Lives*) about grabbing beautiful women “by the pussy” was recorded.
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-As with Lauer, it’s unclear how much Zucker knew about his cash cow’s bad behavior in the studio, but Trump’s audaciousness suggests he wasn’t exactly keeping his proclivities a secret. Yet Zucker continued to use other NBC programs to both feed and siphon Trump’s celebrity — with dire consequences.
-
-“By putting Trump in \[the\] pseudo-factual setting \[of a\] reality show, Zucker helped to create the Trump phenomenon,” says Columbia University journalism professor Samuel Freedman. “And the whole country is now paying a terrible price.”
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-By the time Zucker had ascended to president and CEO of NBC Universal in 2007, his and Trump’s worlds were ever more intertwined. The Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants had become a joint venture between NBC and Trump. That year, NBC Universal reportedly made a $10,000 donation to the Trump Foundation. Trump’s 2007 business how-to book, *Think Big and Kick Ass,* even cited a comment Zucker had made about how, in a post-*Friends* world, Trump was NBC’s new Jennifer Aniston. (“He said very, very nicely, ‘Donald Trump may not have hair as good as \[her\], but he’s got great ratings.’ ”)
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-Still, Zucker’s fiefdom was crumbling from the inside. Despite all of the cross-promotion, *The Apprentice* ratings had continued to slip, along with the rest of NBC’s prime-time lineup. *Today’*s numbers had also taken a hit. The headaches piled up. In 2009, Zucker engineered Jay Leno’s disastrous move to prime time, only to reverse course four months later and move him back to late night, where an already installed Conan O’Brien was heading up *The Tonight Show.*
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-Corporate winds were shifting, too. The next year, Zucker was shown the door ahead of Comcast closing its 51 percent acquisition of Universal. Though he’d received a golden parachute pegged at $30 million to $40 million, he was facing his first career comeuppance.
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-> “Jeff liked gimmicks. The gimmick of the missing plane, the gimmick of Trump, and Andrew and Chris Cuomo and their dog- and-pony show. This is an important story. People are dying. It’s not about ‘Who does Mom love more?’ It was ridiculous.”
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-Meanwhile, as one door closed for Zucker, Trump was walking through the one *The Apprentice* had opened, starting to lay the groundwork for a political future. Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2011, he floated a possible presidential run — and, in a taste of what was to come, began promoting the Obama birther conspiracy. He later reversed course and said he wouldn’t run, deciding to milk the promotional machine of *The Apprentice* — which also earned him $427 million over its run — a little longer.
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-**After a couple of years executive-producing** his old colleague Katie Couric on her short-lived Disney-ABC syndicated talk show, *Katie,* Zucker left in January 2013 to run CNN — a job Trump bragged he’d secured for his old friend. The degree of Trump’s involvement is murky. Beyond a couple of tweets endorsing Zucker (“Great move by CNN if they sign Jeff Zucker. He was responsible for me and The Apprentice on NBC — became #1 show!”), a source familiar with the interaction says Trump did put in a good word with then-Turner Broadcasting System chairman and CEO Phil Kent at a gala dinner for the American Turkish Society in 2012, calling Zucker “a genius.” (Kent declined to comment for this piece, but has recently told friends that he has no regrets about his decision.)
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-As CNN president, Zucker’s first hires included Chris Cuomo and Gollust, who resigned from her position in the governor’s office, where she’d been working less than six months. At first, she reported to the network’s senior vice president for Turner Broadcasting, but within seven months, she began reporting directly to Zucker.
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-Unlike NBC, whose policy stated that supervisor-subordinate romances were “strongly discouraged,” CNN’s rules were far more strict. According to the company’s code of conduct, “To avoid a conflict of interest, employees must not hire or supervise (directly or indirectly) someone with whom they have a personal relationship, and if you are in a position to influence the employment, advancement, or hiring of someone with whom you have a personal relationship . . . you must inform the HR department in advance of taking any action.” But as network president, Zucker had oversight of the HR department, and apparently didn’t care about flouting these rules.
-
-While inside the network some people resented the Gollust relationship, Zucker appears to have been widely liked by CNN staffers, particularly the high-paid anchors whose careers he championed. (Don Lemon called him “the backbone, the glue, and the spirit of this company, the man who I personally credit with change in my life, the man who believed in me when nobody else did.”) But as the years went on, Zucker was taking fire from outside critics for giving a disproportionate amount of airtime to his onetime superstar, Trump. In the lead-up to the 2016 election, CNN was mocked for its breathless coverage of the candidate’s rallies, which the network frequently aired from start to finish. Sometimes producers went so far as to leave a camera fixed on an empty podium with a chyron that read: “Trump About to Take the Stage.” Trump also regularly guested on the network’s political shows, having reasonably civil conversations with its anchors about his divisive rhetoric. The tactic worked: CNN routinely trounced rivals MSNBC and Fox in ratings during the election cycle, and boasted its most-watched year ever in 2016.
-
-At a December 2016 dinner held at the Harvard Institute of Politics, Zucker was heckled and booed when the conversation turned to CNN’s coverage of Trump. “The crowd did not react positively,” says one attendee. “It wasn’t just GOP people. It was people on the left who were upset over CNN’s role in giving that kind of attention to Trump.” But Zucker appeared to be neither surprised nor contrite. Instead, he argued that Trump was great for ratings and profitability. And he insisted that his old *Apprentice* buddy was the only Republican candidate willing to call into CNN’s morning show. “Cable news in general, and CNN in particular, should not be held responsible for the fact that Donald Trump said yes to those interviews and the others didn’t,” he said.
-
-Sources say that in the run-up to the 2016 election, Zucker and Trump spoke directly about coverage, as well as through disgraced Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who was a frequent guest on CNN. Cohen denied any involvement to *Rolling Stone.* Still, in a 2020 segment of *Tucker Carlson Tonight,* the host ran audio clips he said were from a 2016 phone call between Cohen and Zucker. In the recording, the CNN exec praised Trump’s campaigning, offered advice for that night’s Republican debate, and said he wanted to discuss giving Trump a weekly show.
-
-To many observers, Zucker’s legacy is inextricably linked with the 45th president, to his detriment. “Overall, I think Zucker is a very flawed figure,” says NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen. “He definitely participated in the onslaught of Trump coverage that was part of his rise to power. He also turned CNN into an extremely adversarial network to Trump when that was needed. That’s part of his legacy as well. Which is not to say that they balance each other. But you have to reckon with both of those things.”
-
-But even when the tone of the relationship between Trump and CNN shifted, Zucker couldn’t resist bragging that Trump’s animosity was personal. It went back to their “strong, 20-year friendship,” as he explained on an episode of David Axelrod’s podcast, before crowing without a hint of irony that when Trump didn’t get the “preferential treatment” he expected based on the pair’s long history, he turned on the network.
-
-Of course, Trump is a man known to thrive on negative attention, so CNN’s hammering of his presidency still played directly into his hands. As the supposedly neutral network turned more partisan in its take on him, Trump painted himself as a victim of bias, branding CNN, and later most mainstream media, as “fake news.” The daily Trump-versus-CNN cage match set the stage for the misinformation age, with large swaths of the population eventually questioning anything the network reported, from Covid death rates to 2020 election results. And still, Zucker couldn’t quite quit their co-dependent relationship, knowing that wall-to-wall Trump equaled stellar ratings, even as it contributed to the collapse of discourse in the U.S. “Jeff is responsible for the death of nuance,” as one NBC News alum who worked with Zucker puts it.
-
-**As the pandemic raged** in March 2020, Andrew Cuomo’s star was rising, and he was touted as a potential challenger to Joe Biden for the Democratic ticket. Zucker, seeing a new ratings bonanza, reversed course on an internal policy barring Chris Cuomo from interviewing his brother. “You get trust from authenticity and relatability and vulnerability,” Zucker told *The New York Times’* Ben Smith of the decision. “That’s what the brothers Cuomo are giving us right now.”
-
-The on-air exchanges between the Cuomos were often cringeworthy, like when Chris asked his older sibling: “With all of this adulation that you’re getting for doing your job, are you thinking about running for president? Tell the audience.”
-
-“Jeff liked gimmicks,” says one former anchor who worked with Zucker, citing CNN’s incessant coverage when a Malaysian passenger jet disappeared from radar in 2014. “The whole gimmick of the missing plane, the gimmick of Trump, and the gimmick of Andrew Cuomo and Chris Cuomo having their little dog-and-pony show. This is an important story. People are dying. It’s not about, ‘Who does mom love more?’ It was ridiculous, so non-journalistic at every turn. There’s no excuse for it at all.”
-
-
-
-Zucker’s interactions with Gov. Andrew Cuomo during the pandemic came under scrutiny as part of CNN’s investigation into the conduct of anchor Chris Cuomo.
-
-Brad Barket/Getty Images
-
-For a time, Zucker’s abuses of power went unchecked; CNN operated like an island within the massive portfolio of WarnerMedia (as the network’s parent company was renamed following AT&T’s completed acquisition of Time Warner in 2018). That is until Jason Kilar took over as Warner CEO in May 2020 and began overhauling the sprawling entertainment and media conglomerate. One of his first decisions: to remove Zucker’s oversight of CNN’s finances, human resources, and corporate communications, the division run by Gollust. Zucker had no input in the matter, and was given just 24 hours’ notice. The move prompted several journalists to query WarnerMedia about the relationship between Zucker and Gollust.
-
-At the same time, a variety of storms were closing in. By February 2021, Gov. Cuomo had become embroiled in a growing `#MeToo` scandal in which he was accused of sexual misconduct by 11 women. New York Attorney General Letitia James conducted her own investigation into the matter, with the results indicating that *New Day* anchor Chris Cuomo had reached out to “sources,” including other reporters, to gauge whether more women were going to come forward, and relayed what he was hearing to his brother’s advisers. Even more shocking, Gollust played a role behind the scenes as Andrew Cuomo navigated the fallout; she connected with Chris as he guided his brother’s response to the claims, according to sources, much as Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund co-founders Roberta Kaplan and Tina Tchen had. (Those women resigned in August 2021 over their involvement in the governor’s handling of the sexual-harassment allegations.)
-
-Controversies continued to pile up for Zucker. In June 2021, he was criticized for allowing CNN’s chief legal analyst, Jeffrey Toobin, to return to the air after he’d exposed himself on a Zoom with *New Yorker* magazine colleagues. In September, as Cravath, Swaine & Moore launched its investigation into Chris Cuomo, Zucker steadfastly backed the anchor. In December, the actor Jussie Smollett testified in his case involving a falsely reported hate crime that he’d received advice from Lemon in the aftermath of the incident, prompting him not to hand over his phone records to Chicago police; the issue was never raised internally at the network.
-
-Early that same month, the tide apparently turned on Chris Cuomo when Washington, D.C., attorney Debra Katz sent a letter to CNN’s general counsel stating she represented a Jane Doe who claimed she was sexually assaulted by Cuomo when he was an anchor for ABC’s *20/20*; the woman wanted CNN to hold Cuomo responsible for his actions. (A Cuomo representative says, “These apparently anonymous allegations are not true.”)
-
-On Dec. 4, CNN fired Cuomo for cause. (A WarnerMedia source says the assault allegation was not a factor.) Six days later, CNN fired Cuomo’s *New Day* producer John Griffin following his indictment by a federal grand jury in Vermont for attempting to lure minors as young as nine to engage in unlawful sexual activity. (Griffin has pleaded not guilty.) That same month, news surfaced that police in Virginia had launched a criminal probe into Rick Saleeby, who resigned from his post as a senior producer on Jake Tapper’s *The Lead*; that investigation also involved allegations from “potential juvenile victims.” Heller says that “Jeff had no knowledge of either of these two producers’ behavior.” But by the time the Cravath investigation brought Zucker and Gollust’s misdeeds to Kilar’s attention in late January, the writing was on the wall for Zucker.
-
-Kilar acted swiftly to oust the media industry’s most high-profile executive, who departed without severance. But Zucker, ever the master at shaping the narrative, negotiated the terms of his Feb. 2 exit, sources familiar with the matter say, citing only the supposedly recent, undisclosed romantic relationship with Gollust. (Nothing about journalistic lapses was mentioned, although at least two publications, *Rolling Stone* and the *New York Post,* invoked the Andrew Cuomo ties.) A number of high-paid anchors, like Lemon and Tapper, bemoaned their fallen leader on air in hyperbolic terms that reflect the loyalty Zucker instilled in his favorite talent. (Tapper: “\[Chris Cuomo\] threatened Jeff. Jeff said, ‘We don’t negotiate with terrorists.’ And Chris blew the place up. How do we get past that perception — that this is the bad guy winning?”)
-
-In his wake, Zucker leaves a media landscape more fractured than ever, with public distrust of journalists at an all-time high. And why not, when a peek behind the curtain reveals secret dealings between his news outlets and the politicians they’re supposed to hold to account, coverage dictated not by the issues but by whatever sensational dreck would keep eyes glued to the screen, and newsrooms where alleged predators roamed freely? Zucker may not have invented the culture of powerful men exploiting the women around them, but he incubated it for the modern media age, empowering people who were supposed to hold the public’s trust — but couldn’t even be trusted to keep their hands off of their subordinates. Perhaps most damning, he leaves a political landscape warped by a man he was all too proud to use for ratings throughout his career.
-
-“I understood who and what Donald Trump was, because I was from New York, and I understood that he was just a one-man publicity machine,” Zucker told an audience of college students back in 2011. “Even if the show wasn’t good, he was going to say it was good. Even if the ratings weren’t good, he was going to say the ratings were great. Nobody could generate publicity like Donald Trump. And by the way, that turned out to be entirely true.”
-
-Now, many are waiting to see how the onetime wiz kid will reinvent himself again. Though a journalism job would seem out of the question given all that went down at two networks on his watch, a return to show business is within the realm of possibility. He has also said he would love to run the Miami Dolphins, and hasn’t ruled out a run for office himself. Wherever he lands, former colleagues are sure it’ll be on his feet. “Don’t hold the garage sale for Jeff Zucker,” says one. “Someone will hire him. He’s too smart.”
-
-And as for the impact he’s had on American culture, some say it’s too early to call. “It’s a 100 percent fair assessment to say Jeff laid the groundwork for a Trump presidency,” says Touchet. “From the beginning, there was a symbiotic relationship. But I don’t know if that’s Jeff’s legacy, because I don’t think he’s done. I know Jeff, and he’s not going away. I don’t know where he’s going to land, but there’s too much drive and power hunger to sit sideways for too long.”
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-Tag: ["🤵🏻", "🚔", "Epstein", "🇺🇸", "🚫"]
-Date: 2022-04-23
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-04-23
-Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/22/business/jeffrey-epstein-william-derosa.html
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-```button
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-^button-JeffreyEpsteinaRareCelloandanEnduringMysteryNSave
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-
-
-# Jeffrey Epstein, a Rare Cello and an Enduring Mystery
-
-
-
-Credit...Joan Wong
-
-The Great Read
-
-A cello’s strange odyssey helps explain how the notorious Mr. Epstein surrounded himself with the world’s richest and most powerful men.
-
-Credit...Joan Wong
-
-- April 22, 2022
-
-When Jeffrey Epstein died in jail in 2019, he took many secrets with him. One was how a sexual predator and college dropout managed to forge bonds with an astonishing number of the world’s richest and most powerful men, like Britain’s Prince Andrew and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
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-Another was why Mr. Epstein owned a rare Italian cello. It was the only nonfinancial asset listed on his foundation’s annual tax forms, described simply as “cello” and carried on the books at a value of $165,676.
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-Mr. Epstein had never played the cello or shown any interest in musical instruments as an investment.
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-The first mystery is large, and it is still being untangled by lawyers, victims and journalists. The second is seemingly small, contained to the rarefied world of fine string instruments. But the two mysteries are connected. And the cello’s strange journey into and out of Mr. Epstein’s possession offers a window into the notorious criminal’s life and legacy.
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-Mr. Epstein’s Manhattan mansion was filled with curiosities. There was a portrait of Bill Clinton in a blue dress, a stuffed giraffe, prosthetic breasts in the master bathroom.
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-But more than objects, Mr. Epstein collected people. Over the years he cultivated leaders in the fields of business, finance, politics, science, mathematics, academia, music, even yoga. He often cemented the relationships with introductions to others in his orbit, donations to causes they supported or other gifts and favors.
-
-That is where the cello came in.
-
-## False Claims and Accordion Lessons
-
-As a child growing up in Brooklyn, Mr. Epstein and his younger brother, Mark, showed an aptitude for music. Both began lessons on the saxophone, then switched to more difficult double-reed instruments. Jeffrey played the bassoon, Mark the oboe, both in high demand in orchestras and other ensembles. It was as a bassoonist that Jeffrey earned a scholarship in 1967 to Interlochen, the prestigious summer music camp nestled in the woods of northern Michigan. When his mother visited him that summer, he asked her to bring bagels.
-
-As an adult, Mr. Epstein falsely claimed to have had a budding career as a concert pianist. And he claimed to have begun piano lessons at age 5, which Mark Epstein said in an interview was not true. (He took lessons on the accordion as a young boy.) Mr. Epstein later took piano lessons, but he never achieved more than a high-school level of proficiency.
-
-It was the cello that became a recurring motif in Mr. Epstein’s self-told life story, starting after he and a friend backpacked in Europe in the early 1970s. Among the stories Mr. Epstein later recounted was playing the piano for Jacqueline du Pré, the British cello virtuoso. In Mr. Epstein’s telling, he met Ms. du Pré in 1971 while visiting London. Ms. du Pré enjoyed the patronage of Queen Elizabeth II, and it was through the cellist that Mr. Epstein said he’d gained access to members of the British royal family, forging an especially close friendship with Prince Andrew.
-
-Image
-
-
-
-Credit...Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images
-
-The tale was not entirely implausible. Ms. du Pré, who died in 1987, was still performing at the time Mr. Epstein visited London, where he bought a full-length fur coat that he wore for years afterward. But Ms. du Pré hardly needed Mr. Epstein as an accompanist, since, among the world’s countless other professional musicians, she was married to the celebrated pianist Daniel Barenboim.
-
-At Interlochen, to which Mr. Epstein became a significant donor and regular visitor, he met and befriended a 14-year-old cellist, Melissa Solomon, in 1997. According to her account in [a 2019 podcast](https://www.stitcher.com/show/broken-jeffrey-epstein/episode/s1-e4-where-the-strings-are-64497040), he insisted she apply to Juilliard and agreed to pay her tuition there. She said he never attempted to have sex with her (he did get her to massage his feet), but after she declined to attend a party with Prince Andrew, Mr. Epstein cut ties and stopped paying her tuition.
-
-Another Interlochen student, identified only as Jane, testified in the recent trial of Mr. Epstein’s closest associate, Ghislaine Maxwell. Jane said that Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell began grooming her when she was a 13-year-old student at the camp and that Mr. Epstein subsequently raped her, all while promising to advance her career.
-
-## Thanksgiving at the Ranch
-
-In the mid-1990s, Mr. Epstein showed up backstage at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach, Fla., after a performance by the cellist William DeRosa, a young prodigy who’d made his concert debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at age 11. By the time Mr. Epstein saw him, Mr. DeRosa was regarded as one of the world’s best cellists, performing at Carnegie Hall, on television and with leading symphony orchestras.
-
-Image
-
-Credit...Peter Schaaf/ICM Artists
-
-Mr. Epstein’s and Mr. DeRosa’s paths didn’t cross again until around 2004, when Mr. DeRosa began dating a blond model named Kersti Ferguson.
-
-Originally from Savannah, Ga., Ms. Ferguson said in an interview that she met Mr. Epstein through a mutual friend when she was 18. Ms. Ferguson and Mr. Epstein spent time at his Palm Beach estate, where she met Ms. Maxwell. Mr. Epstein invited Ms. Ferguson to his Virgin Islands estate while she was in college, and after she broke up with a boyfriend, Mr. Epstein flew her and her mother to his New Mexico ranch for Thanksgiving. He sometimes called her four times a day. He showed her photos of himself with what he said were his powerful friends, among them former President Bill Clinton, the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
-
-After she began dating Mr. DeRosa, Mr. Epstein insisted on checking him out. “Be nice,” Mr. DeRosa recalled Mr. Epstein warning him. He seemed fascinated by Mr. DeRosa’s musical talents. He once suggested they play together, but Mr. DeRosa brushed him off. He said he had never heard Mr. Epstein play the piano.
-
-Mr. DeRosa and Mr. Epstein discussed their shared admiration for Ms. du Pré, with whom Mr. DeRosa had spent a summer studying and living. Mr. DeRosa had a collection of every recording Ms. du Pré had released, and he and Mr. Epstein sometimes listened to them together. When Mr. Epstein asked to borrow them, Mr. DeRosa obliged. (He said Mr. Epstein never returned them.)
-
-In 2006, Mr. Epstein [was arrested](https://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/03/us/03epstein.html) in Florida after investigators found evidence that he’d been sexually involved with girls. Ms. Ferguson said Mr. Epstein never suggested having sex with her or asked her to recruit other young women. On the contrary, when Ms. Ferguson attempted to hug him, he’d “shrivel up,” she said, as if afraid of catching a disease. And she thought he and Ms. Maxwell were in love, even though Mr. Epstein confided in Ms. Ferguson that he had no intention of marrying.
-
-## Rich and Powerful
-
-Image
-
-Credit...Ruby Washington/The New York Times
-
-For a time after his arrest, Ms. Ferguson didn’t hear from him. Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage prostitute and [was sentenced](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/12/us/politics/jeffrey-epstein-justice-department-miami.html) to 13 months in jail, though he was allowed to serve much of that time at home.
-
-Then, in 2010, as Mr. Epstein was trying to reconstitute his orbit of the rich and powerful, he called her. “I need to buy a cello,” Mr. Epstein said abruptly, asking if she would enlist Mr. DeRosa in the search. When Mr. Epstein next spoke to Mr. DeRosa, he explained that he was buying a cello for a young Israeli cellist. “Go find one,” he ordered, then hung up.
-
-At first Mr. DeRosa didn’t take Mr. Epstein’s command seriously. But Mr. Epstein kept calling, as did members of his staff, asking if he’d made any progress. Mr. DeRosa got to work tracking down a cello.
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-Like many professional musicians, Mr. DeRosa was wired into the small world of rare string instruments, a few of which command prices as high as $20 million. His own cello, made by the Italian master Domenico Montagnana in 1739, is considered one of the world’s finest and is likely worth millions of dollars. Mr. DeRosa assured Mr. Epstein he wouldn’t have to spend that much.
-
-Soon after, Mr. DeRosa was visiting his mother in Los Angeles when he learned of a cello being sold there by a musician who recorded soundtracks for Hollywood studios. (Before that, the cello had been played by a member of the Indianapolis symphony orchestra.)
-
-While not a Stradivarius or a Montagnana, this cello had a distinguished pedigree, and was manufactured by Ettore Soffritti, who worked in the string instrument center of Ferrara, Italy, from the late 1800s until his death in 1928. Benning Violins, the Los Angeles dealer, described the cello’s sound as “rich and powerful” and said the instrument was “suitable for the finest of cellists.”
-
-Mr. DeRosa tried the cello. He was smitten. He said he considered it “one of the greatest modern cellos in existence.” (By “modern” he meant any produced after the Italian Renaissance.) With an asking price of $185,000, he also considered it a bargain.
-
-Mr. Epstein seemed pleased when Mr. DeRosa told him he’d found something. He said the cello’s intended recipient — a young Israeli man named Yoed Nir — had to test the instrument first. Mr. DeRosa knew nearly every up-and-coming cellist, but he had never heard of Mr. Nir.
-
-Mr. DeRosa had the cello on a trial basis, and Mr. Nir tested the instrument on a visit to Mr. DeRosa’s mother’s house in Los Angeles. Mr. Nir, who was about 30 years old and had dark, shoulder-length hair, which he tossed theatrically while playing, played some of Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites. He had clearly had musical training (he was a graduate of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance), but Mr. DeRosa considered his playing unexceptional by his exacting standards. He could think of many young cellists more deserving of such an instrument. “I thought it incredibly odd that Jeffrey had chosen this guy,” Mr. DeRosa recalled.
-
-Mr. Nir approved of the instrument, and Mr. Epstein had his accountant, Richard Kahn, step in to negotiate the purchase from Benning Violins. Mr. Kahn obtained an appraisal, then bargained down the price to $165,000. (Mr. DeRosa, who felt like his reputation was on the line since he’d initiated the transaction, found this insulting.)
-
-When Mr. Epstein refused to buy an economy class ticket to fly the instrument back to New York — the usual method for transporting a valuable cello — Mr. DeRosa sent him an angry email accusing him of being a cheapskate. “I’m done,” he told Mr. Epstein.
-
-“Why are you so agitated?” Mr. Epstein responded.
-
-## ‘You Can’t Treat Someone Like That’
-
-Weeks later, when Mr. DeRosa was back in New York, Mr. Epstein’s assistant called and said Mr. DeRosa should be at his house the next morning at exactly 7:30 a.m. There, Mr. Epstein gestured toward a large unopened cardboard box. Mr. DeRosa said he opened the package and verified that it was same cello he’d located in Los Angeles.
-
-“Did you make any money on the transaction?” Mr. Epstein asked.
-
-“No,” Mr. DeRosa answered, furious at the insinuation that he’d taken a cut.
-
-Mr. Epstein walked out without further comment. “He showed no interest in the cello,” Mr. DeRosa recalled.
-
-Ms. Ferguson was upset when she heard about the meeting. She called Mr. Epstein and chastised him. “You can’t treat someone like that,” she said. He was unapologetic.
-
-The money to buy the cello came from Mr. Epstein’s foundation, and the purchase was reflected on its 2011 tax return. Mr. Kahn drew up an agreement in which the cello would be lent to Mr. Nir at no cost, according to a person familiar with the arrangement.
-
-Image
-
-Credit...Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
-
-Not long after, the singer Judy Collins performed at the Café Carlyle. A [positive review](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/arts/music/17collins.html) in The New York Times mentioned in passing that Ms. Collins had “added a new element, a cellist, Yoed Nir.”
-
-Mr. Epstein and Ms. Ferguson subsequently papered over their disagreement, and she urged Mr. DeRosa to forgive him. When a valuable Stradivarius cello came on the market, Mr. Epstein offered to buy it for Mr. DeRosa’s use. Mr. DeRosa had a unique connection to the instrument, since a foundation had previously owned it and lent it to him early in his career.
-
-So confident was the seller that a deal would come together that Mr. DeRosa took possession of the instrument. But Mr. Epstein balked at the asking price of $14 million, refusing to pay more than $10 million, according to Mr. DeRosa. The deal unraveled, and Mr. DeRosa returned the cello. It later sold for more than the asking price, Mr. DeRosa said.
-
-## Mr. DeRosa Has Regrets
-
-Mr. DeRosa and Ms. Ferguson were shocked in 2019 when Mr. Epstein was arrested and charged with sex trafficking. Ms. Ferguson couldn’t reconcile the allegations with the man she thought she knew. Given his wealth and connections to powerful people, she figured he’d somehow get off the hook. She wrote him a letter in jail offering to visit and bring food. She never got a reply. On Aug. 10, Mr. Epstein [died by suicide](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/nyregion/jeffrey-epstein-suicide.html).
-
-Several months later, Mr. DeRosa emailed Mr. Nir to find out what had happened to the Soffritti cello. Mr. Nir said only that he’d returned it. At the Epstein foundation’s request, Mr. Nir had delivered the cello to a New York law firm in October 2019. Its case was broken, and the cello itself had suffered some damage, according to Mr. DeRosa. (Mr. Nir said the case wasn’t broken when he returned it and that the instrument was “in very good playing condition.”) The foundation asked Benning Violins to again market and sell it, and Benning agreed to supply a new case.
-
-Wittingly or not, Mr. Epstein had made a sound investment. This time the price was $220,000 — or 33 percent more than what Mr. Epstein had paid eight years earlier. With the backing of a financial partner whom Mr. DeRosa wouldn’t identify, he took possession of the cello in early 2020, just before the coronavirus pandemic brought an end to live performances.
-
-Like many people in Mr. Epstein’s orbit, Mr. DeRosa now regrets ever getting tangled up with him and wishes he had kept the cello for himself. “I wish I’d never let Jeffrey buy the cello,” Mr. DeRosa said. “I’m not a dealer. I’m a concert cellist. I was always angry at myself that I let it go.”
-
-## Back on the Market
-
-Two years later, the Epstein cello was back on the market.
-
-All of Mr. DeRosa’s performances during the pandemic were canceled. An extra cello was a luxury he could no longer afford.
-
-Julian Hersh, a cellist and co-founder of Darnton & Hersh violins in Chicago, thought the cello might be useful to a company he was starting with Jonathan Koh, a music faculty member at University of California, Berkeley. There Mr. Koh had witnessed Silicon Valley’s fascination with the blockchain, cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens. His idea was to market digital images of rare instruments, or fractional shares of them, as N.F.T.s, in some cases along with videos of professional musicians playing the instruments. He and Mr. Hersh reasoned that rare instruments were works of art, and if an N.F.T. for a work by the artist known as Beeple could [sell at Christie’s](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/arts/design/nft-auction-christies-beeple.html) in 2020 for $69 million, why not a token for a rare instrument? Payment would be exclusively in cryptocurrency, adding to the allure for a new generation of investors.
-
-Image
-
-Credit...Peter Prato for The New York Times
-
-Mr. Hersh wasn’t deterred by the cello’s provenance. “Jeffrey was horrible,” he said. “No question about it.” But there was a clear title — in other words, there was no dispute over the cello’s ownership — which was what really mattered to investors.
-
-Mr. Hersh and Mr. Koh launched their new venture, called Musikhaus, in January. They described its mission as “bridging the worlds of classical music with the rapidly evolving world of nonfungible tokens” to “make timeless digital collectibles.” Among the first offerings was the Epstein cello.
-
-The listing came just days after [Ms. Maxwell’s conviction](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/29/nyregion/ghislaine-maxwell-guilty-verdict.html) for sex trafficking and conspiracy, which thrust the Epstein saga back into the news. Dealers and collectors grimaced at what seemed an attempt to capitalize on Mr. Epstein’s notoriety. “The timing was terrible,” Mr. Hersh acknowledged. The Epstein connection “was just too hot. I blame myself.”
-
-At first Mr. Hersh removed the reference to Mr. Epstein from the cello’s description, but he then decided the provenance shouldn’t be concealed. He removed the listing from their website altogether. He hopes to re-list the Soffritti N.F.T. in the future. “So what if Jeffrey owned it?” Mr. Hersh said. “It’s still one of the best 20th-century cellos in the world.”
-
-## A Clue at the Cafe
-
-The mystery persists: Why had Mr. Epstein bought the cello in the first place? What was his connection to Mr. Nir?
-
-An important clue emerged at the 2011 Judy Collins concert at the Café Carlyle. Ms. Collins’s longtime musical arranger and pianist, Russell Walden, recalled that one thing about the evening stuck in his memory. At the cafe, he met Mr. Nir’s wife, Anat. Mr. Nir mentioned that she was the daughter of Mr. Barak, the former Israeli prime minister.
-
-There are hardly any public references to Mr. Barak’s children. Reached recently in Tel Aviv, he confirmed that Yoed and Anat Nir are his son-in-law and daughter.
-
-Image
-
-Credit...Corinna Kern/Reuters
-
-Mr. Barak — who was prime minister from 1999 to 2001 and later served in other high-ranking government jobs — said that another former prime minister, Shimon Peres, introduced him to Mr. Epstein in 2003. Mr. Barak has said that he and Mr. Epstein met dozens of times but he “never took part in any party or event with women or anything like that.”
-
-Over the years Mr. Epstein wooed Mr. Barak by, among other things, [investing $1 million](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/world/middleeast/epstein-israel-barak-ehud.html) in a limited partnership established by Mr. Barak in 2015.
-
-He said he introduced Mr. Epstein to Mr. Nir in 2010 or 2011, though he didn’t know that Mr. Epstein subsequently lent Mr. Nir the cello. Therefore, Mr. Barak said, it “could not be true” that Mr. Epstein used the cello loan to curry favor. A more likely explanation, he said, “is that Mr. Epstein did it based on the reputation of Yoed as an extremely gifted cellist.” (Asked if he’d ever told his father-in-law about the loan, Mr. Nir declined to answer.)
-
-Nonetheless, the loan of a $165,000 cello was the kind of favor that Mr. Epstein might only have made known when he wanted something in return. After all, not just anybody had the resources and connections to source an extraordinary cello for the relative of a powerful political leader — just the type of person that Mr. Epstein had a knack for keeping close.
-
-Ronen Bergman contributed reporting. Susan Beachy contributed research.
-
-
-
-
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-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
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diff --git a/00.03 News/Kerouac at 100 - The American Scholar.md b/00.03 News/Kerouac at 100 - The American Scholar.md
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----
-
-Tag: ["🎭", "📖", "🇺🇸"]
-Date: 2022-04-06
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-04-06
-Link: https://theamericanscholar.org/kerouac-at-100/
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
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-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-04-13]]
-
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-
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-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-Kerouacat100TheAmericanScholarNSave
-
-
-
-# Kerouac at 100 - The American Scholar
-
-
-
-Ashok Boghani (Flickr/ashokbo)
-
-I was 20 years old and up in the mountains of Morocco, staying with a family in a two-room hut on a hash farm. Sweating in over 100-degree heat, with pesky flies keeping me from sleep, there was nothing I could do to escape the discomfort. So, inspired by the book I was reading, Jack Kerouac’s *The Dharma Bums**,* I tried meditating for the first time. Over the 21 years since then, I’ve asked many American Buddhist monks and professors of Buddhist studies how they were first introduced to Buddhism, and several gave me the same answer: Jack Kerouac.
-
-Kerouac was born on March 12 a hundred years ago, and upon his centenary I’ll venture to say that out of all 20th-century American writers, he was among the most influential. His two most popular novels—*On the Road* and *The Dharma Bums*—showed people they could live a completely different way of life: a bohemian existence at odds with postwar American consumerism. Both books are about freedom. Both depict a way of living free from 20-year mortgages, nine-to-five jobs, conventional relationships, and family responsibilities. They present the liberating idea that you can do whatever you want with your life—what you want to do, not just what you are supposed to do. For many readers, this insight was profound.
-
-Despite their similarities, the books are quite different. Stylistically, *On the Road* is far superior. But saturated as it is with Buddhism, *The Dharma Bums* goes further, venturing beyond physical and social freedom and into spiritual freedom. Essentially a piece of Buddhist propaganda, it arguably turned more people on to the religion than any other work of American fiction. But Kerouac is all energy and attitude in the novel, not depth, and many of the misconceptions of Buddhism Americans have today are due to his flawed presentation. His friend Locke McCorkle, who studied with the philosopher Alan Watts at the American Academy of Asian Studies and served as the model for *Dharma Bums* character Sean Monahan, later said that though Kerouac’s “intuitions were right,” he “made up his Buddhism” and “didn’t know a lot about it, didn’t have a lot of training in it.” Watts himself said Kerouac had “Zen flesh but no Zen bones,” and poet and essayist Kenneth Rexroth wrote, “Kerouac’s Buddha is a dime-store incense burner.” (Both Watts and Rexroth also have roles in *The Dharma Bums*.) During a meeting with D. T. Suzuki, Kerouac felt the famous Zen teacher and translator was looking at him as if he were “a monstrous imposter.”
-
-Perhaps this harsh dismissal of his work by leading Buddhist scholars is why Kerouac eventually gave up on Buddhism, turning back to Catholicism—and alcoholism—before dying of a cirrhosis-caused hemorrhage at age 47, in 1969.
-
----
-
-The seeds of this tragic fate begin to sprout in *The Dharma Bums*. About a third of the way through the book, Kerouac’s alter ego mentions his “recent years of drinking and disappointment,” a reference to his stalled literary career.
-
-Kerouac was accepted to Columbia University on a football scholarship, but dropped out in 1942. He worked for the Merchant Marine during the Second World War, but was never in harm’s way. All the while and afterward, Kerouac lived the bohemian life, tracing and retracing a big triangle between New York, San Francisco, and Mexico City. He was writing constantly, and in 1950 “John” Kerouac published his first book, *The Town and the City*. A traditional novel, longer than anything else he wrote, it is based on his experiences growing up in Lowell, Massachusetts, and his transition to New York City, where he met a circle of eccentric friends he’d later call the Beat Generation.
-
-At 28, Kerouac thought he’d made it. Then came disappointment when the book didn’t sell. Worse, no publisher would accept his second novel. Halfway to the jazz-inspired epiphany of “writing spontaneously,” Kerouac, high on Benzedrine, typed this book on one 120-foot-long scroll over the course of 20 days. A single 120,000-word paragraph, the novel fictionalized his experiences from 1947 to1950, as he took road trips with Denver-raised delinquent Neal Cassady, the model for the book’s antihero, Dean Moriarty. Kerouac called it *On the Road*. He took the scroll to Roger Giroux, the editor at Harcourt, Brace who had published *The Town and the City*. Giroux rejected it immediately.
-
-For six years, Kerouac continued to receive rejections. No publisher would take it, particularly because of the book’s depictions of drug use and sexual promiscuity. Although he was disappointed, he continued to write. After finishing *On the Road* in 1951, Kerouac wrote *The Subterraneans, Doctor Sax, Maggie Cassidy, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard,* and *Tristessa,* all of which would remain unpublished for years. He also married and divorced twice. In the second marriage, he fathered a daughter he refused to recognize as his own, mainly for fear of having to make child-support payments. So there was failure in literature, failure in love, and moral failure. During these years, he developed his drinking habit—and an interest in Buddhism.
-
----
-
-In 1954, while staying with Neal and Carolyn Cassady at their home in Los Gatos, California, Kerouac found Dwight Goddard’s *A Buddhist Bible* in the San Jose Public Library. Originally published in 1932, this nearly 700-page book gave Kerouac a foundational knowledge of Buddhist concepts—from *dharma* to *karma* to *maya* to the cyclical idea of the universe. He dove into it. Friends recall him carrying the book around wherever he went. He didn’t have a guide or teacher, but he felt he could digest the ideas of Buddhism on his own. Over the following two years, he wrote a sprawling book of Buddhist notes called *Some of the Dharma,* which began as letters aiming to teach Allen Ginsberg about Buddhism. Kerouac also wrote a biography of the historical Gotama Buddha, titled *Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha.* (Both books were published posthumously.) The works show his serious interest in Buddhism, an interest that quickly overwhelmed everything else in his life.
-
-For instance, in January 1955, Kerouac wrote his new agent, Stanley Colbert at Sterling Lord, saying, “I think the time has come for me to pull my manuscripts back and forget publishing.” He wanted all his projects returned, including *On the Road,* which he was then pitching as “The Beat Generation.” He claimed that being unable to publish “worked out fine,” because from then on all of his writing was “going to have a basis of Buddhist Teaching free of all wordly and literary motives.” He said he could only have published “Beat G” as a “Pre-enlightenment work.” *Some of the Dharma* grew to more than 200 pages, and spreading the Buddhist Word became Kerouac’s main focus. In a letter to his sister, Caroline, he wrote: “I intend to be the greatest writer in the world and then in the name of Buddha I shall convert thousands, maybe millions.”
-
-Editors, however, also showed little interest in his Buddhist writings. But his passion only deepened after becoming friends with Gary Snyder, the poet, scholar, and translator studying Asian culture and languages as a grad student at Berkeley, where Kerouac lived with Ginsberg in late 1955. Snyder was able to read Chinese and Japanese Buddhist texts in their original languages, and Kerouac loved learning from him, especially about Buddhist lore. Snyder quickly replaced Neal Cassady as Kerouac’s new hero. Following Snyder’s model, Kerouac became a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the Cascades; the only book he brought with him was the *Diamond Sutra*.
-
----
-
-Everything changed in late 1956, after he came down from the mountains. With the help of editor and critic Malcolm Cowley, Kerouac was able to publish excerpts of “The Beat Generation” in the literary magazines *New World Writing* and *The Paris Review*. With this push—and the publicity that followed Ginsberg’s success with his poem “Howl,” which was dedicated to “Jack Kerouac, new Buddha of American prose”—the time for Kerouac became ripe. Finally, after many revisions to the original manuscript, Viking accepted *On the Road,* publishing it in the fall of 1957. Within a few weeks, *The New York Times* hailed Kerouac as the voice of a new generation. He became famous overnight, appearing on radio and television, in newspapers and on college campuses, and quickly grew uncomfortable with fame.
-
-By then he was 35. His 21-year-old girlfriend at the time, Joyce Glassman (now Johnson), recalls this tumultuous period of Kerouac’s sudden celebrity, saying, “I felt this kind of anger in people. They were fascinated by him. They also thought he was very threatening. They hated him. All the men wanted to fight him. All the women wanted to fuck him, not in a nice way, but in an aggressive way.” Interviewers were hostile, as if Kerouac were the despicable Dean Moriarty himself. When Kerouac went out at night in Greenwich Village, he’d get drunk and obnoxious. Once, he was beaten quite badly, his head smashed against a curb. He needed to get away. Despite his fame, Viking didn’t want to publish any of his unpublished novels. They wanted him to write another book like *On the Road*. So Kerouac retreated to his sister’s house in Orlando, where he wrote *The Dharma Bums* in less than two weeks*.*
-
-In this time of transition—before his drinking habit turned to outright alcoholism, and after his years of wandering and creative fury—he wrote about what was perhaps the happiest period of his life. *The Dharma Bums* chronicles his adventures with Snyder, Ginsberg, and other Bay Area poets during 1955 and 1956—the time immediately before *On the Road* was published and, as his friend John Clellon Holmes put it, before Kerouac’s fame “so discombobulated him that for the rest of his life he never, never got his needle back on true north.”
-
-Indeed, by the time *The Dharma Bums* was published, in 1958, Snyder was living in Japan with fellow Beat and soon-to-be Zen monk Philip Whalen, who invited Kerouac to join them. Kerouac wrote back that he’d be too embarrassed for them to see him, admitting, “I’ve become so decadent and drunk and don’t give a shit. I’m not a Buddhist anymore.” But by then it was too late. *The Dharma Bums* was already on the way to converting thousands, maybe millions of readers—or at least leading them to the Buddha’s path, as it did to me.
-
-Permission required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses.
-
- has a master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard University, where he teaches writing. His work has appeared in *The New York Times*, *The Washington Post,* and many other publications.
-
-
-
-
----
-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
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diff --git a/00.03 News/Librarian finds love notes, doodles in books and shares them with a grateful public.md b/00.03 News/Librarian finds love notes, doodles in books and shares them with a grateful public.md
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-
-Tag: ["🤵🏻", "🇺🇸", "📚"]
-Date: 2022-08-07
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-08-07
-Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/08/03/oakland-library-found-book-notes/
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
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-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-08-07]]
-
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-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-LibrarianfindslovenotesdoodlesinbooksNSave
-
-
-
-# Librarian finds love notes, doodles in books and shares them with a grateful public
-
-If you’ve ever mistakenly left a note or a to-do list — or worse, a love letter — behind in a library book, and figured your personal item was tossed by the librarian, you might be wrong.
-
-Especially if you live in Oakland, Calif.
-
-In her 20 years as a librarian, Sharon McKellar has unearthed all kinds of left-behind personal items — from doodles to recipes to old photographs — nestled between the pages of returned library books. She carefully removes them and reads them, then she scans and uploads them to the library’s website after scrubbing any personal identifying information.
-
-It has become a hobby, and she has got quite a following of people who are equally charmed by the forgotten finds.
-
-“Part of the magic is that they sort of just appear,” McKellar said. “Sometimes, they may have been in a book for a really long time before we notice them there.”
-
-McKellar — a librarian at the Oakland Public Library — marvels at each memento, no matter how mundane. She chronicles them all.
-
-“Things that seem the most mundane can be the most interesting,” she said. “I love the little peek into somebody’s life in that moment.”
-
-McKellar has been doing this for many years, but in 2013, she decided to make her pastime public. She began uploading each scanned item to the library’s website — which was revamped about a year ago — on a page she created called [“Found in a Library Book.”](https://oaklandlibrary.org/found-in-a-library-book/)
-
-The top of the page says: “Have you ever wondered what happens to the things you leave behind? Well, if you leave them in an OPL library book, or around the library, you might find them featured right here, on our website. See some of our found treasures below.”
-
-The impromptu project took off. Staff members at the library — which has 18 locations around the city — started sending McKellar submissions of interesting things they discovered in books and around the library.
-
-“I do believe it is the nature of people who are inclined to work in libraries to have a tendency to enjoy ephemera and collecting of things,” said McKellar, 46, adding that she always seeks to return important items to their owner, and removes any private information — such as names and addresses — from her digital posts.
-
-She divides the items into various categories: notes, art, photos, cards and letters, artifacts, facts, bookmarks, creative writing, lists, written in a book, and items by kids. She then gives each piece an applicable title.
-
-When considering which items to showcase on the site, “I don’t discriminate,” McKellar said. “The idea is to post everything, because what’s a nugget to me might not be a nugget to someone else.”
-
-For McKellar, the treasures that tickle her most are drawings by children — especially those that [paint a clear picture](https://oaklandlibrary.org/content/dad-and-cj/) of what might be going on in their lives, despite the simplicity of the artwork.
-
-She also loves looking at people’s lists: to-do lists, grocery lists, brainstorming lists, bucket lists. All the lists.
-
-“I’m a person who makes lists for everything and then tends to leave them behind,” McKellar said, explaining that there’s an element of relatability that intrigues her about a stranger’s personal notes. “It feels connecting in a way.”
-
-[“Learning to cook”](https://oaklandlibrary.org/content/learning-to-cook/) is the title of one list that randomly turned up, and is written in distinctly curly cursive. Several dishes are listed: Almond butter cake, banana muffins, deviled eggs and baking powder biscuits.
-
-Another list, scribbled messily on a yellow Post-it Note, is mostly crossed out. Some tasks are still pending, though, including: “buy hay” and “vit AE moisturizer.”
-
-To anyone other than the scribe, these notes might seem meaningless, McKellar said, but to her, they are an opportunity for creativity.
-
-“I love it as a storytelling device,” said McKellar, who hopes to soon host an in-person display at the library to share some particularly special pieces. “You can look at an object, whether it’s a photo or a scrap of paper, and you can think of all the possible people who might have brought that into our space, and why and how it got here, and what their stories are.”
-
-“You could really let your imagination dream up all kinds of scenarios, and you will be unlikely to ever guess the actual one,” she continued. “But that’s kind of the fun.”
-
-Other staff members at the library have long been involved in the project, too. They scour returned books for interesting items and share their finds with McKellar — who is the curator of the sprawling collection.
-
-Remy Timbrook, a librarian in the children’s department, finds “lots of little drawings” in returned books. They always brighten her day, she said.
-
-“I love little illustrations of things,” said Timbrook, 38, who has worked at the library since 2015. “Sometimes there are notes, or their recommendations for a book, or a response to what’s happening in the book.”
-
-Her favorite find, she said, was a leaf — which was burrowed within a children’s nonfiction book about leaves. Naturally, she found it last autumn.
-
-“I turned the page and I thought it was an illustration,” Timbrook said. “Then, it fell out of the book.”
-
-Christy Thomas, who has worked at the library for 18 years, has also been delighted by the project.
-
-“I’ve seen so many lovely things,” said Thomas, 48. “It’s like finding a treasure, and it’s so nice that we have this process to actually do something with them and share them.”
-
-Especially amid the world’s current woes, “it’s wonderful to be able to get a boost from the small joys that we can find,” she said.
-
-The collection of miscellaneous mementos, Thomas added, is “a reminder that these are shared objects that so many of us enjoy, and that’s one of the things that I really love about it.”
-
-People on the internet are also fans of the forgotten vestiges. The website page has been popular for years, McKellar said, but the initiative recently spread wider on social media.
-
-“The Oakland Public Library scans the paper scraps people leave in library books and I’m obsessed with them,” [tweeted Annie Rauwerda](https://twitter.com/anniierau/status/1549746719600136195) — a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, who works as a comedian, writer and content creator.
-
-She came across the project in a newsletter, and was immediately hooked.
-
-“It’s just so endearing to see people’s private personal thoughts that they didn’t write for an audience,” said Rauwerda, 22, who runs the popular Twitter account, [@depthsofwiki](https://twitter.com/depthsofwiki). “It’s very relatable.”
-
-She spent an hour scrolling on the site, and selected some favorites — which she shared in a thread. Some are silly, and some are sweet.
-
-In [one image](https://twitter.com/anniierau/status/1549746742513516545/photo/1), a handwritten Post-it note reads: “The squirrel can type!!!” on a book page with illustrations of a squirrel using a typewriter.
-
-Another shows [a book review](https://twitter.com/anniierau/status/1549746752827408384) of sorts, written on lined paper in penmanship that appears to be a child’s.
-
-“I love this book,” reads the review. “It stole my heart and made me cry.”
-
-“When you find tear stains,” it continues, “you will now know they are mine. Enjoy!”
-
-McKellar and her fellow library staff members also have found wistful and insightful love letters.
-
-“When you broke my heart … you freed me. Thank you,” [one note says](https://oaklandlibrary.org/content/you-freed-me/).
-
-“Remember, I Love U Sweetheart,” [another reads](https://oaklandlibrary.org/content/remember-i-love-u/). “The past is the past, so lets not Take it home with us. I just want to Love U, and be happy.”
-
-“I always wonder who left it behind,” said McKellar. “Did the writer ever give it to that person? Did they leave it behind by accident, or did they really not care?”
-
-She revels in the mystery — which, she knows, will never truly be solved. For her, that’s part of the appeal.
-
-“I think it’s compelling to see these little glimpses into other people’s lives,” McKellar said. “They feel very human.”
-
-
-
-
----
-`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/00.03 News/Liz Truss has made Britain a riskier bet for bond investors.md b/00.03 News/Liz Truss has made Britain a riskier bet for bond investors.md
deleted file mode 100644
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-Tag: ["🗳️", "📈", "🇬🇧", "🌳"]
-Date: 2022-10-16
-DocType: "WebClipping"
-Hierarchy:
-TimeStamp: 2022-10-16
-Link: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/10/11/liz-truss-has-made-britain-a-riskier-bet-for-bond-investors
-location:
-CollapseMetaTable: true
-
----
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-Parent:: [[@News|News]]
-Read:: [[2022-10-16]]
-
----
-
-
-
-```button
-name Save
-type command
-action Save current file
-id Save
-```
-^button-TrusshasmadeBritainariskierbetforinvestorsNSave
-
-
-
-# Liz Truss has made Britain a riskier bet for bond investors
-
-## There is no way for her to go back to the way things were before
-
-Liz Truss has already secured her place in British political history. However long she now lasts in office, she is set to be remembered as the prime minister whose grip on power was the shortest. Ms Truss entered Downing Street on September 6th. She [blew up her own government](https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/09/28/how-not-to-run-a-country) with a package of unfunded tax cuts and energy-price guarantees on September 23rd. Take away the ten days of mourning after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, and she had seven days in control. That is roughly the shelf-life of a lettuce.
-
-Listen to this story.
-
-Enjoy more audio and podcasts on [iOS](https://economist-app.onelink.me/d2eC/bed1b25) or [Android](https://economist-app.onelink.me/d2eC/7f3c199).
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