"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/C.T.E. Study Finds That Young Football Players Are Getting the Disease.md\"> C.T.E. Study Finds That Young Football Players Are Getting the Disease </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Inside Foxconn’s struggle to make iPhones in India.md\"> Inside Foxconn’s struggle to make iPhones in India </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Plight of the Oldest Sister.md\"> The Plight of the Oldest Sister </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Piecing Together My Father’s Murder.md\"> Piecing Together My Father’s Murder </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump.md\"> My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Chasing Chop Suey Tracing Chinese Immigration Through Food.md\"> Chasing Chop Suey Tracing Chinese Immigration Through Food </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore.md\"> The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Inside an OnlyFans empire Sex, influence and the new American Dream.md\"> Inside an OnlyFans empire Sex, influence and the new American Dream </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The ‘Crispy R’ and Why R Is the Weirdest Letter.md\"> The ‘Crispy R’ and Why R Is the Weirdest Letter </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/C.T.E. Study Finds That Young Football Players Are Getting the Disease.md\"> C.T.E. Study Finds That Young Football Players Are Getting the Disease </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Inside Foxconn’s struggle to make iPhones in India.md\"> Inside Foxconn’s struggle to make iPhones in India </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Plight of the Oldest Sister.md\"> The Plight of the Oldest Sister </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Piecing Together My Father’s Murder.md\"> Piecing Together My Father’s Murder </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump.md\"> My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.01 Reading list/Martin Eden.md\"> Martin Eden </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Chasing Chop Suey Tracing Chinese Immigration Through Food.md\"> Chasing Chop Suey Tracing Chinese Immigration Through Food </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore.md\"> The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore </a>",
@ -11805,20 +11941,25 @@
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Bill Watterson’s Life After “Calvin and Hobbes”.md\"> Bill Watterson’s Life After “Calvin and Hobbes” </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Evolutionary Reasons We Are Drawn to Horror Movies and Haunted Houses.md\"> The Evolutionary Reasons We Are Drawn to Horror Movies and Haunted Houses </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How workers remove toxic debris and ash after Hawaii wildfires.md\"> How workers remove toxic debris and ash after Hawaii wildfires </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.04 Cinematheque/Gangs of London (2020–).md\"> Gangs of London (2020–) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.01 Reading list/La Prochaine Fois que tu Mordras la Poussière.md\"> La Prochaine Fois que tu Mordras la Poussière </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.01 Reading list/Le Camp des Saints.md\"> Le Camp des Saints </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-10-25 ⚽️ PSG – AC Milan (3-0).md\"> 2023-10-25 ⚽️ PSG – AC Milan (3-0) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Orcas are learning terrifying new behaviors. Are they getting smarter.md\"> Orcas are learning terrifying new behaviors. Are they getting smarter </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat.md\"> The Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How a Sexual Assault Case in St. John’s Exposed a Police Force’s Predatory Culture.md\"> How a Sexual Assault Case in St. John’s Exposed a Police Force’s Predatory Culture </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/A crumbling, long-forgotten statue with an unusual erect phallus might be a Michelangelo. Renaissance scholars want hard evidence..md\"> A crumbling, long-forgotten statue with an unusual erect phallus might be a Michelangelo. Renaissance scholars want hard evidence. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Winging It with the New Backcountry Barnstormers.md\"> Winging It with the New Backcountry Barnstormers </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Martin Scorsese on Making “Killers of the Flower Moon”.md\"> Martin Scorsese on Making “Killers of the Flower Moon” </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The wild business of desert island tourism - The Hustle.md\"> The wild business of desert island tourism - The Hustle </a>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/C.T.E. Study Finds That Young Football Players Are Getting the Disease.md\"> C.T.E. Study Finds That Young Football Players Are Getting the Disease </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Midlife isn't a crisis, but sleep, stress and happiness feel a little different after 35 – or whenever middle age actually begins.md\"> Midlife isn't a crisis, but sleep, stress and happiness feel a little different after 35 – or whenever middle age actually begins </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Plight of the Oldest Sister.md\"> The Plight of the Oldest Sister </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Inside Foxconn’s struggle to make iPhones in India.md\"> Inside Foxconn’s struggle to make iPhones in India </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Babies and chicks help solve one of psychology’s oldest puzzles.md\"> Babies and chicks help solve one of psychology’s oldest puzzles </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Plight of the Oldest Sister.md\"> The Plight of the Oldest Sister </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump.md\"> My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Piecing Together My Father’s Murder.md\"> Piecing Together My Father’s Murder </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.01 Reading list/Mémoires de Léonard.md\"> Mémoires de Léonard </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.01 Reading list/Le Temps gagné.md\"> Le Temps gagné </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.01 Reading list/La Prochaine Fois que tu Mordras la Poussière.md\"> La Prochaine Fois que tu Mordras la Poussière </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.01 Reading list/La Familia Grande.md\"> La Familia Grande </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore.md\"> The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Chasing Chop Suey Tracing Chinese Immigration Through Food.md\"> Chasing Chop Suey Tracing Chinese Immigration Through Food </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft.md\"> A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft </a>",
@ -11853,25 +11994,13 @@
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/La Prochaine Fois que tu Mordras la Poussière.md\"> La Prochaine Fois que tu Mordras la Poussière </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat.md\"> The Crimes Behind the Seafood You Eat </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How a Sexual Assault Case in St. John’s Exposed a Police Force’s Predatory Culture.md\"> How a Sexual Assault Case in St. John’s Exposed a Police Force’s Predatory Culture </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/How a Sexual Assault Case in St. John’s Exposed a Police Force’s Predatory Culture.md\"> How a Sexual Assault Case in St. John’s Exposed a Police Force’s Predatory Culture </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Winging It with the New Backcountry Barnstormers.md\"> Winging It with the New Backcountry Barnstormers </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/A crumbling, long-forgotten statue with an unusual erect phallus might be a Michelangelo. Renaissance scholars want hard evidence..md\"> A crumbling, long-forgotten statue with an unusual erect phallus might be a Michelangelo. Renaissance scholars want hard evidence. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The wild business of desert island tourism - The Hustle.md\"> The wild business of desert island tourism - The Hustle </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Martin Scorsese on Making “Killers of the Flower Moon”.md\"> Martin Scorsese on Making “Killers of the Flower Moon” </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"02.03 Zürich/Mit & Ohne.md\"> Mit & Ohne </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Rape, Race and a Decades-Old Lie That Still Wounds.md\"> Rape, Race and a Decades-Old Lie That Still Wounds </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The First Guy to Break the Internet.md\"> The First Guy to Break the Internet </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Rape, Race and a Decades-Old Lie That Still Wounds.md\"> Rape, Race and a Decades-Old Lie That Still Wounds </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Bodegas The small corner shops that run NYC.md\"> Bodegas The small corner shops that run NYC </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Kwame Onwuachi’s Cuisine of the Self.md\"> Kwame Onwuachi’s Cuisine of the Self </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Inside Job A crooked cop, a dead man and an $800,000 estate fraud.md\"> The Inside Job A crooked cop, a dead man and an $800,000 estate fraud </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/America’s epidemic of chronic illness is killing us too soon.md\"> America’s epidemic of chronic illness is killing us too soon </a>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/How a Sexual Assault Case in St. John’s Exposed a Police Force’s Predatory Culture.md\"> How a Sexual Assault Case in St. John’s Exposed a Police Force’s Predatory Culture </a>"
],
"Refactored":[
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.02 Travels/Skiing in Switzerland.md\"> Skiing in Switzerland </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/C.T.E. Study Finds That Young Football Players Are Getting the Disease.md\"> C.T.E. Study Finds That Young Football Players Are Getting the Disease </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Inside Foxconn’s struggle to make iPhones in India.md\"> Inside Foxconn’s struggle to make iPhones in India </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Plight of the Oldest Sister.md\"> The Plight of the Oldest Sister </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump.md\"> My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Piecing Together My Father’s Murder.md\"> Piecing Together My Father’s Murder </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore.md\"> The librarian who couldn’t take it anymore </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Chasing Chop Suey Tracing Chinese Immigration Through Food.md\"> Chasing Chop Suey Tracing Chinese Immigration Through Food </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft.md\"> A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Inside an OnlyFans empire Sex, influence and the new American Dream.md\"> Inside an OnlyFans empire Sex, influence and the new American Dream </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How workers remove toxic debris and ash after Hawaii wildfires.md\"> How workers remove toxic debris and ash after Hawaii wildfires </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Tunnels of Gaza.md\"> The Tunnels of Gaza </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/They Tried to Expose Louisiana Judges Who Had Systematically Ignored Prisoners’ Petitions. No One Listened..md\"> They Tried to Expose Louisiana Judges Who Had Systematically Ignored Prisoners’ Petitions. No One Listened. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/‘The good guys don’t always win’ Salman Rushdie on peace, Barbie and what freedom cost him.md\"> ‘The good guys don’t always win’ Salman Rushdie on peace, Barbie and what freedom cost him </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/What Really Happened to JFK.md\"> What Really Happened to JFK </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Tunnels of Gaza.md\"> The Tunnels of Gaza </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How Does the World’s Largest Hedge Fund Really Make Its Money.md\"> How Does the World’s Largest Hedge Fund Really Make Its Money </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/A School of Their Own.md\"> A School of Their Own </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The ‘Crispy R’ and Why R Is the Weirdest Letter.md\"> The ‘Crispy R’ and Why R Is the Weirdest Letter </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Martin Scorsese on Making “Killers of the Flower Moon”.md\"> Martin Scorsese on Making “Killers of the Flower Moon” </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Miseducation of Maria Montessori.md\"> The Miseducation of Maria Montessori </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Rape, Race and a Decades-Old Lie That Still Wounds.md\"> Rape, Race and a Decades-Old Lie That Still Wounds </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How a Sexual Assault Case in St. John’s Exposed a Police Force’s Predatory Culture.md\"> How a Sexual Assault Case in St. John’s Exposed a Police Force’s Predatory Culture </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Source Years.md\"> The Source Years </a>",
# C.T.E. Study Finds That Young Football Players Are Getting the Disease
They all died young. Most played football. Only a few came close to reaching the pros.
But like hundreds of deceased N.F.L. players — including the Pro Football Hall of Famers Mike Webster, Junior Seau and Ken Stabler — they, too, had C.T.E., the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated hits to the head. For now, it can be positively diagnosed only posthumously.
The brains of Wyatt and 151 other young contact-sport athletes, both men and women, are part of a study recently released by researchers at Boston University.
From a journal entry written by Hunter Foraker:
“I need to remember to ask if I can be tested for borderline personality disorder +/or bipolar disorder. This is because of my extreme highs + lows.”
Excerpt from an essay written by George Atkinson III:
The families of five of these athletes — Wyatt, Meiko, Hunter and the twin brothers Josh and George — spoke extensively about the downward spirals, the confusing diagnoses and the heartache of loss and regret.
And they pondered a complicated question, fraught with implications for parents everywhere:
If you could do it again, would you let your child play tackle football?
The answers varied, which gets to the heart of a risk-versus-reward dilemma. There is a line between the love of a game and the dangers it presents, and even those who have lost a child cannot agree where it is.
But as we learn more about what contact sports can do to the brain, it may be harder to justify letting children play.
And when it comes to football in this country, that presents an especially difficult choice.
An American Ritual
It is hard to imagine their childhoods without football. This is America, and football is laced into its cultural soul.
Lives spin around the game: afternoon practices, Friday night games, Saturdays and Sundays spent huddled around televisions.
Start them young in tackle football. Watch their faces as they put on the pads. Watch their helmets jiggle as they run down the field. Watch them collide with the others.
Watch them get up and do it again. And again. And again.
How dangerous could it be? They are so small. So young. So resilient. They seem so happy.
Wyatt Bramwell dreamed of playing football at the University of Missouri and then the N.F.L.
Meiko Locksley was a former college football player and the son of Michael Locksley, who is now the head football coach at the University of Maryland.
Hunter Foraker played at Dartmouth College before quitting over concerns about concussions.
Josh and George Atkinson III were twins who played for the University of Notre Dame. Their father, George Atkinson, is a former Oakland Raiders defensive back known as the “Hit Man.” His sons died by suicide less than a year apart.
All young athletes get hurt. There are times when the situation becomes scary. The crowd moans, then hushes. Coaches and trainers run out. Players silently kneel. Who is hurt? How bad is it?
There is worry, there is empathy, there is relief. The game goes on.
Those are just the injuries that get noticed. There is no counting the ones that don’t. Every smack of the head. Every jar of the brain. For some players, maybe most, they may never add up to anything serious, or maybe not for many years.
For others, they multiply quickly.
When is a battered helmet merely the mark of a gritty, hard-hitting player, and when is it a cracked shell hiding something damaged and darker?
‘He Wasn’t the Same Kid’
Each athlete had his unique struggles. Most families did not connect the dots to C.T.E., with symptoms that can include impulsivity, moodiness and memory loss.
Meiko Locksley fought deep bouts of paranoia. Wyatt Bramwell was a model student in high school who became uncharacteristically rebellious. Hunter Foraker, haunted by nightmares, abused alcohol as his problems deepened. Josh and George Atkinson III had suicidal thoughts after their mother’s death.
The families shared at least one thing: a growing concern that something was wrong with their child. Was it a passing phase or an ominous sign? Was it due to football or something else?
There were desperate searches for answers. Interventions. Professional help. But these were a different kind of sports injury, not the broken bones or the torn ligaments that were relatively easy to diagnose.
In some cases, the kids themselves became worried, wondering what was wrong with their minds. They said so, sometimes to their parents, sometimes to doctors.
Sometimes in a journal or a college essay. Sometimes in song lyrics. Sometimes in suicide notes.
Wyatt Bramwell sent the most direct message, through the video that he recorded on his phone for family and friends moments before he died. All of the families in the study had that sudden, shattering moment. George Atkinson felt it twice: Josh’s death by suicide in 2018 and then George III’s less than a year later.
Amid all the struggles by the young men and their families to try to fix what they could not explain, there came the worst possible news.
‘We Should Have His Brain Donated’
Today’s athletes play in an era of heightened awareness of the dangers of concussions and of the cumulative effects of hits to the head.
It is different than 20 years ago, when most research focused on deceased N.F.L. players, including Hall of Famers, whose lives had unraveled because of damage to their brains.
Now, families of young athletes who never came close to fame or fortune are approaching researchers, donating their children’s brains in a desperate search for answers.
A positive C.T.E. diagnosis can be both illuminating and painful.
It can be a relief for a family to have a scientific explanation for the struggles of their child. It can be oddly comforting to know that symptoms may have gotten worse, since C.T.E. is a progressive disease.
But it also may raise more tangled, philosophical questions about what the families might have done differently.
‘Would I Let Him Play Football Again?’
Some families are haunted by regrets and what-ifs. They want others to learn from their loss. But what is the lesson?
For some, answers are hard.
The researchers behind the study of the young athletes believe the more years of tackle football that someone plays, at any age, the higher the likelihood the person will develop C.T.E.
Only a small percentage of youth football players will play in college or in the pros. But as the study shows, they can still become afflicted with C.T.E.
So researchers recommend that families delay the start of tackle football, to limit exposure.
Many of the families from the study now agree. Atkinson, the former Raiders player who still works for the team, thinks tackle football should not be played until high school. So does Kia Locksley, the wife of Maryland’s coach.
Several parents said that they cringe when they drive past fields of young children who are wearing helmets and pads and tackling one another.
What ties them all together is that their children are gone. And they don’t wish that on anyone else.
*If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to* *[SpeakingOfSuicide.com](https://www.speakingofsuicide.com/resources/)* *for a list of additional resources.*
The 152 brains in the Boston University study belonged to contact-sport athletes who died before turning 30. They were donated between 2008 and 2022 to the [UNITE Brain Bank](https://www.bu.edu/cte/brain-donation-registry/brain-bank/).
Additional footage and photography from the Bramwell, Foraker and Locksley families; Getty Images.
# Inside Foxconn’s struggle to make iPhones in India
When Chinese engineer Li Hai left the wintry cold of northern China and flew into the humid heat of Tamil Nadu in southern India, he had little idea what to expect.
It was early 2023. Months before the trip, a manager at the Foxconn iPhone factory where he worked had asked for volunteers to go on a temporary assignment to India. Li didn’t think long. He’d never traveled much, but was eager to. “I just wanted to go out and take a look,” Li told *Rest of World,* using a pseudonym because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
Li is soft-spoken, sincere, and unassuming. He grew up in a rural part of China known for its steel mill industry, and had never strayed far. But what he lacked in his knowledge of the wider world, he made up for with curiosity.
Foxconn organized a brief training session on cultural sensitivity before his trip. There, Li was taught not to mention religion or politics, and to say “please” when speaking with his new Indian colleagues. “People from China might talk in a blunt way,” he said. “But when we talk with Indians, we should be more polite.”
Li worried most about food. On the eve of his departure, he packed his suitcase with diarrhea medication, packets of soup base to make his own Chinese hot pot, and — because he’d heard people in India ate with their hands — chopsticks.
Nervous but excited, Li carried his first passport on his first flight for his first trip abroad. The flight was a series of surprises: Turbulence, the diverse crowds in the Singapore airport where he had a layover, the cabin crew who addressed him in English.
His final destination was Sunguvarchatram, an industrial center on the outskirts of the state capital Chennai. The town sits at the heart of a global shift in electronics manufacturing currently underway.
Like many of its competitors, Apple has relied on China for assembling its products for years. But political and economic factors have forced the company, as well as the broader tech sector, to rethink that approach by seeking partners from across the region.
Foxconn — also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry — has been investing heavily in its iPhone factory in Sunguvarchatram. But with the factory’s higher material costs and a greater percentage of defective phones, the company has struggled to replicate the cutthroat efficiency it is known for, according to people familiar with the matter. As a result, the iPhones produced by Foxconn in Sunguvarchatram have always been less profitable than those made in China, two people close to the company told *Rest of World*. Foxconn did not respond to requests for comment.
Early this year, in an effort to improve production and ready the plant to manufacture Apple’s upcoming flagship iPhone 15, Foxconn dispatched more Chinese workers to Sunguvarchatram. Engineers like Li would get the India plant up to China speed.
> “Manufacturing an entire iPhone 15 within India — that is going to be projected as a big moment not just for Apple, but for India.”
Using language apps, half-remembered classroom English, and gestures, Li and hundreds of his Chinese colleagues were tasked with translating the Foxconn formula for an Indian workforce largely unfamiliar with the intensity and intricacies of 21st-century electronics manufacturing.
It would be a serious challenge. In late August, *Rest of World* visited Sunguvarchatram, where Foxconn and other Apple suppliers were working at full throttle ahead of the iPhone 15 launch. We spoke with more than two dozen assembly line workers, technicians, engineers, and managers, all of whom requested anonymity or pseudonyms to avoid being identified by their employers.
They detailed the successes, struggles, and cultural clashes that, over the past year or so, have played out on one of the world’s most consequential factory floors. In China, Foxconn demands long days, high targets, and minimal delays and mistakes — all of which proved difficult, if not impossible, to replicate in India. The stress clearly took a toll on the company’s local workforce.
The ultimate goal — a successful production run of the iPhone 15 — would be a high-profile marker of India’s budding manufacturing prowess.
“The government’s message is that India has arrived on the scene, and is moving towards becoming a manufacturing powerhouse,” Anand P. Krishnan, a fellow with the Centre of Excellence for Himalayan Studies at Shiv Nadar University, who studies manufacturing labor in China and India, told *Rest of World*. “Manufacturing an entire iPhone 15 within India — that is going to be projected as a big moment not just for Apple, but \[also\] for India.”
---
**Every eight hours**, the streets of Sunguvarchatram come alive with buses emblazoned with the names of multinational tech giants — Samsung, Yamaha, or FHH, for Foxconn Hon Hai. Tired workers are ferried between factories and their apartments or dormitories — known as hostels in India. Others hop onto motorcycles or climb into three-wheeled auto rickshaws.
Sunguvarchatram is part of a budding industrial corridor between Chennai and Bengaluru, southern India’s biggest cities. Foreign carmakers opened factories here first. Starting in the 2000s, Taiwanese tech manufacturers set up operations. Among them were Foxconn and its competitor Wistron, which was the first company to make iPhones in India in 2017 — the lower-end iPhone SE.
The area is still in transition from an agricultural town to a global manufacturing hub. Fallow fields are interspersed with high-tech factory campuses and brand-new hostels built to accommodate thousands of assembly line workers.
Sunguvarchatram’s evolution is a dream come true for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In 2014, at a Delhi landmark during his first Independence Day address, he unveiled what would become his signature “Make in India” initiative. “I want to appeal to people all over the world, from the ramparts of the Red Fort, ‘Come, make in India,’‘Come, manufacture in India,’” [Modi said](https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/full-text-prime-minister-narendra-modis-speech-on-68th-independence-day/).
During most of the second half of the 20th century, India was home to a thriving industry of national [electronics manufacturers](https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/Ashok-Parthasarathi-How-reforms-killed-Indian-manufacturing/article62116287.ece). But in 1991, import taxes were lowered, and foreign competitors flooded and dominated the market. Indian brands folded, and the country’s tech manufacturing sector collapsed. It is one of the reasons why India has had a persistent [problem with anemic job creation](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/13/business/economy/india-economy-jobs.html) for its young and quickly growing population over the past three decades.
Annual foreign investment [has doubled](https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1861929) since the announcement of Make in India, according to the government, but critics say the initiative is a work in progress at best. The manufacturing sector slightly outpaced India’s economy overall between 2003 and 2018, but — despite Make in India — [has since fallen behind](https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/indias-manufacturing-sector-faces-worsening-decline-implications-for-growth-employment-and-income-11686851477882.html). Its output grew by just 1.3% over the past year. Tech manufacturing, however, has once again become a bright spot. Companies like Foxconn, Samsung, and the Chinese-owned Salcomp have all announced new or expanded facilities since last year.
A primary driver of investment in India is the continuing U.S.-China trade war. Chinese workers are also no longer the cheapest option for some manufacturing: The country’s [workforce is shrinking](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-02/china-loses-more-than-40-million-workers-as-population-ages), [better educated than ever](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-07-25/bloomberg-big-take-china-s-growing-youth-jobs-crisis-risks-economic-setback?sref=QYWxDQ1o), and [not that interested in factory jobs](https://www.wsj.com/articles/asia-factories-consumer-goods-labor-prices-7140ab98?mod=article_inline) anymore.
Late last year, [a series of crises at the world’s biggest iPhone factory](https://restofworld.org/2023/foxconn-iphone-factory-china/) — a Foxconn facility in Zhengzhou, central China — underscored Apple’s need to diversify its manufacturing partners. [According to one estimate](https://restofworld.org/2023/foxconn-iphone-factory-china/), the factory’s delays cost Apple $1 billion a week.
Apple has since sped up plans to expand in India. Foxconn is in the middle of [doubling its workforce in the country](https://www.reuters.com/technology/foxconn-aims-double-jobs-investment-india-over-next-12-months-2023-09-17/). Company chairman Young Liu has [met with Modi three times](https://restofworld.org/2023/foxconn-year-in-india/) over the past 18 months to discuss expansion plans. Many other companies in the iPhone supply chain are also scouting locations for factories, Jules Shih, director of the Chennai branch of Taipei World Trade Center, a Taiwanese government-funded trade promotion group, told *Rest of World*.
Some of China’s manufacturing strengths will be hard for India to match. China’s one-party system goes to great lengths on Foxconn’s behalf, [investing billions of dollars](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/technology/apple-iphone-china-foxconn.html) to help set up factories, subsidize energy and shipping, and recruit and bus in workers during labor shortages. Independent unions are banned in China.
In India, Apple’s suppliers [have to contend](https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/govt-expedites-land-allotment-for-foxconn-plant-says-deal-is-safe/articleshow/101769820.cms) with local policymakers, landowners, and labor groups. The country lacks China’s vast network of material and equipment makers, who compete for Apple orders by cutting their own margins. “Apple has been spoiled in China,” a senior manager at an Apple supplier, who was recently deployed from China to India, told *Rest of World*. “Here, except labor, everything else is expensive.”
---
**Foxconn [began manufacturing](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-india-idUSKBN1X01SM/)** iPhones at Sunguvarchatram in 2019, starting with the iPhone XR. At that point, the model was more than a year old. When Li arrived at Foxconn Sunguvarchatram in early 2023, the factory was making iPhone 14s, for which production in India had begun [two months after its launch](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-23/apple-s-new-iphone-14-to-show-india-closing-tech-gap-with-china). This year, the goal was to have a shipment of made-in-India iPhone 15s ready to go as soon as the model was announced.
The iPhone plant is part of a sprawling 60-hectare campus where Foxconn also makes phones for other brands. About 35,000 employees go to work inside half a dozen white, three-story factory buildings. Li may as well have been walking back into the Chinese plant he was familiar with at home: the same advanced equipment, the same rows of tables with workers repeating tasks thousands of times a day, the same final product. But there was one obvious difference. Unlike in China, the assembly line was staffed almost exclusively by young women.
When electronics manufacturing took off in China in the 1980s, rural women who had just begun moving to the cities made up the majority of the factory workforce. They didn’t have many other options. Managers at companies like Foxconn preferred to hire women because they believed them to be more obedient, Jenny Chan, a sociologist at Hong Kong Polytechnic University who studies labor issues at Foxconn, told *Rest of World*.
Over the past 30 years, that’s changed. Today, most of China’s iPhone workers are men; women have moved into less arduous service sector jobs. But in India, Foxconn and other electronics manufacturers are once again recruiting from a female workforce beginning to migrate for better jobs.
> "\[If\] they go out and not return by a specific time, their parents would be informed."
Hiring a young, female workforce in India comes with its own requirements — which include reassuring doting parents about the safety of their daughters. The company offers workers free food, lodging, and buses to ensure a safe commute at all hours of the day. On days off, women who live in Foxconn hostels have a 6 p.m. curfew; permission is required to spend the night elsewhere. “\[If\] they go out and not return by a specific time, their parents would be informed,” a former Foxconn HR manager told *Rest of World*. “\[That’s how\] they offer trust to their parents.”
Foxconn also had to find a workaround for employing married women. The company typically requires workers to pass through metal detectors when entering and exiting its factories in order to [prevent leaks about upcoming products](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-asia-secrecy/for-apple-suppliers-loose-lips-can-sink-contracts-idUSTRE61G3XA20100217), according to reports. But in India, married women wear a *mangalsutra*, a metal pendant; and a *metti*, a metal toe ring. These workers are searched manually and have their jewelry logged in a notebook.
Padmini grew up as one of five siblings in the countryside near the ancient city of Tirunelveli — a nine-hour drive south of Chennai. The 26-year-old has a nursing degree, but felt “trapped” being on call 24/7 as a stay-at-home nurse.
Padmini got an assembly line job at Foxconn in 2021. Initially, she felt overwhelmed — the protective clothing, the machinery, the ominous “please cooperate with us” slogan on the wall. Having lived her whole life in inescapable tropical heat, she struggled to adjust to what felt to her like freezing cold air-conditioning. “I didn’t even know what a tweezer was,” she told *Rest of World*. “I didn’t know the name. I didn’t know how to hold it.”
Padmini now shares a modest one-bedroom apartment in Sunguvarchatram with eight other women — five sleep in the hall, and four in the bedroom. They each pay 1,250 rupees ($15) in rent. “It is a little difficult,” Padmini said. She rarely sees her roommates, who all rotate through different shifts once a week — 6 a.m. to 2 p.m., 2 p.m. to 10 p.m., or 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. — and only have Sundays off.
Every workday, Padmini rides a Foxconn shuttle bus to the factory, passes a metal detector, puts on an anti-static gown over her kurta, and sits down at the assembly line, where, every hour, she’ll stitch together at least 495 volume control parts.
---
**When they first** got to India, Li and his peers struggled to communicate with their new coworkers. They’d learned English in high school and university but had barely used it since. Locals had trouble understanding how they pronounced even simple phrases, like “thank you.” Li studied vocabulary books during his commutes and meal breaks. He also carried a notebook and a pen, so that whenever Indian coworkers used words he didn’t recognize, he could ask them to write down what they said.
Language barriers became most apparent when dealing with equipment, which is often sourced from China. “All machines have Mandarin. Standard operating procedures, work instructions, commands — everything comes only in \[Chinese\]. Even the software is like that,” an Indian senior manager said. “Even the ‘emergency button’ will be written in Mandarin.”
Chinese engineers told *Rest of World* they train Indian colleagues on operating and repairing machines with the help of translation apps, or with more primitive methods. “Body language is universal,” one Chinese engineer said.
> “Even the ‘emergency button’ will be written in Mandarin.”
A Chennai-based translator who speaks fluent Mandarin and has worked for many Chinese and Taiwanese companies operating in the area, including Foxconn, told *Rest of World* they often find themself in the middle of tense situations and frayed patience.
They recounted how a Chinese Foxconn worker became frustrated with a junior Indian technician who repeatedly failed to solve a technical glitch. The Chinese worker fixed it himself and walked away. “He did not teach me,” the translator recalled the Indian worker saying timidly. “How many times should I teach?” the Chinese worker replied.
Indian workers initially couldn’t grasp why their Chinese colleagues would get so upset by things like a 30-minute machine breakdown, the translator said. Over time, though, the Indian middle managers have gradually become more sensitive to delays.
Once, when a malfunctioning piece of equipment halted part of Foxconn’s iPhone assembly line, the resulting panic left a deep impression on the translator. As a technician rushed to fix the issue, an Indian manager hulking over him kept demanding in Tamil, “Is it over? Is it over?” The technician’s hands trembled under the pressure, the translator recalled.
---
**This year, for** the first time ever, Apple wanted to build its new iPhone model in China and India concurrently. Trial production — a particularly challenging part of the iPhone manufacturing cycle — began around April. Foxconn flew in yet more Chinese employees to introduce new machinery to Sunguvarchatram workers and deal with any hiccups.
The same month, the Tamil Nadu government sent a strong signal welcoming Foxconn and other manufacturers: Authorities approved new regulations that would increase workdays from eight to 12 hours. This meant that Foxconn and other electronics factories would be able to reduce the number of shifts needed to keep their production line running from three to two, just like in China.
Shift lengths have been a point of contention this year in India, pitting big international manufacturing firms against local workers and interest groups. In February, following lobbying from Apple, Foxconn, and other companies, the Indian state Karnataka loosened its labor laws to allow for 12-hour work shifts, [according to the *Financial Times*](https://www.ft.com/content/86bf4c20-e95a-4f8e-bd8d-b7bdee3bc3ba). Foxconn plans to build two new factories in the state.
In response, the All India United Trade Union Centre and other activist groups staged a protest, during which participants burned copies of the proposed bill. Although the Karnataka assembly [passed the law](https://restofworld.org/2023/india-labor-laws-apple-manufacturing/), no major company in the state is known to have implemented a 12-hour workday.
> "I’ll die if it’s 12 hours of work."
Tamil Nadu’s subsequent policy change also received strong pushback from opposition parties and workers’ rights groups. Political parties aligned with the government called the bill “anti-labor” and, during the vote, walked out of the legislative assembly. After the bill passed, trade unions in the state announced a series of actions including a demonstration on motorbikes, civil disobedience campaigns, and protests in front of the ruling party’s local headquarters. The government shelved its new rule within four days.
Indian Foxconn workers told *Rest of World* that eight hours under intense pressure is already hard to bear. “I’ll die if it’s 12 hours of work,” said Padmini, the assembly line worker. “I have to be alive to do work.”
For the expatriate workers, the slower pace of the factory floors in India is its own shock to the system. A Taiwanese manager at a different iPhone supplier in the Chennai area told *Rest of World* that India’s 8-hour shifts and industry-standard tea breaks were a drag on production. “You have barely settled in on your seat, and the next break comes,” the manager lamented.
### Timeline: Foxconn in India
### 2006
Foxconn starts operations in India, including at its factory in Sunguvarchatram. Nokia is its main client.
### 2010
The Sunguvarchatram factory closes temporarily after 250 workers are hospitalized. Later in the year, hundreds are arrested after they go on strike.
### 2014
Foxconn announces it will shut its India operations, reportedly due to a lack of orders.
### 2015
The company reverses course. Chairman Terry Gou announces Foxconn is developing new facilities in India.
### 2019
Foxconn begins making iPhones in Sunguvarchatram, starting with the then-year-old iPhone XR.
### 2021
Thousands of Indian Foxconn workers protest after about 250 of their colleagues contract food poisoning.
### 2023
Several Indian states woo Foxconn to set up new factories as the company dials up its India plans.
### September 2023
Sunguvarchatram-produced iPhone 15s are the first made-in-India flagship iPhones available on launch day.
In China, Foxconn relies on lax enforcement of the country’s labor law — which limits workdays to eight hours and caps overtime — as well as lucrative bonuses to get employees to work 11 hours a day during production peaks. Two foreign employees at the Sunguvarchatram plant told *Rest of World* that Foxconn used bonuses and promotional opportunities to encourage engineers and managers in India, too.
But five Chinese and Taiwanese workers said they were surprised to discover that their Indian colleagues refused to work overtime. Some attributed it to a weak sense of responsibility; others to what they perceived as Indian people’s low material desire. “They are easily content,” an engineer deployed from Zhengzhou said. “They can’t handle even a bit more pressure. But if we don’t give them pressure, then we won’t be able to get everything right and move production here in a short time.”
Three current and former Foxconn employees told *Rest of World* that the foreign managers and technicians hurled the same abusive language they used at home at underperforming Indian workers. It happened less often after some of them complained to HR, one employee said. But the foreign staff are still frustrated by local workers’ performance. “They know how to do it, but they are slow,” the employee said. “They even walk slowly.”
A foreign manager complained that Indian workers requested leave too frequently — to care for sick family members, for instance — or for reasons they considered insufficient, such as a “blood moon” lunar eclipse, deemed particularly inauspicious for women. They and another foreign manager said Indian workers were also frequently late to meetings.
At the same time, the expat staff enjoy the Indian work culture of tea breaks, chatting with colleagues, and going home on time. They recognize they are helping the company spread a Chinese work culture that they know can be unhealthy. At Foxconn’s factories in China, people strive to exceed their targets, sacrifice leave days, and stay late to impress the bosses.
The Chinese workplace is too *neijuan*, or “involuted,” several expat employees said. The term, increasingly popular in China, describes [the incessant competition in Chinese society](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/chinas-involuted-generation) and the grinding race to the bottom that comes with it. “Gradually, we’re bringing involution to India,” joked an engineer.
---
**By May, Li** had overcome much of his language barrier, he said, amazed by his own progress. “Surprisingly, I could understand what they were saying!” He could talk about iPhone minutiae, but also engage in small talk. One woman on the assembly line told Li she was jealous of his “white” skin color. Others were curious why he was single. “House, car, and money,” he replied, explaining the requirements for an eligible bachelor back home. “Chinese girls, very bad,” he remembered a female worker responding. “Here no house, no car, no money. Only love.”
The mostly male Chinese engineers live isolated from local communities. Foxconn has rented them homes in a high-end apartment complex called Hiranandani Parks. Its 27-story towers look incongruous with the surrounding countryside. The shared apartments are sparsely decorated. Some workers have hung their own mosquito nets above their beds — several Chinese workers have caught dengue in India.
In the evenings, the Chinese engineers frequent a handful of East Asian restaurants, go jogging through their compound, or call their children, parents, and partners back home. On Sundays, Foxconn sends a shuttle bus to bring them to one of three shopping malls in Chennai.
Li never adjusted to Indian food. He tried a few local dishes, but quickly gave up. “Every time I walk past the Indian canteen on my way to the office, I can’t stand the smell,” he said. “Their food is all yellow and mushy stuff.” During the weekly trips downtown, Li sticks with KFC and McDonald’s.
Foxconn has a Chinese food canteen where specially trained Indian chefs make dishes such as pork stew or tomato egg stir-fry. Chinese workers have $60 deducted from their weekly expat bonuses in exchange for three meals a day. On Sundays, the engineers cook themselves elaborate banquets using ingredients from a nearby Korean supermarket or use those they stuffed in their suitcases from home.
Despite occasional disputes during shifts, Chinese and Indian coworkers socialize outside of work. Indian employees sometimes visit Hiranandani Parks for festivities like Chinese New Year, or to join the Sunday banquets, Li said. Chinese engineers take advantage of those occasions to video-call their children so they can practice English with their Indian colleagues.
Both groups have picked up phrases from the other’s language. Sometimes an Indian colleague will greet Li with the common Chinese greeting, “Have you eaten yet?” To which Li will reply in Tamil, “I already ate.”
- 
- 
---
**From June onward**, the iPhone 15’s trial production ramped up ahead of the September launch. A sense of urgency spread throughout the factory. Workers who used to leave as soon as their shift ended now stayed at the office until late at night, in part so they could stay in touch with U.S.-based Apple employees.
For Indian workers, it was a rough adjustment. “They might feel uncomfortable at first, but they need to gradually get used to it,” one foreign employee told *Rest of World*. “\[The company is\] slowly establishing the Chinese hardworking mode here.”
On the assembly line, Foxconn’s targets were tough to reach, workers said. Jaishree, 21, joined the iPhone shop floor in 2022 as a recent graduate with a degree in mathematics. (With India’s high level of unemployment, Foxconn’s assembly line has plenty of women with advanced degrees, including MBAs.) Jaishree told *Rest of World* that during her first week, she was scared to use the screw gun to fasten an iPhone’s tiny screws and struggled to match the required pace. “At the start, during my eight-hour shift, I did about 300 \[screws\]. Now, I do 750,” she said. “We have to finish within time, otherwise they will scold us.”
With the intense workload, bathroom visits require strategizing. “I go only during breaks,” said Jaishree. “If we go \[to the bathroom\], the work would build up.” Another worker, Rajalakshmi, said her target is to inspect 526 motherboards every hour. The soft-spoken 23-year-old tries not to step away from her work in between breaks, knowing an unmet target will invoke the ire of her assembly line leader.
Mealtimes are an issue, too. In December 2021, [thousands of Indian Foxconn employees protested](https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/india-thousands-of-women-workers-at-foxconn-iphone-assembly-plant-stage-sit-in-protest-over-food-poisoning-in-company-hostel/) after some 250 colleagues contracted food poisoning. In response, the company changed food contractors, and increased its monthly base salary from 14,000 rupees to 18,000 rupees ($168 to $216) — double the [minimum wage prescribed](https://cms.tn.gov.in/sites/default/files/go/labemp_e_44_2022_2D.pdf) by the Tamil Nadu labor department for unskilled workers.
Though Foxconn’s Indian canteen currently serves a variety of local staples — flatbreads, lentil stews, spicy soups, and, on Wednesdays, meat-based dishes — assembly workers still complain of poor quality. “Just to satisfy our hunger we eat,” Padmini said. Women who live in Foxconn hostels complain about the food served there all the time, she said. “Sometimes they don’t eat at all.”
Working conditions take a physical toll. Padmini has experienced hair loss because she has to wear a skull cap and work in air-conditioned spaces, she said. “Neck pain is the worst, since we are constantly bending down and working.” She has irregular periods, which she attributes to the air conditioning and the late shifts. “\[Among\] girls with me on the production line, some six girls have this problem,” Padmini said.
Workers said they regularly see colleagues become unwell. “The day before yesterday, a girl fainted and they took her to the hospital,” Padmini told *Rest of World* in September, adding that two more women had fainted that same week. “Mostly it happens during the first shift. Many girls come without eating or wouldn’t have slept properly.” Rajalakshmi said she had witnessed three women faint in September.
Two Chinese engineers confirmed that they had seen ambulances taking away unwell workers, and said this was uncommon in China. They theorized Indian women don’t eat enough. Another engineer suggested the female workers were too thin. “If you give them meat, they won’t eat it because of their religious customs,” he said.
Apple declined to comment on the record. The Tamil Nadu Labour Welfare and Skill Development Department did not respond to requests for comment.
> "They used to hire women up to age 30, now they hire only up to 28."
Although Chinese workers today still deal with frequent overtime and constant pressure, their food, living conditions, and health care have improved, said Chan from Hong Kong Polytechnic University. But sleep-deprived women fainting and missing periods was common during the early years of China’s manufacturing boom as well, according to labor scholar Pun Ngai’s book *Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace.*
Still, the factories’ relatively high pay, combined with an escape from village life and parental control, made the job worth it. The same is now happening in Chennai. Female workers at the factory told *Rest of World* that, as the main breadwinners, they are now able to convince their parents to delay marrying them off. Two iPhone assembly line workers told *Rest of World* they were using their income to build homes back in their villages.
Padmini, now about two years into the job, talked about life at Foxconn with the confidence of a seasoned factory worker. Dressed in a plain red *churidar-kameez* — a long Indian dress — with a scarf around her shoulders and metallic earrings on her Sunday off, she said she was saving up most of her monthly income to repurchase the gold heirlooms her parents had pawned. She had also bought her first smartphone, a cheap Xiaomi model.
Her biggest worry is getting too old for the job and being let go. Padmini and two other workers told *Rest of World* that Foxconn prefers to hire younger women. Padmini, at 26, believes she is close to the age where the company might consider her too old. “They used to hire women up to age 30, now they hire only up to 28,” she said.
---
**On September 12**, Apple unveiled the iPhone 15 at its headquarters in Cupertino, California. The company’s slick announcement video brimmed with buzzwords expounding on the iPhone’s qualities: “aerospace-grade aluminum,” “nano-crystalline particles,” “quad-pixel sensor.”
Half a world away, Foxconn Sunguvarchatram had succeeded in its mission. By late summer, the iPhone 15 assembly line was humming. The percentage of defective phones — an important indicator — had decreased to the levels achieved in China, Foxconn employees told *Rest of World*.
The same day that Apple executives unveiled the iPhone 15, Foxconn workers in Sunguvarchatram gathered to perform a *puja* for the plant’s first shipment of the new model.
The Hindu ritual, common in India’s manufacturing industry, asks for a smooth production process. In front of a truck loaded up with new phones, workers placed framed pictures of Hindu gods decorated with flower garlands. They lit incense and offered bananas in prayer while the curious foreign employees watched. At the end, a worker smashed a coconut and a pumpkin on the ground.
When the made-in-India iPhone 15s hit local stores on launch day, the moment sparked a wave of nationalist pride. “Proud and thrilled to own the MADE IN INDIA IPHONE 15.. #MakeInIndia,” [actor Ranganathan Madhavan posted on X](https://twitter.com/ActorMadhavan/status/1704941840875565070).
At the factory, Foxconn threw a party. While assembly line workers remained bent over their workstations to produce more phones, engineers and office staff ate cake and other snacks while executives thanked them for their hard work. “It was like launching a rocket,” Li said. “After all the research and preparation, we finally sent the rocket into the sky.”
Li is staying in India for now, though he’s unsure for how long. Both foreign and local workers said that having the Chinese engineers and managers in India would be necessary in the coming years to keep the factory operating efficiently, and to help it prepare for the iPhone 16 and beyond.
> "If we didn’t come here, someone else would."
“\[China’s\] learnings are from 15 years of factory work, now we need to catch up,” said an Indian middle manager who oversees iPhone assembly lines at Foxconn. The Sunguvarchatram plant still assembled fewer than 10% of all iPhone 15s, according to people familiar with the matter. Foxconn makes the larger Plus and more advanced Pro models exclusively in China. Indian conglomerate Tata is also [assembling a small number of iPhone 15s](https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/for-workers-at-this-iphone-plant-tata-means-a-fresh-start/articleshow/105501609.cms) from a plant it acquired from Taiwanese manufacturer Wistron, the *Economic Times* reported.
Li said Chinese engineers sometimes talked about how they were working to make their own jobs obsolete: One day, Indians might get so good at making iPhones that Apple and other global brands could do without Chinese workers. Three managers said some Chinese employees aren’t willing teachers because they see their Indian colleagues as competition. But Li said that progress was inevitable. “If we didn’t come here, someone else would,” he said. “This is the tide of history. No one will be able to stop it.”
During the first week of October, the national holiday celebrating Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday fell on a Monday and created a rare two-day weekend for Foxconn employees. Li planned to visit the Taj Mahal. He would spend a good deal of the weekend in buses and airplanes, but figured it would be worth it — he wanted to have seen it before his time in India was up.
But a few days before he was due to leave, Li had to cancel. Management had announced that the factory needed to stay open to meet targets. Sunday would be a workday.
@ -42,12 +42,8 @@ Brian Adam, Bryce’s longtime boyfriend (who, like Bryce, uses a stage name for
This being a sex business, their workdays are filled with what others might see as debauchery, but which they see as just work: Two (or three) people will slip into a bedroom next to the kitchen or the gym with a cameraman, or just their cellphones, to record a collab or start live-streaming themselves exercising in the nude.
[Press Enter to skip to end of carousel](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2023/onlyfans-bryce-adams-top-earners-creator-economy/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNjk5Njc4ODAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzAxMDYxMTk5LCJpYXQiOjE2OTk2Nzg4MDAsImp0aSI6IjViYjVhZTg3LThjMmYtNGY3Zi1iM2RlLWZhZmQ1ZGE3Y2QxZiIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS90ZWNobm9sb2d5L2ludGVyYWN0aXZlLzIwMjMvb25seWZhbnMtYnJ5Y2UtYWRhbXMtdG9wLWVhcm5lcnMtY3JlYXRvci1lY29ub215LyJ9.nGVBBjcWezdo6jdXH619oHk100K0Q3Wbe9WtYQoFoVY&itid=gfta#end-react-aria87065138-1)
###### The Creator Economy
End of carousel
Then they’ll head back to their desks to resume chatting or drive to the beach to make TikToks. After a few days, the video editors will upload the files to the OnlyFans servers with names like “Bryce & Holly Shower” or “Sex on a Jungle Trail,” retailing for $25 a scene.
Adams’s employees call their headquarters in central Florida “the farm.” Bought last year with OnlyFans money, the 10 acres of pastureland once held a grove of pecan trees.
Here, in our house of worship, people were taunting me about politics as I tried to mourn.
Pablo Delcan
*This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter.* *[Sign up for it here](https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/sign-up/one-story-to-read-today/)**.*
It was July 29, 2019—the worst day of my life, though I didn’t know that quite yet.
The traffic in downtown Washington, D.C., was inching along. The mid-Atlantic humidity was sweating through the windows of my chauffeured car. I was running late and fighting to stay awake. For two weeks, I’d been sprinting between television and radio studios up and down the East Coast, promoting my new book on the collapse of the post–George W. Bush Republican Party and the ascent of Donald Trump. Now I had one final interview for the day. My publicist had offered to cancel—it wasn’t that important, she said—but I didn’t want to. It *was* important. After the car pulled over on M Street Northwest, I hustled into the stone-pillared building of the Christian Broadcasting Network.
## Explore the January/February 2024 Issue
Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
All in a blur, the producers took my cellphone, mic’d me up, and shoved me onto the set with the news anchor John Jessup. Camera rolling, Jessup skipped past the small talk. He was keen to know, given his audience, what I had learned about the president’s alliance with America’s white evangelicals. Despite being a lecherous, impenitent scoundrel—the 2016 campaign was marked by [his mocking of a disabled man](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-criticized-after-he-appears-mock-reporter-serge-kovaleski-n470016), his xenophobic slander of immigrants, his casual calls to violence against political opponents—Trump had won [a historic 81 percent of white evangelical voters](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/11/08/us/politics/election-exit-polls.html). Yet that statistic was just a surface-level indicator of the foundational shifts taking place inside the Church. Polling showed that born-again Christian conservatives, once the president’s softest backers, were now his most unflinching advocates. Jessup had the same question as millions of other Americans: Why?
As a believer in Jesus Christ—and as the son of an evangelical minister, raised in a conservative church in a conservative community—I had long struggled with how to answer this question. The truth is, I knew lots of Christians who, to varying degrees, supported the president, and there was no way to summarily describe their diverse attitudes, motivations, and behaviors. They were best understood as points plotted across a spectrum. At one end were the Christians who maintained their dignity while voting for Trump—people who were clear-eyed in understanding that backing a candidate, pragmatically and prudentially, need not lead to unconditionally promoting, empowering, and apologizing for that candidate. At the opposite end were the Christians who had jettisoned their credibility—people who embraced the charge of being reactionary hypocrites, still fuming about Bill Clinton’s character as they jumped at the chance to go slumming with a playboy turned president.
[From the April 2018 issue: Michael Gerson on Trump and the evangelical temptation](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-last-temptation/554066/)
Most of the Christians I knew fell somewhere in the middle. They had to some extent been [seduced by the cult of Trumpism](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-last-temptation/554066/), yet to composite all of these people into a caricature was misleading. Something more profound was taking place. Something was happening in the country—something was happening in the Church—that we had never seen before. I had attempted, ever so delicately, to make these points in my book. Now, on the TV set, I was doing a similar dance.
Jessup seemed to sense my reticence. Pivoting from the book, he asked me about a recent flare-up in the evangelical world. In response to the Trump administration’s policy of [forcibly separating migrant families](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/09/trump-administration-family-separation-policy-immigration/670604/) at the U.S.-Mexico border, Russell Moore, a prominent leader with the Southern Baptist Convention, [had tweeted](https://twitter.com/drmoore/status/1143418475723055106), “Those created in the image of God should be treated with dignity and compassion, especially those seeking refuge from violence back home.” At this, Jerry Falwell Jr.—the son and namesake of the Moral Majority founder, and then-president of Liberty University, one of the world’s largest Christian colleges—took great offense. “Who are you @drmoore?” [he replied](https://twitter.com/JerryFalwellJr/status/1143613031450103813). “Have you ever made a payroll? Have you ever built an organization of any type from scratch? What gives you authority to speak on any issue?”
This being Twitter and all, I decided to chime in. “There are Russell Moore Christians and Jerry Falwell Jr. Christians,” I wrote, summarizing the back-and-forth. “Choose wisely, brothers and sisters.”
Now Jessup was reading my tweet on-air. “Do you really see evangelicals divided into two camps?” the anchor asked.
I stumbled. Conceding that it might be an “oversimplification,” I warned still of a “fundamental disconnect” between Christians who view issues through the eyes of Jesus and Christians who process everything through a partisan political filter.
[From the June 2022 issue: Tim Alberta on how politics poisoned the evangelical church](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/06/evangelical-church-pastors-political-radicalization/629631/)
As the interview ended, I knew I’d botched an opportunity to state plainly my qualms about the American evangelical Church. Truth be told, I *did* see evangelicals divided into two camps—one side faithful to an eternal covenant, the other side bowing to earthly idols of nation and influence and fame—but I was too scared to say so. My own Christian walk had been so badly flawed. And besides, I’m no theologian; Jessup was asking for my journalistic analysis, not my biblical exegesis.
Walking off the set, I wondered if my dad might catch that clip. Surely somebody at our home church would see it and pass it along. I grabbed my phone, then stopped to chat with Jessup and a few of his colleagues. As we said our farewells, I looked down at the phone, which had been silenced. There were multiple missed calls from my wife and oldest brother. Dad had collapsed from a heart attack. There was nothing the surgeons could do. He was gone.
The last time I saw him was nine days earlier. The CEO of *Politico*, my employer at the time, had thrown a book party for me at his Washington manor, and Mom and Dad weren’t going to miss that. They jumped in their Chevy and drove out from my childhood home in southeast Michigan. When he sauntered into the event, my old man looked out of place—a rumpled midwestern minister, baggy shirt stuffed into his stained khakis—but before long he was holding court with diplomats and *Fortune* 500 lobbyists, making them howl with irreverent one-liners. It was like a Rodney Dangerfield flick come to life. At one point, catching sight of my agape stare, he gave an exaggerated wink, then delivered a punch line for his captive audience.
It was the high point of my career. The book was getting lots of buzz; already I was being urged to write a sequel. Dad was proud—very proud, he assured me—but he was also uneasy. For months, as the book launch drew closer, he had been urging me to reconsider the focus of my reporting career. Politics, he kept saying, was a “sordid, nasty business,” a waste of my time and God-given talents. Now, in the middle of the book party, he was taking me by the shoulder, asking a congressman to excuse us for just a moment. Dad put his arm around me and leaned in.
“You see all these people?” he asked.
“Yeah.” I nodded, grinning at the validation.
“Most of them won’t care about you in a week,” he said.
The record scratched. My moment of rapture was interrupted. I cocked my head and smirked at him. Neither of us said anything. I was bothered. The longer we stood there in silence, the more bothered I became. Not because he was wrong. But because he was right.
“Remember,” Dad said, smiling. “On this Earth, all glory is fleeting.”
Now, as I raced to Reagan National Airport and boarded the first available flight to Detroit, his words echoed. There was nothing contrived about Dad’s final admonition to me. That is what he believed; that is who he was.
Once a successful New York financier, Richard J. Alberta had become a born-again Christian in 1977. Despite having a nice house, beautiful wife, and healthy firstborn son, he felt a rumbling emptiness. He couldn’t sleep. He developed debilitating anxiety. Religion hardly seemed like the solution; Dad came from a broken and unbelieving home. He had decided, halfway through his undergraduate studies at Rutgers University, that he was an atheist. And yet, one weekend while visiting family in the Hudson Valley, my dad agreed to attend church with his niece, Lynn. He became a new person that day. His angst was quieted. His doubts were overwhelmed. Taking Communion for the first time at Goodwill Church in Montgomery, New York, he prayed to acknowledge Jesus as the son of God and accept him as his personal savior.
Dad became unrecognizable to those who knew him. He rose early, hours before work, to read the Bible, filling a yellow legal pad with verses and annotations. He sat silently for hours in prayer. My mom thought he’d lost his mind. A young journalist who worked under Howard Cosell at ABC Radio in New York, Mom was suspicious of all this Jesus talk. But her maiden name—Pastor—was proof of God’s sense of humor. Soon she accepted Christ too.
When Dad felt he was being called to abandon his finance career and enter the ministry, he met with Pastor Stewart Pohlman at Goodwill. As they prayed in Pastor Stew’s office, Dad said he felt the spirit of the Lord swirling around him, filling up the room. He was not given to phony supernaturalism—in fact, Dad might have been the most intellectually sober, reason-based Christian I’ve ever known—but that day, he felt certain, the Lord anointed him. Soon he and Mom were selling just about every material item they owned, leaving their high-salaried jobs in New York, and moving to Massachusetts so he could study at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.
For the next two decades, they worked in small churches here and there, living off food stamps and the generosity of fellow believers. By the time I arrived, in 1986, Dad was Pastor Stew’s associate at Goodwill. We lived in the church parsonage; my nursery was the library, where towers of leather-wrapped books had been collected by the church’s pastors dating back to the mid-18th century. A few years later we moved to Michigan, and Dad eventually put down roots at a start-up, Cornerstone Church, in the Detroit suburb of Brighton. It was part of a minor denomination called the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC), and it was there, for the next 26 years, that he served as senior pastor.
Cornerstone was our home. Because Mom also worked on staff, leading the women’s ministry, I was quite literally raised in the church: playing hide-and-seek in storage areas, doing homework in the office wing, bringing high-school dates to Bible study, working as a janitor during a year of community college. I hung around the church so much that I decided to leave my mark: At 9 years old, I used a pocket knife to etch my initials into the brickwork of the narthex.
The last time I’d been there, 18 months earlier, I’d spoken to a packed sanctuary at Dad’s retirement ceremony, armed with good-natured needling and PG-13 anecdotes. Now I would need to give a very different speech.
Standing in the back of the sanctuary, my three older brothers and I formed a receiving line. Cornerstone had been a small church when we’d arrived as kids. Not anymore. Brighton, once a sleepy town situated at the intersection of two expressways, had become a prized location for commuters to Detroit and Ann Arbor. Meanwhile, Dad, with his baseball allegories and Greek-linguistics lessons, had gained a reputation for his eloquence in the pulpit. By the time I moved away, in 2008, Cornerstone had grown from a couple hundred members to a couple thousand.
Now the crowd swarmed around us, filling the sanctuary and spilling out into the lobby and adjacent hallways, where tables displayed flowers and golf clubs and photos of Dad. I was numb. My brothers too. None of us had slept much that week. So the first time someone made a glancing reference to Rush Limbaugh, it did not compute. But then another person brought him up. And then another. That’s when I connected the dots. Apparently, the king of conservative talk radio had been name-checking me on his program recently—“a guy named Tim Alberta”—and describing the unflattering revelations in my book about Trump. Nothing in that moment could have mattered to me less. I smiled, shrugged, and thanked people for coming to the visitation.
They kept on coming. More than I could count. People from the church—people I’d known my entire life—were greeting me, not primarily with condolences or encouragement or mourning, but with commentary about Limbaugh and Trump. Some of it was playful, guys remarking about how I was the same mischief-maker they’d known since kindergarten. But some of it wasn’t playful. Some of it was angry; some of it was cold and confrontational. One man questioned whether I was truly a Christian. Another asked if I was still on “the right side.” All while Dad was in a box a hundred feet away.
It got to the point where I had to take a walk. Here, in our house of worship, people were taunting me about politics as I tried to mourn my father. I was in the company of certain friends that day who would not claim to know Jesus, yet they shrouded me in peace and comfort. Some of these card-carrying evangelical Christians? Not so much. They didn’t see a hurting son; they saw a vulnerable adversary.
That night, while fine-tuning the eulogy I would give at Dad’s funeral the following afternoon, I still felt the sting. My wife perceived as much. The unflappable one in the family, she encouraged me to be careful with my words and cautioned against mentioning the day’s unpleasantness. I took half of her advice.
In front of an overflow crowd on August 2, 2019, I paid tribute to the man who’d taught me everything—how to throw a baseball, how to be a gentleman, how to trust and love the Lord. Reciting my favorite verse, from Paul’s second letter to the early Church in Corinth, Greece, I told of Dad’s instruction to keep our eyes fixed on what we could not see. Reading from his favorite poem, about a man named Richard Cory, I told of Dad’s warning that we could amass great wealth and still be poor.
Then I recounted all the people who’d approached me the day before, wanting to discuss the Trump wars on AM talk radio. I proposed that their time in the car would be better spent listening to Dad’s old sermons. I spoke of the need for discipleship and spiritual formation. I suggested, with some sarcasm, that if they needed help finding biblical listening for their daily commute, the pastors here on staff could help. “Why are you listening to *Rush Limbaugh*?” I asked my father’s congregation. “Garbage in, garbage out.”
There was nervous laughter in the sanctuary. Some people were visibly agitated. Others looked away, pretending not to hear. My dad’s successor, a young pastor named Chris Winans, wore a shell-shocked expression. No matter. I had said my piece. It was finished. Or so I thought.
A few hours later, after we had buried Dad, my brothers and I slumped down onto the couches in our parents’ living room. We opened some beers and turned on a baseball game. Behind us, in the kitchen, a small platoon of church ladies worked to prepare a meal for the family. *Here*, I thought, *is the love of Christ*. Watching them hustle about, comforting Mom and catering to her sons, I found myself regretting the Limbaugh remark. Most of the folks at our church were humble, kindhearted Christians like these women. Maybe I’d blown things out of proportion.
Just then, one of them walked over and handed me an envelope. It had been left at the church, she said. My name was scrawled across it. I opened the envelope. Inside was a full-page-long, handwritten screed. It was from a longtime Cornerstone elder, someone my dad had called a friend, a man who’d mentored me in the youth group and had known me for most of my life.
He had composed this note, on the occasion of my father’s death, to express just how disappointed he was in me. I was part of an evil plot, the man wrote, to undermine God’s ordained leader of the United States. My criticisms of President Trump were tantamount to treason—against both God and country—and I should be ashamed of myself.
However, there was still hope. Jesus forgives, and so could this man. If I used my journalism skills to investigate the “deep state,” he wrote, uncovering the shadowy cabal that was supposedly sabotaging Trump’s presidency, then I would be restored. He said he was praying for me.
I felt sick. Silently, I passed the letter to my wife. She scanned it without expression. Then she flung the piece of paper into the air and, with a shriek that made the church ladies jump out of their cardigans, cried out: “What the hell is wrong with these people?”
There has never been consensus on what, exactly, it means to be an evangelical. Competing and overlapping definitions have been offered for generations, some more widely embraced than others. Billy Graham, a man synonymous with the term, [once remarked](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/evangelical-christian/418236/) that he himself would like to inquire as to its true meaning. By the 1980s, thanks to the efforts of televangelists and political activists, what was once a religious signifier began transforming into a partisan movement. *Evangelical* soon became synonymous with *conservative Christian*, and eventually with *white conservative Republican*.
My dad, a serious theologian who held advanced degrees from top seminaries, bristled at reductive analyses of his religious tribe. He would frequently state from the pulpit what *he* believed an evangelical to be: someone who interprets the Bible as the inspired word of God and who takes seriously the charge to proclaim it to the world.
From a young age, I realized that not all Christians were like my dad. Other adults who went to our church—my teachers, coaches, friends’ parents—didn’t speak about God the way that he did. Theirs was a more casual Christianity, less a lifestyle than a hobby, something that could be picked up and put down and slotted into schedules. Their pastor realized as much. Pushing his people ever harder to engage with questions of canonical authority and trinitarian precepts and Calvinist doctrine, Dad tried his best to run a serious church.
The author and his father in 2019 (Courtesy of Tim Alberta)
But for all his successes, Dad had one great weakness. Pastor Alberta’s kryptonite as a Christian—and I think he knew it, though he never admitted it to me—was his intense love of country.
Once a talented young athlete, Dad came down with tuberculosis at 16 years old. He was hospitalized for four months; at one point, doctors thought he might die. He eventually recovered, and with the Vietnam War escalating, he joined the Marine Corps. But at the Officer Candidates School in Quantico, Virginia, he fell behind in the physical work. His lungs were not healthy. After receiving an honorable discharge, Dad went home saddled with a certain shame. In the ensuing years, he learned that dozens of the second lieutenants he’d trained alongside at Quantico—as well as a bunch of guys he’d grown up with—were killed in action. It burdened him for the rest of his life.
This experience, and his disgust with the hippies and the drug culture and the war protesters, turned Dad into a law-and-order conservative. Marinating in the language of social conservatism during his time in seminary—this was the heyday of the Moral Majority—he emerged a full-spectrum Republican. His biggest political concern was abortion; in 1947, my grandmother, trapped in an emotionally abusive marriage, had almost ended her pregnancy with him. (She had a sudden change of heart at the clinic and walked out, a decision my dad would always attribute to holy intercession.) But he also waded into the culture wars: gay marriage, education curriculum, morality in public life.
Dad always told us that personal integrity was a prerequisite for political leadership. He was so relieved when Bill Clinton’s second term ended that he and Mom hosted a small viewing party in our living room for George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration, to celebrate the return of morality to the White House. Over time, however, his emphasis shifted. One Sunday in early 2010, when I was home visiting, he showed the congregation an ominous video in which Christian leaders warned about the menace of Obamacare. I told him afterward that it felt inappropriate for a worship service; he disagreed. We would butt heads more regularly in the years that followed. It was always loving, always respectful. Yet clearly our philosophical paths were diverging—a reality that became unavoidable during the presidency of Donald Trump.
Dad would have preferred any of the other Republicans who ran in 2016. He knew that Trump was a narcissist and a liar; he knew that he was not a moral man. Ultimately Dad felt he had no choice but to support the Republican ticket, given his concern for the unborn and the Supreme Court majority that hung in the balance. I understood that decision. What I couldn’t understand was how, over the next couple of years, he became an apologist for Trump’s antics, dismissing criticisms of the president’s conduct as little more than an attempt to marginalize his supporters. Dad really did believe this; he believed that the constant attacks on Trump’s character were ipso facto an attack on the character of people like himself, which I think, on some subconscious level, created a permission structure for him to ignore the president’s depravity. All I could do was tell Dad the truth. “Look, you’re the one who taught me to know right from wrong,” I would say. “Don’t be mad at me for acting on it.”
To his credit, Dad was not some lazy, knee-jerk partisan. He was vocal about certain issues—gun violence, poverty, immigration, the trappings of wealth—that did not play to his constituency at Cornerstone.
Dad wasn’t a Christian nationalist; he wanted nothing to do with theocracy. He just believed that God had blessed the United States uniquely—and felt that anyone who fought to preserve those blessings was doing the Lord’s work. This made for an unfortunate scene in 2007, when a young congregant at Cornerstone, a Marine named Mark Kidd, died during a fourth tour of duty in Iraq. Public opinion had swung sharply against the war, and Democrats were demanding that the Bush administration bring the troops home. My dad was devastated by Kidd’s death. They had corresponded while Kidd was overseas and met for prayer in between his deployments. Dad’s grief as a pastor gave way to his grievance as a Republican supporter of the war: He made it known to local Democratic politicians that they weren’t welcome at the funeral.
“I am ashamed, personally, of leaders who say they support the troops but not the commander in chief,” Dad thundered from his pulpit, earning a raucous standing ovation. “Do they not see that discourages the warriors and encourages the terrorists?”
This touched off a firestorm in our community. Most of the church members were all for Dad’s remarks, but even in a conservative town like Brighton, plenty of people felt uneasy about turning a fallen Marine’s church memorial into a partisan political rally. Patriotism in the pulpit is one thing; lots of sanctuaries fly an American flag on the rostrum. This was something else. This was taking the weight and the gravity and the eternal certainty of God and lending it to an ephemeral and questionable cause. This was rebuking people for failing to unconditionally follow the president of the United States when the only authority we’re meant to unconditionally follow—particularly in a setting of stained-glass windows—is Christ himself.
I know Dad regretted it. But he couldn’t help himself. His own personal story—and his broader view of the United States as a godly nation, a source of hope in a despondent world—was impossible to divorce from his pastoral ministry. Every time a member of the military came to church dressed in uniform, Dad would recognize them by name, ask them to stand up, and lead the church in a rapturous round of applause. This was one of the first things his successor changed at Cornerstone.
Eighteen months after Dad’s funeral, in February 2021, I sat down across from that successor, Chris Winans, in a booth at the Brighton Bar & Grill. It’s a comfortable little haunt on Main Street, backing up to a wooden playground and a millpond. But Winans didn’t look comfortable. He looked nervous, even a bit paranoid, glancing around him as we began to speak. Soon, I would understand why.
Dad had spent years looking for an heir apparent. Several associate pastors had come and gone. Cornerstone was his life’s work—he had led the church throughout virtually its entire history—so there would be no settling in his search for a successor. The uncertainty wore him down. Dad worried that he might never find the right guy. And then one day, while attending a denominational meeting, he met Winans, a young associate pastor from Goodwill—the very church where he’d been saved, and where he’d worked his first job out of seminary. Dad hired him away from Goodwill to lead a young-adults ministry at Cornerstone, and from the moment Winans arrived, I could tell that he was the one.
Barely 30 years old, Winans looked to be exactly what Cornerstone needed in its next generation of leadership. He was a brilliant student of the scriptures. He spoke with precision and clarity from the pulpit. He had a humble, easygoing way about him, operating without the outsize ego that often accompanies first-rate preaching. Everything about this pastor—the boyish sweep of brown hair, his delightful young family—seemed to be straight out of central casting.
There was just one problem: Chris Winans was not a conservative Republican. He didn’t like guns. He cared more about funding anti-poverty programs than cutting taxes. He had no appetite for President Trump’s unrepentant antics. Of course, none of this would seem heretical to Christians in other parts of the world; given his staunch anti-abortion position, Winans would in most places be considered the picture of spiritual and intellectual consistency. But in the American evangelical tradition, and at a church like Cornerstone, the whiff of liberalism made him suspect.
Dad knew the guy was different. Winans liked to play piano instead of sports, and had no taste for hunting or fishing. Frankly, Dad thought that was a bonus. Winans wasn’t supposed to simply placate Cornerstone’s aging base of wealthy white congregants. The new pastor’s charge was to evangelize, to cast a vision and expand the mission field, to challenge those inside the church and carry the gospel to those outside it. Dad didn’t think there was undue risk. He felt confident that his hand-chosen successor’s gifts in the pulpit, and his manifest love of Jesus, would smooth over any bumps in the transition.
He was wrong. Almost immediately after Winans moved into the role of senior pastor, at the beginning of 2018, the knives came out. Any errant remark he made about politics or culture, any slight against Trump or the Republican Party—real or perceived—invited a torrent of criticism. Longtime members would demand a meeting with Dad, who had stuck around in a support role, and unload on Winans. Dad would ask if there was any substantive criticism of the theology; almost invariably, the answer was no. A month into the job, when Winans remarked in a sermon that Christians ought to be protective of God’s creation—arguing for congregants to take seriously the threats to the planet—people came to Dad by the dozens, outraged, demanding that Winans be reined in. Dad told them all to get lost. If anyone had a beef with the senior pastor, he said, they needed to take it up with the senior pastor. (Dad did so himself, buying Winans lunch at Chili’s and suggesting that he tone down the tree hugging.)
Winans had a tough first year on the job, but he survived it. The people at Cornerstone were in an adjustment period. He needed to respect that—and he needed to adjust, too. As long as Dad had his back, Winans knew he would be okay.
And then Dad died.
Now, Winans told me, he was barely hanging on at Cornerstone. The church [had become unruly](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/06/evangelical-church-pastors-political-radicalization/629631/); his job had become unbearable. Not long after Dad died—making Winans the unquestioned leader of the church—the coronavirus pandemic arrived. And then George Floyd was murdered. All of this as Donald Trump campaigned for reelection. Trump had run in 2016 on a promise that “Christianity will have power” if he won the White House; now he was warning that his opponent in the 2020 election, former Vice President Joe Biden, was going to “hurt God” and target Christians for their religious beliefs. Embracing dark rhetoric and violent conspiracy theories, the president enlisted prominent evangelicals to help frame a cosmic spiritual clash between the God-fearing Republicans who supported Trump and the secular leftists who were plotting their conquest of America’s Judeo-Christian ethos.
People at Cornerstone began confronting their pastor, demanding that he speak out against government mandates and Black Lives Matter and Joe Biden. When Winans declined, people left. The mood soured noticeably after Trump’s defeat in November 2020. A crusade to overturn the election result, led by a group of outspoken Christians—including Trump’s lawyer Jenna Ellis, who later pleaded guilty to a felony charge of aiding and abetting false statements and writings, and the author Eric Metaxas, who suggested to fellow believers that martyrdom might be required to keep Trump in office—roiled the Cornerstone congregation. When a popular church staffer who had been known to proselytize for QAnon was fired after repeated run-ins with Winans, the pastor told me, the departures came in droves. Some of those abandoning Cornerstone were not core congregants. But plenty of them were. They were people who served in leadership roles, people Winans counted as confidants and friends.
By the time Trump supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Winans believed he’d lost control of his church. “It’s an exodus,” he told me a few weeks later, sitting inside Brighton Bar & Grill.
The pastor had felt despair—and a certain liability—watching the attack unfold on television. Christian imagery was ubiquitous: rioters forming prayer circles, singing hymns, carrying Bibles and crosses. The perversion of America’s prevailing religion would forever be associated with this tragedy; as one of the legislative ringleaders, Senator Josh Hawley, explained [in a speech the following year](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FH-FWfDupbw), long after the blood had been scrubbed from the Capitol steps, “We are a revolutionary nation precisely because we are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible.”
That sort of thinking, Winans said, represents an even greater threat than the events of January 6.
“A lot of people believe there was a religious conception of this country. A biblical conception of this country,” Winans told me. “And that’s the source of a lot of our problems.”
For much of American history, white Christians have enjoyed tremendous wealth and influence and security. Given that reality—and given the miraculous nature of America’s defeat of Great Britain, its rise to superpower status, and its legacy of spreading freedom and democracy (and, yes, Christianity) across the globe—it’s easy to see why so many evangelicals believe that our country is divinely blessed. The problem is, blessings often become indistinguishable from entitlements. Once we become convinced that God has blessed something, that something can become an object of jealousy, obsession—even worship.
“At its root, we’re talking about idolatry. America has become an idol to some of these people. If you believe that God is in covenant with America, then you believe—and I’ve heard lots of people say this explicitly—that we’re a new Israel,” Winans said, referring to the Old Testament narrative of God’s chosen nation. “You believe the sorts of promises made to Israel are applicable to this country; you view America as a covenant that needs to be protected. You have to fight for America as if salvation itself hangs in the balance. At that point, you understand yourself as an American first and most fundamentally. And that is a terrible misunderstanding of who we’re called to be.”
Plenty of nations are mentioned in the Bible; the United States is not one of them. Most American evangelicals are sophisticated enough to reject the idea of this country as something consecrated in the eyes of God. But many of those same people have chosen to idealize a *Christian America* that puts them at odds with *Christianity*. They have allowed their national identity to shape their faith identity instead of the other way around.
Winans chose to be hypervigilant on this front, hence the change of policy regarding Cornerstone’s salute to military personnel. The new pastor would meet soldiers after the service, shaking their hand and individually thanking them for their service. But he refused to stage an ovation in the sanctuary. This wasn’t because he was some bohemian anti-war activist; in fact, his wife had served in the Army. Winans simply felt it was inappropriate.
“I don’t want to dishonor anyone. I think nations have the right to self-defense. I respect the sacrifices these people make in the military,” Winans told me. “But they would come in wearing their dress blues and get this wild standing ovation. And you contrast that to whenever we would host missionaries: They would stand up for recognition, and we give them a golf clap … And you have to wonder: Why? What’s going on inside our hearts?”
This kind of cultural heresy was getting Winans into trouble. More congregants were defecting each week. Many were relocating to one particular congregation down the road, a revival-minded church that was pandering to the whims of the moment, led by a pastor who was preaching a blood-and-soil Christian nationalism that sought to merge two kingdoms into one.
As we talked, Winans asked me to keep something between us: He was thinking about leaving Cornerstone.
The “psychological onslaught,” he said, had become too much. Recently, the pastor had developed a form of anxiety disorder and was retreating into a dark room between services to collect himself. Winans had met with several trusted elders and asked them to stick close to him on Sunday mornings so they could catch him if he were to faint and fall over.
I thought about Dad and how heartbroken he would have been. Then I started to wonder if Dad didn’t have some level of culpability in all of this. Clearly, long before COVID-19 or George Floyd or Donald Trump, something had gone wrong at Cornerstone. I had always shrugged off the crude, hysterical, sky-is-falling Facebook posts I would see from people at the church. I found it amusing, if not particularly alarming, that some longtime Cornerstone members were obsessed with trolling me on Twitter. Now I couldn’t help but think these were warnings—bright-red blinking lights—that should have been taken seriously. My dad never had a social-media account. Did he have any idea just how lost some of his sheep really were?
I had never told Winans about the confrontations at my dad’s viewing, or the letter I received after taking Rush Limbaugh’s name in vain at the funeral. Now I was leaning across the table, unloading every detail. He narrowed his eyes and folded his hands and gave a pained exhale, mouthing that he was sorry. He could not even manage the words.
We both kept quiet for a little while. And then I asked him something I’d thought about every day for the previous 18 months—a sanitized version of my wife’s outburst in the living room.
“What’s wrong with American evangelicals?”
Winans thought for a moment.
“America,” he replied. “Too many of them worship America.”
---
*This article was adapted from Tim Alberta’s new book,* [The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism](https://tertulia.com/book/the-kingdom-the-power-and-the-glory-american-evangelicals-in-an-age-of-extremism-tim-alberta/9780063226883?affiliate_id=atl-347)*. It appears in the [January/February 2024](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2024/01/) print edition with the headline “The Church of America.”*
When my older sister, G, was a child, she bought a pet chick from a street vender near our family’s home in Ankara, Turkey. The bird had a pale-yellow coat and tiny, vigilant eyes. G would place him on her shoulder and listen to him cheep into her ear. But he soon grew into a rooster, shedding feathers and shitting on the furniture, so our grandfather had a housekeeper take him home to kill for dinner. In a school essay, my sister described this experience as her “first confrontation with death.”
I wrote my own essay about the chick many years later, for a high-school English class. The assignment was to interview relatives and retell a “family legend.” G’s tale, which she repeated often, hinted at a strange, wondrous chapter of our past, before our parents immigrated to the United States and had me. I read G questions from a how-to handout on oral history, relishing the excuse to pry. But there was another encounter with death that I didn’t dare ask about, an untold story that involved the two of us. One night in August of 1999, on a summer trip back to Ankara, our dad was murdered. G was twelve and I was three. We were both there when it happened, along with our mom, but I was too young to remember.
The Turkish language has a dedicated tense, sometimes called the “heard past,” for events that one has been told about but hasn’t witnessed. It’s formed with the suffix “*‑miş*,” whose pronunciation rhymes—aptly, I’ve always thought—with the English syllable “-ish.” The heard past turns up in gossip and folklore, and, as the novelist Orhan Pamuk has written, it’s the tense that Turks use to evoke life’s earliest experiences—“our cradles, our baby carriages, our first steps, all as reported by our parents.” Revisiting these moments can elicit what he calls “a sensation as sweet as seeing ourselves in our dreams.” For me, though, the heard past made literal the distance between my family’s tragedy and my ignorance of it. My dad’s murder was as fundamental and as unknowable as my own birth. My grief had the clumsy fit of a hand-me-down.
As far as I can recall, no one in the family explained his death to me. My mom considered my obliviousness a blessing. “He’s a normal boy,” she’d tell people. From a young age, I tried to assemble the story bit by bit, scrounging for information and writing it down. But G always seemed protective of her recollections from that night and skeptical of my self-appointed role as family scribe. She, too, had written about our dad over the years, and she’d point to the chick story as an early sign of my tendency to cannibalize her experiences. We’d quibble over the specifics—had my writing filched details from hers?—but to me it was an epistemological problem. I wanted what she had, which was firsthand access to the defining tragedy of our lives.
I can summon a single brief scene from what I believe to be the night of the crime. Some adult has lifted me onto a bed next to a window and left the room. There are flashes outside, bright red and blue, which look to me like light-up sneakers.
We returned from Turkey with our original plane tickets, one of them unused. Back home, in Massachusetts, my mom had G and me sleep in her bed, barricading the door with a wooden dresser. In time, though, she did her best to project an air of normalcy, worrying that our misfortune would prime others to see us as vulnerable foreigners. “It’s as if we are stained,” she would say. Every fall, she’d contact our teachers before the student directory showed up in the mail, to make sure that no one removed our dad’s name from our listing. On her advice, I let people assume that he had died of an illness. When relatives called from Ankara, she would hand me the receiver and have me recite one of the few Turkish phrases I knew: “*Iyiyim*”—“I’m fine.” Alone in her bedroom, however, she’d cry out, “Why?” In a note to a school counsellor, several years after my dad’s death, she admitted, “Although I am trying my best, our home has not been a joyful place.”
After school, I’d sneak into her closet, where the shape of my dad still hung from wire hangers, emanating a gentle, smoky scent. I’d run my nails down his neckties and reach into the pockets of his tweed blazers, pulling out a miniature Quran or his keys to our old Ford. There was a business card for the local Quick Cuts and Turkish lira bills in preposterous denominations—ten million, twenty million—from the time before the government slashed six zeros from the currency. Before bed, my mom and I sometimes read from a picture book about the life of the Prophet Muhammad, whose father had died before his birth. Because Islam forbids depictions of the Prophet, the illustrations hid his figure behind a shimmering foil silhouette, a golden void that reminded me of the chalk outlines scrawled around corpses in cop shows.
Much of what I knew about my dad I learned on the Internet. When I typed his name into Google, the first suggested search term was “*cinayet*,” which an online dictionary informed me was the Turkish word for “murder.” A short obituary in the Boston *Globe* noted only that he’d died, on vacation in Ankara, “at the hands of an intruder.” The phrasing seemed to me strangely intimate, as though someone had suffocated him in a tender embrace. Like my mom, he’d been a professor of chemical engineering. He was eulogized in one scientific journal as “warm and decent,” with an “easygoing, modest, and upbeat personality.” He sounded nothing like me, an odd, caustic child who preferred horror movies to Saturday-morning cartoons. When my mom drove us around, I made a point of leaving my seat belt unbuckled; in the event of a deadly crash, I didn’t want to be left behind.
Someone had given my mom a copy of “The Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Sourcebook,” which, she explained doubtfully, was supposed to help her turn back into the person she’d been before my dad’s death. I’d seen this person in old photos, a long-haired woman sipping Coke from glass bottles by the Aegean Sea, but she was unfamiliar to me. I remember thinking that I hadn’t been much of anyone before my dad’s death. There was no self to recover, no past to reclaim. My first and only memories of him overlapped with everyone else’s last.
One weekend when I was nine or ten, I switched on the family computer while my mom took a phone call in the next room. As long as she was on the landline, I couldn’t access the dial-up, so I found myself browsing documents on the computer’s desktop. In a folder of G’s homework assignments was a file titled “dad.doc.” In it, she described our father as a steady, soothing presence. “He faced even the gravest situation with a covert, wise chuckle,” she wrote.
With a tingling sense of trespass, I opened the next file, a short story by G. It was narrated by a young girl babysitting her little brother while their mother, a widow, runs errands. The girl describes her brother as “complacent and unaware in his youth,” adding, “to him our father was probably just a fuzzy picture in the papers or a glossy portrait over the dining room table.” I closed that document and opened another, which appeared to be an application essay. I stopped when I got to these sentences: “A thief broke into our apartment in the middle of the night and shot my father. He was killed instantly.” Overcome by the violence of this image, I hit the switch on the power strip, and the screen went black. I rushed out of the room and into my mom’s arms. It was the first time that I remember crying about my dad.
Besides one of my mom’s cousins, who’d married an American Air Force pilot, all our family lived abroad. Sometimes when I misbehaved, my mom would talk about moving us back to Turkey. We spent what seemed like entire summers at my grandfather’s apartment in the bleary heat of Ankara, where I wasn’t supposed to consume tap water or street food. Walking with my mom through Kızılay Square, I’d watch venders churn goat’s-milk ice cream behind wheeled stalls, plunging long spoons into metal vats with the rhythmic discipline of oarsmen.
At some point on every trip, a yellow cab took us to visit my parents’ old apartment, which had remained in the family. I guessed that it was the site of the crime because, once inside, my mom and G shut themselves in the bedrooms to cry. Since I couldn’t cry, I’d wait on the balcony, which left my bare feet black with dust, or in the living room, where there were still bullet holes in the upholstery and Berenstain Bears books on the coffee table. In one, Sister Bear wakes up screaming after seeing a scary movie and scurries to her parents’ room for reassurance. “You must have had a nightmare,” Papa Bear tells her. In college, G published an essay about the “ambivalent nostalgia” of visiting that apartment. When she was little, she wrote, the sounds of prayer and the scents of neighborhood cooking had drifted in from the street. Now those fond memories jostled with ones “of violent struggle, the ring of gunshots, the crash of breaking windows.”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a27770)
“We can remove the toothpick, but we’d better leave the pimento where itis.”
Cartoon by Roland High
Like many immigrant parents, our mom considered writing to be an unremunerative indulgence. Throughout my childhood, she tried to nudge me toward the sciences. On weekends, we conducted experiments with litmus strips from her lab, dipping them into milk or Windex and watching the paper change shades. She gave me a grid-ruled notebook to record the results, but I perverted it into a journal. In diary entries and English essays, I told the story of my dad’s death, or what I’d heard of it, again and again. Was I trying to dignify our shame and suffering? To reclaim the voice so often denied to survivors of violence? I could trot out answers from the trauma literature, but the reality was both more selfish and more desperate. Recounting the story was the only way of writing myself in.
The day I left for college, I dug up the oral-history handout that I’d used to interview G about the chick and asked my mom directly about the murder. “Remember that you’re an interested relative, not a hard-nosed reporter,” the handout said. We sat together in the living room, on our old patterned couch. She told me that she’d selected it with my dad before his last trip to Turkey but that he hadn’t lived to see it delivered. To ease her into the act of reminiscence, I brought up a memory from Ankara that I’d never managed to slot into the time line of childhood. A cousin, my dad’s niece, was babysitting me. Maybe I was five. I insisted on baking something, and she deemed the result inedible.
“That must have been during the trial,” my mom said. “I left you with her because she spoke the most English.” She’d left G in Massachusetts, to spare her the stress of testifying, but with me there was no such concern. “You were too young to be a *şahit*,” my mom explained, using the Turkish word for “witness.”
“Did you tell me why we were there?” I asked.
“What was I going to say? Someone had come into the house and shot your father? It would have been very awkward, and the psychologists said, ‘Don’t.’ ”
For a while, she told me, I didn’t understand that he’d died. When friends called to offer condolences, I’d rush to the phone and answer, “Daddy?” My mom felt as though God had betrayed her. “I was told that if you didn’t hurt anyone, if you didn’t cheat or steal, then you would be protected from something so awful,” she said. “I was angry at my parents for tricking me.” She recalled wearing sunglasses to the trial, so that she wouldn’t have to meet the suspect’s eyes. After shooting my dad, the man had threatened to kill her, too, using the Turkish verb *yakmak*, literally “to burn.” Repeating his words, my mom started to weep, and I felt too guilty to ask anything else. “Don’t push for answers,” the handout said. “*TO BE CONTINUED*,” I wrote in my journal. But it was several years before we spoke of the murder again.
In the documentary “Tell Me Who I Am,” from 2019, middle-aged British twins named Alex and Marcus Lewis consider the rift that developed between them after Alex lost his memory in a motorcycle accident at the age of eighteen. For years, as he worked to fill in the “black empty space” of his youth, his brother hid the horrific abuse that they’d both endured as children. The film recounts Alex’s efforts to extract the truth from Marcus, who fears that any disclosures would be unbearable for them both. “We’re linked together,” Alex explains. “Yet we have this unbelievable separation of silence.”
When I was a child, the age gap between G and me made her a somewhat remote figure. In my memories, she’s doing homework behind the closed door of her bedroom, or driving us to school, with No Doubt on the stereo and me in the back seat. I remember her joking that by the time I had a personality she was already out of the house. As she attended college, then law school, we spoke mostly by e-mail and text message. We first discussed the night of our dad’s death when I was eighteen or nineteen. I had asked to meet at a pub, so that I could test out a fake I.D. “Do you remember that night?” she asked me. “I took you, and we hid in a closet.” She said that she wasn’t certain the police had got the right guy.
The gulf between us exposed itself sporadically. “I like scary movies,” G once said, trying to relate to my interests. But when she joined me to see “The Babadook,” a supernatural horror film about a single mother haunted by grief, she sobbed so hard that we stayed in our seats until long after the theatre had cleared. G encouraged me to send her my writing, but she bristled at my attempts to narrate our dad’s death. Sometimes her recollections contradicted our mom’s. I’d never rushed to the phone and answered, “Daddy?,” she said. When I imagined our mom “clutching her dying husband,” G told me, “You’re lying about Dad. That’s not how it happened.” I once tried writing a passage from his point of view; G said she found it exploitative. “I so liked the rest of your piece, told from your perspective, since that is genuine and truly your story to tell,” she added. Other details made her feel “mildly plagiarized.”
I felt caught in a peculiar quandary. If I repeated details that G had already written down, was I relying on a primary source or appropriating what my peers in creative-writing workshops would call her “lived experience”? The tautology maddened me. I had lived the experience, too, yet I felt like either a mimic, reciting my family’s recollections, or a fabulist, mistaking my imagination for fact. My ignorance isolated me from G and our mom. I had a sense that I was hammering on a bolted door, begging them to admit me to an awful place. And why would I want to get in? Well, because they were there.
When I was in college, G called to say that she’d seen new photographs from the night of the crime. One of our great-uncles had archived old news clippings about the murder and forgotten to wipe the scans from a flash drive of family snapshots that he gave her. Back in the U.S., she opened the files expecting baby pictures and instead found an article displaying an image of our dad’s body. “Mom has one, too,” G said of the flash drive. “Have you seen the picture?” There was no reason I would have, so the question struck me as a taunt, another reminder that the facts of the murder remained out of my reach.
After we hung up, I booked a bus ticket home for the weekend. On Saturday, while my mom was at the supermarket, I searched for the drive on her desk and dresser, in her handbag and coat pockets, but found nothing. I was on my best behavior the next morning, rinsing and recycling the plastic cups of yogurt which I’d otherwise have tossed in the trash. As I left, I said casually that G had mentioned some family photographs. I was suspicious when my mom handed over a flash drive, as though she’d anticipated my request, and then enraged when, on the bus back to campus, I opened every file and realized that she’d removed the scans from the crime scene. What remained were quirky relics, like a black-and-white photograph of my dad as a little boy, wearing a fez after his circumcision ceremony.
I called my mom to confront her. “All I am trying to do is to protect you,” she told me. “I couldn’t protect you that night.” Eventually, she offered to show me the materials, but only under her supervision, a plan that she said she’d come up with after consulting two psychologists. I rejected the idea and resorted to petulance, blocking my mom’s phone number until she e-mailed me the scans. They came through at such magnified dimensions that I had to scroll left and right several times to see them.
The article that G had referred to was published soon after our dad’s death, in a tabloid called the *Star Gazetesi*. Because the text was in Turkish, all I could take in at first were three color photos. The largest showed a plainclothes policeman escorting G down a dark sidewalk outside the apartment. She was wearing rainbow-strapped sandals and had her eyes squeezed shut. In the second picture, my mom raised her arms to shield her face from the photographers. In the smallest image, set just beneath the headline, my dad’s corpse lay prone on the floor, with his face buried in the bloodied fabric of a woven rug. A box of red text bore the words “*BU HABER TELEVİZYONDA YOK*,” simple enough for me to parse without a dictionary: “You won’t see this news on television.”
A college friend who’d lost his father introduced me to an Emily Dickinson poem about pain’s capacity to conceal itself, so that “Memory can step/Around—across—upon it.” Looking at the picture of my dad, I felt no pain. I felt estranged and ashamed of my estrangement, as though I were seeing someone else’s father. Perhaps the spats with my sister had led me to internalize her resentment: to feel too much would be to take something that wasn’t mine. I wondered what kind of rug, precisely, was beneath my dad’s body. I’d need the detail later if I wrote about the scene.
The tabloid photographs excluded two key characters, the killer and me. We were twins in our omission. According to the article, the police had pulled a suspect’s fingerprints from the railing of our apartment’s balcony. Witnesses said they’d seen a stocky, brown-haired man fleeing the building. The media was calling him “the balcony burglar,” although he hadn’t stolen anything from us. He’d escaped, which explained his absence, but where was I? If the photographers had focussed their attention below eye level, would they have found a three-year-old trailing behind?
The older I got, the more I sensed that I’d surrendered the right to grieve or rage. I wanted to collect on those emotions. When I came home from college, I’d round up crafts that my mom had saved from my childhood and smash them on the back porch. In my apartment, I’d sprawl face down on the floor of the shower, trying to imagine what my dad had felt as he’d lain there with life clinging to him. If people asked where he was or what he did for a living, I’d say flatly, “He was murdered in a home invasion,” and watch their faces change.
Before my senior year, I made arrangements to visit Ankara and research the crime myself. With the help of an American journalist who’d worked in Turkey, I contacted a local researcher, who planned to track down police reports and court transcripts ahead of my arrival. Not long before my flight, though, the researcher informed me that he’d been unsuccessful, because my dad had died before such records were reliably digitized. “The file is in the archive but has no reference number,” he said.
It was a bad time to go searching for facts in Turkey. Journalists were being imprisoned. The authorities had blocked access to Wikipedia. When my mom learned what I was up to, she warned me that I could get myself arrested. Then she booked her own flight to Ankara. I had envisioned a risky mission during which I’d become a man in a distant land. I ended up in a hotel room with my mom, who reminded me each night to bolt the door and wear my retainer. “Your father died, he died, he is dead,” she’d say in the dark, as we lay in adjacent twin beds. “Will you spend your life doing this?”
We argued daily about our itinerary. I had fantasized about visiting the prison where the killer was incarcerated, two hundred kilometres from Ankara, and speaking with him face to face. My mom fobbed me off with wistful trips around the city. We went to my dad’s elementary school, where modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was memorialized in the foyer, and to the university where my dad had taught. “I don’t want murder to define him,” my mom said. His former students, now professors themselves, told me stories about his polished shoes and his collection of Charlie Brown comics. When they heard about my interest in meeting the killer, they reacted as though I’d suggested exhuming the body.
My mom set up an appointment with the lawyer who’d represented our family during the trial. He was a neighbor who’d been sleeping in his own apartment, several stories above ours, when his wife awoke him to say that Hasan Orbey had been shot. Greeting us at his office, the lawyer shook my hand and kissed my mom on each cheek. He told us that any request for an audience with the killer would be at best denied—the prison was closed to most visitors—and at worst interpreted as a threat of revenge. To prove it, he called a prosecutor friend. I heard only his side of the conversation, which my mom translated from Turkish in a whisper. “I told him the same thing, but he grew up in America, in different circumstances,” the lawyer said. He looked at me the way a cashier might examine a troublesome customer. “Yes,” he repeated. “America.”
“What would you even say?” my mom asked me once he’d hung up the phone. “Imagine the man is sitting there.” She pointed to an empty chair beside us.
“No, no,” the lawyer said. He gestured to suggest a partition. “He’d be on one side. You’d be on the other.” Turning to me, he added, “You could say whatever the truth was. You could say you want to see the person who made your father disappear.”
“Be reasonable,” my mom replied, clicking her tongue.
On his desk, beside three tulip-shaped glasses of black tea, the lawyer set down a pair of binders. He explained that they contained copies of files related to my dad’s case. The sheets peeked out from their plastic covers like the layers in baklava. My mom appeared to be offering a trade: if I agreed not to contact the prison, then I could take the documents home. She’d even help me translate them.
I refused to leave the country without at least driving by the prison, so she recruited a childhood friend of my dad’s, H, as a chaperon. My mom planned to stay at the hotel bar and dull her nerves with raki. “This has been too much,” she said as I got ready to leave. “I lost my husband. After your father was shot, my mother could not walk. My father had a heart attack. My parents died early because of the stress. When you have children, you will understand.”
To get to the prison, H and I rode a bullet train and then hailed a cab. On the drive, he recalled, laughing, that before he and my dad became friends they’d got into a squabble, and my dad had punched him in the face. The taxi’s meter ticked upward, and expanses of dusty land rose and fell on either side of us. Road signs marked with black silhouettes warned of wayward livestock. Eventually, H had the driver turn onto an off-ramp. I spotted the Turkish word for “prison” on a sign above a security fence surrounding a low-slung building. A few guards stood out front wearing helmets and holding guns. H reached across my body and locked the car door. Then he told the driver to turn back.
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a22839)
“Sorry I’m late. I took the wrong twig.”
Cartoon by Mick Stevens
From the police reports, which my mom translated on unlined paper in a tilted, elegant script, I learned that we’d arrived in Ankara for our family vacation on August 16, 1999, a day before one of the deadliest earthquakes in Turkish history. On the first night of the trip, the quake ripped through the country’s northwestern coast, crushing buildings and killing thousands of sleeping people. But we were far from the epicenter, and my parents reassured their American friends, on the phone, that we were safe. Later that week, they had a dinner reservation to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary. G and I spent the evening at our grandparents’ place, watching reruns of the British sitcom “Keeping Up Appearances,” until our parents came by and drove us back to the family apartment.
I fell asleep, but my parents and sister were up late with jet lag. Our dad went across the street to buy pistachios and ice cream from a corner store. “There was nothing out of the ordinary,” my sister would later tell the police. She and our dad sat in the living room reading Tintin comics. Our mom pestered them to get to bed, but G couldn’t sleep, so she tried to tidy up her room. It was hot in the apartment, and she started to feel nauseated, so our dad got a pail from the kitchen and said a prayer for her. To be decent before God, he covered his shirtless body with a bedsheet. My sister returned to our parents’ room. “I told her to lie down so we’d wake up on time in the morning,” our mom recalled to the police. That is when our dad left the room again.
Later, neighbors in our building described being awoken by what they assumed were aftershocks of the earthquake. My sister knew right away that the sounds were gunshots. “I heard my dad cry,” she told the police. “The shots did not stop. My mom was in a state of shock. She shouted, ‘Hasan! My husband!,’ and went toward the door.” G picked me up and rushed us into the bedroom closet. When I started to cry, she told me to be quiet. “I didn’t know whether the man was still inside,” she said, but he was gone by the time the police arrived.
After my trip to Ankara, G and I argued bitterly. I planned to go back to Turkey and learn more. G claimed that my efforts to meet the murderer were reckless and might endanger our relatives. A few weeks later, I walked her down the aisle at her wedding, and then we didn’t speak for six months. Around that time, she wrote our mom and me a letter confessing to her own feelings of estrangement. “I’m so angry we aren’t as kind to each other as we would have been if we hadn’t been through all this,” she said.
When I told G that I was working on this piece, she surprised me by saying that she sometimes feels I’ve written her out of the story. She mentioned that I’d once described hiding from the killer in the closet, as though I were alone. “I *pulled* you into the closet,” she said. “To save your life.” For a moment, we seemed to narrow the distance between us.
“Mom always told me not to talk to you about it, because you didn’t remember,” she said.
“Mom always told *me* not to talk to *you* about it,” I replied. “Because you did.”
The memoirist Joyce Maynard often tells students to “write like an orphan,” without regard for what their loved ones will think. Several years ago, when my mom read this quote in a profile I wrote of Maynard, she said, “You’re not going to do that, right? Write like you’re an orphan?” After a moment, she added, “You’re not an orphan.” She liked to cite a Turkish proverb—“*Kol kırılır yen içinde kalır*”—about the virtues of discretion: “A broken arm stays in its sleeve.” “You’ll lose me,” she once said, of my insistence on telling our story, and then immediately took it back.
I went to graduate school to improve my Turkish and brought the legal files to campus in a banker’s box. On the floor of my dorm, under an enormous lamp designed to treat seasonal affective disorder, I spent hours studying the original documents beside my mom’s translations. The police had labelled sketches of the crime scene with words that I recognized from my Turkish workbook: a bathroom (*banyo*), a balcony (*balkon*), a nursery (*çocuk odası*). Other vocabulary was unfamiliar: the chalk outline of a victim (*maktul*); the black marks of bullet casings (*mermi kovanları*), grouped together like the dots on a die. My mom couldn’t bear to translate more than a few words of the autopsy report, so I tried to do the rest myself. To native English speakers, Turkish syntax can seem inverted, so I deciphered each sentence backward, beginning at the end. My dad had bullet holes in his chest, his shoulder, his rib cage, his right elbow, and his left thigh. All but one bullet had exited his body.
The suspect, whom I’ll call V, was in his early thirties, a decade younger than my dad. By his own account, he had committed multiple previous burglaries and had finished a stint in prison just a few months before my dad’s murder. Afterward, he evaded apprehension for a year before getting arrested for a lesser offense and confessing. “I feel remorse,” he told the police of the murder. “I had no place to run and was in a panic and scared.” Later, though, he changed his story. He denied his guilt throughout the trial but was eventually sentenced, in 2003, to life in prison. In a series of unsuccessful appeals, he accused the police of coercing him into a confession. “I am a burglar, not a murderer,” he wrote in one letter. In another, he added, “When my family is broken and my life ends within four walls, will the court’s conscience be clear?”
I found these claims both disturbing to contemplate and difficult to square with V’s original testimony, in which he’d recounted the night of the murder in exacting, often extraneous detail. He’d reported the number of beers that he’d drunk before working up the nerve to break into homes, and the color of a military jacket that he’d stolen earlier that night from a veteran’s apartment, where he’d also found the gun that he used to kill my dad. He’d described entering our home through an open window and following a stream of light through the hallway. He reached the living room and, hearing a sudden sound, crouched beside a cabinet. The light turned on, and he saw a man with a wide forehead walk toward him, saying, “Who are you?” V was still crouching when he removed the gun from his left side and shot. He emptied the magazine and watched my dad topple backward.
The police had interviewed a few of V’s family members, including his wife. The two had what she described as an arranged marriage, wedding in a religious ceremony several months after the murder. She said she was aware of his earlier criminal record but added, “Besides that, I don’t have any other information about his past.” At the time of V’s arrest, she was six months pregnant with their child.
This last revelation dislodged a block in my mind. The sensation was almost physical, like the pop in your ears as a plane lands. I’d never imagined that there was a child on the other side of the tragedy. He or she—I pictured a boy—would have been just a few years younger than I was. Whether his father was guilty or not, he, too, had lost a parent to the murder. Perhaps he’d visited the prison that I’d managed only to see.
Every time I’m in Ankara, I retrace the route that V described taking that night. A café called the Salon Arkadaş, where he’d been employed at the time, has been replaced by an Italian roastery where people work on laptops and eat tiramisu. I follow Tunalı Hilmi Avenue toward my family’s former home, past sleeping street dogs and storefronts that advertise their air-conditioning. This August, twenty-four years since the murder, I looked up at our old apartment, now a rental, and noticed that the new tenants had strung bulbs of garlic to dry on the balcony, which was reinforced with metal bars.
An odd custom of Turkish law enforcement involves bringing a suspect to the scene of the crime for a reënactment. One newspaper clipping shows V standing on the balcony railing, bracing himself against the side of the building to demonstrate how he’d reached the open window. He is average-looking, with silvery hair and the tanned complexion of many Turks, wearing scuffed shoes and a baggy suit. I have examined his face many times, trying to see him through my family’s eyes. G had advised me that if I managed to meet him he might become violent. “He should rot,” our mom said. He was a thief, a criminal, a killer. Even the newspaper called him “*oldukça soğukkanlı*”—“rather cold-blooded.” I know the Turkish words now, and at least as much about the murder as my mom and my sister do. Yet I still cannot feel much of what they feel. What I see when I look at him is someone else’s father. ♦
Women are expected to be nurturers. Firstborns are expected to be exemplars. Being both is exhausting.
Harry Gruyaert / Magnum
Being an eldest daughter means frequently feeling like you’re not doing enough, like you’re struggling to maintain a veneer of control, like the entire household relies on your diligence.
At least, that’s what a contingent of oldest sisters has been saying online. Across social-media platforms, they’ve described the stress of [feeling accountable](https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8AuVk25/) for their [family’s happiness](https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8Aup8ac/), [the pressure](https://www.tiktok.com/@scilatina/video/7245848814031031594?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7290928141148751406) to succeed, and the impression that they [aren’t being cared for](https://www.tiktok.com/@cinphotos/video/7243560344994483498?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7290928141148751406) in the way [they care for others](https://www.tiktok.com/@mariandacalos/video/7224338176456887579?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7290928141148751406). Some are still teens; [others](https://www.tiktok.com/@yl.wolfe/video/7255016617552137515?lang=en) have grown up and left home but still feel over-involved and overextended. As one [viral tweet](https://twitter.com/MelissaOng69420/status/1511474451442929666) put it, “are u happy or are u the oldest sibling and also a girl”? People have even coined a term for this: “eldest-daughter syndrome.”
That “syndrome” does speak to a real social phenomenon, Yang Hu, a professor of global sociology at Lancaster University, in England, told me. In many cultures, oldest siblings as well as daughters of all ages tend to face high expectations from family members—so people playing both parts are especially likely to take on a large share of household responsibilities, and might deal with more stress as a result. But that caregiving tendency isn’t an inevitable quality of eldest daughters; rather, researchers told me, it tends to be imposed by family members who are part of a society that presumes eldest daughters should act a certain way. And the online outpour of grievances reveals how frustratingly inflexible assumptions about family roles can be.
Research suggests some striking differences in the experiences of first- and secondborns. Susan McHale, a family-studies professor emeritus at Penn State University, told me that parents tend to be “focused on getting it right with the first one,” leading them to fixate on their firstborn’s development growing up—their grades, their health, the friends they choose. With their subsequent children, they might be less anxious and feel less need to micromanage, and that can lead to less tension in the parent-child dynamic. On average, American parents [experience less conflict](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2003.00608.x) with their secondborn than with their first. McHale has found that when firstborns leave home, their relationship with their family [tends to improve](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1532-7795.2010.00683.x)—and conflict then commonly increases between parents and their younger children, because the spotlight is on them. Birth order can also create a hierarchy: Older siblings are often [asked to serve](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3288255/) as babysitters, [role models](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2012.01011.x), and advice-givers for their younger siblings.
[Read: The longest relationships of our lives](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2023/08/sibling-relationships-change-adulthood/675027/)
To be clear, birth order [doesn’t influence](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/birth-order-is-basically-meaningless/411577/) personality itself—but it *can* influence how your family sees you, Brent Roberts, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me. Eldest kids, for example, aren’t necessarily more responsible than their siblings; instead, they tend to be given more responsibilities because they are older. That role can affect how you understand yourself. Corinna Tucker, a professor emerita at the University of New Hampshire who studies sibling relationships, told me that parents frequently compare their children—“‘This is my athlete’; ‘this is my bookworm’; … ‘so-and-so is going to take care of me when I’m old’”—and kids internalize those statements. But your assigned part might not align with your disposition, Roberts said. People can grow frustrated with the traits expected of them—or of their siblings. When Roberts asks his students what qualities they associate with firstborns, students who are themselves firstborns tend to list off positives like “responsible” and “leadership”; those who aren’t firstborns, he told me, call out “bossy” and “overcontrolling.”
Gender introduces its own influence on family dynamics. Women are usually the “kin keepers,” meaning they perform the often invisible labor of “making sure everybody is happy, conflicts are resolved, and everybody feels paid attention to,” McHale told me. On top of that emotional aid, her [research](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2016-49292-001) shows, young daughters spend more time, on average, than sons doing chores; the jobs commonly given to boys, such as shoveling snow and mowing the lawn, are irregular and not as urgent.
*Daughtering* is the term that Allison Alford, a Baylor University communication professor who [researches](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01463373.2021.1920442?journalCode=rcqu20) adult daughters, uses to describe the family work that girls and women tend to take on. That can look like picking up prescriptions, planning a retirement party, or setting aside money for a parent’s future; it can also involve subtler actions, like holding one’s tongue to avoid an argument or listening to a parent's worries. Daughtering can be satisfying, even joyful. But it can also mean caring for siblings and sometimes for parents in a way that goes above and beyond what children, especially young ones, should need to do, Alford told me.
[Read: When kids have to act like parents, it affects them for life](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2017/10/when-kids-have-to-parent-their-siblings-it-affects-them-for-life/543975/)
Research on eldest daughters specifically is limited, but experts told me that considering the pressures foisted on older siblings *and* on girls and women, occupying both roles isn’t likely to be easy. Tucker put it this way: Women are expected to be nurturers. Firstborns are expected to be exemplars. Trying to be everything for everyone is likely to lead to guilt when some obligations are inevitably unfulfilled.
Of course, these conclusions don’t apply to all families. But so it is with eldest daughters: Although not all of them are naturally conscientious or eager to kin-keep, our cultural understanding of family roles ends up shaping the expectations many feel the need to rise to. The people describing “eldest-daughter syndrome” are probably all deeply different, but talking about what they share might make their burdens feel a little lighter. And the best-case scenario, Alford told me, is that families can start renegotiating what daughtering looks like—which should also take into account what eldest daughters want for themselves.
- [x] Nicolas Jaar - Space is Only Noise ✅ 2023-12-01
 
#### Autres
- [] Mulatu Astakte (Paris Abeba; Ethiopiques) [Paris Jazz Corner : Be Bop, West coast, Free Jazz, Fusion, Swing, Blues, Brazil, Latin et plus en LP, EP et CD](https://www.parisjazzcorner.com/index.php)
- [x] Mulatu Astakte (Paris Abeba; Ethiopiques) [Paris Jazz Corner : Be Bop, West coast, Free Jazz, Fusion, Swing, Blues, Brazil, Latin et plus en LP, EP et CD](https://www.parisjazzcorner.com/index.php) ✅ 2023-11-25
- [x] Amy Winehouse - Back to Black ✅ 2023-11-08
- [x] Marvin Gaye ✅ 2023-11-11
- [ ] Parov Stelar - The Princess
- [x] Jacques Brel ✅ 2023-11-11
- [x] Louise Attaque - Ton Invitation ✅ 2023-11-18
- [ ] Nina Simone
- [ ] Bobby Womack
- [ ] Lightenin’ Hopkins (Hard to Love a Woman, Mojo Hand)
State of slopes and lifts: [Mountain railways, snow reports & rates | Jungfrau Region](https://grindelwald.swiss/en/winter/planning-and-events/mountain-railways/)
- [ ] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2023-11-25
- [ ] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2023-12-09
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2023-12-02 ✅ 2023-12-01
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2023-11-25 ✅ 2023-11-24
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2023-11-18 ✅ 2023-11-17
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2023-11-11 ✅ 2023-11-10
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2023-11-04 ✅ 2023-11-03
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2023-08-12 ✅ 2023-08-07
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2023-08-05 ✅ 2023-08-05
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%% 🔁 every week on Saturday 📅 2023-07-29 ✅ 2023-08-04
- [ ] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2023-11-25
- [ ] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2023-12-09
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2023-12-02 ✅ 2023-12-01
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2023-11-25 ✅ 2023-11-24
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2023-11-18 ✅ 2023-11-17
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2023-11-11 ✅ 2023-11-10
- [x] 🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%% 🔁 every month on Saturday 📅 2023-11-04 ✅ 2023-11-03
iOS
12 months ago