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Obsidian
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midweek flush

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main
iOS 8 months ago
parent ab13e793b6
commit dd2eae865d
117 changed files with 7270 additions and 39657 deletions
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4
.obsidian/community-plugins.json
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@ -40,7 +40,6 @@
"obsidian-camera",
"table-editor-obsidian",
"obsidian-smart-typography",
"podnotes",
"obsidian-banners",
"templater-obsidian",
"obsidian-kanban",
@ -61,5 +60,6 @@
"cm-editor-syntax-highlight-obsidian",
"obsidian-icon-folder",
"obsidian-icon-shortcodes",
"obsidian-media-db-plugin"
"obsidian-media-db-plugin",
"obsidian-dev-tools"
]

2
.obsidian/plugins/cron/data.json
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@ -19,7 +19,7 @@
"601d1cc7-a4f3-4f19-aa9f-3bddd7ab6b1d": {
"locked": false,
"lockedDeviceName": "iPhone",
"lastRun": "2024-03-10T07:12:39+01:00"
"lastRun": "2024-03-19T07:18:35+01:00"
}
}
}

128
.obsidian/plugins/customjs/main.js
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2
.obsidian/plugins/customjs/manifest.json
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@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
{
"id": "customjs",
"name": "CustomJS",
"version": "1.0.18",
"version": "1.0.19",
"minAppVersion": "0.9.12",
"description": "This plugin allows for the loading and reuse of custom javascript files inside your vault.",
"author": "Sam Lewis",

105
.obsidian/plugins/find-unlinked-files/main.js
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@ -416,8 +416,8 @@ var Utils = class {
isFileToIgnore() {
return this.filesToIgnore.contains(this.filePath);
}
isValid() {
return !this.hasTagsToIgnore() && !this.hasLinksToIgnore() && !this.checkDirectory() && !this.isFileToIgnore();
shouldIgnoreFile() {
return this.hasTagsToIgnore() || this.hasLinksToIgnore() || this.checkDirectory() || this.isFileToIgnore();
}
/**
* Writes the text to the file and opens the file in a new pane if it is not opened yet
@ -523,12 +523,12 @@ var FindOrphanedFilesPlugin = class extends import_obsidian4.Plugin {
callback: () => this.deleteEmptyFiles()
});
this.addSettingTab(new SettingsTab(this.app, this, DEFAULT_SETTINGS));
this.app.workspace.on("file-menu", (menu, file, source, leaf) => {
this.app.workspace.on("file-menu", (menu, file, _, __) => {
if (file instanceof import_obsidian4.TFolder) {
menu.addItem((cb) => {
cb.setIcon("search");
cb.setTitle("Find orphaned files");
cb.onClick((e) => {
cb.onClick((_2) => {
this.findOrphanedFiles(file.path + "/");
});
});
@ -580,7 +580,7 @@ var FindOrphanedFilesPlugin = class extends import_obsidian4.Plugin {
const files = this.app.vault.getFiles();
const emptyFiles = [];
for (const file of files) {
if (!new Utils(
if (new Utils(
this.app,
file.path,
[],
@ -588,7 +588,7 @@ var FindOrphanedFilesPlugin = class extends import_obsidian4.Plugin {
this.settings.emptyFilesDirectories,
this.settings.emptyFilesFilesToIgnore,
this.settings.emptyFilesIgnoreDirectories
).isValid()) {
).shouldIgnoreFile()) {
continue;
}
const content = await this.app.vault.read(file);
@ -618,31 +618,69 @@ var FindOrphanedFilesPlugin = class extends import_obsidian4.Plugin {
this.settings.openOutputFile
);
}
findOrphanedFiles(dir) {
async findOrphanedFiles(dir) {
const startTime = Date.now();
const outFileName = this.settings.outputFileName + ".md";
let outFile;
const files = this.app.vault.getFiles();
let outFile = null;
const allFiles = this.app.vault.getFiles();
const markdownFiles = this.app.vault.getMarkdownFiles();
const links = [];
markdownFiles.forEach((markFile) => {
if (markFile.path == outFileName) {
outFile = markFile;
const canvasFiles = allFiles.filter(
(file) => file.extension === "canvas"
);
const links = /* @__PURE__ */ new Set();
const findLinkInTextRegex = /\[\[(.*?)\]\]|\[.*?\]\((.*?)\)/g;
const canvasParsingPromises = canvasFiles.map(
async (canvasFile) => {
const canvasFileContent = JSON.parse(
await this.app.vault.cachedRead(canvasFile)
);
canvasFileContent.nodes.forEach((node) => {
var _a;
let linkTexts = [];
if (node.type === "file") {
linkTexts.push(node.file);
} else if (node.type === "text") {
let match;
while ((match = findLinkInTextRegex.exec(node.text)) !== null) {
linkTexts.push((_a = match[1]) != null ? _a : match[2]);
}
} else {
return;
}
linkTexts.forEach((linkText) => {
const targetFile = this.app.metadataCache.getFirstLinkpathDest(
linkText.split("|")[0].split("#")[0],
canvasFile.path
);
if (targetFile != null)
links.add(targetFile.path);
});
});
}
);
markdownFiles.forEach((mdFile) => {
var _a, _b, _c;
if (outFile === null && mdFile.path == outFileName) {
outFile = mdFile;
return;
}
(0, import_obsidian4.iterateCacheRefs)(
this.app.metadataCache.getFileCache(markFile),
(cb) => {
const cache = this.app.metadataCache.getFileCache(mdFile);
for (const ref of [
...(_a = cache.embeds) != null ? _a : [],
...(_b = cache.links) != null ? _b : [],
...(_c = cache.frontmatterLinks) != null ? _c : []
]) {
const txt = this.app.metadataCache.getFirstLinkpathDest(
(0, import_obsidian4.getLinkpath)(cb.link),
markFile.path
(0, import_obsidian4.getLinkpath)(ref.link),
mdFile.path
);
if (txt != null)
links.push(txt.path);
links.add(txt.path);
}
);
});
const notLinkedFiles = files.filter(
(file) => this.isValid(file, links, dir)
await Promise.all(canvasParsingPromises);
const notLinkedFiles = allFiles.filter(
(file) => this.isFileAnOrphan(file, links, dir)
);
notLinkedFiles.remove(outFile);
let text = "";
@ -661,6 +699,13 @@ var FindOrphanedFilesPlugin = class extends import_obsidian4.Plugin {
text,
this.settings.openOutputFile
);
const endTime = Date.now();
const diff = endTime - startTime;
if (diff > 1e3) {
new import_obsidian4.Notice(
`Found ${notLinkedFiles.length} orphaned files in ${diff}ms`
);
}
}
async deleteOrphanedFiles() {
var _a, _b;
@ -735,7 +780,7 @@ var FindOrphanedFilesPlugin = class extends import_obsidian4.Plugin {
this.settings.unresolvedLinksFilesToIgnore,
this.settings.unresolvedLinksIgnoreDirectories
);
if (!utils.isValid())
if (utils.shouldIgnoreFile())
continue;
for (const link in brokenLinks[sourceFilepath]) {
const linkFileType = link.substring(link.lastIndexOf(".") + 1);
@ -782,7 +827,7 @@ var FindOrphanedFilesPlugin = class extends import_obsidian4.Plugin {
const files = this.app.vault.getMarkdownFiles();
let withoutFiles = files.filter((file) => {
var _a;
if (new Utils(
const utils = new Utils(
this.app,
file.path,
[],
@ -790,11 +835,11 @@ var FindOrphanedFilesPlugin = class extends import_obsidian4.Plugin {
this.settings.withoutTagsDirectoriesToIgnore,
this.settings.withoutTagsFilesToIgnore,
true
).isValid()) {
return ((_a = (0, import_obsidian4.getAllTags)(this.app.metadataCache.getFileCache(file)).length) != null ? _a : 0) <= 0;
} else {
);
if (utils.shouldIgnoreFile()) {
return false;
}
return ((_a = (0, import_obsidian4.getAllTags)(this.app.metadataCache.getFileCache(file)).length) != null ? _a : 0) <= 0;
});
withoutFiles.remove(outFile);
let prefix;
@ -816,8 +861,8 @@ var FindOrphanedFilesPlugin = class extends import_obsidian4.Plugin {
* @param file file to check
* @param links all links in the vault
*/
isValid(file, links, dir) {
if (links.contains(file.path))
isFileAnOrphan(file, links, dir) {
if (links.has(file.path))
return false;
if (file.extension == "css")
return false;
@ -843,7 +888,7 @@ var FindOrphanedFilesPlugin = class extends import_obsidian4.Plugin {
this.settings.ignoreDirectories,
dir
);
if (!utils.isValid())
if (utils.shouldIgnoreFile())
return false;
return true;
}

2
.obsidian/plugins/find-unlinked-files/manifest.json
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@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
{
"id": "find-unlinked-files",
"name": "Find orphaned files and broken links",
"version": "1.9.1",
"version": "1.10.0",
"description": "Find files that are not linked anywhere and would otherwise be lost in your vault. In other words: files with no backlinks.",
"author": "Vinzent",
"fundingUrl": "https://ko-fi.com/vinzent",

54
.obsidian/plugins/media-extended/main.js
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2
.obsidian/plugins/media-extended/manifest.json
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@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
{
"id": "media-extended",
"name": "Media Extended",
"version": "3.0.4",
"version": "3.0.7",
"minAppVersion": "1.5.7",
"description": "Media(Video/Audio) Playback Enhancement for Obsidian.md",
"author": "AidenLx",

2
.obsidian/plugins/media-extended/styles.css
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4
.obsidian/plugins/meld-encrypt/main.js
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2
.obsidian/plugins/meld-encrypt/manifest.json
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@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
{
"id": "meld-encrypt",
"name": "Meld Encrypt",
"version": "2.3.6",
"version": "2.3.7",
"minAppVersion": "1.0.3",
"description": "Hide secrets in your vault",
"author": "meld-cp",

42
.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-activity-history/data.json
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@ -12,8 +12,8 @@
"checkpointList": [
{
"path": "/",
"date": "2024-03-10",
"size": 13983098
"date": "2024-03-19",
"size": 14476062
}
],
"activityHistory": [
@ -3174,7 +3174,43 @@
},
{
"date": "2024-03-10",
"value": 1496
"value": 217066
},
{
"date": "2024-03-11",
"value": 1667
},
{
"date": "2024-03-12",
"value": 1760
},
{
"date": "2024-03-13",
"value": 1301
},
{
"date": "2024-03-14",
"value": 45693
},
{
"date": "2024-03-15",
"value": 3338
},
{
"date": "2024-03-16",
"value": 2407
},
{
"date": "2024-03-17",
"value": 225813
},
{
"date": "2024-03-18",
"value": 1493
},
{
"date": "2024-03-19",
"value": 1452
}
]
}

8
.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-book-search-plugin/main.js
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2
.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-book-search-plugin/manifest.json
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@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
{
"id": "obsidian-book-search-plugin",
"name": "Book Search",
"version": "0.6.1",
"version": "0.6.3",
"minAppVersion": "0.15.0",
"description": "Helps you find books and create notes.",
"author": "anpigon",

588
.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-commits/data.json
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@ -1400,7 +1400,7 @@
"links": 3
},
"02.03 Zürich/@@Zürich.md": {
"size": 6986,
"size": 7813,
"tags": 3,
"links": 14
},
@ -1545,7 +1545,7 @@
"links": 16
},
"05.02 Networks/Server VPN.md": {
"size": 6228,
"size": 6947,
"tags": 4,
"links": 11
},
@ -1570,7 +1570,7 @@
"links": 1
},
"01.02 Home/Household.md": {
"size": 5541,
"size": 6297,
"tags": 2,
"links": 4
},
@ -2030,7 +2030,7 @@
"links": 6
},
"06.02 Investments/Crypto Tasks.md": {
"size": 6088,
"size": 6769,
"tags": 3,
"links": 12
},
@ -7270,7 +7270,7 @@
"links": 7
},
"02.03 Zürich/Juan Bautista Bossio.md": {
"size": 2777,
"size": 3091,
"tags": 3,
"links": 3
},
@ -11412,7 +11412,7 @@
"00.03 News/Cillian Murphy Is the Man of the Moment.md": {
"size": 40753,
"tags": 4,
"links": 1
"links": 2
},
"00.03 News/The rise and fall of robots.txt.md": {
"size": 19027,
@ -11472,12 +11472,12 @@
"00.03 News/Recovering the Lost Aviators of World War II.md": {
"size": 41568,
"tags": 3,
"links": 1
"links": 2
},
"00.03 News/How a Con Man Ended Up in Solitary in Colorado Supermax Federal Prison.md": {
"size": 25800,
"tags": 4,
"links": 1
"links": 2
},
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-26.md": {
"size": 1276,
@ -11504,11 +11504,6 @@
"tags": 0,
"links": 7
},
"00.02 Inbox/La Louisiane.md": {
"size": 2404,
"tags": 0,
"links": 1
},
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-01.md": {
"size": 1412,
"tags": 0,
@ -11537,7 +11532,7 @@
"00.03 News/How Russian Spies Get Flipped or Expelled, As Told by a Spycatcher.md": {
"size": 16868,
"tags": 5,
"links": 1
"links": 2
},
"00.03 News/The (Many) Vintages of the Century.md": {
"size": 15031,
@ -11547,7 +11542,7 @@
"00.03 News/I always believed my funny, kind father was killed by a murderous teenage gang. Three decades on, I discovered the truth.md": {
"size": 26351,
"tags": 3,
"links": 1
"links": 2
},
"00.03 News/The Great Pretenders How two faux-Inuit sisters cashed in on a life of deception.md": {
"size": 41977,
@ -11557,7 +11552,7 @@
"00.03 News/The Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Problem, by Andrew Cockburn.md": {
"size": 32155,
"tags": 2,
"links": 1
"links": 2
},
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-05.md": {
"size": 1412,
@ -11600,17 +11595,212 @@
"links": 2
},
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-10.md": {
"size": 1435,
"tags": 0,
"links": 8
},
"02.03 Zürich/Kafi Freud.md": {
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},
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-03-10 ⚽️ PSG - Stade Reims (2-2).md": {
"size": 437,
"tags": 0,
"links": 2
},
"03.02 Travels/11 Remote Destinations That Are Definitely Worth the Effort to Visit.md": {
"size": 37820,
"tags": 2,
"links": 2
},
"00.03 News/Dear Caitlin Clark ….md": {
"size": 4925,
"tags": 4,
"links": 1
},
"00.03 News/Joe Biden’s Last Campaign.md": {
"size": 84671,
"tags": 4,
"links": 1
},
"00.03 News/One woman saw the Great Recession coming. Wall Street's boys club ignored her..md": {
"size": 22974,
"tags": 4,
"links": 1
},
"00.03 News/Jan Marsalek an Agent for Russia The Double Life of the former Wirecard Executive.md": {
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"00.02 Inbox/American Psycho.md": {
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},
"03.01 Reading list/Terre d'Ébène.md": {
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}
},
"commitTypes": {
"/": {
"Refactor": 6989,
"Create": 2503,
"Link": 9097,
"Expand": 2127
"Refactor": 7010,
"Create": 2543,
"Link": 9180,
"Expand": 2142
}
},
"dailyCommits": {
@ -11621,40 +11811,55 @@
"3": 12,
"4": 46,
"5": 16,
"6": 70,
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"18": 1009,
"19": 954,
"20": 879,
"21": 780,
"22": 764,
"23": 1386
}
},
"weeklyCommits": {
"/": {
"Mon": 2919,
"Tue": 1719,
"Wed": 7892,
"Thu": 1344,
"Fri": 1458,
"Mon": 2928,
"Tue": 1728,
"Wed": 7895,
"Thu": 1351,
"Fri": 1475,
"Sat": 0,
"Sun": 5384
"Sun": 5498
}
},
"recentCommits": {
"/": {
"Expanded": [
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"05.02 Networks/Server VPN.md\"> Server VPN </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Mumbo Jumbo.md\"> Mumbo Jumbo </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-04-10 ⚽️ PSG - FC Barça.md\"> 2024-04-10 ⚽️ PSG - FC Barça </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-04-16 ⚽️ FC Barça - PSG.md\"> 2024-04-16 ⚽️ FC Barça - PSG </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"02.03 Zürich/Juan Bautista Bossio.md\"> Juan Bautista Bossio </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Terre d'Ébène.md\"> Terre d'Ébène </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Terre d'Ébène.md\"> Terre d'Ébène </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"02.03 Zürich/@@Zürich.md\"> @@Zürich </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.02 Home/Household.md\"> Household </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"06.02 Investments/Crypto Tasks.md\"> Crypto Tasks </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-10.md\"> 2024-03-10 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-03-10 ⚽️ PSG - Stade Reims.md\"> 2024-03-10 ⚽️ PSG - Stade Reims </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-03-10 ⚽️ PSG - Stade Reims.md\"> 2024-03-10 ⚽️ PSG - Stade Reims </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-03-10 ⚽️ PSG - FC Reims.md\"> 2024-03-10 ⚽️ PSG - FC Reims </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Kafi Freud.md\"> Kafi Freud </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-08.md\"> 2024-03-08 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"05.02 Networks/Configuring UFW.md\"> Configuring UFW </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-03-05 ⚽️ Real Sociedad - PSG (1-2).md\"> 2024-03-05 ⚽️ Real Sociedad - PSG (1-2) </a>",
@ -11690,24 +11895,49 @@
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-01-28 ⚽️ PSG - Brest 29.md\"> 2024-01-28 ⚽️ PSG - Brest 29 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-01-28 ⚽️ PSG - Brest 29.md\"> 2024-01-28 ⚽️ PSG - Brest 29 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-01-28 ⚽️ PSG - Brest 29.md\"> 2024-01-28 ⚽️ PSG - Brest 29 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-01-28 ⚽️ PSG - Brest 29.md\"> 2024-01-28 ⚽️ PSG - Brest 29 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.08 Garden/@Plants.md\"> @Plants </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-01-28 ⚽️ PSG - Brest 29.md\"> 2024-01-28 ⚽️ PSG - Brest 29 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.02 Home/Household.md\"> Household </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Barfussbar.md\"> Barfussbar </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Barfussbar.md\"> Barfussbar </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"02.03 Zürich/The Old Crow.md\"> The Old Crow </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-01-22.md\"> 2024-01-22 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.02 Home/Household.md\"> Household </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Klewenalp.md\"> Klewenalp </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.03 Family/Joséphine Bédier.md\"> Joséphine Bédier </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-01-20 ⚽️ US Orleans - PSG (1-4).md\"> 2024-01-20 ⚽️ US Orleans - PSG (1-4) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-01-20 ⚽️ US Orleans - PSG.md\"> 2024-01-20 ⚽️ US Orleans - PSG </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-01-20 ⚽️ US Orleans - PSG.md\"> 2024-01-20 ⚽️ US Orleans - PSG </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-01-20 ⚽️ US Orleans - PSG.md\"> 2024-01-20 ⚽️ US Orleans - PSG </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.02 Travels/Hoch Ybrig.md\"> Hoch Ybrig </a>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-01-28 ⚽️ PSG - Brest 29.md\"> 2024-01-28 ⚽️ PSG - Brest 29 </a>"
],
"Created": [
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-19.md\"> 2024-03-19 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-18.md\"> 2024-03-18 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Underworld.md\"> Underworld </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/American Psycho.md\"> American Psycho </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Kindred.md\"> Kindred </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Dog of the South.md\"> The Dog of the South </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Mumbo Jumbo.md\"> Mumbo Jumbo </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Portnoy's Complaint.md\"> Portnoy's Complaint </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Catch-22.md\"> Catch-22 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Catcher in the Rye.md\"> The Catcher in the Rye </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Nightwood.md\"> Nightwood </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Their Eyes Were Watching God.md\"> Their Eyes Were Watching God </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/East Goes West.md\"> East Goes West </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Great American Novels.md\"> The Great American Novels </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/A Mistake in a Tesla and a Panicked Final Call The Death of Angela Chao.md\"> A Mistake in a Tesla and a Panicked Final Call The Death of Angela Chao </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/‘We wanted to invade media’ the hippies, nerds and Hollywood pros who brought The Simpsons to life.md\"> ‘We wanted to invade media’ the hippies, nerds and Hollywood pros who brought The Simpsons to life </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Inside the Glorious Afterlife of Roger Federer.md\"> Inside the Glorious Afterlife of Roger Federer </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Battle Over California Squatters Rights in Beverly Hills.md\"> The Battle Over California Squatters Rights in Beverly Hills </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/How Jesse Plemons Came to Star in, Well, Pretty Much Everything.md\"> How Jesse Plemons Came to Star in, Well, Pretty Much Everything </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/On popular online platforms, predatory groups coerce children into self-harm.md\"> On popular online platforms, predatory groups coerce children into self-harm </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/A Bullshit Genius.md\"> A Bullshit Genius </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-17.md\"> 2024-03-17 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-04-16 ⚽️ FC Barça - PSG.md\"> 2024-04-16 ⚽️ FC Barça - PSG </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-04-10 ⚽️ PSG - FC Barça.md\"> 2024-04-10 ⚽️ PSG - FC Barça </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-16.md\"> 2024-03-16 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Untitled.md\"> Untitled </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/A Compendious Dictionary of the French Language (French English- English-French).md\"> A Compendious Dictionary of the French Language (French English- English-French) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-15.md\"> 2024-03-15 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Gangsters, Money and Murder How Chinese Organized Crime Is Dominating America’s Illegal Marijuana Market.md\"> Gangsters, Money and Murder How Chinese Organized Crime Is Dominating America’s Illegal Marijuana Market </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-14.md\"> 2024-03-14 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-13.md\"> 2024-03-13 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-12.md\"> 2024-03-12 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-11.md\"> 2024-03-11 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Jan Marsalek an Agent for Russia The Double Life of the former Wirecard Executive.md\"> Jan Marsalek an Agent for Russia The Double Life of the former Wirecard Executive </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/One woman saw the Great Recession coming. Wall Street's boys club ignored her..md\"> One woman saw the Great Recession coming. Wall Street's boys club ignored her. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Joe Biden’s Last Campaign.md\"> Joe Biden’s Last Campaign </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Dear Caitlin Clark ….md\"> Dear Caitlin Clark … </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/11 Remote Destinations That Are Definitely Worth the Effort to Visit.md\"> 11 Remote Destinations That Are Definitely Worth the Effort to Visit </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-03-10 ⚽️ PSG - FC Reims.md\"> 2024-03-10 ⚽️ PSG - FC Reims </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Untitled.md\"> Untitled </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-10.md\"> 2024-03-10 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-09.md\"> 2024-03-09 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-08.md\"> 2024-03-08 </a>",
@ -11718,49 +11948,27 @@
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Problem, by Andrew Cockburn.md\"> The Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Problem, by Andrew Cockburn </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Great Pretenders How two faux-Inuit sisters cashed in on a life of deception.md\"> The Great Pretenders How two faux-Inuit sisters cashed in on a life of deception </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/I always believed my funny, kind father was killed by a murderous teenage gang. Three decades on, I discovered the truth.md\"> I always believed my funny, kind father was killed by a murderous teenage gang. Three decades on, I discovered the truth </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The (Many) Vintages of the Century.md\"> The (Many) Vintages of the Century </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/How Russian Spies Get Flipped or Expelled, As Told by a Spycatcher - VSquare.org.md\"> How Russian Spies Get Flipped or Expelled, As Told by a Spycatcher - VSquare.org </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-04.md\"> 2024-03-04 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-03.md\"> 2024-03-03 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-02.md\"> 2024-03-02 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-03-01 ⚽️ AS Monaco - PSG.md\"> 2024-03-01 ⚽️ AS Monaco - PSG </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-01.md\"> 2024-03-01 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Untitled.md\"> Untitled </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-29.md\"> 2024-02-29 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-28.md\"> 2024-02-28 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-27.md\"> 2024-02-27 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Invisible Man.md\"> Invisible Man </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-26.md\"> 2024-02-26 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/When the Border Crisis Is in Your Backyard Migrants, Cartels and Cowboys.md\"> When the Border Crisis Is in Your Backyard Migrants, Cartels and Cowboys </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/How a Con Man Ended Up in Solitary in Colorado Supermax Federal Prison.md\"> How a Con Man Ended Up in Solitary in Colorado Supermax Federal Prison </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/As a Son Risks His Life to Topple the King, His Father Guards the Throne.md\"> As a Son Risks His Life to Topple the King, His Father Guards the Throne </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Recovering the Lost Aviators of World War II.md\"> Recovering the Lost Aviators of World War II </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-25.md\"> 2024-02-25 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-24.md\"> 2024-02-24 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-23.md\"> 2024-02-23 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Sesame Seared Tuna Steak Recipe.md\"> Sesame Seared Tuna Steak Recipe </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-22.md\"> 2024-02-22 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-21.md\"> 2024-02-21 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-20.md\"> 2024-02-20 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-19.md\"> 2024-02-19 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The surreal life of a professional bridesmaid - The Hustle.md\"> The surreal life of a professional bridesmaid - The Hustle </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The rise and fall of robots.txt.md\"> The rise and fall of robots.txt </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Cillian Murphy Is the Man of the Moment.md\"> Cillian Murphy Is the Man of the Moment </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Exclusive Life Aboard a Nuclear Submarine as the US Responds to Threats Around the Globe.md\"> Exclusive Life Aboard a Nuclear Submarine as the US Responds to Threats Around the Globe </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The art of doing nothing have the Dutch found the answer to burnout culture.md\"> The art of doing nothing have the Dutch found the answer to burnout culture </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Long Shadow of 1948.md\"> The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and the Long Shadow of 1948 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Untold Origin Story of ESPN.md\"> The Untold Origin Story of ESPN </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Helvetia ein Schweizer Dorf in den USA mit Fasnacht und Urdemokratie.md\"> Helvetia ein Schweizer Dorf in den USA mit Fasnacht und Urdemokratie </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-18.md\"> 2024-02-18 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-17.md\"> 2024-02-17 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-16.md\"> 2024-02-16 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-15.md\"> 2024-02-15 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-14.md\"> 2024-02-14 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-13.md\"> 2024-02-13 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-12.md\"> 2024-02-12 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him..md\"> His Best Friend Was a 250-Pound Warthog. One Day, It Decided to Kill Him. </a>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The (Many) Vintages of the Century.md\"> The (Many) Vintages of the Century </a>"
],
"Renamed": [
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.01 Reading list/Terre d'Ébène.md\"> Terre d'Ébène </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Great American Novels.md\"> The Great American Novels </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/‘We wanted to invade media’ the hippies, nerds and Hollywood pros who brought The Simpsons to life.md\"> ‘We wanted to invade media’ the hippies, nerds and Hollywood pros who brought The Simpsons to life </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Inside the Glorious Afterlife of Roger Federer.md\"> Inside the Glorious Afterlife of Roger Federer </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Battle Over California Squatters Rights in Beverly Hills.md\"> The Battle Over California Squatters Rights in Beverly Hills </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How Jesse Plemons Came to Star in, Well, Pretty Much Everything.md\"> How Jesse Plemons Came to Star in, Well, Pretty Much Everything </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/On popular online platforms, predatory groups coerce children into self-harm.md\"> On popular online platforms, predatory groups coerce children into self-harm </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/A Bullshit Genius.md\"> A Bullshit Genius </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.01 Reading list/La Louisiane.md\"> La Louisiane </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Gangsters, Money and Murder How Chinese Organized Crime Is Dominating America’s Illegal Marijuana Market.md\"> Gangsters, Money and Murder How Chinese Organized Crime Is Dominating America’s Illegal Marijuana Market </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Jan Marsalek an Agent for Russia The Double Life of the former Wirecard Executive.md\"> Jan Marsalek an Agent for Russia The Double Life of the former Wirecard Executive </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/One woman saw the Great Recession coming. Wall Street's boys club ignored her..md\"> One woman saw the Great Recession coming. Wall Street's boys club ignored her. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Joe Biden’s Last Campaign.md\"> Joe Biden’s Last Campaign </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Dear Caitlin Clark ….md\"> Dear Caitlin Clark … </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.02 Travels/11 Remote Destinations That Are Definitely Worth the Effort to Visit.md\"> 11 Remote Destinations That Are Definitely Worth the Effort to Visit </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-03-10 ⚽️ PSG - Stade Reims (2-2).md\"> 2024-03-10 ⚽️ PSG - Stade Reims (2-2) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-03-10 ⚽️ PSG - Stade Reims.md\"> 2024-03-10 ⚽️ PSG - Stade Reims </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"02.03 Zürich/Kafi Freud.md\"> Kafi Freud </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.01 Reading list/Yoga.md\"> Yoga </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.01 Reading list/Invisible Man.md\"> Invisible Man </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-03-05 ⚽️ Real Sociedad - PSG (1-2).md\"> 2024-03-05 ⚽️ Real Sociedad - PSG (1-2) </a>",
@ -11793,27 +12001,32 @@
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld.md\"> A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How Nikola Jokić Became the World’s Best Basketball Player.md\"> How Nikola Jokić Became the World’s Best Basketball Player </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Nat Friedman Embraces AI to Translate the Herculaneum Papyri.md\"> Nat Friedman Embraces AI to Translate the Herculaneum Papyri </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Paper mills are bribing editors at scholarly journals, Science investigation finds.md\"> Paper mills are bribing editors at scholarly journals, Science investigation finds </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-02-10 ⚽️ PSG - Lille OSC (3-1).md\"> 2024-02-10 ⚽️ PSG - Lille OSC (3-1) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Why Tim Cook Is Going All In on the Apple Vision Pro.md\"> Why Tim Cook Is Going All In on the Apple Vision Pro </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Precipice of fear the freerider who took skiing to its limits.md\"> Precipice of fear the freerider who took skiing to its limits </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How Two Single Moms Escaped an Alleged Sex-Trafficking Ring and Ultimately Saved Each Other.md\"> How Two Single Moms Escaped an Alleged Sex-Trafficking Ring and Ultimately Saved Each Other </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Super Bowl Strip Tease The NFL and Las Vegas Are Together at Last.md\"> Super Bowl Strip Tease The NFL and Las Vegas Are Together at Last </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.02 Travels/Hörnlihütte.md\"> Hörnlihütte </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.02 Travels/Lenzerheide.md\"> Lenzerheide </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Did Drug Traffickers Funnel Millions of Dollars to Mexican President López Obrador’s First Campaign.md\"> Did Drug Traffickers Funnel Millions of Dollars to Mexican President López Obrador’s First Campaign </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.03 Food & Wine/Cuban Picadillo Bowls.md\"> Cuban Picadillo Bowls </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.03 Food & Wine/Thai Peanut Chicken Bowls.md\"> Thai Peanut Chicken Bowls </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Bear Hibernation Uncovering Black Bear Denning Secrets in Arkansas.md\"> Bear Hibernation Uncovering Black Bear Denning Secrets in Arkansas </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-01-28 ⚽️ PSG - Brest 29 (2-2).md\"> 2024-01-28 ⚽️ PSG - Brest 29 (2-2) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-01-28 ⚽️ PSG - Brest 29.md\"> 2024-01-28 ⚽️ PSG - Brest 29 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/In the Land of the Very Old.md\"> In the Land of the Very Old </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Ripples of hate.md\"> Ripples of hate </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Hippy, capitalist, guru, grocer the forgotten genius who changed British food.md\"> Hippy, capitalist, guru, grocer the forgotten genius who changed British food </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Fentanyl, the portrait of a mass murderer.md\"> Fentanyl, the portrait of a mass murderer </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Taylor Swift deepfakes are a warning.md\"> The Taylor Swift deepfakes are a warning </a>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Paper mills are bribing editors at scholarly journals, Science investigation finds.md\"> Paper mills are bribing editors at scholarly journals, Science investigation finds </a>"
],
"Tagged": [
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Mumbo Jumbo.md\"> Mumbo Jumbo </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Catch-22.md\"> Catch-22 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Portnoy's Complaint.md\"> Portnoy's Complaint </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Catcher in the Rye.md\"> The Catcher in the Rye </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/East Goes West.md\"> East Goes West </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Their Eyes Were Watching God.md\"> Their Eyes Were Watching God </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Nightwood.md\"> Nightwood </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Great American Novels.md\"> The Great American Novels </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/‘We wanted to invade media’ the hippies, nerds and Hollywood pros who brought The Simpsons to life.md\"> ‘We wanted to invade media’ the hippies, nerds and Hollywood pros who brought The Simpsons to life </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/‘We wanted to invade media’ the hippies, nerds and Hollywood pros who brought The Simpsons to life.md\"> ‘We wanted to invade media’ the hippies, nerds and Hollywood pros who brought The Simpsons to life </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Inside the Glorious Afterlife of Roger Federer.md\"> Inside the Glorious Afterlife of Roger Federer </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Battle Over California Squatters Rights in Beverly Hills.md\"> The Battle Over California Squatters Rights in Beverly Hills </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How Jesse Plemons Came to Star in, Well, Pretty Much Everything.md\"> How Jesse Plemons Came to Star in, Well, Pretty Much Everything </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/On popular online platforms, predatory groups coerce children into self-harm.md\"> On popular online platforms, predatory groups coerce children into self-harm </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/A Bullshit Genius.md\"> A Bullshit Genius </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Terre d'Ébène.md\"> Terre d'Ébène </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Gangsters, Money and Murder How Chinese Organized Crime Is Dominating America’s Illegal Marijuana Market.md\"> Gangsters, Money and Murder How Chinese Organized Crime Is Dominating America’s Illegal Marijuana Market </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Joe Biden’s Last Campaign.md\"> Joe Biden’s Last Campaign </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/One woman saw the Great Recession coming. Wall Street's boys club ignored her..md\"> One woman saw the Great Recession coming. Wall Street's boys club ignored her. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Jan Marsalek an Agent for Russia The Double Life of the former Wirecard Executive.md\"> Jan Marsalek an Agent for Russia The Double Life of the former Wirecard Executive </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.02 Travels/11 Remote Destinations That Are Definitely Worth the Effort to Visit.md\"> 11 Remote Destinations That Are Definitely Worth the Effort to Visit </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Dear Caitlin Clark ….md\"> Dear Caitlin Clark … </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Kafi Freud.md\"> Kafi Freud </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/I always believed my funny, kind father was killed by a murderous teenage gang. Three decades on, I discovered the truth.md\"> I always believed my funny, kind father was killed by a murderous teenage gang. Three decades on, I discovered the truth </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Great Pretenders How two faux-Inuit sisters cashed in on a life of deception.md\"> The Great Pretenders How two faux-Inuit sisters cashed in on a life of deception </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Problem, by Andrew Cockburn.md\"> The Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Problem, by Andrew Cockburn </a>",
@ -11841,32 +12054,10 @@
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Nat Friedman Embraces AI to Translate the Herculaneum Papyri.md\"> Nat Friedman Embraces AI to Translate the Herculaneum Papyri </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How Nikola Jokić Became the World’s Best Basketball Player.md\"> How Nikola Jokić Became the World’s Best Basketball Player </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Nat Friedman Embraces AI to Translate the Herculaneum Papyri.md\"> Nat Friedman Embraces AI to Translate the Herculaneum Papyri </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Paper mills are bribing editors at scholarly journals, Science investigation finds.md\"> Paper mills are bribing editors at scholarly journals, Science investigation finds </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Why Tim Cook Is Going All In on the Apple Vision Pro.md\"> Why Tim Cook Is Going All In on the Apple Vision Pro </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Precipice of fear the freerider who took skiing to its limits.md\"> Precipice of fear the freerider who took skiing to its limits </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Man in Room 117.md\"> The Man in Room 117 </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Hörnlihütte.md\"> Hörnlihütte </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.02 Travels/Lenzerheide.md\"> Lenzerheide </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.04 Cinematheque/@Cinematheque.md\"> @Cinematheque </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.03 Food & Wine/Cuban Picadillo Bowls.md\"> Cuban Picadillo Bowls </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.03 Food & Wine/Thai Peanut Chicken Bowls.md\"> Thai Peanut Chicken Bowls </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Bear Hibernation Uncovering Black Bear Denning Secrets in Arkansas.md\"> Bear Hibernation Uncovering Black Bear Denning Secrets in Arkansas </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Ripples of hate.md\"> Ripples of hate </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/In the Land of the Very Old.md\"> In the Land of the Very Old </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Fentanyl, the portrait of a mass murderer.md\"> Fentanyl, the portrait of a mass murderer </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Hippy, capitalist, guru, grocer the forgotten genius who changed British food.md\"> Hippy, capitalist, guru, grocer the forgotten genius who changed British food </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Juror Who Found Herself Guilty.md\"> The Juror Who Found Herself Guilty </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Barfussbar.md\"> Barfussbar </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Inside the house shows that bolster Boston’s lacking nightlife.md\"> Inside the house shows that bolster Boston’s lacking nightlife </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Hvaldimir, the Whale Who Went AWOL.md\"> Hvaldimir, the Whale Who Went AWOL </a>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Paper mills are bribing editors at scholarly journals, Science investigation finds.md\"> Paper mills are bribing editors at scholarly journals, Science investigation finds </a>"
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-17.md\"> 2024-03-17 </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-03-01 ⚽️ AS Monaco - PSG.md\"> 2024-03-01 ⚽️ AS Monaco - PSG </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-25.md\"> 2024-02-25 </a>",
@ -11916,10 +12107,11 @@
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2023-11-02.md\"> 2023-11-02 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.02 Home/Real Estate.md\"> Real Estate </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2023-10-26.md\"> 2023-10-26 </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=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2023-10-26.md\"> 2023-10-26 </a>"
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/A Compendious Dictionary of the French Language (French English- English-French).md\"> A Compendious Dictionary of the French Language (French English- English-French) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Spy War How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin.md\"> The Spy War How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/When the Border Crisis Is in Your Backyard Migrants, Cartels and Cowboys.md\"> When the Border Crisis Is in Your Backyard Migrants, Cartels and Cowboys </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/As a Son Risks His Life to Topple the King, His Father Guards the Throne.md\"> As a Son Risks His Life to Topple the King, His Father Guards the Throne </a>",
@ -11968,62 +12160,60 @@
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Who Will Remove My IUD.md\"> Who Will Remove My IUD </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Strange and Mysterious Death of Mrs. Jerry Lee Lewis.md\"> The Strange and Mysterious Death of Mrs. Jerry Lee Lewis </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/‘Trump’s Kevin’ McCarthy could soon be speaker of the House - Los Angeles Times.md\"> ‘Trump’s Kevin’ McCarthy could soon be speaker of the House - Los Angeles Times </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Most Lawless County in Texas.md\"> The Most Lawless County in Texas </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How Ukrainians Are Protecting Their Centuries-Old Culture From Putin’s Invasion.md\"> How Ukrainians Are Protecting Their Centuries-Old Culture From Putin’s Invasion </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Do We Have the History of Native Americans Backward.md\"> Do We Have the History of Native Americans Backward </a>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Most Lawless County in Texas.md\"> The Most Lawless County in Texas </a>"
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-19.md\"> 2024-03-19 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-19.md\"> 2024-03-19 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-18.md\"> 2024-03-18 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-18.md\"> 2024-03-18 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Kindred.md\"> Kindred </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/American Psycho.md\"> American Psycho </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Portnoy's Complaint.md\"> Portnoy's Complaint </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Mumbo Jumbo.md\"> Mumbo Jumbo </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Catcher in the Rye.md\"> The Catcher in the Rye </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/East Goes West.md\"> East Goes West </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Their Eyes Were Watching God.md\"> Their Eyes Were Watching God </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Nightwood.md\"> Nightwood </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Great American Novels.md\"> The Great American Novels </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/‘We wanted to invade media’ the hippies, nerds and Hollywood pros who brought The Simpsons to life.md\"> ‘We wanted to invade media’ the hippies, nerds and Hollywood pros who brought The Simpsons to life </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Inside the Glorious Afterlife of Roger Federer.md\"> Inside the Glorious Afterlife of Roger Federer </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/The Battle Over California Squatters Rights in Beverly Hills.md\"> The Battle Over California Squatters Rights in Beverly Hills </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How Jesse Plemons Came to Star in, Well, Pretty Much Everything.md\"> How Jesse Plemons Came to Star in, Well, Pretty Much Everything </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/On popular online platforms, predatory groups coerce children into self-harm.md\"> On popular online platforms, predatory groups coerce children into self-harm </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/A Bullshit Genius.md\"> A Bullshit Genius </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-17.md\"> 2024-03-17 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-04-10 ⚽️ PSG - FC Barça.md\"> 2024-04-10 ⚽️ PSG - FC Barça </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-04-16 ⚽️ FC Barça - PSG.md\"> 2024-04-16 ⚽️ FC Barça - PSG </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-16.md\"> 2024-03-16 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-15.md\"> 2024-03-15 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-15.md\"> 2024-03-15 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Terre d'Ébène.md\"> Terre d'Ébène </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-15.md\"> 2024-03-15 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.01 Reading list/La Louisiane.md\"> La Louisiane </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/A Compendious Dictionary of the French Language (French English- English-French).md\"> A Compendious Dictionary of the French Language (French English- English-French) </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-15.md\"> 2024-03-15 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-15.md\"> 2024-03-15 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-14.md\"> 2024-03-14 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Gangsters, Money and Murder How Chinese Organized Crime Is Dominating America’s Illegal Marijuana Market.md\"> Gangsters, Money and Murder How Chinese Organized Crime Is Dominating America’s Illegal Marijuana Market </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-14.md\"> 2024-03-14 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-13.md\"> 2024-03-13 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-13.md\"> 2024-03-13 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-12.md\"> 2024-03-12 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-12.md\"> 2024-03-12 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-11.md\"> 2024-03-11 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-10.md\"> 2024-03-10 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The (Many) Vintages of the Century.md\"> The (Many) Vintages of the Century </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.01 Reading list/Yoga.md\"> Yoga </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-09.md\"> 2024-03-09 </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-09.md\"> 2024-03-09 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-08.md\"> 2024-03-08 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-07.md\"> 2024-03-07 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-08.md\"> 2024-03-08 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-07.md\"> 2024-03-07 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-07.md\"> 2024-03-07 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-06.md\"> 2024-03-06 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-06.md\"> 2024-03-06 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.01 Reading list/Invisible Man.md\"> Invisible Man </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-06.md\"> 2024-03-06 </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-05.md\"> 2024-03-05 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-05.md\"> 2024-03-05 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-04.md\"> 2024-03-04 </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Great Pretenders How two faux-Inuit sisters cashed in on a life of deception.md\"> The Great Pretenders How two faux-Inuit sisters cashed in on a life of deception </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Problem, by Andrew Cockburn.md\"> The Pentagon’s Silicon Valley Problem, by Andrew Cockburn </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/I always believed my funny, kind father was killed by a murderous teenage gang. Three decades on, I discovered the truth.md\"> I always believed my funny, kind father was killed by a murderous teenage gang. Three decades on, I discovered the truth </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How Russian Spies Get Flipped or Expelled, As Told by a Spycatcher.md\"> How Russian Spies Get Flipped or Expelled, As Told by a Spycatcher </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The (Many) Vintages of the Century.md\"> The (Many) Vintages of the Century </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-04.md\"> 2024-03-04 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-03.md\"> 2024-03-03 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-02.md\"> 2024-03-02 </a>",
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"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-03-01 ⚽️ AS Monaco - PSG.md\"> 2024-03-01 ⚽️ AS Monaco - PSG </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-01.md\"> 2024-03-01 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"01.06 Health/2023-12-15 Eczema.md\"> 2023-12-15 Eczema </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-01.md\"> 2024-03-01 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-01.md\"> 2024-03-01 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/La Louisiane 1.md\"> La Louisiane 1 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-28.md\"> 2024-02-28 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-29.md\"> 2024-02-29 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-29.md\"> 2024-02-29 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-28.md\"> 2024-02-28 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-28.md\"> 2024-02-28 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld.md\"> A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-27.md\"> 2024-02-27 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-27.md\"> 2024-02-27 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/The surreal life of a professional bridesmaid - The Hustle.md\"> The surreal life of a professional bridesmaid - The Hustle </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-27.md\"> 2024-02-27 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.01 Reading list/Zoo Station.md\"> Zoo Station </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Invisible Man.md\"> Invisible Man </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-26.md\"> 2024-02-26 </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-26.md\"> 2024-02-26 </a>"
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/How a Con Man Ended Up in Solitary in Colorado Supermax Federal Prison.md\"> How a Con Man Ended Up in Solitary in Colorado Supermax Federal Prison </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/One woman saw the Great Recession coming. Wall Street's boys club ignored her..md\"> One woman saw the Great Recession coming. Wall Street's boys club ignored her. </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Jan Marsalek an Agent for Russia The Double Life of the former Wirecard Executive.md\"> Jan Marsalek an Agent for Russia The Double Life of the former Wirecard Executive </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.02 Inbox/Joe Biden’s Last Campaign.md\"> Joe Biden’s Last Campaign </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"03.02 Travels/11 Remote Destinations That Are Definitely Worth the Effort to Visit.md\"> 11 Remote Destinations That Are Definitely Worth the Effort to Visit </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.03 News/Dear Caitlin Clark ….md\"> Dear Caitlin Clark … </a>",
"<a class=\"internal-link\" href=\"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-10.md\"> 2024-03-10 </a>"
],
"Removed Tags from": [
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105
.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-map-view/main.js
Unescape View File

@ -17760,6 +17760,39 @@ exports.exclude = (input, filter, options) => {
};
});
// The pound sign is optional here
const TAG_NAME_WITH_HEADER = /tag:(#?[\p{L}\p{N}_\/\-]*)/gu;
// Same as above, but also supporting wildcards for query purposes (not used for inline tags)
const TAG_NAME_WITH_HEADER_AND_WILDCARD = /tag:(#?[\p{L}\p{N}_\/\-\*]*)/gu;
// Note no '#' sign
const INLINE_TAG_IN_NOTE = /tag:(?<tag>[\p{L}\p{N}_\/\-]+)/gu;
// path:"..."
const PATH_QUERY_WITH_HEADER = /path:"((?:[^"]|\\")+?)"/gu;
const LINKEDTO_QUERY_WITH_HEADER = /linkedto:"((?:[^"]|\\")+?)"/gu;
const LINKEDFROM_QUERY_WITH_HEADER = /linkedfrom:"((?:[^"]|\\")+?)"/gu;
const NAME_QUERY_WITH_HEADER = /name:"((?:[^"]|\\")+?)"/gu;
// path:"path with spaces" OR path:path_without_spaces
const QUOTED_OR_NOT_QUOTED_PATH = /path:(("((?:[^"]|\\")*)")|((?:[^"\s]|\\")*))/gu;
const QUOTED_OR_NOT_QUOTED_LINKEDTO = /linkedto:(("((?:[^"]|\\")*)")|((?:[^"\s]|\\")*))/gu;
const QUOTED_OR_NOT_QUOTED_LINKEDFROM = /linkedfrom:(("((?:[^"]|\\")*)")|((?:[^"\s]|\\")*))/gu;
const COORDINATES = /(?<lat>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+),(?<lng>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+)/;
const INLINE_LOCATION_OLD_SYNTAX = /`location:\s*\[?(?<lat>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+)\s*,\s*(?<lng>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+)\]?/g;
// A link name is defined here as [^\]]* to prevent a previous link in the same line to count as the beginning
// of the link name
const INLINE_LOCATION_WITH_TAGS = /(?<link>\[(?<name>[^\]]*?)\]\(geo:(?<lat>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+),(?<lng>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+)\))[ \t]*(?<tags>(tag:[\p{L}\p{N}_\/\-]+[\s,.]+)*)/gu;
// Should be exactly like above but without the tags
const INLINE_LOCATION_WITHOUT_TAGS = /(?<link>\[(?<name>[^\]]*?)\]\(geo:(?<lat>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+),(?<lng>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+)\))/gu;
const FRONT_MATTER_LOCATION_V2 = /(?<header>^---.*)(?<loc>location:[ \t]*\"(?<lat>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+),(?<lng>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+)\").*^---/ms;
const FRONT_MATTER_LOCATION = /(?<header>^---.*)(?<loc>location:[ \t]*\[(?<lat>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+),(?<lng>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+)\]).*^---/ms;
// location: [32.84577588420059,35.36074429750443]
/**
* Returns a match object if the given cursor position has the beginning
* of a `tag:...` expression
*/
function getTagUnderCursor(line, cursorPosition) {
return matchByPosition(line, TAG_NAME_WITH_HEADER, cursorPosition);
}
/**
* An ordered stack (latest first) of the latest used leaves.
* Maintained by the main plugin object.
@ -17920,14 +17953,17 @@ function updateInlineGeolocation(app, file, fileLocation, geolocationMatch, newL
const content = yield app.vault.read(file);
let groups = geolocationMatch === null || geolocationMatch === void 0 ? void 0 : geolocationMatch.groups;
if (groups) {
let newGeoLocationText = '';
if (groups.name) {
newGeoLocationText = `[${groups.name}](geo:${newLat},${newLng})`;
}
else {
newGeoLocationText = `\`location: [${newLat},${newLng}]`;
const newGeoLocationText = `[${groups.name}](geo:${newLat},${newLng})`;
// We want to replace just the part containing the coordinates, not optional tags that follow and are
// included in geolocationMatch. So we do a re-match without any tags, to know the length of the part
// we want to replace.
// The "old" inline syntax isn't supported here, but it's so antique I think it's fine.
const matchWithoutTags = geolocationMatch[0].match(INLINE_LOCATION_WITHOUT_TAGS);
if (!matchWithoutTags) {
console.error('Cannot update inline geolocation:', geolocationMatch[0]);
return;
}
let oldGeolocationText = geolocationMatch[0];
let oldGeolocationText = matchWithoutTags[0];
let before = content.slice(0, fileLocation);
let after = content.slice(fileLocation + oldGeolocationText.length);
yield app.vault.modify(file, `${before}${newGeoLocationText}${after}`);
@ -35441,26 +35477,31 @@ function createIconElement(containerEl, icon) {
}
function getInternalIconFromOptions(iconSpec, iconFactory) {
var _a;
const errorIcon = '<p class="mv-emoji-icon" style="color:white">❓</p>';
if (isFontAwesome(iconSpec.icon)) {
// The behavior of Leaflet Extra Markers is to render Font Awesome with Web Fonts & CSS, which has
// proven too slow for displaying hundreds of markers.
// This overrides the HTML generated by Extra Market to use the SVG Symbols alternative, which
// seems much faster.
// See here for more details: https://fontawesome.com/v5/docs/web/advanced/svg-symbols
return iconFactory.getIcon(iconSpec).outerHTML;
const icon = iconFactory.getIcon(iconSpec);
return (icon === null || icon === void 0 ? void 0 : icon.outerHTML) || errorIcon;
}
else if (isText(iconSpec.icon)) {
// Emoji or other short textual icon
const color = (_a = iconSpec.iconColor) !== null && _a !== void 0 ? _a : 'white';
return `<p class="mv-emoji-icon" style="color:${color}">${iconSpec.icon}</p>`;
}
else
return errorIcon;
}
function isFontAwesome(iconName) {
if (iconName.startsWith('fa-'))
return true;
}
function isText(iconName) {
return iconName.length <= 2;
// Some emojis have a longer length so just checking for the string length isn't enough
return iconName.length <= 2 || /\p{Extended_Pictographic}/u.test(iconName);
}
// Utilizes the SVG capabilities of Font Awesome to generate icons, instead of using Web Fonts.
// Since we create the SVGs directly where they are needed, we can affort to turn off the slow
@ -37604,37 +37645,6 @@ var fxp = {
XMLBuilder: json2xml
};
// The pound sign is optional here
const TAG_NAME_WITH_HEADER = /tag:(#?[\p{L}\p{N}_\/\-]*)/gu;
// Same as above, but also supporting wildcards for query purposes (not used for inline tags)
const TAG_NAME_WITH_HEADER_AND_WILDCARD = /tag:(#?[\p{L}\p{N}_\/\-\*]*)/gu;
// Note no '#' sign
const INLINE_TAG_IN_NOTE = /tag:(?<tag>[\p{L}\p{N}_\/\-]+)/gu;
// path:"..."
const PATH_QUERY_WITH_HEADER = /path:"((?:[^"]|\\")+?)"/gu;
const LINKEDTO_QUERY_WITH_HEADER = /linkedto:"((?:[^"]|\\")+?)"/gu;
const LINKEDFROM_QUERY_WITH_HEADER = /linkedfrom:"((?:[^"]|\\")+?)"/gu;
const NAME_QUERY_WITH_HEADER = /name:"((?:[^"]|\\")+?)"/gu;
// path:"path with spaces" OR path:path_without_spaces
const QUOTED_OR_NOT_QUOTED_PATH = /path:(("((?:[^"]|\\")*)")|((?:[^"\s]|\\")*))/gu;
const QUOTED_OR_NOT_QUOTED_LINKEDTO = /linkedto:(("((?:[^"]|\\")*)")|((?:[^"\s]|\\")*))/gu;
const QUOTED_OR_NOT_QUOTED_LINKEDFROM = /linkedfrom:(("((?:[^"]|\\")*)")|((?:[^"\s]|\\")*))/gu;
const COORDINATES = /(?<lat>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+),(?<lng>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+)/;
const INLINE_LOCATION_OLD_SYNTAX = /`location:\s*\[?(?<lat>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+)\s*,\s*(?<lng>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+)\]?/g;
// A link name is defined here as [^\]]* to prevent a previous link in the same line to count as the beginning
// of the link name
const INLINE_LOCATION_WITH_TAGS = /(?<link>\[(?<name>[^\]]*?)\]\(geo:(?<lat>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+),(?<lng>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+)\))[ \t]*(?<tags>(tag:[\p{L}\p{N}_\/\-]+[\s,.]+)*)/gu;
const FRONT_MATTER_LOCATION_V2 = /(?<header>^---.*)(?<loc>location:[ \t]*\"(?<lat>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+),(?<lng>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+)\").*^---/ms;
const FRONT_MATTER_LOCATION = /(?<header>^---.*)(?<loc>location:[ \t]*\[(?<lat>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+),(?<lng>[+-]?([0-9]*[.])?[0-9]+)\]).*^---/ms;
// location: [32.84577588420059,35.36074429750443]
/**
* Returns a match object if the given cursor position has the beginning
* of a `tag:...` expression
*/
function getTagUnderCursor(line, cursorPosition) {
return matchByPosition(line, TAG_NAME_WITH_HEADER, cursorPosition);
}
/**
* TODO! This is an unfinished feature of an Import dialog, currently only from KML (that can be exported
* from Google Maps).
@ -41294,11 +41304,16 @@ function getFrontMatterLocation(file, app, settings) {
const frontMatter = fileCache === null || fileCache === void 0 ? void 0 : fileCache.frontmatter;
if (frontMatter && settings.frontMatterKey in frontMatter) {
try {
const location = frontMatter[settings.frontMatterKey];
const frontMatterLocation = frontMatter[settings.frontMatterKey];
// V1 format: an array in the format of `location: [lat,lng]`
if ((location === null || location === void 0 ? void 0 : location.length) == 2 &&
typeof location[0] === 'number' &&
typeof location[1] === 'number') {
if ((frontMatterLocation === null || frontMatterLocation === void 0 ? void 0 : frontMatterLocation.length) == 2) {
// Allow arrays of either strings or numbers
const lat = parseFloat(frontMatterLocation[0]);
const lng = parseFloat(frontMatterLocation[1]);
if (Number.isNaN(lat) || Number.isNaN(lng)) {
console.log('Unknown location format:', frontMatterLocation);
return null;
}
const location = new leafletSrc.LatLng(frontMatter.location[0], frontMatter.location[1]);
verifyLocation(location);
return location;
@ -41306,7 +41321,7 @@ function getFrontMatterLocation(file, app, settings) {
else {
// V2 format: a string in the format of `location: "lat,lng"` (which is more compatible with
// Obsidian's property editor)
const locationV2 = location.match(COORDINATES);
const locationV2 = frontMatterLocation.match(COORDINATES);
if (locationV2 &&
locationV2.groups &&
locationV2.groups.lat &&

2
.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-map-view/manifest.json
Unescape View File

@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
{
"id": "obsidian-map-view",
"name": "Map View",
"version": "5.0.1",
"version": "5.0.2",
"minAppVersion": "1.5.6",
"description": "An interactive map view.",
"isDesktopOnly": false

20172
.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-memos/main.js
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8
.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-memos/manifest.json
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@ -1,10 +1,10 @@
{
"id": "obsidian-memos",
"name": "Obsidian Memos",
"description": "A plugin for capturing ideas in Obsidian",
"version": "1.9.7",
"name": "Thino",
"description": "Capturing ideas and save them into daily notes.",
"version": "2.3.8",
"author": "Boninall",
"authorUrl": "https://github.com/Quorafind/",
"isDesktopOnly": false,
"minAppVersion": "0.14.0"
"minAppVersion": "1.0.0"
}

9316
.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-memos/styles.css
View File

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148
.obsidian/plugins/obsidian-reminder-plugin/data.json
Unescape View File

@ -2,11 +2,6 @@
"scanned": true,
"reminders": {
"05.01 Computer setup/Storage and Syncing.md": [
{
"title": ":cloud: [[Storage and Syncing|Storage & Sync]]: Backup Volumes to [[Sync|Sync.com]] %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-03-11",
"rowNumber": 188
},
{
"title": "Backup [[Storage and Syncing#Instructions for Anchor|Anchor Wallet]] %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-04-04",
@ -25,7 +20,12 @@
{
"title": ":camera: [[Storage and Syncing|Storage & Sync]]: Transfer pictures to ED %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-04-11",
"rowNumber": 192
"rowNumber": 193
},
{
"title": ":cloud: [[Storage and Syncing|Storage & Sync]]: Backup Volumes to [[Sync|Sync.com]] %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-06-10",
"rowNumber": 188
}
],
"06.01 Finances/hLedger.md": [
@ -87,15 +87,15 @@
}
],
"05.02 Networks/Server VPN.md": [
{
"title": ":shield: [[Selfhosting]], [[Server VPN|VPN]]: Check VPN state & dashboard %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-03-18",
"rowNumber": 293
},
{
"title": ":shield: [[Server VPN]]: Backup server %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-04-02",
"rowNumber": 285
},
{
"title": ":shield: [[Selfhosting]], [[Server VPN|VPN]]: Check VPN state & dashboard %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-06-18",
"rowNumber": 293
}
],
"04.01 lebv.org/Hosting Tasks.md": [
@ -332,50 +332,50 @@
}
],
"01.02 Home/Household.md": [
{
"title": "🛎 🧻 REMINDER [[Household]]: check need for toilet paper %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-03-25",
"rowNumber": 99
},
{
"title": "♻ [[Household]]: *Paper* recycling collection %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-03-12",
"time": "2024-03-26",
"rowNumber": 75
},
{
"title": ":bed: [[Household]] Change bedsheets %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-03-16",
"rowNumber": 110
"time": "2024-03-30",
"rowNumber": 113
},
{
"title": "🛎 🧻 REMINDER [[Household]]: check need for toilet paper %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-03-18",
"rowNumber": 97
"title": "🛎️ :house: [[Household]]: Pay rent %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-03-31",
"rowNumber": 95
},
{
"title": "♻ [[Household]]: *Cardboard* recycling collection %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-03-19",
"rowNumber": 81
},
{
"title": "🛎️ :house: [[Household]]: Pay rent %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-03-31",
"rowNumber": 93
"time": "2024-04-02",
"rowNumber": 82
},
{
"title": ":blue_car: [[Household]]: Change to Summer tyres @ [[Rex Automobile CH]] %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-04-15",
"rowNumber": 121
"rowNumber": 125
},
{
"title": ":blue_car: [[Household]]: Change to Winter tyres @ [[Rex Automobile CH]] %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-10-15",
"rowNumber": 122
"rowNumber": 126
},
{
"title": ":ski: [[Household]]: Organise yearly ski servicing ([[Ski Rental Zürich]]) %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-10-31",
"rowNumber": 129
"rowNumber": 133
},
{
"title": ":blue_car: [[Household]]: Renew [road vignette](https://www.e-vignette.ch/) %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-12-20",
"rowNumber": 123
"rowNumber": 127
}
],
"01.03 Family/Pia Bousquié.md": [
@ -454,27 +454,27 @@
}
],
"06.02 Investments/Crypto Tasks.md": [
{
"title": ":chart: Check [[Nimbus]] earnings %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-03-11",
"rowNumber": 88
},
{
"title": ":ballot_box_with_ballot: [[Crypto Tasks]]: Vote for [[EOS]] block producers %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-04-02",
"rowNumber": 72
},
{
"title": ":chart: Check [[Nimbus]] earnings %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-04-08",
"rowNumber": 88
}
],
"05.02 Networks/Configuring UFW.md": [
{
"title": "🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]] Get IP addresses caught by Postfix %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-03-16",
"time": "2024-03-23",
"rowNumber": 239
},
{
"title": "🖥 [[Selfhosting]], [[Configuring UFW|Firewall]]: Update the Blocked IP list %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-03-16",
"rowNumber": 300
"time": "2024-03-23",
"rowNumber": 301
}
],
"01.03 Family/Amélie Solanet.md": [
@ -536,7 +536,7 @@
"00.08 Bookmarks/Bookmarks - Work.md": [
{
"title": ":label: [[Bookmarks - Work]]: review bookmarks %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-03-16",
"time": "2024-06-16",
"rowNumber": 71
}
],
@ -707,15 +707,15 @@
}
],
"02.03 Zürich/Juan Bautista Bossio.md": [
{
"title": ":horse_racing: [[Juan Bautista Bossio|Juan]]: Bring a bottle of fernet + normal coca cola %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-03-20",
"rowNumber": 102
},
{
"title": ":birthday: :horse_racing: [[Juan Bautista Bossio|Juan]]‘s birthday %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-04-19",
"rowNumber": 121
"rowNumber": 122
},
{
"title": ":horse_racing: [[Juan Bautista Bossio|Juan]]: Bring a bottle of fernet + normal coca cola %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-04-20",
"rowNumber": 102
}
],
"00.08 Bookmarks/Bookmarks - Investments.md": [
@ -735,7 +735,7 @@
"01.07 Animals/2023-07-13 Health check.md": [
{
"title": ":racehorse: [[@Sally|Sally]], [[2023-07-13 Health check|Note]]: Check front hoofs healing",
"time": "2024-03-12",
"time": "2024-03-26",
"rowNumber": 53
}
],
@ -827,30 +827,25 @@
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-01-06.md": [
{
"title": "19:20 :notebook: [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Register will with [local authorities](https://www.notariate-zh.ch/deu/home?not=Riesbach-Zuerich)",
"time": "2024-03-15",
"time": "2024-03-25",
"rowNumber": 104
}
],
"02.03 Zürich/@@Zürich.md": [
{
"title": "🎭:frame_with_picture: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out exhibitions at the [Rietberg](https://rietberg.ch/en/) %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-03-15",
"rowNumber": 95
},
{
"title": ":hibiscus: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Sechseläuten %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-04-15",
"rowNumber": 117
"rowNumber": 118
},
{
"title": ":hibiscus: :runner: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Zürich Marathon %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-04-21",
"rowNumber": 127
"rowNumber": 128
},
{
"title": ":hibiscus: :fork_and_knife: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Book a restaurant with terrace for the season: [[Albishaus]], [[Restaurant Boldern]], [[Zur Buech]], [[Jardin Zürichberg]], [[Bistro Rigiblick]], [[Portofino am See]], [[La Réserve|La Muña]] %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-05-01",
"rowNumber": 103
"rowNumber": 104
},
{
"title": "🎭:frame_with_picture: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out exhibitions at the [Kunsthaus](https://www.kunsthaus.ch/en/) %%done_del%%",
@ -860,47 +855,52 @@
{
"title": ":hibiscus: :canned_food: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out [FOOD ZURICH - MEHR ALS EIN FESTIVAL](https://www.foodzurich.com/de/) %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-06-01",
"rowNumber": 104
"rowNumber": 105
},
{
"title": "🎭:frame_with_picture: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out exhibitions at the [Rietberg](https://rietberg.ch/en/) %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-06-15",
"rowNumber": 95
},
{
"title": ":hibiscus: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Zürich Pride Festival %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-06-15",
"rowNumber": 118
"rowNumber": 119
},
{
"title": ":sunny: :movie_camera: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out programmation of the [Zurich's finest open-air cinema | Allianz Cinema -](https://zuerich.allianzcinema.ch/en) %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-07-01",
"rowNumber": 105
"rowNumber": 106
},
{
"title": ":sunny: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out Seenachtfest Rapperswil-Jona %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-08-01",
"rowNumber": 121
"rowNumber": 122
},
{
"title": ":sunny: :runner: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out tickets to Weltklasse Zürich %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-08-01",
"rowNumber": 128
"rowNumber": 129
},
{
"title": ":sunny: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Street Parade %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-08-10",
"rowNumber": 119
"rowNumber": 120
},
{
"title": ":sunny: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Zürich Openair %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-08-23",
"rowNumber": 120
"rowNumber": 121
},
{
"title": ":maple_leaf: :movie_camera: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out Zürich Film Festival %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-09-15",
"rowNumber": 106
"rowNumber": 107
},
{
"title": ":maple_leaf: :wine_glass: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out Zürich’s Wine festival ([ZWF - Zurich Wine Festival](https://zurichwinefestival.ch/)) %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-09-25",
"rowNumber": 107
"rowNumber": 108
},
{
"title": ":snowflake:🎭 [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out floating theatre ([Herzlich willkommen!](http://herzbaracke.ch/)) %%done_del%%",
@ -910,27 +910,27 @@
{
"title": ":maple_leaf: :wine_glass: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out [Discover the Excitement of EXPOVINA Wine Events | Join Us at Weinschiffe, Primavera, and Wine Trophy | EXPOVINA](https://expovina.ch/en-ch/) %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-10-15",
"rowNumber": 108
"rowNumber": 109
},
{
"title": ":snowflake: :person_in_steamy_room: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out [Sauna Cubes at Strandbad Küsnacht — Strandbadsauna](https://www.strandbadsauna.ch/home-eng) %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-11-15",
"rowNumber": 101
"rowNumber": 102
},
{
"title": ":christmas_tree: :cocktail: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Check out pop-up bars ([Pop-ups at Christmas | zuerich.com](https://www.zuerich.com/en/visit/christmas-in-zurich/pop-ups)) %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-12-01",
"rowNumber": 102
"rowNumber": 103
},
{
"title": ":snowflake: :swimmer: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: Samichlausschwimmen %%done_del%%",
"time": "2024-12-08",
"rowNumber": 114
"rowNumber": 115
},
{
"title": ":snowflake: :partying_face: [[@@Zürich|:test_zurich_coat_of_arms:]]: ZüriCarneval weekend %%done_del%%",
"time": "2025-02-15",
"rowNumber": 115
"rowNumber": 116
}
],
"03.02 Travels/Geneva.md": [
@ -1002,13 +1002,8 @@
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-28.md": [
{
"title": "14:25 :potted_plant: [[Household]]: Buy a garden rack for the aromatic garden",
"time": "2024-03-15",
"time": "2024-03-23",
"rowNumber": 103
},
{
"title": "14:25 :potted_plant: [[Household]]: Buy soil for the aromatic garden",
"time": "2024-03-20",
"rowNumber": 104
}
],
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-08.md": [
@ -1037,6 +1032,13 @@
"time": "2024-11-05",
"rowNumber": 107
}
],
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{
"title": "09:15 :performing_arts: [[@Lifestyle|Lifestyle]]: Book tickets for the [Colombian exhibition]([](https://rietberg.ch/en/exhibitions/morethangold)) at the Rietberg",
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super(app, plugin);
this.plugin = plugin;
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@ -5592,6 +5596,10 @@ class SettingsView extends obsidian.ItemView {
super(leaf);
this.plugin = plugin;
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}
setSettings(settings, errorList) {
this.settings = settings;
this.errorList = errorList;
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const value = !this.settingsManager.getSetting(section.id, setting.id);
this.settingsManager.setSetting(section.id, setting.id, value);
this.settingsTab.settingsMarkup.rerender();
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"description": "<p>In a speech on Wednesday, President Vladimir V. Putin said that he would require hundreds of thousands more Russians to fight in Ukraine — and alarmed the West by once again raising the specter of nuclear force.</p><p>The mobilization signals that Mr. Putin is turning the war from one of aggression to one of defense, offering clues about what the next phase of the fighting will involve.</p><p>Guest: <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/by/anton-troianovski?smid=pc-thedaily\">Anton Troianovski</a>, the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times.</p><p>Background reading: </p><ul><li><a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/21/world/europe/putin-ukraine-russia-nuclear.html\">Accelerating his war effort</a>, Mr. Putin accused the West of trying to “weaken, divide and ultimately destroy” Russia.</li><li>American and other officials vowed to<a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/21/us/politics/putin-ukraine-biden.html\"> continue sending military, economic and humanitarian aid</a> to Ukraine.</li></ul><p>For more information on today’s episode, visit <a href=\"http://nytimes.com/thedaily?smid=pc-thedaily\">nytimes.com/thedaily</a>. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. </p>\n",
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"description": "<p>The funeral of Queen Elizabeth today will be one of the most extraordinary public spectacles of the last several decades in Britain, accompanied by an outpouring of sadness, reverence and respect.</p><p>But the end of the queen’s 70-year reign has also prompted long-delayed conversations about the future of the Commonwealth and of the four nations that make up the United Kingdom.</p><p>Guest: <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/by/mark-landler?smid=pc-thedaily\">Mark Landler</a>, the London bureau chief for The New York Times.</p><p>Background reading: </p><ul><li>In Commonwealth nations with British colonial histories, Queen Elizabeth’s death has<a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/world/queen-elizabeth-commonwealth.html\"> rekindled discussions about a more independent future</a>.</li><li>The loss of the beloved figurehead has left many in Britain anxious and unmoored, unsure of their nation’s identity, its economic and social well-being, or<a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/10/world/europe/queen-elizabeth-uk-identity.html\"> even its role in the world</a>.</li></ul><p>For more information on today’s episode, visit <a href=\"http://nytimes.com/thedaily?smid=pc-thedaily\">nytimes.com/thedaily</a>. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. </p>\n",
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@ -102,7 +102,7 @@ This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
- [x] 19:18 :notebook: [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Find help online to redact a will 📅 2024-01-31 ✅ 2024-01-31
- [ ] 19:20 :notebook: [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Register will with [local authorities](https://www.notariate-zh.ch/deu/home?not=Riesbach-Zuerich) 📅 2024-03-15
- [ ] 19:20 :notebook: [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Register will with [local authorities](https://www.notariate-zh.ch/deu/home?not=Riesbach-Zuerich) 📅 2024-03-25
%% --- %%

4
00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-02-28.md
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@ -101,8 +101,8 @@ hide task count
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
- [ ] 14:25 :potted_plant: [[Household]]: Buy a garden rack for the aromatic garden 📅2024-03-15
- [ ] 14:25 :potted_plant: [[Household]]: Buy soil for the aromatic garden 📅2024-03-20
- [ ] 14:25 :potted_plant: [[Household]]: Buy a garden rack for the aromatic garden 📅 2024-03-23
- [x] 14:25 :potted_plant: [[Household]]: Buy soil for the aromatic garden 📅 2024-03-20 ✅ 2024-03-16
- [x] 14:25 :potted_plant: [[Household]]: Buy seeds and young plants for the aromatic garden 📅 2024-03-25 ✅ 2024-02-28

14
00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-10.md
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@ -16,9 +16,9 @@ Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 20
BackHeadBar: 30
Water:
Coffee:
Steps:
Water: 3.5
Coffee: 4
Steps: 13583
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
@ -114,7 +114,13 @@ This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
📖: [[La Louisiane]]
📺: [[2024-03-10 ⚽️ PSG - Stade Reims (2-2)]]
🍴: [[Chicken Schnitzel]]
🍽️: [[Spicy Szechuan Noodles with Garlic Chilli Oil]]
&emsp;

134
00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-11.md
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@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2024-03-11
Date: 2024-03-11
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 20
BackHeadBar: 30
Water: 2.5
Coffee: 5
Steps: 11070
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2024-03-10|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2024-03-12|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2024-03-11Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2024-03-11NSave
&emsp;
# 2024-03-11
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2024-03-11
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2024-03-11
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2024-03-11]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

136
00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-12.md
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@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2024-03-12
Date: 2024-03-12
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 20
BackHeadBar: 30
Water: 2.5
Coffee: 5
Steps: 7880
Weight: 93.9
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2024-03-11|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2024-03-13|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2024-03-12Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2024-03-12NSave
&emsp;
# 2024-03-12
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2024-03-12
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2024-03-12
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
📖: [[La Louisiane]]
🍽️: [[Spicy Coconut Butter Chicken]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2024-03-12]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

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00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-13.md
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@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2024-03-13
Date: 2024-03-13
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 20
BackHeadBar: 30
Water: 3
Coffee: 5
Steps: 11840
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2024-03-12|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2024-03-14|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2024-03-13Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2024-03-13NSave
&emsp;
# 2024-03-13
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2024-03-13
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2024-03-13
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
📖: [[La Louisiane]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2024-03-13]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

134
00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-14.md
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@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2024-03-14
Date: 2024-03-14
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 20
BackHeadBar: 30
Water: 3
Coffee: 6
Steps: 12864
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2024-03-13|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2024-03-15|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2024-03-14Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2024-03-14NSave
&emsp;
# 2024-03-14
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2024-03-14
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2024-03-14
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
📖: [[La Louisiane]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2024-03-14]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

137
00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-15.md
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@ -0,0 +1,137 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2024-03-15
Date: 2024-03-15
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 20
BackHeadBar: 30
Water: 2
Coffee: 5
Steps: 9344
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2024-03-14|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2024-03-16|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2024-03-15Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2024-03-15NSave
&emsp;
# 2024-03-15
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2024-03-15
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2024-03-15
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
- [ ] 09:15 :performing_arts: [[@Lifestyle|Lifestyle]]: Book tickets for the [Colombian exhibition]([](https://rietberg.ch/en/exhibitions/morethangold)) at the Rietberg 📅2024-04-01
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
📖: [[La Louisiane]], [[Terre d'Ébène]]
🍸: [[No Idea]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2024-03-15]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

134
00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-16.md
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@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2024-03-16
Date: 2024-03-16
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 20
BackHeadBar: 30
Water: 3.125
Coffee: 3
Steps: 10475
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2024-03-15|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2024-03-17|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2024-03-16Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2024-03-16NSave
&emsp;
# 2024-03-16
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2024-03-16
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2024-03-16
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2024-03-16]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

134
00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-17.md
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@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2024-03-17
Date: 2024-03-17
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 8.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 20
BackHeadBar: 30
Water: 2.625
Coffee: 2
Steps: 2563
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2024-03-16|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2024-03-18|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2024-03-17Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2024-03-17NSave
&emsp;
# 2024-03-17
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2024-03-17
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2024-03-17
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2024-03-17]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

136
00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-18.md
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@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2024-03-18
Date: 2024-03-18
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 20
BackHeadBar: 30
Water: 3
Coffee: 3
Steps: 15512
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2024-03-17|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2024-03-19|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2024-03-18Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2024-03-18NSave
&emsp;
# 2024-03-18
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2024-03-18
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2024-03-18
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
📖: [[Terre d'Ébène]]
🍴: [[Spicy Coconut Butter Chicken]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2024-03-18]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

134
00.01 Admin/Calendars/2024-03-19.md
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@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2024-03-19
Date: 2024-03-19
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 20
BackHeadBar: 30
Water: 1
Coffee: 5
Steps:
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2024-03-18|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2024-03-20|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2024-03-19Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2024-03-19NSave
&emsp;
# 2024-03-19
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2024-03-19
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2024-03-19
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
:book:: [[Terre d'Ébène]], [[Lolita]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2024-03-19]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

12
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-03-19 🏠 Arrivée Meggi-mo.md
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@ -1,12 +0,0 @@
---
title: "🧚🏼 Arrivée Meggi-mo"
allDay: true
date: 2022-03-19
endDate: 2022-03-20
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
# Arrivée de [[@@MRCK|Meggi-mo]]
- [l] Arrivée à [[@@Zürich|Zürich]] de Meggi-mo, le [[2022-03-19|19/03/2022]].

11
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-03-24 🎡 Départ de Meggi-mo.md
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@ -1,11 +0,0 @@
---
title: "🧚🏼 Départ de Meggi-mo"
allDay: true
date: 2022-03-24
endDate: 2022-03-25
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
# Départ de Meggi-mo
Départ de ma [[@@MRCK|Meggi-mo]] le [[2022-03-24|24/03/2022]].

9
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-03-31 🏠 Arrivée de Papa.md
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@ -1,9 +0,0 @@
---
title: "👨‍👩‍👧 Arrivée de Papa"
allDay: false
startTime: 20:25
endTime: 20:30
date: 2022-03-31
---
- [l] [[2022-03-31]], arrivée de [[Amaury de Villeneuve|Papa]] à [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]

9
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-04-04 🗼 Départ Papa.md
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@ -1,9 +0,0 @@
---
title: "👨‍👩‍👧 Départ Papa"
allDay: false
startTime: 13:30
endTime: 14:00
date: 2022-04-04
---
[[2022-04-04]], départ de [[Amaury de Villeneuve|Papa]]

11
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-04-10 🗳️ 1er tour Présidentielle.md
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@ -1,11 +0,0 @@
---
title: "🗳 1er tour Présidentielle"
allDay: true
date: 2022-04-10
endDate: 2022-04-11
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
1er tour des élections présidentielles à [[@@Paris|Paris]], le [[2022-04-10|10 avril 2022]]; avec [[@@MRCK|Meggi-mo]] dans l'isoloir.

8
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-04-24 🗳️ 2nd tour élections présidentielles.md
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@ -1,8 +0,0 @@
---
title: "🗳 2nd tour élections présidentielles"
allDay: true
date: 2022-04-24
endDate: 2022-04-25
---
2nd tour des élections présidentielles le [[2022-04-24|24 Avril]] à [[@@Paris|Paris]].

9
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-04-27 📍 Arrivée à Lisbonne.md
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@ -1,9 +0,0 @@
---
title: "🛩 Arrivée à Lisbonne"
allDay: false
startTime: 16:00
endTime: 16:30
date: 2022-04-27
---
Arrival on [[2022-04-27|this day]] in [[Lisbon]].

9
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-05-01 🏠 Départ de Lisbonne.md
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@ -1,9 +0,0 @@
---
title: "🛩 Départ de Lisbonne"
allDay: false
startTime: 15:30
endTime: 16:00
date: 2022-05-01
---
Departure from [[Lisbon]] to [[@@Zürich|Zürich]] [[2022-05-01|this day]].

9
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-05-15 🏠 Definite arrival of Meggi-mo to Züzü.md
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@ -1,9 +0,0 @@
---
title: "🧚🏼 Definite arrival of Meggi-mo to Züzü"
allDay: true
startTime: 06:30
endTime: 07:00
date: 2022-05-15
---
[[@@MRCK|Meggi-mo]] is arriving to [[@@Zürich|Zürich]] for good on [[2022-05-15|that day]].

17
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-10-14 📍 Weekend à GVA.md
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---
title: "🚆 Weekend in GVA"
allDay: true
date: 2022-10-14
endDate: 2022-10-17
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Weekend à [[Geneva]] avec [[@@MRCK|Meggi-mo]].
&emsp;
Départ: [[2022-10-14]] de [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]
Retour: [[2022-10-16]] à [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]

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00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-10-21 🗼 Weekend à Paris.md
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---
title: "🗼 Weekend à Paris"
allDay: true
date: 2022-10-21
endDate: 2022-10-24
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Weekend à [[@@Paris|Paris]] avec [[@@MRCK|Meggi-mo]].
&emsp;
Départ: [[2022-10-21]] de [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]
Retour: [[2022-10-23]] à [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]

10
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-11-19 💍 Fiançailles Marguerite & Arnold.md
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---
title: "💍 Fiançailles Marguerite & Arnold"
allDay: false
startTime: 16:30
endTime: 15:00
date: 2022-11-19
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Fiançailles de [[Marguerite de Villeneuve|Marguerite]] et [[Arnold Moulin|Arnold]] [[2022-11-19|ce jour]] à [[Geneva|Genève]].

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00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-12-26 🏠 Papa à Zürich.md
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---
title: "👪 Papa à Zürich"
allDay: true
date: 2022-12-26
endDate: 2022-12-31
completed: null
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
[[Amaury de Villeneuve|Papa]] arrive à [[@@Zürich|Zürich]] le [[2022-12-26|26 décembre]] à 13h26.

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00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2022-12-30 🏠 Stef & Kyna in Zürich.md
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---
title: "Stef & Kyna in Zürich"
allDay: true
date: 2022-12-30
endDate: 2023-01-05
completed: null
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Stef & Kyna arrivent à [[@@Zürich|Zürich]] le [[2022-12-30|30 décembre]] avec Swiss le matin.

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00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-01-23 🩺 Médecin.md
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---
title: Médecin
allDay: false
startTime: 11:15
endTime: 12:15
date: 2023-01-23
completed: null
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
[[2023-01-23|Ce jour]], 1er RDV avec [[Dr Cleopatra Morales]].

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00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-02-06 📍 Genève.md
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---
title: Genève
allDay: true
date: 2023-02-06
endDate: 2023-02-08
completed: null
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Depart à [[Geneva|Genève]] [[2023-02-06|ce jour]] et retour le [[223-02-07|lendemain]].

13
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-02-09 🩺 Médecin.md
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---
title: ⚕ Médecin
allDay: false
startTime: 12:15
endTime: 13:15
date: 2023-02-09
completed: null
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
[[2023-02-09|Ce jour]], RDV de suivi avec [[Dr Cleopatra Morales]]

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

13
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-02-19 🎞️ Tár @ Riff Raff.md
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---
title: 🎬 Tár @ Riff Raff
allDay: false
startTime: 20:30
endTime: 22:30
date: 2023-02-19
completed: null
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
[[2023-02-19|Ce jour]], [[Tár (2022)]] @ [[Riff Raff Kino Bar]].

12
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-03-06 🩺 Médecin.md
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---
title: 🩺 Médecin
allDay: false
startTime: 15:00
endTime: 15:30
date: 2023-03-06
completed: null
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
[[2023-03-06|Ce jour]], rdv avec [[Dr Awad Abuawad]]

13
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-03-11 🏠 Marg & Arnold à Zürich.md
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---
title: 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Marg & Arnold à Zürich
allDay: true
date: 2023-03-11
endDate: 2023-03-13
completed: null
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Arrivée le [[2023-03-11|11 mars]] de [[Marguerite de Villeneuve|Marg]] et [[Arnold Moulin|Arnold]].
Départ le [[2023-03-12|lendemain]].

12
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-03-18 🇨🇭 Molly & boyfriend in Zürich.md
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---
title: 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Molly & boyfriend in Zürich
allDay: true
date: 2023-03-18
endDate: 2023-03-20
completed: null
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Weekend in [[@@Zürich|Zürich]] for [[@@MRCK|Meggi-mo]]‘s cousin Molly and boyfriend.
Arrival on [[2023-03-18|18th March]] and departure on Monday [[2023-03-20|20th March]].

13
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-04-14 🩺 Médecin.md
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---
title: 🩺 Médecin
allDay: false
startTime: 11:45
endTime: 12:15
date: 2023-04-14
completed: null
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
[[2023-04-14|Ce jour]], rdv avec [[Dr Cleopatra Morales]]

10
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-12-21 🏠 Arrivée Papa.md
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---
title: 🏠 Arrivée Papa
allDay: false
startTime: 20:26
endTime: 21:26
date: 2023-12-21
completed: null
---
[[2023-12-21|Ce jour]], arrivée de [[Amaury de Villeneuve|Papa]] à [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]

10
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2023-12-27 🗼 Départ Papa.md
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---
title: 🗼 Départ Papa
allDay: false
startTime: 13:30
endTime: 14:30
date: 2023-12-27
completed: null
---
[[2023-12-27|Ce jour]], départ de [[Amaury de Villeneuve|Papa]] de [[@@Zürich|Zürich]] pour [[@@Paris|Paris]]

18
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-03-10 ⚽️ PSG - Stade Reims (2-2).md
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---
title: ⚽️ PSG - Stade Reims (2-2)
allDay: false
startTime: 13:00
endTime: 15:00
date: 2024-03-10
completed: null
---
[[2024-03-10|Ce jour]], [[Paris SG]] - Stade Reims: 2-2
Buteurs:: ⚽️⚽️ G. Ramos<br>⚽️ Munetsi (SR)<br>⚽️ Diakhité (SR)
&emsp;
```lineup
formation: 433
players: Navas,Hernandez,Beraldo,Danilo (Nuno Mendes),Hakimi,Zaïre-Emery,Ugarte,Soler (Dembélé),Barcola (Kolo Muani),G.Ramos (M'Bappé),Lee
```

13
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-04-10 ⚽️ PSG - FC Barça.md
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---
title: ⚽️ PSG - FC Barça
allDay: false
startTime: 21:00
endTime: 23:00
date: 2024-04-10
completed: null
---
[[2024-04-10|Ce jour]], [[Paris SG]] - FC Barcelona:
Buteurs::
&emsp;

13
00.01 Admin/Calendars/Events/2024-04-16 ⚽️ FC Barça - PSG.md
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---
title: ⚽️ FC Barça - PSG
allDay: false
startTime: 21:00
endTime: 23:00
date: 2024-04-16
completed: null
---
[[2024-04-16|Ce jour]], FC Barcelona - [[Paris SG]]:
Buteurs::
&emsp;

86
00.02 Inbox/American Psycho.md
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---
Tag: [""]
Date: 2024-03-17
DocType: "Source"
Hierarchy: "NonRoot"
TimeStamp:
location:
Source:
Type: "Book"
Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Language: EN
Published: 2010-06-09
Link:
Read:
Cover: http://books.google.com/books/content?id=Gd_mGRCwW1QC&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Parent:: [[@Reading master|Reading list]]
ReadingState:: 🟥
---
&emsp;
```button
name Edit Source parameters
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-SourceEdit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-TNSave
&emsp;
# American Psycho
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
>
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Cover
&emsp;
```dataviewjs
dv.el("span", "![](" + dv.current().Source.Cover + ")")
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
&emsp;

86
00.02 Inbox/Catch-22.md
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---
Tag: ["Novel"]
Date: 2024-03-17
DocType: "Source"
Hierarchy: "NonRoot"
TimeStamp:
location:
Source:
Type: "Book"
Author: Joseph Heller
Language: EN
Published: 1999-10-05
Link:
Read:
Cover: http://books.google.com/books/content?id=Xfze51E7TEoC&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Parent:: [[@Reading master|Reading list]]
ReadingState:: 🟥
---
&emsp;
```button
name Edit Source parameters
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-SourceEdit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-TNSave
&emsp;
# Catch-22
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
>
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Cover
&emsp;
```dataviewjs
dv.el("span", "![](" + dv.current().Source.Cover + ")")
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
&emsp;

86
00.02 Inbox/East Goes West.md
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---
Tag: ["Novel"]
Date: 2024-03-17
DocType: "Source"
Hierarchy: "NonRoot"
TimeStamp:
location:
Source:
Type: "Book"
Author: Younghill Kang
Language: EN
Published: 2019-05-21
Link:
Read:
Cover: http://books.google.com/books/content?id=v8hqDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Parent:: [[@Reading master|Reading list]]
ReadingState:: 🟥
---
&emsp;
```button
name Edit Source parameters
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-SourceEdit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-TNSave
&emsp;
# East Goes West
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
>
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Cover
&emsp;
```dataviewjs
dv.el("span", "![](" + dv.current().Source.Cover + ")")
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
&emsp;

86
00.02 Inbox/Kindred.md
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---
Tag: [""]
Date: 2024-03-17
DocType: "Source"
Hierarchy: "NonRoot"
TimeStamp:
location:
Source:
Type: "Book"
Author: Octavia E. Butler
Language: EN
Published: 1988
Link:
Read:
Cover: http://books.google.com/books/content?id=WdtgAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Parent:: [[@Reading master|Reading list]]
ReadingState:: 🟥
---
&emsp;
```button
name Edit Source parameters
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-SourceEdit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-TNSave
&emsp;
# Kindred
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
>
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Cover
&emsp;
```dataviewjs
dv.el("span", "![](" + dv.current().Source.Cover + ")")
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
&emsp;

4
00.02 Inbox/Lolita.md
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@ -19,7 +19,7 @@ CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Parent:: [[@Reading master|Reading list]]
ReadingState:: 🟥
ReadingState:: 🟧
---
@ -80,7 +80,7 @@ dv.el("span", "![](" + dv.current().Source.Cover + ")")
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
Adapted into [[Lolita (1962)]]
&emsp;
&emsp;

86
00.02 Inbox/Mumbo Jumbo.md
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---
Tag: ["Novel"]
Date: 2024-03-17
DocType: "Source"
Hierarchy: "NonRoot"
TimeStamp:
location:
Source:
Type: "Book"
Author: "Ishmael Reed"
Language: EN
Published: 1972
Link: "https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbo_Jumbo_(novel)"
Read:
Cover: "https://d28hgpri8am2if.cloudfront.net/book_images/onix/cvr9780684824772/mumbo-jumbo-9780684824772_hr.jpg"
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Parent:: [[@Reading master|Reading list]]
ReadingState:: 🟥
---
&emsp;
```button
name Edit Source parameters
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-SourceEdit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-TNSave
&emsp;
# Mumbo Jumbo
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
>
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Cover
&emsp;
```dataviewjs
dv.el("span", "![](" + dv.current().Source.Cover + ")")
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
&emsp;

86
00.02 Inbox/Nightwood.md
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---
Tag: ["Novel"]
Date: 2024-03-17
DocType: "Source"
Hierarchy: "NonRoot"
TimeStamp:
location:
Source:
Type: "Book"
Author: Djuna Barnes
Language: EN
Published: 1995
Link:
Read:
Cover: http://books.google.com/books/content?id=zkdaAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Parent:: [[@Reading master|Reading list]]
ReadingState:: 🟥
---
&emsp;
```button
name Edit Source parameters
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-SourceEdit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-TNSave
&emsp;
# Nightwood
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
>
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Cover
&emsp;
```dataviewjs
dv.el("span", "![](" + dv.current().Source.Cover + ")")
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
&emsp;

86
00.02 Inbox/Portnoy's Complaint.md
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---
Tag: ["Novel"]
Date: 2024-03-17
DocType: "Source"
Hierarchy: "NonRoot"
TimeStamp:
location:
Source:
Type: "Book"
Author: Philip Roth
Language: EN
Published: 1969
Link:
Read:
Cover: http://books.google.com/books/content?id=Ugzm_5E0v-MC&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Parent:: [[@Reading master|Reading list]]
ReadingState:: 🟥
---
&emsp;
```button
name Edit Source parameters
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-SourceEdit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-TNSave
&emsp;
# Portnoy's Complaint
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
>
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Cover
&emsp;
```dataviewjs
dv.el("span", "![](" + dv.current().Source.Cover + ")")
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
&emsp;

86
00.02 Inbox/The Catcher in the Rye.md
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---
Tag: ["Novel"]
Date: 2024-03-17
DocType: "Source"
Hierarchy: "NonRoot"
TimeStamp:
location:
Source:
Type: "Book"
Author: Jerome David Salinger
Language: EN
Published: 1964
Link:
Read:
Cover: http://books.google.com/books/content?id=j--EMdEfmbkC&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Parent:: [[@Reading master|Reading list]]
ReadingState:: 🟥
---
&emsp;
```button
name Edit Source parameters
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-SourceEdit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-TNSave
&emsp;
# The Catcher in the Rye
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
>
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Cover
&emsp;
```dataviewjs
dv.el("span", "![](" + dv.current().Source.Cover + ")")
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
&emsp;

86
00.02 Inbox/The Dog of the South.md
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---
Tag: [""]
Date: 2024-03-17
DocType: "Source"
Hierarchy: "NonRoot"
TimeStamp:
location:
Source:
Type: "Book"
Author: Charles Portis
Language: EN
Published: 2007-06-05
Link:
Read:
Cover: http://books.google.com/books/content?id=ozuEDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Parent:: [[@Reading master|Reading list]]
ReadingState:: 🟥
---
&emsp;
```button
name Edit Source parameters
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-SourceEdit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-TNSave
&emsp;
# The Dog of the South
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
>
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Cover
&emsp;
```dataviewjs
dv.el("span", "![](" + dv.current().Source.Cover + ")")
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
&emsp;

86
00.02 Inbox/Their Eyes Were Watching God.md
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---
Tag: ["Novel"]
Date: 2024-03-17
DocType: "Source"
Hierarchy: "NonRoot"
TimeStamp:
location:
Source:
Type: "Book"
Author: Zora Neale Hurston
Language: EN
Published: 2004
Link:
Read:
Cover: http://books.google.com/books/content?id=w_BrAQAACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&source=gbs_api
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Parent:: [[@Reading master|Reading list]]
ReadingState:: 🟥
---
&emsp;
```button
name Edit Source parameters
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-SourceEdit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-TNSave
&emsp;
# Their Eyes Were Watching God
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
>
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Cover
&emsp;
```dataviewjs
dv.el("span", "![](" + dv.current().Source.Cover + ")")
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
&emsp;

86
00.02 Inbox/Underworld.md
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---
Tag: [""]
Date: 2024-03-17
DocType: "Source"
Hierarchy: "NonRoot"
TimeStamp:
location:
Source:
Type: "Book"
Author: Don DeLillo
Language:
Published: 2007-11-01
Link:
Read:
Cover: http://books.google.com/books/content?id=Ug3ArDMHLnQC&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Parent:: [[@Reading master|Reading list]]
ReadingState:: 🟥
---
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Date: 2024-03-17
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Link: https://www.thedriftmag.com/a-bullshit-genius/
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# A Bullshit Genius
**O**n a friendly stroll somewhere in Colorado in the summer of 2004, Steve Jobs asked Walter Isaacson if he would consider writing his biography. Isaacson, a journalist, academic, and policymaker who was then CEO of the Aspen Institute, an influential think tank, had just published a six-hundred-odd-page study of Benjamin Franklin, and was at work on another about Albert Einstein. “My initial reaction was to wonder, half jokingly,” Isaacson later reflected, “whether he saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence.”
Isaacson did not take Jobs up on the offer until 2009, when he learned that the Apple boss was dying of pancreatic cancer. When *Steve Jobs* was published in 2011, just a couple of weeks after its subject passed away, it became clear that during his years of reporting the book, Isaacson had been convinced of what had first struck him only in jest. The front cover, designed with input from Jobs himself, featured a black-and-white photograph of the tech guru gazing knowingly at the camera, his thumb on his chin in contemplation: here is Jobs as world-historic genius, Silicon Valley successor to Franklin and Einstein. The narrative resonated with a public still enthralled by the misfit, college-dropout tech genius. That year was a kind of high-water mark for techno-optimism; the Arab Spring protests were still bringing democracy to the Middle East one tweet at a time; Google, with its ping-pong tables and massage rooms, was still widely considered the best place to work in the world. Isaacson’s portrait of Steve Jobs played to this market, selling around 380,000 copies in its first week.
A decade later, Isaacson was casting around for the next genius to include in his rarefied canon, which had grown to include Leonardo da Vinci, too, and was being sold as a “genius biographies” box set. What was kindred among these men, according to Isaacson, was not necessarily high I.Q. but an original spirit. They thought differently than others did — hit targets, as Schopenhauer put it, that no one else could see. This quality often put them out of step with the prevailing attitudes of their time, but these men did not acquiesce to ideological pressure or subscribe to social mores. The Isaacson genius was an avatar of intellectual freedom, a kind of liberal humanist hero who flourished in the West’s innovative meccas: Renaissance Florence, revolutionary America, prewar Western Europe, Silicon Valley.
As Isaacson surveyed the landscape in search of a new genius, one name kept coming up: Elon Musk. He was, without a doubt, a man with grand vision — electric cars, space travel, telepathy. He was unyielding in this vision, too, sometimes belligerently so. In Isaacson’s telling, he arranged a call in 2021 with the help of some mutual friends, and the two spoke for an hour and a half. (Musk has also taken credit for the idea.) Musk, unsurprisingly, was enthusiastic about the prospect of being written about. Isaacson, in turn, demanded full access to his subject, and the freedom to make up his own mind. “You have no control,” he reportedly told Musk. Over the next two years, the biographer followed the Tesla boss around, spoke to his family, friends, and colleagues, and received Red Bull-fueled text messages from Musk late into the night. During this period, Musk’s already bizarre life devolved into pandemonium. He bought Twitter at a massive loss, intervened in the war in Ukraine, spawned offspring with otherworldly names, and challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match. A Fox News segment compared the two men by height, weight, age, and I.Q.: Zuckerberg, 152; Musk, 155. A battle of the geniuses, and also one of the dumbest spectacles of all time.
Nevertheless, when *Musk* was published in September of last year, it was clear from the dust jacket alone that the book would situate Elon in the Isaacson lineage, painting him as the true heir to Jobs — a brilliant, if troubled, Silicon Valley genius. The cover features a head shot of Musk staring directly into the camera, fingers on his chin — like Jobs, in a thinking position — and the epigraph consists of two quotes, the first from Musk: “To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?” Directly below it is one attributed to Jobs: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
This time, the pitch didn’t quite land. Mainstream liberal attitudes toward Silicon Valley culture had cooled since the Jobs era, in large part due to a perceived rightward lurch among its upper echelons during the Trump years. Musk had emerged as the poster boy for this shift; he shared a meme that compared Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Hitler, and frequently posted about the “woke mind virus” and Covid vaccines. Isaacson’s book was panned by many; some critics accused the author of engaging in access journalism. In a combative interview, tech reporter Kara Swisher repeatedly asked Isaacson if he had come to “like” Musk. You can hear her frustration and bewilderment. How could Isaacson, her old friend and fellow liberal stalwart, not see Musk for the “asshole” he is, and, in fact, try to rehabilitate his image and burnish his legacy? Jill Lepore posed a similar question in her *New Yorker* review. Isaacson, she wrote, is “a gracious, generous, public-spirited man and a principled biographer.” Why did he write this apologia for a “supervillain”?
But within the context of Isaacson’s nine books, *Musk* is not an anomaly. In method and thesis, it is perfectly in line with a career built on promoting elite interests under the guise of biographical neutrality and insipid humanism. This time, though, his “genius” subject is idiotic enough to throw the bullshit at the heart of the project into stark relief. Musk is not just the natural successor to Isaacson’s genius canon; he may be its necessary conclusion.
**I**saacson’s first book was not a biography, but a collection of essays entitled *Pro & Con: Both Sides of Dozens of Unsettled and Unsettling Arguments*. Published in 1983, when Isaacson was an up-and-coming editor at *Time m*agazine, it lays out opposing positions on controversial topics like gun control, abortion, and smoking. Isaacson acts as a kind of referee, mediating impartially in order to allow his readers to come to their own conclusions. It is a role that Isaacson would later leverage to great effect — as a neutral observer floating above the political fray — but this early attempt went mostly unnoticed. He had more success with his second book, coauthored with *Newsweek* editor Evan Thomas, which told the story of the coterie of East Coast statesmen who crafted U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. But his breakout achievement came in 1992, with his next project, a biography of Henry Kissinger. The book was an amalgam of his first two works. Isaacson sought to present both sides of the bloody machinations of one of America’s most notorious statesmen — to produce, as he put it, “an unbiased biography that portrayed Kissinger in all of his complexity.” While *The* *New York Times* called it a “devastating portrait of Mr. Kissinger,” Christopher Hitchens felt that Isaacson’s fealty to “the tradition of New York-Washington ‘objectivity’” led him to grossly euphemize Kissinger’s war crimes. Isaacson, Hitchens wrote in the *London Review of Books*, “moves in a world where the worst that is often said of some near-genocidal policy is that it sends the wrong ‘signal.’”
Isaacson’s interest in power, and his commitment to that “New York-Washington objectivity,” made him particularly at home at *Time*, where he was promoted to managing editor in 1996. Under his leadership, the magazine pivoted away from hard news to entertaining profiles of prominent figures across the political and cultural spectrum. Isaacson had a knack for covering the influential in affable, entertaining prose that gently probed entrenched hierarchies, but did little to upset them. (Kissinger, for instance, still accepted invitations to Isaacson’s *Time* gala dinners after that supposedly “devastating portrait.”) Isaacson’s magnanimity was less usefully deployed at CNN, where he was made CEO in the summer of 2001. He arrived at a network under attack from an ascendant Fox News, which had been pitched by Rupert Murdoch as an alternative to the hegemony of the liberal media. Isaacson aimed for principled impartiality — or he played both sides, depending on how you look at it. One of his first moves as chairman was to meet with Republican lawmakers to discuss how the network could cover conservative perspectives with balance. The strategy backfired. Liberal viewers thought Isaacson was pandering to the right, while conservatives still preferred Fox, particularly after 9/11, when Roger Ailes expertly appealed to patriotic bloodlust. In 2002, Fox eclipsed CNN in the ratings, and Isaacson left the following year.
His next job, as president of the Aspen Institute, was a far more comfortable fit. The organization was established in Colorado in 1949, by a wealthy industrialist named Walter Paepcke, who enlisted the future curator of the *Great Books of the Western World* series to put together a continuing education program for business leaders with limited reading habits, composed of the most significant works in the Western canon. Paepcke’s hypothesis was that mountainside discussions of the likes of Sophocles, Adam Smith, and Herman Melville — interspersed with picnics and the occasional afternoon white-water rafting trip — would help the upper crust “gain access” to their “own humanity by becoming more self-aware, more self-correcting, and more self-fulfilling.” Over the decades, the Institute grew into a kind of nonpartisan paradise, where participants from various, and sometimes opposed, political backgrounds could think out loud and learn from their differences. Aspen was a neutral zone, an intellectual Switzerland, facilitating the peaceful transmission of ideas among people of goodwill. But if Aspen encouraged collegial disagreement, it wasn’t a place for true dissent. With professed neutrality, the Institute quietly pushed its own agenda — to imbue participants with the feeling that they were rightful heirs to and custodians of the Western intellectual tradition, of which their wealth and power were somehow natural outgrowths.
Isaacson took to this agenda gladly, and his biographical works began to reflect the values and style of the Institute. He published his biography of Benjamin Franklin during his first year as president, presenting the founding father as the type of guy who would have felt right at home in the mountain seminars. Isaacson writes that he could “easily imagine having a beer with him after work, showing him how to use the latest digital device, sharing the business plan for a new venture, and discussing the most recent political scandals or policy ideas.” A few years later, Isaacson framed Einstein, too, in the mold of a liberal think-tank fellow of the late 2000s. What made Einstein’s insight into the fabric of the universe possible, Isaacson proposes, was a “nonconformist” spirit, unbounded curiosity, and an appreciation for the arts. (He makes much of the physicist’s prowess on the violin.) Isaacson trumpets not just Einstein’s scientific virtues, but his liberal values, too: “Tyranny repulsed him, and he saw tolerance not simply as a sweet virtue but as a necessary condition for a creative society.” As with Kissinger, Isaacson narrates the two men’s lives in impressive detail, and without too much editorializing. When he does intervene, the analysis is banal, platitudinous, and sentimental. Einstein teaches us, for example, to “question every premise, challenge conventional wisdom, and never accept the truth of something merely because everyone else views it as obvious.”
Isaacson also sought to modernize Aspen for the 21st century. If, in Paepcke’s era, the elites were capitalists who wanted to delve into Goethe, by Isaacson’s time they were increasingly tech investors and founders who wanted to pontificate about the future. The tech scene was one that Isaacson was already familiar with and enamored by. In the 1990s, he had briefly left *Time* to work as the new media editor for Time Warner, where he helped develop Pathfinder.com, a web portal that aggregated content from across the media company. This early attempt at digital journalism failed, costing the company over a hundred million dollars. Isaacson was sent back to edit the magazine, where he satisfied his entrepreneurial urge by establishing a new section covering science and technology, with a focus on the wunderkinds of Silicon Valley. By the time he arrived at Aspen, Isaacson knew how to appeal to this crowd, and one of his first major initiatives was to establish the Aspen Ideas Festival, a weeklong event where “thought leaders’’ gathered to give [TED-like talks](https://www.thedriftmag.com/what-was-the-ted-talk/) to card carriers and members of the public who paid the price of entry. The conference fulfilled the Aspen remit to a tee, but with a modern twist, providing the ruling class with an opportunity to broaden their horizons not by reading ancient tracts, but by listening to snappy presentations from the likes of Colin Powell, Jane Goodall, and Jeff Bezos.
Under Isaacson’s leadership, the new Aspen ideal was to be as interested in Goethe as in quantum computing. Amusingly, Isaacson also retrospectively imposed his admiration for tech innovators onto his historical subjects. Franklin is not just a “successful publisher and consummate networker with an inventive curiosity,” but a man who “would have felt right at home in the information revolution.” And although Einstein was not, like Franklin, much of an inventor — he was more prone to theorizing in the abstract than to patenting — “his fingerprints,” Isaacson emphasizes, “are all over today’s technologies. Photoelectric cells and lasers, nuclear power and fiber optics, space travel, and even semiconductors all trace back to his theories.” There was, clearly, a taste for this kind of thing in the 2000s, when the phrase “techno-enthusiast” could still be uttered with a straight face. Both biographies were best sellers.
**W**ith Franklin and Einstein, Isaacson was simply rearticulating the achievements of canonical geniuses in the vernacular of his time. Jobs represented a different challenge: because he was still alive, a case had to be made for his inclusion in Isaacson’s coterie of polymaths. Following some two years of reporting, Isaacson wrote a fluent narrative about Jobs that, at least superficially, depicted a man with two sides. Sometimes he is a brilliant, intense, eccentric creative with an uncompromising aesthetic vision. Jobs drops acid and travels to India. He takes a course in calligraphy and later uses what he learned there to help develop the Mac’s font range. He sees a Cuisinart food processor at Macy’s and has the idea to encase his computers in molded plastic. Other times, Isaacson shows Jobs as volatile and cruel. He gets his girlfriend pregnant, then denies it. He betrays old friends (including his Apple cofounder, the true engineering genius Steve Wozniak). He parks in handicapped spaces. He screams at subordinates. He cries like a small child when he does not get his way. But whenever Jobs behaves badly or demands too much of his staff, or loses himself in perfectionistic pursuit of some detail, Isaacson demonstrates how the unwieldy parts of Jobs’s temperament allowed him to create world-changing products. The cruel and authoritarian impulses were established, in other words, as necessary components of his creativity. “His personality and passions and products were all interrelated,” Isaacson writes, “just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system.”
It is a classic stereotype: the flawed genius, wherein the flaw is the essence of the genius. It is also a pose that Jobs had previously adopted to market Apple products. In 1997, Apple launched the “Think Different” ad campaign, which featured black-and-white footage of iconic twentieth-century geniuses — Einstein, Picasso, Edison, Martin Luther King, Jr. — as well as a spoken-word poem that, according to Isaacson, Jobs helped draft. Isaacson buys right into the conceit. Instead of offering critical reflection on what type of person invokes Martin Luther King, Jr. to advertise computers, he recapitulates the ad campaign wholesale, concluding the biography with a quote directly from the spoken-word copy (the same one that would later appear in the epigraph of *Musk*): “While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
“Think different” encapsulated Isaacson’s idea of genius in two words, and became one of his mantras. After the biography was published, the chairman of the firm that created the ad accused Isaacson of “revisionist history.” It is true that Jobs had been involved in overseeing the ad, but he had not been the mastermind, as Isaacson portrayed him. In fact, Jobs had initially described the copy for the ad as “shit.” This corrective notwithstanding, Isaacson would continue to attribute the slogan to Jobs alone, and also apply it to his own subjects, even retrospectively. “Einstein had the elusive qualities of genius, which included that intuition and imagination that allowed him to think differently (or, as Mr. Jobs’s ads said, to Think Different),” Isaacson wrote in a 2011 *New York Times* editorial. “Like Mr. Jobs, Franklin enjoyed the concept of applied creativity — taking clever ideas and smart designs and applying them to useful devices.” What’s remarkable here is that Isaacson compares Einstein and Franklin to Jobs, instead of the other way around: with Isaacson’s spin, Jobs becomes their apotheosis, and Silicon Valley begins to look something like the genius promised land.
Of course, Isaacson’s Jobs biography did not inaugurate the Silicon Valley myth. It was evangelized throughout the 1990s, when tech founders were framed as geek heroes who were engineering machines that would one day turn libertarian principles into social facts. What Isaacson did in *Jobs* was repackage the folklore for a mainstream audience and focus it on one person. The pitch worked — and the book’s success transformed Isaacson into a star biographer. In 2012, he was named to *Time*’s list of influential people for writing a “trio of brilliant works about men of genius.” Isaacson later [referred to himself](https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2014/mayjune/conversation/venn-diagram-walter-isaacson) as a Boswell for Silicon Valley, a shadow-like scribe who exists to record how the ingenious live for posterity. A more apt analogy, though, might be Giorgio Vasari, a prominent architect and mediocre artist who lived some five hundred years ago in Florence. In 1550, Vasari published *Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors*, a group biography of Italian artists. A seminal work, it originated the concept of the “Renaissance” and its association with Florence, where Vasari’s benefactors, the Medicis, ruled. It also featured the first full account of the life of Leonardo da Vinci. “So great was his genius, and such its growth, that to whatever difficulties he turned his mind, he solved them with ease,” Vasari writes. Indeed, it was Vasari who established the endlessly repeated trope that it was ingenious Renaissance Men like da Vinci who led Florence, and then all of Europe, out of the darkness and into the light. The book made Vasari’s reputation, too, forever linking his name with this period in history. With the Jobs biography, Isaacson’s project began to bear a distinct resemblance to Vasari’s; Palo Alto became a kind of American Florence, the home base of the 21st-century Renaissance, leading the world towards a brighter, enlightened future. Isaacson was the court biographer.
In his next book, *The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution* (2014), Isaacson traces the lineage of Silicon Valley, a place where “authority should be questioned, hierarchies should be circumvented, nonconformity should be admired, and creativity should be nurtured.” The first forebear of the digital revolution, according to Isaacson, was Ada Lovelace, the mathematician daughter of Lord Byron who developed a theory for programming a prototype computer called the Analytical Engine. Isaacson uses her poetic pedigree and unconventional approach to mathematics to make the argument that, like the Renaissance, the digital age was a product of irreverent creatives who embraced the marriage between the arts and humanities. “I was struck by how the truest creativity of the digital age came from those who were able to connect the arts and sciences,” Isaacson writes. Each subsequent figure is cast in this mold. Claude Shannon is “the eccentric information theorist, who would sometimes ride a unicycle up and down the long red terrazzo corridors while juggling three balls and nodding at colleagues.” Alan Kay builds graphical user interfaces and plays in a jazz band. Sergey Brin and Larry Page attend Montessori schools.
This angle may have sold in 2011, but by 2014 perceptions about tech culture were just beginning to shift. The book’s publication coincided with the beginning of the so-called “tech-lash,” heralded by *The Economist* the year before as a “revolt against the sovereigns of cyberspace.” Pundits were panicking about device addiction and misinformation; the internet, where knowledge was supposed to be free, was beginning to reveal itself as a giant surveillance engine that accumulated wealth and power for the few, while fragmenting society into increasingly antagonistic and paranoid groups. The tech industry was dominated by megacorporations — Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google — that tried to ameliorate concerns about their consolidation of wealth and power with noble slogans like “Don’t Be Evil.’’ Critiques emerged from Silicon Valley stalwarts, like virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier, who lamented how the hyper-successful tech lords had lost touch with their formerly radical, free-spirited values. Tristan Harris, a tech entrepreneur who began to freak out about the fiendishly addictive affordances of social media, established a Center for Humane Technology. Others, like Peter Thiel, thought the problem was that the bloated tech giants had become enfeebled by establishment politics and liberals more concerned with effecting social change than fortifying American power with new technology. Donald Trump’s populist, antiestablishment posturing only emboldened Thiel’s reactionary grievances. Meanwhile, disinformation-obsessed liberals blamed social media and iPhones for rending the fabric of our shared reality — and for bringing about Trump’s election.
If the tech-lash caused Isaacson’s faith in the Silicon Valley model of genius to wobble, he didn’t show it. In 2017, he published a biography of Leonardo da Vinci in which he described the original Renaissance man as innovative — an outsider, the noble bridge between science and art. This was almost indistinguishable from how he wrote about his coterie of hackers, geniuses, and geeks. He went so far as to invoke Jobs’s advertising slogan “Think Different,” this time to capture the spirit of the man who painted the Mona Lisa. “The fifteenth century of Leonardo,” he writes, “was a time of invention, exploration, and the spread of knowledge by new technologies. In short, it was a time like our own.” He continues with a lesson: “Above all, Leonardo’s relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it — to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.”
After the da Vinci biography, Isaacson left the Aspen Institute, became a history professor at Tulane University, took a consulting role focusing on “technology and the new economy” at a global financial services firm, and launched a podcast in partnership with Dell called “Trailblazers,’’ which looked at “digital disruption and innovators using tech to enable human progress.” He also continued working in policy, something he had intermittently done for decades. (Isaacson advised the Bush administration on U.S.-Palestine relations, for example, and under Obama, he was appointed to the Defense Innovation Board.) His next biography, *The Code Breaker* (2021), was about Jennifer Doudna, one of two winners of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on CRISPR gene-editing technology. Although it reprised some themes from his previous works — maverick scientist, innovation, code — it was a departure, too. This was Isaacson’s first full-length work about a woman, and it contained extensive deliberation about the ethics of biomedical technologies. It was also timely. In it, Isaacson reports on how Doudna and her collaborators assisted in the development of the mRNA Covid vaccine. The savior in that moment was not some tech maven, but an international conglomerate of scientists who collaborated extensively with global public health institutions. Was Isaacson taking a step away from the hyper-individualistic Silicon Valley and towards a broader, more complex conception of scientific innovation?
**N**ot quite. A few months after the Doudna book came out, Isaacson spoke to Elon Musk on the phone. Musk was, at the time, on the cusp of becoming the richest man in the world, a position consolidated during the pandemic. For some, this made Musk a hero: a brazen, freethinking visionary, leading humanity into a brighter future. For others, Musk became a symbol of everything that was wrong with Silicon Valley: he was the mad king of a high-tech feudal state. In any case, he was the object of our collective fascination, a walking headline. Isaacson embraced the opportunity to get close to this powerful and polarizing figure, and he produced a biography of astounding access and significant detail. If you’re curious about what Musk’s life looks like day to day, Isaacson paints a vivid picture of the chaos — all laid out in highly consumable prose. As usual, Isaacson promises to be objective — to show all sides of the man while withholding judgment. This may have worked with Einstein, da Vinci, and even Jobs. But Elon Musk was like cable news come to life; he may have once appealed to CNN viewers, but was now looking more and more like a Fox guy. And Isaacson did not learn his lesson from his time at CNN. In his effort to appeal to Musk’s lovers and haters, he ended up making himself look like an apologist.
To begin, Isaacson delves into Musk’s upbringing in apartheid South Africa. Two formative experiences are recounted. The first is veldskool, a sadistic militant survival camp for boys, where Musk learned “that if someone bullied me, I could punch them very hard in the nose, and then they wouldn’t bully me again.” The other comes courtesy of Errol Musk, the psychologically abusive father who berates Elon after he is awfully beaten by another boy at his school. Evidently, Musk internalized the savagery of his early years; Isaacson could have offered a psychoanalytic reading of how this prepared him for the cutthroat, domineering, hyper-capitalist world of Silicon Valley. But Isaacson would rather view his high-tech Florence as a creative utopia. Accordingly, he frames Musk’s trauma in cartoonish, Marvel-like terms: Musk is beset by demons, but like Jobs, he ultimately channels them to “nurture the flame of human consciousness, fathom the universe, and save our planet.” In one scene, Musk challenges the CTO of PayPal, Max Levchin, to an arm wrestle to resolve a disagreement about operating systems. Musk wins and enlists a team of engineers to rewrite the existing code. The effort takes an entire year and achieves nothing other than distracting engineers from a dire fraud problem on the service. But Isaacson ties this up in a mini-redemption arc: Levchin is seen marveling at Musk’s technical expertise. As in *Jobs*, Isaacson employs his troubled-genius bait and switch, recounting an unhinged Musk anecdote and then justifying it with a moment of brilliance.
The trouble is, there is very little in Musk’s early life that offers any evidence of genius, creative talent, or even above-average intelligence. He is an emotionally detached child who sits in class staring into space. He likes computer games and *The* *Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*. He gets As and Bs. The only evidence of superlative capability that Isaacson can conjure is that Musk read his dad’s encyclopedias and made small rockets with chlorine and brake fluid. What does stand out among this otherwise entirely unremarkable youth are stories in which Musk succeeds through dumb luck and aggression. In one, Musk competes in a Dungeons and Dragons tournament with his brother and cousins. The game master tells them that their mission is to identify the bad guy among the opposing players. On the first move, and without any evidence, Musk correctly guesses that the game master himself is the bad guy. The others accuse Musk of cheating. How did he know? “These guys were idiots,” Musk explains to Isaacson. “It was so obvious.” Any reader can see that this story is just Musk being a cocky teenage boy. Isaacson, however, takes it as proof that Musk could “think different.” Musk’s big break comes when he sells his first company, Zip2, at the height of the dot-com boom for $307 million. Zip2 is a searchable business directory that uses map software to give users directions. It’s not exactly the Mona Lisa, but, as Isaacson insists, “some of the best innovations come from combining two previous innovations.” Musk parlays the capital from that sale into an online-payments business that, fortunately, merges with PayPal. What does he contribute? An idea that new users could sign up with their email addresses instead of their Social Security numbers. Isaacson: “Like Steve Jobs, he had a passion for simplicity when it came to designing user interface screens.”
If there is anything remarkable that emerges about Musk in the biography, it is his grandiose, cosmic sense of mission — his obsession with making humanity multi-planetary, for example — and his absurd appetite for risk. The combination could be inspiring for those Musk worked with — and it certainly makes for good marketing. Like Jobs, Musk’s great talent is in self-mythologizing. He builds his cult of personality not around the guru-creative ideal, as Jobs did, but as a crazed, workaholic, alpha-male superhero: a manic Iron Man sending a Tesla Roadster into space. Isaacson credulously regurgitates Musk’s lore, just as he did in *Jobs,* recounting an anecdote in which Musk plays a game of Texas Hold ’Em and goes all in on every single hand — losing, doubling up — until he eventually wins. “It would be a theme in his life,” Isaacson writes. “Avoid taking chips off the table; keep risking them.”
To redeem Musk as a Jobs-like genius, Isaacson leans heavily on the “crazy” element of the “think different” campaign. It is the “crazy ones,” the ones who go all in at poker, who change the world. The problem is, as the biography progresses, the craziness intensifies even as it bears little connection to the genuine achievements of Musk’s companies, which are adeptly run by very talented employees who do their best to keep Musk out of the way. Isaacson tries to craft a coherent narrative out of such life events as: Musk accusing a British caver who helped save trapped Thai soccer players of being a “pedo guy”; smoking a fat blunt on Joe Rogan’s podcast while talking about our coming A.I. overlords; naming his son with the musician Grimes X Æ A-Xii. Isaacson attempts humor at times, affecting the befuddled tone of a naive grandfather regaling internet drama. When Musk takes over Twitter, Isaacson frames the chaos as a kind of clownish farce.
The contrived goofiness distracts from the troubling reality that, as Musk grew more deranged, his power increased. By 2021, when Isaacson began reporting the book, Musk was running two of the world’s most important companies: Tesla and SpaceX (including its subsidiary Starlink). Isaacson got to see in real time how Musk wielded his influence. One evening, in September 2022, Musk messaged Isaacson to tell him that Ukraine was planning a surprise attack on a Russian naval fleet in Crimea with Starlink-connected submarine drones. Musk told Isaacson he believed there was a “non-trivial possibility” that such an attack could trigger nuclear war, so, as Isaacson tells it, “he reaffirmed a secret policy that he had implemented, which the Ukrainians did not know about, to disable coverage within a hundred kilometers of the Crimean coast.” But Isaacson got the facts wrong. There was no Starlink coverage enabled all the way to Crimea to begin with. The Ukrainians asked Musk to switch it on for their drone attack, but he declined. Much was made of this error after *Musk* was published, but more concerning than Isaacson’s errant reporting was his indifference to the fact that, whether Musk made the order directly or simply affirmed the preexisting geographical limit, the final decision was still ultimately his alone, giving Musk almost state-like authority. Isaacson fails to call this for what it is: a completely undemocratic consolidation of power. Instead, Isaacson tempers the whole terrifying ordeal by assuring us that Musk never sought such power. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars,” Musk told Isaacson during a late night phone call. “It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.” Once again, Isaacson’s performance of neutrality precludes him from a clear-eyed assessment of his subject. If Kissinger was a serial killer dressed up as a peacemaker, Musk is a mad, petulant oligarch dressed up as a genius.
Isaacson is fond of concluding his books with pithy parting phrases that capture, and also reduce, his subjects. Einstein, we’re told, is the “locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe.” Da Vinci is “the epitome of the universal mind.” Jobs is one of the “crazy ones” who “push the human race forward.” He makes no such attempt to summarize Musk. This biography ends at a Starship Launch on 4/20, Musk’s favorite day, because of its associations with weed. He is hyped up on Red Bull with Grimes and three of his eleven kids by his side. He whistles “Ode to Joy” and then gives the command for his rocket to self-destruct after it fails to get into orbit. It is a scene of almost fantastical madness, but Isaacson can’t tell what it all means. In part, this is because Musk just doesn’t fit within the rubric of Isaacson’s new Renaissance Man. It’s also because, as Isaacson was writing the draft, and also after the book was published, Musk continued to unravel publicly, doing dumb things and posting about it for us all to see. In fact, the sense I got, on finishing the book, was that if Musk’s life signifies anything it is how the Vitruvian sense of ourselves as heroic creatures about whom coherent biographies may be written disintegrates online. Life on the platforms unfolds in a fractious and disorienting present tense, never cohering into a meaningful narrative. It is all crisis and reaction, grist for the content mill.
**T**here must be a valuable lesson in the material of Musk’s life — a metaphor for the false promise of Silicon Valley, maybe, which was always the veldskool painted as utopia. But Isaacson has made himself a main character in this tragedy (or is it by now a farce?). Like Vasari to the house of Medici, Isaacson has tied his name to the house of Palo Alto. He is unable to unveil its darker truths without implicating himself.
In the book’s penultimate chapter, Isaacson is summoned to meet Musk in Austin, where the purported genius waxes lyrical about how human intelligence is leveling off while digital intelligence increases exponentially. The A.I. overlords are coming. Musk feels it is his duty to intervene, to develop A.I. according to the principles of rationality and truth, so that our civilization may endure — which is why, Musk tells Isaacson, he is starting an A.I. company. This is right out of the Silicon Valley marketing playbook: by framing the algorithms in folkloric terms of good and evil, tech companies distract from the ways in which they are leveraging mass-surveillance apparatuses, accumulating our data and selling it back to us in the form of supposedly super-advanced A.I. that sometimes gets basic math wrong. Isaacson, as always, repeats the tale dutifully, with little critical intervention.
All this suggests that Isaacson’s next project might just be a ham-fisted biography of A.I. itself — the genius machines created in our image. After all, Isaacson is perfectly placed to whitewash power with the language of humanism. It’s been his project all along. Though Isaacson’s biographies have become so predictable, his style so platitudinous, that we could probably just do it for him, with a bit of help. Computer: write a genius biography of A.I. in the style of Walter Isaacson.
Oscar Schwartz is a writer and journalist. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.
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35
00.03 News/Cillian Murphy Is the Man of the Moment.md
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**In the fall of 2021,** Christopher Nolan knew just where to find Cillian Murphy. The director flew to Ireland with a document in his carry-on, Hollywood’s equivalent of the nuclear football. It was a script for his top secret new film, printed, apparently, on red paper. “Which is supposedly photocopy-proof,” Murphy explained. He wasn’t surprised by the in-person visit. The two had worked together on five previous films, and every Nolan script, Murphy said, had been dropped off by Nolan or one of his family members. “So, like, it’s been his mom who’s delivered the script to me before. Or his brother, he’ll go away and come back in three hours. Part of it has to do with keeping the story secret before it goes out. But part of it has to do with tradition. They’ve always done it this way, so why stop now? It does add a ritual to it, which I really appreciate. It suits me.”
Cillian Murphy covers the March 2024 issue of GQ. [Subscribe to GQ >>>](https://subscribe.gq.com/subscribe/gq/150922?source=EDT_GQM_EDIT_IN_ARTICLE_TOUT_0_COVERSTORY_MARCH_ISSUE_2024_ZZ)
Shirt and pants by Versace. Tank top by Calvin Klein. Belt from Kincaid Archive Malibu. Socks by Uniqlo. Necklace (bottom) and ring (on ring finger), his own.
Murphy met Nolan at his Dublin hotel room—and then Nolan left him to read. He read and read and read. All 197 pages, the rarest kind of script, written in the first person of the film’s protagonist, J. Robert Oppenheimer. All action, all incidence, swirling around this character—a big-brained, psychologically complex giant of world history. Murphy had never played a lead in a Nolan film before, but had committed to this role as soon as Nolan told him about it, before he’d even seen a page of the script. “He’d already called me and said he wanted me to play the part. And I had said Yes—because I always say Yes to him.” The afternoon ran out. “And he doesn’t have a phone or anything,” Murphy said. “But he knew instinctively when to come back.” Nolan in command of time, as ever. They spent the rest of the evening together—and then Murphy took the DART train home, and got to work.
@ -61,8 +58,6 @@ He tries to do one movie a year, preferably not in summer, when he likes to spen
In Monkstown. Probably at his table. Looking present. Clear-eyed. Like any local, but with more moisture in his skin. At dinner, he asked me just once not to put something in the piece: a nuanced take he shared on a local establishment. Nothing so dangerous as an unwelcome opinion in a small town. No truer sign of someone “just fucking living” there. The dream.
Sweater by Tom Ford. Pants by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Scarf, stylist’s own. Necklace (top) by Mikimoto.
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**Nolan had first** seen Murphy in 2003, in a promotional image for *28 Days Later* that had run in the *San Francisco Chronicle.* “I was looking to cast Batman, looking for some actors to screen-test, and I was just very struck by his eyes, his appearance, everything about him, wanted to find out more,” Nolan told me. “When I met him, he didn’t strike me as necessarily right for Batman. But there was just a *vibe*—there are people you meet in your life who you just want to stay connected with, work with, you try to find ways to create together.” So Nolan put him on camera just to see what happened. “He first performed as Bruce Wayne, and I saw the crew stop and pay attention in a way that I had never seen before, and really never seen since. And it was this electricity just coming off the guy, it was an incredible energy. And so I called some executives, and they were impressed enough with him that they let me cast him as Scarecrow. Those Batman villains at the time had only ever been played by huge stars — Jack Nicholson, Arnold Schwarzenegger. So, it’s just a testament to his raw talent.”
@ -79,9 +74,7 @@ Murphy was back in his room, preserving his energy, prepping for the next day, m
“Okay, he’s losing weight, he can’t eat at night, you know he’s miserable,” Damon said. “But you know he’s doing what’s best for the movie that you all want to be as good as possible, and so you’re cheering him on. But at dinner you’re sitting there and you’re all shaking your heads going, *Man,* this is brutal.”
“The one thing that he would allow himself, his one luxury, is that he would take a bath at night. I mean he would allow himself literally a few almonds or something. And then sit in his bath with his script and just work. By himself, every night.”
T-shirt from Raggedy Threads. Pants by Prada. Shoes by Bally. Socks by Uniqlo.
“The one thing that he would allow himself, his one luxury, is that he would take a bath at night. I mean he would allow himself literally a few almonds or something. And then sit in his bath with his script and just work. By himself, every night.”.
The performance is so big, but so much of it is invisible to the audience, in the concentrated intensity of the interpretation. The nucleus. Toward which so many elements subtly draw us closer to his character. Just one example: If it were period accurate, Murphy said, everyone would be smoking and wearing hats, but he’s the only one doing either. “It’s emphatic, but subliminally so.” The author Kai Bird, who cowrote the monumental biography of Oppenheimer, *American Prometheus,* upon which the film is based, spent a day at the Los Alamos set watching Murphy play the scene where Oppenheimer talks to his team of scientists about the bomb while someone drops marbles into a fishbowl and a snifter. “At one point during a break, he approached wearing his baggy brown suit and turquoise belt and I raised my arms and shouted, ‘Dr. Oppenheimer, Dr. Oppenheimer, I’ve been waiting decades to meet you!’ ” Bird said. “He especially captured the voice and Oppie’s intensity.” (At one point during our conversation, Bird asked me to confirm: “Those are *his* blue eyes, right? Or is he wearing lenses?”)
@ -91,8 +84,6 @@ Murphy’s reticence in many interviews is palpable. “It’s like Joanne Woodw
“People always used to say to me, ‘He has reservations’ or ‘He’s a difficult interviewee,’ ” Murphy said. “Not really! I love talking about work, about art. What I struggle with, and find unnecessary, and unhelpful about what I want to do, is: ‘Tell me about yourself…’ ”
All clothing by Ralph Lauren Purple Label. Necklace (top) by Atra Nova by Sheila B. Necklace (middle) by FoundRae. Necklace (bottom), his own.
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**Nonetheless: He grew** up in Cork. Went to Catholic school better suited for a certain kind of athletic boy than an artistic soul. “I always fucking hated team sports. I like watching them. But I was terrible at them,” he said. That classic system for schooling was not good for him, “emotionally and psychologically,” he said. “But at least it gave me something to push against.”
@ -103,8 +94,6 @@ That winter weekend, while walking around Dublin, on a bit of a Joycean ramble,
“Theater is the key to Cillian,” director Danny Boyle told me. “Weirdly, given that he is such an extraordinary film actor.” That ability, from the theater, to travel the great distance of an extreme character arc. “Everybody talks about his dreamy Paul Newman eyes. And all that’s to his advantage, of course, because behind is this capacity, this reach that he has into volcanic energy.” (The other key to Cillian, Boyle said, is that he’s a bloody Irishman: “He’s one of the great, great exports, and the homeland clearly nourishes him constantly.”) Boyle cast Murphy in 2002’s *28 Days Later,* the first film of Murphy’s that made him known. It led, in its way, to the Nolan partnership, as well to working with Boyle again on 2007’s *Sunshine.* “When we did *28 Days Later,* he was really just starting off,” Boyle said. “By the time he came back for *Sunshine,* he was a seriously accomplished actor.”
Vintage kimono from Cannonball and Tilly Vintage. Tank top by Calvin Klein. Pants by The Row.
In the aughts, Murphy was working frequently, in some movies that were better than others. “Many of my films I haven’t seen,” he said. “I know that Johnny Depp would always say that, but it’s actually true. Generally the ones I haven’t seen are the ones I hear are not good.”
I asked him if he’s seen *Oppenheimer*.
@ -127,8 +116,6 @@ Murphy and his filmmakers have run this play several ways in recent years. In *A
The first frame he appears in in *Anthropoid,* a moonbeam strikes his cheekbone, like it’s a plane of alabaster, and the question immediately pops to mind: Are you a Nazi or the resistance? Are you the good guy or the bad guy—or both, that “*two* thing.” The stable and the wild. The duality. The pull within.
Robe by Ralph Lauren Purple Label. Shirt by Van Heusen, from Front General Store. Pants by The Row. Belt from Kincaid Archive Malibu.
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**In Dublin,** we found ourselves walking through busy streets, beneath abundant winter sunshine and caustic seagulls. We were approached by fans at a shocking clip—but also by sisters of friends.
@ -171,8 +158,6 @@ Murphy joked at one point that he spent the actors’ strike at home “eating c
One film a year, control, restraint, a hand firmly on the wheel.
T-shirt from Kincaid Archive Malibu. Pants by Alexander McQueen. Shoes by Bally. Socks by Pantherella.
Murphy has a natural propensity to an analog lifestyle that works well with Nolan, who doesn’t use email or have a smartphone. “I aspire to that life,” Murphy said. “I was just clearing stuff off my phone, but have to keep the apps for music and music discovery.”
“I still have all my CDs and DVDs and Blu-Rays,” he said. “I *cannot* get rid of them. I did get rid of my VHS, though. I just left them on the street because nobody wanted them. I went and brought them to a library and was like, *Look at this pretentious collection of art films!*—and they were like, No thanks, man…”
@ -193,8 +178,6 @@ When I put it to Murphy, he took a beat: “There’s a big, big body of work th
Murphy told me he’d heard “one of the Sydneys”—Lumet or Pollack—once said that it takes 30 years to make an actor. He believed that. “I’m 27 years,” he said. “So I’m close.”
Vintage coat by Saint Laurent by Hedi Slimane from David Casavant Archive. Vintage tank top by Helmut Lang from David Casavant Archive. Pants by Dior Men. Necklace (top) by Mikimoto. Necklace (bottom) by Platt Boutique Jewelry.
---
**After Nolan** hand-delivered the *Oppenheimer* script to Murphy and left him to read in that Dublin hotel room, he made his way to the Hugh Lane Gallery, and, more specifically, to the Francis Bacon studio there, a perfect preservation of the impossibly messy London studio where the Irish-born painter had lived and worked for much of his life. Murphy and Nolan share a love of Bacon—a towering figure of the 20th century, born in its first decade, dead in its last. Besides the reassembled studio, the museum has several paintings by Bacon—some finished, some unfinished. In all instances, though, the portraits of people—ghoulishly distorted figures—were rendered unsparingly. Never perfect representations. Never straight impressions. But rather an artist’s interpretation of another being, reconfigured into a stark image. You can see what might appeal to both a director of a biopic and his leading man.
@ -237,20 +220,6 @@ He said it again: “Deepen the mystery. That’s it, isn’t it?”
*A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2024 issue of GQ with the title “How Cillian Murphy Cracked the Code”*
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**PRODUCTION CREDITS:**
*Photographs by **Gregory Harris***
*Styled by **George Cortina***
*Hair by **Teddy Charles** at Nevermind Agency*
*Skin by **Holly Silius** using Lyma & YSL Beauty*
*Set Design by **Colin Donahue** for Owl and the Elephant Agency*
*Produced by **Paul Preiss** at Preiss Creative*
**OPENING IMAGE FASHION CREDITS:** *Jacket by Hermès. Shirt by Dries Van Noten. Pants and belt (throughout) from Kincaid Archive Malibu. Boots by Manolo Blahnik. Necklace (top) by Atra Nova by Sheila B. Necklaces (second and third from top) and bracelets (on right wrist, top and bottom, throughout) by Platt Boutique Jewelry. Necklace (bottom) and ring (on ring finger, throughout), his own. Watch (on left wrist, middle, throughout) and bracelets (on left wrist, bottom, and throughout, and on right wrist, middle, throughout) from FD Gallery. Bracelet (on left wrist, top, and throughout) by Belperron. Ring (on left pinkie, throughout) by TenThousandThings. Rings (on right pinkie, throughout) by Graff.*
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00.03 News/Dear Caitlin Clark ….md
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# Dear Caitlin Clark …
Dear Caitlin Clark,
This week, I was lucky enough to see you play in person. I brought my 5-year-old daughter to Williams Arena in Minneapolis, where I live now with my wife and two girls. You dominated as usual and were playing at a different level than anyone else on the court. The shots you were making reminded me of when I would play NBA video games with a cheat code.
To be honest, we really don't have much in common. I'm a first-generation Sri Lankan immigrant, and my parents didn't really know much about American sports, so I found my own path. I remember watching a VHS tape with a documentary I found of Michael Jordan and was amazed by him. I watched "Space Jam" and joined my middle school basketball team. I was terrible. On my best day, on full stretch, I'm a whopping 5 feet 4 inches. Basketball never was and never will be my jam.
In late middle school I discovered tennis. I was good, not great, but I harnessed the energy of MJ and learned how to outwork and outhustle my opponents and ended up playing in high school and college. I learned a lot of life lessons from sports along the way and I told myself I would teach my kids how to play sports early so they wouldn't be playing catch up like me.
For better or worse, this imaginary future kid I was teaching was always a boy.
Fast-forward a few years, and I now am the proud dad to two girls. For the first few years of their short little lives, my work prevented me from spending as much time as I wanted with them. I've been intentional about building my relationship to these two absolute gems of humans — but at first, it was hard to connect. I played dress-up and dolls and let them paint my fingernails — all of which they loved, but mommy was always better at it. We started regular daddy daughter dates to help foster our relationship.
My youngest daughter was an easy egg to crack. We both love cinnamon rolls and have regular daddy daughter dates exploring various cinnamon roll shops around the Twin Cities. My eldest daughter has been more complex. It took a while, but I found my cheat code.
Caitlin Clark.
Our daddy daughter dates occur whenever you play. We sit back, relax, and watch you dominate. I see the same transformation in her as I did in myself when I first learned of the grit and tenacity that was "like Mike." Together, I've watched my daughter's confidence soar as we have learned about how practice helps you get better, how to be a good teammate, and how sometimes we win and sometimes we lose, but we always try to our best.
Before you came along, I was stuck in a rut in my own fatherhood, because I had only ever imagined raising a boy. I don't believe this shortsighted childhood perspective was borne of bigotry or pro-patriarchy sentiments. Rather, like many Americans, my fault was that the lens in which I viewed the future was biased by my own personal experience. While I was getting my fingernails painted and playing with dolls, it was hard for me to impart the "be like Mike' lessons that shaped my own childhood.
This week, I spent an outrageous amount of money to see you in person with my 5-year-old daughter. You were electric as usual and we jumped and danced and cheered. At one point, my daughter leaned over to me and said, "She hits that shot in the game because she works on it a lot in practice, right daddy!" It was worth every penny. You even graciously stuck around and signed our jersey at the end of the game. I said, "Thank you! You are amazing!" I wanted to say so much more, but there were hundreds of other little girls with their moms and dads waiting to see you.
Allow me to try one more time now that the throngs of adoring fans are gone:
Dear Caitlin Clark,
If you read this, I want to say thank you.
Thank you for being an electrifying, transcendent athlete who is actively changing the world of sport. But mostly, thank you for helping me be a better dad.
*Dr. Asitha Jayawardena is a pediatric ENT surgeon at Childrens Minnesota.*
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00.03 News/Gangsters, Money and Murder How Chinese Organized Crime Is Dominating America’s Illegal Marijuana Market.md
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# Gangsters, Money and Murder: How Chinese Organized Crime Is Dominating America’s Illegal Marijuana Market
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive [our biggest stories](https://www.propublica.org/newsletters/the-big-story?source=www.propublica.org&placement=top-note&region=national) as soon as they’re published. This article was produced in partnership with [The Frontier](https://www.readfrontier.org/).
It seemed an unlikely spot for a showdown between Chinese gangsters: a marijuana farm on the prairie in Kingfisher County, Oklahoma.
On a Sunday evening in late November 2022, a blue Toyota Corolla sped down a dirt-and-gravel road in the twilight, passing hay meadows and columns of giant wind turbines spinning on the horizon. The Corolla braked and turned, headlights sweeping across prairie grass, and entered the driveway of a 10-acre compound filled with circular huts and row after row of greenhouses. Past a ranch house, the sedan stopped outside a large detached garage.
The driver, Chen Wu, burst out of the car with a 9 mm pistol in his hand. Balding and muscular, he had worked at the farm and invested in the illegal marijuana operation.
Charging into the garage, Wu confronted the five men and one woman working inside. Like him, they were immigrants from China. Piles of marijuana leaves cluttered the brightly lit room, covering a table and stuffed into plastic bins and cardboard boxes.
![](https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/20240312_ok-marijuana-bodycam-room01.jpg?crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=450&q=75&w=800&s=469452c3a7db5e58c27721308201f186)
Stacks and boxes of marijuana fill the garage where four people were shot to death on a farm, shown in a still image from a sheriff’s deputy’s bodycam video. Credit: Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department
Wu aimed his gun at He Qiang Chen, a 56-year-old ex-convict known at the farm as “the Boss.” Chen had a temper; he was awaiting trial in the beating and shooting of a man two years earlier at a Chinese community center in Oklahoma City.
Before Chen could make a move, Wu shot him in the right knee. The boss fell to the floor, writhing in pain.
Wu held the others at gunpoint. He said Chen owed him $300,000 and told his hostages they had half an hour to get him the money.
If they didn’t, he said, he would kill them all.
Both the shooter and his victim were from Fujian, a coastal province known for mafias, immigration and corruption. They had come to America and joined a wave of new players rushing into the nation’s billion-dollar marijuana boom: Chinese mobsters who roam from state to state, harvesting drugs and cash and overwhelming law enforcement with their resources and elusiveness.
Now, their itinerant odysseys had collided in this remote outpost in the heartland. The clash left four people dead and unveiled an international underworld of dangerous dimensions.
### Wild West
The bloodshed in Kingfisher County made national headlines, highlighting Oklahoma’s role as the latest and wildest frontier in the marijuana underworld.
From California to Maine, Chinese organized crime has come to dominate much of the nation’s illicit marijuana trade, an investigation by ProPublica and The Frontier has found. Along with the explosive growth of this criminal industry, the gangsters have unleashed lawlessness: violence, drug trafficking, money laundering, gambling, bribery, document fraud, bank fraud, environmental damage and theft of water and electricity.
Chinese organized crime “has taken over marijuana in Oklahoma and the United States,” said Donnie Anderson, the director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, in an interview.
Among the victims are thousands of Chinese immigrants, many of them smuggled across the Mexican border to toil in often abusive conditions at farms ringed by fences, surveillance cameras and guards with guns and machetes. A grim offshoot of this indentured servitude: Traffickers force Chinese immigrant women into prostitution for the bosses of the agricultural workforce.
The mobsters operate in a loose but disciplined confederation overseen from New York by mafias rooted in southern China, according to state and federal officials. Known as “triads” because of an emblem used long ago by secret societies, these criminal groups wield power at home and throughout the diaspora and allegedly maintain an alliance with the Chinese state.
In 2018, the mafias set their sights on Oklahoma when the state’s voters approved a ballot measure that legalized the cultivation and sale of marijuana for medicinal purposes. The law did not limit the number of dispensaries or growing operations – known in the industry simply as “grows.” It requires marijuana businesses to have majority owners who have lived in the state for two years, and it bars [shipping](https://www.oscn.net/applications/oscn/DeliverDocument.asp?CiteID=486029) the product [across state lines](https://law.justia.com/codes/oklahoma/2022/title-63/section-63-423v1/). But limited enforcement enabled out-of-state investors to recruit illegal “straw owners” and to traffic weed clandestinely across the country. And land was cheap. In this wide-open atmosphere, the industry grew at breakneck speed and, regulators say, is now second only to the oil and gas industry in the state.
Since Colorado became the first state to legalize marijuana for personal use in 2012, a patchwork of marijuana-related legislation has developed across the country. State authorities generally require licenses and put limits on cultivation, and federal law prohibits interstate sales. But steep taxes on legal products and gaps and differences in laws across states have created the conditions for a massive black market to thrive.
![](https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/20240312_ok-marijuana-bodycam-grow01.jpg?crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=450&q=75&w=800&s=29a82f150c0f3d89e707f34c2ea82279)
A body-camera image shows a law enforcement officer responding to the murders at the marijuana farm. Credit: Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department
Oklahoma has quickly become a top supplier of illicit weed. Although street prices fluctuate and calculating the value of a black market is complex, officials estimate the value of the illegal marijuana grown in the state at somewhere between $18 billion and $44 billion a year. State investigators have found links between foreign mafias and over 3,000 illegal grows — and they say that more than 80% of the criminal groups are of Chinese origin.
The federal response, however, has been muted. With the spread of legalization and decriminalization, enforcement has become a low priority for the U.S. Department of Justice, anti-drug veterans say.
“The challenge we are having is a lack of interest by federal prosecutors to charge illicit marijuana cases,” said Ray Donovan, the former chief of operations of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “They don’t realize all the implications. Marijuana causes so much crime at the local level, gun violence in particular. The same groups selling thousands of pounds of marijuana are also laundering millions of dollars of fentanyl money. It’s not just one-dimensional.”
The expansion into the cannabis market is propelling the rise of Chinese organized crime as a global powerhouse, current and former national security officials say. During the past decade, [Chinese mafias became the dominant money launderers](https://www.propublica.org/article/china-cartels-xizhi-li-money-laundering) [](https://www.propublica.org/article/china-cartels-xizhi-li-money-laundering)for Latin American cartels dealing narcotics including fentanyl, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. The huge revenue stream from marijuana fuels that laundering apparatus, which is “the most extensive network of underground banking in the world,” said a former senior DEA official, Donald Im.
“The profits from the marijuana trade allow the Chinese organized criminal networks to expand their underground global banking system for cartels and other criminal organizations,” said Im, who was an architect of the DEA’s fight against Chinese organized crime.
U.S. law enforcement struggles to respond to this multifaceted threat. State and federal agencies suffer from a lack of personnel who know Chinese language and culture well enough to investigate complex cases, infiltrate networks or translate intercepts, current and former officials say. A federal shift of priorities to counterterrorism after 2001 meant resources dedicated to Chinese organized crime dwindled — while the power of the underworld grew.
And the shadow of the Chinese state hovers over it all. [As ProPublica has reported](https://www.propublica.org/article/how-beijing-chinese-mafia-europe-protect-interests), the authoritarian regime and the mafias allegedly maintain an alliance that benefits both sides. In exchange for government protection, Chinese mobsters [deliver services](https://www.smh.com.au/national/illegal-malign-china-s-state-sponsored-crime-stretches-across-pacific-20230517-p5d8xe.html) such as illegally moving money overseas for the Communist Party elite and helping to spy on and intimidate Chinese immigrant communities, according to Western national security officials, case files, Chinese dissidents and human rights groups.
Because China has emerged as the top geopolitical rival of the United States, carrying out brazen espionage and influence activities in this country, the spread of Chinese mafias in Oklahoma and elsewhere also poses a potential national security threat, state and federal officials say.
Leaders of Chinese cultural associations in Oklahoma and other states are allegedly connected to both the illegal marijuana trade and to Chinese government officials, ProPublica and The Frontier have found. A number of influential leaders have been charged with or convicted of crimes ranging from drug offenses to witness intimidation. (A second part of this series further explores that issue.)
“You’d be very naive to sit and say the Chinese state doesn’t know what Chinese organized crime is doing in the U.S.,” Anderson said, “or that there is not a connection between the Chinese state and organized crime.”
In February, [50 U.S. legislators wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland](https://www.ernst.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/ernst_works_to_shut_down_ccp-linked_marijuana_farms.pdf) expressing concern that Chinese nationals, “including those with potential ties to the Chinese Communist Party,” are “reportedly operating thousands of illicit marijuana farms across the country.”
The bipartisan group of lawmakers, who included all but two members of Oklahoma’s congressional delegation, asked whether federal authorities are investigating CCP connections to the marijuana underworld and how much illicit revenue returns to China.
The Department of Justice plans to respond to the questions raised by the legislators, a department spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
“The Department is working on developing a marijuana enforcement policy that will be consistent” with federal guidance related to state legalization initiatives, said the spokesperson, Peter Carr. “Among the federal enforcement priorities under that policy is preventing the revenue from the illegal distribution of marijuana from going to criminal enterprises, gangs, and cartels.”
The department declined to comment about other issues raised in this story.
In response to a list of questions, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, D.C., said in an emailed statement that he was “not aware of the specifics” related to Chinese organized crime in the marijuana industry. But the spokesperson, Liu Pengyu, said China wages a determined fight against drugs, the “common enemy of mankind.”
“We always ask our fellow citizens to observe local laws and regulations and refrain from engaging in any illegal or criminal activities while they are abroad,” Liu said in the written statement. “The Chinese government is steadfast on fighting drug crimes, playing an active part in international anti-drug cooperation, and resolving the drug issue with other countries including the US in an active and responsible attitude.”
ProPublica and The Frontier interviewed more than three dozen current and former law enforcement officials in the United States and overseas, as well as academic experts, defense lawyers, farmworkers, Chinese dissidents, Chinese-American leaders, human rights advocates and others. Some sources were granted anonymity to protect their safety or because they were not authorized to speak to the media. Reporters reviewed thousands of pages of court files, government reports, news reports and social media posts in English, Chinese and other languages.
![](https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/20240305-stefano-summo-mj-ca-ok-plane.jpg?crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=395&q=75&w=800&s=e5fede3fb96bc3e676aa761b85f59bd5)
Credit: Stefano Summo for ProPublica
### California Dreams
He Qiang Chen came to New York about 30 years ago from the Changle district outside Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian.
Chen and his older brother opened a restaurant and a laundry in the Bronx and became legal U.S. residents. By the early 2000s, they had moved to North Carolina, where they also ran restaurants, according to public records and law enforcement officials. They shuttled back and forth to New York, buying properties in and around Flushing, which has a vibrant Chinese business district. The area has also developed a reputation as a bastion of Chinese crime bosses with nationwide reach, leading to a refrain in law enforcement: “All roads lead to Flushing.”
Until about five years ago, public records indicate that Chen’s encounters with the justice system consisted of repeated tickets for speeding and reckless driving.
In 2017, though, the brothers launched into the marijuana racket at a level that would make investigators think they’d been involved in crime for a while. They went to California, where Chen paid $825,000 for a four-bedroom house behind a wrought-iron gate in the San Joaquin Valley about 35 miles from Sacramento.
The semirural lot was near a winery and an equestrian center. But Chen wasn't interested in genteel pastimes. Along with his romantic companion, a 43-year-old woman from San Francisco named Fang Hui Lee, Chen and his brother got to work converting the spacious barn into a cannabis plantation.
Several associates also established themselves in the Sacramento area. A 39-year-old fellow transplant from North Carolina, Yifei Lin, bought a suburban house and set up a clandestine indoor grow, court records show.
The cross-country move was part of a migration of criminal groups into the marijuana industry. Other destinations included Colorado and the Pacific Northwest. California law limited cannabis for personal use to six plants and required commercial growers to get a license. With criminal penalties diminishing, the goals of legalization were to establish regulation, generate tax revenue and eliminate organized crime from the picture.
Instead, the low risk and fast money set off a feeding frenzy. The players who established clandestine grows included Mexican cartels, Cuban immigrant gangs and longtime locals. But the [Chinese crews were the biggest and best organized](https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/21/illicit-cannabis-china-00086125). They smuggled their product by car, truck and plane to the East Coast, where profit margins were stratospheric.
In this rapacious subculture, mobsters went into subdivisions and snapped up a half dozen homes at a time. In San Bernardino County, east of Los Angeles, a federal court [convicted a real estate agent](https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/chino-real-estate-agent-pleads-guilty-charge-coordinating-multi-million-dollar-scheme) in 2020 for a typical tactic: paying “ghost owners” to fly in from China posing as buyers, sign paperwork and go home, according to case files and interviews.
The bosses brought in recent Chinese immigrants to tend indoor crops, often stealing industrial quantities of water and power from public utility systems for their operations. Grow houses created a nefarious mix of risks: toxic fumes from banned pesticides, [deadly fires](https://www.sgvtribune.com/2023/10/27/butane-honey-oil-lab-in-irwindale-where-4-were-killed-operated-under-the-radar/) from makeshift electrical bypasses, volatile chemicals and flammable equipment. The presence of drugs, cash and weapons was a magnet for crime, and the blighted homes hurt property values.
In November 2018, Sgt. George Negrete, a detective for the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office, got a tip about Chen’s illegal grow.
Doing surveillance on foot from an adjacent water treatment facility, Negrete saw telltale signs, such as spray foam filling the seams of the barn walls to mask heat, light and odor. Utility records showed that the electric bill had spiked from $170 a month to more than $2,000 per month after Chen bought the property, indicating sustained use of air conditioning and high-intensity lights.
On Dec. 13, deputies served a search warrant. They found 3,835 plants and arrested the Chen brothers, Lee and two other men, court documents say. Chen claimed he didn’t speak English. But he admitted he was in charge. He told Negrete that someone had advised him marijuana was a good business.
“They weren’t scared or afraid,” Negrete said in an interview. “It was like regular business for them.”
The crew had slept on mattresses on the floor. Lee apparently supervised the day-to-day work. And deputies found two .40-caliber pistols, court documents say. Firearms were unusual at Chinese-run grows that Negrete had raided.
“It made me think they were at a higher scale in an organization,” the detective said.
### Cash and Discipline
The arrests of the Chens and their associates happened during a state-federal crackdown in the Sacramento area known as [Operation Lights Out](https://www.justice.gov/usao-edca/pr/sweeping-two-day-operation-targets-international-organized-crime-sacramento-area).
On the day of the raid on Chen’s house, federal prosecutors [indicted a Sacramento real estate broker](https://www.justice.gov/usao-edca/pr/sacramento-real-estate-broker-indicted-international-money-laundering-conspiracy), accusing her and other suspects of teaming with financiers in Fujian who wired millions of dollars to acquire houses for indoor grows through fraudulent maneuvers, according to a criminal complaint. Authorities also seized more than 100 houses.
The elaborate and brazen nature of the alleged conspiracy led investigators to believe it involved the triads, according to three former federal officials who declined to be named because they were not authorized to discuss the case.
Suspects used banks in China to wire money to the U.S. defendants in suspicious and obvious increments, according to the criminal complaint and former federal officials. Yet there was no interference from the most powerful police state in the world. Although hard proof was elusive, two former senior U.S. officials told ProPublica they suspected Chinese officials protected the scheme and may have benefited from it financially.
“There was no question in my mind that there was at least Chinese government awareness of this,” a former senior Department of Justice official said. “There was no way they didn’t see the movement of the money going to the same people in the United States. But could we prove it? We suspected Chinese officials were complicit.”
Although the prosecution had a big impact by combining the might of the FBI, DEA, IRS and Homeland Security Investigations, it was one of the few federal offensives against Chinese networks involved in marijuana.
Still, DEA financial investigations around the country revealed that the emerging marijuana empire intersected with the networks laundering billions of dollars for Latin American drug lords. Some of the funds from the laundering returned to China, but a lot was reinvested into new U.S. marijuana ventures, current and former officials said.
The marijuana proceeds were “another massive bucket of money” with which high-level Chinese crime bosses funded interconnected rackets such as the money laundering and migrant smuggling, said former senior DEA official Christopher Urben, who is now a managing partner at the global investigations firm Nardello & Co.
Agents marveled at the scope of the enterprise and the lack of turf wars. Around 2019, the DEA learned that triad bosses had traveled from China to sit-downs in New York, where they issued directives and kept the peace nationwide, according to Urben and other current and former officials. New York had become the command hub for marijuana as well as money laundering.
“The discipline involved is incredible,” Urben said. “How are we having thousands of workers moved into the country and among states? How are all these groups doing this without more conflict or violence? How do you ensure that all these mid-level managers get along, with all this money, all this marijuana? The only way you can do it is with an organized crime apparatus.”
In the federal prosecution in Sacramento, a defendant pleaded guilty this Feb. 27. The real estate broker and two others are still awaiting trial.
Meanwhile, Chen and his associates pleaded no contest to misdemeanors in state courts, which sentenced them to probation. Wasting no time, the crew headed for Oklahoma in 2020.
In contrast to California, Oklahoma did not limit the size of grows. As long as the operations had a nominal local owner and a medical marijuana license, they could spread dozens of greenhouses capable of holding tens of thousands of plants over a cheap parcel of farmland.
Some Chinese groups redeployed by air, according to officials and case files. Federal agents began detecting flights of private planes from California to rural airfields in Oklahoma. Couriers aboard the aircraft carried hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to buy farmland, sometimes for twice or three times its value. To dodge federal interdiction teams, some pilots filed flight plans for one airstrip, then diverted to another.
And money poured in from China. Around 2020, one group crowdfunded Oklahoma marijuana ventures through an invitation to investors on WeChat, the popular Chinese social media platform, said Mark Woodward, spokesperson of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics. U.S. investigations show that WeChat, although heavily monitored by Chinese security forces, is often a forum for discussions of criminal activity.
Oklahoma’s marijuana industry surged to “an astronomical level,” said Ray Padilla, a Denver-based DEA agent. He estimated that 90% of Colorado’s illicit producers moved to the neighboring state.
Oklahoma was the new frontier, Padilla said. And it was “absolute insanity.”
### Gunplay at the Association
A statue of a panda bear sits like a chunky sentry atop a pillar on Classen Boulevard in Oklahoma City’s Asian District.
Mixing a longtime Vietnamese community with a more recent Chinese one, the boulevard is lined with stores, restaurants, massage parlors, nail salons and, block after block, marijuana dispensaries.
Behind the panda, a ground-floor suite in a corner mini-mall houses the local chapter of the American Fujian Association.
Shortly before dusk on Dec. 8, 2020, a black Mercedes SUV carrying Chen and Lin pulled up at the mini-mall accompanied by two other cars. The crew had driven an hour from their new farm in Kingfisher County. They were looking for Jintao Liu, who had also relocated from Sacramento after his marijuana site got busted, court documents show. Liu and Chen had been feuding since Chen had failed to pay him for organizing a delivery from California.
When Liu had asked him to pay the $2,000 debt, Chen had become infuriated and began to terrorize Liu and his wife with threatening phone calls and texts showing photos of guns. Chen squared off with Liu at a gathering and punched him in the jaw. Later, Chen threatened to kill his wife and three children, court records say.
The reasons for the rage remain somewhat murky. Asked during a court hearing why Chen was so angry if he owed the money, not the other way around, Liu answered, “He did not want to pay. He was this kind of a person.”
On the afternoon that Chen and his crew appeared outside the Fujianese association, Liu was inside watching a friend play cards, according to court testimony. Liu and several other men came out. A brawl ensued.
“Shoot him,” Chen told Lin, according to witnesses.
Lin pulled a gun and fired, the bullet fracturing Liu’s hipbone, according to court documents.
Police soon arrested Chen and Lin. A search of Chen’s house in suburban Edmond turned up three pistols, 27.5 pounds of marijuana, $97,000 in cash and eight vials of ketamine, the party drug of choice in the Chinese underworld, court records say.
Prosecutors charged Chen and Lin with assault and battery with a deadly weapon and drug offenses. The men made bail and went right back to the grow. (Lin has pleaded not guilty. His lawyer declined to comment.)
![](https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/20240312_ok-marijuana-bodycam-farm01.jpg?crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=450&q=75&w=800&s=5abb8b3bd363fd70b08f595b9f209a4c)
An Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics agent searches for witnesses and survivors at the Kingfisher County farm where four people were shot to death. Credit: Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department
Their farm was about 13 miles from Hennessey, population 2,000. Lin had bought the 10-acre spread for $280,000, court documents say. To evade a state residency law, he paid cash to a local man named Richard Ignacio to pose as the 75% owner of the medical marijuana business and obtain a license, court documents allege. Ignacio had allegedly been drafted as a straw owner by an Oklahoma City accountant, a 20-time felon named Kevin Pham, who has been charged in connection with the Kingfisher farm and other grows, court documents say. Ignacio told investigators that he “earned significant income” acting as a hired front man.
Ignacio pleaded guilty last year to being a straw owner for the Kingfisher farm. He and Pham have pleaded not guilty to other charges and are awaiting trial. They could not be reached for comment.
Lin lived at and managed the place for Chen, according to court records and interviews. For equipment, three companies in China shipped about 440,000 pounds of greenhouse parts. Even among the vast marijuana farms in Oklahoma, the spread was unusually large: it contained over 100 greenhouses and several indoor grow houses, interviews and satellite images show.
The closest neighbor, Gary Hawk, lived about a mile away. He had grown up at the place next door when it was a dairy farm owned by his parents. There was tension with the newcomers from the start. After a neighboring farmer used a plane for crop dusting, men at Chen’s farm threatened to shoot it out of the sky, Hawk said in an interview.
“The mail carrier would go by and she would stop to deliver mail there,” he said. “They would come out of the house and one guy would come out with a machete and one guy would come out with an AR-15. That was just to pick up the mail. ”
The farm employed an armed security officer stationed in a guard hut and as many as two dozen laborers, according to law enforcement officials and others who spent time there. Workers slept in trailers, the garage or the cluttered main house, where meals were prepared throughout the day and there was only one bathroom. During an inspection by fire marshals that found multiple safety violations in 2021, most of the employees presented Chinese identification and U.S. immigration documents.
Neighbors complained about uncollected trash blowing into nearby pastures and endangering cattle, said Sgt. Michael Shults of the Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department.
“We’ve been out there several times explaining to them you need to put trash up,” Shults said in an interview. “Cattle get into plastics that are blowing around, you know, cattle will eat almost anything.”
Deputies soon became convinced that Chen’s crew, like many others, was trafficking its product on the black market in other states. In April 2021, Shults and other deputies intercepted a vehicle carrying 46.8 pounds of marijuana and arrested the driver, who was from Texas and did not have an Oklahoma cannabis transport license. Surveillance showed that she was one of two suspected couriers who had picked up bales at the farm that day, according to Shults and court documents.
### Awash in Weed
By 2021, a mysterious investor had joined the crew at the Kingfisher farm.
Chen Wu (also known as Wu Chen, but not related to the brothers) was in his mid-40s and from Fujian, according to officials and Chinese media reports. There are gaps in his past that investigators are still trying to fill. What they do know suggests he was a heavyweight: He had ties to Chinese criminal networks involved in money laundering, drug trafficking and migrant smuggling across the country and overseas, according to officials and court records.
As a young man, Wu lived illegally in Spain, whose Chinese population has grown rapidly in the past two decades. In 2000, police on the resort island of Mallorca arrested him for entering the country illegally, Spanish law enforcement officials said.
As often happens, though, he managed to stay. He sought work authorization in 2003 and gave an address in a gritty neighborhood of Madrid. Five years later, he got in trouble for using someone else’s identity, officials said, and Spanish police issued an arrest warrant for him in 2010.
But he had already moved on. Wu spent time in the Caribbean, including Cuba. Arriving in the United States around 2016, he bounced around the country pursuing illicit schemes, officials said. In Minnesota, he married the owner of a restaurant and got legal status. During his divorce in 2020, Wu claimed in legal filings to have only about $18,000 to his name, records show.
Yet he moved to Oklahoma and invested in Chen’s farm. After months working there, he argued with his partners over money and left.
By then, the state was awash in weed.
![](https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/20240312_ok-marijuana-bodycam-grow02.jpg?crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=450&q=75&w=800&s=a6b632346f1cabe9271274f0440ba074)
Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics agents and Kingfisher County deputies search through buildings on the 10-acre marijuana farm. Credit: Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department
The number of licensed marijuana grows in Oklahoma peaked at nearly 10,000 at the end of 2021. Authorities suspected most of them of trafficking on the black market. One Chinese criminal group oversaw at least 400 grows. Another outfit smuggled truckloads to the East Coast every week, [selling each for over $20 million](https://www.readfrontier.org/stories/with-cheap-land-and-low-fees-oklahoma-grown-marijuana-fuels-the-black-market-in-other-states/), before investigators dismantled it.
Whether bosses or grunts, most of the newcomers were from New York, where a mob hierarchy oversees the illicit marijuana trade in Oklahoma and swoops in to collect the profits, according to law enforcement officials and court files.
“You have many different levels,” said Anderson, the state anti-drug director. “Some overseeing grows. Then another upper echelon that controls money. … They’re never around except to collect money.”
The boom caused prices to crater, hurting the legal industry. And it brought a generalized surge of crime. At airports, wary-looking Chinese immigrant laborers with backpacks became a familiar sight to law enforcement officers. So did human traffickers accompanying flashily dressed prostitutes to [brothels set up for overseers of the marijuana farms](https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2023/10/26/one-arrested-in-human-trafficking-scheme-tied-to-oklahoma-medical-marijuana-farms/71317992007/). Illegal casinos appeared, seizures of ketamine soared, and robberies and violence plagued grows, dispensaries and stash houses, according to court cases and law enforcement officials.
There was complex criminality as well. In [a case](https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/three-men-arrested-complex-bank-fraud-and-cryptocurrency-laundering-scheme) investigated by the FBI, a Chinese ring based in New York and Oklahoma allegedly used a cryptocurrency scheme to steal over $10 million from banks and other financial institutions. One defendant, who is now awaiting trial, was involved in a marijuana grow with an associate of Chen’s Kingfisher County crew, according to law enforcement officials and public records.
The victims of another scam were law-abiding Asian Americans. Cybercriminals manipulated the computer system of the Texas Department of Public Safety to obtain thousands of driver’s licenses destined for Asian Americans, tricking authorities into [mailing the licenses to marijuana farms in neighboring Oklahoma](https://cw39.com/news/texas/affidavit-texas-drivers-licenses-were-sent-to-oklahoma-addresses-in-organized-fraud-scheme/). The suspects used the licenses for fraudulent purchases or sold them on the underground market. Police arrested the accused mastermind in New York and extradited him to Texas last April to stand trial.
Before marijuana legalization, Oklahoma was “a pretty quiet state,” said Tony Lie, president of the Oklahoma Chinese Association. “We didn’t have any Chinese criminal gangs coming here.”
Lie has lived in Oklahoma for more than 30 years. Members of his longtime organization come from several regions in mainland China as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan. In contrast, most of the newcomers are Fujianese. Lie said the ills of the marijuana industry have hurt the image of Chinese Americans in the state.
“We don’t want people to come to Oklahoma to do something bad for the Chinese community,” Lie said.
The shooting at the Fujianese association in 2020 had opened a window into a fast-evolving underworld.
But it turned out to be just a prelude.
### Pitch-Black Night
Shortly before 8 p.m. on Nov. 20, 2022, Kingfisher County Sheriff Dennis Banther alerted his deputies to a hostage incident at a farm near Hennessey.
“Everybody go 10-8,” the text message said: Go in service and rush to the scene.
Shults was the third to arrive. Four gunshot victims lay dead in the garage, and the shooter was on the loose. Deputies feared he was hiding in the sprawl of agricultural buildings known as hoop-houses.
“It was pitch black,” Shults said. “When you’re out there in the pitch dark, in the black night, and you’ve got four people down, been executed, and you don’t know if the shooter’s still on scene or not … it’s find the shooter. Survival.”
![](https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/20240312_ok-marijuana-bodycam-room02.jpg?crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=450&q=75&w=800&s=9f5129cf821911fcc30560ab4e93104e)
Kingfisher County deputies discovered the bodies of four victims among stacks of marijuana in the garage. Credit: Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department
The sergeant came upon a wounded man lying in a black Ford F-150 pickup truck. It was Lin, the farm manager who had been the accused gunman at the Fujianese association, according to court documents.
A second survivor emerged from the darkness. A deputy struggled to ask the farmworker urgent questions using Google Translate on his phone. Deputies found another worker who had recorded part of the incident on a cellphone, leaving it near the garage with the camera on before fleeing, according to court documents and interviews.
The survivors said the killer was Wu, who had worked at the farm until about a year earlier. He had arrived in his Toyota Corolla and shot Chen and a dog that was in the garage. Wu then told his hostages he would kill them if they didn’t hand over $300,000 in half an hour.
“The Boss told his girlfriend, who was inside the garage at the time, to call her brother to get the money,” a witness told police.
As minutes passed, Wu became increasingly agitated. The hostages tried to stop Chen’s bleeding by wrapping a long-sleeved shirt around his knee as a makeshift tourniquet.
But Chen “was not doing very well,” the witness said. In a grim exchange, the wounded boss told the gunman “to finish him off.”
Wu pumped two bullets into Chen’s chest. Then, two hostages rushed at the gunman, who let loose a barrage that killed Chen’s brother, Chen’s girlfriend Lee and a newly hired employee. The wounded Lin ran outside and took refuge in the truck.
Although the phone video didn’t capture the actual shooting, it recorded the sound of gunshots and showed the gunman leaving the garage.
Emergency personnel swarmed the scene. A helicopter evacuated the wounded man. Deputies spent all night doing a sweep of the grounds, finding another terrified worker hiding in a barn.
At one point, a sedan with New York plates pulled up to the farm. An Asian man rolled down the window, startling deputies, and said he “was sent” to pick up the workers remaining onsite, a deputy said.
“You need to back him off,” a sheriff’s lieutenant yelled to his deputies. Afterward, they would wonder who had sent him so quickly.
In one area of the dark compound, deputies thought they were trudging through mud. After sunrise, they realized it was human excrement — a sign of the conditions in which the farmworkers lived.
Meanwhile, the gunman sped east toward Florida. From the road, he called people in Florida, including a Chinese organized crime figure suspected of involvement in drugs and human trafficking, according to court records and law enforcement officials familiar with the case.
Investigators believe Wu wanted help from smugglers to flee the country, possibly to Cuba, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S., court records say. One affidavit for search warrants for Wu’s phones and online accounts seeks evidence “relating to the planning, preparation and actions taken to facilitate human smuggling.”
Soon after Wu got to Miami Beach, however, a license plate reader detected his car. Police arrested him two days after the murders. During an extradition hearing, Wu told the judge his life was in danger.
“If I go back to Oklahoma, I’ll be killed in the prison or jail,” he said through an interpreter. “I’m afraid I will be killed because these people are mafiosos.”
![](https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/20240305-stefano-summo-mj-car-chase.jpg?crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=379&q=75&w=800&s=340fff8669f57c753ef7f184782afd92)
Credit: Stefano Summo for ProPublica
### Aftermath
It seemed ironic: a mass murderer begging the court for protection. But a strange story told by a deputy who brought him back suggests that his fears may have been well founded.
Kingfisher County sheriff’s Lt. Ken Thompson had 25 years of experience transporting prisoners. He and another deputy drove nonstop to Florida in a marked Chevrolet Tahoe. In Miami, they checked into a motel near the airport in the evening, planning to sleep a few hours before picking up Wu from the Miami-Dade County jail, Thompson said in an interview.
They changed their minds, Thompson said, because “a weird deal happened.”
Looking out of the window of his motel room, Thompson said, he saw a car pull up next to his marked police vehicle in the parking lot. Another car appeared, then a third. The three cars drove around the motel as if doing surveillance, he said.
The deputies concluded that they “didn’t really feel comfortable sitting in this place,” Thompson said. They decided to take custody of Wu and hit the road.
After the deputies left the jail with Wu in the back seat, the three cars from the motel reappeared, Thompson said, and shadowed the Tahoe on the highway.
Thompson said he did evasive maneuvers to lose them, exiting abruptly and returning to the highway miles later.
“It's just a feeling, a gut feeling that you get, and the fact that they all just kind of just paced right around us,” he said. “I mean, they flew right up on us, but then they just locked down to our speed. So it was a weird deal.”
Thompson suspects that people in organized crime somehow located the deputies in Miami. He said he did not know if their goal was to harm Wu, to free him or simply to monitor a case that was causing a commotion.
The prisoner was polite and obedient during the cross-country ride, getting out for bathroom breaks and accepting a McDonald’s breakfast burrito that the deputies offered him. After they crossed the Oklahoma state line, though, his demeanor changed, the lieutenant said.
“You couldn’t pry him out of that car,” Thompson said. “Once he reached Oklahoma, he wouldn’t get out of the car.”
On Feb. 9, Wu pleaded guilty to the four murders and assault and battery. The judge sentenced him to life without possibility of parole. (He declined an interview request.)
The quadruple murder made international headlines and set off a flurry of investigative activity and [political attention](https://www.kjrh.com/news/local-news/ok-attorney-general-creates-task-force-to-target-illegal-cannabis-grow-operations). A state crackdown has reduced the number of growing operations by almost half, officials say.
Chinese immigrants involved in the marijuana industry say law enforcement has been excessively harsh on them since late 2022. Qiu (Tina) He, who operated a marijuana-related consulting firm that is under investigation, said in an interview that many Asian investors have become disillusioned by what she called discriminatory treatment and the risks of the business. She denied wrongdoing in her case and predicted the state will suffer from the loss of tax revenue if Asian investors leave.
“We are funding Oklahoma,” she said. “Oklahoma City will be like a ghost town if we leave.”
![](https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/20240312_ok-marijuana-bodycam-farm02.jpg?crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=450&q=75&w=800&s=124d933bd8e27dd5dcb13f50023ab446)
Law enforcement officers search dozens of metal and plastic marijuana grow houses at the Kingfisher farm the day after the quadruple homicide. Credit: Kingfisher County Sheriff’s Department
The crime in Kingfisher County was a relatively unusual eruption of violence in the Chinese underworld. Law enforcement experts say the frontier atmosphere in Oklahoma is likely a result of the sheer amount of money generated by the cannabis trade and the number of criminals it has attracted. The growing wealth and power of Chinese organized crime is causing clashes elsewhere in the country as well, experts said.
“Maybe it’s more like the Wild West as these groups keep spreading,” said Urben, the former DEA official. “You are going to have violence even if someone is controlling from above. I think there would be even more conflict if the triads were not so involved.”
Additional funding for this story was provided by The Pulitzer Center.
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# How Jesse Plemons Came to Star in, Well, Pretty Much Everything
When Jesse Plemons goes quiet—and here on the front porch of his childhood home, thirty minutes east of Waco, Jesse Plemons has just gone quiet—you don’t know if you’re at the end of something or the beginning. 
Nobody suggests so much by saying so little.
Take his big entrance in Martin Scorsese’s *Killers of the Flower Moon*. Plemons, as a federal agent, knocks on the door of a grifter played by Leonardo DiCaprio, telling him he’s there to see about some murders. “See what about ’em?” DiCaprio asks. Plemons stops, considers just so. “See who’s doin’ it,” he says. In that half second, you feel the whole movie kick into a higher gear. “It’s like a hot knife cutting through cold butter,” Scorsese tells me in an email. “I never tire of it.”
Or take the scene in Max’s *[Love & Death](https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-stand-up-desk/behind-the-story-candy-montgomery-murder/)—*which recently earned Plemons his third Emmy nomination—where Elizabeth Olsen’s character confesses that she’s attracted to him. Plemons takes another lengthy beat: “Oh,” he replies. [Lesli Linka Glatter](https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/meet-tv-director-lesli-linka-glatter/), the director of the series (*Texas Monthly* was an executive producer), remains astounded: “It’s got everything in that one moment,” she says. Plemons works those silences like a composer uses negative space, oceans of meaning floating in the ellipses. What follows can be devastating or hilariously deadpan; he might burst into tears or shoot someone. Everything hinges on those pauses.
At present, however, I have a feeling time’s up. 
Plemons and I are nursing Miller Lites, watching the horses nose through the scrubby winter grass. It’s the day before Christmas Eve, damp and in the middle fifties, with a wind that blows unobstructed across a muddy gray expanse. The tranquility is disturbed only by a car in the distance, trundling east toward downtown Mart. Probably returning from Waco, seeing as there are just two directions you can go from the end of the long unpaved driveway that leads out of here, down where the road connects these 36 acres to the world beyond.  
Six months ago, I’d met Plemons in Los Angeles, where we’d talked endlessly about his career—in restaurants, on a golf course, and at the home he shares with his wife, the actress Kirsten Dunst. Today we’d driven all around his hometown, rehashing his youth. And now that we’ve nearly exhausted our time together, there’s not much reason left to talk. So he doesn’t. 
It’s a relief just being here, Plemons tells me. “The silence, especially at night,” he says. He relies on coming back to it, recalibrating along this same flat line where he started. Beginning when he was ten, Plemons would set out down the driveway to spend half his year in Los Angeles—auditioning, maybe doing a movie or TV role. Then he would come home to the familiar routines of school and chores: weed-eating, chopping mesquite, fetching hay. Bouncing between those extremes, he says, allowed him to see all the kinds of people there are between here and Hollywood—to observe the infinite ways to live a life.
Plemons, 36, appreciates it even more now that he has kids of his own. He shares two sons with Dunst—five-year-old Ennis and three-year-old James—and they have all quickly grown accustomed to Texas life, even if it’s part-time. “I just like the air in Texas,” Dunst told me when I first met her. “I love big sky, open land, horses.” We’d been sitting behind the couple’s home in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley—a place *Architectural Digest* called a ranch house, seemingly without irony. This was in June 2023, during the first of two Hollywood strikes that would delay shooting on Plemons’s new Netflix series, *Zero Day*. 
I’d planned to profile him during one of the biggest years of his career. Instead I’d caught him at intermission, in the lull where he was finally able to be alone with his family, save for the meddling reporter canvassing it all, trying to get some sense of what still denotes Jesse Plemons as a “Texas actor”—one of our finest, in fact—besides his birth certificate. 
Virtually every role draws on a self-possession you get from growing up in a place like Mart. It’s why some of our most celebrated Texas actors—Barry Corbin, Tommy Lee Jones, Matthew McConaughey, Sissy Spacek—all hail from small Texas towns. There is something innate, a soulfulness it instills that never leaves you, no matter how far away you might move, how glamorous your surroundings become. It’s inside everything Plemons does, imbuing even his tiniest on-screen role with uncommon depth.
As soon as I’d arrived in Mart this morning, Plemons had taken me straight to the barn, where we’d watched James stomp around bowlegged in his shiny new boots as he helped his grandfather feed the horses. “You saw his little John Wayne walk,” Plemons says, smiling again at the memory. “He thinks he’s a cowboy now.”  
Growing up, Plemons felt like he was a cowboy too. How could he not? His dad was a team roper; his cousin rode broncos. Even as a boy, he admired on-screen cowboys Robert Duvall and fellow Texan Jones in the miniseries *[Lonesome Dove](https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/the-making-of-lonesome-dove/).* As a kid he used to carry a rope and a toy pistol with him everywhere—better to have it and not need it. He had both on him in 1990 when his mom took him to his first audition. Plemons was around James’s age when he landed his first gig, playing a cowboy in a Coca-Cola commercial.
He joined the Central Texas Youth Rodeo Association when he was about six. The competitions for kids that age are “pretty ridiculous,” Plemons says—then goes on to describe something called goat hair pulling. It’s exactly what it sounds like: somebody ties a goat to a stake at one end of the arena, and you ride your horse to it, hop off, and, quick as you can, run up and snatch some hairs from the goat to show to the judges. He’d been pretty good at it.
“I was the best, Sean,” Plemons says, then laughs. “No, I think I was decent.” Fast enough to place, anyway. The goat hair pull wasn’t much—just a sideshow. But Plemons gave it his all, making off with whatever small glories he could grab.
![Jesse Plemons at his home in Los Angeles on February 9, 2024.](https://img.texasmonthly.com/2024/03/jesse-plemons-3.jpg?auto=compress&crop=faces&fit=scale&fm=pjpg&h=1024&ixlib=php-3.3.1&q=45&w=819&wpsize=large)
Jesse Plemons at his home in Los Angeles on February 9, 2024.Photograph by Peter Yang
Earlier that year, in June, I had met Plemons at the Smoke House, a storied Burbank haunt beloved by celebrities and starry-eyed tourists. But it was only as we were leaving that anybody pestered him for a photo—a guy who’d said, “I really love all that s— you did.” 
After he’d walked away, Plemons shrugged: “At least he said *all* the s—.” Plemons has scored an Oscar nomination (for *The Power of the Dog*) and three Emmy nods; shared the screen with Tom Hanks, Al Pacino, and Meryl Streep; and appeared in some of the buzziest TV shows of the past twenty years. With *Killers of the Flower Moon,* Plemons has now acted in seven Best Picture nominees, putting him in rarefied company, including Marlon Brando, Katharine Hepburn, and Laurence Olivier. But he has not yet had the kind of starring role that takes you from being critically respected to being relentlessly hounded. 
If he had to put money on it, Plemons said, most people probably know him as Todd, the genteel psychopath he played on *Breaking Bad*. But he’s also gotten *Game Night,* thanks to his meme-spawning turn as a creepy Machiavellian cop. Then there are those fans, particularly back in Texas, who will forever know him as Landry, the awkward smart-ass he played on *Friday Night Lights*. That role started small too—“sort of an afterthought,” the show’s creator, Peter Berg, says. Just the sidekick to the star quarterback. But Plemons clambered into the main ensemble thanks to his almost supernatural ability to steal scenes. “Everything we gave him, he just made the absolute most of it,” Berg said, so they kept giving him more. 
Director Scott Cooper, who’s cast Plemons in three of his movies, placed him in a pantheon of supporting players including Wilford Brimley, John Cazale, Gene Hackman, and Plemons’s personal hero, Robert Duvall. “Guys who just stand up and tell the truth,” Cooper said, “and they never push the emotion.” His ability to be natural, no matter the scene, has endeared Plemons to filmmakers. To Berg, he forever proved his mettle during *Friday Night Lights*’ infamous second-season plot when Landry kills somebody—a sensationalistic twist that, by rights, also should have killed the show. “Jesse was able to bring enough artfulness that we survived it,” Berg said. “He was probably the only actor in our stable that could have pulled that off.” 
His skills are subtle, bordering on imperceptible. Plemons’s face can be open, guileless and sweet, but then close like a fist, his lips curling in menacing resolve, his eyes going glassy as a shark’s. He’s uniquely adept at this kind of reveal, specializing in characters who are never purely good *or* bad—whose actions may be despicable (even Ed, his genial Midwestern butcher in *Fargo,* feeds a guy into a meat grinder) but whose motivations are understandable. “He lets you in,” said Glatter, who directs him again in *Zero Day*. Plemons plays a “slick government insider,” as Glatter puts it, to Robert De Niro’s ex-president, with the same grounded humanity we’ve come to expect. We empathize with Plemons, even when we shouldn’t. And we never see him coming. 
He does it again in April’s *Civil War,* a thriller that’s set in an America torn apart by its political rancor. Plemons is in just one scene, with Dunst, the film’s star. Wearing candy-red sunglasses and brandishing a carbine, he delivers the big mic drop of the trailer: “Okay . . .” he says. “Well, what kind of American are you?” There is the pause again—aloof, terrifying, just another of his many little moments. 
We made the short drive back from the Smoke House in Plemons’s Lexus, passing lines of striking writers picketing outside the Warner Bros. gates and pulling up in front of a house set back on a small gravel path flecked by agave bushes that I could just make out in the moonlight. “It doesn’t really feel like L.A.,” Plemons said as we stepped out, “which I appreciate.” 
He started coming to L.A. in 1998, not long after winning a small role in *Varsity Blues.* Back then he’d stay in the famed Oakwood apartments that have provided a safe haven for generations of young actors, such as Reese Witherspoon, Neil Patrick Harris, and Plemons’s future wife. He was surrounded by kids who seemed to be there just to get *here—*who only wanted to be famous. He’d auditioned alongside them for the same commercials, the same syrupy sitcoms. But his heart wasn’t in it. He was drawn to the serious roles, the “troubled teen” parts in TV dramas like *CSI* or *Judging Amy*. He couldn’t muster the right energy to sell a punch line or a hot dog. “Thank God I was bad at that,” Plemons said. 
Outside his home, we picked our way across a front porch littered with toys, stepping over a dollhouse crudely painted black. Ennis and James are a little “obsessed” with Halloween, he explained. James even has a zombie character he’s been trying out. Like his dad, who used to sing Garth Brooks songs at family gatherings or hop around pretending to be a flying monkey from *The Wizard of Oz,* James is a ham. “He’s like a baby Chris Farley,” Plemons said. 
The foyer was littered with the flotsam familiar to any working parent: stacks of mail, piles of children’s drawings, balls of various size and provenance. It only vaguely resembled the glamorously rustic chalet from the November 2021 issue of *Architectural Digest* I’d snooped through before coming here, its sleek Danish furniture and nineteenth-century terra-cotta tiles subsumed into cozy chaos. Whistling through his teeth, Plemons led me into a den dominated by a pool table and offset by a small bar, stopping to show me an antique organ he’d picked up from a woman who claimed it had belonged to the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. (She was in a Christian band, Plemons said, “so if she was lying to me, there’s a serious problem.”) 
Dunst was there, fresh from putting the kids to bed, extending a casual hello. Although they officially married only in the summer of 2022, they’ve been together since 2016, more than a year after they first met playing husband and wife on FX’s *Fargo*. Dunst had known Plemons only by reputation, although she started bingeing *Friday Night Lights* while snowbound on *Fargo*’s Calgary set. They naturally spent a lot of time together, perfecting the singsong cadence of their characters’ Minnesota accents. They’d fallen into an instant rhythm, she said, and felt a kinship right away. “Immediately I felt safe, and he did too,” Dunst said. “And free.” Five years later they played husband and wife again in *The Power of the Dog,* which earned Dunst her own Oscar nomination, prompting talk of the couple as Hollywood royalty. 
It was weird for Dunst, she would tell me a few hours later, having a reporter just hanging out in her house. Dunst, after all, is a lot more famous than Plemons and has been famous for longer. Dunst’s breakthrough happened when she was just ten years old, starring opposite Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in 1994’s *Interview With the Vampire*. Their house sits less than two miles from the fire escape where she kissed Spider-Man. The gate outside, Dunst later confided, is the same one she used to egg when she was growing up here as a burgeoning teen idol.
Dunst’s celebrity has taken some getting used to for Plemons. In one of our earliest interviews, he told me that he’d recently picked up photography after playing with some of Dunst’s old cameras. He is especially drawn to street photography, feels a pull to shoot strangers on the sly. But he’s struggled with the ethics. “I know what it’s like, mainly through Kirsten being followed by paparazzi,” he said. “Being on the other side of it never feels good.” They’d swarmed his family when Dunst was pregnant, crowding the sidewalk until Plemons finally had to ask the photographers how many pictures they could possibly need.
Plemons doesn’t love doing press. He hates discussing his “process” in particular. (“I just get so annoyed with myself,” he said. “It’s hard to talk about without sounding pretentious.”) He is, according to *GQ*, “the worst schmoozer in Hollywood.” But although he’s not always comfortable in a crowded room, he finds people infinitely fascinating. It’s one of the reasons he got into acting in the first place. Plemons seems to enjoy observing people’s tics and filing their behaviors away for future reference. After he’d whipped me at pool, Plemons remarked on how I hold the cue stick in my left hand even though I’m right-handed. “He’s one of the kindest humans I’ve ever met,” Dunst said. “I think that sensitivity makes him very astute when it comes to other people.” 
But that empathy can make it especially hard for him to set boundaries. Plemons told me about a *Love & Death* reception with the cast. He’d gone to the restroom, and on the way back he was waylaid by a guy who claimed to be a descendant of Wyatt Earp and tried to levitate in front of him. Plemons never made it back to his castmates, who left without him. “I’m guessing it’s my upbringing,” he said. “I don’t know how not to just, like, talk to people.”
What Plemons *does* know how to talk about is music. That night, between pouring tequilas and schooling me at billiards, he pulled record after record from a vinyl collection that took up one side of the den: Gene Clark, Donovan, Michael Hurley. On the wall by the bar hangs a one-of-a-kind test pressing of Bob Dylan’s “If Not for You,” a gift from a music supervisor friend who’d also installed his quadraphonic sound system, arranged around a couch that looks like it’s seen a lot of late nights. 
If Plemons could travel anywhere in time, he said, he’d go to Austin in the seventies, to the [Armadillo World Headquarters](https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/the-coming-of-redneck-hip/) scene prowled by the likes of Jerry Jeff Walker and John Prine. On his index finger Plemons has a tattoo of the initials “TVZ” in honor of [Townes Van Zandt](https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/the-great-late-townes-van-zandt/), the artist whose music changed his perspective on everything, even acting. It was Van Zandt who taught him that there were no real rules, he says, and that poetry could come out of anyone. “Townes or John Prine, a lot of these guys are so unassuming,” Plemons said. “Like, *look at this goofy hillbilly*. And *this* is inside of him?”
Once the hour grew late and he tired of beating me at pool, Plemons, Dunst, and I retreated to the deck with their dog, Colt, a sixteen-year-old beagle (he’s a native Texan too, Plemons noted) sprawled decadently on a couch beside us. We talked about Plemons’s own music—about the alt-country band he’d had in Austin, Cowboy and Indian, and his hopes of playing in another group someday, ideally with the musician friends he left there. They talked about the house they’re renovating in East Austin that they hope to move into soon, maybe for good. Life’s just easier in Texas, they said. In Austin, Plemons said, “the people just look at you in a different way. They’re not on the hamster wheel.”
He and Dunst have been getting into film development, beginning with a documentary about a photographer she met while working on *Civil War*. Plemons had also been collaborating on a project with *Drunk History* creator Derek Waters—one of Plemons’s many “my buddies,” of whom there seem to be an infinite supply—about a guy who runs a low-rent amusement park in the nineties. The protagonist is “sort of equal parts Willy Wonka, Orson Welles, Walt Disney,” Plemons said. “A true artist struggling against the capitalistic pull, trying to keep something pure. And it’s impossible.” 
But the break had also provided Plemons with the space to confront what has sometimes been an obsessive relationship with his profession—the feeling of “your entire worth being tied up in your work,” he said. These feelings were more pronounced before his kids were born, but he still notices them. His last real vacation was the summer he married Dunst, the cap to an exceptionally crazy sixteen months. The summer prior, Plemons had injured himself while filming the Netflix thriller *Windfall,* pushing too hard during a scene where Jason Segel chases him through an orange grove and tearing his ACL. A few months later Plemons was on the mend, but a cyst had developed that made it feel like his leg was about to explode. It left him hobbling right up until he was due to start *Killers of the Flower Moon*. Coincidentally, De Niro had sustained his own leg injury, and producers had already incorporated his limp into his character. But Plemons couldn’t also be limping. The decision of whether or not he would have to drop out came down to the day. Two weeks after *Killers* wrapped, Plemons started *Love & Death*. Somewhere in there, James was born. “I think I developed eczema during that time just from being so stressed,” Plemons said. 
He started going to therapy some years back, looking to address his unhealthy work-life balance. He’d resisted at first, believing he should be able to handle it himself. But therapy has helped. “I’ve realized that I could turn some of that work that I expend on characters on myself,” Plemons said. 
Going back to Texas could help too. But of course it’s not that easy. Many of the couple’s best friends are in L.A. Dunst’s mom and brother both live up the street. Ennis just got into a good school, and James is close behind. There’s also the not-inconsiderable fact that Plemons and Dunst happen to be highly in-demand actors—and Austin, for all its redeeming qualities, just isn’t where many movies are made. Plemons wishes more filmmakers like Jeff Nichols, who’s lived in Austin since 2003, would start producing their work in Texas. Maybe then he could see it happening. But for now Austin remains just a notion—another liminal space between where he is and where he’d like to be.
![Plemons in his living room.](https://img.texasmonthly.com/2024/03/jesse-plemons-12.jpg?auto=compress&crop=faces&fit=scale&fm=pjpg&h=640&ixlib=php-3.3.1&q=45&w=1024&wpsize=large)
Plemons in his living room.Photograph by Peter Yang
The morning after he’d trounced me at pool, Plemons took me to a picturesque public green tucked into the rolling foothills of the Verdugo Mountains so he could humiliate me at golf too. It was one of those postcard-worthy California days, 70 degrees and breezy. At one point a doe ambled down from the hills, followed by her passel of fawns. They stopped on the fairway to nurse just as I was teeing up, and Plemons ran out with his camera, snapping a photo. He was relaxed and unhurried. From the golf cart’s cup holder, his phone unfurled a lazy stream of country and psychedelic rock—Kevin Ayers, the Texas Gentlemen, Cut Worms—while I sliced ball after ball into Wildwood Canyon. We followed with a leisurely lunch at the clubhouse, our conversation turning idly to the possibility of actors joining the strike too. We didn’t think much of it. We parted, making plans to meet again in Mart in just a few weeks. 
We didn’t. We *couldn’t*—not until the Screen Actors Guild had hammered out a new deal and lifted its ban on talking to the press. Finally, in late December, two days after the contracts had been ratified, Plemons sent word that he’d be home for the holidays, a brief respite before he had to get back to *Zero Day*. It was now or never. 
I arrived in Mart fifteen minutes earlier than agreed upon. I’d factored in stopping off somewhere to pick up a six-pack of beer for Plemons’s dad, only to end up turning off Interstate 35 and driving through twenty miles of unspoiled nothing. When I pulled up the long path that led me from the main road onto the Plemons ranch, a frisky corgi (later introduced as Stevie) ran out to greet me, barking and blowing my cover. Plemons’s older sister, Jill, emerged to bring me inside. Dunst came out of the hallway to meet me after I was already in the living room, James and Ennis hiding behind her; everyone was still in the shower, she said. I apologized for being early, sitting shamefully at the dining room table by the Christmas tree, until at last Plemons emerged, hair still wet, to hug me hello. He was soon followed by his parents, Jim Bob and Lisa, who each offered me the first of about a dozen coffees that I politely declined while we chatted. 
Lisa has done the same job since before Plemons was born, spending most of her career training others to teach students with disabilities. Jim Bob is reluctantly retired from 28 years of driving a fire truck; he’s a dedicated civil servant who values hard work—he built everything on the ranch himself—and one of the few staunch Democrats in their largely conservative town. He is also one of the most ingratiating good ol’ boys you’ll ever hope to meet, with an easy laugh and the chummy loquacity of a guy who’s spent half of his life jawing with other men in cramped quarters. Plemons said he loves to watch Jim Bob work the room at *Vanity Fair* parties, talking up stars like they’re anybody else. We’d chatted for maybe twenty minutes before Jim Bob told me about meeting Salma Hayek at the Cannes Film Festival—he never asks celebrities for their photos but (he gave me a conspiratorial grin) couldn’t help asking Hayek for one to show his buddies back home. 
The Plemons’ history in McLennan County stretches back nearly a century. A *Waco Tribune-Herald* clipping from 1933 lists Jim Bob’s great-grandmother as the third-place winner for her quilts and preserves at a local fair. The house of Jim Bob’s great-grandfather, Lon Jefferson Plemons, sits just up the road from theirs. Jim Bob said some of the older guys in town might still remember the story of the day Lon went chasing after some dogs that were bothering his cows: Lon had leaned his shotgun against the fence to crawl over, the gun fell over and went off, and that was the end of Lon Jefferson Plemons. Jim Bob grew up just ten miles away, in Axtell. He’d met Lisa when she was a student at Baylor, charming her over the popcorn machine at a Waco dance hall. After they married, they spent some time in the Dallas area, where the kids were born, living in Fort Worth and Kaufman before moving to Bellmead. They’d settled in Mart because they liked the land—and because they’d always been here.
There were no actors in their family. Jim Bob has a distant cousin who runs a small theater in Beaumont, he said. Lisa’s dad, who used to chaperone Plemons on acting gigs, briefly caught the bug, doing some bit player work on *Walker, Texas Ranger,* plus a little print modeling. But for the longest time Plemons thought he was the only performer in his bloodline. Then one day, when Plemons was about sixteen, he and Jim Bob were playing guitar together, and his dad started strumming a tune he’d never heard before. It was an old song Jim Bob had written back in college, he said. The next thing he knew, his dad was rustling around in his safe, pulling out a dusty reel-to-reel that contained nine or ten original tunes. Plemons had played one for me on the golf course—a lovely filigree of acoustic guitar, topped by a serene high tenor reminiscent of James Taylor. 
“Until that point it always felt like where did this come from?” Plemons had said. “Everything comes from somewhere.”
An hour after I’d arrived, we left the kids behind with Dunst and Jill as Plemons, his parents, and I piled into Lisa’s car and set off toward downtown Mart. We passed the population sign reading 1,748—it’s dropped, Plemons remarked—and turned onto Texas Avenue, home to the city’s only stoplight. Downtown remains largely unchanged from Plemons’s day. There’s the grocery store, the banks, and the First Baptist church the family attended. On Sundays, Jim Bob told me, the pastor used to reassure the congregation that he’d get them out in time to beat the Methodists to Dairy Queen.
When Plemons and his sister were little, Lisa would drive them, just like this, to act as background extras on shoots in the region. It was a fun escape, but one Plemons took seriously. Lisa didn’t like being on camera. Neither did Jill: she hated the way the old dresses they made her wear got stuck in the tumbleweeds, and she especially detested the fake sweat they dabbed on them for *Children of the Corn IV*. But Plemons savored every minute. He and his parents laughed as they recalled the time Plemons broke his arm on the set of 1997’s *True Women* and they had to take him to the emergency room in his 1800s costume. But even then, they’d just put it in a period-accurate sling, and Plemons went back to work. 
We’d wended our way over to the home of the Class 2A Division II eight-time state champion Mart Panthers. “This is Football City, USA, right here,” Jim Bob said as we passed. On game nights, they shut the streets down. We see the former Mart High, the one Plemons attended, which now lies abandoned, along with the weedy remains of Chambless Field, where all the games used to be held. We stopped so Plemons could hop out with his camera. 
Plemons had been a quarterback in middle school, then moved over to tight end in high school. But by then he was always off in L.A., missing too many practices. He’d had to quit the team. He quit baseball too, despite being a hotshot pitcher with, as Jim Bob recalled, a wily curveball. He’d missed his seventh-grade district football championship just to do a movie he ended up getting cut from. 
Nobody in Mart understood what Lisa and Jim Bob were doing. Letting your kid run off to Hollywood? Still, they found support. Darrell Evans, the principal of the school where Lisa taught, the one who let her take weeks off at a time to go to L.A., is a hero of the Jesse Plemons story. Evans also helped the young actor keep up with his schoolwork, but by the time Plemons started trying to teach himself chemistry, he decided he’d be better off just getting his GED. 
Straddling the two worlds wasn’t easy. Plemons would leave home for three months sometimes, and when he got back, his friends would ask him how many movies he’d made. The disconnect could be jarring: one day Plemons would be presenting at a teen awards show, and the next he was marching with the band in the homecoming parade. “When he comes back to Mart, Texas, well, you’re not a movie star here, buddy,” Jim Bob said.
They’ve seen everything he’s done since, and they like it all, even the “weird” ones. They have watched their son play soldiers and psychopaths, FBI agents and tech whizzes, and still they have no idea how Plemons does what he does. “Some of the stuff I watch, I mean, dang,” Jim Bob said. “I’m like, wait a minute, I *know* him. I changed his diapers, and he fooled me.”
![Plemons at home in Los Angeles, on February 9, 2024.](https://img.texasmonthly.com/2024/03/jesse-plemons-7.jpg?auto=compress&crop=faces&fit=scale&fm=pjpg&h=1024&ixlib=php-3.3.1&q=45&w=819&wpsize=large)
Plemons at home in Los Angeles on February 9, 2024.Photograph by Peter Yang
It is late afternoon now, the sun dipping behind the wall of clouds that never did burn off. The kids are inside with Dunst, who’s been trying to get them to nap—unsuccessfully, by the sound of it. We’ve just returned from Waco, where we had lunch with the entire family, plus Dunst’s mother, Inez, at the venerable greasy spoon George’s, a Plemons favorite, just down the highway from Baylor. I am still logy from the queso and the platters of fried pickles and fried jalapeños that were all just the warm-up for plates of chicken-fried steak with mashed potatoes on the side. Plemons had chided me for being stingy with the gravy, even as he’d ordered the blackened catfish and green beans, trying to stay sharp for when he’s back in front of the cameras. 
Plemons seems slightly more withdrawn today than he was in L.A. To be fair, he’s been battling an ear infection ever since he landed in Texas. He’s also spent the day being driven around his hometown by his parents, reliving his adolescence from the backseat while a reporter buzzes questions in his good ear. If he is tired—of talking about himself, of me intruding on one of the few seconds of peace he may get all year—I wouldn’t blame him. The strike has also left him thinking about all the extraneous stuff that fell away in the interim, leaving only the work, which is all he’s ever cared about. Part of being in the moment, after all, is not spending too much time looking back. “There is a fraction of \[promotion\] that is truly in support of the movie,” he says. “And then there’s a large majority of it that’s just really in support of the machine.” 
The resolution to the strike wasn’t perfect, Plemons says. He’s still worried about the future—the flattening of art into “content,” filmmakers such as Charlie Kaufman, who directed him in the mind-bender *I’m Thinking of Ending Things,* still having to scrape for financing. There’s also the specter of artificial intelligence reducing actors to digital puppets. “Maybe we could make this whole profile about brainstorming what I’m going to do when I become obsolete,” Plemons says. “What we’re *both* going to do.”
He’ll soon star opposite Emma Stone in *Kinds of Kindness,* an anthology film from *Poor Things* director Yorgos Lanthimos, the plot of which even Plemons struggles to describe. He wants to go “way off somewhere else,” he says—take chances, maybe fail. He’d like to work with the Safdie Brothers or Ari Aster. He came pretty close to starring in Jordan Peele’s *Nope,* bowing out only when *Killers of the Flower Moon* conflicted. He’d love to do a movie with the Coen brothers, to whom he’s sent a dozen audition tapes over the years. Would he do a Marvel movie? “I’ll never say never, but not anytime soon,” he says. 
His worries about obsolescence are understandable, but I think they’re unfounded. His talents lie in the spaces between the binary code, in the characters that he is able to make human in a way that a machine could never fake. In ways that still seem inexplicable, even to those who know him, Plemons grabs hold of some piece of these characters, lending them empathy and dignity in a way that makes you say, “Who *is* that guy? And how does he locate this whole other world inside of him?” 
“For Jesse, the future is limitless,” Scorsese says. “He’s that good.” Berg looks forward to Plemons getting older, growing into playing generals or presidents. His mom wishes he would do a musical, although that seems unlikely. (That said, if someone doesn’t cast Jesse Plemons in a *Tender Mercies–*type tale about a down-on-his-luck country singer, they’re leaving money on the table.) “I haven’t seen him dance like Fred Astaire,” Cooper says. “But I wouldn’t put it past him.”   
“I’ve never been more excited about the work, I don’t think,” Plemons says. “And then the rest of it . . .”—and here again is that pregnant pause—“is the rest of it.”  
Plemons drains his beer and stands to shake my hand. He’s ready to go back inside, to let the silence speak for itself again. What comes next is anyone’s guess.
---
*Photography Credits, Styling: Tiffani Moreno; Grooming: Thea Istenes for Exclusive Artists*
*This* *article* *originally appeared in the April 2024 issue of*  Texas Monthly *with the headline “Jesse Plemons Is Gonna Need a Moment.”* [***Subscribe today***](https://subscription.texasmonthly.com/pubs/TZ/TXP/Main-Subscribe.jsp?cds_page_id=261743&cds_mag_code=TXP&id=1673294688511&lsid=30091404485013890&vid=1&utm_medium=webcta&utm_source=texasmonthly.com&utm_campaign=end-article)*.*
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00.03 News/How Russian Spies Get Flipped or Expelled, As Told by a Spycatcher.md
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00.03 News/How a Con Man Ended Up in Solitary in Colorado Supermax Federal Prison.md
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@ -46,7 +46,7 @@ One of the men is [Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán](https://www.cbsnews.com/news
James Sabatino is 47 years old. He has a rap sheet of financial crimes stretching back to his adolescence. He is currently serving a twenty-year sentence for running a criminal enterprise that engaged in mail fraud, wire fraud, and the receiving and selling of stolen goods. Despite his alleged ties to the Gambino crime family, a few assault charges in his youth and some admitted loose talk about wanting to blow up a courthouse and “clip” certain people who might be inclined to testify against him, he is not serving time for any violent crimes. He’s a con man, not a mad bomber or a drug kingpin. Outside of Florida, hardly anyone has ever heard of him.
[click to enlarge ![](https://media2.westword.com/den/imager/u/blog/18851998/feature_jimmy_sabatino.jpg?cb=1705418176)](https://media2.westword.com/den/imager/u/original/18851998/feature_jimmy_sabatino.jpg "James Sabatino says the severe isolation he demanded "has saved lives." - Department of Justice")
![](https://media2.westword.com/den/imager/u/blog/18851998/feature_jimmy_sabatino.jpg?cb=1705418176)
James Sabatino says the severe isolation he demanded "has saved lives."
@ -66,12 +66,10 @@ Because he’s represented by an attorney, Sabatino isn’t supposed to send let
Jimmy Sabatino may be stuck in The Suites, but he’s finally hit the big time.
[click to enlarge ![](https://media2.westword.com/den/imager/u/blog/18851993/feature_supermax.jpg?cb=1705418176)](https://media2.westword.com/den/imager/u/original/18851993/feature_supermax.jpg "The U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum, or ADX, outside of Florence. - BOP.gov")
![](https://media2.westword.com/den/imager/u/blog/18851993/feature_supermax.jpg?cb=1705418176)
The U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum, or ADX, outside of Florence.
BOP.gov
**January 29, 1995, was a black day** for San Diego Chargers fans, who watched their team get blown out by the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl XXIX. It was an even bigger bummer for hundreds of would-be attendees who showed up at Joe Robbie Stadium in Miami, clutching tickets for which they’d paid a small fortune, only to be denied entrance.
The tickets were hot. They had been boosted by an eighteen-year-old high school dropout named James Sabatino, who’d obtained inside information about when a shipment of 262 tickets would arrive at a Federal Express distribution center in Florida. [Posing as the president of the Miami Dolphins](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/sports/1995/12/07/super-bowl-ticket-scam-lands-teenager-in-prison/ea5f972e-a1c5-4315-a905-326bc844e96c/), Sabatino had called FedEx and insisted that the tickets be held for pickup. An associate collected the precious ducats, which were then parceled out to online ticket brokers for up to a thousand dollars each.
@ -88,7 +86,7 @@ After the great Super Bowl ticket heist, Sabatino moved on to more elaborate cap
He scammed airline tickets, jewelry from Tiffany’s and other luxury goods, insisting “the company” would handle the bill. By claiming to be working on big-budget movie or music projects involving various film stars and celebrated rappers, he persuaded wide-eyed vendors to supply him with vast quantities of computers, pagers and cell phones, no money down.
[click to enlarge ![](https://media1.westword.com/den/imager/u/blog/18851991/feature_el_chapo.jpg?cb=1705418176)](https://media1.westword.com/den/imager/u/original/18851991/feature_el_chapo.jpg "Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán is the only other resident of The Suites at ADX. - Department of Justice")
![](https://media1.westword.com/den/imager/u/blog/18851991/feature_el_chapo.jpg?cb=1705418176)
Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán is the only other resident of The Suites at ADX.
@ -121,7 +119,7 @@ The fraudulently obtained goods and services were [valued at more than $10 milli
“I don’t apologize to nobody,” Sabatino told U.S. Senior District Judge Joan Lenard. “As far as the government is concerned, they allowed this case to happen…they should be embarrassed.”
[click to enlarge ![](https://media1.westword.com/den/imager/u/blog/18851995/feature_unibomber.jpg?cb=1705418176)](https://media1.westword.com/den/imager/u/original/18851995/feature_unibomber.jpg "Notorious residents of the federal supermax include Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, who died last year. - FBI")
![](https://media1.westword.com/den/imager/u/blog/18851995/feature_unibomber.jpg?cb=1705418176)
Notorious residents of the federal supermax include Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, who died last year.

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00.03 News/I always believed my funny, kind father was killed by a murderous teenage gang. Three decades on, I discovered the truth.md
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I saw Reynolds from a distance as he was released into the corridor, a boy much smaller than his age, joining his parents who were visibly overjoyed as they accompanied him down the stairs and out of the building.
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As the decades passed, I thought about the boys from the gang as little as possible. I had no feelings of anger or even blame, having long made my peace with the chaos of it all. I left religion behind when we moved away from the estate, and built a career in science communication and critical thinking. My job requires me to ask hard questions, check evidence, put bias and feelings aside and consider the facts even when doing so is hurtful. But I had never done that for the events of my father’s death. Until now.

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00.03 News/Inside the Glorious Afterlife of Roger Federer.md
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# Inside the Glorious Afterlife of Roger Federer
**The Sheats-Goldstein House,** located high up in Beverly Hills, is a John Lautner–designed marvel, with a tennis court, a koi pond, and, from the living room, a sweeping view of Los Angeles, just now easing into spring. Though the home’s owner, [courtside fixture](https://www.gq.com/story/nba-fashion-style-jimmy-goldstein-interview) Jimmy Goldstein, pledged in 2016 to someday donate the house to LACMA, photos of Goldstein with various luminaries—Bill Clinton, Karl Lagerfeld, Drake—still line the walls, and a well-worn CD collection (*Pure Pacha Summer 2014, Club St. Tropez 2006*) sits stacked in one corner of the living room. This is where they shot the scene in *The Big Lebowski* in which Jeff Bridges sprawls on the modernist couch, drugged into a dream by a particularly potent White Russian. Now Roger Federer is sitting right about where The Dude sat, taking in the view.
He hasn’t seen the film, he says, though he heard it was a “big success”—he’s more familiar with the location because he once shot something here for a Champagne brand, which is a very Roger Federer thing to say. In person, he is slightly taller than you might think, his eyes a touch more hazel-y. At 42, he still moves with the same grace and efficiency as he did when he was a professional tennis player, though when he and I stand up from the couch where we’ve been talking, we both make the exact same involuntary groan. (Nevermind that Federer has played in more than 1,500 professional tennis matches, and won 20 Grand Slams, and I’m just a guy who watched a sampling of those victories from a variety of reclined postures—it was the same exact sound.) “My back was fine yesterday,” Federer says, laughing and patting it gently.
Jacket by Todd Snyder. Hoodie by Uniqlo. Sunglasses by RF Oliver Peoples.
Last night, Federer attended the Academy Awards ceremony for the second time. (The first time was in 2016, “when Leo won for *The Revenant*”—another very Roger Federer thing to say.) Even before his retirement, on a tear-filled September evening at the 2022 Laver Cup in London, Federer has had an uncommon interest, for a professional athlete, in the world outside of sports. He has long been a fixture on red carpets from Wimbledon to the Met Gala. “I know some players who do hotel, club, hotel, club, room service, watching sports all day, and that’s it,” Federer says. This was not, and is not, Federer’s way. He is a social guy, and a curious one. Since retiring, in part because of an injury to his left knee that required multiple surgeries, he has traveled frequently from his home in his native Switzerland—Tokyo, Thailand, South Africa—with his wife and four kids, and tried his hand at design, most recently with the California eyewear brand Oliver Peoples, with whom he is releasing a sleek line of sunglasses this week.
One and a half years into his new life, he is reflective but still seemingly powered by whatever potent mix of ease and focus he relied upon as a player. “Just staying in the narrow tennis mind is not enough,” Federer says. “I feel like going out and meeting people and doing different things to me is very appealing, even though I used to dread red carpets and small talk and all that stuff.”
**Why did you dread it?**
Just, what do you say? What are we doing here? Why do I have to wear this? It was all those questions when you’re a teenager, like, My God, I feel like I can’t breathe in the tie. So I said, look: I need to wear more suits, so I get comfortable in suits. And actually I used to make a conscious effort of wearing more ties with either just a blazer, jacket, and jeans, or ties with a cardigan, and just make sure I get used to the feeling of wearing that type of clothing.
**That’s a very athlete answer. It’s like, “Oh, I’ll just train.”**
“I’ll train.” I would train myself to be comfortable in it, but it’s so true because if you only wear it once every blue moon and then you only wear it to award shows, you come to the award show and you’re literally freaking out because you’re so uncomfortable and you’re so nervous. So I said: I have to get in the right frame of mind.
**How is retirement?**
I’m really relieved, if that makes any sense.
**Relieved in what way?**
I mean, the last few years have been tough with my knee. You could feel the end coming closer. So when it’s all said and done and you’re over the line and you’re retired officially, you take a deep breath and you’re like, “Wow, okay, that was good.”
**So the emotion wasn’t sadness or grief, it was happiness?**
In the moment, it was suffering. Because I knew it was going to be hard. The moment of retirement in London, everything that led up to it. And then of course you have flashbacks a little bit later when you see highlights or people ask you, “How did you feel in that very moment?” and they show you a highlight. You’re like, “Oh, my God, do I really have to see that again?”
**You were sobbing that night.**
Yeah, it’s super highly emotional. Something that has always been with you is gone and will be forever gone, and you cannot have it back as much as you want it back. The train has left the station. And that’s okay, and I want it to be that way, but of course you cannot just go from one day to the next and say like, “Okay, no problem, that’s easy.”
**Do you feel like you got the ending that you wanted, ultimately?**
Definitely. Even better. Because I was always petrified of the moment when you play and the match is over, we shake hands, and then the opponent kind of just drifts away or he hangs around and you then take the mic, you’re all alone on the court, some of your friends are up in the stands, but nobody knows if you’re going to lose in the first round or you’re losing the finals or whatever. So not everybody can be there. Not everybody knows on that very day that that was going to be the end. So you end up being like, okay, and then you speak, that’s it, boom, over, and then next match and the show goes on.
**The next two guys just come out and start hitting a tennis ball back and forth.**
It’s not a big deal, but the show goes on. And I was just always afraid that I was going to be standing alone down on court. Everything I’ve always hoped for is to be in a team environment and surrounded by my closest ones where I could tell the world, “Okay, this is going to be the day.” I don’t remember the date to be honest, but that particular Friday night I was able to say, I’m going to be playing and everybody can come and watch me play. There was still a Saturday and Sunday that followed up the Laver Cup and I could just hang around, relax, enjoy. I was still part of the team, so it felt like a net catching me.
**Did you allow yourself to picture retirement while you were playing?**
I mean, a hundred percent you have flashes as you sit in the car on the way to training or something and you look outside and think, Okay, how is retirement going to be? Or: Where am I going to retire? How am I going to retire? How much longer can I play? Those questions naturally pass your mind as you think about your life and you think about your kids and where the journey’s going to go. But I think every player has that. I’ve been asked about retirement since 2009 when I won the French Open and I tied Sampras’s record \[of 14 Grand Slams\]. People say, “So what else is there to achieve?” I’m like, yeah, “Good question. I dunno. But I love playing and we’ll see where it takes me.”
**Your whole life, you identify one way. You’re like, “I’m a professional tennis player, that is my identity.” And then one day you’re not a professional tennis player anymore.**
You’re not. You’re “retired.” They’re like, “What do you do?” “I don’t know.” I’m retired. It’s strange.
Clothing by Prada. Shoes, his own.
**Was there a moment when you were like: Wait, who am I actually?**
Tennis was my identity, but it was not what I was doing all day every day. I mean, for the most part, I’m being more of a dad and a husband and a son. Being a tennis player was my hobby, and then that became my job. But I always tried to not identify myself just purely as a tennis player. When tennis was taken away or put aside, well, I still had all the other things. And I think that mindset has anyway been a strength of mine throughout my career. I knew that if tennis ends tomorrow, which it can with an accident or whatever, it happens, you have to be able to live with yourself without the game.
**That’s something that you tell yourself while you’re playing, but then you wake up one day and you actually have to live it.**
I feel like it’s been pretty straightforward and not too complex to dive into the retirement life. I actually don’t have enough time in the day. And I love being surrounded by people and friends and I’m very social. So I think it has always helped me, that I don’t sit alone in a room. I feel like I’ve had maybe two afternoons since my retirement where I’ve been at home alone because kids were in school or doing something and my wife was working on some other projects and here I am at home, I’m like, Okay, what do I do? I don’t know. It was awkward enough. So let’s not have those moments. Let’s not do that anymore. Let’s not do that again.
**Do you feel like retirement has changed your relationship to time at all in any way?**
Good question. I feel…what do I feel? I feel minutes matter more now than before. I don’t know if it’s an age thing as well, as you get older, you feel like time’s running away from you and you still have a lot to accomplish, a lot to do.
**One of the things you’ve done since retirement is start designing stuff, like clothes and shoes and now sunglasses. What do you get out of that?**
I think when you have a chance to work with great people, great minds, you get into this idea of how cool would it be to have your own sunglasses and, if you could, who would you choose? And you’re like: Oliver Peoples, how cool would that be? California, such a distant place from Switzerland, such a different world altogether. How could we conceptualize an idea and make it come to life? And having spent, I dunno, 80 percent of my life in the summer because we’re chasing the sun all year round with the tour makes me want to wear more sunglasses now. Who knows what played a role in it, but I just thought it could be something really, really fun.
**How involved did you get in the actual design of the thing?**
In this case with Oliver Peoples, they sketch out the ideas, I bring in my opinions as well. And then it’s like you put it all in a pot, you cook it up, you stir it up. And then what is your inspiration? Do we want to reference tennis or do we just stay away completely from it? But Oliver Peoples really thought it would be cool to reference tennis with some of the colors, which reference the different surfaces, and the strings at the back with the logo. And I just thought that actually is a great idea. So okay, let’s dive deeper into it. And I’m so happy with the result. Honestly, I think they look really good.
**You haven’t always been interested in fashion. What got you into it?**
Travels for sure. My wife, Mirka, is three years older and she was always very elegant and always very into cars, watches, and fashion. Those were her hobbies. And she was always very outgoing, visiting places, and I think she inspired me very much to also go to museums, meet people, be more outgoing, be socially stronger. Because we started dating when I was 18 years old and we had met at the Sydney Olympics back in 2000. And so I think that’s what got me into the whole fashion world. When you go to all these different cities, I’m sorry, you cannot wear jeans and running sneakers and, I dunno, an oversized T-shirt every single day. And then as I was growing into a more successful tennis player, you were doing this red carpet. So you need a suit and you cannot wear the same tie every time.
Jacket by Tod's. Sweater and pants by Theory. Sunglasses by RF Oliver Peoples.
**You also are working right now on a documentary about yourself and the final days of your playing career that you have coming out on Amazon with the filmmakers Joe Sabia and Asif Kapadia. Why’d you decide to do that?**
Well, I didn’t, to be honest. I don’t know how to explain. This was something I didn’t want to do. It’s like writing a book. I didn’t want to write a book. I just was not ready to write my story. So that was never an idea. Then when the end was coming nearer, and once the Laver Cup was set, the question was: Well, do we want to have anything documented? Just maybe more for my own story, for my own kids, for friends and coaches and my team. How about if we film a little bit of an over-the-shoulder type thing? Then at least we’d have something, because we almost have no behind the scenes of my life because I never want anybody around. So then they came and I said, “Well, you probably want to see before, and then during, and after \[the match\].” And then Joe told me, “Hey, I have so much footage and it’s so incredible and it would be such a waste not to share this. Can I just pitch to you a one-hour doc?” And I’m like, “Okay, well sure, but that’s not the point here. But yeah sure, show me.” And it’s super emotional, hard-core to watch. So I watch it with Mirka and Tony \[Godsick, Federer’s agent\] and we’re like, Oh, my God, wow. So next thing you know, it’s like we’re doing one and a half hours, last-12-days-of-my-life type thing. I watched a screening the other day, it was hard-core. I cried like six times.
**Why did you cry?**
I just think there’s so many moments where you feel that suffering I was talking about. You see the end coming and there is this end point, but it’s beautiful. But it’s just for me also probably emotionally going through it, it’s hard. I wonder how the viewer will see it. But I think it’s maybe very nice, and I think for a lot of athletes, maybe it’ll be good to see how I went out.
**When you say “suffering,” you mean mental suffering, not physical, right?**
No, yeah, we’re talking mentally, just emotionally. It goes through your body, literally. It’s like a full whole body experience. You’re like, “Oh, my god.”
**Had you ever experienced any feeling like that before?**
I mean, with Grand Slam matches. The one thing that comes close was maybe when I lost at Wimbledon \[in 2021\], my last match against \[Hubert\] Hurkacz, in straight sets. Six-love in the third. And I literally came off the court and my knee was so bad I couldn’t even play properly anymore. And I knew that this maybe was my last Wimbledon. I tried to get ready for the press conference to see, Okay, what could they possibly be asking me? It has to be about the knee, and my mind is spinning and I’m having fireworks in my head and it was literally like, Oh, my God, I just lost at Wimbledon. I tried everything. This is the maximum I could have done. Actually, I played really good considering I made it really far, I thought. That whole experience was a whole full out-of-body experience because everything happened in a way I didn’t think it was going to happen or shouldn’t happen. Like the match six-love in the third, the press conference, the feelings I was having, the fear, the anxiety, just the whole thing. I mean it was hard-core. So maybe that comes a little close in a different way to my retirement.
**Do you miss tennis?**
Not really, actually.
**Really?**
Yeah, I get that question a lot, and I don’t miss it. I really don’t. I feel really at peace. I think it’s also because I know that my knee and my body and my mind don’t allow me to be out there. Do I feel like, Oh, I could hit that shot? Yeah, okay: Maybe I could right now. But I feel like I squeezed the lemon out. I tried everything I had. And I’m so at peace. I love to go to play tennis when I play with my children. I just booked a court with my wife for the first time in my life. We asked, “Is a court available on Tuesday from three to four maybe? Because I think it’d be maybe fun to go play.” This was like a month ago, or two months ago, and we went to play next to my kids, who were having a lesson, and it was just so much fun. I love playing tennis and I always thought, How is that moment going to be when I retire and I go back on a tennis court and actually don’t have to improve? Who cares if I miss a forehand? Who cares if it’s getting better or not?
Shoes by Crockett & Jones.
**Are you still able to summon greatness on occasion?**
Yes. Actually it’s so funny. I was just at Stanford a couple of days back and I went to watch their team play tennis because Tony’s son is a freshman at Stanford. And then I saw them doing something and I told Tony’s son, “Look, on the forehand return, I think you should be doing this.” And I explained quickly, I took a racket, I was dressed like this \[varsity jacket, jeans, and a sweater\] and I’m clocking forehand returns, and it’s just there. It doesn’t go away. It’s like riding a bike. And then we did another exercise and then I’m trying to explain how there’s different versions of forehands. There is the loopy one, the fast one, the angle-y one, whatever. And every one I hit was perfect. And I’m just thinking, My God, it’s still there.
**Do you still watch tennis at all?**
I watch highlights. A full match is hard for me to watch because I’m just too busy with children and running around. Maybe I watched one full, entire match last year. But other than that, it’s highlights and I check scores every day. I’m surprised actually. I thought I was just going to check out completely and not care so much, but I guess I still know too many players and I want to see how they do.
**Obviously anytime Rafael Nadal or Novak Djokovic win, people think of you, because of your longtime rivalry with both players and because of curiosity about how everyone will finish relative to one another in terms of history. Are *you* thinking of you when they play? Are you paying specific attention?**
I mean obviously you’re aware when they’re in the finals or you’re aware when Rafa comes back or you’re aware when Novak breaks another record. It’s all good, you know? But I will not set my schedule aside, like, well, This match I have to see. But obviously I’ve followed it and I love to see that, especially Novak’s been going from strength to strength. It keeps on going. And Rafa obviously, I felt sad for him that he has not been able to play nearly as much or at all to what he wanted to do. I hope that he can do what he wants to do in the summer, because even though I have a good feeling for him, and I know he pulled out of Indian Wells and Doha and all that stuff, but I still am very hopeful that he can get back on the train and ride it.
**These are guys that you were sharing a court with for years. And then you turn on the TV and they’re still on the court and you’re not. Does that feeling have a name? Does it feel like anything?**
It feels good. When I retired in London at the press conference next to Andy \[Murray\], Novak, Rafa, and \[Björn\] Borg and everybody who was there, I said, “It’s fitting for me to be the first to go.” I had the time without them on tour when I came on tour and now it’s their time to have a moment on tour without me. So it would’ve felt wrong for me if Murray, who almost retired with his hip, or Rafa with his knees, we didn’t know how long he was going to play. So I’m happy I was the first to go. And actually I wish that they can go on for as long as I did.
**Does the competitor inside of you also feel that way?**
Oh, that one is gone.
**Really?**
Yeah, totally. Completely. Because I’m proud and happy about what I achieved; and I will never forget when I broke Sampras’s record, he was cool about it. Or as cool as you can be. And I’ll never forget that. And I think you also take a different role when you retire. You end up being very, I dunno, content in your position, and you also are supportive of the game as a whole. So if things are achieved, I see it in the sphere of: Okay, well, we’re competing not within the tennis-level sphere, but actually we’re competing in the sports sphere, putting tennis on the map on a bigger scale. We’re fighting for eyeballs with Netflix or Amazon, or whatever it is.
Turtleneck by Theory. Shorts by Uniqlo. Sneakers by On.
**Are there younger players that you like to watch, or anyone you see with similarities to you?**
I mean, obviously we are missing the one-hander situation. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but for the first time in history—
**There’s not a player with a one-handed backhand in the top 10, currently.**
That’s a dagger right there.
**I wondered how you felt about that.**
I felt that one. That one was personal. I didn’t like that. But at the same time, how do you say, it makes the one-handers—Sampras, Rod Laver, me—it makes us special as well that we’ve carried the torch, or the flag or whatever, for as long as we did. So I love seeing players with one-handers like Stan \[Wawrinka\] and \[Richard\] Gasquet and \[Stefanos\] Tsitsipas. Dominic Thiem has a wonderful one. Grigor \[Dimitrov\], good friend. So I love that. And then I like to see characters, and I like to see explosive athletic players. What we get more and more nowadays is that I wish that sometimes we had a little bit more variety, and also back and forth coming to the net a little bit more, not just side to side. We’ll see where the game will go. But obviously the problem is when you have a lot of similar players playing against each other, a lot of the points end up being played in a similar fashion. And my goal on the tour was always—playing every point in a similar way against my opponent is what he wants. What he doesn’t want is if I mix it up and have variety. So for me, seeing two guys play against each other and have 20 same points back to back to back, come on. It can be very interesting. It’s like an arm wrestle. But I like to say, “Let’s not enter the arm wrestle. Let’s enter another game.”
**You were talking about the one-handed backhand like you think it’s not coming back.**
I think it’s still going to exist, it’s going to come back, it’s going to be there. But I mean, I taught my four kids a double-hander. Not that I can teach them a double-hander.
**No!**
I’m a terrible example. And I’m also a bad custodian of the one-hander. But maybe we can still change that.
**Is there any younger player you see now where you think, Maybe they can win as much as I won?**
I don’t like to put the pressure on these players because honestly aiming for 20 \[major victories\] was not something I did, Rafa did, or Novak did. Of course you have the players that you think are going to win multiple Slams. Somebody has to win Slams and naturally they’re going to win them nicely and do it perfectly and they’re going to be the ones carrying the game and become the superstars of our sports, which some are already announcing themselves to do: \[Carlos\] Alcaraz, \[Jannik\] Sinner, and so forth. And there’s a lot of momentum right now also to see who’s going to be the next guy. So I think the next two to three years, they’re going to give us a really good idea because I think there are good players right now, but I still think they are recalibrating their game to understand: Okay, how can I beat the best in the business on their best surface?
**At this point, you are very familiar with how people describe the way you played tennis: “beautiful,” “effortless,” and so on. On the one hand, that’s an obvious compliment. On the other hand, I’m curious about how you feel about that being the way your game will be remembered.**
Today, I take it as a big compliment. When I was playing, I was struggling a little bit more with it because I feel like then they would not see the fighter and the winner I hopefully was. Because if you’re not a fighter, if you cannot put in effort—you cannot achieve what I achieved with just being effortless. I think when you’ve worked unbelievably hard, only then can you make it look effortless. So I always struggled—especially early on—with the thought of: Well, do they not see the passion and fight and everything I put into it? Because when I would win it’s like, “Oh, it’s so easy.” And when I would lose, it’s like, “Wish he tried a bit more,” almost. And that in the beginning was really, really hard to accept and really complex for me. It was a bit of a mind bender then. And I think eventually I felt really comfortable in my skin and I knew that I was putting it all on the line. And that’s why when I would lose a match, I could literally, five minutes later, match was over, It’s no problem. I gave it all I had, and we move on.
**Do you think the perception of effortlessness was a byproduct of your style, or something intentional you were doing?**
I think playing in an effortless way—let’s say, could be right after impact \[*Federer mimes the most beautiful forehand you’ve ever seen*\], if you’re able to be maybe relaxed, or you’re able to relax while you’re moving, or right away when the point is over, you are able to find a sense of tranquility almost. I think I did that naturally because I thought, That’s going to give me extra energy towards the back end of a match or back end of a tournament, or I could play maybe a few more years. So I did it because I thought, If I’m really tense and uptight all the time, I’ll be exhausted within no time. That’s why when I see other players that are really intense, I’m like, Jesus. I really respect that because I could not be that.
**Can I confess something? You and I are about the same age, and I’m a tennis fan, and I always watched you play, but I think I rooted for you more in the back half of your career, when the humanity, and the possibility of you losing, was more evident. Does that make sense?**
Total sense. I was not really aware of it I guess until 2008. Or maybe there was a moment when, I think in ’05 when I lost to \[Marat\] Safin at the Australian Open, I said, “I’ve created a monster.” When I lose a set, people are like, “Oh, my god, Roger lost a set.” Or I’m losing in a semis with match point against Safin. People are like in shock. *Can you believe it?* I’m like, what do you mean, shock? Can you believe it? It’s normal to lose against an unbelievable player.
So I think in 2008 when I lost to Rafa \[*at Wimbledon, in what many think was the greatest match of all time*\], it was, I mean, a very particular moment because obviously I was devastated after losing that match. But then I would come to the States a month later and people are still talking about it, like, “Oh, my God, that Wimbledon match.” I’m like, “Yeah, I mean, it was good.” “No, no, that was special and shit. So you lost. But my God, I mean just seeing the human side come out of you and we’ve seen you win so much. So seeing you on the losing side felt really different and special.” I’m like, “Yeah, okay. I mean, the match was fine. Okay, it was good. But really.” And then it kept on going for days and days until I realized we created something special in that very moment.
And also it was maybe the Federer 2.0 has entered the building type thing that, okay, now this was the one that actually loses also some, and that’s how he is. And that can happen and it’s part of life. And I think the more human side started coming out probably because just when you lose, people can relate a little bit more because we all lose in life, and before that I was winning for so long. Then of course the kids were born, then you become a parent, and then it’s even more relatable, I believe. And then like you said, I think people started to really know me because I’d been on tour for so long. So I think that’s why I had a lot of emotional support from a lot of the fans towards me.
**To be clear, I was never rooting for you to lose, but I think I did identify more with the *possibility* of losing. Did you notice crowds gravitating to you more as that became more possible?**
I do think maybe there is something with my game that resonates a lot with the people. They feel that maybe if they come and watch me play that something special is going to happen. I play a different type of way. Maybe I was also the bridge from the older generation, one-handed backhand, effortless like everybody used to play back in the day, end of the ’90s, to the new powerful super-spinny, grunty sort of game that came in, and I was still the old-school-type guy. So I think sentimentally, I was probably a favorite of many because of my game.
Shirt by Theory. Pants by Uniqlo. Sneakers by On. Sunglasses by RF Oliver Peoples.
**You’ve mentioned your kids—you have two twin boys, who are nine, and two twin girls, who are 14. Are they serious tennis players?**
Not serious, but we make them play.
**Really?**
Because I don’t want my kids to be the only kids in my circle not to play. And obviously I live in a tennis circle, and otherwise they’re the only kids not playing because all the other kids play tennis and this is their passion. So that’s why I say to the girls, who were not super in love with it in the beginning, like, “Guys, I mean you have to play a little bit.” So they all four play now.
**The way I understand your story is that tennis was not forced on you by your parents. It was your choice. Are you able to parent the same way?**
I’ve tried to be more the GM than the coach, and I’ve told them I’m not the coach. And if I can be of help, great. And if you don’t want me out there, that’s okay too. But sometimes I can’t control myself, like at Stanford. I come in and go like, “Let me just quickly teach a little fundamental thing.”
**Do they understand how the rest of the world regards you or what you accomplished?**
Well, much more now than ever before. When they were younger, especially the girls, I would not tell them about my ranking or my successes, even when I was ranked number one. They would ask me: “How good is Stan?” “He’s obviously incredible. I mean, legendary player and he’s fantastic.” “What about Rafa?” “Yeah, he’s also, he’s super good.” And then they were like, “What about you?” “I mean, I’m okay.” I would really downplay it.
But now obviously I can’t do that sometimes anymore because their friends come up and say, like, “Oh, your dad did this, or this, did you know that?” And sometimes they’ve asked me as well. And then now I can be more open and honest about my accomplishments sometimes or my experiences. And I use it more as storytelling or as an experience to share it with them.
**I feel like it’s always so well documented: the climb, the desire to be great, and then the peak. But there are way fewer words for what happens afterwards. How would you describe what you’re living through now?**
Yeah, so I’m happy I didn’t have a decline at the end. The decline came because of injuries, if you want. I don’t call it a decline, it’s just the struggles I guess. But now I’m happy. It’s a different life altogether. It’s like when I was in rehab, as an example. I liked rehab because it was something new in my life. It was a new challenge. It’s literally one step at a time or one movement at a time. And it’s the same with life now. I mean: a new space, navigating through this new life, with new projects, with my children especially. And I like this time. Even though I did say in interviews last year that I’ve never been more stressed. But this was not because of retirement. This was just about me caring for my children together with my wife and just trying to help them go through school and all the demands. And you care so dearly as a parent, you almost, I don’t want to say I want it too much. Not at all. I feel like I’m a super laid-back guy. But just I would wake up and go like, okay: *I’ve got to be there. I’ve got to help them.*
**Parenting is a different form of stress, right? Grand Slam pressure, sure, but you had 20 years of that.**
Exactly. And it’s not like I’ve been a parent of 14-year-olds or nine-year-old boys before. Every day is the first time for me.
**Zach Baron** *is GQ’s senior special projects editor.*
---
**PRODUCTION CREDITS:**
*Photographs by **Lachlan Bailey***
*Styled by **Jim Moore***
*Grooming by **Nathanael Röthlisberger***
*Tailoring by **Irina Shishko***
*Set design by **BG Porter** for Owl and the Elephant*
*Produced by **Annee Elliot***
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# Jan Marsalek an Agent for Russia? The Double Life of the former Wirecard Executive
It’s the middle of summer in Nice, and the Mediterranean is lapping gently against the walls of the quay. A man with shortly trimmed dark hair in a black suit and a radiant white shirt is striding briskly toward a cutter. A second man is carrying his case. An attractive woman – tall and blond, her summer dress fluttering in the wind – is pacing on the aft deck of the *Poseidon III*, laughing nervously. Her name is Natalya Zlobina, and she is the Russian lover of Jan Marsalek, one of the most-wanted men in Europe.
DER SPIEGEL 10/2024
![](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/09c80e1f-ba8c-471e-8840-869e4023dccb_w335_r0.7502857142857143_fpx45_fpy56.jpg)
**The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 10/2024 (March 2nd, 2024) of DER SPIEGEL.**
[SPIEGEL International](https://www.spiegel.de/international/ "SPIEGEL International")
The scene, recorded by a camera at the Port of Nice, becomes a bit blurry. The man in the black suit climbs down a ladder to the *Poseidon III* and greets the woman with a kiss. She laughs; he seems annoyed. Now, it's possible to recognize his face, well-known these days from the wanted posters plastered on the walls of train stations and airports: It is Jan Marsalek himself, the former COO of Wirecard, which was once listed on Germany’s blue-chip stock index, the DAX. He has been on the run since June 2020.
The moment hardly lasts a minute, and it can be seen in the video that the woman quickly makes it clear to him that the cutter is just part of a little prank. The real ship is rocking in the waves one slip over – a luxurious mega-yacht, of course, where a group of laughing men is waiting. Later, Zlobina will celebrate her 30th birthday here. It is July 6, 2014, the day on which Jan Marsalek’s life will change. The day on which he will meet a man with excellent ties to the Russian military secret service agency GRU, and on which he will apparently begin his second life as a spy.
Marsalek’s story has thus far been more of a financial thriller, already an almost unbelievable tale of fraud, lies and deception. A story of a school dropout rising to become the COO of the financial company Wirecard, a firm considered for a time as one of the most powerful newcomers to the German economy in decades, courted by government ministers and premiers. But Wirecard’s success, as would become clear, was a sham. Billions of euros in account balances evaporated, almost 6,000 people lost their jobs and top executives were arrested.
The drama is now taking a bizarre turn, the plot gets even crazier. Suddenly, the financial thriller has become a spy thriller. And the main character is no longer a charismatic trickster, but a villain straight out of a James Bond movie, cynical and dangerous. A man who is still on the run today. But where is he? And how has he managed to escape the authorities all this time?
Joint reporting by DER SPIEGEL, German public broadcaster ZDF, the Austrian newspaper *Der Standard* and the Russian investigative platform The Insider has now found some answers. On the basis of confidential documents, mobile phone data, travel records, lab results, investigation files, emails and chats, Marsalek’s story can now be told in its entirety. Marsalek isn’t just the main character in one of Germany’s largest ever financial scandals. He is also – so it would seem from interviews with secret service agents, police investigators and people from his orbit – a spy working for the Kremlin. A man whose activities in his role as an agent endangers lives. Marsalek has apparently commissioned Bulgarian accomplices to track Moscow’s critics across all of Europe, spy on them and possibly even eliminate them. The plot was uncovered at the last moment by the British domestic intelligence agency MI5.
Marsalek’s ties to Russian secret service agencies go back an entire decade. It seems that he was initially recruited by the GRU, but he is also thought to have worked for the KGB’s successor agency, the FSB, in recent years. Zlobina, his girlfriend, is also in touch with men from the security services. Over the several years Marsalek spent as the head of a DAX-listed company, he was apparently able to quietly expand his spying network, traveling to Russia on more than 60 occasions and using six Austrian passports and a diplomatic document to do so.
There are plenty of indications that Marsalek also involved Wirecard in Russian intelligence activities – that money was laundered and mercenaries were paid through the company. Was Marsalek using Germany’s model company to help an adversarial power? Did a DAX-listed company assist in the waging of war? How did all this take place without German intelligence officials taking notice?
Jan Marsalek’s tracks lead into a shrill parallel world that feels at times like a poorly lit B movie. At others, it slips into the horror genre. It includes scenes with flights in MiG fighter jets and rocket-propelled grenades are fired in Syria. And others with champagne parties on the Côte d’Azur and mercenary armies are recruited in Libya. Characters include agents, nude models, mercenaries, politicians, psychopaths and murderers.
And a Russian priest who has astounding similarities to Jan Marsalek.
### THE PRIEST
Halfway between Moscow and Rostov-on-Don lies the city of Lipetsk. Founded in the early 18th century by Peter the Great, it is home to half a million residents today. At a traffic circle on the way into the center of town is a charming, 200-year-old chapel with a golden dome and a façade colored brightly in yellow, blue and white. Twice a day except for Tuesdays, a priest named Konstantin Bayazov holds services there. He has a dark beard and shortly trimmed hair. If you watch the priest during his services, you start seeing similarities to Marsalek, and the two men’s birthdays are also just a single year apart. The parallels were also apparently noticed by Russian secret service agents.
![Marsalek's Russian passport, passport file, Pastor Konstantin Bayazov](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/00c1916c-690a-4d2c-b707-8bc45ea24b1a_w520_r1.4441951766685361_fpx33.91_fpy50.93.png "Marsalek's Russian passport, passport file, Pastor Konstantin Bayazov")
Marsalek's Russian passport, passport file, Pastor Konstantin Bayazov
\[M\] Lea Rossa / DER SPIEGEL; Fotos: DER SPIEGEL (3)
Bayazov – the real Bayazov – hasn’t used his own passport since September 2020. Because since then, there has been a second Bayazov, a fake one. The passport file was changed on September 5, 2020, and a new passport was issued with the number 763391844. Both the file and the travel document now include the scowling image of Jan Marsalek.
A contact person is also included in the file, complete with a telephone number: Evgeniya Kurochkina. She is thought to provide assistance to the Russian domestic intelligence agency FSB. According to leaked information from Russia, Kurochkina has regularly telephoned and traveled with a Moscow-based agent of the authority.
This won’t be the only moment in the course of this story that feels like you’ve suddenly landed in a spy novel by John le Carré.
### MARSALEK, THE GAMBLER
Marsalek established his first ties to Russia in 2010. Shortly before that, he had become a member of the executive board of the financial services provider Wirecard, a company that was largely unknown at the time. Wirecard’s main line of business was taking care of the technical processing of credit card payments for online vendors. Early on, that consisted primarily of porno and gambling sites. But the head of the company, Markus Braun, was looking for more. A native of Vienna, Braun saw himself as an intellectual visionary and was fond of wearing black turtle-neck sweaters like Apple’s Steve Jobs. And he, too, wanted to lead a global company.
Marsalek, who is also Austrian, was Braun’s right-hand man. He had started working for Wirecard – called Wire Card at the time – when he was 20 as "Director Technology" for a starting monthly salary of 9,000 deutsche marks – not bad for someone who had just dropped out of school. But Marsalek was good at programming and understood the new network technology. That was enough to impress the founder of Wirecard.
Braun and Marsalek would prove to be a dream team, they were ambitious and brash. Their goal was global expansion, envisioning telecom companies, airlines and retailers all taking care of their digital payments through Wirecard. The company’s stock price climbed continuously, even if its revenues and profits didn’t keep pace early on. In February 2010, Marsalek was promoted to chief operating officer.
The two were also interested penetrating the Russian market, and their door opener was Florian Stermann, the enigmatic and somewhat shady president of the Austrian-Russian Friendship Society. With his assistance, Wirecard began negotiating with the Russian telecommunications company Megafon in 2011. Wirecard was hired to provide prepaid credit cards for mobile phone customers, but the project failed. The company got a second chance to secure a significant deal in Russia though – by processing transactions for the Moscow subway, with its 7 million passengers per day.
It was up to Marsalek to usher the deal to completion, and he began making frequent trips to Russia. It was a life he quickly took to – the world of the international executive, complete with luxury hotels and gourmet restaurants. It was a validation for him, a school dropout with no advanced degree who had always wanted to prove everyone wrong and leave all those behind who just seemed to get in his way. Including his mother.
Marsalek was born in Vienna on March 15, 1980, and grew up just a few kilometers away in the town of Klosterneuburg. He went to a French private school before attending the local high school. He was a good student, quite talented. "Eloquent," with a "great aptitude for computer sciences," say former teachers.
But he was also a child who always had a hard time with rules and conventions, as his mother told DER SPIEGEL with a shake of her head just a few weeks after Marsalek’s disappearance. The interview took place in July 2020 in an old farmhouse not far from Vienna. She reverted to her birth name years ago and asked that it not be used in print. She said she hadn’t been in touch with her son for quite some time. She calls him a "arrogant showoff."
A few old photos from his childhood still exist. One of them shows him wearing a gray coat and a floppy hat that is far too big for him, looking like the cliché of a secret agent. His father was hardly ever at home during the week due to his job as the managing director of a company in the Czech Republic. Back home, says his mother, arguments were frequent.
![Childhood photos of Jan Marsalek](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/83d92290-78e3-4813-a167-060a131a5f3b_w520_r1.4441951766685361_fpx63_fpy44.99.png "Childhood photos of Jan Marsalek")
Childhood photos of Jan Marsalek
\[M\] Lea Rossa / DER SPIEGEL; Fotos: DER SPIEGEL (2)
In June 1999, she says, her son suddenly moved out after a fight. For a long time, the only indications that he was alive came in the form of mobile phone bills and past-due notices, she recalls. She kept track of his career through the media. "I was always suspicious of Wirecard. The fact that Jan rose so quickly in the company without a diploma, how is that possible?"
"Charisma," is the response given by almost all former Wirecard employees when asked that question. Former teachers, past lovers and former friends agree. Even as a 20-year-old, Marsalek exuded self-confidence and intelligence. "You immediately see him as a successful person who knows what he is talking about and what he is doing," says Pav Gill, the former chief legal officer for Wirecard in Asia. "A genius salesman who attracts people," says a former confidant. "He is eloquent, charming and extremely intelligent," says Jörn Leogrande, the former head of innovation for Wirecard.
It was an impression reinforced by Marsalek’s lifestyle, which included parties in Saint Tropez and 15,000-euro dinners in the Mandarin Oriental in Munich, including several 2,500-euro bottles of champagne and Remy Martin Louis XIII cognac to wash it down.
But he was also erratic. Before long, the deal with the Moscow metro ran into difficulties and Marsalek seemed to lose interest in Russia. It was at this moment that Natalya Zlobina made her appearance. The dubious Russian businessman Sergey Lee, say people who were present at the time, recommended her with the warmest of words. Zlobina, he told Marsalek, citing her excellent contacts in the Moscow administration, could save the metro deal.
Surprisingly good contacts for a 29-year-old who had, to that point, primarily made a name for herself as an online erotic model. In the horror sex film "Red Lips 2 – Blood Lust," she plays a Russian secret agent who kills her victims with a neurotoxin. Being an agent was apparently a role she was comfortable with – also, it seems, in real life.
One clue is the fact that her personal information is closely protected. Access to her passport file in an official database was temporarily blocked, with officials instead providing information for a completely different woman. Someone also deleted Zlobina’s travel data from a police system. Such security measures are frequently used by Russian secret service agencies to protect their operatives.
Zlobina was also likely acting as a "honey trap" for Marsalek, a term used in the agency world for attracting a target with a romantic liaison.
The subway deal between Moscow and Wirecard never actually materialized, but the relationship between Marsalek and Zlobina quickly deepened beyond mere professional interests. They took quick trips together to places like Barcelona and Santorini, with Marsalek picking up his new girlfriend in Moscow with a private jet. These and dozens of other trips can be retraced with the help of confidential flight and border-crossing databases, internal emails, chats and reports from acquaintances.
![Zlobina, vacation photos from Jan Marsalek](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/3edd01bb-240d-4532-bf00-1ba4ff8e70e4_w520_r1.4441951766685361_fpx51.89_fpy44.99.png "Zlobina, vacation photos from Jan Marsalek")
Zlobina, vacation photos from Jan Marsalek
\[M\] Lea Rossa / DER SPIEGEL; Fotos: DER SPIEGEL (3)
The two of them were looking for adventure, sources close to them say when describing their relationship. Marsalek apparently called her "Zebra," and she allegedly had an animal nickname for him as well.
In September 2013, the couple took a trip to the Chechnyan capital of Grozny, apparently to meet relatives of the dictator Ramzan Kadyrov, according to witnesses. Kadyrov’s clan, the witnesses say, had parked around $100 million in accounts in Hong Kong and were looking for a way to get the money to Western Europe, laundered.
Zlobina allegedly introduced Marsalek as the one who could solve the problem. Wirecard was taking care of large financial transactions every day. Perhaps nobody would notice a few extra million?
Witness accounts in combination with trips taken by both Zlobina and by a Kadyrov confidant show that people involved met later on two occasions, once in Vienna and once in Asia. Whether a deal ever actually took shape is unclear. But Marsalek apparently proved his worth in one way or the other.
A couple of months later, in summer 2014, on that warm July evening in the Port of Nice, it was time for the next, decisive step. A special guest was in attendance for Zlobina’s birthday party. According to the recollections of other guests at the party, she introduced him to Marsalek as "Stas," saying he was a "general."
His complete name is Stanislav Petlinsky, a figure from the shady world of the Russian security apparatus who is as illustrious as he is indistinct. In the 1990s, he worked for the Russian special forces unit Spetsnaz and was later part of the Presidential Administration of Russia in the Kremlin, according to people close to him. After that, his rank and his role become less clear. Western agents believe Petlinsky works for several Russian secret service agencies.
Marsalek, in any case, was smitten from the very beginning, say those who witnessed the early days of their friendship. Others say you can see Marsalek from two perspectives: Marsalek before Stas, and Marsalek after Stas.
![Marsalek wined and dined his friend Stanislav Petlinsky for the latter's birthday at the high-end Munich restaurant Tantris.](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/9eead628-20c8-40db-8834-c1840a2cad6b_w488_r1.4441951766685361_fpx31.15_fpy50.93.png "Marsalek wined and dined his friend Stanislav Petlinsky for the latter's birthday at the high-end Munich restaurant Tantris.")
Marsalek wined and dined his friend Stanislav Petlinsky for the latter's birthday at the high-end Munich restaurant Tantris.
\[M\] Lea Rossa / DER SPIEGEL; Foto: DER SPIEGEL
Marsalek had an interest in weapons? Stas offered to arrange a shooting training session for him. Yan had questions about the underground world of Russian secret service agencies? Stas seemed to have all the answers.
Petlinsky would later tell some that he handed Marsalek off to the GRU after their first meeting. That would mean that starting in summer 2014, Marsalek was a tool of Russian secret service agencies, a view shared by Western intelligence officials.
Zlobina knew that Marsalek was an adrenalin junky, and they took a flight together in a fighter jet. One photo shows Marsalek sitting in a MiG-29 wearing a pilot’s helmet and oxygen mask, giving the thumbs up. A "Top Gun" fever dream.
![Zlobina and Marsalek in a MiG fighter jet](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/e6c1c0cb-8453-4a3e-8da4-25b60a7cb334_w520_r1.4441951766685361_fpx65.05_fpy49.98.png "Zlobina and Marsalek in a MiG fighter jet")
Zlobina and Marsalek in a MiG fighter jet
\[M\] Lea Rossa / DER SPIEGEL; Fotos: DER SPIEGEL (3)
Petlinsky guided Marsalek into the world of the Russian secret service. Companions say that Marsalek even presented himself as an agent during this period. Others recall his interest over the years in the art of disappearing without a trace, in fake identities and escape routes. "It was a constant topic, almost an obsession," says one person close to Marsalek.
Petlinsky also introduced Marsalek to a brawny man who occasionally wore a Hells Angels sweatshirt. He called him "Vladimir, my mercenary." In Moscow, he was known as "Biker," likely because of his predilection for rocker gang gear. His real name is Anatoly Karazy. He is thought to have served as an officer with the GRU special forces together with Petlinsky in Chechnya. After leaving the military, Karazy joined the notorious mercenary army Wagner Group, a paramilitary organization so powerful that it has its own secret service – of which Karazy had taken over leadership by 2017, at the latest.
On May 5, 2017, the Wagner secret service chief Karazy flew from Moscow to Munich for a meeting with Marsalek. The two traveled onward together in a private jet to Beirut, where they met Petlinsky. From there, the trip took them across the mountains to the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, where the Russian army, Wagner mercenaries and troops from Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s military were fighting against Islamic State and against insurgents. At around this time, Wagner members were involved in torturing civilians to death in the area.
Marsalek and his two Russian companions stayed for several days. Photos show the Wirecard executive wearing aviator sunglasses, a bulletproof vest and a combat helmet. In one photo, a rapid-fire rifle can be seen. In another, the ancient Roman theater of Palmyra.
![Marsalek and Petlinsky in Syria, Petlinsky with rocket-propelled grenade launcher](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/058e97ee-b383-47b3-a893-93157eb9461c_w520_r1.4441951766685361_fpx34.61_fpy49.98.png "Marsalek and Petlinsky in Syria, Petlinsky with rocket-propelled grenade launcher")
Marsalek and Petlinsky in Syria, Petlinsky with rocket-propelled grenade launcher
\[M\] Lea Rossa / DER SPIEGEL; Fotos: DER SPIEGEL (2)
Some say that Marsalek fired at Islamist fighters. Anatoly Karazy did not respond to a request for comment about his past and about Marsalek.
Was the trip to Syria just another example of Marsalek’s addiction to adrenaline? Or were the Russians, was Petlinsky, interested in getting Marsalek to do things for which he could later be blackmailed?
DER SPIEGEL received a tip: Those interested in finding Stanislav Petlinsky would be advised to have a look in Dubai, on the terrace of the hotel restaurant Al Mandhar at the five-star beach resort Jumeirah al-Naseem. Guests there are served champagne and beluga caviar among the palms and pools. In the background is the shimmering Persian Gulf and the Dubai trademark Burj Al Arab. This, apparently, is where Petlinsky likes to meet his business contacts.
On a Friday in mid-February, the terrace is full of young Russian women dressed in luxury labels and accompanied by muscular men wearing olive green T-shirts. The oligarch Alexander Lebedev, a former secret service officer, can be seen sitting in one of the pavilions next to his wife, a model and influencer with 2.7 million followers on Instagram. The news is just spreading on the internet that the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny has died in prison.
It doesn’t take long before Petlinsky actually does appear on the terrace. In his early 60s, he is wiry and muscular, a physique clearly visible from his fitted, light-gray pinstriped suit and tight black T-shirt. On his left wrist, he is wearing a silver Rolex, his eyes are hidden behind mirrored aviator sunglasses, and his hair is shorn close. He nods to the oligarch Lebedev, who nods back.
Yes, he says, he met Marsalek back on that yacht in the South of France. "You know what? I was in love with him from the very first moment," Petlinsky says with a laugh.
Why?
"He has such a wonderful spirit," Petlinsky says. "I always think so small, in terms of what’s possible. Jan always thinks big – really, really big."
What do you mean?
Petlinsky says that the office of German chancellor would probably be too meaningless for his friend. A big project like leading Europe, China and Russia together as a counterbalance to the United States, he says – that’s the kind of thing that would interest Jan.
So he’s a star-gazer?
Petlinsky doesn’t want to say anything bad about his friend Jan. "Jan always had himself under control." He wanted his brain to be working at maximum capacity. "Jan wasn’t addicted to anything," says Petlinsky, "except perhaps to power."
Marsalek is "a nerd," always "super precise, a bit autistic really." And then Petlinsky, who has excellent contacts with mercenary leaders, says: "Human relationships are not Jan’s biggest strength. He lacks empathy."
![The skyline of Dubai, Marsalek in a Learjet](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/10c14909-b21e-482c-b932-4ad99544a935_w488_r1.4441951766685361_fpx65.05_fpy49.98.png "The skyline of Dubai, Marsalek in a Learjet")
The skyline of Dubai, Marsalek in a Learjet
\[M\] Lea Rossa / DER SPIEGEL; Fotos: DER SPIEGEL; Kamran Jebreili  / AP
It isn’t difficult to tell that this conversation is lasting longer than he wants. A couple of tables away, a man in mirrored glasses and golfing shorts is waiting. A young woman comes by looking for attention. "Moscow people," says Petlinsky.
Does Marsalek work for Russian intelligence services?
No, but he is "obsessed with the world of espionage," says Petlinsky.
Did Petlinsky introduce him to a lot of people in Russia?
Yes, including "high-ranking decision-makers," some of them members of the Duma, Russia’s parliament.
Including agents?
Petlinsky changes the subject. He is apparently well-versed in laying false trails and interweaving truth with fiction.
Is Petlinsky himself currently with the GRU, and in what rank?
There is no evidence for this, he responds. Petlinsky claims to be a "security consultant," only to later talk about personal encounters with President Vladimir Putin. And about how he once tracked a corrupt FSB officer around the world, catching up to him in Montenegro. He complains about how unprofessional the Berlin Tiergarten park murder was, referring to the 2019 murder of a Georgian enemy in the German capital committed by an FSB killer who was then captured. Petlinsky makes clear that he would have liked to kill the murder victim himself – and would have then spit on the body.
Tattooed, militaristic-looking men show up on the terrace, some of whom drop by for a chat. He shakes hands with some. A "hero," he says on one occasion, indicating a brawny mercenary who, says Petlinsky, has 3,000 men under his command in Ukraine. Petlinsky seems to know almost everybody here. The hotel terrace in Dubai appears to be something of a hub for Russian mercenaries, businesspeople and much, much younger women.
"What was it like in Syria?"
He apparently finds the subject unobjectionable and freely confirms it. The trip with the Wagner commander, he says, had been a dream of Jan’s that he was able to fulfil.
And what about Marsalek’s boasts that he had been allowed to shoot at Islamists?
Petlinsky smiles. Jan, he says, had likely imagined flying in a helicopter with the side door open, loud music and Ray-Ban sunglasses. He says he quickly took a hand grenade away from Jan.
And what about firing at people. What weapons did he use?
Petlinsky is silent for a moment. Then he uses the abbreviation RPG, rocket-propelled grenade. It had been "cool for Jan," he says, when someone instructed him on the correct way to position his legs when shooting from a lying position. "We may have also told him roughly in which direction the front was." Later, Petlinsky will write in a message to DER SPIEGEL that firearms training was "a standard part of preparing to travel to crisis areas."
Petlinsky now wants to bring our conversation to an end, perhaps because it was taking an uncomfortable turn: After Marsalek disappeared, an employee of Petlinsky’s arranged a Russian passport for him – after which he and Jan apparently spent time together traveling in Russia.
"Who told you that?" Petlinsky wants to know. "I have great respect for your work, but you might also make mistakes."
What about the spy ring that Marsalek had apparently established, and the allegedly planned kidnappings and assassinations that Western agencies were able to foil.
That was alarming, says Petlinsky. But murders were certainly never part of the plan, that was falsely interpreted. Petlinsky smiles.
You can insist over and over again that he is clearly lying, that there is evidence for certain things. But Petlinsky just draws down the corners of his mouth and shrugs. He has to go, and politely declines when asked about being photographed. Sorry guys.
### MARSALEK’S TWO LIVES
Many of those who encountered Marsalek in Munich in summer 2017 shortly after his return from Syria describe him as having been "completely exhilarated." At Wirecard headquarters on the outskirts of Munich, meanwhile, the mood was jubilant. The company was expanding rapidly – to Africa, Australia, Asia and North America. The hype was immense. After a wait of several decades, Germany had finally produced another global player, a company that appeared to be in the big leagues – at a time when German banks, even years after the financial crisis, still hadn’t returned to health. Commerzbank was almost broke and Deutsche Bank was but a shadow of its former self.
At Wirecard, though, it seemed that the future of banking was taking shape, with software solutions for the kind of payment transactions that made online shopping possible in the first place. According to company records, Wirecard was processing payments for 279,000 clients per year, including the supermarket chain Aldi and travel company TUI.
But rumors were swirling. People were saying that Wirecard was inventing profits and cooking the books, that the company was sleazy. Money laundering was mentioned.
In 2015, Munich prosecutors searched Wirecard offices on behalf of U.S. authorities. Additional investigations took place in the U.S. It remained unclear what they found.
Braun and Marsalek responded to the accusations with irritation. Everything was just malicious attempts at stock price manipulation by hedge funds and journalists, they said. They had naysayers shadowed and threatened by private detectives.
In 2018, Wirecard became part of the DAX, the German blue-chip index that included, at the time, the 30 most valuable and most important companies in the country. With more than 270,000 customers, Wirecard processed 125 billion euros in transactions and generated 560 million euros in revenues that year. At least according to the balance sheet. Later, it would be declared void. Either many of the declared sales didn’t actually exist, which is what prosecutors believe. Or they were funneled by Marsalek through dark channels, as claimed by Braun, who has been in investigative custody for three years and denies all of the accusations leveled against him. At the time, though, nobody saw what was going on. In fact, Braun and Marsalek were even planning a takeover of Deutsche Bank, an operation they had codenamed "Panther."
Marsalek’s main job was to make Wirecard even bigger, and to do so as rapidly as possible. Increasingly, though, he became something of a phantom at Wirecard headquarters, largely invisible even for senior managers. "Nobody really knew what he did," says a colleague. For several years toward the end, Marsalek only rarely stepped into his 110-square-meter (1,180-square-foot) office on company premises on the outskirts of Munich.
Instead, he built up his own center of operations around 10 kilometers away in the center of Munich. It was here where his two lives – the official and the secret – would merge.
The four-story, art nouveau villa at Prinzregentenstrasse 61 is one of the most exclusive addresses in the Bavarian capital, a property of more than 1,600 square meters filled with Italian furniture, bronze sculptures and paintings of historic battles. Acquired in 1903 by Prince Alfons of Bavaria as a prestigious aristocratic residence, it was later inhabited by Conrad Röntgen, the discoverer of x-rays. Starting in 2016, the villa served the Wirecard executive as a hub for his secret operations. At least some of the 680,000 euros in annual rent was covered through back channels by Wirecard. At the time, the Russian consulate was located on the other side of the street.
![Marsalek's headquarters on Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich, photos from his office there](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/07daac2d-7be4-4f7c-97fa-54edb3562a88_w520_r1.4441951766685361_fpx53.29_fpy44.99.png "Marsalek's headquarters on Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich, photos from his office there")
Marsalek's headquarters on Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich, photos from his office there
\[M\] Lea Rossa / DER SPIEGEL; Fotos: DER SPIEGEL (2); Robert Haas / picture alliance / SZ Photo
Marsalek set up his office on the first floor, receiving his visitors in an elegantly furnished meeting room. Leaning against a wall of the office was the framed Austrian declaration of war against Sardinia from 1859. The room was frequented by politicians, bankers and agents. The visitors included a former Libyan intelligence chief, a former senior domestic security official from Austria – and, on one occasion, a former chief of staff from Helmut Kohl’s Chancellery, Bernd Schmidbauer. And Petlinsky, of course, often.
"People were coming in and out all the time," says a woman who worked closely with Marsalek for many years. She was already at his side when he first made it onto the Wirecard board of executives in 2010. For this story, we have chosen to refer to her as Johanna Singer; she requested anonymity as a condition for being interviewed for this story.
She also got to know Petlinsky in the Prinzregentenstrasse villa. "I thought he was really nice," she says, adding that he talked about his grandchildren. Singer arranged a birthday party for him in the gourmet restaurant Tantris in Munich. A photo shows him laughing at a table together with Marsalek, a star-shaped birthday cake between them.
Singer says she only learned later from state prosecutors about the many other shady characters who frequented the villa. Did she really think things were completely normal? That Marsalek equipped the villa with medical supplies, hospital beds and gas masks? That he invited a security expert in from Israel to inspect the place for surveillance devices? "As I now know today, Jan had a number of different personalities."
She paints the picture of an erratic man who liked to live life on the edge, a man who, after leaving work, would go to the cinema in tailor-made Brioni suits to watch spy films. An adrenaline junky with a tendency for hypochondria for whom she would quickly fly over to London just to buy his favorite cough syrup.
Some investigators raise their eyebrows when Johanna Singer is mentioned. She has been questioned several times – as a witness, not as a suspect, investigators emphasize. But it is also just as true, they say, that Singer is likely holding back information. She has been too close to Marsalek for too long, they say.
It is hard to believe, for example, that in all these years she never noticed who had turned into of the most important regulars in Prinzregentenstrasse. For Singer, he is just "a former civil servant from Austria" who is now "working as a consultant in the private sector." But Martin Weiss wasn't just any civil servant. For years, he had headed Department II at the Austrian Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism (BVT), the Austrian domestic intelligence service. There, he had been responsible for gathering information, conducting investigations and analyzing intelligence. A top agent in charge of the core operational business of the intelligence service. All intelligence information collected by the BVT ended up in the department he oversaw. That includes all information sent to Vienna by partner services such as the CIA, the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution or Israel's Mossad.
After Weiss officially left the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Marsalek hired him as a "consultant." But the two had probably known each other since at least 2015. It appears that Marsalek needed Weiss mainly as a henchman for dirty agent work and not really for Wirecard business.
For example, to investigate people of interest to Marsalek and the Kremlin in particular. It was an easy game for Weiss, with his network in Western intelligence services. Weiss had searches conducted of more than two dozen people in internal databases to find out what the authorities knew about them. They included Marsalek's own family and Petlinsky, as well as journalists living in Europe and a Kazakh opposition activist.
Weiss would later admit some of it following his arrest in interrogations with the special investigation unit of the Austrian Interior Ministry.
According to documents from the investigation, it was "conspicuous" that people, "apparently in the interests of the Russian Federation," were investigated with particular frequency. Also striking was the fact that it took quite some time before the Austrian intelligence service took notice of Marsalek. A Viennese special investigation unit called AG Fama, which was investigating possible Russian moles in the BVT, only came across him after Marsalek's escape. Today, the investigation file comprises thousands of pages. The investigation came to the conclusion that Weiss and Marsalek were part of an "intelligence cell whose capacities and capabilities were used by Russian intelligence services."
### IN THE KREMLIN'S SIGHTS
Marsalek's activities could have been discovered earlier, in part because yet another agent also belonged to the cell: A brawny, cagey veteran of the BVT with the mellifluous name Egisto Ott, a controversial figure in the Austrian intelligence scene for some time. As early as 2017, foreign intelligence services – presumably the American CIA and the British MI6 – had sounded the alarm. Ott, they said, had repeatedly sent data from his official e-mail address at BVT to his private account. The foreign intelligence services presumed that he was spying for the Russians. His superior at BVT at the time was Martin Weiss.
Ott was suspended, but his network continued to function. He used it to gather sensitive information on target persons for Weiss and Marsalek. To that end, he apparently employed informants at home and abroad to make inquiries for him on official service computers. Weiss allegedly paid Ott thousands of euros for his work, as investigators would later determine. Ott has denied the allegations.
Despite the severity of the accusations, he was released after a short period in custody. It takes a bit of looking around in Austria these days if you want to talk to him. Neighbors haven't seen him at his apartment in Vienna for some time. But in Ott's home region of Carinthia, in a valley near Wörthersee lake, a beautiful estate lies shimmering in the winter sun.
A few hours later, Mr. and Mrs. Ott emerge to walk their dog. Ott, a stocky man with a green quilted jacket and a firm handshake, agrees to a walk with the DER SPIEGEL reporter.
"You can tell that I'm a Russian spy just by the fact that I still have my old mobile phone number," he jokes. He says the accusations are baseless, a vast conspiracy by influential opponents in politics and the intelligence service – because he knew too much. In long monologues, Ott tells outlandish stories about ransom money that allegedly disappeared during hostage rescues and ended up in the pockets of his enemies. "I never took part in breaking the rules, but always did an excellent job," says Ott. He claims they just wanted to shut him down.
Mountains of investigation files on Ott's activities cast a few doubts on his account. How the flow of information appears to have worked, through various channels and connections, is demonstrated by the screenshot of a chat that Ott saved on his iPhone 8 on September 10, 2019. In the message, Petlinsky turns to his friend Marsalek with a problem. The mistress of Russian billionaire Arkady Rotenberg and her sister were constantly having trouble when crossing borders into Europe. Marsalek, at the time still a Wirecard board member, forwarded the message to his helper Martin Weiss and asked "whether we could provide support in the matter." Petlinsky confirmed the instance, but said that the request had just been a favor for the two women.
It fell to Ott to actually take care of the task. As further text messages suggest, Ott apparently asked a police colleague in Italy for discreet help. The Italian returned two weeks later after uncovering some information. The women, he found, had an entry in the European border search system SIS that had been issued by Latvia for undercover checks on the grounds of "terrorism." In this manner, sensitive data found its way to Petlinsky and thus to Moscow.
A question to Ott during the walk: How could this assignment have had a work-related purpose? His answer: "I didn't make an inquiry with us. This is verifiable: There is nothing."
The probes carried out by Ott and Weiss could sometimes be extremely threatening for those affected, as shown by the case of a journalist who was spied on. Christo Grozev has spent many years investigating the machinations of Russian intelligence services. Grozev was head of the renowned research platform Bellingcat and now works for DER SPIEGEL. He contributed to this article.
Grozev's investigative reporting has revealed the most terrible secrets of the Russian state, uncovering the intelligence ties of the killer of Georgian national Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in Berlin's Tiergarten park in August 2019. Reports from Bellingcat about the secret service men who poisoned the now deceased politician Alexei Navalny in 2020 caused a global sensation. Jan Marsalek was also the focus of Grozev's attention on several occasions: One DER SPIEGEL article traced his escape route to Minsk in Belarus and revealed for the first time dozens of trips to Russia made by the former executive in previous years.
Accordingly, Grozev has long held a high position on the Kremlin's wanted list. Early last year, Western security authorities gave the journalist, who was living in Vienna at the time, a sudden warning that he should leave Austria as soon as possible. He says he was told that they had concrete knowledge of attack plans by Russian services. Grozev relocated.
Around two years earlier, on December 15, 2020, Weiss had sent an encrypted message to Ott. It read: "Could we make a query in Austria about a Mr. Christo Grozev?" In a later message, Weiss wrote to Ott: Grozev is supporting an operation "against the cause." Ott then provided the address of Grozev's private apartment.
Ott confirms the interaction during our walk with him in Carinthia. "All I did was go to the Registration Office and pay 3.40 euros to find out where he lives." He says he also may have taken a few photos of Grozev's building. That's not illegal, he adds. Why was Weiss so keen to know where Grozev lived? Did the assignment come from Marsalek? Ott claims he never gave it any thought. He denies that he may have helped Putin's spies locate an enemy. "I always fought the Russian intelligence service throughout my career," he says.
In any case, he says, the investigations into his activities were sloppy and not conducted in accordance with the rule of law. This is one reason why he was released from custody, he says. And it is true that despite years of investigation, the Public Prosecutor's Office has yet to bring charges, as is also the case in the investigation into Weiss. This has prompted suspicions among high-ranking officials that someone in Vienna is stepping on the brakes. Is the influence of Marsalek's network in Austria still so strong that investigations into suspected collaborators are fizzling out?
In the meantime, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has been reformed, renamed and most of its personnel replaced. But there isn't enough evidence against some agents who were considered close to Marsalek and Weiss to remove them from office, one intelligence officer complains. The danger is real that Marsalek is still spying on Austrian authorities, politicians and companies on behalf of Russian services, the intelligence officer says.
### WIRECARD, A RUSSIAN ENTITY?
Why was Moscow interested in recruiting Marsalek in the first place? There is much to suggest that it was his position as Wirecard's chief operating officer that sparked Moscow's interest.
An agent in a company that is involved in global payment transactions: how practical.
All kinds of sensitive information wound up at Wirecard headquarters, all the more so once the company joined the DAX index of blue-chip German companies. Dozens of international companies processed some of their financial transactions through Wirecard. Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office was also a customer and regularly used the company's payment technology. At one point, Marsalek instructed subordinates to compile a year's worth of customer data – allegedly, as he said, for the BND, Germany's foreign intelligence agency. It would later turn out that the BND had never actually requested the data. Instead, it's possible that the confidential information wound up in Moscow.
Also extremely useful was the fact that Wirecard organized its business in Asia through so-called third-party partners. Billions in transactions for customers were processed outside of Wirecard, but the revenues were credited to the company and the supposed commission income was booked to escrow accounts. Even for the auditors, the cash flows were extremely difficult to understand. Hardly surprising then that it took quite some time before it was discovered that billions of euros in Wirecard funds were not in the accounts where they were purported to be held. The whole structure seemed like it had been designed for money laundering.
Some in intelligence circles even allege that Marsalek helped to pay agents and informants of the Russian GRU through Wirecard, a claim that has thus far not been verified.
Several sources did, however, confirm that Marsalek likely used Wirecard funds to buy his own mercenary company through proxies, to be deployed in crisis zones.
Apparently, Marsalek wanted to make himself more and more useful to his Russian friends. What could he do? According to people close to him, Petlinsky had a few ideas, and pointed out that war-torn Libya needs to be rebuilt. Russia has a great interest in the North African country, which is rich in oil and gas reserves – and is also in a position to manage refugee flows to Europe. Petlinsky is said to have suggested getting involved in the business of cement, which would ultimately be needed for reconstruction. The sources claim that Marsalek promptly invested in cement factories.
The people close to Petlinsky also say he made Marsalek aware of an experienced Russian company operating in the gray area between mercenary operations and security service called the RSB Group. The company, Petlinsky allegedly told Marsalek, had experience in counter-terrorism missions, providing protection against pirate attacks and, most importantly, a license for mine clearing. Marsalek was impressed, but he didn't just hire the outfit for a mission in Libya, he apparently immediately bought the entire company. Marsalek now apparently owned his own mercenary company through a murky construct. Petlinsky denies having advised Marsalek to make the investments.
![An RSB mercenary in Libya, the logo of the Wagner Group](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/9bd984f4-925d-42fb-9969-e6bc0dbfd149_w520_r1.4441951766685361_fpx34.61_fpy49.98.png "An RSB mercenary in Libya, the logo of the Wagner Group")
An RSB mercenary in Libya, the logo of the Wagner Group
\[M\] Lea Rossa / DER SPIEGEL; Foto: DER SPIEGEL
And Marsalek had even bigger plans. On June 28, 2017, he described them to crisis expert Kilian Kleinschmidt, who had worked for the United Nations for many years, at Käfer-Schänke, an upscale restaurant in Munich.
Kleinschmidt was commissioned with completing a study for Marsalek, for 200,000 euros, on how Libya could be rebuilt. The invoice, as Kleinschmidt notes today, was to be sent to the "Russian-Libyan Cultural Institute" in Moscow. Initially, he says he thought the goal was to make Libya a better place for people to live.
But at a second meeting, this time at the villa on Prinzregentenstrasse, Marsalek dismissed the first proposals from Kleinschmidt's team as "childish" and revealed his real idea: a military "conversion program" that would train 15,000 to 20,000 Libyan militiamen. According to this idea, the private army was to control Libya's southern border and thus the migration flows.
Kleinschmidt wanted nothing to do with it and was disconcerted. Also because during a coffee break Marsalek had raved about the new equipment that mercenaries were wearing in the field. And of "cool bodycams" that produced videos in top quality. Behind it all was a gruesome idea that Marsalek also presented to Petlinsky: Wagner mercenaries could use these cameras attached to their uniforms to broadcast their fight against the Islamists on the Internet. They could livestream their murder and pillaging. Viewers who liked what they saw should be given the opportunity to donate to the militia in return. The only problem, Marsalek reportedly said, is that the existing Wagner videos "cannot be used as advertising because the boys shoot all their prisoners."
Kleinschmidt wanted nothing more to do with the project, and the two sides ended their collaboration. Of the 200,000 euros that had been promised, Kleinschmidt ultimately only received 80,000 euros.
And the German security authorities? Why hadn't they sent a swarm of agents after Marsalek by that point? From their perspective, they say in Berlin, Marsalek was just a businessman. They simply had no reason to suspect that he was working for Russian intelligence services. In any case, they could hardly start monitoring board members of DAX companies who were flying to Moscow, they claim, saying it really wasn't their job.
An official statement from the Chancellery offers a similar tone. There were "no indications" that "would have justified the intelligence services to take action," it reads.
Part of the problem is that the counterintelligence department inside the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's domestic intelligence agency, is small. Meanwhile, the BND is only now starting to rebuild its counter-intelligence operations. Since the end of the Cold War, German security authorities have been focused on terrorists, not spies. Some Berlin agents also complain that they are now being so strictly controlled and regulated that they are barely able to do their work.
The officers concentrate on monitoring registered agents in embassies, although Marsalek probably never even had anything to do with them. He met his intelligence service contacts in Moscow, on the Côte d'Azur or in Tripoli, far away from German observers.
Furthermore, many politicians were vying for the attention of executives at Wirecard. That also likely contributed to a broader unwillingness to take a closer look at the company. On the contrary.
When Wirecard entered the Chinese market for digital payment processing in 2019, the consulting firm of former German Economics and Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg helped with support at the highest political levels. Close advisors to Chancellor Angela Merkel were also involved. In September 2019, when Merkel traveled to Beijing, she put in a good word for Wirecard in China.
The German Finance Ministry, then led by current Chancellor Olaf Scholz, also lent a helping hand. And all this even as the allegations of fraud and money laundering against Wirecard were growing louder.
According to sources close the chancellor, Scholz never met with Wirecard executives during his time as finance minister. They say that Wirecard did not receive any more international support from the German government than other German companies.
That could be true. At the same time, "other German companies" weren't suspected of fraud.
### MARSALEK'S NEW IDENTITY
Barely nine months after Merkel's trip to China, Wirecard AG filed for insolvency on June 25, 2020, because almost 2 billion euros had disappeared from escrow accounts. Or it never existed in the first place. Marsalek went into hiding. The ID of one of Petlinsky's business partners was used to rent a private jet, and a contact of former agent Weiss organized two trustworthy pilots. False tracks were then laid towards Asia, and Philippine immigration officials were even bribed to fake Marsalek's entry.
In reality, Marsalek landed in Belarus on the night of June 20 and then continued by car toward Moscow, according to confidants of Marsalek who were involved in the escape plans. They claim his escape had been organized by a political functionary who is otherwise in charge of Russian-Libyan relations. In addition to Russian citizenship, the man also holds a passport from Belarus. And he is, how could it be otherwise, a close acquaintance of Petlinsky.
Then there was silence for several weeks. Marsalek had to wait for his new Russian identity, taking the name of the priest Konstantin Bayazov. On September 5, the document was picked up, and the Petlinsky confidant and suspected FSB aide Evgeniya Kurochkina rented a minibus and drove with Marsalek to Crimea. This can be seen by the location data of her mobile phone number, which was obtained by The Insider, and other evidence. Petlinsky was most likely with them. Whether Natalya Zlobina joined them as well is unclear.
On the evening of September 8, Kurochkina's mobile phone was logged in Sevastopol, Crimea. The peninsula annexed by Russia seems to be popular among those who need to disappear quickly. Barely a year earlier, in August 2019, the family of the man who killed the Georgian in Berlin's Tiergarten park was hidden here as well, accompanied by an FSB agent.
Now, it was Marsalek and his friends who showed up. The next morning, on September 9, the group ordered several taxis, according to leaked phone data, and scoured hotels on the southern coast of Crimea. Marsalek apparently checked into one of the overnight accommodations. There, he presented his new passport for registration and an employee scanned it. DER SPIEGEL has seen the document. It is the passport of the priest Bayazov with Jan Marsalek's photo.
There are indications that Marsalek later assumed the identity of Alexander Schmidt in Moscow, and probably also that of a second Russian priest, Vitaly Malkin.
The group initially stayed in Crimea for a few days. Petlinsky chartered a private jet from Simferopol airport in Crimea back to Moscow on September 12, according to booking data. But there was apparently a problem and he didn’t board the flight. Petlinsky ultimately returned to the Russian capital one day later. And that's the point where the trail to Marsalek is lost.
Petlinsky confirmed to DER SPIEGEL that he was in the area at the time and that he flew back on a private jet. But he denied having helped Marsalek escape. When asked about the allegations, Evgeniya Kurochkina, the passport courier, said that interactions between strangers should be "beneficial for both sides" – in other words, she would only provide information for money. Natalya Zlobina left a request for comment about all the accusations unanswered. When asked about Marsalek over the phone, the priest Bayazov said that he couldn't say anything about it. "Why do you refuse to understand that?" Marsalek's defense attorney left an extensive list of questions unanswered.
Did this also mark the end of Jan Marsalek's career as an agent? No. Marsalek apparently continued looking for other ways to make himself useful to his Russian masters. Ways that were even more extreme. The trail leads to a courtroom in Britain.
It's raining in London on this gray autumn day in October 2023 – what else might you expect in a spy thriller? Inside: A wood-paneled hall, the judge in a robe and wig is enthroned on an upholstered seat. "My Lord," the barristers say when addressing him. The benches, the chairs, the stairs: Everything squeaks and creaks in the Old Bailey, Britain's most famous criminal court. Three men and two women follow the preliminary hearing via video link from different prisons with grim expressions on their faces.
The accusations of the public prosecutor's office weigh as heavily as the air is thick in the hall. They claim that Jan Marsalek conspired with the defendants between August 30, 2020, and February 8, 2023, to gather information that is directly or indirectly useful to an enemy and thus harmful to the interest and security of the state, according to a court document.
British agents and criminal investigators claim that Marsalek commissioned the gang to spy on people disliked by the Kremlin, follow them across Europe – and presumably kidnap or even eliminate them in the end. London police arrested the Bulgarian defendants in February 2023 on suspicion of espionage. The domestic intelligence service MI5 had been monitoring them for some time.
In addition to the group's forged passports and masses of travel data, around 80,000 chat messages serve as key evidence, the public prosecutor's office says. According to the prosecutors, the spying was part of kidnapping or assassination plans by Russian agencies. The exact instructions for the Bulgarians allegedly came via Telegram messages from Marsalek. They were apparently paid by cryptocurrency and in cash through an intermediary.
It is not known exactly how the group came to the attention of counterintelligence. But they apparently hit the right target. Investigators allegedly found electronic surveillance equipment and 19 forged documents, including press cards and clothing labeled "Discovery Channel" and "National Geographic." Apparently, some of the suspects had posed as journalists during their clandestine operations.
Businessman Orlin Roussev, 46, a surveillance specialist, is believed to be the ringleader of the group of agents. The British investigators likely tracked down Marsalek through Roussev, an old acquaintance of his from the Wirecard days. As emails between him and Marsalek show, he seemingly provided the executive with specially secured mobile phones several years ago. Roussev once wrote to Marsalek that he knew a Chinese provider who was "more than capable" of delivering "customized solutions" for smartphones and other electronic devices.
In early February, the German authorities revealed just how seriously they now take the danger posed by Marsalek. The key witness in the Wirecard trial, Oliver Bellenhaus, was released from custody on conditional release after around three and a half years. The former Dubai representative of Wirecard heavily incriminated Braun and Marsalek in the trial.
Since then, Bellenhaus has been escorted to and from the high-security Munich courtroom two heavy vehicles. Because of articles published by DER SPIEGEL and other media on the agents allegedly led by Marsalek and operating out of London, the public prosecutor's office and the police consider it necessary to provide Bellenhaus with a security detachment.
The trial in London against the Bulgarian spy ring is due to begin at the end of this year. Some of the targets are still in danger to this day because Moscow has them in its crosshairs.
The alleged principal and ringleader Jan Marsalek will most likely not be in the dock. He remains missing, well hidden by his Russian protectors, largely invisible.
It's a bit like the Loch Ness Monster: Allegedly spotted again and again, but never caught. Some sources believe he is in Thailand, others say India. And then digital tracks point to Caracas in Venezuela. The Kremlin has written to the German judiciary suggesting that they ask around in Kazakhstan. And the *Wall Street Journal* has reported that Marsalek is in Dubai.
That's also where Petlinsky happens to be.
What does he say when asked where Marsalek can be found? "I don't know, we lost contact because of the pandemic," Petlinsky said on a warm February day in the desert sun of Dubai.
He smiles. "Probably somewhere nice."
*With additional reporting by Kate Manchester*
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# Joe Biden’s Last Campaign
“I’ll show you where Trump sat and watched the revolution,” Joe Biden said, stepping out from behind his desk in the Oval Office. It was noon on a Wednesday, in the doldrums of January. The Middle East was aflame, and Biden’s approval rating was among the lowest of any President in history, but, for the moment, he was preoccupied with Donald Trump. As he led the way through a door toward his private chambers, he startled two Secret Service agents in the corridor. They had expected him to remain at his desk for a while; agents, referring to him by his handle, had passed word: “Celtic is in the Oval.” Walking by, he said, in a whispery deadpan, “Hey, guys—it’s a *raid*,” and then moved on.
Biden, always a little taller than you expect, wore a navy suit and a bright-blue tie. He passed a study off the Oval, where he keeps a rack of extra shirts, an array of notes sent in by the public, and a portrait of John F. Kennedy in a contemplative pose. (It’s one of his favorites, even though Bobby Kennedy thought that it evoked his brother during the Bay of Pigs debacle.) He continued to the Oval Office dining room, a small, elegant space where, in Biden’s eight years as Vice-President, he often visited Barack Obama for lunch. One wall is graced by “The Peacemakers,” a famous painting of Lincoln and his military commanders, on the cusp of winning the Civil War. Another is dominated by a large television set, installed by Donald Trump.
It was in front of that TV that Trump spent the afternoon of January 6, 2021, after exhorting his supporters to march on the Capitol and stop Congress from certifying Biden’s election. With the television remote and a Diet Coke close at hand, he watched the events live on Fox News, rewinding at times for a second look. It is a period in Presidential history that the House select committee on January 6th later called “187 Minutes of Dereliction.”
“This is where he sat,” Biden said, and I braced for a bit of speechifying on democracy or character or the defiling of the Presidency. (As early as 1970, a colleague of Biden’s on a Delaware county council observed that he could make a “fifteen-minute speech on the underside of a blade of grass.”) But, in the dining room, he let the moment pass. At the age of eighty-one, in his fourth year as President, he displays less of the reflex to fill every silence. Gesturing around the room, he said, “I don’t do interviews here, because it’s not so commodious.” He gave a rueful laugh and headed back to his office.
Not long ago, most Americans found it inconceivable that they might once again face the choice between Trump and Biden. In the years since Trump lost the 2020 election and refused to concede, he has been found liable for sexual assault and financial fraud, and indicted for attempting to overturn the election and refusing to return classified documents; as his legal challenges mounted, he embarked on a campaign focussed on “retribution” against his enemies. Yet Republicans have become steadily less likely to hold Trump responsible for the violence on January 6th—and less likely to believe that Biden actually won the White House.
Back in the Oval Office, where winter sun shone through glass doors, I asked Biden if it was possible for him to reach voters who had those beliefs. He treated the question as a provocation: “Well, first of all, remember, in 2020, you guys told me how I wasn’t going to win? And then you told me in 2022 how it was going to be this red wave?” He flashed a tense smile. “And I told you there wasn’t going to be any red wave. And in 2023 you told me we’re going to get our ass kicked again? And we won every contested race out there.” He let that sink in for an instant and said, “In 2024, I think you’re going to see the same thing.”
For decades, there was a lightness about Joe Biden—a springy, mischievous energy that was hard not to like, even if it allowed some people to classify him as a lightweight. For better and worse, he is a more solemn figure now. His voice is thin and clotted, and his gestures have slowed, but, in our conversation, his mind seemed unchanged. He never bungled a name or a date. At one point, he pulled out a white notecard inscribed with some of Trump’s most alarming comments: his threat to terminate the Constitution, his casual talk of being a dictator on “Day One,” his description of immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.” Biden tossed the list on his desk and gave a look of disbelief. “What the *hell!* ” he said. “If you and I had sat down ten years ago and I said a President is going to say those things, you would have looked at me like, ‘Biden, you’ve lost your senses.’ ”
I last interviewed Biden in 2020, when he billed himself as a “transition candidate” and praised “an incredible group of talented, newer, younger people.” But, in office, he has presided over the passage of ambitious legislation, the end of the *Covid* pandemic, and an economic revival beyond anyone’s expectation—and declared his intention to run for a second term. I asked Biden if there was ever a time when he doubted that he would run again. “No,” he said. “But, look, if I didn’t think that the policies I put in place were best for the country, I don’t think I’d be doing it again. I’m running again because I think two things: No. 1, I’m really proud of my record, and I want to keep it going. I’m optimistic about the future.” He continued, “And, secondly, I look out there, and I say, ‘O.K., we’re just—most of what I’ve done is just kicking in now.’ ”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a28498)
“Is anyone sitting here?”
Cartoon by Pat Achilles
If you spend time with Biden these days, the biggest surprise is that he betrays no doubts. The world is riven by the question of whether he is up to a second term, but he projects a defiant belief in himself and his ability to persuade Americans to join him. For as long as Biden has been in politics, he has thrived on a mercurial mix of confidence and insecurity. Now, having reached the apex of power, he gives off a conviction that borders on serenity—a bit too much serenity for Democrats who wonder if he can still beat the man with whom his legacy will be forever entwined. Given the doubts, I asked, wasn’t it a risk to say, “I’m the one to do it”? He shook his head and said, “No. I’m the only one who has ever beat him. And I’ll beat him again.” For Biden, the offense of the contested election was clearly personal. Trump had not just tried to steal the Presidency—he had tried to steal it *from him*. “I’d ask a rhetorical question,” Biden said. “If you thought you were best positioned to beat someone who, if they won, would change the nature of America, what would you do?”
By the usual measures, Biden should be cruising to reëlection. Violent crime has dropped to nearly a fifty-year low, unemployment is below four per cent, and in January the S. & P. 500 and the Dow hit record highs. More Americans than ever have health insurance, and the country is producing more energy than at any previous moment in its history. His opponent, who is facing ninety-one criminal counts, has suggested that if he is elected he will fire as many as fifty thousand civil servants and replace them with loyalists, deputize the National Guard as a mass-deportation force, and root out what he calls “the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
But the usual measures do not apply these days. Rarely in American history have two major parties had such wildly different intentions—and such similar levels of support. In 2020, seven states hinged on a difference of less than three percentage points. “The electorate is frozen,” Dmitri Mehlhorn, an adviser to Democratic donors, told me. “There will be important movements on the margin—but they are only important because this thing is fucking tied.”
For a long time, Biden had a modest but steady advantage in the polls, ahead by three or four or five points. By this February, though, Trump had taken the lead, forty-seven to forty-two per cent, according to an NBC poll. (In 2020, by contrast, Biden never trailed Trump in any major poll.) Some Democrats were already complaining publicly that Biden’s campaign was complacent and behind schedule in hiring staff for battleground states. On Bill Maher’s podcast, the political consultant James Carville said, “Somebody better wake the fuck up.” Maher wondered if Biden was in danger of staying so long in his job that he would be blamed for handing it to the opposition—becoming the “Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Presidency.” At a dinner attended by major donors in Chicago, Senator Chris Coons, a co-chair of the Biden campaign, struck a reassuring note. “I’m given to worry on occasion,” he told the audience. “I’ve been known to wring my hands.” But in the 2022 midterms, he reminded them, “the American people showed up,” giving the Democrats unexpectedly strong results. “Folks, trust our voters,” he said. “They will show up again.”
As the election year arrived, Biden’s aides argued that the polls were too early to be useful; they reasoned that sitting Presidents are often a target for free-form resentment—and that, in any case, only a quarter of Americans were engaged enough to even realize that it would be a choice between Trump and Biden. His advisers present his confidence as a virtue. One told me, “He is not diverted by politics or by bad polling or by some crazy-ass shit that Donald Trump has done.” Bruce Reed, one of his closest aides, said, “We live in abnormal political times, but the American people are still normal people. Given a choice between normal and crazy, they’re going to choose normal.”
When I visited Biden in January, two days had passed since the Republican caucuses in Iowa. Trump had won all but one of the state’s ninety-nine counties; the voting was so lopsided that news organizations called the race with many votes still to be cast. For all the speculation that Ron DeSantis might secure evangelical voters, Trump took even more of them than he had eight years before. In the Oval Office, I brought up the Iowa results and asked Biden to explain why Trump was still popular with a substantial portion of Americans. He disputed my framing. “Substantial portion of the Republican *MAGA* *party*,” he said. “That’s who it is.”
His objection was not just rhetorical. “Look, a hundred thousand people voted,” he said. “He got fifty per cent of a hundred thousand votes.” To be precise, it was closer to a hundred and ten thousand votes, but the point remained: Trump had generated the lowest turnout in a contested G.O.P. race in a quarter century, a drop of forty per cent from the Republican primary of 2016. It didn’t help that temperatures were below zero that night, but the fact was that nearly half the Republicans who voted chose someone other than Trump. Some forty per cent of Nikki Haley supporters in Iowa told pollsters that if she fell short they would vote for Biden. “Now, they’re going to argue the weather was the reason,” Biden told me. “But what about this enthusiasm—this hard-baked enthusiasm?”
Trump is too familiar and too disliked to attract many new supporters. And when voters are asked in polls how they will react if he is actually convicted of a felony, Biden pulls ahead again. But the schedule of Trump’s trials is in flux, and, even if he is convicted, it is difficult to predict how that unprecedented spectacle will reverberate.
By the end of January, the race was nearing the point at which history shows a correlation between approval ratings and electoral results: incumbents who trail their opponent nine months from Election Day rarely go on to win. When pollsters asked who would do better in specific areas, the gaps were stark. On immigration and border security, Trump led Biden fifty-seven to twenty-two; on the economy, fifty-five to thirty-three. On the “required mental and physical stamina for the presidency,” Trump was lapping Biden, forty-six to twenty-three per cent. Even seasoned analysts who tend to discount small fluctuations in polls took note. “Let’s say it’s a fifty-per-cent chance that Trump could be President again,” a prominent Biden donor told me. “That’s like a fifty-per-cent chance that the doctor is going to tell you that you have pancreatic cancer.”
David Axelrod, who was Obama’s chief campaign strategist, told me that age was the crucial issue for Biden. “I don’t question his competence as President,” he said. “You give me Biden’s record and take fifteen years off of him, and this wouldn’t be a competitive race. This is the barrier he has to overcome, and it’s a hard one, because the march of time is immutable.”
The kind of people who believe that they should be President of the United States do not generally go graciously into retirement. Alexander Hamilton, who knew his share of ex-politicians, described them as “discontented ghosts.” When Richard Nixon was between stints in office, he fretted, “I’m going to be mentally dead in two years and physically dead in four.” Calvin Coolidge, the only twentieth-century President who voluntarily passed up a reasonable chance at reëlection, said that he hoped to avoid “grasping for office.” (Coolidge noted that Presidents “live in an artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation which sooner or later impairs their judgment.”) In Biden’s case, he has been in politics so long that one of his aides told me a decade ago that he seemed “afraid if he stops working he might just fall over.”
Early in Biden’s Presidency, his age was a fixation mostly on the right. Conservative media circulated video anytime he fell—while dismounting from his bike, or tripping over a sandbag onstage. Kevin McCarthy, the Speaker of the House, joked about bringing “soft food” to a meeting with Biden, even though McCarthy was, according to Politico, “privately telling allies that he found the president sharp and substantive.” Biden’s doctors reported no significant trouble. (His latest medical report, released last week, lists sleep apnea; atrial fibrillation; a “stiff” gait, owing to arthritis and the aftermath of a fractured foot; and gastroesophageal reflux, which causes him to cough and clear his throat. Like most of his predecessors, Biden didn’t undergo a cognitive test, but the report notes that an “extremely detailed neurologic exam was again reassuring.”)
For a time, Democrats who worried that Biden’s age would prevent his reëlection hesitated to speak out. “A lot of people thought, O.K., we’ll get our ass kicked in the midterms, and then we’ll have this big conversation about whether Joe should run again,” a former Democratic official told me. “Then the midterms are this big surprise.” For Biden, questions about his age were inextricable from feelings of being underestimated by the establishment. In 2015, during his second term as Vice-President, when he was reeling from the death of his son Beau, Obama enveloped him in personal support but was, in Biden’s words, “not encouraging” of his running for President—a fact that some intimates recall with bitterness. (One told me that Biden was treated in a spirit of “See you later. Emeritus. God bless. Nice guy.”) An effort to discourage him from running for reëlection in 2024 could well have had the opposite effect. Besides, Trump—just four years younger than Biden—was already so prone to signs of age that the DeSantis campaign set up a social-media account called the Trump Accident Tracker. He had confused Jeb Bush with George W. Bush, talked about Obama when he meant Biden or Hillary Clinton, and called the Hungarian Prime Minister “the leader of Turkey.”
The former Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, a co-chair of Biden’s campaign, urged him to embrace his age with swagger, like his fellow-octogenarians Mick Jagger and Harrison Ford. Biden tried out some jokes. Just as Ronald Reagan, in a 1984 debate, had vowed not to “exploit the youth and inexperience of my opponent,” Biden told an audience he had “never been more optimistic about our country’s future in the eight hundred years I’ve served.” In the meme wars on social media, the campaign promoted illustrations of Biden as a political mastermind, firing lasers from his eyes.
Still, Axelrod and others eventually started voicing their worries. “I felt like Biden had the ability to say, ‘I’ve run my race, and I’ve faithfully fulfilled my duties to the nation,’ ” he told me. “He’s really done a hell of a job, but he is not a particularly competent performer in front of cameras now. That’s mostly how people interact with the President. Bill Clinton said, ‘Strong and wrong generally beats weak and right.’ ” (When Axelrod expressed criticisms, Biden reportedly dismissed him as a “prick,” after which one of Axelrod’s friends printed campaign buttons that read “Pricks for Biden.”)
The concerns about Biden’s age exploded on February 8th, with the release of a report by the special counsel Robert Hur on the handling of classified documents, which Biden’s lawyers had reported after discovering them in his offices and garage. Hur, who had worked for the Justice Department under Trump, concluded that he lacked evidence to bring charges, but also described Biden, indelibly, as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur wrote that Biden “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a28639)
“Aside from the wholesale abandonment, and the immediate mad dash from predators, I’d say my childhood was pretty good.”
Cartoon by Henry Chapman and Steve Macone
The Administration could have chosen to emphasize the fact that Biden, unlike Trump, had been exonerated, but Biden wanted to dispute Hur’s comments. At a hastily called press conference, he said, “I’m well meaning and I’m an elderly man and I know what the hell I’m doing.” He seethed at the assertion that he did not remember the date of his son’s death, saying, “I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away.” In his final answer of the night, after being asked about hostage negotiations, he slipped up, referring to the Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, as the President of Mexico. Stories about Biden’s age and memory dominated the news for days. After the *Times* carried several articles on the topic on a single Sunday, Margaret Sullivan, the newspaper’s former public editor, criticized the response as disproportionate—calling it the “2024 version of the media’s obsession with Hillary’s emails”—and faulted the press for not focussing as much on Trump’s recent threat to let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” against *NATO* allies that do not spend enough on their militaries.
Hur’s comments and Biden’s press conference spread panic among Democrats. “If we don’t get an emergency transplant, we’re going to die,” one donor told me. Ezra Klein, of the *Times*, argued that Biden was governing well but was no longer capable of sustaining the “performance” that a campaign requires: “Whether it is true that Biden has it all under control, it is not true that he seems like he does.” Klein proposed that Democrats hold an open convention this summer and let a “murderers’ row of political talent” compete for the nomination. Proponents often mention Gretchen Whitmer, Raphael Warnock, and Gavin Newsom, among others. But, at the moment, none of these people poll better against Trump than Biden does, or have enough money on hand to mount a serious campaign. And holding an open convention risks fracturing the Party, as a relatively small group of insiders scramble to pick a candidate. The last time Democrats held an open convention, in 1968, a Party divided by war fought openly; the losers stayed home on Election Day, and Richard Nixon won by one per cent.
Unless Biden decides to step aside, it is overwhelmingly likely that he will be the nominee in November. “There is no group of wise men or women who compose the Party anymore, who have the assumed gravitas,” Michael Kazin, the author of “What It Took to Win,” a history of the Democratic Party, told me. “The President now runs the Party.”
Like many Democrats, Axelrod has turned his critiques to the opposition. “Now I think the question is: how do you make the best argument for Biden in a race against Donald Trump?” he told me. “Both these guys are old. The difference between them is one of them is actually working on the project of building a better future—not for himself, but for the country and for our kids and grandkids. And then you have on the other side a guy who’s not looking to the future but is consumed by his own past.”
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, voiced a position that I encountered among many high-ranking Democrats. “He’s not the only option that we *had*,” he told me. “But, once he’d made the decision to go, he became the only option that we *have*.” In the months that remain, Whitehouse said, the best way to beat Trump is a strategy that he called “Biden plus offense.” When people are “frightened or angry, you need to convince them that you, too, are equally concerned and you’re willing to throw punches and pick fights,” he said. “If you’ve got your sleeves rolled up and you’re waist-deep fighting alligators in the swamp, then nobody’s really thinking about your age.”
Last March, Trump held the first rally of his 2024 Presidential campaign in Waco, Texas—a choice with unsubtle significance. Thirty years before, federal agents in Waco confronted a cult called the Branch Davidians, whose members were stockpiling weapons and explosives in their compound. After a siege, the building caught fire, and more than seventy people died. The incident became a rallying cry for right-wing activists and militiamen, who see themselves as locked in conflict with a tyrannical regime. Trump’s event embraced the full aesthetic of anti-government resistance. He stood onstage with his hand over his heart, while loudspeakers blared “Justice for All”—a recording in which inmates serving time for their role on January 6th sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” as Trump recites the Pledge of Allegiance. (“Justice for All” later reached the top of a *Billboard* chart.) While the song played, a huge screen showed scenes of the riot at the Capitol. Trump told the crowd, “For seven years, you and I have been taking on the corrupt, rotten, and sinister forces trying to destroy America.” He declared, “2024 is the final battle.”
The violence of January 6th has become a touchstone for Biden, too, but with a different valence. He staged his first rally of 2024 on the eve of the riot’s third anniversary, near a site chosen to dramatize the stakes: Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where George Washington hunkered down in 1777 and turned a group of militias into a cohesive force for democracy.
The encampment sprawled across a grassy plateau, where Washington arrived at the head of a contingent of weary and ill-equipped soldiers. Biden arrived in Marine One, accompanied by dusty green military helicopters loaded with advisers, security staff, and the press pool. The Presidential arrival is a hoary ritual of the media, but these days it carries the added risk that any stumble will become fodder for critics. Biden descended the steps from the helicopter and turned back to extend a hand to Jill Biden, his wife. They gazed at the weathered remnants of the revolutionary camp, then ducked into a waiting limousine. After a couple of stops—laying a wreath at a memorial, visiting a stone house that Washington used as his headquarters—the motorcade headed to a community college in the nearby suburb of Blue Bell, where Biden would give a speech.
Biden stepped onstage to the audience’s chant of “Four more years!” But little of what followed bore much resemblance to a typical campaign speech. There was no ingratiation, no name-check for the local pols. He barely bothered with the requisite list of first-term achievements. “The topic of my speech today is deadly serious,” he began, “and I think it needs to be made at the outset of this campaign.” He talked of the sacrifices memorialized at Valley Forge. “America made a vow—never again would we bow down to a king,” he said. “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time.” He turned to the memory of January 6th and ticked through the horrors of that day—the wooden gallows, the chants of “Where’s Nancy?” Over and over, he named Trump—more than forty times in all. “Trump lost sixty court cases—*sixty*,” Biden said. “The legal path just took him back to the truth: that I won the election, and he was a *loser*.” The crowd erupted in chuckling applause.
Biden responds to doubters with a question: “If you thought you were best positioned to beat someone who, if they won, would change the nature of America, what would you do?”
Four years ago, Biden tried to position himself as a unifier in an age of conflict and name-calling. But there is less of a market for that this time, and in any case he finds it hard to hide his contempt. He conjured the image of Trump joking about the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, who was struck with a hammer, fracturing his skull: “He laughed about it. What a sick—” Biden held up his hands, as if to stop himself from going further, and clenched his fists as the crowd applauded. (In private, Biden is less decorous; among other things, he has been heard to call Trump a “sick fuck.”) He cited Trump’s threat to give the death penalty to Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his reported mockery of dead soldiers as “suckers” and “losers.” (Trump has denied this.) “How dare he?” Biden asked. “Who in God’s name does he think he is?” He was rolling now, calm and clear. Preserving America’s democracy, he told the crowd, is “the central cause of my Presidency.”
For nearly half a century in Washington, Biden worked on many things—foreign policy, crime, domestic violence. It’s only now, in the era of Trump, that he has arrived at a defining mission. In the final moments of the speech, he posed a question that will almost certainly feature in his rhetoric in the months ahead, a question that could be posed to Biden as much as to the audience. “We all know who Donald Trump is,” he said. “The question we have to answer is: who are we?”
Among the staff members backstage at the rally, none had spent more time formulating that day’s message than Mike Donilon, an unassuming man in a roomy gray suit. Donilon is, as Sheldon Whitehouse puts it, the “high priest of Bidenism.” At sixty-five, he has short white hair, long white eyebrows, and a quiet voice, often used to deliver gnomic pronouncements. He does not tweet or go on television, and even after decades in politics he slips into restaurants in D.C. without attracting notice. He started out as a pollster before making ads and running strategy for campaigns, and has worked with Biden off and on since 1981, longer than nearly any other member of his inner circle. In the 2020 election, it was Donilon who spurred Biden on, helping to shape the campaign around the concept of a “battle for the soul of a nation.” He followed Biden into the White House as a senior adviser.
Donilon’s mild demeanor can be misleading. Like Biden, he has firm beliefs—about politics, the public, the press—and a contrarian side. In 2020, he and his campaign team had to decide whether to emphasize the economy or the more abstract idea that Trump imperilled the essence of America. “We bet on the latter,” Donilon said, even though “our own pollsters told us that talking about ‘the soul of the nation’ was nutty.” That experience fortified his belief that this year’s campaign should center on what he calls “the freedom agenda.” By November, he predicted, “the focus will become overwhelming on democracy. I think the biggest images in people’s minds are going to be of January 6th.”
He sees a parallel to the race between George W. Bush and John Kerry, in 2004. At the time, Donilon was working on television ads for Kerry. “The Democratic Party didn’t want to believe it was a 9/11 election,” he said. Instead, the Party tried to focus on an array of issues—the war in Iraq, the economy, hostility to Bush. But, shortly before the election, a new video of Osama bin Laden was released that dredged up memories of 9/11. Bush won, and Donilon vowed not to repeat the error: “I decided, after the election, I would never be part of a Presidential campaign that didn’t figure out—with clarity—what it wanted to say and stick to it.”
It’s easy to miss how unusual a “freedom agenda” is for a Democratic Presidential campaign. Since the nineteen-sixties, Republicans have held fast to the language of freedom—from the backlash against civil rights to the Tea Party to the Freedom Caucus. But Democrats have been trying to convince the public that the Republican Party under Trump has transformed into the “*MAGA* movement,” an authoritarian crusade bent on dominion. Donilon said, “At its heart, it doesn’t believe in the Constitution, doesn’t believe in law, embraces violence.” He sees an opportunity for Democrats to be “in a place where they usually aren’t.” They can lay claim to the freedom to “choose your own health-care decisions, the freedom to vote, the freedom for your kids to be free of gun violence in school, the freedom for seniors to live in dignity.”
The idea of wrapping the 2024 campaign around this kind of high concept is divisive in Democratic circles. “I’m pretty certain in Scranton they’re not sitting around their dinner table talking about democracy every night,” David Axelrod told me. “The Republican message is: The world’s out of control and Biden’s not in command. That’s the entire message—Trump, the strongman, is the solution. I think you have to be thinking about how you counter that, and how you deal with fears about Biden’s condition.” Axelrod argues that in 2020, even as the Democrats summoned concerns about the soul of a nation, they never lost sight of more concrete issues: “Biden as a guy who really understood and fought for the middle class, Biden as a person of faith, and Biden as someone who had a deep connection to the military. It was basically ‘Biden is one of us.’ ”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a23124)
“I, for one, refuse to just sit at the door pining for his return.”
Cartoon by Frank Cotham
Donilon is undeterred. He shares Biden’s pride in defying predictions that Democrats would take heavy losses in the 2022 midterms, because of inflation and poor views of the economy; instead, they expanded their Senate majority and picked up two governors’ seats, the best performance in decades by a party in the White House. The freedom campaign, Donilon said, is a story in three acts: “The first act was 2020. Trump represented a threat, and Biden won. 2022 was a second round. You had these election deniers, and all these folks around the country, and they were beaten back.” He added, “Round three is 2024. The thing is, you got to win all the rounds.”
As the crowd dispersed in Pennsylvania, I scanned the social-media reaction to Biden’s speech. His supporters had thrilled to the flashes of anger: “Biden almost slips up and calls Trump a sick fuck”; “pissed off Biden is my favorite Biden.” His opponents were posting, too, of course, but they didn’t bother with the content of his remarks. The Republican National Committee put up a clip of Biden walking stiffly beside the First Lady. Soon, it had been reposted hundreds of times, while the posts in Biden’s favor had not spread as widely.
That was no accident, according to Sarah Longwell, a former Republican strategist and a founder of the Bulwark news site. “Democrats do not build their own echo chambers the way Republicans do,” she said. “It’s a strange communications differential. It’s not rocket science: you create a narrative, you are relentless about promoting it, you have a million people all working from the same sheet of paper.” She continued, “I know that this is a thing with Democrats—it’s like herding cats—but if Biden is not the strongest communicator, why aren’t there hundreds of surrogates for him? Having spent a long time on the Republican side, I am constantly flabbergasted by the inability of Democrats to prosecute a case against Republicans relentlessly, with a knife in their teeth.”
In Chester County, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, I stopped for dinner with three local Democratic volunteers. “The three of us live in the swing district of the swing county of the swing state,” Caroline Bradley, a marketing director for a fitness company, told me. “Registration for our district is pretty much fifty-fifty, Democrats and Republicans.” Her friend Vanessa Babinecz chimed in, “Purple, purple, purple!” Babinecz, who is thirty-eight years old and of mixed race, works as an administrator at a private school, and had watched the Valley Forge speech at home, with her toddler on her lap. “I was riveted,” she said—and that surprised her. “He can still connect with people.”
Babinecz confessed a lack of enthusiasm for Biden. “I wish there was someone younger, but I don’t know anyone who’s younger who’s qualified, who could do it,” she said. “I thought Kamala would’ve been great, but for whatever reason she just can’t make a compelling speech.” Babinecz is confident, though, that women will be motivated to vote by Republican efforts to eliminate access to abortion. She said, “Every single woman I’ve ever talked to about it either has had an abortion or knows someone who’s had an abortion.” She offered the President some advice: “He needs to have a few viral TikToks and a few viral Instagrams. We need to see pictures of him in his slippers interacting with his grandkids. A more approachable side, not just him on a stage.”
Social media could be vital. With older Americans already entrenched in partisan identity, strategists are focussed on mobilizing young urbanites. Dmitri Mehlhorn, the donor adviser, said that the numbers are potentially significant: “How many Millennials and Gen Z-ers are in dense cities in one of the seven swing states? About five million.”
Bradley, who described herself as a “HinJew” (“My father’s Hindu, my mother’s Jewish”), keeps a close eye on persuadable voters, monitoring the number of people who contact the local Democratic Party to switch their registration. Through her outreach, she’s heard that “people are sick of Biden now. I don’t know if fear of Trump is enough this year.” When major candidates are unpopular, third-party options prosper. Though polls show modest support for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Cornel West, and Jill Stein, protest votes can tip the results of a tight race—and they become more likely when people think that their vote won’t determine the outcome.
As we talked, the volunteers returned often to the challenge of getting Biden’s message to break through to an overloaded, disengaged public. Bradley looked back fondly at the simplicity of an earlier slogan: “You want to know why Barack Obama was awesome? Hope, change. Hope, change.” She went on, “Biden hasn’t figured out how to be clickbait. I work full time. I have two kids. How much time do people really have? Biden does all of these things and nobody knows what he’s done.” Biden has passed up major opportunities to advertise his record, including televised interviews before the Super Bowl. His advisers have embraced less conventional venues—he has appeared on podcasts with comedians and with a life-style guru.
There is no guarantee that the more people see Biden, the more they’ll like him. But as Longwell, the former Republican strategist, who has spent hundreds of hours with focus groups, told me, “Trump was in people’s faces so insanely all the time for so long that actually voters got quite used to the rhythms of a President who was just front and center constantly. Let’s get Biden on shop floors, in swing states, putting his arms around people. People think he is invisible.”
When you go to work for Biden, you’ll likely hear his version of Tip O’Neill’s classic political adage. In his view, all politics is not local; it’s *personal*. Even more than most politicians, Biden refracts the world through the lens of the individual—through an accounting of people’s idiosyncrasies and biographies, their talents, flaws, and blind spots. Before meeting foreign leaders for the first time, he will grill his briefer for insights into their areas of pride and vulnerability. When he talks about economics, he refers to data less often than to “dignity,” and he routinely conjures up the image of a laid-off father or mother, on the humiliating trip home to face their kids. Senator Whitehouse told me, “The world is personal to him in a way that it is not to everyone.”
Biden takes the same approach to his own life, which he tends to frame in terms of obstacles overcome and respect earned—or, when necessary, seized. In his first memoir, “Promises to Keep” (2008), he devoted the opening chapter to his stutter, which a nun mocked by calling him “bu-bu-bu-bu-Biden,” and to his efforts to defeat it by practicing Irish poetry in front of the mirror. He also recalled his mother’s high-minded pugilism: “She once shipped my brother Jim off with instructions to bloody the nose of a kid who was picking on smaller kids, and she gave him a dollar when he’d done it.”
Biden’s self-mythology took shape around the figure of the underdog. “I was young for my grade and always little for my age, but I made up for it by demonstrating I had guts,” he wrote of his early years, in Scranton. He described exploring the region’s culm dumps, heaps of coal slag with fires smoldering below the crust: “On a dare, I’d climb to the top of a burning culm dump, swing out over a construction site, race under a moving dump truck. If I could visualize myself doing it, I knew I could do it.”
That effortful confidence carried over into politics. After scraping through the University of Delaware, he graduated from law school at Syracuse University, despite rarely attending class. In 1972, as a council member in New Castle County, with governing experience mostly related to stoplights and sewers, he decided to run for the United States Senate. His opponent, Senator Caleb Boggs, had won seven straight elections, but Biden saw a path for himself—playing up his youth, showing off his handsome family, flattering Boggs with patronizing grace. In June, while polling at three per cent, Biden rented the biggest ballroom in Delaware for what he was already calling his “victory celebration.” When he won—by just three thousand votes—it was one of the biggest upsets in Senate history.
In 1987, as Richard Ben Cramer started writing “What It Takes,” his study of the psychology of Presidential aspirants, he gravitated to Biden, then a third-term senator competing in the Democratic primary. Biden had survived a personal agony almost beyond reckoning: in 1972, a car accident had killed his wife, Neilia, and daughter, Naomi, and left his young sons, Beau and Hunter, hospitalized. But Biden had found a calling in the Senate, where he came to believe ever more deeply in his capacity to envision a way through obstacles. “Joe called that process ‘gaming it out,’ ” Cramer wrote, “and it went on continuously in his head.”
Biden, the persuasive son of a car salesman, was always gaming out ideas that others thought half crazy—like the time he bought a dilapidated mansion, full of squirrels and asbestos, for two hundred thousand dollars that he didn’t have, or the time he fell in love with a crop of enormous hemlock bushes at a nursery in Pennsylvania and borrowed a truck to haul them home. “Joe drove the thing,” Cramer wrote, “overloaded, rocking and pitching, with trees hanging off the tail, down the back roads, an hour and a half, back to Wilmington.” Sometimes Biden’s ambition nearly derailed his career; in 1987, his first run for President ended abruptly after he was found to have embellished his biography and used other politicians’ lines in his speeches. Biden returned to the Senate, and in 2008, after another unsuccessful campaign for the Presidency, Obama asked him to join his ticket. The idea was that he would bring some foreign-policy experience, a connection to working-class white voters, and not much else. Biden was sixty-five years old; the job would be, as Obama’s strategist David Plouffe later put it, “a capstone to his storied career.”
In the Vice-Presidency, Biden took bristly pride in defying the political wisdom of younger advisers. In 2012, he publicly embraced gay marriage while Obama was still weighing the political implications. The same year, though, he sided against progressives in a debate over requiring health-care plans to provide free contraception. When Biden argued that it risked alienating religious voters, a White House aide is said to have dismissed his concern as an artifact of the “electoral map of 1992,” when “the Catholic, white, Reagan Democrat vote was decisive.”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a18970)
Cartoon by Roz Chast
Some of those same voters would prove decisive again, when they sided with Trump in the 2016 election. But Biden was not in that race, of course. As he entered the last year of his Vice-Presidency, his son Beau was stricken with brain cancer—the second great agony of Biden’s life. He coped by returning to his “purpose” as a public servant—asking his chief of staff to overload the schedule with work, and telling him, about his family’s car accident, “The only way I survived, the only way I got through it, was by staying busy and keeping my mind, when it can be, focused on my job.”
When Biden left office, he was still in mourning, and for the first time in decades he was unsure what to do next. He started public-policy organizations, signed a reported eight-million-dollar contract for three books, advocated for veterans’ issues and cancer research. Meanwhile, his son Hunter was coming apart; he had leveraged the family name into a much criticized business venture, joining the board of Burisma, an energy company in Ukraine, while his father was still overseeing relations with the country. While Hunter descended into addiction, he made a multimillion-dollar deal with a Chinese energy company that also benefitted his uncle James. (Hunter is awaiting a possible trial in California on federal tax charges.) Those ventures have become a focus of Republican-led investigations, but they have produced no evidence that Joe Biden was financially involved.
In 2017, Biden published his second book, “Promise Me, Dad,” framed around a moment near the end of Beau’s life when he implored his father to stay engaged in public life after he was gone. In April, 2019, Biden entered the Presidential primary, but found himself beset by concerns that he was too old, too out of touch. After he lost in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, advisers told him that he was so low on cash he might be finished within weeks.
In a turnaround that Biden and his aides still often cite, he won the South Carolina primary, thanks in part to a long-standing bond with Representative James Clyburn, who delivered an endorsement that carried singular weight with Black voters: “We know Joe. But, most importantly, Joe knows us.” Democrats, fearing a divisive primary, rapidly coalesced around Biden, and he went on to beat Trump by more than seven million votes. It was a smaller margin than polls had predicted—but it also represented the highest turnout in a Presidential election in decades.
Winning the Presidency after Trump was a mixed blessing. During the usual redecoration of the Oval Office, Biden was surprised by a proposal to put Franklin Roosevelt’s portrait over the fireplace. “I said, ‘I admire Roosevelt, but why Roosevelt?’ ” he told me. Citing the threat to democracy, the Presidential historian Jon Meacham told him, “Not since Roosevelt has anyone ever inherited a circumstance of more difficulty.”
The economy was in ruins. On Inauguration Day, unemployment was 6.3 per cent, and food banks were sustaining millions of people who had been laid off. Thousands of Americans were still dying of *Covid* every day. Arriving at the White House, Jeff Zients, who was assigned to take over the pandemic response, could not bear to dwell on images of hospitals. “I remember watching CNN out of the corner of my eye, and finally turning it off,” he said.
On both *Covid* and the economy, Biden had a core belief: better to respond too heavily than too lightly. “I want to overwhelm the problem,” he told aides. The risk of a stimulus is inflation, but Biden recalled a bitter lesson from the financial collapse during the Obama Administration, when a stimulus proved insufficient and Republicans, who took control of the House in the next year’s midterms, refused to agree to more. Biden told aides working on the stimulus proposal, “We’re not going to be able to do this again.” In March, 2021, after intense debate among members of the Administration and Congress, Biden signed a $1.9-trillion package. In July, as inflation was registering worldwide, Biden’s approval rating fell substantially for the first time.
That drop in popularity was compounded in August, when Biden fulfilled a years-long desire to pull American troops from Afghanistan—despite warnings that he should disregard the timetable set by Trump. The withdrawal was ugly. The Taliban took over almost instantly, and the Administration was desperately unprepared; it airlifted out some hundred and twenty thousand people, but tens of thousands more who had worked for the U.S. government were still clamoring for evacuation. In “The Last Politician,” a book about Biden’s first two years in the Presidency, Franklin Foer wrote that criticism of his policy “caused him to stubbornly defend his own logic.” According to Foer, Biden saw the scathing coverage and told an aide, “Either the press is losing its mind, or I am.” As people scrambled to flee, a bombing at the gates of the Kabul airport killed thirteen American troops and nearly two hundred Afghans.
Biden’s popularity might have recovered as the economy steadied. The stimulus was likely contributing modestly to rising prices, but it had also kept many out of poverty. Then, in February, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Biden was lauded for his response; European leaders had wrongly predicted that Vladimir Putin was bluffing, but the Administration had released accurate intelligence in advance, which fortified Biden’s bid to rally *NATO* allies. Nevertheless, the costs of energy and shipping spiked, and, by that June, prices in America had soared more than nine per cent in one year—the steepest rise in four decades.
The feeling of a world out of control—inflation, Afghanistan, Ukraine—contributed to a sense that Biden was floundering. Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary, said that a recession was “almost inevitable.” Biden repeatedly disputed the idea, even as a consensus formed: in December, a *Financial Times* survey of economists found that eighty-five per cent predicted a recession within a year. Bloomberg Economics calculated the odds at a hundred per cent.
Those predictions proved resoundingly wrong. By 2024, the country had gained more than three million jobs, unemployment was at historic lows, consumer confidence was steadily rising, and the United States was in stronger shape than all other advanced economies. (Germany, by contrast, declared a recession in early 2023.) The economist Tyler Cowen concluded, in a postmortem on the forecasts, “The problem is that the real world is not as consistent as model builders might like.”
Biden takes evident pride in having been right. He asked me, “How many times did you and your colleagues write, ‘The recession is coming next month’?” In pursuing a larger stimulus, Biden was challenging what he often calls “the orthodoxy of trickle-down economics.” That view, he said, held that “the only way we’re going to get inflation down is to get unemployment up to ten per cent. Come on. That’s how it worked in the past, because we’d want to make sure the wealthy don’t get hurt. But who pays for that?” The goal was rebuilding the economy from “the middle out and the bottom up,” he said. “When that happens, everybody does well, including—*including*—the wealthy.”
In January, when the S. & P. 500 and the Dow hit their highest points in history, Biden posted a video from 2020 of Trump predicting that a Biden win would lead to “a stock market collapse the likes of which you’ve never had.” More recently, Trump had said that he was hoping for a crash. “He’d like to see a recession or a depression,” Biden said, aghast. “He doesn’t want to be the next Herbert Hoover? He’s *already* Herbert Hoover. He’s the only President that ever lost jobs in a four-year period—other than Hoover.”
Roger Altman, a Deputy Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration, told me, “The data is so good you have to rub your eyes.” But feelings about the economy have become, in part, a proxy for partisan identity. In December, more than three-quarters of respondents in a poll for Axios acknowledged reports of the recovery but said they were “not feeling it where I live.” Those most likely to report financial distress were Republicans and rural Americans. Biden, Altman said, needs to hammer home the idea: “ ‘We’re getting key prices back down for you.’ Talk about it every half hour, because this grocery-price anger is a real problem.”
Three days after the Valley Forge speech, Biden was back on the road—this time to Charleston, South Carolina, where he could counter talk that he was losing ground with an important demographic. Four years earlier, Black voters had resuscitated his campaign. Now, according to an NBC News survey, their approval of Biden had dropped nearly twenty points in a year.
The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church occupies a creaky nineteenth-century sanctuary—and a singular position in the history of the Black freedom struggle. Founded near what was once one of the country’s busiest slave ports, it became known as Mother Emanuel, because it spawned so many churches across the Lowcountry of South Carolina. In 2015, it gained international notice, in horrific fashion, when a white supremacist, welcomed at a Bible study, pulled out a gun and murdered the pastor and eight parishioners.
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a28720)
“It says, ‘Unless you’re selling Thin Mints, begone!’ ”
Cartoon by Nick Downes
The horror at Mother Emanuel would come to be understood as an opening shot in an age of far-right violence, and of radicalization in the Republican Party. Joseph Darby, a reverend and an influential political voice in Charleston, told me, “It was a dog whistle in the Nixon days. It’s a bullhorn now. You’ve got Nikki Haley running around with amnesia about slavery. You’ve got DeSantis trying to ban books and saying that slaves might’ve learned to make a buck while they were being beaten, raped, and maimed.”
On the dais at Mother Emanuel, backed by a towering stained-glass mosaic, Biden faced an audience of about seven hundred parishioners and guests. He was introduced by Clyburn, the dean of South Carolina’s congressional delegation, who ticked through the Administration’s programs and repeated his crucial imprimatur: “As I told you four years ago, we know Joe. But, more importantly, Joe knows us.”
Biden rose from his seat, embraced Clyburn, and stepped forward. Before he spoke much of politics, he spoke of loss. After the massacre, Biden and Hunter had visited the church. The trip was meant “to show our solidarity,” Biden recalled, but Beau had died only three weeks earlier, and “my family also needed to be healed.” Now, he said, seeing family members of some of those killed “reminds me that, through our pain, each of us—each of us—must find purpose.”
Biden didn’t restrain himself from politics for long. In the minutes that followed, he drew his opponent into a blistering analogy to the aftermath of the Civil War, when, he said, “defeated Confederates couldn’t accept the verdict of the war.” They took refuge in “a self-serving lie that the Civil War was not about slavery but about states’ rights.” That lie, in turn, gave rise to Jim Crow. “Once again, there are some in this country trying to turn a loss into a lie,” Biden said. “This time, the lie is about the 2020 election, the election in which you made your voices heard and your power known.” He never mentioned Trump’s name, but the point was clear. “In our time, there’s still the old ghost in new garments,” he told the crowd. “And we all need to rise to meet the moment.”
Seated in the second row was Deon Tedder, the son of a custodian and a secretary, who was elected last year to the state senate. He knows that some young voters are unimpressed with Biden. “They’re saying, ‘Well, what has he done? We don’t see anything,’ ” Tedder told me. Trump put his name on people’s stimulus checks—and they still talk about them. But the effects of Biden’s policy agenda will take years to manifest. Tedder went on, “Democrats, even here, we are horrible with messaging. Talk about student-loan forgiveness. Talk about the push to decriminalize nonviolent offenses. You have to break it down so that people can connect.”
After leaving the church, Biden stopped at Hannibal’s, a venerable soul-food spot that draws Democrats on the stump. A President’s entourage is the size of a small army, but as Biden moved from booth to booth he seemed relaxed for the first time all day. A half century of glad-handing shone through. Approaching the owner, who was standing with his daughters, he asked, with mock concern, “Do you know these women?” The man beamed and said, “They’re the next generation. I’m the old patriarch—like you.”
Biden’s victory in the South Carolina primary, on February 3rd, was never in question, but the returns would be studied for indications of his campaign’s momentum. The results were encouraging for Democrats. Turnout in Orangeburg County, home to two historically Black universities, was the second-highest in the state—and it was higher still in the county’s predominantly African American precincts.
Reverend Darby told me that he has always thought Biden’s standing among Black voters was better than press accounts suggested. “Donald Trump is not exactly the picture of health, but if Joe Biden wears sneakers there’s a great national concern. There’s something wrong with that balance,” he said. He believes that as the year moves on voters will recognize practical improvements from some Biden-era policies. He said, “My late wife was diabetic. The first time I found out how much insulin costs, I asked, ‘How much is it with insurance?’ And the pharmacist said, ‘That is with insurance.’ ” (Under the Inflation Reduction Act, a month of insulin, which used to cost Darby about two hundred dollars, is now capped for Medicare recipients at thirty-five dollars.) He continued, “I have two sons. Neither of them are exceptionally enthused. But both of them say, ‘I will be at the polls. Can’t have Trump.’ ”
The Trump White House confronted Americans with a parade of emergencies, pratfalls, and defenestrations. The Biden Administration, by contrast, has a culture of almost ostentatious calm. Biden’s public statements are “actively sedative,” as one commentator put it, and Cabinet members seem to go out of their way to avoid generating excitement. In a list of their personal New Year’s resolutions published by Politico, Gina Raimondo, the Secretary of Commerce, declared, “I’m hoping to drink less diet soda.”
Turnover has been rare in the top ranks of the Administration. Biden has long retained a core group of advisers, and, unlike in the previous Administration, top aides don’t regularly disparage each other to reporters. Anita Dunn, a senior adviser who specializes in communications, considers that a by-product of age. “You don’t have a lot of the jockeying around being close to him, or ‘Who is he listening to?’ ” she said. “We’re closer to the end of our careers than the middles or the beginnings.”
But the culture of calm also relies on a capacity for setting aside concerns. A series of senior aides told me that they doubt Biden is trailing Trump as much as some polls have suggested. “Polling is broken,” one of them said. “You can’t figure out how to get someone on the phone.” Pollsters partly concede the point; few people these days are willing to be candid with a stranger about politics, and fewer still have landlines. “I think the only person who calls me on my landline is Joe Biden,” the aide added. Campaigns that are trailing in the polls often impugn them, of course, but Biden aides cite reasons for their skepticism. When I raised the issue with Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, a top adviser who recently moved from the White House to the campaign, she made a distinction between “favorability” (a line of inquiry in opinion polls) and “vote choice” (the outcome of recent elections, notably the recent ones in which Democrats did well). “Historically, favorability and vote choice have been correlated,” she said. “I actually think that that’s no longer the case.”
Outside the White House, though, concerned Democrats note that Biden was not on the ballot in 2022 or 2023, so voters did not have a chance to signal their feelings about him. They worry that aides are relying too much on Biden’s self-image as the underdog who disproves the doubters. In any Administration, there is a tendency to amplify the good news and obscure the bad. “Every White House does it to some degree,” the former Democratic official told me. He said he believes that Biden’s polls show “flashing red warning signs,” but that the President “can just choose to hear the positive reinforcement.”
Unsurprisingly, Biden’s aides reject the idea that the White House is insular or dismissive of reality. Zients, who succeeded Ron Klain as chief of staff last year, pointed to Biden’s reputation for soliciting opinions from critics. “Just the other day, he picked up the phone and called Larry Summers,” Zients said. As outreach goes, it was relatively safe; Summers, despite his critical comments, is a longtime adviser to Presidents. Biden’s other occasional calls range from the columnist Thomas Friedman to the Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. “That’s how you pressure-test decisions,” Zients said.
At bottom, Biden has oriented his Presidency around an unfashionable faith in compromise, experience, and relationships. As Dunn put it, “The biggest bet of all is that good governing actually can get you reëlected in 2024, when all of the forces seem to be arrayed against it.” But there is little agreement—even among Biden’s supporters—on what good governing looks like. Perhaps the greatest test of Biden’s belief in the old ways of Washington came from abroad, and outraged some of the voters he needs most.
At 12:06 *a*.*m*. on October 7th, the Situation Room at the White House sent an urgent message to national-security officials: “Heavy rocket barrage launched from Gaza.” By 12:48, new details had confirmed that something far more devastating was afoot: “Hamas militants have infiltrated Israel from Gaza via land, air, and sea.” Michael Herzog, Israel’s Ambassador to Washington, had sent the message, “This is war.”
Like many Presidents before, Biden had come to office hoping to avoid engulfing dramas in the Middle East. “No new projects,” as one aide put it. But, after Hamas slaughtered some twelve hundred Israelis, Biden expanded arms shipments to Israel, dispatched ships, and spoke furiously about the rampage of killings, rapes, and kidnappings—what he called “an act of sheer evil.”
[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a28533)
Cartoon by Lynn Hsu
In Biden’s view, the attack was part of a challenge that defines his Presidency: the assault on free societies. “Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common—they both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy,” he said, in an Oval Office address last October. Although Biden has a half century of sometimes tense dealings with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister, he feels a deep kinship with the country, which he first visited in 1973, just before it fought off a surprise attack from its neighbors. “In his gut, he sees Israel as besieged by enemies,” Senator Coons told me. “The tension is that my kids’ college-ish generation doesn’t see Israel as surrounded by enemies, at risk of not surviving.”
As Israel’s retaliation generated horrific images of Palestinians suffering in Gaza, Biden’s tone slowly shifted. He publicly warned Israel against “indiscriminate” attacks and privately intervened to avoid counterstrikes based on bad information; by mid-January, the number of Gazans killed each day had fallen by nearly half, according to a tally by the *Times*. But Biden continued to resist calls for an immediate ceasefire or a reduction in military aid. When I visited the White House, protesters near an entrance used by visitors and staff were dousing the pavement with blood-red liquid and lying across the walkway. The potential political impact was obvious: In 2020, Biden won resoundingly among Arab and Muslim voters—an especially consequential bloc in Michigan, where he won by just a hundred and fifty-four thousand votes. Now some of the same voters in Michigan were promoting a campaign called Abandon Biden, and a national poll showed that his support among Arab and Muslim Americans had dropped by forty per cent.
I asked Biden if he intended to apply more pressure on Israel’s leaders, and, for the first time that day, he did not jab back at the question. “I understand the anger and the rage” sparked by October 7th, he said. “But you can’t let the rage consume you to the point where you lose the moral high ground.” Biden didn’t hide his frustration with Netanyahu’s government. He told me that, when he preached caution to members of Israel’s war cabinet, they replied that America had carpet-bombed Germany in the Second World War. Biden said that he responded, “That’s why we ended up with the United Nations and all these rules about not doing that again.”
Biden holds out hope for the most elusive of grand bargains: getting Israelis to accept the creation of a Palestinian state, in exchange for normalized relations with Saudi Arabia—which many Israelis see as a vital step toward long-term security. He described it as a way for Israel to fight off its attackers without causing undue suffering: “We could put in place a circumstance that ends up where they continue to move—as we did with bin Laden—against the leaders of Hamas, but not assume that every Palestinian is a supporter of Hamas.” He added, “I’ve been pushing very hard for the Israeli government to come down hard on these out-of-control settlers.” (In February, Biden imposed financial penalties and visa bans on four Israeli settlers in the West Bank who were accused of attacking Palestinians and Israeli peace activists.)
I brought up the disdain that Biden’s handling of the war has engendered among Arab Americans and young Democrats. “I don’t want to see any Palestinians killed—I think that it’s contrary to what we believe as Americans,” he said. But he urged his critics to wait. “I think they have to give this just a little bit of time, understanding what would happen if they came into their state or their neighborhood and saw what happened with Hamas,” he said. “The pressure on the leadership to move with every ounce of capacity against Hamas is real. But it doesn’t mean it should be continued. It doesn’t mean it’s right. And so, I think you’re going to see—I’m praying you’re going to see—a significant downturn in the use of force.”
That posture was echt Biden: asking for patience to continue private negotiations, criticizing Netanyahu’s government without renouncing him. It would satisfy almost nobody in the short term. (The day after we spoke, Netanyahu dismissed Biden’s idea of a Palestinian state as an “attempt to impose a reality that would harm Israel’s security.”) As with many issues, Biden is both weighed down and blessed by his experience. He is not counting on an epiphany from Netanyahu. Without saying so explicitly, he is betting that an offer of Saudi normalization would be so popular with Israeli leaders that Netanyahu would have no choice but to engage it. Since the war began, Israel has rejected many American requests—to allow humanitarian assistance, to let out the severely wounded and foreign-passport holders, to pause the fighting while hostages are released—before ultimately agreeing. The Administration treats each no from Israel as an “initial answer,” a national-security official told me, adding, “Other people would like us to take an approach that is much more publicly confrontational. But would it actually lead to better outcomes in the war?”
Not long after I visited Biden, I called Mohammad Qazzaz, a Palestinian American who lives in Dearborn, Michigan, and owns a coffee business. We met in 2020, when he was a strong Biden supporter. Now he was furious. “There are people who bleed Democratic here, but they will never vote for Biden again,” he said. “Some of them are actually saying they will vote for Trump because they just want to screw up the whole system. Screw this country if it thinks we’re dogs.”
Qazzaz can’t bring himself to vote for Trump, but he plans to write in “Free Palestine” on the ballot this November. It’s not yet clear how much this kind of sentiment will hurt Biden. During the Michigan primary, a hundred thousand people—about thirteen per cent of the total—wrote in “uncommitted,” as a protest vote. When I asked one of Biden’s political advisers how much disillusionment over the war will matter, he said, “The single biggest thing is whether it’s a three- or four-month thing—or does it go on longer?”
On a crisp afternoon in late January, Biden and the First Lady boarded Marine One from the South Lawn of the White House, for a short hop to Manassas, Virginia, where George Mason University has a campus. There, they would meet up with Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, to mark the fifty-first anniversary of Roe v. Wade—which the Supreme Court overturned in 2022, starting a national furor. Onstage for Biden’s speech, a backdrop of white letters spelled out “Restore Roe.”
For decades, the politics of abortion were notoriously awkward for Biden. As a devoted Catholic and a liberal Democrat, he was torn between two creeds. Even after he became a vocal supporter of same-sex marriage and transgender protections, he remained, as he put it, “not big” on abortion. “It’s always been a hard issue for him,” an aide told me. “But it became a very easy issue for him because of the Supreme Court.” O’Malley Dillon recalled that when the decision came, in a case called Dobbs v. Jackson, Biden’s immediate response was “How is it that we are rolling back fifty years of rights?”
I asked Biden what he would do in a second term to protect abortion access at the federal level. “Pass Roe v. Wade as the law of the land,” he said. Democrats would need to win control of the House of Representatives and gain seats in the Senate, but Biden expressed confidence. “A few more elections like we’ve seen taking place in the states” would suffice, he said. “You’re seeing the country changing.” Then, reiterating his position on Roe, he said, “I’ve never been supportive of, you know, ‘It’s my body, I can do what I want with it.’ But I have been supportive of the notion that this is probably the most rational allocation of responsibility that all the major religions have signed on and debated over the last thousand years.”
It’s a framing that irritates advocates. (In February, after he told attendees at a New York fund-raiser, “I don’t want abortion on demand, but I thought Roe v. Wade was right,” Slate ran a story titled “Biden’s Latest Abortion Fumble Is Particularly Distressing.”) But, so far, they have chosen to avoid a fight with a Democratic President whose opponent crows that he was able to “terminate” Roe. After the midterms in 2022, researchers found that abortion restrictions had disproportionately motivated first-time and younger voters, and women under fifty.
Since Dobbs, twenty-one states have tightened restrictions on abortion. The prospect of a further rollback looms. In a concurring opinion on Dobbs, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that the legal rationale for overturning Roe could be applied to “correct the error” in cases on same-sex marriage, the decriminalization of homosexuality, and access to contraception. I asked Biden if he thought that the Justices would undo those protections. “I don’t think there’s a majority to go there,” he said, but added, “I think that a couple on the Court would go considerably further”—specifically “the guy who likes to spend a lot of time on yachts.”
“Thomas?” I asked.
Biden grinned.
At the event in Manassas, it became clear that two of the most important issues for young people are colliding. As Biden began cranking up his speech, a man in the auditorium yelled, “Genocide Joe, how many kids have you killed in Gaza?” The audience drowned him out with chants of “Four more years,” and Biden returned to his lines, but moments later another call came from across the room: “Israel kills two mothers every hour!”
While the protesters were removed, Biden looked out calmly, knitting his fingers on the lectern. He seemed determined to project the mien of a parish priest, saying of the protesters, “They feel deeply.” But he barely made it through the next sentence of his speech before there was another shout. “This is going to go on for a while,” he told the crowd. Eventually, he gave up bothering to pause with each interruption—his supporters shouted, “Keep going!”—and by the end there had been at least a dozen removals. Biden wound up the speech to thundering applause. Still, it was hard to see how the impassioned young people who had been ejected, or who had stayed away that day, would change their minds between now and November.
A few hours after I met Biden in the Oval Office, he was due to sit down with members of Congress to discuss an ungainly jumble of issues, including military aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, as well as the humanitarian crisis at America’s border with Mexico. They had been conjoined in a single bill after Republicans vowed to block funding for Ukraine unless Biden did something about immigration.
At the West Wing, more than a dozen Republicans and Democrats filed into the Cabinet Room, where the fireplace was roaring. The Republicans were led by the unlikely Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, a previously obscure lawmaker from Louisiana: a staunchly religious lawyer, with a rigid shell of salt-and-pepper hair and round schoolboy glasses, who had been installed only after a chaotic internal revolt pushed out his predecessor.
Biden’s aides worried that the meeting would devolve into grandstanding. In December, House Republicans had approved an impeachment inquiry into Biden, in the hope of finding evidence of corruption by him and his family. And immigration was a growing political nightmare for Democrats. For nearly three years, the Administration, beset by internal tensions, had tacked between looser and stricter policies. By the end of 2023, the number of migrants coming to the border had risen tenfold in five years, driven by calamities in Central America, the Middle East, and beyond. Some in the White House spoke glumly of the border with the mantra “All options are bad.”
The Ukraine problem was no less of an emergency, and no simpler to solve. Military analysts estimated that, without more American arms and ammunition, Ukraine would start to succumb to Russia’s attacks by the summer. The Republican Party once defined itself by its opposition to Russian aggression, but the current House of Representatives is often sympathetic to Putin—and nearly always unsympathetic to Biden’s requests for funding. Still, Biden liked his chances. “Bring them here,” he told aides. “I want to meet with them.”
Biden’s seemingly inexhaustible appetite for negotiating with Congress can make him seem like a political misfit, a conciliator in an age of absolutes. But, in one of the more perceptive observations I’ve heard about Biden, his longtime aide Bruce Reed told me that he “proceeds as if things are on the level and tries to force them to be so.” He still believes in the old legislative-favor trade. In 2021, even though Mitch McConnell directed his members not to vote for the stimulus package, Biden made a point of approving a measure that the Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski requested, providing relief for the cruise-ship industry. Biden told aides, “She can’t vote with me now, but that doesn’t mean she won’t later, and she’ll remember this.”
At times, Biden’s deference to lawmakers has infuriated progressive members of his own party. In 2021, some pushed him to publicly criticize Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat who had scuttled the centerpiece of the Administration’s agenda, a bill known as Build Back Better. But Biden refused to “kick the shit” out of Manchin, an aide said. Instead, Steve Ricchetti, Biden’s counsellor, who oversees legislative affairs, privately stayed in touch. They were an easy mix: two genial Italian American pols from industrial flyover states—Manchin from West Virginia, Ricchetti from Ohio. Manchin is a Democrat in a deep-red state, and Biden, betting that he might coöperate after the initial pressure passed, encouraged a strategy to “keep the door open.” Manchin ended up siding with the Administration on a series of pivotal votes. Ricchetti told me, “Had we listened to that advice”—to name and shame Manchin—“we don’t get the Inflation Reduction Act, we probably don’t get the *CHIPS* Act, and we don’t get the veterans’-health bill, or Ketanji Brown Jackson on the Supreme Court.”
Last fall, once Republicans made it clear that they would not agree to aid for Ukraine without an immigration deal, a group of senators started meeting to negotiate across the aisle. By January, they were nearing a compromise that no one in Congress would have predicted a decade ago. To the chagrin of immigration advocates, Democrats were prepared to drop the requirement for a pathway to legalization for undocumented immigrants already in the country, and to accept Republican demands for expanded detention capacity and higher standards for asylum. During the meeting at the White House, Biden told the assembled group, “I will do a big deal on the border.” Speaker Johnson said on television that night that the meeting was productive.
None of that sat well with Trump, who had built his campaign on the politics of a permanent border crisis; if conditions improved, he would have nothing to blame on Biden. On January 25th, even before the text of the bill was available, Trump posted on social media, “A Border Deal now would be another Gift to the Radical Left Democrats.” Republicans rapidly fell in line, without bothering to conceal the rationale. Representative Troy Nehls, a Texas Republican, asked a reporter, “Why would I help Joe Biden?” On February 4th, just hours after the bill was released, Johnson pronounced it “dead on arrival.”
Trump had thwarted a bipartisan effort to address two of Washington’s most urgent problems. Yet this act of cynicism was also, perhaps, a political gift to Biden. For the next nine months, he could blame Republicans for being feckless and destructive. In an apparent preview of how he will talk about the topic during the campaign, Biden told me, “I’m watching television this morning while I’m shaving.” A Republican was trashing him onscreen, he recalled, saying, “Well, Biden won’t support more funding for the border!” Biden laughed. “I mean, what the hell?” he said. “I’ve been pushing *so damn hard* for reform of the border.”
Biden’s opportunity is akin to the one that Harry Truman had in his 1948 campaign for reëlection. Trailing in the polls, Truman railed against what he called a “Do Nothing Congress,” which had failed to stop spiking prices and ameliorate a housing crisis. Much as Biden talks about the threat to freedoms worldwide, Truman spoke of a gathering Cold War, a grand mission that served to unify a fractious Democratic Party. He ultimately prevailed.
“It was a matter of pulling together a coalition that was in even worse fragmentation,” Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian, told me. “Truman did it by going to the American people, running against Congress, standing up on both the Cold War and civil rights. It’s possible that ’48 will prove a precursor to what we have now—if the Democrats take heed.” Sarah Longwell said, drawing on her experience in focus groups, “Nothing papers over the fractures in the Democratic coalition like Donald Trump. He is a walking turnout mechanism. I’ve just spent so much time listening to how much voters viscerally dislike him.” She added, “You’re not building a pro-Joe Biden coalition—you’re building an anti-Donald Trump coalition.”
Near the end of my conversation with Biden, he said, “There’s only one reason, I think, to be involved in elective office, and that’s to be able to do what you think is the right thing.” The sentiment is noble but incomplete. In this election, the right thing is to win. If Biden succeeds, his critics will say that their alarms nudged him to victory. If he loses, they will say that he was captive to hubris. History will be harsh.
Biden believes that he is doing the most essential work of his life. To some, this is a dangerous rationalization. He is at peace with that. In the election, he is betting that Americans will reward him for his achievements: ejecting Trump from the White House, getting the nation out of the pandemic, rescuing the economy, reviving *NATO*—not to mention passing significant legislation on climate change, gun control, drug prices, manufacturing, and infrastructure. But achievement is not the same as inspiration, and Americans are not in a mood of gratitude toward our leaders.
Having entered the Senate at the age of thirty, one of the youngest members in its history, Biden formed an idea of himself as a wunderkind, and he has never quite shed it. He often says, “I feel so much younger than my age.” In the early years of his Presidency, when people asked him about his age, his stock response was “Watch me.” He doesn’t say that as much anymore. Grudgingly, painfully, he may be coming to terms with the reality that people don’t see him the way he hopes they will.
In 1960, when John F. Kennedy ran for President, discrimination against Catholics was widespread, and he faced the persistent slur that he would be controlled by the Vatican. In a speech that fall, Kennedy told an audience of Protestant ministers, “The real issues in this campaign have been obscured—perhaps deliberately.” Without posturing, he asked Americans to join him in rejecting “disdain and division” by promoting “instead the American ideal of brotherhood.” The speech was a success, and the fixation on Kennedy’s faith receded.
Biden has not addressed the matter of age as forthrightly, even though it is a topic that might resonate with Americans, especially those who have suffered the condescension and dismissal that rankle him. Yes, he might stumble at the microphone, but he might also convince skeptics of the power in his patience, institutional memory, and experience. His campaign, at least, has evidently decided that the issue can’t be avoided entirely. Last week, Biden made an appearance on “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” and the first question was about his age. Biden replied, as he often does, with a joke: “You got to take a look at the other guy. He’s about as old as I am, but he can’t remember his wife’s name.”
Biden likes to say, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.” But, unlike his opponent, he is in office, and liable to be judged for the condition of the country. It is a measure of the interlocking crises in the world today that the course of the next eight months depends on circumstances that are unfathomable in advance. Could Houthi militants, firing rockets over the Red Sea, disrupt enough shipping to revive inflation? Could Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., ride a wave of nostalgia onto the ballot in Arizona or Michigan? Could a last-minute deepfake deter a decisive few thousand voters in a swing state? The real world of politics, like economics, is not as consistent as model builders might like.
One of the few points of certainty is a chilling one. Half the respondents to a CBS poll in January said they believed that the losing side of the coming election will resort to violence. Biden has an uneasy relationship to such knowledge. He is convinced that Americans will reject the Trumpist view of politics. “How can we, as a democracy, elect anyone President who says violence is appropriate?” he asked me. And he thinks that the press has failed to take full stock of Trump’s menace. “It’s like you’ve all become numbed by it.”
But he must also prepare for the prospect that this race will get very ugly. When I asked whether he thinks that Trump will concede if he loses in 2024, Biden said no. “Losers who are losers are never graceful,” he said. “I just think that he’ll do anything to try to win. If—and *when*—I win, I think he’ll contest it. No matter what the result is.” ♦
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# On popular online platforms, predatory groups coerce children into self-harm
*Editor’s note: This story describes extremely disturbing events that may be upsetting for some people.*
The person in the online chat introduced himself as “Brad.” Using flattery and guile, he persuaded the 14-year-old girl to send a nude photo. It instantly became leverage.
Over the following two weeks in April 2021, he and other online predators threatened to send the image to the girl’s classmates in Oklahoma unless she live-streamed degrading and violent acts, the girl’s mother told The Washington Post.
They coerced her into carving their screen names deep into her thigh, drinking from a toilet bowl and beheading a pet hamster — all as they watched in a video chatroom on the social media platform Discord.
The pressure escalated until she faced one final demand: to kill herself on camera.
“You just don’t realize how quickly it can happen,” said the mother, who intervened before her daughter could act on the final demand. The mother agreed to talk about the experience to warn other parents but did so on the condition of anonymity out of concern for her daughter’s safety.
The abusers were part of an emerging international network of online groups that have targeted thousands of children with a sadistic form of social media terror that authorities and technology companies have struggled to control, according to an examination by The Washington Post, [Wired](https://www.wired.com/story/764-com-child-predator-network/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) Magazine, [Der Spiegel](https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/cybergrooming-wie-sich-sadisten-weltweit-in-chatgrupp[%E2%80%A6]-straftaten-verabreden-a-1722ca0d-9242-423b-9b18-1e5dff505aa4?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) in Germany and [Recorder](https://recorder.ro/am-ucis-pe-cineva-in-video-call-reteaua-globala-de-tineri-care-isi-castiga-popularitatea-online-prin-crime-pornografie-infantila-si-automutilarea-victimelor/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) in Romania.
The perpetrators — identified by authorities as boys and men as old as mid-40s — seek out children with mental health issues and blackmail them into hurting themselves on camera, the examination found. They belong to a set of evolving online groups, some of which have thousands of members, that often splinter and take on new names but have overlapping membership and use the same tactics.
Unlike many “sextortion” schemes that seek money or increasingly graphic images, these perpetrators are chasing notoriety in a community that glorifies cruelty, victims and law enforcement officials say. The FBI issued a [public warning](https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2023/PSA230912?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) in September identifying eight such groups that target minors between the ages of 8 and 17, seeking to harm them for the members’ “own entertainment or their own sense of fame.”
![](https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/4AW547VSF3JSB3EIJB4V6ZQHFA_size-normalized.jpg&high_res=true&w=2048)
An Oklahoma woman whose daughter was targeted by predators on Discord agreed to be photographed for this report on the condition that her identity not be revealed to protect the safety of her family. (Nick Oxford for The Washington Post)
The group that targeted the Oklahoma girl and others interviewed for this report is called “764,” named after the partial Zip code of the teenager who created it in 2021. Its activities fit the definition of domestic terrorism, the FBI recently argued in court.
“I had the feeling that they really loved me, that they cared about me,” said an 18-year-old woman from Canada who described being “brainwashed” and then victimized by the group in 2021. “The more content they had of you, the more that they used it, the more that they started to hate you.”
While lawmakers, regulators and social media critics have long [scrutinized](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/31/senate-hearing-child-safety-tech-ceos-zuckerberg/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) how [Facebook](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/31/mark-zuckerberg-apology-hearing-child-safety/?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template) and Instagram can harm children, this new network thrives on Discord and the messaging app Telegram — platforms that the group 764 has used as “vessels to desensitize vulnerable populations” so they might be manipulated, a federal prosecutor said in court recently.
Discord, a hub for gamers, is one of the most popular social media platforms among teens and is growing fast. The platform allows anonymous users to control and moderate large swaths of its private meeting rooms with little oversight.
Telegram — an app that includes group chats and has more than 800 million monthly users — allows for fully encrypted communication, a feature that protects privacy but makes moderation more challenging. Telegram delegates most moderation to leaders of groups on the platform, intervening in some instances when posts violate its policies.
On Telegram, members of these groups post child pornography, videos of corpse desecration and images of the cuts they have made children inflict on themselves, according to victims and an examination of messages. In chat groups with as many as 5,000 members, they brag about their abusive acts and goad each other on. They share tips on where to find girls with eating disorders and other vulnerabilities congregating online, and on how to manipulate them.
In a group chat on Telegram this past April, one such member wrote that he had obtained an 18-minute video of a minor engaging in sexual acts. He wrote that she was “the 14th girl this month.”
do u see her face on there... on the video... cause ill send it to the school
The platforms say deterring these groups is an urgent priority. But after creating the spaces that predators from around the globe use to connect with one another and find vulnerable children, even removing thousands of accounts each month has proved insufficient. The targeted users start new accounts and swiftly reconvene, according to interviews with victims.
In a statement, Telegram did not respond to detailed questions about this network but said it removes “millions” of pieces of harmful content each day through “proactive monitoring of public parts of the platform and user reports.”
“Child abuse and calls to violence are explicitly forbidden by Telegram’s terms of service,” said Remi Vaughn, a Telegram spokesperson. “Telegram has moderated harmful content on our platform since its creation.”
After reporters sought comment, Telegram shut down dozens of groups the consortium identified as communication hubs for the network.
Discord has filed “many hundreds” of reports about 764 with law enforcement authorities, according to a company spokeswoman, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from 764-affiliated groups. The company removed 34,000 user accounts associated with the group last year, many of them assumed to be repeat offenders, she said.
“It’s their responsibility to provide a safe space for everyone.”
— Mother of a 764 victim in Oklahoma, referring to Discord
“The actions of 764 are appalling and have no place on Discord or in society,” the company said in a statement. “Since 2021, when Discord first became aware of 764, disrupting the group and its sadistic activity has been among our Safety team’s highest priorities. Discord has specialized groups who focus on combating this decentralized network of internet users, and 764 has and continues to be a target of their daily work.”
The company uses artificial intelligence to detect predatory behavior and scans for abusive text and known sexually explicit images of children in the platform’s public spaces, the spokeswoman said. It shuts down problem accounts and meeting spaces and sometimes bans users with a particular IP address, email or phone number, though the spokeswoman acknowledged that sophisticated users can sometimes evade these measures.
The Post and its media partners shared reporting for this examination, including court and police records from multiple countries, and interviews with researchers, law enforcement officials and seven victims or their families — all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their safety — in North America and Europe. The media consortium also collected and analyzed 3 million Telegram messages. Each news organization wrote its own story.
The Oklahoma girl’s mother said she holds Discord responsible for her daughter’s abuse, detailed in videos and police records.
“Discord has provided a safe space for evil people,” the mother said. “It’s their responsibility to provide a safe space for everyone.”
### A cult that prizes sadistic acts
The founder of 764 was a 16-year-old boy in Texas who used variations of the screen names “Felix” or “Brad” while running the group’s online operations from his mother’s home. Bradley Cadenhead soon developed a following online as the leader of a self-described cult that prized sadistic acts, according to court records that describe both his online and real-world lives.
Cadenhead became fascinated with violent imagery at age 10, the records say. Three years later, he was sent to a juvenile detention center after allegedly threatening to shoot up his school.
He created the first 764 Discord server in January 2021, according to the company spokeswoman. Discord servers are meeting spaces where members gather to communicate with each other by text, voice and video. The person who creates a server controls who is admitted to it and who moderates its content.
The group’s name refers to the first three numbers in the Zip code of Cadenhead’s hometown, Stephenville, about 100 miles southwest of Dallas, said Stephenville Police Capt. Jeremy Lanier.
Court and police records show that Discord struggled to keep Cadenhead off its platform.
Starting in November 2020, the company spokeswoman said, Discord noticed that child sexual abuse material was being uploaded from IP addresses — a set of numbers that identify a device used to connect to the internet — that investigators later traced back to Cadenhead. The company sent authorities reports about illegal images on 58 different accounts operated by Cadenhead, well into 2021, the spokeswoman said.
Lanier told The Post that Cadenhead was uploading child pornography on Discord as late as July 2021, several months after the Oklahoma girl was groomed and abused there.
The Discord spokeswoman said that each time one of Cadenhead’s accounts was flagged, it was shut down and banned. She acknowledged that the company banned only some of the IP addresses used by Cadenhead, saying that it used such bans only when they were deemed tactically appropriate. She said sophisticated predators often have 50 to 100 accounts, some stolen or purchased, to evade enforcement actions.
The reports from Discord prompted the investigation that led to his arrest on child pornography charges in July 2021. Speaking later to a juvenile probation officer, Cadenhead said that his server attracted as many as 400 members who routinely posted shocking images, including videos of torture and child pornography. It was also “quite common” for members to groom victims and extort them by threatening to distribute compromising images, Cadenhead told the officer. Sometimes their motivation was money, and other times they did it “just for power,” the officer wrote in a report to the court after Cadenhead pleaded guilty.
Cadenhead, now 18 and serving an 80-year prison sentence for possession with intent to promote child pornography, did not respond to a letter requesting an interview. His parents did not return messages. Chris Perri, a lawyer for Cadenhead, said he may challenge the sentence based on “potential mental health issues.”
Lanier said that in six years of investigating child pornography cases he had “never seen anything as dark as this. Not even close.”
### ‘What did they want you to do’
![](https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/I27EVVBZUV3XUIXNIEAJ2525QY_size-normalized.jpg&high_res=true&w=2048)
A woman whose daughter was targeted by online predators through Discord shows messages she sent to her child. (Nick Oxford for The Washington Post)
The Oklahoma teenager’s experience with 764 started innocuously, her mother said in an interview. The girl downloaded the Discord app on her phone because her middle school art teacher encouraged students to use it to share their work. A fan of horror stories, she soon began searching for gory content.
She landed in a chatroom where she met “Brad,” who flattered her and invited her to the 764 server. The 14-year-old was typical of children victimized by these groups: She had a history of mental illness, having been hospitalized for depression the previous November, her mother said.
“He pretended to like her as a girlfriend,” the mother said. “She sent him videos or pictures. And then the manipulation and control started. ”
For more than two weeks, the girl complied with the demands of a handful of abusers in the 764 server, live-streaming some videos from inside her bedroom closet while her mother was in the house, according to her mother. They told the girl that if she didn’t comply they would send explicit photos of her to her social media followers, classmates and school principal. They threatened to hurt her younger brother.
The Post reviewed a video of the girl that was still circulating on Telegram late last year, a recording of a live stream on the 764 Discord server. The girl holds the family’s hamster in one hand and a razor blade in the other as three males berate her. “Bite the head off, or I’ll f--- up your life,” a male with the screen name “Felix” yells, as she sobs. “Stop crying,” says another male.
“People are not understanding the severity, the speed at which their children can become victimized.”
— Abbigail Beccaccio, chief of the FBI’s Child Exploitation Operational Unit
The girl’s mother said in an interview that “Brad” coerced her daughter into killing the hamster. The victim from Canada said she was in the Discord sever at the time and confirmed that the 764 leader pressured the girl into mutilating the animal as dozens of people watched online.
The girl’s mother found out about the extortion later that same night in April 2021.
She heard the muffled sound of her daughter’s voice through the bathroom door, talking to someone as she bathed. She waited by the door until her daughter opened it. On her daughter’s torso were self-inflicted cuts the abusers had told her to make while she was in the bathtub, the mother said.
The girl told her mother that a cult was extorting her and that she had been instructed to take her own life the following day.
“I believe she was going to kill herself,” the mother said. “If I had not been at that bathroom door, I have no doubt I would have lost my daughter.”
The mother struggled to understand the depravity.
“What did they want you to do?” she asked later, in a text message to her daughter.
“Cut their names,” her daughter answered. “Cut until the bath was red. Lick a knife with blood.”
The mother shut off the teen’s contact with the group and spoke with local police, but harassment followed, records show. The principal at the girl’s middle school received multiple anonymous calls saying the girl had strangled cats and harmed herself, according to a police report obtained by The Post. The group also “swatted” the family, falsely reporting an emergency at the house that prompted police to respond, the mother said.
The investigation by police in the Oklahoma town never identified the girl’s online abusers, police records show, with a detective noting a handful of Discord screen names of the suspects, including “Brad.”
### Moderators struggle as the network grows
In the nearly three years since, the network has grown and reports of abuse have risen, posing a challenge to social media platforms.
Abbigail Beccaccio, chief of the FBI’s Child Exploitation Operational Unit, estimated that thousands of children have been targeted by the online groups using these tactics, although she declined to discuss any groups by name.
“People are not understanding the severity, the speed at which their children can become victimized,” she said. “These are offenders that have the ability to change your child’s life in a matter of minutes.”
A nonprofit that directs reports of abuse against children from social media companies to law enforcement said it saw a sharp increase in this type of exploitation last year. Fallon McNulty, director of the CyberTipline at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said the center received hundreds of reports of minors extorted into hurting themselves last year and continues to receive dozens each month.
These online groups, she said, are responsible for “some of the most egregious online enticement reports that we’re seeing in terms of what these children are being coerced to do.”
A 13-year-old girl in England said she witnessed a young man hang himself on the 764 server last January. The 18-year-old Canadian said she watched a male shoot himself in the head on a Discord live stream.
“They wanted you in the groups and they were going to ridicule you and drive you to suicide,” the Canadian said.
The Discord spokeswoman said the company is assisting law enforcement in an investigation of the incident described by the Canadian woman. The spokeswoman declined to comment on the incident described by the girl in England or say how many suicides on the platform have been linked to 764.
Although the FBI could not say how many deaths are attributable to this network, the agency said at least 20 children died by suicide in the United States as a result of being extorted with nude images between October 2021 and March 2023.
The Discord spokeswoman said the company met with the FBI in 2021 after learning about the existence of 764 on its platform. She declined to provide details about the meeting but said the FBI was not aware of the group at the time.
The FBI’s first public mention of 764 was the warning it issued in September. The bureau declined to comment on any steps it took to investigate the group after the 2021 meeting.
Discord said it has worked to rid the platform of the group’s members, dedicating senior officials on its safety team specifically to targeting the group.
“We proactively detect, remove, and ban related servers, accounts, and users,” the company said in a statement. “We will continue working relentlessly to keep this group off our platform and to assist in the continued capture and prosecution of these violent actors.”
Victims said in interviews that when Discord’s moderators took down servers and banned accounts, users would simply create new ones.
“The 764 Discord groups \[would\] keep getting taken down. They \[would\] bring them back up, and then they take it down and they bring it back up. It’s a cycle that keeps repeating,” said the 18-year-old from Canada.
Even though she was a victim, she said her Discord accounts were regularly banned because she was in servers that contained violent imagery. She estimated that she created 50 to 100 different Discord accounts with new identifying information each time. “I kept getting deleted, and I just kept making more new emails, new phone numbers, all of the above,” she said.
A killing in Romania in 2022 illustrates users’ ability to get around bans. A 764 member who went by the screen names “tobbz” and “voices” fatally stabbed an elderly woman on a Discord live stream that April. Months earlier, Discord had shut down one of his accounts and reported him to authorities, the spokeswoman said, but he managed to remain on the platform.
The attacker, a German teenager whose name has not been released by authorities because he was a minor, was convicted of murder and sentenced to 14 years in prison. “I committed the crime just to provide content within the group,” he told Romanian investigators, referring to a 764 affiliate.
The Discord groups often have parallel channels on Telegram, where members exchange tips on how to avoid Discord bans and groom victims. They boast about their exploitation, posting photos of victims’ with their screen names cut into their bodies.
They also share screenshots of their exchanges with victims, such as one posted to a Telegram channel in January.
You don’t want that photo posted everywhere right?
Ofc I don’t but I don’t wanna cut sign for you neither
Do you really think you’re given a choice?
Okay but like why me bruh I didn’t do anything
Ur going to do something for me, cutting or not
Can’t you find someone else please
A how-to guide circulated on Telegram offers tips on how to groom girls who are “emotionally weak/vulnerable.”
“Gain her trust, make her feel comfortable doing anything for you, make her want to cut for you by getting to her emotions and making it seem like youre the only person she could ever need in her life,” it advises.
Another guide advises targeting girls who have eating disorders or bipolar disorder.
The Post and its partners also found several video recordings on Telegram of victims being abused on Discord, including the Oklahoma girl and others who had carved usernames and group names into their bodies. Some users on Telegram noted that Discord had stepped up its enforcement in the past year and said that it was more difficult to stay on the platform.
There were also comments about recruiting victims on Roblox, a gaming platform popular with young children.
“I groomed him on Roblox,” a user wrote in May 2023. “Told him to mic up. Then started grooming him”
A Roblox spokesperson said the platform is aware of the groups’ activities.
“Fortunately, these crime rings and organizations represent a small number of users, but they evolve their tactics in an attempt to evade our detection by relying on coded messages and avoid violation of Roblox policies. Our sophisticated systems and teams are extremely vigilant in looking for imagery, language or behavior associated with them.”
Experts said social media companies have little financial incentive to eliminate child abuse under the current law, which shields them from liability for content posted on their platforms.
“When you create liability for these companies, they have to absorb it,” said Hany Farid, a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “When they absorb it, they make different decisions because the economics change.”
### ‘Tired of living in fear’
In recent months, there have been signs that the FBI is ramping up its investigations into the network of related groups, starting with the public warning in September.
Between October and January, federal prosecutors in court documents identified three men facing child pornography charges as members or associates of 764.
Federal authorities have also begun examining 764’s imprisoned founder. In November, the FBI asked Stephenville police to share the information they had collected during their investigation of Cadenhead two years earlier, according to Lanier, the police captain. The following month, the mother of the girl in Oklahoma said, FBI agents contacted her and asked her to recount the details of the abuse. She said she was not told why the FBI was interested in the case. The FBI declined to comment.
The criminal case that led to Cadenhead’s imprisonment did not include charges for abusing the Oklahoma girl, and the girl’s mother said she was not notified of his arrest.
For years, not knowing the identity of her daughter’s tormentors has left the mother fearful of what they might do next. She was relieved last month when a Post reporter told her about Cadenhead’s arrest.
“I’m tired of living in fear,” she said.
Her daughter, now 17, has been in and out of mental health institutions in the past few years, she said. She has found a measure of stability since undergoing trauma therapy for the online abuse, the mother said.
But a reminder remains: a scar — the number 764 — is still visible on her thigh.
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# One woman saw the Great Recession coming. Wall Street's boys club ignored her.
## The Great Recession's unsung hero
Brooksley Born saw the financial crisis coming. Wall Street's boys club ignored her.
![Illustration of a woan stopping a bomb.](https://i.insider.com/65e2111590413ab8e1d853e7?width=700)
Angle down icon An icon in the shape of an angle pointing down.
As chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Brooksley Born saw the financial crisis coming. But no one listened.
Andrius Banelis for BI
[Read in app](https://insider-app.onelink.me/4cpG/?af_js_web=true&af_ss_ver=2_3_0&af_dp=insider%3A%2F%2Fbi%2Fpost%2Fwoman-warned-great-recession-2008-brooksley-born-wall-street-sexism-2024-3&af_force_deeplink=true&is_retargeting=true&deep_link_value=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.businessinsider.com%2Fwoman-warned-great-recession-2008-brooksley-born-wall-street-sexism-2024-3&pid=businessinsider&c=post_page_share_bar_v2_smart_4.13.23 "Download the app")
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*This is an excerpt adapted from "WOMEN MONEY POWER: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality."*
When Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in the fall of 2008, jolting an already ailing [global economy into near-freefall](https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/what-caused-the-great-recession), the whole world was in shock. But one woman could legitimately have claimed she saw it coming.
The story of Brooksley Born is not only the tale of a remarkable regulator whose Cassandra-like warnings — if heeded — could've prevented the great financial crisis from exploding into raging, ruinous enormity. It's also, more broadly, an account of how systemic bias and prejudice created the conditions for a dangerous breed of [groupthink](https://www.businessinsider.com/lessons-from-the-financial-crisis-2015-4) to thrive with [ultimately disastrous consequences](https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/biggest-stock-market-crashes-in-history). Understanding what went wrong back then can teach us an important lesson about managing risks in the future: Every voice in the room is worth hearing, even if — and perhaps especially if — the message is inconvenient.
Born grew up in California in the 1940s and 1950s and graduated from Stanford University in 1961. She attended Stanford Law School as one of only seven women in her class and was also the first female student ever to be named president of the Stanford Law Review. During her first year, she recalled in an interview years later, one man in the class told her that she was "doing a terrible thing" by taking the place of a man who would have to go to Vietnam and might get killed. At the time, men could be drafted if they weren't able to get a deferment. In 1964, Born graduated first in her class, but the school refused to recommend her for a Supreme Court clerkship. When she managed to convince Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Potter Stewart to meet with her, he told her outright that he simply wasn't ready for a female law clerk.
Eventually, Born was offered the opportunity to clerk for Judge Henry Edgerton of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, paving the way for an associate position at Arnold & Porter, a law firm that today ranks among the largest and most prestigious in the world. Born recalls that she was drawn to the firm in part because it was one of only a handful at the time that had a female partner.
Born specialized in institutional and corporate law; complex litigation, mostly in the federal courts; and the regulation of the burgeoning futures market, in which contracts to buy or sell a particular financial asset for delivery at a predetermined time were exchanged. But beyond the global financial system, she also started to foster an interest in the inherent structural inequalities that permeated American society and business and what she, as a lawyer, could do to change that.
> She could see that the data points were heading the country into a serious set of calamities, each calamity worse than the one before.
Born thrived in private practice, but as the daughter of civil servants, she had always dreamed of a government appointment. As she gained prominence in legal circles and academia, she'd become acquainted with the Clintons, so when Bill Clinton won the 1992 presidential election, rumors swirled that Born might be his attorney general pick. It was never a hope she voiced publicly, but it certainly would have been a great honor. But in 1993, Clinton appointed veteran Miami prosecutor Janet Reno for that post, and in 1996 he awarded Born with what many considered to be a consolation prize: chairmanship of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a little-known government agency with a few hundred employees that had been created in 1974 to regulate the market for financial derivatives. Born had admittedly hoped for something a little flashier, but she accepted with gratitude and grace.
Indisputably, she was qualified. She was deeply analytical, staunchly impartial, and blindly devoted to using her position, knowledge, and skill to ensure that the financial system worked to protect American savers. Crucially, she believed in the power of regulation, and she had an unshakable faith in her ability to recognize when regulation was inadequate.
"Brooksley had the advantage of knowing the law and understanding the fragility of the system if it weren't regulated," Michael Greenberger, who would later serve as her deputy at the CFTC, said in a magazine interview in 2009. "She could see that the data points, by lack of regulation, were heading the country into a serious set of calamities, each calamity worse than the one before."
---
Not long after she assumed chairmanship of the CFTC, Born started to feel a lingering unease with the rapidly expanding derivatives market. Derivatives allow investors to bet on the trading direction of underlying assets that they "derive" their value from — equities, mortgages, or interest rates, for example — without trading the asset itself. By the mid-1990s, this market was growing at a breakneck pace.
Specifically, Born was worried about an explosion in the size of the [over-the-counter, or OTC, derivatives market](https://www.businessinsider.com/bubble-derivatives-otc-2010-5) — "the hippopotamus under the rug," as she later came to call it. OTC trades were happening away from public exchanges, quietly and behind closed doors. There was no way of knowing the nature, scope, and true scale of the multi-trillion-dollar market. What had allowed the OTC market to flourish in such an uncontrolled manner was the aggressive deregulation that had occurred in the preceding decades.
In 1994, Bankers Trust had come within a whisker of blowing up two of its most important clients — Procter & Gamble and Gibson Greeting Cards — after selling them complex derivatives products that, as it later turned out, were falsely valued. A few years before that, it had emerged that a trader at Japanese bank Sumitomo had spent a decade using derivatives to try to corner the copper market, leading to billions in losses. The memory of that now haunted Born, and she was also starting to hear rumors that companies were using derivatives to manipulate their quarterly financial statements.
Unfortunately, her fears weren't shared at the highest echelons of government and the Federal Reserve. In March 1998, Born paid a visit to [Robert Rubin](https://www.businessinsider.com/robert-rubin-why-wont-he-go-away-2010-3), who had served as Treasury secretary since 1995, a period during which the United States had enjoyed remarkable economic growth, near full-employment, and a buoyant stock market, coupled with only moderate inflation. A veteran of Goldman Sachs, Rubin had personally overseen the loosening of regulatory guidelines that had been in place for more than half a century, and he was confident that continued deregulation was the key to national economic prosperity.
> If Wall Street got too spooked, it would go into meltdown, and it would all be her fault.
So to Rubin, Born was more of an inconvenience than anything, and she certainly wasn't in his club. "She had no sense of the smooth collegiality that characterized the top policymakers of the Clinton administration," journalist Michael Hirsh wrote in his 2010 book, "Capital Offense: How Washington's Wise Men Turned America's Future Over to Wall Street." "So what if she was running a nominally independent agency? She had no sense of place, no respect for who they were."
Similarly, when Alan Greenspan sat atop the Federal Reserve, Born's opinions were just as unpopular. Greenspan, an eccentric and often enigmatic, mostly self-taught economist who ended up presiding over the Fed for more than 18 years, had begun his career as a worshiper of philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand. He was as devoted to free-market capitalism as Rubin, and Born was an unwelcome voice in his ear.
According to Hirsh's book, Greenspan invited Born to lunch when she first took over at the CFTC in 1996, during which she voiced her concerns about the lax regulation in some of the most opaque but sprawling corners of the financial market. "Well, Brooksley, I guess you and I will never agree about fraud," Greenspan reportedly told her, to which Born wondered out loud what, exactly, there was to not agree upon.
"Well, you probably will always believe there should be laws against fraud, and I don't think there is any need for it," Greenspan replied, as reported by Hirsh. Born was gobsmacked.
Quoting an unnamed Fed official, Hirsh wrote that staffers under Greenspan privately thought of Born as "a lightweight wacko." Born, for her part, knew that she wasn't, and would never be, one of "them." She was a lawyer, not an economist, and, most obviously, she was a woman. But that didn't dent her resolve to do her job properly, and at that moment she considered that to mean pulling out all the stops to prevent the derivatives market from blowing up in a cataclysmic fashion.
But whatever she said or did, Rubin and Greenspan didn't want to hear about her sleepless nights or her predictions about an impending crisis. They had grown up on Wall Street during an era when braggadocian machismo was a character trait that led to success, and when women never dreamed of expressing an opinion on something as complex as the financial markets. Born headed up an agency that was so obscure, it was housed in a rented space in the commercial district of downtown Washington. As far as they were concerned, she held no real sway in the hallowed halls of government and financial policymaking. They were not about to let her waste their time. With the Asian financial crisis well underway, and contagion a real risk, they had more important matters to deal with, and at least for the time being, it certainly looked like they had America on their side. Greenspan was regularly referred to as the "wizard of monetary policy." In early 1999, Time magazine would run a cover story lauding Rubin, Greenspan, and Lawrence Summers, who was deputy Treasury secretary, as the "Committee to Save the World," heroes of the free market: the "three marketeers."
---
Finally, in the late spring of 1998, Born started to act. Under her guidance, the CFTC started preparing what's known as a concept release, an invitation for members of the public to submit comments on the relevance and appropriateness of existing regulation of the OTC derivatives market, which by that time was estimated to have a value of about 29 trillion dollars. A concept release is often a precursor to a formal regulatory proposal, and news that Born was drafting this one shook some of the most influential institutions in Washington to the core. Lawrence Summers reportedly called her in a panicked rage to warn her what would happen if she kept pushing: If Wall Street got too spooked, it would go into meltdown, and it would all be her fault.
The following month Rubin, Greenspan, and Arthur Levitt, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, came face-to-face with Born on the matter during a meeting of the president's Working Group on Financial Markets, of which they were all members. Rubin cut to the chase. Born was playing a dangerous game, he suggested. If the concept release were to be published, markets might be sent into a tailspin, fueled by uncertainty over what might be about to happen. But aside from that, Rubin argued, Born and the CFTC didn't even have jurisdiction to make decisions about this kind of regulation in this particular market. That, Born countered, was ridiculous.
![Cover of WOMEN MONEY POWER: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality](data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'%3F%3E%3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' width='1' height='1'/%3E)
WOMEN MONEY POWER: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality by Josie Cox.
[Abrams Press](https://store.abramsbooks.com/products/women-money-power)
Shortly after the meeting, Greenspan, Rubin, and Levitt published a rare joint statement underscoring their "grave concerns" about the CFTC proposal. Summers, for his part, argued that Born even so much as drawing attention to the possibility that something needed to change in that particular corner of the market would cast "a shadow of regulatory uncertainty over an otherwise thriving market." They might have thought that grilling her at the Working Group on Financial Markets had served to silence her, but they were wrong. In May, Born circulated the concept release. Rubin was incensed, and Born recalls it triggering a "firestorm of opposition." By some accounts, Rubin never spoke to her again.
The war entered its next battle. One morning and without warning, Born was summoned by staffers for Jim Leach, who chaired the House banking committee, and the chair of the agriculture committee, Richard Lugar, to appear on the Hill, where she was berated yet again for stepping out of line. It was the first of several hearings during which Born tried desperately yet as calmly as possible to explain why she, the chair of a small and relatively toothless agency, was terrified of what might be going on in the derivatives market.
Even in the autumn of that year, as a massive hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, which had two Nobel laureates on its board of directors, almost collapsed under the weight of trillions of dollars of derivative bets gone wrong, no one — it seemed — was prepared to take Born seriously. As Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera write in their 2011 book about the financial crisis, "If there was a moment when Bob Rubin could have used his immense stature to do something about the derivatives problem ... this was it."
It was clear, by this point, that Born had fired all the shots in her arsenal. One last time she pleaded with the House banking committee to do something about "the unknown risks that the over-the-counter derivatives market may pose to the US economy," including credit default swaps. She referenced an "immediate and pressing need to address whether there are unacceptable regulatory gaps." But she was a lone wolf. Not long after, Treasury officials lobbied Congress to pass legislation preventing the CFTC from being able to regulate the OTC derivatives market. Congress responded by barring the commission from enacting any regulation along these lines for six months. In January 1999 Born wrote to President Clinton informing him that she would not be seeking reappointment for a second term atop the CFTC and would be returning to Arnold & Porter instead.
---
Born's Cassandra-like warnings, it seemed, were quickly forgotten. Even in 2001, as Enron — which had helped create the global market for energy-based derivatives — was forced to file the [largest corporate bankruptcy in American history](https://www.businessinsider.com/thomas-cook-enron-lehman-the-worst-company-collapses-bankruptcies-2019-9), regulators didn't change their tune. In fact, as President George W. Bush assumed office, a fresh enthusiasm for Reaganomics and deregulation swept across Washington. Leverage was king.
Born retired from private practice in 2003. Five years later, she watched from a distance as the unregulated derivatives market that had caused her so many sleepless nights sent the value of financial assets around the world into free fall, bringing economies to their knees and crushing global banks. In the months and years that followed, it became increasingly hard to deny that the multi-trillion-dollar OTC derivatives market was the root cause of the great financial crisis.
"It helped foment a mortgage crisis, then a credit crisis, and finally a once-in-a-century systemic financial crisis that, but for huge US taxpayer interventions, would have in the fall of 2008 led the world economy into a devastating depression," Michael Greenberger stated as he testified at a Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission hearing in June 2010.
> As the US economy soared, the powerful trio of men wasn't inclined to entertain the idea that they might be doing something wrong.
Even Alan Greenspan, testifying before a congressional committee in late 2008, admitted that the crisis had exposed a "flaw" in the economic philosophy and ideology that had guided him for years. "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms," Greenspan said.
It's impossible not to wonder why no one with the ability and power to make a difference truly took Born's warnings to heart. It's certainly reasonable to conclude that sexism played a part. In a 2009 "Frontline" episode, Arthur Levitt, the former chairman of the SEC and an erstwhile vehement opponent of Born, admitted that the crisis had, for him, catalyzed a change of heart. He felt different now than back when he was pitted against Born during those bitter battles in Washington. "I've come to know her as one of the most capable, dedicated, intelligent, and committed public servants," he said. "I wish I knew her better in Washington," he added. "I could have done much better. I could have made a difference."
---
In 2012, Lauren Rivera, a professor at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, published research on hiring processes at 120 major employers, a third of which were banks. Rivera's research concluded that hiring is "one of those critical gatekeeping moments whereby the judgments we make about people have enduring effects." On the back of her findings, she coined the term "Looking Glass Merit" to describe the unconscious tendency that we as humans have to define merit in a way that is self-validating.
It's not hard to understand how this phenomenon might have been at play here. Born was distinct. In a sea of economists and politicians in Washington, she was a lawyer. In the President's Working Group on Financial Markets meeting, she was the odd one out, because she sat atop a relatively obscure agency. She didn't grow up on Wall Street, like so many others in government did, and, perhaps most important, she was a woman.
When Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Lawrence Summers batted her concerns aside, they were likely demonstrating [confirmation bias](https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/health/mental-health/confirmation-bias) — a human instinct or heuristic impulse to seek out and attribute value to evidence that supports our underlying belief about something and to disregard information that might discredit it. As the US economy soared, the powerful trio of men wasn't inclined to entertain the idea that they might be doing something wrong and that the deregulation they had championed for so many years was setting the market up for disaster.
In a blog post published a decade after the crisis, in September 2018, Christine Lagarde, who at the time was managing director of the International Monetary Fund, described the great financial crisis as "a sobering lesson in groupthink." She wrote that in the years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and other major financial institutions, policy has addressed the flaws in the system that ultimately led to the crisis. But there's one thing that's not changed much, she contended, and that's culture.
She added that "the true legacy" of that crisis cannot yet be adequately assessed because it's "still being written." More than 15 years on, and with far more women in positions of power across business, politics, and elsewhere, it may be too early to tell whether the lessons from that crisis have all been internalized. Would a Brooksley Born today be able to avert a financial meltdown? One hopes so, but it may take another crisis to know for sure.
---
[*Josie Cox*](https://www.businessinsider.com/author/josie-cox) *is a journalist who has written for Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. She is the author of "WOMEN MONEY POWER: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality."*
*Excerpt adapted from* [*WOMEN MONEY POWER*](https://www.abramsbooks.com/product/women-money-power_9781419762987/) *by Josie Cox. Copyright © 2024 Josie Cox. Used by permission of Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS, New York. All rights reserved.*
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# The Battle Over California Squatters Rights in Beverly Hills
## After a fugitive doctor abandoned his mansion, an enterprising group of party throwers slid in the front door.
![](https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/ad8/355/124572d3473ff175858ecaf61cc9eb128a-NY-Mag-Beverly-Hills-Squatters-Feb-20-20.rhorizontal.w1100.jpg)
Morgan Gargiulo in the backyard of 1316 Beverly Grove Place in February. Photo: Michelle Groskopf
The movie producer lives on a quiet cul-de-sac above Beverly Hills, close enough to the action to see office towers, far enough away to run into the occasional mountain lion. Beverly Grove Place winds into a canyon shaded by eucalyptus trees; the neighbors are entrepreneurs, hedge-fund investors, heiresses, studio executives, actors, and the actors’ agents. Their multimillion-dollar homes, like the producer’s, have high gates and plenty of cameras.
One such home, a four-bedroom, six-bathroom at the end of a long driveway, is even more hidden than most. It had been on the market, sitting empty for months, when, in October, the producer spotted a car in the driveway. He didn’t think anything of it until more started showing up almost nightly. They clogged the narrow road, blocking the producer’s Bentley. Then heavy bass began pumping from the backyard pool area every night, the beat ricocheting around the canyon. People would arrive — tumbling out of Ubers, teetering up from the base of the street. Early one morning, two young-looking women in spaghetti straps carrying sparkly little purses rang the producer’s doorbell. “I’m about to climb this ho,” one said, looking at the gate. She pushed her mouth onto his Ring camera to kiss the lens.
People who could afford to buy a house on the cul-de-sac didn’t throw parties like these. After a few weeks, the producer called the real-estate agent on the listing for the empty mansion, 1316 Beverly Grove Place. No one had bought the house, the agent said. Whoever had moved in did not belong there.
*Who the fuck are these people,* the producer wondered, *squatting in the most exclusive Zip Code in America?*
An overhead view of the mansion. Photo: New York Magazine
Beverly Grove place is not technically in Beverly Hills. It’s in an area called Beverly Hills Post Office, north of Sunset Boulevard between Coldwater Canyon and Benedict Canyon. Residents get “90210” on their mail, but their cops, water, and power come from the City of Los Angeles. Which meant that, for many years, the neighborhood served as a sort of class bridge for those with Beverly Hills aspirations but L.A. budgets. That has since changed — the area’s bigger acreage, better views, and relative privacy have recently drawn Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, who bought a $61 million Georgian-style compound last year, and LeBron James. The house at 1316, just down the road from where James is building his estate, is a leftover from the previous era. Built in 1999, it is a mere 5,875 square feet with a motor court and an opulent fountain. It was designed with a hodgepodge of vaguely Mediterranean architectural influences, all columns and archways like a Tuscan restaurant in Vegas.
When John A. Woodward IV got the listing in September, the mansion was priced at $4.995 million. It was unfurnished, so Woodward had to borrow old photos from the former broker, but other than that, it was in good condition. He hired a pool guy and a landscaper to keep the place looking nice for tours. There were the usual showings, some offers. Then, a few weeks before he heard from the producer, Woodward got a call from the pool guy. Someone had pulled up with a U-Haul, he said. He assumed there was a new owner and was hoping they might consider keeping him on. Woodward raced over to Beverly Grove to see what he was talking about. When he got there, he found his clicker no longer opened the gate. His keys didn’t work in the front door, either. Someone had even ripped up and discarded his FOR SALE sign. When he realized he was locked out, Woodward called the police. Two beat cops showed up and went inside; when they came back out, they said the people in the mansion were claiming they had a lease. It was a civil matter now, and there was nothing they could do.
The producer wasn’t the only neighbor who started noticing the new arrivals that October. Rick Rankin, a tech entrepreneur who lived one street over, realized something was amiss on one of his morning jogs. “There were people congregating,” Rankin says. “I wasn’t born yesterday. They’re jittery; their eyes are spinning. They were clearly on something.” By early November, some of the concerned formed a group chat called “Neighborhood Watch.” Among them: the producer, Rankin, and Rick and Fran Solomon. The Solomons had built their house — a glass-and-concrete *Miami Vice*–style seven-bedroom with a koi pond in the entryway — next to 1316 after buying a teardown on the reality show *Million Dollar Listing.* (According to Fran, her husband “was actually one of the first people to ever build a glass home in Beverly Hills.”) The couple, who live in Florida now, had just leased their house, which overlooks 1316, to a family with small children.
Before the crisis at 1316, Beverly Grove Place was friendly if not exactly tight-knit. Residents were often traveling or, like the Solomons, didn’t live there full time. But by mid-November, the text chat had become as active and impassioned as any condo board. Nearly every night, neighbors who could see into the backyard of 1316 sent videos of the packed parties happening there, colored rave lights blinking from the rooms. The cars kept arriving, a mix of beat-up sedans, Porsches, and G-Wagons. “Cut off their water,” one person suggested. “They’re possibly Mafia so wouldn’t want to try that,” another replied. “They are not Mafia,” someone else said. “Who said that? Cut the water.” One of the neighbors got in touch with LeBron James’s house manager. They were told James was very concerned.
What was happening next door confirmed something the Solomons, and many of the other neighbors, were already feeling about Los Angeles. “We chose to leave the state of California for many reasons. One of them was the crime rate,” Fran says. More than one neighbor mentioned the L.A. County district attorney, George Gascón, a progressive who had ridden in on the wave of reformers elected after the summer of 2020, who they believed was letting crime run rampant. Property damage and theft were up — smash and grabs in Beverly Hills, home invasions in Bel Air, carjackings in Santa Monica. The neighbors heard through the grapevine that someone from the DA’s office, apparently having heard about the situation at 1316, had said, “Squatters have rights.” This set the group chat aflame. “Welcome to California,” one wrote. “Thanks Liberals.”
On the afternoon of November 25, a typically sunny Saturday, the producer again found himself sitting in a traffic jam on his own picturesque street. The residents at 1316 seemed to be preparing for yet another blowout. Bartenders were unloading tables and booze from a van parked in the cul-de-sac. Two others held food and DJ equipment. Beefy security guards were posted at the gate. The neighbors still had no idea who was living in the house. The producer decided he’d had enough. After he was finally able to park his car, he delivered a tirade to the crowd, telling everybody they were partying with squatters. A woman interrupted — they were just the help, she said. Should she run in to grab the owner? Sure, the producer said, and called the police.
Two cops arrived, and as they waited with the producer, out came a 30-something man with slicked-back brown hair dressed like a kind of California swami in an unbuttoned shirt. “Hi, I’m your new neighbor, Morgan,” he said silkily with a European lilt. “What seems to be the problem?”
“You’re not my new neighbor. Go fuck yourself,” the producer responded. But the man was unflappably polite. He said that he had a lease and that he had rented the home for one year for $50,000, which made even the cops laugh, the producer recalls. (His response: “That’s less than my fucking utilities!”) The man went back inside and returned with a piece of paper, which had two boxes on it: one with his own name, Morgan Gargiulo, and another, labeled “landlord in possession,” with the name Giovanni Arcore. The paper had no address, no amount, no term of agreement, but it said “lessor” and “lessee.” Gargiulo also showed the police a Spectrum internet bill in his name registered to the house and his own driver’s license, which listed 1316 Beverly Grove Place as his official residence.
Nicholas Ucci in the living room with his dog, Duke. Photo: Michelle Groskopf
The neighbors had plenty of ideas about what was going on behind the doors of the house: orgies, mounds of coke, mafiosi. But they couldn’t have envisioned how quickly an entire ecosystem had managed to take hold in 1316 thanks to Gargiulo.
Half-Scottish and half-Italian, Gargiulo, 34, was raised in Lecce, a small city in Southern Italy. He claims his father owned stables in France and ran casinos in Montenegro. When he was 25, Gargiulo started an amateur nightclub in a private house with a pool, where the themes were pure Americana: “The Great Gatsby,” “Hip-Hop Burger Party,” and “Dinner With Elvis.” But he had bigger dreams than being a debonair nightlife impresario in his hometown, and less than three years later, he moved to L.A. to become an actor. He got parts in a few shorts under the name Morgan MacLean*.*
On Instagram, Gargiulo began posting pictures of his new American Dream life, all step-and-repeats, aviator sunglasses, cars, and James Dean poses. The reality was less glamorous and more typical of a Hollywood hopeful: The roles were small, as were the apartments, which he shared with roommates, and he still had to work in restaurants. In 2020, Gargiulo met a Swedish singer and violinist named Elin Wolf, a petite blonde in her 30s who had recently graduated from the Musicians Institute in Hollywood. Gargiulo was “silver-tongued,” Wolf says — incredibly charming. They formed a rock band. Soon after, she moved into his apartment in Burbank. Wolf says Gargiulo was constantly lying. Once, he told her he was taking her to Wine Country, then never showed up. She later found out he was at Coachella. Still, he was a “connector,” able to drop someone’s name to get them on a list or into some after-party. “Morgan always had an entourage, people he parties with. He would surround himself with people with money,” she says, “so he could get invited to things, make it seem like he was the orchestrator. He would say, ‘Oh, I bought this table.’ He was obsessed with this fantasy life.” He did the same, she says, with the boats he captained in Marina del Rey on day cruises despite not being licensed in the U.S. (His sailing excursions got mixed reviews. One person described their trip as “a bad/weird experience from the beginning” and mentioned that Gargiulo fell asleep.)
He could be violent, too. In August 2022, he and Wolf got into an argument at a club. According to Wolf, he dragged her outside, forced her into his car, and drove to the marina where she was living on a rented boat. He attempted to strangle her and tried to force himself on her before she escaped. Wolf ran to a neighbor, who called the police, and Gargiulo was arrested and charged with misdemeanor domestic violence. (Gargiulo denies he attacked Wolf.) Photos show bruises under Wolf’s eyes where Gargiulo had allegedly dug his fingers into her skin. A week later, he took off for Burning Man.
Prosecutors had to chase Gargiulo for more than a year before he pleaded no contest to battering Wolf. As they were attempting to close the case, in September 2023, he took a tour of the mansion; it had just gone on the market. He claims he lucked into the house by way of Arcore — the mysterious Italian American from the “lease,” who called him after the tour and offered it to him for a steal. But phone calls and emails to the Gmail account listed on the lease never went through, nor is there even a Giovanni Arcore on record in California. I don’t know exactly how Gargiulo actually got into the mansion. Maybe someone with access really did let him in for cash. Or maybe he saw the empty home and realized that, with a little cunning, he could simply move in. “Who would not take an opportunity like that, I wonder?” Gargiulo asks when recounting the serendipitous event. In this telling, the price had dropped to only $35,000.
A morning after at the mansion. Photo: Michelle Groskopf
The mansion was a flex, but it also quickly became a profitable venture. Gargiulo invited one of his Burning Man friends, an Argentine American named Martino Vincent, 47, to move in; he took on the role of party promoter. Vincent calls himself a producer, filmmaker, entrepreneur, and software developer, though his real sources of income are opaque. In 2016, he tried to crowdfund the invention of a sneaker you could tie with a mobile app named for Nikola Tesla. The two met while Gargiulo was captaining day cruises. Vincent was doing something similar, chartering yachts for day-trippers as “Captain Burning Man.” (Vincent does not have a captain’s license either, but he says he always had other people captain his charters.)
The parties were five nights a week, the neighbors say. Invitations — beamed out to their network in the electronic-dance-music scene — described the location as a “secret Beverly Hills mansion.” The idea seemed to be to re-create Burning Man in Beverly Hills. They turned the downstairs living room into a club floor with rave lights, a Warhol-style print, and a disco ball. Eventually, they brought in some Moroccan-inspired poufs and rugs to evoke a lounge. At one end was a DJ setup where Gargiulo held court, performing his melodic house-music act. They billed some of the events as fundraisers for their camp at Burning Man. Others were “Shabbat dinners,” at which they supposedly collected donations for the victims of the Nova-festival massacre on October 7. And they charged heavily for admission. “It was the biggest mansion I had ever been to,” says a 22-year-old who went to one of the early parties. Security at the gate was charging $1,500 for a table upstairs, he says, and $500 downstairs. Buying a table came with bottle service. If you brought girls, you got in free. Vincent, who escorted the 22-year-old and his girlfriends to their table, told him he was the owner, which he believed until on a later visit he met Gargiulo, who said no, *he* was the owner. The parties were nearly as wild as the neighbors imagined. “I’ve never been to a party like that,” says the 22-year-old. “I’d get there at, like, 8 p.m. and wouldn’t leave until 4 p.m. the next day.” He saw “people sucking the air out of balloons.” (The housemates describe the admission charges as “suggested donations” and say they’re not responsible for what other people did at the house.)
Within a few weeks, they had added another layer to the operation: room rentals. Nicholas Ucci, 51, another EDM enthusiast and Burner, says Vincent brought him in to help run this side of the business and provide general house maintenance. Ucci moved in with his pit bull, Duke, and took on the role of enforcer, security guard, and handyman. He listed the “Beverly Hills Lodge” for $150 to $300 a night on booking.com. “Boasting an outdoor swimming pool, a fitness centre, a garden and a shared lounge, Beverly Hills Lodge is situated in the Beverly Hills district of Los Angeles, only 8.2 km from Petersen Automotive Museum,” read the description. “Languages spoken at the 24-hour front desk include English, Spanish, Italian and Korean.” (There was also supposedly massage service.) Photos from the listing showed spare-looking rooms with crude wooden furniture, stock art, and bright overhead lighting. The reviews were poor. One guy named Gary said he arrived to discover all the rooms were already claimed.
Two of them were taken full time by Vincent’s girlfriend, Jane (not her real name), an interior decorator and lifestyle consultant, and his fiancée, Yung Kim, an entrepreneur and poet with an M.F.A. Jane says that she and Vincent co-own a boat and that they are founders of a few start-ups together, the latest being a lithium-mining company based in Argentina, though none have taken off yet. Kim says she and Vincent met a decade ago at a Google event and have been engaged ever since. The rest of the rooms were taken by — well, it depended. “Every time, I would see new people who were staying there,” says a former friend of Gargiulo’s who spent time at the house. “I mean, they were literally, like, housing the homeless. They would basically bring people in and say, ‘Oh, you’re gonna be our maid. You can stay here as long as you clean the house for us.’ ”
Although the scene was more flophouse, the venue was a powerful backdrop against which the housemates could post proof of their upgraded lifestyle. Jane took a selfie in a gold bikini by the pool, captioning it with her name for the house, “Villa de Leone.” “Happy Thanksgiving 2023!!” Kim wrote next to a photo of her and Vincent, wineglasses in hand, hosting festivities in the kitchen. Because they were in a mansion, they were able to pass themselves off as genuine mansion people, which helped the parties to occasionally graze the C-list. Fabio Lanzoni, the chiseled romance-novel-cover heartthrob, picked up a guest one night and stopped for a selfie with Gargiulo. Before Christmas, the house was the location of a 007-themed holiday fundraiser for a charity called Create Impact, at which models walked the red carpet outside the garage in gowns and tuxedos and a belly dancer performed with a candelabra on her head. (Create Impact did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) In January, they held an Emmy Awards after-party attended by an actual Emmy winner, a drone operator who was honored for his work on *Elton John Live: Farewell From Dodger Stadium.* Some of the housemates posed on Instagram clutching his statuette.
For a house to have a squatter, it has to have an owner. But the answer to the question “Who owns 1316 Beverly Grove Place?” is not so simple. In 2007, after living there for three years, the music executive Damon Dash sold the place for $3.6 million to a chiropractor from the Valley named Paul Turley. Although Turley was on the deed, the person who actually moved in was his business partner, Munir Uwaydah, a seemingly normal if somewhat flashy Lebanese American orthopedic surgeon in his 40s.
As it turned out, Uwaydah made his money by [fraudulently billing insurance companies](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/surgeon-alleged-ringleader-in-150-million-insurance-scam/) for surgeries performed on workers injured on the job. According to court documents, Uwaydah, Turley, and a ring of associates paid workers-comp attorneys and marketers thousands of dollars a month to send them patients, some of whom didn’t require surgery at all. Eventually, they created a web of fake entities to serve the grift: a surgical office to do the procedures patients didn’t need, an MRI facility to take the phony MRIs, and a pharmacy to bill for medications they never received. Dozens of patients were operated on by Uwaydah’s physician’s assistant. Some of them were permanently scarred. (“You idiots! What did you do?” one [reportedly](https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-insurance-fraud-20150928-story.html) screamed after the physician’s assistant left 24 inches of gauze in her shoulder after surgery.) Uwaydah and his co-conspirators allegedly created shell companies to hide assets, and money flowed to Estonia and Lebanon, to a horse farm Uwaydah owned in Germany, and to real-estate acquisitions like the mansion.
In 2015, 15 people, including Uwaydah and Turley, were [indicted](https://da.lacounty.gov/sites/default/files/press/091515_15_Indicted_in_150_Million_Insurance_Fraud_Patient_Scam_Conspiracy.pdf) on 132 felony counts in one of the largest insurance-fraud cases in California history. But by then Uwaydah [was long gone](https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-surgeon-fraud-ring-20151006-story.html), having fled the country in 2010, after his 21-year-old ex-girlfriend, an aspiring model named Juliana Redding, was strangled to death in her Santa Monica bungalow. [Prosecutors alleged](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/48-hours-probes-murder-of-juliana-redding-a-hollywood-whodunit/) Uwaydah had paid one of his associates, a woman named Kelly Soo Park, to kill Redding. She was eventually [acquitted](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kelly-soo-park-acquitted-on-all-charges-in-2008-death-of-aspiring-model-juliana-redding/); Turley wasn’t so lucky. In 2022, he was sentenced to two years in prison for his part in the medical-fraud scam. Uwaydah, meanwhile, was never charged in connection to Redding’s death and reportedly remains in Lebanon.
Through this entire saga, Uwaydah seems to have managed to retain control of the mansion. (Cleverly: Just months before Turley was indicted, he signed the deed over to an LLC called Notre Dame Properties, which, according to prosecutors, is controlled by Uwaydah.) That means that, unbeknownst to the neighbors, a fugitive surgeon in an ongoing criminal proceeding was acting as a landlord on their quiet block for more than a decade.
In 2021, things grew, if possible, more complicated when the mansion’s last tenant before Gargiulo moved in. Death Row Records co-founder Michael “Harry-O” Harris had just been pardoned by Donald Trump on federal drug-trafficking charges when he rented the mansion — through his company, Nulane Entertainment — for $14,000 a month. (Although the company was on the lease, neighbors say they saw Harris living there.) In court documents, Nulane claims to have signed an agreement that gave the company the option to eventually buy the house for $4.4 million. But a few days before the sale could go through, Notre Dame Properties sold it to yet another party, a different LLC called MDRCA Properties, managed by a Lebanese Canadian named Adel Yamout. The money for the house — $3.8 million — came from a hard-money lender named Jeff Scapa. Yamout wasn’t willing to be very specific about where he found the house in the first place. “I got it from the guys who got it from that guy,” he told me, implying he doesn’t know Uwaydah. In any case, Nulane sued all three parties, claiming breach of contract.
In the middle of this fracas, the state suddenly declared that, in fact, none of these people could have the mansion. The DA’s office had been fighting to seize properties connected to Uwaydah and his associates, including the Beverly Grove Place home, since Uwaydah’s 2015 indictment. And in January 2021, a judge had ordered a court-appointed receiver, a kind of trustee, to take control of the house. This was done under California’s “freeze and seize” law, which allows the state to confiscate the assets of people convicted of white-collar crimes. The house at 1316 should have been the people’s property, to be sold to pay restitution to victims of the fraud scheme. Instead, Notre Dame Properties seems to have ignored that fact and continued to rent out the mansion, then sell it. So in June 2023, in an attempt to clean up the mess, the same judge issued another order reappointing the receiver to sell the house, pay Scapa back, and give whatever was left over to Uwaydah’s victims.
Which is how Gargiulo found the mansion when he first toured it that September — uniquely entangled with a new owner bleeding money on a high-interest loan, a lender who needed to be repaid, and the state technically in charge of the place but evidently reluctant to act like a landlord. All he needed to do was slip inside.
By the end of November, the neighbors of 1316 Beverly Grove Place were beside themselves. While Googling the property, the producer learned about the Uwaydah saga, information he promptly passed on to the shocked Neighborhood Watch. Outside, all they could see was chaos on the cul-de-sac — people stumbling to and fro at all hours of the night; Duke, Ucci’s dog, collarless and barking on the street. Once, the morning revealed a luxury car totaled on the narrow street. “We got to get these bad people out of here,” someone urged in the chat. At one point, the police were called to the house for a burglary, which was laughable to the neighbors: The burglars were being burglarized.
The efforts to convince the court in charge of the mansion that the squatters presented a safety threat were being ignored for reasons the neighbors couldn’t fathom. They had no idea why, if 1316 was the property of the state, California couldn’t just evict their tormentors. But on December 1, the issue became moot: The judge reversed himself, officially returning the mansion to the most recent owner, Adel Yamout. The DA’s office would not comment on why it released the property. Officials likely realized that because of Scapa’s loan, which had to be paid back, there would be little money left over from a sale for Uwaydah’s victims. But the whiplash meant one thing to the neighbors: There was an owner of the mansion again who was willing and incentivized to start an eviction, and an unlawful-detainer lawsuit was filed against the occupants. Not right away, though — Yamout says it took weeks to get the paperwork in order.
That was too long for the producer, who decided to take matters into his own hands. He hired Mark Ebner, a veteran L.A. journalist turned private investigator. “Mark is the go-to PI for everyone in Hollywood,” the producer says. “Everyone knows him.” Ebner once had a glossy gonzo magazine career, starting out at *Spy* — for his first article, he joined the Church of Scientology. But about 14 years ago, he learned that PI work was better paid and more stable. He has a tattoo that reads SUICIDE BY MEDIA CAN TAKE A LIFETIME. Now, his clients are “nosebleed level” rich, according to Ebner. “I’m not using the baseball bat,” he explains in a raspy Rhode Island accent. “But I can work well within the boundaries and still get something done.”
The producer enlisted Ebner to wage a “maximum pressure” campaign on 1316. On December 29, armed with binoculars, his PI badge, golf clubs, Nicorette lozenges (for during), and weed (for after), he began a stakeout in his black SUV. His legion of off-duty security guards, out-of-work 20-somethings, and ex-cons took relief shifts. One day on the cul-de-sac, Ebner found a white Porsche with a plastic bag of pill capsules sitting in the window. He took photos of little silver nitrous-oxide canisters and crumpled red Solo cups lying in the gutter and on the grass. He chatted with some of the mansion’s visitors. “Are you coming to the dinner party?” one young woman asked him as he stood at the gate. He said “no.” “I’m sorry, my brain’s gone to mush,” she responded. “No kidding,” Ebner said.
On New Year’s Eve, the housemates hosted a major party. Ebner took the opportunity to run the plates on the cars outside 1316, then did a spate of background checks. As it turned out, Ucci had a startling 132 possible criminal infractions, some decades old — cocaine possession, arrests for felony burglary, an assault-and-battery conviction, forgery and counterfeiting, and illegal shellfishing at night, among others. Gargiulo’s eviction from an apartment on Yucca Street in Hollywood came up, as did his battery conviction, for which he was on probation. The producer shared the findings with the Neighborhood Watch. Rankin, the neighbor who works in tech, sent a flurry of emails with the information to a host of city employees and used a contact in former Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti’s office to reach Karen Bass, the current mayor. Her office assigned the case to a public-safety officer with whom Rankin had a video call. “Then nothing,” he says. (The mayor’s office said it contacted police and the city attorney’s office.) So they decided to go to the press. “Dump it to the *Daily Mail* and watch it explode,” the producer told Ebner. Their article went up on January 19. “Beverly Hills mansion neighboring LeBron James’s dream home is overtaken by ‘squatters’ hosting nightly raucous raves and charging $75 entry,” it reads, severely underreporting the admission price.
Meanwhile, conflict in the house was threatening its fragile equilibrium. The parties seemed to be taking a toll on the pool, which was turning a brackish green. The neighbors witnessed one wasted woman being handcuffed outside the mansion; she yelled that it was a meth den. Police and fire trucks were routinely called by the housemates themselves, including Jane and Kim, who others say often summoned the cops on each other. The two women had side-by-side rooms and fought constantly. (“I’m as civil as I can be,” says Kim of their unique living arrangement. “I mean, I don’t enjoy the situation.”) Another time, police responded to an assault in which a person was attacked with a metal box, according to a Citizen-app item from the Neighborhood Watch chat. The assailant was apparently wearing a bucket hat.
About a week after the *Daily Mail* dump, the members of the unofficial mansion task force had a glimmer of hope that the negative attention had paid off. On January 26, the producer was having lunch at Soho House when his Neighborhood Watch notifications began pinging. “There are a million cops here!” someone said. “They’re getting them out.” The producer excused himself and zoomed up to Beverly Grove Place. By the time he got there, over a dozen LAPD officers, fully armed, had gone into the mansion. They had dragged out a shirtless Gargiulo, Vincent, Jane, and whoever else was in the house and lined them up along the wall in the driveway, handcuffing them, while helicopters hovered overhead. The neighbors gathered to watch, feeling a considerable amount of Schadenfreude as they saw the inhabitants squinting and twitching in the sun.
At the end of the day, however, the police let them go. The LAPD had not, as it looked to the neighbors, been raiding the house for squatters. The inhabitants themselves had called in a report of intruders with a knife; Gargiulo later said three bedraggled people had run into the house through the open door, screaming that they were there to serve some papers and terrorizing the still-partying guests. Gargiulo believes they were members of the Squatter Squad, a “same-day squatter-removal” service in Irvine, trying to go viral online. The intruders had run back out, and the cops released those they had handcuffed. It was a major defeat for the Neighborhood Watch. “Our judicial system is a joke,” the producer complains. “ ‘Squatters have rights’ — okay, I get that they do, if they’re a family and they’re displaced. But this is not your typical homeless person. This was a lifestyle play.” The producer and other neighbors began to text me more examples of harrowing squatter tales from L.A. and beyond: a house inhabited by OnlyFans creators in Hollywood, a British construction worker who moved into a retiree’s home and flipped it for nearly $200,000.
KTLA caught the white-haired Ucci coming back to the house — apparently he hadn’t been at home when the raid happened. He introduced himself as Mr. Gucci. “Now that I’m back, there will be no more parties,” Mr. Gucci proclaimed to the cameras, closing the gate.
By February, the house at 1316 Beverly Grove Place was in a period of détente. Yamout had officially sued the residents for eviction on January 18, and since the raid, the raves had quieted down. The housemates were still having people over, but it wasn’t the same. The crowd was smaller. “Shit’s broken. Trash everywhere. The pool is disgusting,” says the 22-year-old, who was there recently. “We were doing lines off of wooden tables outside.” Why did he go back? “It’s still a nice house,” he says.
From the back, where the Mediterranean inspired pool and patio were visible, the mansion looked fairly bombed out. A shabby rug hung over the side of the building; cheap-looking folding chairs were strewn around the patio. A pirate flag was crumpled in the corner. On the second floor, gray blankets had been hung from the balconies in an attempt at noise mitigation. Trash littered the grass below. A plastic beach ball was on the ground.
Gargiulo absconded to Vegas for most of the month, where he tells me he stayed at the Wynn during the Super Bowl. He has no qualms about staying in the mansion even after everything that happened. “When I discovered that there were situations which were not as legitimate as I thought,” he says, “I obviously spoke to lawyer friends of mine, and I understood that there were rights that I could use to stay, at least until the completion of the lease. I’ve heard that this is the way it works in America with these kinds of things.” Anyway, he says, “I don’t feel I have done anything bad.” Just the opposite: “I actually feel I brought to Los Angeles some wonderful, wonderful moments of joy and music, and I’ve seen people very happy. I’ve seen people fall in love.” He especially resented how he had been characterized in the press. This wasn’t a master plan, he says. They weren’t even trying to make money. Plus: “The parties were very refined. I’ve seen, like, you know, the *Daily Mail* and many other news outlets talking about me as a sophisticated criminal, as a pirate and all these things, when at the end of the day, I don’t think it is even comparable, what I have done, to people who are involved in $150 million scams and murder,” he says gravely, referencing Uwaydah.
It’s true that for all the neighbors’ fears about living in the midst of criminals, they already had been; they just didn’t know it. The latest accused fraudsters to take up residence were louder, more obvious, and more desperate than their predecessors, but the mansion had long been in the possession of people who got it by lying and stealing. And for all the court’s efforts, it may still be. The current owner — Yamout, to whom the government turned the house back over in December — recently clarified that he actually does know Uwaydah, but just barely. This would appear to be the case: In 2021, according to a lawsuit filed in the Netherlands, Yamout purchased the right to harvest eggs from a prizewinning jumping show horse named Oak Grove’s Heartfelt. Who co-owned Heartfelt the horse? Munir Uwaydah via one of his many businesses. Yamout’s lawyer also represented Uwaydah as recently as 2021. (When asked about these connections, that lawyer says Yamout and Uwaydah “are not personally engaged in business activities.”)
On February 23, the housemates had their day in court. Up until almost the very end, they believed there was a chance they could stay in the mansion. Vincent, Kim, Gargiulo, and Jane showed up to the hearing together — everyone except Ucci, who was never named in the eviction lawsuit and didn’t have to attend. He had hoped he could buy the mansion through his global-awareness nonprofit and turn it into “sober living for CEOs. I can double the square footage and the value in less than a year,” he says, claiming he had already repaired the dryer and was working on cleaning the pool. During the hearing, Vincent made an impassioned plea for the constitutional right to a jury trial and for the court to cover any fees. Like Gargiulo, he seems surprised by the neighbors’ characterization of the mansion parties. “Orgies?” Vincent says. “I wish.”
The Villa de Leone residents’ desire to stay was existential but also not enough. When it became clear the judge would not side in the group’s favor, the housemates settled with Yamout, coming to an agreement that they would leave the mansion in 30 days. In the meantime, there would be no more parties. Duke had to stay inside. Yamout could bring further legal action if the property was severely damaged. It wasn’t — not really. At a court-mandated inspection a week later, Yamout’s lawyer, Scapa the lender, a few brokers, and an insurance appraiser found filthy floors, some holes in the wall, a layer of algae on the pool, and a broken fridge in the foyer. The occupants were already packing — a few of them were spotted out by the garage, flinging the Moroccan-inspired poufs into a truck. A video was disseminated to the Neighborhood Watch chat, which was already starting to die down. “Good riddance, grifters,” one neighbor wrote.
The Squatters of Beverly Hills
Every product is independently selected by editors. Things you buy through our links may earn *Vox Media* a commission.
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# The Great American Novels
In 1868, a little-known writer by the name of John William DeForest proposed a new type of literature, a collective artistic project for a nation just emerging from an existential conflict: a work of fiction that accomplished “the task of painting the American soul.” It would be called the Great American Novel, and no one had written it yet, DeForest admitted. Maybe soon.
A century and a half later, the idea has endured, even as it has become more complicated. In 2024, our definition of literary greatness is wider, deeper, and weirder than DeForest likely could have imagined. At the same time, the novel is also under threat, as the forces of anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism seek to ban books and curtail freedom of expression. The American canon is more capacious, more fluid, and more fragile than perhaps ever before. But what, exactly, is in it? What follows is our attempt to discover just that.
In setting out to identify that new American canon, we decided to define *American* as having first been published in the United States (or intended to be—read more in our entries on *Lolita* and *The Bell Jar*). And we narrowed our aperture to the past 100 years—a period that began as literary modernism was cresting and contains all manner of literary pleasure and possibility, including the experimentations of postmodernism and the narrative satisfactions of genre fiction.
This still left millions of potential titles. So we approached experts—scholars, critics, and novelists, both at *The Atlantic* and outside it—and asked for their suggestions. From there, we added and subtracted and debated and negotiated and considered and reconsidered until we landed on the list you’re about to read. We didn’t limit ourselves to a round, arbitrary number; we wanted to recognize the very best—novels that say something intriguing about the world and do it distinctively, in intentional, artful prose—no matter how many or few that ended up being (136, as it turns out). Our goal was to single out those classics that stand the test of time, but also to make the case for the unexpected, the unfairly forgotten, and the recently published works that already feel indelible. We aimed for comprehensiveness, rigor, and open-mindedness. Serendipity, too: We hoped to replicate that particular joy of a friend pressing a book into your hand and saying, “You have to read this; you’ll love it.”
This list includes 45 debut novels, nine winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and three children’s books. Twelve were published before the introduction of the mass-market paperback to America, and 24 after the release of the Kindle. At least 60 have been banned by schools or libraries. Together, they represent the best of what novels can do: challenge us, delight us, pull us in and then release us, a little smarter and a little more alive than we were before. You have to read them.
Read More
### The Great American Novels
- ### The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
1925
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-great-gatsby.jpg?v2)
- ### An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser
1925
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/an-american-tragedy.jpg?v2)
- ### The Making of Americans
Gertrude Stein
1925
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-making-of-americans.jpg?v2)
- ### Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather
1927
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/death-comes-for-the-archbishop.jpg?v2)
- ### A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
1929
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/a-farewell-to-arms.jpg?v2)
- ![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/passing.jpg?v2)
- ### The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
1929
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-sound-and-the-fury.jpg?v2)
- ### Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner
1936
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/absalom-absalom.jpg?v2)
- ### Nightwood
Djuna Barnes
1936
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/nightwood.jpg?v2)
- ### East Goes West
Younghill Kang
1937
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/east-goes-west.jpg?v2)
- ### Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
1937
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/their-eyes-were-watching-god.jpg?v2)
- ### U.S.A.
John Dos Passos
1937
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/usa.jpg?v2)
- ### Ask the Dust
John Fante
1939
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/ask-the-dust.jpg?v2)
- ### The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
1939
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-big-sleep.jpg?v2)
- ### The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West
1939
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-day-of-the-locust.jpg?v2)
- ### The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
1939
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-grapes-of-wrath.jpg?v2)
- ### Native Son
Richard Wright
1940
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/native-son.jpg?v2)
- ### The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers
1940
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-heart-is-a-lonely-hunter.jpg?v2)
- ### A Time to Be Born
Dawn Powell
1942
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/a-time-to-be-born.jpg?v2)
- ### All the King’s Men
Robert Penn Warren
1946
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/all-the-kings-men.jpg?v2)
- ![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-street.jpg?v2)
- ### In a Lonely Place
Dorothy B. Hughes
1947
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/in-a-lonely-place.jpg?v2)
- ### The Mountain Lion
Jean Stafford
1947
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-mountain-lion.jpg?v2)
- ### The Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger
1951
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-catcher-in-the-rye.jpg?v2)
- ### Charlotte’s Web
E. B. White
1952
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/charlottes-web.jpg?v2)
- ### Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
1952
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/invisible-man.jpg?v2)
- ### Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
1953
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/fahrenheit-451.jpg?v2)
- ### Maud Martha
Gwendolyn Brooks
1953
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/maud-martha.jpg?v2)
- ### The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow
1953
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-adventures-of-augie-march.jpg?v2)
- ### Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
1955
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/lolita.jpg?v2)
- ### Giovanni’s Room
James Baldwin
1956
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/giovannis-room.jpg?v2)
- ### Peyton Place
Grace Metalious
1956
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/peyton-place.jpg?v2)
- ### Deep Water
Patricia Highsmith
1957
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/deep-water.jpg?v2)
- ![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/no-no-boy.jpg?v2)
- ### On the Road
Jack Kerouac
1957
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/on-the-road.jpg?v2)
- ### The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson
1959
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-haunting-of-hill-house.jpg?v2)
- ### Catch-22
Joseph Heller
1961
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/catch-22.jpg?v2)
- ### A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L'Engle
1962
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/a-wrinkle-in-time.jpg?v2)
- ### Another Country
James Baldwin
1962
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/another-country.jpg?v2)
- ### One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Ken Kesey
1962
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/one-flew-over-the-cuckoos-nest.jpg?v2)
- ### Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov
1962
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/pale-fire.jpg?v2)
- ### The Zebra-Striped Hearse
Ross Macdonald
1962
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-zebra-striped-hearse.jpg?v2)
- ### The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
1963
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-bell-jar.jpg?v2)
- ### The Group
Mary McCarthy
1963
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-group.jpg?v2)
- ### The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon
1966
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-crying-of-lot-49.jpg?v2)
- ### A Sport and a Pastime
James Salter
1967
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/a-sport-and-a-pastime.jpg?v2)
- ![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/couples.jpg?v2)
- ### Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick
1968
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/do-androids-dream-of-electric-sheep.jpg?v2)
- ### Divorcing
Susan Taubes
1969
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/divorcing.jpg?v2)
- ### Portnoy’s Complaint
Philip Roth
1969
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/portnoys-complaint.jpg?v2)
- ### Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
1969
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/slaughterhouse-five.jpg?v2)
- ### Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
Judy Blume
1970
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/are-you-there-god-its-me-margaret.jpg?v2)
- ### Desperate Characters
Paula Fox
1970
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/desperate-characters.jpg?v2)
- ### Play It as It Lays
Joan Didion
1970
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/play-it-as-it-lays.jpg?v2)
- ### Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine
Stanley Crawford
1972
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/log-of-the-ss-the-mrs-unguentine.jpg?v2)
- ### Mumbo Jumbo
Ishmael Reed
1972
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/mumbo-jumbo.jpg?v2)
- ![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/sula.jpg?v2)
- ### The Revolt of the Cockroach People
Oscar Zeta Acosta
1973
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-revolt-of-the-cockroach-people.jpg?v2)
- ![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/oreo.jpg?v2)
- ### The Dispossessed
Ursula K. Le Guin
1974
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-dispossessed.jpg?v2)
- ### Winter in the Blood
James Welch
1974
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/winter-in-the-blood.jpg?v2)
- ### Corregidora
Gayl Jones
1975
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/corregidora.jpg?v2)
- ### Speedboat
Renata Adler
1976
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/speedboat.jpg?v2)
- ### Ceremony
Leslie Marmon Silko
1977
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/ceremony.jpg?v2)
- ### Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison
1977
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/song-of-solomon.jpg?v2)
- ### A Contract With God
Will Eisner
1978
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/a-contract-with-god.jpg?v2)
- ### Dancer From the Dance
Andrew Holleran
1978
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/dancer-from-the-dance.jpg?v2)
- ### The Stand
Stephen King
1978
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-stand.jpg?v2)
- ### Kindred
Octavia E. Butler
1979
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/kindred.jpg?v2)
- ### The Dog of the South
Charles Portis
1979
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-dog-of-the-south.jpg?v2)
- ### Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson
1980
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/housekeeping.jpg?v2)
- ### The Salt Eaters
Toni Cade Bambara
1980
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-salt-eaters.jpg?v2)
- ### Little, Big: Or, the Fairies’ Parliament
John Crowley
1981
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/little-big-or-the-fairies-parliament.jpg?v2)
- ### Oxherding Tale
Charles Johnson
1982
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/oxherding-tale.jpg?v2)
- ### Machine Dreams
Jayne Anne Phillips
1984
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/machine-dreams.jpg?v2)
- ### Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
1985
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/blood-meridian.jpg?v2)
- ### A Summons to Memphis
Peter Taylor
1986
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/a-summons-to-memphis.jpg?v2)
- ### Watchmen
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
1986
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/watchmen.jpg?v2)
- ![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/beloved.jpg?v2)
- ### Dawn
Octavia E. Butler
1987
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/dawn.jpg?v2)
- ### Geek Love
Katherine Dunn
1989
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/geek-love.jpg?v2)
- ### Tripmaster Monkey
Maxine Hong Kingston
1989
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/tripmaster-monkey.jpg?v2)
- ### Dogeaters
Jessica Hagedorn
1990
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/dogeaters.jpg?v2)
- ### American Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis
1991
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/american-psycho.jpg?v2)
- ### How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
Julia Alvarez
1991
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/how-the-garcia-girls-lost-their-accents.jpg?v2)
- ![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/mating.jpg?v2)
- ### Bastard Out of Carolina
Dorothy Allison
1992
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/bastard-out-of-carolina.jpg?v2)
- ### The Secret History
Donna Tartt
1992
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-secret-history.jpg?v2)
- ### So Far From God
Ana Castillo
1993
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/so-far-from-god.jpg?v2)
- ### Stone Butch Blues
Leslie Feinberg
1993
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/stone-butch-blues.jpg?v2)
- ### The Shipping News
Annie Proulx
1993
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-shipping-news.jpg?v2)
- ### Native Speaker
Chang-rae Lee
1995
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/native-speaker.jpg?v2)
- ### Sabbath’s Theater
Philip Roth
1995
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/sabbaths-theater.jpg?v2)
- ### Under the Feet of Jesus
Helena María Viramontes
1995
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/under-the-feet-of-jesus.jpg?v2)
- ### Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace
1996
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/infinite-jest.jpg?v2)
- ### I Love Dick
Chris Kraus
1997
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/i-love-dick.jpg?v2)
- ### Underworld
Don DeLillo
1997
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/underworld.jpg?v2)
- ### The Intuitionist
Colson Whitehead
1999
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-intuitionist.jpg?v2)
- ### Blonde
Joyce Carol Oates
2000
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/blonde.jpg?v2)
- ### House of Leaves
Mark Z. Danielewski
2000
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/house-of-leaves.jpg?v2)
- ### The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Michael Chabon
2000
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-amazing-adventures-of-kavalier-and-clay.jpg?v2)
- ### The Last Samurai
Helen DeWitt
2000
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-last-samurai.jpg?v2)
- ### The Quick and the Dead
Joy Williams
2000
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-quick-and-the-dead.jpg?v2)
- ### Erasure
Percival Everett
2001
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/erasure.jpg?v2)
- ### I, the Divine
Rabih Alameddine
2001
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/i-the-divine.jpg?v2)
- ### The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen
2001
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-corrections.jpg?v2)
- ### Caramelo
Sandra Cisneros
2002
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/caramelo.jpg?v2)
- ### Perma Red
Debra Magpie Earling
2002
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/perma-red.jpg?v2)
- ### The Russian Debutante’s Handbook
Gary Shteyngart
2002
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-russian-debutantes-handbook.jpg?v2)
- ### The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri
2003
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-namesake.jpg?v2)
- ### Veronica
Mary Gaitskill
2005
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/veronica.jpg?v2)
- ### The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Díaz
2007
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao.jpg?v2)
- ### A Visit From the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan
2010
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/a-visit-from-the-goon-squad.jpg?v2)
- ### I Hotel
Karen Tei Yamashita
2010
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/i-hotel.jpg?v2)
- ![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/open-city.jpg?v2)
- ### Salvage the Bones
Jesmyn Ward
2011
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/salvage-the-bones.jpg?v2)
- ### The Round House
Louise Erdrich
2012
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-round-house.jpg?v2)
- ### Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2013
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/americanah.jpg?v2)
- ![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/nevada.jpg?v2)
- ### A Brief History of Seven Killings
Marlon James
2014
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/a-brief-history-of-seven-killings.jpg?v2)
- ### Family Life
Akhil Sharma
2014
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/family-life.jpg?v2)
- ### Fates and Furies
Lauren Groff
2015
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/fates-and-furies.jpg?v2)
- ### The Fifth Season
N. K. Jemisin
2015
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-fifth-season.jpg?v2)
- ### The Sellout
Paul Beatty
2015
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-sellout.jpg?v2)
- ### The Sympathizer
Viet Thanh Nguyen
2015
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-sympathizer.jpg?v2)
- ### Amiable With Big Teeth
Claude McKay
2017
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/amiable-with-big-teeth.jpg?v2)
- ### Lincoln in the Bardo
George Saunders
2017
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/lincoln-in-the-bardo.jpg?v2)
- ![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/sabrina.jpg?v2)
- ![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/severance.jpg?v2)
- ### There There
Tommy Orange
2018
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/there-there.jpg?v2)
- ### Lost Children Archive
Valeria Luiselli
2019
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/lost-children-archive.jpg?v2)
- ### Nothing to See Here
Kevin Wilson
2019
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/nothing-to-see-here.jpg?v2)
- ### The Old Drift
Namwali Serpell
2019
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-old-drift.jpg?v2)
- ### No One Is Talking About This
Patricia Lockwood
2021
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/no-one-is-talking-about-this.jpg?v2)
- ### The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
2021
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/the-love-songs-of-w-e-b-du-bois.jpg?v2)
- ### Biography of X
Catherine Lacey
2023
![](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/est/best-books/biography-of-x.jpg?v2)
​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
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00.03 News/‘We wanted to invade media’ the hippies, nerds and Hollywood pros who brought The Simpsons to life.md
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Alias: [""]
Tag: ["🎭", "🇺🇸", "📺"]
Date: 2024-03-17
DocType: "WebClipping"
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TimeStamp: 2024-03-17
Link: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/mar/11/the-simpsons-matt-groening-gary-panter-zines-comics-harvard-lampoon-alt-weekly-newpapers
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# ‘We wanted to invade media’: the hippies, nerds and Hollywood pros who brought The Simpsons to life
In an early episode from the first series of The Simpsons, Homer is seen reading a publication called [The Bowl Earth Catalog](https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/The_Bowl_Earth_Catalog). It’s a punning nod to the Whole Earth Catalog: the 1960s counterculture tome of west coast environmentalism, DIY and tech utopianism (and more quietly, consumerism) that was championed by [Steve Jobs](https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-complicated-legacy-of-stewart-brands-whole-earth-catalog) and Silicon Valley mavens. It’s a typical blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference for those who want to see it, but offers a glimpse at the prehistory of The Simpsons.
By the time the show’s creator, Matt Groening, was making it as a cartoonist and comic strip artist in early-80s LA, the hippy counterculture was ageing out (and getting rich). The baton had been passed on – or grabbed – by the burgeoning alternative culture of punk and new wave music, with weekly alt-newspapers, self-published zines, underground comics and much else in between. Whatever you labelled it, a DIY ethos remained ever-present.
It all seems a far cry from the behemoth The Simpsons became: from its early merch-filled Bart-mania period to its imperial 90s era, and on into two further decades including a film and a continued run of record-breaking shows.
On YouTube, [a video hints](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyrVrymqH54) at early, scrappier foundations: in it Matt Groening introduces his friend, the artist [Gary Panter](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/18/gary-panter-songy-of-paradise-graphic-novel-interview), at a bookshop event in LA in 2008. He quotes from the [Rozz Tox Manifesto](https://www.altx.com/manifestos/rozztox.html), a set of 18 commandments Panter had published in 1980: “This is item 12,” Groening reads, listing his favourites. “‘Waiting for art talent scouts? There are no art talent scouts. Face it, no one will seek you out, no one gives a shit.’ Item 15. ‘Law: if you want better media, go make it.’”
![Jimbo](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/04f028172a8e86624bad2f45cf8011c623718102/0_0_6805_9300/master/6805.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none)
Origin story … Gary Panter’s Jimbo character, acknowledged as an influence on Bart Simpson. Photograph: Courtesy of Fantagraphics
“We sure were interested in getting our work out,” Panter says over the phone from his home in Texas. “We both wanted to invade media.”
Panter, a painter, illustrator, musician, and more recently maker of bracelets, originally published his satirical manifesto piecemeal in the free personals section of the Los Angeles Reader, an alt-weekly that launched in 1978. It was a call to arms of sorts, mixing the avant garde and low culture, the outsiders and the mainstream, to make something new within the prevailing system. There was a small pool of like-minded people circling. “It was art students mostly, and ugly nerd kids and fat kids, and so that was kind of great,” Panter recalls.
Around the same time, Groening, then an aspiring comic artist who had moved to LA from the Pacific Northwest, started self-publishing his Life in Hell comic strip, a series of darkly funny observations featuring anthropomorphic rabbits, while working at a branch of [Licorice Pizza record shop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licorice_Pizza_(store)) (later memorialised by Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2021 film). Life in Hell was “really smart, very minimal”, says Panter, who wrote Groening a fan letter. “We met at a party. And it turned out we were both Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart fans. And so we just hit it off and started hanging out. We were both broke. So we would pool our resources and share hamburgers and stuff.”
Groening and Panter [collaborated on comics](https://lithub.com/gary-panter-matt-groening-and-the-dual-history-of-punk-and-comics/) for punk zines under names including the Fuk Boys. [Byron Werner](https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2013/sep/01/subgenius-cutup-20130901/) (who went on to a long career in Hollywood visual effects) was also among their LA set, self-publishing comics, while the influential cartoonist [Linda Barry](https://drawnandquarterly.com/author/lynda-barry/) was a friend of Groening’s, “so out of that came this giant explosion of mini comics across the country in the next few years. There was a lot percolating at the same time,” Panter says.
Groening continued with his weekly Life in Hell strip, eventually syndicated widely in alternative papers – and, improbably, he kept it going until 2012 despite his vast television commitments. One of Panter’s signature [antihero characters](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/books/review/gary-panter-jimbo-adventures-in-paradise-crashpad.html), Jimbo, complete with spiky hairdo, is credited by many, including Groening, as an inspiration for Bart Simpson. “He’s said that. I think he’s being kind,” Panter demurs.
Panter was the first to attain greater mainstream success, entering television in 1986 to design surreal, Day-Glo sets for Pee-wee’s Playhouse, though he left after three years feeling burnt out by the experience. “Matt was much more equipped to function \[in the mainstream\]. I really just wanted to be a painter, or a cartoonist, which is what I did. Matt was a class president, explorer, boy scout, football star. We both had dads who drove us crazy – so we wanted to prove ourselves, I guess.”
Groening would soon follow Panter into television, when the under-heralded producer, production designer and writer [Polly Platt](https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/movies/polly-platt-producer-and-production-designer-is-dead-at-72.html) gave director-producer James L Brooks an original Life in Hell artwork. Brooks, who was involved in everything from The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Taxi to Broadcast News, helped Groening go from underground comic strip to bratty TV sketches, then world-renowned sitcom.
What was unusual at the time was that the sensibility of The Simpsons found its way into primetime TV, melding Groening’s alternative cartoon underpinning with more offbeat and cynical late-night comedy writers, hired from Saturday Night Live and David Letterman.
![Matt Groening with his Life in Hell comic book](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c0d261c8ac54029d35479019ce3238e175e62891/0_190_3664_2199/master/3664.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none)
Matt Groening with his Life in Hell comic book, which he continued to publish until 2012. Photograph: George Rose/Getty Images
“People were not used to seeing that type of humour on primetime TV. It’s hard to believe now,” says Bill Oakley, who along with writing partner Josh Weinstein, joined the hallowed Simpsons writing room in 1992. “Almost 70% of TV probably has that sensibility today. But at the time most comedies were extremely down the middle, extremely bland.”
The competition at the time was more safe sitcoms such as The Cosby Show and Mad About You, but The Simpsons was looking further afield. Mad magazine was an obvious childhood favourite of all the writers, says Oakley, while Fox’s Married … With Children was an irreverent sitcom antecedent. Another touchstone, less widely known in the UK, was the 1960s sitcom Green Acres, about a fish-out-of-water New York couple. Its daring and willingness to break the fourth wall was the sort of humour that could have easily sat with The Simpsons.
The related National Lampoon and Harvard Lampoon magazines were the other natural threads. While the former set the alternative comedy template taken up by SNL, the latter was a more direct breeding ground for many writers. The majority of the early Simpsons writers’ room, Oakley included, went to Harvard and wrote for the Harvard Lampoon – a lineage so prevalent at The Simpsons, it became a source of some eye-rolling. “By the late 90s you weren’t talking about your Harvard Lampoon affiliation very much,” Oakley says. “Other people got sick of hearing about it. The thing about the Lampoon, though, is not just the sensibility; it’s like going to graduate school in comedy.”
![A cover of Mad Magazine from December 1953.](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/09cb2b802047a41edd1daa3fb5750de64a52afac/0_0_3526_4782/master/3526.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none)
A cover of Mad Magazine from December 1953. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
George Meyer was one of those who came through the Harvard Lampoon line. After college he wrote for then upstart late night chatshow host David Letterman, among other things, and on the side self-published a small humour magazine called Army Man (“America’s only magazine,” ran the tagline). It featured work from Meyer himself and future Simpsons writers including John Swartzwelder, Jon Vitti and Ian Maxtone-Graham, as well as cartoonist Roz Chast and comic actor [Bob Odenkirk](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/feb/19/bob-odenkirk-better-call-saul-heart-attack-interview).
Although it only lasted three issues, its influence went far: copies of copies were passed around on college campuses, while offers to expand the publication and turn it into a TV show came in. Among its fans was Sam Simon, the writer-producer who was putting together the team for The Simpsons and recruited Meyer and other Army Man contributors. The little magazine had an outsized impact on The Simpsons’ comic foundations. There is also neat parallel and connective tissue between these self-published humour magazines (Oakley and Weinsten briefly had their own, too), and the alt-zines and comics that Groening and Panter had experimented with years before.
By the 2000s Meyer, gentle and hippy-ish in outlook, was a richly garlanded executive producer. “The funniest man behind the funniest show on TV,” was how the [New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/03/13/taking-humor-seriously) characterised him in a 2000 profile. Equally celebrated is Swartzwelder, one of the original writers, who is credited with the most episodes in the show’s history, as well as some of its most beloved jokes and characters infused with a sort of carnivalesque, cracked Americana. Reclusive and rarely photographed, Swartzwelder, who left the show in 2003, has an almost mythic reputation among Simpsons fans and serious comedy watchers. “He was a totally unique unicorn, who came from an entirely different universe,” says Oakley.
Such characters can lead one to believe that The Simpsons was a haven of Zappa-infused, Pynchonian oddballs. However, John Ortved, author of The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorised History, undercuts the mythologising a little – even Swartzwelder, for all his eccentricities, previously worked in advertising. The writers’ room was ultimately made up of “professionalised TV writers, led by Sam Simon”, explains Ortved. “He’d written on Taxi, he’d written on Cheers. It didn’t come more establishment than Sam Simon. And the writing room he put together, it wasn’t all grizzled veterans like him, it was a very young room but they had experience. They’d written on It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, Tracey Ullman, these weren’t fresh-faced youngsters with an axe to grind; these were the top young minds in the industry.”
Ortved points out that what made The Simpsons particularly special was this mix: the nerdy Harvard guys, the professional TV writers, Groening’s cynical gen X outlook, and all of it shepherded to screen by Hollywood veterans Brooks and Simon. Also key was that the Fox network largely gave The Simpsons a free hand to produce what they liked. It was the very collision of art and commerce that the Rozz Tox Manifesto had jokingly demanded a decade earlier: “An avant garde placed squarely in the entertainment field …. Capitalism for good or ill is the river in which we sink or swim.”
There is a poignancy here, too. It seems ever harder to imagine such a perfect storm of talent could brew to create a show with the impact of The Simpsons today. As last year’s Hollywood writers’ strike showed, the conditions and opportunities for creative people continue to worsen. Meanwhile the wider landscape has also got tougher: the alt-weeklies that helped people find their voice have fallen off, and zines are largely a relic of a pre-internet time.
Gary Panter sometimes wonders if the underground can still exist in the age of the internet shining a half-light on anything and everything – but then remains defiant. “There still is an underground,” he says. “That’s the great thing. People are not necessarily trying to be underground but there are tens of thousands of creative people doing stuff, who aren’t just looking at the biggest projects.”
Panter says that when Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly started Raw magazine in 1980, showcasing alternative comics, there were very few American artists working in the medium that they were interested in, but now there are thousands. And there’s no need to over-sentimentalise particular past moments. The culture thrives out there regardless.
“People are like: ‘Oh, what was the LA punk rock scene like?’” he says. “LA punk rock was like any time you go out in the middle of the night to a club to see what’s gonna happen. That’s what it was like. And it’s still scattered all across the country and the world.”
*The Simpsons is available on Disney+.*
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3
00.08 Bookmarks/Bookmarks - Work.md
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- [ ] :label: [[Bookmarks - Work]]: review bookmarks %%done_del%% 🔁 every 3 months 📅 2024-03-16
- [ ] :label: [[Bookmarks - Work]]: review bookmarks %%done_del%% 🔁 every 3 months 📅 2024-06-16
- [x] :label: [[Bookmarks - Work]]: review bookmarks %%done_del%% 🔁 every 3 months 📅 2024-03-16 ✅ 2024-03-16
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