post-Mallorca push

main
iOS 4 days ago
parent 7de1594e2f
commit df856e2492

@ -19,7 +19,7 @@
"601d1cc7-a4f3-4f19-aa9f-3bddd7ab6b1d": {
"locked": false,
"lockedDeviceName": "iPhone",
"lastRun": "2025-02-20T10:26:22+01:00"
"lastRun": "2025-03-31T11:00:28+02:00"
}
}
}

@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
{
"id": "dataview",
"name": "Dataview",
"version": "0.5.67",
"version": "0.5.68",
"minAppVersion": "0.13.11",
"description": "Complex data views for the data-obsessed.",
"author": "Michael Brenan <blacksmithgu@gmail.com>",

@ -1,8 +1,3 @@
/** Live Preview padding fixes, specifically for DataviewJS custom HTML elements. */
.is-live-preview .block-language-dataviewjs > p, .is-live-preview .block-language-dataviewjs > span {
line-height: 1.0;
}
.block-language-dataview {
overflow-y: auto;
}
@ -74,7 +69,7 @@
padding-right: 8px;
font-family: var(--font-monospace);
background-color: var(--background-primary-alt);
color: var(--text-nav-selected);
color: var(--nav-item-color-selected);
}
.dataview.inline-field-value {
@ -82,7 +77,7 @@
padding-right: 8px;
font-family: var(--font-monospace);
background-color: var(--background-secondary-alt);
color: var(--text-nav-selected);
color: var(--nav-item-color-selected);
}
.dataview.inline-field-standalone-value {
@ -90,7 +85,7 @@
padding-right: 8px;
font-family: var(--font-monospace);
background-color: var(--background-secondary-alt);
color: var(--text-nav-selected);
color: var(--nav-item-color-selected);
}
/***************/

@ -12,8 +12,8 @@
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@ -4563,6 +4563,146 @@
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]
}

File diff suppressed because it is too large Load Diff

@ -75,7 +75,7 @@
"showRenderNotice": true,
"diceModTemplateFolders": {},
"replaceDiceModInLivePreview": true,
"version": "11.4.1",
"version": "11.4.2",
"viewResults": [],
"showDice": true
}

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@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
{
"id": "obsidian-dice-roller",
"name": "Dice Roller",
"version": "11.4.1",
"version": "11.4.2",
"minAppVersion": "0.12.15",
"description": "Inline dice rolling for Obsidian.md",
"author": "Jeremy Valentine",

@ -86,7 +86,7 @@
"MomentsIcon": "https://images.pexels.com/photos/256514/pexels-photo-256514.jpeg",
"MomentsQuote": "Share your thino with the world",
"DefaultThemeForThino": "classic",
"LastUpdatedVersion": "2.4.59",
"LastUpdatedVersion": "2.7.5",
"ShareToThinoWithText": false,
"ShareToThinoWithTextAppend": "",
"ShareToThinoWithTextPrepend": "",
@ -116,5 +116,19 @@
"FilterByMetadata": false,
"ShowSourcePath": false,
"ShowUpdateMessage": true,
"SyncManually": false
"SyncManually": false,
"MemoFixedPrefix": "",
"MemoFixedSuffix": "",
"UseMemoFixedStrings": false,
"enableWordCount": false,
"maxWordCount": 0,
"enableReferenceLinksGroup": false,
"doubleClickBehavior": "edit-thino",
"useMobileViewDefaultHeader": false,
"IgnoreFolderForMultiType": [],
"UseBlockLinkWhenDragging": false,
"ShowScrollToTopButton": true,
"ZoomImageWhenViewing": false,
"ViewArchiveInRandomReview": false,
"DraggingBehavior": "block-link"
}

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@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
"id": "obsidian-memos",
"name": "Thino",
"description": "Capturing ideas and save them into daily notes. (Closed source)",
"version": "2.4.59",
"version": "2.7.5",
"author": "Boninall",
"authorUrl": "https://github.com/Quorafind/",
"isDesktopOnly": false,

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@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
{
"id": "obsidian-reminder-plugin",
"name": "Reminder",
"version": "1.1.18",
"version": "1.1.19",
"minAppVersion": "1.0.3",
"description": "Reminder plugin for Obsidian. This plugin adds feature to manage TODOs with reminder.",
"author": "uphy",

@ -1 +1 @@
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@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
{
"id": "obsidian-tasks-plugin",
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"description": "Track tasks across your vault. Supports due dates, recurring tasks, done dates, sub-set of checklist items, and filtering.",
"helpUrl": "https://publish.obsidian.md/tasks/",

@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
{
"timelineTag": "timeline",
"sortDirection": true
}

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@ -1,10 +1,10 @@
{
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"author": "pyrochlore",
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}
{
"id": "obsidian-tracker",
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"description": "A plugin tracks occurrences and numbers in your notes",
"author": "pyrochlore",
"authorUrl": "",
"isDesktopOnly": false
}

@ -48,7 +48,7 @@
"devMode": false,
"templateFolderPath": "00.01 Admin/Templates",
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"version": "1.11.5",
"version": "1.13.2",
"disableOnlineFeatures": true,
"enableRibbonIcon": false,
"ai": {

@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
{
"id": "quickadd",
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"version": "1.13.2",
"minAppVersion": "1.6.0",
"description": "Quickly add new pages or content to your vault.",
"author": "Christian B. B. Houmann",

@ -0,0 +1,111 @@
{
"confirmDeletion": true,
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"mainTrigger": "/",
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{
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{
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},
{
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},
{
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},
{
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},
{
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"selected": false
},
{
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},
{
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},
{
"id": "tasks-packrat-plugin:run",
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}
]
}

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@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
{
"id": "slash-commander",
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}

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@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
{
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"description": "Create and use templates",
"minAppVersion": "1.5.0",
"author": "SilentVoid",

@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
{
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"version": "7.7.19",
"minAppVersion": "1.6.1",
"author": "@kepano",
"authorUrl": "https://twitter.com/kepano",

@ -47,8 +47,8 @@
"list-collapse": []
}
},
"icon": "lucide-trello",
"title": "Life - Practical infos"
"icon": "lucide-file",
"title": "Plugin no longer active"
}
},
{
@ -57,16 +57,16 @@
"state": {
"type": "markdown",
"state": {
"file": "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-02-20.md",
"file": "00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-03-31.md",
"mode": "preview",
"source": true
},
"icon": "lucide-file",
"title": "2025-02-20"
"title": "2025-03-31"
}
},
{
"id": "309fdf4d568503ba",
"id": "ed6ffb75d57eda41",
"type": "leaf",
"state": {
"type": "thino_view",
@ -204,27 +204,17 @@
"state": {
"type": "advanced-tables-toolbar",
"state": {},
"icon": "spreadsheet",
"title": "Advanced Tables"
}
},
{
"id": "8a77fcdea0c02dd0",
"type": "leaf",
"state": {
"type": "DICE_ROLLER_VIEW",
"state": {},
"icon": "dices",
"title": "Dice Tray"
"icon": "lucide-file",
"title": "Plugin no longer active"
}
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"id": "5b95cc0b948c760c",
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"state": {
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@ -232,6 +222,16 @@
"icon": "lucide-file",
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}
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@ -244,6 +244,7 @@
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"meld-encrypt:New encrypted note": false,
"meld-encrypt:Convert to or from an Encrypted note": false,
"meld-encrypt:Encrypt/Decrypt In-place": false,
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"obsidian-memos:Thino": false,
"obsidian42-brat:BRAT": false,
@ -262,50 +263,49 @@
"canvas:Create new canvas": false,
"daily-notes:Open today's daily note": false,
"templates:Insert template": false,
"command-palette:Open command palette": false,
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"03.02 Travels/Son Ginard Polo Club.md",
"03.01 Reading list/Le rêve de la Terre.md",
"00.02 Inbox/Cassandra at the Wedding.md",
"01.07 Animals/2024-12-02 Stomach bug.md",
"01.07 Animals/2024-10-29 Holiday.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-03-26.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-03-25.md",
"00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-03-24.md",
"06.01 Finances/2025.ledger",
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"00.01 Admin/Pictures/Sally/ima3958121943638555313.jpeg",
"00.01 Admin/Pictures/Sally/IMG_5006.jpg",
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"00.02 Inbox/Pasted image 20240521223309.png",
"00.01 Admin/Pictures/Sally/ima10032556959173512188.jpeg",
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@ -102,7 +102,7 @@ This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
- [x] 09:14 :cook: [[@@Recipes|Recipes]]: Find a dhal recipe, [[2024-09-11|link]] 📅 2024-09-24 ✅ 2024-09-25
- [ ] 09:18 :motor_scooter: [[@Lifestyle|Lifestyle]]: Check out the possibility to buy a scooter, [[2024-09-11|🔗]] 📅2025-03-29
- [ ] 09:18 :motor_scooter: [[@Lifestyle|Lifestyle]]: Check out the possibility to buy a scooter, [[2024-09-11|🔗]] 📅 2025-06-29
%% --- %%

@ -102,7 +102,7 @@ This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
- [ ] 10:16 :blue_car: [[@Life Admin|Admin]]: Clean car [[2024-11-30|🔗]] 📅 2025-03-22
- [ ] 10:50 :racehorse: [[@Lifestyle|Lifestyle]]: Buy montura for Ambar [[2023-11-30|🔗]] 📅2025-02-28
- [x] 10:50 :racehorse: [[@Lifestyle|Lifestyle]]: Buy montura for Ambar [[2023-11-30|🔗]] 📅 2025-02-28 ✅ 2025-02-28
- [x] 17:35 :blue_car: [[@@Travels|Travels]]: Buy Austrian vignette [[2024-11-30|🔗]] 📅 2024-12-17 ✅ 2024-12-01

@ -16,9 +16,9 @@ Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water:
Water: 2.66
Coffee: 4
Steps:
Steps: 12449
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:

@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-21
Date: 2025-02-21
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 1.66
Coffee: 5
Steps:
Weight: 94.5
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-20|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-02-22|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-21Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-21NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-21
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-21
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-21
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
🚆: [[@@Zürich|Zürich]] to [[@France|La Clusaz]]
:book:: [[Berlin Alexanderplatz]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-21]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-22
Date: 2025-02-22
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 0.33
Coffee: 3
Steps: 5550
Weight:
Ski: 13
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-21|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-23|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-22Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-22NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-22
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-22
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-22
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
:ski:: [[La Clusaz]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-22]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-23
Date: 2025-02-23
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 8
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 3.08
Coffee: 2
Steps: 3545
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[00.01 Admin/Calendars/2025-02-22|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-24|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-23Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-23NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-23
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-23
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-23
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
:train2:: [[@France|La Clusaz]] to [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]
:book:: [[Berlin Alexanderplatz]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-23]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-24
Date: 2025-02-24
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 6.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 3.44
Coffee: 2
Steps: 4909
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-23|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-25|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-24Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-24NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-24
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-24
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-24
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
🛫: [[@@Zürich|Zürich]] to [[@United States|Denver]]
:book:: [[Berlin Alexanderplatz]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-24]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-25
Date: 2025-02-25
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 3
Coffee: 3
Steps: 6008
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-24|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-26|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-25Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-25NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-25
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-25
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-25
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-25]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-26
Date: 2025-02-26
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 3
Coffee: 3
Steps: 2652
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-25|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-27|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-26Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-26NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-26
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-26
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-26
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-26]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-27
Date: 2025-02-27
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 8
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 3
Coffee: 4
Steps: 4438
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-26|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-02-28|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-27Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-27NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-27
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-27
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-27
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-27]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-02-28
Date: 2025-02-28
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 3
Coffee: 3
Steps: 6206
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-02-27|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-03-01|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-02-28Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-02-28NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-02-28
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-02-28
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-02-28
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-02-28]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-03-02
Date: 2025-03-02
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 4
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 3
Coffee: 2
Steps: 2413
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-03-01|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-03-03|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-03-02Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-03-02NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-03-02
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-03-02
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-03-02
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-03-02]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-03-05
Date: 2025-03-05
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2
Coffee: 5
Steps: 7293
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-03-04|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-03-06|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-03-05Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-03-05NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-03-05
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-03-05
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-03-05
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-03-05]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-03-07
Date: 2025-03-07
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 8.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2
Coffee: 3
Steps: 8082
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-03-06|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-03-08|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-03-07Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-03-07NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-03-07
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-03-07
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-03-07
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
🛬: [[@@London|London]] to [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]
📖: [[Berlin Alexanderplatz]], [[Hard Rain Falling]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-03-07]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-03-08
Date: 2025-03-08
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 8
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 3
Coffee: 3
Steps: 5398
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-03-07|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-03-09|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-03-08Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-03-08NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-03-08
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-03-08
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-03-08
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
:book:: [[Hard Rain Falling]]
🍴: [[Beef Noodles with Beans]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-03-08]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-03-10
Date: 2025-03-10
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2.5
Coffee: 5
Steps: 12613
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-03-09|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-03-11|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-03-10Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-03-10NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-03-10
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-03-10
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-03-10
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
:book:: [[Fatale]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-03-10]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-03-12
Date: 2025-03-12
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 3
Coffee: 4
Steps: 3966
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-03-11|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-03-13|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-03-12Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-03-12NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-03-12
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-03-12
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-03-12
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;
:book:: [[Fatale]]
🍽: [[Spicy Szechuan Noodles with Garlic Chilli Oil]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-03-12]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-03-13
Date: 2025-03-13
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2
Coffee: 4
Steps: 8546
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-03-12|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-03-14|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-03-13Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-03-13NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-03-13
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-03-13
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-03-13
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;
:book:: [[The Expendable Man]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-03-13]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,138 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-03-15
Date: 2025-03-15
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2.5
Coffee: 5
Steps: 9077
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-03-14|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-03-16|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-03-15Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-03-15NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-03-15
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-03-15
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-03-15
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
🍴: [[Big Shells With Spicy Lamb Sausage and Pistachios]]
:book:: [[The Expendable Man]]
🍽: [[Spicy Coconut Butter Chicken]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-03-15]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,140 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-03-16
Date: 2025-03-16
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 8
Happiness: 90
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 3
Coffee: 5
Steps: 2806
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-03-15|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-03-17|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-03-16Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-03-16NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-03-16
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-03-16
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-03-16
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;
🍴: [[Miss Miu]]
:book:: [[The Expendable Man]]
🍽: [[Velouté de carottes à lanis]]
:tv:: [[2025-03-16 ⚽️ PSG - OM]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-03-16]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-03-18
Date: 2025-03-18
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 3
Coffee: 5
Steps: 7141
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-03-17|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-03-19|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-03-18Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-03-18NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-03-18
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-03-18
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-03-18
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;
🍽: [[Big Shells With Spicy Lamb Sausage and Pistachios]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-03-18]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-03-20
Date: 2025-03-20
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 3
Coffee: 5
Steps: 14268
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-03-19|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-03-21|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-03-20Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-03-20NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-03-20
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-03-20
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-03-20
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-03-20]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-03-22
Date: 2025-03-22
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 3
Coffee: 5
Steps: 5246
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-03-20|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-03-22|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-03-21Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-03-21NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-03-21
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-03-21
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-03-21
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
🚆: [[@@Zürich|Zürich]] to [[@France|Annemasse]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-03-21]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-03-23
Date: 2025-03-23
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 3
Coffee: 3
Steps: 6604
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-03-22|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-03-24|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-03-23Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-03-23NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-03-23
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-03-23
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-03-23
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
🚆: [[@France|Annemasse]] to [[@@Zürich|Zurich]]
:book:: [[Le rêve de la Terre]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-03-23]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-03-26
Date: 2025-03-26
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7
Happiness: 90
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2.5
Coffee: 5
Steps: 11608
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-03-25|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-03-27|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-03-26Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-03-26NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-03-26
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-03-26
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-03-26
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
🛬: [[@@London|London]] to [[@@Zürich|Zürich]]
:book:: [[Le rêve de la Terre]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-03-26]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,136 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-03-28
Date: 2025-03-28
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 1.5
Coffee: 5
Steps: 4981
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding: 1
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-03-27|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-03-29|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-03-28Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-03-28NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-03-28
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-03-28
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-03-28
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
:racehorse:: S&B with [[@Sally|Sally]] & [[@Ambar|Ambar]] at [[Son Ginard Polo Club]]
🍽: [[Cassai Beach House]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-03-28]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,138 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-03-29
Date: 2025-03-29
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 90
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water: 2
Coffee: 3
Steps: 10882
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding: 4
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-03-28|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-03-30|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-03-29Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-03-29NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-03-29
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-03-29
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-03-29
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
:racehorse:: 4 chukkers with [[@Sally|Sally]] & [[@Ambar|Ambar]] at [[Son Ginard Polo Club]] > 1 goal
🍽: [[Cassai Gran Café and Restaurant]]
:book:: [[Cassandra at the Wedding]]
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-03-29]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
---
title: "🗒 Daily Note"
allDay: true
date: 2025-03-31
Date: 2025-03-31
DocType: Note
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp:
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
Sleep: 7.5
Happiness: 85
Gratefulness: 90
Stress: 25
FrontHeadBar: 5
EarHeadBar: 30
BackHeadBar: 20
Water:
Coffee: 4
Steps:
Weight:
Ski:
IceSkating:
Riding:
Racket:
Football:
Swim:
---
%% Parent:: [[@Life Admin]] %%
---
[[2025-03-30|<< 🗓 Previous ]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[@Main Dashboard|Back]] &emsp; &emsp; &emsp; [[2025-04-01|🗓 Next >>]]
---
&emsp;
```button
name Record today's health
type command
action MetaEdit: Run MetaEdit
id EditMetaData
```
^button-2025-03-31Edit
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-2025-03-31NSave
&emsp;
# 2025-03-31
&emsp;
> [!summary]+
> Daily note for 2025-03-31
&emsp;
```toc
style: number
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### ✅ Tasks of the day
&emsp;
```tasks
not done
due on 2025-03-31
path does not include Templates
hide backlinks
hide task count
```
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 📝 Memos
&emsp;
This section does serve for quick memos.
&emsp;
%% --- %%
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### 🗒 Notes
&emsp;
Loret ipsum
&emsp;
---
&emsp;
### :link: Linked activity
&emsp;
```dataview
Table from [[2025-03-31]]
```
&emsp;
&emsp;

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

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

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

@ -1,91 +0,0 @@
---
title: "👰‍♀ Mariage Eloi & Zélie"
allDay: true
date: 2023-02-10
endDate: 2023-02-12
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Mariage d[[Eloi de Villeneuve|Éloi]] avec [[Zélie]] en [[@France|Bretagne]] (Rennes) [[2023-02-11|ce jour]].
&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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
---
title: ⚽️ Liverpool - PSG (0-1)
allDay: false
startTime: 21:00
endTime: 23:00
date: 2025-01-25
completed: null
---
[[2025-03-11|Ce jour]], Liverpool - [[Paris SG|PSG]]: 0-1
Buteurs:: ⚽️ Dembélé
&emsp;
```lineup
formation: 433
players: Donnarumma,Nuno Mendes,Pacho,Marquinhos (Beraldo),Hakimi,Vitinha,Ruiz (Zaïre-Emery),Neves (Gonçalo Ramos),Kvaratskhelia (Lee),Dembélé, Barcola (Doué)
```

@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
---
title: ⚽️ PSG - OM (2-1)
allDay: false
startTime: 21:00
endTime: 23:00
date: 2025-03-16
completed: null
---
[[2025-03-16|Ce jour]], [[Paris SG|PSG]] - OM: 2-1
Buteurs:: ⚽️ Dembélé<br>⚽️ Nuno Mendes<br>⚽️ Lirola (csc)<br>⚽️ Gouiri (OM)
&emsp;
```lineup
formation: 433
players: Donnarumma,Nuno Mendes,Pacho,Beraldo,Hakimi,Vitinha,Ruiz,Zaïre-Emery (Barcola),Kvaratskhelia (Hernandez),Dembélé (Lee),Doué (Neves)
```

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@ -19,7 +19,7 @@ CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Parent:: [[@Reading master|Reading list]]
ReadingState:: 🟥
ReadingState:: 🟧
---

@ -0,0 +1,171 @@
---
Tag: ["🎭", "🎥", "🪦", "👤"]
Date: 2025-03-18
DocType: "WebClipping"
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp: 2025-03-18
Link: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2025/03/09/gene-hackman-betsy-arakawa-final-hours-hantavirus/82058693007/
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Parent:: [[@News|News]]
Read:: 🟥
---
&emsp;
```button
name Save
type command
action Save current file
id Save
```
^button-AmaskacaneandafranticdogNSave
&emsp;
# A mask, a cane and a frantic dog: Inside the final hours of Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa
---
## Arakawa was already dead, splayed on a bathroom floor of the Santa Fe home she shared with Hackman, who didn't make any calls or otherwise ask for help for the seven days he outlived his wife.
SANTA FE, N.M. One of the last times anyone saw Betsy Arakawa in public, she was strolling through the aisles of a CVS Pharmacy in Santa Fe, her face covered by a mask, likely because of the virus ravaging her lungs.
Within hours, she was dead.
Security cameras captured Arakawas image during her visit to the pharmacy on Feb. 11, the last day she is believed to have been alive. The longtime wife and main caregiver of actor [Gene Hackman](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2025/03/07/gene-hackman-cause-of-death-wife/80684790007/), Arakawa had busied herself with errands that day: sending an email, stopping at the pharmacy, doing some grocery shopping.
Most notable was what she didnt do. She failed to swing by Gruda Veterinary Hospital in southwest Santa Fe to pick up the prescription dog food and medication she had ordered for one of her three dogs, Zinna, Bear and Nikita.
Arakawa had been taking her dogs to that vet for years and never once missed a food or meds pickup. The following week, sometime after Feb. 17, Grudas staff tried calling Arakawa on her cellphone to remind her the food was ready. No one picked up.
“She was devoted to those dogs,” Robert Gruda, the hospitals owner, told USA TODAY in an interview. “She was consistent, predictable. We knew something was wrong when she didnt pick up the food on time.”
Unbeknownst to Gruda and his staff, Arakawa, 65, was already dead, splayed on a bathroom floor of the Santa Fe home she shared with Hackman, seized by a rare but potentially lethal disease spread by rodents.
![](https://www.gannett-cdn.com/authoring/authoring-images/2025/03/08/USAT/82009825007-gene-hackman-and-wife-death-update.jpg?crop=1919,1079,x0,y0)
![play](https://www.gannett-cdn.com/appservices/universal-web/universal/icons/icon-play-alt-white.svg)
Death timeline of Gene Hackman, wife
Gene Hackman and his wife died a week apart and from entirely different causes. No foul play is suspected in the deaths.
Hackman, 95, racked by advanced Alzheimers disease, lived another week after his wife died, then died in a mudroom on the other side of the house, a cane and sunglasses nearby. What exactly did Hackman do during that time? Did he even know his wife was dead? Was he aware that one of the couples dogs, Zinna, a 12-year-old Australian Kelpie mix, had also died while locked in a crate in the home?
News of the couples twin deaths has rattled and baffled the Santa Fe community, where they were at once pillars and reclusive. On Friday, Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza and other officials held a news conference to reveal details on the causes and dates of their deaths.
Yet, more questions remain. How and why, for example, did Arakawa, by all accounts a youthful, energetic woman, contract the [hantavirus](https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2025/03/07/hantavirus-pulmonary-syndrome-disease-hackman/81985917007/) and die so suddenly?
“Im more confused and really devastated even more,” Santa Fe restaurateur Doug Lanham, a close friend of the couple and Hackmans former business partner, said after the news conference. “How do you connect all these dots?”
***The latest news from Hollywood: [Sign up](https://profile.usatoday.com/newsletters/entertainment/?ipid=signuptop10) for USA TODAY's Entertainment newsletter.***
## 'An excellent dog owner, excellent caretaker'
Arakawa began bringing her dogs to the Gruda Veterinary Hospital several years ago and quickly became a favorite at the animal hospital. She reliably brought the dogs to appointments and chatted with staff and Gruda. She regularly called Zinna by her full name, Zinfandel, and confided to Gruda that she was named after Hackmans favorite wine varietal. 
“She was an excellent dog owner, excellent caretaker to those dogs,” he said. “She really doted on them.”
One of the last times the hospital staff saw Arakawa was in late January, when she came in to pick up Zinna, who had had “major surgery,” Gruda said. She was her typical, alert self, he said. 
The staff instructed her to confine Zinna to a crate, to keep her from running around and undoing the effects of the surgery, Gruda said. 
“She was friendly, dutiful,” he said of Arakawa. “Thats how we make a living, with owners that care for their animals and see us consistently.”
By this time, even the couples closest friends were seeing them less and less around town. Lanham, who used to golf regularly with Hackman and dine with the couple, hadnt seen them in more than five years. 
A few weeks after picking up Zinna from the hospital, on Feb. 11, Arakawa began her day by exchanging emails with a massage therapist around 11:21 a.m., according to Mendoza, the sheriff. She later shopped at a Sprouts Farmer Market grocery store between 3:30 and 4:15 p.m., then visited a CVS Pharmacy. Surveillance footage showed her wearing a mask, he said. 
Arakawa returned home around 5:15 p.m. and used a remote to open the gate at Santa Fe Summit, the gated community in the foothills just outside of Santa Fe where the couple had lived for decades. 
She made it inside the sprawling, 9,000-square-foot home. But by now, the hantavirus was clawing its way into her lungs. Her hours were numbered. 
## A rare but deadly rodent disease
First discovered in 1993, the hantavirus began spreading from the Southwest to across the U.S. Humans contract it by breathing in aerosolized urine, feces or saliva from a rodent in New Mexico, the tiny deer mouse is usually the culprit.
Cases are rare. As of 2024, New Mexico had seen only 136 infections over the past 50 years, with just five of those in Santa Fe County, according to Erin Phipps, the state public health veterinarian. Dogs dont get the disease, and the strain found in the U.S. cant spread from human to human, she said. 
Symptoms are akin to getting the flu: body aches, fever, abdominal pain. But the disease could quickly turn deadly. After incubation the virus for anywhere from three to four weeks and up to eight weeks, an infected persons lungs will begin to fill with fluids that escape through capillaries, triggering coughing and shortness of breath, said Greg Mertz, professor emeritus of internal medicine and former chief of the division of infectious diseases at the University of New Mexico. 
Hantavirus has a staggering mortality rate of between 35% and 50%, according to health officials. 
“Unfortunately, it could progress to cardiogenic shock over a period of a few hours,” he said. “Even in a hospital, most deaths occur within the first day.”
During cardiogenic shock, the heart stops pumping adequate blood supply to the organs. Blood pressure plummets and the patient lapses into cardiac arrhythmia, or an irregular heartbeat. From there, its very difficult to save an infected person, Mertz said. 
The virus is difficult to detect, as many of the symptoms are akin to the flu, he said. There is no medicine to combat it and, once it spreads, its hard to stop it from overwhelming the body. 
Mertz said he was treating a patient once with hantavirus at University of New Mexico Hospital. The patient was sitting on a hospital bed and began complaining about feeling ill. Their blood pressure dropped and they went into shock, he said. Within 20 minutes, the patient was dead. 
“Its a pretty horrific progression,” Mertz said. “There arent a lot of diseases with higher mortality rates.”
## 'Come over here! Come over here!'
Around 1:43 p.m. on Feb. 26, a maintenance man who had done work on the Hackman home for years visited the property and found the front door ajar. He peeked through a window and saw Arakawa lying on the floor. He then notified another maintenance man who works for the subdivision, who called 9-1-1. 
Paramedics with the Santa Fe Fire Department arrived at the scene, pushed open the front door and saw Arakawa lying on the nearby bathroom floor, Chief Brian Moya said. She looked deceased, so they retreated back outside and radioed the Santa Fe County Sheriffs Office for backup, as per protocol. 
Backed by several sheriffs deputies, the two paramedics and three other Santa Fe firefighters inspected Arakawas body, which had noticeable signs of decomposition. A bottle of prescription thyroid medication was on the bathroom counter, loose pills spread across the countertop. 
The first responders then fanned out through the sprawling four-bedroom home, meticulously checking bedrooms, hallways, bathrooms and closets for other people or signs of foul play, Moya said. Thirty minutes passed without a sign of anyone else. 
As they searched, one of the couples dogs kept running up to them, barking and running off in a different direction, he said. At first, paramedics thought the dog wanted to play. Then, they realized it wanted them to follow. 
“They realized (the dog) was trying to say, Hey, come over here! Come over here!’” Moya said.  
The dog led them to a mudroom in the far end of the home, next to the kitchen. It then sat next to the body of Hackman, who was crumpled on the floor. Sunglasses and a cane laid nearby. His hands were blackened and showed signs of decomposition, Moya said. A back door was propped open, allowing the dogs to go in and out of the home. 
Firefighters went through the home and two detached structures on the property with handheld six-gas monitors, measuring oxygen levels and looking for signs of harmful gases, such as carbon monoxide. The readings were nothing out of the norm, Moya said. The gas company later did its own inspection and also found no harmful levels of gases. 
The two workers who first alerted police to the home told investigators they rarely saw the owners while conducting maintenance around the house, according to a search warrant affidavit. They said they mostly communicated via phone calls or text and primarily with Arakawa. 
First responders noted how clean and organized the home appeared, Moya said. “It was very neat, organized with no clutter,” he said.  
The two surviving dogs, Bear and Nikita, were rounded up and transported to a local pet day-care facility. Hackmans and Arakawas bodies were taken to the state Office of the Medical Investigator at the University of New Mexico for autopsies. 
## Finally, some answers
At 2 p.m. Friday, outside the sheriffs office in Santa Fe, Heather Jarrell stepped before the cameras. For over a week, media from all over the world had descended upon the New Mexico capital, all looking for answers to the same question: How did Hackman and Arakawa die?
Jarrell, New Mexicos chief medical examiner, had led the queries into the couples deaths from her lab in Albuquerque. Finally, she had some answers.
Hackmans heart showed signs of previous heart attacks, a pacemaker and multiple heart surgeries, as well as a scarred kidney due to chronic high blood pressure. Hackmans cause of death was cardiovascular disease. He also had advanced Alzheimers disease, she said, which contributed to his death.
In other, less-experienced medical examiners' offices, Arakawas cause of death may have gone undetected. But Jarrell and her staff knew enough to recognize the microscopic evidence revealed in the patients lungs. Arakawa tested negative for COVID-19 and influenza but positive for the hantavirus, Jarrell said. Cause of death: hantavirus pulmonary syndrome. 
Her lungs had crashed as the virus branched through her body. 
As Jarrell examined the patients, she received a phone call from one of Hackmans doctors. 
His pacemaker, the doctor said, had shown activity as recently as Feb. 17. 
After further inspecting the device, Jarrell and investigators noticed Hackmans heart also showed an atrial fibrillation, or irregular heartbeat, the following day, on Feb. 18. Thats likely when he died, Jarrell said. 
Mendoza said authorities are still waiting on more data from two cellphones collected at the home, as well as results from a necropsy on Zinna. But the medical examiners information answered a lot of the questions they had, he said. 
Hackman was in the house for seven days after Arakawa died. There were no cameras inside the house to record his movements.
In that time, he didnt make any phone calls or otherwise ask for help, authorities said. He hadnt eaten but had somehow managed to stay hydrated. 
Clouded by Alzheimers and struggling with a scarred heart, he was alone while his wife and main caregiver was dead on the bathroom floor near the front of the home.
Its likely, authorities said, Hackman never knew his wife was already gone.
*Contributing: Javier Zarracina, USA TODAY*
*Follow Jervis on X: @MrRJervis.*
Facebook Twitter Email
&emsp;
&emsp;
---
`$= dv.el('center', 'Source: ' + dv.current().Link + ', ' + dv.current().Date.toLocaleString("fr-FR"))`

@ -12,7 +12,7 @@ CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Parent:: [[@News|News]]
Read:: 🟥
Read:: [[2025-03-08]]
---

@ -0,0 +1,59 @@
---
Tag: ["🤵🏻", "🇨🇦"]
Date: 2025-03-18
DocType: "WebClipping"
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp: 2025-03-18
Link: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/canada-the-northern-outpost-of-sanity
location:
CollapseMetaTable: true
---
Parent:: [[@News|News]]
Read:: [[2025-03-19]]
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# Canada, the Northern Outpost of Sanity
When I was a boy, the company that my father worked for transferred him from Los Angeles to Toronto, so I lived in Canada for most of my elementary-school years, attending the Northlea public school, where I remember boys and girls entering through separate doors after taking off our hats in deference to the Queen. (As a clueless émigré, I was sent to the principals office on my first day for not showing this particular form of respect.) This was the mid-nineteen-sixties, when Canada was coming out of that provincialism and into its own. The dashing Pierre Elliott Trudeau ruled Ottawa as an echo of J.F.K., and one of the first songs I learned in school celebrated the countrys 1967 centennial. (“Its the hundredth anniversary of Confederation / Evrybody sing together!”) My family had returned to the States by the time I was ten, but Ive always been grateful for those years in a nation with a tighter sense of community than my own, exemplified by its national broadcaster, the CBC, and by its national health-care system.
Canadas democracy has frayed and strained in the years since, but always held—Quebecs independence movement was subdued by real concessions from the rest of the provinces, for instance. Canada has not always been a model global citizen—its determination to export oil means that it bears outsized responsibility for the climate crisis—but, on balance, it has been a good and decent country, not to mention a firm ally. Americas craziness has drifted north across the border in recent years, though, producing out-there influencers, such as the psychologist-podcaster [Jordan Peterson](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/jordan-petersons-gospel-of-masculinity), and Foxish stunts, such as the “Freedom Convoy” of truckers that briefly paralyzed the Canadian capital with demands for an end to vaccine mandates. Indeed, the bilious mood thats gripped the planet, post-*COVID*, seemed almost certain to set the stage for the election of a Trumpian figure, Pierre Poilievre, who has delivered the same kinds of broadsides about “utopian wokeism” and who delights in calling the sitting Prime Minister—Pierre Trudeaus son Justin—a “wacko.”
But [Donald Trump](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/donald-trump)s tariff attacks on Canada—and, even more, his insistence that the country should be incorporated as the fifty-first state—may halt this slow drift into the United States baleful orbit, at least for now. The threats seem to be producing the countrys finest recent hour, stirring a kind of patriotic resolve that is showing itself in everything from widespread scorn for the hockey great Wayne Gretzkys truckling visits to Mar-a-Lago to a rekindled affection for Justin Trudeau after he delivered a truly remarkable [speech](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83f47jIS_D8) on Tuesday:
> Today the United States launched a trade war against Canada, their closest partner and ally, their closest friend. At the same time, theyre talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin, a lying, murderous dictator.
> Make that make sense.
> Canadians are reasonable and we are polite, but we will not back down from a fight—not when our country and the well-being of everyone in it is at stake. At the moment, the U.S. tariffs came into effect in the early hours of this morning, and so did the Canadian response.
He added, addressing Americans, “We dont want this. We want to work with you as a friend and ally. And we dont want to see you hurt, either. But your government has chosen to do this to you.”
Trudeau, who had been polling badly—owing to, among other things, concerns about the economy and immigration—[stood down in January](https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/why-justin-trudeau-had-to-step-down) as the leader of the Liberal Party. He has been serving as a caretaker Prime Minister until his party chooses a new leader, on Sunday (who will then stand in the federal election, which could be called for any time before October). That seems to have liberated him to take on Americas ridiculous “policy”; theoretically, the reason for the tariffs is to stanch the flow of fentanyl across the border, but, as Trudeau pointed out, there really is no flow to stop—less than half an ounce of the drug was seized by Canadian officials on the northern border in January, even after Ottawa had made a number of showily expensive efforts to bolster border defenses.
All Canadian politicians, in fact, are joining in the patriotic defense—Poilievre said this week that Trump had “stabbed Americas best friend,” and Ontarios premier, Doug Ford, a conservative in the Trumpian mode, who won election in 2018 on the inflation-fighting “Buck-a-beer” ticket (bringing the floor price of a beer down to a dollar), threatened to cut hydroelectricity supplies to the U.S.and to do it “with a smile.” But the polling indicates that Trumps absurdity may have roused Canadians to something like normalcy. In recent weeks, the Liberals have closed a twenty-point deficit and are now running level with Poilievre—theyre most likely to choose as their standard-bearer Mark Carney, a calm technocrat who, as governor of the Bank of England, shepherded the British economy through a Brexit that he himself had opposed.
As of Thursday afternoon Trump seemed to be wavering on [his tariffs](https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-financial-page/the-white-house-is-gaslighting-americans-about-donald-trumps-tariffs) on both Canada and Mexico. The stock markets reaction seems to have spooked his advisers, who look ready to claim some kind of victory (fentanyl repulsed, half an ounce at a time!) and retreat—at the urging of the auto industry, Trump backed off the tariffs on cars for a month, and farmers seeking fertilizer seem to have won some grace for potash. Trudeau, ridiculed repeatedly as “governor” by Trump, appears to have fought the giant with some success. If Carney or someone like him succeeds Trudeau in Ottawa, hell have a heavy role to play during the Trump years, of course, but hell also have a natural ally in the United Kingdoms Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, another progressive centrist. As our self-proclaimed king and his billionaire courtiers do their best to break Americas system, the English-speaking (and, in the Canadian case, proudly bilingual) sentinels of democracy will be in those royalist capitals that America once fought for its freedom.
I live in Vermont now, not far from the border—its odd but comforting to gratefully sniff the air of sanity that drifts down across the forty-fifth parallel. Long may the maple leaf fly above a sovereign and unbowed north. ♦
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# Code Name Caesar: The Man Who Photographed Assad's Torture Victims
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Heroes arent born. Theyre made. Like Caesar, a Syrian man whose real name is Farid Almazhan.
Up until spring 2011, Almazhan was an ordinary junior officer in the army of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, loyally carrying out orders at military police headquarters in northern Damascus. He was responsible for photographing the bodies of soldiers after they died in accidents, for example. "That was my job,” he says.
But then, he became the man who smuggled 26,342 high-definition photos of 6,679 dead bodies out of the country. A collection of images that make up the most damning evidence yet of the regimes suspected crimes against humanity. Should Assad one day be dragged into court, it will be in large part due to these pictures.
![](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/92c277a0-85a2-4336-abc4-5612569e5ec9_w335_r0.7502857142857143_fpx54.99_fpy33.75.jpg)
**The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 11/2025 (March 7th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL.**
That was almost 12 years ago. Its a winters day and Caesar is sitting in the living room of a narrow rowhouse with no name on the door in a town in northern France. A powerfully built 56-year-old, he is wearing a blue down vest and dark creased slacks. His brown eyes are glancing nervously through the room. He keeps the down vest on as if to be ready to move at a moments notice.
He has agreed to a meeting with DER SPIEGEL on this day, 10 years after coming to France and going underground, because he hopes to be able to regain some semblance of control over his own story now that Assad has been toppled and fled to Moscow. Control that he has lost little by little ever since going into exile and into hiding.
The war in Syria lasted 13 years, cost hundreds of thousands of lives and drove more than 6 million Syrians out of the country. It began with unrest in 2011 in the city of Daraa, where youth sprayed anti-regime graffiti on a wall and were arrested and tortured by the secret service. Those were the sparks that ignited the fury of the Syrians.
At the time, Almazhan was head of forensics for the military police in Damascus, and he and his team, right at the beginning of the uprising, received a new assignment: No longer were they only responsible for photographing the bodies of soldiers, but they were also to document the horribly disfigured bodies of civilians who had been killed in prison. Young men. The elderly. Children. Later it would be entire families. Almahzan spent two long years using his camera to log the daily tyranny the regime visited upon his fellow citizens. The Syrian security apparatus kept meticulous records of its atrocities.
![Whistleblower Farid Almazhan in Washington, D.C.](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/b176a52b-eacb-428e-8840-25504f4f174c_w488_r1_fpx50_fpy50.jpg "Whistleblower Farid Almazhan in Washington, D.C.")
Whistleblower Farid Almazhan in Washington, D.C.
Foto: Privat
![Former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/b989e851-166a-4f06-ac49-7b79704c713a_w488_r1.5_fpx59.98_fpy49.96.jpg "Former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad")
Former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad
Foto: Syrian Presidency / AP / picture alliance
Caeser would later tell the U.S. criminal law expert David Crane of his "surprise” at the regimes "unshakeable sense of complete impunity.” Now retired, Crane had been a chief prosecutor for the United Nations and, together with his team of experts, was the first to investigate the authenticity of Caesars story and his photos after he fled Syria. On January 21, 2014, they published the "Caesar Report,” which sealed Assads status as an international pariah. The vast majority of world leaders no longer wanted to meet with Assad for political talks.
And Farid Almazhan, the former mid-level military man, became Caesar, a leading Assad adversary. Crane gave him the alias to protect his identity.
"I had always known that Syria was a dictatorship,” says Caesar on this winter day in the nameless rowhouse in northern France. "But it seemed to me to be the lesser evil, better than chaos or extremism.”
Almazhan is sitting on an oversized sofa hugging the rooms inside corner like a U. The shelves are full of books written in Arabic script, and colorful foil letters still glitter on the ceiling beam spelling out Eid Mubarak, blessed feast leftover from the festival in summer marking the end of Ramadan.
![Mass graves exhumed near the city of Daraa in December 2024](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/31788eeb-c76f-45ae-aaf2-9f3a42853782_w520_r1.4627343392775491_fpx65.62_fpy49.98.jpg "Mass graves exhumed near the city of Daraa in December 2024")
Mass graves exhumed near the city of Daraa in December 2024
Foto: Bekir Kasim / Anadolu / picture alliance
It is his sisters home. Almazhan himself lives a few streets away. Without her, whose codename, Cinderella, we will use here, and without her husband Ussama Uthman, who came out with his true identity four days after Assads fall, there likely never would have been a hero by the name of Caesar. Nor, perhaps, would this meeting with the DER SPIEGEL team have taken place a discussion lasting just over eight hours, of which Caesar will only be present for 26 minutes.
Almazhan sinks into the sofa, beads of sweat forming on his forehead. He seems tense, as though it wasnt just the camera that captured the corpses of those who had been tortured, starved and shot, but also his entire body.
"Farid changed a lot during that period. He just wanted to get out."
Ussama Uthman
"I had always wanted a quiet life,” he says, kneading his large hands together. "I was never interested in politics.” But then, he says, he became witness to the largest political crime in the 21st century to that point. He saw horrific scenes in the countrys morgues and he realized: "Assad is the evil. Does a reasonable ruler do such a thing to his people just because they demonstrate peaceably for freedom and dignity?”
As a member of the military police, he says, he was part of the state apparatus complicit in the injustice. "I couldnt do it anymore.”
In spring 2011, Uthman, his friend and brother-in-law, convinced Almazhan not to leave the army. "Farid changed a lot during that period,” says Uthman. He grew angry quickly and had trouble sleeping. "He just wanted to get out.”
### Fifty Dead Bodies a Day
Uthman, 58, is sitting on the other end of the sofa, a man with a graying beard wearing a traditional felt cap. He says he immediately recognized the importance of the photos his friend was telling him about every day and encouraged him to keep going, beseeching him to make copies. "In three months, it will all be over.”
From May 2011 to August 2013, Almazhan and his team photographed as many as 50 dead bodies each day. They needed up to 30 minutes for each one. They no longer had time to photograph the dead from five different angles, as the military police bureaucracy called for, but only from three or four due to the time pressures.
![Sednaya Prison just outside of Damascus was notorious for torture](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/4cdbb574-f3cf-4fa0-be19-b4504d29f7a0_w488_r1.25_fpx51.2_fpy50.jpg "Sednaya Prison just outside of Damascus was notorious for torture")
Sednaya Prison just outside of Damascus was notorious for torture
Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
Uthman opens up his notebook and shows a photo of dead bodies stacked in the hallway of a military hospital. In another image, they are lying in a garage entryway. During this period, says Uthmann, Almazhan and his team would drive from their headquarters to Military Hospital 601 in Mezze to photograph the dead. The hospital was in western Damascus, near the presidential palace. "Here, on the hill, you can seen Assads residence,” says Uthman, pointing to a stately home.
To document the dead, soldiers would collect more and more bodies at the secret service prisons in Damascus, pack them into refrigerated trucks and bring them to the hospital. They were photographed, officially declared dead by forensics experts and given death certificates for the benefit of the families. The photos, he says, served as evidence for the Syrian president, who received daily updates about how many alleged terrorists had been eliminated, says Uthman. "After that, the bodies were buried in mass graves.”
### Tattoos of Assad
Nobody trusted anybody in Syria at that time, Uthman says. Soldiers were deserting, and it became less and less clear who the government actually considered to be an enemy. Christians were now also among the murder victims, who were widely considered to be supporters of the multi-confessional state. There were even Alawite victims, from the same religious group that the Assad family belongs to. Some of the dead bore a tattoo of the president on their breast as a symbol of their loyalty.
![Almazhan speaking to the Foreign Affairs Committee in the U.S. Senate in March 2020](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/31b26c0f-d0bd-4f78-8ddb-9a8996491400_w488_r1.562796833773087_fpx67.83_fpy50.jpg "Almazhan speaking to the Foreign Affairs Committee in the U.S. Senate in March 2020")
Almazhan speaking to the Foreign Affairs Committee in the U.S. Senate in March 2020
Foto: Joshua Roberts / REUTERS
What did he think when he saw the photos?
"I saw myself, my family. I was afraid that we could be next,” says Uthman.
His wife Cinderella walks into the room wearing a long skirt and a beige headscarf. She places homemade baklava on the table. She, too, took a significant risk back then.
When her brother came home from work at night, she was often the one who received the data, says her husband. As her young son slept, Uthman says, she would transfer the photos to an external hard drive, delete the data card and give it back to her brother before dawn. To make sure that nothing was lost, Uthman would also later upload the images to a cloud, encrypted and in low resolution. As he talks, his wife remains silent, a smile on her face.
Uthman says his wife isnt used to speaking with strangers. Her husband was the one who gave her the alias Cinderella.
"I am tired, but I know that it was all worth it. For Syria!” is all the 48-year-old says.
"If the security services had discovered that I was copying them, they would have punished me with death."
Farid Almazhan, alias Caesar
As time passed, Almazhans job grew increasingly dangerous, says Uthman. Starting in 2012, even the military police would be regularly searched as they left work bags, coats, but not shoes. Caesar would often hide the data card holding the pictures in the heel of a shoe. Or he would put it in his belt or in a loaf of bread.
On his computer, Uthman now opens a satellite photo showing the route Almazhan would take every evening. After leaving military police headquarters in Kabun, he would climb into a minibus and pass through several checkpoints in the part of Damascus under Assads control. His home in the town of Tall, meanwhile, was in rebel-held territory. As a regime soldier, he also had to fear the checkpoints set up by the rebels.
Caesar only managed to get through because he had good contacts with the opposition, says Uthman.
In contrast to his brother-in-law, says Uthman, he has been political since his youth in part because he still has clear memories of the Hama revolt in 1982, when the Sunni group Muslim Brotherhood rose up against the state. Hafez al-Assad, Bashars father, was president at the time, and he had tens of thousands of people arrested and up to an estimated 40,000 people killed. As a schoolchild, Uthman watched as his teacher was led away as an alleged sympathizer. "He never returned.” Back then, he says, there was no evidence of the crimes committed. "This time, they wont get away with it.”
After finishing school, he refused military service, he says, making a living with his own construction company, which hired Cinderella as a designer at some point.
"What Farid did, going to work every day in a security agency. I never could have done that,” he says.
At some point, he says, it was just a matter of time before the operation was exposed. Security personnel even searched his home in Tall to arrest his brother, who was also part of the opposition, says Uthman. His brother wasnt at home at the time, but they took Uthmans computer. They failed to find the photos because Cinderella had buried the hard drive beneath a bucket in the earthen cellar.
Uthman was the first to leave the country in spring 2013, followed by his wife and the children.
“The interest of Western states was rather limited. Instead of being interested in the end of Assads rule, they were only focused on the fight against Islamic State.”
Former UN prosecutor David Crane
Soldiers were banned from leaving the country during the war. It was only in August 2013, when Caesar was sent outside the Damascus city limits on a work assignment, that he was able to escape. The opposition smuggled him across the border into Jordan in a truck full of sacks of flour. They later had a friend bring the hard drive containing the photos out of the country.
The Syrian opposition had a global network, including powerful contacts in Washington, Ankara, Riyadh, Doha, Paris and Berlin. Many diplomats were given the opportunity to view the photographic material. "The interest of Western states was rather limited,” says Crane, the former UN prosecutor, in a telephone interview with DER SPIEGEL. "Instead of being interested in the end of Assads rule, they were only focused on the fight against Islamic State.”
An official appraisal of the photos was eventually commissioned by the government of Qatar. The emirate had supported the uprising against Assad from the very beginning, pumping billions of dollars into the effort. A law firm in London was awarded the contract and that firm turned to Crane, who put together a team of forensic experts and two additional ex-UN prosecutors to determine the authenticity of the photographic material and write a report.
Crane recalls first meeting the former military photographer on a sunny Monday in January 2014. He, two colleagues and the whistleblower from Damascus sat down together at a large round table in the Ritz-Carlton in Doha. He later reconstructed the conversation using his notes.
"Why did you do it?” he says he asked the man, whose identity was unknown.
"For the Syrians. For the people. So that the murderers would be held responsible and sentenced. For the family members,” Almazhan replied.
"Wasnt it extremely dangerous to copy the photos?” Cranes colleague, the British criminal lawyer Desmond de Silva, wanted to know.
"Yes, very dangerous. If the security services had discovered that I was copying them, they would have punished me with death.”
"Did you receive any money in exchange for the photos, or did you derive any other benefits?”
"No.”
"You performed this work solely for reasons of conscience?”
"Inshallah. How can you guarantee my safety?” the former soldier responded, according to Cranes notes. He says they could sense his fear.
"He is a simple, honest man,” says Crane. "We were extremely impressed by his motives.”
One week later, the report was published. In the 31-page document, they left no doubt about the authenticity of the photographers material. In an interview with the broadcaster Al Jazeera, de Silva described the report as a "smoking gun” showing evidence of "industrial-scale” killing by the Assad regime. "The pictures show over a period of years the systematic murder of detainees by starvation, by torture, the gouging out of eyes, the hideous beating of people, the mutilation of bodies.”
### A "PR Coup"
Crane and his colleagues gave interviews for days and the level of global disgust was immense. The pictures were sent around in ministries and shown at international conferences.
In New York, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and his U.S. counterpart John Kerry called the 15 members of the UN Security Council together for an informal special session. They wanted to bring Assads atrocities before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
![Uthman in front of a computer in France with original pictures taken by Caesar on the screen](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/1df5685a-989a-4af3-bf42-ffd3b2d01cf6_w488_r1.3333333333333333_fpx37.5_fpy50.jpg "Uthman in front of a computer in France with original pictures taken by Caesar on the screen")
Uthman in front of a computer in France with original pictures taken by Caesar on the screen
Foto: Susanne Koelbl / DER SPIEGEL
Even the Russian delegate seemed distraught after viewing the photos, say diplomats who were present. Russia had consistently backed Assad in the war.
But when the diplomats reconvened two months later to pass a resolution to refer Syria to the ICC, two veto powers voted against it. The Russian delegate called the images a "PR coup.” The Chinese argued that they didnt want to interfere.
"We couldnt believe that the world knew everything and didnt do anything."
Ussama Uthman
Hopes for justice were crushed by international realpolitik.
"We couldnt believe that the world knew everything and didnt do anything,” says Uthman.
Cinderella convinced her brother to travel to Washington in July 2014. "Thats the only way to make anything happen,” she urged him, according to Uthman. In the U.S., he testified in Congress before the House Foreign Affairs Committee wearing glasses and a blue raincoat, the hood pulled low over his face. Photos and videos were not permitted during the session. Afterwards, nothing happened.
### Asylum in France
While still in Syria, they thought their evidence would be enough to get the world to intervene in their countrys civil war, says Uthman. But they were neither able to protect their fellow Syrians from torture, barrel bombs and chlorine gas, nor could they embark on a new, better life overseas.
In the war, the friends had a shared project. In exile, they seemed to grow alienated from each other. The two men, says Uthman, increasingly disagreed when and how they should go public with their knowledge.
Quiet heroes like Caesar, Cinderella and Uthman usually dont survive persecution by the terrorist regimes of their home countries. But the Caesar team managed to do just that.
"The years in France werent easy,” says Uthman. "The French state offered us asylum and a certain amount of protection.”
But they and their families lived as targets of persecutions, constantly trying to remain invisible and always wary of the long arm of Assads secret service. They consistently avoided deeper friendships and new encounters. When the parents of other Syrian children made videos during school events and field trips, they would turn away. Almazhan felt that attending a French language course with other refugees would be too dangerous. Both families remain reliant on state support even today.
And then they were forced to stand by and watch as the pictures were wrested from them as other appropriated their story. A friend from the opposition, whom Uthman had taken into confidence and given a copy of the photos before fleeing, uploaded Caesars images to the internet without prior agreement and even shared details of the operation. Another Syrian man, who had emigrated to the United States in the 1990s and who had translated for Caesar during his trip to Washington, began presenting himself as Caesars spokesman and referred to himself as "keeper of the Caesar files.”
![Anwar Raslan, a former colonel in Assad's secret services, was convicted in 2022 in Koblenz, Germany and sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity.](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/61738e7d-29a1-453e-9790-862c54c4d734_w488_r1.4486940298507462_fpx42.1_fpy54.98.jpg "Anwar Raslan, a former colonel in Assad's secret services, was convicted in 2022 in Koblenz, Germany and sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity.")
Anwar Raslan, a former colonel in Assad's secret services, was convicted in 2022 in Koblenz, Germany and sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity.
Foto: Thomas Lohnes / AFP
![A torn-up portrait of former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in the presidential palace in Damascus in December](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/f7b43cbb-da3b-4b35-9729-05d5e7be5c70_w520_r1.5_fpx66.67_fpy50.jpg "A torn-up portrait of former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in the presidential palace in Damascus in December")
A torn-up portrait of former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in the presidential palace in Damascus in December
Foto: Ali Haj Suleiman / Getty Images
Certain lawyers and court cases did give the activists some hope, however: In 2022, a regional court in Koblenz convicted a former colonel in the Syrian secret services to life in prison on the strength of Caesars photos. The man, formerly the deputy head of the Khatib torture prison in Damascus, had previously fled to Germany. With the help of the pictures, his involvement in the killing of at least 27 prisoners, including a child, was proven.
"The trial is a milestone in the history of justice, and for the future investigation of Assads dictatorship,” says the Berlin-based legal expert Patrick Kroker, who works for the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. Should Assad be extradited and prosecuted one day, he says, the material will be useful for illuminating chains of command and determining where responsibility lies.
In 2019, Caesar again traveled to Washington. The U.S. government didnt send troops, but it did implement sanctions against Damascus. The law was called the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act.
From that point on, Syria was largely isolated internationally. The countrys currency, the Syrian lira, plunged in value and ultimately, 80 percent of Syrians in the country were dependent on humanitarian aid.
And the countrys suffering bore Caesars name.
"That was not our intention,” says Uthman.
A young girl with dark curls suddenly runs into the living room and snuggles up to her father. "My sunshine.” Uthmans daughter has never seen her parents homeland.
### The Word "Amnesty"
In December 2024, things began moving quickly, with rebels from Hayan Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) first taking Hama, then Homs, and then, within just a few days, Damascus. In the night before Sunday, December 8, Assad fled the country. Euphoria was everywhere as people tore pictures of the dictator off the walls of offices and cafés and destroyed his statues. Mass graves in Syria were exhumed after 54 years of dictatorship.
The rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, now the countrys interim president, wrote on Telegram: "We will not hesitate to hold accountable the criminals, murderers, security and army officers involved in torturing the Syrian people.”
But Caesars happiness about the end of the regime wouldnt last long. Because in al-Sharaas first speech, the word "amnesty” made an appearance.
![The view over Damascus from Mt. Qasioun](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/b780c9b9-6c5e-4654-a94f-dec734a950d2_w520_r1.25_fpx40_fpy50.jpg "The view over Damascus from Mt. Qasioun")
The view over Damascus from Mt. Qasioun
Foto: Johanna Maria Fritz / DER SPIEGEL
![Rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, now the countrys interim president, in Damascus in January](https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/78ca6996-921a-4a78-91ce-af80aaabcef1_w488_r1.500207039337474_fpx56.64_fpy44.97.jpg "Rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, now the countrys interim president, in Damascus in January")
Rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, now the countrys interim president, in Damascus in January
Foto: Syria's Transitional Government / AFP
"What did we do all this for?” he demands during his brief presence in the living room in France, his voice trembling.
He says he just recently received a call from Damascus from the man who had translated for him in the U.S. The man said he was in the process of showing journalists in Damascus where exactly Caesar had been active. "Hey, where exactly was the morgue where you took the photos?” he asked.
"I want to say that I have never authorized anybody to speak in my name,” says Caesar angrily. "Write that!” They would be his final words before his sister Cinderella escorted him to the door. He would say nothing more on this day.
His brother-in-law Uthman is now on the phone every day with human rights activists in Syria, Washington and Berlin. He says he has to get to Damascus as fast as he can to somehow prevent amnesty from being extended to Assads security forces.
"But Im stuck here!” His residency status is currently unclear. He is unable to travel back to the homeland he fled.
Cinderella places a glass of tea in front of him and whispers soothingly into his ear.
Assad has found refuge with his family in Moscow, under the protection of Vladimir Putin. From Syria, meanwhile, the first stories are emerging of brutal lynchings of former government supporters.
It is not the kind of justice that Cinderella, Uthman and Caesar had been hoping for.
*With reporting by Bushra Alzoubi*
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Alias: [""]
Tag: ["🥉", "🇺🇸", "🏈", "🎓"]
Date: 2025-01-06
DocType: "WebClipping"
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp: 2025-01-06
Link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-12-20/college-football-insiders-reveal-secret-economy-of-nil
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# College Football Insiders Reveal Secret Economy of NIL
*This is the third story in the series Turf Wars, documenting how the pay-for-play era exploits many athletes.*
Sports agent Henry Organ answered a call in September from a mother looking to protect her son. Rated among the top 20 high school football recruits in California, he had committed months earlier to play for the University of Oklahoma. A team official had agreed that he'd be paid $300,000 his freshman year, his mother said, as long as he stopped visiting other schools.
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Tag: ["🫀", "🧠", "💽"]
Date: 2025-02-23
DocType: "WebClipping"
Hierarchy:
TimeStamp: 2025-02-23
Link: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/feb/08/elon-musk-chip-paralysed-man-noland-arbaugh-chip-brain-neuralink
location:
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^button-ElonMuskputachipinthisparalysedmansbrainShouldwebeamazedorterrifiedNSave
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# Elon Musk put a chip in this paralysed mans brain. Now he can move things with his mind. Should we be amazed - or terrified?
Noland Arbaughs life changed in a fraction of a second in June 2016. He was a 22-year-old student, working at a kids summer camp in upstate New York, when he went swimming in a lake. He cant tell me exactly what happened, but thinks one of his friends must have accidentally struck him very hard in the side of his head as they ran into the water and plunged beneath the surface.
When he woke up face down in the water, unable to move or breathe, Noland immediately knew he was paralysed. But he didnt panic. He felt no fear at all, he says. “You never know what youre going to do in those high-stress situations. I found out that day that its hard to shake me. I am very, very calm under pressure.”
Elon Musk would ultimately turn this quality to his advantage when, after nearly eight years of being quadriplegic, Noland agreed to allow the worlds richest man to implant an electronic chip into his brain. In January 2024, [Noland became the first human recipient](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/20/elon-musk-neuralink-brain-chip-patient-chess) of a [brain-computer interface (BCI)](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/19/elon-musk-neuralink-human-trials-brain-implant) developed by Musks company, Neuralink. If it worked, it would allow him to control a computer using only the power of his mind.
Only four months after he first heard about Neuralink, Noland was on an operating table, with a purpose-built robot poised to insert the N1 chip into his motor cortex. The stakes could not have been higher for him: he was risking infection, haemorrhage and [brain damage](https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/neuralink-musk-fda/). “My brain is the last part of myself that I really feel I have control over,” he tells me from his wheelchair at his kitchen table in Yuma, Arizona. But the stakes for humankind, too, were very great: if Neuralink succeeds, the worlds most powerful billionaire will have fulfilled his science-fiction-fuelled dreams of melding minds with machines.
What kind of person chooses to be Elon Musks guinea pig? And, once the experiment is over, what happens next for Noland, and for the rest of us?
---
Nolands world is in a different universe to Musks. Now 30, he lives in the same simple, single-storey house in the dusty military town in the Sonoran desert where he grew up. He left for an international studies degree at [Texas A&M University](https://today.tamu.edu/2024/06/03/aggie-is-neuralinks-first-brain-implant-participant/), only to move back after his accident so that his mother, Mia, stepfather and half-brother could take care of him. The words “Be grateful for small things, big things and everything in between” are stencilled on the kitchen wall. Goats, chickens and a plump turkey named Hope roam the back yard. Two golden retrievers and an enormous goldendoodle pad around the kitchen, occasionally pushing their noses into my lap.
Noland has an electric wheelchair that he can operate using a mouthpiece; his forearms lie still on the brightly upholstered armrests. Every so often, Mia reaches forward to uncurl his fingers, or offer him a sip of coffee from a straw in a Big Gulp cup, or swat away the flies that buzz around his face in the merciless Arizona heat. He asks her to roll up his shirt to show me a sleeve of tattoos on his arm. “I got it done after my accident because it didnt hurt,” he grins. Two bracelets are inked on to his wrist; a permanent rendering of ones given to him by the girls who pulled him out of the water in 2016.
Before his accident, Noland was outdoorsy and athletic, playing football, American football, basketball, rugby and golf. He liked to go hunting and shooting deer with his family. He was musical, too, playing bass in a rock band, and he performed in high school theatre productions. He loved Xbox and PlayStation, but was never really into tech. A shelf next to us is still crammed with the board games he used to play: Settlers of Catan; The Game of Life.
Mia worked at their church, and Noland was a student leader there. His faith was a huge part of his life, growing up. “I always wanted to make it through college as a Christian,” he says. “That lasted about a week. I was sleeping around, I was doing drugs, I was drinking a lot.” He sees his accident as divine intervention. “It was God pulling me back. I really do think that it was the best thing that could have happened to me.”
The blow to Nolands head didnt break his neck it dislocated it, and his vertebra went back into place immediately but it left his spinal cord severely damaged. The higher up a serious spinal cord injury is, the more extensive the paralysis. Superman actor Christopher Reeve shattered his first and second vertebra, and could not hold up his head without assistance. Nolands injury was around his fourth and fifth vertebrae, so he can move his head and shoulders, and express himself with nods and shrugs, which he often does. He uses the word “luck” a lot. “I was really lucky that I wasnt ventilated for my entire life,” he says. “I was really lucky that I didnt have a traumatic brain injury.”
At first, there were “a lot of promising signs” that his condition might improve, but he ultimately never recovered much movement. At the beginning of his adult life, he was facing a lifetime of dependency.
“I have to rely on my family for *everything*: to give me a shower, to help with bowel movements and urination.” Noland was a smoker, and if he wanted a cigarette he would have to ask someone to take him outside, put one in his mouth, light it and get rid of the ash for him. He liked to smoke weed, too (its legal in Arizona).
“I didnt like him smoking, but hes an adult. It was hard,” Mia tells me. She looks over to him. “Im your mom. Of course, Im going to give my two cents.”
“Im a grown man,” Noland says. “To have to rely on other people to do it it really, *really* sucked.” He reluctantly gave up a couple of years ago, unable to bear the guilt of exposing his carers to secondhand smoke.
“Another thing people take for granted, just being able to text someone privately, is not easy as a quadriplegic. If I want to dictate something, its like yelling out to the world what Im saying …”
I love you!’” shouts Mia.
“… I just didnt have a way to build my life privately.”
There was an iPad Noland could use. “Id have a stick that I would hold in my mouth, with a little piece of conductive fabric on the end of it, and I would touch my iPad and use it in that way. I did that for years.” But it was frustrating. He had to be put into the right position by other people. Texting with the mouth stick was very slow, and if Noland wanted to use dictation he had to speak with the stick in his mouth. If it fell out, hed have to call for help. “Its not very easy. And then there wasnt a whole lot I could do on it. I mean its an iPad. You cant do all the same things you can do on a computer.”
He asks Mia to open his laptop in front of him on the kitchen table. He turns towards the screen.
“Implant connect,” he says.
And he begins to play chess, moving pieces across the board with swift, deft cursor movements, while his hands remain motionless on the armrests of his wheelchair. Hes been playing against some of the Neuralink engineers for a few months, he tells me as he takes someones pawn. “None of them are very good, so its not too hard.”
Next, hes browsing the internet, opening X, checking his DMs, composing a message by directing his cursor across a virtual keyboard. Now hes slaying baddies, darting back and forth with a reapers scythe in a game called Vampire Survivors. “I love this game,” he says, looking over to me while keeping control of the cursor. He completes a level and digital confetti rains down the screen.
Its extraordinary, but also totally unremarkable: Noland is using a computer like anyone else does; hes just not moving his body at all. “Sometimes I forget how impressive it is, because its so natural to me,” he says, shrugging again.
In some respects, Noland is *better* at using a computer than the rest of us. When he first received the Neuralink implant, he tells me, all he wanted to do was play video games. He challenged his friends to a multiplayer version of Civilization VI, called Red Death. “It is absolutely a game of speed, a test of speed. Whoevers quickest to the draw wins. And I was beating them.” His eyes are wide. “It blew my mind. Just that one little taste made me realise that this technology is going to change the world.”
---
Theres nothing new about BCIs. The first experiments involving chips and animal brains began [in the late 1960s](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7824107/). The gold standard in human BCI design, the Utah Array a square matrix of needles inserted 1.5mm into the brain was developed in 1992. Two decades before Nolands surgery, in 2004, a quadriplegic man called [Matthew Nagle](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4396387.stm) became the first person to have a chip implanted inside his skull. While no regulator has yet allowed BCIs to be used outside an experimental setting, enough people have them for an [online forum, BCI Pioneers](https://bcipioneers.org/), to exist for the community.
But Noland is the first to try out the chip produced by an entrepreneur whose explicit aim is to find a way to feed information *into* the brain, as well as receiving from it a man who has proved to be all too willing to tip the scales of social media to beam his thoughts into millions of peoples phones with real-world consequences, promoting far-right figures in [the UK](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/02/elon-musk-tommy-robinson-release-angers-labour-mps) [and Germany](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr7errxp5jmo), and fuelling [riots across England](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/05/no-10-criticises-elon-musk-post-x-riots) last summer.
The theory behind BCIs is relatively simple: they read the electrical signals produced by neurons and turn them into computer commands. (The brain cells of a quadriplegic person are still firing, after all, but the signals are prevented from travelling down the spinal cord.) BCIs can connect to the brain either through a wearable device, such as a cap, or by being surgically attached to brain tissue. The closer the device is to the brain cells, the more accurately it can translate the signals.
Neuralinks N1 chip is wireless and aimed to be smaller and more powerful than any that had gone before. (Its about the size of a 50p coin.) While the Utah Array had 100 electrodes reading signals from targeted neurons, [the brochure](https://neuralink.com/pdfs/PRIME-Study-Brochure.pdf) used to recruit Noland which resembles an ad for an Apple product boasts of “1,024 electrodes distributed across 64 threads, each thinner than a human hair”. Those 64 threads are inserted “reliably and efficiently” 3.5mm into the cortex of the brain by Neuralinks R1 surgical robot.
In his authorised biography of Musk, Walter Isaacson describes how the billionaire first began thinking about implanting chips in brains in 2016, when he was travelling in a car with his chief of staff, Sam Teller, and became frustrated by how long it took for him to type a message on his iPhone. “Imagine if you could think into the machine,” Musk said, “like a high-speed connection directly between your mind and your machine.” Musk immediately asked Teller to find him a neuroscientist who could help him understand BCIs.
Many of Musks ventures have been influenced by his love of science fiction, from reusable rocket ships (SpaceX), electric cars and [humanoid robots](https://www.tesla.com/en_gb/AI) (Tesla) to [hyperloops for mass transit in autonomous pods](https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop) (The Boring Company). Neuralink is inspired by the Culture series of novels by Iain M Banks, which Musk has [singled out](https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1873164495331442991) [for praise](https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1837908854950003110). Banks describes a brain implant called a “neural lace” that is implanted in childhood, and can read and store every thought and sensation a person experiences. “When I first read Banks, it struck me that this idea had a chance of protecting us on the artificial intelligence front,” Musk told Isaacson.
“Everything that youve ever experienced in your whole life smell, emotions all of those are electrical signals,” he [told podcaster Lex Fridman](https://lexfridman.com/elon-musk-and-neuralink-team-transcript/) in August. “If you trigger the right neuron, you could trigger a particular scent. You could certainly make things glow. You can think of the brain as a biological computer.” As such, the brain could be harnessed or hacked.
Musk hopes the enhanced human brain will be able to keep one step ahead of or at least keep up with computers. “If we can find good commercial uses to fund Neuralink, then in a few decades, we will get to our ultimate goal of protecting us against evil AI by tightly coupling the human world to our digital machinery,” he told Isaacson. His first commercial target was augmenting people with quadriplegia.
Of the eight-strong team of neuroscientists and engineers who co-founded Neuralink in 2016, only one remains. Former employees have [complained of being under pressure](https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/25/elon-musk-neuralink-update-brain-machine-implants/) to produce results within rushed timelines. But those who stayed with the company were able to create the kind of eye-catching stunts Musk was looking for.
In an event [livestreamed on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVvmgjBL74w) in August 2020, Musk unveiled Gertrude the pig, who had been living with a Neuralink chip nestled under her skull for two months. He showed how Gertrudes movements were being read by the chip and wirelessly transmitted to a computer. “I could have a Neuralink right now and you wouldnt know,” Musk said. “Maybe I do.” (In response to the demo, MIT Technology Review said [Neuralink was simply “neuroscience theater”](https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/30/1007786/elon-musks-neuralink-demo-update-neuroscience-theater/).) Eight months later, Neuralink released a [video of a macaque named Pager](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsCul1sp4hQ) playing the video game Pong using only the power of his mind. When he scored well, he was rewarded with a sip of banana smoothie.
The company was swiftly [dogged with allegations of animal cruelty](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/15/elon-musk-neuralink-animal-cruelty-allegations), with a [Wired investigation](https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/) detailing vet records containing “gruesome portrayals of suffering endured by as many as a dozen of Neuralinks primate subjects”. (The US Department of Agriculture ultimately reported that it [could not find any violations of animal research rules](https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/regulator-says-found-no-animal-welfare-breaches-at-elon-musk-firm-beyond-2019-incident/articleshow/101965058.cms) when it inspected the facilities in 2023.)
In September 2023, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) [gave Neuralink an investigational device exemption](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/19/elon-musk-neuralink-human-trials-brain-implant) that allowed them to recruit participants for the first ever human trials. Neuralinks [Prime study](https://neuralink.com/blog/prime-study-progress-update-user-experience/) aimed to demonstrate that the NI implant was “safe and useful in daily life”. All they needed was the right human being.
---
In the years after his accident, Noland did whatever he could to increase his chances of regaining some of what he had lost. He added his name to the largest database for spinal cord injury studies in North America, but was never chosen to take part. He thinks it was because he was honest about being a smoker on the questionnaire. He was told that if he tried to move as much as possible wiggling his fingers, rotating his wrists his brain might create new neural pathways. Night after night, hed lie in bed with his eyes closed, focusing on trying to move. “You think: Oh, Im finally moving I can feel myself moving! You open your eyes and look, and nothing is happening. Its really frustrating.”
Then, on 19 September 2023, a friend rang him. “Hes a big Elon Musk fan. He knew all about Neuralink. And when he saw that the human trials had opened up, the first thing he did was give me a call.”
At that time, Noland says he only knew “what the average person knows” about Musk: “Tesla owner, SpaceX, Starlink, richest man in the world sort of thing. Darling of the left for years, spoke out about a couple of things, the left basically turned against him, and then he started making his way towards the right.” He knew nothing about Neuralink, but his view on Musk was clear: “He is one of the most impressive men that have lived in my lifetime. People can not like him for a lot of different reasons, but what hes doing pushing the boundaries of space travel, the cars, the internet its incredible.”
His friend helped him fill out the online application on the day the trial opened. His first interview was just three days later, on a Friday. The following Monday, he had his second interview.
Determined to stand out, Noland chose the first available slot for every interview, but he didnt hold out much hope of being chosen. “Other quadriplegics go out and do things with their lives; I came home after my accident and lived with my parents. I thought theyd probably want someone more impressive.”
Its obvious to me that he is the perfect candidate: a warm, likable, earnest person whose future was taken from him by a twist of fate at the start of his adult life. From a PR perspective, hed clearly be a fantastic choice. But Noland really doesnt see it.
There were several rounds of interviews and assessments. Noland was sent to the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, for eight hours of scans, blood tests, urine tests, memory tests and psychological evaluations. The Neuralink team spoke to Mia, too. “They asked if we had any concerns, questions, doubts or anything,” she says. “Noly used to send me stuff to read. I didnt want to know every detail. I just wanted to be as supportive as I could.”
Noland agreed to be part of Neuralinks Prime study for six years; he had to sign a 35-page consent form, which included what he describes as a “laundry list” of risks. In early January 2024, he got the call telling him he had officially been selected to be the first person to have a Neuralink chip. His surgery would be in two weeks.
Even though it all happened so fast, Noland said he was ready for anything. “Im good at lying there and thinking through every possible scenario. I told my parents: If I have any sort of brain injury, then I dont want to live with you any more I want you to put me in a home. I did everything I needed to do. I was so at peace.”
“I got a little bit worried and nervous, because hes already been through so much,” Mia tells me, making a twisting motion with her fists over her stomach. “But you just look at Noland and you think: Hes got this; hes excited. That helped a lot.”
Musk was supposed to be at the Barrow Neurological Institute on the morning of Nolands surgery, on 29 January 2024. “I guess something happened with his plane a malfunction or something so he couldnt make it,” Noland says. They FaceTimed just before he went into theatre. “It lasted maybe a minute. Hey, Im really excited. Thank you. This is such a cool thing, what youre doing, its awesome. Thats what *I* was saying to *him*,” he says, smiling. “He was like: Youre gonna be making history, things like that.” Noland was unfazed to be speaking to the worlds richest man. “Hes a regular guy just much more impressive and a little bit more eccentric.”
The surgery took less than two hours. He shows me a picture on his phone of the large L-shaped incision on his shaved head. Theres nothing to see now: shaggy dark hair covers the scar. “They took out a piece of my skull and then replaced my skull with the chip. My skin is over the top,” he says, letting me feel the spongy place on his scalp where there is no longer any bone.
Musk arrived with his entourage when Noland was still groggy from the anaesthetic. He thanked Noland, and told him the surgery had been a success. A little later, a 10-strong Neuralink team came in to wake up the implant. When they switched it on and could see it had connected with a tablet that was receiving real-time information from Nolands brain cells, some of them burst into tears. “I was trying to move my finger, like Id done a million times, and I saw a big yellow spike \[on the screen\].” The whole room erupted with applause.
Next, Noland and the chip had to learn how to work together: the human learning how to create the best signals with his mind, the computer how to correctly decode them. Noland still does four hours a day of what he calls “session” work for Neuralink, performing exercises such as clicking targets on a screen to fine-tune the cursor control.
But it quickly became second nature to him. At first, he used what he calls “attempted” movements: he would try to move his hand and the cursor would move where he was trying to get his hand to go. But then he became able to direct it with “imagined” movements: he was no longer trying to move anything apart from the cursor itself.
“Youre not thinking about doing it youre just *willing* the cursor to go wherever you want.” His eyes are wide. “When I first moved it with imagined movement, it blew my mind. It was crazy. That was two weeks in, and I was giddy all day. That was when it all became real to me.”
It sounds like telekinesis, I say. Noland shrugs. “I called it telekinesis youre moving something with your mind but Elon Musk called it telepathy, because Im communicating with a computer through my mind.”
Musks goal is not to allow quadriplegics to move things, after all its for minds to have seamless interfaces with computers.
---
But it has been far from seamless for Noland. At first, he was frustrated that he had to stop using the implant every five or six hours so he could charge it. But the Neuralink team managed to find a fix, and now he can use the N1 continuously, wearing a baseball cap fitted with a coil that has been charged from the mains whenever the battery is low.
Then, a month after his surgery, the worst happened: the implant began to stop working. He started to lose control of the cursor. It came to a head when he travelled to Fremont to visit Neuralinks California facility and demonstrate his new skills. Noland assumed the team must have tinkered with the software. “I was like: You guys need to fix this. Im here to play Mario Kart with Neuralink. I cant have you guys messing around with things right before I do that.’”
Just before he arrived, the team informed him that when theyd performed the surgery they hadnt factored in how much his brain moves, pulsing with each heartbeat. The threads had started retracting as soon as they had been implanted; now 85% of them were out of place, their electrodes picking up nothing at all.
“It was really bad. I was getting it all taken away from me. That was *really*, really hard,” says Noland.
“He cried,” says Mia. “We gave him time. He didnt want us around him.”
Noland nods. “I cried in my van right before we went over to Neuralink.”
He asked the team to “do whatever they needed to do to fix it. Go in and do another surgery.” But the neurosurgeon was reluctant to operate on him again, he says. Instead, Neuralink engineers tweaked the software, so that the remaining 15% of the threads read groups of neuron signals, instead of signals from individual cells. So far, it works.
Nolands main frustration now is how he types by moving his cursor to click individual letters on a keyboard. Its nowhere near the kind of mind-to-screen text output that Musk dreamed of when he founded Neuralink. “We have gotten up to almost 25 words a minute, but dictation is still better. Well see how that goes over time.”
He knows that his Neuralink chip will always be the worst. In August 2024, the [company announced](https://neuralink.com/blog/prime-study-progress-update-second-participant/) that a second trial participant an anonymous quadriplegic man who has chosen not to meet or speak to Noland had received an implant. With his superior chip, “Alex” is able to design three-dimensional objects using the power of his mind. None of his threads have retracted. Last month, [Musk revealed](https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-neuralink-brain-computer-interface-9dbc92206389f27fd032825cf1597ee5) that a third also unnamed person had now received a Neuralink chip.
Is Noland envious of those who will come after him? “A little bit,” he concedes. “Im really excited for them though.”
---
Although relentlessly positive, Noland recognises the dark possibilities of the technology lodged in his brain. Neuralink says it doesnt monitor his brain or track what he does online, but warned him that someone might be able to “reverse engineer” the data produced by his neurons to work out what hes been looking at. “With that in mind, I keep it very PG,” he tells me.
On the day of the US presidential election, [Noland tweeted a headline](https://x.com/ModdedQuad/status/1853907092802793706) from the satirical website the Onion: “Neuralink Patient Unable To Stop Hand From Voting For Trump.” “So true,” he joked. (He voted for Trump of his own free will.) Five days later, he [asked his followers](https://x.com/moddedquad/status/1855441948972048826?s=43) what the “biggest moral and ethical concerns” of a Neuralink implant could be.
“Kids might use it to cheat in school,” one responded.
“Hacking them and taking over a user,” said another.
“The ability for others to read your mind … and interfere with it,” said a third.
Why ask the question? “Its something I get asked constantly, and I dont have good answers.” But hes clearly thought about it. When I ask him what a bad use of a BCI might be, he reels off a list. “Mind control, body control. At this point, its only reading my signals, but it will be able to write at some point, and sending signals into the brain can be *scary*. You could make people see anything, experience different feelings, emotions, hallucinations …”
Musk is excited about a future where Neuralink sends signals to the brain. He explored the possibilities with Isaacson. “Want to see infrared, ultraviolet? How about radio waves or radar?” [In a presentation in 2022](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YreDYmXTYi4), Musk described how the ability for Neuralink to write on the brain would allow someone born blind to see. He also said he was “confident that it is possible to restore full body functionality to somebody who has a severed spinal cord” using chips implanted below the site of injury.
The billionaires extraordinary ambitions have so far been able to go almost unchecked. Neuralink hasnt registered its human trials at the publicly accessible database ClinicalTrials.gov, and has made very few details about its research public. This avoidance of external scrutiny has led medical ethicists to [describe Neuralink as “science by press release”](https://www.thehastingscenter.org/the-neuralink-patient-behind-the-musk/). Musks impatience for eye-catching results is likely to increase now that Neuralink has serious competition from other startups, both in [the US](https://www.wired.com/story/the-race-to-put-brain-implants-in-people-is-heating-up/) and [in China](https://english.news.cn/20240425/331ce62ba74e40908b35e26e89657fd5/c.html), where companies are [focusing on non-therapeutic BCIs](https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CSET-Bibliometric-Analysis-of-Chinas-Non-Therapeutic-Brain-Computer-Interface-Research.pdf) that could enhance cognition among the general population.
In August, Musk said that [hundreds of millions of people](https://lexfridman.com/elon-musk-and-neuralink-team-transcript/#chapter1_elon_musk) will have a Neuralink implant within the next two decades. “If its extremely safe, and you can have superhuman abilities lets say you can upload your memories, so you wouldnt lose memories then I think probably a lot of people would choose to have it,” he added. This is either the ultimate in wearable tech or Black Mirror dystopia, depending on your point of view. “I might get it …” Joe Rogan, the US podcaster, remarked last year. “I dont want to be the only person who cant read minds.”
It might all be hype and bluster. But its possible to imagine a future where the sum total of all human knowledge is available to anyone with a brain implant. They could switch off their anxiety or their empathy as required. With total recall of every moment in their lives and every piece of information they ever encountered, every problem solved before the conscious mind could consider it, life for these people would be pretty much frictionless. In that world, wouldnt there be incredible inequality between those who had BCIs and those who didnt?
“If you think about all technology today, there are people who have the money to use things and people who dont,” Noland says when I put this to him. “I know Elon wants to produce it to scale, and make it cheap and affordable.” He shrugs. “Its not fair, but life isnt fair.”
---
FDA rules mean Neuralink cant pay Noland for his participation in the research, or contribute to the cost of his care. His house isnt fully accessible; for the last eight years, he has been showering outside in his back yard. “Theres no privacy. But we didnt have the money to build a shower for me. Thats something that weve always wanted.”
Since becoming the human face of Neuralink, Noland has amassed more than 128,000 followers on X. In November, he announced that he was going to do a [72-hour fundraising livestream](https://x.com/moddedquad/status/1859116842453004745?s=43): people could watch him using the brain implant in real time and donate so his family could build a new house that would meet his needs. He raised $750,000 over those three days, he tells me, but most of it came from the “crypto community” and will be subject to huge taxes when he tries to cash it out. Hes still trying to raise funds.
Noland dreams of being able to connect to a Tesla car and Teslas Optimus humanoid robot. “It would give me the ability to have a 24-hour caregiver that I can control, to do *anything* for me, and I would be able to get around.”
You could start smoking again, I say.
“I could *totally* start smoking again. I could teach the Optimus robot how to roll cigarettes!”
“What the heck are you encouraging him to do? Jenny, you can leave now,” says Mia, laughing.
The reality of Nolands future looks far more prosaic. When the study ends, Neuralink will either remove his implant or simply switch it off. Surely he will want an upgrade then?
“They cant promise me anything,” he says. “Any sort of promises would incentivise me to stay in the study.” Hed like to go back to college to complete his degree, and then use his skills as a spokesperson to become an advocate for the growing BCI community. If anyone ever works out a way to restore movement to people with quadriplegia, Noland says it will probably be too late for him: his muscles have already atrophied so much.
“Im content with my lot in life,” he says. “I was before Neuralink, and I will be again after. Ill find a way.”
As I pack up my things, Noland tells me that he calls his chip Eve. Hes always liked that name. “Neuralink and I, were on the eve of something great, so that works out perfect, too. Also Adam and Eve. God created Adam, and then gave Adam a helper, who is Eve. Im Adam, in this scenario, and Eve is my helper. Together they cursed humanity. Maybe I will do the same, with Eve.”
He shoots me a bright grin. “I dont think enough people enjoy that joke as much as I do.”
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Date: 2025-03-02
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TimeStamp: 2025-03-02
Link: https://www.eater.com/24353782/lolfood-kid-food-dining-trend-pizza-hot-dog
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# Everything Sucks. At Least There Are Jalapeño Poppers.
The pizza rolls on the menu really sealed it for me. Id seen other inklings that food these days was trending a little comfort first, brain second. But perusing the menu of the [buzzy Corner Store](https://www.grubstreet.com/article/the-corner-store-nyc-restaurant-review.html) and seeing five-cheese pizza rolls served with ranch solidified my instinct that something was up, and just made me cackle out loud. I think thats the point. It was already goofy that one of Manhattans hottest new bars was run by the guys behind Houlihans, but putting straight-up pizza rolls on the menu — not pizza rolls with locally made cheese, not pizza rolls with a Korean influence, basically just... Totinos — is just so damn funny. And everywhere I looked there was another dish made of our simplest, sincerest, college party dreams.
At Corner Store you can also snack on spinach artichoke dip like youre at a Super Bowl party. In Brooklyn, [Blue Hour](https://ny.eater.com/2024/6/12/24175598/blue-hour-opening-gas-station-bushwick) serves its take on a Taco Bell Crunchwrap out of a gas station, and at the sleek and sophisticated Time and Tide, theres a [giant honking Goldfish cracker](https://www.instagram.com/p/DFLJIU8RlF5/). At Portlands [Take Two](https://www.taketwopdx.com/drinks-food) you can get jalapeño popper arancini and waffle fries smothered in Bolognese. Wen Wen served a truly [obscene chicken Parm sandwich](https://www.instagram.com/p/DEFuZ6Zx8y9/?img_index=1) in Taiwan, christening it “[stupid food](https://www.instagram.com/p/DEVDhlSxMGO/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link).” [Chicagos Void](https://voidchicago.com/) serves “Spaghetti Uh-Os” out of a can, tableside. Los Angeless [Evil Cooks](https://www.instagram.com/evil_cooks/?hl=en) makes a “McSatan” bacon cheeseburger taco. [Chain threw a whole festival](https://la.chainfest.com/) celebrating winky riffs on fast food. [Everywhere has a smash burger](https://www.eater.com/2024/12/16/24322393/year-of-smash-burger-america-trend-2024), and on TikTok, everyone just wants to find the [best chicken Caesar wrap](https://www.tiktok.com/@brittanyroseblog/video/7449951042705362222?q=viral%20chicken%20caesar%20wrap&t=1735829416777) and eat it out of their car.
Americans have never not wanted things like mozzarella sticks and chicken tenders. But lately there has been an air of fervor around the simple, the lightly childish, the dont-make-me-think-too-hard foods. The reverence for craft, artisanal, personal foods has led to a certain exhaustion with fussiness, and an embrace of what is good and uncomplicated. We dont want to be challenged. We dont want to think. We just want to laugh at the sheer stupidity when we see the menu. This is LOLfood.
Margaret Eby, author and deputy food editor of the *Philadelphia Inquirer*, noted that during a recent service at the new “dinner party” restaurant [Scampi](https://www.instagram.com/scampi_philly/?hl=en), the chef brought out hot dogs. “She intuitively understood that people want this beautiful handmade pasta that you went to Sicily and studied for, plus a hot dog,” she said. Scampis website looks like a [90s 8-bit game](https://lizlaugh.love/?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaajxrV8_RnJBUgh3R5PEvnGSHxweXhOSwNei9bk9uWqZ5JvEbcaob9X-p4_aem_alHp6ZxaGElJCzKcILG7uA), and serving a hot dog next to handmade tortelli is nothing short of a punchline. “When you present someone with something thats so connected to barbecues and baseball games and just chilling out, it activates this pleasure center. Like *oh, were having fun*.”
Its all comfort food, but with a slightly trolling “lol wouldnt it be funny” edge; fun is always at the forefront. Much like the 2000s lolcat internet memes, this isnt about making smart jokes. Its about the most basic humor that still gets a laugh.
![](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAUEBAAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs)
“At the very beginning we knew that we wanted some, pardon the pun, cheesy classics on the menu,” says Blake Foster, owner and operator of [Gabbianos](https://www.instagram.com/p/C-YyMmVSBAU/?img_index=1) in Portland, which opened in 2022 and serves mozzarella stick shot glasses filled with marinara. Nicknamed “shotzarellas,” they were the perfect combination of straightforwardly goofy and earnestly good. According to co-owner Heather Wallberg, Gabbianos served 29,000 individual cups last year.
At Time and Tide, chef Danny Garcia says the Big Goldfish is about playing with the memories and associations customers are already coming in with. “Its incredibly special when you can sit down at a restaurant and bite into something, and it takes you back to a place as a kid,” he says. The giant cracker is obviously a reference to the snack that smiles back — he says he and pastry chef Renata Ameni saw mini Goldfish, and thought how funny it would look in the opposite direction. But he says Time and Tide in general is also “pulling a lot of strings from Red Lobster.” The cracker evokes the chains famous Cheddar Bay Biscuits, made with Old Bay butter and chives. For him, the fun is in being unpretentious. “I want to cook food that is approachable, but its also fun and delicious.”
Dani Kaplan, co-chef of Void, says the Spaghetti Uh-Os are also all about sparking “a kind of Proustian nostalgia, a familiarity of a time and place, while presenting a dish that is reimagined and elevated.” It hits the marks of fine dining — hand-rolled pasta Os, poured tableside, evocative of a properly made Caesar salad — but the familiarity its assuming is not with other fine dining experiences. Its with cheap, canned pasta for children.
Every trend is a reaction masquerading as a new idea. And we have had so many reactions over the past 15 or so years. Essentially, mass food trends ping between two different tracks — the comfort and the craft. Back in 2009, the recession caused everything to veer lowbrow. Every fine dining restaurant put a burger on the menu, and no dish was complete without bacon. It was an era of [Epic Meal Time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9FRSghXhDM) and KFC Double Downs, interspersed with lolcats asking if they can haz cheesburgers. But the rise of YouTube and the embrace of home cooking as a cost saver soon led to a homemade, artisanal boom, offering the idea that maybe snack foods made by international conglomerates werent the be-all-end-all of flavor. Think *Portlandia*, with every restaurant giving you the [life story of your heritage chicken](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G__PVLB8Nm4) and serving you [house-made charcuterie](https://ny.eater.com/2014/4/15/6246051/restaurant-review-robertas).
*Ping*, over to the poptimism of the late teens, rejecting again the persnickety craft movement, with the [reconsideration](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-accidental-american-genius-of-guy-fieri) ([or not](https://www.grubstreet.com/2016/09/maybe-its-not-time-to-reconsider-guy-fieri-after-all.html)) of Guy Fieri and all things unpretentious. *Pong*, to everyone developing parasocial relationships with the stars of the *Bon Appétit* test kitchen, and then, bolstered by COVID lockdown, making sourdough and growing their own scallions. *Ping* to [chaos cooking](https://www.eater.com/23331987/restaurant-dining-trends-chaos-cooking-fusion-cuisine), wild mashups of every cuisine that speaks to a chefs specific tastes, big and brash yes, but still something you had to think about and engage with to get the full story.
And now, *pong*. Fuck that, LOLfood says. Actually, Taco Bell rules just as it is, and Id rather eat spaghetti and meatballs (or Spaghetti Uh-Os). I want to be amused by the simplest things. Much of the embrace of what food critic Alan Sytsma calls “[kids menu food](https://www.grubstreet.com/article/everything-is-a-kids-menu-now.html?ref=bestfoodblog.net)” is a weariness with the excesses of chaos cooking and the general maximalist vibe, the everything everywhere all at once of it. This time, the juxtaposition is what makes it, the amusing image of a hot dog next to a glass of natural wine, the pizza roll in the chic, modern dining room. The setting can be elevated, this trend says, but the food should not be. The martini may be $20, but please, just give me a Goldfish that tastes like Red Lobster.
---
**This is in many ways** Maximalism On Recession. Its a practical response. Then as now, ingredients like potatoes and cheese and bacon were comparatively cheap for restaurants, and guaranteed crowd pleasers, which are needed on menus when diners are ever more cautious about spending. You know youre going to like shotzarella, even if youve never had it before. At its core this is an emotional reaction. “Were in uncertain times, and this is the time when we crave comfort food,” NPR food commentator Bonny Wolf [said in January 2009](https://www.npr.org/2009/01/11/99188114/2009-food-trends-a-side-dish-of-recession), noting *Gourmet* magazines cover that month was of spaghetti and meatballs. When dining out, she says, we were “over the era of pretension.”
Uncertain times, eh? There is no shortage of that. “I think the prevailing mood in general has been one of low-key dread,” says Eby, noting worries about the Trump administration and what it means for basically every aspect of life, including the restaurant industry. And when your brain is full up thinking about other, honestly more important things, the things you do for leisure often return to their most basic. “In the same way that sometimes you need to watch a show thats extremely smooth, that you dont need to engage with it intellectually, sometimes you need the same thing out of food,” she says.
Foster says the idea for Gabbianos first came about during COVID lockdown, when he realized the pod he was in couldnt stop eating pasta. And not handmade noodles with region-specific sauces, but east coast red sauce pasta, heaping with mozzarella and parmesan. Theres a reason we were all making [a big lasagna](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/dining/samin-nosrat-lasagna.html). “The pandemic has changed. Weve been able to get out of our homes, but theres still so much uncertainty and fear and change,” says Wallberg.
Dread and financial precarity means restaurants have to walk the line between offering comfort, but not something so familiar that you could just get it at home. The Big Goldfish, familiar but distinctly not something you can just get at the grocery store, is the perfect example. “We sell 80 of these things at night, everyone is getting this,” says Garcia. “Did we make it to be an Instagram sensation? No, but it just so happened that its a very cute thing, and people love to take pictures of it.” That certainly helps.
There is also the fact that “pure foods” and making everything from scratch have now become the realm of [trad wives](https://www.eater.com/24145665/tradwife-trend-ballerina-farm-housework-home-cooking) and the reactionary right, nostalgia from a different angle. When anti-vaxxers are [fearmongering about seed oils](https://www.eater.com/24300865/are-seed-oils-bad-for-you-fears-panic-explained-carbone-seed-oil-scout) and chugging raw milk, it puts everyone else in a weird position of defending junk food. “I personally do not need to stand up for red dye #3. But theres an element where its just like, leave trans people alone and also let me have Cheetos,” says Eby.
Of course a chicken Parmesan is good no matter what is going on with the world. But there is an edge to LOLfood. Its not just an embrace of approachability and comfort, but a rejection of everything else. Our own uncertain times have once again led to a side-eyeing of snobbery, and snobbery is anything that whiffs of authority or intellectual pursuit. We only trust restaurant reviews made by people eating out of clamshells in their cars. Anything else is too glossy, too poised.
Any trend centering on comfort of course raises questions about what food is considered comforting, and what is seen as “challenging.” But in America, theres nothing glossy about a chicken finger, nothing so immediately knowable as a mozzarella stick. Our bullshit meters are high, but theres no small amount of irony in that fact leading everyone to pizza bites, just as it did in 2009. The ball will *ping* again — most people live in the middle anyway, craving both quotidian comforts and new-to-them culinary experiences. As Kaplan puts it, “Perhaps this is the moment for this dish, or perhaps there will always be moments for dishes like these.” But for now, enjoy a few more of the cheese and the beef and the ever-so-clever (but very lol) gestures to the elementary school cafeteria menu. Theyll be unavoidable.
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Date: 2025-03-02
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Link: https://www.vulture.com/article/gene-hackman-1930-2025-obituary-absolute-power-french-connection-conversation.html
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# Gene Hackman (1930-2025) Had Absolute Power
[remembrance](https://www.vulture.com/tags/remembrance/) Feb. 27, 2025
## An actor who barely changed his look but constantly transformed himself.
[![Portrait of Matt Zoller Seitz](https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/ffd/b68/0099f30d2748f546e3495657dce8390e0d-critics-portraits-0013-MattZollerSeitzFI.2x.rsquare.w168.jpg)](https://www.vulture.com/author/matt-zoller-seitz/)
By
![Hackman on the set of 'A Bridge Too Far' in 1976.](https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/d15/eff/e072a8e1025fa76c9cc9b090dc429ff3e9-genehackman-lede.rvertical.w570.jpg)
Hackman on the set of *A Bridge Too Far* in 1976. Photo: Fairchild Archive/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images
Gene Hackman was a virtuoso of the smile. When the corners of his mouth curled up, this split-second pause before the unveiling told you something thrilling was about to happen, but he was so inventive that you never knew quite what. It made Hackman, who died at 95 with his 65-year-old wife, the classical pianist Betsy Arakawa (in what authorities are currently saying was probably not foul play but clearly requires some investigation), one of the biggest stars of the 1970s, and guaranteed him full employment until his retirement some 20 years ago.
If Hackman flashed his teeth in delight, there was a chance his character might suddenly punch or shoot someone a moment later. If there was a wink and a “heh *heh*,” the odds rose: See the 1995 Western *The Quick and the Dead*, a film packed with insinuating smiles, especially the scene where Hackmans despot sheriff, John Herod, warns Sharon Stones vengeful gunfighter to leave town, fixes her with a lipless sneer, casts a glance toward a henchman (signaling that he should be ready to shoot), then slaps her and restrains her from striking back, smirking in presumptive triumph. If the Hackman smile stayed fixed for more than a couple of seconds and his eyes lit up with joy, protracted cruelty might be incoming. Think of the scene in *The French Connection* where his brutal racist narcotics detective, Popeye Doyle, repeatedly asks a regular in a Harlem bar, “Ever pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?” It was an interrogation tactic to disorient suspects by hammering them with nonsense.
With Warren Beatty in *Bonnie and Clyde.* Photo: Everett Collection
Other times, the Hackman smile masked confusion, treachery, cowardice, or brokenness. The 1974 Francis Ford Coppola thriller *The Conversation*, in which Hackman plays a surveillance expert named Harry Caul who gets pulled into a conspiracy, incorporates dozens of subtly different but equally intriguing Hackman smiles, several of which are piled into a sequence where Caul hosts an impromptu party at his shabby office. In the space of a couple minutes, we get a cocky “yes — the legend is true” smile as Cauls partner (John Cazale) asks him to tell the story of the time he “hid a bug in a parakeet,” followed by an alpha-dog grin as Caul shows off a handcrafted shotgun microphone, a “whos the nerd *now*?” smile as he draws a prospective one-night stand into an embrace; a gratingly overdone chuckle as he deflects a colleagues proposal for a partnership by telling a homophobic joke that gets a blank look; and, as he walks away, an “I sure landed that joke!” smile that amounts to a silent laugh track.
Even during a decade in which Shelley Duvall, Richard Pryor, Dustin Hoffman, Liza Minnelli, Telly Savalas, and other performers with faces off a city bus became marquee names, Hackman stood out by appearing ordinary while setting up bespoke fireworks displays. He was middle class; educated and imaginative, but not self-consciously artsy; a westerner with a drawl-adjacent vocal manner that could convey anything from the neon citadels of Los Angeles and Miami to the plains of Kansas and Iowa.
As Lex Luthor in *Superman.* Photo: Warner Bros./Everett Collection
Hackman was born and raised in California, disillusioned by his parents divorce and his fathers abandonment of the family, seasoned by time in the U.S. Marine Corps (he lied about his age to enlist at 16) and acting classes in Pasadena and New York (where he roomed with both Dustin Hoffman and Robert Duvall). Over his four decades of work, he became a patron saint of American dads — a fantasy identification figure for men who did not live anything resembling dangerous lives but still felt pretty sure they could take out a home invader if it came to that. His persona was a paragon of the hale straight American white guy spotted in droves from Puget Sound to Indianapolis and on down into the panhandle of Florida, with a wife, two grown kids, and two mortgages, probably a Republican but open to persuasion. He was one of those men who looked about 50 whether he was 30 or 70. He had broad shoulders, meaty hands, narrow eyes, a borderlineW.C. Fields nose, and a paunch modest enough to hide in a windbreaker. His hairline was already receding when he started acting, and when he disguised that it was often for comic effect, as when he played [the old blind man](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXPl_wr2QNw) who unknowingly torments Peter Boyles monster in *Young Frankenstein* and Lex Luthor opposite Christopher Reeves Superman. (Luthor was bald in the comics, but Hackman told director Richard Donner he didnt want to go through the hassle of maintaining the look — a diva demand that paid off marvelously at [the end of *Superman: The Movie.*](https://youtu.be/aWdSa653jDE?si=PURddCJ2fJcDSDGq&t=155) (As the hero delivers him to prison, Luthor defiantly yanks off a wig we didnt know was a wig and announces himself to the warden as “Lex Luthor … the most brilliant criminal mind of our time!”)
Talent and energy fueled Hackmans long and varied career, which teamed him with some of the greatest directors, writers, and actors ever. He got a Best Actor Oscar for *The French Connection* and a Best Supporting Actor for playing the sadistic small-town sheriff Little Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwoods *Unforgiven*, who beats Eastwoods alcoholic gunfighter within an inch of his life before dying of lead poisoning. Hackman got three additional nominations from the academy, for playing Clydes brother in *Bonnie and Clyde*, who gets dragged into the lovers bloody rampage; the hero of *I Never Sang for My Father*, whos guilt-ridden over his decision to move cross-country and abandon his aging pop; and *Mississippi Burning*, as an FBI agent named Rupert Anderson who uses his bona fides as a good ol boy to crack open a case against Klansmen who murdered civil-rights workers. The latter film was controversial because in the real-world 1960s, the FBI was more likely to surveil, harass, and frame civil-rights activists than avenge them. But Hackmans character was based on a real agent who was instrumental in solving the killings, and his live-wire performance blunted the fact-checkers, turning Anderson into a progressive fantasy echo of Popeye Doyle who cherry-picked his biography to charm and smash the racists. Along the way, there were trophies and citations from everyone else imaginable. The Golden Globes awarded him Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy for *The Royal Tenenbaums*, a production in which the mercurial Hackman clashed with his young director, Wes Anderson, who later called him “one of the most challenging and best actors I ever worked with.”
As Popeye Doyle in *The French Connection.* Photo: 20th Century Fox/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
In Francis Ford Coppolas *The Conversation.* Photo: Everett Collection
All in all, Hackmans career makes a case against the received wisdom that physically transformative “chameleonic” acting should be considered the pinnacle of the trade. Hackman rarely changed his appearance beyond adding or subtracting glasses or facial hair. But he was never the same guy twice — not even in the 1998 techno-thriller *Enemy of the State*, a project in which every key creative player, including director Tony Scott, insisted Hackman was reprising *The Conversation*s Harry Caul even as Hackman was busy playing somebody new (for him): a black-ops answer to Sean Connerys *Untouchables* cop, tutoring Will Smiths fugitive in the art of hiding and seeking. The Gene Hackman who played the self-sacrificing priest in *The Poseidon Adventure* was physically indistinguishable from the ex-athlete turned private eye in *Night Moves*; the inspirational coaches in *Downhill Racer*, *Hoosiers*, and *The Replacements*; the tyrannical submarine captain in *Crimson Tide*; the aforementioned Herod in *The Quick and the Dead*, who denies fathering the teenage son who wants to kill him in a gunfight; the straying husband and steelworker in the little-seen but engrossing marital drama *Twice in a Lifetime*, from 1985; and the pathetic producer in *Get Shorty* who recycles cool-guy lines spoken by the movies badass loan-shark hero with the same success rate as Harry Caul telling jokes.
In Clint Eastwoods *Unforgiven*, which won Hackman a second Oscar. Photo: Warner Bros./Everett Collection
Hackman was especially adept at dramatizing the abuse of power by men who thought they could get away with anything but found that assumption tested by their own hubristic blunders. In *No Way Out*, Hackman plays Secretary of Defense David Brice, a professional glad-hander and power-tripper who flies into a rage when he suspects his mistress (Sean Young) is seeing another man (Kevin Costner), accidentally kills her during an argument, and subcontracts the cover-up to his right-hand man (Will Patton), a sociopath who worships Brice. Hackman is extraordinary, and absolutely ego-free, in his performance as a man whose guts are all in his job title; once Brice commits a capital crime that he mentally redefines as a careless mistake, he goes from swaggering power broker to cowering whiner so fast that youd think a switch had been flipped.
With Willem Dafoe in *Mississippi Burning.* Photo: Orion Pictures
With Peter Boyle in *Young Frankenstein* (“I was gonna make espresso!”). Photo: Twentieth Century Fox
In *The Birdcage* — a remake of the 1978 French farce *La Cage aux Folles*, adapted by Elaine May and directed by Mike Nichols — Hackman plays another powerful Washington insider, an opportunistic Republican senator and vice-president of the Society for Moral Order named Kevin Keeley. While pandering his way through a hotly contested election, the senator ends up getting bamboozled by his own daughter and future son-in-law, who convince one half of the grooms same-sex parental unit to don drag and pretend to be a mom so that Senator and Mrs. Keely will approve the nuptials. Its Hackmans sharpest comedic performance since Lex Luthor in the Superman series: an unpeeling onion of naïveté. Its inevitable and comically correct that Keeley would end up in Barbara Bush finery as he sneaks through the heros rainbow-coalition-coded Miami nightclub to escape reporters, but what puts the sight gag over the top is Hackmans intricate portrayal of a man who is shocked to find himself open to previously unthinkable experiences. “No one will dance with me,” says the senator, with a faraway look. “I think its this dress. I told them white would make me look fat.”
A year after *The Birdcage*, Hackman played the president of the United States in the Clint Eastwood thriller *Absolute Power*, about an aging cat burglar who happens to rob a billionaires mansion on the night when the chief executive is trying to bed the billionaires young wife. The president is a monstrously selfish and overbearing misogynist who tries to overpower his date after she resists his violent advances. The Secret Service settles things in his favor, with bullets; Hackmans reaction as the smoke clears is even more chilling than what weve seen in prior performances as important but craven men. The character combines the entitlement of Brice in *No Way Out* and the alienation from normal human behavior that becomes a comic spectacle in *The Birdcage* with a level of darkness that wouldnt be out of place in a David Lynch production about evil forces possessing mortals. Hes revolting and terrifying — and he looks more or less exactly the same as the other two Washingtonians. It seems astonishing that a man who rarely changed shape could shape-shift with such assurance until you remember that the essence of acting is pretending. If youre engaging enough to get the audience on your side no matter what — as Hackman was — all you need to do to suspend disbelief is walk onstage and say, “Here I am on a surfboard in the ocean” and wait for onlookers to imagine the crashing waves.
That triptych of roles in politically adjacent genre movies — *No Way Out*, *The Birdcage*, and *Absolute Power* — is also a vivid illustration of what we might call the Gene Hackman Principle of Transformative Acting: The best special makeup is talent. Hes visually the same guy in all three movies, down to the suits and ties, but if you watch them in a row without knowing the plots going in, you could never guess what Hackmans character was going to do based on what youd seen last time. Each new assignment was a chance to revisit the familiar and make it feel brand new. The patriarch Royal Tenenbaum [summed up that brand of creative chaos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVZGhCulb58) in the “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” montage, where he resolves to show his sheltered grandsons how not to play it safe, dropping *g*s by the handful: “Im not talkin about dance lessons! Im talkin about puttin a brick through the other guys windshield. Im talking about takin it out and choppin it up!”
Hackman seemed to know himself. He didnt give many interviews, but when he did, he was upfront about how much of his success came from relentlessness — the same type he often showcased in his movie roles. [He told *Vanity Fair*](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/03/gene-hackman-dustin-hoffman-hollywood) that his actor origin story was overhearing a former fellow Marine who had attended one of his early stage performances mocking Hackmans brief performance as a bellhop. “I wasnt going to let those fuckers get me down,” he said. “I insisted to myself that I would continue to do whatever it took to get a job. It was like me against them — and in some way, unfortunately, I still feel that way. But I think if youre really interested in acting, there is a part of you that relishes the struggle.”
He certainly relished it — and even more so, the cathartic experience of mastering the lines, the scenes, the role, the craft. Hackman was at home in every budget level, style, genre, and decade of his acting life. He was a sledgehammer talent, shattering any complacency that filmmakers and fellow actors mightve brought into a project. But he was also a handyman — the kind of reliable, all-purpose day player who could fix casting and storytelling problems by showing up and raise brief moments to iconic status (as in another Nichols comedy, *Postcards From the Edge*, in which he plays the most empathetic, measured, polite, loyal Hollywood blockbuster director in all of movie history, with such grace that he fools you into thinking such a man could exist).
In *Hoosiers.* Photo: Orion Pictures/Everett Collection
Hackman withdrew from acting a few different times once he got past 70, finally bowing out for good after the 2003 comedy *Welcome to Mooseport*. By the time his own story ended, he had nothing left to prove, even as a multi-talent (he carved out [a second career](https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/gene-hackman/378680/?srsltid=AfmBOop99f8IJGv5mnAEznjOB5EiJxiDtkcnHk8eNdNTslVGYstfGtJJ) writing and co-writing well-regarded western and adventure novels featuring strong, simple good guys; nasty bad guys; and resourceful mothers and children). His final exit, after years of distance from the public eye, [was uncharacteristically mysterious](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/us/gene-hackman-wife-dead-new-mexico.html).
Its probably inevitable in a final analysis like this that we think back on the death scenes in an actors repertoire. Hackman had so many great ones that his short list would not be short at all. Among the highlights are the priests immolation in *The Poseidon Adventure* (going silent and letting onlookers absorb the profundity of his sacrifice before dropping into a pool of flame); Herods death by gunfire in *The Quick and the Dead* (hes so astonished to have been shot in the chest that he gives the heroine time to finish him with a shot through the eye); and Bill Daggetts wheezing, glassy-eyed sign-off in *Unforgiven* (“I dont deserve to die this way; I was building a house!”). Alive even in death: That was Hackman. Its enough to put a smile on your face.
In Wes Andersons *The Royal Tenenbaums.* Photo: Buena Vista Pictures/Everett Collection
Gene Hackmans Absolute Power
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# How a Chinese battery factory sparked a political meltdown in a small Michigan town
In the spring of 2024, Chuck Thelen came to an unpleasant conclusion: He would have to eat part of a battery. It was, he figured, maybe the only way to solve his problem.  
Thelen, 59 at the time, has broad shoulders, graying short hair, and an assertive way of speaking that seems to come naturally to American executives. He was a vice president at the U.S. subsidiary of Gotion, a Chinese battery company that was trying to outcompete its peers by betting on overseas markets. With operations spread across the world, Gotion tasked Thelen with bringing the companys first factory to America.
![How a Chinese battery factory sparked a political meltdown in a small Michigan town thumbnail](https://restofworld.org/wp-content/uploads/listen/long-reads/images/how-a-chinese-battery-factory-sparked-a-political-meltdown-in-a-small-michigan-town-e304hnh.jpg)
### How a Chinese battery factory sparked a political meltdown in a small Michigan town
The Chinese company Gotion's EV battery plan was the kind of big, ambitious, the U.S. economy — and the struggling small town of Big Rapids — needed. But thats not how some locals saw it. In this narrated feature *Rest of World* explores how ambitious executives at Gotion wanted to join Americas EV gold rush, but were met with geopolitics in rural Michigan, USA.
Written by Viola Zhou. Narrated by Jane Seidel.
Original story: [https://restofworld.org/2025/gotion-ev-battery-us-expansion-backlash-michigan/](https://restofworld.org/2025/gotion-ev-battery-us-expansion-backlash-michigan/)
On its face, the expansion was a big, ambitious project, and exactly the kind of thing Michigan — and the U.S. economy — needed. The facility would bring an estimated 2,350 jobs and $2.3 billion of investment to a small college town called Big Rapids. Gotion would pay future workers in this semi-rural community some $62,000 a year, more than 50% higher than the local median household income. And a new plant would be aligned with the revival of U.S. manufacturing — a goal espoused by both Democrat and Republican politicians. 
But thats not how some locals saw it. In fact, they were furious. Hundreds of residents protested the factory: putting up yard signs, creating Facebook groups, and organizing rallies. Broadly calling themselves the “No Gos,” they claimed the chemicals produced from the plant would be toxic, and said the electric-vehicle revolution was a scam. They called Gotions Chinese ownership suspicious, and painted the battery plant as a Communist Trojan horse. Thelen became the face of the project. The No Gos called him “China Chuck.”
Caught up in Americas deepening political divide, the local spat quickly spiraled into a regional and then national media story. Washington politicians, from members of Congress to presidential candidates, called Gotion a Communist Party affiliate and a potential military espionage threat. 
The story would grow like a weed, and evolve to embody, in part, how political divides can derail international investments in the U.S. It would also contrast how Chinas one-party state is able to launch a world-leading EV sector in a matter of years with how similar efforts in the U.S. can stall in debates and disagreements about the needs and wants of any one community.
Since the fall of 2022, when the project was initially announced, Thelen had fought the detractors. He touted his hometown bonafides to win over the locals: He wrote about his Michigan upbringing in a local newspaper, had Gotion donate to local nonprofits, and debated the No Gos on the radio and at town meetings. In response, Thelen was booed and called a liar.
Finally, Thelen came up with a stunt to disprove at least one of the No Gos talking points. He would show that Gotions products were safe. And he would do that by eating the chemicals inside its batteries. 
Thelen set his sights on a township board meeting scheduled for April 9, where the Pro Gos — residents in favor of Gotion — and No Gos would square off again. As the date approached, Thelen looked into lithium iron phosphate, the key component of Gotions EV batteries, to make sure this dark gray powder was non-toxic. He consulted Gotions researchers, read up on the substances safety guidelines, and even did a taste test in private. “It is tasteless,” he recalled in a subsequent radio interview, comparing it to corn starch. 
On the day of the board meeting, in front of about 100 townspeople and at least one sign that read, “Gotion the big lie,’” Thelen brought a jar of lithium iron phosphate to the podium. Grim-faced and wearing a navy blue suit, he poured out a small sample of the substance into a bottle for the audience to pass around. Then he began reading safety guidelines for handling it. “If you get it on the skin, wash it off,” he said. “If you get it in your mouth, drink plenty of water.”
Then, Thelen opened the jar again, this time dipping his index finger inside. “This is my finger,” he said, putting his finger in his mouth. A sucking sound was heard across the room. He raised his finger up high. “Thats how non-toxic this material is.” 
The No Gos were not impressed.
---
**Gotion was founded** in 2006 in the eastern Chinese city of Hefei by Zhen Li, a civil servant turned property developer, who decided to bet his fortune on the countrys nascent battery industry. Li hired a dozen or so researchers to develop lithium iron phosphate batteries for EVs. For the first few years, Gotions batteries only powered electric bicycles, and the company struggled to turn a profit.  
Then, in 2009, Gotion caught a lucky break: The Chinese government announced a monumental industrial policy called the Auto Industry Adjustment and Revitalization Plan, which would help turn the country into the worlds EV powerhouse. Under the initiative, China would build enough manufacturing capacity to produce 500,000 EVs and hybrids over the next two years. Concurrently, Beijing launched a “Ten Cities, Thousand Vehicles” program to encourage EV adoption across the public sector, rolling it out to 10 new cities every year. A flood of subsidies, loans, and local government orders promoting the EV industry followed.
Beijing selected Hefei to be one of the programs first pilot cities — and Gotion secured a contract to produce batteries for the countrys first fleet of electric public buses. In public speeches, Li said his fleet demonstrated that electric buses could be a viable replacement for traditional buses nationwide. The gamble paid off. Gotion now operates 10 plants in China, making batteries for buses as well as passenger cars, and was valued at about $6 billion at the time of publication. In 2014, the company opened a research facility in Fremont, California — blocks away from a Tesla factory. Gotion now employs some 23,000 people worldwide.
Li, worth an estimated $1.2 billion, dresses in dark suits, wears thin-framed glasses, and peppers his speeches with quips on topics such as “the energy revolution” and “the scientific spirits.” The 60-year-old appears in public as a humble businessman, but is a demanding father to his son and heir apparent, Chen Li. The older Li also has a reputation for being particular: Gotions property designs incorporate the principles of feng shui. According to one former employee, Li insists that even the plants in the lobby of a Gotion office building are placed just so. He enjoys books about philosophy and history, and his favorite text is the [Tao Te Ching](http://c/), a 400 B.C. Taoist classic that promotes virtues such as simplicity and humility.
Chinas battery industry is a crowded and highly competitive space. As EVs and other battery-powered devices took off over the past decade, two Chinese players emerged to dominate the market: CATL, which makes batteries for companies such as Volkswagen, BMW, and Tesla; and BYD, which started as a battery manufacturer and now sells more electrified cars than any other company in the world. Together, CATL and BYD produced more than half of the worlds EV batteries in the first half of 2024. Gotion came in 11th place in global market share, with 1.9%. The companys batteries mostly go into cheap domestic Chinese brands, such as Geely and Chery. 
Struggling to compete at home, Gotions Chairman Li set his eyes abroad. By [manufacturing outside of China](https://restofworld.org/2023/chinese-ev-manufacturers-hungary/), Gotion would be closer to local automakers, benefit from local government subsidies, and dodge potential tariffs against Chinese imports. As part of a global expansion, in 2021, Gotion brought in Volkswagen as the companys largest shareholder — and began sketching out factories and partnerships in Germany, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia.
Around the same time, the Biden administration was spending billions of dollars to jumpstart the U.S. own EV revolution, and compete with China. To take advantage of the funds, international companies would have to build their batteries in the U.S., leading to a [battery factory boom](https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/20/tracking-the-ev-battery-factory-construction-boom-across-north-america/).
For a Chinese company to build a facility in the U.S. was risky — Chinese businesses are regularly scrutinized for Communist Party connections and ties to surveillance, espionage, or human rights violations. In 2022, Huawei was banned from selling telecoms equipment in the U.S. Proposals to ban messaging app WeChat and drone maker DJI have swirled continuously. TikTok has operated in the U.S. under the threat of a ban for nearly five years. More recently, the popularity of e-commerce sites Temu and Shein has prompted the U.S. to change its shipping rules. 
“Its really over the last several years that Americans have become obsessed with the CCP \[Chinese Communist Party\],” Meg Rithmire, a Harvard Business School professor who researches Chinas political economy, told *Rest of World*. Rithmire said tightened party control over the Chinese society, state investments in strategic industries, and Beijings more aggressive foreign policy have all fueled a deep suspicion in the U.S. “Theres just this blurred boundary between firms and the state.”
No Chinese battery makers had attempted to build their own factories in the U.S., but Li was eager: Gotion could become one of Americas first local battery suppliers. 
Gotion tapped Thelen, who had been with the company for just two years handling project management and operations, to set up an American factory. A 20-year veteran of Bosch, a German company that makes home appliances and auto parts, the Midwestern native had just the right experience to sell Americans on Gotion.
---
**This past December**, I flew to Michigan to find Chuck. The winters first snowstorm had just hit, and the landscape was covered in a thick blanket of snow. Temperatures hovered at minus 6 degrees Celsius (20 degrees Fahrenheit). Navigating my blue Nissan over frozen, bumpy country roads felt precarious. Whenever I stepped outside the car, a freezing wind stung my face. 
Big Rapids is a college town. Shops selling chocolates, jewelry, and weed sit side-by-side in Victorian homes. It was a few weeks before Christmas, and wreaths and American flags hung from the street lamps. Students and teachers from Ferris State University, the citys biggest employer, trudged in and out of coffee shops. 
The surrounding area is home to small factories that make things like military boots and appliance parts. People hunt deer and raise chickens.
Thelens whole life seems circumscribed by this small pocket of Michigan. As a child, he spent family vacations in a cottage on Horsehead Lake, a scenic area 20 minutes from downtown. He went to Ferris State University, where he met and danced with his future wife, Tracey, at a downtown bar in 1990.
Id been emailing Thelen for months, and getting no response. But on my first night in Big Rapids, in a cozy restaurant downtown, I ran into Tracey Thelen, Chucks wife, and Chucks niece. They were having cocktails at the bar. It underscored just how small Big Rapids is. 
After I introduced myself, Tracey spoke of her husband endearingly and described him as “having a huge heart.” Something about the run-in unlocked an opportunity: Chuck Thelen agreed to give me 15 minutes on the phone.
Thelens tone on the call was initially diplomatic and stoic. Then, a sense of frustration and defiance crept into his voice: He talked about his admiration for Gotions Chairman Li, his commitment to a made-in-America movement, and complained about the disinformation being drummed up to destroy what he had been working for. “It has been truly difficult,” he said. But he said he had no regrets.
In mid-2021, Thelen started looking for a Gotion site where the company could produce lithium iron phosphate, the low-cost battery chemical increasingly favored by EV makers. He reviewed dozens of sites across the U.S. As he was driving through Big Rapids one day, Thelen later recounted, he saw an ad for available industrial land nearby. It occurred to him that he could bring the Gotion factory close to home. 
Michigans rust-belt saga is well known by now. Mecosta County, home to Big Rapids, had an unemployment rate of [6.7%](https://www.milmi.org/DataSearch/Unemployment-by-County) at the end of 2024, compared with the national average of about 4%. Some 7,300 people, or 18% of the population, [lived below the poverty line](https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST5Y2023.S1701?q=poverty%20rate%20in%20mecosta%20county) in 2023. With a shortage of well-paying jobs, young people often commute hours to bigger cities, or move out entirely. 
Thelen convinced his Gotion superiors that Big Rapids was an obvious choice for a factory: It had an ample pool of labor and a local university that could run training programs. In return, Gotion would bring good new jobs to the rural town. “I started this project because I thought it was the right thing for the community and the company,” Thelen told me. 
Thelen encouraged Chairman Li to visit Big Rapids in July 2022. Li found the place to be too rural, according to a person familiar with the matter. But he eventually relented, possibly moved by a subsidies package offered by Michigans state government, and a chance to be close to Detroits “Big Three” automakers. 
In September 2022, Michigan offered Gotion an incentive package that included a $125 million grant, depending on the companys performance. Gotion would buy roughly 1 square kilometer (260 acres) of land. The first 500 local employees were expected to join by the end of 2024. Later on, the company would roll out a plan to set up an office in downtown Big Rapids.
City officials were ecstatic. The jobs Gotion promised would make it the biggest employer in the region. “It was in many ways a dream come true,” Jim Chapman, the former supervisor of Green Charter Township, where the Gotion site was located, told me. “Something we never expected just fell out of the sky.” Officials gave the development a nickname: Project Elephant.
---
**The timing for** Project Elephant couldnt have been worse. Just as the agreement was put in place, in October 2022, U.S.-China relations reached a low point.
In February 2023, a mysterious Chinese balloon was spotted drifting across America, triggering nationwide anxiety over Beijings espionage campaign. In March 2023, as members of Congress [grilled](https://www.npr.org/2023/03/23/1165579717/tiktok-congress-hearing-shou-zi-chew-project-texas) TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew on whether or not the Chinese government was using the app to spy on Americans, Thelen faced his own grilling in Michigan. 
The Gotion factory had divided the small town into No Gos and Pro Gos, each with its own Facebook group and spokespeople. Friends quarreled and blocked one another. Shouting matches erupted at town meetings. Some of the No Gos initiated a boycott of businesses run by the Pro Gos.
For some No Gos, the concern over Gotion was tied to anxiety about the potential environmental impact of battery production. “My daughter will be riding the bus to school on an electric vehicle over my dead body,” Marjorie Steele, an environmentalist who opposed the Gotion plant, told me, arguing that EVs were dangerous and unreliable, especially during Michigan winters. 
An April 2023 [township meeting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArQZnIJKY5Q), which was moved to a playground to accommodate the large crowd, lasted more than two hours as No Gos took turns to speak out against the plant. One resident sang a song he wrote. The lyrics went: “We care about our environment, its causing commotion. Come on, baby, say no to Gotion.” The audience clapped.
Steele also expressed concern for how the facility could change Big Rapids. She said she was worried that an influx of foreign nationals would disrupt the areas economy and culture. But the majority of the concerns werent about the environment or the community, per se, two local officials told me. They were about Gotions Chinese roots and a ginned-up panic that the company would bring communism to Big Rapids.
In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has increasingly pushed private companies to set up party branches. Business leaders commonly join the party to gain higher social status and build government connections. For the No Gos, this raised suspicion that Gotion was a tool for communist infiltration. 
No Gos pointed to Gotions Community Party branch, footage of [employees](https://dailycaller.com/2023/08/31/gotion-ccp-red-army-ev-batteries/) visiting party memorials in Red Army outfits, and [executives attending political study meetings](https://dailycaller.com/2024/04/05/exclusive-exec-at-us-battery-manufacturer-pictured-at-chinese-communist-party-meetings/) as corroborating evidence. 
“We are America, and we dont want communism here. Can you assure us of that?” Lori Brock, who runs a horse farm near Gotions factory site, asked Thelen on a radio show in spring 2023. Brock, a Donald Trump supporter, would emerge as a de facto spokesperson for the No Gos. She appeared in national media, met with politicians, and hosted rallies against Gotion on her farm. Brock and Thelen became archenemies.  
Meanwhile the U.S. presidential election cycle was swinging into action, and the story of Michigans Gotion plant went national. Republican leaders blamed the Democrats for subsidizing a Communist Party-linked company. No Go rallies attracted characters like Congressman John Moolenaar, who currently represents Big Rapids and chairs a House committee focused on threats from China.
During a campaign speech in Michigan in June 2023, Trump called out Gotions Michigan plant  as evidence that then-President Joe Bidens EV push was benefiting China. “The cars dont go far. The range is even worse in the winter. The materials are all made in China,” Trump [said](https://www.youtube.com/live/5DvX6WRDctg?si=DXIxXD8X-DIiuWNi&t=8189) of EVs. “The state of Michigan, its going to be decimation.” 
On our phone call, Thelen attributed resistance to Gotion to xenophobia, a not-in-my-backyard attitude among some residents, and a rise of McCarthy-style anticommunist panic. “I expected some, but the level of prejudice and the fact that they brought an entire political party in to fund their fight, thats troublesome,” he told me. 
Throughout 2023, Thelen defended the factory relentlessly. He presented himself as a husband, a father, and a “lifelong Michigander” who hunted, fished, and [rode tractors on the weekend,](https://youtu.be/zkiw7lWRGME?si=gQQwmT2AldFH8bYw&t=1417) just like everyone else. He argued the factory would lift people out of financial struggles. He addressed concerns regarding Gotions Chinese ownership by pointing out that members of the No Go group seemingly had no issue using iPhones, computers, and dishwashers — all made in China. 
“The American flag proudly flies on the front porch of my house. And nothing has or could ever stop me from singing the national anthem for 18 years while I was coaching youth sports,” he [told](https://youtu.be/zkiw7lWRGME?si=tyf0QSPGsBKlsu8o&t=1774) angry residents at one township meeting. “And I will be running this plant.” 
That summer, Chairman Li came back to Michigan to inspect the proposed Gotion site, and maybe help drum up support. Thelen told me that Li was too busy to partake in hunting or fishing, but he took time to charm local officials with Chinese-style hospitality.
At a seafood restaurant in nearby Grand Rapids, Li and his subordinates, dressed in zipped-up jackets typical of Chinese politicians and businessmen, held a luncheon for Big Rapids officials and local leaders who supported the Gotion plant. Because of a tight schedule, lunch ended before dessert was served. As guests walked out, Li seemingly noticed an untouched tray of chocolate mousse, and took it upon himself to serve the Americans. The gesture had the intended effect. “He is the chairman of a huge mega corporation, and he treated us all just beautifully,” Fred Guenther, the mayor of Big Rapids who attended the gathering, told me. “He had me sold.”
For the No Gos, however, photos of Chinese executives driving around Big Rapids in a [Mercedes-Benz](https://x.com/rstudley/status/1694000213101576415) only sparked more suspicion. In a recall election in November 2023, residents of Green Charter Township voted out five officials who supported the Gotion project, including supervisor Chapman. 
Gotion fought back. In March 2024, the company [sued](https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/chinas-gotion-sues-us-township-breach-contract-over-24-billion-plant-2024-03-18/) the newly elected board, filled with No Go figures, saying the township had broken contracts by rescinding its support for the factory. It demanded the township comply with its obligations, including approving water system connections to the future plant.
Any construction on the plant itself seemed indefinitely stalled. Throughout it all, Thelen appeared calm and polite, even in the face of personal attacks. But in private, he was frustrated with what this project had devolved to. In Thelens texts to Chapman, made public as part of the lawsuit between Gotion and Green Charter Township, Thelen called the anti-Gotion people “knuckleheads.” After one township meeting, he texted Chapman, “What a group of ignorant racists.”
“This whole thing is literally the biggest test of stamina and patience I have ever endured,” Thelen texted Chapman at a different moment. “If it was not so important for the community I would have resigned this week.” 
Meanwhile, Thelen put on a brave face: He ate lithium iron phosphate, and continued assuaging the locals. In April 2024, Thelen launched monthly “Chat with Chuck” virtual townhalls to address concerns about the factory. He talked about being in a “David versus Goliath” battle with “some extremists on the far right side” and their Republican Party backers.
But the No Go movement was only gaining power. In June 2024, five lawmakers, including now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio, [accused Gotion](https://lahood.house.gov/_cache/files/3/b/3b1ef219-c48e-45af-ae73-64762d0efe6f/5C2F96D226C841EA08B4583C57B4D2EF.2024-06-05---letter-to-fletf---gotion.pdf) of sourcing aluminum and other materials from firms connected to forced labor in Xinjiang. Gotion has [denied](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-lawmakers-call-add-chinas-catl-gotion-import-ban-list-wsj-reports-2024-06-07/) any connections to forced labor. In August, now-Vice President JD Vance [spoke](https://youtu.be/Qlgp-khRov4?si=t2qYXkuUYwRGEbkt&t=58) at a campaign rally at Brocks horse farm, and accused Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris of allowing the Communist Party to build factories in America. Some politicians even accused Gotion of possibly working with the Taliban to access lithium in Afghanistan — although the source they [cited](https://gophouse.org/posts/rep-martin-raises-concerns-about-chinese-communist-partys-ties-to-gotion-project) was about a company called Gochin, and Gotion says they are unrelated.
After July, the monthly “Chat with Chuck” sessions went on an indefinite hiatus.
---
**Despite the companys** struggles in Michigan, Gotion and Chairman Li appeared undeterred in their quest to launch a U.S. plant. The company proceeded with a second effort at building a factory. This time, it would be led by Lis son, Chen Li — a graduate of Purdue and Columbia, and an avid fan of Elon Musk. 
This factory would cost $2 billion. Whereas the Michigan plant is intended to produce battery material, the Illinois factory will make finished goods: battery cells, modules, and packs for EVs and energy storage. Following months of location scouting, Gotion decided on a former Kmart warehouse in Manteno, Illinois, located about one hour outside Chicago. Compared with Big Rapids, the area was more liberal and less rural. It had a higher income level and a larger share of Black and Hispanic populations.
Gotion promised to hire 2,600 people. Illinois offered incentives valued at $536 million, with Governor JB Pritzker calling it the most significant new manufacturing investment in the state in decades.
Burned by its experience in Michigan, the company launched an aggressive charm offensive. In order to forge a good reputation from the start, Gotion arranged for dozens of county leaders, school officials, and newer employees to visit China over the course of multiple delegations. The visitors have toured factories, learned calligraphy, and hiked the Yellow Mountain, a local tourist attraction. At a banquet in Hefei, Li drank fiery *baijiu* liquor from thimble-sized glasses with his guests, and served them food, recalled one participant. 
In the fall of 2024, Gotion sponsored a [local Oktoberfest event](https://www.audacy.com/wbbm780/news/local/controversy-brews-at-gotion-backed-manteno-oktoberfest) in Manteno, where locals drank cocktails and got to check out the companys batteries up close. The Kankakee Community College hosted Gotion recruitment events and is now planning to expand its internal combustion engine car workshop to include EVs, according to the schools president, Michael Boyd. 
A No Go campaign took shape in Manteno, too — but it didnt derail the factory.
Tim Nugent, the mayor of Manteno, accompanied me on a tour of Kankakee Community College. He told me he was surprised by the national attention on the No Go movement. Nugent said he has been working hard to sell his community on the EV revolution. After the factory plan was announced, potential suppliers from China, Canada, and the Netherlands also inquired about factory sites in Manteno, he said. “I think history will show that its good for us,” he told me. “But history takes time.” 
In December 2024, the Manteno community seemed to be gelling around the plant. Chinese and American workers had recently shared a Thanksgiving dinner, and launched a Gotion rock band. By early 2025, two production lines for energy storage batteries had gone into operation. Close to 150 people had been hired. “This factory is not just being pulled up from China and set down in America. Its full of American people,” Andrew Wheeler, the factorys head of public relations, told me. 
Mark Kreusel, head of the Manteno plant, came to Gotion after 30 years with Chrysler. He told me he was impressed by the Li familys commitment to sustainability. “I think \[Gotions Chairman Li\] is probably the bravest Chinese businessman out there, because hes the only one that was willing to stick his neck out and invest in America when everybody else was afraid to,” he said. “Just because governments have differences doesnt always mean companies and people have to have differences.” 
When I asked Gotion for interviews with the chairman, a representative at the Chinese headquarters declined, explaining that the company was moving quietly given the current political climate. I asked the chairmans son, Chen Li, about the challenges Gotion faced overseas. He offered a one-line response over text: “We are now a global company, and should not be defined as a Chinese company with 100% Chinese ownership.”
---
**In Big Rapids,** on a Thursday in early December, the site that Gotion purchased for its plant was eerily quiet. I toured the site with Marjorie Steele, the activist who was committed to safeguarding the local ecology from a giant factory. More than two years after the project was announced, there was little progress to see here: The land was still mostly forest and wetland, covered in snow and fresh deer tracks. Locals say the land is also frequented by owls, bats, and the rare bobcat.
The company did manage to cut down some trees, which did not escape Steeles notice. Pointing out the felled beech trees, she yelled, “God damn Chuck!” into the woods. 
Downtown, the former JCPenney department store that Gotion leased to be its office building was still empty. Although Gotion [won a court ruling](https://upnorthlive.com/news/local/company-wins-court-ruling-to-continue-development-of-michigan-factory-serving-ev-industry) in May 2024 to continue developing its factory, officials at Green Charter Township said they had not received any new permit applications.
During our call, Thelen told me Gotion had not abandoned the project, but that legal proceedings would take time. Despite resistance from Republican Party heavyweights, Thelen said he hoped Trump would come around to support Gotion. “As much as I might disagree with the other politicians, I can say wholeheartedly I do agree with President-elect Trump, and you need to localize the manufacturing for these products,” he told me. Gotion in Big Rapids, Thelen insisted, could still be a success story. “Weve got some politics that got in the way. And really there is no need for politics in this situation.” 
As Gotions battle in Michigan quietly grinds on, EV adoption has continued to rise globally, partly thanks to cheaper, better-performing batteries: In 2024, more than 17 million EVs were sold worldwide, 25% more than the previous year. Gotions global expansion is moving ahead as well. It opened its German factory in 2023. In June 2024, the company announced gigafactory plans in both Morocco and Slovakia. The Morocco factory, expected to begin production in 2026, could make some of the battery chemicals that were supposed to come from Michigan.
And Gotion is clearly proud of its progress in Illinois. When I dropped by the companys California office in December, a TV in the reception area played a promo video about the facility on repeat. 
But Big Rapids may not be part of the EV revolution. Before I left the town, I visited Brock, the horse farmer and leader of the No Go group. She was triumphant: Detroit News had named her “Michiganian of the Year” for her activism against Gotion. For Christmas, she made ornaments in the shape of mini red trucks — each carrying a “No Go on Gotion” sign and an American flag — as gifts to fellow No Gos.
As we sat in her living room, a herd of deer ran across the field outside her window. She listed the Republican leaders she had met with, and showed me the provocative emails she had sent to Chen Li following Trumps victory. “You are not wanted here!!!!” she wrote in one email. “Trump will never allow you to do business here.” 
But the person she had the most disdain for was Chuck Thelen. It was Thelen who defended a “Communist company,” she said. It was Thelen she confronted directly at town meetings. And it was Thelens wife, Tracey, with whom she developed an online beef. By fighting Thelen, Brock told me, she was protecting America from a repressed, Communist way of life. She was proud of stalling Gotion, and everything it represented, maybe indefinitely. 
Brock recalled Thelens battery-chemical eating stunt dismissively. She didnt believe that the chemicals he put in his mouth were real. Following the demonstration, Brock said, she prepared her own samples of lithium, magnesium, and cobalt for Thelen to taste. “I wanted him to take a tablespoon of each one and drink it,” she said. “And he wouldnt do it.”
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# How the Irish Pub Became One of the Emerald Isle's Greatest Exports
Alan Hynes grew up in Kinvara, a small Irish village in County Galway. It had one shop, a post office, a church and two pubs. When hed go to the auction house with his father on the weekend, theyd stop into a few pubs on the 12-mile trip home. He moved to Californias Marin County in 1998 and today owns a concrete and excavation business. Seven of his nine brothers and sisters are also in the Golden State, but he says he has always felt something missing—that community cornerstone. So, at 51, he decided to open a pub.
The Burren House had its grand opening on March 7 on a main strip of downtown San Rafael, about 5,000 miles from Kinvara. Its next to an Italian restaurant, and theres a Walgreens across the parking lot behind the building, but to Hynes, its familiar.
“Where I grew up, the pub is just an intrinsic part of Irish life. If theres a baptism, theyd have the party at the pub after. Funerals, too. Everything revolves around the pub,” he says. “Ive always been used to a small countryside kind of place, so I was concerned it would be too audacious to try to open a pub somewhere else and the aesthetics would be over-the-top, it wouldnt feel cozy and comfy, but then it started coming together.”
When Hynes talks of the pub “coming together,” he means the assembly of the component pieces—the mahogany bar and millwork for the backbar counters and shelving, leather stools and chairs, decorative floor tiling, mirrors and glasswork and knickknacks. Each element was designed and produced in Ireland, then sent over in a shipping container. The [Liscannor](https://www.ucc.ie/en/bees/outreach/geogarden/rock9/) stone in the entryway was sourced in the [Burren region](https://www.ireland.com/en-us/destinations/regions/the-burren/), the bars namesake. Noticeably absent are shamrock garlands, green tinsel and leprechaun-themed anything.
The Burren is one of the most recent projects of the [Irish Pub Company](https://irishpubcompany.com/), a Dublin-based design group that has created upwards of 2,000 pubs in more than 100 countries on every continent except Antarctica. Germany is its biggest European client, and Switzerland is a close second. In Russia, it has established three venues in Moscow, one in Sochi and one in Novosibirsk, in Siberia. The companys handiwork is also found in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Japan, Nigeria and Mauritius, and at the New York-New York Hotel in Las Vegas. A project is currently underway in a new high-end shopping center in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. This year alone, the company has nine projects in various stages of completion, including in the Canary Islands and Hout Bay, a Cape Town suburb, as well as four under discussion.
But founder [Mel McNally](https://irishpubcompany.com/mel-mcnally/) is not in the business of just shipping pub-in-a-box packages around the world. Each one is custom-designed to fit a specific space in collaboration with the local owner, who has creative control over the many, many, *many* details involved. The companys stock-in-trade is not the Irish pub as a commodity; its the Irish pub as a vibe. You cant sell the history and lore and memories intrinsic in a communitys longstanding institution. But you can sell the craftsmanship inextricably linked to a nations cultural legacy.
The Irish Pub Company evolved out of a project McNally did about pub design for a competition when he was an architecture school student in Dublin in the 1970s. What the professors believed to be a cheeky excuse to spend time drinking pints turned into a two-year expedition through Ireland in which McNally and some architect friends visited more than 200 pubs in cities and remote country villages.
“We recorded the essence of what makes a pub a pub—in the scale, the architecture, the mix of details, the craftsmanship,” McNally says. “No two are the same, but they have an essence that we carry into projects we do now.”
That essence is anchored by the bar itself. “Its the altar of service,” McNally says. All activity and movement revolves around it, like electrons orbiting around a nucleus. No matter where McNally visited, how big or small or old or accessible the pub was, the slab of mahogany was the gathering zone. As such, in every bar that his company creates, the bar is visible from anywhere in the pub. Its nonnegotiable.
But the essence is not limited to those physical aspects. The space and décor contribute to the *je ne sais quoi* of Irish pubs. “To go to an Irish pub, youre always welcomed in. You meet people, talk to people. Thats the reality,” McNally says. “Lots of people try, but they dont get the essence.”
Developing, designing and building out a pub takes anywhere from four to nine months from initial conversation to grand opening and can run a client anywhere from $250,000 to over $1 million. First, the Irish Pub Companys designers look at the layout plan to understand the size, capacity and flow of the space, as well as any restrictions that might be imposed by landmark associations if the building is listed on a historic registry.
The customizing starts by selecting the pub style. “Victorian” style is modeled on the classic Dublin spots, like the historic [Long Hall Pub](https://www.instagram.com/thelonghalldublin/?hl=en), where dark-stained woods, elaborate stained-glass partition panels and shiny brass accents abound. [Snugs](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/93409/brief-history-irish-snug), small enclosed sitting booths traditionally occupied by women while their husbands caroused at the bar, are a staple. “Country” style, inspired by rural stone-built establishments, has paler woods and scuffed finishes that contribute a warm cottage-like feel. Ceramic jugs, crockery and cast-iron kettles might be scattered about the place. The décor of the “Celtic” style is imbued with symbolism and characters from ancient Gaelic folklore and mythology. “Shop” style nods to the old-world convention of rural pubs that double as the community general store. Shelves are lined with bric-a-brac like antique ceramic groceries.
From there, the details are selected—everything from the floor layout to bar design, including display cabinets, drink shelves, stained-glass panels, joinery and wood stains, alongside decorative lighting, glass, metal and woodwork. The Irish Pub Companys Dublin office has slabs of wood with different finishes, books of fabric and leather swatches. Each detail of each piece of furniture—the footpad of a stool, the piping on a seat cushion, the upholstery of a bench—is a consideration. Up to 80 people could be involved in a single project in the companys workshop outside Dublin, including carpenters, joiners, metalworkers, furniture-makers, upholsterers, glass artists and painters. In a way, you could compare it to cooking *cacio e pepe* in Milwaukee with pasta handmade in Rome and authentic pecorino Romano.
McNallys daughter Anna McNally, who works in business development for the company, notes a design shift shes seen since the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Prior to Covid, we had more requests for a mixed-modern style, which takes some traditional elements and makes them modern with, say, a different kind of material,” she says. She showed a more contemporary style of stained-glass panel with crisp, clean angles instead of classic curved shapes or petal-like edges. “Pre-Covid, people wanted stone as the top of the bar and timber on the front. Now people are going back to hardwood bar tops and traditional leather on chairs. Theyre looking more toward comfort and familiarity.”
Pub design is a societal-mood metric.
The business was kickstarted by a partnership with Guinness. In the mid-1990s, the Irish brewer was facing dwindling sales. The craft brewing scene was picking up momentum, especially in the United States. The import market was starting to feel the impact.
“We approached Guinness back then because we felt the concept had a value outside Ireland,” says McNally. The beer company connected him with its network of distributors, and he went on a roadshow across Europe with his team of designers. Orders started coming in, especially from around Germany (the first client was in Berlin) and Italy. In 1996, Fado, the first project in America, opened in Atlanta. ([Four more locations have since opened](https://www.fadoirishpub.com/locations) throughout the U.S.) One year later, [Darren Fagan](https://irishpubcompany.com/darren-fagan/) moved to the city as a project manager and today runs the North American arm of the Irish Pub Company. Hes worked on about 80 bars throughout the U.S.—from Denver to Tulsa to Philadelphia to Palm Beach International Airport in Florida. After studying mechanical engineering, he worked as a draftsman in the R&D department at an Irish firm that designs fittings and installations for retail stores. His boss introduced him to McNally. The Guinness partnership had momentum. As Fagan explains it, by elevating the kinds of pubs where Guinness was sold, they could increase their sales. But it was the growth of craft breweries and their brewpubs that sparked the companys marketing push.
“Craft brew bars are about the beer and exposing a brewers mastery. Its like a celebrity chefs restaurant: They produce phenomenal food, and theres a time when everyone wants to eat that chefs food, but it doesnt mean the restaurant has a soul or a purpose beyond the food itself,” says Fagan. “Pubs are more than just the product, and they have the longevity to prove it. That longevity comes from the connection to the community.”
While a historic pub in an Irish coastal farming village might have its roots fixed in a community through generations of locals gathering to share stories and comfort around the bar, a newer establishment needs to tell a legitimate story of its own to appeal to people enough that they want to come back—not a tall tale from a marketers playbook.
“It isnt just an aesthetic experience. A pub will develop its own character over time, but it has to have a soul rooted in a connection to the community, otherwise its easy to question the idea of authenticity,” says Fagan. “We start with the story, which is the core, or the soul.”
Some come easy, like Alan Hynes playing tribute to his childhood in Kinvara with nine brothers and sisters, but others take a bit of work, genealogical research and academic sleuthing. For siblings Tim and Jennifer Strickland, who opened [Wexford](https://www.wexfordpub.com/) in Savannah, Georgia, in August 2024, the discovery of a *Savannah Morning News* article about Irish immigrants in the city led them to [Howard Keeley](https://ww2.georgiasouthern.edu/news/expert/?username=drhoward.keeley), director of the [Center for Irish Research and Teaching at Georgia Southern University](https://ww2.georgiasouthern.edu/cah/irish/), who shared his research about the trade and immigration connections between County Wexford, on the southeastern Irish coast, and Savannah. The Irish history of the port city goes back to the 1730s, when Irish immigrants arrived as settlers after Georgia became a colony and came in greater numbers to work as building boomed. Immigration grew in the mid-19th century, largely spurred by the potato famine. Imagery of the [Dunbrody ship](https://www.dunbrody.com/), which carried immigrants from Wexford to Savannah at that time, figures into the décor. The 32 names on a wall are an homage to the first women who participated in the citys St. Patricks Day parade in the 1930s. An area of the pub is reserved for the Center for Irish Research and Teaching to curate displays of artifacts, like old sheet music brought to Savannah on ships, leading some locals to refer to Wexford as the first Irish museum in Savannah.
“A pub needs to not just connect with the local community, but be a hub of the community, and in modern times, a lot of that has gotten diluted,” says Fagan. “Otherwise, its just a pub in a box.”
Hynes says hes already seeing how Burren House can become a gathering place for the locals.
“Around Marin, there are brewpubs that are open in the afternoon and all different bars where people go at night, but there arent a lot where youll see families coming in the afternoon with newborn babies, and then old grandmothers up at the bar after dinner. Were already seeing all that,” says Hynes. “People feel comfortable sitting here. Everyone gets the same treatment. Pubs are a great equalizer.”
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Filed Under: [Architecture](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/tag/architecture/), [Business](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/tag/business/), [Food](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/tag/food/), [Ireland](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/tag/ireland/)
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# Inside Elon Musks Digital Coup
As Americas most decorated civil servants sipped cocktails in the presidential ballroom of the Capital Hilton, worrying about their table assignments and wondering where they fell in the pecking order between US senator and UAE ambassador, [Elon Musk](https://www.wired.com/tag/elon-musk/) sat staring at his phone, laughing.
Few of the guests at the Alfalfa Club banquet in Washington, DC, on January 25 knew what he knew: that a crew of senior executives and young Musk loyalists was preparing to occupy the top offices of a nearby federal building. Under guard, they would sleep on mattresses lined with body temperature and breath rate sensors as they raced to refactor the nations code base—or, better yet, scrap it altogether.
Musk wasnt big on formalities, but hed dressed up for the occasion. The Alfalfa Club had been around since 1913 and existed solely to host a yearly banquet where the most important people in government could hobnob with the most important people in business. Membership was limited to around 200, and the Alfalfas admitted new “sprouts” only when existing members died. That evening, Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan and Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman joined the likes of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and US senator Kirsten Gillibrand as members. Musk was attending as a guest.
The social chairs of the Alfalfa Club seemed to think that elections and constitutional norms should determine the seating chart in American political life. The head table was reserved for Alfalfas in government. Musk, the assumed leader of the so-called [Department of Government Efficiency](https://www.wired.com/tag/doge/), sat on the opposite side of the room. He spent much of the dinner on his phone—talking to the president, if whispers were to be believed. Musk was closer than ever to Donald Trump. He told friends he was crashing in government buildings. He would soon move in next door to the White House, staying in the Eisenhower Executive Office Buildings Secretary of War Suite. Hed even had his video-gaming rig installed there.
As Musk sat in the Hilton ballroom, his operatives, working under a trusted lieutenant, had already gained access to systems at the Office of Personnel Management, the federal HR department for 2.2 million or so career civil servants. Many of these operatives would show up later at agencies across the federal government—people like Akash Bobba, a UC Berkeley graduate and former intern at Palantir, the defense contractor cofounded by Peter Thiel; Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old who has gone by the online nickname “Big Balls”; and Nikhil Rajpal, an engineer in his thirties who had worked at Twitter during Musks acquisition, where hed once pitched the idea of auctioning off dormant usernames to the highest bidder. As an undergraduate, also at UC Berkeley, Rajpal had been president of a libertarian student group that was fond of the motto “Futuate cohortem urbanam”—Latin for something like “Fuck these city dwellers.”
In Musks mind, Washington needed to be debugged, hard-forked, sunset. His strike teams of young engineers would burrow into the governments byzantine bureaucratic systems and delete what they saw fit. Theyd help Trump slash the budget to the bone. Musk turned to those around the table at the Hilton: *Can you believe we were spending taxpayer money on condoms?* They shook their heads. Musk looked back at his phone. Then: *What if we cut all federal grants to NGOs?*
Illustration: Sam Lyon
In the days and weeks that followed, DOGE hit one part of the federal government after another. The Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, and Veterans Affairs; the Federal Aviation, General Services, Social Security, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric administrations; the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service; the US Agency for International Development and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the National Park Service and the National Science Foundation—all fell under Musks control. An estimated tens of thousands of federal employees were effectively fired or resigned. “This is a digital coup,” one USAID source told WIRED at the time.
Along the way, DOGE also gained access to untold terabytes of data. Trump had given Musk and his operatives carte blanche to tap any unclassified system they pleased. One of their first stops: a database previously breached more than a decade ago by alleged Chinese cyberspies that contained investigative files on tens of millions of US government employees. Other storehouses thrown open to DOGE may have included federal workers tax records, biometric data, and private medical histories, such as treatment for drug and alcohol abuse; the cryptographic keys for restricted areas at federal facilities across the country; the personal testimonies of low-income-housing recipients; and granular detail on the locations of particularly vulnerable children.
What did DOGE want with this kind of information? None of it seemed relevant to Musks stated aim of identifying waste and fraud, multiple government finance, IT, and security specialists told WIRED. But in treating the US government itself as a giant dataset, the experts said, DOGE could help the Trump administration accomplish another goal: to gather much of what the government knows about a given individual, whether a civil servant or an undocumented immigrant, in one easily searchable place.
WIRED spoke with more than 150 current and former federal employees, experts, and Musk supporters across more than 20 agencies to expose the inner workings of DOGE. Many of these sources requested anonymity to speak candidly about what DOGE has done—and what it might do next.
Musk and Trumps relationship was cemented on July 13, 2024, when a would-be assassin came within inches of killing the former president in Butler, Pennsylvania. Musk was impressed by the photo of Trump, blood streaming down his face, raising his fist in the air and shouting “Fight, fight, fight” for the cameras. The image quickly became a meme—Musks love language. He endorsed Trump that day and pivoted his recently launched super PAC to get the former president reelected.
The following month, during a live discussion on X, Musk floated the idea of working for Trump on a “government efficiency commission.” Trumps response was enthusiastic. “You're the greatest cutter,” he said admiringly.
Two years earlier, after Musk purchased Twitter in a chaotic blitz of last-minute paperwork and hundred-million-dollar money transfers, he had cut roughly 80 percent of the companys staff, closed at least a dozen international offices, and rolled back Twitters content moderation policies in the name of free speech. He demanded change at such speed that one of his lieutenants, Steve Davis, took to sleeping at Twitters San Francisco headquarters with his partner and their newborn baby.
In Washington, Musk estimated that his team could cut “nearly $2 trillion” from the federal budget. After you set aside nondiscretionary spending such as Medicare and Social Security benefits and interest payments on the national debt, that number, $2 trillion, was a little more than what you had left over. In other words, Musk was functionally proposing to cut *everything* else, from foreign aid to housing subsidies, from the maintenance of national parks to the collection of basic weather data, from investigations into predatory lenders to the operation of air traffic control systems.
After Trump won, he announced that Musk, along with former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, would colead DOGE. The announcement kicked off a stealthy recruiting process, led by Davis, the same executive whod slept at Twitter HQ. Musk pictured a team of super-high-IQ individuals joining him in Washington for an 80-hour-a-week, 18-month hackathon on the US government.
The DOGE brain trust camped out on the eighth floor of the SpaceX office in Washington, DC, commandeering multiple conference rooms and conducting meetings and interviews with DOGE hopefuls, according to a person with knowledge of the events. One question for applicants: Who did you vote for in 2024?
Among Davis early recruits was Zsombor (Anthony) Jancso, a San Franciscobased engineer and former Palantir employee in his mid-twenties. After Palantir, Jancso had worked on a project called Accelerate X, which purported to offer “a modern OS for government” with solutions “delivered in days.” His cofounder, an MIT-educated engineer named Jordan Wick, joined DOGE too.
A few weeks after the 2024 election, an online handle associated with Jancso reached out to a group of people who had participated in an AI challenge put on by the US Space Force. The person said they were looking for “hardcore engineers” and instructed applicants to send their GitHub or LinkedIn to @DOGE on X and reply privately with their X handle. (To do all this, theyd need to pay for [X premium](https://fortune.com/2024/11/16/elon-musk-doge-job-application-x-premium-subscription-cost/).) Not long after that, the same handle posted in a group for Palantir alums: “This is a historic opportunity to build an efficient government, and to cut the federal budget by 1/3.”
Luke Farritor, a 23-year-old engineer, quickly joined in the DOGE recruitment effort. The son of an academic at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a physician, Farritor was homeschooled and filled his childhood bedroom with books by James Baldwin and Jordan Peterson. During college he got prestigious internships at SpaceX and took to wearing his SpaceX T-shirt all the time. Later, Farritor came to a certain nerdy prominence for his role in using machine learning to decipher an ancient papyrus charred by the same volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii. He said his work received support from a $2 million gift from the Musk Foundation, and Musk backed it on X. The papyrus project also helped earn Farritor a Thiel Fellowship last spring—a $100,000 grant funded by the oligarch and meant to encourage bright young people to drop out of college, which Farritor promptly did.
On December 5, Farritor posted in a Discord group for SpaceX interns, noting that DOGE was looking for “skilled software engineers (and ops people) at any career stage who are willing to work for ~6mo in person in DC. Paid.” He added: “Were going to fix the government!”
Musk, meanwhile, was spending time at Mar-a-Lago and getting a crash course on American civics, as taught by an array of Washington bureaucrats, venture capitalists, and right-wing shitposters on X. One of Musks advisers was Antonio Gracias, a private equity investor and early Tesla backer, who later summarized what theyd learned on a podcast: “A department just basically asks for money from Treasury and they send it out.”
Of course, the truth was a lot more complicated. Before the Treasury cuts a check, the payment authorization has to pass through an array of bespoke technical systems built up over decades to ensure that the money Congress appropriates is properly spent by the executive branch. The system is inefficient by design, so as to provide backstop after backstop. To Musk, that meant it was ripe for disruption. (His adviser Gracias would go on to become a DOGE “IT specialist” at the Social Security Administration.)
Still, Musk seemed to grasp that hed been cavalier in setting his goal at $2 trillion. Government spending factors into gross domestic product; that level of cutting, the economist Dean Baker told WIRED, would represent a hit to the economy akin to the 2008 financial crisis, with the potential to produce double-digit unemployment. By mid-January, Musk [suggested](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/elon-musk-says-doge-probably-wont-find-2-trillion-federal-budget-cuts-rcna186924) that $1 trillion—a sum merely greater than the entirety of nondefense discretionary spending—was a reasonable aim. He started to home in on individual government agencies. He seemed especially eager to eviscerate USAID, the governments primary instrument for foreign aid. The right-wing conspiracy theories hed eventually repost on X portrayed it as a criminal enterprise, a tool of the deep states woke agenda.
As Trumps second inauguration drew near, Musks and Ramaswamys visions for DOGE started to sharply diverge. Ramaswamy advocated an incremental approach: Push for changes in law that would eventually cut off spending at the source. Musk didnt want to wait around for that. Increasingly, his plans seemed in line with a scheme that incoming vice president JD Vance had laid out in a podcast interview in 2021: Fire all midlevel civil servants and replace them with Trump loyalists. Just before Trump officially took office, Musks vision won out, and Ramaswamy left the organization.
Illustration: Sam Lyon
Trump officially established DOGE on the afternoon of his inauguration. He effectively pasted it on top of the US Digital Service, an Obama-era agency set up to attract private-sector talents into a few years of civil work. Now the *D* in USDS would stand for “DOGE.” The order also established another organization within it—the US DOGE Service Temporary Organization—that would expire on July 4, 2026. This would give DOGE the ability to bring in special government employees, people who would serve for a limited time before returning to the private sector and who, critically, would not be subject to the same transparency requirements as regular government workers.
As Trumps presidency began, the DOGE brain trust broke camp at SpaceX headquarters in DC. An employee who was there says they left a mens bathroom “trashed.” One of the urinals was “filled with gum and Zyn.”
Daisy Kid Henderson first heard from DOGE around 9:30 pm on Inauguration Day, when she received an email inviting her to a meeting with anonymous staffers the following afternoon. Henderson, a fiery 28-year-old software engineer at the USDS, describes herself as an “eternal optimist.” Still, she found the lack of names on the invite disconcerting.
Henderson, who is based in Denver, had been working for the USDS since January 2024. She landed there after a seven-year stint at Comcast, where her job involved everything from quantum computing to robotics to an audio algorithm for filtering sounds that people with PTSD or autism might find triggering. For Henderson, USDS was a chance to take a breath and reevaluate her career while doing some good. “It was my dream job,” she recalls. “When I was hired on, it was even better than I imagined.” Henderson had overseen three generative AI pilot programs at the Department of Homeland Security. One, created for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, helped local officials plan and apply for disaster aid funding. She also partnered with the Food and Nutrition Service to help a number of states more quickly deliver assistance to low-income families.
By the time Hendersons appointment with DOGE rolled around, she recalls, “they had been doing these meetings all day nonstop.” DOGE “had four or five interviewers and worked in shifts,” Henderson says, likely in an attempt to churn through all 200 legacy USDS employees as quickly as possible. According to another USDS staffer, someone had tried asking the interviewers for their last names, and the reply had been: “This is a one-way conversation. We won't be answering any questions.”
One question the DOGE people seemed to be asking everyone: *What do you think about DOGE?*
Henderson tried to stay positive as her call with the two young DOGE operatives began. They introduced themselves by their first names only, Cole and Ram. (That was Cole Killian, a 24-year-old who had attended McGill University, and Nikhil Rajpal, the former college libertarian and X employee.) As the men asked Henderson about her projects, they seemed particularly interested in her AI-related work for FEMA and her technical abilities. Then the questions took a strange turn—centering around “who the underperformers are at USDS,” Henderson recalls, and what skills she brought to her role. At one point, Killian simply got up and walked out of the room without a word. Rajpal carried on as though nothing had happened. Afterward, Henderson learned her colleagues had been asked whether they should keep their jobs.
Similarly strange meetings were going on at the General Services Administration, another early DOGE target. If OPM was the federal governments HR department, GSA was the operations and IT departments rolled into one. It oversaw more than 1,000 federally owned buildings, from anonymous office parks to minimalist masterpieces, along with hundreds of thousands of government vehicles and tens of billions in annual government purchasing.
As would happen at agencies across the government, the GSA seizure took place in the shadows—a matter not of announcements but of calendar invitations from unknown people, of unfamiliar names appearing in internal directories. The sixth and seventh floors, which had offices and suites used by the administrator, the “A-suite,” were restricted and largely locked down. No longer could employees simply badge in through the turnstile. Now they had to pass through metal detectors and have their belongings x-rayed.
During that first week, GSA employees caught a glimpse of a whiteboard sitting in a large, vacant room with three items written on it:
> **Spending Cuts $585 m**
>
> **Regulations Removed 15**
>
> **Square feet sold/terminated 203,000 sf.**
No one in the rank and file seemed to know who wrote it or what it meant.
As one of Musks top operatives at the GSA, DOGE installed Nicole Hollander—Steve Davis partner, the other parent of the newborn who slept at Twitter HQ. A former Tesla software engineer, Thomas Shedd, became the director of the GSAs Technology Transformation Services, which operates dozens of crucial systems used across government agencies, including Login.gov, Cloud.gov, and the Federal Procurement Data System, a database that makes all unclassified government contracts above the micropayment level freely available to the public. DOGEs strike force at GSA included Coristine, the young engineer known as “Big Balls,” and Farritor, the papyrus whiz kid. Another young DOGE recruit, Ethan Shaotran, also got a GSA email account and A-suite clearance. Shaotran had recently served as the president of Harvards mountaineering club. Hed drifted into DOGEs orbit at a hackathon for xAI, another company Musk owns.
Soon it became clear that DOGE wanted GSA to adopt one product in particular: an AI chatbot that could plug into the agencys main portal, the Enterprise Data Solution. Such a tool would allow a handful of DOGE technicians to ask questions in plain language and get answers from vast stores of government data. (How this would accord with the GSAs Internal Data Sharing Policy, which mandates that requests for certain kinds of controlled unclassified information must be approved by supervisors, was unclear.) To DOGE operatives unfamiliar with GSAs systems, this might have seemed like a quick build—particularly if the team used an off-the-shelf large language model, like Claude or Gemini or Llama, as a starting point.
But the engineers at GSA knew the project DOGE had in mind was far more complex than it seemed. The Enterprise Data Solution is a maze of disparate databases, analytical tools, and machine-learning systems, all with tightly controlled permissions. Creating even a quick chatbot that could tap into these datasets and produce useful answers was anything but trivial. During the Biden administration, employees at TTS had started exploring the possibility of building a simpler chatbot called GSAi, which they hoped would increase productivity by helping people write emails and eventually process contract and procurement data. By the end of Bidens term, though, there was no GSA chatbot on the horizon.
“Anyone can build a chatbot today; it's really not that interesting,” a data scientist remarked during a February meeting about GSAi. A version of it—one that wasnt directly connected to EDS—was set to go live soon. “The interesting part is in the quality. Can we build a high-quality chatbot, one where our domain expertise is being applied?”
To bridge the gap, GSA engineers proposed building what they called a discovery layer, an intermediary designed to decode user queries, identify relevant data sources, and generate precise searches that returned data the AI could interpret. The proposal, pitched to the A-suite—the select group that sources say includes DOGE members like Davis and Hollander—would also give GSA the ability to audit queries and check the quality of the responses. But for that to work, every database would need to be mapped, its columns and metadata described and categorized, ensuring the system understood what data lived where. None of this would happen automatically. It would be a manual, painstaking process.
As the GSA engineers discussed the scope of what needed to happen, according to sources familiar with the events, they seemed deflated. DOGEs timeline was unrealistic. “This is a multiyear play,” one employee said bluntly in a meeting about the project, “and they think in terms of days and weeks.”
A day after the Alfalfa Club dinner, rumors were swirling that the Department of Housing and Urban Development would soon have its funding frozen. Grantees who already had their projects approved—state and county governments, nonprofits—began aggressively drawing down their funding at an unprecedented scale. While HUD employees could have stopped the withdrawals, they didn't. And so, in the space of just a few days, around 1,400 grantees withdrew $1.5 billion in federal funding—five times the normal rate, according to data compiled from the agency's banking system and shared with WIRED.
For Musk to gain what he seemingly most wanted—a “delete” button he could wield against any agency by cutting off its funding at the source—he would need direct access to the US Treasury. DOGE dispatched operatives to the Treasurys Bureau of Fiscal Service, which controls more than $5 trillion in disbursements, including Social Security and Medicare payments, tax refunds, and the salaries of federal workers. The operatives wanted access to two key systems: the [Payment Automation Manager](https://fiscal.treasury.gov/pam/) and the [Secure Payment System](https://fiscal.treasury.gov/sps/). David Lebryk, the highest-ranking career official at the Treasury, [retired](https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5119996-david-lebryk-retirement-treasury-doge-musk/) rather than comply. The financial journalist and payments expert Nathan Tankus would later say that the news of Lebryks retirement gave him a “panic attack,” because everyone above Lebryk was a political appointee.
Illustration: Sam Lyon
Meanwhile, Farritor and a DOGE colleague had started showing up at USAID, one of Musks political bêtes noires. They carried backpacks with six or seven laptops each, sources familiar with the events told WIRED, and were allegedly instructed to access “employee email accounts and all digital infrastructure,” according to a lawsuit later filed against DOGE on behalf of USAID employees. Initially turned away for lack of security clearance, they came back with a handwritten note on stationery from the Executive Office of the President saying they were suitable.
On X, Musk called USAID a “criminal organization” and said it was “time for it to die”; Trump alleged that the agency was “run by a bunch of radical lunatics.” According to [The Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/24/musk-doge-usaid-cuts-dc/), Farritor and the other DOGE operative would run manually through payments, clicking off lifesaving programs. On February 3, Musk bragged that he had spent the weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
Soon afterward, [as WIRED first reported](https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-associate-bfs-federal-payment-system/) on February 4, a 25-year-old former X engineer named Marko Elez was granted the ability not only to read the code in the Treasury systems but also to write—or change—it. With that level of access, he (or anyone he reported to) could potentially have cut off congressionally authorized payments, effectively allowing Trump or Musk to exercise a line-item veto. More immediately ominous to people familiar with the systems was the possibility that, by tampering with the code, Elez could cause the systems, in whole or in part, to simply stop working. “Its like knowing you have hackers on your network, but nobody lets you do anything about it,” a Treasury employee told WIRED.
The fact of Elezs read/write access to Treasury payment systems, confirmed later by Tankus, became a source of contention. Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, denied that DOGE had read/write access. In a [letter to Congress](https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0009) that same day, Bessent wrote that members of the Treasury staff, including DOGE operative and Cloud Software Group CEO Thomas Krause, would have “read-only access,” which they needed to “continue this operational efficiency assessment.” But the letter didnt mention Elez, whom a Treasury employee described to WIRED as the “hands-on-keyboard” person. (White House officials have gone [back](https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/03/bessent-musk-doge-treasury-payments-00202278) and [forth](https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/11/musk-ally-mistakenly-power-alter-payments-system-00203714) about DOGEs access to Treasury payment systems. This issue ended up in the courts. The cases are ongoing.)
By early February, Elez came under fire after [The Wall Street Journal](https://www.wsj.com/tech/doge-staffer-resigns-over-racist-posts-d9f11a93) found racist comments from accounts linked to him on social media. One suggested that “99%” of immigrant workers from India would be “replaced by slightly smarter” large language models. When the Journal asked whether Elez was connected to the account, he resigned. Later, with public support from Musk and Vice President Vance, DOGE rehired him. Before long, he was designated as an “IT specialist” at another target of Musks: the Social Security Administration.
DOGE had installed a handpicked chief information officer at the SSA—the former CTO of a payments company headed by Jared Isaacman, a billionaire who once commanded two trips to space using SpaceX rockets and is Trumps current nominee to lead NASA. That new CIO, Michael Russo, had asked to bring on Akash Bobba, the former Palantir intern who had been working out of OPM, as an engineer.
But there were “challenges” with Bobbas background check, Tiffany Flick, the acting chief of staff to the acting administrator, later stated in a sworn affidavit given in a suit against the SSA. Bobba wasnt brought on immediately. By February 10, seven days after he was requested to be onboarded, phone calls and emails started to come in—from Russo, Steve Davis, and others—making clear that Bobba was to be given access to SSA systems and data by the end of the day. As Russo and Davis “grew increasingly impatient” that evening, Flick recalled, Bobba was sworn in over the phone at 9 pm.
Initially, Flick and officials from the CIOs office determined that Bobba would be given anonymized, read-only access to records in the Numerical Identification System, which contains information on everyone who has ever applied for a Social Security number. On February 15, Bobba reported that there were issues with the dataset hed been provided. Russo demanded that Bobba be given full access to “everything, including source code,” Flick recalled. This included the SSAs Enterprise Data Warehouse, which contains the “names of spouses and dependents, work history, financial and banking information, immigration or citizenship status, and marital status,” according to Flicks affidavit.
Later that day, the chief information officer for the whole federal government—a political appointee working out of the Office of Management and Budget—issued an opinion to Russo granting Bobba the access. Flick retired. In her affidavit, she expressed serious concerns about the potential for SSA records to be “inadvertently transferred to bad actors” and about “incredibly complex web of systems” being “broken by inadvertent user error.”
Over at the USDS, Daisy Kid Henderson had decided it was time for her to leave too. Since DOGEs takeover, Henderson and her colleagues had had little contact with their new overlords. Each day, the legacy employees logged on to their government laptops to work on projects from the last administration, like generative AI for the IRS. One USDS worker said at the time that they did their best to “ignore the clown show.”
Then Henderson received another email from DOGE: They wanted to speak with her again the following morning. She was told they liked her enthusiasm and wanted to draw her closer into the fray.
Henderson did not return their admiration. From what she had seen of DOGE, she says, they showed a “blatant lack of regard for the American peoples private data.” Henderson wanted no part of it. Instead of accepting the meeting, she forced-shut down her laptop and phone and didn't acknowledge the email until Monday, when she resigned. “I didnt want to be seen as being locked in with what DOGE was doing,” she says. “On the flip side, if I was to stand up to them, or to say no, Elon Musk has shown that he is totally OK blasting and doxing employees and having that army descend upon me.” She responded to the email saying she had found a new opportunity in the private sector. She hadnt, but with her skills, it wouldnt be long before she did.
“I was put in a position where, whether I chose to engage or not engage, I might have to cross ethical lines. I would have to breach the oath to the Constitution that I swore. I would have to breach my morals,” she says. “It was clear I was going to be asked to join in on one of their tirades and work on a complete dismantlement of government systems.”
Later that month, DOGE imposed a $1 spending limit [on federal employee credit cards](https://www.wired.com/story/doge-government-credit-cards/). The move instantly roiled agencies from the National Park Service to the National Institutes of Health as employees scrambled to buy basic necessities to do their jobs. Yet again, DOGEs move-fast ethos would put Americans personal data at risk.
At one SSA office, a manager confirmed to his staff that he could no longer pay the company that shreds sensitive documents. “We print a lot of shit daily,” one SSA employee told WIRED. “Stuff with peoples names, addresses, phone numbers, SSNs, bank accounts, you name it. We have giant locking trash bins we put it in, and we pay a shredding company to empty them every month.” With the new $1 limit, the employee said, a “stockpile” of sensitive data was growing, leaving workers with two options: “Shred it ourselves on regular office shredders—of which we have two, I think, and so it would take forever—or just sit on it while it piles up.”
Other employees at SSA told WIRED that rather than showing their anger at work where they could face retribution, they instead attended weekend protests at Tesla dealerships in DC, part of a nationwide protest effort to drive down the share price of Musks electric car company.
On March 7, DOGE got one of the things it seemed to want most from GSA: a chatbot that could automate work previously done by federal employees. The tool rolled out to some 1,500 employees at GSA, with an agencywide launch planned a week later. An internal memo about the tool touted the “endless” tasks it could help with: “draft emails, create talking points, summarize text, write code.” The memo hinted at the dangers of deploying chatbots at the federal level, warning workers not to “type or paste” internal or personally identifiable information as inputs.
People who used it werent impressed. “Its about as good as an intern,” one GSA employee [told WIRED](https://www.wired.com/story/gsai-chatbot-1500-federal-workers/). “Generic and guessable answers.” This version of GSAi almost certainly couldnt interact with the EDS discovery layer first proposed by engineers. More likely it was just the first step in an iterative approach. As one official said in the February meeting about the project, the first goal could be to “deliver this sort of janky, doesnt-work-all-the-time chatbot” to pave the way for a “turbo-charged” version down the line.
Its unclear whether DOGE was on the same page.
Around that time, GSA employees learned there were cuts on the way. “I encourage each of you to consider your options as we move forward,” wrote Stephen Ehikian, GSAs acting administrator, whose wife had recently worked for Musk at X. “The new GSA will be slimmer, more efficient, and laser-focused on efficiency and high-value outcomes.”
Similar messages were going out across DC. The federal governments funding was due to lapse on March 14, potentially triggering a shutdown. While Trump was busy lobbying House Republicans to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government afloat until September, [WIRED reported](https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-has-wanted-the-government-shut-down/) that Musk had expressed interest in a shutdown—in part because doing so would potentially make it easier to cut hundreds of thousands of federal workers.
But hours before the House convened to vote on the resolution, Musk and Trump had apparently put their differences aside. They convened on the White Houses South Lawn to admire a small fleet of Teslas. Trump had recently posted that he planned to buy one. Of the protesters at Tesla factories who were speaking out against Musks work with DOGE, Trump said, “Were going to catch them” and that they would “go through hell.”
The president and his richest ally walked around the cars, admiring the different colors, before getting into one. “Everythings computer!” Trump exclaimed, after sitting down. “Thats beautiful.”
It was Musk's car, but Trump occupied the drivers seat.
*Updated: 3/14/2025, 2:00 PM EDT: The article has been updated to clarify discretionary budget spending.*
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*Additional reporting by Paresh Dave and Matt Giles*
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*Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at* *[mail@wired.com](mailto:mail@wired.com).*
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@ -58,8 +58,6 @@ Eisenberg didnt learn about Culkins attempt to back out until after the fi
Culkin isnt Jewish, which was a major discussion, Eisenberg says: “Ihave 17,000 thoughts about this, and where I come out is he gave me an amazing gift by helping to tell this story that is very personal for my family.” As Benji, Culkin is as enchanting as he is impulsive and infuriating, ­casually befriending other people on the tour to the astonished envy of David then later berating their sweet guide for his “constant barrage of stats.” In a vivid moment roughly midway through the film, he publicly melts down about the cognitive dissonance of traveling first class on a ­Polish train on a Holocaust tour, embarrassing David and baffling his peers. David in particular cant seem to understand why Benji is so consistently plagued by ­suffering. “You see how people love you? You see what happens when you walk into a room?” he goes on to ask him. “I would give anything to know what that feels like, man.”
With Jesse Eisenberg in *A Real Pain.* Photo: Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
Unlike a lot of actors, who tend to try to distance themselves from their most widely known role in fear of being existentially stuck or typecast, Culkin constantly and happily steers our conversation back to ­*Succession*. The show was deeply meaningful to him — it was where he says he finally realized he wanted to be an actor. On a personal level, he was such a fan of the series that he almost always watched it with Charton as it aired each Sunday night, though he mostly avoided the internet discourse. “My wife would tell me certain things, like, Oh, people are making fun of the way you sit. And shell show me on her phone. And Im scrolling, like, Oh, yeah, [I sit weird in the show.](https://www.vulture.com/article/kieran-culkin-hbo-succession-quirky-sits.html) I didnt know that.’” He still hasnt seen the final episode, in part because he was already in Poland filming *A Real Pain* when it aired. Its been so long now that he and Charton are planning a rewatch going back to episode one. He admits he might also be avoiding the finale because then the whole thing will really be over. He still daydreams about a spontaneous fifth-season pickup: “Theres part of me that feels like, *When are they going to call?*” he says. “I think maybe the reason is because I didnt get the closure of watching the last fucking episode.” Suddenly, we are confronted by the half-naked body of his *Succession* co-star [Alexander Skarsgård](https://www.vulture.com/tags/alexander-skarsgard/) hovering above us on a gigantic billboard. Culkin stops talking and looks up at him, beaming with pride. “Well!” he says. “There he is.”
While filming *Succession*, where he was encouraged to play around with his lines and his character, Culkin developed a sort of free-associative acting style, but he wont go so far as to call it improv (“That has a certain feel to it”). Instead, he calls it *blagging*, British slang he picked up from his wife that loosely translates to “fake it till you make it.” He doesnt like to talk too much about how he does this or try to analyze it; to look at it too hard might ruin the whole thing. “Its written, and I understand the character, and then some shit comes out sometimes; thats it. And I dont force it,” he says.

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# Men Lie About Their Height—Even Baseball Players
Spring training is off to a rough start for Colorado Rockies left fielder Nolan Jones, who does not have a hit through his first four games, but that barely matters. He already claimed perhaps his most cherished victory of the season: He learned he is taller than first baseman Michael Toglia.
“Mikes told me hes taller than me for three years straight,” says Jones. “But I was taller than him on the ABS.”
“By four millimeters!” laments Toglia, who is listed at 65” but is actually 64”.
“Taller,” says Jones, 64” plus four millimeters.
Amid the fungoes and photo days has come a new rite of spring: the couple of hours when Major League Baseball descends upon camps to measure hitters for the [automated ball-strike challenge system](https://www.si.com/mlb/abs-challenge-system-is-awesome-spring-training) (ABS) in use for approximately 60% of exhibition games this spring. The idea is that the games would proceed as normal, with human umpires, except that teams would get two challenges per game. Only the pitcher, catcher or batter can use a challenge; if the challenge is successful, the team retains it. (The league said fans and players overwhelmingly prefer this system to a fully human one or a fully automated one.)
The league, which debuted the system in the independent Atlantic League in 2019 and has expanded it to the Florida State League and Triple A since, is trying it at the major league level for the first time this year. If it earns rave reviews, it could come to the regular season as early as 26.
“This is a pretty big decision for the game of baseball,” says MLB executive vice president of baseball operations Morgan Sword, “that we want to get everybody to weigh in on.”
But first there are some logistics to sort through, starting with the dimensions of the automated strike zone. MLB has settled on a strike zone width of 17 inches and height spanning the length between 27% of a batters height to 53.5% of a batters height (roughly the letters to the knees when hes in his normal stance). In order to get that height, they have to measure it.
Which is bad news for the players who have been a little generous when submitting their stats to the media guide.
Outfielder Benny Montgomery, listed at 6'5", gets measured by Malone for the ABS challenge system. / Colorado Rockies
“Some guys are gonna get caught,” says Rockies pitcher Austin Gomber, who because of his position did not need to be measured and because of his 65” listed frame did not need to worry. (If a pitcher pinch-hits—or if a player who was not officially measured debuts—the league will just use his listed height.)
Infielder Kyle Farmer is among those about to undergo a disappointing rewriting. Much like a lot of 511” guys on dating apps, hes long listed himself at 60”. The ABS measurers disagreed.
“Im 512”!” he insists.
But the measuring team does not accept appeals. A group of independent strength and conditioning coaches, chosen jointly by the league and the union, are visiting each camp to start the spring (the Rockies went first.) They bring in players in shorts, so they can make sure no one is bending his knees to reduce the size of his strike zone, and they have them stand up against a wall in socks or bare feet. They ask them to take a deep breath, which inflates the lungs and forces players to stand up straight, then, just like at the doctors office, they bring the measuring device down onto the players head and call out the number. They repeat the test and average the results. They also do the whole thing in millimeters, leaving players frantically Googling to learn their fate.
The veterans know that you want to be as short as possible. Third baseman Ryan McMahon, who is listed at 62” and did not know his ABS result because he is unfamiliar with the metric system, slumped as much as he could get away with.
“Hopefully that helps,” he says. “No high strikes!”
But most of the time, ego takes over. There were heated discussions of cushioned socks. Some players were disappointed to learn their hair earned them no extra ticks. When it came down to it, almost no one could bring himself to crouch.
“\[Outfielder Sam\] Hilliard was like, Man, I got on the scale and I couldnt help it, I wanted to be as tall as I could,’” McMahon relates.
In the end, it doesnt really matter; the league is sending the results to Southwest Research Institute, which will confirm through biomechanical analysis that no one was cheating. And even the cheaters probably only bought themselves fractions of an inch. But still, for the team, shouldnt you do everything you can?
Jones considers this. Then he looks at Toglia. “No,” he says. “Honestly, I wouldve stretched out just to be taller than him.”
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TimeStamp: 2025-03-23
Link: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-a-case-of-mistaken-identity-a-murder-in-cairo-and-a-decades-long/
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# Opinion: A case of mistaken identity, a murder in Cairo, and a decades-long investigation into the death of a journalist
*Peter Gillman is the author, with Emanuele Midolo, of* Murder in Cairo: The Killing of David Holden*, from which the following article is adapted.*
[Go to essay](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-a-case-of-mistaken-identity-a-murder-in-cairo-and-a-decades-long/?intcmp=gift_expired#essaystart)
## A note from our editor-in-chief
A central tenet of successful journalism is making promises you then keep.
*Murder in Cairo* is the culmination of a near 50-year promise, to do all that journalism can offer to solve the murder of the foreign correspondent David Holden.
At first, the promise belonged to the investigative Insight team of The Sunday Times of London, which was then owned by the Thomson family, future proprietors of The Globe and Mail. These were colleagues of Mr. Holden, who was executed within hours of travelling to Cairo on assignment for peace talks between Egypt and Israel in December, 1977.
Mr. Holdens editor at The Sunday Times, Sir Harold Evans, had ordered a team of investigative journalists to Egypt and the wider region immediately after the killing. No expense was to be spared but despite the determination, and months in the field, the bread crumbs of clues lay scattered.
I always count my lucky stars that I got to know Harry Evans. He was a long-time mentor of mine, and friend.
He taught me the Harry principles of investigative journalism. Readers will readily recognize that they live on in all the investigative work we do here at The Globe and Mail.
There are five principles decide what the story is, resource it appropriately, be relentless in the pursuit, recognize the audience is only beginning to pay attention at precisely the time the newsroom is losing interest in the story, and always remember you may be wrong.
This granite bedrock explains how journalists commit to stories seemingly without end. And the road map removes all excuses when someone like Harry asks you to help with the story. Harry had included a chapter on the Holden killing in his memoirs *My Paper Chase*, in which he wrote about the unfinished business. The secrets, kept for nearly five decades.
Before Harry died in September, 2020, at the age of 92, we spent time on many occasions modelling what may have happened to Mr. Holden that fateful day.
I promised Harry I would stay on the story and help where I could. Harry had wanted to know where the rot lay, including in his own newsroom, where telexes belonging to the foreign department were going missing.
I spoke to a number of people in various countries, and knowing the CIA had a file on Mr. Holden, I asked one former CIA director point-blank during a visit to Washington if the CIA had arranged the assassination. “We dont whack journalists,” came the reply.
In sharing this adapted excerpt, we combine the powerful forces of two generations. One who lived the tragedy, the other who inherited it. Peter Gillman went to the scene of the crime the week it happened and spent months penning the original investigative piece for The Sunday Times; Emanuele Midolo began working at The Sunday Times in 2020, but with a burning curiosity he joined forces with Mr. Gillman. Together they have produced (most of) the answers we have been waiting for. It is an astonishing act of tenacity.
The story is one of intrigue, bafflement and of spies both inside a newsroom and outside. The double and triple lives some of the characters convey makes the telling as riveting as any spy novel. But the one difference is rather than double-crossing duplicity, *Murder in Cairo* is a promise kept.
*David Walmsley, Editor-in-Chief*
One evening in September, 1974, David Halton, a foreign-affairs correspondent for the CBC, arrived at Cairo International Airport on a flight from London. Mr. Halton, aged 34, with receding brown hair and dark-blue eyes, was working his well-trodden Middle East beat. He had covered the Six-Day Arab-Israeli war in 1967 and the death of Egypts president Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970. This was his fourth or fifth visit to Cairo in as many years and he knew the arrivals routine.
He joined the line of passengers for the visa and passport controls where his documents were checked and stamped. As he was walking toward the baggage reclaim area, he was stopped by two men wearing scruffy suits. They asked if he was David Halton or so he thought. “Yes, Im David Halton,” he replied.
The men introduced themselves as Egyptian press officials who would take him to his hotel. Mr. Halton was puzzled, as he had not informed the Egyptian authorities that he was coming. But it was late at night and, after a long days travelling, he could certainly use a lift.
“Thats very kind of you,” Mr. Halton told the pair, following them into the baggage area.
The two men retrieved his luggage, then escorted him past customs and through the swing doors that opened into the clammy Cairo night.
Mr. Halton was accustomed to heading to the row of regulated taxis to the left of the arrivals building. Instead, they steered him to a cluster of unmarked cars to the right. They opened the front passenger door of an ancient sedan and gestured that he should sit next to the driver, while the two officials occupied the rear seats.
As the car wove its way through Cairos notorious traffic, one of the officials asked Mr. Halton about his travel plans and how long he intended to stay in Egypt. He mentioned several unfamiliar names.
“Im sorry, Im not sure what you are talking about,” Mr. Halton told them.
The official flashed a cryptic smile and replied that they had set up some of the meetings he had requested. Even more perplexed, Mr. Halton said that he not asked for any interviews to be arranged. He turned in his seat and asked the question that had been puzzling him ever since they had greeted him in the arrivals building:
“How did you know I was coming?”
It was the officials turn to look surprised.
“You are David Holden of The Sunday Times?” one asked.
Now Mr. Halton realized what had happened.
“Actually its David Halton, Hal-ton, not David Hol-den. Im sorry but I think youve got the wrong person. Im David Halton from CBC.”
The two Egyptians looked at each other in disbelief and whispered briefly in Arabic. Then one said, “Were almost at the hotel, so well drop you off.” The two men said nothing for the rest of the journey. There was a peremptory parting once they arrived at the hotel. Mr. Halton thanked them and the car sped away.
Mr. Halton thought little more of the episode. There was plenty in the Middle East to occupy him, as Egypt completed a shift of allegiance from the Soviet to the U.S. camp, then took part in initial moves toward a peace deal with Egypts former mortal enemy, Israel, mediated by the Americans.
Three years later, David Halton realized his unsettling encounter with the Egyptians could have had a very different ending.
On Dec. 6, 1977, David Holden, chief foreign correspondent of the London Sunday Times, arrived at Cairo airport on an unusually warm winters night. Aged 53, with slicked-back brown hair and china-blue eyes, he was making his last stop on a 10-day swing through the Middle East ahead of peace talks between Egypts President Anwar Sadat and Israels Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
Mr. Holdens flight from Amman had been delayed and it was 11:15 p.m. by the time he was following the same journey through the arrivals building as David Halton three years before. He bought some Egyptian currency and purchased a visitors visa, then lined up at immigration control. After his documents had been checked and stamped, he retrieved his red Samsonite suitcase in the baggage hall, passed through Customs, and headed for the exit.
Somewhere along this journey, like David Halton, Mr. Holden was intercepted by one or more Egyptian officials. Once outside, he was escorted away from the official taxis to the left and toward the cars parked to the right. There he got into a battered Fiat that, it turned out, had been stolen and resprayed just 24 hours before. The car sped away, disappearing into the Cairo night.
Some six hours later, Mr. Holdens body was found, dumped in the dirt beside a road a few miles from the airport. He had been shot through the heart with a single bullet fired from behind, clearly a professional hit. All identifying marks had been removed. The body was taken to the city morgue where it was identified as Mr. Holdens three days later. This time the assassins had got their man.
As a reporter working at The Sunday Times, I was part of a team immediately dispatched to the Middle East to try to reconstruct Mr. Holdens last journey. Beyond that, we aimed to answer two key questions: Who killed Mr. Holden? And why? Our attempt to do so lasted the best part of a year, and produced more questions than answers.
Our failure was to preoccupy me for the next four decades. And so four years ago I teamed up with a young Sunday Times journalist, Emanuele Midolo, to resume the quest. So what did we find? Why should the case still exert such a hold? And how does David Halton, whose uninvited ride in 1974 foreshadowed that of his near-namesake three years later, feel about his narrow escape today?
I hardly knew Mr. Holden. To me, he was remote and aloof, rarely mixing with his Sunday Times colleagues. He appeared every inch the professional journalist and writer, attracting epithets such as distinguished and accomplished. The son of a newspaper editor in Englands north-east, he studied at Cambridge, dabbled with acting, then rose through Britains journalistic establishment, working successively for The Times, The Guardian and Sunday Times. For his final trip he was reporting for both The Sunday Times and the New York Times, visiting Syria, Jordan, Israel and the occupied West Bank before his fatal flight to Cairo.
The news that Mr. Holdens body had been found and identified caused consternation when it reached The Sunday Times late on Saturday, Dec. 10. Among the most distressed was its legendary editor, Harold Evans, who had lost correspondents before and felt a burden of responsibility on his shoulders. He also had a newspaper to prepare. The next days issue carried a front page report with the headline: Sunday Times man found shot dead in Egypt.
Mr. Evans called me that day and asked me to go to Jordans capital, Amman; other journalists were sent to Cairo, Jerusalem and Beirut. We spent a week scrutinizing Mr. Holdens movements during his last trip, compiling a list of press conferences and meetings hed attended, and interviews hed conducted.
We were left with some puzzling gaps and anomalies, as when he appeared to be in two places at the same time. We pondered the meaning of a postcard Mr. Holden sent from Jerusalem to his long-time friend, the writer Jan Morris, the day before he died. It showed a fortress in Jerusalems Old City, with Mr. Holdens note: “In the Middle East, citadels still have their uses.”
At the end of that first week, The Sunday Times published a summary of our findings under the headline: Who Killed David Holden? After a break over Christmas, we continued our inquiries into the New Year. Among our interviewees was David Halton, who had been in Cairo when Mr. Holden was killed. He told us about his alarming near-miss in 1974; he was uncertain whether it had been in August or September, before plumping for the latter.
We considered a range of motives for the killing: a robbery gone wrong; an act of terrorism; a fatal love tryst; revenge by Israel for a devastating Sunday Times article published six months before that revealed the systematic torture of Palestinian detainees. But one thing was crystal clear: Someone had badly wanted Mr. Holden dead. The killers had used three cars, all stolen, the first on Nov. 18, when Mr. Holden was still arranging his trip, the second and third just 24 hours before he arrived, indicating that they knew his travel plans. Two of the cars had been resprayed. Mr. Holden had been killed in one of the cars, his suitcase and typewriter were found in another, and the killers made their getaway in a third.
We had an uneasy sense that we were venturing into deep and murky waters and this was strengthened when I returned to the Middle East in January with a colleague, John Barry. We went to Lebanon where we met officials from the Palestine Liberation Organization at its Beirut headquarters to ask, in the politest possible manner, whether it had murdered Mr. Holden. The PLO denied doing so, citing two grounds: It had a policy of not killing journalists; and, following our revelations of Israels torture of Palestinian detainees, it considered The Sunday Times a friend.
We were back at our hotel when we received devastating news: A thief at The Sunday Times was stealing printouts of our messages, known as telexes, which described our findings and travel plans. On checking back, the newspaper found that a number of Mr. Holdens telexes had also been stolen, suggesting that this was how the killers learned his travel plans. At The Sunday Times, anxiety bordering on paranoia reigned. Entry into the office building was all too easy, with minimal security checks. But a thief would still need to have known where to locate the messages. The alternative, even more troubling, was that someone on the staff was in collusion with the killers: In other words, it had been an inside job.
John Barry and I completed our trip without mishap. The Sunday Times mounted a sting to try to catch the telex thief, which failed. It was then that Harold Evans asked us to broaden our inquiries, “no expense spared,” to encompass Mr. Holdens whole life. Over the next six months, as we compiled Mr. Holdens biography, curiosities and questions emerged. There appeared to have been an attempt by MI6, Britains secret intelligence agency, to recruit Mr. Holden while he was at Cambridge; and his swift rise at The Times suggested he was assisted by friends in high places. He had some kind of relationship with the CIA, which had taken a close interest in his movements during his final trip. We were intrigued when we learned that Mr. Holden was gay and had spent 10 years in a secret relationship with an academic named Leo Silberman, who, we discovered, had lied about his credentials and, as a young man, had strong leftist beliefs.
A year after Mr. Holdens killing, following a third visit to the Middle East and two to the United States, I wrote a 30,000-word internal report summarizing our findings. I contended that the killers were most likely the Egyptians themselves, on the grounds that they in the shape of their notorious secret service, the Mukhabarat were by far the best-placed to conduct such a complex operation. As for the motive, I discarded our previous theories and argued that Mr. Holden must have been involved with “one or more” intelligence bodies; in short, he was a spy. The “or more” could have been the decisive element, if Mr. Holden was thought by one set of spooks to have betrayed them to another. The price of treason, I concluded, was death.
My report was intended in the first instance for Harold Evanss eyes only. But speculative as it was, nothing from it could be published, as The Sunday Times had been closed in a battle with the all-powerful British print unions over the introduction of new printing technology. The newspaper eventually reappeared, but in 1981 it was sold to Rupert Murdoch and Mr. Evans departed as did I, to pursue a freelance career. But I retained my interest in the Holden case, staying in touch with a secret U.S. State Department source. The case preyed on Harold Evans too, and when I last met him in 2020 by then he was Sir Harold he told me that the newspapers failure to crack the case was the biggest regret of his career.
Sir Harold died in September that year. The next day I received a phone call from Emanuele Midolo. An Italian working in Britain, and known as Manu, he had attended an investigative journalism course of mine in which I described the Holden case as the one that got away. I remembered him as talented and dedicated so when he proposed that we try to see the story through together, I agreed. As well as my own investment in the case, we would be making good Sir Harolds desire to solve the mystery.
I felt that we formed a complementary partnership. Approaching 80, I was the old-school reporter, accustomed to pavement pounding and door-knocking, from a time without computers, mobile phones or the internet. Manu, in his 30s, was the new-age Sunday Times reporter adept at the skills of the digital era. He scoured my old internal report for leads that would previously have been out of reach. We located a precious few survivors from Mr. Holdens era to see what they could tell us, despite their advanced age and fading memories. Over the next four years, we assembled a case that addressed the questions I had posed in my 1978 report.
One finding which endorsed my feelings was that no one really seemed to know Mr. Holden. A BBC producer called him “a charming enigma.” We supposed that Jan Morris, who had known him since the 1950s, would have some clues but even she called him “opaque and elusive.” We learned more about his early career as an actor, which seemed suited to someone living out concealment and deceit.
A new discovery concerned the milieu in which Mr. Holden became a reporter, where there was a frequent crossover between the worlds of journalism and espionage. I had glimpsed this before but was taken aback when I learned its full extent. The foreign editor of The Sunday Times until 1960 was none other than Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, and a Second World War intelligence chief who enlisted many of his wartime colleagues to work on the newspaper while doubling as spies. One spectacular example was John Slade-Baker, who in the 1950s was posted to Cairo where he simultaneously trained as journalist and MI6 agent. In 1956, as the Suez Canal crisis deepened, Slade-Baker even acted as a diplomatic go-between, relaying messages from Nasser to the British government and vice versa. Another was Tony Terry, who worked on the initial inquiries into Mr. Holdens death in 1977. A third was Donald McCormick, who became a foreign desk manager and was there in 1977 and 1978.
Much later we came to suspect that Mr. McCormick was the telex thief. We learned that a telex operator had described Mr. McCormick coming into the wire room around the time Mr. Holden was killed and asking for copies of all incoming telexes relating to the Holden inquiry. The operator knew that Mr. McCormick was one of Flemings intelligence recruits, and what he said led us to suppose that MI6 had wanted to track Mr. Holdens movements, and ours, for reasons that remained unclear.
As foreign editor, Fleming had clearly felt no embarrassment about these dual roles, which raised questions about Mr. Holdens swift rise at The Times. For instance, he had been posted to Washington within three months of being taken on as a trainee in 1954. The man who hired him had also hired the notorious British double agent Kim Philby at the Economist when MI6 was looking for somewhere to put him out to pasture.
All of this, coupled with the apparent attempt to recruit Mr. Holden at Cambridge, led us to consider that he had been working for British intelligence. That was strengthened by Mr. Holdens gift for being in the right place at the right time. Time and again he arrived at the location of impending crises or coups, from Suez in 1956 to the Greek colonels coup in 1967. Was that sheer journalistic acumen? Or was Mr. Holden receiving tipoffs from people who wanted their man in place?
Those questions became more pertinent when we learned of Mr. Holdens further ability to leave at the right time, too. One example was related by the renowned photographer Sir Don McCullin, who was with Mr. Holden in Kampala, capital of Uganda, in September, 1972, when armed insurgents, supported by neighbouring Tanzania, mounted a coup against the notorious dictator Idi Amin. “On the Sunday night he fled,” Sir Don told us. “Everybody thought it was very weird. He went unan­nounced: gone.” That same night the photographer was thrown into Makindye military prison “a noto­rious killing spot and with terrible hygiene. We had a harrowing time. We could have died.”
More than 50 years on, Sir Don remained aggrieved that Mr. Holden did not tip off his colleagues that it was time to leave. “A Tanzanian border guard was captured and brought to that prison. They beat him to death right in our cell, in front of us. It was the most dangerous moment of my life. I suppose I have to thank David Holden for that.”
Mr. Holden was also in Chile shortly before the coup that deposed President Salvador Allende, who was replaced by the CIA-favoured candidate Augusto Pinochet this time leaving 24 hours before Allende died. That suggested that Mr. Holden had links with the CIA, strengthened by his astonishing attacks on leaders who were CIA enemies and targets. Abandoning his customary wry objectivity, Mr. Holden savaged both Cubas Fidel Castro and Chiles Allende in articles for a periodical, Encounter, that proved to have been funded by the CIA.
We discovered that the CIA had taken a close interest in Mr. Holdens movements during his last trip, using proxies to inquire about his travel plans. And from my covert State Department source I learned that the CIA had a secret station in East Jerusalem. It was near the Tower of David, also known as the citadel, which was depicted in the postcard Mr. Holden sent to Jan Morris, with his note that citadels still had their uses.
We eventually concluded that MI6s probable interest in Mr. Holden had come to nothing; a relationship with the CIA was far more likely. None of this was necessarily enough to get Mr. Holden killed. But then came a new item to add to the mix: the KGB. In 1978 we had been keenly interested in Mr. Holdens relationship with the academic Leo Silberman, who had falsely claimed to be an Oxford professor. Our further research showed us the extent of Mr. Silbermans radical background attending May Day demonstrations in London, working with the British Labour movement which he had attempted to conceal. We also learned that both the CIA and the FBI held files on Mr. Silberman, describing him variously as “a smooth operator” and “glib, slick … creates impressions that are not true.” One document, heavily redacted, appeared to indicate that he was connected to the Soviet secret service, the KGB.
Then came Manus dramatic discovery of letters in Paris archives where Mr. Silberman described how during the 1930s he had recruited young people to the Soviet cause, using a mix of politics and sex. He also laid out his plans to infiltrate the British Labour Party. His motivation, he explained, was “the awareness and belief of the strength of our class, the greatness of our comrades and the thought of the army of revolutionaries in all our countries.”
We were now certain that Mr. Silberman was working for the KGB and had enlisted Mr. Holden in the early 1950s too.
We also learned of an apparent confession Mr. Holden had made in the 1970s to a Middle East academic, Fred Halliday, telling him candidly that he was working for the KGB. We could not understand why Mr. Holden would break his cover in such a way but it was another compelling piece in the mosaic we were assembling. Our belief that Mr. Holden had been working for the KGB was strengthened when we considered both who had conducted the killing and its timing.
We had new evidence to confirm my previous speculation that the Egyptians had killed Mr. Holden: On two occasions a prominent Egyptian figure had said as much. He was Mohamed Heikal, a former minister and newspaper editor who had been close to both the Nasser and Sadat regimes, although he was later jailed by Mr. Sadat. In the 1990s, when asked by the British journalist Michael Adams who had killed Mr. Holden, he replied “We did.” He said the same to a U.S. reporter, adding: “I liked David very much, but he was much more than a journalist.”
So why would the Egyptians do this? The answer lay in the historic geopolitical shifts in the Middle East. Throughout the 1960s Egypt had been solidly in the Soviet camp. In the 1970s U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made it his mission to induce Egypt to switch sides, succeeding with a mix of power politics and bribes. The U.S. reopened its Cairo embassy in February, 1974, together with a new CIA station. As the respective intelligence heads struck up a close working relationship, the CIA provided Egypt with the latest intelligence and security technology.
My State Department source had told me that Egypt provided the CIA with the names of all known KGB agents, who were now nakedly exposed. The CIA already had suspicions about Mr. Holden, but the fact that he was also on its own books, effectively making him a double agent, meant that his fate was sealed. What exactly passed between the CIA and Egyptians remains uncertain. The Egyptians may have taken out Mr. Holden as favour to the CIA; or they did so on their own account, as an element in their cleansing of the past.
At the time of our original inquiry we knew very little of this, least of all about the CIA, and the political focus of our inquiries was on the peace moves between Egypt and Israel. Now, the timing of the CBCs David Haltons narrow escape became decisive. Mr. Holdens last previous visit to Egypt was in 1972. The CIA were back in Cairo by spring 1974. Mr. Halton made his near-miss visit just a few months later. To the Egyptians, it must have appeared that Mr. Holden had arrived at a remarkably opportune moment. After learning of their mistake, they waited until he next appeared in their sights, in December, 1977.
I had first learned about Mr. Haltons 1974 visit during our initial investigation. When we reached him at his home in Ottawa in 2022, our questions were far better informed. Mr. Halton reflected again on his narrow escape. “Ive covered a lot of wars, as most foreign correspondents do,” he told us. Yet the near miss, on the road from Cairo airport to central Cairo, “was the most dangerous and most memorable moment in my career.”
[Open this photo in gallery:
![](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/resizer/v2/6XEUWBOBLJGANBN5NZ4SM6ZJYE.jpg?auth=df46716f069cdcf2347ebc18296ab01881f24c9c85d45bd169a548e989dc7092&width=600&quality=80)
](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/resizer/v2/6XEUWBOBLJGANBN5NZ4SM6ZJYE.jpg?auth=df46716f069cdcf2347ebc18296ab01881f24c9c85d45bd169a548e989dc7092&width=600&height=400&quality=80&smart=true)
Mr. Halton from his time as Senior Correspondent, Washington for CBC television. He retired in 2005.Supplied
Mr. Halton, while admitting that his memory for dates had become uncertain, had good reason to remember the assassination in December, 1977. He was in Israel in November when he heard that Mr. Sadat might be preparing to visit. He hurried to Cairo and secured an interview in which Mr. Sadat confirmed his plans. Sadly for Mr. Halton, he was unable to transmit his news and was scooped by another reporter. Mr. Halton was still in Cairo when he heard that Mr. Holden had been killed.
[Open this photo in gallery:
![](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/resizer/v2/BCAJSJKE45GQVHE62IBQYPK6UU.jpg?auth=4d008d5a41f94b96ceb227805a26691a258d233663e01ecb8a30a7987e69cab3&width=600&quality=80)
](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/resizer/v2/BCAJSJKE45GQVHE62IBQYPK6UU.jpg?auth=4d008d5a41f94b96ceb227805a26691a258d233663e01ecb8a30a7987e69cab3&width=600&height=400&quality=80&smart=true)
Mr. Holden on April 25, 1973.SUPPLIED BY THE SUNDAY TIMES
He did not know Mr. Holden personally, but was aware of his “giant reputation.” But by terrible mischance, a Canadian radio station made the confusion that had so nearly proved fatal before, reporting that the CBCs David Halton had been “assassinated.”
Some of Mr. Haltons relatives heard the report and called his wife to commiserate. Mr. Halton called her soon afterward, greeting her with the words: “Darling, its not me.” With some relish, he told us that he was able to use Mark Twains line about reports of his death being “greatly exaggerated.”
Talking to Mr. Halton, so celebrated in Canada, felt special. He was of my generation, like me born in Britain during the Second World War. He was enthralled by the Holden story and understood the hold our quest had exerted. It traversed a period, the Cold War, that we both knew and had come to seem a faraway country.
Now, as the political sands shift again, there are likely to be further casualties among those stranded by new allegiances. Mr. Halton was fascinated too by the wilderness of mirrors, as the intelligence world is referred to, where nothing is what it seems and which now appears an apt metaphor for an era where truth is discarded in favour of belief. Mr. Halton had admired Mr. Holden for what he appeared to be, but then had to make a new evaluation on learning of his intelligence links.
I, too, had lost innocence during our search. But it felt a price worth paying, both to complete our quest, and to fulfill one of the last wishes of the greatest newspaper editor, Sir Harold Evans.
**Editors note:** (March 17, 2025): A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to Menachem Begin as Israel's president in 1977. He was prime minister. This version has been updated.
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But then two years ago, out of nowhere, I got an email from my publisher, saying: “Would you blurb this book?” And the book was called “The Final Witness” by Paul Landis. Paul Landis was Jackie Kennedys Secret Service agent, and he was in Dallas the day of the assassination. So I got this book. Paul is actually from Cleveland, Ohio, and Shaker Heights in particular, where I live. So Id met him once before, briefly, but I thought, “Whoa, whats this book going to be about?” So I read it, and I couldnt stop reading it. It was very well done. And then you get to the end of the book, and he has this great reveal that he had found what we call the “magic bullet” in the limousine, as they were getting out of the limousine and taking the president into the hospital at Parkland. And I read that, and I thought, “My goodness, this is a big deal.” I knew enough about the Kennedy assassination, and so I called the publisher and said, “You know, this guys got to be 88 years old, and is he ready for the publicity thats going to come his way? And can I help out in any way?” And Paul said, yeah, hed be happy to have the help. So he and I then spent maybe 12 or 14 sessions, two hours each, going over what he remembers, what happened.
![](https://dotcompatterns.files.wordpress.com/2022/08/star1-1.png?w=100)
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I was highly skeptical, but I came to the conclusion that he was telling the truth, that this wasnt a recovered memory. So I wanted to write a long piece about it to justify this book, so to speak, and *Vanity Fair* picked it up. So [that was my first article](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/09/new-jfk-assassination-revelation-upend-lone-gunman?srsltid=AfmBOorUbd7cydd4b8p38SYzOhJLjA5QFfWzQ_MJM-Qu1tQN736AasDx) that I wrote last year, and that ended up being one of their top five most-read articles for 2023. That then led to the second long article about this spoof film, \[where JFK playacts his own\] assassination, which happened two months before his assassination. So it really just fell in my lap. It was an email that showed up. I wasnt looking for it, but once I read it and got into it, I just thought I really needed to understand this better and to get to know Paul very well. And hes now become a very good friend.
**In thinking about JFK and Jackie and what their family was like behind the scenes, out of the public eye, it seems like a jarring, surprising thing that they would be shooting this home movie thats so fatalistic. What did you think when you first heard from Landis that this home movie was shot so soon before JFK was assassinated?**

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@ -38,10 +38,6 @@ Here, the plants hold their essences close to the stem out of necessity, only le
After a year in Santa Fe, Ive finally started to scratch the surface of knowing this landscape. But the learning is slow and requires all my senses, including the one most often forgotten, what Hellen Keller called the “fallen angel” of the body. Unable to see or hear, smell became her primary way of reading the wider world; she lamented how that “most important” sense had been “neglected and disparaged” by the general populace, though she found it hard to communicate this knowledge to others. “It is difficult to put into words the thing itself,” she wrote. “There seems to be no adequate vocabulary of smells, and I must fall back on approximate phrase and metaphor.”
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> Sniffing, searching, naming: These actions enable us to more thoughtfully engage with our environment.
Perhaps due to our trouble translating scents into language, it was once common wisdom that human noses were weak, shoddy things compared to our animal friends. Time and research has challenged that paradigm. Although we dont have the smart wet noses of dogs or the large nasal chambers of reptiles, humans can discriminate between an estimated 1 trillion different odors; the myth of our poor olfaction is rooted in the Victorian distaste for all things scented and the Puritanical eschewing of all things bodily. In other eras people assumed that odd smells were evidence of [impending illness](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/miasma-theory), [ghostly presences](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8486), or [moral failings](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18505801/), rather than taking them for what they were.
@ -50,20 +46,12 @@ Weve also numbed our noses into oblivion, dulling [our most primal sense](htt
Yet its a wildly worthwhile thing, to immerse oneself in a landscape, and savoring the scents of place is a crucial element of this process. “Olfactory scientists have considered smell to be largely the purview of the unconscious, but by putting a smell into words we bring it into consciousness,” explains Asifa Majid, a cognitive scientist at the University of Oxford who studies both language and olfaction. Sniffing, searching, naming: These actions enable us to more thoughtfully engage with our environment.
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Smell can also ground us in our bodies—my therapist uses scent as a part of our meditative practice—and tie our consciousness to place and time, rather than letting it swirl wildly around the contortions  of future-thought. I relish my olfactory abilities because they help me feel embodied, reminding me that I am also a part of the world.
“We are constantly taking a read of our environment and synching,” says artist and theorist Gayil Nalls,\* founder of the World Sensorium Conservatory, a repository of “culturally important” botanical scents. Just as we constantly take in information from our eyes and ears, both consciously and unconsciously, were also receiving olfactory detail. “It is a big, important way that we understand our environment,” Nalls says.
On New Years Eve, 1999, Nalls debuted an “olfactory sculpture” to millions of people in Times Square. This scent was composed from iconic plants from every nation; for America, Nalls chose pine. After speaking to Nalls, I went for a walk through the scrubby forests at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains on the Atalaya trails. Almost immediately upon entering the woods, I found myself leaning into trunks, sniffing at the bark of a ponderosa pine.
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It was a hot day, and it smelled warm, resinous, homey, and alive. Even in that small patch of forest, each tree—piñons and junipers, bristlecone pines, and cypress—smelled distinctive, each plant had its own olfactory fingerprint, and together they created a complex and resonant symphony of a very particular smellscape. The more I sniffed at bark, the more confused I became. What did pine even smell like, anyway? It was only when I stepped back that the forest came into view. Iconic and piney, certainly, but also so much more.
I could list each note that sung with the pine, laying it out beat by beat. Thats how perfume companies do it: They give you the top, middle, and base notes. Sometimes this information is provided right on the packaging, though one still must sniff the nozzle to understand how they all come together. Language can only offer a loose approximation of a perfume, and a perfume can only offer a loose approximation of a natural smellscape.
@ -72,10 +60,6 @@ The airy scent that follows rain is known as petrichor, and there are many forms
For perfumers, the discovery and naming of geosmin in the 1960s was a boon, although it did take several more years to perfect the lab-synthesized version of the compound. It can be used in perfumery to add a muddy, petrichor scent to the bouquet. Since most fragrance houses dont release a list of their chemical compounds, its not always easy to know when youre smelling geosmin, but if youre looking for a desert-inspired smellscape, theres a good chance that synthetic petrichor will be part of the mix.
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> “We underestimate the human sense of smell, but we notice it a great deal when it is gone.”
Indie perfume house Solstice Scents makes a botanical, woodsy scent called “Desert Thunderstorm,” which features sage, pinon resin, sweetgrass, creosote brush, sand, and petrichor among its notes. Another atmospheric perfume, “Two cups of tea, a summer monsoon, and me and you” by Death and Floral, also relies heavily on petrichor to ground it in place. Both can veer mildewy if worn too heavily. Thats the risk of geosmin thanks to our remarkable sensitivity to this compound.
@ -84,10 +68,6 @@ But there are other ways to get a rainy desert scent, according to Cebastien Ros
“Were obsessed with trying to capture that exact experience of being out here, walking the hills, smelling the piñon resin when it gets hot, smelling the ponderosa bark that wafts the air with vanilla,” Rose says. But its not enough to simply extract oils from the bark. Its even difficult to capture a single tree in perfume form, says Rose. Plus, that wouldnt reflect the experience of walking under the “giant, orange-barked trees. You wouldnt get the oak moss, the soil, the place.” That, explains Rose, is where the “art of perfumery” comes in. The Dryland Wilds ponderosa perfume has yellow nutsedge, sweet clover, piñon, oakmoss, fir, and ponderosa. It contains extracts that mimic the dirt, resulting in a liquid that smells like a tree, yes, but is also intended to smell like a moment—a dry summer afternoon on the Atalaya trails, for instance. “Weve had people cry after smelling it,” adds Moore. “One woman had lived in a ponderosa tree trying to protect old growth forest for a year, and for her, that hit was instantaneous.”
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To me, this perfume feels more like an artistic interpretation, a translation of experience, as emotionally resonant as a poem or a song. “Its not just about creating a nice-smelling thing,” Moore had said. “Its about trying to connect and reconnect to these spaces. To connect and inspire a sense of stewardship.” Its a lot to ask from a splash from a $32 perfume bottle, but perhaps scent could inspire action. Its what Nalls is hoping for, too. And doesnt every artist want, at least on some level, for their work to change the world?
Perfumery is an ancient art. Its also a lucrative product. According to Stuart Firestein, a neuroscientist at Columbia University who studies olfaction, most of the funding that goes into research about the nose comes from the fragrance industry; compared to vision, which is well-studied and well-funded, we know relatively little about both the physiology and psychology of perceiving scent.
@ -96,10 +76,6 @@ That is beginning to change as more scientists look to the olfactory system for
Smell, as a sense, is dependent on so many variables—it can be affected by our previous experience, our current context, and our emotional or mental state. Something may smell “good” in one scenario and disgusting in another. How we judge a smell can be changed by the [sounds were hearing](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4246650/), the [temperature that surrounds us](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.571852/full), the food were tasting, [the colors were seeing](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9940644/). Its a sense that shifts and slips, sometimes in predictable ways but sometimes in totally unexpected directions. Much like the brain as a whole.
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> A smellscape is more than the list of chemicals found in a location. Its a poetic map of the world.
To lose your sense of smell, Majid points out, is to experience a disruption in perception that can have massive emotional and psychological impacts. “The human sense of smell is strongly linked to well-being, so much so that when people lose their sense of smell they report it deeply impacts their quality of life, and it can even be linked to depression,” she says. “Its a sense we take for granted, as much as we take breathing for granted.” Firestein agrees. “In general, we underestimate the human sense of smell,” he says. “But we notice it a great deal when it is gone. Suddenly, people complain quite vividly about their sense of smell. They can know they are home, see all their stuff, but they dont *feel* like they are at home. Its invasion of the body snatchers.”
@ -108,23 +84,14 @@ Ive always been keenly aware of the scent of my home and the scents of my bod
Similarly, a smellscape is more than the list of chemicals found in a location. Its a poetic map of the world, fed to us through our oldest sense. The smells of the desert are more than just sweet, dusty, dry, or sharp. Each smell is a distinct sensation, but together they are more than that. Smellscapes are part of place-making, the process by which a site becomes imbued with meaning and metaphor; a *place* is more than just the physical location. Places have history, lore, memory, and emotion all infused into them, and encounters we have with a place are participatory.
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Its of course impossible to remake the smellscape of the desert in a single piece of art. The place is continually changing based on the weather, the time of year, the exact location, and just as importantly, my mindset. The most we can ask from a perfume is that it evokes that sense of the place, opening doors in memory that we can choose to walk through. And like landscape painters, who often alter colors and dramatize scenery for effect, perfumers are free to play with their ingredients to create something that is both more and less than the real experience. They can create an atmosphere that speaks to our experience of nature without reproducing it note-by-exact-note.
Smelling a landscape, and knowing, on a deep level, the scent of a place—these actions bring us more into the world. And when a site becomes a place, were better equipped to celebrate and protect it.
I plan to leave this landscape at some point, returning to my family back east, my little house in the Maine woods. I will spend many cold New England days aching for the bright sensations of New Mexico. Ill feel place-sick but perhaps will find solace in a pathway back, in my mind, cleared by just the right desert perfume. This scent of place weaving a web of connection across an entire continent. ![](https://assets.nautil.us/sites/3/nautilus/nautilus-favicon-14.png?fm=png)
I plan to leave this landscape at some point, returning to my family back east, my little house in the Maine woods. I will spend many cold New England days aching for the bright sensations of New Mexico. Ill feel place-sick but perhaps will find solace in a pathway back, in my mind, cleared by just the right desert perfume. This scent of place weaving a web of connection across an entire continent.
*\*Gayil Nalls is married to John Steele, who is the publisher of* Nautilus.
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*Lead image: Mike Hardiman / Shutterstock*
- ###### Katy Kelleher
@ -133,11 +100,6 @@ Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. [Log in](https://nautil.us/concier
Katy Kelleher is the author of *[The Ugly History of Beautiful Things](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Ugly-History-of-Beautiful-Things/Katy-Kelleher/9781982179366)*, a book of essays about coveted objects and their dark backstories. She publishes a semi-regular newsletter on Substack, *[Color Stories](https://colorstories.substack.com/)*. She currently lives and hikes in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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