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INTERNATIONAL EDITION | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018

New world, U.S. moves

new nuclear to protect
arms race its elections
Mikhail Gorbachev from Russia
WASHINGTON
OPINION

Over 30 years ago, President Ronald Operation tells hackers

Reagan and I signed in Washington the
United States-Soviet Treaty on the
elimination of intermediate- and short-
er-range missiles. For the first time in
history, two classes of nuclear weapons
were to be eliminated and destroyed.
This was a first step. It was followed
in 1991 by the Strategic Arms Reduc-
tion Treaty, which the Soviet Union
signed with President George H.W.
Bush, our agreement on radical cuts in
tactical nuclear arms, and the New
Start Treaty, signed by the presidents
of Russia and the United States in 2010.
There are still
The threat too many nuclear
weapons in the
against a treaty world, but the
that I signed American and
with Ronald Russian arsenals
Reagan is the are now a fraction
latest victim of what they were
in the during the Cold
militarization War. At the Nucle-
of world affairs. ar Nonproliferation
Review Conference
in 2015, Russia and
the United States
reported to the international communi-
ty that 85 percent of those arsenals
had been decommissioned and, for the
most part, destroyed.
Today, this tremendous accomplish-
ment, of which our two nations can be
rightfully proud, is in jeopardy. Presi-
dent Trump announced last week the
they’ve been identified
and are being tracked
BY JULIAN E. BARNES
The United States Cyber Command is
targeting individual Russian operatives
to try to deter them from spreading dis-
information to interfere in elections,
telling them that American operatives
have identified them and are tracking
their work, according to officials briefed
on the operation.
The campaign, which includes mis-
sions undertaken in recent days, is the
first known overseas cyberoperation to
protect American elections, including
the midterms that will take place on
Nov. 6.
The operations come as the Justice
Department has outlined a campaign of
“information warfare” by Russians
aimed at influencing the midterm elec-
tions, highlighting the broad threat the
American government sees from
Moscow’s influence campaign.
Defense officials would not say how
many individuals they were targeting,
and they would not describe the meth-
ods that Cyber Command had used to
send the direct messages to the opera-
TYLER HICKS/THE NEW YORK TIMES tives behind the influence campaigns. It
Amal Hussain, 7, suffering from severe malnutrition, at a clinic in Aslam, Yemen. Of nearly two million malnourished children in Yemen, 400,000 are considered critically ill. was not clear if the information had
been delivered in an email or a chat or
through other electronic intervention.

Saudi Arabia’s tragic war

United States’ plan to withdraw from
the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces
Treaty and his country’s intention to
build up nuclear arms.
I am being asked whether I feel
bitter watching the demise of what I
worked so hard to achieve. But this is
not a personal matter. Much more is at
stake.
A new arms race has been an-
nounced. The I.N.F. Treaty is not the
first victim of the militarization of
world affairs. In 2002, the United
States withdrew from the Antiballistic
Missile Treaty; this year, from the Iran
nuclear deal. Military expenditures
have soared to astronomical levels and
keep rising.
As a pretext for the withdrawal from
GORBACHEV, PAGE 13
The New York Times publishes opinion
from a wide range of perspectives in
hopes of promoting constructive debate
about consequential questions.
Conflict’s economics push
millions in Yemen to
the brink of starvation
DECLAN WALSH AND TYLER HICKS reported
from Hajjah and other areas of northern
Yemen this month.
Chest heaving and eyes fluttering, the 3-
year-old boy lay silently in a hospital
ward in the highland town of Hajjah, a
bag of bones fighting for breath.
His father, Ali al-Hajaji, stood anx-
iously over him. Mr. Hajaji had lost one
son three weeks earlier to the epidemic
of hunger sweeping across Yemen. Now
he feared that a second was slipping
away.
It wasn’t for a lack of food in the area:
The stores outside the hospital gate
were filled with goods and the markets
were bustling. But Mr. Hajaji couldn’t af-
ford any of it, because prices were rising
too fast.
“I can barely buy a piece of stale
bread,” he said. “That’s why my children
are dying before my eyes.”
The devastating war in Yemen has
gotten more attention recently, as out-
rage over the killing of a Saudi dissident
in Istanbul has turned a spotlight on
Saudi actions elsewhere. The harshest
criticism of the Saudi-led war has fo-
cused on the airstrikes that have killed
thousands of civilians, including some at
weddings and funerals and on school
buses, aided by American-supplied
bombs and intelligence.
But aid experts and United Nations
officials say a more insidious form of
warfare is also being waged in Yemen,
an economic war that is exacting a far
greater toll on civilians and now risks
tipping the country into a famine of cata-
strophic proportions.
Under the leadership of Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi-led
coalition and its Yemeni allies have im-
posed punitive economic measures
aimed at undercutting the Houthi rebels
who control northern Yemen. But these
actions — including periodic blockades,
stringent import restrictions and with-
holding the salaries of about a million
civil servants — have landed on the
backs of civilians, laying the economy to
waste and driving millions deeper into
poverty.
Those measures have inflicted a slow-
burn toll: infrastructure destroyed, jobs
lost, a weakening currency and soaring
prices. But in recent weeks the eco-
nomic collapse has gathered pace at
alarming speed, causing top United Na-
tions officials to revise their predictions
of famine.
“There is now a clear and present
danger of an imminent and great, big
famine engulfing Yemen,” Mark Low-
cock, the under secretary for humani-
tarian affairs, told the Security Council
on Tuesday. Eight million Yemenis al-
YEMEN, PAGE 6
WHY WE RAN THESE POWERFUL PICTURES
Words alone were not adequate in
telling the story of Yemen and all of the
suffering of its people. PAGE 6
Senior defense officials said they
were not directly threatening the opera-
tives. Still, former officials said anyone
singled out would know, based on the
United States government’s actions
against other Russian operatives, that
they could be indicted or targeted with
sanctions. Even the unstated threat of
sanctions could help deter some Rus-
sians from participating in covert disin-
formation campaigns, said Andrea
Kendall-Taylor, a former intelligence of-
ficial now with the Center for a New
American Security.
“This would be a way to generate
leverage that can change behavior,” she
said.
The Cyber Command operations ap-
pear relatively measured, especially in
comparison with the increasingly elabo-
rate and sophisticated efforts by Russia
to use disinformation to sow dissent in
the United States.
But the American campaign is limited
CYBER, PAGE 7

From a splintered bat, a dozen chopsticks

TOKYO
Recycled baseball lumber
is part of Japanese effort
to preserve native ash trees
BY JERÉ LONGMAN
The bats the Red Sox and the Dodgers
break during the World Series are likely
to be sold at team stores or by memora-
bilia companies, donated to charity, giv-
en away or even repurposed as wooden
handles for bottle openers.
In the Japan Series, which begins Sat-
urday in a country meticulous about re-
cycling, cracked and splintered bats
may find another use as objects indis-
pensable to life in Japan: chopsticks.
Each season, thousands of damaged
bats are reprocessed into reusable “kat-
tobashi,” a mash-up of the Japanese
word for chopsticks and a baseball
chant that translates as “get a big hit.”
The recycling is part of a conservation
effort, designed to be decades long and
to help preserve and replenish a species
of ash tree known as aodamo that is na-
tive to Japan and a region of eastern
Russia.
Aodamo wood — durable, light, flexi-
ble and resistant to splintering — was
once used to make most of the profes-
sional bats here. But baseball officials,
sporting goods companies and conser-
vationists say logging of aodamo is no
longer considered economically feasible
on Hokkaido, the northern Japanese is-
land that is considered the sweet spot
for bat production.
At one time, Japanese stars like Ichiro
Suzuki and Hideki Matsui used aodamo
bats. So did some Americans like Mike
Piazza. But forestry officials did not sys-
tematically replant the trees as they
were felled.
Now the vast majority of bats are
made from maple and white ash, mostly
imported. Mizuno and Zett, two leading
Japanese sporting goods manufactur-
SHIHO FUKADA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES ers, say they no longer make bats from
Hyogoo Uratani, chief executive of Hyozaemon, a chopsticks manufacturer in Fukui, aodamo ash. The hope is that if the refor-
Japan, wanted Japanese baseball “to start having a conscience about recycling.” CHOPSTICKS, PAGE 2

Y(1J85IC*KKNPKP( +.!"!?!&!@
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2 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018
page two
From left, a pile of damaged bats at the Hyozaemon company factory in Fukui, Japan; after the barrel of the bat is cut, the pieces are polished before being shaped into chopsticks; thanks to a deal with certain teams, some chopsticks are given a team logo.
From a splintered bat, a dozen chopsticks
CHOPSTICKS, FROM PAGE 1
estation project is successful over the
next half century or so, use of aodamo in
baseball will again become feasible.
Articles in The Nikkei financial news-
paper and other Japanese publications
first sounded alarms about the de-
creased availability of aodamo wood in
2000.
The Nikkei article was read by offi-
cials at the Hyozaemon chopsticks com-
pany, founded in 1921, with an office in
Tokyo and a factory in Obama City, Ja-
pan.
(Yes, the company said it made sou-
venir chopsticks for a certain American
president and first family.)
Hyozaemon’s chief executive, Hyogoo
Uratani, 73, had played baseball in high
school and was intrigued. He contacted
a friend, Takeo Minatoya, 81, who had
been a professional pitcher for the Taiyo
Whales of Japan’s Central League and,
later, a general manager and consultant
for the team, now called the Yokohama
BayStars.
At the time, broken bats were mostly
given away or burned in barrels to keep
players warm during spring training,
Mr. Minatoya said. The bats-into-chop-
sticks idea, he said through an interpret-
er, allowed Japanese baseball “to start
having a conscience about recycling.”
He helped persuade the 12 teams in
Japan’s Central and Pacific Leagues to
participate. Hyozaemon pays a licens-
ing fee to put team logos on its chop-
sticks. In turn, Nippon Professional
Baseball, Japan’s equivalent of Major
League Baseball, makes an annual con-
tribution of 3.5 million yen, or about
$31,000, to the nonprofit Aodamo Pres-
ervation Society.
The money is used to plant aodamo
seedlings on Hokkaido. Other baseball
entities contribute 2.5 million yen to the
aodamo nonprofit, while Hyozaemon
contributes an additional 100,000 yen,
Mr. , Naito said. More than 10,000 trees
have been planted so far, he said.
Hyozaemon said it collects an aver-
age of 10,000 broken bats each season.
They are gathered by a courier service,
whose records indicate it collected ap-
proximately 2,180 bats in July, August
and September from professional and
industrial leagues and from collegiate
teams that still use wood, unlike Ameri-
can universities, which use metal bats.
Only the barrel of the bat is consid-
University backed by philanthropist is forced out of Hungary
BUDAPEST
BY BENJAMIN NOVAK
AND MARC SANTORA
In 1989, as the Soviet Union crumbled
and countries across Eastern and Cen-
tral Europe emerged from decades of
political oppression, a group of intellec-
tuals led by the Hungarian-born philan-
thropist George Soros proposed a uni-
versity that would help in the transition
to democracy from dictatorship.
Two years later, Central European
University was founded in Prague, dedi-
cated to educating a new generation on
the foundations of a free society, includ-
ing a respect for the rule of law and uni-
versal human rights. In 1993, it moved to
Budapest.
Now, as Hungary drifts toward au-
thoritarian rule under Prime Minister
Viktor Orban, the university says it is
being forced to close its Budapest cam-
pus, portraying itself as a victim of Mr.
Orban’s efforts to vilify Mr. Soros and to
stifle dissent and academic freedom.
On Thursday, university officials said
they would stop admitting new students
in Budapest after failing to resolve a dis-
pute with the government over a new
law that appeared to require it to open a
branch in the United States. Central Eu-
ropean University is accredited in Hun-
gary and the United States.
“For 18 months, we have defended our
right to remain as a U.S. degree-grant-
ing institution in Budapest, but we are
unable to secure the guarantees we
need from the Hungarian government
to preserve our academic freedom,” the
university’s president, Michael Ignati-
eff, said at a news conference in the Hun-
garian capital. Mr. Ignatieff said that the
university’s central operations would be
moved to Vienna.
“This is our home,” Mr. Ignatieff said,
adding that the university hoped to
reach a last-minute deal that would al-
low it to stay in Budapest. “If the govern-
Satoshi Yamashita cutting cracked and splintered baseball bats into smaller pieces to be made into chopsticks. The barrel of one bat can yield five or six pairs of chopsticks.
ered thick enough to make chopsticks,
while the tapered portion toward the
handle can be repurposed into shoe-
horns and handles for forks and spoons.
The cap of the bat can be made into a
drinking cup.
The barrel is sawed from the handle,
sliced vertically into thin blocks then
sanded by craftsmen into the shape of
chopsticks. Team logos are imprinted,
and layers of lacquer are applied.
An anti-Soros billboard in Budapest in 2017. George Soros, a Hungarian-born billionaire,
founded the Central European University, one of the leading institutions in the region.
ment thinks they can get rid of C.E.U.,
they’ve got another thing coming.”
Mr. Orban has long used Mr. Soros as
a foil, rife with anti-Semitic tropes, cast-
ing him as the leader of a nefarious
global cabal, determined to undermine
Hungary’s Christian values and allow
Muslim immigrants to overrun the
country.
Mr. Orban has been the chief architect
behind a campaign of misrepresenta-
tions and falsehoods aimed at Mr. Soros,
even photoshopping him into campaign
posters with opposition candidates dur-
ing the country’s elections this past
spring.
The attacks on Mr. Soros took a more
dangerous turn in the past week in the
United States, when someone sent an
explosive device to his home in New
York, one of at least eight such bombs
sent to people frequently denounced by
President Trump.
Mr. Soros, a Jew who survived the
Nazi occupation of Budapest during
The barrel of one bat can yield five or
six pairs of chopsticks, Hyozaemon offi-
cials said.
In 2004, Mr. Matsui, then playing for
the New York Yankees, donated a bat to
be made into chopsticks for his mentor
Shigeo Nagashima, a former player and
manager of the Yomiuri Giants, Japan’s
most successful team with 22 champi-
onships. Mr. Nagashima, now 82, was re-
covering from a stroke at the time.
ATTILA KISBENEDEK/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
World War II, has dedicated a large part
of the fortune he made in the financial
markets to promoting democracies
around the world, much of it through the
work of his Open Society Foundations.
At the same time, however, the coun-
try of his birth has been moving away
The Hungarian prime minister
has long used the philanthropist
George Soros as a foil, employing
anti-Semitic tropes.
from the values he spent a lifetime
championing.
In May, the Hungarian branch of his
foundation was forced to shutter its
doors, citing the “increasingly repres-
sive political and legal environment.”
Still, university officials pressed on,
hopeful that they could come to a solu-
tion that would allow the school to stay
open.
Mr. Matsui, 44, said he had also helped
plant aodamo seedlings on Hokkaido
when he played for the Giants before
joining the Yankees in 2003.
“It’s great we’re spreading the aware-
ness that aodamo trees are decreasing,”
he said.
Masayuki Naito, the secretary gen-
eral of the Aodamo Preservation Soci-
ety, described the involvement of profes-
sional, industrial and amateur leagues
Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary has been the chief architect behind a cam-
paign of misrepresentations and falsehoods aimed at Mr. Soros.
The university established educa-
tional programs with Bard College in
New York in an attempt to comply with
the new law requiring a presence in the
United States.
“Hungarian authorities inspected
these programs and the New York State
Board of Education confirmed to the
Hungarian authorities that C.E.U. was
in compliance with the agreement by of-
fering educational activity in the State of
New York,” the university said in a state-
ment.
“Nevertheless, the Hungarian au-
thorities have indicated that they would
not sign the New York State agree-
ment,” the statement added. “All at-
tempts to find a solution that would en-
able C.E.U. to remain as a U.S. degree-
granting institution in Budapest have
failed.”
The United States’ ambassador to
Hungary, David B. Cornstein, issued a
statement saying that the university
“remains a priority for the U.S. Govern-
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
PHOTOGRAPHS BY SHIHO FUKADA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
in the preservation effort as “very im-
portant for the future of Japanese base-
ball.”
“It is an excellent material that is
uniquely Japanese,” Mr. Naito, 57, said.
Takumasa Kosugi, 39, a Panasonic ex-
ecutive who once played for the compa-
ny’s team in a top industrial league, said
an aodamo bat “felt soft, like it wanted to
catch the ball and hold it longer than
other bats, so you could control it.”
TAMAS KOVACS/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK
ment” and that he would continue to
work to try and find a solution.
Central European University is con-
sidered one of the leading institutions in
the region, with a faculty made up of top
scholars from around the world and
some of Europe’s leading politicians.
Mr. Orban himself received a grant in
the late 1980s from the Soros founda-
tions to study grass-roots democracy
and the importance of a vibrant civil so-
ciety in a free society.
He has moved a long way from the po-
sitions he held decades ago, when he po-
sitioned himself as a champion of West-
ern values.
Mr. Orban says he wants to make
Hungary a bulwark of Christianity and
is creating an “illiberal democracy” to
achieve that goal.
Critics see a leader bent on amassing
ever greater power over the state by
whatever means necessary.
Attacks on academic freedom, they
contend, are just the latest in a series of
..
But it can take 50 to 70 years for an
aodamo tree to grow to a height and
thickness needed to make bats. Even
then, only four to six bats can be made
from one tree. And lumber companies
no longer feel it is cost-effective to cut
the trees just to make bats, Mr. Naito
said.
“They can still try logging it on top of
the mountains or somewhere deep in
the forest, but it will cost a lot of money,”
he said.
So baseball continues its preservation
effort, even if some actions are mostly
symbolic.
Nippon Professional Baseball plans
to hold tree-planting ceremonies during
the 2018 Japan Series between the Fuku-
oka SoftBank Hawks and the Hiroshima
Toyo Carp, as it does yearly at all-star
and championship games. Aodamo sap-
lings will then be placed in the ground
outside the stadiums.
While Nippon Professional Baseball’s
financial contribution is limited, Akihiro
Kagayama, the organization’s general
manager of business development and
special events, said Japanese profes-
sional baseball is committed to preserv-
ing aodamo trees.
Displaying photographs of aodamo
trees planted outside stadiums in Tokyo
and Nagoya, Mr. Kagayama said, “Our
dream is that one day these will be
forests.”
Yet replanting the aodamo trees has
not come without complications. Deer
effectively ate all the trees replanted on
Hokkaido from 2000 to 2004, before
plastic coverings were implemented as
shields, Mr. Naito said. And in 2016, the
preservation effort lost a formidable ad-
vocate upon the death of Yasumitsu Toy-
oda, 81, a Hall of Fame player who had
urged sporting goods companies and
players to become more financially in-
volved because it was “a matter of doing
the right thing.”
Still, preservationists hold out hope
that aodamo bats will return to use one
day.
“Even if it would happen, I won’t be
able to see that moment because it
would take more than 70 years,” Mr.
Naito said. “Still, that is our wish.”
Kantaro Suzuki contributed reporting
from Tokyo, and Tyler Kepner and David
Waldstein from New York. Doris Burke
contributed research.
assaults on democratic institutions.
University officials, already facing
punitive tax increases and forced to sus-
pend studies related to migration, found
themselves on the front lines of another
of Mr. Orban’s culture wars when the
government banned the teaching of
gender studies.
European Union leaders have
watched Mr. Orban’s moves in Hungary
with increasing alarm. In September,
they moved to invoke Article 7 of the
bloc’s founding treaty against Hungary
for undermining the union’s core values,
which could see the country lose its vot-
ing rights.
As European lawmakers debated ini-
tiating the measure last month, Mr. Ig-
natieff warned them that the fate of the
university was about far more than the
school itself.
“This is not an abstract issue,” he said
to the European Parliament. “A lot of the
future of Europe hangs in the balance.”
Students at the sprawling campus,
which is spread across several historic
buildings in central Budapest, lamented
the situation.
“Of course I am angry with Orban, be-
cause C.E.U. is a great thing in Hunga-
ry,” said Reka Blazsek, a 24-year-old
Hungarian studying for a master’s in
economics.
Tatiana Shaw, 32, a Russian citizen
who is studying public policy, said she
was mystified why the university had
become such a target.
She recalled how the American am-
bassador recently told a group of stu-
dents that he did not associate the uni-
versity with Mr. Soros. But she noted
that Mr. Trump had attacked Mr. Soros
on Twitter only days before the ambas-
sador spoke to them.
“I feel maybe it is somehow related to
Trump, that Trump hates Soros,” she
said. “It’s a shame for Hungary. It re-
minds me of Russia very much.”
Benjamin Novak reported from Buda-
pest, and Marc Santora from Warsaw.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018 | 3

4 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018
World
Digging deep to honor a boxing pioneer
LONDON
London railway project
prompts hunt for remains
of black bareknuckle fighter
BY STEPHEN CASTLE
Born a slave on Staten Island in 1763,
Bill Richmond left America in 1777,
never to return, and spent most of his
life in Britain.
But it was not until he was 40 years
old that he began bare-knuckle boxing
— a brutal sport that brought him fame,
prestige and an invitation to the corona-
tion of King George IV.
Yet even in his adopted country,
where he has been called the world’s
first black sporting superstar — or ster-
eotype, some would say — Richmond’s
remarkable life story is largely forgot-
ten.
Now, almost two centuries after his
death, in 1829, he is back in the limelight
as a search begins in earnest for Rich-
mond’s remains.
As part of a rail upgrade, one of Lon-
don’s main stations is being redevel-
oped, prompting the excavation of a
burial ground containing the remains of
an estimated 45,000 Londoners, includ-
ing Richmond.
As archaeologists pick their way
through the huge site, clearing topsoil
with diggers and exhuming by hand
those buried here, they are hoping to
identify and rebury the boxer who tran-
scended the raw racism of his age to
emerge a sporting hero. For his fans,
this is a big moment.
“He was the pioneer of black sporting
endeavor,” said Luke G. Williams, au-
thor of a biography “Richmond Un-
chained,” who sees his subject as the
forerunner of giants like Jesse Owens
and Muhammad Ali. “He was the first
black sportsman to achieve celebrity.
There had been no one before him who
had reached that level of national promi-
nence.”
Richmond took the name of the town
on Staten Island where he grew up as a
slave in the household of Richard Charl-
ton, rector of St. Andrews — and per-
haps, Mr. Williams thinks, his unac-
knowledged father.
His book dismisses as a case of mis-
taken identity one theory that Rich-
mond served, at the age of 13, as hang-
man at the execution of the American
revolutionary Nathan Hale in 1776.
Nevertheless, it was thanks to an
English officer, Brig. Gen. Hugh Percy,
that Richmond won his freedom, left
America and gained some education in
England, where he trained as a cabinet
maker.
His first fights may have been pro-
voked by racial taunts, but his sporting
career began when he was employed by
Thomas Pitt, the second Lord Cam-
elford and Baron of Boconnoc — a box-
ing enthusiast and swashbuckling aris-
tocrat whose turbulent life scandalized
Georgian England before his death at 29
in a typically reckless duel.
Richmond not only began the brutal
sport of bare-knuckle fighting at age 40,
but also continued into his mid-50s, win-
ning 17 contests and losing just twice. He
mentored another freed slave, Tom Mo-
lineaux, and instructed the essayist
William Hazlitt (according to some ac-
counts by Lord Byron) in sparring. So
prominent was Mr. Richmond that he
was among a group of pugilists invited
to the coronation of George IV in 1821 to
act as ushers.
Little is known about his English wife,
Got spare change? Pakistan is saving up to build dams
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN
BY MEHER AHMAD
Pav Akhtar is not one to fall for TV dona-
tion ads. In fact, he says, he and his sib-
lings jokingly chide their mother for
watching them on Pakistani satellite
channels at their home in Lancashire,
England.
But when he saw the call on a Paki-
stani news show for overseas Pakistanis
to donate to a new fund-raising initia-
tive, he wired his money without hesita-
tion.
“It’s not a generic begging bowl,” said
Mr. Akhtar, 40. “It’s a specific demand
for a specific outcome, and that moti-
vates me.”
Mr. Akhtar was not donating to a char-
ity, though. He was giving money to the
government.
The financially challenged Pakistani
state is running a crowdsourcing-style
campaign in a last-ditch effort to secure
$14 billion to build two dams, which offi-
cials say will solve the country’s endem-
ic shortages of water and electricity. It
has become the cause du jour for Paki-
stanis both at home and abroad.
Television news shows regularly fea-
ture the day’s biggest donors handing
over their paychecks en masse, includ-
ing the national soccer team, Pakistani
politicians, government employees and
members of the military.
Radio ads across the country implore
average citizens to donate even 10 ru-
Archaeologists have been surprised at how well London’s damp clay has preserved skeletonized remains in the area where they hope to find the remains of Bill Richmond.
An 1810 illustration of Mr. Richmond, a
freed slave who became a famous boxer.
Mary, except that she was white, or
about their several children. But Mr.
Williams argues that Richmond had
straddled both race and class divisions
of his time: his education and proximity
to the wealthy made him more socially
adept than many English-born boxers
who rose from abject poverty.
To some, that only illustrates the limi-
tations placed upon black people, some
of which remain. “There has always
been a route to black exceptionalism
through sport,” said Kehinde Andrews,
professor of black studies at Birming-
ham City University, who added that
boxing success still reinforced some
stereotypes attached to black people.
The Indus River in northern Pakistan where the dams would be built. Critics say the
dams won’t be a silver bullet to end water and electricity shortages in the country.
pees (less than 10 cents) over the phone.
Pakistani celebrities have announced
their own hefty donations on social me-
dia and made fund-raising appeals to
their fans.
This past week, Chief Justice Mian
Saqib Nisar, who created the fund, be-
rated the television channel Geo News
in the Supreme Court for not donating “a
single penny” to the dam project.
“Did Geo group hold a marathon
transmission for dam funds?” he said.
“Geo has not taken the lead over the
This London station is being redeveloped, and a burial ground being excavated for the project contains the remains of Mr. Richmond.
“Of course, it’s not bad that he was a
celebrity,” said Professor Andrews, but
his story tells us little about the mainly
wretched conditions of a population of
around 15,000 black people living in
Britain in the late 18th century.
Moreover, his vehicle of social ad-
DANIAL SHAH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
dam issue even though it is the biggest
of all channels.”
To allow for smoother overseas
money transfers, the State Bank of Paki-
stan has even authorized the use of a
service owned by PayPal, potentially
opening the way for PayPal itself to en-
ter one of the few countries where it is
banned.
That new openness reflects the grav-
ity of Pakistan’s financial situation as
the government grasps for funding
wherever it can. The country faces a bal-
vancement — a vicious and dangerous
sport — says much about the limited
prospects for black people. “If there
were other things he could be doing,
why boxing?” Professor Andrews said.
In any event, almost two centuries af-
ter his death, the spotlight has fallen on
ance-of-payments crisis, with a record
$18 billion account deficit for the last fis-
cal year.
On Tuesday, Pakistan announced that
it had secured a $6 billion assistance
package from Saudi Arabia to help with
the crisis.
About half the assistance will be de-
posited at Pakistan’s central bank, to
shore up the country’s dwindling fi-
nances — it has only enough cash left to
cover about two months of imports —
while the remaining $3 billion will be a
deferred oil payment owed to the Saudis
in three years.
With Pakistan still discussing a possi-
ble multibillion-dollar bailout from the
International Monetary Fund, the Saudi
assistance is likely to lower the amount
requested.
And Pakistan has already received
several billion dollars in emergency
loans this year from China, its major re-
gional ally.
Other doors were closed this year
when the United States froze aid and Pa-
kistan was returned to an international
financial “gray list,” in both cases over
concerns that Pakistan was not doing
enough to combat terrorist groups oper-
ating on its soil.
With few options left, the government
is going directly to the people.
The dam project would seem an un-
likely way to galvanize Pakistanis, who
in recent years have grown weary of
corruption scandals and crumbling pub-
lic services. Construction of the dams
has yet to begin, and even the most opti-
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
HS2 LTD
HS2 LTD
Richmond again because of a high-
speed rail project that has prompted the
renovation of Euston Station in the
north of the city.
The work means digging up grave-
yards in London and Birmingham, as
well as other historic sites along the
mistic estimates say they won’t be func-
tional for at least a decade.
But Imran Khan, the new prime min-
ister, is no stranger to fund-raising or
sunny rhetoric. He spent years in the
1980s and ’90s raising money to build a
world-class cancer hospital for the poor
in Lahore, which he often cites as proof
of his resolve.
“I am the greatest fund-raiser in the
history of Pakistan,” he said last month.
The financially challenged state
is running a crowdsourcing-style
campaign to secure $14 billion to
build two dams.
“We can build dams in five years if the
donations continue.”
Mr. Khan and his government have
created a sense of urgency around the
project, known as the Diamer-Bhasha
and Mohmand Dams, spawning social
media discussions and news debates
that cast the dams as pivotal for Paki-
stan’s future.
On Sept. 8, Mr. Khan appealed on tele-
vision to the nine million Pakistanis liv-
ing abroad, asking them to give at least
$1,000 each. As of Oct. 8, they had donat-
ed about $3 million, including more than
$300,000 from the United States.
That is a small fraction of the $48 mil-
lion raised since the government
opened a bank account for donations in
July, which itself is less than 1 percent of
the dams’ total estimated cost of $14 bil-
..
route, in what Mike Court, the lead ar-
chaeologist for the first phase of High
Speed 2, describes as Britain’s “biggest
ever archaeological project.”
After his death, Richmond was buried
in the graveyard next to St. James
church, which was built in 1789 but de-
molished in the 1960s. Other prominent
people laid to rest here included Capt.
Matthew Flinders, who led the first cir-
cumnavigation of Australia, and James
Christie, who founded Christie’s auc-
tioneers in 1766.
But burials stopped in 1853, and
around 1887, the cemetery was turned
into a public garden.
Archaeologists have been surprised
how well London’s damp clay soil has
preserved skeletonized remains and
some wooden coffins.
“Some of the coffins that we are find-
ing look like they were put into the
ground last week — really, really amaz-
ing,” said Mr. Court, speaking near the
huge site, where about 160 archaeolo-
gists and dozens of construction and
support staff are working.
He expects the excavation to yield a
wealth of information for social histori-
ans about the diet, health, migration pat-
terns and environment of the period.
(The small number of lead coffins will
not be opened.)
Mr. Williams hopes that if Richmond’s
skeleton is recovered, it may provide
DNA clues about his parentage. Were he
the son of the rector, that would make
him the uncle of Elizabeth Ann Bayley
Seton, the first American-born woman
to be canonized by the Roman Catholic
Church, Mr. Williams said.
If archaeologists are lucky, the name
plate on Richmond’s coffin may have
survived. Otherwise, it may be possible
to identify him from the fractures he un-
doubtedly suffered or from an injury to
his knee that he carried throughout his
fighting career.
But are Richmond’s remains still
there?
Although burial records suggest they
are, archaeologists cannot be certain be-
cause parts of the graveyard were dug
up in the late 1800s.
Of an estimated 45,000 remains still
thought to have avoided destruction,
about 1,500 have been recovered so far,
and Richmond’s are not among them.
“We know that they were buried in
this burial ground; what we don’t know
is whereabouts in the burial ground,”
said Mr. Court, who, nonetheless, de-
scribed the prospects of success as
good.
In 19th-century England, the social hi-
erarchy was as rigid in death as in life,
with the wealthy buried closest to the
church. The part of the graveyard that
was lost included a big slice at the other
end of the plot, where poorer people
were laid to rest.
And that may have included Rich-
mond who, despite his sporting success
and later career as a boxing instructor
and pub landlord, ended life in financial
straits.
He was not friendless, however, and
Richmond overcame years of profes-
sional rivalry to befriend Tom Cribb,
perhaps the best-known English boxer
of his day, who by then was landlord of
the Union Arms pub.
Richmond spent the last evening of
his life at the pub in Central London —
renamed the Tom Cribb — that now
bears a plaque in memory of the “freed
slave, boxer, entrepreneur.”
If his remains are found, there could
be another memorial, and Mr. Williams
welcomes the fresh attention afforded
his sporting hero.
“I want more people to know his
story,” he said.
lion. A Pakistani television network
noted last month that at the current rate,
funding the dam would take 120 years.
But critics say that even if the money
is raised, the dams won’t be the silver
bullet the Pakistani government would
have donors believe.
“Because the dams are a big project,
there’s been a lot of hype created around
it and people in the government want to
get some political mileage from it,” said
Hassan Abbas, a hydrologist who has
worked to address water shortages in
Pakistan for more than two decades.
Mr. Abbas said Pakistan’s water
shortages stemmed from the outdated
irrigation system left over from the
British colonizers, which in many areas
is more than 100 years old. An expensive
dam project can’t fix the problem when
it lies downstream, he said.
The repeated calls to donate, though,
drill home the same message: Pakistan
needs the dams to survive.
“In the public perception, these things
count,” Mr. Abbas said. “You hear some-
thing again and again, the idea sticks: ‘If
the dam isn’t made, we’ll die.’ ”
As for the donors — average citizens
and Pakistanis abroad who have handed
over their money without stipulations —
the unlikelihood of the project’s success
isn’t a deterrent.
Mr. Akhtar, the donor in Lancashire,
said he did not regret his decision. End-
lessly debating the merits of the dams
will only leave Pakistan where it has al-
ways been, he said: “It’s like arguing
while Rome burns.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018 | 5

world

For migrants, a caravan journey filled with risk

MEXICO DISPATCH
HUIXTLA, MEXICO
BY KIRK SEMPLE, ANNIE CORREAL
AND MAYA AVERBUCH
As the caravan of migrants wound its
way to the United States, many along
the route said they had joined it for the
safety that its size provided.
But dangers remained, including the
ever-present risk of deportation and the
fear of being left behind.
Even before the migrants make it to
the American border, which President
Trump is preparing to fortify with as
many as 1,000 active-duty soldiers and
is considering taking executive action to
close, they face danger and risk.
When the migrants arrived this week
in the southern city of Huixtla, officials
steered them toward a sprawling ath-
letic complex for temporary shelter. The
officials had mobilized ambulances and
medical personnel. They had ordered
3,000 sandwiches and had stockpiled
crates of bottled water. Security person-
nel were on hand to keep the peace.
Thousands of migrants began staking
out ground for the night, laying out plas-
tic tarps and blankets. And then a rumor
started spreading like a bad cold: The
arrangement was a trap set by the immi-
gration authorities.
Low-level panic set in. The migrants
grabbed their bags and streamed out of
the park, heading for the town’s central
“They’re really afraid,” he said. “We’re a
small town, a poor town, but we’re doing
everything we can to help.”
Most of the migrants left anyway,
heading toward the town’s central plaza.
They seemed to feel more comfortable
in a place not penned in by fences.
‘HE WAS ONE OF US’
The man was named Melvin Gómez. He
fell from a moving vehicle on the Car-
rera Costera, a highway snaking
through southern Mexico, and died. He
was 21.
Those were the spare details offered
by local officials this week about what is
believed to have been one of the first
deaths among the caravan participants.
For migrants traveling with Mr.
Gómez, the accident, which took place
on Monday as the caravan made its way
LUIS ANTONIO ROJAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES north through the Mexican state of Chia-
Migrants lighting candles in Huixtla, Mexico, for Melvin Gómez, a fellow caravan par- pas, brought into view the mortal dan-
ticipant, who fell from a moving vehicle on a highway and died. gers of their endeavor.
Mr. Gómez had leapt onto the back of
a truck as locals picked up migrants by
square. “They’re going to lock the gates, charge, officials had nobody they could the dozen — in cars, trucks, vans — to
and the migration officials are going to call to intervene. ferry them to Huixtla, sparing them
come!” shouted Cristian, 18, a Honduran Bernardo Castañeda, who is the head hours on the road in the blistering sun.
migrant who gave only his first name of internal affairs for Huixtla, appealed On Tuesday, which was declared a day
because of his undocumented status. to a group of suspicious migrants to stay. of rest, migrants lit candles after dark in
Municipal workers and volunteers “I have a thousand sandwiches now, I the central square in Huixtla. They
tried vainly to dispel the rumor. This will have 1,000 more sandwiches in an raised the candles, and closed their eyes
was when it began to matter that there hour, I will have another 1,000 sand- in prayer. A sign dedicated to the fallen
was no clear leadership of the caravan of wiches in another hour,” he said. “Why migrant appeared above the crowd:
nearly 7,000 migrants, which has been don’t you go over and eat?” “For our brother, Melvin Gómez — we
traveling for 12 days. Without anyone in He stepped away from the crowd. love you,” it said.
After the prayer, people knelt to place
their candles on the flagstone square,
creating a giant flickering cross.
AFRAID TO LEAVE THE CARAVAN
The Honduran mother had a difficult
choice: She could take her son to the
nearest hospital, or she could keep up
with the caravan and take cash for treat-
ment later.
Dunia, 26, who declined to give her
last name because of gang threats, had
been walking with her three children
The migrants are “really afraid.
We’re a small town, a poor town,
but we’re doing everything we
can to help.”
and other participants when a passing
van struck her 5-year-old son.
The boy was conscious in the back of
the Red Cross vehicle. The paramedics
said he had minor abrasions to his head
and left arm.
But Dunia was afraid to have him
checked out immediately at the hospital
because it would mean leaving the cara-
van, which was already slipping out of
sight. The caravan was her best chance
of getting to the United States, she said
— safer and cheaper than going alone. If
she became separated from the group,
she could end up back in Honduras.
Yet at the same time, she wondered if
her child was in worse shape than the
paramedics thought. The police called
her over to negotiate with the driver, Ra-
fael Wardado Chavez, about paying for
medical care. He was sitting in hand-
cuffs in the back of a police car.
Dunia stood outside the car and wiped
her sweating face with an orange T-
shirt. She glanced at the back of the Red
Cross vehicle.
“I want to make sure that they check
him properly,” Dunia said. “You must be
a father, and you threw my baby far.”
The driver promised he would help
pay for the boy’s care. But he said it
wouldn’t be a good idea to leave the car-
avan now and go to the hospital.
“Mami, the thing is that if you stay
here, you’re going to lose the caravan,”
Mr. Wardado said. “I’ll pay to cure him.”
Dunia hesitated. Everyone around
her had an opinion. The consensus from
the police officer and two passers-by —
another migrant and the driver of a
pickup truck — was that she should
keep going. The driver agreed to pay
800 pesos for medical care, the equiva-
lent of $50, and give them a ride to the
next stop on the caravan’s route.
The family piled into his van and he
drove toward Huixtla. But a half-hour
outside the town, he announced that he
was running low on gasoline and had no
cash to fill up, so he could not make it the
rest of the way.
The family got out and waited along
the roadside for another ride.

Saving the tigers,

in all their diversity
Study finds 6 subspecies,
and author argues that
all must be preserved
BY RACHEL NUWER
Fewer than 4,000 tigers remain in the
wild. New research aims to give conser-
vationists an improved understanding
of their genetics to help save them.
After years of debate, scientists re-
port in the journal Current Biology that
tigers comprise six unique subspecies.
One of those subspecies, the South
China tiger, survives only in captivity.
“The results presented in this paper
are important because they contradict
the currently accepted international
conservation classifications for tigers,”
said Uma Ramakrishnan, a molecular
ecologist at the National Center for Bio-
logical Sciences in Bangalore, India,
who was not involved in the study.
A system recently proposed by some
scientists that would classify the world’s
tigers into two subspecies would harm
the world’s remaining tigers rather than
benefit them, said Shu-Jin Luo, a genet-
icist at Peking University who led the
study. Preserving what is left of tigers’
genetic diversity will require ensuring
that all remaining subspecies are taken
into account, she and her co-authors ar-
gue.
“If you think that all tigers are genet-
ically homogeneous, you might say if
you lose the Amur tiger, you still have
the Bengal tiger — and that’s O.K. be-
cause they’re very similar,” Dr. Luo said.
“But that’s not O.K., because now we
know that tigers are not all alike.”
Dr. Luo hopes that their new findings
put to rest a decade-long debate over
whether tigers constitute six, five or two
subspecies. In 2004, she and her col-
leagues first presented research that ti-
gers constitute six living subspecies,
based on partial genomic analyses. But
other researchers soon challenged the
findings.
The latest analysis confirmed six liv-
ing subspecies: Bengal, Amur, South
China, Sumatran, Indochinese and Ma-
layan. Scientists also believe that three
additional subspecies — Caspian, Javan
and Bali tigers, described in the 1930s —
already have been lost to extinction.
The distinction between species and
subspecies is sometimes hazy. Although
two different subspecies can mate and
produce viable offspring, subspecies of-
ten are separated by distinct habitats,
different environmental adaptations
and unique genetic and morphological
features. Subspecies, many researchers
believe, are evolution’s intermediary
steppingstones on the path to fully
formed species.
Armed with more affordable and ro-
bust genomic technologies, Dr. Luo and
her colleagues strengthened their origi-
nal findings. Previously, just one com-
plete tiger genome had been sequenced.
In the new study, the researchers under-
took whole-genome sequence analysis
of 32 preserved wild tiger specimens
from around the world. A statistical
analysis of 1.8 million DNA variants
across the specimen tigers’ genomes fi-
nalized the breakdown into six distinct
subspecies.
“While genomic methods have been
applied extensively to humans and
model organisms, their use to study en-
dangered species remains under-ex-
ploited,” Dr. Ramakrishnan said.
The analysis also offered a window
into the evolutionary history of tigers.
Fossil evidence indicates that the preda-
tor evolved roughly two million years
ago in Asia. The new study revealed that
tiger subspecies last shared a common
ancestor relatively recently, about
110,000 years ago, likely in modern-day
Southeast Asia and southern China. As
the climate changed, tigers expanded
west to India, north to China and Siberia
and south to Indonesia and Malaysia.
In the tens of thousands of years
since, tigers have evolved into sub-
species with distinct genomic signa-
tures. For example, the researchers
found that Sumatran tigers — which live
on a single island in Indonesia, and were
the first to diverge from the other sub-
species — possess genes associated
with smaller body sizes relative to most
tigers on the mainland. This lines up
with morphological observations and
ecological expectations, Dr. Luo said.
“In India and Siberia, tigers prey on
large ungulates, but in Sumatra, they
rely more on wild boar and smaller
deer,” she said. “It makes sense that
smaller prey would exert selection pres-
sure for smaller tigers.”
An estimated 100,000 tigers roamed
Asia’s forests, swamps and grasslands a
century ago. But poaching, habitat de-
struction and retaliatory killings have
sent their numbers spiraling down-
ward; today more tigers survive in cap-
tivity than in the wild.
Tigers have already disappeared
from Cambodia and Vietnam, and only a
few stray, isolated individuals are
thought to survive in the wild in Laos
and China.
Ullas Karanth, the Asia director of sci-
ence for the Wildlife Conservation Soci-
ety, praised the new study for advancing
the understanding of tiger genetics, but
he cast doubt on the feasibility of saving
all six subspecies. “The numbers in all
but the Indian and Russian subspecies
are just too small,” he said.
Tiger populations with a reasonable
prospect of survival currently occupy
only about 10 percent of their potential
habitat, Dr. Karanth said.

VISUAL CHINA GROUP/GETTY IMAGES

Siberian tigers catching a chicken at a tiger park in Mudanjiang, China. An estimated

100,000 tigers roamed Asia a century ago. Today, only 4,000 remain in the wild.

6 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018
world
Saudi Arabia’s tragic war
YEMEN, FROM PAGE 1
ready depend on emergency food aid to
survive, he said, a figure that could soon
rise to 14 million, or half of Yemen’s pop-
ulation.
“People think famine is just a lack of
food,” said Alex de Waal, author of
“Mass Starvation” which analyzes re-
cent man-made famines. “But in Yemen
it’s about a war on the economy.”
The signs are everywhere, cutting
across boundaries of class, tribe and re-
gion. Unpaid university professors issue
desperate appeals for help on social me-
dia. Doctors and teachers are forced to
sell their gold, land or cars to feed their
families. On the streets of the capital,
Sana, an elderly woman begs for alms
with a loudspeaker.
“Help me,” the woman, Zahra Bajali,
calls out. “I have a sick husband. I have a
house for rent. Help.”
And in the hushed hunger wards, ail-
ing infants hover between life and death.
Of nearly two million malnourished chil-
dren in Yemen, 400,000 are considered
critically ill — a figure projected to rise
by one quarter in the coming months.
“We are being crushed,” said Dr.
Mekkia Mahdi at the health clinic in
Aslam, an impoverished northwestern
town that has been swamped with refu-
gees fleeing the fighting in Hudaydah,
an embattled port city 90 miles to the
south.
Flitting between the beds at her spar-
tan clinic, she cajoled mothers, dis-
pensed orders to medics and spoon-fed
milk to sickly infants. For some it was
too late: the night before, an 11-month-
old boy had died. He weighed five and a
half pounds.
Looking around her, Dr. Mahdi could
not fathom the Western obsession with
the Saudi killing of Jamal Khashoggi in
Istanbul.
“We’re surprised the Khashoggi case
is getting so much attention while mil-
lions of Yemeni children are suffering,”
she said. “Nobody gives a damn about
them.”
She tugged on the flaccid skin of a
drowsy 7-year-old girl with stick-like
arms. “Look,” she said. “No meat. Only
bones.”
The embassy of Saudi Arabia in
Washington did not respond to ques-
tions about the country’s policies in
Yemen. But Saudi officials have de-
fended their actions, citing rockets fired
across their border by the Houthis, an
armed group professing Zaidi Islam, an
offshoot of Shiism, that Saudi Arabia, a
Sunni monarchy, views as a proxy for its
regional rival, Iran.
The Saudis point out that they, along
with the United Arab Emirates, are
among the most generous donors to
Yemen’s humanitarian relief effort. Last
spring, the two allies pledged $1 billion
in aid to Yemen. In January, Saudi Ara-
bia deposited $2 billion in Yemen’s cen-
tral bank to prop up its currency.
But those efforts have been overshad-
owed by the coalition’s attacks on Yem-
en’s economy, including the denial of sal-
aries to civil servants, a partial blockade
that has driven up food prices, and the
printing of vast amounts of bank notes,
which caused the currency to plunge.
And the offensive to capture Huday-
dah, which started in June, has endan-
gered the main lifeline for imports to
northern Yemen, displaced 570,000 peo-
ple and edged many more closer to star-
vation.
A famine here, Mr. Lowcock warned,
would be “much bigger than anything
any professional in this field has seen
during their working lives.”
When Ali Hajaji’s son fell ill with diar-
rhea and vomiting, the desperate father
turned to extreme measures. Following
the advice of village elders, he pushed
the red-hot tip of a burning stick into
Shaher’s chest, a folk remedy to drain
the “black blood” from his son.
“People said burn him in the body and
it will be O.K.,” Mr. Hajaji said. “When
you have no money, and your son is sick,
you’ll believe anything.”
The burns were a mark of the rudi-
mentary nature of life in Juberia, a clus-
ter of mud-walled houses perched on a
rocky ridge. To reach it, you cross a land-
scape of sandy pastures, camels and
beehives, strewn with giant, rust-col-
ored boulders, where women in black
cloaks and yellow straw boaters toil in
the fields.
In the past, the men of the village
worked as migrant laborers in Saudi
Arabia, whose border is 80 miles away.
They were often treated with disdain by
their wealthy Saudi employers but they
earned a wage. Mr. Hajaji worked on a
suburban construction site in Mecca,
the holy city visited by millions of Mus-
lim pilgrims every year.
When the war broke out in 2015, the
border closed.
The fighting never reached Juberia,
but it still took a toll there.
Last year a young woman died of cho-
lera, part of an epidemic that infected 1.1
million Yemenis. In April, a coalition
airstrike hit a wedding party in the dis-
trict, killing 33 people, including the
bride. A local boy who went to fight for
the Houthis was killed in an airstrike.
But for Mr. Hajaji, who had five sons
under age 7, the deadliest blow was eco-
nomic.
He watched in dismay as the riyal lost
half its value in the past year, causing
prices to soar. Suddenly, groceries cost
twice as much as they had before the
war. Other villagers sold their assets,
such as camels or land, to get money for
food.
But Mr. Hajaji, whose family lived in a
one-room, mud-walled hut, had nothing
Heading toward a shelter as a storm approached in Bani Hassan, Yemen. The country’s currency lost half its value in the past year, causing villagers to sell their assets, such as camels or land, to get money for food.
Ali al-Hajaji lost one of his five sons to malnutrition. “I can barely buy a piece of stale
bread,” he said. “That’s why my children are dying before my eyes.”
to sell. At first he relied on the generos- That evening, after prayers, the vil-
ity of neighbors. Then he pared back the lage gathered to bury Shaadi. His grave,
family diet, until it consisted only of marked by a single broken rock, stood
bread, tea and halas, a vine leaf that had under a grove of Sidr trees that, in better
always been a source of food but now oc- times, were famous for their honey.
cupied a central place in every meal. Shaadi was the first in the village to
Soon his first son to fall ill, Shaadi, was die from hunger.
vomiting and had diarrhea, classic A few weeks later, when Shaher took
symptoms of malnutrition. Mr. Hajaji ill, Mr. Hajaji was determined to do
wanted to take the ailing 4-year-old to something. When burning didn’t work,
he carried his son down the stony path
to a health clinic, which was ill-equipped
“All the big countries say they for the task. Half of Yemen’s health facil-
are fighting each other in Yemen. ities are closed because of the war.
But it feels to us like they are So his family borrowed $16 for the
journey to the hospital in Hajjah.
fighting the poor people.” “All the big countries say they are
fighting each other in Yemen,” Mr. Hajaji
the hospital, but that was out of the ques- said. “But it feels to us like they are fight-
tion: fuel prices had risen by 50 percent ing the poor people.”
over the previous year. Yemen’s economic crisis was not
One morning in late September, Mr. some unfortunate but unavoidable side
Hajaji walked into his house to find effect of the fighting.
Shaadi silent and immobile, with a yel- In 2016, the Saudi-backed Yemeni
low tinge to his skin. “I knew he was government transferred the operations
gone,” he said. He kissed his son on the of the central bank from the Houthi-con-
forehead, bundled him up in his arms, trolled capital, Sana, to the southern city
and walked along a winding hill path to of Aden. The bank, whose policies are
the village mosque. dictated by Saudi Arabia, a senior West-
Why we are publishing these photographs
malnutrition, and Bassam Mohammed
BULLETIN BOARD
Hassan, an emaciated, listless young
boy with an empty look in his eyes.
BY ERIC NAGOURNEY
This is our job as journalists: to bear
AND MICHAEL SLACKMAN witness, to give voice to those who are
otherwise abandoned, victimized and
Amal Hussain is a 7-year-old Yemeni forgotten. And our correspondents and
girl with a haunting gaze whose image photographers will go to great lengths,
sits atop our latest report from Yemen, often putting themselves in harm’s
a country plunged into war and on the way, to do so.
brink of a catastrophic famine. This report, “Saudi Arabia’s tragic
Amal is skin and bones, and her war,” was written by Declan Walsh,
head is turned away, as if she cannot and the photographs were taken by
bear to meet the eyes of those looking Tyler Hicks. To bring it to you, they
at her. had to navigate their way, not only
Some readers may feel they want to through a country devastated by war,
look away, too. And if experience is any but also through their own emotional
guide, some are going to demand to trauma.
know why we are asking them to look Then, after they filed their report,
at all. came the time for the hard discussions
But online and in print, we are ask- in New York City.
ing you to look — not just at Amal, but Times editors don’t decide lightly to
also at others like Shaher al-Hajaji, a publish pictures of the dead or the
scarred 3-year-old boy in the grip of dying. The folders of photo editors
A bridge that was damaged in Bani Hassan by a Saudi airstrike. The airstrikes have
killed thousands of civilians, including some at weddings and on school buses.
ern official said, started printing vast
amounts of new money — at least 600
billion riyals, according to one bank offi-
cial. The new money caused an inflation-
ary spiral that eroded the value of any
savings people had.
The bank also stopped paying sala-
ries to civil servants in Houthi-con-
trolled areas, where 80 percent of Yem-
enis live. With the government as the
largest employer, hundreds of thou-
sands of families in the north suddenly
had no income.
At the Sabeen hospital in Sana, Dr.
Huda Rajumi treats the country’s most
severely malnourished children. But
her own family is suffering, too, as she
falls out of Yemen’s vanishing middle
class.
In the past year, she has received only
a single month’s salary. Her husband, a
retired soldier, is no longer getting his
pension, and Dr. Rajumi has started to
skimp on everyday pleasures, like fruit,
meat and taxi rides, to make ends meet.
“We get by because people help each
other out,” she said. “But it’s getting
hard.”
Economic warfare takes other forms,
TYLER HICKS/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Wadah Askri Mesheel, 11 months old, died
eight hours after arriving at a clinic.
bulge with powerful images that did
not make the cut because they were
considered too horrific, too invasive or
too gratuitous.
The images we have now published
out of Yemen may be as unsettling as
anything we have used before.
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
too. In a recent paper, Martha Mundy, a
lecturer at the London School of Eco-
nomics, analyzed coalition airstrikes in
Yemen, finding that their attacks on
bridges, factories, fishing boats and
even fields suggested that they aimed to
destroy food production and distribu-
tion in Houthi-controlled areas.
Saudi Arabia’s tight control over all
air and sea movements into northern
Yemen has effectively made the area a
prison for those who live there. In Sep-
tember, the World Health Organization
brokered the establishment of a hu-
manitarian air bridge to allow the sick-
est Yemenis — cancer patients and oth-
ers with life-threatening conditions — to
fly to Egypt.
Among those on the waiting list is
Maimoona Naji, a 16-year-old girl with a
melon-size tumor on her left leg. At a
hostel in Sana, her father, Ali Naji, said
they had obtained visas and money to
travel to India for emergency treatment.
Their hopes soared in September when
his daughter was told she would be on
the first plane out of Sana once the airlift
started.
But the agreement has stalled,
But there is a reason we made this
decision.
The tragedy in Yemen did not grow
out of a natural disaster. It is a slow-
motion crisis brought on by the leaders
of other countries who are willing to
tolerate extraordinary suffering by
civilians to advance political agendas.
And yet somehow the vast catastro-
phe has failed to catch the world’s
attention as much as the murder of a
single man, the Washington Post con-
tributor Jamal Khashoggi, in the Saudi
Consulate in Istanbul.
The story of Yemen and all its suffer-
ing is one that must be told, and as
powerful as Declan’s writing is, it
cannot be told in words only.
Yes, Tyler’s images are hard to look
at. They are brutal. But they are also
brutally honest. They reveal the horror
that is Yemen today. You may choose
not to look at them. But we thought
you should be the ones to decide.
..
PHOTOGRAPHS BY TYLER HICKS/THE NEW YORK TIMES
blocked by the Yemeni government, ac-
cording to the senior Western official.
Maimoona and dozens of other patients
have been left stranded, the clock tick-
ing on their illnesses.
“First they told us ‘next week, next
week,’” said Mr. Naji, shuffling through
reams of documents as tears welled up
in his eyes. “Then they said no. Where is
the humanity in that? What did we do to
deserve this?”
The Saudi coalition is not solely to
blame for Yemen’s food crisis.
In Houthi-held areas, aid workers say,
commanders level illegal taxes at check-
points and frequently try to divert inter-
national relief aid to the families of sol-
diers, or to line their own pockets.
At the United Nations on Tuesday, Mr.
Lowcock, the humanitarian official, said
that aid workers in Yemen faced obsta-
cles including delayed visas, retracted
work permits and interference in the
work — problems, officials said pri-
vately, that were greatest in Houthi-held
areas.
Despite the harrowing scenes of suf-
fering in the north, some Yemenis are
getting rich. Upmarket parts of Sana are
enjoying a mini real estate boom, partly
fueled by Yemeni migrants returned
from Saudi Arabia, but also by newly en-
riched Houthi officials.
Local residents say they have seen
Houthi officials from modest back-
grounds driving around the city in
Lexus four-wheel drives, or shopping in
luxury stores, trailed by armed gunmen,
to buy suits and perfumes.
Tensions reached a climax this sum-
mer when the head of the United Na-
tions migration agency was forced to
leave Sana after clashing with the
Houthi administration.
In an interview, the Houthi vice for-
eign minister, Hussain al-Ezzi, denied
reports of corruption and insisted that
tensions with the United Nations had
been resolved.
“We don’t deny there have been some
mistakes on our side,” he said. “We are
working to improve them.”
Only two famines have been officially
declared by the United Nations in the
past 20 years, in Somalia and South Su-
dan. A United Nations-led assessment
due in mid-November will determine
how close Yemen is to becoming the
third.
To stave it off, aid workers are not ap-
pealing for shipments of relief aid but for
urgent measures to rescue the battered
economy. “This is an income famine,”
said Lise Grande, the United Nations
humanitarian coordinator for Yemen.
“The key to stopping it is to ensure that
people have enough money to buy what
they need to survive.”
One hope for Yemenis is that the inter-
national fallout from the death of the
Saudi dissident, Mr. Khashoggi, which
has damaged Prince Mohammed’s in-
ternational standing, might force him to
relent in his unyielding prosecution of
the war.
Peter Salisbury, a Yemen specialist at
Chatham House, said that was unlikely.
“I think the Saudis have learned what
they can get away with in Yemen — that
Western tolerance for pretty bad behav-
ior is quite high,” he said. “If the
Khashoggi murder tells us anything, it’s
just how reluctant people are to rein the
Saudis in.”
Saeed Al-Batati contributed reporting.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Conspiracy theories quickly enter mainstream
The Shift
KEVIN ROOSE
Just hours after the news broke this
week that explosive devices had been
sent to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama
and other prominent Democrats, a
conspiracy theory began to take shape
in certain corners of conservative
media.
The bombs, this theory went, were
not actually part of a plot to harm
Democrats, but were a “false flag”
operation concocted by leftists in order
to paint conservatives as violent radi-
cals ahead of the elections next month.
“These ‘Suspicious Package’ stories
are false flags, carefully planned for
the midterms,” tweeted Jacob Wohl, a
pro-Trump internet troll who writes for
Gateway Pundit, a right-wing news
site. By nightfall, as more explosives
were discovered addressed to Repre-
sentative Maxine Waters, a California
Democrat, and Eric H. Holder Jr., an
attorney general under Mr. Obama, the
fact-free explanation had gelled: The
bombs were props, planted by Demo-
cratic operatives and amplified by a
biased liberal media.
A woman arrived at a debate be-
tween the two candidates for Florida
governor, Ron DeSantis and Andrew
Gillum, with a sign that read “Demo-
crats Fake News Fake Bombs.” Lou
Dobbs, the Fox Business host and
confidant of President Trump, echoed
the line in a tweet that he later deleted.
Conspiratorial thinking has always
been with us — the grassy knoll, moon
landing, Freemasons. But it has been
turbocharged in the Trump era, as
cable news networks and pliant social
media networks allow hastily assem-
bled theories to spread to millions in
an instant. Often, by the time the offi-
cial, evidence-based explanation has
formed, it has already been drowned
out by a megaphonic chorus of cranks
and attention-hungry partisans.
“The process by which something
gets called a false flag has acceler-
ated,” said Anna Merlan, the author of
“Republic of Lies,” a coming book
about conspiracy theories. “People
U.S. moves to protect its elections from Russia
CYBER, FROM PAGE 1
in large part to keep Moscow from esca-
lating in response by taking down the
power grid or conducting some other re-
prisal that could set off a bigger clash be-
tween great powers. Compared with tra-
ditional armed conflict, the rules of cy-
berwarfare are not well defined.
Cyber Command was founded in 2009
to defend military networks but has also
developed offensive capabilities. The
command shares a headquarters and
leadership with the National Security
Agency, which collects electronic and
signals intelligence. A joint Cyber Com-
mand-N.S.A. team has been working on
the effort to identify and deter foreign
influence campaigns.
American officials also said the cam-
paign is one aspect of a broader effort,
which includes purges by social media
companies of fake accounts that spread
propaganda, to fight Russian intrusion
in democratic elections. Cyber Com-
mand has also sent teams to Europe to
shore up the defenses of American allies
so they can combat Russian intrusions
on their own government networks, ac-
cording to defense officials.
American intelligence officials have
concluded that Russia is unlikely to try
to hack into voting machines or directly
manipulate voting results this year. Ear-
lier this month, the director of national
intelligence said that state and local
governments have reported attempted
intrusions into their networks, but that
foreign governments have not penetrat-
ed voting systems.
But Russian efforts to sway public
opinion by spreading false information
have continued, and officials said those
efforts are becoming more refined, tar-
geting specific groups of Americans. Al-
most all of the Russian disinformation
Police officers investigating outside CNN at the Time Warner Center in Manhattan, after explosive devices were sent to the network.
who make a living conspiracy-peddling
are in an arms race with each other, so
there’s a rush to stake out that terri-
tory and start spinning their narratives
about what happened.”
Within hours of the first bomb’s
discovery, conservative media figures
were openly speculating about the true
motives behind the campaign. Ann
Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Michael
Savage and other high-profile com-
mentators flocked to an alternative
narrative that could explain the tar-
geted threats to top Democrats without
blaming those Democrats’ political
opponents. “Republicans just don’t do
this kind of thing,” Mr. Limbaugh said
on his radio show. (Critics quickly
provided Mr. Limbaugh with plenty of
counterexamples, including abortion
clinic bombings committed by right-
wing extremists.)
efforts, according to current and former
officials, are aimed at sowing dissent,
polarizing the political parties and set-
ting the stage for the 2020 presidential
election.
The defense officials would not iden-
tify their targets. But other officials said
some of the targets were involved in pre-
vious Russian efforts to spread disinfor-
mation in the United States and Europe,
including the 2016 presidential election.
The new American campaign, accord-
ing to these officials, is aimed at both oli-
garch-funded hacking groups and Rus-
sian intelligence operatives who are
part of Moscow’s disinformation cam-
paign. It is not clear whether Cyber
Command’s effort is also aimed at halt-
ing Russian operatives charged with
hacking political entities.
Others said the American govern-
ment must be ready to go further — cut-
ting off the Russians’ ability to spread
propaganda.
“It is very important to identify the
source and essentially be able to neu-
tralize that source,” said Laura Rosen-
berger, the director of the Alliance for
Securing Democracy and a former
Obama administration official. “These
are networks that operate. The more we
can identify the key nodes in those net-
works and remove them by taking them
offline is really how we will get at this
problem in a systemic way and not play
Whac-a-Mole.”
Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, the head of
both Cyber Command and the National
Security Agency, hinted at the new cy-
beroperations this month as he noted
that American adversaries are “looking
to really take us on below that level of
armed conflict” by sowing distrust in so-
ciety and by attempting “to disrupt our
elections.”
Global Headquarters: 49 Charles Street  Mayfair  London  W1J 5EN  +44 (0)20 7290 9585
As prominent conservatives tiptoed
around the conspiracy theory swamps,
the right-wing internet dived in head-
first. Users on a pro-Trump Reddit
forum called r/the_donald frantically
assembled evidence to buttress the
unfounded theory that the bombs were
a left-wing setup. Conservatives on
Facebook and Twitter distilled the
theory into memes and talking points
that were shared thousands of times.
Groups originally formed to promote
QAnon, a sprawling pro-Trump con-
spiracy theory, latched on and turned
up the volume even higher.
Historically, “false flag” conspiracy
theories — named for a naval maneu-
ver in which a ship flies a different
country’s flag in order to trick enemies
into retreating or to facilitate an es-
cape — have remained on the edges of
American discourse. Alex Jones, the
Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, the head of United States Cyber Command, said America’s
adversaries are “looking to really take us on below that level of armed conflict.”
“This is what great power competi-
tion looks like today, and it’s what we
will look at as we look to the future,” he
said during a panel discussion in Wash-
ington.
Cyber Command has a relatively
short history of overseas operations
against adversaries, but it did conduct
missions aimed at curtailing the ability
of the Islamic State to spread propagan-
da and recruit online. Those operations,
which included efforts to freeze comput-
ers, yielded mixed results.
Assessing the effectiveness of Ameri-
can cyberoperations at this point is diffi-
cult. The director of national intelli-
gence, Dan Coats, is expected to com-
plete a review after the November
midterm elections.
THE MATCHMAKING SERVICE
 WORLDWIDE 
w w w. g r a y a n d f a r r a r. c o m
JEENAH MOON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
conspiracy-theory-loving Infowars
founder, was labeled a crank and worse
for theorizing that the attacks of Sept.
11, 2001, were an “inside job,” and
suggesting that the 2012 mass shooting
at Sandy Hook Elementary School was
an elaborate hoax concocted in order
to promote gun control.
Mr. Jones has been largely pushed to
the fringes of the internet — kicked off
Twitter, Facebook and a dozen other
services — and his cries for attention
now seem mostly pitiful. (This week,
he was filmed yelling at a pile of ma-
nure outside a rally for President
Trump in Texas.) But his spirit lives on
in the larger universe of pro-Trump
media, which has fused the conspirato-
rial grandeur of Infowars with an
unshakable faith in Mr. Trump’s right-
eousness. Conspiracy theorists who
might once have resorted to handing
ERIN SCHAFF FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
But some American officials said they
believed the initial operations had at
least partly diminished the effective-
ness of Moscow’s election manipulation
effort.
Similarly, British officials said they
had seen less activity by Russian propa-
gandists than expected after their iden-
tification of the Russian intelligence
agents behind the poisoning in the
spring of a former Russian spy and the
Dutch authorities’ detailing this month
of a failed Russian cyberattack on the
Organization for the Prohibition of
Chemical Weapons.
Outside experts believe that a major
reason Russian social media trolls are
less effective is aggressive work by
technology companies. Twitter and
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018 | 7
out subway pamphlets and shouting
from street corners have found hungry,
durable audiences on cable news
shows and social networks. And false
flag philosophy — the idea that power-
ful groups stage threats and tragic
events to advance their agendas — is
now a bizarrely common element of
national news stories.
“The reason we’re seeing more false
flag narratives is not that there are
necessarily more of them, but that
they’re more visible,” Ms. Merlan said.
“It’s much easier for a casual news
consumer to see them on Twitter.”
Conspiracy theories most often rise
around fast-moving news events, like
mass shootings and bomb threats, in
which fuzzy initial reports often give
way to more accurate explanations
later on. And sometimes, those ques-
tioning the most apparent motives turn
out to be justified.
There are structural reasons for the
conspiracy theory boom. Social media
platforms like YouTube, Reddit and
Facebook have allowed fringe thinkers
to bypass traditional gatekeepers and
reach millions of people directly. In
addition, the dominance of Fox News
and other partisan media outlets has
created a flourishing market for con-
spiracy-driven outrage. And a polar-
ized electorate has eagerly lapped up
explanations for major news events
that conform to their views.
The desire for politically convenient
explanations is not contained to the
right. Soon after the bombs were re-
ported, and before key facts about
them were known, liberals on Twitter
adopted the term “MAGAbomb” to
describe the campaign, referring both
to the explosive devices and to Mr.
Trump’s signature rallying cry.
It is Mr. Trump, of course, who has
done more than any other prominent
figure to promote (or in the case of the
racist conspiracy theory about Mr.
Obama’s birth certificate, to popular-
ize) a number of conspiracy theories.
Other theories have taken root among
his followers — like Pizzagate, QAnon
and the baseless, sensational claims
made about Christine Blasey Ford, the
woman who accused Justice Brett M.
Kavanaugh of sexual assault — often
without official censure.
“We have a president who pushes
these ideas because he built a coalition
Facebook purges of Russian-created or
-controlled accounts have reduced the
effectiveness of Moscow’s propaganda,
said Ben Nimmo, an expert on Russia’s
online misinformation efforts at the At-
lantic Council’s Digital Forensic Re-
search Lab.
Some American officials have said
they were frustrated by what they
viewed as President Trump’s timidity at
The American campaign is
aimed at both oligarch-funded
hacking groups and Russian
intelligence operatives.
taking on the Russians involved in elec-
tion meddling. Mr. Trump has fre-
quently wavered about whether he be-
lieves the Russians interfered in the
2016 elections to help his bid for the
presidency.
But officials said broad agreement ex-
isted throughout the rest of the govern-
ment that the Russian interference cam-
paign was continuing and required a
more muscular response to deter fur-
ther meddling.
Cyber Command’s new operations re-
flect a push by Defense Secretary Jim
Mattis to expand the Pentagon’s role
countering Russian hackers threat-
ening America and its allies. In the
White House, John R. Bolton, the na-
tional security adviser, has also been
pushing to speed up approval for elec-
tion defense operations.
Mr. Bolton announced new cyberwar-
fare authorities last month, but the
White House provided few details. Un-
der the new guidelines, Mr. Trump has
handed off approval for certain actions
to the National Security Council, secre-
world
that believes in conspiracy theories,”
said Joseph Uscinski, an associate
professor of political science at the
University of Miami who studies con-
spiracy theories. “He has to continue
pushing these ideas to keep his people
motivated.”
Conspiracy theories play especially
well on social media, which amplifies
provocative and engaging content by
design and often rewards misinforma-
tion with increased distribution. One
study published this year, led by M.I.T.
researchers, found that on Twitter,
falsehoods were 70 percent more likely
to be retweeted than
Fact-free accurate news.
Conspiracy theo-
explanations ries are not false
by conspiracy news, exactly. They
theorists over often rely on a speck
a series of of doubt, or a gap in
mail bombs the evidentiary trail,
have spread to make a bold claim,
fast. even if they ignore
some of the other
available proof. But
they do travel over
the same networks, and stand out from
more accurate — if predictable —
stories in much the same way.
Fact-checking, long offered as a
possible antidote to misinformation, is
not likely to solve the problem. The
available data on the effectiveness of
fact-checking, especially on social
media, is mixed. Facebook halted a
program last year that labeled false
news stories with red flags, after find-
ing that the labels actually induced
more people to click. The company’s
current approach is to decrease the
visibility of stories labeled false by
third-party fact-checkers, in hopes of
starving them of oxygen.
The real solution, of course, is likely
to be cultural, rather than technolog-
ical. A White House occupied by a
conspiracist-in-chief is not likely to do
much to quell the spread of implausible
narratives, nor is a conservative media
apparatus that profits from the popu-
larity of these theories. As long as Mr.
Trump is in office, conspiracy theorists
will continue to raise the specter of
false flags, and some in power will feel
empowered to take them seriously.
“If we had President Jeb Bush, we
wouldn’t be wondering if he believed
these theories,” Mr. Uscinski said.
tary of defense or head of Cyber Com-
mand, depending on the operation.
In the final months of the Obama ad-
ministration, as details of Russia’s inter-
ference in the 2016 election were uncov-
ered, officials privately pushed Cyber
Command and the National Security
Agency to create options to respond.
Cyber Command and the N.S.A. were
hesitant to offer options, a former offi-
cial said, out of concern that if they tried
to directly deter Moscow’s activities,
Russian operatives would learn too
much about America’s espionage tech-
niques, among the government’s most
closely held secrets.
Since taking the helm of Cyber Com-
mand and the N.S.A. in May, General
Nakasone has said he has the authority
to act against adversaries threatening
American elections. Inside both the
command and the agency, he has
pushed to develop new options to deter
interference.
American officials say the Russian ef-
fort to destabilize the American elec-
tions is closely tied to Moscow’s work in
Europe.
The criminal complaint unsealed on
Oct. 19 showed that Elena Alekseevna
Khusyaynova, the St. Petersburg ac-
countant involved in the disinformation
campaign in the United States, was also
active in Europe, including in Ukraine,
considered the focus of Moscow’s efforts
to weaken its neighbors and the West.
Cyber Command has also sent teams
to Ukraine, Macedonia and Montenegro
to build up defenses against Russian
hackers intent on penetrating govern-
ment networks on its doorstep in East-
ern Europe.
Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt contrib-
uted reporting.
 ..
8 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

science lab

FREEZE-FRAME LIFE

Just a blob of cells? Wait 26 seconds

Researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s
Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Va., have built a
new microscope that can trace individual cells’ origins and
movement in real time, sketching a virtual map of how
mammals develop in the womb.
The photos below, taken in a span of 26 seconds, show a
blob’s tiny cells multiply, interact and organize into the first
organ systems of a living mouse embryo.
The crater on the left of the blob will give rise to the
stomach, pancreas and liver. The white line across the cen-
ter of the images is the notochord, or an early backbone.
The results could have critical applications for under-
standing how organ systems form in humans as well, po-
tentially assisting treatments of birth defects. “We have
been previously limited to snapshots in time, like reading
random pages torn out of a book,” said Kate McDole, a de-
velopmental biologist and one of the study’s co-authors.
“But how are the organs actually formed? What’s the
timing, the tissues, the dynamics that are involved? You
can only study that by looking at it live.”
“This work fills in all the gaps and tells a complete story,”
Dr. McDole added. EMILY BAUMGAERTNER

KATIE MCDOLE ET AL.

Researchers developed a new microscope that traces embryonic cell movement in real time, sketching a virtual map of how organ systems develop.

P R OT E C T I N G B I O D I V E R S I T Y

How long did it take

for all these fish
to arrive here?
35 million years or so
Along the coral reefs of Southeast
Asia and Australia, hundreds of
kinds of wrasses thrive. Some are
an inch long, others eight feet;
some are skinny as cigars, others
hefty as footballs.
This diversity stems from
wrasse ancestors that migrated to
the area that now bridges the
Pacific and Indian Oceans. They
settled there and diversified over
tens of millions of years.
The region is so diverse be-
cause many ancestors of today’s ERNIE JANES/ALAMY

marine life colonized it so long A E S O P G OT I T R I G H T rats that lived in and around Toron-
ago, a new paper points out.
City rats eat meat. to between 1790 and 1890, re-
It emphasizes that biodiversity
searchers have determined that
is a long game and that the rich- Country rats eat city rats enjoyed a higher-quality
ness of species will not be easily whatever they can. and more stable diet than rural rats
replaced if it is lost because of
It’s been nearly 3,000 years since did. Just as in Aesop’s tale, the city
human activities. STEPH YIN
GEORGETTE DOUWMA/SCIENCE SOURCE
Aesop wrote “The Town Mouse and rats benefited from the largess of
the Country Mouse,” the fable in human waste, whereas country rats
which an urban rodent exposes his scraped by.
rural cousin to the city’s superior “Rats that lived in the city had a
TO OT H Y P R E D ATO R
dining options. A new study suggests lot more meat in their diet,” said
Lurking on the reefs: that Aesop was right about the geo- Eric Guiry, who is an Ontario ar-
A prehistoric wolf graphical differences in rodent diets. chaeologist and was the study’s
By analyzing the remains of brown lead author. DOUGLAS QUENQUA
in sheep’s clothing
Some 150 million years ago, fish swim-
ming in the sponge and coral reefs of
what is now southern Germany might
not have suspected that a piranha-like
predator prowled among them.
The waters were teeming with bony
fish called pycnodontiformes, known
for teeth that were most likely used for
smashing snail shells and sea urchin
spines.
Scientists thought other fish were
usually not on their menu.
But now, researchers have found a
pycnodontiform that they think ripped
chunks of flesh from other fish. ADAM Ü/MUSEO DE LA BALLENA Y CIENCIAS DEL MAR

The finding represents the earliest

ENDANGERED PORPOISES
record of flesh-eating in bony fish. “It’s
Glimpsing vaquitas
a wolf in sheep’s skin,” said Martina
Kölbl-Ebert, with the Jura-Museum and hoping it’s not
Eichstätt in Germany. “This one had for the last time
daggers and scissors in the mouth,
Scientists working to prevent the
implying a completely different mode extinction of an elusive porpoise called
of feeding.” NICHOLAS ST. FLEUR the vaquita put out to sea last month,
M. EBERT AND T. NOHL
worried about what they would find.
ONLINE: TRILOBITES It has been almost two years since
Daily nuggets of science for mobile readers: nytimes.com/trilobites the last vaquita count. At that time,
scientists said that only 30 remained in
“They’re reaching the bottom of their barrel.” the Gulf of California, their only hab-
Ken Balcomb, of the Center for Whale Research in Washington State, on orca itat. Since then, seven vaquitas have
populations in Puget Sound. died or been killed, and experts fear
that more have been entangled in gill
nets and have drowned.
“Every time I go to look for vaquitas,
I worry it will be my last time to see
them,” Barbara Taylor, a biologist at
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, wrote in an email.
She was aboard the ship on Sept. 26
when a mother and calf surfaced at
sea.
Later that day, expedition scientists
spotted two more adults. And the next
day, at least two additional pairs ap-
peared, including what appeared to be
another calf. ELISABETH MALKIN
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Business
A worker at Green Cow Farm outside Beijing checking on the “People’s Pigs”: Little Black, Little White, Little Gray and Old White. The environmentalist Abby Rockefeller wants to take them to the United States.
Booking a pen for rare Chinese pigs
BEIJING
Environmentalist buys
4 swine in need of a home.
Will Beijing let them go?
BY SUI-LEE WEE
Abby Rockefeller wants to bring the
People’s Pig of the Northeast back to the
people. First, she has to bring it to up-
state New York.
Ms. Rockefeller, a great-granddaugh-
ter of John D. Rockefeller Sr., paid $1,400
this month to buy four of the People’s
Pigs — Little Black, Little White, Little
Gray and Old White — from a farm in
suburban Beijing. She hopes to use
them as breeding stock to restore a vari-
ety of swine once known in China for its
virility, fatty meat and ability to endure
cold. Today, by one estimate, there are
only 2,000 left.
“I would very much like to get these
remarkable, unusual pigs that are now
rare,” Ms. Rockefeller said in a tele-
phone interview from Cambridge, Mass.
“These pigs matter to me, and they
would be a symbol if I can get them to
the United States.”
If she succeeds, it will be a happy end-
ing for four animals caught up in the pe-
culiarities of modern China. Chinese ef-
forts to spur urbanization and modern-
ize farming may deprive them of their
current home. Health restrictions mean
they can’t be moved. Chinese conserva-
tion experts want to save them. Local of-
ficials have threatened to bury them
alive.
Better news for workers than investors
BY NEIL IRWIN
The stock market drop in October has
been unsettling for anyone with a port-
folio, particularly after a 3 percent
plunge Wednesday that wiped out the
year’s gains. Could this be the beginning
of a larger crash, or a recession?
Well sure, it could. But even before ac-
counting for the moderate rebound in
markets Thursday morning, it makes
more sense to view this sell-off differ-
ently. This isn’t a crash, it’s a reset. The
economy is shifting in ways that aren’t
bullish for stock prices in the years
ahead, but signal mostly good news for
the economy and for ordinary people
trying to make a living.
The bull market that will turn 10 years
old early next year has, for most of its
run, been a total dream for stock invest-
ors. Economic growth in the United
States has been steady, but growth
worldwide has been slow — which has
kept interest rates low, making stocks a
more compelling investment than cash
or bonds in comparison.
Weak growth and high unemploy-
ment meant companies faced little pres-
sure to pay more for their inputs, includ-
ing both labor and raw materials. If a
An empty barn at Green Cow Farm. Local officials told the farm to get rid of its animals.
It is hard to overstate the ubiquity of
pork in China, the world’s largest pig
breeder and pork consumer. From the
north to the south, the meat is served in
everything from dumplings to soup. Ev-
ery part of the pig is eaten, including the
head, feet, heart, tongue, stomach and
kidneys.
But the bulk of it comes from Western
pigs. These breeds came to China as a
way to meet the explosion in demand
from a richer population that wanted
more meat. The government gave subsi-
dies to pig farmers starting in the 1980s
to cultivate breeds from the United
States and Denmark with names like
Duroc and Landrace.
Local breeds have faded. Of about 72
local pig breeds in China, at least 31
worker demanded a raise or a supplier
threatened a price increase, there were
plenty of alternatives.
Late in this bull market, the Trump
administration made its signature do-
mestic policy initiative a steep cut in
corporate tax rates, which flows
through directly into higher after-tax
profits for shareholders.
Those three factors together were
enough to propel the Standard & Poor’s
500 up more than 300 percent from its
March 2009 low to its recent high in Sep-
tember. But now, all three are shifting.
The economy is now heating up
enough that interest rates are rising to
more normal levels. Part of that is a re-
sult of Federal Reserve rate increases
aimed at preventing the economy from
overheating and from having excess in-
flation break out. But it’s not just the
Fed. Even longer-term interest rates
that the Fed does not directly control
have risen in the last year, as have long-
er-term rates in other countries. British,
German and Japanese bond yields are
all up over the same span.
If you look at the stock market only in
terms of its valuation — how much you
have to spend to buy shares for each dol-
lar of corporate earnings you are captur-
ing — the stock market drop in recent
weeks can be explained in significant
part by the rise in longer-term rates in
the same period. If you look at the price-
GILLES SABRIÉ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
could become extinct, according to a
2013 report by Oriental Weekly, a news-
magazine affiliated with China’s official
news agency, Xinhua.
The People’s Pig of the Northeast, or
“dongbei minzhu” in Chinese, origi-
nated from Heilongjiang Province in
northeastern China. The origin of the
name is unclear. In English, some of
their fans call the pigs by the literal
translation of their name, while others
call them Min pigs. Local connoisseurs
say their meat is tastier than foreign
pork. China’s Ministry of Agriculture
lists the breed on what it calls its “na-
tional team” — animals of excellent ped-
igree whose genes should be protected.
Wang Chuduan, a professor at China
Agricultural University in Beijing who
earnings ratio of the S.&P. 500 stocks, for
example, and invert it to view it as the
earnings-to-price ratio, it was 4.77 per-
cent on Sept 1, meaning buying $100
bought you $4.77 worth of corporate
profits. After the stock drop, that had
risen to 5.23 percent.
The jump closely parallels the rise in
longer-term bond yields, which, again,
are mostly driven by an improving
growth outlook. The yield on 10-year
Treasury bonds has risen to 3.13 percent
from 2.85 percent in that same span.
The market drop signals a new
phase for economic expansion.
Higher interest rates have made
bonds more attractive, and it makes per-
fect sense that investors would demand
a more favorable valuation from stocks
given that alternative. The story might
be different if investors believed that
higher growth would feed dispropor-
tionately into higher corporate profits.
But the current economic moment of-
fers plenty of reason to think it won’t.
Earlier in the expansion, there might
have been lots of workers on the side-
lines, and companies had leverage with
their suppliers. But there are signs that
is changing, like recent comments by
3M and Caterpillar that their input costs
A Jersey cow boarding a truck to move from the Green Cow Farm.
specializes in pig breeding, estimates
that 2,000 of these purebred pigs are in
China, up from just 100 in the 1990s.
“The People’s Pig of the Northeast is
one of the most important and most rep-
resentative among all the native pig
breeds,” Mr. Wang said. “If they are not
conserved, they will disappear.”
Little Black, Little White, Little Gray
and Old White lived among 200 other
pigs, chickens and cows at the Green
Cow Farm outside Beijing. Lejen Chen,
the farm’s American co-owner, started
the organic farm 14 years ago to supply
her two restaurants with chicken, pork
and milk because she could not find a
safe source of food in Beijing.
Just before a weeklong national holi-
day in October, local officials told the
were rising, which helped kick off the re-
cent bout of market weakness.
Finally, while the first big economic
initiative of the Trump administration,
the tax cuts, was an unquestionable
boon for stocks, the focus this year has
been on a trade war, especially with
China.
So far, the scale of the tariffs hasn’t
been big enough to have much impact
on overall economic growth. But there
has been a direct bottom-line impact for
particular blue-chip companies that
make goods using steel or aluminum
(prices of which have spiked because of
tariffs) or that import key parts from
China.
As companies try to reroute supply
chains or absorb higher costs to avoid
raising prices on consumers, the trade
war may have a much larger effect on
the bottom lines of major industrial com-
panies, and hence on their stock prices,
than it does for ordinary consumers.
Put it together, and the stock market
tumble of the last few weeks is not a
mystery to be solved, nor a warning of
horrible things to come, so much as an
inevitable result of the economic expan-
sion reaching a more mature stage.
The stock market looks forward, not
back — share prices are determined by
what investors think the future looks
like. And the economic future is starting
to look quite different from the past.
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018 | 9
GILLES SABRIÉ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
GREEN COW REGENERATIVE FARM
farm’s owners that they needed to get
rid of all of their animals within five
days, Ms. Chen said. If they failed to do
so, the officials warned, bulldozers
would cover them up.
“They wanted all animals off, you
could not leave one chicken,” Ms. Chen
said. “They said when the higher-ups
come for the tour, if there was one
chicken here, they would lose their
jobs.”
China is on a campaign to shut down
small farms in favor of building large-
scale commercial operations like the
kind in the United States. Officials say
the move will improve food safety and
the environment. Last year, the Beijing
government said it had shut down 370
PIGS, PAGE 10
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How Google
protects its
elite male
employees
SAN FRANCISCO
Some executives accused
of misconduct have left
with millions of dollars
BY DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI
AND KATIE BENNER
Google gave Andy Rubin, the creator of
Android mobile software, a hero’s
farewell when he left the company in Oc-
tober 2014.
“I want to wish Andy all the best with
what’s next,” Larry Page, Google’s chief
executive then, said in a public state-
ment. “With Android he created some-
thing truly remarkable — with a billion-
plus happy users.”
What Google did not make public was
that an employee had accused Mr. Rubin
of sexual misconduct. The woman, with
whom Mr. Rubin had been having an ex-
tramarital relationship, said he had co-
erced her into performing oral sex in a
hotel room in 2013, according to two
company executives with knowledge of
the episode. Google investigated and
concluded her claim was credible, said
the people, who spoke on the condition
that they not be named, citing confiden-
tiality agreements. Mr. Rubin was noti-
fied, they said, and Mr. Page asked for
his resignation.
Google could have fired Mr. Rubin and
paid him little on the way out. Instead,
the company handed him a $90 million
exit package, paid in installments of
about $2 million a month for four years,
said two people with knowledge of the
terms. The last payment is scheduled
for next month.
Mr. Rubin was one of three executives
that Google protected over the past dec-
ade after they were accused of sexual
misconduct. In two instances, it ousted
senior executives, but softened the blow
by paying them millions of dollars as
they departed, even though it had no le-
gal obligation to do so. In a third, the ex-
ecutive remained in a highly compen-
sated post at the company. Each time,
Google stayed silent about the accusa-
tions against the men.
The New York Times obtained corpo-
rate and court documents and spoke to
more than three dozen current and for-
mer Google executives and employees
about the episodes, including some peo-
ple directly involved in handling them.
Most asked to remain anonymous be-
cause they were bound by confidential-
ity agreements or feared retribution for
speaking out.
The transgressions varied in severity.
Mr. Rubin’s case stood out for how much
Google paid him and its silence on the
circumstances of his departure. After
Mr. Rubin left, the company invested
millions of dollars in his next venture.
Sam Singer, a spokesman for Mr. Ru-
bin, disputed that the technologist had
been told of any misconduct at Google
and said he left the company of his own
accord.
“The New York Times story contains
numerous inaccuracies about my em-
ployment at Google and wild exaggera-
tions about my compensation,” Mr. Ru-
bin said in a statement after the publica-
tion of this article. “Specifically, I never
coerced a woman to have sex in a hotel
room. These false allegations are part of
a smear campaign by my ex-wife to dis-
parage me during a divorce and custody
battle.”
GOOGLE, PAGE 10
Est.
1926
taxfreecars@bluewin.ch

10 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018
business
How Google has protected elite men
GOOGLE, FROM PAGE 9
Mr. Rubin’s exit from Google after an
inappropriate relationship was previ-
ously reported, but the nature of the ac-
cusation and the financial terms have
not been disclosed.
In settling on terms favorable to two
of the men, Google protected its own in-
terests. The company avoided messy
and costly legal fights, and kept them
from working for rivals as part of the
separation agreements.
When asked about Mr. Rubin and the
other cases, Eileen Naughton, Google’s
vice president for people operations,
said in a statement that the company
takes harassment seriously and reviews
every complaint.
“We investigate and take action, in-
cluding termination,” she said. “In re-
cent years, we’ve taken a particularly
hard line on inappropriate conduct by
people in positions of authority. We’re
working hard to keep improving how we
handle this type of behavior.”
After publication of this article, Sun-
dar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, and
Ms. Naughton wrote in an email to em-
ployees that the company had fired 48
people for sexual harassment over the
last two years and that none of them re-
ceived an exit package.
“We are committed to ensuring that
Google is a workplace where you can
feel safe to do your best work, and where
there are serious consequences for any-
one who behaves inappropriately,” Mr.
Pichai and Ms. Naughton wrote.
Some within Google said that was not
enough.
“When Google covers up harassment
and passes the trash, it contributes to an
environment where people don’t feel
safe reporting misconduct,” said Liz
Fong-Jones, a Google engineer for more
than a decade and an activist on work-
place issues. “They suspect that nothing
will happen or, worse, that the men will
be paid and the women will be pushed
aside.”
Google, founded in 1998 by Mr. Page
and Sergey Brin when they were Stan-
ford University graduate students, fos-
tered a permissive workplace culture
from the start.
In Silicon Valley, it is widely known
that Mr. Page had dated Marissa Mayer,
one of the company’s first engineers
who later became chief executive of Ya-
hoo. (Both were single.) Eric Schmidt,
Google’s former chief executive, once
retained a mistress to work as a com-
pany consultant, according to four peo-
ple with knowledge of the relationship.
And Mr. Brin, who along with Mr. Page
owns the majority of voting shares in
Google’s parent, Alphabet, had a con-
sensual extramarital affair with an em-
ployee in 2014, said three employees
with knowledge of the relationship.
David C. Drummond, who joined as
general counsel in 2002, had an extra-
marital relationship with Jennifer
Blakely, a senior contract manager in
the legal department who reported to
one of his deputies, she and other
Google employees said. They began dat-
ing in 2004, discussed having children
and had a son in 2007, after which Mr.
Drummond disclosed their relationship
to the company, she said.
Google then took action. Ms. Blakely
said Stacy Sullivan, then the head of hu-
man resources and now chief culture of-
ficer, told her that Google discouraged
managers from having relationships
with subordinates.
“One of us would have to leave the le-
gal department,” Ms. Blakely said. “It
was clear it would not be David.”
Since the affair, Mr. Drummond’s ca-
reer has flourished. He is now Alpha-
bet’s chief legal officer and chairman of
CapitalG, Google’s venture capital fund.
He has reaped about $190 million from
Buckle up for the era of turbocharged engines
Wheels
BY STEPHEN WILLIAMS
When an engineer suggested installing
a supercharger in one of Walter Owen
Bentley’s cars to give it more power for
the 24 Hours of Le Mans road race, the
British industrialist bristled. He be-
lieved in only one way to make his
4.5-liter Bentleys go faster: Make the
engines even bigger.
“There’s no replacement for dis-
placement,” Mr. Bentley announced 90
years ago. He was referring to the
historical automotive equation that
more “air” inside an engine’s metal
block and more pistons in that block to
pump the power to the wheels were
the keys to speed.
A supercharged version found its
way into the “Blower Bentley” in the
1920s, even though the stubborn Mr.
Bentley insisted its function was only
to “pervert” the engine design and
“corrupt its performance.”
Fast-forward nearly a century, and
welcome to the era of the ubiquitous
turbocharger, which is the fashionable
version of forced induction.
Unlike the supercharger, which is
mechanically driven by the engine, the
modern turbo is essentially a small
turbine attached to the engine, driven
by exhaust gases, that forces more air
into the combustion chamber. Most
industry experts expect that by 2027,
more than half the vehicles sold in the
Jennifer Blakely, with her sons. She left Google after an affair with its general counsel. “Google felt like I was the liability,” she said.
Richard DeVaul, a director at Google X, apologized for an “error of judgment” with a woman who had interviewed for a job with him.
stock options and awards since 2011 and
could make more than $200 million on
other options and equity awards, ac-
cording to company filings.
Ms. Blakely was transferred to sales
United States will be powered by one.
Because of the pressures put on car
and truck makers to meet federal
regulations — to increase fuel efficien-
cy and reduce carbon dioxide emis-
sions — the future of the automobile is
turbocharged almost by default. Ad-
vancements in turbo technology, ma-
terials and efficiency are being devel-
oped to make the transition from your
father’s gas-guzzling Oldsmobile to
today’s fuel-sipping Honda as seamless
as possible.
Automakers that have embraced
turbo tech — that’s most of them —
claim improvement of up to 30 percent
over formal mileage estimates from
the Environmental Protection Agency.
“It’s a global phenomenon,” said
Craig Balis, chief technology officer at
Garrett Motion, one of the major sup-
pliers of turbochargers, which until
this month was part of Honeywell.
“If you look at the maturity we have
now, as opposed to 10 years ago, all
methodologies are improved: aerody-
namics, exhaust streams, thermal
management,” he added. “And there
are advances in control technologies”
— like variable geometry, so-called
V.N.T. — that Garrett says improves
thermal efficiency and emissions in the
next generation of gasoline turbo
engines.
While most consumers may be ag-
nostic about the machinery that whirs
and whines under the hoods of their
vehicles, automakers cheer the turbo
advance despite the gremlins that
bedevil the process: turbo lag, or
hesitation, when a driver accelerates,
CAYCE CLIFFORD FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
JASON HENRY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
in 2007 and left Google a year later. The In late 2008, she said, Mr. Drummond
company asked her to sign paperwork left her. They later fought a custody bat-
saying she had departed voluntarily. tle for their son, she said, which she won.
She said she “signed waivers, releases How Mr. Drummond, 55, was treated
and whatever else they wanted.” “amplifies the message that for a select
JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
The Le Mans Classic has cars from an era when Le Mans tested superchargers.
and the high heat generated by the “In normal customer operating
spinning turbos. Still, many of the conditions, the fuel economy benefit is
problems associated with turbocharg- certainly there,” Mr. Damen said. “We
ing in decades past — the special haven’t observed any limiting factors
maintenance, the oil consumption, the that would prohibit use of turbocharg-
need to idle the engine before shut-off ers” in any General Motors engine.
— have been solved. Turbocharging is among the few
“Decades ago, the turbo was seen as high-priority items on the agendas of
a fun aggregate to increase perform- both G.M. and its crosstown rival,
ance, but we are targeted now toward Ford.
efficiency and CO2 reductions,” said “Something that was niche 15 years
Marco Damen, engineering group ago we at Ford have made main-
manager for charging systems at stream,” said Dave Filipe, the compa-
General Motors in Pontiac, Mich. (In ny’s vice president for global power-
1962, Oldsmobile created the turbo- train engineering. “We downsize the
powered JetFire V8, but it was essen- engine and boost with the turbo — you
tially a novelty.) get great torque response, great per-
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
few, there are no consequences,” said
Ms. Blakely, 54. “Google felt like I was
the liability.”
Google’s sexual harassment policy
states that violators may be terminated
— but it was flexible in how it enforced
the rules.
In 2013, Richard DeVaul, a director at
Google X, the company’s research and
development arm, interviewed Star
Simpson, a hardware engineer. During
the job interview, she said he told her
that he and his wife were
“polyamorous,” a word often used to de-
scribe an open marriage. She said he in-
vited her to Burning Man, a festival in
the Nevada desert, the following week.
Ms. Simpson went with her mother
and said she thought it was an opportu-
nity to talk to Mr. DeVaul about the job.
She said she brought conservative
clothes suitable for a professional meet-
ing.
At Mr. DeVaul’s encampment, Ms.
Simpson said, he asked her to remove
her shirt and offered a back rub. She
said she refused. When he insisted, she
said she relented to a neck rub.
“I didn’t have enough spine or back-
bone to shut that down as a 24-year-old,”
said Ms. Simpson, now 30.
A few weeks later, Google told her she
did not get the job, without explaining
why.
She waited two years to report the
episode to Google after she said she
wrestled with talking about it. A human
resources official later told her that her
account was “more likely than not” true
and that “appropriate action” was taken.
She said the official asked her to stay
quiet about what had happened, which
she did — until Mr. DeVaul’s public pro-
file began rising in articles in The New
York Times and The Atlantic.
“We would never tell a complainant to
stay quiet,” Chelsea Bailey, the head of
human resources at X, said in a state-
ment, adding that officials investigated
and “took appropriate corrective ac-
tion.”
In a statement, Mr. DeVaul apologized
for an “error of judgment.” He said X de-
cided not to hire Ms. Simpson before she
went to Burning Man and that he did not
realize she had not been informed.
In another harassment case, Google
paid Amit Singhal, a senior vice presi-
dent who headed search, millions of dol-
lars on the way out.
In 2015, an employee said Mr. Singhal
groped her at a boozy off-site event at-
tended by dozens of colleagues, said
three people who were briefed on the in-
cident. Google investigated and found
that Mr. Singhal was inebriated and
there were no witnesses, they said.
Google found her claim credible, they
said. The company did not fire Mr. Sing-
hal, but accepted his resignation and ne-
gotiated an exit package that paid him
millions and prevented him from work-
ing for a competitor, said the people.
In a blog post in February 2016, Mr.
Singhal said he wanted to focus more on
philanthropy and his family.
With Google silent about the circum-
stances of Mr. Singhal’s departure, he
found another lucrative job. Less than a
year later, he became head of engineer-
ing at the ride-hailing company Uber.
Weeks later, the technology news web-
site Recode reported that Mr. Singhal
had left Google after a misconduct accu-
sation. Uber dismissed Mr. Singhal for
not disclosing the inquiry.
Uber and Mr. Singhal declined to com-
ment. In a statement last year, he said
that “harassment is unacceptable in any
setting” and that he had not engaged in
any such behavior.
Claire Cain Miller contributed reporting
from Portland, Ore. Doris Burke contrib-
uted research.
formance feel, better fuel economy,
better emissions.”
Mr. Felipe said Ford’s EcoBoost
program had filtered down to its F-150
trucks: 70 percent of current F-150
sales are for turbo-equipped engines.
“We haven’t been force-feeding this to
our customers,” he said. “They’re the
ones who are telling us, with the high
take rate, that they like turbos.”
A turbocharger adds about $200 to
the cost of an engine, but that increase
is often offset because a smaller engine
is cheaper to build. “If we go from a V
configuration to an in-line configura-
tion, there’s cost optimization,” Mr.
Damen said. Most four-cylinder en-
gines use an in-line configuration.
“A V engine has a more elaborate
block, two cylinder heads, two valve
trains,” Mr. Damen said. “Go to an
in-line, you only have one cylinder
head, one valve train, and that’s con-
siderable.”
One alternative to the turbocharger
is still the supercharger, usually found
in the powertrain architecture of high-
performance cars.
Mr. Damen isn’t convinced it’s a
viable choice for mainstream vehicles.
“The big advantage is that it takes
energy directly from the crankshaft, so
there is no lag in engine response,” he
said. “The downfall is that it uses
primary energy — energy from the
crankshaft — that you want to give to
the wheels. Whereas a turbo uses
waste energy that would otherwise be
exhausted.”
More development is underway to
meet other challenges. BorgWarner, a
..
N.Y. farm
eyes 4 pigs
from China
PIGS, FROM PAGE 9
farms in its suburbs, reducing major
pollutants.
An official from the Lixian Town Agri-
cultural Service Center, which governs
the village where the Green Cow Farm
is situated, said that in April the local au-
thorities started making farms comply
with a policy that farms with green-
houses can be used only for growing
vegetables and cannot contain live-
stock. The official, who declined to give
his name, denied that the authorities
had given the farm only a few days to get
rid of all of its animals.
Supporters of the Green Cow Farm
say the real environmental enemies are
large companies that confine hundreds
or thousands of pigs, chickens and cat-
tle, increasing the risk of water pollution
and outbreaks of infectious diseases.
They say the government should in-
stead protect small family farms that
grow heritage breeds.
Ms. Chen and her husband, Shan En,
sold some of the animals. They sent oth-
ers to another farm, what they call their
“Noah’s ark.” One cow initially refused
to get on the truck, circling the farm
three times before she finally gave in.
But Little Black, Little White, Little
Gray and Old White could not be moved.
The government has imposed rules on
transporting live pigs to prevent the
spread of African swine fever, a highly
contagious disease that is sweeping
across China. The disease isn’t fatal to
humans but has killed thousands of pigs
in China and prompted mass culling.
So Ms. Chen called Ms. Rockefeller.
She had visited the Green Cow Farm
twice, in 2007 and 2009, and has a farm
in Hudson, N.Y., that she believes will
make a comfortable home for the pigs.
On a recent Tuesday, Little Black, Lit-
tle White and Old White gathered in
front of their pen, chomping on vegeta-
ble scraps. Little Gray snoozed under a
tree. Around them, cages that once con-
tained chickens stood empty. (Ms. Chen
said the chickens were free to roam dur-
ing the day but were put there at night
for their protection.)
In their purest forms, the People’s
Pigs of the Northeast have thick black
coats with long hair. Ms. Chen said she
believed some of her pigs, which have
whiter coats, are of mixed breeds.
It has been nearly a month since offi-
cials first delivered their threat.
“It makes me so sad,” said Huang
Tiancen, the farm manager, who raised
the sows when they were piglets. “I’ve
been working with them for more than
10 years.”
No one knows for certain how pigs
can be moved from China to the United
States. China has placed the People’s
Pig on its list of protected animals, so
taking them out of the country can be
challenging. If individuals or institu-
tions want to export a protected animal,
they must submit a plan to the provin-
cial animal husbandry department and
“propose a shared-benefit plan for the
state.” The application then goes to the
national animal husbandry and veteri-
nary department for approval.
The village’s vice mayor, meanwhile,
visited the farm on Oct. 9 and asked em-
ployees whether the pigs were gone yet.
Still, Ms. Rockefeller is hopeful she
can get them to her farm in Hudson.
“I know it’s not going to be easy. But I
want to be part of it, I want to be part of
her effort to save something from the
farm,” she said, referring to Ms. Chen.
“And also to help make the point of this
outrageous behavior.”
Elsie Chen contributed research.
key supplier for the industry, has
shown an “e-booster” that it says will
improve torque and vanquish the
turbo-lag gremlin in current internal
combustion engines by using electrici-
ty to spin the turbo up to 70,000 revolu-
tions per minute in less than a second.
At Garrett, the emphasis is also on
refining an electrified, or e-turbo,
booster, meant for hybrids that use the
evolving 48-volt power system, which
is replacing the 12-volt electrical net-
works in many cars.
“The e-turbo gives you good low-end
torque, lets you downsize the engine
and regenerates some of the electricity
it takes when you let off the throttle,”
said Mr. Balis, the Garrett official. The
company demonstrated an e-turbo-
equipped Audi Q7 this year.
Mr. Bentley might be pleased to
know that engines with big displace-
ments and no forced induction — most
of these are called naturally aspirated
engines — live on in cars like Chevro-
let’s Corvette and Ford’s Mustang GT.
Despite the assurance of Mr. Filipe
of G.M. that “in our lineup, there will
always be a mix of turbo and naturally
aspirated engines,” Noah Charlap isn’t
convinced.
“It’s so sad when you pop open the
hood of a four-cylinder Mustang and
see a turbo,” said Mr. Charlap, 37, who
works as a mechanic at a Chevrolet
store in Queens, N.Y. Turbocharged
cars are fine “if you’re the type of
person who just likes to go from Point
A to Point B. But if you enjoy driving,
like I do, you’re just not going to have
that power on demand.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018 | 11

Opinion
The enduring fantasy of the modernizing autocrat
Mohammed Pankaj Mishra
bin Salman
is the latest
in a long “Oil is flowing again into the free mar-
line of kets of the world,” The New York Times
declared in 1954 as Mohammed Reza
“courageous Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, visited the
modernizers” United States. The previous year, a
who turned C.I.A.-backed coup had overthrown
Iran’s elected prime minister, Moham-
out to be med Mossadegh, and within a few years
vicious the C.I.A. would help found Savak, the
dictators. shah’s diabolical security agency, re-
sponsible for the torture and disappear-
Why do ance of countless dissidents. According
people keep to The Times, however, Mossadegh was
falling for it? “where he belongs — in jail,” and Iran
under its monarch was open to “new
and auspicious horizons.”
The following year, The Atlantic
Monthly hailed the shah as “an articu-
late and positive force,” summing up the
tone of the American press coverage of
a ruthless usurper decades before
politicians, investors and journalists in
the United States began to praise an-
other oil-rich potentate and American
ally: Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman of Saudi Arabia, who now
stands accused of unspeakable crimes
including the murder and dismember-
ment with a bone saw of the journalist
Jamal Khashoggi.
For months, Prince Mohammed had
been presented as a revolutionary
figure in the American press. Jeffrey
Goldberg, the present editor of The
Atlantic, claimed that his advent was as
momentous as the collapse of the Soviet
Union. David Ignatius of The Washing-
ton Post returned from Saudi Arabia
with the insight that the prince was
bringing about “a more modern, more
entrepreneurial, less hidebound and
more youth-oriented society.”
A recent Western romance gone bad
with an Arab princeling seems to have
offered no cautionary lessons to Prince
Mohammed’s cheerleaders. Until 2011,
Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, son of Libya’s
dictator, was depicted as a staunch
modernizer by many members of the BANDAR AL-JALOUD/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Anglo-American establishment. He
even reportedly managed to get Tony
Blair, the former prime minister of
Britain, whom he described as a “close,
personal friend,” to comment on his
Ph.D. thesis at the London School of
Economics. That illusion was shattered
when Mr. Qaddafi ferociously sup-
pressed his father’s opponents during
the Arab Spring uprisings.
Why do Western elites succumb
again and again to this fantasy of a
youthful reformer and top-down mod-
ernizer in the East?
Doubtless, quasi-Westernized men
and women from the exotic Orient
flatter white self-images. These silver-
tongued inheritors of wealth and power
appear reassuringly familiar — suavely
cosmopolitan folks who are au fait with
the codes of bourgeois liberalism, unlike
coarse nativists like Iran’s Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad.
Prince Mohammed, for instance,
could serenely supervise massacres in
Yemen so long as he, exchanging his
robes for blue jeans, promised to let
Saudi women drive. Similarly, the Paki-
stani prime minster Benazir Bhutto, a
Harvard and Oxford alumna, presented
herself to her Western peers as a radical
feminist even as she emboldened the
Taliban in Afghanistan and courted
Islamic fundamentalists at home while
looting her country’s treasury.
Acquiring mansions in Surrey, Eng-
land and Palm Beach County, Fla.,
splurging at Cartier and Bulgari, Ms.
Bhutto and her husband, Asif Ali
Zardari, helped strengthen a wide-
spread perception in the postcolonial
world: that its expensively educated
rulers are as venal as they are socially
liberal. In the West, however, Ms.
Bhutto could count upon, right up to her
assassination in 2007, her Ivy League-
Oxbridge networks to present her as a
valiant modernizer of her intractably
backward people. Mr. Ignatius of The
Washington Post, fondly recalling Ms.
Bhutto in a Rolling Stones T-shirt at
Oxford in the 1970s, claimed after her
death that she was “the most potent
Pakistani voice for liberalism,” who had
managed to embrace the modern world
with “confidence and courage.”
The confident and courageous West-
ernizer was also the role that Syria’s
British-educated president, Bashar
al-Assad, and his British-born wife
Asma, were initially allotted in the
Western press. The singer Sting as well
as Secretary of State John Kerry social-
ized with Syria’s glamorous first couple
in Damascus. Just as the Arab Spring
got underway in 2011, Vogue published unleashing of lethal force against them Middle East. Indeed, the American Crown Prince
a fawning profile of Ms. Assad, describ- is not just an occasional moral lapse. It shock-and-awe campaign in Iraq, and Mohammed bin
ing her as “the very freshest and most is a preferred way to discipline and the accompanying regime of torture Salman posing for
magnetic of first ladies.” punish a potentially volatile opposition. and rendition, was designed around the a selfie at a busi-
Strategic concerns, of course, also Certainly, powerful institutions and assumption that brutality was the only ness conference
weigh on minds enchanted by the mag- individuals in the West eagerly pushed way to discipline Arabs. One senior in the Saudi
netic princes and princesses of the East. manifestly coercive projects of West- White House official recalled a meeting capital, Riyadh,
For many Beltway pundits as well as for ernization so long as the game is not with the Princeton historian Bernard on Tuesday.
President Trump, given away by some conspicuous Lewis, who told the Bush administra-
Strategic Prince Mohammed’s atrocity. For instance, Sanjay Gandhi, a tion that “in that part of the world,
loathing of Iran and self-proclaimed devotee of free markets nothing matters more than resolute will
concerns, tenderness for Israel and the de facto ruler of India in the and force.” In this view, “The Arab
of course, override all other mid-1970s, not only put his political Mind” (the title of a 1973 book by an
also weigh considerations. It is opposition in prison, he also presided Israeli academic that became a guiding
on minds also true that oil over the forced sterilization of millions text for neoconservative adventurers
enchanted by needs to keep flowing of poor men in a program of population and the American military in the Middle
the magnetic in free markets, and, control aggressively promoted in the East) was unusually impressed, and
princes and as with the Shah of Third World by the Ford Foundation, easily cowed, by extreme cruelty.
princesses Iran, there is much the World Bank and the International Accordingly, successive American
money to be made Monetary Fund. presidents have waged lawless wars in
of the East. from selling things to As Sanjay’s mother, Prime Minister the East; poring over “kill lists,” they
the prince that his Indira Gandhi, suspended fundamental have ordered extrajudicial executions
country doesn’t need. rights, more than six million men were by drones. More recently, one of the
Still, slack private morality, cynical sterilized in India in a year. Visiting a region’s richest countries, Saudi Arabia,
realpolitik, naked avarice and craven terrorized India in 1976, the World has tried to starve near-destitute Yem-
celebrity worship do not fully explain Bank’s president, Robert McNamara, en into submission, with the help of a
the myopia that excuses grotesque hailed the Gandhis’ “disciplined, realis- cutting-edge arsenal supplied by some
crimes until they become impossible to tic approach” and the general junking of of the world’s leading liberal democra-
conceal. This weakness for quasi-en- “socialist ideologies.” cies.
lightened despotism in the global South Biopolitical violence has been un- Many fans of Prince Mohammed in
stems from a visceral fear of politically leashed with special vigor against those the West are now scrambling to disavow
disaffected masses. Moreover, the who resist Western interests in oil-rich MISHRA, PAGE 13

What’s wrong with Germany’s Social Democrats?

The party Jochen Bittner
should be Contributing Writer
embracing
the challenge
of economic HAMBURG, GERMANY What does it take
to make a major political party so frus-
inequality. trated with itself that it prefers therapy
Instead, it’s over governing?
shrinking The German Social Democrats are
mired in a sort of depression. Call it
away. power-phobia. The party governs the
country as the junior partner with the
center-right Christian Democrats, led
by Chancellor Angela Merkel — yet
many members fear that carrying on in
this coalition might destroy them.
The party seems to be in free fall. In
recent elections in the state of Bavaria,
the Social Democrats, known by their
German acronym SPD, scored their
worst result ever, sliding from 20.6 to 9.7
percent. There is another election due in
the state of Hesse this Sunday, where
polls point to a similar result.
Should the Social Democrats receive
another beating in Hesse, demands will
grow within the party to quit the gov-
erning coalition. That could lead to new
elections, and a new coalition of parties
that would put the SPD on top. But
many in the party, especially young
members, believe Germany’s oldest
political party needs a sabbatical — a
timeout to reflect what went wrong and
how to reset.
Part of the party’s problem is that Ms.
Merkel’s conservatives have co-opted
many of the center-left’s ideas, from the
introduction of the minimum wage to
the establishment of same-sex mar-
riage, and in doing so both embraced
and suffocated the Social Democrats.
But there’s another, self-inflicted
reason for the malaise of the SPD. In the
past two decades the Social Democrats
have shifted to the right economically,
but (perhaps as a compensation) to the
left culturally. This may be fine for the
country’s urban upper classes, but it
leaves most German voters confused
about the party’s appeal.
At the same time, the SPD has ig-
nored an issue that a center-left party,
born of the labor movement, should be
eager to embrace. Germany, the world’s
fourth-largest economy and Europe’s
richest country, is a prosperous place —
but one rived by inequality and social
injustice.
You have to look twice at traditional
data to see the scale of the problem.
Unemployment has halved in the past
20 years, from around 11 percent to
around 5 percent; private wealth has
nearly doubled, to 11.7 trillion euros
today. Wages have risen, too.
But the drop of unemployment in
Germany came at a price: the emer-
gence of a new lower class, the so-called
precariat — the working poor, or, as you
might call them, the subsistence labor-
ers — who find it nearly impossible to
accumulate wealth. One million people
in Germany are employed in the gig
economy — “Leiharbeiter,” in German
— who do only temporary work without
protection against dismissal. More than
three million more Germans have only
temporary work contracts, with only
mild protections.
Meanwhile, the richest 10 percent of
the households in Germany possess
Andrea Nahles, Chairwoman of the German Social Democrats, in Berlin last week.
nearly 60 percent of the entire net
household wealth, according to a study
by the trade union-linked Hans Böckler
foundation, well over the average for
developed countries. This is Ms.
Merkel’s Achilles’ heel. Why has SPD
not attacked it?
The answers is that, in order to do so,
the Social Democrats would have to
confront themselves with their very
own shortcomings, with failures that
touch the heart of their leftist self-im-
age. Over the last two decades, largely
under the auspices of the Social Demo-
crats — either as the governing party, or
as the junior party with control over
ROBERT SCHLESINGER/GETTY IMAGES
domestic ministries — state-financed
poverty has been replaced by privately-
financed poverty.
Beginning in the 2000s under Chan-
cellor Gerhard Schröder, the SPD were
the ones who legislated many of the
reforms that created today’s imbal-
ances. They not only introduced drastic
cutbacks in social welfare; the party
also initiated a tax reform that lowered
the top rate from 53 to 42 percent.
The maximum rate kicks in compara-
tively early, with an annual income of
around 55,000 euros. But how fair is it,
from a leftist point of view, that the same
tax rate applies to someone earning
200,000 euros? Nor did the SPD seem to
mind that the chief executive of
Deutsche Post earns 239 times the
salary of his average employee.
Then came the refugee crisis, which
hit at a time when the belief in solidarity
among Germans themselves had
reached a low. All of a sudden, it
seemed, the Social Democrats rediscov-
ered their empathy for the underprivi-
leged — as long as they had come from
abroad. The party showed a striking
lack of interest, at least rhetorically, on
the social costs imposed by the arrival
of over a million refugees.
Earlier this year, a food bank in Es-
sen, in western Germany, decided to
temporarily exclude foreign nationals,
who were overwhelming their supplies
and leaving longtime clients empty-
handed. Leading Social Democrats
accused the food bank volunteers of
xenophobia. Yet the SPD’s moral out-
rage did little to answer a complex
question that confronts the entire conti-
nent: How do you distribute scant
resources fairly in a framework that
transgresses national boundaries?
To organize globalization in a fairer
way, into one a system at least resem-
bles the balances of the old nation state,
is both a demanding and a highly de-
manded task for Social Democracy
today. It is something that the center left
should be ready to tackle. Instead, the
Social Democrats turning inward,
unable to answer the country’s most
pressing questions at a time when
Germany needs them.
JOCHEN BITTNER is a political editor for
the weekly newspaper Die Zeit.
 ..
12 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

opinion

Brazil prepares to elect a hypocrite

evident nature of their own views. secured the passage of only two bills, Flávio has just been elected to Brazil’s
A.G. SULZBERGER, Publisher Vanessa Barbara And so in an effort to understand my while at the same time multiplying his Senate; Eduardo was re-elected to the
DEAN BAQUET, Executive Editor MARK THOMPSON, Chief Executive Officer Contributing Writer fellow Brazilians, I’ve turned to the assets and those of his family? Mr. congress; and Carlos has been a City
JOSEPH KAHN, Managing Editor STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON, President, International
work of the psychologist Jonathan Bolsonaro and his sons possess have Council member in Rio de Janeiro since
TOM BODKIN, Creative Director JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DEMARTA, Senior V.P., Global Advertising
Haidt, whose moral foundations theory properties valued at $4 million, accord- he was 17. Mr. Bolsonaro’s brother,
SUZANNE DALEY, Associate Editor ACHILLES TSALTAS, V.P., International Conferences
makes an impressive attempt to con- ing to the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. Renato, tried and failed to be mayor of
SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL For a liberal woman nect people with differing political Mr. Bolsonaro speaks of patriotism Miracatu and became a special aide to a
CHARLOTTE GORDON, V.P., International Consumer Marketing
JAMES BENNET, Editorial Page Editor
like me, it’s hard to understand why views. Having done so, I can concede and authority — moral foundations that City Council member. He was dis-
HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS, V.P., International Circulation
JAMES DAO, Deputy Editorial Page Editor
anyone would vote for a presidential that there’s something about Mr. Bol- are important to conservatives. His charged from the job after a TV report
HELENA PHUA, Executive V.P., Asia-Pacific
KATHLEEN KINGSBURY, Deputy Editorial Page Editor
candidate who has been described by sonaro that activates deep moral intu- campaign slogan is “Brazil above every- revealed that he was getting paid with-
SUZANNE YVERNÈS, International Chief Financial Officer
international publications as “racist, itions in his supporters. Many people thing and God above everyone.” And out reporting to work.
homophobic and sexist” (Libération), “a side with him not for his proposals but yet, as a captain in the army in the 1980s, Many conservative voters appreciate
threat to democracy” (The Economist), because to them, he has become a sym- he was punished for disloyalty after authority because it creates order. They
a “Trump of the tropics” (The Guard- bol of everything writing an article in a magazine publicly aspire to elect a strong ruler with a firm
ian), “a xenophobe” (Clarín) and a Some good. The problem complaining about his wages — an grip on the country. However, I’m not
sympathizer with “military dictator- is that these people interesting display of respect for au- sure Mr. Bolsonaro is capable of enforc-
Brazilian
DEMOCRATS COULD WORK WITH TRUMP ships and torturers” who has “openly
conservatives
are responding only thority. He was later accused and con- ing his command. One example: He
expressed fascist ideas” (Zeit). to Mr. Bolsonaro the victed of planning to bomb military acknowledges that he has only a “super-
In his frenetic campaigning for the midterms, Presi- I’m referring, of course, to Jair Bol- see the symbol — not Mr. barracks as well as a pipeline that sup- ficial understanding” of economics.
If he dent Trump has gone all in with racially charged, eth- sonaro, the current front-runner to presidential Bolsonaro the man. plies water to Rio de Janeiro, also as When asked questions about taxes or
remembers become the next president of Brazil. The candidate Jair Mr. Bolsonaro part of his protest against low salaries. public debt, he relies entirely on the
nonationalist demagogy — spinning out dystopian
his campaign
far-right Mr. Bolsonaro is a former army Bolsonaro as speaks of fairness, (Mr. Bolsonaro denies the bomb plan judgment of his economic adviser, Paulo
visions of “unknown Middle Easterners” storming the officer who has served seven terms as a representative for example. Ac- and was acquitted on appeal.) Guedes. In addition, after being stabbed
promises. southern border, MS-13 members terrorizing the coun- federal congressman, during which, of everything cording to Mr. Haidt, According to military records, Mr. in a recent street rally, he has refused to
And cares according to Le Monde, he was “an fairness is about Bolsonaro’s superiors also considered attend political debates with Mr. Had-
tryside and anxious Californians rioting over sanctuary insignificant politician from Brasília,
they value. proportionality; it is him immature. For a brief time, he was dad, which hasn’t made him sound
enough cities. better known for his verbal excesses They should the idea that people involved in gold mining; his superior, authoritative or self-confident at all.
to stick But in the gaps between such fantasies, Mr. Trump than for his parliamentary activism.” look closer. should get only what Col. Carlos Pellegrino, said that the According to Mr. Haidt, conservative
with them. Now, according to a recent survey by they deserve. Mr. captain had ambitions “to seek by other voters also place particular importance
has also begun revisiting broadly popular policy
the polling firm Ibope, 59 percent of Bolsonaro’s sup- means” — outside the military — “the on the value of sanctity (or purity),
themes of the sort that he campaigned on in 2016 but voters plan to support him in the second porters are angry about the perceived opportunity to fulfill his aspirations to rejecting ideas of degradation. But Mr.
then largely abandoned — or actively worked against round of the elections, which will take abuse of social welfare programs such be a rich man.” So much for all that Bolsonaro would degrade our nation
— once he settled into the Oval Office. place on Sunday. (Fernando Haddad, as Bolsa Família, which provides finan- patriotism. with his rudeness and ignorance. He has
the candidate of the left-leaning Work- cial aid to poor families. They feel ag- One thing is true, though: Mr. Bol- been disrespectful to women, homosex-
Chief among the president’s newly rediscovered ers’ Party, has 41 percent of voters grieved by the image of people getting sonaro is loyal. The Bolsonaro clan are a uals, blacks and indigenous people, and
policy passions: protecting health care coverage for behind him.) money without working. (They also tight-knit bunch, many of them working has shown an inability to represent our
pre-existing conditions (“Republicans will totally pro- Mr. Bolsonaro’s ascendancy has don’t support affirmative action.) in the same field. Mr. Bolsonaro is so people with class and intelligence. He’s
deeply polarized Brazilian society. For That’s all understandable. And yet if supportive of traditional family struc- far from being a world leader.
tect people with Pre-Existing Conditions, Democrats the past decade, our presidential elec- that’s the case, why aren’t Mr. Bol- tures that he has been married three When it comes to moral intuitions, Mr.
will not!” he tweeted Wednesday). Like a mesmerizing tions have been the stage for a center- sonaro’s voters more disturbed by the times. Bolsonaro looks poised to fulfill conser-
video loop, Mr. Trump keeps reassuring voters over left versus center-right face-off, which times he himself has violated principles His first wife, Rogéria, was a City vative hopes only on the surface: Look
at times has provoked some heated of fairness? For many years, for in- Council member in Rio de Janeiro for closer, and he acts against everything
and over that Republican lawmakers really, truly do debates — but now it feels like the house stance, he received housing assistance two terms, with the support of her then- they most cherish. Let’s hope Brazilians
support this wildly popular provision — or at least they is burning down. from the Congress despite possessing husband. His second wife, Ana Cristina, realize that — and quickly.
will after he gives them a good talking to. More than ever, the election has an apartment in Brasília. When asked at one point accused him of threatening
become a battle over values — fairness about this, he told a newspaper, in vul- her, but eventually withdrew her com- VANESSA BARBARA is the editor of the
The president is, likewise, renewing his vow to tackle
versus equality, freedom versus author- gar language, that he used the allow- plaint; she was running for Congress, literary website A Hortaliça and the
the high cost of prescription drugs. On Thursday, he ity, justice versus legality — in which ance to have sex. What about the fact but failed to get elected. author of two novels and two nonfiction
announced a plan to revamp how Medicare pays for both sides are appealing to the self- that in his 26 years as a lawmaker, he Three of his sons are also politicians: books in Portuguese.
certain medications. The proposal, which would bypass
Congress altogether, isn’t finalized and is expected to
draw strong pushback from industry interests.
Also back on the president’s to-do list: infrastruc-
ture. In 2016, Mr. Trump promised to deliver a plan
immediately after getting elected. That high-priority
agenda item went exactly nowhere with this Congress.
But not to worry, he guarantees that there’ll be a big
push right after the midterms. “We think that’s going
to be an easy one,” he recently told Fox Business.
It would be easy to dismiss Mr. Trump’s latest policy
patter as hogwash, the sort of promise-making in
which he specializes — like his pledge to drain the
political swamp or get Mexico to pay for The Wall.
But if Democrats manage to take control of the
House after the Nov. 6 elections, Mr. Trump’s campaign
palaver could shift to something more interesting: a
starter map to policies on which the president and
Democratic lawmakers might actually be able to get
something done.
Yes, go ahead and roll your eyes. Yet recall that in
the days before Mr. Trump took office, when lawmak-
ers from both parties were anxiously wondering what a
Trump era would look like, some Democrats said they
would be willing — happy even — to work with the new
president on shared values. Infrastructure develop-
ment was one area of potential agreement. Lowering
prescription drug costs and shoring up coverage for
pre-existing conditions clearly would fall into that cate-
gory as well. NELSON ALMEIDA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

Nearly two years on, a Democratic House majority Supporters of the Brazilian right-wing presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro at a rally this month. Mr. Bolsonaro’s ascendancy has deeply polarized Brazilian society.
playing ball with a president that most of its base
would love to see driven from office may sound absurd.
Some of Mr. Trump’s promises aren’t much different

Health care, hatred, and lies

from what he touted in 2016, and so far he has lacked
follow-through to realize them, either because he’s not
interested or because other Republicans won’t let him.
But, if the House flips, there are advantages to at least overwhelmingly oppose cuts in Social standards, involving things like pre- false claim that people protesting Brett
trying. Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Even tending that tax cuts favoring the rich Kavanaugh were paid by George Soros.
self-identified Republicans favor pre- were actually aimed at the middle class. Finally, threats of retribution against
Many congressional Democrats and presidential venting insurers from discriminating These days, the lies are utterly shame- political opponents and critics have
hopefuls are eager to avoid looking excessively parti- against people with pre-existing medi- less, with candidates who have worked become standard fare on the right, and
san or vindictive as 2020 approaches. Offering to work cal conditions — something Obamacare nonstop to dismantle protections for not just in the chants of “lock her up” —
does, but Republican health proposals pre-existing conditions posing as cham- which Trump led on the same day some-
with Mr. Trump on drug costs, for example, might help Paul Krugman wouldn’t. pions of such protections, and accusa- one sent Hillary Clinton a bomb. Ted
them come across as functioning adults. So how do Republicans manage to tions that Democrats are the ones trying Cruz may have been joking when he
With Republicans likely to retain control of the Sen- win elections? Partly the answer is that to destroy Medicare. suggested sending Beto O’Rourke to
ate, the odds of even a vaguely progressive bill of any gerrymandering, the Electoral College But lies about policy, while they may jail, but that kind of joke would have
and other factors have rigged the sys- confuse some voters, aren’t enough. been unthinkable not long ago.
real significance making it through the upper chamber Until recently, it looked as if the tem in their favor; Republicans have Hate has always been part of the pack- And it’s hard to see calling the news
are slim. It’s hard to imagine Mitch McConnell, the midterm elections might be defined held the White House after three of the age. media “enemies of the people” as any-
Senate Republican leader, allowing his members to largely by an argument about health past six presidential elections, despite Let’s not romanticize the past. When thing other than an incitement to vio-
care. Over the past few days, however, winning the popular vote only once. And Reagan talked about welfare queens lence.
come within 100 miles of, say, a costly infrastructure the headlines have been dominated they will probably hold the House un- driving Cadillacs, or a So will this ramped-up strategy of
plan. But this, too, could work to the Democrats’ advan- instead by hatred — hysteria over a less Democrats win by at least 6 per- Hate is how “strapping young hate work? It might, in part because
tage. caravan of migrants a thousand miles cent. buck” using food those same news media still dance to
from the U.S. border, and now the at- Also, let’s not forget about voter
Republicans stamps to buy steaks, the haters’ tune. Take the story of the
By pushing issues that the president specifically and tempted assassination of multiple suppression, which is putting an in- change the he knew exactly what migrant caravan. The right’s hysteria is
aggressively promoted on the campaign trail this year, prominent Democrats. creasingly heavy thumb on the scale. subject from he was doing. obviously insincere; it’s clear that it is
House Democrats could turn up the political heat on But whoever sent the bombs and why, Still, given how unpopular Republicans’ policy. Under Trump, hyping the story to take attention away
the caravan hysteria is no accident: policy positions are, how do they even however, the strategy from health care and other substantive
Senate Republicans to take awkward votes on popular
creating a climate of hatred is how get close enough to cheat? of hatred has gone to issues: Never mind pre-existing condi-
issues. If Mr. McConnell declined to take action, as is so Republicans avoid talking about health One way they have traditionally a whole new level. tions! Look at those scary brown peo-
often his way, Democrats could hammer home the care. What we’re seeing in this election gotten there is with red-baiting, portray- For one thing, after decades of cloak- ple!
contrast between their let’s-get-stuff-done attitude and is a kind of culmination of the strategy ing any and all progressive policies as ing its strategy in euphemisms, the Yet major news organizations have
the right has been using for decades: the next thing to Communism. More G.O.P. is back to letting racists be rac- given the caravan saturation coverage,
Republicans’ obstructionism. distract working-class voters from than half a century ago, Ronald Reagan ists. Hardly a week goes by without the more than they’ve ever given health
As for Mr. Trump’s incentive to reach across the policies that hurt them by promoting warned that Medicare would destroy revelation that some Trump official or care, all the same.
aisle: The man likes to win. It may well be the only culture war and, above all, racial antag- American freedom. (It didn’t.) A few prominent Republican supporter is a The thing is, if this strategy of hate
onism. days ago, the Trump White House is- bigot and/or white nationalist. works in the midterms, the right will
thing he cares about. Thus far, the president’s path to When it comes to substance, the sued a report equating Medicare for All At the same time, the mainstream pursue it even more avidly. Don’t expect
victory has run through a Congress wholly controlled modern conservative policy agenda, with Maoism. G.O.P. has gone all in on the kind of anyone involved to experience any
by members of his own party. If the midterms change which centers on cutting taxes and Another key tactic involves lying conspiracy theorizing — tinged with pangs of conscience. Indeed, after CNN
tearing up the social safety net, is con- about both their own positions and anti-Semitism — that used to be re- and several prominent critics received
that, Mr. Trump will need to revise his approach to sistently unpopular. By large margins, those of their opponents. During the stricted to the fringe. For example, not bombs in the mail, Trump blamed . . . the
dealing with the opposition if he ever wants to see voters want to raise, not lower, taxes on administration of George W. Bush, the only Trump but also senior senators like media. I have seen the future, and it’s
another legislative win. corporations and the wealthy. They lies were relatively subtle by current Charles Grassley have bought into the full of menace.

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..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Yes, I’m an American nationalist
David Brooks
Here’s a question: To which layer of
society do you feel most attached: your
neighborhood, town, county, state,
nation or humanity as a whole?
I’ve put that question to a lot of
people. About 5 percent say they feel
most connected to humanity as a
whole. A vast majority of the rest say
their strongest attachment is to the
local — their neighborhood or town.
I get that. Though we’ve moved
around a lot, my family has a clear
home base. If you start at East 15th
Street in Lower Manhattan and walk
two miles south, you will have walked
by where my great-grandfather had
his butcher shop, where my maternal
grandfather practiced law, where my
father lived during high school, where
I went to elementary school and where
my youngest son now attends college.
That’s five generations within two
miles. I feel a magical attachment to
that neighborhood. The blocks and
street names enchant in my mind.
And yet I have to say my strongest
attachment is to the nation, to the
United States. You could take New
A new nuclear arms race
GORBACHEV, FROM PAGE 1
the I.N.F. Treaty, the United States
invoked Russia’s alleged violations of
some of the treaty’s provisions. Russia
has raised similar concerns regarding
American compliance, at the same
time proposing to discuss the issues at
the negotiating table to find a mutually
acceptable solution. But over the past
few years, the United States has been
avoiding such discussion. I think it is
now clear why.
With enough political will, any prob-
lems of compliance with the existing
treaties could be resolved. But as we
have seen during the past two years,
the president of the United States has
a very different purpose in mind.
It is to release the United States
from any obligations, any constraints,
and not just regarding nuclear mis-
siles.
The United States has in effect taken
the initiative in destroying the entire
system of international treaties and
accords that served as the underlying
foundation for peace and security
following World War II.
Yet I am convinced that those who
hope to benefit from a global free-for-
all are deeply mistaken. There will be
no winner in a “war of all against all”
York out of my identity and I’d be sort
of the same. If you took America out of
my identity I’d be unrecognizable to
myself.
What does this national attachment
feel like? It feels a bit like any other
kind of love — a romantic love, or a
love between friends. It is not one
thing that you love but the confluence
of a hundred things. Yes, it is the
beauty of the Rockies, but it is not just
the land. It is the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, but not just the creed. It’s
winning World War II and Silicon
Valley, but it is not just the accomplish-
ments. It is the craziness, the diversity,
our particular brand of madness.
The 19th-century French philoso-
pher Ernest Renan argued that “a
nation is a soul, a
How love spiritual principle”:
“These are the es-
of country sential conditions of
nourishes
being a people:
a life.
having common
glories in the past
and a will to contin-
ue them in the present; having made
great things together and wishing to
make them again. One loves in propor-
tion to the sacrifices that one has com-
mitted and the troubles that one has
suffered.”
When I think of the great American
nationalists, I think of Abraham Lin-
coln and Theodore Roosevelt, A. Philip
Randolph and Walt Whitman, of
course, but also the wild mixed-up urge
that seizes millions to sacrifice, in
sometimes opposite ways, for the
BRYAN R. SMITH/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
— particularly if it ends in a nuclear
war. And that is a possibility that can-
not be ruled out. An unrelenting arms
race, international tensions, hostility
and universal mistrust will only in-
crease the risk.
Is it too late to return to dialogue
and negotiations? I don’t want to lose
hope. I hope that Russia will take a
firm but balanced stand. I hope that
America’s allies will,
Is it too late upon sober reflec-
tion, refuse to be
to return to launchpads for new
dialogue and American missiles. I
negotiations? hope the United
I don’t want Nations, and particu-
to lose hope. larly members of its
Security Council,
vested by the United
Nations Charter with primary respon-
sibility for maintaining international
peace and security, will take responsi-
ble action.
Faced with this dire threat to peace,
we are not helpless. We must not re-
sign, we must not surrender.
MIKHAIL GORBACHEV is the former presi-
dent of the Soviet Union. This article
was translated by Pavel Palazhchenko
from the Russian.
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018 | 13
opinion
Why sex is not binary
Anne Fausto-Sterling
Two sexes have never been enough to
describe human variety. Not in biblical
times and not now. Before we knew
much about biology, we made social
rules to administer sexual diversity. The
ancient Jewish rabbinical code known
as the Tosefta, for example, sometimes
treated people who had male and female
parts (such as testes and a vagina) as
women — they could not inherit prop-
erty or serve as priests; at other times,
as men — forbidding them from shaving BIOPHOTO ASSOCIATES, VIA GETTY IMAGES
or being secluded with women. More No single biological measure places humans into either the male or female category.
brutally, the Romans, seeing people of
mixed sex as a bad omen, might kill a
person whose body and mind did not bryonic testes or ovaries make hor- male levels and patterns of hormones
conform to a binary sexual classifica- mones that further push the embryo’s that cause adult sexual maturation.
tion. development in either a male or female Dr. Money called these layers puber-
Today, some governments seem to be direction (depending on which hor- tal hormonal sex and pubertal morpho-
following the Roman model, if not killing mones appear). Fetal hormonal sex logical sex. But these, too, may vary
people who do not fit into one of two orchestrates internal reproductive sex widely beyond a two-category classifi-
sex-labeled bins, then at least trying to (formation of the uterus, cervix and cation. This fact is the source of continu-
deny their existence. This month, Prime fallopian tubes in females or the vas ing disputes about how to decide who
Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary deferens, prostate and epididymis in can legitimately compete in all-female
banned university-level gender studies males). During the fourth month, fetal international sports events.
programs, declaring that “people are hormones complete their job by shaping There has been a lot of new scientific
born either male or female” and that it is external genital sex — penis and scro- research on this topic since the 1950s.
unacceptable “to talk about socially
constructed genders, rather than bio-
logical sexes.” Now the Trump adminis-
tum in males, vagina and clitoris in
females.
By birth, then, a baby has five layers
But those looking to biology for an
easy-to-administer definition of sex and
gender can derive little comfort from
tration’s Department of Health and of sex. But as with chromosomal sex, the most important of these findings.
common good: Gloria Steinem as Human Services wants to follow suit by each subsequent layer does not always For example, we now know that rather
much as Phyllis Schlafly, those who legally defining sex as “a person’s status become strictly than developing under the direction of a
stand for the anthem and those who as male or female based on immutable binary. Furthermore, single gene, the fetal embryonic testes
kneel. The
biological traits identifiable by or before the layers can conflict or ovaries develop under the direction
Love for nation is an expanding love birth.”
complexity with one another, of opposing gene networks, one of which
because it is love for the whole people. This is wrong in so many ways, mor- is more than with one being binary represses male development while
It’s an ennobling love because it comes cultural. It’s
with the urge to hospitality — to share
ally as well as scientifically. Others will
explain the human damage wrought by biological,
and another not: An
XX baby can be born
stimulating female differentiation and
the other of which does the opposite.
what you love and to want to make such a ruling. I will stick to the biological too. with a penis, an XY What matters, then, is not the presence
more love by extending it to others. error. person may have a or absence of a particular gene but the
In the soul of a nationalist, Yoram He started with chromosomal sex, vagina, and so on. balance of power between gene net-
Hazony writes in his book “The Virtue determined at fertilization when an X- These kinds of inconsistencies throw a works acting together or in a particular
of Nationalism,” there is a gratifying or Y-bearing sperm fuses with an X- monkey wrench into any plan to assign sequence. This undermines the possibil-
tension between a person’s intense bearing egg. At least that’s what usually sex as male or female, categorically and ity of using a simple genetic test to
loyalty to her inherited traditions and happens. Less commonly, an egg or in perpetuity, just by looking at a new- determine “true” sex.
an awareness that there are many sperm may lack a sex chromosome or born’s private parts. The policy change proposed by the
other traditions, similarly beautiful,
have an extra one. The resultant em- Adding to the complexity, the layering Department of Health and Human
but that don’t happen to be her own.
bryo has an uncommon chromosomal does not stop at birth. The adults sur- Services marches backward in time. It
In a family you can feel when love is
sex — say, XXY, XYY or XO. So even rounding the newborn identify sex flies in the face of scientific consensus
stretched and broken. And you can feel
considering only the first layer of sex, based on how they perceive genital sex about sex and gender, and it imperils the
the same thing in the nation. Today,
there are more than two categories. (at birth or from an ultrasound image) freedom of people to live their lives in a
when bombs are sent and vitriol fol-
lows, our common American national-
And that’s just the first layer. Eight to and this begins the process of gender way that fits their sex and gender as
12 weeks after conception, an embryo socialization. Fetal hormones also affect these develop throughout each individ-
ism, our mutual loyalty, is under strain.
acquires fetal gonadal sex: Embryos brain development, producing yet ual life cycle.
It’s threatened by extreme individu-
with a Y chromosome develop embryon- another layer called brain sex. One
alism — people who put the needs of
ic testes; those with two X’s form em- aspect of brain sex becomes evident at ANNE FAUSTO-STERLING is an emeritus
the individual above the needs of the
bryonic ovaries. This sets the stage for puberty when, usually, certain brain professor of biology and gender studies
community. It’s threatened by global-
fetal hormonal sex, when the fetal em- cells stimulate adult male or adult fe- at Brown University.
ists — people whose hearts have been
bleached of the particular love of place.
The greatest threats come from those
who claim to be nationalists but who
are the opposite.
Donald Trump says he is a national-
ist, but you can’t be a nationalist if you
despise half the nation — any more
than you can be a good father if you
despise half your children. You can’t be
a nationalist if you think that groups in
the nation are in a zero-sum conflict
RONAL D P HILL IP S
with one another — class against class, FINE ANTIQUE ENGLISH FURNITURE
race against race, tribe against tribe.
You can’t be a nationalist if you de-
spise diversity. America is diversity; if
you don’t love diversity, you are not an
American nationalist. “We have chased
metaphysical and theological abstrac-
tions from politics. What now remains?”
Renan asked. People remain. People
with their same old need for belonging.
People with their same old need to
dedicate their lives to something, but
with the great unifying object of love —
the nation — taken away.
If you stop the love songs to America,
take the celebration of America out of
public life, you leave people spiritually
bereft, robbed of a great devotion. The
results are what you see — loss of con-
nection, a tendency to catastrophize,
feelings of anger, isolation and power-
lessness. People begin to feel that the
injustices in American society are the
whole and there is no hope of redemp-
tion. They get the urge to burn every-
thing down. American nationalism has
been one of the great joys, comforts and
motivators of my life. I don’t know how
anybody can live without it.
The fantasy
of autocrats
MISHRA, FROM PAGE 11
him. But he cannot be so easily distin-
guished from his groupies in the Ameri-
can establishment. The prince is only
the latest, if pitifully crude, exponent of
shock-and-awe savagery that many
Western elites have long deemed vital to
the pacification of intransigent non-
Westerners. And there is nothing excep-
tional, in the extensive moral squalor
created by them abroad and deepened
now by President Trump at home, about
Prince Mohammed’s own apparent
response to a mild critic: exterminate
the brute and mutilate his corpse.
PANKAJ MISHRA is the author, most re-
cently, of “Age of Anger: A History of A GEORGE III MAHOGANY LIBRARY ARMCHAIR
the Present.” TO A DESIGN BY THOMAS CHIPPENDALE
EXHIBITING AT TEFAF NEW YORK FALL
CORRECTION OCTOBER 27TH - 31ST 2018
An Op-Ed on Oct. 19 about protest 26 BRUTON STREET, LONDON W1J 6QL
songs, “Them’s Fightin’ Words,” mis- +44 (0)20 7493 2341 ADVICE @ RONALDPHILLIPS.CO.UK
stated a detail of the history of the RONALDPHILLIPSANTIQUES.COM
lyrics of “America the Beautiful.” They
were first published in 1895 under the
title “America,” not “Pikes Peak.”
 ..
14 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Sports
French soccer hunts for American money
United States, where top clubs from American households receive. Quillot
LONDON
other European leagues have marketed said he was in regular contact with
themselves for decades, said Edward Yousef al-Obaidly, the network’s deputy
Blackmore, who runs OGC Capital, a chief executive, to improve the agree-
Domestic league seeks sports consultancy. ment.
buyers to upgrade clubs “You are competing against guys
who’ve been doing it for 20 years and
Quillot points to statistics showing
rising attendances and the record-
and global TV presence have massive reach,” he said. breaking domestic contract as a sign
There is perhaps no better example of that Paris’s dominance is not hurting lo-
BY TARIQ PANJA Ligue 1’s visibility problem than the fact cal interest in the league. Still, rival
that so far it has been unable to sell tele- clubs, notably Lyon, which was the dom-
French soccer is on a selling spree. vision rights in Brazil, which is the home inant force in France before the Qatari
Still celebrating its triumph in the of Neymar, the league’s biggest star. The takeover of P.S.G., have at times been
World Cup, France is on the lookout for country obsesses over the fate and form outspoken in their frustration.
buyers for as many as six teams in its of the skillful forward, and his every The league’s new motto, “La Ligue
top league, Ligue 1, said Didier Quillot, move is scrutinized in the Brazilian des talents,” alludes to its unrivaled abil-
the competition’s chief executive. Play- news media, but not a single second of ity to develop players. Europe’s top
ing the role of matchmaker, he has been live domestic soccer from France is cur- teams usually feature a French-trained
hunting for investments in a surprising rently available. Local broadcasters are player. Seventy-two players in this sea-
place — the United States. unconvinced of the value of French soc-
Armed with a 32-page investor pre- cer rights.
sentation, Quillot has traveled to the Brazil is not alone. The French International diversification has
United States six times this year. He league’s overseas rights are worth €75 become crucial to a sport whose
hosts lunches and addresses meetings. million each season, or about a third of teams rarely looked beyond their
He urges sports bankers, American the fee Paris St.-Germain paid for Ney-
franchise owners and other en- mar. Rival leagues generate far more,
own borders a generation ago.
trepreneurs who have been lured by with the Premier League collecting $1.3
English soccer to take a look at France billion annually. son’s Champions League started out in
instead, as the former Los Angeles “Our No. 1 main task is looking for in- France, while 52 players at the World
Dodgers owner Frank McCourt did vestors and our No. 2 main task is im- Cup were formed in an academy there.
when he bought Olympique de Marseille proving and increasing the value of our Often, players are barely out of their
in 2016. TV rights outside of France,” Quillot teenage years before they are traded to
“It’s the next big thing,” he tells them. said. balance the books. Just eight of the 23
Quillot, 59, is a former head of Orange Indeed, such low fees for interna- players on the French World Cup roster
France, the country’s largest mobile net- tional media rights hold the promise of earned their living in France.
work and one of its largest media com- GONZALO FUENTES/REUTERS growth, which is attractive to potential Right now, player trading is what is
panies. He believes he has the skills to Neymar, a Brazilian striker for Paris St.-Germain, is one of the world’s biggest stars, but France’s top league struggles for attention. owners. But to achieve it the league will likely to lure potential investors to
“energize” what he acknowledges has have to come to an understanding with France, said Blackmore, the financier.
been a largely pedestrian organization Qatar’s beIN Sports, which controls the That point is made explicitly in a
fixated on rules and regulations rather members are the leagues in England, crucial to success international diversi- Yet some American bankers who domestic rights. brochure created by the investment
than revenue and reach, even if it is Spain, Germany and Italy. fication has become in soccer, a sport in have met Quillot remain skeptical, say- The relationship between Ligue 1 and bank Lazard to advertise St.-Étienne,
roughly two decades behind the compet- To change the dynamic, Ligue 1 hired which players and clubs rarely looked ing there are few people in America will- the Qataris is complex. The country’s one of French soccer’s storied clubs.
itive curve in looking outside its borders Quillot in 2016. beyond their own borders a generation ing to sustain the annual $10 million to sovereign wealth fund owns P.S.G., a Listing 12 profitable player transac-
for growth. After nailing down a record deal for ago. $20 million losses that can come with team of stars that has drawn most of the tions, the team tells prospective invest-
While France’s recent World Cup vic- domestic television rights — it will be “It’s high time the French started owning a Ligue 1 team, while waiting for attention to the league. Quillot refers to ors it can “detect affordable players with
tory underlined the prodigious talent worth about 1.2 billion euros, or about thinking outward as opposed to inward,” franchise values to rise. it as France’s “tête de gondole,” or dis- high potential” before developing their
the nation has on tap, it also highlighted $1.37 billion, annually, beginning in 2020 said Jérôme de Bontin, a soccer execu- American money has come to play an play case. skills to “finally make a significant gain
how far the country’s domestic league (comparable to Spain, Germany and Ita- tive with a unique perspective on the increasingly significant role in Euro- The Qataris have spent more than $1.1 thanks to a timely resale while not af-
had fallen behind its rivals: Kylian ly) — Quillot is now setting his sights league’s plans, having run Major pean soccer, especially in England. billion since acquiring the team in 2011, fecting the sporting results.”
Mbappé was the only starter for France overseas. League Soccer’s New York Red Bulls Those behind the bets have endured building a roster headed by Neymar and Ligue 1 now has a permanent office in
in the final in Moscow who plays for a He wants American investors to bring and also Monaco, one of France’s top mixed results. For every Manchester Mbappé, two players whose transfers China, its only one outside France, and
French club. not only cash but cachet and marketing performing clubs, in recent seasons. United or Liverpool, there’s an Aston rank as the first and second most expen- has signed an agreement to host three
The French domestic league lags experience to Ligue 1, even though most Quillot said he had lined up potential Villa or Sunderland. Outside England, sive in soccer history. BeIN’s spending editions of its curtain-raising Trophée
competitors in revenues, so players of its clubs lose millions of dollars each American buyers for two teams, though Roma, which is owned by the Boston on domestic rights has fueled income des Champions in Shenzhen, China. The
forged on the French production line are season and franchise values have been he declined to name them. Separately, a hedge fund veteran James Pallotta, has rises for the other 19 teams, too. But the first edition this season attracted 41,000
quickly sold to wealthier teams in rival largely stagnant. His urgency for inter- consortium backed by King Street Capi- lost more than $225 million since he took network has struggled to gain distribu- fans. It also shifted match times to ac-
leagues. The league has for sometime national diversification — from a coun- tal and Fortress Investment Group is over in 2012. tion in some countries, especially the commodate viewers in Asia.
been classified as the fifth of the so- try that has often had a less than chari- close to completing a $100 million buy- Also, French teams still have to gain a United States, where it is largely a pre- Of course, the Premier League made
called big five of Europe, whose other table view of outsiders — illustrates how out of Bordeaux. toehold in markets in Asia and the mium channel that only a fraction of this move more than a decade ago.

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Solution No. 2610 KENKEN THE SATURDAY CROSSWORD | Edited by Will Shortz 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
Fill the grid so
that every row,
column 3x3 box Fill the grids with digits so as not Across 25 “Happy Days” 50 Ads that get 15 16

and shaded 3x3 to repeat a digit in any row or hangout, informally lots of traffic?
1 Overweight
box contains column, and so that the digits and untidy
17 18
within each heavily outlined box 26 Waiting for a delivery 52 Confident self-
each of the 9 Fertilizer ingredient assessment 19 20 21
numbers will produce the target number 28 Miss, e.g.
1 to 9 exactly shown, by using addition, 15 Sybaritic 53 Tarzan’s realm
30 23andMe services 22 23 24
once. subtraction, multiplication or pursuit 54 What a hack has
division, as indicated in the box. 33 Ones going on runs
A 4x4 grid will use the digits 16 City on the 56 Do a double take? 25 26 27
For solving tips Douro River 35 Got on the
and more puzzles: 1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6. board 57 Progressive 28 29 30 31 32
www.nytimes.com/ 17 Bro-ey
sudoku competitor
For solving tips and more KenKen shout-out 37 Like oil spills 33 34 35 36
puzzles: www.nytimes.com/ and clearing of rain 58 Being
18 1973 Best Actor
kenken. For Feedback: nytimes@ winner for “Save the forests 59 Hinged 37 38 39 40 41
kenken.com Tiger” 41 Jack’s other name
42 43 44
19 Knotty tree growth 42 Certain Febreze Down
KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. targets
20 Took sick leave, say 45 46 47 48 49
Copyright © 2018 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved. 1 Some disguised
22 Slobbery toon 44 Paragon fishing trawlers
50 51 52
23 Subject of the 45 Played with the bow, 2 Nebulous
Answers to Previous Puzzles documentary “Top in music 53 54 55
Secret Rosies: The 3 Method of solving
Female Computers of 48 “Say Anything
…” director
4 Transferrer of stock? 56 57
W.W. II”
49 Embroil 5 Today preceder
24 Torah vessels 58 59

Solution to October 26 Puzzle 6 “That’s lousy”

PUZZLE BY BYRON WALDEN
7 Clocked
T A B L E S C R A P A S I S 21 Capital across the 34 Formulaically 45 At ___
A L P I N E L A K E R I C A 8 “Y” with a bar Red Sea from Asmara humorous minimum
K A L E C A E S A R E D E N 9 Skunks
E M U A S A P P H T E S T 26 Idaho’s Nez ___ 36 Mad 46 Turn yellow or red,
I O S S O N B W A H A H A 10 Take in the County
38 Woman’s say
P E N G R A Y A R E A paper
B I A S S A I L S M E N 27 Makes out name meaning “gift”
11 Winner of five British 47 Fissure
L I N T S K U N K B E T A 29 Belgium’s longest- 39 Decked out
Opens between 1975
U G H S U I N G A I D S
and 1983
49 Where “The Last
reigning monarch (44
S P A R E S E T C F O 40 Like some Supper” is located
T H R O A T S S A C M T A 12 Hardwear? years)
aspirin
S A M O S A P U C E O W N 31 Macbeth met one at regimens 51 Fabric
F R O M I V E C H A N G E D
13 One with a frog in its
throat? Dunsinane Hill purchase
O M N I N O P R E S S U R E 43 Prepare for a
R A Y E S W E E T T A L K S 14 Signs of rush hour 32 Cabbage for canning? long day ahead 55 Add up to
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018 | 15

Weekend
Year
of our
favorite
monster
Mary Shelley’s novel ‘Frankenstein’
turns 200 as a universal myth
BY JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

At movie awards ceremonies, most win-

ners thank their stars, their agents,
their significant others. Guillermo del
Toro, during his victory lap earlier this
year for “The Shape of Water,” thanked a
teenager who had been dead for more
than 150 years.
“So many times, when I want to give
up, when I think about giving up,” he
said onstage at the British Academy of
Film and Television Awards in Febru-
ary, “I think of her.”
“She gave voice to the voiceless, and
presence to the invisible,” he continued,
“and showed me that sometimes to talk
about monsters, we need to fabricate
monsters of our own.”
Del Toro, the leading cinematic mon-
ster-maker of our time, was talking
about Mary Shelley, the author of
“Frankenstein,” and not for the first
time. Adapting the novel — begun when
Shelley was only 18 — has long been a
dream project for the director, who has
called Victor Frankenstein’s nameless
creation “the most beautiful and mov-
ing” of all monsters.
The world will have to wait for del To-
ro’s version, but this is Frankenstein’s
year. The novel’s 200th anniversary has
inspired a cavalcade of exhibitions, per-
formances and events around the world,
from Ingolstadt, the Bavarian home of
Victor Frankenstein’s fictional lab, to
the hell mouth of Indiana, which in a bid
to become the epicenter of American

Clockwise from
left: a 1931 edition
of the novel; the
“animal electrici-
ty” experiments of
Luigi Galvani and
his nephew Gio-
vanni Aldini, which
Mary Shelley was
aware of; and the
pantomime actor
T. P. Cooke, who
was first to play
the monster on-
stage, in 1823.
THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY UNIVERSAL PICTURES

THE MORGAN LIBRARY & MUSEUM
Franken-frenzy, has held more than 600
events since January.
Then again, when is it not the mon-
ster’s moment? While Frankenstein
may have thwarted his creature’s desire
to procreate, Shelley’s novel has given
birth to a seemingly endless stream of
adaptations and riffs, including at least
170 screen homages, from the sublime to
the ridiculous and beyond (see “Alvin
and the Chipmunks Meet Frank-
enstein”).
There have been camp Frank-
ensteins, feminist Frankensteins, queer
Frankensteins, and political Frank-
ensteins of all stripes, which have taken
the monster’s murderous revolt against
its maker as allegory of everything from
scientific overreach to capitalism to rac-
ism to war.
Of course, the recently fashionable
zombies and vampires, who tend to trav-
el in packs, have starred in plenty of
pointed allegories of their own. But they
can’t match the deeper jolt of human
recognition that Shelley’s solitary,
lonely monster stirs.
“The story touches on the most basic
part of what it means to be an embodied
human creature,” said Elizabeth Camp-
bell Denlinger, a co-curator of “It’s
Alive! Frankenstein at 200,” an exhibi-
tion at the Morgan Library & Museum in
Manhattan that gathers artifacts rang-
ing from original pages of the manu-
script to Elsa Lanchester’s “Bride of
Frankenstein” beehive. “It leaves us
asking, ‘Am I a monster too?’”
“Frankenstein” was born during a fa-
mously gloomy summer of 1816, which
has become almost as mythic as the
story itself. Mary Shelley and Percy
Shelley, her husband, were guests at a
lakeside villa in Switzerland with Lord
Byron and others, who passed the rainy
days dreaming up ghost stories, in a
kind of competitive parlor game.
The first glimmerings of the monster
came to her one night. “With shut eyes
but acute mental vision,” she recalled, “I
saw the pale student of unhallowed arts
kneeling beside the thing he had put to-
gether.” Later, she would sum up her
dual (at least) intentions of her “hideous
progeny,” as she called the book: “to
speak to the mysterious fears of our na-
ture, and awaken thrilling horror.”
“Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Pro-
metheus” was published anonymously
two years later, in 1818, and almost im-
mediately grabbed the popular imagina-
tion. Since then, it has become the rare
story to pass from literature into com-
mon myth.
Even people who have never cracked
the novel know the story of the mis-
shapen creature patched together from
human corpses who turns on his creator,
or at least the archetypal green-skinned,
bolt-in-the-neck image embodied by
Boris Karloff. (Those key characteris-
tics are under copyright by Universal
Pictures until 2026, as it happens.)
But almost from the beginning, it also
slipped the bounds of its own novelist-
creator, leaving some of its own
patched-together parts behind, starting
with most of the monster’s philosophical
preoccupations, and even his basic pow-
ers of speech.
In the first stage production, in 1823,
the nameless creature (or “——,” as he
was identified in a playbill included in
the Morgan show) was played by T. P.
Cooke, an actor famous for pantomime,
setting the template for an inarticulate,
if not entirely wordless, monster.
MONSTER, PAGE 21

16 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018
weekend
Widow
developed
a luxury
empire
WANDA FERRAGAMO
1921-2018
BY RACHEL SYME
Wanda Ferragamo, who stepped in to
run her husband Salvatore Ferragamo’s
shoemaking business after his death in
1960 and then oversaw its expansion
into a global luxury goods brand, died on
Oct. 19 in her hilltop villa near Florence.
She was 96.
An internal company memo signed by
her surviving children confirmed her
death.
When Salvatore Ferragamo died of
cancer in 1960 at 62, Mrs. Ferragamo,
then 38, decided to take over the busi-
ness herself, despite having no experi-
ence working in the industry — or work-
ing outside the home at all.
“I had never worked in my life before
my husband died,” she told Time maga-
zine in 2007. “I was a very young girl
when I met him. At that time, women
were taught only to play the piano and
paint and learn about culture. That’s
all.”
The couple had six children, the
youngest being only 2 years old. But she
felt that she had to carry out her hus-
band’s vision — to push the company be-
yond footwear. And she insisted that it
be known by his full name, Salvatore
Ferragamo.
Over five decades, first as president
and then as chairwoman, Mrs. Ferra-
gamo oversaw the growth of the com-
pany from a small shoe-design and man-
ufacturing concern in Florence into a
leading luxury goods house that ranged
beyond shoes to sell leather wallets, silk
scarves, crystal flacons of perfume and
much more.
When she inherited the business, it
made 800 pairs of shoes a month. By
1981, it was making 60,000 a month, in
addition to selling handbags and men’s
wear. She introduced eyewear in the
1990s, and she opened stores in New
York, Hong Kong, Mumbai and Mexico
City.
Mrs. Ferragamo would arrive at the
office every morning at 10:30. In the
hallways of the company’s headquar-
ters, in the Palazzo Spini Feroni, a mag-
nificent Medieval palace on Via de
Tornabuoni in Florence, she was known
Top, Wanda Fer- as “Signora,” always wearing elegant
ragamo in her clothing and her trademark seven-cen-
office outside timeter high heels.
Florence in 2008. One of her first and boldest decisions
From left, Mrs. was to make her daughter Fiamma the
Ferragamo with company’s creative force. Fiamma
Audrey Hepburn Ferragamo was 19 when her father died,
and Salvatore and she had already been designing
Ferragamo outside shoes under his tutelage.
the company The decision paid off: Fiamma in-
headquarters in vented the Vara shoe, a round-toed
1954 in Florence. pump with a grosgrain ribbon and gold
Tokyo knows how
to make a statement
Expressive dressing prevails over prescribed style
in Japan’s largest city
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREA DICENZO TEXT BY SHIHO TAKEZAWA
“What I like about
fashion is the idea
of being able to
wear whatever you
want, wherever
you want. I see
people who worry
about how they are
seen by others, I
hope to inspire
them so they will
be able to express
themselves, too.”
— Isaka Nohara,
19, student
medallion that remains the company’s
most popular item. Another daughter,
Fulvia, oversaw the company’s expan-
sion into silks.
Her four other children — Giovanna,
Leonardo, Massimo and Ferruccio —
were also given prominent roles in the
company, as were grandchildren.
Insisting that the business should re-
main in the family, Mrs. Ferragamo re-
jected several offers over the years to
sell it, and she navigated its first public
stock offering in 2011. According to
Bloomberg News, Salvatore Ferragamo
now reports an annual revenue of more
than $1.6 billion.
In 2004 Mrs. Ferragamo was awarded
the Cavaliere di Gran Croce, or grand
cross, a top honor in Italy. She stepped
down as chairwoman in 2006 and took
the title of honorary chairwoman. She
remained as head of the Ferragamo
Foundation, an initiative begun in 2013
that supports young Italian artisans
with funding and training courses.
Wanda Miletti was born on Dec. 18,
1921, in Bonito, a hilly village in southern
Italy about 55 miles east of Naples. Her
father was a medical doctor and the
mayor; her mother was a homemaker.
It was in Bonito that she met Salva-
LOCCHI HISTORICAL ARCHIVE, FLORENCE
tore, who was 24 years her senior. He
had been born there in 1898, the 11th of
14 children of a poor farmer and his wife.
But it was a circuitous path that had led
him to Wanda.
Mr. Ferragamo had left school at 9 to
work as an apprentice to a local cobbler.
By age 11 he was working in the trade in
Naples. When he was 16, he traveled to
the United States, first to work at a shoe
factory in Boston, and then to Santa Bar-
bara, Calif., where he joined his broth-
ers. He wound up in Hollywood, where
he set up a business making shoes for
the studios during the silent film era.
There he made Egyptian sandals and
Western boots for Cecil B. de Mille’s
large-scale epics, and became a sought-
after heel-maker for screen sirens like
Joan Crawford, Anna May Wong, Greta
Garbo and Lillian Gish.
He returned to Italy in 1927 and set up
a shoe shop in Florence. The financial
crash of 1929 had him declaring bank-
ruptcy, but by the late 1930s he had been
able to pay off his debts and purchase
the Palazzo Spini Feroni.
When he moved in, Mr. Ferragamo
wanted to fill the building not only with
footwear but also with family. So he went
on a tour of Italy — to go “shopping for a
Kana Tsutsui, 21,
a fashion stylist.
“Japanese fash-
ion is full of differ-
ent cultures, that’s
the fun part of
Tokyo fashion. We
are a secular
society and this
allows us to see
things without
prejudice. I don’t
know if it’s a good
thing or a bad
thing, but that
perspective is
building up the
fashion culture.” —
Bunta Shimizu, 20,
stylist and model
MASSIMO SESTINI
wife,” as he wrote in his autobiography.
He found her in his hometown, Bonito,
where he had become a local benefactor.
There, Dr. Miletti invited Mr. Ferra-
gamo to his home and, according to Mr.
Ferragamo’s memoirs, the two men en-
tered into a conversation about the con-
tours of the foot.
Mr. Ferragamo asked Dr. Miletti’s
daughter, Wanda, if he could use her for
a shoe-fitting demonstration. He fell in
love with her the moment he saw that
she “had one toe peeping out of her
stocking,” he wrote.
Two weeks later, Mr. Ferragamo sent
her a pair of custom black suede ox-
fords. “I had never worn anything so
comfortable,” Mrs. Ferragamo later re-
called. “I thought I could fly.”
They married in a church in Naples in
the fall of 1940 — she was 18, he was 42 —
and as Mr. Ferragamo told it, they spent
their first married night watching Allied
planes attack the city.
They and their family later lived in a
30-room villa in Fiesole, a village north-
east of Florence.
The Ferragamo headquarters in Flor-
ence is also the site of the Museo Salva-
tore Ferragamo, an archival museum
that Mrs. Ferragamo helped found in
1995 to chronicle her husband’s
footwear innovations, including the first
cork wedge sandals and the architectur-
al cage heel, a hollow metal cylinder
strong enough to support body weight.
Mrs. Ferragamo is survived by her
son Ferruccio, who is now president and
chairman; her daughter Giovanna Gen-
tile Ferragamo, who is vice-chair-
woman; her son Massimo, who is chair-
man of Ferragamo USA; her son Leon-
ardo, who is also a senior executive; 23
grandchildren; and many great-grand-
children.
Fiamma di San Giuliano Ferragamo
died of breast cancer in 1998 at age 57.
Fulvia Visconti Ferragamo died, also of
cancer, in March at 67.
Even after stepping into an honorary
role, Mrs. Ferragamo continued to ad-
vise her children.
“When my husband died his dream
was a House of Ferragamo where you
could buy shoes and everything else for
elegant dressing,” Mrs. Ferragamo told
The Times in 1981. “So little by little we
followed that dream.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
style
Open Thread:
Issues with fur
Every week Vanessa Friedman,
The Times’s fashion director, answers
a reader’s fashion-related question
in the Open Thread newsletter at
nytimes.com/styles. You can send her a
question at openthread@nytimes.com
or via Twitter: @vvfriedman. Questions
are edited and condensed.
I am up in the Great White North,
a.k.a. Canada. I have never supported
the trapping of fur from any animal
by leg hold devices, clubbing, etc.
But one of our very successful Toron-
to designers, Paula Lishman, uses
real fur. It is trapped by indigenous
people, who are still living their hunt-
er/gatherer lives. Many still depend
upon fur trapping to support their
families. What are the economic,
physical and environmental costs of
fake fur? — Jennifer, Toronto
I’ve been fascinated by the recent
swell of designers renouncing fur. But
as with any such hot-button issue,
there’s a great desire to paint it in
black and white — yet this one is cast
in shades of gray. Even the definition of
“fur” is fungible.
For example, the Fur Free Alliance,
an international coalition of animal
protection organizations, says fur
“includes, but is not limited to, mink,
coyote, sable, fox, muskrat, rabbit and
raccoon dog.” It does not include
shearling, leather, wool or fleece, often
considered byproducts. PETA, howev-
er, has begun campaigns against
sheepskin and down feathers.
Faux fur trim on a
fall 1969 style by
Courrèges.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
There is also a major difference
between rejecting fur on moral
grounds and rejecting it on envi-
ronmental grounds. When Gucci an-
nounced it was dropping fur, it refer-
enced eco reasons (as well as saying it
just wasn’t “modern”). But the science
is much fuzzier than personal morality.
Animal fur, for example, is an or-
ganic material and biodegrades much
faster than most faux fur, which is
often acrylic. In addition, synthetics
tend to shed microfibers when they are
washed, which are increasingly seen
as contributing to our ocean crisis.
Though the manufacture of fur gar-
ments can have negative environmen-
tal effects, especially when it comes to
the chemicals, the same is true of
leather and shearling.
In the end, I tend to come down in
the same place I do with most issues of
sustainability: The simplest solution is
to buy used or repurposed or invest in
a responsibly made garment you in-
tend to wear and pass on.
VANESSA FRIEDMAN
“I value person-
ality in fashion
because I don’t like
to look like others.
I have an outgoing
personality, so I
like to use a lot of
bright colors.” —
Miku Odamaki, 17,
student
“I choose clothes
based on my mood
of the day, playing
with many differ-
ent colors. Fashion
is something that
comes naturally to
me. I don’t even
have to think about
it.” — Natsumi
Kamono, 27, an
aspiring pop star
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018 | 17

books weekend

Good. I take the empty injector and

Blood bring it to my neck. I hit the trigger

and stab and hope maybe I’ll get some-
thing. I hit the trigger again. Again.” If
Ben’s voice borrows a little from Saun-
ders’s narrator in “The Semplica-Girl

and love Diaries,” the influence is understand-

BOOK REVIEW
Friday Black
By Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. 194 pp.
Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Paper, $14.99.
BY TOMMY ORANGE
This year has been exhausting in so
many ways, asking Americans to
accept more than it seems we can,
more than it seems should be possible.
But really, in the end, today’s harsh
realities are not all that surprising for
some — for people of color, or for
people from marginalized communi-
ties — who have long since given up
on being shocked or dismayed by the
news, by what this or that administra-
tion will allow, what this or that police
department will excuse, who will be
exonerated, what this or that fellow
American is willing to let be, either by
contribution or complicity. All this is
done in the name of white supremacy
under the guise of patriotism and
conservatism, to keep things as they
are, favoring white people over every
other citizen, because where’s the
incentive to give up privilege if you
have it? Now more than ever, I believe
fiction can change minds, build empa-
thy by asking readers to walk in oth-
ers’ shoes, and thereby contribute to
real change. In “Friday Black,” Nana
Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has written a
powerful and important and strange
and beautiful collection of stories
meant to be read right now, at the end
of this year, as we inch ever closer to
what feels like an inevitable phenome-
nal catastrophe or some other kind of
radical change, for better or for worse.
And when you can’t believe what’s
happening in reality, there is no better
time to suspend your disbelief and
read and trust in a work of fiction — in
what it can do.
Adjei-Brenyah grew up in a suburb
of New York and graduated with his
M.F.A. from Syracuse University,
where he was taught by the short
story master George Saunders. “Fri-
day Black” is an unbelievable debut,
one that announces a new and neces-
sary American voice.
This is a dystopian story collection
as full of violence as it is of heart. To
achieve such an honest pairing of gore
with tenderness is no small feat. The
two stories that bookend the collection
are the most gruesome, and maybe my
favorites. Where they could be seen as
gratuitous (at least to those readers
who are not paying close attention to
the news, or to those who intentionally
avert their eyes), I find them perfectly
“Friday Black” paced narratives filled with crackling
is an dialogue and a rewarding balance of
unbelievable tension and release. Violence is only
gratuitous when it serves no purpose,
debut, one that and throughout “Friday Black” we are
announces a aware that the violence is crucially
new and related to both what is happening in
necessary America now, and what happened in its
American bloody and brutal history. Adjei-
Brenyah exaggerates only ever so
voice. slightly, or uses a futuristic hypotheti-
cal premise to reveal something true
about the United States’ underhanded,
undermining underbelly of an uncon-
scious, which acts out its most base
insults, impulses and injuries to the
detriment of black communities (and
many other communities of color).
More often than not, his characters
struggle with not knowing what to do,
given these seemingly impossible,
extreme circumstances, and not all of
them figure it out. But we don’t need
them to: His many truths, insights and
beautifully crafted sentences just sing
on the page. “All I do is sweat and feel
hurt all around my body and in my
head,” says one character. “It gets
able. Whether or not that writer’s
tutelage shows here, I can think of no
better a short story writer to borrow
from or emulate. That being said,
Adjei-Brenyah’s voice here is as power-
ful and original as Saunders’s is
throughout “Tenth of December.”
The title of the collection is an inver-
sion of our most bloodthirsty, capitalis-
tic annual ritual — Black Friday — and
in the titular story, Adjei-Brenyah
turns everything inside out to expose
our blood and guts and desire and
greed and savings. Every bit of hyper-
bole holds more truth than most of
what the news, which only sometimes
tries its best to be cool, calm and objec-
tive, has to report.
Fiction in 2018 has gotten it right in
finding truth without relying on fact.
“Friday Black” is one of three stories
in the book exploring capitalism and
mall culture in a way I’ve never read
before. It’s one of the shorter entries in
the collection, but it sets the gruesome
scene for two later stories that tackle
the same world from distinct points of
view. All three mall stories are smart,
funny and fun, despite having morbid
tendencies. I could read a whole novel
of voices from the many storefronts of
this generic American Anywhere.
The final story, “Through the Flash,”
is an intense and harrowing Ground-
hog Day journey through the possibili-
ties of infinite time, and its potential
implications for morality and redemp-
tion. At one point in the story, in which
an infinitely looping reality means
each day starts over again with a flash,
the main character, Ama — a.k.a.
“Knife Queen”— reflects on a particu-
SOPHY HOLLINGTON larly horrific period of time: “Every
inch of my black skin painted the ma-
dark. By then, I feel like death / poop”; roon of life.” The word “maroon” here
another articulates, “How I feel about refers to blood, but I had to explore
Marlene: She could keel over plus die whether there were more meanings to
and I’d be happy plus ecstatic.” In unpack in it as well. Turns out it also
smart, terse prose, Adjei-Brenyah is means a firework, or a bang used to
unflinching, and willing, in most of signal a warning, or, as a verb, to leave
these 12 stories, to leave us without someone trapped and isolated in an
any apparent hope. But the hope is unjustly. Does there come a time when inaccessible place, abandoned. Black
there — or if it isn’t hope, it’s maybe enough is enough, and violence must Americans and other Americans of
something better: levelheaded, com- face violence with violence? color are already carrying the weight
passionate protagonists, with just In the story “The Era,” the author of cruel, unreckoned-with histories on
enough integrity and ambivalence that paints a cold, sterile, prophetic world their shoulders; so to live amid unmiti-
they never feel sentimental. Each of as seen through the eyes of a teenager, gated, too often racially motivated
these individuals carries a subtle clar- Ben, who is not genetically modified, violence with little to no accountability
ity about what matters most when but a “clear-born.” “The Era” explores on the horizon feels a lot like abandon-
nothing makes sense in these strange what humanity might look like in the ment. Adjei-Brenyah, with his own
and brutal worlds he builds. future of scientific advancement, and “maroon of life,” is here to signal a
The first story in the collection, “The what is true and authentic vs. syndi- warning, or perhaps just to say this is
Finkelstein 5,” is about chain-saw cated or synthetic. Who is to say who what it feels like, in stories that move
decapitation, innocence destroyed by is more valuable: the genetically modi- and breathe and explode on the page.
white privilege via brute force, and the fied beings or the “clear-borns”? Most In “Friday Black,” the dystopian future
lack of white accountability in Ameri- compelling in this story is Ben’s in- Adjei-Brenyah depicts — like all great
ca’s maddening racial bias and failing creasingly addictive relationship to a dystopian fiction — is bleakly futuristic
justice system. The main character, socially acceptable, regulated drug only on its surface. At its center, each
Emmanuel, who throughout the story called “Good,” and our eventual under- story — sharp as a knife — points to
tempers his “blackness” on a 1-to-10 standing of how cold and lifeless is the right now.
scale, is trying to figure out how to idea of gene manipulation technology if
exist in a society that expects you to you follow it to its logical conclusion. “I Tommy Orange is the author of “There
play by rules it means to rule you with, look in the medical kit just in case. No There.”

By the Book THE SUNDAY CROSSWORD

Barbara Kingsolver Match Play
Edited by Will Shortz

Across 48 Grub 106 Say whether or 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

The author, most recently, of the novel do-over. Maybe I could just take him to 1 Chunks of land 51 Part of a not you’ll attend
“Unsheltered” loves “fiction that edu- lunch. 7 “Be on the preschool day 108 Blow out 18 19 20 21 22

cates me on the sly, especially about Still, a quiet dinner with dead people lookout” 52 Opinion 110 Imbroglio 23 24 25 26
messages, for
something I didn’t realize I wanted to is hard to resist. I’d start with George short
53 Nirvana seeker 111 Prostates
56 Sorority letter 27 28 29 30
know. I’m open to any kind of arcana.” Eliot because “Middlemarch” is my 11 Person to take
115 French 101 verb
57 Forbiddance 117 Collaborative
favorite book, and she’s said to have complaints to,
site
31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38
58 Masthead list,
What books are on your nightstand? been sort of magical as a conversation- informally
for short 118 Snatch 39 40 41 42 43 44
14 Polo of “The
“Southernmost,” by Silas House, alist. Next I’d ask Pablo Neruda and Fosters” 60 More lit, perhaps 119 Game suggested
“Dopesick,” by Beth Macy — two new Nikos Kazantzakis. Obviously, in addi- 18 Popular 62 “After Earth” by this puzzle’s
45 46 47 48 49 50

releases from fellow Appalachians. The tion to some help in the kitchen we are Dominican 69 Pothead theme 51 52 53 54 55 56
spectacular “Americanah,” by Chima- going to need Babel Fish. dance 70 ____ Lama 125 Racer Luyendyk
20 Leave quickly 71 Do the wave? 126 Half of dos 57 58 59 60 61
manda Ngozi Adichie. “The Shepherd’s
21 Musical Yoko 72 What un 127 Taking care of
Life,” by James Rebanks, who makes a Disappointing, overrated, just not 22 Get a ____ on desierto lacks things
62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69
convincing case for a farm in the Lake good: What book did you feel as if someone 74 Lyrical lament 128 Nickel-and- 70 71 72 73 74
District as center of the universe. JILLIAN TAMAKI you were supposed to like, and did- 23 Sou’wester 75 Not able to diming sort
75 76 77 78 79
Sharon Olds, Lucille Clifton, Mary n’t? Do you remember what was the 25 Abbr. in many catch something 129 They might
Oliver, and Wendell Berry’s Sabbath What moves you most in a work of last book you put down without fin- blood type 77 Growth ring break out in 80 81 82 83
names hives
poems, because poetry before sleep is literature? ishing? 26 “Logic dictates
80 Farthest point in
130 Cockapoo or 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94
an orbit around
essential, like flossing the word-loving Truth and beauty, of course. And for- “Hillbilly Elegy” was not for me. As a …” the moon cockatoo, maybe
parts of the brain. Rushdie is here, Lily getting completely that I am me. Kentucky native who lived in many 27 It’s usually put in 82 This woman 131 Cpls.’ superiors
95 96 97 98 99

Tuck, Louise Erdrich’s “Future Home other places before moving back to the middle of a 83 Closure 132 Act obsequiously 100 101 102 103 104
table
of the Living God.” Adam Hochschild’s Which genres do you especially enjoy Appalachia to raise my family, I have 28 Late hours
opening?
105 106 107 108 109 110
monumentally disquieting “King reading? And which do you avoid? no use for the “barely got out of them 31 Messes up
84 Vote in France Down
Leopold’s Ghost,” which needs to be I love fiction that educates me on the hills alive” narrative. This region has 85 Blue swaths on 1 Atlanta-based 111 112 113 114 115 116
35 Downfall in maps cable inits.
relocated — that’s not a bedtime story. sly, especially about something I didn’t been savaged by one extractive indus- pinball
87 They follow oohs 2 Cold and wet 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124
In a lower stratum of the pile there’s realize I wanted to know. I’m open to try after another, and still its land- 37 Music export
90 Like the simplest 3 Term in tennis,
from Tokyo, for 125 126 127 128
evidence of an Australia binge: “The any kind of arcana: scientific, cultural, scapes and people impress me every short instructions golf and
Body in the Clouds,” by Ashley Hay, historical. As long as novelists have day. We’re not one psyche, one color, 38 Sciences’ 95 Talk show host baseball, all 129 130 131 132
“Only Killers and Thieves,” by Paul done their research and honored accu- one culture, not all J. D. Vance’s cous- counterpart Cohen with different
PUZZLE BY ERIK AGARD / EDITED BY WILL SHORTZ THE NEW YORK TIMES
97 Trade punches meanings
Howarth. For the record, the rest of the racy where it counts, I’d rather learn ins, and certainly not without hope, but 39 “Jeez!”
4 Hero interred 8 “Oh, quit being 32 Sister and wife 63 Chinese New 93 Sand-burrowing
41 Princess 100 Hills with gentle
house has tidied up since I began from a confabulation than from a text- the rest of America seems keen to slopes on one in Santa Clara, silly!” of Cronus, in Year treat marine creatures
who says “I
shelving a lot of books in one skinny book. reduce us to a pitiable monoculture. recognized your side and steep Cuba 9 Sailor in the myth 64 One of the 94 Reasons to do
tablet, but screens are no good before The year I left here, it was “Deliver- foul stench when slopes on the 5 “Later, luv” Navy 33 Collect from the Castros something
other soil
sleep, so the nightstand is an ongoing What book might people be surprised ance” that gave people permission to I was brought on 6 Rhyming 10 Seatbelt, e.g.
34 Result of a
65 Shed material 96 Quaint
board” 103 Fake nickname in
debacle. My husband is nostalgic for to find on your shelves? do that. When my daughters went 11 “C’mon, be
religious schism
66 Dwarf planet demographic
43 Campy 1972 104 Verdi tragedy Cardinals history serious” with more mass grouping
the days when he could still see the A couple of gaudy pink-and-blue “name away to college, they found the story vampire film 105 “Grand Ole” 7 Midriff muscles, 12 ____ Day 36 Camping need than Pluto 98 Number two:
clock. your baby” books on my reference hadn’t changed much. Anyone who 45 Peace marches venue for short vitamins 40 Japanese dogs 67 Good throw? Abbr.
shelf have provoked double-takes from really wants to know our region might 13 Rémy Martin with turned-up 68 “Get outta here!”
Solution to puzzle of October 20-21 99 Revved up
tails
What’s the last great book you read? visitors over the years, and a few look to actual residents: Elizabeth F I B B E R L I B I D O S T R A P
product
42 Neighbor of
70 ____ Taurasi, 101 Timeline part
I’ll nominate “This Changes Every- surreptitious glances at my belly. I’m Catte’s recent “What You Are Getting 14 Bridge- all-time W.N.B.A. 102 Align
A M A R N A U N I T A R D S C H A F E Wyo.
supporting scoring leader
thing,” by Naomi Klein, and “The expecting characters, and they’ll all Wrong About Appalachia” and Ronald K I B I T Z C R O S S B O W R E T R O
frame
44 Commercial
73 Supplementary
107 “¡Let’s go!”
Overstory,” by Richard Powers, in two need names. Multiple, multiple births. Eller’s classic “Uneven Ground” are E N Y A O A K E N H I D E A R S O N
15 Dulles designer
rhyme for
item
109 Some flight
S N A R K Y I C E T D O M E “Famous” board info
different categories of greatness. Many good starting points. From there the O T T E R A B A C U S M E N S S H O P 16 Pasta sauce 46 Transmits 76 Suffix with
111 Mop
more exist. You’re organizing a literary dinner pleasures are so many: Harriette W R E N C H R E S T V I N E T O R Y brand 47 Part of a Mario
methyl
112 Poop out
party. Which three writers, dead or Arnow, James Still, Gurney Norman, L I P O U B E R E G A D A S H L A R 17 Longtime singing costume 78 Gymnastics flip
113 Over
What classic novel did you recently alive, do you invite? Lee Smith, Denise Giardina, Charles
S O S A L
E B O O K
L A C A R D
U S A U S A
I B L
A R
E D T O
I E S
talent show, 49 Part of a “Which 79 Arizona capital
114 ____ interview
familiarly of the Navajo
read for the first time? My party skills are probably inade- Frazier, Maurice Manning, George Ella N O L I T A B R A T Z D O N U T S
19 ____-vaxxers
came first?”
Nation 116 Coin in Köln
dilemma
For no good reason I harbored a life- quate to the cause. At the last high- Lyon, Silas House, Crystal Wilkinson, B A L E D T H E F B I P A R T B
24 Singer Reese 50 Comment before 81 ____ Germany 120 Sci-fi C.G.I.
long resentment of Willa Cather, as if decibel literary gathering I attended, I Ann Pancake. Also Kayla Rae Whita-
L E D G E S A V E U S U S E S J I F
29 Garment worn “I missed that” 86 Relatively creations
I N V A D E N E W T A P S O T A T A
she were some perfect older sister who managed a minute of small talk with a ker, whose debut, “The Animators,” G A I N A B E L T R I P S E I Z E D by John Roberts 54 Director Van cool stellar 121 Debut,
Sant phenomenon metaphorically
did everything before I did, much polite, bearded gentleman before we came out last year. This list doesn’t H E C T A R E S T O I L E T S E Z M E that’s hidden in
his name 55 Cross 88 “Come again?” 122 Dealership
better. When I finally broke down and each fled to quieter quarters, and only end. L U S H P U N T T W I T C H
89 Some bathroom expanse
A R B Y S E G A N E P S O N L A M P 30 R&B’s ____ Hill 59 Maker of the
read “My Ántonia,” I rued my foolish- later realized I’d met J. M. Coetzee, the L E A P S S A N D R A O H E M I N O R 31 Bristol, Conn.- game Zaxxon installations 123 I problem?
ness and all our lost years. Willa and I literary giant whose work has been a What do you plan to read next? E N N U I T H E R E I G O P O P D U O based cable 61 ____ contendere 91 Brother of Ham 124 Hem but not
have made up. compass for my writing life. I’d like a In which chair? S T A T E M A D D O W T O S S E D
inits. 62 Pad alternative 92 Play starter? haw?

18 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018
weekend
Opera
awash in
political
theater
BUDAPEST
Millions are being given
to ‘national culture’ as
Hungary turns rightward
BY MICHAEL COOPER
The grand, gilded Hungarian State
Opera House here is where Brahms
once heard Mahler conduct Mozart. It’s
where Bartok’s still-shocking “Blue-
beard’s Castle” had its premiere a cen-
tury ago. It’s where the artist Matthew
Barney shot part of his “Cremaster” cy-
cle, and Jennifer Lawrence filmed
scenes for her violent thriller “Red Spar-
row,” in which she played a ballerina-
turned-spy.
These days, the house is also emerg-
ing as a flash point in Hungary’s culture
wars.
The opera company is in the midst of
one of its biggest expansions ever,
thanks to the investment of hundreds of
millions of dollars by the increasingly
autocratic right-wing government of
Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is
building what he calls an “illiberal de-
mocracy” and has described Hungary’s
theaters, opera houses and concert halls
as “temples of national culture.” The
money is paying for the first major over-
haul of the State Opera since the Cold
War, as well as a construction spree that
will leave it with three theaters when
work is completed next year.
But in the midst of its country’s right-
ward turn, the company has recently at-
tracted controversy. It canceled some
performances of the musical “Billy El-
liot” after a conservative newspaper de-
nounced the work as “gay propaganda”
and staged “Porgy and Bess” with white
singers, against the wishes of its cre-
ators’ estates.
This month, the State Opera and the
Hungarian National Ballet are bringing
350 singers, dancers and musicians to
New York to perform nearly two weeks
of fully staged operas and ballets. The
lineup includes “Bluebeard’s Castle,”
Karl Goldmark’s rarely staged “The
Queen of Sheba” and “Bank Ban,” an
1861 Ferenc Erkel work considered the
national opera of Hungary, as well as
ballets including “Swan Lake” and “Don
Quixote.” The tour will run from Tues-
day through Nov. 11 at the David H. Koch
Theater at Lincoln Center.
“Our musical heritage has always
been very strong, and we have to convey
it,” Szilveszter Okovacs, the general di-
rector of the opera, said in an interview
here last spring, explaining that it made
sense to tour while the main opera
house was closed for renovations.
The ambitious and expensive tour
comes at a moment when many of Hun-
gary’s leading classical musicians, espe-
cially those with international careers,
have criticized the Orban government.
The eminent pianist Andras Schiff no
longer performs in Hungary, where he
was born. (“I’m a great opponent of the
political situation there now,” he told the
BBC in 2013.) Adam Fischer, a sought-
after conductor, stepped down as music
director of the State Opera in 2010 in
part to protest the Orban government’s
policies. His brother Ivan, the music di-
rector of the acclaimed Budapest Festi-
val Orchestra, is an outspoken support-
er of human rights at home and abroad.
The State Opera and Ballet’s first
United States visit comes as the Trump
administration has been making over-
tures to Mr. Orban’s Hungary. Both
President Trump and Mr. Orban came to
power taking a hard line against immi-
gration and courting the right. Both
campaigned against George Soros, the
liberal investor. Both have emerged as
strong critics of the European Union.
Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist,
Stephen K. Bannon, has described Mr.
Orban as “Trump before Trump.”
One area where they diverge, though,
is the arts. Mr. Trump tried, but failed, to
eliminate the National Endowment for
the Arts and the National Endowment
for the Humanities, and has had an un-
easy relationship with artists, many of
whom have been publicly critical of his
policies. Mr. Orban, on the other hand,
has made big investments in culture,
seeing it as an important component of
national identity. After his re-election in
April, the government’s website re-
ported that the opera star Plácido Do-
mingo had congratulated Mr. Orban in a
letter, praising him as “a great supporter
of the arts and culture.”
Classical music and dance are among
the most international art forms and
have played a big role in cultural diplo-
macy over the years. But they can stir
tensions as well. During several recent
visits to the United States, the Russian
conductor Valery Gergiev has attracted
protests by advocates for gay rights and
Ukrainian autonomy; last spring, the
Philadelphia Orchestra drew pro-Pales-
tinian demonstrators who were opposed
to its tour of Israel.
Michael M. Kaiser, who used to bring
visiting international companies to the
Kennedy Center regularly when he led
it, said that the politics involved in the
Hungarian tour could lead to tensions.
“I think there are certainly elements
of discomfort,” said Mr. Kaiser, the chair-
man of the DeVos Institute of Arts Man-
agement at the University of Maryland.
“We in the arts always want to believe
that we are showing off the very best of
humankind.”
In Hungary, Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party
has moved to exert more control over
cultural appointments in recent years,
naming scores of theater directors
across the country. Mr. Okovacs, a
trained singer with a deep knowledge of
opera and a showman’s knack for audi-
ence development initiatives, worked as
a television executive before he became
general director of the State Opera in
2011.
“If someone forms a government,” he
AKOS STILLER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
said, “of course he gives positions to
The company people he can trust, to run it smoothly.”
staged “Porgy But, he added: “It’s not a bad thing. At
and Bess” with the opera, it has been so for 135 years. It
has always been a State Opera. And
white singers. that’s where it stops: They have never
exercised any pressure.”
And at a time when other major cities,
including New York and London, have
found it difficult to support two opera
houses, Hungary has reopened a sec-
ond, the Erkel Theater, run by the State
Opera as a lower-priced alternative. Mr.
Okovacs noted that it was the Orban
government that brought back the Erkel
in 2013, after it had been closed for sev-
eral years.
Now the company is in a fever of con-
struction. It hopes to complete the reno-
vation of its main house by September. A
few miles away, construction crews are
building a third theater for chamber-
size works in a cavernous 19th-century
railway maintenance shop. The opera
house is turning the facility into a
sprawling, 237,000-square-foot complex
of workshops, rehearsal studios and
storage space called the Eiffel Art Stu-
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Above, Zsolt Haja,
left, and Lajos
Geiger, holding a
sword, in a re-
hearsal of “Bank
Ban” at the Erkel
Theater in Buda-
pest. Left, Orsolya
Hajnalka Roser,
center, and Laszlo
Boldi also prepar-
ing for the work,
considered Hunga-
ry’s national opera.
Below, Mr. Haja
performing it.
ATTILA NAGY
dios. It will include a restaurant in a vin-
tage rail car.
And the ballet has been transformed
in recent years. The idea for the New
York tour began with Tamas Solymosi,
the director of the ballet, who has hired a
large number of new artists — decreas-
ing the average age of the dancers by
nearly a decade, he said, to 25 or 26 —
brought different repertoire, and estab-
lished a new school, the Hungarian Na-
tional Ballet Institute.
Now, he said, the company is ready for
the world stage. Unlike the State Opera,
which is bringing Hungarian works on
tour, the ballet is making a point of focus-
ing primarily on classics. Mr. Solymosi,
who had an international career as a
dancer, said he wanted the New York au-
dience to have a reference point. “How
can they can really judge the company if
I bring something they’ve never seen?”
he said.
The State Opera’s programming is ex-
tensive — it has held more perform-
ances than any major opera company in
recent years, by some counts — and in-
ventive. A Puccini festival this season
..
music
AKOS STILLER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
features hits (both a traditional “La Bo-
hème” staging for purists and a modern
take, “La Bohème 2.0”) as well as rar-
ities, including “Edgar.” The company is
performing dozens of different titles, in-
cluding Meyerbeer’s “Les Huguenots”;
a staging of two unfinished Mozart op-
eras, “L’Oca del Cairo, ossia lo Sposo
Deluso”; and plenty of war horses.
In May, it celebrated the centennial of
“Bluebeard’s Castle” with a striking new
production conducted by the celebrated
Hungarian composer Peter Eotvos and
directed by Kasper Holten, the former
director of opera at the Royal Opera in
London. The performance was praised
by the critic John Allison in Opera maga-
zine, who noted that “no orchestra has
lived with this music more.” (The com-
pany will bring a different “Bluebeard”
production to New York, but the same
strong cast: Andras Palerdi as Blue-
beard and Ildiko Komlosi as his bride,
Judit.)
But the State Opera has also courted
controversy. In January, it staged
“Porgy and Bess” with white singers —
over the objections of the Gershwin
brothers’ estates, which ask that the
work be performed with black casts.
The staging drew criticism abroad, but
also praise within Hungary from some
who saw it as striking a blow against po-
litical correctness. The production,
mounted during Mr. Orban’s re-election
campaign, relocated the action to a
hangar-like space full of homeless peo-
ple searching for a promised land — re-
minding some of the refugee crisis that
overwhelmed the Budapest train sta-
tion in 2015, and of Mr. Orban’s strong
anti-immigration stance.
“There was really silly fake news
about our ‘Porgy’ production,” Mr. Oko-
vacs said in the interview, switching
briefly from Hungarian to English to
employ a favorite phrase of Mr. Trump’s.
Less than a month after that inter-
view last spring, his company was mak-
ing international news again, this time
for canceling 15 performances of a re-
vival of the musical “Billy Elliot” after a
columnist in Magyar Idok, a pro-gov-
ernment newspaper, denounced it as
gay propaganda.
The columnist, Zsofia N. Horvath,
questioned how a state institution could
stage such a show. “Promoting homo-
sexuality cannot be a national goal in a
situation when the population is de-
creasing and aging, and our homeland is
threatened by foreign invasion,” she
wrote.
In a response published in the paper,
Mr. Okovacs questioned whether operas
by Mozart, Strauss and Beethoven fea-
turing women who dress as men were
gay propaganda, too — and noted that
the State Opera sends a CD to the family
of every newborn Hungarian baby.
“Just because something that is an
undeniable part of life appears onstage
at the opera,” he wrote, “it doesn’t mean
we are promoting it.”
The company said that it canceled 15
of the 44 planned performances not be-
cause of the criticism, but because the
blowback had weakened audience inter-
est.
Andrea Tompa, a Hungarian theater
critic who has written about the growing
political influence on the performing
arts in Hungary, said that she caught
one of the remaining “Billy Elliot” per-
formances after the firestorm. “What is
really frightening is that these institu-
tions don’t take strong positions,” she
said in a telephone interview. “Even if
their artistic leaders have strong poli-
tical relationships.”
Over the summer, as the controversy
died down, Mr. Okovacs announced the
theme of next year’s opera season,
which seems far less likely to arouse
criticism in the right-wing press: Chris-
tianity.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
theater
Gender flip gives
‘Company’ new life
LONDON
Sondheim musical turns
into British commercial
theater event of the year
BY MATT WOLF
At last, “Company” has a human pulse
and a proper dramatic core. And for that
to happen, it took a woman.
The Stephen Sondheim-George Furth
musical from 1970 long ago entered the
canon with its tale of a commitment-
phobic Manhattan bachelor named
Bobby who ricochets among multiple
couples while searching for a soul mate
of his own.
Now enter the twice Tony-winning
English director Marianne Elliott, who
has replaced Bobby with a female equiv-
alent called — what else? — Bobbie. (I
sense a trend afoot: The forthcoming
film of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musi-
cal “Cats” will feature Judi Dench cast in
the male role of Old Deuteronomy.)
The result is entirely transformative:
This production is the commercial the-
atrical event of the year to date. And the
Gielgud Theater — where the show and
its resplendent leading lady, Rosalie
Craig, are on view through March 30 —
is not likely to be its final resting place.
(It’s just one measure of the intense in-
terest in the show that it has already
doubled the length of its run, originally
announced through Dec. 22.)
I have long understood “Company” as
a play with limitations. No matter how
admirable the Bobby on view, the birth-
day boy always seemed a strangely ab-
sent guest at his own surprise party — a
cipher whose inability to connect with a
woman for keeps didn’t really matter,
given the ebullient company he kept and
the ceaseless riches of Mr. Sondheim’s
music and lyrics. The show boasts at
least a half-dozen of the 88-year-old
composer’s defining numbers, not least
its climactic solo showstoppers, “The
dior.com
BRINKHOFF/MOEGENBURG
Ladies Who Lunch” and “Being Alive.”
But those reservations no longer ap-
ply. We still find out surprisingly little
about the newly female Bobbie: No
mention is ever made of her family, nor
is it ever clear what she does for work.
But we know that, because she’s a wom-
an, her body clock is surely ticking. And
if she wants to have children, she’ll need
to settle on a man to do it with. That feel-
ing of anatomical countdown lends an
unexpected meaning to “Tick Tock,” a
dance number that is here accompanied
by a nightmare sequence where Bobbie
imagines a domestic life — morning
sickness and all — that is far from bliss.
The gender flip involves more than
simply putting the central character in a
red dress, however much Bobbie’s sar-
torial choice contrasts with the many
impersonal interiors of Bunny Christie’s
agile set, which uses doors as the central
visual metaphor: Bobbie, it’s clear,
needs to unlock something in herself to
move forward in love and life.
Whereas Bobby before had a slew of
girlfriends, lending him the air of a diffi-
dent playboy, this Bobbie is on the re-
bound from a range of boyfriends, none
of whom are quite right (or likely father
material). Ms. Elliott’s keen eye is espe-
cially acute in the duologues where Bob-
bie faces off against these men in se-
quence. Each encounter feels like a fully
Patti LuPone achieved playlet, with Matthew Seadon-
is in roaring Young, in particular, especially touching
voice as the as the kind but out-of-place Theo, who
wants nothing more than to abandon
astringent if Manhattan for Cape Cod.
solicitous Putting a female in the driver’s seat
Joanne. works wonders, too, for the great comic
duet “Barcelona,” which presents our
sexually rapacious heroine with a
sweet, smiling flight attendant, Andy, as
dim as he is hunky. Performing the bulk
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018 | 19
weekend
Women matter to this production on-
stage and off, starting with Ms. Christie,
whose occasional Lewis Carroll-esque
visuals suggest Bobbie plunging down a
rabbit hole of her own fearful imagina-
tion, and Ms. Elliott, whose previous
reclamation of another iconic New York
title, “Angels in America,” didn’t hint at
her success here. Broadway’s top-
drawer star Patti LuPone is in roaring
voice as the astringent if solicitous Jo-
anne, who pushes Bobbie to open her
heart. In a recent interview with The
Sunday Times of London, Ms. LuPone
said with some astonishment that she
had never before in her storied career
been directed in a musical by a woman:
Well, it was worth the wait.
As a tremulous, moist-eyed Ms. Craig
takes center stage at the climax to sing
“Being Alive,” it’s as if a realm of possi-
bility has been revealed like some sort of
newly acquired vision, which, come to
think of it, is exactly what this “Com-
pany” possesses: clarity and insight
and the ability to make a time-tested
musical feel brand new. Ms. Elliott’s
achievement equals the much-ac-
claimed London revival of Mr. Sond-
BRINKHOFF/MOEGENBURG heim’s “Follies,” which will return to the
National Theater here in February.
Above, Rosalie Then, audiences will be in the fortunate
Craig, center, as position of being able to see these
the now female shows, as the lyric from “Company”
main character in puts it, “Side by Side.”
“Company.” Above A more immediate companion piece
left, Patti LuPone to “Company” can be found in the writ-
as her friend er-director Nina Raine’s new play,
Joanne. Left, “Stories,” running through Nov. 28 at the
Claudie Blakley as National, which also hosted the pre-
the protagonist in miere of her last play, “Consent,” in 2017.
“Consent.” (That one transferred to the West End.)
Echoing themes from Ms. Elliott’s
“Company,” Ms. Raine posits an un-
attached 39-year-old Londoner, Anna
(the always sympathetic Claudie Blak-
ley), who is driven nearly to psychic
ruin by her desire to have a child. So des-
perate is the state of affairs that Anna’s
mother (Margot Leicester) refers to her
SARAH LEE daughter’s life as “a tragedy.”
Anna meets with an array of possible
of the scene in his underpants, Richard sperm donors, all of whom are played
Fleeshman is a revelation in the part. So with accent-shifting finesse by the pro-
is Jonathan Bailey, in syllable-perfect tean Sam Troughton. If the play none-
form as the reluctant wedding partner theless feels like a case study wrenched
to Paul (a memorably gentle Alex Gau- from Ms. Raine’s own experience — her
mond). A jittery trip to the heterosexual actual baby featured in the opening
altar has been refashioned to accommo- scene of “Consent” last year — that may
date gay marriage, as befits a story up- be because of the challenge inherent in
dated to the present and to couplings of transmuting personal experience into
all kinds. The corresponding song, “Get- art. This latest play has the quality of a
ting Married Today,” raises the roof necessary birth that was probably more
afresh. cathartic to write than it is to watch.
ROSE DES VENTS COLLECTION
Yellow gold, pink gold, diamonds,
malachite, mother-of-pearl and pink opal.

20 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018
weekend
Her aim:
To make
history
manifest
Allison Janae Hamilton wants to connect
with the past and the American South
BY SIDDHARTHA MITTER
Indoors, for Allison Janae Hamilton, is
always a kind of compromise. She grew
up in Florida — first in Miami, attuned to
the ocean and the Everglades, then in
Tallahassee, with its exuberant tree
cover, and where she enjoys kayaking in
the haunting cypress swamps. Child-
hood summers were spent in western
Tennessee, returning for planting and
picking time on her maternal family’s
farm. Her multimedia art never strays
far from her concern with the land, espe-
cially the Southern land, and its occu-
pants, especially its black occupants.
“Landscape is this incredibly beauti-
ful plane that we get to live on,” she said.
“But it’s also a plane that has been
wielded by those in power in a very vio-
lent way.”
Her work has an unabashed pastoral
quality. Yet every rustic setting where
she stages her photography, every clip
and sound in her video works, every ar-
tifact in her installations — the fencing
masks, the tambourines, the bundles of
horsehair, the taxidermy alligators — is
present for a reason. Her aim is to mani-
fest history: that of her family, the black
South and, by this method, the nation.
Ms. Hamilton, 34, is based in New
York: She arrived in 2006, fresh out of
Florida State University (where her fa-
ther, Leonard Hamilton, is the head bas-
ketball coach), and after a stint in fash-
ion, began earning graduate degrees.
Before receiving her M.F.A., from Co-
lumbia in 2017, she already had a Ph.D.
in American Studies from New York
University, where she studied with the
photography scholar Deborah Willis
and wrote a dissertation on the carniva-
lesque in black visual culture. In the
summer, she goes upstate weekly to ride
horses.
This year, New York tightened its
claim on her when she landed a spot in
the Studio Museum in Harlem’s artist-
in-residence program, a prestigious in-
cubator of black talent, alongside resi-
dents Sable Elyse Smith and Tschabal-
ala Self. But even as her star rises in the
art world, she is determined to invest in
her soul base, the South, and buy her
own land. “There’s just more space,” she
said. “And in order for me to think about
these issues, it’s important for me to be
there, and in the community.”
Recently, she explored the legacy of
the turpentine industry that dominated
the Southeast well into the 20th century,
in which workers in backwoods camps,
isolated and kept in debt by company
scrip, tapped the pine trees for resins.
Her research took her to abandoned
camps in the forests of Florida and Geor-
gia. “Pitch,” her first museum solo exhi-
bition, currently at Mass MoCA in North
Adams, Mass., through March, is titled
for the resinous substance that ship-
builders used to make vessels water-
tight.
She installed a deconstructed pine
forest in a gallery of the old mill com-
plex, with 12-foot trunks, imposing and
straight, set in twos and threes. The pine
fragrance drifts through the gallery,
along with the choral track of a video in-
ALLISON JANAE HAMILTON, VIA MASS MOCA; PHOTOGRAPHED BY DAVID DASHIELL
stallation in a small walk-in room. In it,
Ms. Hamilton, her face concealed by a
beaked mask, rides a brown horse. In-
sects hover across swamp waters. An
African-American congregation wor-
ships in a country church.
Elsewhere, plywood panels lean
against walls, roughly painted in the
manner of Southern yard art, with
splotches, stars or lettering. Photo-
graphs place their subjects in vistas of
forests, fields, cabins, dressed in vintage
apparel. One is Ms. Hamilton’s mother,
masked and holding a pheasant. In an-
other room, two taxidermy alligators
bite their own tails, in the ouroboros mo-
tif; a silent row of fencing masks looks
on, some adorned in feathers or beads,
while spears decorated with horsehair
line the wall.
ALLISON JANAE HAMILTON
It makes for a visual language that
both edges toward Southern Gothic and
sets itself apart, with reminders of how
different fates unfold in the same land-
scape, shaped by ancestral custom but
also by race and class. The mystic refer-
ences come from hoodoo, the knowledge
of rural black healers, for whom hunting
or cultivating is inextricably spiritual
and economic. The pine trees express
the beauty of a grove, but also the ex-
ploitation of land and labor.
“It’s always interesting when an artist
builds a vocabulary, a set of tools, and is
able to skillfully utilize it,” said Larry Os-
sei-Mensah, who curated “Pitch” with
Susan Cross and who is now senior cura-
tor at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Detroit. Ms. Hamilton’s method, he said,
is so original that he struggles to iden-
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Clockwise from
left: Allison Janae
Hamilton; her work
“Pink Creature I”;
and some of the
objects she uses in
her practice.
HEATHER STEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
ALLISON JANAE HAMILTON, VIA MASS MOCA; PHOTOGRAPHED BY DAVID DASHIELL
Left, Ms. Hamil- tify exact precursors. “There’s a very
ton’s work “The clear line of sight,” he added. “She has a
Hours.” Above, her clear sense of direction, which I think is
video installation refreshing.”
“Floridaland.” Hallie Ringle, the curator of contem-
Below left, an porary art at the Birmingham Museum
installation view of of Art in Alabama, and until recently as-
a deconstructed sistant curator at the Studio Museum,
pine forest in her said Ms. Hamilton’s practice reminded
solo exhibition her of the Chicago-based painter Kerry
“Pitch.” James Marshall. “Maybe it’s the rich-
ness of the composition, or the colors
that she’s tapping into,” said Ms. Ringle,
who selected Ms. Hamilton for “Fic-
tions,” the Studio Museum’s showcase
exhibition last year. It’s an intriguing
connection: the Chicago painter and the
rural-South mixed-media artist, yet
both invested in the spirit material of Af-
rican-American life. “Her installations
are super smart,” Ms. Ringle said.
“They’re really layered, and they unfold
almost as paintings.”
In “Fictions,” Ms. Hamilton showed
“Foresta,” a walk-in installation that
paired her signature objects — the
masks, the taxidermy forms — with
shimmering footage of swamp waters.
The installation in “Pitch” is both simi-
lar and different. “I repeat some
footage,” she said. “I figure if you can
have motifs that repeat in drawings or
painting or objects, why can’t video
have that, too? I like having a marker.”
On a recent afternoon, Ms. Hamilton’s
studio in the Studio Museum’s tempo-
rary work space in Harlem, where it has
taken up quarters during construction
of its new building, was tidily arrayed
with her tools. Alligator heads, agape
“Her and toothy, rested on a shelving unit be-
installations side antlers and pelts. Women in her
are super family have all hunted, but Ms. Hamil-
ton shoots only targets. “I’m not a good
smart. They’re enough shot to give a clean death,” she
really layered, said. Her alligator skins come from
and they friends who hunt for meat. “I try to get
unfold almost things sustainably that way.”
as paintings.” The artist, who favors a vintage-casu-
al look, from jeans and boots to fitted
jackets and frills, fabricates the cos-
tumes that her portraiture subjects
wear as she art-directs them in the
woods. Next to the sewing machine in
the studio were confections-in-progress
like a fur collar mounted with cloth
roses. With her Mass MoCA exhibition
up — as well as an outdoor sculpture at
Storm King Art Center, part of a col-
..
arts
DAVID DASHIELL, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MASS MOCA
HEATHER STEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
lective show on climate change at the
open-air museum in Mountainville, N.Y.
— she is back in research mode, starting
the process toward her residency exhi-
bition in the spring.
On her mind are hurricanes. Ms.
Hamilton watched from afar as Hurri-
cane Michael walloped the north Flor-
ida coast and her home city. “Every hur-
ricane season, you feel more helpless
being away,” she said.
Her attunement to the sting of these
storms is partly a rural inheritance:
“My grandmother can tell you every-
thing about climate change,” she said.
But now her research takes her into the
history of hurricanes — from the Galve-
ston Hurricane of 1900 to this year’s
Florence and Michael — and their im-
pact on black communities.
She knows that after the Okeechobee
Hurricane of 1928, which appears in
Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were
Watching God,” at least 1,600 black mi-
grant laborers were buried in mass
graves — archaeologists suspect many
more. Katrina, a shaping event for soci-
ety and politics today, had precedents.
“My concern is which communities are
more vulnerable,” Ms. Hamilton said.
“Which ones are given the least care,
which ones are always on the wrong
side of the levee; and how that relates to
the history of power, and of the country.”
Ms. Hamilton’s sculpture at Storm
King, through Nov. 11, involves stacks of
white-painted tambourines, quintessen-
tial storytelling instruments; its title,
“The peo-ple cried mer-cy in the storm,”
quotes “Florida Storm,” a hymn by
Judge Jackson that responded to an-
other devastating hurricane, of 1926.
Music, sacred and secular, has partici-
pated through history in the self-narra-
tion of African-Americans, and their re-
silience through trauma. In her coming
works, Ms. Hamilton envisions adding
original sound works into ever more im-
mersive environments.
Despite the gravity, she feels her art
growing less heavy as her research ad-
vances. “I feel interested in going lighter
with color, more ethereal, playing up the
water theme,” she said. Even in trauma,
after all, the land is beautiful. “So I want
you to feel that. The lightness and
beauty, but wait a minute — there’s
something amiss, something that’s not
quite right.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018 | 21

arts weekend

ity itself, which he calls a kind of “creat-

A myth ed monster.”
“For me, the novel is a kind of poetic
touchstone for asking, ‘How do people
become evil? How do I work through my
own fears of becoming a monster?’” he

turns 200 said.

Other writers have used the story to
create double-edged 21st-century poli-
tical allegories. In “Frankenstein in
Baghdad,” by the Iraqi novelist Ahmed

this year Saadawi, a peddler stitches together

stray parts of bombing victims in hopes
of creating a body for proper burial, only
to see it become a rampaging killer.
“Destroyer,” a recent comic by the
MONSTER, FROM PAGE 15 novelist Victor LaValle that transports
If it took the medium of film to jolt the the story to the age of Black Lives Mat-
Frankenstein pop culture tradition ter, features two “monsters.” There’s
DÉPARTEMENT DES ARTS DU SPECTACLE/
alive, it also took the 20th century to THE BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE DE FRANCE Shelley’s original, who is found alive in
fully activate its warning against sci- the Arctic, and also a 12-year-old Afri-
ence run amok. In a 1987 essay, the biolo- failed to resemble him?’” she said. can-American boy who is shot by the po-
gist Leonard Isaacs credited Shelley The Frankenstein story has become a lice and then reanimated by his mother,
with writing what may have been “the touchstone for gay and transgender art- a scientist who happens to be the last liv-
first future myth,” which “lay waiting for ists, who have mined both its story of pa- ing descendant of Victor Frankenstein.
human activity to catch up with it.” rental rejection and its homoerotic sub- LaValle, expressing skepticism of
A line of Victor Frankenstein’s from text (perhaps made most literal in Andy “touchy-feely monsters,” said he
James Whale’s 1931 movie version — Warhol’s X-rated “Flesh for Frank- wanted to embrace the creature’s — and
“Now I know how it feels to be God!” — enstein”). Some transgender artists the mother’s — rage, which he called
was a frequent target of local censors, DAVE HOGAN/GETTY IMAGES have taken the fear of the monster’s “un- “the right of the maligned and op-
who saw it as blasphemous. Whale’s natural” body and turned it on its head. pressed.”
“Bride of Frankenstein” (1935), the Mor- ley Jackson’s “Patchwork Girl” (1997), Harvard who teaches a course on mon- From left, Boris In “Amateur: The True Story of What Perhaps more simply, he also wanted
gan Library show notes, took care to an early hypertext novel, Mary Shelley sters, said the novel was about both “un- Karloff in the 1931 Makes a Man,” his recent memoir of be- to take readers back to what had drawn
condemn any enthusiasm Victor ex- herself creates the female monster, who natural” creation and, perhaps more film, and a French coming the first transgender man to him to Frankenstein in the first place.
pressed for his unholy labors. then falls in love with her. (To navigate, conventionally, family life. stage version fight in Madison Square Garden, the “As a kid,” he said, “I was drawn to the
But since then, the hubris of “playing readers clicked on different parts of the “It asks, on the one hand, ‘What if I around 1826. writer Thomas Page McBee invokes fear of the monster. I wanted a monster
God” has been freely invoked in debates monster’s body.) hate my child?’ and on the other ‘What if “Frankenstein” as a metaphor both for who would tear a human being in half,
over the atomic bomb, artificial intelli- Deidre Lynch, an English professor at my father deems me a misfit who has the trans experience and for masculin- for better or for worse.”
gence, genetic engineering, nanotech-
nology and just about any other technol-
ogy that threatens to overrun its human
creators.
To some, the Frankenstein metaphor
itself (aided by “Frankenfoods,” “frank-
enscience” and other scary “frank-
enwords”) has become something of a
rhetorical monster, rampaging across
the possibility of reasoned public debate
about scientific innovation.
Ed Finn, a literary scholar at Arizona
State University and co-editor of a new
annotated edition of Shelley’s novel
aimed at scientists, engineers and “cre-
ators of all kinds,” said that the Frank-
enstein story, when invoked simplisti-
cally, was itself a “dangerous narrative.”
“A better conversation about Frank-
enstein would focus on the deep connec-
tion between scientific creativity and
our responsibility to ourselves and one
another,” he said.
But if some hope to turn the story into
a more positive one of ethical science,
feminist artists and critics have read it
as an allegory of male usurpation of fe-
male procreative power.
Margaret Atwood’s 1966 poetry col-
lection, “Speeches for Doctor Frank-
enstein,” imagined the monster as a
woman addressing her creator. In Shel-

UNIVERSAL PICTURES

From above: a
poster for the 1931
film; one for the
first screen ver-
sion, in 1910; and
Victor LaValle’s
comic “Destroyer,”
which adapts the
story for the era of
Black Lives Matter.

CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

UNIVERSAL PICTURES
 ..
22 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

weekend living

How I fell for

‘I’m the man’
A high-earning professional attempts
to recast herself in a relationship
Modern Love
BY SUSAN FORRAY
My new guy and I were lying next to
each other, half-covered by bedsheets,
the afternoon sun warming my feet. We
had been dating for about a month.
“I’m the man,” he said. “I should be
in charge of the money.”
“Right,” I said, feeling a jolt of anxi-
ety. As a partner at a financial consult-
ing firm, I thought: “I’m in charge of
the money every day.”
But I reasoned that he and I weren’t
going to be sharing a checking account
anytime soon, so why end things pre-
maturely? Besides, in the context of
our conversation, he wasn’t even refer-
ring to me but to his ex-wife; they had
been driven apart by financial dis-
agreements. This put some distance
between his words and me, or so I told
myself.
I didn’t normally go for guys who
said things like, “I’m the man.” I usu-
ally fell for men who didn’t argue when
I said it was my turn to pay for dinner.
These men noticed my intelligence
before my looks, or at least they said
they did.
But in my post-divorce haze, I found
myself falling for a different kind of
man.
As his words lingered, I felt a combi-
nation of shock and curiosity, as if
encountering a species previously
thought extinct. I knew there were men
who believed they should be in charge
of money. The shock came from en-
countering one who readily admitted it.
But he already had made clear he
believed in traditional gender roles.
With sex, too, he had said, “I’m the
man. I want to lead.”
I found his bluntness surprising but
also alluring. He was confident in his
desires.
thought of themselves as staunch
feminists — in hindsight, frustratingly
so, at least in the sense that they were
too inclined to defer to me (under the
guise of respecting me) to ever take
charge, either financially or sexually. I
can’t blame them; the pattern of choos-
ing men too reticent to arouse me had
been mine.
I had interrogated the last man I
dated on his Democratic bona fides
before agreeing to meet for coffee. But
with my new guy, I found myself qui-
etly acquiescing as he told me his
voting history shouldn’t matter. (I took
this to mean his voting history was the
opposite of mine.)
After paying for coffee that first
evening, he carefully aligned the bot-
tom of the receipt with his credit card,
then wrapped it around tightly before
placing the card back in his wallet (my
ex would have scrunched up the re-
ceipt and tossed it in the nearest trash
can). Watching the care he took with
this mundane task, I knew I wanted
him.
A week later, we played chess in an
ice-cream parlor. I sensed that losing
would dampen his ardor, so I left my
king open to attack, letting him check-
mate me twice. As we left, he took my
hand and pulled me closer.
Lying in his bed before falling
asleep, I felt guilty about the chess
games. They were like fake orgasms,
untruthful actions giving the man an
exaggerated view of his talents. But
these games didn’t hide sexual dissat-
isfaction; they hid my intelligence,
turning me into someone he would feel
a need to protect.
He often cooked for us in the kitchen
he had remodeled himself (despite a
career in data analytics, not construc-
tion). The walls of my kitchen were
still marked with the rough outlines of
the cabinetry my ex had wrested off
years earlier in his aborted attempt at
an upgrade.
Sitting with a glass of wine, admiring
my new guy’s cooking and handiwork,
I was tempted to minimize the implica-
tions of his beliefs on gender roles. I
pondered him being in charge of the
money. Unlike my ex, he was frugal, BRIAN RAE

Since my ex-husband had divorced believing a car was for transportation,

me the previous year, I had been recon-
sidering what I thought I knew about
relationships. And my previous belief
in a relationship of equals seemed
painfully naïve.
My ex called himself a feminist, but
in our marriage that seemed to mean
he felt fine about me dramatically
out-earning him, fine about spending
my income freely on luxuries and fine
about me covering the mortgage, the
private school tuition for our children
and the rest of our financial commit-
ments. (At the time, he was building a
small retail business from which he
took no salary.)
This experience should have led me
to dump any guy who claimed it was a
man’s job to manage a couple’s money,
but here it was having the opposite
effect. I craved a man who sought to
take financial responsibility for his
family, even if I didn’t need it.
After my fantasy of a partnership of
equals had failed to materialize, I
seemed to want to replace it with a
fantasy of paternalistic protection.
The men I’d previously dated
not luxury. His home was outfitted
with charming furniture he had made
himself.
But he wasn’t cheap when it came to
me. He paid when we ate out; I never
even offered, in part because I knew
doing so would displease him, but also
because I relished feeling cared for. He
was fiscally responsible, generous and
trustworthy.
So I told myself there was nothing
wrong with the man being in charge of
the money as long as he made good
decisions. At the same time, I found
myself becoming guarded around my
new guy, evading his questions and
hiding things I thought he wouldn’t
like. When he asked if I ever went to
church, I said no — but failed to men-
tion I was Jewish. I never lied about
my career, though I didn’t tell him the
whole truth, either. He knew I was an
actuary but not that I was a partner at
the firm.
Despite my evasiveness, I knew
what I loved about him. A few years
earlier, a dog had attacked his son. He
fought off the dog, but his son was left
with stitches and difficulty sleeping.
I craved a man He sued the neighbor who owned the
who sought to dog, getting a sizable contribution to
take financial his son’s college fund, and the neighbor
moved away.
responsibility Given the choice between a man
for his family, who said all the right things about
even if I didn’t supporting a strong woman and a man
need it. who shielded his child from a vicious
dog with his bare hands, I chose the
latter. Not that the two are mutually
exclusive.
In the end, though, he didn’t choose
me.
He was smart enough, first of all, to
see through my deceptions: the re-
straint during chess and the lack of
candor about my career. There were
other things he may have spotted, too,
like the mezuza on my door frame or
the chess strategy books on my
shelves.
And I think he must have realized I
earned more than him. When he ex-
pressed frustration that he hadn’t been
able to save for his children’s college
costs, I said nothing. And when he
asked me about alimony and child
support, I answered truthfully: I didn’t
receive any.
When I made the mistake of men-
tioning work, he finally asked enough
questions to find my career history
online. It was aggressive enough (on
his part) and evasive enough (on my
part) for us both to feel as if it was the
beginning of the end.
A few hours later, I lay next to him,
noticing the swarthiness of his arms
against my pale skin. I told him a story
about sex with my ex-husband.
“You initiated?” he said, mildly
incredulous.
His other beliefs I had sensed and
anticipated, but given our sexual com-
patibility, I hadn’t expected him to
believe a woman shouldn’t initiate sex.
When I next saw him, he was sullen
and withdrawn. I mentioned my cab-
inetry problems, as if to say, “See, I
don’t earn more than you. I can’t even
afford a normal kitchen.”
It was a last-ditch effort to turn
myself into the person I thought he
wanted and also the person I wanted
to be: a woman who needed to be
protected. Or perhaps, more accu-
rately, a woman who wanted to feel
protected, whether she needed it or
not. My attempt was halfhearted
though; I knew the endeavor was
doomed.
After we had sex, he said he couldn’t
stay over, though he had no plans for
the morning. The next day, by text, I
ended it, which is what he wanted me
to do.
It seemed like an obvious decision,
but I surprised myself by bursting into
tears. What he had offered — strength,
protection and generosity — were
things I had been looking for without
even knowing it. That’s the thing about
gender roles. They can meet a need
you were afraid to acknowledge, and
they can take it all away when you
don’t conform.
Eventually, I hired someone for the
cabinetry work. It was expensive, but
that’s O.K. It’s my kitchen, and I’m in
charge of the money.
Susan Forray works as an actuary in
Milwaukee.

Should I stay at a lab
that makes animals suffer?
The Ethicist
B Y K WA M E A N T H O N Y A P P I A H
I am an undergraduate researcher in a
university-affiliated biology lab. The
research we are doing involves subject-
ing many mice to disease, suffering and
death. I haven’t interacted with the
mice directly, but I use their serum in
my experiments. The thought of ani-
mals suffering for the data we produce
really bothers me; I am vegan for ethi-
cal reasons. My only justification is that
the research we do will hopefully pro-
vide disease prevention in the future.
However, I don’t know if that is enough
considering the slim chance of develop-
ing a therapy and the many mice that
are suffering right now.
The lab offered to have me continue
to work throughout the upcoming
semesters. The people I work under
have been exceptional mentors; re-
maining in the lab would be extremely
valuable for me professionally, and I am
fortunate to be given this opportunity.
On the other hand, I don’t know if I am
sacrificing my values to focus on aca-
demic and professional goals. Can I
continue to work in this lab? Name
Withheld
YOU OUGHT NOT participate in research
that involves wrongful suffering.
Whether the suffering in question is
wrongful depends in part on whether
the research might yield important
benefits to people or other animals and
whether the suffering could be mitigat-
ed or avoided altogether. The guide-
lines in Britain get at some important
precepts here, usually referred to as
the 3Rs: replacement (substitute
nonanimal alternatives where possi-
ble), reduction (minimize the number
of animals used) and refinement (ad-
just procedures in order to minimize
animal suffering). In the United States,
of course, there are laws and regula-
tions about animal welfare that your
university is presumably complying
with, but many people think those
rules are too lax. You should inform
yourself further by talking to your
mentors.
If they are responsible, they will
want to assure you that what they are
doing is morally permissible. Animal
research has, after all, led to treat-
ments that save millions of lives. But
once you have the whole story, you
may disagree with their assessment. If
you do, and the principal investigators
aren’t inclined to change their pro-
cedures, you shouldn’t continue to
work in this lab. (That itself won’t save
any animals, but the fact that others
will continue a wrong if you withdraw
isn’t a reason to carry on participat-
ing.) You should also make the case to
the university authorities that they
ILLUSTRATION BY TOMI UM
ought to stop or reform the work.
There is a vast scope for research in
the life sciences that does not involve
the wrongful treatment of animals.
And there’s good news in the longer
term: Emerging technologies — such
as the use of the complex cellular
structures known as organoids — may
reduce the need for animal models.
I have an acquaintance who is a good
friend of my sister’s. She is the care-
giver for her elderly parents. Decades
ago, her father had an affair, and a
child was conceived. My sister’s friend
never knew of the affair, and she has no
idea she has a half sibling. I feel guilty
for keeping the truth from her but
would never reveal it while her mother
is alive. But if her mother passes away
before her father, I would confront him
and tell him that if he didn’t reveal the
truth, I would. I think my sister’s friend
should know that she has a sibling. My
sister says that we should mind our
own business. Name Withheld
YOU DON’T SAY how you came by this
knowledge; let’s stipulate that you
don’t have any obligations of confiden-
tiality. Let’s agree further that it would
be good for your sister’s friend to learn
the truth about her family at some
point. But one thing that strikes me is
that your connection to all this seems
rather indirect. Your sister presumably
knows her friend better than you do
and thinks her friend doesn’t need to
know about her secret half sibling.
Nor do you think that the right to
know the truth trumps everything else.
You think the truth would be so painful
for your acquaintance’s mother that it
should be kept from her. You give little
weight to the cost to the adulterous
father, evidently because he was in the
wrong. But do you really think this
gives his suffering no weight at all? All
this is aside from the prospective cost
to your friend of learning of her fa-
ther’s betrayal, which your sister ap-
parently believes would overwhelm the
value to her of having a better under-
standing of her family’s history. Truth
matters, but as you already know, it
isn’t the only thing that matters.
After my mother died, I asked one of
her oldest friends if she knew if my
mother ever had an affair while mar-
ried to my father. (My father is also
deceased.) She told me that my mother
had an affair with someone I knew, but
she would not disclose his name. I
became obsessed with trying to figure
out who it was. My husband and I
would discuss different scenarios but
never came to any conclusions.
A few years ago, my mother’s friend
finally told me who it was. I was
shocked! She said that this man had
made my mother very happy and that
she had never planned on leaving my
father. I had no judgment toward my
mother because this man had brought
so much joy into her life. (He was also
married at the time. He then got a
divorce and has since died.)
His daughter was a good friend of
mine. Now that all the parties have
died, I would like to tell my friend. I
know she knew that her father cheated
on her mother; perhaps she even knew
of this relationship and doesn’t want to
tell me for fear of hurting me. It would
feel comforting to talk with her about it,
but it’s possible this will change my
friend’s feelings about me or my mother.
Should I take this indiscretion to my
grave? Name Withheld
PEOPLE ARE ENTITLED, where there aren’t
strong countervailing considerations,
to know the truth about their families.
In this case, your involvement in the
story is direct, and the adulterers and
the spouses they betrayed are all dead.
The harm there will be reputational,
and we aren’t entitled to reputations
we don’t deserve. So my default view is
that you may indeed share what you’ve
learned. But again, when you make
decisions, you should bear their conse-
quences in mind, and you might take a
moment first to think about whether
this revelation will damage relation-
ships among the living.
Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philos-
ophy at N.Y.U. His books include “Cos-
mopolitanism,” “The Honor Code” and
“The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Iden-
tity.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
real estate
A rural villa
built on
a cliffside
House Hunting In . . .
Dominican Republic
BY VIVIAN MARINO
FIVE BEDROOMS ON THE
OCEANFRONT
$3.3 MILLION
This Mediterranean-style villa, perched
on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean,
is in the gated Sea Horse Ranch resort,
near the beach town of Cabarete on the
rural northern coast of the Dominican
Republic.
Sitting on just over an acre of land-
scaped property, the house, known as
Villa Ataraxia, was designed by Sergio
Escarfullery, a local architect, in the
early 2000s and built out of concrete and
stone, with a heavy terra-cotta roof. Its
7,857 square feet include five bedrooms
and six full bathrooms. All of the rooms
The home is have oversized windows, and the living
within the room, in the back of the house, opens on
250-acre three sides to outdoor spaces with the
Sea Horse same Mexican tile and mahogany fin-
Ranch ishes found inside.
resort. A walkway cuts a path through the
center of the backyard to a large lap
pool, a brick barbecue and a palapa, or
thatched structure, overlooking the
ocean.
“The views are amazing,” said Luis
Gonzalez, an agent with Holden Sothe-
by’s International Realty in Cabarete,
one of the property’s listing brokers.
“You get great views of the ocean and
the rocks below the cliff.”
The owners, a family from California,
have used it as a vacation home for the
last five years, Mr. Gonzalez said. They
are including all furnishings in the sale.
The gated estate is entered via a stone
driveway with a covered, two-car car-
port on one side. A large wooden door
opens to an entry hall that stretches
back to the yard and tropical gardens
behind the house. To the right of the hall
is a den that could be used as a TV room
or library; to the left is a formal dining
room that opens to a chef’s kitchen with
granite countertops and stainless-steel
appliances. At the end of the hall is the
living room, anchored by an ornate iron
chandelier, with large sliding doors that
open to covered patios on two sides and
the backyard in the rear.
Although the living area is on one
main level, soaring beamed ceilings
throughout — reaching as high as 35 feet
in some places — offer additional mez-
zanine space. Two of the guest suites
have sizable sleeping lofts, and a small
stairway off the kitchen leads up to the
staff quarters.
The en suite bedrooms are in a sepa-
rate wing of the house and include a
large master suite with a seating area, a
marble bath with a whirlpool tub and a
covered terrace. In all, there are two
king and nine queen beds in the house,
When an architect becomes the client
Fearing her own fussiness,
Carrie Byles hired a former
intern to revamp her house
BY TIM MCKEOUGH
Many architects dream of designing
their own homes — but not all archi-
tects. Carrie Byles, for instance, is a
partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill,
one of the largest architecture firms in
the United States, but when it came to
renovating her 1956 house in Sausalito,
Calif., she wanted help.
“I thought that if I designed it on my
own, it would probably take me 10 years
because I’d fuss over it a long time, and
I’m so busy I’d never have time to work
on it,” said Ms. Byles, 56, who spends her
days focused on much larger projects
like university and condominium tow-
ers, as well as an expansion of the Se-
attle-Tacoma International Airport.
She had bought the two-bedroom,
The redesigned 1,671-square-foot, midcentury-modern
home in Sausalito, house in 2011 for about $1 million be-
Calif., has an open cause she liked its post-and-beam con-
layout that pro- struction, exposed ceilings and seven-
motes indoor- foot-square sliding glass doors. But
outdoor living. other elements looked tired, like the
kitchen and the vinyl-clad solarium add-
ed by a previous owner.
In 2014, shortly after Sausalito, just
north of San Francisco, introduced new
regulations to address a housing short-
age, allowing an increase in floor area
for homeowners building accessory
dwelling units (or secondary resi-
dences, like in-law suites), Ms. Byles de-
cided it was time to make a few changes.
Her plan was to add a wheelchair-acces-
sible in-law unit on the lower level and
renovate her kitchen.
“I’m really passionate about homes
that support all phases of life,” said Ms.
Byles, who envisioned her parents using
the in-law unit when they visited from
making it well suited for large gather-
ings.
The 250-acre Sea Horse Ranch resort
offers numerous amenities, including
tennis courts, an equestrian center,
pools, a beach club and beach access. It
is just outside the town of Cabarete in
the Puerto Plata province (population
around 330,000), about 19 miles from the
city of Puerto Plata and a short drive
from Isabel de Torres National Park. It
is seven miles from Gregorio Luperón
International Airport and about 140
miles north of Santo Domingo, the capi-
tal city on the southern coast.
MARKET OVERVIEW
Although the Dominican Republic’s
housing market slowed after the 2008
global financial crisis, “it never fell as
much as other parts of the Caribbean
and the world,” said William Holden, the
broker-owner of Holden Sotheby’s In-
ternational Realty.
In the years since, he said, the market
has been “on a slow uptrend,” thanks to
a stable economy and an increase in
tourism. Popular tourist spots along the
southern and eastern coasts, like Casa
de Campo and Punta Cana, have seen
more growth than those on the northern
coast, where there are fewer interna-
tional flights and tourist attractions, real
estate agents said.
“Everything is on a smaller scale” in
the Puerto Plata region, said Sabine A.
Mertes-Urbahn, the broker-owner of Se-
lect Caribbean Properties. “But you
have a very nice international, cos-
mopolitan community here, with many
families from all over the world.”
Washington State, and using it herself
(or housing a caretaker there) later in
life.
For design help, she called on Jennifer
Weiss, a San Francisco architect who be-
gan her career as an intern in Ms. By-
les’s office.
“She was my boss 25 years ago,” said
Ms. Weiss, who now has her own firm
and has designed numerous private
homes. “Of course, I was thrilled.”
But where Ms. Byles envisioned a few
changes, Ms. Weiss saw the potential to
do something transformational.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY RICARDO PIANTINI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Mr. Holden estimated that sales vol-
ume in the northern region is up around
2 percent from last year, although he and
others said that prices have remained
level.
Luxury properties in the Cabarete
area typically start at about $200,000 for
an older two- or three-bedroom condo-
minium farther from the water, agents
said.
Oceanfront homes in newer luxury
developments, like Sea Horse Ranch,
sell for at least $700,000.
Several new oceanfront luxury condo-
miniums have been built in the last dec-
ade, Mr. Holden said, with unit prices
ranging from $500,000 to $2 million.
WHO BUYS THERE
Americans and Canadians looking for
vacation or retirement homes make up a
large portion of the foreign buyers in the
Dominican Republic, real estate profes-
sionals said, noting that there is also
strong interest from Europeans, partic-
ularly those in France, Germany, Italy
and Spain.
Mr. Holden said he has also seen a
growing number of Russian buyers, as
well as a recent influx of Venezuelans.
Buyers on the northern coast are typi-
cally drawn to the miles of sandy and
rocky beaches, as well as the excellent
surfing and sailing, particularly in Caba-
rete.
“If you’re looking to make a growth on
your investment, the northern coast is
the way to go,” said Juan Manuel Suero,
a senior partner at the law firm Aaron
Suero & Pedersini, in Santo Domingo.
Other buyers are lured by the diverse
She quietly developed two sets of
plans: one that reflected the limited
changes Ms. Byles had requested and
another that illustrated what could be
done by completely renovating and ex-
panding the house, including demolish-
ing the solarium, reorienting the main
living spaces to take advantage of views
to Mount Tamalpais and Richardson
Bay, increasing the size of the living
room and replacing the shingled exteri-
or with an expanse of glass and wood
slats.
“Jennifer did that thing that architects
terrain. “In the north coast we have
mountains, and rivers where you can go
rafting,” Ms. Mertes-Urbahn said. “The
area is also famous for surfing. And
there’s snorkeling. It’s more diverse
here.”
BUYING BASICS
There are generally no restrictions on
foreign ownership of property in the Do-
minican Republic.
Local financing is available, but usu-
ally at less attractive terms than many
buyers could get at home, Mr. Suero
said, so most international buyers pay in
cash or obtain loans elsewhere.
Although it is not required, buyers are
advised to hire an experienced local law-
yer to represent them during the trans-
action, which usually takes around 45
days.
The lawyer will oversee due diligence
on the property, Mr. Suero said, arrang-
ing for a title search and appraisal,
among other things. Legal fees are usu-
ally 1 percent to 2 percent of the sale
price of a property, although they are ne-
gotiable.
Closing documents must be nota-
MATTHEW MILLMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
do” when they want to convince their cli-
ents to dream bigger, Ms. Byles said.
“She put this drawing in front of me, and
I don’t think I spoke for a couple of min-
utes. I just thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s
so much money.’ But it was the architect
in me that said, ‘Oh my God, we have to
do this.’”
As Ms. Byles’s notion of funding a
small renovation with her savings faded
away, she took out a construction loan
and found a houseboat to rent as a tem-
porary home.
She and Ms. Weiss also took pains to
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018 | 23
weekend
rized. Notaries, who are required to Counterclockwise
have a law degree, charge a nonnego- from above: The
tiable fee based on the property’s value. main entrance; the
large lap pool
LANGUAGES AND CURRENCY overlooking the
Spanish; Dominican peso (1 Dominican ocean; one of the
peso = $0.02) five bedrooms in
the 7,857-square-
TAXES AND FEES foot home.
Sellers typically pay the real estate
agent’s commission, which ranges from
4 percent to 8 percent of the sale price.
Buyers are responsible for a number of
closing costs, including a transfer and
stamp tax.
The annual property taxes on this
home are $7,000, Mr. Gonzalez said, and
monthly homeowner association fees,
which cover common-area mainte-
nance, security and garbage collection,
are $755.
CONTACT
Luis Gonzalez,
Holden Sotheby’s International Realty,
+1 (809) 571-0072,
holdensothebysrealty.com;
Jennifer Kirkman, Sea Horse Ranch,
+1 (809) 571-3880, sea-horse-ranch.com
keep the neighbors happy, outlining the
shape of the proposed additions with “It was the
poles and tape during the planning architect in
phase, and adjusting the pitch of the roof me that
to preserve the view from a nearby said, ‘Oh
house. my God, we
Construction began in the summer of
2015, and the house — now 2,436 square
have to do
feet — was completed by Farallon Con- this.’”
struction by the end of 2016, at a cost of
about $435 a square foot.
Ms. Weiss’s design resulted in a
kitchen far larger, airier and with more
dramatic views than Ms. Byles’s initial
plan called for, along with an open layout
that promotes indoor-outdoor living.
Hopper windows and seven adjust-
able skylights allow the house to be
cooled entirely by air currents, eliminat-
ing the need for air-conditioning. (The
skylights are also handy for clearing
smoke when “you burn your pork chops
in the broiler,” Ms. Byles noted.)
Landscaping and finishing touches
took an additional year, and included
planting 50 Japanese maple trees. Ms.
Byles’s father used to sell the trees, and
she had maintained a collection of 18 of
them in pots for years. To complete the
landscape, she asked her father to bring
her one more — but he arrived with 32.
Although Ms. Weiss designed the
house, Ms. Byles believes the experi-
ence has made her a better architect.
“Every architect should be a client
once,” she said. “I have visceral empa-
thy for my clients now. When you’re
writing checks out of your personal ac-
count, it’s a big deal.”
And the accessory dwelling unit has
proved surprisingly flexible in accom-
modating unforeseen lifestyle changes.
During the construction, Ms. Byles met
her boyfriend, Greg Bryan, 63, who
moved in after the house was completed
and found his own use for the space.
“He turned it into a man cave,” Ms.
Byles said. “I had never thought of that
option.”
 ..
24 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2018 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

weekend travel

A good place to start:

Getting in the Loop
The city’s downtown core is bursting
with new restaurants and art attractions,
and architecture fans are sure to be happy
36 Hours
in Chicago
BY ELAINE GLUSAC
Chicago’s 77 neighborhoods — including
Lincoln Park, home to the new Wright-
wood 659 gallery — offer myriad rea-
sons to stray from the beaten path. But
lately the Loop, as the downtown dis-
trict is called for the elevated train
tracks that encircle it, is fighting for
your attention with a new architecture
center, writers’ museum and river walk,
design-centric hotels, destination
restaurants and Art on the Mart, a dig-
ital art installation broadcast across a
2.5-acre building facade on the river. All
of the city’s train lines fan out from
downtown, making it a great base from
which to explore beyond, particularly
for those in search of vibrant storefront
Saturday
Art history 10 a.m.
You don’t need us to tell you to go to the
Art Institute of Chicago (admission $20
to $25). But while you’re there, here are
a few specifically Chicago-centric exhi-
bitions you might otherwise overlook.
Through Jan. 6, “Hairy Who? 1966-
1969,” features the boldly graphic work
of six countercultural South Side-based
artists. Then make your way to the
quirky Thorne Miniature Rooms, a sub-
terranean collection of 68 dollhouse-
scale architectural vignettes, including
a Gothic church, a Tudor great room and
a 1940s New Mexican dining room. All
were designed by Narcissa Niblack
Thorne, a Chicago artist and the wife of
James Ward Thorne, heir to the Mont-
gomery Ward retail fortune. From Nov.
17 to Jan. 8, several of the rooms are dec-
orated in denominationally appropriate
holiday style.
View points 12 p.m.
For a panoramic lunch, dine at Cindy’s,
the conservatory-like rooftop restau- PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHELLE LITVIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

theaters, design shops and breweries.
Late fall and winter are bargain times to
appreciate them, when rates for every-
thing from airfare to hotel rooms drop.
But the best reasons to visit Chicago
now largely defy climate.
Friday
First drafts 2:30 p.m.
Two new cultural stars have concen-
trated the appeal of the Loop district.
The former Chicago Architecture Foun-
dation moved to a prominent riverfront
location in August and, having added an
intriguing museum with models of fa-
mous buildings worldwide, renamed it-
self the Chicago Architecture Center. It’s
the start of the center’s famous river-
boat architectural tours ($47), now
launching from across the street
(through Nov. 19). If it’s too cold for a
river tour, instead join one of the down-
town walking tours ($26) that tell the
story of Chicago’s design evolution.
Nearby, the interactive exhibits of the
American Writers Museum, including
manual typewriters where patrons are
encouraged to add to crowdsourced
rant at the Chicago Athletic Association
hotel overlooking Millennium Park and
Lake Michigan. Share the generous
seafood cocktail ($22) and cast-iron chi-
laquiles ($27) while taking in the views.
Then continue south to the Chicago
River to stroll on the two-year-old Chi-
cago Riverwalk, a 1.25-mile long, water-
level promenade. In fair weather, the
kayak launches, picnic lawns and cafes
bustle, but even in the off-season, the
walkway offers good perspectives on
the surrounding landmark high-rises.
Style sales 2 p.m.
After appreciating design in the city,
take a souvenir home from a clutch of
North Side shops that specialize in ar-
chitectural salvage, modern design and
antiques. Begin trolling at the vast
warehouse where Architectural Arti-
facts trades in decorative building cast-
offs, including wrought-iron railings,
wooden mantelpieces and terra cotta
gargoyles, and more portable goods, like
art tiles and juggling pins. In the nearby
Andersonville neighborhood, visit
Brimfield for vintage plaid blankets and
college pennants. Next door, Scout deals
midcentury furnishings and funky finds
ences of 60 or fewer, who toast perform-
ances post-curtain at the theater’s new
adjacent bar.
Toddlin’ town 10:30 p.m.
In a town where nightclubs and bars
stay open an extra hour on Saturday
nights, there’s a nightcap for every
mood. The polished new Z Bar at the
Peninsula Chicago hotel offers bird’s-
eye views over Michigan Avenue’s Mag-
nificent Mile downtown. In Wicker Park,
the intimate Up Room atop the Robey
hotel channels a midcentury lounge
with Chicago accents, including drinks
inspired by the Great Fire of 1871, such
as Holy Cow milk punch ($15). In the
Loop, enter through a neighboring diner
to reach the neo-dive-bar Moneygun
and huddle in a circular booth with a
classic cocktail like a Pink Squirrel
($11.75). Nearby, play a game of foosball
or bocce ball at the retro Game Room in
WWW.BREGUET.COM
the Chicago Athletic Association.
Sunday
Lakefront tour 10 a.m.
Eighteen miles of paved pathway run
along the edge of Lake Michigan, the
Great Lake that moderates much of Chi-
cago’s weather. Biking is the best way to
appreciate the city’s sparkling outdoor
asset. Rent a hybrid, town cruiser or
road bike from Bike and Roll Chicago at
Millennium Park or Navy Pier (from
$12.50 an hour) and head southbound
for a traffic-free cruise and stellar sky-
line views on your return back north
(the heavier Divvy shared bikes are an-
other option at $3 per 30 minutes). Win-
ter occasionally disrupts this plan, in
which case head to Maggie Daley Park
next to Millennium Park to skate on the
meandering ice ribbon that simulates a
frozen prairie path amid surrounding A bridge designed
high-rises (free; skate rentals $14). by Frank Gehry
connects Maggie
Cultural consumption noon Daley Park to
In recent years, the Museum of Contem- Millennium Park
porary Art (admission $15) has used in- in downtown
novative exhibitions, such as “I Was Chicago.
Raised on the Internet” and the current
show, “Picture Fiction,” on Kenneth Jo-
sephson’s conceptual photography, to
attract younger patrons, which has reju-
venated the gallery experience. Stop in
to see how, then head to the museum’s
new ground-floor restaurant, Marisol,
for brunch. Its chef, Jason Hammel, a
farm-to-table pioneer with Lula Cafe in
Logan Square, brings his savory skills
downtown to the fittingly modern space.
Indulge in a housemade doughnut ($4),
frittata ($14) and crispy pork succotash
($16), then walk it off on the nearby
Magnificent Mile stretch of Michigan
Avenue.

stories, bring the art of storytelling to as well as Impressionist Chicago city-

life (admission $12). scapes by the local artist Chuck Meyers.

Fine and friendly food 7 p.m. Brew break 4 p.m.

At the new Bellemore, diners in the West
Loop are treated not just to refined food
and glamorous design, but the kind of
pretension-free dining that character-
izes Chicago’s vibrant restaurant scene.
The chef Jimmy Papadopoulos uses
global ingredients and cooking tech-
The explosive Chicago craft beer scene
is largely neighborhood-based, from Ar-
gus Brewery in the South Side Pullman
district and Moody Tongue Brewery in
Pilsen to Temperance Beer Company in
north suburban Evanston. One of the
most popular breweries, Half Acre Beer

A performance of
“Made in Amer-
niques to create richly flavored, multi-
textured seasonal dishes including, re-
ica” at Second cently, a salad with port-marinated
City’s Up Comedy pears ($14) and grilled lamb belly with
Club. eggplant, pickled grapes and chickpea
crackers ($36). Menu splurges include
the Instagram-famed oyster pie ($68),
but guests needn’t succumb to enjoy
what is simultaneously a down-home
and dressed-up dinner while listening to
David Bowie and ogling the taxidermy
birds above the bar.
Late-night laughs 10:30 p.m.
Chicagoans may be divided on the mer-
its of deep-dish pizza, but when it comes
to homegrown invention, no one dis-
putes the reign of improv comedy. Mem-
bers of the seminal Compass Players
went on, in 1959, to form Second City,
whose alumni include Bill Murray and
Tina Fey. Catch a late-night improv
show at Second City’s slick Up Comedy
Club in the Old Town district (tickets
from $18). Or head a mile west to iO The-
ater, where the Improvised Shake-
speare Company specializes in long-
form improv using the playwright’s lan-
guage to craft two-act comedies based
on an audience suggestion (tickets $20).
Co., recently opened a tap room, restau-
rant and beer garden just west of Ander-
Breguet La Classique
Tourbillon Extra-Thin 5367
sonville. Claim a rustic wood table and a
pint of its signature Daisy Cutter pale
ale, Pony pilsner (each $6) or wet-hop-
ped black ale Sticky Fat ($8) to relax in
the family-friendly locale. Alcohol-free
options include local Dark Matter Coffee
($2) and 164 Soda ($3). When hunger
strikes, don’t miss the housemade bread
($6) and roast chicken ($18).
Tiny houses 7:30 p.m.
Five major theaters in Chicago, includ-
ing Steppenwolf and Goodman theaters,
claim Tony Awards. But it’s the city’s
small, often storefront-based theaters —
over 200 of them — that form the back-
bone of the rich theater community. Go
intimate at A Red Orchid Theater in Old
Town, where the actor Michael Shannon
is a founder. The ensemble-focused
Strawdog Theater in the North Center
neighborhood is known for immersive
staging of new works and rewritten clas- B E I J I N G C A N N E S C H E N G D U C H O N G Q I N G D U B A I E K AT E R I N B U R G G E N E VA G S TA A D H O N G K O N G
sics such as “Great Expectations.” Steep KUALA LUMPUR LAS VEGAS LONDON LOS ANGELES MACAO MILAN MOSCOW NEW YORK NINGBO
Theater in the Edgewater area has
PA R I S S E O U L S H A N G H A I S I N G A P O R E TA I P E I T O K Y O V I E N N A Z U R I C H – W W W. B R E G U E T. C O M
strong ties to contemporary play-
wrights such as Simon Stephens, and of-
ten stages searing shows before audi-