RENAISSANCE MAN EVERYDAY NEEDS
A CELEBRATION FILLING GAPS LEFT
OF LEONARDO BY INSURANCE
PAGE 15 | TRAVEL
Can Trump
make a deal
with Kim?
Nicholas Eberstadt
OPINION
And so they meet again. President
Trump and Kim Jong-un, the ruler of
North Korea, are expected to gather
this week in Hanoi, Vietnam, for a
second round of nuclear negotiations.
Mr. Kim bested Mr. Trump at their first
meeting in Singapore in June last year.
And he is poised to do so again.
The reason is simple: He has a
strategy and the Americans do not.
The United States hopes to somehow
keep the world safe from North Korea.
But Mr. Kim has an actual plan to
make the world safe for North Korea.
Mr. Kim’s plan — the same as his
father’s and grandfather’s, and one
breathtakingly revisionist — is nothing
less than unconditional reunification of
the Korean Peninsula under the control
of his government in Pyongyang.
Nuclear weapons are indispensable to
achieving his vision.
One wants to And rational actors
do not bargain away
make North their core interests;
Korea safe only fools or traitors
for the world. do.
The other For a time, the
wants to Trump team’s
make the counter-proliferation
world safe for policy — its “maxi-
North Korea. mum pressure”
campaign of eco-
nomic strangulation
by way of sanctions
— seemed to pose a much more seri-
ous threat to Pyongyang’s nuclear
quest than did previous American
administrations.
North Korea’s distorted economy,
which is highly dependent on imports
of food and energy, as well as foreign
subsidies, would not be able to with-
stand such measures indefinitely, the
thinking went. If it was squeezed
enough, North Korea’s defense indus-
try would suffer, too, and Mr. Kim’s
threat to target the United States
would never be fully realized.
But then Mr. Kim went on the coun-
teroffensive.
In his 2018 New Year’s address, he
declared that “the power and reliabil-
ity” of North Korea’s nuclear warheads
and ballistic missiles had “already
been proved to the full.” He ordered
testing to stop and mass production to
start. At the same time, he announced
that he was ready for dialogue with
“compatriots” from South Korea “if
they sincerely wish” for “national
concord and unity.”
This was a deft gambit. It allowed
the new South Korean government to
jump back into conciliatory engage-
ment — which President Moon Jae-in
did almost instantly — and to help
EBERSTADT, PAGE 11
The New York Times publishes opinion
from a wide range of perspectives in
hopes of promoting constructive debate
about consequential questions.
The Oscars spread the wealth around
Alfonso Cuarón of Mexico with his awards for “Roma”: best foreign-language film, best
director and best cinematography. “Bohemian Rhapsody” won the most Oscars: four.
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PAGE 8 | TECH
INTERNATIONAL EDITION | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2019
Seeking a Plan B Protesters climbing barrels to get on a bridge to escort a humanitarian aid convoy from Colombia to Venezuela. The Venezuelan opposition
hoped the convoy would weaken the rule of President Nicolás Maduro, but only one truck made it through. Now there is new talk of the need for foreign help. PAGE 3
Giving up on capitalism
trade unionism. His parents may have
BRIGHTON, ENGLAND
gotten their news from The Sun and The
Daily Mail, but he listens to reports on
the “crisis of capitalism” from Novara
Some British millennials Media, a left-wing independent media
group. Over Christmas he started read-
are losing patience with ing Marx.
promises of social mobility Mr. McIntyre is the first in his family
to attend college, part of a vast cohort of
BY ELLEN BARRY
young Britons who were meant to em-
body upward social mobility. It is a para-
Alex McIntyre was raised on budget dox that so many in this bulge, like their
cuts. counterparts in the United States, are
The youth center where he went after giving up on free-market capitalism,
school was closed when he was 10. When convinced it cannot provide their fam-
he was 11, his mother’s housing benefit ilies with a decent life.
was shaved away, a casualty of the Wel- The general election of 2017 exposed
fare Reform Act. By the time the street- the starkest generation gap in the recent
light in his cul-de-sac began blinking off history of British politics. Young voters
at midnight, a few years later, these broke dramatically for the Labour Party,
events had knitted together into a single whose socialist leader, Jeremy Corbyn,
story, about a government policy that has promised to rebuild the welfare
had defined his childhood. state and redistribute wealth. Hardened
“Austerity, that’s what I know. That’s against the centrists of their parents’
my life,” said Mr. McIntyre. “I’ve never generation, they have tugged the party
known an England that was a different to the left, opening up rifts that are now
way.” fracturing Labour.
Now 19 and old enough to vote, Mr. The young also saw their views on
McIntyre is making up for lost time. leaving the European Union — three-
Over the last six months, he was drawn quarters of them voted to Remain —
into the center of the Momentum move- bulldozed by Leavers their grandpar-
ment, an ideological marketplace ents’ age. Mr. McIntyre is still angry
buzzing with rebranded socialism and that he was too young, by a year, to vote
LOS ANGELES
‘Green Book’ is declared
best picture, but many
films earn academy’s favor
BY BROOKS BARNES
In many ways, the 91st Academy
Awards ceremony — the first without a
host in 30 years — played out like the
more populist and less prestigious Gold-
en Globes, handed out by the Hollywood
Foreign Press Association seven weeks
earlier: It veered in multiple directions,
as voters sprinkled their attention
among a dozen pictures, with no film
walking away with a commanding
sweep.
“Green Book,” about a white chauf-
feur and his black client in segregation-
era America, won best picture and two
MONICA ALMEIDA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES other trophies on Sunday night, over-
coming a series of awards-season set-
backs and mixed reviews.
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Alex McIntyre with a friend he met in class at the University of Brighton last year. He is
now working at a pub and fighting for better working conditions and better pay.
in that 2016 referendum. He is pale and
lanky, discreetly tattooed, caustically
funny and so well-mannered that he
would rather miss his train than cut into
a line. (“Being British can be limiting,”
he observed.)
He is not representative of a genera-
By backing “Green Book,” voters
slowed the rise of Netflix, which had ag-
gressively pushed “Roma” in the best-
picture race. But Netflix made signifi-
cant inroads anyway, with “Roma,”
about a domestic worker in 1970s-era
Mexico City, winning three Oscars, in-
cluding best director and cinemato-
grapher for Alfonso Cuarón. (Netflix
had previously received only one Oscar
for a feature-length film.)
In another twist, “Bohemian Rhap-
sody,” the blockbuster biopic about
Queen and its frontman, Freddie Mer-
cury, received the most Academy
Awards — four — with wins for Rami
Malek’s lead acting and for editing,
sound mixing and sound editing.
Like “Roma,” “Black Panther” went
home with three Oscars. The Dick Che-
ney biopic, “Vice,” received one, for hair
and makeup. And “The Favourite,”
which had 10 nominations, tying
“Roma” for the most, left with one Oscar,
for Olivia Colman as lead actress.
A gobsmacked Colman gave a gig-
gling, circuitous acceptance speech that
OSCARS, PAGE 13
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The Netherlands € 3.50
Tunisia Din 5.200
SKIER’S ARDUOUS TREK
AFTER OLYMPIC GOLD,
A CANCER DIAGNOSIS
PAGE 12 | SPORTS
MERIDITH KOHUT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
MARY TURNER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
tion. But his grievance is generational:
that the state has taken away benefits
his parents and grandparents enjoyed,
like low-cost housing and free educa-
tion.
“We’re not blind to it. We’re not stupid,
BRITAIN, PAGE 2
Here to steal your heart.
nytimes.com/mlpodcast
..
Israeli leader
stakes his
future on a
racist party
JERUSALEM
Pact with anti-Arab group
condemned by left and
right at home and overseas
BY DAVID M. HALBFINGER
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of
Israel has made something of an art
form of cutting deals with small political
parties, but his latest alliance has
earned him denunciations from quar-
ters where he has usually been able to
count on unshakable support.
Mr. Netanyahu, his future imperiled
by prosecutors and political challengers
alike, has enraged Jewish leaders in Is-
rael and the United States by striking a
bargain with a racist anti-Arab party
whose ideology was likened by one in-
fluential rabbi to Nazism. Even pro-Is-
rael groups in the United States that pre-
fer to air their disagreements quietly
have issued public condemnations.
The furor has aggravated already
fraught relations between Israel and
Jews in the diaspora, undercutting Jew-
ish efforts in North America and Europe
to fight anti-Semitism at a time when it
is on the rise on both continents.
The embattled Mr. Netanyahu, grasp-
ing for every potential vote, has turned
to the extremist party Otzma Yehudit, or
Jewish Power, whose leaders have a
long history of expressing support for
violence against Palestinians, the expul-
sion of Arabs from Israel and the occu-
pied territories, and a ban on intermar-
riage or sex between Jews and Arabs.
The prime minister arranged for the
organization to merge into a somewhat
more mainstream party of religious Zi-
onists, the Jewish Home. That pact, an-
nounced last week, could easily catapult
Otzma Yehudit from the disreputable
fringe into Israel’s next governing coali-
tion.
Otzma Yehudit’s leaders proudly call
themselves disciples of Meir Kahane, an
anti-Arab militant born in New York
who served a term in the Israeli Parlia-
ment in the 1980s before his Kach Party
was outlawed in Israel and declared a
terrorist group by the United States. He
was assassinated in New York in 1990.
Much as Kach did, Otzma Yehudit’s
platform calls for annexing the occupied
territories, rejecting a Palestinian state,
expelling “enemies” of Israel — a euphe-
mism for Arabs — and taking “owner-
ship” of the Temple Mount. The Temple
Mount site, in Jerusalem, is holy to both
Muslims and Jews, and is overseen by
Muslim clerics under Jordanian super-
vision.
The pact between Mr. Netanyahu and
the Kahanists set off a predictable erup-
tion in the United States from liberal
Jewish groups like J Street and Ameri-
cans for Peace, as well as the Union of
Reform Judaism, which normally stays
out of Israeli politics.
ISRAEL, PAGE 4

2 | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2019
page two
‘Austerity, that’s what I know. That’s my life’
BRITAIN, FROM PAGE 1
you know,” Mr. McIntyre said. “The rea-
son we’re opposing what’s going on, is
what we’ve been dealt.”
Britons who came of age after the
global financial crisis of 2008 will, in
many cases, be worse off than their par-
ents. Born on the wrong side of skyrock-
eting property values, 30-year-olds are
only half as likely to own homes as baby
boomers were at the same age. A third
are expected to rent for their whole
lives.
Unlike previous generations, they are
expected to foot the bill for expensive
educations. The average graduate now
owes the government more than 50,800
pounds, or $64,000, a debt to be paid
back gradually upon securing a well-
paid job, according to the Institute for
Fiscal Studies. The portion of Britons at-
tending college has climbed to 49 per-
cent, the highest level ever, but they will
graduate into a historic spell of wage
stagnation.
Robert Ford, a professor of politics at
the University of Manchester, recalled
Margaret Thatcher’s thesis about home-
ownership: By allowing low-income
Britons to buy the state housing they
rented, she could make them into stake-
holders in market capitalism, enlarging
the Tory Party. With his students, realiz-
ing in their 20s that they are not likely
ever to own a home, that process has
been thrown into reverse.
“All the risk has been shifted onto
them,” he said. “They know this is not
the situation their parents and grand-
parents were in. You’ve got a generation
since the crisis with lower mobility and
lower security. It makes them less con-
vinced that the market delivers good
outcomes.”
It was a big deal for Mr. McIntyre to
make it to college.
He comes from the lower-middle-
class neighborhood of Welwyn Garden
A group of Mr. McIntyre’s fellow employees preparing placards for a series of walkouts
and strike actions. Many of the co-workers have college degrees.
City, north of London, where life ex-
pectancy trails the national average. He
grew up in a state-subsidized rental
property and attended a school ranked
“Requires Improvement” by the state
educational inspection agency. His sis-
ter had her first child at 16.
Social mobility was a mantra for the
Conservative Party during those years.
David Cameron promised this in 2010,
as he announced the tripling of univer-
sity tuition fees. Higher fees, he argued,
would open up new spots and create bet-
ter opportunities by encouraging mar-
ket competition, something closer to the
American system.
“We have made our choice,” Mr. Cam-
eron said. “A choice in favor of social mo-
bility, in favor of a fairer society. Of a
country where you can escape — truly
escape — the circumstances of your
birth.”
Mr. McIntyre was a test case for this
experiment. He was identified as gifted
and enrolled in a charity program, the
Social Mobility Foundation. He was sent
to stay at Cambridge University, where
he ate in a wood-paneled dining hall,
served by waiters, an experience he de-
scribed as “hilarious.” He thrilled his
mother by saying he wanted to become
a doctor.
But once he arrived at the University
of Brighton, that confidence collapsed.
Rents in Brighton rose faster than any-
Charles Dickens tried to banish wife to asylum, letters show
LONDON
BY PALKO KARASZ
As a great novelist and a master journal-
ist, Charles Dickens maintained tight
control over what the public learned
about his 1858 separation from his wife,
perhaps the most scandalous story in
his eventful life.
But letters revealed last week cast the
episode in a new and cruel light. Dick-
ens, they suggest, not only sought to
banish Catherine, his companion of two
decades and the mother of his 10 chil-
dren, while pursuing an affair with a
young actress, Ellen Ternan.
He also tried to have his wife impris-
oned in an asylum.
“This is a stronger and more damning
account of Dickens’s behavior than any
other,” John Bowen, a professor of 19th-
century English literature at the Univer-
sity of York in northern England, wrote
Alex McIntyre, center right, celebrating the series of walkouts and strike actions that he and his friends who work together in a pub have organized.
where else in England last year, accord-
ing to Hamptons International, a rental
agent. The room he found, at the top of a
musty, water-stained stairway, cost
more than his government maintenance
loan could cover. When he added up his
tuition and maintenance loans, the
amount he will repay the government
once he is in a secure job, it came to
£46,500, or roughly $61,000. His anxiety
was so intense that he tried to get an ap-
pointment for medication.
“It’s that feeling of having absolutely
nothing which I don’t want to even go
near,” he said.
“We’re not blind to it. We’re not
stupid, you know. The reason
we’re opposing what’s going on, is
what we’ve been dealt.”
The panic eased when he found a job
as a kitchen assistant at a J.D. Wether-
spoon pub. Wetherspoons is Britain’s
ubiquitous low-cost restaurant chain.
Its founder, a self-made millionaire
named Tim Martin, is an American-
style celebrity entrepreneur who counts
Walmart’s Sam Walton among his he-
roes.
Mr. McIntyre worked the fryer, lower-
ing hash browns and sausages in a met-
al basket into a spitting tub of hot oil, so
in The Times Literary Supplement on
Tuesday. The article accompanied the
publication of an analysis of letters held
at Harvard.
Dickens, a celebrity in his own time,
was careful of his image and legacy. In
the 1860s, he burned the letters and pa-
pers of 20 years on a bonfire in his back
yard. Many of his contemporaries acted
similarly. Still, scholars and biographers
continue efforts to pierce the privacy of
his life and his relationship with women.
The circumstances of the separation
have inspired fiction, biography and a
feature film, “The Invisible Woman,”
starring Felicity Jones as Ms. Ternan,
the lover kept in the shadows while
Dickens maintained the image of a Vic-
torian family man.
Mrs. Dickens herself rarely spoke of
the separation. Nearly a decade after
her husband’s death, she confided in Ed-
ward Dutton Cook, a theater critic and
her neighbor in Camden, north London.
The letters Professor Bowen ana-
Rents in Brighton rose faster than anywhere else in England last year, according to Hamptons International, a rental agent.
that his hands were speckled with pin-
prick burns. He liked the Wetherspoons
clientele, including the ones who lined
up, shakily, for pints at 8 a.m. “Forgotten
people,” he called them.
But he seethed over the pay and work-
ing conditions. Five days a week he
worked midnight-to-8 a.m. shifts, which
left him shaky and ill. Was this adult life,
this relentless precariousness? His co-
workers did not offer much comfort: A
lot of them already had university de-
grees.
“Other people can’t pay their rent, and
I’m a paycheck away from not being
able to pay my rent,” he said. He was in
this frame of mind when he was ap-
proached quietly by a co-worker, who
asked him, a little mysteriously, “We’re
fed up. Are you fed up?”
A few months later, Mr. McIntyre
strode out on to North Street for his first
walkout, accompanied by their union
rep from the Bakers, Food and Allied
Newly published correspondence gives Charles Dickens’s wife a voice on a scandal that
the author worked hard to keep quiet. The picture of him that emerges isn’t flattering.
Workers Union, demanding a minimum
wage of £10 an hour. The strikers looked
nothing like the coal miners of the 1980s
printed on Britain’s collective memory;
they were sons and daughters of the
middle class, wearing wallet chains and
leopard skin pants and Doc Martens.
“You are already trending, No. 6 on Twit-
ter,” whooped the union rep. “Solidarity
from Plovdiv, Bulgaria!” someone
shouted.
Afterward, Mr. McIntyre was so exhil-
arated that he barely slept. “I’m sitting
here with a cup of coffee, thinking,
‘What just happened?’ ” he said a little
later. “This is not the end. It is the first
step in something big.”
He had passed into the world of the
young left that has coalesced in Brigh-
ton, a bohemian university town.
It is a world of anticapitalist work-
shops, anarchist retreats and rent
strikes, and it is embodied by Mr. Cor-
byn, 69, a grandfatherly socialist who
CARL COURT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARY TURNER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
was dismissed as an anachronism dur-
ing the centrist era of Tony Blair and Bill
Clinton.
Mr. McIntyre said he encountered
new ideas every day now, like food on a
cafeteria shelf. He met Callum Cant, a
tall, thin, erudite doctoral student who
has organized a Marx reading group for
employees at Wetherspoons and edits
Notes from Below, an online journal on
“self-emancipation of the working class
from capitalism and the state.”
Mr. Cant, 24, who comes from a
wealthy village in Hampshire, arrived at
college in 2014 and was swept into pro-
tests against austerity and tuition hikes.
He never drifted back to the path his
parents expected of him, toward a job in
London finance or journalism.
“I get teased about coming from a pri-
vate school among comrades,” he said.
“But I got a look at what their lives were
like. They weren’t happy. They weren’t
fulfilled.”
lyzed were based on those conversa-
tions and, according to the professor, are
some of the first documents discovered
that present her perspective.
Dickens fell out of love with his wife,
Mr. Dutton Cook wrote. “She had borne
10 children and had lost many of her
good looks, was growing old, in fact.”
“He even tried to shut her up in a luna-
tic asylum, poor thing!” Mr. Dutton
Cook continued. “But bad as the law is in
regard to proof of insanity he could not
quite wrest it to his purpose.”
Dickens may well have been in a posi-
tion to sideline his wife in this way. Many
Victorian physicians, Professor Bowen
wrote in The Times Literary Supple-
ment, would have considered assertions
about his wife’s “languor” and “excit-
ability” sufficient basis to draw up a cer-
tificate of “moral insanity.”
According to other letters in the same
collection, Dickens also had what might
have seemed an ideal connection: a
friendship with Dr. Thomas Harrington
..
Now, he is one of the group of hipster
leftists who broadcast over Novara Me-
dia.
One of them, the 26-year-old Ash
Sarkar, thrilled left-wing Twitter in a
televised debate this summer by eye-
rolling Piers Morgan, one of Britain’s
most famous journalists, who had mis-
taken her for a garden-variety Labour
activist. “I’m a communist, you idiot!”
she told him, throwing him a withering
look reserved for the young who disdain
the old. “I’m literally a communist!”
(Novara now charges £15 for T-shirts
with this quote.)
One of its planks is “Fully Automated
Luxury Communism,” the notion of a
“post-work society” in which labor is
largely automated and workers live off a
“massively increased minimum wage.”
Mr. McIntyre wasn’t certain where he
stood on Marx, but he did feel at home
with the trade union guys. A future was
taking shape in Mr. McIntyre’s mind,
complete with new friends and new
ideas — the thing, in other words, that
college had been supposed to provide.
He wasn’t sure, anymore, about going
into medicine. He called his mother one
day to give her this news.
“I thought I wanted to be a scientist,
but I love politics,” he said later. “There
are amazing opportunities with the bak-
ers’ union.”
He was, he acknowledged, of two
minds, having invested so many years
in preparing for college. “I’ve accrued
half the debt, it would be quite dumb of
me to completely abandon what I’ve
worked years for,” he said. “On the other
hand, my passion for what I do at uni has
dwindled.”
She listened to him quietly and hung
up the phone, he said. A single mother,
she had worked two or three jobs the
whole time he was growing up and still
takes in ironing for extra cash. His appli-
cations to college had been thrilling for
her, and she went through the choices
with him, one by one.
“She wants me to have a better fu-
ture,” he said. “For her, that is going to
university, getting a degree, earning
loads of money.”
The next day she called to tell him to
stay in school. He said he would.
At home for the holidays, he was
warned not to discuss politics with his
Thatcherite grandparents, and tiptoed
around the subject. No one in his life has
brought up the bitter, divisive strikes of
the 1970s and ’80s, which soured public
opinion against the labor movement.
“Either they are left-wing or they are-
n’t political at all,” he said. “That’s young
people. That’s us.”
Mr. McIntyre has begun to count the
months until he will graduate and throw
himself into full-time activism.
Before Christmas he was invited by
the bakers’ union president, Ian Hod-
son, to speak to students in the left-wing
stronghold of Liverpool.
He drank pints of beer with veteran
organizers, men with meaty forearms
who spoke to him in a Lancashire twang
about Maggie Thatcher and the Peas-
ants’ Revolt. On his way home he
stopped by a picket of shipbuilders at
Liverpool’s docks, his first old-school in-
dustrial picket line.
He was bleary, after nightclubbing
with the bakers’ union president until 3
the night before, and wheeling a carry-
on bag behind him.
Then he saw what he had been look-
ing for: The gray hulk of the Cammell
Laird plant, and two dozen workers
warming their hands over a fire in a
steel barrel. They were picketing over
layoffs, and complained that they had
been replaced by Romanians. A half-fin-
ished icebreaker loomed at the pier, its
deck crawling with tiny figures. “This is
Franny, he built the Titanic,” joked one of
the men, and offered Mr. McIntyre a ba-
con sandwich.
“It’s so inspiring,” Mr. McIntyre said.
“It gives me goose bumps.”
He picked up a union banner and
walked out to the roadway to hold it for a
few minutes, trying to make eye contact
with the drivers. Cargo trucks were bar-
reling by and drenching his feet in
plumes of water.
A few of them saw him. A van marked
“compressed air” honked. A street
sweeper honked. So did a flatbed truck
loaded with wooden pallets. Mr. McIn-
tyre grinned. He was at home. “I love it,”
he said.
Tuke, a psychiatrist who ran a private
lunatic asylum near London.
But correspondence suggests that Dr.
Tuke rebuffed Dickens. After 1864, the
novelist was calling the doctor a
“wretched Being” and a “Medical Don-
key.”
The collection of 98 letters from Mr.
Dutton Cook to a journalist friend,
William Moy Thomas, was bought at
auction in 2014.
“This is a great man who set out to do
good in life and he did do great things,”
Claire Tomalin, who has written biogra-
phies of both Dickens and Ms. Ternan,
told The Times of London this past
week. “But when he went off the rails, he
started behaving very badly.”
“Reading the material was quite diffi-
cult to be honest,” Professor Bowen
wrote in a statement from the Univer-
sity of York. “Dickens is a literary great
who I have studied and admired for
many years, but some of the letters
made very uncomfortable reading.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2019 | 3

World
Venezuela’s opposition seeks a Plan B
NEWS ANALYSIS
CÚCUTA, COLOMBIA
With aid stuck at border,
there’s new talk of a need
for foreign intervention
BY NICHOLAS CASEY
AND ALBINSON LINARES
As the humanitarian aid at the heart of a
Venezuelan border standoff remained in
warehouses this week, and with Presi-
dent Nicolás Maduro’s blockade still in-
tact, it became clear that the opposition
leaders trying to oust him had little in
the way of a Plan B.
Juan Guaidó, the top opposition offi-
cial, and his allies had hoped that getting
the badly needed food and medicine in-
side Venezuela by force would represent
a moment of irreversible collapse in Mr.
Maduro’s authority. But just one aid
truck made it through on Saturday, the
deadline set by the opposition to end the
impasse, and Mr. Maduro easily fended
off the biggest challenge to his power
since Mr. Guaidó swore himself in as the
country’s rightful leader last month.
Clashes between opposition pro-
testers and forces loyal to Mr. Maduro,
which have left four dead since Friday,
continued into Sunday, threatening the
image of Mr. Guaidó’s nonviolent move-
ment. The military officials crucial to
keeping Mr. Maduro in power largely re-
sisted Mr. Guaidó’s call for mass defec-
tions, with only about 150 deserting. And
even Mr. Guaidó’s own future remained
unclear: After he slipped over the bor-
der into Colombia on Friday, disobeying
a travel ban, it was anyone’s guess
whether Mr. Maduro would allow him to
return.
“It was one of the outcomes we had
imagined, but it wasn’t the one we
wanted,” said Armando Armas, an oppo-
sition lawmaker, adding that it was un-
likely the organizers would try to get the
aid through again soon. “We can’t ex-
pose our people any more. The entry of
humanitarian aid can’t be the trigger of
a wider conflict.”
But while Mr. Maduro prevailed in
this border showdown, conditions inside
the country remain deeply unfavorable
to him. He is still immensely unpopular
within Venezuela, where he has over-
seen one of the most catastrophic eco-
nomic disasters in Latin American his-
tory, a calamity that has led a tenth of
the population to leave the country,
largely because of shortages of food and
medicine. Further damage was done to
his image on Saturday as he denied aid
to suffering Venezuelans.
Mr. Guaidó, for his part, has galva-
nized his country, and more than 50
other nations have recognized his claim
to the presidency. The Trump adminis-
tration, a vocal supporter of Mr. Guaidó,
has issued crippling sanctions against
Mr. Maduro’s state oil company.
Still, even if few doubted that the op-
position’s resolve would be lost over its
failure to deliver the food and medicine,
Above, opposition protesters preparing Molotov cocktails near a bridge connecting Norte de Santander, Colombia, with Venezuela. Only one truck carrying humanitarian aid made
it through the Venezuelan government’s blockade. Below, Venezuelan security forces fired tear gas at protesters who tried to escort the aid across the bridge.
Saturday seemed like a turning point,
with new talk of a need for foreign inter-
vention.
Mr. Guaidó, a 35-year-old who had
emerged onto the national stage only in
recent months, had sought a political
weapon in the arrival of international
aid donations. He announced Saturday
as the day of an “aid avalanche,” in
which his supporters would defy the
“Yesterday, we brought
humanitarian aid, we brought
flowers and flags, and we got
bullets instead.”
president and break his control of the
borders. The presidents of Colombia,
Chile and Paraguay joined the effort,
along with the British billionaire Rich-
ard Branson, who flew to the border to
attend a concert where a lineup of Latin
pop musicians urged that the aid be al-
lowed through.
Yet by day’s end, the avalanche was
more like a drop in the bucket.
Some of the supplies, instead of reach-
ing Venezuelans in need, had been
burned after crossing from Colombia.
Mr. Maduro, seeing the aid as undermin-
ing his authority, had declared that his
country was not a beggar and did not
need it. Government forces and allied
groups backed up that message with vi-
olence, bringing condemnation from the
United Nations on Sunday.
Thwarted at the border, the opposi-
tion began rallying around the banner of
foreign action to topple Mr. Maduro.
Ahead of the meeting with Vice Presi-
dent Mike Pence and other regional
leaders in Bogotá on Monday, Mr.
Guaidó wrote on Twitter that “we must
keep all options open for the liberation of
our homeland.” Julio Borges, another
opposition leader, said he would ask for
the use of force at that meeting.
President Trump has raised some
hopes for such an intervention, saying
that “the twilight hour of socialism” has
arrived in the Western Hemisphere.
But “the U.S. rhetoric was over the
top,” said Charles S. Shapiro, a former
ambassador to Venezuela, adding that
the statements may have led some in the
opposition to believe that military as-
sistance would be on the way if Mr. Ma-
duro blocked the aid.
As those shipments were stymied, im-
ages of violence marked Colombia’s bor-
der bridges on Sunday. Near the San-
tander Bridge, where aid had been
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MERIDITH KOHUT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
burned the day before, dozens of young
men hurled stones at Venezuelan secu-
rity forces and erected barriers.
Others stalked the streets of a nearby
neighborhood in search of ingredients to
make homemade bombs and masks to
ward off tear gas. “Yesterday, we
brought humanitarian aid, we brought
flowers and flags, and we got bullets in-
stead,” said Delbert Rondón, a 34-year-
old who had left the western city of
Mérida seeking medicine. “I’m here un-
der the bridge helping the boys — I pass
them rocks, rags, bottles of water, vin-
egar. We have to help them because they
are the resistance.”
Those scenes, however, were ones
that the opposition had sought to avoid.
Major protest movements in 2014 and
2017 started off as peaceful demonstra-
tions, but as the weeks wore on, they
were overtaken by groups largely com-
posed of young men who clashed with
security forces in the streets. In 2017
alone, the clashes resulted in the deaths
of more than 100 people on both sides.
Mr. Guaidó’s movement had appeared
to avoid street violence and requests for
foreign military intervention.
After declaring himself president on
Jan. 23 to the cheers of crowds, he had
amassed hundreds of thousands of sup-
porters on the streets of Caracas, the
capital, and other cities in largely peace-
ful rallies. His strategy was rooted in a
mix of civil disobedience and interna-
tional pressure, urging Mr. Maduro’s
military to abandon him, rather than
seeking an outside military campaign to
topple him.
“The nonviolent character of these
protests is absolutely key in making a
difference,” said David Smilde, a senior
fellow at the Washington Office on Latin
America. He added that the more the op-
position requested outside military in-
tervention, the less likely it would be
that Venezuelans would demonstrate in
the belief that foreign help was near.
A march on Sunday on the Colombian
border was meant to be a model for oth-
ers to come. Organizers said the plan
had been for protesters to walk along-
side trucks filled with humanitarian aid
across three bridges, persuading sol-
diers on the other side to let the aid
across with appeals that the families of
the armed forces suffer the same short-
ages as most Venezuelans.
The marchers received blessings by a
priest at an encampment at sunrise, and
by early afternoon thousands had gath-
ered with white roses and had begun
linking arms near the Tienditas Bridge.
Organizers planned to use a tow truck to
remove shipping containers left as an
obstacle by Mr. Maduro’s government.
At a pedestrian footbridge farther
south, cheers erupted as aid trucks be-
gan to approach the border, with hun-
dreds of young Venezuelans sitting atop
the shipments.
But then Venezuelan national guard
soldiers fired tear gas canisters toward
the cars. Many of the protesters stepped
off the trucks and rushed the soldiers,
throwing stones. Soon, large crowds
were tossing rocks up to the stone
throwers on the bridge, as opposition ac-
tivists and Colombian national police of-
ficers watched on.
Anatoly Kurmanaev contributed report-
ing from San Antonio, Venezuela.

A slow train ride dictated by politics Drug lord’s home leveled,

BEIJING
BY JANE PERLEZ
The young leader of North Korea likes to
present himself as a modern man pro-
jecting his isolated country onto the
world stage.
But for his meeting with President
Trump in Vietnam this week, the North
Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, is traveling
south through China in an armored train
— not even a high-speed one — and then
planning to drive the last leg to Hanoi,
the Vietnamese capital. The journey is
expected to take as long as two days
from the starting point in Pyongyang,
the capital of North Korea, instead of a
few hours by plane.
His unusual itinerary can be ex-
plained by geopolitics, the rickety state
of North Korean aircraft and a bit of his-
tory.
Mr. Kim, who left the railway station
in Pyongyang on Saturday, appears to
be indulging China by taking such a pro-
tracted trip. His dark green train will
take him past glistening cities and pro-
ductive countryside that show off the
country’s four decades of blazing eco-
nomic growth.
China has played host to Mr. Kim four
times in the past year, in an effort to im-
press upon the North Korean leader that
China, not the United States, is his best
bet as an economic model. In turn, Mr.
Kim, 35, has dutifully toured Chinese
green energy projects and high-tech
ventures and shown deference to the
Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, who is al-
most twice his age.
But the young leader chafes at China’s
hold, and his train trip shows that there
are limits to it.
When he traveled to meet Mr. Trump
for the first time in Singapore last June,
Mr. Kim borrowed a Boeing 747 belong-
ing to the Chinese national carrier, Air
China. (His own Soviet-made Ilyushin
Il-62 is almost 40 years old and short of
spare parts.)
The train journey suggests that he
was reluctant to do so again.
The North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on his armored train before leaving Pyongyang,
North Korea, for Vietnam, where he will meet President Trump this week.
“He does not want to show the world
his heavy reliance on China by waving
his hand in front of China’s national flag
on a Chinese plane as he did at the Sin-
gapore airport,” said Cheng Xiaohe, a
North Korea expert at Renmin Univer-
sity in Beijing.
The resulting jokes about North Ko-
rea’s being a province of China appar-
ently did not sit well with Mr. Kim.
“Traveling by train is a forced choice,”
Mr. Cheng said.
Until Mr. Kim arrived in the Chinese
border city of Dandong late Saturday,
Chinese analysts doubted that the
North Korean leader would take his own
train across China. The security de-
mands would entail too much upheaval
to the regular schedules for China’s vast
fleet of heavily used high-speed trains,
they said.
But China is clearly willing to make
the sacrifice, said Yun Sun, an analyst at
the Stimson Center, a research institute
in Washington.
“The Chinese see the trip as a sign of
North Korea’s complete trust and that
only China can guarantee his safety,”
KCNA, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
Ms. Yun said. “And every time North Ko-
rean leaders travel through China, the
hope is to show them how great eco-
nomic reform is.”
The train journey affords a nice sym-
metry with the travels of Mr. Kim’s
grandfather Kim Il-sung, the founder of
North Korea, to whom the young leader
bears a strong resemblance.
Kim Il-sung first visited Vietnam in
November 1958. Like the current North
Korean leader, he went to China first be-
fore venturing to Vietnam, where he
was greeted by the Communist leader
Ho Chi Minh.
Photographs from that 1958 trip that
appeared this weekend in the Chinese
state newspaper The Global Times
show the portly Kim Il-sung with
sharply barbered black hair embracing
the reed-thin Ho Chi Minh.
Mr. Kim toured the Chinese cities Bei-
jing, Wuhan and Guangzhou, according
to The Global Times, and then arrived in
Hanoi on a plane provided by China.
The current North Korean leader ap-
pears to be taking a route similar to his
grandfather’s, with some tweaks. It is
unclear how much sightseeing is
planned. After Dandong, in the north-
eastern rust belt of China, Mr. Kim is
likely to see the skylines of Wuhan and
Changsha, among the most developed
cities in central China (the train’s re-
ported speed: about 35 miles per hour).
He will see China’s two major water-
ways, the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers,
and arrive at the Vietnamese border
southwest of Guilin, a city revered
among the Chinese for its mountainous
landscape.
In a sign of the rivalry between China
and its southern neighbor, Vietnam has
deliberately continued to use different
spacing on its railroad tracks, which in
the past made it more difficult for China
to invade, Mr. Cheng said. So Mr. Kim
will have to leave his train at the border
with Vietnam. He will travel the last 105
miles or so to Hanoi by road, Vietnam-
ese officials say, a winding route
through low mountains.
Before meeting Mr. Trump, Mr. Kim is
planning talks with leaders of Vietnam’s
Communist Party during what is being
billed as a state visit, similar to the one
made by his grandfather.
The big question for Mr. Kim is
whether his courting of China will pay
off with real support.
Above all, Mr. Kim wants Beijing to
urge the United Nations to ease sanc-
tions against North Korea. That is also
expected to be his major request of Mr.
Trump in Hanoi.
Overturning the sanctions is likely to
require more than a train ride through
China and a show of interest in China’s
economic model, Ms. Yun said.
So far, China has urged the United Na-
tions to ease some sanctions, and Bei-
jing may reward Mr. Kim with more ag-
ricultural aid starting in the spring. But
that is probably the limit, she said.
“I don’t think China wants to cross
Trump at this point — the price is too
high considering the trade deal,” she
said, referring to the trade talks be-
tween Washington and Beijing that are
reaching a critical point.
Luz Ding contributed research.
as Colombia confronts past
BY MEGAN SPECIA
As the looming gray building imploded,
crumbling into a pile of debris and dust,
a crowd of onlookers cheered. Some
wept.
The televised blast that leveled the
Monaco building, the former home of
the drug kingpin Pablo Escobar in
Medellín, Colombia, erased a symbol of
the city’s past that many have tried to
forget.
In its place, the city is planning a me-
morial park to honor the victims of his
drug cartel’s crimes.
“Today, that building falls and hope
begins,” President Iván Duque of Co-
lombia said in a televised statement. “It
is impossible to change the past, but you
can build a better present and a better
future.”
Mr. Escobar lived in the Monaco for
years, until 1988, when rivals bombed it.
The Escobar family abandoned the
structure and it has remained vacant
ever since.
But more than 25 years after Mr. Es-
cobar’s death, the six-story building
with a penthouse had still incited heated
debate, as city officials have weighed
the potential tourist draw of the site
against the urge to move on from a
painful past.
The drug lord’s legacy has cast a
shadow over Medellín, driven in part by
new documentaries, television shows
like the Netflix hit “Narcos” and books
that have focused on Mr. Escobar’s life
— often neglecting the details of his vic-
tims and glorifying his legacy.
In death, he has become something of
a folk hero for his meteoric rise from the
working class to billionaire and for his
generosity to some, building houses and
hospitals for the poor.
Tour guides — including Pablo Esco-
bar’s top hit man, John Jairo Velásquez,
known as Popeye — take customers on
walks through the cartel’s old haunts.
Street vendors sell T-shirts emblazoned
with Mr. Escobar’s face.
But the tourist narrative often leaves
out the impact of his bloody rise to
power and the bribery, kidnappings and
killings of anyone who dared defy the
cartel.
The mayor of Medellín, Federico
Gutiérrez, told the local news outlet El
Colombiano before the demolition that
knocking down the structure was an im-
portant symbolic step forward for the
city and the country.
He said that flipping the narrative by
emphasizing victims’ stories, rather
than glorifying the illegal activity of Mr.
Escobar and others like him, was essen-
tial to reclaiming Colombia’s national
story.
The tourist narrative often makes
him a folk hero, but it leaves out
the effects on his victims of the
violence that supported him.
“We are concerned about the way in
which we have narrated, and stopped
narrating, our own history,” Mr.
Gutiérrez said. “In most stories, the per-
petrators are the protagonists, and this
has long-term consequences, because it
ends up validating an environment of il-
legality.”
The city consulted neighbors, aca-
demics, local artists and the families of
victims to design the memorial park, he
said.
The purpose of demolishing the Mon-
aco on Friday “is not to erase history,” he
said. “We need our young people to
know the stories, to tell them this cannot
happen again.”
Last week, Mr. Gutiérrez joined doz-
ens of victims’ families and members of
the community for a ceremony on the
grounds of a hotel near the site of the
Monaco, where they watched the build-
ing fall.
“Medellín can tell a different story,” he
told the crowd. “Today a symbol falls
and a light of hope is born.”

4 | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2019
world
Israeli leader stakes future on anti-Arab party
ISRAEL, FROM PAGE 1
But the outrage was not limited to the
left.
On Friday, the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee, the American lobby-
ing group known as Aipac, and the
American Jewish Committee, both of
which rarely weigh in publicly on Israeli
politics, declared Otzma Yehudit’s ideas
“reprehensible.” They vowed not to
have any contact with its leaders even if
they become part of the next govern-
ment.
In an equally extraordinary step,
Rabbi Benny Lau of Jerusalem, a pillar
of religious Zionism, repeatedly assailed
the merger over the weekend, warning
on social media that “the defilement and
destruction of the land serves as a guar-
antee for the loss of the land.”
Rabbi Lau lamented that the prime
minister seemed concerned only with
winning re-election, and, from his pulpit
at the Rambam Synagogue, likened Ka-
hanism to Nazism and its ideas to the
anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws of Nazi
Germany.
In Israel’s chaotic parliamentary sys-
tem, small parties like the ultra-Ortho-
dox Shas can be make or break when it
comes to forming a majority coalition af-
ter an election, and Mr. Netanyahu has
routinely struck deals giving them out-
size influence.
But this time, he is running with his
indictment on corruption charges
widely expected, and facing his tough-
est challenge yet from Benny Gantz, a
centrist and popular former army chief.
So desperate to prevent any right-wing
ballots from being squandered on a
party unable to win its own seats in the
Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, Mr. Ne-
tanyahu has pre-emptively stretched
his coalition’s margins farther to the
right than ever before.
The two leaders of Otzma Yehudit
who could win Knesset seats, depending
on the merged party’s share of the vote
in April, are Michael Ben Ari and Itamar
Ben Gvir. They are co-founders of
Lehava, a group that opposes Jewish-
Arab relationships and was implicated
in a 2014 arson attack on a school for
Jewish and Arab children in Jerusalem.
Mr. Ben Ari calls Arabs the “enemy”
and advocates expelling them. He was
denied a visa to the United States in 2012
as a member of a terrorist organization.
Mr. Ben Gvir, who was a legislative
aide for Mr. Ben Ari, has acknowledged
having a picture in his home of Baruch
Goldstein, the Kahane follower who
massacred 29 Palestinians while they
were praying at a mosque in Hebron, in
the West Bank, in 1994.
Mr. Ben Gvir first gained notoriety in
1995, as a radical opponent of the Oslo
peace process, when he stole the hood
ornament from Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin’s car and said, “We got to his car,
and we’ll get to him, too.” Weeks later,
Mr. Rabin was assassinated by a mem-
ber of a group that also had roots in Ka-
hanism.
Stepping (ever so slightly) out of Trump’s shadow
SHANNON, IRELAND
Vice president is careful
to stay on message, no
matter the diplomatic cost
BY KATIE ROGERS
When it came time to stretch his legs
during a refueling stop in Ireland on his
recent Europe trip, Vice President Mike
Pence left his cabin suite at the front of
Air Force Two dressed in a flight jacket
with the vice presidential seal.
As he disembarked to stroll a few laps
around the airport terminal like a Mid-
western mall walker, his wife, Karen,
made a beeline to an assortment of sou-
venirs in the duty-free shop.
Back across the Atlantic, President
Trump, Mr. Pence’s boss, was in the
midst of firing off his early morning
tweets, including one addressed to the
Senate Intelligence Committee denying,
once again, that there was any collusion
between the Trump campaign and Rus-
sia. The vice president, for his part,
seemed worlds away, enjoying a brief
stop with the second lady as if they were
tourists on a long-planned vacation.
“You will never ever hear him
talk about his conversations,
his advice, their discussions,
ever.”
Appearing together in Washington,
Mr. Trump, a former reality show mogul,
and Mr. Pence, an evangelical Christian,
are a strikingly odd couple, with the vice
president usually seen as a meek help-
mate casting a cipher’s gaze in the presi-
dent’s direction. But with at least 10 dip-
lomatic trips to six continents under his
belt, Mr. Pence appears to have mas-
tered the art of stepping out of Mr.
Trump’s shadow on his own terms. He
avoids taking any perilous steps into the
president’s limelight by staying relent-
lessly on message, whatever the diplo-
matic cost.
Their contrasting styles will be on dis-
play again this week. On Wednesday,
Mr. Trump will be engaging in a high-
stakes, if not theatrical, summit meeting
in Vietnam with Kim Jong-un, the North
Korean leader and his occasional pen
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, grasping for every potential vote, has turned to the extremist party Otzma Yehudit, whose ideology has been likened to Nazism.
Itamar Ben Gvir, right, a leader of Otzma Yehudit, which has expressed support for
violence against Palestinians and the expulsion of Arabs from Israel.
pal. That meeting comes with the added
drama of Mr. Trump’s former fixer testi-
fying to Congress on the same day.
With Mr. Trump in the spotlight, Mr.
Pence will be left to test his international
clout against a conflict that turned
deadly over recent attempts to deliver
humanitarian aid to Venezuela, a coun-
try reeling from a collapsed economy
and violent political turmoil. On Mon-
day, Mr. Pence was scheduled to visit
Bogotá, Colombia, to reinforce the
Trump administration’s demands that
Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan presi-
dent, step down to clear the way for
Juan Guaidó, the opposition leader who
has the support of the White House.
This urgent situation in Latin Amer-
ica will present a thornier challenge to
the vice president than his four-day trip
this month to Poland and Germany,
where he was sent to deliver earnest, el-
oquent entreaties in support of Israel
and to accuse Iran of trying to perpe-
trate another Holocaust.
Despite the sharp language, it was a
comparatively low-stakes trip. On the
first leg, Mr. Pence dined on cod and
posed for group pictures at an adminis-
tration-organized summit meeting,
which was ostensibly about Middle East
peace but was geared heavily toward
isolating Iran. He took it in stride when
Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state,
was accidentally identified as the vice
president during a luncheon.
But Mr. Pence demonstrated little in-
terest in other delicate relationships at
play when he demanded that European
allies exit the nuclear accord with Iran
negotiated by the Obama administra-
tion and accused them of undermining
American-led sanctions. Mr. Pence’s ag-
gressive approach infuriated those who
watched it happen, including Mr. Pom-
peo, the administration’s top diplomat.
He stayed relentlessly on message
even while fielding questions from re-
porters aboard Air Force Two about his
visit to the former Auschwitz concentra-
tion camp.
“We just felt waves of emotion,” Mr.
Pence said about his time there, allow-
ing only a peek into his personal experi-
ence of the trip, which included laying
roses in a gas chamber and reading from
Scripture.
He then veered back into a screed
against Iran, accusing the government
of harboring “the same vile, anti-Semitic
hatred that animated the Nazis in Eu-
rope,” and calling on “freedom loving”
GALI TIBBON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
Vice President Mike Pence and his wife, Karen, arriving in Munich this month. He has at least 10 diplomatic trips under his belt.
people to condemn the Iranian govern-
ment.
Mr. Pence’s demand that the allies
leave the nuclear accord was all but ig-
nored by the crowd at his next stop, the
Munich Security Conference. Angela
Merkel, the German chancellor, publicly
stuck with Iran and criticized the Trump
administration in a speech moments be-
fore Mr. Pence took the stage to deliver
his own.
One of the few indicators that Mr.
Pence noticed the chilly European re-
ception came when he mentioned Mr.
Trump.
“I bring greetings from the 45th presi-
dent of the United States of America:
President Donald Trump,” Mr. Pence
said. The reference that drew raucous
applause at “Make America Great
Again” rallies drew silence in Munich.
The chorus of outrage over Mr. Netan-
yahu’s actions reflected pent-up con-
cern and frustration in the United States
and elsewhere over the prime minister’s
right-wing and ultra-Orthodox-ap-
proved policies and how difficult they
are making it for liberal Jews to defend
Israel against growing opposition, in-
cluding among new members of Con-
gress.
Aipac did not comment beyond a terse
Twitter post on Friday, but that alone
was exceptional: In 2017, when Mr. Ne-
tanyahu infuriated American Jews by
reneging on a deal to improve access to
the Western Wall for non-Orthodox wor-
shipers, the group sent emissaries to
register objections but said nothing in
public.
Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin of Temple
Solel in Hollywood, Fla., called Mr. Ne-
tanyahu’s actions a “slap in the face to
American Jews” as they grapple with
new political challenges posed by Rep-
resentative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of
The vice president’s allies say it is not
his job to worry about how he might be
judged for the message he is delivering
on the world stage — even if it creates a
mess diplomats need to clean up.
“I don’t think it was as much about
how he was received,” Marc Short, Mr.
Pence’s incoming chief of staff, said. “He
was effective in getting his message
across.”
This relatively low-key approach
makes for a kind of comfortable stability
as well as a whiff of rigidity on Mr.
Pence’s trips.
Mr. Pence does not drink — he gave it
up in the past, Mr. Short said, for “lots of
reasons,” so no alcohol is served on-
board Air Force Two.
Mr. Pence opts for coffee as he revises
and tweaks his prepared remarks at all
hours. Any reporters or West Wing staff
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
POOL PHOTO BY ABIR SULTAN
Minnesota, and other supporters of the
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
movement against Israel.
Aipac clearly understood “that if they
need to defend Israel to America, then
Israel needs to be able to be morally de-
fensible,” Rabbi Salkin said.
The prime minister hopes to line
up enough lawmakers to keep
him in power even if he is put on
trial for corruption.
Yohanan Plesner, president of the Is-
rael Democracy Institute, said it was the
first time Aipac had spoken out on do-
mestic issues involving Israel’s charac-
ter as a democratic state. Mr. Netanya-
hu’s move, he said, had made it harder
both to preserve bipartisan American
support for Israel and sustain enthusi-
asm among American Jews.
“There’s a difference between a racist
MATTHIAS SCHRADER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
members along for the ride have to
make do.
When they are in different places, ac-
cording to aides, Mr. Pence and the pres-
ident speak several times a day. Their
conversations tend to remain private
even among the vice president’s closest
advisers.
“You will never ever hear him talk
about his conversations, his advice,
their discussions, ever,” said Marc Lot-
ter, Mr. Pence’s former spokesman.
“The only thing we would hear is, ‘The
president wants us to do this.’”
This deferential style is one Mr. Pence
has told people he admired in George
H.W. Bush when he was Ronald Rea-
gan’s vice president.
Mr. Bush was so humble that he re-
fused to let a helicopter deposit him on
the South Lawn after Mr. Reagan was
..
party entering the Knesset — the
fringes of Israeli democracy can unfor-
tunately contain such elements — and
their being encouraged by the prime
minister,” Mr. Plesner said. Still, on Sun-
day, Aipac said it was “honored” to an-
nounce that Mr. Netanyahu would at-
tend its conference next month.
For Mr. Netanyahu, his push to har-
vest every last right-wing vote is not
merely about winning re-election. With
the attorney general expected any day
now to announce that he will seek Mr.
Netanyahu’s indictment in a sprawling
bribery scandal, the prime minister
hopes to line up enough lawmakers to
keep him in power even if he is put on
trial — “what you may label an indict-
ment-proof coalition,” said Mr. Plesner.
“He’s entering this campaign with
much fewer inhibitions than in the past,”
Mr. Plesner said.
Indeed, in just the past few weeks, to
score political points Mr. Netanyahu has
antagonized Arab diplomats by leaking
a video of a private meeting with them;
attacked members of his own party he
sees as potential successors; bragged
publicly about secret military strikes in
Syria; warned darkly that a victory by
Mr. Gantz would give Arab politicians
enhanced power; and warned that “a
Palestinian state would endanger our
existence,” just months before the
United States is expected to issue its
peace plan.
In pushing the Otzma Yehudit deal,
Mr. Netanyahu even threw his own
party, Likud, under the bus, giving away
one of its Knesset candidacies to a mem-
ber of Jewish Home as recompense for
the merger. Moreover, he promised Jew-
ish Home the ministries responsible for
both housing and education.
That itself raises concerns among
more moderate right-wing Israelis. A
leader of Jewish Home, Bezalel
Smotrich, who could be handed one of
those posts, has called himself a “proud
homophobe,” supported segregated ma-
ternity wards for Arab and Jewish wom-
en, said Jewish developers should not
have to sell homes to Arabs and favored
a shoot-to-kill policy against Palestinian
stone-throwers.
With old lines between Likud and the
farthest right wing growing blurry,
Yossi Klein Halevi, a scholar at the
Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusa-
lem, observed that campaign ads had
popped up on city buses showing Moshe
Kahlon, the foreign minister, who heads
his own center-right party, alongside
Menachem Begin, the first Likud prime
minister.
“The sane right,” the ads say, in an im-
plicit attack on today’s Likud.
Mr. Halevi, who was a Kahane fol-
lower in the 1970s but renounced his
ideas long ago, said Israelis had yet to
absorb the ramifications of the Otzma
Yehudit-Jewish Home merger. “We’re in
for a major moment of self-reckoning,”
he said. “More and more Israelis are go-
ing to realize what that means.”
shot in a 1981 assassination attempt.
“Only the president lands on the South
Lawn,” Mr. Bush remarked at the time.
And so, even on Mr. Pence’s European
trip, Mr. Trump’s influence could hardly
be missed. His in-flight entourage con-
tained several Trump loyalists, includ-
ing the president’s daughter Ivanka and
her husband, Jared Kushner, the archi-
tect of the administration’s nascent Mid-
dle East peace plan, who traveled along-
side Mr. Pence for most of his stops.
Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant
general well liked by Mr. Trump, found
his way aboard as Mr. Pence’s national
security adviser. He landed in Pence
World last year, after a previous stint as
the president’s acting national security
adviser — a role he assumed after Mi-
chael T. Flynn was dismissed for misin-
forming Mr. Pence about the nature of a
conversation with Russia’s ambassador
to the United States.
Pence loyalists were also given a seat
— and access to the P.A. system. Tom
Rose, a former publisher of The Jerusa-
lem Post and conservative talk show
host turned senior adviser to the vice
president, got on it after Mr. Pence vis-
ited Auschwitz.
“Of all the friends we have, two truly
stand above them all,” Mr. Rose said.
“President Donald Trump and my be-
loved friend, a true Lion of Judah, Vice
President Mike Pence.”
Travelers aboard broke into applause,
and the plane was cleared for takeoff.
Mr. Pence’s mission on Monday is to
put further pressure on Mr. Maduro, an
embattled leader whose government
the Trump administration has declared
an ideological adversary of the United
States. The decision to send a vice presi-
dent into a volatile political situation in
Latin America does not come without
risky precedent: In 1958, Richard M.
Nixon’s motorcade was attacked when
Mr. Nixon, then the vice president,
toured Caracas, Venezuela.
Still, for Mr. Pence, Latin America is
well-trodden territory: It is his fifth trip
there as vice president. He has visited
often enough to draw Mr. Maduro’s at-
tention: Last summer, Mr. Maduro
lashed out at Mr. Pence, calling him
“sick and obsessive” and a “poisonous
viper” when he learned the vice presi-
dent was visiting the region.
The insult will most likely not deter
Mr. Pence from delivering the latest iter-
ation of Mr. Trump’s message. As Mr.
Short put it, “he gives a terrific speech.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Military families reeling over polluted water
FOUNTAIN, COLO.
Move is made to clean up
toxic drinking systems,
but frustrations persist
BY JULIE TURKEWITZ
When Army Staff Sgt. Samuel Fortune
returned from Iraq, his body battered by
war, he assumed he’d be safe.
Then the people around him began to
get sick. His neighbors, all living near
five military bases, complained of tu-
mors, thyroid problems and debilitating
fatigue. Soon, the Colorado health de-
partment announced an unusually high
number of kidney cancers in the region.
Then Mr. Fortune’s wife fell ill.
The military, it turned out, had been
leaching toxic chemicals into the water
for decades.
Mr. Fortune felt “stabbed in the back,”
he said. “We give our lives and our bod-
ies for our country, and our government
does not live up to their end of the deal.”
That was 2016. Since then, the De-
fense Department has admitted that it
allowed a firefighting foam to slip into at
least 55 drinking water systems at mili-
tary bases around the globe, sometimes
for generations. This exposed tens of
thousands of Americans, possibly many
more, to per- and polyfluoroalkyl sub-
stances, a group of synthetic chemicals
known as PFASs that have been linked
to cancers, immune suppression and
other serious health problems.
Though the presence of the chemicals
has been known for years, an announce-
ment a week ago from the Environmen-
tal Protection Agency for the first time
promised regulatory action, a signifi-
cant acknowledgment of the startling
scope of the problem that drew outrage
from veterans and others living in con-
taminated communities.
Acting administrator Andrew
Wheeler said that the agency would be-
gin the process of potentially limiting
the presence of two of the compounds in
drinking water, calling this a “pivotal
moment in the history of the agency.”
The admission drew some praise, but
many said that it was not enough and
that millions of people would keep in-
gesting the substances while a regula-
tory process plods along. “It should
have been called an inaction plan,” said
In Milan, men win supporting roles
MILAN
BY MATTHEW SCHNEIER
There they were. You could choose your
own metaphor based on your particular
outlook. The barbarians at the gate?
The late-comers to the party? Whatever
else they were, at women’s fashion
week, or Milano Moda Donna as the Ital-
ians call it, they were everywhere: men.
From the first day, at Gucci, where
they hid behind masks and were girded
with spike collars (not, in all likelihood,
for sale, the designer Alessandro Mi-
chele said, for anyone who was curious)
to nearly the last, where they bobbed in
the wine-dark sea of Giorgio Armani’s
black-and-navy processional, they
spanned the week.
You couldn’t fairly say that they domi-
nated it. The women on the runways,
with their stern, set expressions, stalk-
ing in their fearsome heels (this was a
week to remind you that our word
“stiletto” derives from the Italian for “lit-
tle dagger”), were too powerful and too
numerous for that. It was more like a Sa-
die Hawkins Day, and women’s wear,
with the power all on its side, had invited
the men to the dance.
The reasons are easy enough to
guess. While it remains, at least for the
moment, a smaller part of the business
than women’s wear, men’s wear has
been growing explosively in recent
years. And the heads of luxury brands
have noticed the change with evident
pleasure.
“It’s more than a buzz. It’s a deeper
trend,” Sidney Toledano, chairman and
chief executive of LVMH’s Fashion
Group, told Reuters last year about the
rising tide of men’s wear. Cédric Charbit,
the chief executive of Balenciaga at Ker-
ing, LVMH’s rival, said at a Financial
Times luxury conference last year that
men represented the label’s fastest-
growing category of shoppers. And
some market research, like that con-
ducted by Euromonitor, has even sug-
gested that sales of men’s wear are on
track to outpace women’s in the near fu-
ture. Add that to the fact that a full-scale
runway show may cost well into six fig-
ures, and the most elaborate may rise to
seven.
Presenting a unified collection while
saving costs is a powerful draw, espe-
cially at a moment when fashion shows
are as much a public entertainment as
an industry invitational, and wherever
and whenever they occur, they are ulti-
mately destined to live where we in-
A water tank in Fountain, Colo., where the drinking water system was one of dozens the military polluted. Samuel Fortune, top right,
who served in Iraq, said he felt “stabbed in the back” by the military. He believes his wife fell ill from the contaminated water in 2016.
Judith Enck, a former E.P.A. regional
administrator appointed by President
Barack Obama.
While the military has used the chem-
icals extensively, it is far from the only
entity to do so, and in recent years, com-
panies like DuPont have come under fire
for leaching PFASs into water systems.
All told, 10 million people could be
drinking water laced with high levels of
PFASs, according to Patrick Breysse, a
top official at the federal Centers for Dis-
ease Control. Mr. Breysse has called the
presence of the chemicals “one of the
most seminal public health challenges”
of the coming decades.
The residents of Fountain, a moun-
tain-flanked suburb of Colorado
Springs, were told of the contamination
by local officials who had been required
by the E.P.A. to test the water for the
substances, a step toward possible regu-
lation.
Soon dozens of communities from
New York to Washington State discov-
G U CC I
GI O RG I O A R M A N I
ered their water was similarly polluted.
Many people began demanding that
state and military officials test their
blood for the chemicals, hoping to learn
the extent of their presence in their bod-
ies. The military has started an expen-
sive cleanup effort that has involved
shifting entire municipalities to new wa-
ter sources and assessing toxic plumes
that continue to spread for miles.
Maureen Sullivan, the military’s dep-
uty assistant secretary for environment,
said the government had moved “ag-
gressively” to tackle the problem, as-
sessing cleanup duties and looking for
alternatives to the firefighting foam, a
version of which the military still uses.
“I’m proud of what the Department of
Defense has done in the past two-plus
years,” she said.
But frustration persists.
The military never alerted all of the
people who drank polluted water, mean-
ing some are still in the dark. When
asked how many people were affected
RYAN DAVID BROWN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
by contamination, Ms. Sullivan said she
“couldn’t hazard a guess.”
“We’re tracking water sources,” she
said, “not people.”
Local and state governments have
had to carve millions from their budgets
to deal with the problem, much of which
may never be paid back. In places like
Oscoda, Mich., where the lake now
froths with toxic foam, residents are
fighting with defense officials over the
extent to which the military must clean
up the mess.
“When I was in the Air Force, they
preached all the time: ‘Do the right
thing. Integrity first. Service before self.
Excellence in all we do’,” said Aaron
Weed, a 22-year veteran who is now Os-
coda’s town supervisor. “This is not the
Air Force that I was a part of,” he contin-
ued. “The side of the Air Force that I am
seeing is just disgraceful.”
Blood testing has emerged as a stick-
ing point. Specifically, there is a growing
movement of veterans and others,
PHOTOGRAPHS BY VALERIO MEZZANOTTI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
SA LVATO R E F E R RAG A M O
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2019 | 5
THE NEW YORK TIMES
united in advocacy groups with names
like Fountain Valley Clean Water Coali-
tion and Need Our Water, who are ask-
ing that the military test their blood for
the chemicals, hoping to bring results to
their doctors or use them in lawsuits.
Their requests have been denied, and
the military says that too little is known
about the substances to make the re-
sults useful. Instead, it will pay for the
C.D.C. to start yearslong population-
based health studies in some communi-
ties.
“They don’t want to know,” said Cindi
Ashbeck, 56, a veteran who worked out
of Wurtsmith Air Force Base in Oscoda.
“It’s not being addressed, because you
open that can of worms, and you’ve got
an Agent Orange thing on your hands.”
PFASs are a broad class of chemicals
developed in the 1940s. Because they re-
pel grease and water, they have been
used across industries for decades, of-
ten to prevent stains. They are placed in
a dizzying array of products: food pack-
aging, nonstick pans, clothing, furni-
ture. They are also used to extinguish
fires where petroleum-based explosions
pose a danger.
But the chemicals move quickly
through the earth and into water, where
they persist indefinitely. Some scientists
creasingly all do: online.
For the designers and creators in Mi-
lan, the argument was more frequently
one of creativity and coherence than
commerce. Angela Missoni, who runs
her family’s namesake knitwear label,
invoked, in her own fashion, the old wis-
dom about measuring twice to cut once.
“I love men’s and women’s together,”
she said, standing before a blue-glitter
backdrop that matched her blue-glitter
runway and the glittery knits that she
showed for men and women alike. “It
helps to bring it together. It makes you
think in a more clear direction. Instead
of thinking twice, you think once and
you try to keep it together.”
Clarity was the virtue cited as well by
Paul Andrew of Salvatore Ferragamo,
who was elevated last week from wom-
en’s creative director to creative direc-
tor of the entire brand, men’s and wom-
en’s alike.
“When I started as creative director,
the company had so many aesthetic vi-
sions, and when you went into a Ferra-
gamo store, it was like schizophrenia,”
he said. “You didn’t really know where
to put your eye. Now you go into the
store and there’s one complete vision
between men’s and women’s.”
A complete vision does not mean one
world
have deemed them “forever chemicals,”
and over the last two decades, a growing
body of research has shown that the
compounds meant to help us are likely
hurting us.
The most comprehensive data, based
on a study of 69,000 people living near in
a West Virginia DuPont plant, say expo-
sure is associated with kidney cancer,
testicular cancer, thyroid disease, high
cholesterol and ulcerative colitis, among
other problems, while animal studies
show delays in development.
Soon, Ms. Fortune was in and out of
the hospital, and Mr. Fortune became in-
creasingly concerned that the cause of
her illness was the chemicals the mili-
tary said came from nearby Peterson
Air Force Base.
His wife told doctors of a debilitating
pain in her right abdomen, intense joint
pain and exhaustion. Her blood cell
counts rose and fell like yo-yos. Some
doctors thought it was Lyme disease;
others weren’t so sure.
Like many around the country, Mr.
Fortune has joined one of several law-
suits against the companies that made
the firefighting foam, including 3M and
Tyco Fire Products. Others, including
the City of Newburgh, N.Y., are suing the
military directly.
But the lawyer in the Colorado case,
David McDivitt, said he thought that
would be too difficult because “it’s tough
to sue the federal government.”
For years, there were signs that the
chemicals in the military’s firefighting
foam were dangerous.
Defense Department studies dating
to the 1970s indicated that the sub-
stances were harmful to laboratory ani-
mals, according to an investigation by
The Colorado Springs Gazette, and the
Army Corps of Engineers told Fort Car-
son to stop using the foam in 1991, calling
it “harmful to the environment.”
In 2000, under E.P.A. pressure, 3M
phased out production of some of the
compounds, announcing that they could
“could potentially pose a risk to human
health.” Five years later, the E.P.A. de-
clared that another compound was
“likely to be carcinogenic to humans.”
But the military has said it continued
to use firefighting foams containing the
compounds because companies have
continued to produce them and the
E.P.A. doesn’t regulate them.
Industry officials have said they are
following E.P.A. rules, while the E.P.A.
has said it is still exploring regulation.
fashion
in which gender does not figure. For all
the talk in American circles about the
rise of genderless or gender-noncon-
forming fashion, the runways of Milan
felt coed, rather than gender-agnostic.
In many cases, pieces and motifs
were appropriated for men and women,
like the motorcycle-style leather jackets
and pants or the gaping, open-plan
knitwear of Daniel Lee’s first show for
Bottega Veneta, or the ripcord-cinching
jackets of Mr. Andrew’s Ferragamo. At
Paul Surridge’s show for Roberto Ca-
valli, his Modernist tiger print — to my
eye, it looked more like a wavy surre-
alist seascape in de Chirico colors but it
wouldn’t be Cavalli without an animal
print, I suppose — and a free hand with
sequins showered men and women
both.
The danger is, rarely do men and
women look equally good in a piece.
(Vogue sniffed that the motorcycle
leather pieces were “more believable on
the men.”) So when each keeps more or
less to his or her own, bringing them into
formation, merged like lanes on a road-
way, only heightens the dissonance.
So it was that Mr. Armani’s ponytailed
gentlemen, in their check suits and blue-
on-black formal wear, gave the sense of
being mere walkers to his women.
Which was almost a shame, when you
recalled that Mr. Armani, who started
his label decades ago with men’s wear,
revolutionized women’s wear by dap-
pling it with the style and shape from the
other side of that divide.
And across that same divide came the
editors of several men’s magazines, who
appeared in their front row seats this
week at the handful of shows with mixed
casts. They are usually creatures of Mi-
lano Modo Uomo, the men-specific week
that takes place in January and June,
and bobbled around during women’s
like cheerful visitors with newly
stamped passports.
(It didn’t hurt that the schedule for
these aisle-crossers included ample
windows for lunch.)
“You know me, I love a cohesive mes-
sage,” Matthew Marden, the style direc-
tor of Esquire, said when asked how he
was finding the shows. He might have
spoken for Milan’s conflicted stance on
men’s versus women’s when he nodded
at the relaxing standards of gendered
clothing.
“Everything is so fluid these days, it’s
kind of fun,” he said. “The lines continue
to blur between what is women’s wear,
what is men’s wear.”
And then, he added, after a pause and
with a chuckle, “Within reason.”

6 | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2019
Business
SpaceIL’s Beresheet spacecraft with technicians and the company’s top executive, Ido Anteby, second from left. Launched last week, the craft is to land on the moon in April.
How Israel shot for the moon
If it succeeds, craft
will be first privately
built vessel to make trip
BY KENNETH CHANG
It started in 2010 with a Facebook post.
“Who wants to go to the moon?”
wrote Yariv Bash, a computer engineer.
A couple of friends, Kfir Damari and
Yonatan Winetraub responded, and the
three met at a bar in Holon, near Tel
Aviv. At 30, Mr. Bash was the oldest.
“As the alcohol levels in our blood in-
creased, we became more determined,”
Mr. Winetraub recalled.
They formed a nonprofit, SpaceIL, to
undertake the task. More than eight
years later, the product of their dreams,
a small spacecraft called Beresheet,
blasted off last week atop a SpaceX Fal-
con 9 rocket at the Cape Canaveral Air
Force Station in Florida.
If the mission succeeds, it will be the
first time that a private company has
gone to the moon. It will also be a point
of pride for Israel. Until now, only gov-
ernmental space agencies of three
superpower nations — the United
States, the former Soviet Union and
China — have accomplished an intact
landing on the lunar surface.
The original goal was to compete in
the Google Lunar X Prize competition,
which was offering a $20 million grand
prize for the first privately financed ven-
ture to land a robotic spacecraft on the
moon. The founders initially envisioned
a tiny lander that would weigh only a
dozen pounds, cost just $10 million and
make the trip by the end of 2012.
The challenge turned out to be much
harder and much more expensive.
“We didn’t imagine, I think, how much
time and effort it would take,” Mr. Dam-
ari said.
After several extensions, the deadline
for the Google Lunar X Prize passed a
year ago without a winner. Even without
the $20 million prize, SpaceIL persisted.
Unlike many of the other competing
teams that wanted to build profitable
businesses, SpaceIL had given itself a
mission, to inspire students in Israel to
take an interest in science and engineer-
ing.
“This is our bigger vision,” Mr. Dam-
ari said. SpaceIL would build the first Is-
raeli spaceship to travel far from Earth,
but for today’s students, “It's their job to
build the next one,” he said.
As part of SpaceIL’s parsimonious ap-
proach, Beresheet, which means “Gene-
sis” or “in the beginning” in Hebrew,
tagged along aboard the SpaceX rocket
with an Indonesian communications
satellite as well as a small experimental
satellite for the United States Air Force.
Beresheet will not take the quick, di-
rect path to the moon. That would re-
quire a fuel-guzzling firing of a large en-
gine to break out of Earth orbit and then
another to slow down at the moon. In-
stead, with several engine firings, the
spacecraft will slowly adjust its orbit,
stretching to the outermost point until
the moon’s gravity pulls it into lunar or-
bit.
That is a long and winding, four-mil-
lion-mile-long journey to reach a desti-
nation that is a quarter-million miles
away.
In April, it is to land at a lava plain
named Mare Serenitatis, or the Sea of
Serenity. An instrument built by the
Weizmann Institute of Science will
measure the moon’s magnetic fields as it
approaches, and that data could help
give hints about the moon’s iron core.
Beresheet is also carrying a durable
ARIEL SCHALIT/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mr. Winetraub scrounged $50,000 for
the entry fee, and on Dec. 31, they sent in
the money and the paperwork with less
than two hours to spare.
From the beginning, their pitch was
geared to philanthropists, not venture
capitalists.
“It’s a very different story than a com-
mercial company trying to explain how
they’re going to return the investment of
the investors,” Mr. Bash said. “It’s one of
the best decisions we made in the begin-
ning.”
One of the people who heard their pre-
sentation was Morris Kahn, an Israeli
telecommunications billionaire. “I gave
them $100,000, no questions asked,” Mr.
Kahn said, “and I said, ‘Start.’”
Mr. Kahn said at the beginning he just
wanted to help. “Eventually, not only I
got sucked in, I sucked myself in,” he
CORINNA KERN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES said. “I got excited by this project.”
Yariv Bash, co-founder of SpaceIL, financed the project with the help of philanthropists. Mr. Kahn became president of
SpaceIL and recruited other investors
including Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas
casino billionaire and major donor to the
Republican Party in the United States.
As a nonprofit, SpaceIL also tapped
the energy of volunteers. “If you were
interested in space and wanted to do
something beyond your day job, you
could volunteer and give some of your
time,” Mr. Winetraub said.
As full-fledged development started,
Mr. Kahn brought in Eran Privman, who
had been an executive at his companies,
to run the organization.
But as the 2018 Lunar X Prize dead-
line approached, the effort appeared
doomed. SpaceIL still needed $30 mil-
lion more. In late 2017, Mr. Kahn re-
signed. A fund-raising plea by Mr. Priv-
man at the end of that year fell short.
CORINNA KERN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES CORINNA KERN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES A few months later, Mr. Kahn re-
Another co-founder, Kfir Damari, under- Yonatan Winetraub, the third co-founder, turned, replacing Mr. Privman with Ido
estimated the effort that was needed. helped raise the initial $50,000. Anteby, a longtime manager at the Is-
rael Atomic Energy Commission, to
shepherd the final construction and
testing of Beresheet.
Mr. Kahn agreed to provide any re-
maining money needed.
And now SpaceIL is approaching its
end in a few months. “A day after, all of
us will need to look for a job,” said Eran
Shmidt, deputy manager of SpaceIL.
Mr. Winetraub joked, “This is a great
job description. If it's successful, then
you're fired.”
However, commercial interest in the
moon has revived during the Trump ad-
ministration. In November, NASA an-
nounced the selection of nine compa-
nies, including several former Lunar X
Prize contestants, that will compete for
contracts to take small payloads to the
moon. The European Space Agency is
considering a similar program.
Israel Aerospace Industries has
TERRY RENNA/ASSOCIATED PRESS signed an agreement with OHB System,
A SpaceX rocket carrying the SpaceIL craft being launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla. a German satellite manufacturer, to
compete for the European work, and Mr.
Doron said the company is in discussion
backup of humanity’s knowledge in the Industries, which partnered with about collaborating with some of the
form of a disc provided by the Arch Mis- SpaceIL. “It also puts a lot of pressure NASA-selected companies.
sion Foundation, containing 30 million and responsibility on the project team.” The SpaceIL founders have largely
pages of information, as well as a time The United States and the former So- moved on. Mr. Winetraub is now a grad-
capsule with Israeli cultural symbols viet Union sent robotic landers to the uate student at Stanford, pursuing a
and a Bible. moon beginning in 1966, part of the doctorate in cancer research. Mr. Bash
Within a few days of its landing, space race that culminated with the is chief executive of Flytrex, a company
Beresheet is expected to succumb to the Apollo 11 astronauts stepping foot on the developing drones to deliver consumer
heat of lunar noon. Then, its mission will moon in 1969. In 2013, China became the goods. Mr. Damari is chief product and
end. third nation to send a spacecraft to the strategy officer for Tabookey, a cyber-
The price tag to build and launch moon, and this year, it became the first security start-up.
Beresheet ended up at $100 million, not to land one on the moon’s far side. When they started SpaceIL at the bar,
$10 million, and the spacecraft bulked Back in November 2010, it was a rush they were all single. “We were in a really
up to 1,300 pounds. The SpaceIL for the SpaceIL founders just to get to different place back then,” Mr. Damari
founders point out that this is still much the starting line. The Google competi- said.
cheaper and smaller than what a space tion had been announced three years On Thursday, he was in Florida to
agency like NASA would build. earlier. About 30 teams had already en- watch the launch with his wife and two
“It’s very refreshing in many ways,” tered, and the deadline for submissions children. “I never imagined my big boy
said Opher Doron, the space division was the end of the year. From friends is five years old and actually the age he
general manager at Israel Aerospace and family, Mr. Bash, Mr. Damari and will remember,” Mr. Damari said.
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
How to fix
a broken
tax system
Andrew Ross Sorkin
DEALBOOK
Everyone, it seems, has ideas about
tax strategies, some more realistic
than others. The list of tax revolution-
aries is long. The short list includes
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez, who wants a top tax rate of 70
percent on incomes above $10 million a
year; Senator Elizabeth Warren, who
wants a wealth tax; Senator Bernie
Sanders, who wants an estate tax with
a 77 percent rate for billionaires; and
even Senator Marco Rubio, who has
proposed a tax on stock buybacks.
Whatever your politics, there is a
bipartisan acknowledgment that the
United States tax system is broken.
Whether you believe the system
should be fixed to generate more reve-
nue or employed as a tool to limit
inequality — and let’s be honest for a
moment, those ideas are not always
consistent — there is a justifiable sense
that the American public doesn’t trust
the tax system to be fair.
In truth, how could it, when a
wealthy person like Jared Kushner, the
son-in-law of the president, reportedly
paid almost no federal taxes for years?
Or when Gary D. Cohn, the former
president of Goldman Sachs who once
led President Trump’s National Eco-
nomic Council, says aloud what most
wealthy people already know: “Only
morons pay the estate tax.”
If you pay taxes, it’s hard not to feel
like a patsy.
A New York Times poll found that
support for higher taxes on the rich
cuts across party lines, and Democrat-
ic presidential hopefuls are offering
plans to do it. But the current occupant
of the Oval Office signed a $1.5 trillion
tax cut into law, so the political hurdles
are high.
Over the past month, I’ve consulted
tax accountants, lawyers, executives,
political leaders and yes, billionaires,
and specific ideas have come up for
plugging the gaps in the tax code,
without blowing it apart.
None of these are as headline-grab-
bing as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s Green
New Deal, nor will they evoke the
emotional response of a sound bite
about Ms. Warren’s wealth tax. But it
could be that evolution has a better
chance than revolution.
PATCH THE ESTATE TAX
None of the suggestions in this column
— or anywhere else — can work unless
the estate tax is rid of the loopholes
that allow wealthy Americans to bla-
tantly (and legally) skirt taxes.
Without addressing whether the
$11.2 million exemption is too high —
and it is — the estate tax is riddled
with problems. Chief among them:
Wealthy Americans can pass much of
their riches to their heirs without
paying taxes on capital gains — ever.
According to the Center on Budget and
Policy Priorities, unrealized capital
gains account for “as much as about 55
percent for estates worth more than
$100 million.”
That’s because after someone dies,
the rules allow assets to be passed on
at their current — or “stepped up” —
value, with no tax paid on the gains. An
asset could rise in value for decades
without being subject to a tax.
Many wealthy Americans even
borrow against their assets rather than
sell them to avoid paying capital gains
tax. That’s why closing this loophole is
so critical: You could raise rates and
put a big tax on the sale of property
and it wouldn’t matter for many
wealthy families. They wouldn’t actu-
ally pay it.
The Congressional Budget Office
estimates simply closing this loophole
would raise more than $650 billion
over a decade.
As central as this idea is to the other
suggestions, it is not an easy sell.
Three Republican senators introduced
a plan this year to repeal the estate
tax.
But this and other changes — elimi-
nating the hodgepodge of generation-
skipping trusts that also bypass estate
taxes — are obvious fixes that would
introduce a basic fairness to the sys-
tem and curb the vast inequality that
arises from dynastic wealth.
INCREASE CAPITAL GAINS RATES
Our income tax rates are progressive,
but taxes on capital gains are less so.
There are only two brackets, and they
top out at 20 percent.
By contrast, someone making
$40,000 a year by working 40 hours a
week is in the 22 percent bracket.
That’s why the billionaire Warren E.
Buffett says his secretary pays a
higher tax rate.
So why not increase capital gains
rates on the wealthiest among us?
..
One chief argument for low capital
gains rates is to incentivize invest-
ment. But if we embraced two addi-
tional brackets — say, a marginal 30
percent bracket for earners over $5
million and a 35 percent bracket for
earners over $15 million — it is hard to
see how investment plans would be
fundamentally changed.
Most of America wouldn’t be af-
fected at all and those wealthy individ-
uals who are successful enough to pay
more would be unlikely to hold back on
investment. After all, they’d still want
to get a return on their money, rather
than having it sit idle.
END REAL ESTATE LOOPHOLES
One reason there are so many real
estate billionaires is that the law allows
the industry to perpetually defer capi-
tal gains on properties by trading one
for another. In tax parlance, it is known
as a 1031 exchange.
In addition, real estate industry
executives can depreciate the value of
their investment for tax purposes even
when the actual value of the property
appreciates. (This partly explains Mr.
Kushner’s low tax bill.)
These are glaring loopholes that are
illogical unless you are a beneficiary of
them. Several real estate veterans I
spoke to privately acknowledged the
tax breaks are unconscionable.
FIX CARRIED INTEREST
This is far and away the most obvious
loophole that goes to Americans’ basic
sense of fairness.
For reasons that remain inexplicable
— unless you count lobbying money —
the private equity, venture capital, real
estate and hedge fund industries have
kept this one intact. Current tax law
allows executives in those industries to
have the bonuses they earn investing
for clients taxed as capital gains, not
ordinary income.
Even President Trump opposed the
loophole. In a 2015 interview, he said
hedge fund managers were “getting
away with murder.”
This idea and the others would not
swell the government’s coffers to
overflowing, but they would help re-
store a sense of fairness to a system
that feels so easily gamed by the
wealthiest among us.
There are a couple of other things
worth considering.
LET’S TALK ABOUT PHILANTHROPY
Nobody wants to dissuade charitable
giving. But average taxpayers are
often subsidizing wealthy philan-
thropists whose charitable deductions
significantly reduce their tax bills.
PETE MAROVICH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
seeks a tax increase on the wealthy.
These people deserve credit for
giving money to noble causes (though
some nonprofits are lobbying organiza-
tions masquerading as do-gooders) but
their wealth, in many cases, isn’t pay-
ing for the basics of health care, de-
fense, education and everything else
that taxes pay for.
Philanthropic giving is laudable, but
it can also be a tax-avoidance strategy.
Is there a point at which charitable
giving should be taxed?
I’m not sure what the right answer
is. But consider this question posed by
several philanthropic billionaires:
Should the rich be able to gift stock or
other assets to charity before paying
capital gains taxes?
At a minimum, we ought to consider
whether the wealthy should be allowed
to take deductions when they move
money to their own foundations, or
whether they should only take a de-
duction when the money is spent. This
would prevent them from using their
foundations to capture a tax deduction
without the money having to go to a
worthy cause at the same time.
FINALLY, FUND THE I.R.S.
The Internal Revenue Service is so
underfunded that the chance an indi-
vidual gets audited is minuscule — one
person in 161 was audited in 2017,
according to the I.R.S. And individuals
with more than $1 million in income,
the people with the most complicated
tax situations, were audited just 4.4
percent of the time. It was more than
12 percent in 2011, the Center on Budg-
et and Policy Priorities reported.
The laws in place hardly matter:
Those willing to take a chance can
gamble that they won’t get caught.
That wouldn’t be the case if the agency
wasn’t having its budget cut and losing
personnel.
Mary Kay Foss, an accountant in
California, told the trade magazine
Accounting Today what we all know,
but inexplicably never say aloud: “No
business would cut the budget of the
people who collect what’s owed.”
“It encourages people to cheat,” she
said. “We need a well-trained, well-
paid I.R.S. staff so that those of us who
pay our taxes aren’t being made fools
of.”
Nobody wants to be a patsy.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2019 | 7

business

Hobbling searches to curb fake vaccine news

BY CHRISTINA CARON
Pinterest, a digital platform popular
with parents, took an unusual step to
crack down on the proliferation of anti-
vaccination propaganda: It purpose-
fully hobbled its search box.
Type “vaccine” into its search bar and
nothing pops up. “Vaccination” or “anti-
vax”? Also nothing.
Pinterest, which allows people to save
pictures on virtual pinboards, is often
used to find recipes for picky toddlers,
baby shower décor or fashion trends,
but it has also become a platform for
anti-vaccination activists who spread
misinformation on social media.
It is an especially effective way to
reach parents: 80 percent of mothers
and 38 percent of fathers in the United
States are on Pinterest, according to
2017 data from comScore. The company
has more than 250 million monthly ac-
tive users and is expected to go public
this year.
Other platforms, like Facebook and
YouTube, have also been infiltrated with
misinformation about vaccines, and are
taking steps to combat it. One of
YouTube’s policies is to demonetize anti-
vaccine videos. But only Pinterest, as
first reported by The Wall Street Jour-
nal, has chosen to banish results associ-
ated with certain vaccine-related
searches, regardless of whether the re-
sults might have been reputable.
“Right now, blocking results in search
is a temporary solution to prevent peo-
ple from encountering harmful misin-
formation,” said Jamie Favazza, a
spokeswoman. The company said it was
working with experts to develop a more
tailored long-term approach.
The changes, which were not publicly
announced, started in September and
October.
Opposition to vaccinations can be
traced to the introduction of the first
vaccine in the 18th century. Over time
most people accepted vaccines, and dis-
eases that could be prevented by them
declined. They declined so much, in fact,
that the success of vaccines may have
muted the dangers associated with
those diseases.
The World Health Organization iden-
tified “vaccine hesitancy” as one of this
year’s 10 notable threats to global
health.
“I think this is stunning,” said Dr.
Gregory A. Poland, director of the Mayo
Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group in
Rochester, Minn. “It shows the magni-
Opponents in Washington State of limiting parents’ ability to prevent children’s vaccination. “Vaccine hesitancy” has been identified as a significant threat to global health.
tude of the problem.”
Despite clear evidence that vaccines
are effective and safe, some people still
choose not to get vaccinated or to vacci-
nate their children. That has contribut-
ed to a surge in measles cases world-
wide. In the United States, there have
been five measles outbreaks this year
and at least 127 individual cases.
One or two in 1,000 children who con-
tract this highly contagious disease will
die. Last year, measles killed 72 adults
and children in the European region,
where measles has reached its highest
levels in two decades. While measles
deaths are rare in developed countries,
the illness can have severe lasting con-
sequences, such as vision loss.
There are several reasons for vaccine
hesitancy: worries about side effects,
cost, moral or religious objections, fears
about a debunked link to autism and
lack of knowledge about immunizations.
“We’re just seeing all sorts of misin-
formation flying around on social me-
dia,” said Arthur L. Caplan, head of the
Division of Medical Ethics at the New
York University School of Medicine,
who has been writing about vaccine
ethics and policy for 25 years.
“Fake news. Fake science,” he said on
Friday. “Everybody’s an expert.”
On Feb. 14, Representative Adam B.
TED S. WARREN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Schiff of California, a Democrat and the
chairman of the House Intelligence
Committee, wrote a letter to Mark
Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Face-
book, asking what steps the company
was taking to prevent anti-vaccine infor-
mation from being recommended to us-
ers. He sent a similar letter to Sundar
Pichai, the chief executive of Google,
which owns YouTube.
YouTube said on Thursday that it
started surfacing more authoritative
content in late 2017 for people searching
for vaccination-related topics, and that
its algorithmic changes would become
more accurate over time.
YouTube also said it does not permit
anti-vaccine videos to show ads.
“We have strict policies that govern
what videos we allow ads to appear on,
and videos that promote anti-vaccina-
tion content are a violation of those poli-
cies,” a YouTube spokeswoman said on
Friday. “We enforce these policies vig-
orously, and if we find a video that vio-
lates them we immediately take action
and remove ads.”
An analysis by The Daily Beast of sev-
en Facebook pages that promote anti-
vaccine posts found that the pages had
bought a combined 147 Facebook ads
that had been viewed millions of times.
Most of them targeted women over the
age of 25, it reported.
“We’ve taken steps to reduce the dis-
tribution of health-related misinforma-
tion on Facebook, but we know we have
more to do,” Andrea Vallone, a Facebook
spokeswoman, said in a statement.
“We’re currently working on additional
changes that we’ll be announcing soon.”
The company said it was considering
reducing or removing this type of con-
tent from recommendations and demot-
ing it in search results.
Dr. Poland, an internist who has spent
35 years in the vaccine field, said he of-
ten encountered patients who relied on
social media when researching health
questions. “I will explain to a patient in
detail the answer to their question and
they’ll look at me and say, ‘Yeah, but I
saw on Facebook that . . . ’ ” he said, his
voice trailing off. “You just want to tear
your hair out.”
Twitter said that it had no specific pol-
icy to stem the spread of misinformation
about vaccines but that its real-time na-
ture was a “powerful antidote.”
“We, as a company, should not be the
arbiter of truth,” Katie Rosborough, a
Twitter spokeswoman, said in a state-
ment Friday, adding that the company
was working to surface the highest-
quality and most relevant content first.
For all of these companies, containing
the spread of misinformation, particu-
larly about something as emotionally
charged as vaccines, will be a lasting
challenge as they balance fears about
censorship with the need to promote
useful content, experts said.
“It’s a mess that I don’t see easily
solved,” Dr. Poland said.

Detainee’s family seeks help

BEIJING
They stayed quiet, hoping
U.S. diplomacy would
resolve China spy charge
BY CHRIS BUCKLEY
AND EDWARD WONG
Kai Li, an American businessman born
in China, had stepped off a plane in
Shanghai, preparing to visit his moth-
er’s grave. Chinese state security offi-
cers grabbed him and accused him of
spying, and after a short, secretive trial,
a court sentenced him to 10 years in pris-
on.
Now, two and a half years after Mr. Li
was detained, his family in New York
has broken its silence, saying that the
espionage conviction against Mr. Li, an
exporter of aircraft parts, was ground-
less and driven by political motives.
In recent years, relations between the
United States and China have been
tested by trade and technology dis-
putes.
The United States has accused China
of hacking companies and inducing or
bribing scientists to hand over commer-
cial secrets. China has also stepped up
warnings against foreign spies and pub-
licized convictions of foreigners on espi-
onage charges.
Harrison Li, Mr. Li’s son, said the Chi-
nese authorities had charged his father
with providing state secrets to the Fed-
eral Bureau of Investigation. He said he
was sure that his father was not a spy
and that his conviction showed the risks
that American visitors to China face as
tensions with the United States fester.
“I certainly hope that the U.S. govern-
ment will view my father’s case as a seri-
ous indication of China’s willingness to
use the coercive and inflammatory tac-
tics of detaining foreign citizens,” Harri-
son Li said by telephone. “It’s very clear
to us that the nature of the case is poli-
tical and tied to whatever geopolitical
conflicts exist between the two coun-
tries.”
At first, Mr. Li’s family kept quiet
about his case while State Department
officials lobbied Chinese officials to re-
lease him, the son said. But Mr. Li, 56,
went on trial in Shanghai in August 2017
and was convicted and sentenced in
July of last year. Harrison Li said that he
and his mother decided to speak out af-
ter Mr. Li’s appeal was rejected last
month.
The F.B.I. declined to comment on the
case. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign
Affairs did not respond on Friday to
faxed questions about the case, nor did
the police, the prosecutors’ office or the
foreign affairs office in Shanghai.
The case raises broader questions
about how foreign businesspeople deal-
ing with sensitive sectors in China — in
this case, the aerospace sector — are
vulnerable to espionage charges.
Before Mr. Li’s detention, his life cen-
tered on his home and businesses on
Long Island, where he owned two gas
stations. He went to the United States in
1989 after the Tiananmen Square mas-
sacre and gained citizenship there in the
1990s, said his son, who graduated from
Harvard last year and works in finance.
Mr. Li’s wife also immigrated from
China.
Mr. Li ran a company that exported
aircraft parts to China and elsewhere in
Asia on behalf of a subsidiary of Boeing,
Harrison Li said, and he visited China
two or three times a year. The son said
he did not know the subsidiary’s name,
and Boeing had no immediate comment
on Friday.
The aerospace sector looms large in
the competition between China and the
United States, and both governments
guard against the theft of secrets. Last
year, the United States orchestrated a
complex international sting operation to
arrest a Chinese intelligence official
who was charged with trying to get pro-
prietary information from a GE Aviation
employee.
LI FAMILY
Kai Li in Shanghai in 2011. A Chinese
court sentenced him to 10 years in prison.
“I’m sure that his business would
have made him an easier target for the
Chinese government,” Harrison Li said
of his father. He said his father wrote in a
letter, while in detention, that the paper-
work for the exports entailed making fil-
ings with the United States government
that may have drawn suspicion from
Chinese investigators.
Relations have been strained since
last year, when President Trump added
tariffs to goods made in China with the
intent of forcing Beijing to dismantle
what he and other critics say are unfair
trade and investment barriers.
China was also incensed by the arrest
in Canada late last year of Meng
Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of
Huawei, who American prosecutors say
helped Huawei slip past American sanc-
tions on Iran by fraudulently misleading
a bank. Two Canadian men were de-
tained in China in December in what ap-
peared to be payback for Ms. Meng’s ar-
rest.
Members of the Trump administra-
tion and of Congress have taken up Mr.
Li’s case, including Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo and other State Depart-
ment officials, Harrison Li said.
“We regularly raise Mr. Li’s case with
Chinese officials,” the State Department
said a written statement. It said con-
sular staff had sent multiple requests to
the Chinese authorities seeking Mr. Li’s
release on humanitarian grounds, but
received no response.
Last week, Senator Chuck Schumer,
Democrat of New York, and four mem-
bers of the House of Representatives
sent a letter to Mr. Trump urging him,
for a second time, to push the Chinese
government to release Mr. Li. The letter,
a copy of which was obtained by The
New York Times, said, “It is incumbent
upon our government to fulfill its re-
sponsibility to a citizen in distress and
be his vociferous advocate.”
Mr. Schumer told The Times on
Thursday, “The Trump administration
must use all tools available to prioritize
bringing Mr. Li back home.”
On Friday afternoon, Garrett Mar-
quis, a spokesman for the White House
National Security Council, said the
United States had appealed to Beijing
“multiple times over the past two years
for Li Kai’s immediate release.”
In China, President Xi Jinping has
brought in new laws to combat espio-
nage and perceived threats to national
security, which include vague and
sweeping definitions of national secrets.
In recent years, Chinese security offi-
cers have been especially tough in de-
taining people born in China who have
foreign citizenship. Some visitors of Chi-
nese descent have spent years in prison
on sweeping charges.
In a travel warning for China reissued
last month, the State Department said
that American citizens of Chinese her-
itage could face additional scrutiny and
harassment.
When Mr. Li went to trial, United
States consular officers were not al-
lowed into the hearing, after the court
invoked a rule banning outsiders from
sensitive cases involving national secu-
rity. The hearing lasted a little over an
hour, said Harrison Li, who is in touch
with the consular officers.
After the trial, the court took the un-
usual step of ordering additional investi-
gation by the prosecution office, post-
poning a judgment, Harrison Li said.
Such a move suggests that judges
thought the evidence presented by the
prosecution was insufficient.
Still, the judges last year declared Mr.
Li guilty of sharing one “classified” state MARCH 21  26
secret and four “confidential” state se-
crets, his son said, citing a judgment W W W. B AS E LW O R L D . C O M
seen by the United States consulate in
Shanghai. Those classes of secrecy both
fall below the topmost confidentiality
classification in China.
Chris Buckley reported from Beijing and
Edward Wong from Washington.

8 | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2019
tech
A glimpse of what’s next for smartphones
Brian X. Chen
TECH FIX
SAN FRANCISCO — It’s hard to imagine
how smartphones could get much
better. Most are already zippy and
equipped with jumbo screens, powerful
cameras and face scanners.
So what else can we look forward to?
It turns out, plenty. For a peek at the
future of the phone, look to Samsung,
the world’s largest handset maker. On
Wednesday, the South Korean com-
pany showed off a family of four new
Galaxy phones that incorporate new
technologies and features that may
start spreading to other smartphones.
Of the four new devices, one will
work on next-generation ultrafast 5G
cellular networks, which means it can
download a movie in seconds rather
than minutes. Three of the models will
have slightly larger screens and more
complex camera systems than their
predecessors.
And Samsung is also teasing a fifth
device that can be folded and unfolded
like a book to decrease or increase the
phone’s screen size to suit its owner. It
is expected to be available in the
United States on April 26 and in Eu-
rope on May 3.
There’s a lot to unpack here. Here’s
what you need to know about what’s
coming with screen sizes, cameras, 5G
and the elusive foldable phone.
Phone screens keep getting bigger.
Why would I want this, and won’t this
add volume to my pocket?
Many phone makers, including Sam-
sung, Apple and Google, have focused
on making screens larger without
adding bulk to their bodies. To do this,
they stretched the screens from one
edge to another while shrinking the
borders surrounding the screen.
Samsung is continuing this trend. Its
new Galaxy S10 and S10 Plus phones
have 6.1-inch and 6.4-inch displays, up
from the 5.8-inch and 6.2-inch screens
on last year’s Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus.
Even though the screens are bigger,
Samsung said, the device are more
compact than their predecessors.
The company also unveiled the
Galaxy S10 5G, its first phone to work
with 5G networks, which will have a
jumbo 6.7-inch screen. In addition, it
showed the Galaxy S10E, a model with
a 5.8-inch display in a body that is
smaller than the S9’s, for people who
prefer more compact devices.
Why would you want a bigger
screen? When upgrading devices,
people are increasingly gravitating
Filling some gaps in health care
BY ERIC RAVENSCRAFT
You (or your employer) pay for health
insurance every month. In exchange,
you assume that if you have any health-
related needs, they’ll be covered. Yet
there are gaps in the system that your
provider may not want to pay for. Now,
medical start-ups want to fill in those
gaps.
As Silicon Valley looks for the next big
thing to pour money into, health care
looks like an increasingly tantalizing
field. According to Forbes, more than
$2.8 billion worth of venture capital was
invested in health care start-ups in Sep-
tember 2018 alone. An increase of 70 per-
cent over the previous year.
It’s not hard to understand why, ei-
ther. Especially in the United States, the
health care you get from your insurance
provider is hardly as comprehensive as
it could be. If you get injured or sick, a
doctor might be able to take care of you,
but for day-to-day health problems,
there’s a lot to be desired.
HELP FOR YOUR HEARING
For example, in the United States, hear-
ing aids are rarely covered by health in-
surance. While 48 million people in the
country suffer from some form of hear-
ing loss according to the Hearing Loss
Association of America, insurance
providers do not consider it a vital issue
unless it occurs when you are young. As
you get older, your hearing deteriorates.
As far as your health care provider is
concerned, it’s not worth paying to fix.
If you choose to get a hearing aid,
most insurance companies consider this
an elective procedure — like choosing to
get plastic surgery — and won’t cover it.
You’ll also have to go through a lengthy
process of seeing your general practi-
tioner, who will refer you to an ENT (ear,
nose and throat) specialist, who then
works in conjunction with an audiologist
to determine if you should buy a hearing
aid.
Once you get through that long, ardu-
ous process, the bill comes due. Accord-
ing to a study by the National Acade-
mies of Sciences, Engineering and
Medicine, the average cost for a pair of
hearing aids is $4,700, or about $2,350
per ear. A mere six companies make up
98 percent of the worldwide hearing aid
market. Assuming your doctor pre-
toward phones with larger displays.
Many feel that they are getting more
bang for the buck with bigger screens,
as studies have shown that people
spend more time using apps, watching
videos and browsing the web on big-
screen phones.
Why would I want a foldable phone?
Samsung first showed a prototype of
its foldable phone at a conference for
The Eargo hearing aid can be bought directly from the company’s website.
scribes a hearing aid to begin with, you
don’t have many accessible options.
Eargo, a new company that walks the
line between medical firm and tech
start-up, wants to be one of those op-
tions, and wants to make the process
easier.
Eargo sells a pair of hearing aids for
$1,450. You can buy them directly from
the company’s website. The Eargo Max,
boasts better audio quality and im-
proved noise reduction for $2,150 per
pair, and the Eargo Neo, their premium
product, offers the company’s best audio
quality, a more comfortable design, and
fast-charging for $2,550 per pair. Even
the upgraded model is around half the
cost of traditional, bulkier hearing aids
you may picture when you think of what
hearing aids look like. If you’re (under-
standably) unsure about buying a hear-
ing aid from the internet, the company
offers a 45-day trial period to see if
Eargo works for you.
Unlike other over-the-counter per-
sonal sound amplifiers — which legally
can’t be labeled hearing aids — the
Eargo models are certified as Class 1
medical devices by the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) for treatment of
light to moderate hearing loss. The com-
pany’s support team consists of hearing
aid dispensers licensed in one or more
software developers last year. When
folded up, it looked like a phone with a
small screen; when unfolded, its
screen doubled in size.
At a media event on Wednesday,
Samsung shared some details about its
foldable device, Galaxy Fold. It has two
screens — a smaller one and a larger
one — with a hinge in the middle con-
taining multiple interlocking gears.
When folded up, the viewable screen
EARGO
states to advise customers on their
hearing aid needs. Because Eargo sells
its products online, rather than in physi-
cal stores, a dispenser that’s licensed in
one state can sell to customers in all of
them.
Eargo’s chief executive, Christian
Gormsen, argues that this makes more
sense than the current model he de-
scribes as archaic, in which dispensers
are licensed by state-level boards and
can only operate within their state. “I
More than $2.8 billion worth of
venture capital was invested in
health care start-ups in
September 2018.
believe in a professional that’s certified.
I don’t care whether that person is certi-
fied in California or Colorado . . . It’s like
saying you can’t drive your car outside
the state where you got your driver’s li-
cense. It doesn’t make any sense.”
However, going around your doctor
presents the problem of financing. In-
surance companies rarely pay for hear-
ing aids to begin with, but even at a com-
paratively low price, around $2,000 is
not always an easy chunk of change to
drop. Especially for seniors who may be
SAMSUNG
measures 4.6 inches. Unfolding the
device reveals its 7.3-inch display,
which is the size of a tablet screen.
Samsung said it was working with
Google, YouTube and others to develop
apps that seamlessly make the transi-
tion between a single screen when
folded up and the double screens in
unfolded mode.
You may want a foldable phone if
you love tablet computers. Plenty of
Modern Fertility’s test is designed to make information about fertility easily accessible.
on a fixed income, or patients who rely
on their employer-provided Medicare,
Medicaid or disability insurance to
cover medical expenses. Like most
hearing aids, you can ask your insur-
ance providers if you can get reim-
bursed for a pair of Eargo hearing aids,
but it’s unlikely to be covered. The ex-
pense will have to come out of your own
pocket.
To help ease the burden, Eargo has
partnerships with both CareCredit and
Synchrony to offer financing deals, of-
ten without interest if you pay it off rela-
tively quickly. In a 24-month financing
deal, for example, the Eargo Max would
cost a little over $100 a month, which is
easier to stomach than the lump sum all
at once. It’s still a lot of money, and you
don’t get assistance paying for it, but fi-
nancing options at least mean it doesn’t
hit quite as hard.
For severe hearing loss, Mr. Gormsen
believes specialists will always have
their place. “If we suspect there is too
much hearing loss . . . we will always ad-
vise them to contact a specialist.” How-
ever, millions live with such minor to
moderate hearing loss that it goes un-
treated — and uncovered by your insur-
ance — until it gets worse. “The funda-
mental challenge of this industry is the
stigma and if we stay medical I think our
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
people enjoy using tablets like Apple’s
iPad and Amazon’s Fire Tablet for their
roomy screens that are upward of
seven inches diagonally. That makes
watching videos, reading books and
playing games more enjoyable. The
downside is that tablets are so large
that they aren’t pocketable. A foldable
phone, in theory, will let people have a
tablet that can be folded up and carried
in a pocket.
Other phone makers are expected to
jump on this trend. Huawei, the Chi-
nese telecommunications giant, posted
an image on Twitter this month teasing
a foldable phone that will be unveiled
at Mobile World Congress, the tech
trade show in Barcelona, next week.
Foldable phones raise plenty of
questions. When folded, the device
becomes thicker in the pocket, which
might make it bulky and uncomfort-
able. And it’s unclear whether making
the displays bendable also makes them
more fragile when
Studies have dropped.
shown that Smartphones al-
people spend ready have many
more time cameras. Why
using apps, would I need more?
watching Many newer smart-
videos and phones include mul-
browsing the tiple camera lenses
web on that let you produce
different camera
big-screen effects. For example,
phones. last year’s iPhone XS
included a rear
camera with dual
lenses; the two lenses worked together
to blur the background while sharp-
ening a subject in the foreground,
producing what’s known as the bokeh
effect.
Samsung’s new Galaxy S10 and S10
Plus take this up another notch. Both
include a triple camera system ar-
ranged horizontally on the back of the
phone. The left lens is for zooming, the
middle lens contains the main camera,
and the right lens features a brand-
new ultrawide angle lens for capturing
broader shots, like landscapes or a big
group gathering at Thanksgiving
dinner.
What’s more, the Galaxy S10 5G will
have a fourth camera for depth-sens-
ing, which will enable richer aug-
mented-reality applications that use
data to digitally manipulate the physi-
cal world when people look through the
smartphone lens.
Expect other companies to keep
beefing up the number of cameras this
year. Apple also plans to add another
camera to some of its next iPhones,
according to a person briefed on the
company’s plans, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity because the
details are confidential. Apple declined
to comment.
What’s the big deal about 5G?
Samsung’s new Galaxy S10 5G will be
one of the first phones to work with 5G
wireless networks, which are a succes-
MODERN FERTILITY
likelihood of impacting that stigma is go-
ing to be tough,” Mr. Gormsen said.
PROACTIVE FAMILY PLANNING
Modern Fertility is another company
aiming to fill in a crack in our modern
health care system. For $159, the com-
pany offers a fertility test that can help
women who are trying to get pregnant
— or may want to in the future — find out
more about their fertility and plan
ahead. It sounds like exactly the kind of
basic test you could ask your OB-GYN
for.
The reality is far more complicated.
As Modern Fertility co-founder and
chief executive Afton Vechery ex-
plained, “There’s no such thing as ‘fertil-
ity’ in the medical system today. There’s
only infertility . . . Infertility means you
have to be trying for between nine and
12 months, dependent on your age,” she
said. At that point, a small number of
states might recognize a legitimate con-
cern.
“Then, and only then might this test-
ing be reimbursed,” she said. Otherwise,
you’re on your own.
In other words, if you’re getting close
to your 30s and you want to get informa-
tion about your own body to plan ahead,
your insurer doesn’t think that’s worth
paying for. As Ms. Vechery herself found
..
sor to current 4G networks. These new
networks will introduce internet
speeds so fast that devices will be able
to download high-quality videos in a
few seconds.
But contain your excitement for now.
The carriers are still far from deploy-
ing a broad 5G network.
AT&T said it should have 5G de-
ployed in 21 cities in the first half of
this year. Verizon Wireless just did its
first 5G data test on a smartphone late
last year. There isn’t expected to be
much traction for the new cellular
technology until 2020.
And even when 5G does reach your
hometown, there may be confusion
about it. In a controversial move,
AT&T said that it planned to give dif-
ferent flavors of 5G different names:
5G+ will be the fastest speed taking
advantage of brand-new infrastruc-
ture, and 5GE will essentially be a
faster version of 4G using upgraded 4G
equipment.
Gordon Mansfield, an AT&T execu-
tive, said the labels would be helpful
indicators for people with 5G phones.
The 5GE icon on a phone screen will
inform them they have speeds that are
faster than the current 4G networks,
and the 5G+ indicator will mean they
are getting the fastest speeds possible,
he said.
Also unclear is how much it will cost
for people to buy 5G access — and
whether the tremendous speeds will
encourage consumers to burn through
their cellular data faster than they did
with slower technologies. The carriers
have yet to announce pricing for data
plans using 5G.
Phones have become costly, in some
cases exceeding $1,000. Can we
expect prices to continue climbing?
Yes, in the high-end phone market,
where Samsung and Apple compete.
The Galaxy Fold, which arrives in
stores late April, will cost $1,980.
Samsung has not announced pricing
of the Galaxy S10 5G, though the de-
vice is expected to top $1,000, in part
because of its 5G compatibility and
depth-sensing camera lens.
For Samsung’s phones with more
incremental changes, prices are also
up.
Prices start at $750 for the Galaxy
S10E, $900 for the S10 and $1,000 for
the S10 Plus. Compare that with the S9
and S9 Plus, which started at $720 and
$840.
Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at
Creative Strategies, said she was
doubtful that prices could go up much
more in the near-term.
The $749 iPhone XR, which despite
rave reviews has not sold as robustly
as some had anticipated, demonstrated
that consumers may have hit a thresh-
old.
“We’re getting to a point where
people will say, you know what, the
technology is enough for me — I might
want a different phone, but I don’t
want more,” she said.
out, you can still get the testing done, but
you’ll pay for it in both time and money.
“Finding the time to get off work to get
that testing done, going back in to my
doctor, getting it interpreted, it was in-
credibly empowering after I got that in-
formation. But then I got a bill in the
mail a few weeks later for $1,500,” she
explained.
She started Modern Fertility to make
that process accessible to everyone. The
test that the company performs is the
same FDA-approved test you would get
at an infertility clinic, without having to
go through your medical provider. You
can either visit a Quest Diagnostics loca-
tion to have blood drawn, or get a kit
with a finger prick test.
After your test is analyzed, Modern
Fertility will pair you with an infertility
nurse for a one-on-one consultation that
the company employs, as part of its
package so you can get a breakdown of
what your test means. However, as Ms.
Vechery acknowledged, your doctor or
regular OB-GYN should still be part of
the process. “All of our results are meant
to be shared with a woman’s physician
to help inform that conversation.”
To help pay for the test, the company
has made sure it’s Flexible Spending Ac-
count (FSA) and Health Spending Ac-
count (HSA) eligible. Your insurance
provider might not pay for it, but if
you’ve set aside some pretax money to
spend on medical expenditures, then
you can spend it on Modern Fertility’s
kit. It’s extremely unlikely that your in-
surance will cover a test of this kind, but
at least you can use your own pretax
money to pay for it.
The cruel irony in the current system
is that you can’t test your fertility until
you’ve already proved that you can’t
have a child. Which, in turn, you can’t
find out until you start trying to have a
child to begin with.
Unfortunately, gaps in the American
health care system that companies like
these are trying to fill are common, and
they leave patients searching for solu-
tions while simultaneously offering en-
trepreneurs new opportunities. Paying
for devices and services piecemeal from
independent companies is hardly ideal
(in fact, it’s part of the reason we have
health care providers to begin with), but
for now, at least some companies are
trying to take up the slack.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2019 | 9

Opinion
Stop counting women
Quotas and Katherine Mangu-Ward
tallies won’t
bring real
progress on I recently joined the board of a small
gender parity. nonprofit organization. I can’t say for
sure that my ovaries got me the gig,
but I think they were at least part of
my appeal. That uncertainty isn’t
pleasant, but it’s less unpleasant than
not being invited to join the board at
all. The same is true for nearly every
television or conference panel I’m
asked to be on. Political journalism has
long been male-dominated, libertarian-
ism doubly so. For many professional
women, doing gender-balance math is
a tic, a reflexive response to being in
too many rooms with too few other
women.
That reflex was on display in Janu-
ary, when the announcement of Oscar
nominations set off the annual ritual of
counting up female nominees and then
lamenting the ways in which women
have been slighted. In recent years,
the Hollywood commentariat has
institutionalized my counting reflex.
In a typical example of the genre,
The Atlantic declared “female film-
makers were entirely neglected.”
Bustle told its readers, “Don’t cele-
brate too much” over women’s success
in the documentary category, but focus
instead on how their numbers in the
directing and cinematography catego-
ries were shockingly low. At the Gold-
en Globes, even as she clutched her
best supporting actress trophy, Regina
King scolded Hollywood for not doing
better and vowed “to make sure that
everything I produce” is going to be
“50 percent women.”
Women are, of course, more than
capable of producing Oscar-worthy
cinema or panel-worthy insights.
However, the notion that the lack of
perfectly equal representation is obvi-
ous evidence of injustice is wrong-
headed and counterproductive.
I understand why people want to
keep tallies. While some gender imbal-
ances can be explained by individual
or group preferences, the shortage of
women in so many areas of public life
has been allowed or ignored or tacitly
excused for so long that it may take
hard numbers to open people’s eyes.
And there’s something seductive
about counting. We count sheep to fall
asleep. We celebrate anniversaries and
birthdays. We track stock prices. We
log miles run and dollars spent. To
count something is to see it, to under-
stand it, to have the illusion of control
over it.
But people who want to lose weight
initially learn to count calories in order
to recalibrate their perceptions about
how to make healthy choices. The goal
isn’t a lifetime of squinting at labels.
The goal is to develop a new set of
habits and instincts, to make good
decisions that feel natural and un-
forced. An occasional audit is vital, but
continuous mortification can be crip-
pling and wasteful. People who rou-
tinely go on about their diet rules — or
worse, freely share their thoughts
about co-workers’ lunch orders — are
more likely to provoke resentment
than to convert the reluctant. In the
same way, the real work of recalibrat-
ing representation must be done pri-
vately and incrementally, one day at a
time.
Counting is a form of mental labor,
just like remembering when it’s time to
buy laundry soap or send out birthday
invitations. As such, it is predomi-
nantly — though not exclusively —
performed by women, who shoulder
the mental load of tracking, fostering,
supporting and promoting other wom-
en. Keeping those running tallies of
gender imbalance is like other emo-
tional labor: It’s exhausting and dis-
tracts from more substantive work,
and some people are skeptical it needs
to be performed at all.
It can also be difficult to see the
forest when you’re busy counting the
trees. Not every cracked glass ceiling
is a victory. Recently, major newspa-
pers trumpeted the fact that women
hold all of the highest positions at the
Central Intelligence Agency. The chief
executives of four of the nation’s five
biggest military contractors are now
women; Northrop Grumman, Lock-
heed Martin, General Dynamics and
the defense arm of Boeing all have
#ladybosses. It’s hard to imagine our
feminist forebears seeing female domi-
nance of the military-industrial com-
plex as an unmixed blessing.
I’m a magazine editor, and when I
have a story to assign, I shuffle writ-
ers’ names around in a mental matrix
of who is expert enough, dependable
enough and affordable enough to get
the job done. Gender is a considera-
tion. It’s not the primary one.
The idea that an outsider could look
at my table of contents — as the byline
counters at the group VIDA: Women
in Literary Arts do, for instance — and
decide whether I’d made those calcula-
tions correctly based purely on a gen-
der tally seems presumptuous at best. gradual organic process of moving
“Fifty percent gender parity is al- toward a society where men and wom-
ways something to strive for,” a VIDA en can both pursue the work they want
board member told me when I called — safely, with fair salaries and equal
to ask if there were situations that opportunities for promotion — is to corporate hierarchy. In Kenya, law- SIMONE NORONHA
gender imbalance might be justified. freeze and polarize the conversation makers are debating a bill to enforce
The board member, Sarah Clark, was by imposing a bunch of rigid laws and the so-called Two-Thirds Gender Rule,
unwilling to give ground on the idea policies. California passed a bill last a constitutional clause prohibiting
that sometimes the numbers won’t fall that mandates the presence of at more than 66 percent of the legislature admissions affirmative action wars of
even up, and that’s O.K. least one woman on the board of any to be the same gender. the 1990s. (Like most of America’s
Later in our conversation, however, I publicly traded company headquar- In the case of any kind of quota, wars, this conflict is continuing, but
found myself nodding along as I lis- tered there, with increases in that there are obvious trade-offs between many people have stopped paying
tened to what was essentially a stra- number under certain conditions. one category (gender) and others attention.) They settled on a compro-
tegic case for diversity — namely that “We are tired of (race, sexual orientation, disability mise that does a shockingly good job of
“investing in building trust with read- Keeping being nice. We’re status among them) that arguably mirroring the way people actually
ers who are women and who are non- tired of being polite. deserve more consideration. As usual, function when left to their own de-
binary is an investment worth mak-
those running We are going to the law is a lagging indicator. Gender vices. Hard quotas aren’t permitted,
ing.” tallies of require this because is easier (though not always easy!) to but giving some consideration to bal-
That’s exactly right. In journalism, gender it’s going to benefit notice and tally in ways that other ance and diversity is fine.
and in moviemaking, it’s natural to imbalance the economy,” said a statuses aren’t. In a perfect world, In the meantime, the powers that be
think about how to serve and expand is like other co-author of the there would never be a roomful of at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
your audience. Those who argue for emotional legislation, Hannah- white men deciding whether to pick a and Sciences have actually laid the
diversity among our storytellers make labor: It’s Beth Jackson, a woman instead of a person of color for groundwork for sustainable improve-
the case that doing so ensures we exhausting Democratic state a “diversity slot.” We do not live in a ments. They have tried to fix unbal-
capture a truer, fuller portrait of reality senator from Santa perfect world. anced inputs rather than mandating
— which is fair enough.
and distracts Barbara, in a floor Underlying all of this is that there is equal outputs. In 2018, they invited a
But consider “Roma.” This wrench- from more speech. This line of something deeply off-putting about record 928 new members, on top of 774
ing, beautiful film is set almost entirely substantive argumentation is slotting people into categories by the year before, half of whom were
in the world of women; it delicately work. typical, and baffling. gender, about sussing out the precise women — up from 100 to 200 new
engages class and race, stares un- Could it really be nature of their genitals and their additions in a normal year. As recently
flinchingly at the darkness and light of true that increasing hearts before deciding if their pres- as 2014, Oscar voters were 76 percent
motherhood, and yet it shows up on female board representation is irrefut- ence on a masthead or a list of finalists male (as well as 94 percent white and
the wrong side of the gender ledgers: ably good for business yet won’t hap- is just. on average 63 years old).
The director is Alfonso Cuarón, a man. pen unless companies are forced to do Being a token woman or winning the We’re too far from parity for anyone
It is all the more troubling when the it right now? women’s trophy is better than nothing. to claim the current system is just. It’s
gender accountants are legislators or In Norway, where a requirement for But it’s also reductive and demeaning. equally unclear that a 50/50 result is
regulators with the power to do more 40 percent female board membership Our unease over this was reflected in the only acceptable outcome.
than just name and shame. Tech- became law in 2008, there’s some the mockery Mitt Romney got for his On Oscar night this year, I winced
nocrats on the right and left are quite evidence that strict quotas may be “binders full of women.” Though the when only men were the nominees in
certain they know all kinds of things: counterproductive. Fewer companies idea of a president carefully curating some ostensibly coed categories. And I
the right number of children to have, chose to undertake initial public offer- lists of women to hire for top-level celebrated victories for women when
homes to own, degrees to obtain, pills ings in the period after the policy took positions (rather than, well, other they come and left the counting to
to take, miles to drive, women to em- effect and there was no measurable activities) doesn’t seem so bad looking PricewaterhouseCoopers.
ploy. Precise numerical goals create a change in the affected companies’ back, does it?
false sense of clarity and certainty. performance or improvement in the The courts grappled with the prob- KATHERINE MANGU-WARD is the editor in
The absolute best way to ruin the prospects for women lower on the lems of quotas during the college chief of Reason magazine.

Netflix is shrinking the world

Instead of
trying to sell
American
ideas to a
foreign
audience, it’s
Farhad Manjoo
aiming to sell
international
ideas to a For months after the 2016 election, I
global wanted nothing more than to escape
audience. America. I don’t mean literally — in the
cliché liberal way of absconding to
Canada — but intellectually, socially,
psychically. Donald Trump was all
anybody talked about, and I needed
sanctuary. I wanted to find places where
the American president-elect and his
American opponents and their Ameri-
can controversies simply did not exist.
I found such a place in a British reali-
ty baking contest. By which I mean I
found it on Netflix, which has become
the internet’s most invaluable and
intoxicating portal to the parts of planet
Earth that aren’t America.
On Sunday, Netflix competed for its
border digital cosmopolitanism to the
bank.
For me, it was nice British people
politely baking against one another that
offered one of the first hints of Netflix's
unusual strategy. “The Great British
Baking Show,” for those not in the cult, is
an amateur baking contest, and it is one
of the least American things you will
ever see on TV. It depicts a utopia: a
multicultural land of friendly blokes and
mums with old-timey jobs — Imelda is a
“countryside recreation officer” —
blessed with enough welfare-state-
enabled free time to attain expertise in
British confectionary. To an American,
the show suggests a time and place
where our own worries have no mean-
ing. And that, more than baking, is what
“The Great British Baking Show” is
really about.
The show was first produced and
aired on British broadcast television (as
“The Great British Bake-Off”) and
imported to the United States by PBS,
which then licensed it to Netflix; more
recently, Netflix has licensed the show
directly from its British broadcaster,
Channel 4. But Netflix, which has 139
million paying members around the MAX GUTHER

first Best Picture Oscar for “Roma,” the
Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón’s
exploration of his childhood in Mexico
City. Though it didn’t win that award (it
did win for Best Foreign Language Film
and in two other categories, includng a
second Best Director Oscar for Cuarón)
“Roma” is a fitting testament to Net-
flix’s ambitions. Virtually alone among
tech and media companies, Netflix
intends to ride a new kind of open-
world, has lately become something
more than a licenser of other countries’
escapist television.
In 2016, the company expanded to 190
countries, and last year, for the first
time, a majority of its subscribers and
most of its revenue came from outside
the United States. To serve this audi-
ence, Netflix now commissions and
licenses hundreds of shows meant to
echo life in every one of its markets and,
in some cases, to blend languages and
sensibilities across its markets (see
Marie Kondo’s half-in-Japanese tidying-
up blockbuster).
In the process, Netflix has discovered
something startling: Despite a sup-
posed surge in nationalism across the
globe, many people like to watch movies
and TV shows from other countries.
“What we’re learning is that people
have very diverse and eclectic tastes,
and if you provide them with the world’s
stories, they will be really adventurous,
and they will find something unexpect-
ed,” Cindy Holland, Netflix’s vice presi-
dent for original content, told me.
The strategy may sound familiar;
Hollywood and Silicon Valley have long
pursued expansion internationally. But
Netflix's strategy is fundamentally
different. Instead of trying to sell Amer-
ican ideas to a foreign audience, it’s
aiming to sell international ideas to a
global audience. A list of Netflix’s most
watched and most culturally significant
recent productions looks like a Model
United Nations: Besides Ms. Kondo’s
show, there’s the comedian Hannah
Gadsby’s “Nanette” from Australia;
MANJOO, PAGE 11
 ..
10 | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

opinion

Not the fun kind of feminist

words to describe maddening male frighteningly perceptive. libidinous culture feels neither pleasur-
A.G. SULZBERGER, Publisher behaviors that had once gone un- Dworkin showed foresight in other able nor liberating. “Me and my peers,
named — manspreading, mansplain- ways. She defended Monica Lewinsky we believed in this sort of fairy tale,
DEAN BAQUET, Executive Editor MARK THOMPSON, Chief Executive Officer
ing. Then came the obscene insult of when the young woman was being that there was a line of demarcation
JOSEPH KAHN, Managing Editor STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON, President, International
Donald Trump’s victory. It seems like treated like a joke, and she was un- that was very clear between rape and
SUZANNE DALEY, Associate Editor JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DEMARTA, Senior V.P., Global Advertising
something sprung from Dworkin’s sparing in her disgust for Bill Clinton. nonconsensual acts, and consent,” said
CHARLOTTE GORDON, V.P., International Consumer Marketing
cataclysmic imagination, that Ameri- She was intersectional before the word Fateman. “We knew where the line
JAMES BENNET, Editorial Page Editor
JAMES DAO, Deputy Editorial Page Editor
HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS, V.P., International Circulation
HELENA PHUA, Executive V.P., Asia-Pacific
Michelle Goldberg ca’s most overtly fascistic president was coined. The “closely interwoven was, and everything on the side of
would also be the first, as far as we fabric of oppression” in America, she consent was great, and it was an ex-
KATHLEEN KINGSBURY, Deputy Editorial Page Editor SUZANNE YVERNÈS, International Chief Financial Officer
know, to have appeared in soft-core wrote in “Woman Hating,” meant that pression of our freedom. But that’s not
porn films. I think Trump’s victory “wherever one stood, it was with at the experience of sex that a lot of
marked a shift in feminism’s relation- least one foot heavy people are having.”
For decades now, Andrea Dworkin has ship to sexual liberation; as long as on the belly of an- Moira Donegan, the writer best
existed in the feminist imagination he’s in power, it’s hard to associate How Trump other human being.” known for creating an online list of
mostly as a negative example, the libertinism with progress. helped make Still, the resurrec- alleged sexual abusers and harassers
woman no one wanted to be. And so Dworkin, so profoundly out tion of Dworkin’s in media, recently wrote an apprecia-
GETTING ANSWERS ON DRUG PRICES An anti-porn, anti-prostitution mili- of fashion just a few years ago, sud-
Andrea
work and reputation tive reappraisal of Dworkin occasioned
Dworkin
tant in the feminist sex wars of the late denly seems prophetic. “Our enemies is in some ways by “Last Days at Hot Slit.” “It should
Twenty-five years ago, Congress hauled before it the 1970s and 1980s, she sometimes — rapists and their defenders — not
relevant quite strange, be- not be hard to say that heterosexuality
Elected top executives of the nation’s seven largest tobacco again.
seemed like a misogynist caricature of only go unpunished; they remain cause her contempo- as it is practiced is a raw deal for wom-
officials have companies and forced them to make a number of long- a women’s rights activist, a puritanical influential arbiters of morality; they rary admirers tend en and that much pornography eroti-
made a lot of overdue admissions about cigarettes — including that battle ax in overalls out to smite men have high and esteemed places in the to reject her central cizes the contempt of women,” she
noise about for their appetites. Dworkin never society; they are priests, lawyers, political commitments. Dworkin, who’d wrote. “It should not be hard to say
they might cause cancer and heart disease and that the actually wrote that all sex is rape, a judges, lawmakers, politicians, doctors, turned tricks as a broke, bohemian any of this. But it has become hard.”
the cost of executives had suppressed evidence of their addictive claim often attributed to her, but she artists, corporation executives, psychi- young woman, wanted to outlaw pros- Seen from a certain angle, the
prescription potential. did see heterosexual intercourse as atrists and teachers,” Dworkin said in titution and pornography, and in the #MeToo movement — or at least those
drugs. Now almost metaphysically degrading, a lecture she wrote in 1975, included in 1980s she made an alliance with the offshoots of the movement that ques-
The hearing ushered in a public health victory for the calling it, in her 1987 book “Inter- “Last Days at Hot Slit.” religious right to push anti-pornogra- tion the unequal power dynamics
they must ages. In its wake, lawmakers and health officials en- course,” “the pure, sterile, formal Maybe this once sounded paranoid. phy legislation. There is no sympathy behind seemingly consensual encoun-
demand acted measures that would ultimately bring smoking expression of men’s contempt for After Trump’s election, the Brett Kava- for such a bargain in feminist circles ters — looks like a way of saying those
answers from women.” Feminism would spend dec- naugh hearings, and revelations of today, where it’s mostly taboo to treat hard things. Indeed, some of Dworkin’s
rates in the United States to an all-time low.
ades defining itself against her bleak, predation by men including Roger sex work as distinct from any other ideas have been reincarnated in
pharmaceuti- With seven pharmaceutical executives set to testify dogmatic vision. Ailes, Harvey Weinstein, Les Moonves, kind of labor. #MeToo, and not just because she also
cal companies. before the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday, one So it’s been striking to see that re- Larry Nassar and countless figures in Yet the renewed interest in Dworkin sought to challenge oppression by
can only hope for a similarly pivotal moment for pre- cently, feminists have started invoking the Catholic Church, her words seem is a sign that for many women, our going public with her own stories of
Dworkin, who died in 2005, in a spirit sexual abuse.
scription drug prices. of respect and rediscovery. The cultur- Think of the woman who told a
Drug prices are soaring in a way that defies reason. A al critic Jessa Crispin castigated con- reporter, last year, about an encounter
vial of insulin that cost less than $200 a decade ago now temporary feminists for their whole- with the actor Aziz Ansari that she’d
sale abandonment of Dworkin’s work come to understand as sexual assault,
sells for closer to $1,500. Actimmune, a drug that treats
in her 2017 book “Why I Am Not a though she didn’t describe force or
malignant osteoporosis and sells for less than $350 for a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto.” threat. Decades earlier, Dworkin creat-
one-month supply in Britain, costs $26,000 for a one- Rebecca Traister listed Dworkin’s ed a political framework for viewing
month supply in the United States. Not even experts “Intercourse” as one of the books that such an experience — one most would
inspired her 2018 best seller “Good and probably write off as bad sex — as a
seem to know how those prices are set or why they Mad.” The Wing, the network of fash- violation. In that 1975 lecture, she
keep rising. ionable women’s co-working spaces described “presumptive rape” as one
The industry’s own explanations — that other entities and social clubs, sells enameled pins of in which “the constraint on the victim’s
Dworkin’s face. will is in the circumstance itself; there
in America’s byzantine health care system are to blame
A new anthology of Dworkin’s work, has been no mutuality of choice and
for most price increases, and that its products are ex- “Last Days at Hot Slit,” is out this understanding.” Consent, she insisted,
pensive and risky to make — are tough to swallow, month, edited by Johanna Fateman had to mean more than just acquies-
given drug companies’ conspicuous profit margins. Its and Amy Scholder. (“Last Days at Hot cence.
Slit” was a working title for a version Taken literally, much of Dworkin’s
response to the crisis of soaring drug prices has been of the manuscript that became writing dead ends in despair. She
meager at best. Last year, several companies agreed to Dworkin’s first book, “Woman Hat- insisted on being credited for her
hold off on planned price increases, but only for six ing.”) Reading Dworkin now, Fateman hard-earned knowledge of the world,
wrote in a recent essay in The New but would dismiss other women’s
months, and only after President Trump chastised them
York Review of Books, “beyond the testimonies — particularly about their
on Twitter. Those same companies have aggressively anti-porn intransigence she’s both enjoyment of sex — that contradicted
resisted both state and federal efforts to enact formal reviled and revered for, one feels a her ideology. “The quality of the sensa-
changes to drug pricing rules. prescient apocalyptic urgency, one tion or the need for a man or the desire
perfectly calibrated, it seems, to the for love: These are not answers to
Mr. Trump has not kept his campaign promise to high stakes of our time.” (Fateman, an questions of freedom; they are diver-
“negotiate like crazy” with drug makers to lower the art critic who used to be in a band, Le sions into complicity and ignorance,”
cost of their products. But his bluster on the issue, along Tigre, with Riot Grrrl icon Kathleen she wrote.
Hanna, is also working on an experi- Yet Fateman suggests that it’s pre-
with his blueprint for resolving it, have at least helped
mental nonfiction book based on cisely because Dworkin lost the sex
to keep a spotlight on the pharmaceutical industry and Dworkin’s life.) wars so decisively that we can now see
its questionable practices. So what is it in Dworkin’s long- beyond her most extreme rhetoric.
If the members of the Senate Finance Committee neglected oeuvre that has suddenly “You don’t have to be afraid that An-
become resonant? Perhaps it’s simply drea Dworkin is going to take your
want to make use of that spotlight, here’s what to ask because we’re in a moment of crisis, pornography away,” Fateman said.
executives on Tuesday: when people seeking solutions are That opens up space to consider the
How do you determine list prices for drugs? Who dusting off all sorts of radical ideas. rest of her work, and the price she paid
But I think it’s more than that. for refusing so categorically to make
decides the factors that go into the companies’ drug-
Dworkin was engaged, as many wom- herself appealing to men.
pricing formulas, and why can’t those formulas be made en today are engaged, in a pitched “For a woman writer to thrive (or,
public? Senators should also ask Olivier Brandicourt, cultural battle over whose experiences arguably, to survive) in these current
the chief executive of Sanofi — the only major insulin and assumptions define our common hard times, forgiveness and love must
reality. As she wrote of several es- be subtext,” Dworkin wrote in the
maker scheduled to participate in the hearing — why teemed male writers in a 1995 preface “Intercourse” preface. “No. I say no.”
the cost of insulin continues to rise year after year, to “Intercourse,” “I love the literature It’s in part this “no” that women are
given that the drug has been available for roughly a these men created; but I will not live celebrating when they celebrate
my life as if they are real and I am Dworkin. To treat her writing with
century, and in many cases still enjoys patent protec-
not.” curiosity and respect is itself a way of
tion. Dworkin was unapologetically angry, demonstrating indifference to male
What’s a fair profit margin for lifesaving products? A as so many women today are. Even COLIN MCPHERSON/CORBIS, VIA GETTY IMAGES opinion. “I’m a radical feminist,” she
common lament among pharmaceutical executives has before 2016, you could see this anger once said. “Not the fun kind.” She’s
building in the emergence of new Feminists are invoking Andrea Dworkin, who died in 2005, in a spirit of rediscovery. back because these aren’t fun times.
been that without enough profit from one drug, compa-
nies can’t afford to make the next one. That’s a fair
point. Still, many leading companies enjoy billions of
dollars a year in pure profit, even as lives are put at risk
for want of basic medications. Insurers are subject to a
15 to 20 percent cap on profits and administrative ex-
penses. Congress should consider a similar requirement
The Kim and Trump Nobel Peace Prize
for certain prescription drugs. ity that it could be awarded to Kim. In fact, the North Korean threat at the nuclear program.
The Kims are generally overachievers: remained. Indeed, North Korea has In some sense this is Kabuki. On my
How much do you spend on research and develop- Kim is said to have started driving at apparently continued to produce nucle- last visit to North Korea, in 2017, offi-
ment, and where do those dollars go? Pharmaceutical age 3, and his father had five holes-in- ar fuel and operate its missile bases. cials spoke of learning from Libya that
companies routinely argue that drug prices are high one in his first game of golf, not to American intelligence officials bluntly if you give up your nuclear program,
mention a perfect score of 300 the first told a Senate committee this year that America may then topple your govern-
because research and development is expensive and
time he bowled. North Korea is unlikely to denuclear- ment. So I suspect Kim has zero plans
because any successful drug is preceded by many fail- Nicholas Kristof It is, of course, delusion to think that ize. to give up his nuclear weapons.
ures. Industry critics, however, note that a good deal of either Trump or Kim will win the Nobel Yet if Trump was hoodwinked last But even without full denucleariza-
basic research is funded by the federal government, Peace Prize, and in general it’s not a year, there are some more hopeful tion, it is progress if there is a freeze on
good thing for leaders to go into a signs this time. He has appointed a testing, a halt to nuclear production, an
through the National Institutes of Health, and not by summit delusional. Many security well-respected special envoy, Stephen easing of tensions and an agreement
the drug makers. Many leading drug makers spend As President Trump and Kim Jong-un officials in the United States and Biegun, and both Biegun and Trump on future steps. When an American
most of their research dollars looking for new uses of hold a summit meeting this week in abroad worry that in his quest for the have been signaling crossed into North Korea from China
Vietnam, they have something in com- prize, Trump might make some rash The American that they are now last fall, the North Koreans expelled
existing drugs, not on risky innovations. And independ-
mon: Each apparently looks in the pledge, such as to withdraw American realistic about him rather than imprisoned him as a
ent studies show that research and development costs mirror and sees a Nobel Peace Prize forces from South Korea.
and North trade-offs and a bargaining chip. The United States has
for drug companies are not large enough to explain winner. But delusions can be helpful if they Korean timeline, with likewise eased rules on humanitarian
“If not for me, we would now be at make each side more willing to make leaders’ Trump saying that aid to North Korea.
high drug prices.
War with North Korea!” Trump concessions and pursue an arduous delusions North Korea will Trump and Kim may claim some
Why would any drug need nearly dozens of patents? tweeted last summer. He seems to see peace process. I don’t think there is about getting denuclearize “ulti- magical breakthrough, perhaps around
Patent protection enables drug makers to recoup the his legacy in part as the great peace- any prospect of North Korea handing the prize may mately” and that a declaration of the end of the Korean
money they spend developing and marketing a new maker of the Korean Peninsula and over its nuclear weapons soon, but it is improve their “I’m in no rush.” War. But don’t believe any magic. This
recently boasted that Japanese Prime possible to see a diplomatic path that work on a Here’s what a is not a problem that will be solved this
product. But most experts agree that leading drug mak-
Minister Shinzo Abe had nominated leaves the world safer — and there’s a plausible deal might month or this year.
ers have gamed this system: By applying for dozens of him for the Nobel Peace Prize. fighting chance that we might achieve
nuclear deal. look like. At its best, this will be a slog. We
patents for minor technical tweaks that provide little “Many other people feel that way, this. North Korea should pray that U.S.-North Korea
clinical benefit, they stave off competition for decades. too,” Trump told reporters, as he spoke Last year, Trump was bamboozled at would promise to relations become boring.
about the “beautiful” letter that Abe his first meeting with Kim. There were dismantle its Yongbyon nuclear com- The greatest threat of this presiden-
What will you change? The senators must not allow had written to nominate him. minimal preparations, and Trump plex and a couple of less important cy was that Trump would stumble into
drug makers to point the finger elsewhere on Tuesday. Abe, apparently mortified that his made major concessions such as sus- sites, admit international inspectors a nuclear war, and in 2017 and 2018 the
Yes, insurance companies and other entities play a role effort to stroke Trump had become pending military exercises in exchange and continue its moratorium on nucle- Pentagon was deeply concerned that
public, refused to confirm this. And two for nothing as significant. ar and missile tests. In exchange, the this was a risk with Trump-Kim
in the drug cost crisis. But this hearing is not about
leading Japanese newspapers, The Trump compounded his diplomatic United States would relax sanctions on brinkmanship and Trump’s boast that
them. It’s about the pharmaceutical companies. And Asahi Shimbun and The Yomiuri Shim- ineptitude with rhetorical grandiosity. inter-Korean projects involving tour- his nuclear button was bigger than
those companies need to take meaningful steps toward bun, reported that Abe’s letter was He tweeted, “There is no longer a ism and manufacturing. The two sides Kim’s.
lowering drug prices. If the Finance Committee mem- written at the White House’s request. Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” and could also declare that the Korean War If he and Kim pursue a painstaking
In surprising symmetry, North Ko- he later asserted that Kim had sent has ended, exchange diplomatic liaison peace process instead, in some illusory
bers come prepared on Tuesday, they could finally force rea is said to be abuzz with talk about him “beautiful letters” and “we fell in offices, ease cultural exchanges and quest for a Nobel Peace Prize, we can
the industry to help relieve the strain. the Nobel Peace Prize and the possibil- love.” agree on a path forward chipping away live with that.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2019 | 11

opinion

The priesthood needs women

Netflix is shrinking the world
MANJOO, FROM PAGE 9
from Britain, “Sex Education”; “Elite”
from Spain; “The Protector” from
Turkey; and “Baby” from Italy.
I’ll admit there’s something credulous
and naïve embedded in my narrative so
far. Let me get this straight, you’re think-
ing: A tech company wants to bring the
world closer together? As social net-
works help foster misinformation and
populist fervor across the globe, you’re
right to be skeptical. But there is a cru-
cial difference between Netflix and
other tech giants: Netflix makes money
from subscriptions, not advertising.
This simple difference flips all of its
incentives. It means that Netflix has a
reason to satisfy every new customer,
not just the ones in the most prosperous
markets. Each new title carries subti-
tles in 26 languages, and the company is
creating high-quality, properly lip-
synced audio dubbing in 10 languages.
For years, Netflix has roiled the film and
TV business in Hollywood with its bil-
lions. Now it’s taking its money — the
company spent $12 billion on content in
2018 and is projected to spend $15 billion
this year — to film and TV producers in
France, Spain, Brazil, India, South
Korea and the Middle East, among
other places.
Because it is spending so much on
shows from everywhere, Netflix has an
incentive to get the biggest bang for its
buck by pushing them widely across its
user base. Its algorithms are tuned
toward expanding your interests rather
than narrowing them. As a result, many
of Netflix’s shows are watched widely
beyond their local markets. Dystopian
thrillers seem to travel particularly
well. In 2016, the company added the
Brazilian dystopian thriller series “3%,”
a bleak look at the near future; about
half of its viewers were from outside
Brazil. When the German thriller
“Dark” dropped in 2017, it hit the compa-
ny’s Top 10 list in 136 countries, and
about 90 percent of the series’ viewers
were outside Germany.
“The industry here feels liberated by
it,” Dario Madrona, one of the creators
of “Elite,” told me. According to Netflix,
“Elite” has been seen by 20 million
viewers around the world. That level of
popularity is huge for a teen drama from
Spain; an audience of 20 million would
be a decent hit on American broadcast
TV. “We’re starting to feel, I think, like
how you guys in the
Last year, for U.S. have felt for a
long time,” Mr.
the first time, Madrona said. “You
a majority of can create a show
Netflix’s there, and you can
subscribers be seen all over the
and most of its world.”
revenue came Netflix’s push
from outside abroad has not been
the United without incident.
Late last year, the
States. company earned
international con-
demnation for
pulling an episode of “Patriot Act With
Hasan Minhaj” from its service in Saudi
Arabia. The comedian had criticized the
Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin
Salman, after the C.I.A.’s conclusion that
the prince had ordered the murder of
Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident Saudi
journalist.
Netflix argued that it had no choice
but to obey the Saudi legal authority,
which said the episode violated a stat-
ute, if it wanted to continue operating in
that country. The company’s executives
suggested that bringing the Saudis the
rest of Netflix — every other episode of
“Patriot Act” or shows that explore
issues of gender and sexuality, like “Big
Mouth” and “Sex Education” and “Na-
nette” — was better than having the
entire service go dark in that country.
It’s certainly a slippery argument —
but I believe it’s a valid one. Netflix does
seem to be pushing cultural boundaries
and sparking new conversations all
over the world. After it plastered
Bangkok with billboards advertising
“Sex Education” last month, a conserva-
tive Thai political party filed a complaint
against the company for airing the racy
British comedy, which the party called
“a great challenge to Thai society.” The
young, progressive Thai internet re-
sponded in fury, and in the outrage,
people started talking about actual
problems in Thai society, like the lack of
sex education and the high rates of
teenage pregnancy.
Consider, too, “Nanette,” in which Ms.
Gadsby, who was virtually unknown
beyond Australia before Netflix, deliv-
ers a groundbreaking stand-up per-
formance about, roughly, art history,
homosexuality, women’s rights and the
tragic limits of comedy. The show was
eye-opening to me, and I live in the
progressive wonderland of Northern
California; to a young lesbian in India,
where people like Ms. Gadsby are not
easily visible in media, it might have
been a revelation. In fact, “Nanette” was
a hit across Southeast Asia and India.
It’s legitimate to ask how long Netflix
will be able to keep up this cross-border
conversation — whether, as it keeps
growing, it will have to make legal or
moral compromises with local censors
or other would-be cultural arbiters. But
I’m optimistic about its chances. Would-
n’t it be amazing if the internet did turn
out to bring the world together after all?
Alice McDermott
No Christian should need to be re-
minded of the moral error of discrimi-
nation. We hold at the center of our
faith the belief that every human life is
of equal value. And yet the Roman
Catholic Church, my church, excludes
more than half its members from full
participation by barring women, for
reasons of gender alone, from the
priesthood.
The moral consequences of this
failing become abundantly clear each
time another instance of clergy abuse,
and cover-up, is revealed. It is the
inevitable logic of discrimination: If
one life, one person, is of more value
than another, then “the other,” the
lesser, is dispensable. For the male
leaders of the Catholic Church, the
lives of women and children become
secondary to the concerns of the more
worthy, the more powerful, the more
essential person — the male person,
themselves.
The Catholic Church needs to correct
this moral error.
I was visiting a Catholic university
in Boston in 2002 as the clergy abuse
scandal involving Cardinal Bernard
Law was breaking. I was there to
discuss a novel I had written, but the
questions from the audience at my talk
— and at the book signing after, and on
the sidewalk as I walked to my car —
were mostly, if passionately, rhetorical:
What do we do now? Where do we go
from here? Do you think the church
understands our pain? Do you think
the church understands what we’ve
lost? How much corruption should we
tolerate?
At the time, I could offer only small
commiseration — as well as my regret
that these Catholics had been so be-
trayed by their spiritual leaders that
they were left to seek solace from the
likes of me, a reluctant and often con-
trarian Catholic, a novelist, a woman.
“Awful, yes,” I said. “Outrageous, yes.”
“Hope,” I said now and again. “Hope
for change, perhaps.”
In the intervening years, the institu-
tional church has learned to expand its
vocabulary to include such words as
“transparency” and “victim” and even
“prosecute.” In the intervening years,
wrists have been slapped, apologies
made, some twisted souls have been
sent to jail. But even as bishops and
other Catholic leaders gather in Rome
this weekend to address the abuse
crisis, no Catholic I know feels assured
that real change will come, that the
worst is behind us, that some prince of
the church, even a sainted pope, won’t
eventually be revealed as a predator,
an enabler.
For those of us trying to hang on to
our affiliation with the Catholic
Church, Pope Francis’s recent defrock-
ing of Theodore McCarrick, a former
cardinal and archbishop of Washing-
ton, though commendable, is no recom-
pense for the blindness, the arrogance,
the cruelty of a system that allowed
that pathetic man to become the shep-
herd of one of the most visible dioceses
in the world. We fear that boys’ club
secrecy and prancing misogyny, the
profound moral error of discrimination,
will prevail.
For myself, and for many of the
Catholics I know (especially women),
the question of how much corruption
we can tolerate is
Barring now weighed against
the tremendous loss
women
adheres
to a mere
we would feel, if we
left this church. It’s
an institution that
custom that has shaped us, com-
is contrary to forted us, guided and
God’s intent. informed us, that is
the center of our
spiritual lives as well
as our community
lives and family lives, the source of our
own moral strength, of our faith in the
substance of things hoped for. And yet
small commiserations can no longer
placate our outrage. A sea change is
required.
Forty years ago, when, as the evi-
dence now shows, abusive priests and
winking bishops were flourishing
throughout the world, Sister Theresa
Kane of the Sisters of Mercy stirred a
bit of outrage in the Catholic rank and
file when she implored Pope John Paul
II, on his first trip to the United States,
to “be open to, and respond to, the
voices coming from the women of this
country.”
She added later that “serious social
injustices” were imposed on Catholic
women by the “very system” of their
church, and that until the church began
reckoning with this uncomfortable fact,
it could not “give witness to justice in
the world.”
Sister Theresa was not the first
voice in the Catholic Church to suggest
that discrimination against women
was at odds with the church’s core
mission. More than a decade before, in
1965, the Second Vatican Council re-
leased a document called “Gaudium et
Spes,” or “Joy and Hope” — two gifts
now in short supply among the Catho-
lics I know. It said, in part: “With
respect to the fundamental rights of
the person, every type of discrimina-
tion, whether social or cultural,
whether based on sex, race, color,
social condition, language or religion,
is to be overcome and eradicated as
contrary to God’s intent.”
In barring women from the priest-
hood, then, what Sister Theresa called
the “very system” of the Catholic
Church is adhering to a rule, a mere
custom, that is contrary to God’s in-
tent. It is this grave moral error, far
more than priestly celibacy or Catholic
sexual repression, that provides the
implicit rationale for abusive priests
and, more insidious still, for the men
who excuse and protect them.
Rape and abuse is not about sexual
longing or loneliness. It is about power.
It is about the cruel dehumanization of
the other, the perceived lesser being, in
order to gain, and retain, power. The
institutionalized misogyny of the Cath-
olic Church reinforces the notion of
women, and their children, as the
lesser. Catholic women, and their chil-
dren, can have no assurance that the
church can reform itself until that
essential error is addressed and cor-
rected. And that error cannot be cor-
rected as long as women cannot be
priests.
Lately, as I have listened to the
conversations of my dismayed and
discouraged fellow Catholics, I have
thought of the Catholic women who
have shaped my own faith — nuns,
teachers, mothers, friends. I’ve re-
called the particular sound of these
women’s voices when they have come
to the end of their patience; it’s a calm,
powerful, sober sound, a formidable
voice that can bring children up short,
silence excuses, restore order to chaos.
It’s the voice of a woman saying, sim-
ply: “All right. That’s enough.”
It’s the voice the Catholic hierarchy
needs to hear.
ALICE MCDERMOTT is a professor of hu-
manities at Johns Hopkins University
and the author, most recently, of the
novel “The Ninth Hour.”

Can Trump make a deal with Kim?

EBERSTADT, FROM PAGE 1
cultivate the Americans’ interest in
dialogue with Mr. Kim. The promised
halt in testing was taken as a good-will
gesture; it reduced international pres-
sure. All the while, North Korea quietly
pushed ahead with its nuclear and
missiles programs.
In the lead-up to the Singapore
North Korea, is widely respected, but
has been working the file for just six
months. The North Korean side has
brushed off American entreaties both
for a nuclear inventory and for setting
up substantive working groups ahead
of the summit in Hanoi. All of that is to
its advantage.
If big decisions are made this week
apparently took this to mean the denu-
clearization of North Korea, when for
North Korea, it means getting South
Korea out from under America’s nucle-
Whatever happens
next, we’ll help you
ar umbrella. Mr. Kim is likely to stall
with this cunning phraseology and
constructive ambiguity again.
■ AN ILLUSORY PEACE DECLARATION. The
rumor in Washington is that the United

make sense of it.

meeting, North Korea masterfully
probed for its adversary’s weaknesses.
And it learned that Mr. Trump, for all
his fire-and-fury rhetoric, was not just
interested in a deal, but hungry for
one.
The critical test came in late May
2018, when North Korean state media
ran a scathing statement by a vice
minister of foreign affairs that
slammed John Bolton, the American
national security adviser, (for “reck-
less remarks”) and mocked Vice Presi-
dent Mike Pence (“what a political
dummy he is”). It warned: “We can
also make the United States taste an
appalling tragedy it has neither experi-
enced nor even imagined up to now.”
The next day, Mr. Trump suspended
preparations for the summit — only to
quickly order them resumed. The
North Koreans knew then they had
him hooked.
The Singapore summit was held the
following month. No momentous deci-
sions emerged from it, at least so far as
the public is aware. But on every visi-
ble point of contention, North Korea
came out ahead. And Mr. Trump
praised Mr. Kim while cutting back on
military readiness drills that American
and South Korean troops have been
carrying out together for six decades.
As the second Trump-Kim meeting
approaches, North Korea looks to have
the upper hand again.
Mr. Kim has been playing hardball.
If the United States “persists in impos-
ing sanctions and pressure against our
Republic,” he warned in his New Year’s
address last month, “we may be com-
pelled to find a new way for defending
the sovereignty of the country and the
supreme interests of the state and for
achieving peace and stability of the
Korean Peninsula.”
Team Trump, for its part, is painfully
understaffed. The Senate has yet to
confirm an assistant secretary of state
for East Asia and the Pacific. Stephen
Biegun, the special representative for
— meaning: if Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump
are left alone in a room — the North
Koreans may well game the “dotard,”
as the North Korean ruler has called
the American president. And if no big
decisions are reached, North Korea
will still win, because it will keep forg-
ing ahead with its nuclear and missile-
production programs.
So here’s what to watch out for:
■ ONE-SIDED CONCESSIONS. North
Korean negotiators are old hands at
this one. One particular something-for-
nothing deal they
The United may ask for is being
rewarded for halting
States must
resume
tests — which they
no longer need to
against conduct.
North Korea ■ FALSE HOPES FOR
a policy of FALSE CHOICES. The
“maximum American side seems
pressure” to think it can sell
North Korea on
worthy of
abandoning its nu-
the name. clear weaponry in
exchange for eco-
nomic moderniza-
tion. (This was the pitch in the Destiny
Pictures video that Mr. Trump made
Mr. Kim watch in Singapore.) The
North Korean side may pretend to be
interested and claim that no modern-
ization can happen until sanctions are
lifted. In reality, Pyongyang has its
eyes on both the weapons and the
growth; that’s what Mr. Kim’s
“byungjin,” or simultaneous advance,
policy is all about. Never mind that he
has talked the talk of caring more
about economics in recent times;
North Korea is still a perpetual war
economy. Market development there
would only mean a bigger nuclear
threat, and faster.
■ THE “DENUCLEARIZATION” TRAP. One of
the United States’ main blunders in
Singapore was to sign a joint state-
ment to, among other things, “promote
the denuclearization of the Korean
Peninsula.” American negotiators
States is now willing to accede to long-
standing North Korean demands for a
“peace declaration” that would for-
mally end the Korean War. (Fighting
stopped in 1953, but only by a cease-
fire agreement.) Whatever such a
proclamation might mean under inter-
national law, it would marginalize and
could endanger South Korea. With a
Newspaper subscription offer:
signed declaration in hand, the Kim
government would demand, naturally, Save 66% for three months.
the departure of American forces from
the Korean Peninsula and the scrap-
ping of the United States-South Korean
defense alliance.
The correct position on this question In unpredictable times, you need journalism that cuts through
is, instead, that American forces the noise to deliver the facts. A subscription to The New York
should remain in the peninsula for as
long as the United States and South Times International Edition gives you uncompromising reporting
Korea agree that such a presence is in that deepens your understanding of the issues that matter,
their respective security interests,
peace proclamation or not. and includes unlimited access to NYTimes.com and apps for
And the correct position overall is
for the United States to resume a pol-
smartphone and tablet.
icy of maximum pressure worthy of
the name. North Korea’s trade with
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nomic partner, reportedly dropped by
nearly 60 percent between January
and September of last year. The gov-
ernment in Pyongyang is forced to
spend down strategic reserves. A
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suffocation campaign should be en-
forced ruthlessly.
nytimes.com/discover
In its quest to make the world safe
for itself, the North Korean govern-
ment uses diplomacy — granted, a
diplomacy of bared fangs and broken
promises — to consolidate gains, ex-
tract concessions or provoke new
crises. At the moment, it seems to be in
“consolidate” and “extract” mode. But
it could shift gears to “crisis” as soon
as that seems beneficial. Maybe or
maybe not this week in Hanoi, but
certainly at a time and place of Mr.
Kim’s choosing.
Offer expires June 30, 2019 and is valid for new subscribers only. Hand delivery subject to confirmation
by local distributors. Smartphone and tablet apps are not supported on all devices.
NICHOLAS EBERSTADT isa political econo-
mist at the American Enterprise Insti-
tute.
 ..
12 | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Sports
Winter Olympic glory, then chemotherapy
Her regimen includes training in the
PENTICTON, BRITISH COLUMBIA
small workout room on the ground floor.
On a recent Friday morning, she put
herself through a brisk circuit of weight
3 months after winning lifting, dips, resistance-band work and
other exercises that she has tried to
gold, Kikkan Randall maintain since entering what she calls
learned she had cancer her G.I. Jane phase. She shaved her
head after her hair began to fall out in
BY CHRISTOPHER CLAREY clumps early in chemotherapy.
Randall likes to do laundry between
Inside the living room of her new home, sets, and her deep breathing was often
Kikkan Randall held a wig in her hands. drowned out by the sound of a washing
Her own hair is growing back, but it is machine. Bottles of detergent share
still a long way from matching the shoul- space on shelves with mementos from
der-length coiffure with the pink streaks her and Ellis’s athletic careers.
that she sported for much of her career A photo of the gold medal finish from
to remind people that cross-country ski- Pyeongchang sits atop a baseboard
ers were “NOT boring.” heater where Randall can see it as she
The blond wig with a pink streak — sweats. Though there are signs of the
purchased last year in Anchorage, her PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALANA PATERSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES strain, such as dark half-circles under
home city — was meant to provide a Left, Kikkan Randall with wigs she bought after she received a diagnosis of breast her eyes, she looks lean and fit.
sense of normalcy amid upheaval. cancer. Above, Randall training near her home with Breck, her 2-year-old son, in tow. “Thankfully all the muscles didn’t go
“It’s funny,” she said last week as she away,” she said.
placed it on her no-longer bald head. She has put them to use: biking to and
“Where we’re at now, I feel like I’m play- throughout her extensive and expen- from cancer treatments and hopping on
ing dress-up when I wear this.” sive treatment, but she was required to “I don’t think cancer skis soon after her lumpectomy, using
A year ago, when Randall and Jessie receive her primary cancer care in the patients are told only one pole for a time to avoid over-
Diggins won the United States’ first United States. enough what they working her right side. In September,
Olympic gold medal in cross-country She chose Anchorage, where her par- she won a 10-kilometer run in Penticton,
skiing and its first medal of any kind in ents and many of her closest friends live
can do.” and last month, while still undergoing
the sport in 42 years, Randall already and where she remains a local icon after radiation, she won the women’s event at
had breast cancer. competing in five Olympics. But that the kind of time to not have to be so disci- a duathlon ski race in Anchorage.
She just did not know it yet. meant weeks apart from Jeff and Breck plined and enjoy the reward of all that “I don’t think cancer patients are told
After all the wide-eyed jubilation in as she shuttled between Canada and effort. But what really has been the most enough what they can do,” she said.
Pyeongchang, South Korea, on the night Alaska going through six rounds of che- upsetting is the fact we couldn’t try and Randall, who has a port implanted in
of Feb. 21, 2018, Randall’s realization motherapy, a lumpectomy, follow-up have another kid right away.” her chest to continue receiving injec-
that something might be wrong came on surgery and 33 sessions of radiation. Randall said she expected to be on an- tions of the drug Herceptin, wants to
a much quieter evening — and served as Shortly before she finished her final tihormone medication for at least five promote physical activity during treat-
a stark reminder that cancer doesn’t re- radiation session, on Jan. 25, her mother, years, possibly as long as 10. Pregnancy ment. She has taken inspiration from
ally care if you are an Olympic medalist, to be a mom, psyched to be here starting Randall and Ellis have been open Deborah, opened a bottle of Champagne is not advisable during such treatment, and spoken with Gabriele Grunewald,
an icon in your sport, have no family his- our life here together. And then I was throughout her treatment, particularly to mark the occasion. The bottle had although Randall said she might be able the 32-year-old American middle-dis-
tory of the disease and are more fit than getting ready for bed and just happened on social media — an attempt to connect originally been purchased to celebrate to take a break from the medication to tance runner, who has continued to com-
99.99 percent of the population. to notice it.” with Randall’s fan base and to provide Randall’s long-awaited gold medal. pursue having a child. pete despite dealing with more virulent
It was May 13, Mother’s Day. The Her fingers brushed across some- others in similar situations with infor- “When cancer happened, my mom de- “If we only ever end up with Breck, forms of cancer.
newly retired Randall; her husband, thing hard in her right breast. “I thought mation and inspiration. She has posted cided that bottle had a new meaning,” he’s amazing,” Randall said. Randall has no plans to return to top-
Jeff Ellis; and their 2-year-old son, it was my rib bone at first,” she said, “but from the wig shop, the hospital recovery Randall said. The family moved to Penticton for a level competition and has not skied
Breck, had just spent a day in the out- then it was, ‘Hmm, it feels like it’s kind of room, the bathroom mirror and her Pen- There are, of course, private burdens, job opportunity for Ellis, a former 400- more than 30 kilometers since her diag-
doors near their new home in Penticton, moving around in there.’” ticton couch after chemotherapy and a none heavier than the reality that Ran- meter hurdler for Canada, who was later nosis, but she took part in the American
a small Canadian city between two lakes The diagnosis, delivered on May 31 by cold caught from Breck left her drained dall’s treatment means she and Ellis an elite cross-country skier. But he said Birkebeiner, a 50-kilometer ski mara-
in the Okanagan Valley. telephone as she was traveling to a wed- and miserable for a stretch last year. must postpone plans to have more chil- he left his new job in July to play a bigger thon in Hayward, Wis., on Saturday. She
They had hiked in the nearby moun- ding in Sweden, was Stage 2 invasive Randall found the two pea-size tu- dren. That made her Mother’s Day dis- role with Breck and to have more flexi- then will take part in sprint ski races in
tains in the sunshine, bought a grill for ductal carcinoma. mors in her breast relatively early and covery all the more poignant. bility to help Randall. the Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing as
their yard and shared the feeling that “Early on, there was definitely a received an upbeat prognosis for a com- “When I found out I had cancer, it was After they moved to Canada for Ellis’s part of the buildup to the 2022 Winter
they were finally settling into a rhythm heavy, why-me phase,” Ellis said of Ran- mon type of cancer. almost disbelief,” Randall said. “It was career, Randall’s pursuits are again tak- Olympics. And in November, she plans
after months of transition and a post- dall’s reaction. “How is this possible? Af- But as a new arrival in Canada, she like, ‘I did everything right, and I’ve tak- ing precedence. to run the New York City Marathon.
Olympic move from Anchorage. ter all these years I finally got my medal did not yet have health insurance. The en really good care of myself.’ I had put The couple now work together out of “After everything, it’s great to see her
“We’d had the best day,” Randall, 36, and now I can’t enjoy it? So many years United States Olympic Committee all this work in my career and was look- the house, focusing on Randall’s busi- out there on skis,” Ellis said. “It’s her
said. “I was so psyched on life, psyched of delayed gratification.” agreed to continue providing coverage ing forward to a point where I would get ness and charitable opportunities. happy place.”

NON SEQUITUR PEANUTS DOONESBURY CLASSIC 1992

GARFIELD CALVIN AND HOBBES

SUDOKU No. 2602

WIZARD of ID DILBERT
(c) PZZL.com Distributed by The New York Times syndicate
Created by Peter Ritmeester/Presented by Will Shortz

KENKEN CROSSWORD | Edited by Will Shortz

Fill the grid so
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
Solution No. 2502
that every row,
column 3x3 box Fill the grids with digits so as not 25 Italian port on the 48 Bygone Apple
14 15 16
to repeat a digit in any row or
Across
and shaded 3x3 messenger
column, and so that the digits
1 River that formed part Adriatic Sea
box contains
17 18 19

within each heavily outlined box

of the border between 29 Rope fiber 50 Coagulates
each of the East and West
will produce the target number 32 Deux + un 51 View, as the future 20 21 22 23
numbers Germany
1 to 9 exactly shown, by using addition, 5 Cold and moist, as a 34 “Open ___ …” (store 53 ___ Reader

once. subtraction, multiplication or cellar sign) 55 Biblical verb with 24 25 26 27 28

division, as indicated in the box. 9 Brewery in the Nikkei 35 Bronze coin in the “thou”
A 4x4 grid will use the digits
29 30 31 32 33 34
For solving tips 225 Harry Potter books 56 Not pay for each drink
and more puzzles: 1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6. 14 MGM symbol 36 Flight board posting,
individually, say
www.nytimes.com/
35 36 37 38
for short 60 Sorrowful bell sound
sudoku
For solving tips and more KenKen
15 Jannings who won the
first Best Actor Oscar 63 Legal order
puzzles: www.nytimes.com/
37 Is obliged to 39 40 41 42
(1928) 65 Barn topper
kenken. For Feedback: nytimes@ 39 1/12 of a foot
16 Put in a crate 66 Say hello to
kenken.com
43 44 45 46
40 What each set of
17 British term for a row shaded letters in this 67 Religious setback?
of houses converted 47 48 49 50
puzzle represents 68 Emergency operation,
KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. from stables for short
Copyright © 2018 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved. 18 Chess ending
42 Entr’___ 51 52 53 54
69 Raft-making wood
19 Ω 43 Challenge to a bully
70 Any sacrament 55 56 57 58 59
20 What’s gained or lost 45 Confucian philosophy
71 Smooth sheet material
Answers to Previous Puzzles with daylight saving 46 Classic Chrysler 60 61 62 63 64 65
time product Down
22 What a psychic may 1 “Tickle me” doll
47 “The ___ Club” 66 67 68
read (1970s-’80s 2 Protection for a lender
24 Dublin’s land televangelist show) 3 Ring champ Riddick 69 70 71

Solution to February 25 Puzzle 4 Cover, as a knife

5 Take exception to PUZZLE BY ALEX VRATSANOS
S T L A S P C H A R M something 13 Bitter beer, briefly 38 Cluster around an 58 Obsessive about
H O O D U N T O D A L E Y 6 Liqueur whose name 21 Shell’s industry acorn details
A D N A U S E A M S W I P E is Italian for “a little 23 Blue-blooded 41 Believer in nudism
G O I N G S W I M M I N G L Y bitter” 59 Partner of call
Brit 44 Former competitor of
A L T R E I N N Y E 7 Critical point?
W E T Y E S L A G S 26 Stone face? Nikon and Canon 60 C.I.A.’s Soviet
O P A L E K E L I S Z T
8 Prefix with -mania 27 Clash with 49 Active conflict counterpart
R E C Y C L I N G C E N T E R 9 Formally end 28 Tribal chiefs, typically 50 Channel founded by
M E T R O D U O S U R E 10 French river in fierce 29 Economizes maybe Ted Turner 61 Org. whose monthly
E L B A S E A B O X W.W. I fighting too much magazine advertises
S O S D U S K Q U I
52 Wastes gas, maybe
11 Green Knight’s 30 God-given, as abilities
O U T O F T H E R U N N I N G weapon in “Sir Gawain 54 Student with a private magazines
U S A G E T R I A T H L O N and the Green Knight” 31 Nurse, as a newborn teacher
33 Indian yogurt dip
62 Sushi bar fish
S T Y L E O R A L D I V A 12 What an “O” means in 57 Kipling’s “Rikki-
A S S E T N I L E A T XOXO 36 Kicks out of the game Tikki-___” 64 Upstate N.Y. school
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2019 | 13

Culture
The Oscars spread the wealth around
OSCARS, FROM PAGE 1
nonetheless managed to address the el-
ephant in the room — that her victory
had denied one to Glenn Close (“The
Wife”), who had been expected to break
her seven-nomination losing streak.
“This is not how I wanted it to be,” Col-
man said, as the camera cut to Close in
the audience. Close smiled and offered a
polite shrug.
In a major shift from the #Os-
carsSoWhite years of 2015 and 2016, this
year’s ceremony, which lasted a little
over three hours, was notable for the di-
versity of honorees. Two “Black Pan-
ther” crew members, Hannah Beachler
(production design) and Ruth E. Carter
(costumes), became the first African-
Americans to receive Oscars in their re-
spective categories. Cuarón’s award for
best cinematography for “Roma” made
him the first director to win for shooting
his own film.
Asian-Americans were represented
in victories for “Free Solo,” which was
named best documentary, and for “Bao,”
which won best animated short. L.G.B.T.
people were acknowledged with “Bohe-
mian Rhapsody.
“We made a film about a gay man, an

NOEL WEST FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Hannah Beachler, the production de-

signer of “Black Panther,” with the set
decorator, Jay Hart.
NOEL WEST FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

immigrant, who lived his life just una-

pologetically himself,” Malek said.
“We’re longing for stories like this.”
And Spike Lee (“BlacKkKlansman”)
won a competitive Oscar for the first
time in his celebrated career — albeit for
writing and not directing. It was the lone
award for the film. “Let’s all mobilize,”
Lee shouted, referring to the coming
American presidential election as he ac-
cepted the adapted screenplay award.
“Make the moral choice between love
versus hate. Let’s do the right thing!”

The show took its lead from the

televised Grammys two weeks
before, opening with a rowdy
rendition of “We Will Rock You”
by Queen.

“Green Book” also won best original NOEL WEST FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

screenplay. It was written by Nick Valle-

longa, Brian Currie and Peter Farrelly.
Vallelonga, whose father was the real-
life model for the chauffeur played in the
film by Viggo Mortensen, thanked his
parents. Farrelly thanked his cast,
agents, publicists, production execu-
tives, family and the entire state of
Rhode Island.
“Shallow,” the duet between Lady
Gaga and Bradley Cooper that serves as
the centerpiece of “A Star Is Born,” won
best song. The film came up short dur-
ing much of the awards season, but
“Shallow” proved irresistible to voters.
QUEEN OPENS THE SHOW
The show took its lead from the Gram-
mys two weeks before, opening with a
rowdy rendition of “We Will Rock You”
by Queen.
“Welcome to the Oscars!” shouted
Adam Lambert, who has taken over for
Mercury as Queen’s frontman in recent
years, as a waterfall of sparks fell to the
stage of the Dolby Theater in Holly-
wood.
Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Maya Ru-
dolph then took the stage and — while
explaining they were not the hosts —
gave a mini-performance that drew re-
laxed laughter from the audience and
seemed to make the case that the three
women should be hired to co-host next
year, pronto. In a quick segue, they be-
gan presenting the Oscar for best sup-
porting actress at the show’s eight-
minute mark. Last year, it took the show
18 minutes just to get through Jimmy
Kimmel’s monologue.
Regina King won the supporting ac-
tress trophy for her role in the lyrical art
film “If Beale Street Could Talk.”
“I’m an example of what it looks like
when support and love is poured into
someone,” King said, composing herself
after breaking into tears.
HISTORIC “PANTHER” WINS
Two subsequent awards also found Afri-
can-American women called to the
stage. Carter, a three-time nominee
(“Amistad,” “Malcolm X”), won best
costume design for her Afro-futuristic
“Black Panther” attire. Beachler made
history herself for her production de-
sign for that film (with Jay Hart).
“When you think it’s impossible, just
remember to say this,” Beachler said,
reading off her phone during an emo-
tional speech. “I did my best, and my
Top, the director Peter Farrelly and his award four Oscars, including hair and
“Green Book” collaborators accepting the makeup, during the commercial breaks,
best picture Oscar. Left, the acting win- with the winning moments edited and
ners: from left, Rami Malek, Olivia Col- aired later in the broadcast.
man, Regina King and Mahershala Ali. Perhaps as a protest, intentional or
Above right, Spike Lee, who won as a not, the three winners for hair and
screenwriter. makeup, honored for their work on
MONICA ALMEIDA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
“Vice,” took their time at the micro-
phone. In an awkward and halting set of
thank yous, they fumbled with a piece of
paper containing names and went way
over their allotted 90-second time.
Producers started the playoff music
and ultimately cut sound to the micro-
phone.
SPREADING THE LOVE
The first half of the ceremony indicated
the direction the evening would take.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” picked up Os-
cars for sound editing and sound mix-
ing. John Ottman also won the Oscar for
editing the film. None of the winners
thanked Bryan Singer, who was fired as
the film’s director because of erratic be-
havior on the set and has been dogged
by sexual misconduct allegations.
The first win for “Green Book” was a
supporting actor victory by
Mahershala Ali. It was Ali’s second sup-
porting actor win in recent years. (He
NOEL WEST FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES NOEL WEST FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES previously won in 2017 for his role in
“Moonlight.”) Ali became the second
Above, the guitarist Brian May of Queen African-American man to win two Os-
and Adam Lambert. Above right, Lady cars for acting, joining Denzel Washing-
Gaga and Bradley Cooper performing ton.
“Shallow.” Right, the presenters Melissa “I want to dedicate this to my grand-
McCarthy and Brian Tyree Henry. mother, who has been in my ear my en-
tire life telling me that if at first I don’t
succeed, try, try again,” Ali said from
best is good enough.” the stage.
The film also won for Ludwig “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”
Goransson’s score. won best animated feature for Sony Pic-
“Roma” then won best foreign-lan- tures, as expected. The win was a blow
guage film. And “Free Solo,” about a dar- to Disney and its Pixar studio, which
ing rock climber, took the prize for docu- have dominated the category since its
mentary feature. creation in 2001 and had two nominees
“Thank you, National Geographic for this year, “Incredibles 2” and “Ralph
believing in us, and for hiring women Breaks the Internet.”
and people of color,” said one of the latter Peter Ramsey, one of the three-cred-
film’s directors, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhe- ited “Spider-Verse” directors, spoke
lyi. about the importance of inclusion in ani-
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts mated films. “We see you, we’re power-
and Sciences had pressed the producers ful,” he said to fans who identified with
of this year’s ceremony to drastically re- the diverse characters in the film.
duce the running time. Last year, the Os- Pixar did not leave empty-handed,
cars stretched to almost four hours — thanks to its win for “Bao,” conceived
beyond the endurance of viewers, with and directed by Domee Shi. Even the
ratings dropping to a record low. In one space-race thriller “First Man” picked
abandoned plan, the academy wanted to NOEL WEST FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES up an award, for visual effects.

14 | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2019
culture
Strict Judaism, hot television
The Israeli series ‘Shtisel,’
now on Netflix, captivates
viewers across the board
BY JOSEPH BERGER
The stories are the standard stuff of tele-
vision dramas, sitcoms and soap operas.
A young man yearns for an older
woman but must contend with the med-
dling of a domineering father. The fa-
ther, a widower, is on the prowl himself,
though he seems as captivated by the
tasty dishes eligible women cook as he is
with the women themselves. Mean-
while, his daughter painfully copes with
a husband who has taken off on a busi-
ness trip that cloaks a romantic fling.
But what makes the Israeli series “Sh-
tisel,” currently on Netflix, such ground-
breaking television is that the charac-
ters are the black-hatted, side-curled
men and bewigged women of ultra-Or-
thodox Judaism, a group that is known
in Hebrew by the umbrella term
Haredim and includes Hasidim.
It is an insular subculture that is ob-
scure to most Jews, let alone to many
people of other faiths. While there have
been a handful of movies about the
group, like “Felix and Meira” and “Fill
the Void,” “Shtisel” is the first television
series in America exclusively focused
on it, according to Jane Klain, manager
of research services at the Paley Center
for Media in New York.
A word-of-mouth grapevine of emails
and Facebook posts lauding the show’s
touching characters and its humor has
flourished online, particularly among
Jewish viewers.
Netflix seldom comments on ratings.
But interviews and anecdotal evidence
suggest that Jewish viewers, some gen-
tile viewers and even many Haredim
(literally “tremblers” before God), who
generally shun television, are bingeing
on the series.
The response on social media has
been so strong since the show started
streaming on Netflix in December that
the creators are contemplating a third
season, four years after the most recent
season aired, said Dikla Barkai, a
producer for Abot Hameiri Barkai, the
production company behind the show.
They have not discussed plans with any
broadcasters.
“When magic happens, then you try
to understand why it’s happening,” she
said.
An American version of “Shtisel” is
also in the works. Marta Kauffman, a
creator of “Friends,” and her daughter
Hannah K. S. Canter have sold a version
of the show set in Brooklyn, titled “Em-
mis,” to Amazon and have recently com-
pleted a script they will propose to
broadcasters, according to Barkai.
Kauffman told Variety that she was
not concerned about the unfamiliarity
most Americans have with ultra-Ortho-
dox rituals. “Make sure the stories, and
the universality of those stories, is what
people take in,” she said. “The rest is just
background.”
“Shtisel” was produced in Israel,
which in recent years has won plaudits
for a number of television dramas, in-
cluding “Fauda” and the shows on which
the American series “Homeland” and
“In Treatment” were modeled. “Shtisel”
was broadcast for two 12-episode sea-
sons starting in 2013, and its first season
practically swept the Israeli equivalent
of the Emmys.
It is also another show that has seen a
big spike in popularity after arriving on
Netflix, joining American shows like
“Riverdale” and “You.” The streaming
service, which has dramatically ex-
panded its library of non-American TV
shows in recent years as it seeks an
ever-larger global audience, presents
Buried secrets unearthed in Ulster
BOOK REVIEW
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder
and Memory in Northern Ireland
By Patrick Radden Keefe. Illustrated.
441 pp. Doubleday. $28.95.
BY JENNIFER SZALAI
In “Say Nothing: A True Story of Mur-
der and Memory in Northern Ireland,”
Patrick Radden Keefe trains a cold eye
on an incendiary subject. Despite
having Irish ancestors who immigrat-
ed to the United States in the 19th
century, Keefe, a journalist for The
New Yorker, shares little of the “tribal
solidarity” with the old country that
was ubiquitous in Boston, where he
grew up.
“I never felt any particular interest
in the conflict in Northern Ireland,” he
writes. Whatever feeling he had about
the Troubles — the vicious fighting
between the mostly Protestant loy-
alists who wanted to remain British
subjects and the mostly Catholic re-
publicans who didn’t — amounted to a
“detached concern.”
It’s a somewhat startling admission,
coming toward the end of this reso-
lutely humane book, but an outsider’s
perspective is what gives “Say Noth-
ing” its exacting and terrifying lucidity.
The title comes from a poem by Sea-
mus Heaney that describes “The fa-
mous / Northern reticence, the tight
“Shtisel” in Hebrew with English subti-
tles. There is no dubbed version.
The show focuses on a family living in
the tightly packed, squat apartment
buildings of a Haredi neighborhood in
Jerusalem. The members include the
patriarch, Shulem Shtisel (Doval’e
Glickman), a broad-bearded, stub-
bornly opinionated yeshiva teacher
with a tender side; his youngest son,
Akiva (Michael Aloni), a wispy-bearded
teacher at his father’s yeshiva, whose
real passion is for art; and Akiva’s sister,
Giti (Neta Riskin), burdened by a
scheming, apparent nogoodnik of a hus-
band who has taken off for Argentina,
leaving her to raise five children.
Following Haredi matchmaking
customs, Akiva is paired with one young
woman after another, but none arouse
any joy. Then he meets Elisheva (Ayelet
Zurer), the twice-widowed mother of a
pupil.
She is a dark-haired beauty a decade
older. He is smitten, and so is she, but
they struggle with the father’s meddling
opposition and her own misgivings
about marrying someone so young and
quirky. The plot lines that follow — with
gag of place / And times.” Keefe’s book
is as much about this “penumbra of
silence” as it is about lives lost and
blood shed.
The book begins with a longstanding
mystery: Who abducted Jean Mc-
Conville, and why? McConville was a
mother of 10, born to Protestants and
married to a Catholic, so overwhelmed
by the daunting task of caring for her
brood after her husband died that she
seemed to have no time for anything
else, much less sectarian intrigue. Yet
in December 1972, at the end of the
bloodiest year of the Troubles, a group
of masked men and women barged into
her Belfast home, dragging the 38-
year-old widow away as her frightened
children looked on.
For the next three decades, the
McConville children wondered what
happened to their mother, with some of
them electing never to leave Belfast in
case she returned. The city was small,
suffused with whispers of gossip, but
nobody would actually talk. One inqui-
ry by a family member was met with
an ominous note that warned, “Get
away.” Even after McConville’s re-
mains washed up on a beach in 2003,
the code of silence prevailed.
Keefe follows the McConville story,
interviewing more than a hundred
sources and digging deeper and
deeper, to the point where he comes to
his own conclusion about who mur-
dered her. But the culpability of any
one individual is only part of this me-
no sex and barely any touching — treat
the dilemmas with wit and pathos.
“While it is clothed in the world of the
ultra-Orthodox, ‘Shtisel’ is a human
story about family, love and communi-
ty,” said Marty Greenfield, a retired
chief financial officer of Warner Bros.
Records (and the father of the actor Max
Greenfield). “You laugh, you cry, and at
the conclusion you want more.”
The response has been so strong
that the creators are thinking
about a third season, four years
after the most recent one aired.
Fans of the show say it humanizes
people who are often portrayed in bleak,
derogatory caricatures. And the tension
between the Jewish laws that guide
their daily lives and the yearnings and
whims of the characters makes for emo-
tionally powerful television.
“It’s a wonderfully engrossing family
story that gives us insights into a group
we don’t really know much about, even
those of us who are observant Jews,”
ticulously reported book; Keefe is also
interested in “collective denial,” how
an entire society tries to cope with
trauma and brutality through obfusca-
tion and pitiless rationales.
For instance: “We believed that
informants were the lowest form of
human life. They were less than hu-
man. Death was too good for them.”
Those chilling words belong to Do-
lours Price, another central figure in
“Say Nothing.” Price, the daughter of
Catholic republican stalwarts, grew up
lighting cigarettes for an aunt who lost
her eyes and both hands while partici-
pating in a bombing operation gone
awry. At the time of McConville’s dis-
appearance, Dolours was a vibrant
21-year-old and, like her younger sister,
Marian, an enthusiastic member of the
Irish Republican Army. You quickly
sense that Dolours Price’s story is
bound to intersect at some point with
McConville’s; the question becomes
when — and how.
Keefe’s narrative is an architectural
feat, expertly constructed out of com-
plex and contentious material, ar-
ranged and balanced just so. He knows
better than to hazard an interloper’s
interpretation of where an “ancient
quarrel” began. Whether you go back
to the Protestant settlers of the 17th
century or the Tudors of the 16th or the
Norman raiders of the 12th, you’re
already mired in an endless volley of
recriminations and reprisals. “It al-
most didn’t matter where you started
NETFLIX
NETFLIX
said Lisa Kleinman, a marketing con-
sultant in Brooklyn. “It’s not like I’ve
been dying for a personal glimpse into
the lives of Haredim. But the show is a
beautiful, intelligent family saga that
happens to be about Haredim.”
Dr. Shuly Rubin Schwartz, the provost
of the Jewish Theological Seminary in
New York and a historian of American
Judaism who has written about the por-
trayal of Jews in American culture, said
the show seemed to satisfy a voyeuristic
interest in a reclusive society, as with
other TV depictions of subcultures like
the Mormon polygamists in “Big Love”
and British royalty in “The Crown.”
“Everybody’s talking about it,” she
said, mentioning her neighbors on the
Upper West Side and a friend who is a
Catholic nun as well. “There’s some-
thing very attractive about a communi-
ty with strong values we share: respect
for parents, respect for elders, close-knit
families, modest lifestyles. We may not
live that way, but we admire it.”
At the same time, she added, “it re-
inforces the views of many Jews about
the claustrophobic nature of that soci-
ety, the conformity, the regimentation.”
PA IMAGES, VIA GETTY IMAGES
Dolours Price, left, with her sister Marian
outside Belfast in Northern Ireland.
the story,” Keefe writes. “It was always
there.”
The Good Friday Agreement of 1998
brought some relief; with the excep-
tion of some violent eruptions over the
past two decades, a long stretch of
relative peace in Northern Ireland has
held more or less steady. But the ac-
cord didn’t heal all wounds — and, in
Keefe’s telling, it opened up some new
ones. A number of former I.R.A. foot
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Clockwise from top left: Doval’e
Glickman, left, and Sasson Gabai in
“Shtisel”; Chanie Apfelbaum and Dr.
Shuly Rubin Schwartz, two enthusiastic
audience members; and Michael Aloni in
another scene from the show.
Her friend Dr. Mary C. Boys, the vice
president of academic affairs at Union
Theological Seminary in New York, said
the “very human stories” shatter ster-
eotypes of Haredi families just as well-
crafted works about Catholic nuns shat-
ter those stereotypes.
“One of the most important things we
can do is engage in fiction or nonfiction
that complicates our understanding of
the other, whoever the other is,” said
Boys, who belongs to the Sisters of the
Holy Names of Jesus and Mary.
The show so accurately captures the
granular mores of daily Haredi life
partly because one of its creators,
Yehonatan Indursky, grew up in an ul-
tra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem. The
men wear fringed ritual garments even
while relaxing at home. The women
sleep in snoods covering their hair. Mar-
ried couples sleep in separate beds.
A blessing is said every time food or
drink is consumed, and no one enters a
room without kissing a mezuza, a nar-
row doorjamb fixture that contains the
sacred Shema prayer. First-time meet-
ings to check out a possible match take
place in public hotel lobbies. Even the
way a man sits, pulling up the flaps of his
frock coat away from his backside, feels
authentic.
Emma Goldman, a 30-year-old hu-
man rights professional for a nonprofit,
who grew up in an observant home, not
only was beguiled by how Haredim ex-
perienced “the same internal struggles,
hopes and dreams, heartbreaks and be-
trayals,” but could also recognize the
loopholes some Orthodox Jews find to
soldiers felt betrayed by the agreement
because it kept the British dominion
over Northern Ireland intact. Dolours
Price, who spent eight years in prison
for a 1973 London bombing, was one of
them.
“She had set bombs and robbed
banks and seen friends die and nearly
died herself,” Keefe writes. All those
awful things — and for what? As she
herself put it in an interview, “I was
often required to act contrary to my
nature.”
Keefe’s depiction of Price is so
rounded and intimate you’ll be sur-
prised to learn that he never spoke to
her. The first he ever even heard of
Price was when he read her obituary in
The Times, in 2013. Price participated
in the so-called Belfast Project, a set of
confidential interviews conducted with
paramilitary fighters a few years after
the Good Friday Agreement, kept
under lock and key at Boston College
and subject, from 2011 on, to a sub-
poena made at the request of the Police
Service of Northern Ireland.
The fate of the Belfast Project turns
out to be an absorbing drama in its own
right, as Keefe delicately unpacks the
legal and moral quandary surrounding
what amounts to a cache of confessions
— conducted at considerable risk and
in utmost secrecy — in which people
implicated themselves and others in
the cruelest, most brutal acts.
A name that kept coming up in the
secret interviews was apparently
..
SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES
bend laws to their needs. Elisheva, for
example, stealthily listens to popular
music on the Sabbath and justifies doing
so because she left the audio player on
overnight.
Secular Jews are intrigued as well, as
evident from a host of comments by the
more than 4,000 members of a Facebook
group, “Shtisel: Let’s Talk About It.”
Hasidim and other Haredim, largely
the group known as in Yiddish as
Yeshivish (they may have a similarly
austere appearance, but they do not re-
vere a particular Grand Rabbi as Ha-
sidic sects do), generally decline to own
television sets. In Israel, the show was
denounced by one Haredi columnist as a
“Trojan horse” crafted to influence a pi-
ous community with foreign values. But
Haredim do have laptops and cell-
phones and, though often loath to admit
it, some will watch surreptitiously.
“My wife watches it — off the record,”
said one communal leader in Borough
Park, Brooklyn, New York’s largest Ha-
sidic neighborhood, smiling mischie-
vously and asking not to be identified.
Chanie Apfelbaum, a 38-year-old
Lubavitch Hasid and mother of five who
hosts a popular food blog on Instagram,
was more forthright, calling the series
“the most honest portrayal of an ultra-
Orthodox community ever.” (Lubavitch
Hasidim have long used television
broadcasts to proselytize Jews to be-
come more observant.)
Alexander Rapaport, who runs a Bor-
ough Park soup kitchen called Masbia,
said that had the show been on Amazon
Prime Video instead of Netflix, it might
have been watched more widely be-
cause many Hasidim run their busi-
nesses through Amazon deliveries.
Watching on Netflix, he noted, requires
the deliberate act of subscribing.
Those who do watch (and admit to it)
extol the show’s affecting moments.
Frimet Goldberger, a mother of two and
freelance writer who left the Satmar
sect of Hasidim, based partly in
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, recalled a
scene when Giti is in agony during labor
and her husband, by Haredi custom,
cannot be in the delivery room with her.
He calls her on a cellphone and tenderly
sings a song to her, and she smiles and
tears up, struck by his uncommon dis-
play of affection.
“It struck a visceral chord, and I inti-
mately recognized Giti’s conflicting
emotions — her desire to be held during
this painful and momentous occasion,
and following the law that forbids hus-
bands from touching their wives during
labor,” Goldberger said.
As she watched, she remembered the
birth of her own two children and the
deprivation of not being able to feel the
embrace of her husband during labor,
and she, too, cried.
“Gerry” — as in Gerry Adams, who
until last year was the leader of Sinn
Fein, the political party long aligned
with the I.R.A. In 2014, Adams was
questioned by police about the death of
McConville but never charged; in their
interviews for the Belfast Project,
I.R.A. volunteers said they reported to
Adams.
But to this day, Adams, known as
one of the I.R.A.’s most prominent
leaders during the 1970s, denies ever
having been a member of the I.R.A. It’s
a gambit that’s both audacious and
absurd.
Keefe’s portrait of the shape-shifting
Adams is unsparing; he calls Adams’s
strenuously whimsical persona “cake
fairs with a dash of bloodshed.” But
then Keefe also posits that this very
ambiguity made it possible for the
various sides of the Good Friday
Agreement to believe they could nego-
tiate with Adams and arrive at a peace
deal.
This sensitive and judicious book
raises some troubling, and perhaps
unanswerable, questions. Does moving
forward from an anguished past re-
quire some sort of revisitation and
reckoning? Or are certain memories so
perilous that they’re better left buried
and ignored? A conspicuously unboth-
ered Adams, for one, seems never to
look back. As he once told an inquisi-
tive reporter, in a quote that manages
to sound naïve and cynical all at once,
“If you don’t ask, you can’t tell.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2019 | 15

travel

Leonardo, 500 years after his death
Museums will remember
the Renaissance master
with exhibits in 2019
BY NORA WALSH
This year is the quincentennial of the
death of Leonardo da Vinci, the Italian
Renaissance master who died in May
1519. To celebrate the prodigious poly-
math’s life and work, museums are host-
ing special exhibitions and tour opera-
tors are taking travelers on Leonardo-
inspired journeys across Western Eu-
rope.
In the United Kingdom, the Royal Col-
lection Trust opened a nationwide exhi-
bition of drawings, “Leonardo da Vinci:
A Life in Drawing,” earlier this month.
Museums and galleries in 12 cities, in-
cluding Belfast and Southampton, are
each displaying 12 of Leonardo’s draw-
ings through May 6. Then the entire col-
lection will be shown, along with more
than 50 additional drawings, at The
Queen’s Gallery, in Buckingham Palace,
until Oct. 13; this assemblage will form
the largest exhibition of Leonardo’s
work in more than 65 years. The exhib-
it’s last leg, from Nov. 22 until March 15,
will showcase 80 drawings at the
Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyrood-
house in Edinburgh. The collection, cu-
rated to highlight the artist’s interests as
varied as engineering and botany, “al-
lows us to enter one of the greatest
minds in history,” said Martin Clayton,
Head of Prints and Drawings for Royal
Collection Trust.
Italy will celebrate its native son with
honorary exhibits across the country,
and one of the most comprehensive will
be “Leonardo da Vinci: Drawing the Fu-
ture,” running from April 15 to July 14, at
the Royal Museums of Turin. More than
50 drawings will be on display, including
“Codex on the Flight of Birds” and “Face
of a Young Girl.” Leonardo’s famous
“Self Portrait” will also be on view.
During a similar time period (April 19
to July 14), the Gallerie dell’Accademia
in Venice will exhibit 25 drawings, in-
cluding the rarely displayed master-
work “Vitruvian Man,” while the Sforza
Castle in Milan is set to debut the newly
restored Sala delle Asse room and show
more of Leonardo’s work on May 2, the
anniversary of his death.
In Florence, the Palazzo Strozzi will
unveil a retrospective showcasing 120
paintings, sculptures and drawings de-
voted to the Renaissance maestro An-
drea del Verrocchio; work from Leon-
ardo and other pupils will be featured
(March 9 to July 14). In September, a cu-
rated version of the show will head to
The National Gallery of Art in Washing-
ton. Also in the United States, the Den-
ver Museum of Nature and Science’s
“Leonardo da Vinci: 500 Years of Gen-
ius” exhibit (March 1 to Aug. 25) will
present reproductions of Leonardo’s in-
ventions, historical enactors and the
only 360-degree replica of the “Mona
Lisa” ever made.
The Louvre Museum in Paris, which
houses nearly a third of Leonardo’s sur-
viving artwork, including the “Mona
Lisa,” plans to show a retrospective of
the artist’s paintings starting on Oct. 24.
“We want to illustrate how he placed ut-
most importance on painting,” said Vin-
cent Delieuvin, an exhibit co-curator,
“and how his investigation of the world,
which he referred to as ‘the science of
painting,’ was the instrument of his art,
seeking nothing less than to bring life to
his paintings.”
To explore these exhibits, other
groundbreaking masterpieces and the
places that shaped Leonardo’s life and
art, travel outfitters are organizing
tours across Western Europe. Audley
Travel is offering a customizable 12-day
trip through Italy, France and Britain
designed to provide insight into Leon-
ardo’s muses, peers and the sociopoliti-
cal climate of the Renaissance. “We’ve
created a trip that traces the full arc of
da Vinci’s lifetime, providing travelers a
holistic and immersive look at his life
and inspirations,” said Isabel Norman-
Butler, a manager at the company. Red
Savannah recently started a new series
of European itineraries that can be tai-
lored to highlight art historian-guided
visits of “The Last Supper” in Milan and
jaunts to Leonardo’s birthplace in Tus-
cany that include private tours of Museo
Leonardiano Vinci.
Smithsonian Journeys has created
“The Genius of Leonardo da Vinci: Cele-
brating 500 Years,” an eight-day tour
through Florence, Vinci and Milan led
by Ross King, an author and Renais-
sance history expert. Travelers can
choose either a spring or fall departure,
and on the trip Mr. King will discuss the
connection between Leonardo’s scien-
tific interests and his art (departure
An exhibit in December in Athens celebrating Leonardo da Vinci, who died in 1519.
dates on March 23 and Nov. 9; rates
from $4,995 per person, based on double
occupancy).
“I want travelers to explore a 15th-
century Florentine culture and society
that allowed a boy from the Tuscan
boondocks to become one of the greatest
artists and thinkers of all time,” Mr. King
said.
In France, European Waterways’ six-
passenger luxury barge, Nymphea, will
cruise the Loire Valley, where Leonardo
spent the final years of his life, on
weekly departures from late June
SIMELA PANTZARTZI/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK
through September (all-inclusive rates
begin at $4,650 per person, based on
double occupancy). The six-night cruise
offers guided tours of Leonardo’s tomb
at Château d’Amboise among its excur-
sions, as well as visits to Unesco-listed
Renaissance castles in the region.
Remaining
green while
on the road
BY JUSTIN SABLICH
If you strive for a sustainable lifestyle at
home, you may be tempted to avoid
thinking about the effect your travels
could have on the environment. No one
wants to feel guilty on vacation.
But the effects traveling has on the en-
vironment are significant.
A study published last year by the
University of Sydney found that global
tourism accounts for 8 percent of total
carbon emissions, three times as much
as previously thought.
“As global travel is becoming cheaper
and more accessible, the usage of air-
planes, cruise ships, trains and buses is
increasing and giving off a tremendous
amount of carbon and other harmful
substances,” said Samantha Bray, man-
aging director of the Center for Respon-
sible Travel, a nonprofit organization
that supports sustainable tourism prac-
tices.
Here are some practical ways to limit
negative effects of travel.
HIT THE RAILS If where you’re heading is
accessible by train, consider taking one.
“It’s a great way to see a destination and
has a much lower carbon impact than
flying,” said Justin Francis, chief execu-
tive of Responsible Travel, a travel book-
ing agency that specializes in sustain-
able tourism.
STAY IN SUSTAINABLE LODGING The Global
Sustainable Tourism Council recognizes
certification programs for hotels and
tour operators, Ms. Bray said.
RESPECT YOUR HOSTS Ms. Bray suggests
following the mantra of “leave no trace”
when visiting a destination. “Travelers
can help reduce their waste production
by carrying their own reusable bags,
straws, utensils, and take-away contain-
ers,” Ms. Bray said.
KNOW YOUR TOUR OPERATOR Some tour
companies are better than others re-
garding environmental conservation,
protecting wildlife, supporting cultural
heritage and employing local guides. In
general, choose operators that are
transparent about their support for the
communities they visit.

Hotels turn focus to cleaner air

Operators are adding
purifiers and filters to
scrub out contaminants
BY SHIVANI VORA
Forget free wine hours and on-demand
workout videos. An increasing number
of hotels around the world are now pro-
viding guests the option of booking
rooms with filtration and purification
systems that minimize threats of air pol-
lution and offer cleaner air.
“Interior air quality can be abysmal,”
said Beth McGroarty, research director
for The Global Wellness Institute, a non-
profit organization for the wellness in-
dustry. “Hotels are combating this by in-
stalling high-tech systems in some of
their rooms that improve the air their
guests are breathing.” The quest for
clean air is part of the growing interest
in wellness travel, Ms. McGroarty said.
Outside conditions could certainly be
a larger factor. According to data re-
While the amount varies, a stay can be 5
percent to 7 percent more expensive
than a standard room.
AFTER THE FIRES IN CALIFORNIA
In January, the 556-room InterConti-
nental San Francisco installed Molekule
air purifiers in 30 of its rooms as part of a
pilot project. According to Molekule’s
chief executive, Dilip Goswami, the two-
foot tall, cylindrical devices plug into a
power outlet and eliminate mold, bacte-
ria, chemicals, allergens and viruses
through the company’s patented air pu-
rification technology.
Harry Hobbs, an area director of engi-
neering for InterContinental Hotels,
said that indoor air quality is more im-
portant to the hotel after the wildfires
that occurred last year in Paradise,
Calif., about a three-hour drive away.
“Even though the wildfires weren’t near
the city, they affected the air quality, and
many of our guests asked us for masks
and filters because they had breathing
difficulties. Our staff was also uncom-
fortable,” he said. “After this initial trial,
gus, bacteria and mold on surfaces. The
rooms are also equipped with portable
air purifiers.
Travelers can find a room with these
air-filtration systems on the company’s
website. Vinny Lobdell Jr., the compa-
ny’s president, said it will add more
rooms in another 200 hotels this year,
and Pure Rooms usually comprise be-
tween 3 percent to 5 percent of a hotel’s
total room inventory.
IN-ROOM PURIFIERS, WORLDWIDE
The wellness technology company De-
los is behind the “Stay Well” designation
of more than 1,000 hotel rooms found
globally, including those in Wyndham,
Marriott and MGM Grand hotels.
One of their key features is a wall-
mounted air-purification filter that aims
to reduce allergens and microbes. For
Wyndham’s 50 hotels in North America,
the rooms are now a brand standard:
According to Danica Boyd, the compa-
ny’s vice president of brand operations,
all of its properties will have at least
some Stay Well rooms by the end of this
te in er

leased last year by the World Health Or- I want to offer cleaner air in more rooms year.
ar eth ov

ganization, nine of 10 people globally and more hotels.”

r. g

breathe polluted air. Many top urban CLEAN AIR WHERE IT’S NEEDED MOST
sm m le

destinations, particularly in developing A DEEP CLEANING When The Oberoi in New Delhi re-
so uzz

nations, have been recognized as having The hotel wellness company Pure Well- opened last year after a renovation, air
unhealthy smog conditions. Wildfires ness has designed “Pure Rooms,” avail- purifiers were installed throughout the
P

are becoming more frequent, affecting
air quality for hundreds of miles. And
travelers with respiratory conditions or
allergies may especially benefit from
breathing cleaner air.
Most hotel properties charge a higher
nightly rate for their clean air rooms.
able in 300 hotels globally with several
companies, including Marriott, Hamp-
ton Inn, Embassy Suites and Hyatt.
Pure Rooms are guest rooms that
have been deep cleaned with plant-
based and microbial-resistant cleaners,
developed to prevent the growth of fun-
hotel, including in all the rooms, to com-
bat the worsening issue of Delhi’s pol-
luted air.
More than 40 of the new purifiers fil-
ter exterior air as it enters the building;
the hotel also measures the quality of
the interior air twice a day.

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HARISH TYAGI/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK

The air in November in New Delhi. Before The Oberoi reopened in the city last year, it installed air filters throughout the hotel.
 ..
16 | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION