October 23, 2016

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October 23, 2016

First Words Basic Instinct How ‘‘bias’’ went from a psychological By Emily Bazelon
13 observation to a political accusation.

On Photography Strange Implications What makes an image surreal is not By Teju Cole
16 the artful crafting of illusion but the eruption of the accidental
into the everyday.

The Ethicist Third Degree A man faked his academic credentials. By Kwame Anthony Appiah
20 Should his fiancée be told?

24 16 22

Letter of Choir You can take a breath and escape physically and By Sarah Manguso
22 Recommendation metaphysically, occupying and occupied by the music.

Eat The Way It Was Snack trays can evoke the best of how By Gabrielle Hamilton
24 we used to eat, and how we can again.

Talk Abbi Jacobson The actress and writer didn’t expect Interview by Dave Itzkoff
54 Hillary Clinton to come on her show.

Behind the Cover: Gail Bichler, design director: ‘‘Images from police dashboard cameras and body 8 Contributors 23 Tip
cameras increasingly inform how we understand the sometimes fraught relationship between the police 10 The Thread 50 Puzzles
and the public. Turning the lens of the camera on readers speaks to some of the surprising consequences 19 Poem 52 Puzzles
of total transparency.’’ Photograph by Kenji Aoki for The New York Times. 20 Judge John (Puzzle answers on Page 51)
Hodgman

4 Continued on Page 6
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October 23, 2016

The Forecast Hurricanes like Matthew have laid bare the dirty secret of By Michael Behar
26 Is Cloudy the National Weather Service: Its technologies and methods
are woefully behind the times.

Open City Body cameras have been promoted as a solution to police By McKenzie Funk
30 misconduct. But the strange two-year saga of Seattle shows
just how complicated total transparency can be.

Settling Scores Miri Regev became the culture minister of Israel last year — By Ruth Margalit
36 and promptly declared war on the country’s cultural elite.

The Playborhood A Silicon Valley dad decided to test his parenting theories by By Melanie Thernstrom
42 turning his yard into a playground where kids can take physical
risks without supervision. Not all of his neighbors were thrilled.

Playing on the trampoline in the Lanza family’s backyard in Silicon Valley. Photograph
by Holly Andres for The New York Times.

‘Think about your own 10 best memories of childhood,

and chances are most of them involve free play outdoors.’
PAGE 42

6 Copyright © 2016 The New York Times

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Contributors

Gabrielle Hamilton Eat, Editor in Chief JAKE SILVERSTEIN

Page 24 Deputy Editors JESSICA LUSTIG,
BILL WASIK

Gabrielle Hamilton, the magazine’s newest Managing Editor ERIKA SOMMER

Design Director GAIL BICHLER
Eat columnist, is the chef and owner of
Director of Photography KATHY RYAN
Prune restaurant, which she opened in October
Features Editor ILENA SILVERMAN
1999 in the East Village. In 2011, the James Politics Editor CHARLES HOMANS
Beard Foundation named her the best chef in Story Editors NITSUH ABEBE,
New York City. She is the author of ‘‘Blood, MICHAEL BENOIST,
Bones and Butter.’’ Hamilton writes as a SHEILA GLASER,

chef who happens to cook in many of the ways CLAIRE GUTIERREZ,

that others do. ‘‘I cook at a restaurant; I cook at LUKE MITCHELL,

DEAN ROBINSON,
home; I cook for my children; I cook for adults;
WILLY STALEY,
I cook with weekday urgency; and sometimes
SASHA WEISS
I get to cook with leisure and imagination,’’ Special Projects Editor CAITLIN ROPER
Hamilton said. “I like to take particular care of Associate Editors JEANNIE CHOI,
the cook — the wallet, the body, the time, the JAZMINE HUGHES
Photographed by Kathy Ryan at The New York Times on mood, the success and the well-being of the cook. Chief National Correspondent MARK LEIBOVICH
Oct. 11, 2016, at 10:01 a.m. Because as we all know, ‘A joyous heart makes Staff Writers SAM ANDERSON,

the loaves taste better.’ ’’ EMILY BAZELON,

SUSAN DOMINUS,
MAUREEN DOWD,
Michael Behar ‘‘The Forecast Is Cloudy,’’ Michael Behar writes about science, the
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES,
Page 26 environment and adventure travel. He last
WESLEY MORRIS,
wrote for the magazine about healing JENNA WORTHAM
the body by hacking the nervous system. Writers at Large C. J. CHIVERS,
JIM RUTENBERG

McKenzie Funk ‘‘Open City,’’ McKenzie Funk is a founding member of the David Carr Fellow GREG HOWARD
Page 30 journalism cooperative Deca. He last wrote for Art Director MATT WILLEY

the magazine about the wreck of a Shell oil rig Deputy Art Director JASON SFETKO
Designers FRANK AUGUGLIARO,
in the Arctic.
BEN GRANDGENETT,
CHLOE SCHEFFE
Ruth Margalit ‘‘Settling Scores,’’ Ruth Margalit is an Israeli writer living in New Digital Designer LINSEY FIELDS
Page 36 York. This is her first article for the magazine. Associate Photo Editors STACEY BAKER,
AMY KELLNER,
Melanie Thernstrom ‘‘The Playborhood,’’ Melanie Thernstrom is the author, most recently, CHRISTINE WALSH
Page 42 of ‘‘The Pain Chronicles.’’ She last wrote for the Virtual-Reality Editor JENNA PIROG

magazine about a family deciding when to stop Photo Assistant KAREN HANLEY
Copy Chief ROB HOERBURGER
treating their child with cancer.
Copy Editors HARVEY DICKSON,
DANIEL FROMSON,

Dear Reader: Have You Ever MARGARET PREBULA,

ANDREW WILLETT

Gone in Disguise? Head of Research

Research Editors
NANDI RODRIGO
DAN KAUFMAN,

Every week the magazine publishes the ROBERT LIGUORI,

results of a study conducted online in RENÉE MICHAEL,

LIA MILLER,
June by The New York Times’s research-
STEVEN STERN,
and-analytics department, reflecting
MARK VAN DE WALLE
the opinions of 2,563 subscribers who Production Chief ANICK PLEVEN
chose to participate. This week’s question: Production Editors PATTY RUSH,
Other than on Halloween and at parties, HILARY SHANAHAN
have you ever worn a disguise? 15% Yes 85% No Editorial Assistant LIZ GERECITANO BRINN

Publisher: ANDY WRIGHT Associate Publisher: DOUG LATINO Advertising Directors: MARIA ELIASON (Luxury and Retail) ⬤ MICHAEL GILBRIDE (Fashion, Luxury, Beauty and Home) ⬤ SHARI KAPLAN (Live
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8 10.23.16
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The Thread
Readers respond to the 10.9.2016 issue.
RE: THE FOOD ISSUE
The special issue on Big Food captured the
dizzying, sometimes maddening state of
large-scale food and agriculture in America.
Reading ‘‘Close to the Bone,’’ by Ted
Genoways, brought to mind the words
often attributed to Dr. Albert Schweitzer:
‘‘Think occasionally of the suffering of
which you spare yourself the sight.’’
I applaud the brave individuals risk-
ing their freedom and safety by going
undercover to expose the horrors of
animal agriculture. Animal activists are
often dismissed as fanatics and accused of
trying to force their views on others, but I
see it differently. By shining a spotlight on
carefully hidden cruelty, they are empow-
ering people to make lifestyle choices in
accordance with their own ethical stan-
dards. If you wouldn’t abuse an animal,
why are you comfortable paying someone
else to do it for you?
Stewart David, Venice, Fla.
Michael Pollan makes interesting and
relevant points in ‘‘Big Food Strikes
Back.’’ Yet I can’t help finding his whole
concept of ‘‘Big Food,’’ ‘‘Big Ag’’ and
‘‘Big Meat’’ completely disingenuous.
He’s feeding the narrative that agricul-
ture is out to get us and that there are
these spooky people conniving on how
to mess up our health, make us fat and
ruin our lives. Give me a break.
Yes, things can definitely be improved
in agriculture, but it’s going to take a
coalition of people working together
to achieve that. This is our food system
we’re talking about; we literally need it
to live. It’s going to take both sides, the
Michael Pollans and the ‘‘Big Ag’’ folks
10 10.23.16
of the world, managing to swallow their
egos and sit down together and talk
about practical, realistic solutions before
we see any progress.
Jessica Eise, West Lafayette, Ind.
Thank you, Michael Pollan, for the thor-
ough analysis, and kudos to Michelle THE STORY, ON
Obama for her efforts. TWITTER
We need a national movement
Cheers to
centered on a single issue to get the NYTimes for the
undivided attention of politicians, the new and best
public and Big Food. What’s going food issue of
wrong? Why haven’t we built that sin- Sunday magazine;
Great writing,
gular enormous movement that will great issues but
get people talking? Environmental- who needs
ists, public-health, animal-welfare and blue M&Ms?
@mimisheraton
social-justice advocates need to take a
cue from Big Meat. They spent roughly
$9 million on lobbying in 2010.
Our failure to fight ‘‘Big Food’’ poli-
cy is due to our inability to communi-
cate the issues in a way that politicians
understand: Money. Many of our polit-
ical leaders haven’t a clue that colossal
health care costs for cancer, neurologi-
cal disorders, heart disease and virtually
everything else is essentially tied to Big
Food. So I’ll make it simple: Big Food
equals Big Healthcare Expenses.
So let’s take charge, advocates. Come
up with a unified public campaign to
communicate these issues to politicians
and the public. I suggest starting with
the $956 billion farm bill. And instituting
a self-imposed ban on processed foods,
challenging Americans to grow victo-
ry gardens and keep their hard-earned
money local by eating local.
Amy Reyes, Avon, Ohio
The series of articles in the Food Issue
present a deservedly grotesque image
of our factory food-production system
‘If you wouldn’t
abuse an animal,
why are you
comfortable
paying someone
else to do
it for you?’
Illustrations by Giacomo Gambineri
but leaves out the most important ele-
ment: the people engaged in these vast
enterprises. The cooks, servers, dish-
washers, grocery and warehouse clerks,
factory workers, truck drivers, farmers
and migrant laborers: America’s most
exploited workers, millions of them.
Corporations involved in the food
business are indeed engendering pover-
ty, especially in rural communities, and
evolving into near monopolies. But we
acquiesce or try to be conscientious con-
sumers by patronizing farmers’ markets.
Imagine a world where everyone
picked their own tomatoes: two hours a
day growing food for each man, woman
and child. If the first lady can dig her
hands in dirt, we all can.
Emory MacAlister, Edgewood, Pa.
CORRECTIONS
An article on Oct. 2 about the Obama
administration’s failure to take on corpo-
rate agriculture misattributed a quotation
in the publication Agri-Pulse about the
agriculture industry’s gearing up for ‘‘a
pre-emptive strike against a long list of
new regulations’’ expected from the Obama
administration. A corn-industry spokesman
Photo illustration by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari
— not Agri-Pulse — said: ‘‘We’ve seen so
many attacks. We see Michael Pollan go
on Oprah. What’s going to happen when
those people . . . start to have an impact in
Washington on policies and regulations?’’
The article also misstated the year Agri-
Pulse published the quotation. It was 2010,
not 2009.
An article on Oct. 16 about Hillary Clinton
misspelled the given name of the author of a
book that she mentioned called ‘‘Amusing Our-
selves to Death.’’ He is Neil Postman, not Neal.
Send your thoughts to magazine@nytimes.com.
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First Words

How ‘bias’ went from a psychological observation to a political accusation. By Emily Bazelon

Basic Instinct
In 2004, 57 police officers of different races were divided into two
groups for a simple experiment. Half of them were shown two photo
lineups, one with an array of white faces and one with black faces.
This group was more visually attuned to the white faces. A second
group looked at the same lineups after words like ‘‘violent,’’ ‘‘crime’’
and ‘‘shoot’’ flashed on their screens, at the edge of their field of
vision. This group of officers’ eyes were mostly drawn to the black
faces. In a similar test, using pictures of guns and knives instead of
words, a group of white college students exhibited a similar shift in
attention. ¶ The psychologists who did the research described their
findings in terms of a ‘‘bias’’ in perception, rather than of intentional
prejudice. The distinction is important: The test measured the split-
second reactions of the police officers and the students, not their
considered judgments. This kind of bias lies beneath the surface,
implicit and often automatic. ‘‘Just as black faces and black bodies
can trigger thoughts of crime, thinking of crime can trigger thoughts
of black people,’’ the psychologists wrote in an article called ‘‘Seeing
Black.’’ ¶ Before the civil rights era, and even more recently, it would
10.23.16 13
First Words

have been strange to describe bias as hid-

den or implicit. Outright bias was codi-
fied by Jim Crow, among other laws, and
reinforced by discrimination at work, at
school and in access to housing. Today,
the country imagines itself differently.
We have a ‘‘colorblind Constitution,’’
Justice Clarence Thomas asserted nine
years ago, at the dawn of the Obama
era, as he joined the court’s conservative
majority to strike down school-desegre-
gation plans. In 2013, Chief Justice John
Roberts decreed that central protections
in the Voting Rights Act ‘‘have lost their
relevance’’ because ‘‘things have changed
dramatically’’ in the 50 years since the
law’s initial passage.
And yet this dark election season sug-
gests otherwise. From dim beginning
to dimmer end, the campaign has laid
bare how bias and accusations of bias
are cleaving us from one another. Don-
ald Trump complains that he can’t get
a fair ruling from a judge of Mexican
ancestry, pledges to ban Muslims from
entering the country and suggests that a
woman doesn’t have what it takes to be
president on the grounds of her gender.
In August, a Washington Post poll found
that 60 percent of Americans believed
that Trump was ‘‘biased against women
and minorities.’’ And many Trump sup-
porters believe that Hillary Clinton is
biased against them, based on her state-
ment (for which she later apologized) psychoanalysis theorized that along with In the realm automatic associations are morally neu-
that half of them are ‘‘deplorable’’ and fleeting thoughts and feelings, attitudes tral, like the link between ‘‘doctor’’ or
‘‘irredeemable’’ because of their racism, including prejudice and stereotyping of politics, ‘‘nurse’’ and ‘‘hospital.’’ Instantly connect
sexism and xenophobia. could take root in the unconscious. the distinction ‘‘doctor’’ to ‘‘he’’ and ‘‘nurse’’ to ‘‘she,’’ how-
The most profound division may be In 1998, the psychologists Anthony between ever, and the links become more loaded.
over the nature of bias itself. Now that G. Greenwald, Mahzarin R. Banaji and Still, your choices don’t necessarily reveal
frank prejudice is ostensibly out of Brian Nosek began a groundbreaking observation and that your true self is sexist. They express
bounds, the country finds itself in murk- project to test these ideas empirical- judgment the influence of stereotypes, but they’re
ier territory, arguing about the kind of ly. They used an ‘‘implicit association is easily lost. not an endorsement. ‘‘It’s not a com-
bias that is less obvious and intentional. test,’’ which measured the speed of ment on your character,’’ says Phillip
While some people (mostly on the left) responses for associating positive and Atiba Goff, one of the psychologists who
puzzle over the lessons of studies like negative terms (‘‘terrific,’’ ‘‘lovely,’’ ‘‘evil,’’ conducted the experiments in ‘‘Seeing
‘‘Seeing Black,’’ others (mostly on the ‘‘hurtful’’) with black and white faces, by Black,’’ with a team led by Jennifer Eber-
right) feel blamed for what they see as hitting keys on a computer. More than hardt of Stanford University.
an imaginary problem. five million people have taken this test In the realm of politics, however, that
online to date, and the researchers have distinction is easily lost. ‘‘Implicit bias
Sigmund Freud popularized the con- found that most whites and Asian-Amer- is a problem for everyone,’’ Hillary Clin-
cept of the unconscious in the early icans more quickly associate positive ton said at the first presidential debate in
decades of the 20th century, describ- qualities with white faces than with September. She was answering a ques-
ing a model of the mind in which some black ones. So do more than 30 percent tion about the police, and for a second
cognitive processes lie beneath the of African-Americans. after responding she paused, perhaps
surface, waiting to be ‘‘discovered and This type of bias stems from the human nervous that she would be misinterpret-
translated into conscious form.’’ Begin- instinct to order the world, by sorting ed as painting them as racist. ‘‘I think,
ning in the 1930s, Freud’s followers in its pieces into familiar groups. Often, unfortunately, too many of us in our great

14 10.23.16 Illustration by Javier Jaén

country jump to conclusions about each an associate professor of science and It took would snap them up to address the gen-
other,’’ Clinton finished. It took two days technology studies at Cornell University, der imbalance in science departments.
for Trump to twist her words into the ran through the evidence for this kind of two days for Phillips, who had just graduated from
accusation ‘‘that everyone, including gender bias and proposed giving women Trump to Liberty University, said that his favor-
our police, are basically racist and prej- a scoring bonus for teaching evaluations twist Clinton’s ite college professor was a woman. He
udiced’’ — in other words, you’re guilty across the board. meant to undermine the case that gender
and you just don’t know it. ‘‘Critics will no doubt argue that such words into the bias is real. But he was actually exempli-
At the vice-presidential debate a cou- a policy would give female faculty a dis- accusation fying the effect of working with people
ple of weeks after Clinton and Trump’s tinct and unfair advantage,’’ Pritchard ‘that everyone, across lines of race and gender when they
exchange, Mike Pence expressed incre- wrote in an online post — and indeed, are your equals or betters.
dulity that the shooting of Keith Lam- on a Fox News panel, Tucker Carlson including This presidential campaign, which
ont Scott, a black man in Charlotte, by called her idea ‘‘insane.’’ One of his our police, began with a wall as its chief symbol, has
a black police officer could be an exam- fellow panelists was Cabot Phillips of are basically driven a wedge into the body politic. Polls
ple of the same phenomenon. ‘‘Enough Campus Reform, a conservative group show a widening split in how men and
of this seeking every opportunity to that describes itself as exposing ‘‘bias racist and women plan to vote, and the gap between
demean law enforcement broadly by and abuse’’ on college campuses. He prejudiced.’ white voters and those of color is even
making the accusation of implicit bias cited a study that found that university larger. We have to confront that rift. The
every time tragedy occurs,’’ he said. hiring committees preferred women for work of knitting the country back togeth-
Law-enforcement officials do not nec- positions in the sciences — when they er means looking inward, to understand
essarily see it Pence’s way, however. In a were competing with identical male can- the biases we didn’t ask to have, and
speech about race and bias at Georgetown didates. In other words, when women, then outward, at people we didn’t fully
University last February, the F.B.I. director, too, had stellar recommendation letters see before. The question before us is how
James Comey, frankly acknowledged that and teaching evaluations, universities many Americans are willing to do that.
for many police officers, ‘‘the two young
black men on one side of the street look
like so many others that officer has locked
up. Two white men on the other side of the
street, even in the same clothes, do not.
The officer does not make the same asso-
ciation about the two white guys, whether
that officer is white or black.’’
Over the summer, the Department
of Justice announced that it would start
implicit-bias training for 28,000 person-
nel, including F.B.I. agents, prosecutors
and immigration judges. Many police
officers already take implicit association
tests about race and crime, says Noble
Wray, a former police chief in Madison,
Wis., who leads the Policing Practices
and Accountability Initiative at the
Justice Department. ‘‘We try to help
officers understand that if you’re going
to deal with your implicit biases, you
have to be introspective. You have to
ask yourself questions about how you’re
interacting with people.’’

The stakes of implicit bias may be partic-

ularly high in policing, but that’s hardly
the only area of public and private life
where bias has consequences. In the
last decade, researchers have repeated-
ly found a discrepancy among men and
women in letters of recommendation for
faculty positions in the sciences and in
teaching evaluations across various dis-
ciplines. Last summer, Sara B. Pritchard,
On Photography By Teju Cole

Look at the photograph by Graciela Itur-

What makes an image surreal is not bide of a small child held on someone’s
lap. The child is a boy, and the person

the artful crafting of illusion
but the eruption of the accidental
holding him is his older sister. What is the
first impression the photograph gives? It
isn’t one of sweetness or innocence, but
rather of a strangeness that is difficult
to identify. The boy’s eyes are closed.

into the everyday. His head is thrown back at what could

be read as an unnatural angle, but could
just as well be read as perfectly natural.
Something seems not quite right. Is he
sick? The composition recalls paintings or
sculptures of the Pietà, where the Madon-
na carries the dead Christ. But here, the
girl is too small, too fragile, to be a moth-
er, and that peculiarity of scale is odd, too.
The boy’s face is covered with a veil,
nothing sinister about that: It’s there to
keep dust away. But the veil’s pattern
adds to the picture’s strangeness. The
white dots of the veil rhyme with the
boy’s two front teeth and with the five
whitish fingernails on the girl’s right
hand. The floral motif along the edge
of the veil is echoed by the flowers on
the girl’s dress. Her hair wisps one way,
his another. And all those dots make you
think of some terrible illness. This is a
photograph Iturbide made of two sib-
lings on Holy Thursday in the Mexican
town of Juchitán de Zaragoza in 1986.
But it is also something more mysterious
than its subject or its setting.
Consider another photograph, a recent
one, posted this month on a mesmerizing
Instagram account called @gangculture
by the artist Trevor Hernandez. Against a
dirty wall is a form, something between
a sack and a mattress, stuffed with who
knows what and encased in a sheath of
synthetic yellow material. Bound by three
yellow ties, it slumps against the wall.
‘‘Bound,’’ ‘‘slumped’’: The form reminds us
of a human body, particularly of a human
body under duress. Hernandez was walk-
ing down the street in Los Angeles when
he saw this thing, whatever it is, and pho-
tographed it on his phone. Why does it
make us think of execution, torture or
other sinister situations? This photograph,
compositionally simpler than Iturbide’s,
is in color and doesn’t feature people. But
both his picture and hers make us reach
for the same word: ‘‘surreal.’’
Surreal photographs naturally draw the
mind to Surrealism, which has a formal
and well-documented history. The move-
ment’s initial impetus was literary: how to

16 10.23.16 Photograph by Graciela Iturbide Next Week: On Technology, by Jenna Wortham

 A conference hosted
by Andrew Ross Sorkin
Editor at Large and Columnist

Playing for
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the Long Term

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On Photography
sidestep conscious processes and make
dream states visible. Certain writers made
use of free association to create works that
were influenced by Freud’s theory of the
unconscious. In the first ‘‘Manifesto of Sur-
realism,’’ in 1924, the poet André Breton
wrote that he believed ‘‘in the future reso-
lution of these two states, dream and real-
ity, which are seemingly so contradictory,
into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality,
if one may so speak.’’ The Surrealist move-
ment then went on to establish itself in the
work of visual artists. While painters like
André Masson and Joan Miró practiced
visual automatism, others, René Magritte,
Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí among them,
used meticulous technique to create opti-
cal puns and illusions.
The photographers in the movement
included Man Ray, Andre Kertesz and
Hans Bellmer, who used unusual lenses
(or no lens at all), mirrors, double expo-
sures and darkroom tricks. The work that
resulted is often playful, bizarre and intel-
lectual. But only rarely is it productively
accidental, enchantingly dreamlike and
18 10.23.16
charged with a palpable but irretrievable
meaning. Rather than being surreal, much
of the work made by the Surrealists was,
well, ‘‘surrealist.’’
In trying to theorize suggestibility,
the Surrealists missed some of the ways
in which suggestibility works: through
analogy, understatement and incom-
pleteness. But the surreal image — which,
at its most resonant, breaks through
consciousness instantaneously and sur-
prisingly — is an elusive thing. Eugène
Atget, whom the Surrealists claimed as
an important forerunner, was less artful
and more successfully surreal than they
were. Some of Andre Kertesz’s straight-
forward photographs, the ones that are
not images reflected in trick mirrors, are
genuinely surreal, as are a number of the
images made by Henri Cartier-Bresson
in Mexico in the 1930s. And American
street photographers like Walker Evans,
Helen Levitt and Berenice Abbott have
produced a rich body of surreal photo-
graphs. But photographers whose work
involves staged scenes of the grotesque,
Photographs by Trevor Hernandez (left) and Manuel Álvarez Bravo
made with artificial light and actors, fre-
quently miss the mark. Again, what is
lost is inadvertency and the element of
surprise — the sense that the power of
the image is independent of the photog-
rapher’s plans.
This unpredictability is what draws
me to Iturbide. She has worked all over
the world but is best known for the pho-
tographic projects she has undertaken in
her native Mexico since the 1970s. Like
most convincingly surreal photographs,
Iturbide’s are often ostensibly about some-
thing else: the lives of Zapotec people in
the matriarchal communities of Juchitán,
for instance, or the customs of Seri people
in the Sonoran Desert. But out of these
quasi-anthropological engagements, she
arrives at images that seem to contain
other forms of knowing. Her photographs
Teju Cole are firmly of this world — birds in flight,
children dressed up as angels, animals at
Right: RoseGallery
is the author, most
recently, of the essay the moment of sacrifice — but they have
collection ‘‘Known
an expectant and otherworldly air.
and Strange Things.’’
He is the magazine’s This talent for finding the surreal in the
photography critic. banal is one of the many ways in which
Iturbide is influenced by Manuel Álvarez The surreal given photograph will be surreal. Most can be more surreal. A main feature of sur-
Bravo (1902-2002), her teacher and men- photographs are not interesting. Then a real images is that they invite active verbs:
tor. Drawing on the Mexican traditions image caught strange one turns up, a real winner, and Things pour and shimmer; they push and
that confront death, they both created on the fly it is difficult to pin its strangeness down. spray and brood, as though they had inten-
densely poetic images. Look, for exam- can remind The surreal image caught on the fly can tions. These kinds of images, in which the
ple, at Bravo’s photograph of a fallen remind us of our vulnerability much more inanimate is suddenly animate, generate
sheet, made in the 1940s. By chance or us of our powerfully than manipulated photographs an open-ended visual conspiracy.
by design, a white cloth rests on a tiled vulnerability can. A double exposure that gives a man The photographic surreal, like the sub-
floor. This simple subject opens up a much more two heads is too definite, like something lime or the obscene, is subjective. It can-
cascade of associations: the cloth looks from a horror film. Its heavy-handed ‘‘sur- not be locked down to a theory, codified
like a shroud; its folds and bends appear powerfully than realism’’ robs it of pathos. But a protuber- and filed away under an ‘‘ism.’’ Rather, it
to trace the contours of a human body; manipulated ance on the trunk of a tree, or a chair with arrives like a metaphysical gift, showing
its placement on the ground makes you photographs can. a missing leg, or a twisted metal railing in up when it is least expected to conquer
think of a corpse. This picture, an ances- the midday sun, being more ambiguous, logic and haunt the imagination.
tor to the one Hernandez posted on Insta-
gram, echoes another by Bravo, ‘‘Strik-
ing Worker, Assassinated’’ (1934), which Poem Selected by Matthew Zapruder
shows a union leader lying in the street
with a bloodied face moments after he Yehoshua November integrates his Orthodox Judaism with the everyday, through
was murdered. But what was raw pho- poems of radical clarity. Throughout his work, he shows that religious faith can be
tojournalistic reportage in the earlier compatible with a poetry of deep, uncertain feeling.
picture is transformed into a different
kind of strength in Bravo’s photograph
of the fallen sheet. The dead man is an
instance of death, but the sheet on the
floor becomes Death itself.
Surrealism of this kind often relies for
its effect on humanity in the absence of
actual humans. In a 1929 photograph by
Eli Lotar, two rows of calves’ feet out-
side an abattoir imply a butcher, who
is nowhere to be seen. But the feet also
make us think of our own feet and, horrif-
ically, of amputation. They have a stance, Prayer
an attitude, just as Bravo’s fallen sheet By Yehoshua November
has an attitude. Attitude also suffuses
the trees in a long-term project of Itur- Before the Silent Prayer,
bide’s, in which she photographs ‘‘plants some slip the hood of their prayer shawls
in therapy.’’ Taken in Mexico, Italy, Japan, over their heads,
Mozambique and elsewhere, these pho- so that even among many worshipers
tographs are far from ordinary botany or they are alone with God.
taxonomy. One image from Rome, for
instance, features tall plants covered at
Primo Levi wrote about the sadness of
the top with a black cloth. Are they exe-
‘‘a cart horse, shut between two shafts
cutioners? Or the condemned?
Certain objects tend to recur in surre-
and unable even to look sideways . . . ’’
al photographs: shirts, bedding, ladders,
chairs, shoes. Designed to accommodate Let me be like those pious ones
our bodies, altered by their encounters or that horse,
with us, they retain something of that so that, even amidst a crowd,
humanity even when they are not being no other crosses the threshold
used. Forms that mimic the human are of my dreaming.
frequent, too: animals, trees, silhouettes,
prostheses, wigs, mannequins, puppets.
And there are many surreal photographs
that feature actual humans, humans
whose bodies (like those of Iturbide’s
Matthew Zapruder is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, ‘‘Sun Bear.’’ He teaches
Holy Thursday siblings) stray into other- poetry at Saint Mary’s College of California and is editor at large at Wave Books. Yehoshua November is a
ness. But there’s no guarantee that any poet whose second collection, ‘‘Two Worlds Exist,’’ will be published by Orison Books in November.

Illustration by R. O. Blechman 19
The Ethicist By Kwame Anthony Appiah

worse, became the victim of them. You’d undermines. By insisting on confidential-

A Man correctly feel you had let her down. If she

learned you had kept her in the dark, she’d
have a right to feel that way, too.
ity, her daughter was protecting her own
relationship with your daughter, who
would, no doubt, have been angry if she

I Know Faked A friend of my daughter’s confided

to her mother, about 18 months ago,
discovered that she had been betrayed to
you. So her mother could see the request
had a serious basis.

His Academic that she thought my daughter had

a serious drug problem. She asked her
mother to keep this in confidence, as
Of course, there are considerations
that weigh against keeping a confidence,
and one of them is the possibility that

Credentials. her mother and I are friends.

Recently, this mother told me of her
daughter’s suspicions. When I asked
breaking it might save a life. Even then,
however, the right place to start would
have been for your friend to ask her

Should I Tell her why she had withheld from me such

important information, which might
even prevent my daughter’s death, she
daughter’s permission. In lieu of seeking
this permission, your friend decided that
her daughter no longer had a reason to

His Fiancée? told me she was being loyal to her

A few years ago, I realized that a close
friend was misrepresenting himself
professionally as having multiple graduate
degrees that he did not actually earn. When
I confronted him in a compassionate way,
he denied it, but could offer no evidence to
the contrary. We have fallen out of touch,
but he is now engaged to a woman I know.
We have several mutual friends. I want
nothing to do with this guy and have done
my best to forget about his deception,
but if I were his fiancée, I would certainly
want to know. Thoughts?
daughter — but now that her daughter
and mine had grown apart, she no
longer felt bound by that obligation and
wanted to get this off her chest.
I am very upset by this for several
reasons: that my daughter could be
in jeopardy and so much time has passed;
that I cannot trust this friend to be
honest with me about such a serious issue;
and that her concern was for herself and
releasing her sense of guilt.
Name Withheld
It’s possible to make sense of your friend’s
decisions. Her daughter told her some-
thing in confidence, and there was a
good reason to respect that request. We
should ordinarily respect confidences,
but beyond that, family relationships
are built around the sort of trust that
breaking those confidences obviously
want to keep the information from you.
That, I take it, is why she said that the end
of the friendship between your daugh-
ters meant she no longer felt obliged to
keep the confidence. Still, when you need
someone’s consent, you should ask for it,
not decide that they have no reason to
deny it to you.
How serious would the danger have to
be to outweigh obligations of confiden-
tiality? That’s a difficult judgment. Your
friend probably didn’t have grounds for
deciding how much danger your daugh-
ter was in. That she did tell you once she
felt she could — and that she felt consid-
erable relief in doing so — suggests that
in her own view, the danger was serious.
If that’s so, she should have sought per-
mission to tell you once she feared your
daughter’s health was in serious danger.
But her knowledge that you would have
wanted to know what she knew was not
by itself a reason to break her word to

Name Withheld
Your worry that this woman could be
marrying a con artist is a legitimate one.
You have no obligation to keep this infor-
mation to yourself, since you didn’t get
it from the man in question or commit
To submit a query: to keeping it a secret. But — given that
Send an email to love is blind, or at least visually impaired
ethicist@nytimes — don’t assume she’ll be grateful for the
Bonus Advice From Judge John Hodgman
Robert writes: I recently used a colloquialism, ‘‘as cute as
a baby turtle.’’ My wife responded with the ridiculous claim
that baby beluga whales are far cuter than baby turtles.
Please order that she recognize the cuteness of baby turtles.
————
This court despises mob justice, but when it comes to cute
animals, there is no higher law than Instagram. Searching
for #babyturtles returns nearly 26,000 images. Searching
for #babybelugawhales reveals a single photo of a couple
Illustration by Kyle Hilton

.com; or send mail

to The Ethicist, The information. She may go ahead anyway, smiling and sticking their tongues out. I suspect this may be
New York Times and then you won’t be seeing much of you guys. But even though baby turtles won the alt-cute
Magazine, 620 either of them. derby, please do not divorce! The fact that you both find
Eighth Avenue, New
Suppose you didn’t tell her, though, hairless, alien-looking dwellers of the deep ‘‘cute’’ is itself
York, N.Y. 10018.
(Include a daytime and she ended up having to deal with very cute — as cute as an albino axolotl in an abandoned
phone number.) the consequences of his deceptions or, pet store. (That’s a colloquialism, too.)

20 10.23.16 Illustration by Tomi Um

her daughter. Friendship doesn’t excuse
us from our obligations to others, espe-
cially our families.
A friend of mine is an instructor at a local
university. A few years ago he told me
about a sexual relationship he was having
with a student of his. I warned him of
the myriad dangers of this, of which he
was already aware, of course, but the
relationship continued for a few months.
Recently, this friend’s wife (he is newly
married) discovered he was having an
affair with a different student. His wife
found out through an anonymous tip
and confronted him with the evidence
she uncovered; he confessed and went
to ‘‘sex addiction’’ counseling.
I suspect that this isn’t just the second
student he has had an affair with.
But two is still enough. I have considered
anonymously reporting this to the dean
and asking the administration to consider
looking into the matter. I am disgusted
to think any young college student would
be caught up with a manipulating
college instructor like this.
The person who tipped off the wife
said that he was a predator. I’ve known him
for many years and have witnessed
his predatory behavior toward conquests.
I believe the student would tell the dean
about what happened if prompted. Am
I ethically obligated to say something?
A second concern has to do with your
relations to the other parties involved.
Have you learned all the details you relate
from people other than your friend, the
wife or the student herself ? Your letter
leaves it unclear. If you learned some
of this from your friend’s wife, she has
a claim to being consulted. And, given
the promises he has made, she’s likely
to want to leave the whole thing behind.
Then there’s the instructor’s recent
‘‘conquest.’’ If you’re in touch with her —
you also leave this point unclear — your
main goal should be to let her know that
she can inform the Title IX office at the
university, almost always in confidence,
and that doing so might protect future
victims. (Actually, she should feel free to
talk to anyone in the administration she
trusts and ask them to pass the informa-
tion on.) If she refuses, it won’t do much
good to contact the authorities yourself,
because they won’t force her to talk about
what she doesn’t want to talk about. You
Friendship will also have betrayed her confidence
and added to her distress.
doesn’t
excuse us My husband’s mother has advanced
from our dementia. He says that her political views
were completely consistent, passionate
obligations and well understood by her family
to others, throughout her life and that he knows
especially our exactly how she would vote in this
election. He says it’s ethical to vote on her
families. behalf. I say it isn’t. Who is right?
Name Withheld
You are. A vote is an expression of a citi-
zen’s political will. It is not an expression
of views they once had. If she can’t com-
municate her vote herself, with whatever
assistance is legally permitted, nothing
else will do.
Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philosophy
at N.Y.U. He is the author of ‘‘Cosmopolitanism’’ and
‘‘The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.’’

Name Withheld

If you were a staff member at the uni-

versity where all this went on, you
might have a legal duty to report what
you know to the Title IX coordinator on
the campus, depending on your posi-
tion there and whether the university
receives federal funding. If you are not
on the university’s staff, however, you
will have to be guided by moral rather
than legal concerns. One concern has
to do with your putative friendship with
this man. You have seen him do similar
things over the years and have remained
his friend, at least by self-description. If
you learned all this from him as a friend,
I don’t think you can betray him to the
authorities unless you believe he poses
an imminent threat to another student.
But if your relationship, such as it is, is
to continue, you need to let him know, if
you haven’t already, that you think he is
seriously in the wrong.
Letter of Recommendation
Choir
By Sarah Manguso
I sang in my college’s church choir every
Sunday despite the occasional hang-
over. All that echo! The resounding nave
wrung my heart out harder and better
than any of the desiccated marijuana,
clumsily mixed drinks or inept gropings
of the nights before. We were Mormons
and Baptists, Protestants who knew the
Anglican hymns, Catholics who could
translate the Latin, closeted baritones
who were planning careers in music or
the church or both.
22 10.23.16
A chronically underslept Reform Jew,
I usually dozed through the sermon. I
trained myself to wake up when the rev-
erend professor intoned: ‘‘Let us pray.
Eternal God. . . .’’ A second later I was
up and on my feet, smoothing out my
robe and saying, ‘‘. . . in whom we live and
move and have our being, whose face is
hidden from us by our sin and whose
mercy we forget. . . . ’’
As a young pianist I had been taught
meticulously to disturb the silence of
Photograph by William Mebane
Above: Members a well-insulated concert hall. Though I
of a choir at Middle
Collegiate Church
loved music, I didn’t have the tempera-
in Manhattan. ment for performing. Even while banging
out one of my favorite pieces, I shrank
from the instrument. I heard the music as
belonging to the instrument, not to me.
But in a choir, I can make sound,
focus the mind, enjoy myself and for-
get myself, all at once. There is an old
choristers’ adage that goes, ‘‘When the
music is marked forte, sing so you can
hear yourself; when it’s marked piano,
sing so you can hear the others.’’ After
enough practice, you can learn to feel the
vibration in your skull and tell by the sen-
sation whether your pitch is right, your
timbre true. It is a kind of listening with-
out hearing. Perhaps this combination of
experiences is as common as what psy-
chologists call flow, a state of complete
absorption in an activity.
I feel an additional pleasure, though,
greater than flow, when I sing in a choir.
It’s a mode of singing that strikes a bal-
ance between feeling necessary — each
voice must participate to achieve the
grand unified sound — and feeling invis-
ible, absorbed into the choir, your voice
no longer yours. I can work hard, listen
hard and disappear, let the ocean of
sound close over me. It is comforting to
disappear into all that sound and to know
that no one else will hear me, either. The
performance feels like a secret.
A choral group may possess unity, but
that unity depends on the behaviors of
its individuals. Church-basement prac-
tice rooms get hot and damp and full of
exhalations. Heavy breathing inevitably
skews sexual, and it was sexually inter-
esting to sing in a collegiate church choir.
There were some true believers there and
some young, lost people who had been
imperfectly absorbed into faiths that their
former lives demanded of them. Their
desires joined mine. Imagine a web of
gazes all around the room: the baritones
looking at the basses, the second sopra-
nos all looking at, singing to, training
their longing on the same lethally hot
countertenor. Doubtless some of them
were thinking of God.
I see the beauty in the sheet music
and hear it in the recordings, but when I
try to remember what it was like to sing
my favorite pieces by Tallis, Byrd and
Bach, I can’t; I was singing, not remem-
bering. Twice, as an experiment, before
important performances, one in Amster-
dam and the other in New York, I con-
centrated on a single phrase in a piece,
trained myself to pay attention in that
moment and thus to remember some-
thing of the actual physical experience.
I can still recall those two phrases, but it
took great effort to lay down those men-
tal records. It’s more pleasurable to sing
without remembering, or to forget at the
rate that I sing.
And anyone can forget like this: I have
done it at Lincoln Center and Carnegie
Big Band: Hall, but I’ve been doing it since ele-
Longest continuous mentary school, when the performances
performance by involved holding up little cardboard signs.
a choir: 31 hours,
45 minutes
I don’t remember any other performance,
out of decades of performances, because
Largest choir,
according to I had no self-consciousness during them.
Guinness: 121,440 I’m not talking about shyness or self-doubt
singers (India) or any of those other near-synonyms of
Largest gospel choir: the word; I mean that I forgot myself. I
21,262 (Philippines) forgot that I had a self. Accountability is a
Largest kazoo standard of adulthood; we drag our lives
ensemble: 5,190 behind us; consequences accumulate. You
(U.K.)
said this, you did that. If you’re lucky, you
develop a means of regular and temporary
escape from perpetual self-awareness; if
you’re very lucky, your escape hatch isn’t
a habit that will eventually kill you.
Singing won’t kill you! With a choir,
you can take a breath and escape physi-
cally and metaphysically, occupying and
Tip By Jaime Lowe
How to Cut Your
Own Hair
‘‘Style it dry and identify what’s not
working,’’ says Alexis Wheeler, who owns
the Crown salon in New York. ‘‘Is it too
dense? Is it too long over all? Are the lay-
ers too long on top?’’ Get the right tools.
Wheeler says that any kind of shears will
work: ‘‘I know a lot of people who cut
their hair with nail scissors.’’
Situate yourself someplace where you
will be comfortable. Some self-stylists
will be more at ease cutting by feel; oth-
ers will prefer to use their own reflection.
‘‘When you’re looking in the mirror, it’s
super disorienting,’’ Wheeler says. ‘‘It
takes a while to figure out what you’re
seeing. When I use a mirror, I have to
switch my body position to really see
Illustration by Radio
occupied by the music. When you return
to the rest of life, all that remains is an
echo of overtone, a brief silence and then
the applause. You’re back, and it’s as if
you’ve skipped forward an hour in time, if
it weren’t for the residue, that telltale joy,
and the sense that some part of your life
has been gladly surrendered. You know
you were there, even if you weren’t com-
pletely, exactly there at all.
Singing with a choir is precisely the
opposite of what I do in the rest of my
life, which is to sign my name to things
and speak to people who hold me respon-
sible for what I say. I am obliged to affix
my name to everything I do. Later, if I
want to remove it, I cannot. But no one,
not even the conductor, can sign their
name alone to a choir. Thank heaven,
thank heavenly song.
what I’m cutting. It’s awkward at first,
to see where your body is and where
the hair you want to cut is and where
the scissors are.’’ Negotiate that spatial
relationship by taking your time and by
focusing on a fixed point in the reflected
background to establish depth of field.
If you have thick curly hair and want
to take out some of the weight, part
your hair and separate out some sec-
tions underneath the part. Move your
fingers about two to three inches away
from the scalp. ‘‘You don’t want to cut on
your part,’’ Wheeler says. ‘‘You want it on
the inside of your hair.’’ If you have very
fine hair, be cautious and ‘‘careful not
to create blunt lines.’’ Don’t try to finish
the job too quickly. ‘‘I have clients who
have given themselves full haircuts,’’ she
says. ‘‘They go really slowly. Take a little
bit off and look at it.’’
The most important thing, according
to Wheeler, is to ‘‘cut with confidence.’’
She has been cutting her own hair since
she was 12 and has coached relatives and
friends over Skype through self-given
haircuts. Here’s how you know when you
are done: ‘‘You cut something, you shake
your hair out and it looks good to you.
Or you feel scared — that feeling would
be a good stopping point too.’’
Wheeler also advises that it’s ‘‘import-
ant to have a relationship with a stylist so
that if you have a hair emergency, they
can bail you out.’’
‘‘Everything can be fixed,’’ she says.
23
Eat By Gabrielle Hamilton

The Way It Was

Snack trays can evoke the best of how we used
to eat, and how we can again.

24 10.23.16 Photograph by Davide Luciano Food stylist: Michelle Gatton. Prop stylist: Alex Brannian.
The sport was Last year I was on an evening flight from
New York to West Palm Beach, delight-
about evoking ed to find myself in first class. Across the
an entire aisle sat an older dame — 70s, maybe — in
ethos through slacks, legs crossed, reading The Finan-
cial Times, which she’d folded in vertical
one snack. fourths, exactly the way all the charcoal
gray suits used to do back when bankers
still rode the subway to Wall Street in the
mornings. The steward came through with
the cart, and each one of the Louis Vuitton
bucket bags and the full-length foxes and
the razor-thin silver laptops spilling out of
the rows in front of us ordered their water,
tomato juice, white wine, organic purple
potato chips with Hawaiian sea salt — and
in so doing, confirmed their classy virtues.
The lady in seat 4F, though, the one in
the light cashmere pullover reading the
newspaper, she clicked the latch on her
seat-back tray and said: ‘‘Double Smirnoff,
on the rocks. And Doritos.’’
I’ll introduce myself here — my cook-
ing, my eating, my sensibilities about food
and drink — by telling you I loved her. I
felt reborn by her.
Back in New York, I could not wait to
share my revival zeal with my girlfriend,
Ashley. To fix her just such a sturdy drink
and as sensible a snack when 7:30 rolled
around. To lay on her some of the gospel of
4F. To say we were in the dating phase is an
absurdity because we’d had only one date,
during which we recognized instantly what
an inevitability we were, and thus proceed-
ed accordingly. But still, it was early, and
I was learning the details of her. Maybe
she was one of those people who’d never
condescend to use a restroom at a Popeyes,
let alone house a spicy dark-meat combo
at one? I made her a gin and tonic and set
out a dish of pristinely stacked Pringles —
sour-cream-and-onion flavor. In case she
balked — she herself is a restaurant chef — I
also had a ramekin of Castelvetrano olives.
But Ashley got it immediately, chuck-
ling with recognition. Her own longing
for a kind of return to this approach to
food — if not to life itself — stirred.
It turns out Ashley is shockingly com-
petitive. Scrabble, restaurant-prep, my chil-
dren’s brown-bag lunches — whatever she
enjoys, she enjoys with a drive to excellence
that would wither the casual player. Which
is to say that our next cocktail hour featured
pepperoni cut as thin as fish scales and shin-
gled as neatly, and mortadella folded like
the pocket squares of the Brooks Brothers
set on the downtown 6 train back in the day.
Comment: nytimes.com/magazine
I’m not without a competitive streak
myself. And the sport — as I understood
it — was about evoking an entire ethos
through one snack. I’ve been running
drills on this kind of storytelling since
the day I opened Prune, my restaurant in
the East Village, trying for 17 years now
to insinuate some resonance onto the
plate with nothing but marrow and toast,
butter and sugar. Back at home, there
followed a hard-driving Tournament of
Snack Tray: Boursin cheese and Stoned
Wheat Thins; Triscuits and canned sar-
dines with Dijon mustard and cornich-
ons; smoked salmon and cream-cheese
pinwheels; cherry tomatoes halved and
stuffed, baked Brie with Bonne Maman
apricot preserves. Back and forth Ashley
and I went, passing reminiscences, eve-
ning after evening, through the seasons,
while we also looked for a house of our
own and discussed our wedding.
‘‘Snack tray’’ quickly became a cheerful,
wordless conversation about who we want-
ed to be in the world and how we wanted
that world to be. Where food was not a
fetish object, where your car and driver —
not your handcrafted artisanal gin — was
still your status symbol. Neon-orange Deli-
cious over sweet-potato Righteous.
My two sons, possibly bewildered by
the point of the competition and surely
curious about the lightning pace of the
events of the household (‘‘Wait, Mama,
does this make you . . . ? You’re gay again?’’)
were at least not confused by Cheez-Its,
or deviled eggs, or ham-and-swiss rollups,
or California pitted black olives, which
everyone knows to jab onto your five fin-
gertips before eating. They’re savvy kids;
public-school kids; they know our romance
is accelerated. My 12-year-old, having just
discovered his talent for sarcasm, comes
to the low table where we’ve laid out our
board and wisecracks: ‘‘Ahhhh, snack tray.
The glue that holds this family together.’’
Maybe not, kiddo, I think, but let’s lin-
ger here a minute longer and see if the
glue dries. One more round of hangman,
then. Celebrity. Cards Against Humanity.
Ashley introduces sandwiches to the tray
to let us make dinner out of it: Grilled
cheese, tuna melts, baguette pizza. For
us, the grown-ups, she takes an old Prune
favorite, a shaved-celery-and-fennel
salad, and turns it into a sandwich. She
changes the bread to Pullman, adds but-
ter — wall to wall — but keeps the shaved
celery aggressively dressed with fresh
raw garlic and extra-virgin olive oil and
quite bright with lemon juice.
The ingredients come from the gro-
cery store — and in our house, quite often,
they’ve been in the crisper for a few weeks
too. The wilted celery comes back well
enough under some cold water, and the
scallion is salvaged admirably after the
outside layer is skinned. The Cambozola
holds up wrapped in its original cello-
phane. These toasts are not expensive or
intimidating, but they are outstanding.
They are not going to get better with a
visit to the cheesemonger; they will not
improve with a stop at the farmers’ mar-
ket. Just do as the lady in 4F would do:
She’d pour her Smirnoff, then rummage
around in the fridge. The long-eared span-
iels, sprawled on the oriental, might catch
a treat of ground turkey as she turns on the
Bose and listens to the news. She’d clear a
spot on the counter — push the keys and
the mail and the leashes to the side — and
fix herself this little knockout.
Celery Toasts
Time: 12 minutes
2 slices country white Pullman bread,
½-inch thick
Sweet butter
4 ounces Cambozola triple-cream blue
cheese, sliced, divided evenly between
two toasts
1 cup shaved celery, from the inner head,
toughest outer stalks removed, thinly
sliced on the bias
2 scallions, thinly sliced on bias all the way
up from the white through the green
1 large clove garlic
Extra-virgin olive oil
Lemon juice
Kosher salt
Several grinds black pepper
1. Toast the bread to golden. Butter
generously, ‘‘wall to wall.’’ Lay cheese slices
on top of buttered toast, neatly, evenly.
2. In a small bowl, stir together the celery
and the scallions. Microplane the garlic into
the celery mixture.
3. Dress with olive oil, lemon juice and salt,
and stir very well, until completely dressed,
almost wet with dressing.
4. Mound the shaved celery salad evenly on
top of the blue-cheese toasts, and grind black
pepper over them very generously. Cut each
in half or quarters.
Serves 2.
25
 THE FORECAST IS CLOUDY
BY MICHAEL BEHAR
A t 11 o’clock on the night of Sept. 29, the National Hurricane Center
in Miami posted an updated prediction for Hurricane Matthew.
Using the latest data from a reconnaissance aircraft, the center’s
computerized models led meteorologists there to conclude, in a post on
the center’s website, that ‘‘only a slight strengthening is forecast during
the next 12 to 24 hours.’’ Their prediction proved to be astonishingly amiss:
The following day, Matthew exploded from a Category 1 into a Category 5
hurricane, with winds gusting to 160 miles per hour, strong enough to
flatten even the sturdiest homes.
This was hardly the first time that United States government forecasters
significantly underestimated a storm’s potential. Last year, 24 hours before
Patricia reached Mexico’s Pacific Coast, it unexpectedly mushroomed from
a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane, its winds topping 215 miles
26
per hour. Luckily, Patricia — officially the strongest hurricane on record in
the Western Hemisphere — made landfall over a sparsely populated region.
Matthew behaved similarly, its intensification also unforeseen and sudden,
occurring just two days before it overwhelmed Haiti. Residents there had
little time to flee, and the death toll exceeded 1,000. (More than 30 died in the
United States.) The failure to make timely, accurate predictions about these
storms would have had far deadlier consequences had they made landfall
near a major metropolitan area. In South Florida, for example — where
the initial forecasts for a storm of modest size would not have prompted
hurricane-weary residents to evacuate — Matthew’s rapid increase in power
could have pinned down more than six million people in the region.
It’s a situation that deeply troubles Cliff Mass, a meteorologist and pro-
fessor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington. As he does
 Wind patterns over the continental U.S. during Hurricane Matthew
based on real-time data from the National Digital Forecast Database.
The edge of Matthew’s spiral is visible off the coast of Georgia.

HURRICANES LIKE MATTHEW HAVE

LAID BARE THE DIRTY SECRET OF
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE:
ITS TECHNOLOGIES AND METHODS
ARE WOEFULLY BEHIND THE TIMES.

after every major weather event, Mass deconstructed the bungled predic-
tions for Matthew and Patricia on his popular website, ‘‘Cliff Mass Weather
Blog,’’ which he started in 2008. He called Patricia a ‘‘poster child, perhaps
the worst case in a while, of a major problem for meteorologists,’’ and in
response to Matthew he posted a graph that showed how the National
Hurricane Center’s computer-forecasting model at one point was off by
more than 325 nautical miles in predicting the storm’s westward course.
Mass, who is 64, has become the most widely recognized critic of weather
forecasting in the United States — and specifically the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, which manages the National Weather Service
and its underling agencies, including the National Centers for Environmental
Prediction, where the nation’s weather models are run. Mass argues that
these models are significantly flawed in comparison with commercial and
European alternatives. American forecasting also does poorly at data assimi-
lation, the process of integrating information about atmospheric conditions
into modeling programs; in the meantime, a lack of available computing
power precludes the use of more advanced systems already operating at
places like the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, based
in Reading, England. And there are persistent management challenges, per-
haps best represented by the legions of NOAA scientists whose innovations
remain stranded in research labs and out of the hands of the National Weather
Service operational forecasters who make the day-to-day predictions in 122
regional offices around the country.
As Mass points out, accuracy is everything, often the difference between life
and death, given that extreme weather — tornadoes, flash floods, heat waves
— kills more than 500 Americans each year. ‘‘An incremental improvement

MAP BY FERNANDA B. VIÉGAS AND MARTIN WATTENBERG

would make a huge difference,’’ he says. Industries like shipping, energy,
agriculture and utilities lose money when predictions fail. Even slightly more
precise wind-speed projections would help airlines greatly reduce fuel costs.
Mass participates regularly on government committees tasked with
improving forecasts, where his message is consistently the same — in his
words, ‘‘We could be doing much better, and it’s outrageous that we’re not.’’
Last year, he notes, the Air Force began paying Britain’s Met Office $100,000
a year to license its weather-modeling software. ‘‘That a U.S. government
agency has decided that our capability is not good enough is pretty amaz-
ing,’’ he says. On his blog, he’s not shy about criticizing federal agencies
in post-mortems after storms, often singling out the National Centers for
Environmental Prediction.
William Lapenta, who heads the centers, welcomes the criticism: ‘‘His job
through his blog is quite honestly to provoke people to respond and hopefully
take action,’’ he says. Indeed, Lapenta told me that the National Centers for
Environmental Prediction, which directs the National Hurricane Center,
might never have obtained additional funding from Congress to buy new
supercomputers had Mass not drawn public attention to the center’s inad-
equacies in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. ‘‘People didn’t talk about this
before,’’ Al Roker, the ‘‘Today’’ show weather anchor, told me. ‘‘It wasn’t up
for discussion. People didn’t care. Cliff has made this part of the conversation.
He’s like the weather’s answer to Neil deGrasse Tyson.’’
You don’t have to go far to get firsthand confirmation of Mass’s con-
cerns. Last summer, I visited the regional National Weather Service office in
Boulder, Colo., where I live. The office serves three million people in the great-
er Denver area. Its director, Nezette Rydell, told me she knows many NOAA
scientists who have developed better prediction technologies. But few are at
her disposal. ‘‘There is so much stuff on the shelf that isn’t being used,’’ she said.
Rydell introduced me to a meteorologist on her staff who was track-
ing a thunderstorm inching across Colorado. I watched as he issued a
‘‘severe thunderstorm alert’’ to the public. Like every such warning, it was
dispatched in all capital letters. When I asked why, he explained that the
Weather Service interface was so primitive — the protocol was originally
designed for the telegraph — it could only accommodate uppercase type.
T o make a forecast, meteorologists use a weather model, essentially
a big software program that runs on a supercomputer. Multi-
ple times a day, new atmospheric data — obtained mostly from
weather stations and satellites — is automatically fed into a model, which
generates a prediction by applying equations from fluid dynamics, physics
and chemistry to data like temperature, wind direction and humidity. No
model will be right every time, but faulty predictions can often be traced
back to correctable factors: flawed or insufficient data, shoddy physics,
inferior methods of data assimilation used to integrate that data into the
model or a lack of the microprocessing power needed to run it effectively.
These are the sorts of deficiencies that can prompt forecasters to underes-
timate the severity of a hurricane, for instance — or overhype an end-of-the-
world blizzard, like the one Gary Szatkowski anticipated on the last Sunday
in January 2015. Szatkowski, now retired but then the head meteorologist
for the National Weather Service office in Mount Holly, N.J., predicted that
a cold front creeping westward toward the East Coast would evolve into
an unprecedented nor’easter. The Weather Service issued an official warn-
ing: A ‘‘crippling and potentially historic blizzard’’ with ‘‘life-threatening
conditions’’ and up to three feet of snow was coming.
Ten inches of snow fell. By late Monday night, Szatkowski, whose office
forecasts the weather for more than 11 million people, accepted that he
had made a huge blunder and said in two tweets: ‘‘My deepest apologies to
many key decision makers and so many members of the general public. You
made a lot of tough decisions expecting us to get it right, and we didn’t.’’
Mass spent hours in advance of the January 2015 storm scrutinizing
models on the National Weather Service website. After the debacle, he
posted a critique on his blog and told me later that the forecaster ‘‘broke
all the rules I teach my students.’’
28 0.00.16
10.23.16
While Mass is the most outspoken on the subject, many experts insist
that if the Weather Service wants to meaningfully improve its predictions,
it must employ a technique called ensemble forecasting. The basic prem-
ise is either to tweak the physics equations or to make repeated changes
to a model’s variables: You might bump up the temperature slightly, for
example, and then run the model again. After a half-dozen or so reruns,
you get a set, or ‘‘ensemble,’’ of forecasts that can be compared with one
another. When all the forecasts in an ensemble agree, it’s a reasonably sure
bet that the predictions will pan out.
Nobody I’ve spoken to doubts the superiority of ensembles. Yet they
haven’t been widely adopted in the United States at the resolution required
to forecast localized, or ‘‘mesoscale,’’ events — specifically, thunderstorms,
flash floods and tornadoes — because high-resolution ensembles require
more computing power than the National Weather Service can currently
provide. Higher-resolution ensembles translate to greater accuracy in the
same way that HDTVs are clearer than analog sets. I met with a scientist at
the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder who showed me
a prototype mesoscale ensemble for the United States. But at the moment,
he can’t exploit its full potential because the supercomputing cluster at the
Weather Service simply couldn’t handle the load.
Mass also contends that the Weather Service should be spending far
more to exploit Tropospheric Airborne Meteorological Data Reporting,
or Tamdar, developed in the late 1990s. Regional airlines, like SkyWest,
have Tamdar sensors on their aircraft, capturing data for Panasonic
Weather Solutions’ new global model, which often outperforms Weath-
er Service predictions. In 2008, the Weather Service began buying this
proprietary data, but budget constraints in 2013 put an end to that. The
Federal Aviation Administration funded NOAA to study the value of
Tamdar observations. The results were staggering: Without it, forecast
accuracy plummeted up to 50 percent. Last year, the Weather Service
found a budgetary workaround that let it purchase a small amount of
limited, low-resolution Tamdar data, but it’s nowhere near enough to
make a difference in the accuracy of its models.
O N E S U N N Y S P R I N G M O R N I N G last year, I sat in on an undergrad-
uate course at the University of Washington called Weather Prediction and
Advanced Synoptic Analysis. Mass, doe-eyed and gangly, with finger-thick
eyebrows and a pronounced aquiline nose, arrived for the hourlong lecture
perspiring heavily. ‘‘I just squeezed in a run,’’ he told the class, apologetically.
On an overhead projector, he showed some past National Weather Service
predictions; about one-third of them were wrong.
‘‘Oh, and the fun doesn’t end there,’’ he declared. Next he displayed
screen grabs from the agency’s webpages and mocked the archaic design.
They received more online ridicule from him earlier this month, after the
National Hurricane Center’s website crashed just as Hurricane Matthew
approached the Florida coast.
After class, I joined Mass in his narrow sixth-floor office. (I took a couple
of courses from him when I was a Washington student in the 1980s.) As
we talked, he pulled up a digital photo on his computer that he’d scanned
from 1974, taken on Mass’s graduation day at Cornell, where he earned
a bachelor’s degree in physics. Mass, then 22, stood smiling shoulder to
shoulder with Carl Sagan. ‘‘There is a little Carl Sagan in me — billions and
billions,’’ Mass said, mimicking the renowned astronomer.
‘‘I loved weather,’’ Mass said. ‘‘I also loved astronomy. I wasn’t sure which
way I wanted to go.’’ He’d been experimenting with building computer-
ized weather models while taking Sagan’s class on planetary atmospheres.
‘‘I decided to try modeling Mars.’’ Mass pitched the concept to Sagan.
‘‘He was all excited about it so he said, ‘Let’s write a paper together.’ ’’
The Journal of Atmospheric Sciences published the study; Mass and
Sagan shared a byline. To be paired with Sagan was quite an accomplish-
ment, and the two remained friends until Sagan’s death in 1996. ‘‘Carl
was an activist in a lot of ways,’’ Mass said. ‘‘He basically taught me how
scientists have to go directly to the people.’’
 A few months before Sagan died, Mass began volunteering weekly
at Seattle’s KUOW public radio, hosting a show about the intricacies of
weather forecasting. With his sonorous baritone, Mass brought gravitas to
even the most mundane meteorological concepts. Two years later, in 1998,
he created a webpage to push for bringing Doppler radar to Washington’s
coast. Doppler can reveal a lot about an approaching storm — the intensity
of its rainfall and wind, for instance. It provides a three-dimensional picture
of a storm’s internal structure at a given moment, which satellites generally
cannot do because their orbits result in time delays; they’re lousy, too, at
seeing the atmosphere vertically, supplying something more like a bird’s-
eye view than a cross section of a layer cake.
The National Weather Service installed most of the country’s Doppler
radars — more than 150 of them — during the mid-1990s. But gaps in cov-
erage included a swath along Washington’s coastline. ‘‘We couldn’t see
what was coming in from the ocean,’’ Mass said. ‘‘It was all blank out there.’’
Mass on the roof of the Atmospheric Sciences-Geophysics
Building at the University of Washington in Seattle.
When Mass promoted his radar initiative on KUOW, viewers supported
him, he said — including Maria Cantwell, the state’s Democratic senator. Mass
Riffle for The New York Times
implored her to demand an explanation from Jack Hayes, then the director
of the National Weather Service. Within a few months, Hayes had tracked
down a surplus $4 million Doppler unit from the Air Force. ‘‘Mass is a very
powerful voice,’’ Hayes told me. ‘‘You might quibble with how he pounds his
fist on the table, [and] his arguments are a little more emotional than they
need to be. But at the end of the day, I always appreciate Cliff.’’
Surname
In 1995, Mass founded the Northwest Regional Modeling
by Jenny
Consortium in Seattle to create better local forecasts. At the time, the
Credit by Name
National Weather Service used models with resolutions of 80 kilometers,
Photograph
or about 50 square miles. In Washington State, a sample that large might
encompass topography ranging from 10,000-foot-high snowcapped volca-
noes all the way down to the Pacific Ocean; the resulting forecast, forced
to produce sweeping overgeneralizations, renders itself essentially useless.
‘‘My first test was at 27-kilometer resolution, and then I started doing it
higher and I found something absolutely magical,’’ Mass says. ‘‘We could
actually forecast the local weather.’’
Jeff Renner, the chief meteorologist for Seattle’s NBC television affiliate
KING 5, who retired in April, told me, ‘‘It really allows us to see some
beautiful detail.’’ KING pays more than $20,000 a year to buy model data
from the consortium, which it incorporates into its on-air forecasts. ‘‘[Mass]
was doing a much better job than the Weather Service, where you were
basically getting vanilla ice cream,’’ Renner says. With the consortium, ‘‘it
was like walking into Ben & Jerry’s.’’
H U R R I C A N E S A R E P E R H A P S the deadliest phenomena that forecast-
ers are charged with modeling, but the high stakes mean that they can be
useful in catalyzing change. In October 2012, the European Center’s super-
computing cluster — the most powerful forecasting system in the world
— correctly plotted Hurricane Sandy’s path into the Mid-Atlantic United
States eight days in advance, while the National Hurricane Center predicted
the storm would veer harmlessly offshore. Al Roker told me, ‘‘In a sad way,
it took something like Sandy for people to say, Wait a minute, this is crazy.’’
Because hurricanes form over oceans, where there are very few weath-
er stations, predicting their routes and strength requires satellite data.
What frustrates Roker and other meteorologists is that many satellites
carry outdated technology and are nearing the ends of their life spans.
‘‘There is stuff circling the earth that’s been up there for 20 to 30 years,’’
Roker says. Replacements were scheduled to be sent into orbit last year,
but their launches were postponed in part because the inspector general at
the Department of Commerce, which oversees NOAA, found engineering
and manufacturing defects in their components.
Mass argues that technological shortcomings are not the sole problem,
however. He also blames ‘‘poor organization and poor leadership at NOAA
— their efforts are divided into uncoordinated groups, each trying to protect
their turf.’’ According to Conrad Lautenbacher, who led NOAA from 2001 to
2008, ‘‘There is no orderly process to take some really great idea somebody
has in research and turn it into something that the weather service can use.’’
Dysfunctional, compartmentalized bureaucracy gets in the way.
Five months after Hurricane Sandy, Roker reported a story for ‘‘NBC
Nightly News’’ in which he interviewed Mass about the inadequacies of
the Weather Service. Lapenta, at the National Centers for Environmental
Prediction, was on a treadmill at his gym a few days after NBC aired the
report. ‘‘The woman next to me was working out with her trainer and
talking about the difference between the G.F.S.’’ — Global Forecast System,
the National Weather Service’s go-to model — ‘‘and the European model,’’
Lapenta says. It was the first time in his 28-year career as an atmospheric
scientist that Lapenta overheard the merits of competing weather models
discussed in casual chitchat. He credits the change largely to Mass.
Even though Lapenta got his new supercomputers in January, most of the
system remains idle. ‘‘It’s extraordinary,’’ Mass says. ‘‘They are only using
a small portion of it.’’ He also notes that the upgrades still aren’t enough
to run high-resolution ensembles effectively. Lapenta, however, remains
optimistic; he’s involved with NOAA’s Next Generation Global Prediction
Initiative, and he formed an advisory committee to evaluate the National
Weather Service’s numerous models and come up with a plan to build
better ones. He invited Mass to join the 14-member team, which met for
the first time in the summer of 2015.
‘‘I came away very sobered,’’ Mass says. ‘‘It’s a real mess. They are run-
ning way too many models.’’ At last count, the centers managed at least
a dozen models, some in development, others already operating. None
work very well. (They recently spent eight years and more than $100 mil-
lion trying to fix their main hurricane-forecasting model. But it still per-
forms so poorly that meteorologists inside the agency want to scrap it
altogether.) Mass’s advice was to focus all efforts on designing a single high-
performance weather model that can be adapted to (Continued on Page 51)
The New York Times Magazine 29
30 10.23.16
 O P E N C I T Y

Bodycams have been promoted as a solution to police misconduct. But the strange two-year saga of Seattle — where an
anonymous activist succeeded in forcing hundreds of hours of police footage onto the internet, for anyone to see — shows just how
complicated total transparency can be. B Y M C K E N Z I E F U N K
 new system of in-car dashboard cameras, then
for lists of dashcam recordings, then for some of
the recordings themselves. After the department
denied every one of them, Vedder sued it for
violating the Public Records Act.
The act, which dates to 1972, when govern-
ments ran on paper and our modern torrent
of electronic data was unimaginable, is one of
for example, some addresses, sometimes
the face of a minor — and disclose the rest.
Before the court, Perry had argued that a dif-
ferent law, the state’s Privacy Act, which allows
departments to withhold recordings until
related criminal or civil cases are resolved,
should take precedent and the Seattle Police
should be allowed to broadly deny Vedder’s

O N

his first day on the job in the Seattle Police

Department, Mike Wagers was invited to an
urgent meeting about transparency. It was
July 28, 2014, little more than a week after Eric
Garner was killed on Staten Island, less than
two weeks before Michael Brown was killed in
Ferguson, Mo., and police departments around
the country were facing a new era of public scru-
tiny. Wagers, who has a Ph.D. in criminal justice
from Rutgers, was the Seattle department’s new
chief operating officer, a 42-year-old civilian in
jeans and square-rimmed glasses. He’d left his
wife and two kids in Virginia and come alone to
Seattle, a city he didn’t know — where it rained
but cultural norms, he’d read, didn’t allow you
to use an umbrella — because the job was what
he called ‘‘the chance of a lifetime.’’ Seattle was
the first big-city police department in a decade
to have come under what is known as a consent
decree — police reform by federal fiat — after
a string of violent police actions against black,
Latino and Native American people were caught
on camera in 2009 and 2010. Wagers and his
new boss, Chief Kathleen O’Toole, herself just
arrived in Seattle, would use the best new think-
ing and the best new technology to lead the
turnaround. And then Wagers would go home.
O’Toole’s eighth-floor conference room,
which has views of City Hall and Elliott Bay
and the snow-capped Olympic Mountains, was
packed with top police and city officials. All eyes
were on a lawyer from the city attorney’s office
named Mary Perry. A former naval officer in her
60s, Perry was small and soft-spoken and favored
pearls, and she was the city’s unrivaled expert in
Tim Clemans got into police data as a “hobby.”
the seemingly mundane intricacies of the state’s
Public Records Act. She was briefing the room
on the potential fallout from a landmark case she
had just argued and lost before the Washington the strongest in the country. Washington State requests until the relevant statute of limitations
State Supreme Court. The case stemmed from a agencies cannot deny requests for records ran out. The court disagreed.
series of public-records requests by a reporter for because the requester is anonymous or the As Perry now told Wagers and the officials
the local television station KOMO, Tracy Vedder, request is too broad, nor can they deny requests gathered in the chief’s conference room, Seattle
who began filing them after the same high-profile simply in order to protect an individual’s pri- and other departments across the state were
incidents that would lead to the consent decree. vacy; instead, agencies must redact only the operating in a new reality. Only in cases under
She asked for user manuals to the department’s details deemed sensitive under state code — actual, pending litigation could the police

32 10.23.16 Above: Ian Allen for The New York Times. Opening pages: Screen shots of bodycam and dashcam videos via YouTube.
withhold video footage from the people. This
presented several problems. The first was logis-
tical and financial: Seattle Police were sitting on
more than 1.5 million individual dashcam and
surveillance videos, or about 300,000 hours and
350 terabytes total. Before releasing any foot-
age, someone in the department had to review
and redact it in accordance with the specific
privacy exemptions the state code did have.
The process was manual, a painstaking, frame-
by-frame ordeal. By one estimate, 169 people
would have to work for a year just to fulfill the
department’s existing video requests, and the
department added 2,000 new video clips daily.
Perry feared that the new flood of data, espe-
cially but not exclusively video, could bankrupt
Seattle if someone requested it all. ‘‘It’s like
being on the Titanic,’’ she later told me, ‘‘and
you’ve got a teaspoon to bail.’’
The second problem was privacy. Dashcam
videos were already a concern, but Seattle had
also been considering using body cameras. In
fact, the Police Department was now preparing
a small pilot program involving a dozen officers
from a single precinct to test the hardware. Any
footage that bodycams gathered, Perry warned,
would also be subject to the Public Records Act.
The department would have even more video to
manage and release, but most worrisome was
how fundamentally different, and more intru-
sive, this video would be. Unlike dashcams,
bodycams, which are attached to an officer’s
uniform or purpose-built glasses, can go into
homes and hotel rooms. Unlike dashcams, their
default view during an arrest, or during a sim-
ple conversation with a victim or witness or
informant, is an intimate close-up. Many peo-
ple think of body cameras as a tool for police
accountability, but the primary subject of their
surveillance isn’t the police — it’s the public.
‘‘I believe in open government, I really do,’’
Perry told me, ‘‘but I don’t think people have
really wrapped their heads around all the impli-
cations.’’ If the bodycam pilot was deemed a
success, and the city expanded the program to
the rest of its 850 front-line officers, all of them
now walking surveillance cameras, what then?
Wagers left the meeting stunned. ‘‘I like to
think I can walk into a room, take a complex
problem and break it down into its component
parts,’’ he says. ‘‘This meeting, I walked out think-
ing: Wow, this is complicated. This is messy.’’
IN 2011,
three years before Wagers joined the depart-
ment, a 20-year-old programmer named Tim
Clemans set the record for consecutive daily
visits to Seattle’s Space Needle. ‘‘The main rea-
son I go everyday,’’ he wrote in an online journal
documenting his record attempt, ‘‘is because on
July 7, 2010, I attempted suicide by jumping off
a bridge. The Space Needle changed me from a
depressed, shy and lazy kid to a happy, outgoing,
disciplined young man who has a reason to live.’’
Clemans lived with his parents in a small,
suburban house south of Seattle, sleeping in a
bedroom decorated with a picture of the Space
Shuttle and a free calendar from a local Chinese
buffet. His bed was a mattress on the floor, and
his electronic devices — computers, radios, key-
boards — dominated the room. Clemans, who
has sandy blond hair and wide blue eyes and
walks with the stooped gait of someone who
spends a lot of time in front of a computer,
taught himself to code HTML at age 8. Home-
schooled as a teenager to escape bullying, he
was editing web pages for a hospital, where a
friend from his parents’ church worked, by 14.
He taught himself basic JavaScript and CSS, and
he learned the programming language Python
after he showed up at a mathematics lab at the
University of Washington and offered to volun-
teer in exchange for high-school credit. ‘‘I just
went there,’’ he explains. ‘‘I’m very impulsive,
and I don’t like rules.’’
‘ I L I K E T O T H I N K I C A N WA L K
I N T O A R O O M , TA K E A
COMPLEX PROBLEM AND BREAK IT
DOW N I N TO I T S C OM P ON E N T
PA R T S . T H I S M E E T I N G , I WA L K E D
O U T T H I N K I N G : W O W,
T H I S I S C O M P L I C AT E D.
T H I S I S M E S S Y.’
Day 1 of his record attempt was a fluke. He
was in the vicinity of the Space Needle and
bored, so he took the elevator to the top. Some-
thing about being able to see the whole city at
once captivated him. The next day, Clemans
bought a $50 season pass. He learned of the
previous record — 60 consecutive days — and
vowed to beat it. He came daily by bus and foot,
an hourlong commute, often arriving early and
staying late into the night.
The Space Needle blooms out of the grounds
of the 1962 World’s Fair, a site north of down-
town that is now known as Seattle Center. It is
605 feet tall. You enter through a plaza choked
with Korean tourists and Andean flute musicians
and Marine marching bands, then shuffle up a
ramp to the east, above the gift shop and not
far from a lineup of idling tour buses. Before
handing over your ticket, you are asked to pose
for a photo, then board one of three external
elevators. When the elevator starts its ascent
and the city comes into view, the people inside
either fall silent or gasp out loud.
From the observation deck, you can see moun-
tains in four directions, water in two and, just to
the south, a forest of skyscrapers. You also see a
tangle of cranes; a city increasingly built by the
likes of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates is booming. There
are parks, markets, hidden gardens, tiny houses,
tiny cars. Bulk carriers glide into port. Seaplanes
land and take off. Helicopters float by. The lights
of the radio towers on adjacent Queen Anne Hill,
a seeming stone’s throw away, blink on and off.
Inside, a giant digital wall displays a shifting col-
lage of visitor selfies, along with tourists’ names
and cities of origins. A joystick controls a high-defi-
nition camera mounted somewhere on the tower,
allowing anyone to pan and zoom in on the unsus-
pecting people below, like a drone operator.
The Space Needle became Clemans’s office
and his sanctuary. He brought his laptop, stuffing
it into his backpack along with a toothbrush and
toothpaste and self-help and business books, and
got online with a wireless card. He exercised by
walking laps around the outer deck. He offered
to take tourists’ photos, posed with them and
answered their questions. He wrote code and
blog entries. He stared at the city. It made sense
from up there. It had patterns. Even its famously
chaotic traffic had a predictable ebb and flow.
‘‘The sun is shining!’’ reads one blog entry.
‘‘I can see Rainier. People are happy. It doesn’t
get any better than this.’’ When he claimed the
record on Day 61, he appeared on the evening
news. He said he would keep going for a full
year, then announced on his blog that he would
go for even longer — 1,825 days in a row. He
began wearing a black jacket emblazoned with
the words ‘‘Record Holder’’ in block letters and
spending more of his time talking to tourists,
meeting people from all over the world. ‘‘It
was an enjoyable eight-hour visit,’’ he wrote
in another entry. ‘‘I finished reading ‘Personal
MBA’ and memorized the five parts of a busi-
ness and the 12 ways to create value.’’
Some days he wrote about his attempts to
stick to a routine. Others he dreamed up fan-
ciful lists. ‘‘When I own the Space Needle in
2034,’’ he wrote on Day 107, ‘‘I will do the fol-
lowing twenty things.’’ One: ‘‘I will sell tickets
for $200 to the very top . . . for $600 you can also
hang off the side.’’ Two: ‘‘Each day the Space
Needle will fly a flag. Most days the flag will
be the photo of a random lucky guest.’’ Four:
‘‘For $500 you and your spouse can sleep in an
elevator.’’ Sixteen: ‘‘I will pay French Spider
Man Alain Robert $10 million to climb a leg of
the Space Needle once every day for a year.’’
Eighteen: ‘‘I will give the security bag checkers
X-ray vision glasses.’’ Nineteen: ‘‘I will person-
ally lead a walking tour for people struggling
with suicidal thoughts.’’
‘‘This post is for me,’’ reads the next day’s
entry. ‘‘I’m struggling to meet my goals like
reading and writing computer code four hours
a day. However, I’m really good at meeting this
33
one particular goal, going to the Space Needle
every day. I’ve been able to do so for 108 days
straight for one simple reason: Going to the
Space Needle everyday is more important than
anything else. I have to do it. So when I’m trying
to achieve a goal, I just have to remember it’s
more important than anything else.’’
After almost 160 days, Clemans had an alter-
cation with a Space Needle employee. Before
he could get on the elevator, she asked him to
pose for a photo in the booth at the top of the
ramp, just like the tourists. He had been asked
to do it a hundred times. It was senseless, and
it enraged him. ‘‘I blew up at her,’’ he says. Just
like that, the world-record holder was banned
from the Space Needle for life.
Adrift, he disappeared from public view. He
worked on code, dabbled in robotics and consid-
ered a career as a paramedic. He was pulled over
for reckless driving and hired a lawyer known for
his successful dashcam requests and, he claims,
the video didn’t entirely match the police report,
so the court reduced the charges. He met a woman
on OKCupid, getting her attention by suggesting
that they go build sand castles together.
One day in September 2014, Clemans was
with his girlfriend when he read on his laptop
that KOMO had prevailed over Seattle in the
state’s Supreme Court in June: Police video
had to be released on demand. The Justice
Department had just started its investigation of
Ferguson, but Clemans’s concerns were closer
to home. KOMO posted only snippets. ‘‘I was
just mad that they were getting all this video but
not making it all available,’’ he recalls. He turned
to his girlfriend and told her, ‘‘I think I’m going
to do police data as a hobby.’’
‘‘ I T W A S L I K E
a D.D.O.S. attack,’’ Wagers says, comparing
Clemans’s first email to a distributed denial
of service attack, in which hackers send so
much traffic to a website that it crashes. ‘‘It was
going to seize up the system.’’ The request was
simple, but it was just what Perry had warned
about: Clemans wanted every single video
34 10.23.16
the Seattle Police Department ever recorded,
everything not tied up in an investigation. That
September, Clemans sent similar messages to
almost every police department in the state.
Worried the police would retaliate if they could
find him, he used an untraceable email address:
policevideorequests@mail2tor.com.
Some police departments started sending
videos immediately, some proposed installment
plans and some announced they were delaying
their bodycam programs. In Poulsbo, a town
of 9,500 people across the Puget Sound from
Seattle, the mayor desperately emailed her local
state legislator and asked him to do something
about the cameras and the Public Records Act.
Unlike its smaller counterparts, the Seattle
department did not give its unknown nemesis any
footage. Clemans responded by programming a
bot. It scraped the department’s website for new
case numbers, then automatically requested the
corresponding police reports, firing off emails
10 times a day. The more the authorities denied
him, the more his appetite grew. He asked the
University of Washington for all its records dating
back to ‘‘the formation of the Earth 4.54 billion
years ago.’’ He filed requests with another 60 state
agencies, demanding every email they had ever
sent — 600 million messages in all, according to
a state estimate. The Department of Agriculture
informed Clemans it would need 132 years to
complete the job.
Wagers decided to try a different approach. At
Rutgers, he had been schooled in the reformist
ideals of community policing. Like the longtime
New York City police commissioner William J.
Bratton — whose work when he led the Los Ange-
les Police Department was the subject of Wagers’s
Ph.D. dissertation and who, as it happened, was
Chief O’Toole’s boss when he led the Massachu-
setts Metropolitan District Commission Police —
Wagers liked to quote Sir Robert Peel, the founder
of London’s bobbies, who in the early 19th century
established an Anglo-Saxon tradition of policing
distinct from the militaristic us-versus-them
Above: The Seattle Police Department avoided
the need to edit every video it had taken for
privacy exemptions by blurring everything.
Continental model. Peel taught that good polic-
ing was about building and holding public trust.
‘‘It’s about engagement,’’ Wagers told me. ‘‘We
respond. We engage. It sounds kind of trite, but
it’s a different way of thinking.’’ His new plan for
dealing with Clemans, he says, ‘‘was like any other
response to the community: We engage.’’
On Twitter, Wagers followed @PoliceVideo,
an account that then belonged to the still-
anonymous requester. The next day, the account
tweeted at Wagers, asking him why the depart-
ment was giving PowerPoint presentations to
city leaders about the coming bodycam pilot
program but not sharing the slides with the
public. ‘‘Screw it,’’ @PoliceVideo tweeted when
Wagers was too slow to respond. ‘‘Putting in the
request now. Wish you guys would just publish
this stuff.’’
But Wagers offered to ‘‘do you one better,’’ and
he tweeted a phone number. ‘‘Here’s my cell,’’ he
wrote. ‘‘I give it out to everyone. Call me & happy
to answer questions.’’ It was 6:57 p.m. One min-
ute later, Wagers’s phone rang. It was Clemans.
He still didn’t give his real name — he had been
overwhelmed by media interest in his transpar-
ency fight — but readily accepted when Wagers
invited him to lunch.
The next day, Clemans met Wagers and Mary
Perry at Police Headquarters. They ordered a
pizza. Perry tried to explain that it was techni-
cally impossible for the department to release all
its archived video anytime soon. Clemans coun-
tered with an idea he had. He called it ‘‘overre-
daction.’’ If the system was paralyzed by the
need for frame-by-frame redactions, he won-
dered, why not automatically redact everything?
That is, instead of jockeying with requesters,
painstakingly reviewing each video, blurring
out the protected parts and burning the results
onto DVD after DVD, the department could
just use software to lightly blur everything, then
proactively publish each blurred video online.
Push, not pull. Viewers would be able to make
out enough to know if footage merited a specif-
ic records request and a more precise manual
redaction, and they would presumably ask for
only the segments they thought they needed;
and no longer would the department be buried
Seattle Police Department screen shots via YouTube
under its own video. He agreed to drop his mass
requests if the department would try it out.
In fact, Clemans said, he had stayed up
all night writing a very rough version of the
overredaction code and printed it out. He
showed them what he had done.
T H E P I L OT P RO G R A M,
set to be rolled out in December 2014, would
garner considerable national attention. After
Ferguson, expectations that bodycams could
reduce police violence and ensure accountabili-
ty were high. In polls taken over the next year, 87
percent of Americans and 89 percent of Seattle
residents supported their use. When President
Obama announced an initiative to distribute
$75 million so police departments around the
country could buy more of them, he declared
that the cameras would ‘‘enhance trust between
communities and police.’’ A widely cited study
by University of Cambridge researchers, under-
taken in Rialto, Calif., in 2012 and 2013, found
that when officers wore the cameras, use of
force dropped by 59 percent compared to the
previous year, complaints against the police by
88 percent. By now Wagers understood more
about the hidden costs of bodycams — to indi-
vidual privacy, to the overworked staff of the
public-disclosure unit — but he and O’Toole
began avidly pursuing a federal grant nonethe-
less. ‘‘If research continues to show that they
reduce the use of force, reduce complaints, pro-
duce positive impacts,’’ he said, ‘‘then there’s a
moral cost to not using bodycams.’’
The cameras that Seattle planned to use in its
pilot program — which would be worn on patrol
by a dozen officers in its East Precinct, their video
uploaded to a server at the end of every shift —
were from two local companies: Vievu, which
was founded by a former Seattle SWAT officer,
Steve Ward, in 2007, and its main rival, Axon, a
division of Taser that is responsible for the reli-
able spike in the parent company’s stock after
major police shootings. Together the two compa-
nies dominate a market that analysts believe will
soon be worth a billion dollars a year, with much
of the value coming from software and storage.
Both Vievu and Axon offered bundles that paired
their cameras with editing programs that ran in
the cloud, processing them on computers main-
tained by Amazon Web Services or Microsoft’s
Azure, which are also Seattle-area companies.
But neither bundle came cheap. The millions
of dollars that major police departments were
beginning to spend on bodycam contracts
were millions they weren’t spending on better
training or new officers, and neither compa-
ny had come close to perfecting automated
redaction, without which Seattle Police would
simply be collecting more footage without
any better way to share it with requesters.
Seattle needed an end-to-end software fix,
Wagers realized, and Seattle was also a city
full of programmers. So the day before the
pilot program started, he also tried another
experiment: With help from Clemans, he held
the department’s first-ever hackathon.
The overflow crowd of 80 people was
‘‘straight out of central casting,’’ Wagers says.
‘‘Skinny jeans. Hoodies. People who had sued
the department. People I know I’d seen on
the protest line the previous week.’’ Clemans
demonstrated his overredaction program: the
world as if filmed through a beer glass, fuzzy
but familiar, in which it was still possible (too
possible, some worried) to tell who was tall and
who was short and who was male and who was
female and who was black and who was white
and who was running and who was chasing. It
was well received, and several programmers in
the room offered to help Clemans improve the
algorithm. But Clemans, volunteering his time
and his skills, would be the linchpin. The pilot
would run for six months, and if it went well,
12 officers would soon become 850.
‘IF RESEARCH CONTINUES TO
S H O W T H AT T H E Y R E D U C E T H E U S E
OF FORCE, REDUCE COMPLAINTS,
P R O D U C E P O S I T I V E I M PA C T S , T H E N
THERE’S A MORAL COST TO NOT
U S I N G B O DYC A M S .’
The next day, on Dec. 20, as TV stations
aired reports on the department’s innovative
approach to transparency, the bodycam pilot
began. Clemans and the department soon devel-
oped a rhythm: Some of the videos coming in
from the East Precinct were saved to U.S.B.
sticks, and Clemans, unpaid and on food stamps
at the time, came downtown by bus to pick them
up. He processed them on his bedroom com-
puter, tweaking the overredaction program as
he went, trying to code in the right balance of
concealment and transparency.
EVEN AS HE
helped run Seattle’s experiment in open govern-
ment, Clemans continued to receive hundreds of
hours of dashcam and bodycam video from other
police departments around the state, much of it
unredacted. And, just as he had promised to do in
his records requests, he was continuing to upload
it — unredacted — to YouTube. The first videos
he posted show, with perfect clarity, drunken-
driving stops from the towns Renton and
Tukwila, south of Seattle, and include disturbing
footage of a young white man being shocked with
a Taser in the dark beneath the tree where he
had just crashed his car, the scene illuminated by
flashing lights. In another video, two officers rush
to help a man suffering from a heart attack on a
freeway overpass, saving his life. Others depict
foot chases or friendly interactions with homeless
people, and they gave Clemans more respect for
the police and the difficulties they face every day.
‘‘Policing is just really hard,’’ he says. But he didn’t
watch all the footage himself, because he didn’t
have time and new projects beckoned.
I watched more than a dozen hours of the
video. There were no shootings. Most of it was
routine police work, which may be why it was so
disturbing to see online. In one set of videos that
Clemans posted, a well-dressed white mother
of two is pulled over late on a Friday night. She
is composed until she fails a sobriety test. Then
she pleads for a chance to call the babysitter
— according to Facebook, where I found her
because the video also revealed her name, she
has a young daughter and younger son — before
breaking down in loud screams and sobs in the
back of a patrol car.
Elsewhere in the state, also on YouTube, a body
camera captures the inside of a woman’s home
as she explains how her accused stalker has been
ignoring a restraining order. A father pleads with
two officers to check in on his adult daughter,
who he says has intellectual disabilities and has
become involved with a man he believes is dan-
gerous. Two college roommates accuse each other
of theft and intimidation in their living room.
A white woman apparently overdosing on meth,
who cries out that she’s pregnant, is restrained
and given medical attention. A middle-aged black
man opens his apartment door for a group of offi-
cers who inform him that he has been screaming
all night. Slurring his words, he admits he’s suf-
fering from PTSD and that he has a history of
heroin use. He refuses to let them take him to the
hospital. He refuses even when an officer reminds
him that he has been screaming like this off and on
for a month. But now you can hear the fear in his
voice. ‘‘Am I screaming right now?’’ he wonders.
One of the first bodycam videos that Clemans
uploaded shows a young black woman sitting on
a bed in a hotel room. The officer wearing the
camera is a disembodied voice but for a fleeting
glimpse of his face and torso in a mirror. His man-
ner is professional and sympathetic, and he says
he doesn’t want to arrest her. ‘‘Will I be charged?’’
she asks. ‘‘Let’s get to that later,’’ he says. He asks
her if she would be willing to talk to a counselor.
‘‘So you can get some other kind of job so you
don’t have to do this anymore, O.K.?’’ he says. ‘‘Our
ultimate goal is that there is no prostitution, O.K.?’’
He begins filling out a form — Escort Face
Sheet — on a clipboard. (Continued on Page 48)
The New York Times Magazine 35
36
MIRI REGEV
BECAME THE
CULTURE
MINISTER OF
ISRAEL LAST
YEAR — AND
PROMPTLY
DECLARED WAR
ON THE
COUNTRY’S
CULTURAL
ELITE. SETTLING
SCORES BY
RUTH MARGALIT
PHOTOGRAPHS
BY URIEL SINAI

THE TEL AVIV
MUSEUM OF ART IS
A SOMBER SLAB
OF CONCRETE BUILT
IN THE NO-FUSS
BRUTALIST STYLE
OF THE LATE ’60S.
The architect who planned the museum also
designed Israel’s nuclear reactor; such is the
overlap between culture and political exigency
in the country. One Sunday in March, a throng of
artists, actors and writers clustered in the muse-
um’s main auditorium. They were awaiting the
arrival of Miri Regev, Israel’s culture and sports
minister, of the ruling Likud Party. A year earlier,
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister and
the chairman of Likud, secured a fourth term in
office and swore in his ministers, a coalition widely
regarded as the most right-wing in Israeli history.
In that time, Regev has done just about every-
thing she can to alienate and enrage those she
considers the elites, or the ‘‘cultural junta,’’ of
Israel. Leftists. Secularists. Tel Avivians. Ashke-
nazim — Jews of European origin. People who,
as she told me recently, think that ‘‘classical
music is better than the Andalusian music’’ of
Morocco, or that ‘‘Chekhov is more important
than Maimonides.’’
Regev, who is 51, grew up in Kiryat Gat, a devel-
opment town in Israel’s south, which — like many
other towns in Israel’s peripheria, or periphery, the
areas outside the country’s urban center — was
set up in the 1950s to house the influx of Jewish
immigrants from Muslim countries. In person
she is warm; after two minutes of conversation
she will call you kapara (‘‘sweetheart’’ in Jewish
Moroccan dialect) or neshama (‘‘soul’’ in Hebrew).
Yet in public life she comes across as crass and
hotheaded. That afternoon in the museum, she
was venturing into hostile territory. She had
agreed to speak at an arts-and-culture conference
organized by the liberal newspaper Haaretz to
address the interplay of state funding and cultural
production. Many of those in attendance won-
dered if Regev had come to make amends: Shortly
after her appointment, at a meeting with stage
actors and guild representatives, Regev all but
acknowledged being driven by a sense of political
vendetta. ‘‘We got 30 seats’’ — in the Knesset —
‘‘you got only 20,’’ she told those present. She later
gave an interview in which she called the Israeli
creative class ‘‘tight-assed’’ and ‘‘ungrateful.’’
When at last Regev materialized, wearing
an all-black ensemble and crimson lipstick, a
murmur swept through the auditorium. She is a
striking, fiery presence with wide-set eyes, prom-
inent lips and dark hair streaked with reddish
38 10.23.16
highlights. Standing in front of the audience, her
expression set between a smirk and a scowl, she
clutched the lectern with one hand. ‘‘I was always
told to start a speech with a quote; it makes for a
cultured impression,’’ she began. ‘‘So here goes.
As the famed Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu once
put it’’ — she switched to accented English — ‘‘Cut
the bullshit! Cut the bullshit!’’
Stunned silence fell over the crowd. Then
people began to jeer. Someone cried out, ‘‘The
minister of occupation!’’
‘‘We will expose the hypocrisy and the greed,’’
Regev continued, her voice rising. ‘‘We will guar-
antee loyalty to the laws of the country!’’
People rose from their seats and booed.
‘‘Shame on you!’’ a voice rang out.
Since joining Likud in 2008, Regev has
become known for her provocations no less than
for her nationalist fervor. The columnist Nahum
Barnea called her ‘‘a walking graffiti wall.’’ There
was the time she described migrant workers
from Africa as ‘‘cancer in our body.’’ And the
time she lashed out at an Arab member of the
Knesset: ‘‘Go to Gaza, you traitor!’’ She some-
times unfurls an Israeli flag during speeches and
has on occasion taken reporters to pray at the
Western Wall before an interview. In 2013, she
introduced a bill to annex the Jordan Valley, a
move that would all but foreclose the prospect
of a two-state solution.
Now she continued on a familiar course, stat-
ing that the ministry would stop serving ‘‘as an
A.T.M.’’ and calling to divert money away from
‘‘powerful institutions.’’ At one point she paused.
‘‘Let’s admit it,’’ she said. ‘‘Your culture demands
exclusive funding, while another culture has
been silenced for years.’’
That other culture is Mizrahi, or ‘‘Eastern.’’ It’s
a catchall term that includes Jewish communi-
ties from Muslim countries in the Middle East
and North Africa, as well as the Sephardic Jews,
whose origins can be traced to Spain and Portu-
gal, who settled there. These communities immi-
grated to Israel in mass waves after its founding
in 1948 and into the early 1950s, upending its
demographic makeup: The Jewish population,
almost exclusively Ashkenazi, became more than
40 percent Mizrahi. But it wasn’t just the coun-
try’s ethnic composition that changed. The Jew-
ish population that predated the founding of the
state was primarily young, secular and idealistic;
it was also heavily male. By contrast, the new Miz-
rahi arrivals tended to be large families from tra-
ditional societies. In their ethnic garb, often with
no knowledge of Hebrew, they struck the native-
born Israeli sabras and the European Ashkenazim
as provincial and uneducated. Zalman Shazar, a
future president of Israel, warned that these new
immigrants ‘‘never knew the taste of high school.’’
This sense of superiority was heightened by the
economic plight of the Mizrahim: Having no real
accommodation or employment for them, the
government of David Ben-Gurion placed them
in overcrowded transit camps, where squalor and
hunger became the norm.
The socioeconomic gap between Ashkenazim
and Mizrahim has since narrowed, spurred by
a rise in interethnic marriage (about a third of
Jewish Israeli children born today are ethnical-
ly mixed). But it hasn’t disappeared altogether.
Mizrahim earn roughly 25 percent less per capita
than Ashkenazim, according to Momi Dahan, a
professor of public policy at Hebrew University.
Social and cultural tensions still percolate. In a
2007 poll, more than half of respondents char-
acterized relations between Ashkenazim and
Mizrahim in the country as ‘‘not good.’’
For Regev, ‘‘not good’’ is an understatement.
To her, the public discourse in Israel is rife with
ethnically charged condescension. Derogatory
terms like ars (‘‘thug’’ in Hebrew slang) and freha
(‘‘bimbo’’) have come to connote a kind of garish
shallowness and are applied almost exclusively
to Mizrahim. For too long, she argues, the Israeli
establishment — the news media, academia, the
Supreme Court — has been closed off to large
sectors of society, the same sectors she has cul-
tivated as her base: women, Mizrahim and res-
idents of Israel’s development towns. In other
words, people like her.
‘‘It was all planned,’’ Regev told me this sum-
mer of her speech. We were in the back seat of
her ministerial car, driving north on the Yitzhak
Rabin Highway to attend a ceremony in her
honor. It was a scorching day, and she had kicked
off her stilettos and wedged her bare feet between
passenger seat and window. ‘‘I knew that if I went
to the Haaretz conference, there was no way I was
going to be nice and say, ‘Thank you for inviting
me.’ You know those invitations to high society?
You tell yourself, I have to look pretty and be
nice and wear my high heels? No way. No way. I
was there to tell them what I thought of them. To
tell them: ‘You talked enough. Now you listen.’ ’’
t is a testament to the hopelessness
I of peace efforts today that the most-
talked-about politician in Israel is its
culture minister, traditionally a mar-
ginalized figure overseeing a relatively minuscule
budget. But with the peace process effectively
frozen, Israelis have increasingly turned their
sights inward. These days, there is much talk of
homegrown enemies. Chief among the instiga-
tors is an ultranationalist organization called Im
Tirtzu, or ‘‘If You Will It,’’ named after the famous
first phrase of Herzl’s Zionist maxim, ‘‘If you will
it, it is no dream.’’ Im Tirtzu released a video last
year labeling leaders of Israeli human rights orga-
nizations ‘‘foreign agents’’ and suggesting that
they abet terrorists. The group, which had its start
on university campuses, then began a campaign
to call out prominent left-wing authors — Amos
Oz, David Grossman, A. B. Yehoshua — and other
artists and actors as ‘‘moles in culture.’’
Netanyahu has tried to distance himself from
Photograph by Uriel Sinai for The New York Times
many of the more flagrant displays of such McCa-
rthyism. And yet similar measures are routinely
promulgated on the Knesset floor. One recent
bill calls for enshrining Israel’s legal status as ‘‘the
national home of the Jewish people.’’ A newly
passed law requires nongovernmental organi-
zations that receive more than half their funding
from foreign governments to disclose this in all
their official communications; an earlier version
went so far as to demand that representatives of
these organizations wear a special badge while in
the Knesset. The law is widely seen as targeting
the left because it affects most human rights orga-
nizations in the country, which typically receive
money from foreign governments, but not most
pro-settler groups, whose funding comes largely
from private donors.
The politicians peddling those bills represent a
new vanguard of far-right activism. Younger and
more unabashedly anti-democratic than Netanya-
hu’s cohort of Likudniks, they do not feel the need
to pay lip service to the idea of the occupation as a
temporary necessity. Some — like Naftali Bennett,
the education minister, and Ayelet Shaked, the
justice minister — belong to a smaller party in
Likud’s coalition that ensures its continued drift
rightward. Their platform includes ‘‘fighting any-
one who acts to turn Israel into ‘a state of its citi-
zens.’ ’’ Others are the Likud’s own. Earnest, dour
politicians like Yariv Levin and Ze’ev Elkin make
up the maximalist camp of the party, its rough
equivalents of Ted Cruz and Darrell Issa. Likud
Miri Regev at a film-awards ceremony, where she was booed. Earlier, she walked out of the event in protest
over the rapping of a poem written by the pre-eminent Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
today ‘‘holds the worldview that historic rights
are superior to natural, human rights,’’ says the
political scientist Zeev Sternhell. ‘‘What they’re
saying in effect is, ‘We are the majority, and we
can do whatever we want.’ ’’
Regev is often placed in the maximalist camp.
Like them, she doesn’t believe in the ‘‘illusion of
peace’’ and has spoken out vehemently against
a Palestinian state. She argues that Jews should
be allowed to pray on the Temple Mount, which
goes against Israel’s security arrangements with
the Islamic council that has administered the site
since the 12th century. And she is unapologet-
ic about seeking to cement her party’s power.
She told me: ‘‘There’s a new group on the right
that says: We’re unwilling to bow our heads any
longer. We’re unwilling to let the left decide for
us if we’re in charge.’’
But unlike other politicians in the maximalist
camp, for whom the territorial question remains
central, Regev has decided to set her sights else-
where. Regev’s goal is to dislodge the ‘‘elites’’
in order to elevate previously marginalized
groups. To do so, she has issued new criteria
for the allocation of state funds for cultural insti-
tutions. These include a clause that gives the
government the power to punish acts of ‘‘dele-
gitimization of the state’’ — burning the Israeli
flag during a play, for example — and provides
financial incentives to troupes that perform in
Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
For the country’s diminishing liberal base,
Regev represents not a culture war so much as
a war on culture. As Daniel Ben Simon, a former
Labor politician, put it, ‘‘She’s a commissar of cul-
ture.’’ But 59 percent of Israeli Jews support her
agenda, according to an Israel Democracy Insti-
tute poll. She is often called ‘‘colorful,’’ a charita-
ble description of her internal contradictions. She
has amassed considerable political clout but views
herself as a perpetual underdog. She rails against
Ashkenazi and leftist elites yet is married to an
Ashkenazi man who used to vote left. She uses a
well-worn phrase to characterize Israel as ‘‘a villa
in the jungle,’’ assailing the Palestinians, but speaks
in glowing terms about Arab Israelis who ‘‘respect
the laws of the country.’’ She identifies as conser-
vative but sees herself as a champion of gay rights.
She grew up in a traditional family — ‘‘ ‘feminist’ is
a word I can’t relate to,’’ she has said — but spent
25 years in the Israeli military, rising through the
ranks to become chief censor and then spokes-
woman for the Israel Defense Forces. It’s time, she
says, for Israel to have a female defense minister.
(Preferably her.)
In her first primary contest, in 2008, Regev
rounded off the party’s list for the Knesset — ‘‘No
one gave a damn about her,’’ as a colleague of
hers put it. But by the latest Likud primary, at the
end of 2014, she had clinched a top-five position,
the highest for a woman in the party. Forbes Isra-
el named her the most influential woman in the
country. Given her impressive finish, it was clear
that she would get a ministerial position. She
wanted the welfare ministry and says she prayed
for it at the Western Wall before meeting with
Netanyahu to learn of her assignment. When
she went by his office before the swearing-in
of the new government, she says, he promised
her the job. But a few hours later he called her
at home and rescinded the offer, having given
the welfare portfolio to another Likud politician.
He suggested a few alternatives, including the
culture and sports ministry, ‘‘and as he’s saying
this, tears start streaming down my face,’’ she
told me. It took her a few days to realize that
this was her chance to break out. ‘‘I wanted to
bring the Mizrahi issue to center stage and not
run away from it. And the peripheria. To not be
afraid. To not accept the statement that we’re
beasts, that we’re nothing but mezuza kissers.’’
Her timing was fortuitous. A Mizrahi group
called the Black Panthers, founded in the early
1970s to protest what it saw as the state’s sys-
temic discrimination against Eastern Jews, has
had a renaissance of sorts, thanks to social media
and growing cultural movements that seek to
recast the negative image of Mizrahim. ‘‘I’m the
Mizrahi/You don’t know/I’m the Mizrahi/You
don’t mention,’’ begins a poem by Adi Keissar,
who founded Ars Poetica, a reading series featur-
ing young Mizrahi poets; the name, taken from
Horace, reclaims the pejorative ars. As Maor
Zaguri, a television writer and director, told me,
‘‘We’re practically a majority, and yet the feeling
is that nothing in culture is for us.’’
Whether out of a genuine sense of purpose
or as a way to score political points, Regev has
managed to tap into these age-old antagonisms.
She has threatened to divert state funding away
from places like the Israeli Opera and the canon-
ical theaters of Tel Aviv and prioritize smaller
operations working out of underprivileged areas,
including the peripheria, which is overwhelming-
ly Mizrahi. She has tried to overhaul the Israeli
arts council, the government’s advisory body
on culture, by nominating only people of Miz-
rahi origin who openly share her agenda. At
times, she seems to exert more influence than
Netanyahu, who has recently been dogged by
scandals, including charges that he received
illegal contributions from foreign donors and
that his wife pocketed thousands of shekels
from recycling fees. (Netanyahu has dismissed
the accusations as ‘‘a lot of hot air.’’)
Opinions on Regev’s motives — as with every
subject in Israel — are split. In the media, Regev
is often portrayed as an unwitting crusader for
a cause more sophisticated than she is. She is a
recurring character in a popular satirical Israeli
show, in which a male actor plays her as a primitive
loudmouth. ‘‘The way they see it, Miri Regev is the
ultimate freha,’’ says Ron Cahlili, a documentary
filmmaker and self-described Mizrahi leftist who
supports Regev’s agenda. ‘‘In the fact that she’s a
woman, first of all; in the fact that she’s Mizrahi;
that she comes from Kiryat Gat. In the fact that
40 10.23.16
Regev at a ceremony for a new Torah scroll at the house of a political activist from the Likud Party.
every Friday she posts pictures of herself making
pots of spicy fish. That she lights candles with a
head scarf on, and kisses mezuzas, and talks about
the Temple Mount and about tradition. And is
right wing! Really right wing. This combination
releases all the possible stereotypes. The white
Zionist left can’t take it.’’
For Mizrahi activists like Cahlili, Regev is an
unequivocal good. ‘‘For once in 67 years, a culture
minister is speaking the truth,’’ Cahlili says. ‘‘Even
if she does one-tenth of what she has set out to
do, we’ll have a historic correction of injustice.’’
But others see her as hurting the Mizrahi cause.
‘‘The danger of the Mizrahi struggle is that it will
fall to a place of unjustified hatred, where there’s
no grace and no compassion, and where there’s
an inability to accept a multiplicity of voices,’’
says Mati Shemoelof, a Mizrahi writer and editor.
And many on the left see an inherent hypocri-
sy in the gap between Regev’s words and her
actions. Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Joint List,
an alliance of Arab political parties, told me: ‘‘You
can’t reconcile this seemingly liberal and egali-
tarian approach with an attack on Arabs, which
is what she’s doing.’’
ll of this is new,’’ Regev said late one
‘‘A morning. We were in Kiryat Gat, less
than 20 miles from the Gaza border.
She pointed to where the housing
project she grew up in once stood; it was demol-
ished last year. ‘‘We slept four in a room, in bunk
beds. My grandmother had the bottom bed.’’ Her
eyes brightened; her smile widened. Despite her
talk of hardship, she was in her hometown, and
it felt as though she were taking a victory lap of
sorts — while making sure it wouldn’t be lost on
me just how far she had come.
From her old neighborhood, we drove to the
wealthier part of town, where her husband, Dror,
was raised and where his parents still live. Dror
is an engineer in the aerospace industry. They
met when Miri was 16 and he was in his early
20s — he spotted her at the city’s central bus sta-
tion — and they now have three grown children.
Dror’s grandparents immigrated from Russia and
Poland, and at first Miri felt intimidated by them
and their European ways. ‘‘They were all teachers
and spoke high Hebrew, and I was afraid that I
wouldn’t fit in. But everything was O.K. It was all
in my head. Because I came from a culture that
hugs and touches and kapara and ‘What do you
want to eat?’ and huge pots of food. And at his
house things were different. There was less touch-
ing and less — it’s not that there isn’t love, there
is — but it’s different. The combination between
the cultures isn’t an easy one.’’ Nevertheless, she
added, she and Dror are proud that their children
are now ‘‘really Israeli’’ and ‘‘have both the Eastern
and Western in them.’’
Regev’s driver stopped, and we stepped into
the thick heat of the day. She was dressed for
an event that evening: high heels and a short
black dress that flattered her recently slimmed-
down figure. Her neck was burdened with heavy
necklaces, one a blend between a Star of David
and a sheriff ’s star.
‘‘Shalom!’’ a neighbor stopped her. ‘‘What did
we do to deserve this?’’
‘‘Shh, don’t tell Dror’s parents I’m here,’’ Regev
laughed before enveloping the woman in a hug.
In her hometown, Miri Regev is better known
as Miriam Siboni, her maiden name. Her mother,
Mercedes, immigrated from Spain as a teenager
in 1957 and still watches Spanish entertainment
news every afternoon. Her father, Felix, who is
from Morocco, worked for years as a welder; he
lost two fingers in a work accident. Among them-
selves, the Sibonis usually converse in Spanish
and like to listen to Julio Iglesias and Mercedes
Sosa. They brought up Miri and her three young-
er brothers in a household that was neither secu-
lar nor religious but masorti — traditional. This is
commonplace for Mizrahim in Israel: an adher-
ence to certain Jewish commandments but not
to all. It may mean keeping kosher and saying
Photograph by Uriel Sinai for The New York Times
the Kiddush, but turning on the television after
the Shabbat meal. Or walking to synagogue on
Friday and refraining from lighting the gas, but
still driving to meet friends on a Friday night. It’s
a form of observance that is heavy on ritual and
sits somewhere between the two poles of Ash-
kenazi life: staunch secularism (the kibbutzniks;
the sushi eaters of Herzliya) and strict religiosity
(the kipa-wearers and the ultra-Orthodox).
That afternoon we sat in the snug, well-lit
living room of the Sibonis. Regev had swapped
her heels for a pair of worn flip-flops and piled
up her hair with a clip. The news was on in the
background. I asked her parents about politics.
‘‘I grew up among the progressives, the Labor
Party,’’ Felix said. ‘‘When my daughter joined
Likud, as a father I had to support her, so I
switched.’’ This came as something of a shock.
As far as I knew, Regev had never before spoken
‘I WAS THERE TO
TELL THEM
WHAT I THOUGHT
OF THEM. TO
TELL THEM: ‘‘YOU
TALKED ENOUGH.
NOW YOU LISTEN.’’ ’
about growing up in a Laborite home.
Later I would learn that despite her hard-line
positions, Likud might not have been Regev’s
first choice. In 2008, after retiring from the mili-
tary, she considered her options. She wanted to
enter politics but wasn’t sure which party to join.
‘‘She was debating,’’ recalls Daniel Ben Simon,
who ran in the Labor primaries that year. ‘‘She
told me, ‘If there’s an opportunity at Labor, I’ll go
with Labor.’ ’’ She met with Ehud Barak, then the
chairman of the Labor Party, but he refused to
guarantee her a top spot on the party roster. Real-
izing she stood a better chance of being elected
under Likud, which was riding high in the polls,
Regev scheduled a meeting with Netanyahu. Nitza
Friedman, a close friend of Regev’s for nearly 20
years, remembers being ‘‘surprised’’ when Regev
joined Likud. (Regev acknowledges meeting with
Barak. But she says that they didn’t talk of her
joining the party and that her preference was
always to be a member of Likud.)
When Regev joined the Knesset, she wasn’t
given any significant assignments. Despite her
military bona fides, she barely managed to get
on the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.
She struggled to find a voice in the party. Then,
in 2009, she objected to a tax on fruits and vege-
tables proposed by Netanyahu and made a name
for herself as a populist hero of sorts when she
appeared on the cover of a newspaper chopping
salad. ‘‘Unacceptable,’’ Netanyahu fumed at the
time. Gradually, she also began to align herself
with the coalition’s more hard-line elements,
making headlines for her outrageous statements
in the Knesset. In 2010, an Arab lawmaker partic-
ipated in a flotilla protesting the Israeli blockade
of Gaza. Regev publicly yelled at her, calling her
a traitor in Arabic and a Trojan horse. ‘‘She gave
the show of her life,’’ Ben Simon said, morosely.
‘‘That day, Miri Regev was born.’’
ne evening, I joined Regev for a
O Ramadan visit to her Arab support-
ers at a private home in the north-
ern town of Ma’alot-Tarshiha. It was
an airless night. An enlarged print of the Dome
of the Rock, the holy site in Jerusalem, hung in
the entryway. Every table inside the carpeted
house was laden with watermelon wedges, puff
pastries and silver carafes of black coffee, even
though the fast wouldn’t be broken for another
couple of hours. Regev was the guest of honor,
and a line of men with their young sons formed
to greet her and her aides.
She shook each of their hands, hugging the
men she recognized and pinching the boys’
cheeks. ‘‘They killed you with this heat, huh?’’ she
said. She turned to one of the men, who wore a
white button-down shirt. ‘‘You look like a groom
today! Come, neshama. Join us.’’ She glanced at
the tables, feigning disbelief. ‘‘What’s all this
food for if you can’t eat?’’
‘‘It’s for you,’’ the host replied warmly.
The atmosphere was festive, but the gathering
itself seemed unlikely, surreal even, considering
Regev’s past rebukes of Arab lawmakers — ‘‘Betray-
ers! Terrorists!’’ she fulminated in 2014 — and the
fact that Arab Israelis rarely vote for Likud (the
party garnered about 1 percent of the Arab vote in
the last election). I was told that the evening’s host
was a veteran Likudnik — he referred to Regev as
being ‘‘like family’’ — but I wondered how many
of the other men present actually voted for her.
Then one of the town’s deputy mayors, a
genial lawyer named Ayman Shanati, spoke. ‘‘I’m
not a man of Likud,’’ he said. But with Regev, ‘‘we
are seeing real change and a lot of new projects
in the Arab sector.’’ He praised Regev’s reallo-
cation of funds, which has benefited Arab towns
much as it has the peripheria and ultra-Orthodox
communities, but complained that his town still
didn’t meet certain budget criteria.
Regev nodded. ‘‘Write it down,’’ she told an aide.
The evening began to take on the distinct feel of
electioneering, of a quid pro quo exchange. Regev
has perfected the craft. A staggering amount of
her time is spent shuttling to events of potential
voters, where she schmoozes and canvasses in
equal measure: ‘‘We can’t be complacent,’’ she was
seen telling guests at a bar before the last primary.
It isn’t only supporters whom she showers with
attention. She kisses everyone: the strangers who
ask to take selfies with her, the traffic cop who
lets her entourage pass through, the bleary-eyed
cook catering a work lunch that she attends. She
doesn’t see a disconnect between her radical state-
ments against the Palestinians and her attempt
to promote Arab culture or woo Arab Israeli vot-
ers, many of whom identify as Palestinian. Arab
Israelis want to ‘‘raise their children in peace,’’ she
says, while members of the Palestinian leadership
‘‘sanctify death.’’ (Arab municipalities are used to
such double speak from government ministers
but often decide to swallow the insult in order to
maintain working relations.)
She stood up and thanked Shanati. ‘‘The cultural
revolution that I am leading is to give voice to the
Arab sector,’’ she said at a volume more suitable for
a conference hall. ‘‘My office is your home. Every
problem, every issue.’’ Yet earlier she ventured a
qualifier by way of hyperbole: ‘‘Whoever is loyal
to the state, we’ll bring him the moon.’’
ne morning in June, the heads of the-
O aters, dance companies and orches-
tras across Israel received an official
letter from the culture ministry.
It required them to state, among other things,
whether they had ‘‘refrained from performing’’
for Israelis in Judea and Samaria — the West Bank.
Though the letter was cloaked in bureaucratic
language, the issue is explosive in Israel. For the
Israeli left and for the country’s Arab popula-
tion, the Jewish settlements in the West Bank
are the engine of Israel’s entrenchment in the
Palestinian territories. Some artists, particularly
Arab Israelis, refuse to perform for settlers in the
occupied territories on moral grounds. And yet
the money that cultural institutions receive from
the state each year is based partly on the number
of production runs they mount. Because Israel is
geographically small and has limited audiences,
these institutions can’t afford to perform only
in their home base. And so they go on the road,
touring the country and appearing wherever they
can, including in West Bank settlements.
A few years ago a quiet agreement was reached:
Artists who objected to performing in the West
Bank were to be substituted during those produc-
tions. But Regev imperiled this delicate compro-
mise. When the Arab-Israeli actor Norman Issa
refused to perform in the Jordan Valley last year,
Regev threatened to pull funding from a Jewish-
Arab children’s theater he helped found. The
statement letter, which has become known in the
Israeli news media as the ‘‘loyalty form,’’ drew fire
not just from a handful of personal objectors; some
1,500 artists signed a petition objecting to Regev’s
moves. Stage directors worried that in order to
mount shows that would appeal to the tastes of
settlement councils, theaters would have to adopt,
as the journalist Israel Harel, who himself lives in
a settlement, wrote earlier this year, ‘‘a repertoire
that is homophobic, nationalistic, even religious,
resembling Iran under Khomeini.’’
Many who oppose Regev’s (Continued on Page 53)
The New York Times Magazine 41
 h P a b
T e l y o
42
 ed
ey dad decid

borhood
A S il ic o n V a ll
eories about
to test his th ard
a re n tin g b y turning his y
p
und where
into a playgro s
id s ca n ta k e physical risk
k all
rvision. Not
without supe lled.
f h is n e ig h b ors were thri
o
hernstrom
By Melanie T Andres
P h o to g ra phs by Holly
Credit by Name Surname The New York Times Magazine 43
It was
a Friday afternoon at Mike Lanza’s house in
Menlo Park, Calif., and the boys were going crazy.
There were boys playing ball in the street, while
in the backyard, boys were skittering along the
top of the fence while others were wrestling on
the trampoline. The house itself is nothing special
— a boxy contemporary, haphazardly furnished
— but even by the elevated standards of Silicon
Valley, the Lanzas’ play space is extraordinary.
It boasts a map of the neighborhood painted on
the driveway, a fabulous 24-foot-long play river —
an installation art piece, designed for children’s
museums — and a two-story log-cabin playhouse
with a sleeping loft, whiteboard walls inside
for coloring and really good speakers, blasting
Talking Heads.
Leo Lanza, who was 5 at the time, was taunting
my kids, claiming they were too scared to climb
12 feet to the playhouse roof, using the toe holds,
and then leap onto the trampoline, which has no
surrounding netting. My daughter, Violet, the only
girl there, continued to decorate the playhouse
walls with a purple marker. ‘‘I don’t care if you
get hurt,’’ she responded airily. Her twin brother,
Kieran, scrunched up his round face, turning pink.
‘‘That’s not true!’’ he wailed. ‘‘I am not scared.’’
My kids were in a prekindergarten program
with Leo, the youngest of the three Lanza boys.
I had heard a lot about Mike’s house, a few miles
from our own, but that Friday-afternoon pizza
party, a year and a half ago, was the first time I
had gone there.
Through the glass doors of the kitchen, I could
see Mike opening a bottle of wine for some guests.
Mike is a well-known, if polarizing, figure in our
community. An entrepreneur in his early 50s, he
has a boyish grin, large hazel eyes and curly salt-
and-pepper hair, and wears jeans and sneakers,
like all the other middle-aged tech guys. After
acquiring three Stanford degrees (a B.A., an
M.B.A. and a master’s in education) and selling
a handful of modestly successful start-ups, Mike
decided to focus on his ideas about parenting. He
began writing a blog and giving talks and eventu-
ally self-published a book entitled ‘‘Playborhood,’’
a phrase he coined to describe the environment
he wanted for his kids. (He kept a hand in the tech
world as well — an app he created, a map-based
photo-sharing service called Streetography, is
being released next week.)
Mike is a deep believer in the idea that ‘‘kids
have to find their own balance of power.’’ He wants
his boys to create their own society governed by
its own rules. He consciously transformed his
family’s house into a kid hangout, spreading the
word that local children were welcome to play
in the yard anytime, even when the family wasn’t
home. Discontented with the expensive, highly
structured summer camps typical of the area,
44 10.23.16
Mike started one of his own: Camp Yale, named
after his street, where the kids make their own
games and get to roam the neighborhood.
‘‘Think about your own 10 best memories of
childhood, and chances are most of them involve
free play outdoors,’’ Mike is fond of saying. ‘‘How
many of them took place with a grown-up around?
I remember that when the grown-ups came over,
we stopped playing and waited for them to go
away. But moms nowadays never go away.’’
In Mike’s worldview, boys today (his focus is
on boys) are being deprived of masculine experi-
ences by overprotective moms, who are allowed
to dominate passive dads. Central to Mike’s phi-
losophy is the importance of physical danger: of
encouraging boys to take risks and play rough
and tumble and get — or inflict — a scrape or
two. Central to what he calls mom philosophy
(which could just be described as contemporary
parenting philosophy) is just the opposite: to play
safe, play nice and not hurt other kids or your-
self. Most moms are not inclined to leave their
children’s safety up to chance. I certainly am not.
Mike had invited me to drop the kids off — not
to hover. But I could see Leo brandishing a long
rubber tube, as if he were about to whack my son,
who looked worried. Beneath the pleasantries, it
was clear that Mike thought I was putting my son
at risk of turning into what used to be called a sissy
— a concept whose demise he regrets. And I was
of the opinion that Mike was putting his son at risk
of being a bully, a label Mike thinks is now used to
pathologize normal, healthy, boyish aggression.
Mike came out to the yard, his wineglass in
one hand and a piece of cheese in another. His
wife, Perla Ni, a lawyer who directs a nonprofit,
was working late. Where Mike has a loud, large
and boisterous presence (a neighbor once com-
pared him to a Labrador retriever, happily tram-
pling everyone’s shrubbery), Perla is quiet, petite,
deliberate and self-contained. The only child of
Chinese immigrants, she wants her sons to have
considerably more fun than she had.
‘‘Uh, can you keep an eye on them?’’ I asked
Mike, reluctantly gathering my stuff to leave.
‘‘The society of 5-year-olds is fragile and may
fall into savagery!’’
‘‘Yeah, yeah,” he replied affably. ‘‘I’m a believer
in that Rousseau theory — what’s it called?’’
‘‘Something about a Noble Savage?’’ I said.
‘‘I’m more a believer in the truth of ‘Lord of the
Flies.’ ’’ My smile was thin and conveyed, For the
love of God, can you please put your drink down and
watch the kids?
His smile told me he wanted me to leave already.
IN 2006, WHEN their oldest son, Marco, was
2, Mike and Perla began what proved to be a
two-year house search in Menlo Park and neigh-
boring Palo Alto. They were yearning for the kind
of classic neighborhood that Mike recalled from
his childhood on the East Coast in Scott Town-
ship, a suburb of Pittsburgh. They were living in
San Francisco, but they wanted to move out of
the city to a playborhood — a version of Amer-
ican kid life featured in shows like ‘‘The Little
Rascals’’ and ‘‘Leave It to Beaver,’’ in which kids
build forts and ride bikes outside, unsupervised
— free, skirting danger, but ultimately always
lucky. (The oddness of needing a neologism for
what so recently would simply have been consid-
ered a ‘‘neighborhood’’ only reinforces his point.)
Mike drove around deserted street after street:
The kids were off at Lego robotics classes, Kumon
learning centers or diving practice or squirreled
away with their screens.
Despite having achieved a higher socioeco-
nomic status for his family than he had as a kid,
Mike felt his sons were at risk of having a worse
childhood. Growing up in a middle-class Ital-
ian-American family in the 1960s and ’70s, Mike
rated school as boring-to-O.K., whereas after-
school play time with the gang was awesome.
Like many places, Silicon Valley is sports-crazy,
with kids participating in year-round travel clubs
and working with private coaches. But Mike feels
that organized team sports fail to teach the criti-
cal life skills that he and his friends learned in
pickup games they had to referee themselves.
They were forced to resolve their own disputes,
because if they didn’t, the game would end. Their
focus was not on winning and losing, as when
adults are in charge, he says, but simply on keep-
ing the game going.
Mike recalls how his gang was often short of
a quorum for games. There were two other boys
their age, but one was deaf and the other, he says,
was ‘‘whatever the P.C. way to describe what used
to be called ‘mentally retarded.’ ’’ Since they didn’t
want to ‘‘stoop all the way to girls,’’ he says, giving
me a smile, they found ways to change the rules
to accommodate the two boys with special needs
in their game — ‘‘not because a grown-up forced’’
them to be inclusive, Mike says, but because they
were motivated to be.
Then, when Mike was in seventh grade, his
family moved to a better house in an upscale
development nearby, and the fun ended. Though
the new house wasn’t far from the old one — all
Mike would have had to do was walk up the hill
to play with his old friends — he instead spent
his afternoons watching TV, drinking Coke and
munching on saltines. He didn’t blame his par-
ents; it was bad luck — an unpredictable anomaly
— that the new development wasn’t a playbor-
hood. But today it would simply be the norm.
Playborhoods have all but disappeared.
‘‘Everyone complains about kids not having
enough free time, and being addicted to tech-
nology,’’ Mike says. ‘‘There are a million studies
documenting the negative effects of lack of free
play in children. Well, we know the harms. I asked
myself: What am I going to do about it for my kids?’’
He analyzed the problem like an entrepreneur,
by thinking of children as consumers and seeing
their time as a scarce resource. Playing outside
has to compete with screen time. (A typical
2-to-10-year-old child spends at least a couple
of hours a day on screens; tweens spend more
than four.) Parents who limit screen time, as local
families often do, tend to compensate by piling
on extracurricular activities and tutors.
Even if a boy wanted to play outside, Mike
explains, with whom would he play? At any given
hour, there might be a 30 percent chance that
some kid was playing outside. But the so-called
network effect, in which children influence one
another’s behavior, means that 30 percent might
as well be zero, because it is low enough that
no boy can count on it and so will default to his
screen — causing the percentage to drop lower.
That is, kids don’t play outside because other kids
don’t play outside. Playing outside becomes like
Betamax — it’s just obsolete. But in the case of a
playborhood, the vicious circle transforms into a
virtuous one: When there’s always another kid to
play with, most kids want to play.
As part of Mike’s quest for a playborhood,
he began doing research and visiting neighbor-
hoods in different parts of the country that he
thought might fit his vision. The first place he
visited was N Street in Davis, Calif., a cluster of
around 20 houses that share land and hold regular
dinners together. Children wander around freely,
Photograph by Holly Andres for The New York Times
crossing backyards and playing in the collective
spaces: Ping-Pong table, pizza oven and com-
munity garden. Mike told me the story of Lucy,
a toddler adopted from China by a single mom
who lived on N Street. When Lucy was 3, her
mother died of cancer. But before she died, her
mother gave every house a refrigerator magnet
with a picture of Lucy on it. While the founders of
N Street formally adopted Lucy, the entire com-
munity supported her. Mike pointed out that the
childhood Lucy was having on N Street may be
akin to one she might have enjoyed in a village in
rural China, but it was extraordinary in suburban
America. Lucy could wander around fearlessly,
knowing she had 19 other houses where she could
walk right in and expect a snack.
Mike spent some time in the Lyman Place
neighborhood in the Bronx, where grand-
mothers and other residents organized to watch
the streets — so dangerous that children were
afraid to play outside — and block them off in
the summer to create a neighborhood camp,
staffed by local teenagers and volunteers. Mike
also found his way to Share-It Square in South-
east Portland, Ore., a random intersection that
became a community when a local architect
mobilized neighbors to convert a condemned
house on one corner into a ‘‘Kids’ Klubhouse’’: a
funky open-air structure that features a couch,
a message board, a book-exchange box, a
solar-powered tea station and toys.
Mike was aware of limits to the analogies.
Those playborhoods were in lower- and mid-
dle-class communities; he and Perla had settled
Above: Perla Ni, Mike
Lanza and their three
sons having pizza
with neighbors
in their front yard.
Previous pages:
The Lanza family’s
backyard.
on a house in the Allied Arts area of Menlo Park,
where the median home price is $2 million. (And
the houses in neighboring North Palo Alto and
Atherton cost even more.) Mike found himself
up against the fact that in America, the ethos of
wealth and the ethos of community are often in
conflict: Part of what the wealthy feel they are
buying is privacy and the ability to be choosy
about whom they socialize with. Mike was deter-
mined that his kids would not only know their
neighbors but would also see them, every day.
In order to achieve this, Mike decided he had to
corral his neighbors to sign on to his platform. He
designed big neon-yellow plastic signs like those
used to warn of wet floors, emblazoned with an
icon of children playing and the word Playborhood.
He invited kids to parties and gave the signs to
their parents, to put in their yards and on the road
in front of their houses so their children could
‘‘reclaim the streets from cars.’’ (We had the sign
in our driveway, but my husband accidentally ran
over it, and the shards of yellow plastic remained
there for months — a good reminder, he said, of
what happens to children who play in the street.)
Mike also made another simple-but-radical
The New York Times Magazine 45

move: In a neighborhood in which front yards are
for admiration only, Mike installed a picnic table,
close to the sidewalk, where he and his family often
sat, so that people walking by would have to talk
to them. Mike put a white board on the fence and
started projecting videos and slide shows onto it,
in hope of luring neighborhood children. And it
worked: Dogs stop to drink at a fountain made
from a large, flat millstone in the shape of a hockey
puck, children wander over to the play river and
people pause to read the quotes on the mosaics
he had an artist design. One is from the children’s
book ‘‘The Big Orange Splot’’: ‘‘Our street is us and
we are it. Our street is where we like to be, and it
looks like all our dreams.’’
Mike has influenced our family as well. My kids
and I made friends on our block by playing a game
from Camp Yale in which we asked neighbors to
contribute one ingredient to what turned out to
be an apple-pear-blueberry-strawberry cobbler;
when it was baked, we brought each of them a
‘What strikes me is
that there is this
extraordinary level
of anxiety,’ Mike Lanza
says. ‘Parents don’t
have fundamental faith
in their offspring.’
piece. My daughter liked the game so much, she
recently asked to make her birthday cake that
way. Then, when our next-door neighbors gen-
erously passed along their trampoline, I spread
the word that other children were welcome to
play in our yard anytime. Sometimes visitors will
be surprised when my children aren’t home and
they hear shrieks of laughter coming from our
yard, as neighborhood kids bounce and squirt
water guns they filled in our fountain, and I feel
grateful to Mike for his vision.
MIKE ALWAYS TALKS about just wanting his
boys to have a normal childhood, while complain-
ing that his idea of normal is no longer normal.
His free-time-is-for-goofing-around ethos is par-
ticularly anomalous in Silicon Valley. With all due
respect to Westchester, Silicon Valley may have
the densest concentration in the country of former
engineers, executives and other highly educated
women who have renounced work in favor of what
they call uber-parenting — and they want results.
Just as Silicon Valley leads the way in smartphones,
46 10.23.16
Silicon Valley parents think they should be produc-
ing model kids, optimized kids, kids with extra
capacity and cool features: kids who have start-ups
(or at least work at one); do environmental work in
the Galápagos; speak multiple languages; demon-
strate a repeatable golf swing; or sing arias. To a
comical extent, parents here justify the perverted
ambition through appeals to research (enlarging
the language center of the brain and so forth) while
ignoring research on the negative effects on chil-
dren of being micromanaged.
‘‘What strikes me is that there is this extra-
ordinary level of anxiety,’’ Mike told me. ‘‘Parents
don’t have fundamental faith in their offspring.”
He dislikes the vast expansion of the role of
parenting into every aspect of children’s lives,
including curating their children’s hobbies with
excruciating care, and he says he aspires to be
“the opposite of a tiger parent.’’ ‘‘As a libertarian,
one of the biggest problems we have in Ameri-
can society is that children don’t have enough
freedom” — children thrive on benign neglect.
“Look, there is always a power struggle between
children and adults,” he says. “One way to see the
present is that the children have been decimated.
It’s not good for children that adults have so
much control over them.’’
Local parents often talk about the rash of sui-
cides among Palo Alto high school students in
recent years. ‘‘It’s been pretty clear to me since I
moved here eight years ago that kids are just not
happy here,’’ Mike says, and ‘‘the suicides are just
the extreme examples of the broader problem.’’
He believes ‘‘the poor quality of children’s lives
around here’’ stems from their lack of autono-
my. Basic developmental psychology posits that
if children develop a fundamental sense that
they (not their parents) are masters of their own
destiny, they will be successful adults, and that
without that belief they will flounder: It’s easy
to want to rid yourself of a life that doesn’t feel
truly your own.
Research suggests that students with con-
trolling ‘‘helicopter’’ parents are less flexible and
more vulnerable, anxious and self-conscious, as
well as more likely to be medicated for anxiety
or depression. Similarly, children whose time is
highly structured — crammed with lessons and
adult-supervised activities — may have more
difficulty developing their own ‘‘executive func-
tion’’ capabilities, the ability to devise their own
plans and carry them out. Conversely, the more
time children spend in free play, the better they
develop these capabilities.
Mike says he often feels alienated when he’s
talking to other parents. The common currency
of conversation — rather than sports, politics or
weather — is the achievements of your children.
‘‘I have exactly nothing to say in these conversa-
tions,’’ Mike says. ‘‘Am I going to brag my kids are
jumping on their trampoline, or went to the store
by themselves? Parents don’t measure themselves
according to their kids’ independence, as they
used to, but according to accomplishments. To
me, that’s part of how I judge myself.’’
Reactions to Mike in the neighborhood are
mixed. When the Lanzas first moved in, Mike
had the idea that the neighbors on both sides
should take down the fences between their yards
to facilitate play. But unlike on N Street, none
of them agreed. Mike complained to me that a
neighbor asked Marco to stop climbing into her
yard to see her son, even though her son wanted
to see Marco. Many neighbors disapprove of boys
playing pickup games in the streets and of the
younger kids biking alone. Leo was allowed to
ride around the neighborhood on his own when
he was 5, and two years ago, when Nico was in
first grade, he was allowed to bike a mile and a
half to school alone.
Mike believes his children have grown by tak-
ing risks. ‘‘Marco is naturally physically cautious,
and now he is working on a back flip onto the
trampoline,’’ Mike tells me. ‘‘I’m proud of that.
He’s worked his way up. Other kids learn to take
risks at our house.’’
In the spring of last year, Mike installed
10-foot ladders in each of his sons’ bedrooms
so they could climb through a hole in their
ceilings into the finished attic. Perla was not
enthusiastic. (‘‘She’s not into the man-cave stuff,’’
Mike says.) She was worried they would fall. And
indeed, once, when Leo was playing in the attic,
he tumbled down the hatch and hit his head.
‘‘To me, it was a bump on the head, which is
a normal part of being a kid,’’ Mike said. But
Perla saw it as a head injury and took him to
the hospital for a scan. ‘‘He was fine,’’ Mike said,
rolling his eyes.
Mike tells me that people sometimes ask him
if he is afraid of lawsuits in the event of an injury
on his property. He would never let fear of being
sued dictate how he lives his life, he says.
What about second-degree manslaughter, I
asked: an accident enabled by negligence, if, say,
another child — or even one of his own — broke
his neck leaping from the playhouse onto the
trampoline. (Unenclosed trampolines are a sta-
ple of personal-injury law; an estimated 85,000
children under 14 were hurt on trampolines last
year.) Does he ever worry about that?
He flashed me a look, then snorted with
laughter.
ONE DAY LAST February, Peter Gray, a profes-
sor of psychology at Boston College and a fan of
Mike’s ideas, spent a day observing the Lanza
boys at play. Gray says that when he gives talks
on the critical importance of free play in normal
development, audience members point out that
they are sold on the idea, but that all the kids
are on their screens. He always tells them about
Mike’s playborhood to show how parents can
change their local culture.
As part of Gray’s research, he accompanied
Mike to meet the kids at school. Mike biked home
with the younger kids while Gray and I biked
after Marco and a friend as they rode their skate-
boards to the park. They amused themselves en
route by doing tricks on strangers’ stoops. At the
park, they wobbled down steep cement curves
with older and more skilled skaters as dusk set in.
‘‘All mammals engage in dangerous play,’’ Gray
told me. ‘‘Dangerous play is how kids learn how
to titrate fear. Not everyone has to learn quadratic
equations’’ — which, he points out, most people
forget the minute they leave school anyway —
‘‘but at some point in our lives, we will all be
in stressful situations and we need to be able to
keep our cool. Sometimes there are accidents,’’
he added, ‘‘kid goats fall off cliffs while playing,
or whatever, but they’re rare. If the instinct wasn’t
of evolutionary benefit, the behavior would have
been rooted out.’’
‘‘Well, mother goats don’t die of heartbreak
the way we do,’’ I said peevishly.
Photograph by Holly Andres for The New York Times
He conceded that among humans, mothers in
many societies have a tendency to worry. ‘‘But
there were no helicopter hunter-and-gatherer
moms!’’ he said pointedly. ‘‘Kids were with their
moms until they were 4, and then they were on
their own with the other kids, practicing through
play the intricate skills they need to survive: find-
ing their way through the jungle, making weapons
and identifying food sources.’’
I still recall the visceral shock I felt after I
picked my kids up at the Lanzas’
house at the end of the pizza party,
having left them alone for all of an
hour and a half. On the way home,
Kieran announced that he and Leo
had climbed out on the roof together
— twice, in fact, once at the party and
once at a previous play date.
‘‘The roof ? The Lanzas’ roof ?
Is there a railing? Were you with a
grown-up?’’
The Lanzas have multistory house,
with a sloped top and a narrow, flat
area perhaps 25 feet off the ground. If
you tumbled off the back, you’d land
on the grass or perhaps on the stone
patio. Falling from either side, you
would be impaled on the fence or fall
into the neighbor’s yard. From the
front you’d hit the concrete drive-
way, car, picnic table or fountain.
‘‘We climbed up through a win-
dow in the attic!’’ Kieran said with a
mixture of pride and wonder. ‘‘With
no grown-up!’’
• Mike Lanza and
his sons on
the roof of their
home, as seen
from the backyard
playhouse.
I was so certain it was a tall tale that I was
embarrassed to ask Mike when I saw him at
school drop-off.
‘‘I’m sorry you were uncomfortable with it,’’ he
replied flatly, as we stood outside preschool. ‘‘But
as you know, I don’t worry about things like that.’’
Perla was more equivocal, and last spring, when
she invited us to play at the house, she assured me
that the hatch to the roof — a skylight that opens
— had been closed. In June we went to the Lan-
zas’ for an all-day party celebrating Leo’s seventh
birthday in the morning and Marco’s 12th in the
afternoon. At one point I went looking for Kieran
and wandered up to the attic. Kieran wasn’t there,
but I found a cluster of small boys in the process
of climbing down from the roof through the open
hatch. The youngest seemed to be about 4. They
looked at me as if I were about to scold them.
I already knew Mike’s perspective. ‘‘What are
the chances of falling off the roof ?’’ he argued
vociferously when we tried previously to hash it
out. Have I ever known anyone who has fallen off
a roof ? Anyway, he said, it’s not as if he doesn’t
give his kids any limits: They are not allowed to
play ball or tag up there.
‘‘You trust them?’’ I asked.
‘‘I want to trust them,’’ he replied. ‘‘I’m O.K.
with things happening that I don’t want to hap-
pen. My oxygen is when my kids are having fun.
I’ve ingrained it in their minds not to run on the
roof. It’s a constant struggle for me, but I feel I
am reaching a higher level of parenting if I can
honestly trust them. And I believe they care about
keeping my trust.’’
It was clear that we conceived of risk in
entirely different ways. He thinks of risk in terms
of probability: How likely is it that any given
child will plummet to his death? Google has
an answer to that question (about 150 children
in the United States die from falls from roofs,
windows and balconies annually), but I know
we would regard that number quite differently.
Mike’s decisions aren’t curtailed by statistics,
anyway. There’s a quirky, utopian libertarian
quality to Mike’s philosophy; he is a man guided
above all by his theory of how life should be. For
him, low-probability events are very unlikely
and therefore dismissible; for me, they are trag-
edies that befall someone. I think of playing on
the roof more like entering a lottery in which, if
everyone’s kid plays on the roof, someone’s kid
won’t grow up — and I don’t want a ticket. The
real question is: Do you believe that the child
who falls could be yours?
At the end of the party, I decided I should
check out the roof. I found Kieran, and we
climbed out of the attic and stepped onto the
roof. I spent the first few seconds evaluating the
chance that someone would survive the drop
(remote), but then I succumbed to the heady
feeling of power of looking down on the world.
It was like being in the spire of a castle in a
children’s book: the quilt of houses, yards and
streets, dotted with green lawns and light blue
swimming pools — the neighborhood trans-
formed into a picture of itself, like the maps on
Mike’s walls. Down below I saw the play river,
the fountain and the mosaics in the driveway
and, in the street, the kids kicking a ball, forcing
cars to make way for them. I saw the anima-
tion in the boys’ slender bodies: the power of
making the grown-up world momentarily bend
around them.
I held Kieran’s hand tightly and decided never
to play there again.
The New York Times Magazine 47
Bodycams
(Continued from Page 35)
She answers every question, sharing the intimate
details of her life. She tells him about her relation-
ship with her boyfriend, her clashes with her strict
father, her time as a runaway, her drift from strip
clubs to Backpage.com escort ads, her few regu-
lar johns. She claims she’s new to this work. She
explains that she charges per hour or half-hour. She
has a dog, she says. She can rely on her parents in
times of need, she says. She gives him their street
address. She gives him her full name. She shares
her private email address and phone number. She
shares all this with the camera too.
When the interview is done, she asks about it.
Is the image clear? ‘‘It’s pretty clear, yeah,’’ the offi-
cer says, but ‘‘if the press wanted it, we can redact
faces — can blur out the faces and whatnot.’’ Body
cameras are new to his city, and he doesn’t know
that what he just told her isn’t entirely true. A law-
yer will decide that the video is in no part exempt
from the Public Records Act, and the officer
will later be shocked to see it on YouTube. He will
try and fail to have it taken down. The woman in
the video is easy to find in her other internet life.
She’s on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, where
she chats with friends and posts images of dress-
es and animals and nail polish. You can visit her
parents’ house on Google Street View.
Body cameras can be knocked loose when the
police rush a suspect, as the world learned in July
when Alton Sterling was killed in Baton Rouge,
La. Officers can likewise forget or claim to forget
to turn the cameras on in time to record an inci-
dent in full, as protesters saw after they forced the
police to release the inconclusive, partial body-
cam footage of Keith Lamont Scott’s shooting in
Charlotte, N.C. But for slow-moving scenes like
this one, in the hotel room with the young woman
who seems to trust the officer with her priva-
cy, the technology works almost too well. Bryce
Newell, an information-science researcher now at
Tilburg University in the Netherlands who did his
fieldwork in Washington, interviewing Clemans
and Wagers and riding along with officers as they
tested their new bodycams, gave a clever name to
the problem they posed in a society demanding
transparency: ‘‘collateral visibility.’’
One of the first people revealed to the public
by Clemans’s transparency quest was Clemans
himself. His mass records requests had drawn
the interest of local reporters, who started filing
requests of their own to the Police Department,
seeking his identity. After they got his phone
number, Clemans pre-emptively outed himself,
embracing the role of tech seer. He published a
letter in January 2015 explaining his mission on the
website of the Seattle Privacy Coalition. ‘‘I pushed
the envelope,’’ he wrote, ‘‘so we as a society can
once and for all address accurately recording of
the truth, who should have access to the truth and
what we are to do with the truth.’’ He told the
48 10.23.16
local news site Crosscut that the Public Records
Act did need to be amended. ‘‘It’s not going to
change until it becomes a massive problem,’’ he
said. He told Seattle Weekly that his experience
with police videos had convinced him that cer-
tain things shouldn’t be made public. He left the
footage on YouTube precisely to make that point.
‘‘I don’t think people are going to deal with this
until they have an emotional reaction,’’ he said.
The designated voice of the people in Seattle’s
police-reform process is the Community Police
Commission, a board of local leaders — black,
white, Latino, Native American — that was creat-
ed as part of the city’s settlement with the Justice
Department. It represents the people the consent
decree, and body cameras, were most meant to
protect. On a cloudy Saturday in January 2015, with
the pilot program underway, the commission invit-
ed Wagers to a community meeting on the city’s
south side to take part in a public discussion of how
bodycams would be used and whether, a flier read,
‘‘they will, in fact, increase police accountability.’’
Wagers stood before the crowd, about a hun-
dred people in all, and gave a brief technical over-
view of the pilot program. Then an officer from
East Precinct demonstrated how the bodycam
worked, briefly filming the crowd as he did so.
After that, one commissioner, David Keenan, a
local lawyer, asked a group of waiting panelists to
state, one after the other, when, exactly, the cam-
eras should be on, and to answer a simple question
about the evidence they create: Why do we want it?
That is, whom does it serve? ‘‘Should it only be used
if there’s an accusation against a police officer?’’ he
asked. ‘‘Should it be used by criminal investigators
and by defendants and by prosecutors?’’
The growing national welter of contradictory
state laws and department policies signals that
there is no settled answer. Some allow officers
to view it before writing their reports. (That was
the central issue earlier this month in Portland,
Ore., that caused protesters to storm its City Hall,
where police officers met them with bursts of pep-
per spray.) Some do not. Some treat all bodycam
videos as public records; some limit their release.
Some mandate a quick deletion of police video;
some have no requirements to delete it at all. Some
restrict the use of facial recognition software; most
allow it. A technology meant for one purpose, once
unleashed, is soon used for many others.
One commissioner, Jay Hollingsworth of
the Mohegan tribe, the chairman of the John T.
Williams Organizing Committee, named for a
hard-of-hearing Native American whose 2010
shooting was partly captured on dashcam,
answered Keenan’s ‘‘when’’ question simply: Body-
cams should always be on. To his right, another
commissioner, Jennifer Shaw, the deputy director
of the A.C.L.U. of Washington, said that she agreed
in theory but that her organization supported the
cameras only if they were used exclusively for
police accountability. Next, Ron Smith, a detective
who then headed the Seattle Police Officers’ Guild,
said that he was also in favor of bodycams because
he believed they would exonerate officers from
complaints. But the cameras went into homes and
on lunch and bathroom breaks, and officers abso-
lutely had to be able to switch them on and off.
At the end of the table were two activists,
Marissa Johnson and Dan Bash. Johnson later
became nationally known for leaping onstage at
a Bernie Sanders rally, claiming the candidate’s
microphone and telling him he needed to do more
to acknowledge the Black Lives Matter movement.
‘‘This conversation about bodycams is a complete
and utter farce,’’ she said. Forget the policy details.
She did not consent to being recorded at all. She
did not trust the police to do the right thing with
the footage. Most of all, she did not trust prose-
cutors to use it to prosecute officers. ‘‘Why do I
need a home video of my abuse that’s going to be
filmed by my oppressor?’’ she asked.
An uncomfortable silence filled the room. Then
Hollingsworth announced that the other panelists
had made him change his mind, leaving the two
employees of the Police Department, Wagers and
Smith, two white men, the only people onstage
who clearly supported bodycams. The mood
became tense, and members of the crowd inter-
rupted the next speaker and soon assumed con-
trol of the room, taking turns denouncing police
brutality and glaring at Smith, who was eventually
escorted to his car by another officer.
Three weeks later, the commission, the voice
of the people, called for Seattle to delay full
deployment of bodycams until the state law
could be rewritten. ‘‘This is a new technology,’’
the commission said in a news release, ‘‘which
may have unintended consequences.’’
Much of the moral case for bodycams, that they
reduce police violence, rests on a single exper-
iment: the 2012 Rialto study that Wagers refer-
enced. Rialto is a city of almost 100,000 people,
most of them Latino but with significant black and
Pacific Islander minorities, that sits in the desert
and sprawl east of Los Angeles. Its population is
much smaller and more diverse than Seattle’s,
its police force is much smaller and its murder
rate is significantly higher. Of its 115 sworn police
officers at the time of the study, 54 regularly
conducted patrols, and all 54 were issued body
cameras courtesy of Taser. For a full year, half
of the front-line officers on a given 12-hour shift
were randomly assigned to wear their cameras,
while the other half served as the control. The
data from nearly 1,000 shifts and 50,000 hours
of police-public interactions showed that when
officers wore bodycams, they were less likely to
use batons, Tasers, firearms and pepper spray or
to have confrontations that resulted in police-
dog bites, and they were far less likely to receive
civilian complaints about their conduct.
In an essay published shortly after the White
House announced its $75 million in bodycam
funding in 2014, two authors of the study, Barak
Ariel and Alex Sutherland, hypothesized that it was
not cameras alone that drove the positive results;
it was the fact that before every interaction with
a citizen, officers in the trial were required to
announce that they were recording. There may
have been a ‘‘self-awareness effect’’: Both parties
were reminded at the moment of contact that
they were under surveillance and that they should
behave accordingly. One question was whether the
effect would hold up if officers did not announce
the cameras’ presence. Another was whether it
would hold up when the cameras lost their novelty.
Ariel and Sutherland also worried about any-
one basing decisions on a single study, which,
no matter how rigorous, could well be a fluke,
‘‘the statistical equivalent of ‘luck,’ ’’ they wrote.
The Rialto sample was small. The notable drop
in citizen complaints, for instance, was from 28
in the yearlong period before the study to 3 while
it was underway. At least 40 reasonably scientific
studies have followed Rialto, but many, according
to a recent survey carried out by George Mason
University, have yet to be published.
Rialto suggests a drop in the use of force.
A study from Arizona suggests a drop in arrests
but a rise in citations. A separate Arizona study,
along with one from London, suggests a rise in
arrests. When Temple University researchers
recently sifted through a Washington Post data-
base of 986 deadly shootings of civilians by police
in 2015, they found that when officers wore body
cameras, civilians were 3.64 percent more likely
to die. The increase was more pronounced, 3.75
percent, in the deaths of African-Americans and
Hispanics and a barely measurable 0.67 percent in
the deaths of Caucasians and Asians. They hypoth-
esized that a different kind of self-awareness was
at work: Officers, aware of their bodycams and
more certain their use of deadly force would be
seen as justified, were less likely to hesitate.
After Rialto, Ariel and Sutherland set out to
replicate their influential study on a much larger
scale, collaborating with eight large and small
police departments covering two million citizens
in the United States and Britain. Their resulting
analysis of 2.2 million officer hours, published
this May, seems to validate their concerns that
Rialto offered an incomplete picture. It found that
police use of force actually went up by an aston-
ishing 71 percent when officers could turn their
cameras on and off at will and went down (by 37
percent) only when they recorded nearly every
interaction with the public from start to finish. A
second analysis of the same data, published late
last month, supports Rialto’s finding that citizen
complaints drop significantly, almost to zero,
when bodycams are present, while underscor-
ing the authors’ warning that more research is
needed to understand how and why and under
what conditions. ‘‘It may be that in some places
it’s a bad idea to use body-worn cameras,’’ Ariel
said in announcing the May results, ‘‘and the only
way you can find that out is to keep doing these
tests in different kinds of places.’’
The Seattle Police Department introduced its
new YouTube channel, ‘‘S.P.D. BodyWornVideo,’’
on Feb. 23, 2015, less than two weeks after the
Community Police Commission warned about
unintended consequences in its news release. Fea-
turing footage from the pilot program, with the
images automatically blurred and the audio muted,
it was a national first, and tens of thousands of peo-
ple tuned in. The earliest videos were of Seattle’s
explosive Martin Luther King Day demonstra-
tions the previous month, and they appeared on
the channel as a kind of fever dream. Protesters,
rendered in fog and grayscale and digitally stripped
of their voices, were mostly unrecognizable as they
marched onto a freeway demanding justice for
Michael Brown and were arrested and shackled on
the ground and then trundled into police cruisers.
The videos didn’t shake the local opposition
to bodycams, and they didn’t meet the standards
of the state Public Records Act — if asked, Seattle
would have to provide more precisely redacted
versions — but they met a national need for posi-
tive news about the police. The YouTube channel
was featured on the ‘‘Today Show,’’ and the depart-
ment’s innovation was the subject of coverage,
some skeptical and some not, by The Guardian,
Vice News, ‘‘Marketplace,’’ ‘‘All Things Considered’’
and The New York Times. The tech press couldn’t
get enough. One well-reported article in the online
publication Backchannel called Clemans ‘‘the body-
cam hacker who schooled the police.’’
Wagers began receiving calls and email from
departments around the country. The future of
policing, he saw, was now more than ever reliant
on what technology the police could afford to
buy from companies like those that built modern
Seattle. He pledged that Clemans’s code, once
completed, would be open-source and freely
shared so that smaller agencies, which didn’t
have the staff to handle video-records requests,
let alone the money for bundled bodycam con-
tracts, could stay on the cutting edge. In one
overredaction test, the department processed
2,400 videos in three hours on rented Amazon
Web Services computers in the cloud, a task that
would have gummed up the public-disclosure
unit of the Seattle Police for weeks had the files
been redacted manually. The computer rental
cost the department $1.20 — 40 cents an hour —
Wagers marveled. To meet the demands of the
Public Records Act, all Clemans needed to do was
get his algorithm to redact only faces and other
private details, rather than the full frame.
Clemans was now an employee: The depart-
ment had offered him a six-month contract at
$22.60 an hour. But when the pilot program ended
in July, and the question of whether to expand it
loomed, he still had not perfected his code. He was
trying to solve a problem, mostly by himself, that
teams of professional engineers at Taser and its
rivals have yet to fully crack. Distracted, he noticed
other inefficiencies at Police Headquarters and he
felt increasingly compelled to fix them. After vis-
iting the understaffed 911 center, then in the news
for its slow response times, he came up with a
new idea: a program that automatically highlight-
ed the most pressing calls, allowing dispatchers
to be more efficient. But the captain in charge of
the 911 center didn’t welcome his intrusion, and
he belittled the idea at a tense late-August meet-
ing brokered by their superiors. Clemans, by his
own admission, ‘‘got really mad.’’ He swore at the
captain. He yelled until he had to be escorted
from the building. And just like that, in an echo
of his Space Needle blowup, he was exiled from
headquarters. He made a threat on his way out:
‘‘I’m going to P.D.R.’’ — public-disclosure request
— ‘‘the [expletive] out of you,’’ he shouted.
In September 2015, when Seattle won a $600,000
Justice Department grant to expand the bodycam
program to the rest of the police force, which the
mayor pledged to more than match, Clemans
wasn’t there to help celebrate. He was working
remotely, back in his bedroom or hunched over a
laptop at the Starbucks he now frequented on the
40th floor of Columbia Center, the tallest building
in town, where the views were stunning and free.
Days after the grant announcement, Attorney
General Loretta Lynch came to Seattle to declare
it a national model for police reform. The federal
monitor overseeing the consent decree, who had
previously lauded the overredaction experiment
when calling for rapid deployment of bodycams,
now praised the department’s systematic approach
to investigating any use of force — a significant
change from the cursory reporting of the past.
Wagers, meanwhile, was helping Chief O’Toole
to select his replacement. He had by then been in
Seattle and away from his wife and children for
more than a year.
On Oct. 29, 2015, a week after Wagers announced
he was leaving the department, Clemans texted
in his own resignation. He no longer believed the
department could ever truly be transparent on its
own, he told me. His time inside the department,
far from co-opting him, had weaponized him after
his blowup with the 911 captain: He knew even bet-
ter which records to request. He wrote a new bot
capable of sending the department up to 10,000
requests in 24 hours. He asked for 911 records,
‘‘tables & columns of all databases,’’ all front-
facing dashcam video from 2014 and ‘‘all computer
codes written by Tim Clemans.’’ Over the next few
days, he piled on, requesting ‘‘all roll-call notes,’’ text
records from the department’s license-plate scan-
ners, the source codes of key department software
and ‘‘all Outlook calendars of supervisors, manag-
ers & command staff.’’ He also started building a
website where he would publish it all, which he
called the People’s NSA. He expanded his demands
to include every public record in every format —
paper, tape or digital — the City of Seattle had. He
soon asked 39 neighboring (Continued on Page 51)
The New York Times Magazine 49
Puzzles

SPELLING BEE FREEWHEELING TIGHT-FIT SUDOKU

By Frank Longo By Patrick Berry By Wei-Hwa Huang

How many common words of 5 or more letters can Wheel answers are 6 letters long and circle their Enter digits from 1 to 9 in the grid so that no number
you spell using the letters in the hive? Every answer correspondingly numbered hexagons, starting in one is repeated in any row, column or 3x2-outlined region.
must use the center letter at least once. Letters may of the 6 adjoining spaces and reading clockwise or Some squares are split by a slash and need 2 digits
be reused in a word. At least one word will use all 7 counterclockwise. Rim answers read clockwise around entered in them. The smaller number always goes
letters. Proper names and hyphenated words are not the grid’s shaded perimeter, one after the other, above the slash.
allowed. Score 1 point for each answer, and 3 points starting in the circled space.
for a word that uses all 7 letters. Ex.
WHEELS 1. “Tossed” courses 2. Dinner-table leftovers 3 5
Rating: 5 = good; 10 = excellent; 15 = genius 1 1 6 2 4
fed to pets 3. The Roaring Twenties, for one 4. Made a 2
4 6 4 13
basket or goal 5. Mountain lion 6. Removed, as pencil
marks 7. Stir up
5
1
4 > 3 1
5
6 5 2 4
2 5
4 2 1 356
RIM Edible spears • Simplicity • Sticker on a windshield
A
T C 7
5
M 1 2 4
2
P E 3 4 5 4 9
7
I 3 6
1
6 7 4 2 6 8
Our list of words, worth 20 points, appears with last week’s answers.

DIAGRAMLESS DOWN
1 Know what one’s course
of action will be
By Mary Lou Guizzo and David Steinberg 2 Orations
This diagramless is 17 squares wide by 17 squares deep 3 English beverage since
and has left/right symmetry. The first square across is given 1837
with last week’s answers. 6 Biblical steps to heaven
7 Inquires
8 Thanksgiving vegetable
ACROSS 31 Recycling receptacle
9 Slimy garden pest
1 President before D.D.E. 32 “Mad Men” network
11 Fisherman’s success
4 Hairy Halloween costume 34 Microwaves
12 Obama’s health law, for
5 Dog doc 35 Threaded again, as shoes short
6 Noisy, crested birds 37 Entertainer in a béret, 13 Change the décor of
10 Conger or moray say
14 Very swiftly
11 Eponym of a root beer 39 Walt Whitman poem
15 Less than an instant
brand written after Lincoln’s
assassination 18 Stock portfolio hedges
15 Twangy-sounding
43 Sci-fi escape vehicle 19 Double Dutch activity
16 Solitaire base card
20 Swiftness
17 Freeze over 44 German highways
21 Tolerates
19 San Diego Chargers venue 45 Misfortune
22 “Manon” composer Jules
to which Qualcomm got 46 Two slices of a loaf of
the naming rights in 1997 bread 30 Need for making maple
syrup
23 Pizza chain founded in 48 Gap between neurons
31 Men bearing roses or 41 Wall Street deg. 54 ____-Cat
Chicago, informally 49 Quantity of ale chocolates 42 Pomeranian bark 55 O.J. trial judge Lance
24 French pancake 50 Difficult to comprehend 33 Construction-site sight 47 Specialized Navy
25 Tetra- times two 56 Earn after expenses
52 Barnyard brooders 34 Unpopular teen spot operative
26 Riotous group 57 Pit bull’s warning
53 Protesting loudly 36 Windy City ‘L’ inits. 49 Phnom ____, Cambodia
27 Sporty 1990s Toyota 58 Santa ____ winds
61 Bioluminescent marine 38 Festoons, as a tree on 51 “La Vie en Rose” singer
28 Bout stoppers, briefly dweller Halloween, briefly Edith 59 U.S. Army E-7: Abbr.
29 Quiet attention-getter 62 Marathons, e.g. 40 French rejection 52 Pit viper’s warning 60 Deadlock

50
Bodycams Weather Answers to puzzles of 10.16.16
(Continued from Page 49) (Continued from Page 29) EMOTION

A L L T A L K H A I R C A R E L I A M
cities for the same. By the end of 2015, according to predict weather at a regional scale, similar to what C O A L C A R T H R E A T E N I N D O
a study on public-records requests he obtained via the European Center and Britain’s Met Office T R I C K S O F T H E T R E A D E C R U
a public-records request, Clemans had filed 2,272 are already doing. But there is heavy resistance S E N S N A P L O T I L A G O O N
S P O O K B A L A N C E D E D I T
requests to the Seattle Police Department alone, from the National Weather Service union to I S S U E R E M I N D U S D E T S
making him again its No. 1 antagonist. One day at any associated downsizing. In a blog post Mass S H A L L I T E N D G O E S U P
her office, Mary Perry showed me a printout of the wrote, ‘‘When I talk to middle-level managers in M I N U E T H A N D E R I S P R I M A
S E T S A N M A L T A O C T S
latest ones, five pages long. ‘‘We’re being crippled,’’ the N.W.S., they complain about [its] powerful
R A S C A L G R E A T S A L T L E A K
she said. Wagers was on his way home, Clemans unions that slow down innovation and new ways S U B J E E R I E L O E B
was making more demands than ever and she was of doing business.’’ M A L E S O N W H E E L S S O P S U P
O L A F B O A R D A WW C E E
back where she started.
S I P O N K R I S M A T E M A R K E T
In the summer of 2015, Mass visited Boulder to R I D I N G P O N E E L D E R S
This summer, I joined Clemans at a Black Lives give a presentation at a conference on weather I C K C I D B R O N C S P A T S Y
Matter march in Seattle. He was there to watch the modeling. His 12-minute talk focused on the poor T H E C H O S E N E O N R E D O S
S E L L E R V E R B A O N E M V P
police as protesters demanded justice for Philan- performance of regional models, which typically B E V Y A T E A L O F T W O C I T I E S
do Castile and Alton Sterling, whose deaths were bring higher resolution to smaller geographical A R I D M A R T I N E T R O B E R T S
captured not by bodycams but by citizens’ phones. areas, and should, as a result, be better at pre- D Y N E A U T O N O M Y A R M R E S T

His overredaction code was about to be revived. dicting localized events, like flash floods and
Wagers had taken a job at the Virginia offices of hurricanes. But they’re not — a fact Mass demon- KENKEN
Amazon Web Services, the hidden architecture strated with PowerPoint slides of statistics. He
behind America’s police-video revolution, where he concluded his presentation with a photo of a man
was contacted by a company that wanted to merge doing a face palm, above which he had typed,
Clemans’s software with the website crimereports ‘‘Em-bar-rass-ment: the shame you feel when your
.com. Now, a prototype was in the works, with sup- inadequacy or guilt is made public.’’ The audience
port and partial funding from Amazon. of 200 groaned. But when I chatted with scientists
Searching for blurred video of a crime down during a lunch break, they told me the chiding
your block may someday be as easy as searching for was expected — after all, this was Cliff Mass at the
a restaurant on Google Maps. But a new state law lectern. As a research meteorologist with NOAA
making footage harder to request in bulk — the Tim put it, ‘‘Cliff is very excellent at being provocative.’’ ACROSTIC
Clemans Act, his friends called it — had just gone The next evening I had dinner with Mass at the CATHERINE PRICE, VITAMANIA — [O]ne . . . gelatin
into effect thanks to the efforts of Poulsbo, the small Chautauqua Dining Hall, which has a wraparound capsule . . . , can cure night blindness in a single day.
town that had contacted its state representative. patio looking onto the Flatirons, a succession of Its protection can last . . . half a year or more. It costs
about two cents per capsule, and the FDA doesn’t even
Clemans had also been studying YouTube’s priva- towering rock slabs. We chose an outdoor venue consider it a drug. The miracle cure is Vitamin A.
cy policy, and he would soon decide to remove because a forecast earlier in the day predicted a
the videos he posted there from public view. For dry evening. ‘‘I’m hoping to get in a hike later,’’ he A. Cringe I. Essential Q. Thistles
now, though, he wore his own D.I.Y. bodycam, a said. Midway through our meal, lightning crack- B. Afterglow J. Patentee R. Actuary
C. Tilted K. Recon S. Macaroon
cellphone strapped to a chest harness, and was led overhead, followed by pelting rain. This was,
D. Havoc L. Ibuprofen T. Aspirate
streaming live to the internet as he followed the Mass said, a classic example of a model’s failing E. Eugene M. Child’s play U. Nostrum
protesters and the police on a borrowed bicycle. at the most basic level — it couldn’t even forecast F. Rossetti N. Ensconced V. Ibn Saud
The protesters gathered outside the depart- the weather just a few hours in advance. G. Icelandic O. Vocalist W. Adamant
ment’s East Precinct. An old man, homeless, As we ate, Mass ranted about the storms the H. Near thing P. Indus

busking below a mural, quickly collected his Weather Service flubbed over the past winter. But
things before any violence could break out. But Mass got most excited when I asked him to discuss HEX NUTS TIGHT-FIT SUDOKU

none did. According to the judge who would high-resolution ensembles. The violent thunder- 7
H
R
A 5 4 1 3 9 26
8
preside over the latest consent-decree hearing a storms and frequent tornadoes (there were 1,259 1 3 5
O A G E 2 9 6 4 7 8
few weeks later, notably saying the words ‘‘black in 2015) that routinely thrash the Great Plains and B J N L S 5 6 1
lives matter’’ from the bench, the department was Midwest — killing more than 100 people each year C N A I E 3 8 7 9 24
O G L N
making steady strides toward an exit from federal over the last decade — could be predicted far more T G D V
9 46 1 258 3 7
oversight: Its de-escalation tactics were a national skillfully with high-resolution ensemble forecasts. S A E I E 6 1 2 3 7 4859
model, he said, and its use of force was substantial- So, too, could hurricanes like Matthew. ‘‘But we R P R S D 4 8 1
E H A E 5 7 9 2 6 3
ly down. He never mentioned bodycams. don’t even have enough computer power to do
As the light drained from the sky, I watched it,’’ Mass said. He opened an app on his iPhone Answers to puzzle on Page 50
a bicycle officer help Clemans pump up his tires called RadarScope, made by a private company, SPELLING BEE
and fix his brakes. Young black women and men that projects where a storm is most likely headed.
Peacetime (3 points). Also: Attempt, emaciate, emcee,
took turns at the bullhorn, their voices loud, their ‘‘It looks like it’s moving away,’’ he said. emetic, imitate, impact, mamma, matte, mecca, mimetic,
demand — stop killing us — clear, and the offi- ‘‘I can still get that hike in.’’ Mass excused himself mimic, tatami, teammate, teatime, tempt, timepiece,
cers hung back. The only people filming anything and set off on a nearby trail. He walked warily, titmice. If you found other legitimate dictionary words in
were the other activists. Fifteen months after its stopping often to scan the clouds for clues to the beehive, feel free to include them in your score.
pilot program ended, Seattle has yet to agree on an impending downpour, all while imagining a
its answer to the simple question about body- forecast that someday would be able to simply 1-Across in the diagramless puzzle begins in the 8th
cams: Whom do they serve? tell him when and where it will rain. square of the top row.

The New York Times Magazine 51

Puzzles Edited by Will Shortz

OVER/UNDER 1

17
2 3 4 5

18
6 7 8 9 10

19 20
11 12 13 14 15 16

By Ellen Leuschner and Jeff Chen

21 22 23

ACROSS 47 Olympics venue 89 Melodramatic

24 25 26 27
1 Take on between London response
6 Some subjects in and Tokyo 91 Reagan has one 28 29 30 31 32 33
Scheherazade’s 48 Many a Jazz fan named for him
stories 50 Preserver of bugs 92 Competitor of 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

11 Humbled 52 Caffè ____ Sapporo and Kirin

94 Over the 42 43 44 45 46 47
17 Playful leap 54 “Thinking …”
57 Over the 62-Across 104-Across
18 Mother-of-pearl 48 49 50 51 52 53
59 Prestigious mil. 100 Commercial prefix
source
award with Pen 54 55 56 57 58
20 Words preceding
60 International 102 With 109-Down,
“We stand on cochlea’s place
observance 59 60 61 62 63
guard for thee” in 20-Down, 103 [snort]
21 “Skyfall” singer informally 104 Sky light 64 65 66
22 Over the 27-Across 62 Dreidel, e.g. 105 Sculpture medium
24 In low spirits 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75
63 Cataract for Calder
26 Guarantee that 64 Parisian sibling 108 Print tint 76 77 78 79 80 81
one will 65 Exerted 110 University of
27 Rise 67 Put on the back Washington logo 82 83 84 85
28 Sighed line burner 112 Under the
29 Rev 70 Verizon subsidiary 105-Across 86 87 88 89 90 91

30 Obsessed with 72 Old line in Russia 116 John Paul’s

92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99
fantasy role- 73 ____ Victory (tourist successor
playing games, say attraction in 118 Increasing in pitch
100 101 102 103 104
Portsmouth, 119 “Me Talk Pretty
32 “What have we
England) One Day” humorist 105 106 107 108 109 110 111
here?!”
76 Under the 120 One who can pick
34 Under the 67-Across his work? 112 113 114 115 116 117
29-Across 79 Single-masted 121 Impersonate
38 Certain swinger, pleasure craft 118 119 120
122 Places for studs
informally

10/23/16
82 Keeps up 123 ____ dish
42 Spanish bear 121 122 123
83 Neck and neck
43 Castor ____ 85 Luminous DOWN
(“Popeye” guy) 86 Abbr. in many 1 Signature Obama
44 Balance-sheet abbr. Québec city names 6 Be plentiful 12 Political columnist 46 Bull session 77 R.E.M.’s “The ____
legislation, for
45 Friday, on old TV: 87 Potus No. 34 Matt
7 Louis Armstrong 49 “Thinking …” Love”
short
Abbr. 88 Conditionals vocal feature 13 Debate 50 Gerrymanders, say 78 Kind of branch
2 Gosh-darn
8 High point of a moderator’s day 51 Big Apple paper, 80 Sweets
3 Floor-length job, typically
formalwear European vacation? for short 81 Lynn in the Pro
Puzzles Online: Today’s puzzle and more 14 H. H. Munro’s pen
4 House member 9 N.Y.C. div. 52 Situated Football Hall of
than 9,000 past puzzles, nytimes.com/crosswords name
($39.95 a year). For the daily puzzle commentary: from the Bay Area 10 Cry annoyingly 53 Badly Fame
15 Leon ____, Henry 55 Informal
nytimes.com/wordplay. beginning in 1987 11 Cause for a 84 Application
James biographer acknowledgment
Mobile crosswords: nytimes.com/mxword 5 Quite the hike blessing datum: Abbr.
16 Twain’s “celebrated of responsibility 89 Fashions
jumping frog” 56 Portland-to-
18 Crabgrass, e.g. 90 “Um … fancy
Spokane dir.
KENKEN
Fill the grid with digits so as not to repeat a digit in any row or column, and so that the digits within each
19 Mushroom variety
20 Start of the fourth
qtr.
58 “That was dumb of
me”
61 “____ Flux” (Charlize
meeting you here”
93 [Look what I got
away with!]
heavily outlined box will produce the target number shown, by using addition, subtraction, multiplication 23 Early British Theron film) 95 Small swigs
or division, as indicated in the box. A 5x5 grid will use the digits 1–5. A 7x7 grid will use 1–7. actress Nell 64 Debugger 96 Huffs
25 Like quiche 66 Man’s name that’s 97 Coat for a dentist
28 In conflict the reverse of 98 What “i.e.” means
30 Title fictional 117-Down 99 Charlotte ____, V.I.
character who 67 Woodworking 101 British ____
“sprang from his fasteners 105 Female W.W. II
Platonic conception 68 Clueless enlistee
of himself” 69 Food preservative 106 Stick ____
31 Clothier Bauer abbr. 107 Some P.O. plans
33 Fired bullets, 71 Letters ending a
informally 109 See 102-Across
business name
35 ____ too happy 110 Antidote
72 Buy-one-get-one-
36 Blinker free deal 111 Bank-clock info
37 Abbr. on a 73 Selfish sort 113 Clean-energy grp.
company’s sign 74 Villainous 114 Ringing words?
39 Thin as ____ 75 Target customer of 115 Catch
40 Front and back, at Yelp 117 Man’s name that’s
a golf course 76 Mount of Greek the reverse of
41 Silly billy myth 66-Down
KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. © 2016 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved.

52
Regev
(Continued from Page 41)
stipulations say her approach to cul-
ture is colored by her stint as chief
military censor. In a recent govern-
ment meeting to discuss the estab-
lishment of a new public broadcast-
er, Regev excoriated the prospect
of an independent broadcasting
authority. ‘‘It’s inconceivable that
we’ll establish a corporation that we
can’t control,’’ she said. ‘‘What’s the
point?’’ Regev doesn’t deny that the
role of censor has shaped her think-
ing, but she seems to have learned
that to advocate censorship outright
is bad form. Instead, when liberals
complain of her curbs on freedom of
speech, she counters with what she
calls the state’s ‘‘freedom of fund-
ing.’’ As Regev told me, her voice
rising with each sentence: ‘‘If, as a
cultural institution, you decide not
to perform in Judea and Samaria,
to boycott an entire population that
lives there, that’s fine. But you won’t
get all of your funding. … If you put
on a play about a terrorist who says
he supports killing soldiers, then you
won’t get funding. Not from me.’’
When I asked heads of cultur-
al institutions what they made of
this notion, they all noted that the
funding in question isn’t Regev’s to
distribute but comes from taxpay-
er money. ‘‘There’s no such thing as
‘freedom of funding,’ ’’ one added.
‘‘Citizens have freedoms; states
have duties. In a fascist state, the
state has freedoms and the citizens
have duties. Without funding, cul-
tural production can’t take place.’’
To stroll through the complex that
houses the Tel Aviv Museum, the
Israeli Opera and the Cameri The-
ater is to get a glimpse of the insti-
tutions that Regev is beleaguering.
The Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv was
founded in 1944, four years before
the founding of Israel itself. It was
the first theater to feature a young
generation of sabra actors who spoke
conversational Hebrew, unlike the
more established actors of the city’s
Habima Theater who immigrated
from Russia and were classically
trained. The Cameri was known as
secular, political and often defiant.
Noam Semel has been the
Cameri general director for the last
24 years. He is 70, slight of build,
with a smooth face and the booming
voice of someone who likes to hear
himself speak.
‘‘There is huge unrest,’’ he said as
soon as I sat down in his office, a mod-
est room whose walls were crowded
with framed posters, including one
of him shaking hands with Yitzhak
Rabin. Like most of the heads of the
cultural institutions I spoke to, who
have dozens of employees on their
payroll, Semel was quick to point out
that he was on good personal terms
with Regev, though, he added, ‘‘pro-
fessionally, or intellectually, we have
a disagreement.’’ Semel believes that
Regev’s war on the cultural elites,
and especially on Tel Aviv, is mis-
placed. He named as his inspiration
the longtime French minister of cul-
ture, Jack Lang, who concentrated
France’s artistic talent in Paris, cre-
ating a hub of cultural vibrancy. This
could be Tel Aviv, Semel argued.
What about Regev’s oft-voiced
complaint that a focus on Tel Aviv
would neglect the peripheria, I
asked. Semel turned his computer
screen to face me. ‘‘Where are we
today?’’ he parried. He pointed to
the Cameri production runs for
the day. ‘‘We’re in Jerusalem, Afula,
Kiryat Haim and Beersheba.’’ In
other words: the peripheria. morning standing on the front porch she stormed out of a film-awards
‘‘And that’s regardless of Miri,’’ a of her home, in a small city near Tel ceremony during the performance
colleague of his interjected. Aviv, taping video messages for sup- of a duo rapping a Darwish poem.
‘‘That’s a typical day,’’ he said. porters who request them on Face- ‘‘If you’re not loyal to the country,
‘‘That’s ‘Tel Aviv elite’ for you.’’ book. ‘‘Ready?’’ an aide asked on a then you should be punished,’’ she
recent day, holding her phone to the told me in no uncertain terms.
There is a parable that Regev likes to minister’s face. Regev was framed ‘‘What is this loyalty?’’ Ayman
trot out to demonstrate her tenacity. by greenery; an Israeli flag fluttered Odeh, the leader of the Joint List,
It’s one that appears in many articles from a nearby fence. ‘‘Now we have said when asked about Regev’s ulti-
about her, to her evident delight. It Oren, who’s turning 51,’’ the aide said. matum. ‘‘A person who is against the
concerns a colony of frogs trapped Something inside Regev switched settlements: Is he loyal to the state
at the bottom of a well. One day one on. She smiled her famous smile. of Israel or not? A person who is
of the frogs tries to escape. The other ‘‘Oren, kapara! Fifty-one! You’re so against the occupation: Is he loyal to
frogs all call out to her that it’s impos- handsome! You’re so young! What the state of Israel or not? A person
sible: She won’t make it. But she does the age matter?’’ She signed off: who is against Arab discrimination,
manages to scale the wall anyway. ‘‘Love you, mazel tov, Miri,’’ cupping who is against antidemocratic laws:
Dumbfounded, the other frogs ask her hands into a heart shape. Is he loyal or not? When you demand
her how she did it. ‘‘What?’’ She calls As Regev’s professed cultural loyalty from an entire Arab popula-
down to them. ‘‘I can’t hear you!’’ revolution continues, she seems tion, is that not collective conde-
Turns out she was deaf all along. increasingly to revert to her old scension? Who is this higher being
Regev isn’t deaf, but her ability to role as censor, demanding that who demands loyalty from us?’’
mute her critics and forge ahead is culture march in lock step with the Regev’s answer to that question
indeed remarkable. There are many state. In July, she caused contro- would most likely be: the new right,
who believe that Netanyahu has versy when she called to withdraw the military, the ruling majority. Back
watched her rise not only with awe public funds from Army Radio for on her front porch, she began taping
but also with trepidation. She has airing a segment about the Pales- a video for a coming race to honor
more than hinted at coveting Israel’s tinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. an Israeli soldier who was killed in
highest office. ‘‘I don’t know if he feels She blamed the station for ‘‘sanc- 2014. ‘‘Dear residents of the Golan
intimidated, but there’s no doubt that tifying the anti-Israeli narrative’’ Heights,’’ she said, finding her stride
today I’m a force,’’ Regev told me. and threatened to remove it from as she squinted against the rising
She spends a good part of every the army altogether. In September, morning sun. ‘‘I want to salute you!’’
The New York Times Magazine 53
Talk

Abbi Jacobson who is a mix of Arsenio Hall and Ed Grim-

ley — which, clearly, is my parents’ doing,
because he’s, like, 10. He’s the host, I’m
every guest and then my dad is Elton John.
Didn’t Expect That was a Saturday night.
Your new book, ‘‘Carry This Book,’’ is a
collection of tongue-in-cheek illustra-
Hillary to Come tions imagining what famous people and
fictional characters keep in their bags.
Where did the idea come from? I had
On Her Show to read Tim O’Brien’s ‘‘The Things They
Carried’’ in high school, and the way he
told the stories by going through these
Interview by Dave Itzkoff
Vietnam vets’ bags said so much about
who they were and helped you under-
stand the characters.
How did you choose which bags to
draw? It was a mix of people that I really
You and your best friend, Ilana Glazer, admired and people whom I wanted to
are the creators and stars of Comedy poke fun at. Bernie Madoff is not a person
Central’s ‘‘Broad City,’’ in which you play I admire in any way.
best friends. Does it feel weird whenev- You drew a bag for Hillary Clinton, but
er you’re not working with her? We’ve it’s pretty sedate — there are only a few
managed to create this really cool work- items in there. Apparently she really
ing relationship where our other projects does carry hot sauce. The MetroCard
inspire each other. But this is the longest is commenting on how she couldn’t get
we’ve gone where we haven’t seen each through the turnstile. And then there’s
other. It’s been, like, a month and a half. her BlackBerry, from that famous photo
How did you two meet? When Ilana and I — I got to make a joke that she’s staring at
were coming up in the comedy scene, we Candy Crush, not having to comment on
were on an improv practice team, and I the email thing. I’m not a political comic.
thought that she was Maeby from ‘‘Arrest- Clinton appeared on your show in March.
ed Development.’’ After the first night of Were you surprised to get her? Yeah! We
practice, we go to a bar and we’re talking wrote the episode a year before it came
about where we’re from, and it turns out out. Hillary was the only person running
she knew two of my best friends from at the time — not that we would have
college. And in that moment, I was just ever had another candidate on — but
like . . . this is not Maeby anymore. I would we wrote it not thinking we would ever
know if my friends were friends with actually get her on. Afterward, I said in
Maeby. We really hit it off immediately; some interview that it wasn’t a political
I was just like trying to become friends statement, which was a stupid statement
with Maeby, and then I thought, I’ll just to make. Of course it’s a political state-
stay friends with this girl. ment! For us, it felt like we were justifying
Anytime people work closely together, our show in a different way — it felt his-
they have disagreements, and some- toric. Plus, before we shot Hillary, Amy
times even butt heads. Is it ever tricky to Poehler was her stand-in. She didn’t do
be collaborating with your best friend? the impression.
I really like the way you asked that. A Were you thinking that you had to be on
lot of people ask that, and it feels very your best behavior? Like, everybody, put
Interview has been condensed and edited.

women-specific. Obviously we disagree; down your joints and detox for 48 hours
we’re not one brain. But in a collaborative before she shows up? Yeah. Everyone had
environment, if you always agree, that’s to be background-checked. There was
not going to give you the best outcome. Age: 32 Jacobson is the co- Her Top 5 Dream Secret Service. It was really intense.
creator and co-star ‘‘Broad City’’
Your parents and your brother are art- Occupation:
of ‘‘Broad City’’ on Guest Stars: Do you think she did it because she
ists, and you studied at an art school in Actress, writer watches the show herself or because
Comedy Central. Her 1. Frances
and illustrator
Maryland. Was there also a lot of comedy newest book, ‘‘Carry McDormand someone advised her that it would help
Hometown: This Book,’’ will 2. Nicki Minaj
in your home growing up? Yeah. I recently her reach a certain audience? Listen, I
Wayne, Pa. be published later 3. Louis C. K.
saw this home video where my brother is this month. 4. Philip Baker Hall don’t think she and Bill are watching our
playing this character ‘‘Arsenio Grimley,’’ 5. Bette Midler show. Maybe Chelsea would?

54 10.23.16 Photograph by Andrew T. Warman

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