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PAGE 6 | WORLD
Hong Kong,
she didn’t
do it for you
Yi-Zheng Lian
Contributing Writer
OPINION
At long last, on Wednesday Carrie
Lam, the leader of Hong Kong, an-
nounced, along with a few other large-
ly symbolic measures, the formal
withdrawal of the contentious extradi-
tion bill that set off a summer of pro-
tests. But this is a totally unacceptable
response to the crisis facing the city.
And no less than her earlier steadfast
refusal to concede anything to the
protesters, the gesture — so minor and
coming so late — only confirms what
many of us suspected are the interests
she really serves.
Far more revealing than what she
just announced publicly are statements
she recently made in private. Last
week, in the midst of intensifying
police brutality against the protesters,
Mrs. Lam met with a privileged group
of businesspeople
Carrie Lam, and told them, off the
record, that she
the city’s would quit “if I have
leader, finally a choice.” Her talk
makes a was recorded on the
concession — sly, leaked and dis-
caving to closed on Monday.
Beijing and On Tuesday, she told
big business. journalists that she
had never tendered
her resignation to
Beijing and had not
considered doing so.
Maybe she thought she was showing
a softer side at that private meeting
last week — her human face, if you will
— but the performance was shabby, a
mixed bag of practiced remorse and
the callousness typical of the ruling
class. And more.
Now was no time for self-pity, she
said, and yet she went on to lament,
choking up at times, that she no longer
dared to go out for shopping or to get
her hair done, for fear of being met by
throngs of young people in black T-
shirts and black masks (black is the
protesters’ preferred color). All this
she said even as hundreds of police
officers in full riot gear have been let
loose these days, bashing the skulls
and breaking the teeth of protesters
and innocent bystanders alike, pulling
off the underwear of a young woman
they arrested and deliberately crush-
ing hands under their boots. The chief
executive can’t visit her coiffeur? Big
deal.
Mrs. Lam is heard saying in the
recording, “for a chief executive to
have caused this huge havoc to Hong
Kong is unforgivable.” Quite so. Espe-
cially since “havoc” is a gross euphe-
mism for what Mrs. Lam has done. She
has undermined constitutional guaran-
LIAN, PAGE 11
The New York Times publishes opinion
from a wide range of perspectives in
hopes of promoting constructive debate
about consequential questions.
Youth movement at fashion houses
Top brands handing over
creative keys to a new
generation of designers
BY VANESSA FRIEDMAN
In the fall of 2018, Jean-Philippe Hec-
quet, the newly installed chief executive
of Lanvin, the oldest French fashion
house in continuous existence, was look-
ing for a designer to save it. The stakes
were high. The brand’s collections had
been critically savaged since it parted
ways with Alber Elbaz, its former cre-
ative director, in 2015.
It had quickly run through two other
creative directors without success, and
sales were plummeting. The house had
a new owner, the Chinese group Fosun
International, and it wanted a turn-
around before Lanvin drifted off to the
land of irrelevance. So what did Mr. Hec-
quet do?
Cherchez the millennial.
He hired Bruno Sialelli, age 31. Mr.
Hecquet made a big bet on a very young,
Y(1J85IC*KKNPKP( +,!"!$!@!]
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Violetta Douib at her home near Paris with a picture of her daughter, Julie Douib, who was killed in March. In France, a woman is killed by her partner or ex-partner every three days.
‘He killed me,’ times 100
ILE-ROUSSE, CORSICA
France takes urgent steps
to reverse a trend as the
toll of domestic abuse rises
BY LAURE FOURQUET
Julie Douib tried to do everything right.
She left her abusive partner. She re-
ported his violence to the police at least
a dozen times. After he forced her to give
up custody of their two children for the
weekend, she told the police that he had
a license for a gun and that she was
afraid he would shoot her.
“Madame, I am sorry,” the officer re-
plied, according to Ms. Douib’s father,
“but his license cannot be taken away
unless he points the gun at you.”
He did so 48 hours later, and fired
twice, hitting Ms. Douib, 34, in her chest
and arms. “He killed me,” she said with
her last breath, said Maryse Santini, the
downstairs neighbor who found her.
Ms. Douib’s death in March crystal-
lized the issues of domestic violence and
the difficulties that women in France
face in getting the authorities to take
their fears and complaints seriously,
and to act on them.
She was the 30th woman in France
FROM LEFT: GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES, MARC PIASECKI/WIREIMAGE, ANDREAS SOLARO/AGENCE
Among the new generation of millennial fashion designers, from left: Jonathan Ander-
son (35) at Loewe; Marine Serre (27); and Francesco Risso (36) at Marni.
Canada CAN$ 5.50 Finland € 3.50
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Denmark Dkr 30 Great Britain £ 2.20
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Estonia € 3.50 Hungary HUF 950
NINE MORE LIVES?
PET CLONING
BECKONS IN CHINA
PAGE 7 | BUSINESS
INTERNATIONAL EDITION | FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019
since the beginning of this year to die at
the hands of her partner, and more than
70 additional women have been simi-
larly killed in the months that have fol-
lowed. According to government fig-
ures, a woman is killed in France by her
partner or former partner every three
days.
The 100 deaths as of Aug. 31 is the ear-
liest that such a terrible benchmark has
been reached in France, according to ad-
vocates who track the issue. Though it’s
unclear what factors may be behind the
toll, the issue has drawn wider attention
in France since President Emmanuel
Macron started using the term “femi-
cide.”
The most recent Eurostat data, from
2015, shows that more women are killed
each year in France than in Britain, the
Netherlands, Italy or Spain. In Western
Europe, only Germany and Switzerland
had more.
The toll is increasingly catching the
attention of French officials, who have
begun taking more urgent steps to com-
bat the trend. On Tuesday, the French
government opened a national debate in
an effort to stamp out what some law-
yers and prosecutors call femicide to un-
derscore the particular nature of the
crime.
The term femicide was first coined in
the 1970s to refer to gender-related
killings. Femicide is not recognized in
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Jordan JD 2.00 Oman OMR 1.40 Senegal CFA 2700
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CHRISTOPHE ARCHAMBAULT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
A rally in Paris last month dedicated to the memory of domestic violence victims. The
government has opened a national debate in an effort to stamp out “femicide.”
the French criminal code, but Marlène
Schiappa, the junior minister for gender
equality, said the recognition would be
discussed in the coming weeks.
The consultation process started on
Tuesday, in reference to the domestic vi-
olence helpline 3919, and is to continue
until Nov. 25, the International Day for
the Elimination of Violence Against
unproved name. And in doing so, Lanvin
became the latest in a growing group of
established brands to hand the keys to
the creative kingdom to a new genera-
tion of designers.
Aside from Mr. Sialelli at Lanvin, in
the last year alone Daniel Lee became
creative director of Bottega Veneta at
age 32 (he is now 33); Daniel Roseberry
joined Schiaparelli, age 33; and
Rushemy Botter and Lisi Herrebrugh
landed at Nina Ricci, ages 36 and 29.
Then Rihanna, 31, became the first cre-
ative artist to get a new label at LVMH
since 1987.
They joined a club that includes Jona-
than Anderson at Loewe (35), Frances-
co Risso at Marni (36), Julien Dossena
at Paco Rabanne (36) and Olivier
Rousteing at Balmain (33).
The buzziest names of fashion month,
which begins this week in New York be-
fore rolling out to London, Milan and
Paris, are all under 35: Kerby Jean-Ray-
mond of Pyer Moss (32), Telfar Clemens
(34) and Brandon Maxwell (34) — the
Council of Fashion Designers of Amer-
FASHION, PAGE 2
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HIDDEN AWAY, FOR NOW
REVELING IN A PRISTINE
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BACK PAGE | TRAVEL
DMITRY KOSTYUKOV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Women. Over the course of those 12
weeks, 91 conferences will take place
across France to discuss how to prevent
femicide, protect the victims and punish
offenders.
The meetings will bring French offi-
cials, lawyers and prosecutors together
with associations that represent fam-
FRANCE, PAGE 4
Can
design
save us?
The best way to predict the
future is to design it. Are you in?
#designtoimprovelife l www.theindexproject.org
..
Brexit crisis
may ease
only if voters
weigh in
LONDON
A vote could help clarify
a debate that’s become
hopelessly muddled
BY MARK LANDLER
He jabbed his finger in the air and shook
his head theatrically. He dared the oppo-
sition to back his call for an election and
sneered that the Labour Party’s leader
was a “chlorinated chicken.”
By the time Prime Minister Boris
Johnson finished his first day taking
questions in Parliament, he had ushered
in a new season of political mayhem in
Britain, one in which the voters are now
as likely as their feuding leaders to re-
solve the questions over how and when
Britain should leave the European Un-
ion.
The raucous spectacle this week in
the House of Commons illustrated the
obstacles Mr. Johnson will face as he
tries to lead Britain out of the European
Union next month.
Parliament handed the prime min-
ister two stinging defeats. It first
blocked his plans to leave the Union with
or without an agreement. It then
stymied his bid, at least for the moment,
to call an election for Oct. 15, out of fear
he could secure a new majority in favor
of breaking with Europe, deal or no deal.
The frenzied maneuvering showed
how Brexit keeps propelling the country
ever deeper into uncharted political ter-
ritory, where centuries of unwritten
rules and conventions are giving way to
a brawl over the future of one of the
world’s oldest democracies.
The upheaval in Parliament on
Wednesday was the latest and perhaps
the ultimate test of a political system
that has been under unrelenting strain
since the British voted narrowly to leave
the European Union in June 2016.
Britain has since unwittingly become
a laboratory for how a deeply rooted
parliamentary democracy can be shak-
en to its core by populism, especially
when wrapped in the democratic legiti-
macy of a public referendum.
Parliament has become a theater,
beamed live around the world, in which
democracy’s messy, self-interested and
self-destructive tendencies are laid bare
in real time.
Despite the vote by lawmakers defy-
ing the prime minister’s call to go to the
polls, Britain still appears headed for a
general election in the coming weeks or
months, with the opposition likely to
agree to a vote once a law forbidding a
no-deal Brexit is firmly in place.
An election could clarify a debate that
has become hopelessly muddled. A clear
victory would give Mr. Johnson’s Con-
servative government a mandate to
withdraw, regardless of whether it
strikes an agreement with officials in
Brussels. A defeat would eject him from
BRITAIN, PAGE 4

2 | FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019
page two
Among those in front of the camera of Peter Lindbergh, at left below, were the model
Kate Moss, above, in 1994, and a group of models on a California beach, right, in 1988.
He captured the rise of the supermodel
PETER LINDBERGH
1944-2019
BY ELIZABETH PATON
Peter Lindbergh, a pillar of contempo-
rary fashion photography who played a
key role in inaugurating the supermodel
era in the 1990s, died on Tuesday in
Paris, where he lived. He was 74.
His death was announced on Wednes-
day on his official Instagram account.
No cause was given.
In a career of more than four decades,
Mr. Lindbergh became one of the best-
known names in fashion photography,
propelling the careers of supermodels
like Naomi Campbell, Christy Turling-
ton Burns and Linda Evangelista with
his alternately cinematic and naturalis-
tic portraits in black and white, his pref-
erence.
His work appeared regularly on the
covers of magazines like Vogue and
Harper’s Bazaar, and it has been shown
in museums worldwide, among them
the Victoria & Albert in London and the
Centre Pompidou in Paris. He also pub-
lished several books of his photographs.
Mr. Lindbergh’s most recent high-pro-
file assignment was to shoot mono-
chrome portraits of 15 notable subjects
— including the climate change cam-
paigner Greta Thunberg, the actress
Jane Fonda and the model Adut Akech
Millennials are taking over fashion houses
FASHION, FROM PAGE 1
ica Womenswear Designer of the Year
2019 — in New York; Grace Wales Bon-
ner in London (27); and Simon Porte
Jacquemus (29) and Marine Serre (27)
in Paris.
“The new luxury has brought a major
aesthetic discontinuity, which is getting
some brands and designers out of sync
with the zeitgeist,” Luca Solca, a luxury
analyst at Bernstein, wrote in an email.
“This has been driven by younger con-
sumers embracing a more informal defi-
nition of fashion. This is also producing a
generation shift in the designer ranks.”
Fashion loves a trend, not to mention
a new discovery, and it’s possible that
this is simply the latest example. But the
sheer number of designers of a certain
age range, and the span of countries and
kinds of brands they now run, suggests
that the change may be more systemic
in nature; may, in fact, signify a mean-
ingful shift in the demographics of fash-
ion power.
Gen Y has reached critical mass. And
that has repercussions not only for con-
sumers and the industry, but also for the
Gen X creatives who came before.
HISTORICAL PATTERN
“They always want younger, younger,
younger,” one headhunter in Paris said
of the fashion executives for whom he
worked. (The New York Times agreed to
grant him anonymity because of the
sensitivity of the subject.) “We have put
forth talent in their mid-50s who were
exceptional, and they were summarily
rejected.”
Fashion — even the most expensive,
traditional kind — has long been at-
tracted to the disruptive stylings of
youth; has long been mining their ward-
robe reinventions for ideas. But this de-
velopment is less about aesthetics than
behavior and points of view. And it is
part of a historical pattern.
There have been such tectonic shifts
before: times when major groupings of
designers seemed to arrive en masse, as
opposed to the lone breakthroughs of
wunderkind outliers like Yves Saint
Laurent, who took the reins at Dior at
age 21.
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+ THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
PETER LINDBERGH
— for the September issue of British
Vogue, which was guest-edited by Me-
ghan, the Duchess of Sussex.
“His ability to see real beauty in peo-
ple, and the world, was ceaseless, and
will live on through the images he creat-
ed,” Edward Enninful, the editor of
British Vogue, wrote in a tribute on
Vogue’s website.
Mr. Lindbergh conveyed a timeless,
humanistic romanticism in his work,
producing instantly recognizable im-
agery in advertising campaigns for lux-
ury industry names like Dior, Giorgio
Armani, Prada, Donna Karan, Calvin
Klein and Lancôme.
His work was closely linked to the rise
of supermodel era, most famously with
his January 1990 cover for British
Vogue: a group portrait of Ms. Evangel-
ista, Ms. Campbell, Christy Turlington,
Cindy Crawford and Tatjana Patitz,
whom he had assembled for the shoot in
Lower Manhattan.
He had photographed some of the
women on a beach in Malibu, Calif., two
years earlier for American Vogue, as
well as for the first cover of that maga-
zine under its new editor in chief in 1988,
Anna Wintour.
“It was a new generation, and that
new generation came with a new inter-
pretation of women,” Mr. Lindbergh lat-
er said of the British Vogue cover. He
added: “It was the first picture of them
together as a group. I never had the idea
Kerby Jean-Raymond, 32, of Pyer Moss is among the new high-profile fashion design-
ers. Said one Paris recruiter: “They always want younger, younger, younger.”
Often they rode the wave of broader
social movements: In the 1960s, the
youthquake was given shape by Mary
Quant, André Courrèges and Betsey
Johnson; in the ’90s, the Y.B.D.s (young
British designers), John Galliano, Alex-
ander McQueen and Stella McCartney,
took over the French establishment at
the time of Cool Britannia.
“Fashion has its own class system,
and this is what I call the fourth class:
the youth,” said Colin McDowell, the au-
thor of “McDowell’s Directory of 20th
Century Fashion.” “They rise up every
few decades.”
The main forces driving the move this
time are the rise of the millennial con-
sumer and the technological transfor-
mation of 2007, when the smartphone —
and many of the social media platforms
it enabled — emerged, changing human
interaction just when Gen Y was enter-
ing its majority.
Yet no executive or headhunter will
acknowledge that fashion brands in-
creasingly see age as a criterion for hir-
STEFAN RAPPO
that this was history. Never for one sec-
ond.”
The shoot went on to inspire the video
for George Michael’s 1990 single “Free-
dom,” which featured the five models
and cemented their status as household
names.
Mr. Lindbergh was born Peter Brod-
beck on Nov. 23, 1944, to German par-
ents in Leszno, Poland. When he was
two months old, Russian troops forced
the family to flee, and they settled in
Duisburg, the center of Germany’s steel
industry.
The industrial backdrop of young Pe-
ter’s new hometown would later become
a continuing inspiration for his photog-
raphy, as would the 1920s art scenes of
Russia and Germany. His high-fashion
shoots would often take place on fire es-
capes or street corners, with cameras,
lights and cords on display.
He left school at 14 to work in a depart-
HEATHER STEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
ing a designer, for understandable legal
reasons.
Rather, they discuss the importance
of “digital,” of “having a community,” of
“a willingness to change,” of under-
standing that the world now wants not
so much “beautiful products” as “beau-
tiful products that reflect values.”
There’s no question that such qualifi-
cations can be found in designers of any
age. Alessandro Michele, the creative
director of Gucci, is one of the paceset-
ters for the industry, and he’s 47. But
there is no question these are values
most often associated with millennials.
“YOU DON’T NEED TO TRAIN THEM”
Gen Yers don’t necessarily make differ-
ent clothes — or not dramatically differ-
ent clothes. They aren’t the so-called
street wear generation (Gen X is actu-
ally behind a lot of that — at least the
commercial exploitation of it) or the
gender-fluid generation. But they do
think about how those clothes reach the
end user in different ways, and they do
The English actress, singer and model Charlotte Rampling in 2016.
ment store, then moved to Berlin to
study art at the Academy of Fine Arts.
He began a photography career by acci-
dent — after finding that he enjoyed tak-
ing photographs of his brother’s chil-
dren, he told Harper’s Bazaar in 2009.
In 1971 he moved to Düsseldorf, where
he set up a photo studio. While there, he
changed his last name to Lindbergh af-
ter learning of another photographer
named Peter Brodbeck. Finding success
talk about them differently, and see their
roles differently.
So when François-Henri Pinault, the
chief executive of Kering, which owns
Bottega Veneta, was interviewing de-
signers for the top job at that brand and
wanted to speak to them about sustain-
ability, he said that what struck him
about Mr. Lee was that, “it is a given.”
“He didn’t even understand why we
were asking him about it,” Mr. Pinault
said. He also said that when they first
spoke, Mr. Lee didn’t even talk about
products — just the abstract meaning of
the brand.
Similarly, Mr. Hecquet of Lanvin
noted that designers who grew up in the
social media age are “digitally savvy.”
“The way they think, they way they
operate in their personal lives, there is
less resistance to the way of communi-
cating on social networks,” he said. “You
don’t need to train them or teach them or
force them — it’s natural, and customers
can feel that.”
It’s no accident that Olivier Rousteing
of Balmain was among the first major
designers to have a public personal In-
stagram profile, or that Daniel Rose-
berry staged his first show for Schiapar-
elli by plunking himself down in the mid-
dle of his runway, sketching, instead of
hiding mysteriously backstage. People
were wondering who the new guy they
had never heard of was? Well, there he
was! Check him out.
“For many candidates, the number of
followers is a key part of their résumé,”
said Michael Boroian, the founder of the
executive search firm Sterling Interna-
tional, which specializes in the luxury
industry.
Also, of course, relatively young, un-
tested designers tend to be cheaper, at a
time when geopolitics and the possibil-
ity of a recession are sending tremors
through the industry.
“The existing creative directors have
been making a ton of money,” Mr.
Boroian said. “One of the people I know
was on an 8 million euro package ($8.8
million). The new crew tends to go from
€500,000 to 2 million, though the latter
would have to have a following, so from
the very beginning their name would be
PETER LINDBERGH
in Düsseldorf, he moved to Paris in 1978
to further his career.
A documentary film about his life,
“Peter Lindbergh — Women’s Stories,”
directed by Jean-Michel Vecchiet, was
released this year. Among the women
who appear in the film is Mr. Lind-
bergh’s first wife, Astrid Lindbergh. The
marriage ended in divorce.
Mr. Lindbergh, who divided his time
between Paris, New York and Arles, in
a mover of product. But the compensa-
tion structure is less onerous for the
brand. And in return, they get loyalty.”
In fact, a brand gets more than that: It
also gets a name that will not overshad-
ow the brand name, because most of
these designers were second in com-
mand, working behind the scenes before
being elevated.
“They don’t have any bad or comfort-
able habits,” Mr. Hecquet said. “They
are not used to having a huge team.”
They are not committed to a two-sea-
son cycle, private planes and yachts, sa-
ble and vicuna. They are relaxed about
the idea of change. Disruption for them
is business as usual.
FOLLOW THE MONEY
In addition, as Achim Berg, the head of
McKinsey & Company’s apparel, fash-
ion and luxury group, noted, “Younger
designers are closer to the consumer.”
This may seem obvious, but given the
potential pitfalls involved in opting for
an unknown, it’s also risky.
That is why big brands like Dior and
Givenchy often stick to big names like
Maria Grazia Chiuri and Clare Waight
Keller, both of whom are Gen X design-
ers and had proven track records at the
top of other brands (Ms. Chiuri at
Valentino and Ms. Keller at Chloé).
Choosing to turn the generation
wheel adds a dimension of “is he up to
the job?” scrutiny to the work of design-
ers who are already under significant
pressure to reinvent an aesthetic, not to
mention lead groups of people who may
often be older than them.
Still, the millennial consumer has be-
come the market every brand wants to
own, and it is possible that the millennial
designer is the fastest, most effective
way into their mind-set and wallet.
“Millennials are a key audience for to-
day and tomorrow,” Mr. Hecquet said.
“Not the only one, but for sure it helps to
have a young designer because the way
he does things will naturally attract the
younger consumer.”
“They don’t just buy products, they
are buying a message,” Mr. Hecquet
continued. “That’s what you need to
build a movement.” (This is especially
..
PETER LINDBERGH
the south of France, is survived by his
wife, Petra; four sons, Benjamin,
Jérémy, Joseph and Simon; and seven
grandchildren.
Mr. Lindbergh was well known for his
stance against retouching photographs
— a theme picked up on by the Duchess
of Sussex in a tribute on Wednesday on
Instagram.
“His work is revered globally for cap-
turing the essence of a subject,” she
wrote, “and promoting healthy ideals of
beauty, eschewing photoshopping, and
preferring natural beauty with minimal
makeup.”
In the introduction to his 2018 book,
“Shadows on the Wall,” Mr. Lindbergh
wrote, “It should be a duty for every
photographer working today to use his
creativity and influence to free women
and everyone from the terror of youth
and perfection.”
In 2016, when he photographed some
of the world’s best-known movie stars —
including Helen Mirren, Nicole Kidman
and Charlotte Rampling — for the cele-
brated Pirelli tire company calendar, he
presented them without makeup.
“I hate retouching; I hate makeup,”
he told British Vogue this year. “I always
say, ‘Take the makeup off!’” He added:
“The number of beautiful women who
have asked me to lengthen their legs or
move their eyes further apart, you
would not believe. It’s a culture of mad-
ness.”
important if a brand has lost its identity.)
This is even more crucial when it
comes to China, which despite trade
wars and political tension is for many
brands still the promised land of future
growth, and where millennials are the
highest-spending age group.
According to McKinsey’s 2019 China
Luxury Report, the approximately 10.2
million Chinese millennial luxury con-
sumers are the “driving force of the
country’s luxury appetite,” accounting
for more than half the total spending on
luxury in 2018 — which is to say, more
than half of the $115 billion (821 billion
renminbi) spent at home and abroad.
By 2025, Chinese consumers are ex-
pected to account for 40 percent of
worldwide luxury spending. In the
United States, millennials accounted for
approximately $200 billion in consumer
spending in 2018, according to McKin-
sey. Ka-ching.
THE GEN X PUZZLE
Combined with fashion’s own desire for
change and freshness, be it in garments,
retail strategy or actual employees, this
has created an environment increas-
ingly receptive to the idea of looking
past the usual names — those that have
been, for the last few years, on the short
list for every job that opened up at a big
brand.
It also explains why they may have
been bypassed in the end. Gen X design-
ers, after all, were forged in a time when
luxury had a different understanding of
its own identity.
Mr. McDowell believes the momen-
tum may be irrevocable, and that while
designers in their late 40s and 50s are no
longer the names of first resort, they will
still be in demand for the one-off collabo-
ration and guest star role. But “are they
going to get another big job?” he said.
“No. I don’t think so.”
There will be exceptions, of course,
but the physics of fashion are working
against them, as is the industry’s deep-
seated and defining desire for newness.
It’s part of the myth that fashion tells it-
self about itself. And now it’s reality.
“I don’t regret for a minute taking this
risk,” Mr. Hecquet said.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
World
Israeli leader is looking less invincible
NEWS ANALYSIS
JERUSALEM
Scandals and rivals
besiege Netanyahu
at a critical moment
BY DAVID M. HALBFINGER
Younger rivals in his Likud party are cir-
cling overhead. Bombshell exposés on
the nightly news have returned his
looming indictment on corruption
charges to the forefront.
Even Benjamin Netanyahu’s undis-
puted advantage over every challenger,
his primacy on the international stage
as Israel’s longest-serving prime min-
ister, has lately been a source of as much
embarrassment as luster.
With less than two weeks until a do-
over election that was forced on the
country by his inability to form a gov-
ernment after coming out on top in an
April ballot, Mr. Netanyahu’s larger-
than-life persona may have lost some-
thing that made his re-elections once
seem inevitable.
A series of recent setbacks has over-
taken his aura of indispensability.
Last month, Gilad Erdan, the 48-year-
old minister of strategic affairs, turned
down an appointment as ambassador to
the United Nations. Publicly, he said he
wanted to stay in Israel to help Likud
prevail in the Sept. 17 election. Privately,
he made it known he did not want to be
stuck in New York during a possible bat-
tle to succeed Mr. Netanyahu as party
leader.
That was after Mr. Netanyahu felt
compelled to require Likud lawmakers
to sign a loyalty oath vowing that Mr.
Netanyahu was and would remain the
party’s only candidate, “regardless of
the election results.”
Last week, Avigdor Lieberman —
who forced the repeat election by refus-
ing to join the ultrareligious parties in
Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition — disclosed
that he had met with senior Likud offi-
cials about dumping Mr. Netanyahu as
the party’s standard-bearer if he failed
to emerge from the election with a viable
governing coalition of 61 seats in the 120-
seat Parliament.
“At least two-thirds of the party is
praying that Netanyahu does not get 61
seats,” Mr. Lieberman told the Ynet
news site.
Mr. Lieberman’s claim may be
overblown but Likud did not dispute it.
And analysts said it was plausible.
“Everybody knows, including people
in Likud, that there’s more chance than
ever that this is the end of the Bibi era,”
said Gadi Wolfsfeld, a veteran political
scientist and professor of communica-
tion at the Interdisciplinary Center Her-
zliya. “He’s more vulnerable now than
ever before.”
Nor is Mr. Netanyahu gaining much
relief in the diplomatic realm, long his
most comfortable terrain. While in April
he could point to important achieve-
ments, like the shift of the American em-
bassy to Jerusalem and President
Trump’s recognition of Israeli
sovereignty in the Golan Heights, Mr.
Netanyahu is licking his wounds now
from back-to-back humiliations thanks
to the White House.
He bowed to Mr. Trump’s pressure
last month in barring two Democratic
members of Congress from visiting Is-
rael, reversing his own decision and in-
flaming politics in both countries. Then
Mr. Trump raised the idea of opening
talks with Iran, blindsiding Mr. Netan-
yahu, for whom the president’s aban-
donment of the Iran nuclear deal was his
proudest moment.
And when Mr. Netanyahu reportedly
tried frantically to urge the president
against a meeting with Iran, he could
Norway tries to protect its Viking ships from tourists
OSLO
BY HENRIK PRYSER LIBELL
AND RICHARD MARTYN-HEMPHILL
Two of Norway’s greatest cultural treas-
ures, the preserved Viking longships
Oseberg and Gokstad, managed to sur-
vive sea voyages more than a thousand
years ago, followed by centuries in-
terred in burial mounds alongside vari-
ous dignitaries and objects like a sled,
board games and the remains of pea-
cocks.
But since they were dug up, restored
and put in a museum, existence has not
gotten much easier for the longships.
Their display in the Viking Ship Mu-
seum in Oslo was meant to accommo-
date 40,000 visitors annually, but gets
more than 500,000, and the surge has
brought dust, vibrations and tempera-
ture fluctuations that threaten the
boats’ fragile wood.
Now, after pressure from archaeolo-
gists and museum officials, the Norwe-
gian government has earmarked
around $200 million to build a new home
for the ships next door — and for the del-
icate operation of moving them about 50
yards. The first $4 million is to be re-
leased next year.
“This was the right decision,” said
Jesper Stub Johnsen, deputy director of
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Washington in March, after a meeting with President Trump. He faces a difficult election in less than two weeks.
not get Mr. Trump on the phone.
A quick trip to Ukraine, seen as poten-
tially aiding Mr. Netanyahu with Rus-
sian-speaking voters, accomplished lit-
tle except a minor flap when the prime
minister’s wife tossed a traditional
bread offering onto the tarmac in Kiev,
offending their hosts.
Domestically, the news has been par-
ticularly unkind to Mr. Netanyahu over
the past week, just as Israelis were
sending their children back to school
and reluctantly focusing on another
election campaign.
Last week, Israel’s Channel 12 di-
vulged that the prime minister had per-
sonally instructed a loyal confidant —
now a star witness against him — to re-
ward a friendly telecommunications ty-
coon with favors worth hundreds of mil-
“Everybody knows, including
people in Likud, that there’s
more chance than ever that this
is the end of the Bibi era.”
lions of dollars. He is accused of doing so
in exchange for fawning coverage in the
telecom’s news subsidiary. Mr. Netanya-
hu had previously insisted that he had
only approved the recommendations of
civil servants in the communications
ministry.
Then on Monday, Channel 13 aired a
recording of Mr. Netanyahu berating
Ayoub Kara, then his communications
minister, and interfering in regulatory
policy in 2017, months after Mr. Netan-
yahu had been forced by the Supreme
Court to resign as communications min-
ister himself because of the pending in-
vestigations.
“Are you crazy?” he is heard yelling at
Mr. Kara for having made the mistake of
publicly sharing credit for saving a
right-wing TV channel with Ayelet
Shaked, a rival minister who is persona
the National Museum of Denmark and
the chairman of an international com-
mission formed in 2012 to evaluate the
risks of moving the ships. “The Viking
ships are unique, even in an interna-
tional context.” His commission exam-
ined four possibilities, including doing
nothing, restoring the ships in place or
moving them to another site farther
away.
The pledge of government funding
will not mean a quick trip to safety for
the Oseberg and the Gokstad. Construc-
tion on a new display area will not start
before 2021 and is expected to take
around five years.
Hakon Glorstad, the director of the
University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural
History, which includes the Viking Ship
Museum, has described the ships’ con-
dition as a “catastrophe waiting to hap-
pen.”
In an interview last year, Mr. Glorstad
said he and other conservationists had
been warning the government for years
about the potential disintegration of cul-
tural treasures like the two ships.
He said this week that he was confi-
dent that the ships could be moved
safely, noting that as a test, the Oseberg
had been lifted a fraction of an inch to be
weighed.
Few details are definitively known
about the ships, not even whether they
were coastal raiders, explorers, trading
non grata to the Netanyahus. The re-
cording drew instant comparisons to a
similarly unflattering recording of his
wife that surfaced last year.
It was perhaps more telling that the
recording surfaced at all, suggesting
that people presumed to be loyal to Mr.
Netanyahu were not only taping their
calls with him, but leaking those record-
ings when it could do him the most dam-
age.
“That’s another sign that there are
people in the party that believe it’s time
for him to go,” said Mr. Wolfsfeld, the po-
litical scientist.
Rivals have pounced on both reports,
and seized on the prime minister’s push
to get his would-be coalition partners to
agree to grant him immunity from pros-
ecution. Mr. Netanyahu scored an im-
portant victory on that front over the
weekend when leaders of Ms. Shaked’s
party signaled they would go along with
such a move.
But center-left parties have been
pounding away, suggesting in ads that
Mr. Netanyahu’s desperation to avoid
prison was driving him to hand over key
ministries, including education and
transportation, to ultrareligious leaders
seen as extremists by many secular Is-
raelis.
Mr. Netanyahu may also be pushing
uphill. By doubling down with his ultra-
religious allies, Netanyahu has con-
fronted voters with a stark choice for
their next government. They can go
with him, and expect an even more reli-
giously conservative and nationalist co-
alition, if he can eke one out. Or they can
opt for the national unity government
that Mr. Lieberman is calling for and
that leaders of the Blue and White Party,
which is neck and neck with Likud, have
said they would embrace, provided
Likud first throws Mr. Netanyahu over-
board.
A poll released by the Israel Democra-
cy Institute on Tuesday showed only 27
The Oseberg, a vessel at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, Norway. About $200 million
has been set aside to restore two fragile longships imperiled by a surge in visitors.
vessels or built simply for pageantry.
“We don’t know where these ships
went,” Mr. Glorstad said. He described
the Oseberg, thought to be built around
A.D. 820, as a “Viking-era superyacht”
most likely constructed for journeys
around Oslo.
In contrast, he said, the Gokstad could
have traveled as far as England, Ice-
Avigdor Lieberman, center, forced the repeat election by refusing to join the ultrareli-
gious parties in Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition after the April election.
percent of Israelis want a right-wing
government led by Mr. Netanyahu.
Nearly twice as many preferred either a
unity government led by Mr. Netanyahu
or Benny Gantz of Blue and White, or a
center-left coalition led by Mr. Gantz.
For all the trouble he faces, Mr. Netan-
yahu still remains neck and neck with
Mr. Gantz, and holds a slim edge in as-
sembling a coalition, though polls show
him several seats shy of 61, potentially
leaving him at Mr. Lieberman’s mercy.
Damaging stories about Mr. Netanya-
hu like the leaked recording that sur-
faced Monday do not necessarily harm
him with his supporters, who see the Is-
raeli news media as synonymous with
the leftist “elite” and out to get him, said
Yossi Verter, a political columnist at Ha-
aretz.
Mr. Netanyahu also has tools that his
challengers do not. He squeezed ample
advantage from Israel’s confrontation
NOE FALK NIELSEN/NURPHOTO, VIA GETTY IMAGES
land, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea
or the Caspian Sea.
He added that it was unlikely that the
Gokstad, built about 70 years after the
Oseberg, made it to North America, as it
was constructed well before the first
Vikings are thought to have reached the
continent around the year 1000.
The 70-foot Oseberg and the 78-foot
+ FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019 | 3
DAN BALILTY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
AMIR LEVY/GETTY IMAGES
with Hezbollah and other Iran-backed
militias in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon over
the past week, for example.
And there is still the possibility that
Mr. Trump will try to put his thumb on
the scale with another political gift. Mr.
Netanyahu said Tuesday that he hoped
to arrange a trilateral meeting with the
United States and Russia to discuss Iran
and Syria, giving rise to speculation that
the American participant could be Mr.
Trump himself.
Mr. Verter sounded an alternative
theory: that Mr. Trump would grant a
Netanyahu request to put Jonathan Pol-
lard, the convicted Israeli spy who has
been seeking to move to Israel, on a
plane to Tel Aviv.
Those too certain of a Netanyahu de-
feat, Mr. Verter said, should keep in
mind the old joke about his Houdini-like
ability to evade disaster: “He gets hit
and hit and hit, and finally he wins.”
Gokstad were immediately recognized
as historic discoveries when they were
found, the Gokstad in 1879 in Sande-
fjord, south of Oslo, and the Oseberg in
1903 on a nearby farm.
“It means the same to our part of Eu-
rope as the tomb of Tutankhamen does
for Egypt,” Mr. Glorstad said.
The discovery of the Gokstad, in par-
ticular, was crucial in verifying some of
the Norse sagas, he said, and the ships
“provided a visual language to the re-
cently independent Norway, searching
as it was for a glorious past.”
A replica of the Gokstad was built, and
in 1893 it was sailed across the Atlantic
and through the Great Lakes to Chicago,
where it was displayed at the Columbian
Exposition. That ship is housed today
near Chicago and faces its own funding
challenges for restoration.
The Viking era is enjoying a renais-
sance among Norwegians and foreign
visitors, buoyed in part by television se-
ries like “Vikings,” on HBO; “The Last
Kingdom,” on Netflix; “Game of
Thrones,” with characters and plots that
echo the sagas; and “Beforeigners,” a
new Norwegian-language series from
HBO.
That has meant more interest in Nor-
wegian history. A permanent Viking ex-
hibition opened this summer at the Mu-
seum of Cultural History, and Viking
Planet, a private entertainment center
ISIS tries
using cows
as bombers
Iraqi colonel says move
shows that the group
is short of recruits
BY ALISSA J. RUBIN
The Islamic State has been reluctant to
use humans to carry bombs because of
the group’s reduced numbers, so it has
tried out a new tactic: Bovine suicide
bombers.
Residents of Al Islah, Iraq, last week-
end said they had witnessed “a strange”
sight: two cows fitted with explosive
vests roaming the northern side of the
village, according to Col. Ghalib Al-
Atyia, the spokesman for the police com-
mander in Diyala Province, east of
Baghdad.
The animals wandered into the out-
skirts of the community, and when they
seemed close to houses, the bombs were
detonated remotely, killing the cows and
damaging nearby houses, but not harm-
ing any people, Colonel Al-Atyia said.
In the colonel’s assessment, the at-
tack signaled that the Islamic State,
whose ranks were sharply reduced by
the group’s four-year fight against Iraqi
security forces, was resorting to uncon-
ventional methods because they lacked
manpower.
Still, using cows to deliver bombs is an
odd strategy in Iraq, where the animals
are prized both for meat and milk. A cow
can easily cost $1,200 or more, and no
one in the area could remember ever
seeing a cow sent to its death in such a
way, said several witnesses.
The cows were contributed to the Is-
lamic State by villages in the area
thought to be friendly to their cause,
said security officials in the Diyala Po-
lice Command.
The use of animals as booby traps is
not new. During the civil war in Iraq
from 2003 to 2009, the insurgents who
called themselves Al Qaeda in Iraq
placed bombs both inside and under
dead livestock, counting on families to
try to clear away the corpses.
The animals were contributed by
villages friendly to ISIS’s cause.
In Afghanistan, donkeys were occa-
sionally pressed into service to carry
bombs targeting NATO forces.
Colonel Al-Atyia described the attack
as serving several purposes for the Is-
lamic State, the main one to signal the
group’s continued presence in the area.
Attaching the bombs to the cows and
sending them into the village meant the
Islamic State operatives got close
enough to release the cows near its en-
trance without being caught and were
able to stay close enough to detonate the
bombs, he said.
It also shows the groups’s interest in
intimidating areas they may want to en-
ter in the future, he said. This area is
close to main roads leading to neighbor-
ing provinces. “The Islamic State will
keep trying to breach those areas that
they consider strategic for movement,”
Colonel Al-Atyia said.
Northeastern Diyala has seen almost
weekly Islamic State attacks in the last
year, including ones using mortars and
roadside bombs, as well as small arms
attacks and kidnappings.
Some of those have targeted Al Islah,
even though it is one of the areas that the
Iraqi Army claimed recently to have
cleared of all Islamic State presence,
said security experts.
Falih Hassan contributed reporting.
described as a “visual portal to the
Viking age” with digital recreations of
the lifestyle, opened next to City Hall in
Oslo.
The excavation of a newly uncovered
Viking grave in Gjellestad in eastern
Norway could prove the most promising
such site in a hundred years, with ar-
chaeologists using georadar to find
longhouses, burial mounds and possibly
another ship.
The mania for all things Viking has
been a mixed blessing for the two long-
ships. The Viking Ship Museum had al-
ready begun restricting the numbers of
visitors, and was considering whether
to close the ships’ display altogether if a
funding solution was not found. But the
publicity may have pushed the govern-
ment to act on warnings that it was un-
derfunding cultural preservation.
“Things were done in the past that
were not so wise,” Iselin Nybo, the min-
ister of research and higher education,
said on Tuesday, referring to the tech-
niques that were used when the ships
were first put on public display. “With a
new museum, we are saving the ships
for future generations.”
“The Viking era is part of our history,”
she added, “for better or for worse.”
Henrik Pryser Libell reported from Oslo,
and Richard Martyn-Hemphill from Lon-
don.
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4 | FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

world

Election may be only way to resolve Brexit crisis

BRITAIN, FROM PAGE 1
office and in all likelihood delay and re-
shape the terms of Britain’s exit.
Yet an inconclusive result — equally
plausible, given the splintered nature of
British politics — could leave the nation
even more paralyzed than it is now. With
one of the last political mechanisms ex-
hausted, an indecisive vote could deep-
en divisions and reinforce fears that
Brexit is a problem that defies a demo-
cratic solution.
In many ways, Britain appears set on
a course not unlike that in the United
States, where President Trump, an ally
of Mr. Johnson’s, has galvanized his po-
litical base by vilifying his opponents.
Like Mr. Trump, Brexit has not just dom-
inated the nation’s political debate but
changed the very nature of its politics.
“You have a complete fracturing of
the British political system, and a
British government that has ground to a
halt,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican
pollster who advised the Conservative
Party in past elections and knew Mr.
Johnson as a student at Oxford.
“Everyone is seeking to be as dog-
matic and punitive as they can,” he said.
“This is doomsday politics at its worst.”
If Mr. Johnson can ultimately get Par-
liament to agree to an election, he hopes
to mobilize those who voted to leave by
tarring his opponents as lackeys of Eu-
rope. He is ruthlessly purging the ranks
of the Conservative Party to make it
more radically pro-Brexit and fend off
threats from a new Brexit Party.
Mr. Johnson got an endorsement from
Mr. Trump. “He’s in there fighting,” the
president said. “Boris knows how to
win.”
The parallels between Mr. Johnson’s
campaign and Mr. Trump’s takeover of
the Republican Party are obvious, but
there are important differences as well.
Lawmakers in Britain have pushed back
vigorously on Mr. Johnson’s tactics, with
even members of the prime minister’s
party rebelling against his drive for a
swift exit.
The proposed timing of a vote, before
the Oct. 31 deadline to leave the Euro-
pean Union, has stoked suspicions that
Mr. Johnson is acting in his own inter- PHOTOGRAPHS BY JESSICA TAYLOR/HOUSE OF COMMONS

ests rather than the nation’s. Rather
than embracing the call for an election,
the Labour Party insisted that Parlia-
ment first prohibit Mr. Johnson from
pursuing a no-deal Brexit before it
would agree.
On Wednesday, Parliament moved
closer to achieving that. By a vote of 327
to 299, lawmakers advanced a bill that
would tie Mr. Johnson’s hands on Brexit,
barring any departure without a deal.
The bill now goes to the House of Lords,
which must give its assent.
Until it’s the law of the land, Parlia-
ment is determined to resist Mr. John-
son’s push for a new election. And late
Wednesday night, Mr. Johnson failed to
win in another vote the two-thirds ma-
jority he needed to call an election.
“Under normal circumstances, no op-
position party would ever get in the way
of a governing party calling it quits,”
said Baroness Rosalind Scott, a member
of the House of Lords and a former pres-
ident of the Liberal Democrats. “But all
the normal rules are gone, which makes
it difficult to predict the outcome.”
As Parliament went back into session
this week, the signs of Britain’s political
dislocation were everywhere.
Mr. Johnson took questions while be-
hind him sat members of the Conserva-
tive Party, some of whom he had ex-
pelled earlier for voting against his call
to withdraw, with or without a deal.
Some Conservatives rose to Mr. John-
son’s defense, but others scolded him for
trying to cut off debate on Brexit by cur-
tailing the number of days Parliament
In an unruly session of the British Parliament, Prime Minister Boris Johnson called the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, below, a “chlorinated chicken.” Mr. Corbyn helped to stymie Mr. Johnson’s bid for an election.
could legislate before the deadline.
Those tactics prompted an outburst
from an opposition figure.
“Are you a dictator or a democrat?”
Ian Blackford, a Scottish leader in Par-
liament, bellowed at Mr. Johnson.
“I am a democrat,” Mr. Johnson re-
plied, “because I not only want to re-
spect the will of the people in the refer-
endum but want to have an election.”
Prime Minister’s Questions, a weekly
ritual dating back to 1961, is often
marked by grandstanding, catcalls and
rowdy interruptions. But Wednesday’s
session seemed especially unruly, less
an effort to extract information from the
government’s leader than an opportuni-
ty for Mr. Johnson and the Labour
leader, Jeremy Corbyn, to position
themselves for the coming campaign.
After challenging Mr. Corbyn to a
vote, Mr. Johnson pointed across the
well of the House and declared, “There’s
only one chlorinated chicken that I can
see in this house, and he’s on that
bench.”
Mr. Corbyn has warned often that
Brexiteers will force Britain into a one-
sided trade deal with the United States,
in which the British will be forced to im-
port chemically treated poultry.
Labour’s legislation to prevent him
from withdrawing without a deal, Mr.
Johnson said, amounted to a “surrender
bill” to Europe. He branded it a strategy
of “dither and delay,” repeating the
phrase like it was a poll-tested message
for a campaign.
For his part, Mr. Corbyn complained
that Mr. Johnson refused to answer
questions about the economic costs of a
no-deal Brexit. The government, he
said, declined to release an internal
study, known as Operation Yellowham-
mer, which he said presented a dire pic-
ture of food and medical shortages.
“He’s desperate, absolutely desper-
ate, to avoid scrutiny,” Mr. Corbyn de-
clared. “If the prime minister does to the
country what he did to his party over the
last 24 hours, a lot of people have a great
deal to fear.”
That line drew blood: Mr. Johnson’s
purge the previous day has left the Con-
servative Party in a state of near-civil
war.
The prime minister watched on Tues-
day as one of his members crossed the
House floor and sat with the Liberal
Democrats, officially erasing his gov-
ernment’s one-seat majority.
The subsequent expulsions left the
government 21 seats short of a majority.
For Mr. Johnson, a disheveled figure
known more for his mop of blond hair
than for his legislative skills, an election
would be a chance to take his case out of
the gilded halls of Westminster and di-
rectly to the British public. It is a debate
he won in 2016, when he led the pro-
Brexit referendum campaign, and he
won the party leadership this summer
partly because members believed he
was the best candidate to lead them into
a general election.
“What he doesn’t want
is an election down the
road, when we’re all
eating barbecued rat.”
Mr. Johnson is gambling that the Con-
servatives, riding slightly higher in the
polls, can win a solid majority over La-
bour, which is mired in its own Brexit di-
visions and saddled with a leader, Mr.
Corbyn, whose leftist views put off mid-
dle-of-the-road voters. A strong victory,
he said, would allow him to go into nego-
tiations with European officials with a
stronger hand than his predecessor,
Theresa May.
In the three years since the referen-
dum, however, people here have heard
harrowing accounts of what could hap-
pen if Britain leaves Europe without a
deal: shortages of food and medicine;
trucks lined up for miles at newly in-
stalled border posts on each side of the
English Channel; chaos at airports and
train stations; and violence in Ireland
after a hard border once again bisects
the island.
That explains Mr. Johnson’s eager-
ness to hold the vote in mid-October, just
before the Oct. 31 deadline to leave the
European Union, rather than afterward,
when the costs of a disorderly Brexit
could become clearer to voters.
“What he doesn’t want is an election
down the road when we’re all eating bar-
becued rat,” said Baroness Scott.
There is no indication, however, that
even a resounding election victory for
Mr. Johnson would make Europe any
more amenable to a new deal.
Officials in Brussels said they have no
plans to bend on the demands they
made of Mrs. May, specifically on the
Northern Ireland border, which Mr.
Johnson has said he would not accept.
Europeans have watched the specta-
cle in London with a mixture of bemuse-
ment, distaste and concern.
“Observing how the prime minister
behaves, both to Parliament and oppo-
nents in his own party, is certainly not an
exercise in trust building,” said Norbert
Röttgen, chairman of the Foreign Af-
fairs Committee of the German Parlia-
ment. “We prefer to stay out of this jun-
gle.”

As deaths mount, France tries to tackle domestic violence

FRANCE, FROM PAGE 1
ilies and victims, Mrs. Schiappa said.
“All the people who don’t usually talk
to one another need to meet and sit at
the same table,” she said.
“Over recent years, several govern-
ment policies have been put forward to
tackle domestic abuse,” she said. “But
there is a real communication issue with
actors on the ground.”
Along with the conferences, Prime
Minister Édouard Philippe announced a
series of measures on Tuesday to ensure
that the French authorities better han-
dle domestic violence cases, including
creating a unified protocol to assess how
dangerous a victim’s living situation is.
He also said that specialized prosecu-
tors and courts would be created to
more swiftly handle domestic violence
cases, some of which can drag on for
years.
“Acts of domestic violence are not dis-
agreements within a couple where the
blame is shared,” Mr. Philippe said at a
news conference in Paris. “Very often it
is a process of sexist control, so in-
grained in our mentalities and our hab-
its that some men have grown used to a
form of impunity.”
In the months before her death, Ms.
Douib sought five times to press charges
against her former partner, Bruno Gar-
cia, 43. None of the charges resulted in
any action against him.
When Ms. Douib complained that she
had been forced to sleep in her car after
he had kicked her out of their apartment
half-naked, the police told her that she
could not retrieve her belongings be-
cause the lease was not in her name.
On another occasion, she filed a com-
plaint after she was pushed down the
Banners outside City Hall in Paris listed the names of women killed by their partners
this year. As of Aug. 31, 100 women had died at the hands of their partners.
stairs of her former apartment building,
but the complaint was frozen when Mr.
Garcia pressed his own charges, saying
she had damaged the front door — an al-
legation that contradicted neighbors’
accounts of the events.
“A police station should be a shelter
for all the women suffering from domes-
tic abuse,” said Antoinette Salducci, a lo-
cal representative in Corsica who told
Ms. Douib that she should keep pressing
charges. “I was miles away from think-
ing that the system was so flawed.”
A lack of action by the police should
not be tolerated, said Luc Frémiot, a for-
mer prosecutor and a leading figure in
“Women need to be taken
seriously the moment
they step foot inside
a police station.”
the effort to help domestic violence sur-
vivors in France.
“Women need to be taken seriously
the moment they step foot inside a po-
lice station,” Mr. Frémiot said, adding,
“Any officer who fails to report abuse
should be penalized.”
The authorities need to take more ur-
gent, concrete action than holding a
Violetta and Lucien Douib, whose daughter Julie was fatally shot by her former partner.
“Julie had faith the justice system would prevail,” Mr. Douib said.
summit, he said. That is what he did.
In 2003, Mr. Frémiot put in place
measures that slashed domestic vio-
lence rates in Douai, in northern France.
First, every charge had to be followed
by legal proceedings. Abusers would au-
tomatically be removed from the home
and be placed in the care of psychiatrists
and psychologists. “It’s a way of getting
them to reflect on their anger issues,”
Mr. Frémiot said.
“It’s because of cases like this that I
will never give up the fight,” Mr. Frémiot
said of Ms. Douib’s death. “We have the
means, we have the tools.”
“France can and must do a better job
PHOTOGRAPHS BY DMITRY KOSTYUKOV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
protecting” victims of domestic vio-
lence, he added
Often there are clear warning signs
that a pattern of abuse will lead to a trag-
edy if nothing is done.
Ms. Douib left her partner six months
before she was killed. After the separa-
tion, Mr. Garcia repeatedly threatened
her, telling her that if she did not leave
Corsica — and their children — she
would die.
According to her relatives, Ms. Douib
knew it was only a matter of time before
Mr. Garcia would follow through. But
she refused to leave her children behind.
“She was given the opportunity to
leave, but she stayed to protect her chil-
dren,” said her father, Lucien Douib.
On March 1, Ms. Douib went to the po-
lice station.
Two days later, Mrs. Santini, her
downstairs neighbor, was watching a
Sunday church service on television
when she heard the first gunshot. “Fire-
works,” she thought. She said she had
been aware of the abuse but never be-
lieved that Mr. Garcia would carry out
his threats.
When she heard the second one, she
left her apartment and started climbing
the stairs to the second floor, and she ran
into Mr. Garcia.
She said he stopped and stared at her,
his hands tucked into his jeans, as if he
were holding something beneath his
shirt. It was a “few seconds that felt like
hours,” Mrs. Santini recalled. Though
terrified, she found the courage to keep
climbing the staircase.
A trail of blood led her through the
open front door of her neighbor’s apart-
ment and onto the balcony, she said.
Mrs. Santini said she had grabbed Ms.
Douib’s hand and screamed for help.
But it was too late, she said, recount-
ing Ms. Douib’s dying words.
Mr. Garcia calmly walked to the police
station. When he arrived, he handed in
his 9-millimeter handgun and confessed
to the crime.
“Julie did everything by the book,” her
father said.
“As soon as she found the courage to
speak up, she reported the abuse,” he
said. “Julie had faith the justice system
would prevail.”
Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting
from Paris.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Hurricane Dorian’s aftermath in the Abaco Islands in the Bahamas. Around 70,000 people are in need of lifesaving aid on the affected islands, according to a United Nations official.
Even rescue is out of reach
TREASURE CAY, BAHAMAS
Storm leaves Bahamas
stunned and with nowhere
for relief flights to land
BY KIRK SEMPLE,
FRANCES ROBLES,
RACHEL KNOWLES
AND ELISABETH MALKIN
The pilot was eager to help: He had
gathered generators, diapers, tuna fish
and other supplies. The people living on
the islands in the Bahamas devastated
by Hurricane Dorian needed them, im-
mediately.
But he wasn’t sure there was any-
where to land.
Flying over the hardest-hit areas —
the Abaco Islands and Grand Bahama
Island — the pilot saw homes turned to
matchsticks and boats piled in heaps.
Harbors, supermarkets, a public hos-
pital, airport landing strips — all had
been damaged or blown to smithereens,
frustrating rescue efforts.
Hurricane Dorian, which made land-
fall on Sunday as an extremely powerful
Category 5 hurricane and then lingered
for days, not only left many residents in
the most damaged islands without jobs
or a place to live, it also stripped away
the services required to meet their most
immediate needs — like fresh water,
food and medical care.
“It’s like a bomb went off, honestly,”
said Julie Sands, who lives in Cherokee
Sound, in the Abaco Islands.
The storm, barreling north parallel to
the Eastern Seaboard of the United
States as a Category 3 hurricane late
Wednesday night, could be close to the
Carolinas through Friday morning, with
shore communities as far north as Vir-
ginia facing “a danger of life-threat-
ening inundation from rising water,” the
National Hurricane Center said.
In the Bahamas, with floodwaters re-
ceding, the trail of devastation was
slowly becoming clear as residents be-
gan tallying their losses.
As of Wednesday, said Dr. Duane
Sands, the minister of health, at least 20
people had been confirmed dead and the
toll was expected to rise.
In a late evening news conference,
Prime Minister Hubert Minnis tried to
strike a hopeful note, saying that aid ef-
forts were getting underway in the Aba-
cos and that “more help is on the way.”
He said additional security would be de-
ployed in both the Abacos and Grand
Bahama to protect homes and busi-
Architects’ verdict on plan for Paris station: ‘Indecent’ and ‘absurd’
PARIS
BY ELIAN PELTIER
Leading French architects and others
have denounced a plan to renovate the
Gare du Nord, one of Paris’s main train
stations, calling the designs that would
turn the station into a glassy, mammoth,
restaurant-filled shopping mall “inde-
cent,” “absurd” and “unacceptable.”
The plan for the Gare du Nord, the ter-
minus for the Eurostar train from Lon-
don and the largest station in Europe,
would cost 600 million euros, about $660
million, and direct commuters and trav-
elers through a platform lined with
shops before they reach the trains, in
much the way that airports route pas-
sengers past duty-free shops.
“This means: more distance to travel,
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Assessing the remains of a home in Freeport, Bahamas. Much of the city was paralyzed
by Dorian, which made landfall on Sunday as a powerful Category 5 hurricane.
nesses.
Around 70,000 people are in need of
lifesaving aid on the affected islands,
said the top relief official for the United
Nations, Mark Lowcock, speaking to re-
porters by phone from the Bahamas.
Families picked through the ruins of
their homes, many of them too over-
whelmed to fathom next steps. Some aid
groups figured nearly half of the homes
on the two islands were either destroyed
or severely damaged.
Some residents just wanted to know
the fate of loved ones.
Antonia Nixon, 19, stood at a private
terminal where relief missions were
concentrated in Nassau, the capital of
the Bahamas, hoping that relatives
would be among the passengers
brought in on helicopter evacuation
flights Wednesday morning.
They live in the northern part of the
Abacos, she said, where there has been
a practical communications blackout
since the storm hit.
“My house is gone, and I’m in Nassau
and I have no clue what my family is do-
ing,” she said, breaking into sobs. “I just
want help.”
Long lists of the missing circulated on
social media groups, where families
logged updates in real time.
“Mr. Atkinson contacted his son to let
them know they are all alive,” read one
entry for a family on Grand Bahama.
Others were more worrying: “Have you
seen or heard from my son Raynor,”
wrote his mother, Sheron Johnson.
The montage of grief and fear was
matched in its intensity by the wreckage
left behind. From the air, the scene in the
significantly increased access times,”
the critics wrote in an open letter pub-
lished in the newspaper Le Monde on
Tuesday. They called the plan to triple
the station’s surface area and saturate it
with shops, restaurants and cafes in an
area already buzzing with them a “seri-
ous offense” to users of transport.
Among the 19 signatories of the letter
were the award-winning architect Jean
Nouvel and other renowned architects,
historians and urban planners from
Britain, France and the United States.
“Forcing hundreds of thousands of
people to walk through commercial
spaces becomes unbearable when this
gift to trade goes with long and unneces-
sarily complicated journeys,” they
wrote in the letter. “This project is unac-
ceptable and we demand a rethink from
floor to rafters.”
The project, called “StatioNord,” was
RAMON ESPINOSA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Baker’s Bay
GRAND
BAHAMA Marsh Harbour
Freeport GREAT
BAHAMAS ABACO
Cherokee
Sound
Atlantic Ocean
Atlantic
Ocean
Gulf of
Mexico Detail
200 MILES
THE NEW YORK TIMES
islands was a grim study in contrasts.
In Marsh Harbour, the largest city in
the Abacos, residences lay in ruins,
while the estates at Baker’s Bay ap-
peared unscathed.
Only a handful of people could be seen
walking around. One pair of bicyclists
rode past demolished trees. The single
road leading in and out of Marsh Har-
bour was still flooded in places.
The pilot conducting the flyover, Peter
Vazquez, saw that several airports were
still clearly under water, but a few run-
ways looked like they could be usable
within a few days. This was better than
he had imagined, he said.
“Today’s flight, what it gave us was
huge hope,” Mr. Vazquez said. “I thought
it was going to be weeks, if not months,
for the runways to get clear.”
“a serious urban error,” they added.
The chief executive of S.N.C.F. Gares
& Connexions, the division of the state-
owned rail company that is in charge of
the project, defended the plan in an op-
ed published in Le Monde.
“This transformation is primarily for
the daily commuters, the millions of us-
ers of the R.E.R. and the suburban
trains,” Claude Solard, the chief execu-
tive, wrote, referring to the Réseau Ex-
press Régional, a network connecting
Paris and its suburbs. He argued that he
wanted to reconcile the aspirations of
“hurried travelers” with the creation of
more services for those who have more
time.
The vision for Gare du Nord calls for
its surface space to increase to about 1.2
million square feet, from 388,000 square
feet.
It is reminiscent of measures taken at
SCOTT MCINTYRE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Such hope, however, was in short sup-
ply on Wednesday, as officials warned of
an impending health crisis. The risk of
contaminated water supplies loomed
large.
“We have to assume that all of the
ground water, all of the community wa-
ter, is contaminated,” said Dr. Sands, the
health minister.
In Marsh Harbour the threat was pro-
nounced, especially in the predomi-
nantly Haitian shantytown known as
the Mudd, which officials have said was
demolished by the storm.
On Grand Bahama, the water had re-
ceded, revealing in its wake widespread
decimation. Parts of Freetown were in
shambles, and communications were
spotty, leaving many to wonder about
the fate of relatives and loved ones.
Rashema Ingraham, a resident of
Freeport and the executive director of
Save the Bays, a Bahamian envi-
ronmental organization, struggled to
grasp the extent of the damage.
“We’re just trying to wrap our minds
around the recovery efforts,” she said.
“Everybody is pretty much shell-
shocked.”
Much of Freeport was simply para-
lyzed. The airport was damaged. The
harbor area was in the path of the main
storm surge on the north of the island,
Ms. Ingraham said.
The only public hospital was dam-
aged and the two main supermarkets,
along with their warehouses, were in an
area of Freeport that was completely
submerged.
At the Grand Lucayan Resort and Ca-
sino, which housed some 700 people in
Grand Bahama when other shelters and
public buildings were damaged or
flooded, most people had begun to head
home. Only about 100 were left, said
Jerry Davis, the hotel’s director of secu-
rity.
“The majority were able to assess the
damage and start cleaning up,” he said.
But the economic paralysis following
the storm was another disaster waiting
to unfold.
Ms. Sands, who lives in Cherokee
Sound in Abaco, said her community
suffered much less damage than did
Marsh Harbour. But she feared mass un-
employment in the aftermath of Dorian.
“Put it this way, most people that
work who are not fishermen, they work
in Marsh Harbour,” she said. “And I don’t
think there’s a business that could just
open up and say they’re in business.”
Kirk Semple reported from Treasure Cay,
Bahamas; Frances Robles from Miami;
Rachel Knowles from Nassau, Bahamas;
and Elisabeth Malkin from Mexico City.
other stations in Paris, like the Gare
Saint-Lazare, which serves affluent sub-
urbs west of Paris, like Versailles, and
cities in the Normandy region, though
the nature and scale of the project ap-
pears to have touched a nerve.
High-end boutiques and businesses
have blossomed as part of an effort to
turn main urban rail hubs into commer-
cial spaces that can subsidize struggling
stations throughout the country.
For the Gare du Nord, a construction
permit was initially denied in June by a
city commission, but the company in
charge of the construction — a holding
company owned by S.N.C.F., the French
train operator, and Ceetrus, a branch of
the retail chain Auchan — appealed the
ruling, and a final verdict is expected in
the fall.
The station already handles 700,000
passengers a day, and daily traffic is ex-
+ FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019 | 5
Hurricane ruin unites
Bahamians in Miami
MIAMI
BY PATRICIA MAZZEI
The home that Charles Bethel’s great-
grandmother built in Miami’s Coconut
Grove neighborhood in 1890 still stands,
with a historical marker commemorat-
ing it as one of the first dwellings in the
area owned by a settler from the Baha-
mas.
It was fitting that two blocks away, at
a church founded by some of Miami’s
first Bahamian settlers, Mr. Bethel led a
frantic effort this week to aid storm vic-
tims in the country of his ancestors. Mi-
ami was spared the wrath of Hurricane
Dorian, but the Bahamas suffered a di-
rect hit, one that left much of the islands
in utter devastation.
The ties could not be stronger be-
tween Miami and the archipelago less
than 200 miles east. Bahamians settled
in South Florida decades before Miami
was born, building bridges and railroads
and raising children who would become
some of the region’s most prominent
leaders. This week, their descendants,
many veterans of devastating hurri-
canes, gathered across South Florida to
lend a hand.
“When we were desperate, people
came to our rescue,” said Mr. Bethel, 68,
a retired state juvenile justice adminis-
trator who lost his home in south Miami-
Dade County to Hurricane Andrew, an-
other Category 5 storm, in 1992. “The
community pulled together. There was
no sense of division. Now, we are doing
the same.”
Past disasters, both natural and politi-
cal, have cemented Miami’s identity as a
beacon for the region. The city took in
Cuban exiles after Fidel Castro seized
power. It mobilized to support Haiti after
a crippling earthquake. It adopted the
cause of Venezuelans after their country
was plunged into crisis.
In the case of the Bahamas, Miami
owes its very beginnings to residents
from there. Bahamian laborers worked
in construction and agriculture, creat-
ing the city’s infrastructure and teach-
ing white settlers unfamiliar with the
tropics how to build with coral rock, till
the soil and plant tropical fruit, said
Marvin Dunn, a retired college profes-
sor who chronicled local history in his
book “Black Miami in the Twentieth
Century.”
“It’s probably safe to say that Florida
would not have evolved as it did without
Bahamians in this community,” he said.
Some of the early settlers’ employers
paid them with land, allowing black
homeownership to flourish. In the 20th
century, Bahamian-Americans became
among South Florida’s most influential
civic leaders and civil rights activists.
Bahamians started to arrive in the
1880s, following an economic downturn
on the islands, Dr. Dunn said. Many
went to work in pineapple fields in Key
West and then migrated north to Coco-
nut Grove, which they called Kebo. Ba-
hamians also settled in the Miami neigh-
borhood of Overtown and in Carver
Ranches, which is now part of the city of
West Park, Fla., near Fort Lauderdale.
One of the early figures in Coconut
Grove was Mr. Bethel’s great-grand-
mother Mariah Brown, a laundress in
Key West who became a Grove
innkeeper and built her two-story home
on what is now Charles Street.
Ms. Brown helped establish the
Charles Bethel, at Christ Episcopal Church in Miami, led a frantic effort this week to aid
Hurricane Dorian victims in the Bahamas, the country of his ancestors.
pected to increase to 900,000 by 2030. A
major hub for suburban trains serving
eastern and northern Paris, the station
also links the city to Amsterdam, Brus-
sels and many cities and towns in north-
ern France.
But if the station is well-used, it is not
well-liked. For years, it has been criti-
cized by locals and travelers as dark,
dysfunctional and even chaotic during
rush hours. A prominent British busi-
ness leader once called it “the squalor
pit of Europe.”
This spring, thousands of Eurostar
passengers lined up on its platforms as
they suffered hourlong delays, and for
years it was home to a sexual har-
assment scandal involving employees of
a cleaning company.
Paris prides itself on its century-old
monuments, among them, its soaring,
historic train stations. Quarrels like the
world
Greater St. Paul A.M.E. Church on
Thomas Avenue, Mr. Bethel said. One of
her daughters, Lulu Reddick, Mr.
Bethel’s grandmother, was a founding
member of the nearby Christ Episcopal,
on Hibiscus Street, where Mr. Bethel is
now senior warden, the congregation’s
lead layperson.
On Wednesday, volunteers gathered
in both houses of worship, dripping with
sweat as they sorted through heavy
boxes and bags.
Stacks of water bottles. Heaps of dia-
pers. Baby formula. A chain saw. So
many donations came in that Christ
Episcopal ran out of pallets.
“None of my normal church work is
getting done,” the Rev. Jonathan Archer,
the church’s rector, said with a chuckle.
Rev. Archer is from Nassau, the Bahami-
an capital, and had learned that his rela-
tives there were safe.
“This is in our denominational DNA
— we provide relief in times of crisis,”
said the Rev. Nathaniel Robinson III, the
senior pastor at Greater St. Paul, which
was founded in 1896. “While this hurri-
cane in particular affects our parishio-
ners directly, when it was the Haiti
earthquake, or the hurricane in Puerto
Rico, we did the same thing. Our mem-
bers do feel this one a bit more person-
ally, but it’s the same effort.”
Miami owes its very beginnings
to residents from the Bahamas.
Mr. Robinson said seven seaplanes
lent free of charge by Tropic Ocean Air-
ways in Fort Lauderdale had been
pressed into service for the relief effort
by the city of Miami and various
churches and institutions.
The plight of the Bahamas has drawn
the attention of public officials, includ-
ing the state’s Republican senators,
Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, who asked
President Trump to waive or suspend
certain visa requirements for Bahami-
ans with relatives in the United States
who can take them in temporarily.
Local officials were frustrated that
the federal government had not dis-
patched search-and-rescue teams from
Miami-Dade County and the city of Mi-
ami to the Bahamas, apparently be-
cause they might be needed in Georgia
or the Carolinas.
The Coast Guard has sent helicopters
and boats to perform evacuations on the
islands.
Representative Frederica S. Wilson, a
Democrat representing Miami Gar-
dens, whose mother’s family hailed from
Abaco, said she would like to establish a
Bahamian heritage museum in Coconut
Grove and obtain a formal designation
for the area to be called “Little Baha-
mas.”
Commissioner Ken Russell of Miami,
who represents the neighborhood, said
he won some protection last year for the
last remaining wood-frame shotgun
houses built by Bahamian settlers in the
West Grove.
Back at Christ Episcopal, Mr. Bethel
said he hoped the community’s efforts to
help the islands would draw attention to
the need for affordable housing in West
Grove, to maintain the neighborhood’s
important history.
“If you don’t keep telling your his-
tory,” he said, “you lose it.”
Nick Madigan contributed reporting.
SAUL MARTINEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
one over the renovation plan are com-
mon among experts, and open letters in
the news media are the common way to
express discontent.
The dispute over the Gare du Nord
has been long-running, dividing urban
planners and architects for years over
what a modern train station should be.
“It all goes to one question,” said
Bernard Landau, a former deputy direc-
tor of urban planning at the city of Paris.
“Should we transform all train stations
into shopping malls?”
In addition to competing with local
business, opponents have warned that
new shops would imperil shopping
malls in the nearby suburbs.
The construction is scheduled to start
between the end of the year and early
2020, and to be completed by 2024, when
Paris hosts the Summer Olympics and
Paralympics Games.

6 | FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019
world
Brenda Bushey and her daughter, Mackenzie, at their home in Wallingford, Conn. Ms. Bushey worries that active-shooter drills are scaring students like her daughter.
Scaring those they try to protect
WASHINGTON
School active-shooter drills
can leave some students
anxious and fearful
BY ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON
After the first day of school at Mark T.
Sheehan High School in Wallingford,
Conn., Mackenzie Bushey, a 15-year-old
junior, came home upset that a teacher
had enforced a no-cellphone policy by
confiscating students’ phones before
class. She needed her phone, Mackenzie
told her family last month, to notify the
police, should a gunman attack her
school.
And also, she said, “to say my final
goodbye to you.”
Mackenzie’s mother, Brenda Bushey,
attributes her daughter’s fears to
monthly active-shooter drills at Shee-
han High. “I understand they’re trying
to think about the children’s best inter-
ests,’’ Ms. Bushey said in an interview.
“But you can’t help but think of how it’s
affecting them.”
Nearly every American public school
now conducts lockdown drills — 96 per-
cent in 2015 and 2016 — according to the
Education Department’s National Cen-
ter for Education Statistics. Law en-
forcement officials and many school ad-
ministrators say they are crucial for pre-
paring and safeguarding students, but
methods vary widely and now include
drills that child trauma experts say do
little more than terrify already anxious
children.
“A whole new cottage industry has
emerged where people who don’t know
anything about kids are jumping in and
adapting protocols for groups like police
officers or people preparing for com-
bat,” said Bruce D. Perry, founder of the
ChildTrauma Academy, whose clinical
team assists maltreated and trauma-
tized children through counseling, re-
search and education. As a result, Dr.
Perry said in an interview, “The number
of developmentally uninformed, child-
uninformed and completely stupid ideas
is mind-numbing.”
The news media attention and policy
debate surrounding school shootings,
and the heartbreaking details of massa-
cres like Columbine, Sandy Hook and
Parkland, heighten the perceived risk
among parents and students alike. After
the shooting last year at Marjory Stone-
man Douglas High School in Parkland,
Fla., nearly 60 percent of American
teenagers said they were very or some-
what worried about a mass shooting at
school, a similar proportion as parents,
according to a survey by the Pew Re-
search Center.
In fact, while the vast majority of gun-
related homicides involving children oc-
cur in the United States, only a tiny per-
centage occur on school grounds. But
August’s spate of mass shootings, in-
cluding in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso,
Odessa and Midland, Tex., have lent ur-
gency to a flood of new preparedness ef-
forts.
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DEREK DAVIS/PORTLAND PRESS HERALD, VIA GETTY IMAGES
Active-shooter training at a school in Portland, Me. Nearly every American public
school conducts lockdown drills, even though few gun-related deaths occur on campus.
“Every shooting event brings a spike drill featuring multiple fire alarms, loud
in contacts by people who say ‘we need noises and unseen people jiggling the
to be doing something,’” said Greg handles of classroom doors.
Crane, founder of the ALICE Training Thinking it was a real attack, students
Institute, which teaches seminars for wept and texted goodbyes. Afterward,
school officials and law enforcement, parents were furious.
who then run their own drills. Mr. Crane, the founder of ALICE and a
In mid-August in Muncie, Ind., school former Texas law enforcement officer,
officials running a back-to-school emer- said that such drills are necessary and
gency preparation class for children as could make the difference between life
young as 11 played an emergency hot- and death. ALICE is an acronym for
line recording of a teacher’s agonized alert, lockdown, inform, counter and
pleas for students to hide during the evacuate.
1999 Columbine High School shooting in “The training is not designed to scare
Colorado. anyone,” he said in an interview. “I don’t
have to make it real to get you to under-
stand how the strategies work.”
Trauma experts say some In guidance updated in 2017, the Na-
active-shooter drills go too far. tional Association of School Psycholo-
gists and the National Association of
School Resource Officers acknowledged
A week later in Volusia County, Fla., that such drills had the potential to em-
police officers videotaped their arrest of power staff and save lives. But the
a 15-year-old boy who made a shooting groups warned that “without proper
threat while playing Minecraft online, caution, they can risk causing harm to
and then released to the public as “a participants.”
warning” the recording of the child in Psychologists and many educators
handcuffs and his weeping mother. say frequent, realistic drills contribute
Public school officials in Jefferson to anxiety and depression in children,
County, Colo., distributed buckets and and they have begun urging school sys-
kitty litter to use as makeshift toilets tems to rethink active-shooter training
during an extended lockdown, and felt- for children and to teach preventive
tip markers for marking the time a measures, like recognizing and seeking
tourniquet was applied on the arms of help for troubled classmates.
potential victims. “The best way to make school safer is
The number of armed assailant drills to focus on proven policies and pro-
in American public schools increased af- grams instead of extreme drills that rob
ter the Sandy Hook school shooting in children of their belief that schools are in
Newtown, Conn., in 2012, when the Edu- fact extremely safe places,” Shannon
cation Department changed its active- Watts, founder of the gun safety group
shooter response recommendations Moms Demand Action, said in an inter-
from sheltering in place to “options- view.
based” approaches like “run, hide, fight” Dr. Perry of the ChildTrauma Acad-
— training created for adults faced with emy said that as school shooting drills
workplace violence. proliferated over the past two decades,
The security industry responded, pro- research into their effectiveness failed
moting and selling programs that to keep pace.
schools and local law enforcement offi- Children’s brains and coping skills are
cers adapt with fake blood, menacing still developing, he said, and not all chil-
masked “shooters” and simulated gun- dren react to stress in the same way,
fire. Last year at Short Pump Middle complicating efforts to study how well
School in Glen Allen, Va., school officials drills work.
staged an unannounced active-shooter “People tend to forget that if your
MONICA JORGE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
child reacts to a drill in a way that’s tol-
erable, it doesn’t mean that others do,”
he said. For some children, intense pre-
paredness exercises “can be so over-
whelming that they tune out, or can’t
process it.”
Active-shooter training, he said,
should focus on adults. “If the teachers
in the situation stay relatively calm,
then the children will literally reflect
that emotional state, and follow through
with whatever they’re asked to do,” he
said. Scare tactics, he added, “do not
make kids more thoughtful, compas-
sionate or empathic. It does the oppo-
site.”
Kaitlin Roig-DeBellis, a former Sandy
Hook teacher, describes in her memoir,
“Choosing Hope,” how she tapped simi-
lar skills to save 15 students during the
Dec. 14, 2012, shooting, which killed 20
children and six educators.
Hiding with her students inside her
classroom’s tiny bathroom while shoot-
ing raged outside, Ms. Roig-DeBellis re-
called reminding herself that first
graders would model their teacher’s be-
havior. “If I panic, they’ll all panic,” she
wrote, adding, “It’s a very difficult thing,
putting on a cool front in the midst of
what I know is life and death.”
Alice M. Forrester, the chief executive
of the Clifford Beers Child Clinic in New
Haven, Conn., was part of a team that
helped notify and counsel Sandy Hook
victims’ families, and helped devise an
emotional health program for surviving
children returning to school. She also
served on the Sandy Hook Advisory
Commission, a multidisciplinary body
whose final report recommended a
range of measures to help reduce the
chances of a similar tragedy.
Early on, the commission focused on
school security. “Then we heard from
Dr. Marisa Randazzo, one of the authors
of the Safe Schools Study,” Dr. Forrester
said. The 1999 shooting deaths of 12 stu-
dents and a teacher at Columbine High
School prompted the study, by the Se-
cret Service and the Education Depart-
ment, of 37 prior episodes of school vio-
lence.
The agencies found “that in almost
every instance, people had concern
about the shooter and that the shooter
had indicated need for help,” Dr. For-
rester said.
An additional 2008 report, known as
the Bystander Study, found that people
who knew in advance about an attack-
er’s plans were friends, classmates or
siblings, suggesting attacks “might
have been avoided with proper observa-
tion techniques and more open sharing
of information.”
Many school drills “are done without
a whole lot of thought, to show the public
that we’re doing something,” said
William Modzeleski, the former director
of the Education Department’s Safe and
Drug-Free Schools program, and an au-
thor of the 2008 report.
Communities need to create multidis-
ciplinary assessment teams focused on
violence prevention that “can conduct a
thorough threat assessment in order to
gain an understanding of the individual.
They then can help the person get ap-
propriate services,” Dr. Forrester said.
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Trump policies murky
with election ahead
WASHINGTON
Unclear whether president
will focus on goals or
step up political attacks
BY MICHAEL CROWLEY
President Trump heads into the closing
months of the year before he faces re-
election without a clear policy agenda
and with an uphill path to achieving any
major new accomplishments before he
faces voters.
Over a summer dominated by his per-
sonal attacks on Democratic lawmak-
ers, the news media and his trade show-
down with China, Mr. Trump spent little
time clarifying his positions on several
important agenda items that could bol-
ster his record.
And as official Washington returns to
work after the summer break, it is un-
clear whether Mr. Trump intends to fo-
cus his time and attention on his policy
goals, or whether he will step into a full-
bore campaign mode, escalating attacks
on his political rivals and spurning tradi-
tional governance.
“Does he want a few more wins? Of
course. Everything is a competition
with him, he’s extraordinarily impa-
tient, and he would spend every week
signing bills — any bills — if he could,”
said Brendan Buck, who served as a
spokesman for the former Republican
speaker, Paul D. Ryan. “At the same
time, he’s far removed from the normal
convention of how we look at presidents.
His supporters care far more about the
persona than the policy,” Mr. Buck add-
ed.
Mr. Trump signaled some of that im-
patience on Tuesday when, writing on
Twitter, he gave marching orders to the
Democrat-controlled House, which re-
turns from its summer recess next
week. The House should move on from
“witch hunt” investigations, he wrote,
and “get back to work on drug prices,
health care, infrastructure and all else.”
But on two of those three issues, Mr.
Trump has sent mixed signals about his
willingness to actually negotiate. Mr.
Trump called action on infrastructure “a
necessity” during his State of the Union
address in February, yet he angrily can-
celed a meeting on the subject with
Democratic leaders in May after learn-
ing that Speaker Nancy Pelosi had sug-
gested he was engaged in a “cover-up,”
and talks ground to a halt.
Nor has Mr. Trump backed up his talk
of action on health care. The president
has said he will submit to Congress a
health care plan to completely replace
President Barack Obama’s Affordable
Care Act, and told ABC News in mid-
June that he would do so “in about two
months, maybe less.” More than two
months later, he has not done so, and
many Republicans are skeptical that he
ever will.
Although Mr. Trump omitted the sub-
ject from his tweet, Congress is also ea-
gerly waiting to see whether he will take
the lead on strengthening gun control
laws after a summer of mass shootings.
Mr. Trump has sent conflicting signals
about whether he will push for ex-
panded background checks for gun buy-
ers, and this week, the Senate Republi-
can leader, Mitch McConnell, told the
talk radio host Hugh Hewitt that “the
administration is in the process of
studying what they’re prepared to sup-
port, if anything.”
Speaking to reporters at the White
House on Wednesday, Mr. Trump did lit-
tle to clarify his intentions, saying that
he was considering “many different con-
cepts and many different things” on the
subject.
And in a statement, a White House
spokesman said that Mr. Trump, who
has boasted of being the most successful
president in history, has already kept his
promise to deliver “greatness” to the
country.
"Along with record job growth, rising
wages, fair and reciprocal trade deals,
energy independence, lower prescrip-
tion drug prices, criminal justice reform,
securing our border and judicial ap-
pointments who uphold the Constitu-
tion, this president is helping America
win again, but his work is far from over,”
said the spokesman, Judd Deere.
To be sure, Mr. Trump faces obstacles
to scoring policy victories that would be
worthy of applause lines at his cam-
paign rallies. Many House Democrats
President Trump has spent little time clarifying positions on agenda items like infra-
structure and health care. Congress is also waiting for his take on gun control.
..
would rather impeach him than hand
him legislative victories that could bol-
ster his re-election chances. And his ef-
forts to defang American enemies have
run up against intransigent foreign lead-
ers as well as resistance from both allies
and his own advisers.
But a crucial factor is a president
whose fleeting attention span, impa-
tience with policy details and appetite
for personal feuds and news media con-
troversies make for a limited interest in
traditional legislating and regulating.
Mr. Trump’s primary focus for win-
ning re-election, said the Republican
pollster David Winston, is to connect his
actions as president to positive eco-
nomic news “in such a way that people
understand and see how it’s personally
translating in their lives.”
“He’s got one responsibility, and that’s
to effectively drive his narrative,” Mr.
Winston said. “Everything he does has
to be put in the context of, ‘Will this help
the narrative?’”
Many of the president’s recent tweets
and remarks to the news media would
seem to fail that test. They include his
latest criticism of the mayor of London,
Sadiq Khan, whom Mr. Trump in a Tues-
day tweet called "incompetent” after
the British politician, with whom the
president has sparred before, mocked
him for playing golf after canceling a
trip to Poland to oversee the response to
Hurricane Dorian.
That inevitably drew attention to the
persistent question of how hard the
president is willing to work on his priori-
ties, as opposed to talking about them in
public. Multiple Democratic presiden-
tial candidates have criticized Mr.
Trump, who for years ridiculed Mr. Oba-
ma’s golf outings, for the amount of time
he devotes to golf.
Republicans said they do see theoreti-
cal opportunities for Mr. Trump to score
notable victories, if House Democrats
are willing to help deliver them. Perhaps
the most significant would be congres-
sional ratification of Mr. Trump’s United
States-Mexico-Canada trade agree-
ment, a renegotiated version of the
“Everything he does has
to be put in the context of,
‘Will this help the
narrative?’”
NAFTA trade pact. Trump administra-
tion officials have been working in
earnest on Capitol Hill for months to ap-
prove the trade deal, but it is unclear
whether Ms. Pelosi will support a vote.
Another, as mentioned in Trump’s
Tuesday tweet, is legislation to lower
prescription drug prices. But it is un-
clear whether Democrats and Republi-
cans can reach consensus on that issue.
Mr. Trump has more freedom of ac-
tion on foreign policy and trade, which
offer him some prospects for break-
throughs, if few easy deliverables.
The most likely is a potential agree-
ment with the Taliban that would begin
the phased withdrawal of American
troops from Afghanistan and allow Mr.
Trump to boast that he is winding down
an 18-year military conflict with wan
public support. But top military officials
are worried about a potentially prema-
ture exit, and on Wednesday, Mr. Trump
said that an agreement “may or may not
happen.”
Despite his three friendly meetings
with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un,
his diplomacy with the country is stalled
and Mr. Kim continues to expand his nu-
clear arsenal. Mr. Trump’s “maximum
pressure” campaign against Iran has so
far only led Iran to accelerate its nuclear
program, and Tehran continues to resist
talks that he hopes could lead to a
tougher version of the 2015 nuclear
agreement brokered by the Obama ad-
ministration from which the president
withdrew last year.
Mr. Trump has also said conflicting
things about whether he might release
some or all of a long-in-the-works peace
plan for Israel and the Palestinians be-
fore Israel’s elections on Sept. 17, which
will decide the fate of one of his close al-
lies, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanya-
hu.
Nor has Mr. Trump indicated that he
will revisit the idea of the “very major”
middle-class tax cut that he trumpeted
in the weeks before the 2018 midterm
elections, a subject he quickly dropped.
A White House official did say that the
president’s agenda includes “tax cuts
2.0,” but did not specify what that meant.
ERIN SCHAFF/THE NEW YORK TIMES
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Business
A General Motors plant in Spring Hill, Tenn. The trade war has so far had the most direct impact on manufacturing, which employs only 8.5 percent of American workers.
Everything might be all right
BY NEIL IRWIN
There is at least one bull market under-
way: in recession fears.
It’s apparent in how ordinary Ameri-
cans are thinking about the economy. In
August, consumer sentiment suffered
its biggest drop since 2012, and Google
searches for the term “recession”
surged to their highest levels in more
than a decade.
There are also signs that business ac-
tivity is slackening. The factory sector is
slowing worldwide, and according to a
closely watched survey released this
week, American manufacturing began
contracting in August for the first time
since 2016.
So how worried should Americans re-
ally be? The answer isn’t as simple as
either “run for the hills” or “everything
is fine.”
Rather, based on financial market
moves and economic data, a period of
sluggish growth looks more likely than
an outright recession.
It might be painful in industries di-
rectly affected by the trade wars and the
global manufacturing slowdown. But
those sectors are a relatively small
Meet Garlic, China’s first copied cat
BEIJING
Cloning suggests country
could turn pet duplication
into a viable business
BY SUI-LEE WEE
Garlic was dead, and there was nothing
Huang Yu could do. So on a cold winter
day, he buried his cat’s body in a park
close to his home.
Hours later, still heartbroken, the 22-
year-old businessman recalled an arti-
cle he had read on dog cloning in China.
What if someday he could bring Garlic
back to life?
“In my heart, Garlic is irreplaceable,”
said Mr. Huang, who dug up his British
shorthair and put the cat in his refriger-
ator in preparation for cloning him.
“Garlic didn’t leave anything for future
generations, so I could only choose to
clone.”
That thought led him to Sinogene, a
commercial pet-cloning company based
in Beijing. Roughly $35,000 and seven
months later, Sinogene produced what
China’s official news media declared to
be the country’s first cloned cat — and
another sign of the country’s emergence
as a power in cloning and genetics.
It also suggests that China could turn
pet cloning into a viable business. Dupli-
cating dogs and cats has not really taken
off in the United States and elsewhere,
experts say. Pet-obsessed China might
be different. The size of China’s domes-
tic pet market is expected to reach $28.2
billion this year, up nearly one-fifth from
2018, according to Gouminwang, a pet
consulting firm in Beijing. The country
has 55 million pet dogs and 44 million
pet cats, and demand for cats is acceler-
ating.
Pet cloning is not confined to China —
Barbra Streisand declared last year that
RELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws
A container ship in California unloading cargo from Asia. American consumers have
been the drivers of expansion this year, while businesses have displayed more caution.
share of the American economy. Even as
the risk of recession has clearly in-
creased in the past several weeks, there
are also sources of resilience that have
every chance of proving powerful
enough to keep the decade-long expan-
sion going.
HUANG YU
The original Garlic, left, and Garlic the clone. Sinogene, a pet-cloning company based in
Beijing, charged Garlic’s owner, a 22-year-old businessman, about $35,000 for the copy.
two of her dogs are clones — and people
have been cloning cats for years. But
Garlic is the first cat cloned by China, so-
lidifying its position among major
cloning nations, which include the
United States, Britain and South Korea.
Mi Jidong, Sinogene’s chief executive,
said the company decided to start
cloning pets in 2015 after conducting a
survey of roughly 1,000 people that
showed there was demand. The com-
pany has cloned more than 40 dogs, in-
cluding schnauzers, Pomeranians and
Malteses, at a cost of about $53,000
each, some as pets and others for medi-
cal research.
It charges more for dogs than cats be-
cause the window for harvesting a dog’s
eggs is very small, according to Mr. Mi.
He said more than 100 people had stored
the DNA samples of their pets in antici-
pation of creating clones.
Sinogene’s yearlong effort to clone a
cat was motivated by market research
that showed that cats are becoming in-
creasingly popular in China, said Mr. Mi,
who has never owned a pet. (“Cats and
dogs require too much care,” he said.)
China’s genetics know-how is growing
rapidly. Ever since Chinese scientists
cloned a female goat in 2000, they have
MARK RALSTON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
The economy could experience a
rough patch without tilting all the way
into recession, which the National Bu-
reau of Economic Research defines as “a
significant decline in economic activity
spread across the economy, lasting
more than a few months” and normally
YAN CONG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
succeeded in producing the world’s first
primate clones, editing the embryos of
monkeys to insert genes associated
with autism and mental illness, and cre-
ating superstrong dogs by tinkering
with their genes. Last year, the country
stunned the world after a Chinese scien-
tist announced that he had created the
world’s first genetically edited babies.
Pet cloning is largely unregulated and
controversial where it is done, but in
China the barriers are especially low.
Many Chinese people do not think that
using animals for medical research or
cosmetics testing is cruel, or that pet
cloning is potentially problematic.
There are also no laws against animal
cruelty.
“It satisfies the owner’s spiritual
needs and increases happiness,” said
Wang Chuduan, a professor at China Ag-
ricultural University in Beijing. “There
is a market demand. So what’s the prob-
lem?”
Sinogene has bigger ambitions than
cats and dogs. It is cloning a horse, and
Mr. Mi said his next big goal was to clone
endangered animals, including pandas
and the South China tiger.
“I believe it will be quite difficult and
we will need some more time,” Mr. Mi
HARRISON MCCLARY/REUTERS
visible in a wide range of indicators.
We explored in a previous article the
ways a recession could happen in 2020.
But it’s worth asking the opposite ques-
tion: What are the reasons to think that
the long expansion can continue, de-
spite endless trade wars, a slowing
global economy and turbulent markets?
In this benign scenario for the year
ahead, strong consumer spending pow-
ers the American economy forward; the
economic damage from the trade wars
remains mostly confined to the manu-
facturing and agriculture sectors; and
the Federal Reserve’s shift toward easi-
er money since the start of 2018 kicks in
with its usual delayed effects.
American consumers have been the
drivers of the expansion this year, in-
creasing their spending, even as busi-
nesses display more caution. Because
consumer spending accounts for a much
larger share of the economy than busi-
ness investment does, that has pro-
pelled overall growth.
The Labor Department will release its
monthly reading on the job market on
Friday, but so far in 2019 things have
been pretty good for American workers.
The unemployment rate has now
been 4 percent or lower for more than a
year. The longer that persists, the more
employers may be forced to adjust their
RECESSION, PAGE 8
said in a conference room surrounded
by framed pictures of his company’s
cloning successes, like China’s first
cloned police dog.
Critics contend that pet cloning is in-
efficient and inhumane. It is not clear
what will happen to the resulting ani-
mals, or the impact when they mix with
the broader gene pool. The money could
be better spent on caring for existing an-
imals, the critics say.
Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist at the
University of Colorado Denver, cites the
use of cats as surrogate mothers to
produce clones, which she said was
“similar to the harm that you would im-
pose on a woman whose only purpose in
life is to be a breeding machine for man.”
“The cat has no intrinsic value,” Dr.
Pierce said. “It’s used as an object, as a
means to somebody’s end.”
To clone Garlic, scientists implanted
skin cells from Mr. Huang’s original cat
into eggs harvested from other cats. Af-
ter an electric or chemical shock, 40
cloned embryos were implanted into
four surrogate mother cats. That
produced three pregnancies, two of
which were miscarriages, said Chen
Benchi, head of Sinogene’s medical ex-
periments team.
“The harm is very small,” said Mr. Mi,
Sinogene’s chief executive.
Scientists outside China have not yet
inspected Garlic, who was born on July
21. But the company’s chief scientist, Lai
Liangxue, was an assistant professor at
the University of Missouri, and his
cloning research has been published in
the respected journals Nature and Sci-
ence.
A visit to Sinogene’s laboratory on the
outskirts of Beijing offered scenes out of
something like a feline version of “The
Handmaid’s Tale.” Garlic’s clone, a gray-
and-white kitten, snoozed with his sur-
rogate mother, a different breed from
Garlic. He later played with a toy while
three pregnant surrogate cats watched
CLONING, PAGE 8
New pools of talent
fill recruiters’ needs
ROUND ROCK, TEX.
Businesses adapt policies
and requirements in effort
to gain new employees
BY BEN CASSELMAN
When Kate Cosway completed her mas-
ter’s degree in 2014, her résumé drew
plenty of interest, but she rarely ad-
vanced far in the hiring process. She
was pretty sure she knew why: She is on
the autism spectrum and struggles in
traditional interviews.
Her luck finally turned this summer
when she landed a 12-week internship at
Dell Technologies, a position that this
month will turn into a full-time job work-
ing on automation in the company’s au-
dit department.
A year ago, Ms. Cosway probably
wouldn’t have been hired at Dell. But
last year, the Texas company started a
program aimed at hiring people with au-
tism.
For Dell, the effort is partly a re-
sponse to a growing challenge: With the
unemployment rate under 3 percent in
the company’s Austin area — and with
talent in technical roles especially
scarce — Dell needs to tap into new
pools of potential workers. The com-
pany is also trying to hire more veterans
and people looking to re-enter the work
force, often after raising children.
“This is really one of our business im-
peratives, because we know that there is
a talent crisis,” said Nitcelle B. Eman-
uels, director of diversity and inclusion
at Dell. “We need to get more creative.”
With the United States unemploy-
ment rate now flirting with a 50-year
low, companies are increasingly looking
outside the traditional labor force for
workers. They are offering flexible
hours and work-from-home options to
attract stay-at-home parents, full-time
students and recent retirees. They are
making new accommodations to open
up jobs to people with disabilities. They
are dropping educational requirements,
waiving criminal background checks
and offering training to prospective
workers who lack necessary skills.
Those policies are having an effect. In
recent months, nearly three-quarters of
people who have become newly em-
ployed have come from outside the labor
force — meaning they hadn’t even been
looking for jobs.
The share of adults who are working
is now the highest in more than a dec-
ade, after adjustments are made for the
aging population.
Policymakers are taking notice. Je-
rome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve
chair, opened a closely watched speech
in Jackson, Wyo., last month with a dis-
cussion of how the “historically strong
job market” is reaching people who
missed out on earlier stages of the re-
covery.
“We increasingly hear reports that
employers are training workers who
lack required skills, adapting jobs to the
needs of employees with family respon-
sibilities, and offering second chances to
people who need one,” Mr. Powell said.
Now that progress could be in jeop-
ardy. Evidence is growing that trade
tensions and slowing global growth are
taking a toll on the American economy;
this week, data showed that the manu-
facturing sector was contracting. The
job market has escaped significant dam-
age so far, but it is unclear how long that
can last.
Dell’s executives say that their re-
cruitment efforts are part of a long-term
strategy to diversify its work force, and
that the company won’t abandon them
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just because the unemployment rate
ticks back up.
Economists, however, said they doubt
most companies will keep such pro-
grams in place when the next recession
hits. Similar policies adopted during the
late 1990s and early 2000s largely disap-
peared after the dot-com bubble burst,
and didn’t make a comeback even dur-
ing the relatively healthy job market of
the mid-2000s.
Many economists say that is why it is
so important to keep the current expan-
sion — already the longest on record —
going for as long as possible.
“I think all these gains are incredibly
fragile, and they need to be fostered and
protected,” said Julia Pollak, a labor
economist for the employment site
ZipRecruiter.
Even now, there is evidence that the
job market has room for further im-
provement. Companies are raising pay,
but only gradually, and the inflow of
workers into the labor force has slowed
in recent months.
For workers hired during the good
times, the benefits can be enduring.
Economic research has found that once
people are drawn into the labor force,
they tend to stay in it. That may be espe-
cially true for workers with disabilities
or other barriers to employment who
thrive once given a job — but who strug-
gle to get that chance in all but the
strongest job markets.
Workers who lack required skills
are being trained, and jobs are
being adapted for employees
with family responsibilities.
Ms. Cosway, 31, remembers that
struggle well. After she earned her mas-
ter’s degree, in chemistry and chemical
engineering, her classmates quickly
found jobs. Yet she spent years going
through the dutiful routine of filling out
job applications, carefully tailoring
cover letters and setting up interviews.
And then, more often than not, there was
silence — followed, weeks or months lat-
er, by polite emails from employers who
said they had “gone in a different direc-
tion.”
“After a while, that is quite frustrat-
ing,” Ms. Cosway said. “For these roles, I
am qualified, but I need a bit more sup-
port.”
Dell’s program offered that aid. The
company worked with a local nonprofit,
the Arc of the Capital Area, to identify
nine job candidates, all on the autism
spectrum, for what amounted to a two-
week job interview. Candidates spent a
week learning how to navigate the cor-
porate world — how to draft emails, fol-
low up with colleagues and ask manag-
ers for help or feedback.
In the second week, the candidates
worked on a project that gave them a
chance to show off their technical skills
and their ability to work as a group. Ulti-
mately, six were chosen for 12-week in-
ternships with managers who had re-
ceived their own training in how to work
with adults with autism.
Ms. Cosway won an internship, help-
ing to automate Dell’s audit systems,
then made the most of the opportunity.
When she completed a project that was
meant to take all summer within weeks,
her managers gave her more ambitious
work. She was offered a permanent po-
sition before her internship ended.
Ms. Cosway said she appreciated that
Dell treated her as an asset — “I didn’t
want to be thought of as they were doing
me a favor hiring the special-needs girl,”
she said.
Brian Reaves, Dell’s chief diversity
HIRING, PAGE 8
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business
Tapping new pools of talent
HIRING, FROM PAGE 7
and inclusion officer, said the company
needed people like Ms. Cosway, and
needed to help them succeed.
“This isn’t just a ‘Hey, let’s make some
nice news because these are feel-good
stories,’” Mr. Reaves said. “This is a
strategic program.”
Corporate leaders have spoken for
years about the need to tap into new
pools of talent. But they are increasingly
backing up those words with action, re-
cruiting candidates from outside the la-
bor force and adapting corporate poli-
cies and job requirements to accommo-
date their needs.
Programs like Dell’s are still mostly
limited to white-collar positions. But ed-
ucated workers aren’t the only ones ben-
efiting from the strong job market. Data
from ZipRecruiter shows that more
companies across industries are offer-
ing on-the-job training or tuition reim-
bursement to help open up jobs to candi-
dates who might not have the necessary
skills. A rising share of companies are
advertising that their jobs are open to
people with no experience.
In places like Austin, competition for
workers is particularly intense. Jennifer
Ogas, who oversees the Austin area for
the staffing firm Adecco, said call cen-
ters — typically the bottom rung of the
career ladder — were offering as much
as $17 an hour.
Some call centers she works with are
letting people work from home, and they
are increasingly open to other ideas
they once resisted, such as flexible
schedules.
“I think everything’s on the table at
this point,” Ms. Ogas said.
Still, there are still some steps compa-
nies are reluctant to take. Relatively few,
for example, have begun offering child
care, even though parents routinely say
that benefit would make it easier for
them to work. Martha Gimbel, an econo-
mist who studied the labor market for
the job search site Indeed, said compa-
nies’ caution suggested that they didn’t
want to be saddled with expensive bene-
fits that they might have to take away in
tougher times.
Ms. Gimbel said she feared that many
of the policies that companies had
adopted in the past few years would be
short-lived when the economy cooled.
“There are these things that employ-
ers have ‘learned’ over the past year,”
she said. “They have learned that peo-
ple with criminal records can be good
employees. They have learned that
women coming back from raising chil-
dren can be good employees. They have
learned that letting employers leave 30
minutes early to pick their child up from
soccer practice will not destroy work-
place productivity.”
The American economy
just might be all right
RECESSION, FROM PAGE 7
operations in ways that favor longer-
term growth: by offering better pay and
benefits, by investing in productivity-
enhancing equipment, and by investing
in training for workers who might lack
traditional qualifications or have a
checkered work history.
If business investment drops se-
verely, it could translate into layoffs and
a weaker labor market and thus weaker
consumer spending. But there are re-
cent episodes in which business invest-
ment shrank but consumer spending
kept growing.
For example, from mid-2015 to
mid-2016, there was a huge pullback in
business investment, caused by falling
commodity prices and a slowing global
economy. Yet personal consumption ex-
penditures rose 2.7 percent in that 12-
month period, about the same rate as
now, which kept the American economy
as a whole out of recession.
Similarly, consumer spending kept
rising despite a steep pullback in busi-
ness spending after the dot-com crash in
2000 and 2001. That helped make the
2001 recession mild by historical stand-
ards — and it probably wouldn’t have
become a recession at all if the Sept. 11,
2001, terrorist attacks hadn’t taken
place.
There is plenty of reason to think, in
other words, that American consumers
will be resilient, even amid business
pessimism.
Of course, that is true only so long as
any business pullback is moderate and
temporary. And so the optimistic story
for the economy in the coming year also
relies on some measure of peace in the
trade wars.
One pattern evident since the trade
skirmishes began in earnest in early
2018 has been that businesses are able
to adapt to moderate tariffs reasonably
well.
Through some combination of relo-
cating supply chains, raising prices, tak-
ing a hit to profit margins, or forcing
suppliers to take a hit to profits, they
manage to keep the direct economic ef-
fect manageable.
The risk for the future is less about a
15 percent tariff on this or that particular
imported good, but rather a roiling se-
ries of open-ended trade wars on multi-
ple fronts that could trigger a break-
down in international commerce.
But the good news is that the trade
war has so far had the most direct im-
pact on manufacturing and commodity-
related industries, which are a moderate
share of the overall economy. As of Au-
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Kate Cosway is set to start a full-time job this month with Dell Technologies after going through a new company program for people on the autism spectrum.
“The eternal question,” Ms. Gimbel
continued, “is just are they going to re-
member this when the next recession
hits, or is all of this progress going to be
lost?”
For now, though, some workers are
taking the strong job market as an op-
portunity not just to get back to work,
but to find a more stable career.
Selerina Rodriguez used to work
three low-paying jobs to cover living ex-
penses, pay college tuition and set aside
money for emergencies. Then last year,
she stopped working entirely to help
gust, only 8.5 percent of American jobs
were in manufacturing.
In effect, the shift of the United States
economy toward service industries over
the last two generations may have left it
better able to endure a global trade and
manufacturing slowdown, particularly
compared with export-reliant countries
like China and Germany.
Finally, there is the Federal Reserve.
While lots of attention is being paid to
whether or how much the Fed will cut
interest rates in the immediate future,
the reality is that monetary policy af-
fects the economy with long lags. More-
over, it’s not just interest rate adjust-
ments that matter — it is how markets
perceive the future direction of policy
that affects how hard or easy it will be
for businesses and consumers to get
money.
The shift of the United States
economy toward service
industries may have left it better
able to endure a slowdown.
So, for example, as the Fed raised its
target for interest rates in 2017 and 2018,
the cost for businesses seeking to bor-
row money rose even faster. The effec-
tive rate on BBB-rated corporate debt —
a proxy for borrowing costs of moder-
ately risky companies — rose to 4.8 per-
cent in December 2018 from 3.4 percent
in September 2017.
One way of interpreting the slowdown
in business spending this year is as a de-
layed result of that higher cost of corpo-
rate borrowing percolating through the
economy.
But in early 2019, the Fed signaled a
slower path of future interest rate in-
creases, and this summer it began cut-
ting rates. That has driven the rate on
BBB-rated bonds down to 3.3 percent.
Perhaps the reverse will happen as
those lower rates percolate through the
economy and companies find it easier to
justify new projects.
The same applies to home buying, an-
other key economic driver. Mortgage
rates spiked in 2018 and have plum-
meted lately, which could bode well for
housing in the months ahead.
There are a lot of risks out there, and it
makes sense for chief executives and or-
dinary consumers to be wary of what
the future could hold.
But for now, a gloomy economic fu-
ture remains a far-from-certain possibil-
ity.
care for her brother, who was ill, and his
children.
Now Ms. Rodriguez, 23, is looking to
get back into the labor force, but this
time on her own terms. She enrolled in a
program at Austin Community College
that teaches students how to install and
maintain heating and cooling units.
Within three months, she should have
certification as a technician — a job that
pays around $45,000 a year in the area,
according to government statistics.
“I didn’t want to work three jobs
again,” she said.
Climate change as a banking mission
PARIS
European nominee
promises environment
will be on her agenda
BY LIZ ALDERMAN
As the head of the International Mone-
tary Fund, Christine Lagarde frequently
warned of being “roasted, toasted, fried
and grilled” if the world failed to act on
climate change.
Now, she is pledging to make the Eu-
ropean Central Bank more conscious of
the environment if she is confirmed as
its new president.
“Climate change is one of the most
pressing global challenges facing soci-
ety today,” she told the European Parlia-
ment this week. “My personal view is
that any institution has to actually have
climate change risk and protection of
the environment at the core of their un-
derstanding of their mission,” Ms. La-
garde said.
Her remarks came during a confirma-
tion hearing on Wednesday in which
lawmakers questioned whether she
would follow her predecessor, Mario
Draghi, and do “whatever it takes” to
protect the euro at a time when the Eu-
ropean economy is cooling.
If confirmed, she would take over one
of the world’s most powerful monetary
institutions in November. It is likely to
be a time of economic uncertainty, as
growth in the eurozone slows, and cen-
tral banks in the United States, Japan
and Europe wind down stimulus meas-
ures.
Ms. Lagarde, a lawyer, urged Euro-
pean governments to coordinate more
on fiscal policy to stimulate Europe’s
economy. She promised to review tools
the bank has used to lift growth, includ-
ing negative interest rates and large-
scale bond purchases.
But members of the European Parlia-
ment — where political parties with an
environmental platform made signifi-
cant gains in elections this summer —
also peppered her repeatedly with que-
ries about the need to more effectively
integrate fighting climate change into
the bank’s mandate.
“The primary mandate is price stabil-
ity,” she said, answering to members of
the economic and monetary affairs com-
mittee. “But it has to be embedded that
climate change and environmental risk
are mission critical.”
Just a few years ago, her remarks
might have sounded out of line. Central
bankers barely mentioned a warming
On a recent evening, Ms. Rodriguez
sat attentively as Roland Arrisola, vice
president of operations at Stan’s Heat-
ing & Cooling, explained the opportuni-
ties available at his company.
Ms. Rodriguez had questions: Would
the company pay for training so that she
could move up in the ranks? Would it
work around her class schedule if she
wanted to complete her bachelor’s de-
gree?
Mr. Arrisola said the company was
happy to be flexible.
“If I can find someone who’s smiling,
“Climate change is one of the most pressing global challenges facing society today,” Christine Lagarde said this week.
climate in their assessments of the econ-
omy or of the global financial system.
But regulators around the world are
now expressing concern that markets
aren’t adequately pricing in the risks.
Over 30 central banks and regulators
— not including those in the United
States and Brazil — have joined forces in
a group called the Network for Greening
the Financial System to focus on the po-
tential financial consequences of global
warming. Founded by the Bank of Eng-
land governor Mark Carney — who first
warned of the economic damage of cli-
mate change in a stark 2015 speech —
the group meets regularly to assess
risks.
And many of the world’s biggest com-
panies, including Silicon Valley tech
companies and large European banks,
are preparing for the possibility that cli-
mate change could substantially hit
their profitability within the next five
years, according to a recent analysis of
corporate disclosures.
The European Central Bank has also
stepped up scrutiny. The bank recently
warned that “more frequent and severe
disasters” would hit the banking and in-
surance industries, including the ero-
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
ILANA PANICH-LINSMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
who’s a people person, I’ll teach them
the rest,” he said.
During an hourlong presentation, stu-
dents quizzed Mr. Arrisola about bene-
fits, opportunities for promotions and
his company’s willingness to hire older
workers (the oldest student in the class
is 76) and people with a criminal record.
Mr. Arrisola left little doubt who had
the advantage.
“We’ve got a less than 3 percent un-
employment rate,” he told the students.
“Right now, we’re looking at things a lit-
tle different.”
sion of the value of collateral and assets
held by banks, and insurance liabilities
related to weather-linked catastrophes.
An unexpectedly rapid shift by invest-
ors away from fossil fuels could also
weaken bank balance sheets and de-
stabilize the financial system, the bank
added.
But the bank itself has also faced criti-
cism. Environmental organizations
have accused the European Central
Bank of buying so-called dirty bonds
from companies in industries that are
said to be polluting, including cement
makers and auto manufacturers, as part
of its program to increase liquidity in the
eurozone economy.
Asked whether she would shift the
European Central Bank’s strategy to fo-
cus on buying bonds of nonpolluting
companies, Ms. Lagarde was noncom-
mittal but promised to review the situa-
tion.
She added that the bank had already
bought so-called green bonds that are
earmarked for climate and environmen-
tal projects, but that there weren’t many
available because the market was still
being developed.
Still, she said, if the central bank sig-
..
China shows
its cloning
power with
its first cat
CLONING, FROM PAGE 7
from cages. The new Garlic is scheduled
to stay at Sinogene’s laboratory for an-
other month for observation before he is
sent to Mr. Huang.
Elsewhere, two lab workers in blue
coats were focused on testing the pater-
nity of horses. Tanks of liquid nitrogen
held the cells of pets.
Mr. Huang was initially put off by the
roughly $35,000 price. But in a tele-
phone interview from the eastern city of
Wenzhou, he said getting Garlic back
was worth more than that, even though
his parents disapproved. The original
Garlic died in January from a urinary
tract infection at age 2.
“There is a market demand.
So what’s the problem?”
On the day Garlic died and was bur-
ied, Mr. Huang exhumed Garlic’s
corpse, wrapped it carefully and placed
it in his refrigerator. He then waited for a
Sinogene employee to arrive from Bei-
jing to extract skin cells from Garlic and
bank them. Mr. Huang decided about a
month after Garlic’s death to go through
with the cloning.
In his first meeting with the new Gar-
lic in August, Mr. Huang found that
cloning had not produced an exact copy
of his former pet. The clone is missing a
patch of black fur that graced Garlic’s
chin. Sinogene said that clones might
show slight differences in fur or eye col-
or and that an outside firm had proved
the DNA matched.
“If I tell you I wasn’t disappointed,
then I would be lying to you,” Mr. Huang
said. “But I’m also willing to accept that
there are certain situations in which
there are limitations to the technology.”
At a news conference last month to
unveil the cloned Garlic, Mr. Mi was
quoted as saying that he was consider-
ing using artificial intelligence to trans-
plant the memories of the original pet to
the cloned one. When asked about that
statement, Mr. Mi said it was not some-
thing that his company would embark
on but added that it was a possibility
that the technology could provide.
“It’s a way to imagine the future,” he
said.
Yiwei Wang and Elsie Chen contributed
research.
JOHN THYS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
nals an interest in those assets, it could
encourage a more rapid expansion of
the market.
She urged the European Parliament
to swiftly wrap up a project to create a
unified classification system on what
may be considered environmentally
sustainable investments. The European
Central Bank could be open to channel-
ing more of its bond purchases toward
economic sectors that meet such cri-
teria, she said.
“Lagarde could make the E.C.B.
greener,” Sven Giegold, a German and
co-leader of the Green Party members
in the European Parliament, said in a
statement after the hearing. “Lagarde
will put climate risks at the center of fi-
nancial stability. Lagarde has under-
stood, that economics and ecology must
go together.”
“We will support Lagarde as she
makes the E.C.B. a lever for climate pro-
tection,” said Mr. Giegold, who sits on
the economics committee. “There is no
such thing as a stable financial system
amid collapse of the climate.”
Jack Ewing contributed reporting from
Frankfurt.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019 | 9

Opinion
The historical legacy
of ‘priest weds nun’
My parents Peter Manseau
may not get
to see the
transform- It made news around the world when
ation of my parents married 50 years ago this
summer. They weren’t remotely fa-
Catholicism mous. Their wedding was no lavish
they affair. The surprising interest in their
dreamed of nuptials can be summed up by a head-
line that ran in a Vancouver newspaper,
when they thousands of miles from the ceremony
married 50 in my grandmother’s modest Boston
years ago, home: “Priest Weds Nun.”
The headline wasn’t precisely accu-
but some rate. My mother was a teaching sister
changes are for a decade, but she had left her order
underway. the previous summer; my father by
then had been a priest for eight years.
On the day of the wedding, he was on a
leave of absence from his nearby parish
and, according to canon law, was auto-
matically excommunicated for marry-
ing without first receiving dispensation
from the obligations of his ordination.
As he told reporters waiting outside, he
knew that his decision broke the rules of
the church, but he had done so for its
benefit.
“We believe in the goals of the church
and love the church very deeply,” he
said. “We have committed our lives to
the church, and believe we are doing
this for the good of the church.”
For him, to marry publicly as a Catho-
lic priest was an act of protest meant to
nudge Rome toward reconsideration of
clerical celibacy and the church’s view
of sexuality generally — a reconsid-
eration he had come to regard as inev-
itable after the reforms of the Second
Vatican Council earlier in the 1960s. “I
really felt that in order to be true to the
Gospel,” he said, “I should enter into the
deepest relationship possible for the
church.” By this he meant not his celi-
bate religious vocation but marriage,
family and the complicated relation-
ships they would bring.
For my mother, though she shared
Nun Dropout”; “Former Priest Weds
Ex-Nun”; “Priest Will Wed Nun He Met
on Protestant College Campus.” A few
similar news items had appeared in
previous years, and many more fol-
lowed in the years to come.
Stories about the weddings of priests
and nuns were usually presented as
singular curiosities, but in hindsight
their real significance was not in their
novelty but in their repetition. Un-
beknownst to them, my parents were at
the beginning of an exodus, a rejection
of the established Catholic order from
which the church has yet to recover.
After decades of growth, the ranks of
Catholic clergy in the United States
began to decline around the time of my
parents’ wedding. Between 1969 and
today, the number of priests has fallen
nearly 40 percent; the number of nuns
is down roughly three-quarters. Those
who left did so for all kinds of reasons:
ambition for secular careers, a longing
to start families, just a yearning for
another way of life. Yet entwined with
those practical desires was the fact that
many among my parents’ generation of
priests and nuns recognized the
church’s fault lines — its tendency
toward secrecy, its culture of obedience,
its history of abetting abuse — long
before outsiders learned the extent of
the problem.
As adolescents, both of my parents
endured unwanted physical contact
from priests who were supposed to be
their spiritual mentors, the very men
who guided them into religious life. My
mother’s memories of the convent also
include being required to use a medi-
eval self-flagellation device she and the
other sisters called “the discipline.” My
father’s classmates in seminary includ-
ed several of the most notorious of
Boston’s pedophile clergy. Is it any
wonder they began to ask to what else
their faith might aspire?
My parents’ anniversary is an admit-
tedly arbitrary date from which to look
back over a half-century of Catholic SAM'S MYTH

these sentiments, their wedding day
was more about becoming a bride than
a modern-day Martin Luther. “Our
plans,” she said in one news report, “are
simply to live happily ever after.”
The headlines may not have captured
the nuance, but they conveyed the
essence: My parents’ marriage was
newsworthy because it upset expecta-
tions. As a rule, those who make reli-
gious vows in the Catholic Church do
not also make wedding vows. To news-
paper editors, “Priest Weds Nun” was
an irresistible ecclesiastical spin on
“Man Bites Dog,” and the story itself
turned out to be evergreen, as reporters
continued for years to write about their
life together, including in this newspa-
per.
My parents weren’t the only newly-
weds to receive this kind of attention.
Throughout 1969, couples in Texas, New
York and California made headlines of
their own: “Dissenting Priest Weds
history, but it happens also to coincide
with a moment of widespread re-evalu-
ation of the place of priests and nuns in
the broader culture, in the United States
and around the world.
In the cover story of the June issue of
The Atlantic, another former Boston
priest, the writer James Carroll, called
for the abolition of the priesthood, blam-
ing its culture of clericalism as the root
cause of the church’s continuing crisis.
On the latest season of the Amazon/
BBC Series “Fleabag,” a fraught affair
between a sassy atheist and a “hot
priest,” as the internet calls him, leads
to perhaps the frankest conversations
about celibacy ever in a romantic com-
edy. The spring announcement that the
gothic horror film “The Nun” would
have a sequel suggests that the word
alone is considered sufficiently terror-
inducing for not one but two big-screen
scream fests, while a recent social
experiment called Nuns and Nones put
decidedly unfrightening elderly Catho-
lic sisters in conversation with reli-
giously unaffiliated millennials who
admire the former’s dedication to activ-
ism.
Viewed side by side, these varied
examinations and representations
reveal a deep ambivalence: The priest
might be cast as the key to the church’s
failings or an answer to secular pray-
ers; the nun is a figure fit for night-
mares but also a potential role model for
those seeking order in their lives.
Popular culture remains haunted by
priests and nuns in a way that its audi-
ences’ adherence to, indifference to-
ward or rejection of Catholic doctrines
does not fully explain. Priests and nuns
remain, for many, symbols simulta-
neously of what was and what might be.
Their symbolic significance endures
even as their numbers fall and the
meaning of their vocations, to Catholics
and non-Catholics alike, continues to
shift.
This re-evaluation is not just an
American phenomenon. When South
American church leaders gather in
Rome this fall for the Synod of Bishops
for the Pan-Amazon Region, they will
consider allowing married men to be
ordained as priests to address the short-
age of Catholic clergy in an area home to
tens of millions of people. While some
wonder whether this might eventually
provide a template the Vatican could
follow elsewhere, in other places where
the church is growing as the ranks of
clergy fall, would-be married priests are
not waiting for official sanction. The
priests of Kenya’s breakaway Renewed
Universal Catholic Church, for example,
are guided by a desire to keep their
Catholic identity without forgoing
marriage or resorting to the “secret
families” they say many supposed
celibates maintain.
Catholic sisters around the world are
also now being seen in a new light.
Scandals like those involving the abuse
committed at the Magdalene laundries
in Ireland on the one hand, and, on the
other, the abuse suffered by nuns at the
hands of priests and bishops recently
acknowledged by Pope Francis, have
allowed figures too often caricatured as
parochial school despots or cardboard
saints to be more fully understood.
It is too soon to know what such
movements and revelations will mean
to the future of the faith. In the long
history of the Catholic Church, there is
ample precedent both for the opening of
theological loopholes to address practi-
cal concerns and for independent
churches attempting to continue their
ministry in the style, if not with the
blessing, of Rome. Yet it is clear that in
MANSEAU, PAGE 11

Want to stop right-wing populists? Then don’t do this

A flimsy Mattia Ferraresi
coalition
has sidelined
Italy’s There’s a number of things any savvy
far-right politician who cares about liberal de-
mocracy should avoid: feeding the idea
populist, that the popular will is generally disre-
Matteo garded and political power is managed
Salvini. by unelected elites in smoked-filled
rooms; forming politically incoherent
He will seek alliances with the sole purpose of ex-
revenge. cluding populists; and fueling the per-
ception that the most important deci-
sions of a country are taken outside of
its borders.
Italy’s political class is utterly disre-
garding all this. To oust illiberal dema-
gogues from power, its mainstream
parties are resorting to the same tactics
and management styles that allowed
populism to flourish, planting the seeds
for its return. The country’s new gov-
ernment, which was all but confirmed
on Tuesday, provides a cautionary tale
for everyone engaged in combating the
rise of right-wing populists.
On Aug. 8, Matteo Salvini, the far-
right leader of the League and deputy
prime minister, daringly prompted a
government crisis, in the hope that the
ensuing snap election would grant him
“full powers.” In doing so, he put an end
to the weak alliance with the anti-cor-
ruption Five Star Movement that ran
the country for 14 months. The first fully
populist government coalition in the
West collapsed under the unrestrained
ambition of its most popular leader.
Traditional political forces — anxious
to deny the League, which in May’s
elections for the European Parliament
became the country’s largest party, the
chance to campaign — coalesced to
avoid elections. Embracing the old
enemy-of-my-enemy philosophy, the
Democratic Party and the Five Star
Movement forgot about their suppos-
edly insurmountable disagreements
and conceived of an alliance based
solely on sidelining Mr. Salvini.
It was a textbook example of old-
school political maneuvering, and a
remarkable turnabout. The two parties
previously viewed each other with
loathing: Each considered the other not
just a political adversary but a morally
bankrupt and deeply divisive force.
They traded accusations of being Mafio-
si, subversive, hatemongers, Russian
trolls, flat-earthers and everything in
between.
Last year, Matteo Renzi, the former
leader of the Democratic Party, swore
never to be part of a government with
the Five Star Movement. Now he is
eager to strike a deal. The Five Star
Movement, whose ratings plummeted
while in government, is ready to do
pretty much anything to stay in power.
Those involved didn’t even pretend to
engage in a debate about policy and
ideas: They do not have a common
vision to tackle Italy’s structural prob-
lems. Instead they acted in the most
pragmatic way to seize the opportunity
created by Mr. Salvini’s strategic mis-
step. They’ve bought time, but at what
cost?
The political ramifications go well
beyond Italy. The new unelected gov-
ernment was blessed by the European
Union, and the conversations last
month on the side of the Group of 7
summit in Biarritz, France, were deci-
sive in shaping it. One of the first lead-
ers to publicly rejoice was the bloc’s
budget commissioner, Günther Oet-
tinger, who despite the political neutral-
ity imposed by his role welcomed the
news with enthusiasm. In an interview
on German radio, he said the commis-
sion would “do everything to make the
job of the new Italian government easi-
er when it takes office and so to reward
A banner reading “Salvini get out of Genoa” during an anti-fascist and anti-racist
demonstration against the far-right populist Matteo Salvini in Genoa, Italy, in April.
it.” The president of the European Com-
mission, Jean Claude Juncker, promptly
sent his congratulations; Peter Alt-
maier, the German economy minister,
described it as “good news from Italy.”
The financial markets relished a sup-
posedly more credible, pro-European
government. Even the Vatican sup-
ported it.
Giuseppe Conte, the resigning prime
minister who is also tasked to lead the
new Salvini-free government, instantly
gained international credibility and
personal gravitas, having spent the past
14 months as a pocket-squared puppet
controlled by the populist coalition. In a
matter of few days, Mr. Conte moved
from Mr. Salvini’s useful idiot to Win-
ston Churchill’s political heir.
President Trump’s endorsement of
Mr. Conte wrapped the whole story in
an additional layer of irony. Mr. Salvini’s
SIMONE ARVEDA/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK
main international sponsor — Mr.
Trump reportedly told him back in 2016,
“Matteo, I hope you become prime
minister of Italy soon” — supported the
leader who eventually betrayed him.
And democrats now awkwardly stand
together with a prime minister warmly
approved by the populist in chief.
The goal of kicking Mr. Salvini out of
power apparently justified every
means. This may sound Machiavellian,
but Niccolò Machiavelli also argued
that men need to be either well treated
or crushed: Lighter injuries generate
revenge, and eventually backlash. “The
injury that is to be done to a man ought
to be of such a kind that one does not
stand in fear of revenge,” Machiavelli
wrote in “The Prince.” Mr. Salvini is
politically injured, but not crushed. He
will seek revenge. And he may be em-
powered by the haphazard political
coalition that trampled democratic
practices under the pretext of saving
democracy.
The enraged leader of the League
now thunders against “the robbery of
democracy” and has called his support-
ers to a rally in mid-October to protest a
government that “was born in Brus-
sels” to “exclude the first political party
of Italy from the government,” as he
said in one of his customarily direct
videos. He may have a point.
To be sure, removing Mr. Salvini from
the government has short-term bene-
fits. The policies of the government he
virtually controlled did nothing to bol-
ster Italy’s stagnating economy nor to
ease unemployment, which stands at
almost 10 percent. What Mr. Salvini did
instead was to pollute the public dis-
course with xenophobic rhetoric and
anti-immigration policies predicated on
contempt for migrants, promoting an
“Italians first” mentality that re-
awakened racist instincts that had been
mostly dormant.
And yet his opponents should be
aware of the unintended consequences
of their actions. Years ago, Cas Mudde, a
leading scholar of populism, warned
about using the politics of fear to stig-
matize euro-skeptic leaders and their
voters — and to justify anti-democratic
measures to counter them. Mr. Mudde
predicted that in time it would erode not
only the European integration process
but also “the democratic basis of its
member states.” Italy’s umpteenth
transition to a new unelected govern-
ment proves his point. The flimsy coali-
tion is likely to be just a stopgap before
another populist wave, which may
manifest itself in Mr. Salvini’s comeback
or in another form we’ve yet to imagine.
MATTIA FERRARESI is a writer for the
Italian newspaper Il Foglio and a Nie-
man fellow at Harvard.
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10 | FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

opinion

A war with China could begin over a blackout

minds of the key decision makers” on would do, including the United States interfere with Taiwan’s democracy in
Taiwan, he said. itself. A 1979 American law suggests the run-up to crucial elections in Janu-
A.G. SULZBERGER, Publisher
The main worry of military planners that the United States is committed to ary.
DEAN BAQUET, Executive Editor MARK THOMPSON, Chief Executive Officer
here isn’t so much a full-scale amphibi- Taiwan’s defense, but the law is ambigu- “China is trying to discredit and
JOSEPH KAHN, Managing Editor STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON, President, International
ous invasion. Rather, they fear the ous about just how committed. dismantle Taiwan democracy,” said
SUZANNE DALEY, Associate Editor JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DEMARTA, Senior V.P., Global Advertising
mainland sowing chaos and disrupting China has been vastly improving its Ketty Chen of the Taiwan Foundation
the economy as a way of trying to bring military capabilities, including its abil- for Democracy.
JAMES BENNET, Editorial Page Editor
CHARLOTTE GORDON, V.P., International Consumer Marketing
HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS, V.P., International Circulation
Nicholas Kristof Taiwan to heel. ity to strike aircraft carriers. I’m told A war between the United States and
JAMES DAO, Deputy Editorial Page Editor
Hence the concern about a cyber- that in 18 of the last 18 Pentagon war China over Taiwan would be a cata-
HELENA PHUA, Executive V.P., Asia-Pacific
KATHLEEN KINGSBURY, Deputy Editorial Page Editor
attack that would take out Taipei’s games involving China in the Taiwan clysm. But it would also be a catastro-
SUZANNE YVERNÈS, International Chief Financial Officer
electric grid. Or sabotage of the under- Strait, the U.S. lost. Still, that can be phe if Taiwan were blockaded or
water cables that bring data and inter- misleading, because the war games are squashed into submission, because it is
TAIPEI, TAIWAN If the United States gets net to Taiwan. Or interference in the much more limited than real life would a pillar of technology (the source of
embroiled in a war with China, it may South China Sea with tankers carrying be. For example, the United States could more than 90 percent of the most ad-
begin with the lights going out here in oil to Taiwan. interrupt China’s oil supplies from the vanced computer chips), a pillar of
Taipei. Tensions are rising across the Tensions Wu added that gulf. democracy and an “unsinkable aircraft
HOW TO END GERRYMANDERING Taiwan Strait, and there’s a growing
concern among some security experts
are rising
China could also step
up military pressure
Beijing has also been nibbling away at
Taiwan’s international presence, block-
carrier” standing in the way of any
Chinese projection into the Pacific or
that Chinese President Xi Jinping might across the by increasing patrols ing it from participating in the World toward, say, Okinawa.
Three state judges on a North Carolina trial court just
The U.S. act recklessly toward Taiwan in the next Taiwan in the area, or by Health Organization and other United There are steps the U.S. can take that
did what a majority on the United States Supreme Strait.
few years, drawing the United States holding military Nations agencies, and even barring might reduce the risk of a crisis. Wash-
Supreme Court said was impossible only a few months ago — into a conflict. exercises. Even a Taiwanese from taking tours of the U.N. ington can emphasize to Beijing that
Court’s apply well-established legal standards to strike down Xi’s hard line toward Hong Kong is partial blockade and Taiwanese journalists from getting Taiwan will not take any unilateral
conservatives some of the most egregious partisan gerrymanders in alarming Taiwanese and further reduc- would have a substantial impact if it U.N. accreditation. action, such as declaring itself an inde-
ing the chance, if there ever was any, of a raised insurance costs and damaged President Trump has generally been pendent country — unless China makes
said gerry- the country.
peaceful unification of China. China confidence in the island’s future. more supportive of Taiwan than his a military move, in which case it will do
mandering The state court judges’ 357-page ruling applies to the seems to be abandoning its effort to win Government officials in Taiwan were predecessors, and that’s worked well so so at once.
was not a North Carolina state legislature, the General Assembly, hearts and minds on Taiwan, and it has cagey about how they would respond to far. But this has to be done very care- The United States can also caution
which now has two weeks to come up with new, fairer steadily improved military capabilities provocations in cyber and other realms, fully. While Taiwan and China may Beijing that if the electricity goes out in
matter for — thus prompting the fear that Xi might but Wu said that military officials “are know each other’s red lines, I worry that Taipei, the same may happen in Shang-
maps for state legislative districts. It also sends a
courts, leaving eventually use them. planning for defense and offense.” American politicians may try to help hai, and that if Taiwan-bound ships are
broader message to the justices in Washington, and to “We are very concerned,” Taiwan’s Another senior government official said Taiwan in ways that increase the risk of harassed, they may be reflagged as
the job of
state judges everywhere: See? Protecting democracy foreign minister, Joseph Wu, told me. He that retaliation could include airstrikes triggering a crisis. Nothing can be so American vessels.
protecting from self-interested, power-hungry politicians isn’t so said that one concern was that a slowing on China’s Fujian Province. dangerous as a well-meaning American. But that means thinking through
democratic hard after all. economy and other troubles in China That fits with the belief that Taiwan Aside from its efforts to isolate Tai- what might happen in the next few
self-rule to might lead Xi to make trouble for Tai- would promptly escalate to bring the wan, China also appears to be borrow- years and making clear to Xi that he will
The lawsuit decided on Tuesday was the latest in a wan as a distraction. “This is the sce- war to China. If that happens, no one ing from the Russian playbook and pay an extremely high price if he
state judges. long line of litigation against North Carolina’s legislative nario that is constantly playing in the knows quite what the United States using Facebook and other platforms to messes with Taiwan’s freedom.
maps, which the state’s Republican lawmakers have
been unilaterally hacking up for the last eight years,
then stitching back together to resemble not the state
as it is (a hotly contested battleground) but as they
would like it to be (a towering, impregnable Republican
fortress).
The existing maps were so effective that they helped
entrench Republican majorities even when Democrats
won more votes statewide. In 2018, Republican candi-
dates for North Carolina’s House of Representatives
won less than 50 percent of the two-party statewide
vote, but walked away with 65 seats to the Democrats’
55. Republican candidates for the State Senate also won
a minority of the popular vote, and still took 29 of 50
seats.
This kind of abuse of the democratic process is pre-
cisely what courts are designed to fix. But when North
Carolina voters begged the United States Supreme
Court for relief, arguing that they had been written out
of the political process by the very people who were
supposed to serve them, the five conservative justices
turned their backs. The court could do nothing, Chief
Justice John Roberts wrote in a demoralizing opinion in
June — not because the Republicans are innocent, but
because the judiciary can’t hold them accountable for
what are, in essence, political crimes.
On Tuesday afternoon, the North Carolina judges —
two Democrats and a Republican — agreed unani-
mously that they didn’t need the federal Constitution to
vindicate Americans’ basic democratic rights. They
could rely on their state’s own Constitution, which guar-
antees, among other things, free elections, equal protec-
tion and freedom of speech and assembly — all of which
they said the Republicans’ maps violated.
The judges offered a simple and clear rejoinder to
Chief Justice Roberts’s warning that judges would find LI GANG/XINHUA, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

it impossible to avoid getting caught up in the partisan President Xi Jinping reviewed the Chinese military’s fleet in the South China Sea last year.
bickering over legislative mapmaking. “It is not the
province of the court to pick political winners or losers,”
they wrote. “It is, however, most certainly the province
of the court to ensure that ‘future elections’ in the
‘courts of public opinion’ are ones that freely and truth-
fully express the will of the people. All elections shall be
free — without that guarantee, there is no remedy or
‘This storm is a beast,’ then silence
relief at all.” creasingly contaminated by rising sea the larger more populated islands in the had seen homes built for five become
Erica Moiah James levels. north of the country, just a hundred refuge for 50. We furiously texted
This is the central problem of partisan gerrymander- We watch as the governments of miles away. I can feel the occasional friends and family to make sure they
ing, and one that the conservative justices missed, or small island states like our own, tied to bands of rain and breeze, while I hear were O.K. and we felt helpless.
refused to see: When foxes guard henhouses, the hens multinational agreements, are forced to reports of 200-, 185-, 165-mile-per-hour As landlines failed and batteries died,
invariably disappear. MIAMI Whoever thought Dorian might make decisions that are not in the best winds. I think, what will be left? the footage stopped. Communications
be a good name for a hurricane has interests of the people they serve, while This is no longer unusual for Caribbe- were suddenly interrupted. The last
The North Carolina judges, in contrast, aimed their some explaining to do. In the Bahamas, our electrical grid fails and we are made an people. As I shared video footage text I received was from a friend at 3:45
sights squarely at the foxes — documenting how the when we have to deal with difficulties, more dependent on fossil fuels rather with friends in Puerto Rico, they re- a.m. on Monday: “This storm is a beast
Republican maps had been drawn intentionally to favor we try to make the saddest people than renewable energy. “Too expen- marked, “I know the sound of that — but we are hanging in there.” There
Republicans at the expense of Democrats, and noting among us laugh, knowing that they will sive,” they say. “For whom?” we reply. wind.” Is this what it means to be inti- has been no word since.
return the favor in our hour of need. “Is cost the only consideration?” mately connected by horror? Is there a On Wednesday those of us on other
that the lawmakers had offered no good alternative So when Hurricane Dorian hit land in We feel the sunshine all around us but new creolized language and aesthetic islands and cities barely touched by
explanation for the extreme bias. the Abaco Islands in the northern Baha- are prevented from employing it freely we have now become fluent in by de- Hurricane Dorian began posting pic-
Partisan gerrymandering has a long and bipartisan mas a few days ago and the horrific and legally to meet our energy needs. It fault? We are island people. Where do tures on Facebook and Instagram of
history, and Republicans today see themselves as get- pictures started streaming in on social can be illegal to take your house off the you go? We live on family members disappeared into the
media, among the videos shared early grid and go completely solar on your The Bahamas slim margins. silence of dead batteries and broken
ting revenge for years in which Democrats were in
on was what appeared to be a woman own, but who knows how often the On Day 2, the services. “Have you seen them?” “Are
power and drew the maps in their own favor. But map- running through the rain and wind to government enforces this. The energy
has a tiny footage became less they O.K.?” Beautiful faces streamed
making technology has advanced strikingly in the past safety, only to have her wig blow from from solar panels becomes an enemy carbon intense. We had across social media. I was unable to look
two decades, giving politicians an unprecedented de- her head. The punch line wasn’t the wig instead of a resource. footprint but watched light poles for very long, overcome with emotion
taking flight. It was that she doubled The United Nations recently released carries the snap quickly and the and deathly afraid of recognition.
gree of control in carving up the citizenry for their own
back to retrieve it, rather than continue a damning climate report that stated burden of grid fail. We had seen So we mobilize. We call on the United
benefit. to safety, expanding the list of life’s unless immediate dramatic changes being ground the sea break its States to pass the Green New Deal. We
That’s why Justice Elena Kagan pointed to partisan essentials. Many people might read this take place across the world, places like zero for boundaries, joining donate to groups like HeadKnowles. We
gerrymanders as an existential threat to democratic as a highly inappropriate moment for the Bahamas will be the first to be con- global the rising canals to consider how to gather volunteers and
self-rule. In her dissent from the Supreme Court’s deci- such frivolity, but for Bahamians it was sumed by the ocean. There was no reclaim the earth. I Bahamian mental health workers to
perfect timing. discussion of this apocalyptic report in
warming. had watched as deploy in the coming days. But we need
sion in June, she explained that gerrymandered maps What we have seen in the past few the country, nothing from the prime friends documented everyone’s help and kindness. We need
“make bipartisanship and pragmatic compromise politi- days has been sublime in its horror. It minister. the strange brown tarps, tents, sleeping bags, batteries,
cally difficult or impossible; and drive voters away from has estranged us from the humor that Perhaps it was too much to discuss and gray water rising onto their flashlights, heavy equipment, genera-
an ever more dysfunctional political process.” Justice keeps us going despite the increasing one’s own death sentence. Or perhaps porches, over car roofs and into their tors, chain saws, electrical workers and
fragility of life in the breathtakingly we already knew. Because after all, houses. We had shared images of fam- people capable of rebuilding communi-
Kagan asked, “Is this how American democracy is sup- beautiful place we call home. It has a there are times like this, when hurri- ilies who had done all the recommended cation towers and homes. We need
posed to work?” tiny carbon footprint but carries the canes named Dorian — a name forever preparations become trapped, praying nonperishable food, wipes, adult and
Tuesday’s decision in North Carolina was right to burden of being ground zero for our associated with horror and the undying to be rescued. children’s diapers, bug spray.
answer that question in the negative, and to claim a climate crisis. — ferociously bear down on the places We had seen inside homes where the We need lots of things, but please —
We Bahamians listen to climate de- and the people we love, providing a detritus bobbed in waters 10 feet high no tossed paper towels. This is not
space for state courts elsewhere to intervene when niers in rich countries who are oblivious foretaste of what is to come when the and unreal images of sharks and large funny. Though gracious, Bahamians
partisan gerrymandering has effectively silenced huge or indifferent to those who bear the waters will not recede. fish swimming outside in the deluge, may toss them back to you.
portions of the electorate. But state courts shouldn’t weight for their wonderful life. Mean- It is difficult to summon humor now. even as the water continued to rise 15
have been saddled with this job in the first place. As while, the water rises from the ground in We are an archipelago of 700 islands feet, then 20 feet. We had seen roofs ERICA MOIAH JAMES, an assistant profes-
our yards because the water table is so linked to a global archipelago of small blowing off like sheets of paper, cars and sor in the department of art and art
Justice Kagan wrote in June: “What do those courts
high during high tide, and plants we communities of Bahamians across the boats upended like toys. We had history at the University of Miami, was
know that this court does not? If they can develop and once depended upon no longer grow. We world. I now live in what is often re- cheered as people swam to safety and the founding director and chief curator
apply neutral and manageable standards to identify experience too much rain or too little ferred to as the northern Caribbean city cried upon hearing reports of others of the National Art Gallery of the Baha-
unconstitutional gerrymanders, why couldn’t we?” rain, and fresh water supplies are in- of Miami. The storm assaulted two of who had tried to escape and failed. We mas.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019 | 11

opinion

Boris Johnson loses to democracy When priest

James Butler
LONDON Boris Johnson has begun with
defeat. Legislators voted on Tuesday to
seize control of Parliament, alarmed by
the prime minister’s insistence that he
will take Britain out of the European
Union on Oct. 31, even if no deal with the
bloc has been reached. On Wednesday,
Parliament took steps to tie his hands,
then frustrated his call, at least for the
time being, for an election on Oct. 15.
It has been a week of high political
drama in Westminster — and the culmi-
nation of over two years of intricate
tactical maneuvers and procedural
minutiae that have marked British
politics. Time is so short because Mr.
Johnson last Wednesday “prorogued”
parliament, mothballing it for five
weeks from next week: If the bill fails to
become law by that point, it automati-
cally falls. The unusual length of the
suspension has already occasioned
protests across Britain. Demonstrators
called it a “coup,” and the speaker of the
House of Commons called it a “constitu-
tional outrage.”
Yet on Tuesday night, with Parlia-
ment having again flexed its long dor-
mant democratic muscle, it was Mr.
Johnson who looked isolated. Furious,
he vowed to seek new elections, and
stripped the whip from all his rebels —
when and whether he’ll get them re-
mains to be seen — — effectively bar-
ring them from running again as Con-
servative candidates.
The conflict has laid bare deep ten-
sions in Britain’s democracy — between
the prime minister and Parliament, and
between the people and the politics that
claims to represent them.
Britain’s Parliament is anomalous.
Having failed to sustain its 17th-century
deposition of the monarchy, and having
been the imperial power rather than the
colonized one, Britain has never had a
founding constitutional moment. In-
stead its democracy has evolved within
an accreted mass of archaic institutions,
including an unelected upper chamber
that was until the late 20th century
composed of hereditary aristocrats.
This grandeur itself has sometimes
been thought to be a powerful conserva-
tive influence: The Labour politician
Nye Bevan once wrote it “lies like an
Alp” on the mind of a new member of
Parliament.
Under its ritual pomp, Parliament’s
Prime Minister Boris Johnson outside 10 Downing Street on Monday.
curious evolution has made it unusually ducted through arcane procedural
powerful. A prime minister with a sub- instruments and prominent court
stantial majority has broad latitude to battles. The alien language of parlia-
remake the country, as Margaret mentary procedure — “prorogation,”
Thatcher and to a lesser extent Tony “humble addresses,” “paving motions”
Blair did. But without a solid majority, — is parsed for an unfamiliar public by
Parliament has great power to resist constitutional experts who have rarely
even the most ambitious leader. been in such demand.
Legislators’ tactics this week are not The interviews with members of the
entirely new: A similar procedure was public that dot the news vary from
used to take control and force Theresa bafflement to out-
May, Mr. Johnson’s predecessor, to seek The prime right loathing of
an extension in April. But the complex- politics; enthusiasm
ity of the new bill — which intends to
minister is is a rare beast.
effectively at
prescribe Mr. Johnson’s approach to the According to
European Union in exacting detail — war with the Hansard Society
reflects the total breakdown in trust Parliament for research, civic trust
between executive and legislature. which he once is threadbare: Only
April’s version of the bill passed promised to a third of people
partly because Mrs. May recognized “take back trust politicians to
she had lost; Mr. Johnson will use every control.” act in the public
means at his disposal to frustrate the interest, and just
new bill, including attempts to filibuster under half feel they
its progress in the unelected upper have no influence at
house. Promising a scorched earth, the all on decision-making.
prime minister is effectively at war with Britain’s withdrawal from the Euro-
the Parliament for which he once prom- pean Union was always likely to be a
ised to “take back control.” vastly complex technical matter, and
Despite the throng of demonstrators the bloc’s tendency to conduct politics
outside Parliament — roared slogans through intricate sequencing lends
and vast European Union flags are a itself to squabbles over procedural
daily backdrop to news broadcasts — minutiae. But the cause of the proliferat-
the political progress of Brexit has been ing conflict in British politics has always
a markedly institutional affair, con- been domestic: Despite losing her
BEN STANSALL/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
majority in 2017, Mrs. May’s conduct of
Brexit was distinguished by her auto-
cratic instincts and determination to
avoid parliamentary consultation.
The same highhanded conduct saw
her first dragged to the Supreme Court
to assert Parliament’s right of a “mean-
ingful vote,” and then locked in a battle
with Parliament over the disclosure of
the attorney general’s legal advice. That
battle saw her censured for “contempt
of Parliament.” The phrase epitomizes
her successor’s entire attitude.
One consequence of the prominence
of procedural conflicts since the Brexit
referendum has been to transfer the
political questions which drove it into
arguments about legal permissibility.
Questions about the kind of state the
Britain wishes to be, relations among its
constituent nations, its draconian atti-
tudes to migrants, its vexed history in
Ireland, how it makes domestic political
choices and how far it wishes economic
integration with other European states
— all are folded into, and sometimes
disappear in, conflicts over parliamen-
tary rights and legal obligations.
It is then no wonder that apparently
arid matters suddenly take on intense
but displaced political energy — the
kind that saw High Court judges
branded “enemies of the people” on the
front pages of the tabloid press and that
turned usually pacific sections of soci-
ety into ardent protesters.
The institutional confinement of the
Brexit process has been seized on by
Dominic Cummings, the former director
of Vote Leave, now Mr. Johnson’s chief
adviser and architect of his hard-line
strategy. Mr. Cummings recognizes a
fault line in Britain’s democratic struc-
ture: between an exercise conducted by
plebiscite — the Brexit referendum —
and the conventional, deliberative
methods used to interpret and deliver
the consequences of that vote.
By painting the referendum as the
sole truly democratic exercise, with all
subsequent debates and concerns over
rights a matter of cynical pettifogging
and anti-Brexit trickery, he believes he
can deliver a reconfigured political
landscape, straddled by Mr. Johnson as
a flaxen-haired avatar of the popular
will.
Perhaps Mr. Cummings has in mind
that half the people surveyed by
Hansard claimed they longed for a
strong leader to “break the rules” of
politics. Yet the strongman has feet of
clay. If suspending Parliament was
intended to demonstrate Mr. Johnson’s
credentials as a champion of the people,
it managed to unite only 27 percent of
them. Further overreach as the prime
minister attempts to break Parliament
to his will is unlikely to improve that
number.
Despite Wednesdays’ developments,
very few doubt new elections are on the
horizon, the central issues of which will
be shaped in the next weeks. It will be
an election that Mr. Johnson intends to
fight on a narrow Brexit question. To
beat him, the Labour Party, which has
been as troubled by division between
the two Brexit camps as the country as
a whole, will not only need a clear
message on Brexit but also some
means of bridging its divide.
Democracy could be a powerful
theme: not just its defense in Parlia-
ment but its extension beyond Parlia-
ment’s feudal residues and monarchical
hangovers, into Britain’s regions and its
antiquated electoral system. It is
widely known that Mr. Johnson wants a
“people versus politicians” election.
Perhaps it is time for the opposition to
push for “the country versus Boris
Johnson.”
JAMES BUTLER is a co-founder of Novara
Media whose writing has appeared in
The Guardian, The London Review of
Books and Vice.
wedded nun
MANSEAU, FROM PAGE 9
the 21st century the issue of sexuality
and its implications for religious serv-
ice, long simmering beneath the sur-
face, is in the open as never before.
The actor who plays the priest in
“Fleabag,” Andrew Scott, who grew up
Catholic in Ireland, said recently in an
interview with New York magazine, “If
the church could be a little movable on
the subject of priests and nuns being
allowed to marry, then I think maybe
there might be more people interested
in entering the church in our genera-
tion.”
Though such prescriptions are of-
fered far more often by those who have
left the Catholic Church than those who
remain, today this is not an uncommon
view. That it once would have been a
scandalous notion suggests that those
who shed their collars and veils five
decades ago did something quietly
revolutionary. Despite a lifetime of
preparation for service to a church that
once viewed itself as unchanging, they
imagined that change was possible.
As a historian of American religion,
and no longer a practicing Catholic, I
have developed some distance on my
parents’ story. I have far less of a stake
than they do in the future of vocations
they left behind. Whether the ranks of
priests and nuns continue to decline, or
somehow return again to the kind of
flourishing that made them the signifi-
cant cultural markers they remain, I will
watch with interest, comparing their
rise and fall with that of other religious
groups that have experienced similar
trajectories.
As a son, though, I can’t help but
hope the church might one day ac-
knowledge that my parents were right.
While those who left were once seen as
vow breakers, disappointments or
worse, their understanding that a
reckoning regarding matters of sexu-
ality and power was long overdue has
proved prescient.
My parents may never see the trans-
formation of their faith that they
dreamed of when they married, but 50
years later, they represent a road not
taken, a path that the church they love,
despite it all, may one day follow.
PETER MANSEAU is the curator of Ameri-
can religious history at the Smithsonian
and the author of a memoir, “Vows: The
Story of a Priest, a Nun and Their Son.”

Hong Kong, she didn’t do it for you

LIAN, FROM PAGE 1
tees and political freedoms. She has
politicized what was once a profes-
sional police force and turned it into a
tool of oppression that acts at the
behest of Beijing. She has given the
police unheard-of license to make
arrests in hospitals and bully patients,
and to mistreat — my euphemism this
time — protesters and reporters at the
front lines. The special governance
system that Beijing had promised
would govern Hong Kong and keep it
distinct from the mainland until at
least 2047 has been thoroughly tram-
pled.
Yet it is to a small group of business-
people — and presumably a very select
bunch of those — that Mrs. Lam made
“a plea to you for your forgiveness.”
But forgiveness for what, from them?
For allowing the protesters to close
down the airport for a couple of days?
For sending a little tremor through the
real estate market, still sky-high,
which has made developers so very
rich for so very long? For knocking
some 5,000 points off the Hang Seng
Index since May? For hurting the
city’s big corporate families?
Mrs. Lam has yet to properly ask for
the forgiveness of Hong Kongers. (In
June, she said, “I offer my most sin-
cere apology to all people of Hong
Kong,” but then flatly refused to do
anything they asked.) In her talk to the
business group, she recited almost
verbatim from the Basic Law, Hong
Kong’s mini-Constitution, that in her
capacity as chief executive she is
required to serve two masters: the
central government in Beijing and the
people of Hong Kong. In fact, she
seems to be serving only Beijing and a
small business elite in Hong Kong.
Only, other swaths of the business
sector have had little patience for Mrs.
Lam’s intransigence. The Hong Kong
General Chamber of Commerce point-
edly asked her to make serious conces-
sions toward the protesters in late July.
And so finally on Wednesday, Mrs.
Lam announced the formal withdrawal
of a bill that would allow the extradi-
tion of criminal suspects to mainland
China, one of five of the protesters’
demands. This is ridiculous on her
part, after holding out all summer as
she has while protesters have been
tear-gassed, maimed and subjected to
cruel treatment by the police — and
while much of the city’s population has
supported them, turning up for
marches in the hundreds of thousands.
At this stage, nothing short of the
government’s ad-
China is dressing the pro-
testers’ fifth, and
playing a most sweeping,
game of demand — real
attrition in universal suffrage
Hong Kong. for both executive
But so are the and legislative elec-
protesters. tions — can be
enough. Some pro-
testers have already
declared on the
online forum LIHKG, “Five Demands.
Not One Less.”
Whatever the protesters’ next re-
sponse to Wednesday’s announce-
ments, and however the government
then follows up, Mrs. Lam’s off-the-
record talk with the business group
last week holds hints of what may
come in the medium term.
She said that she had gotten clear
hints from Beijing that no matter what
happened in the streets of Hong Kong,
China would not send in the People’s
Liberation Army; Beijing just wouldn’t
risk damaging its “international pro-
file,” which took so long to build, as
“not only a big economy, but a big,
responsible economy.” There is unin-
tended mercy in cold calculus, appar-
ently.
But this also means, in the words of
Mrs. Lam, that the authorities in Bei-
jing are “willing to play it long,” and
“so you have no short-term solution.”
Put another way: China’s strategy is
essentially to play a game of attrition,
conceding as little as possible while
expecting the Hong Kong government
and the local police to hold out longer
than the protesters, despite the risk of
imposing significant costs on the city
in the meantime.
“You lose tourism, economy, you lose
your IPOs and so on, but you can’t do
much about it,” Mrs. Lam is heard
warning the business group. Then she
tries to sound reassuring: “But after
everything has been settled, the coun-
try will be there to help, with maybe
positive measures, especially in the
Greater Bay Area.”
Yet will businesspeople just sit still
and wait, especially in a financial
center like Hong Kong, where being
nimble and making quick money are
the highest business virtues? And the
opposition movement is not stupid: It
is trying to prolong the conflict, hoping
to sap the economy enough that the
business sector will start clamoring for
a comprehensive political solution.
On Tuesday, a nameless pro-inde-
pendence group claiming to be active
on the front lines of the protests — and
responsible for knifing an off-duty
policeman this weekend — issued a
manifesto. (Here is the original in
Cantonese; here is an adequate sum-
mary in English.) The document criti-
cizes the so-called courageous-militant
arm of the resistance movement as
being too costly in human terms: Close
to 1,000 protesters have already been
arrested. But it also argues that so-
called peaceful-rational camp within
the movement is too costly in financial
terms: Millions of dollars have been
spent on political advertisements in
Western media. And so this nameless
group proposes a more sustainable
strategy: a low-cost and high-risk
effort that would pinpoint its use of
violence, targeting individual police
officers. That, it argues, could quickly
demoralize the entire force, especially
since many officers joined the force for
job security and good pay.
First reactions to the manifesto
online were conflicted, even among
protesters. Would such as extreme
approach be tolerated, if only tacitly,
by the mainstream resistance?
Just maybe, especially considering
that the courageous-militant response
to mounting police brutality, which was
unimaginable just three months ago, is
now accepted, even celebrated at
times. Beijing isn’t the only one playing
a game of attrition in Hong Kong.

YI-ZHENG LIAN, a commentator on Hong

Kong and Asian affairs, is a professor
ANTHONY KWAN/GETTY IMAGES
of economics at Yamanashi Gakuin
Carrie Lam, the chief executive of Hong Kong, at a news conference on Tuesday. University in Japan.

12 | FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019
well
Carl Abrams, 90, a retired Air Force colonel in Williamstown, N.J., cheerfully agrees that he can be stubborn. “He gets very angry and oppositional,” his daughter said.
The stubbornness of age
Researcher advises trying
to equalize power in
relations with parents
BY PAULA SPAN
To what extent, the researchers asked
middle-aged adults, do your parents ig-
nore suggestions or advice that would
make their lives easier or safer?
Ignore instructions from their doc-
tors?
Insist on doing things their own way,
even if that makes their own or others’
lives more difficult, inconvenient or un-
safe?
That’s how several studies directed
by Allison Heid, a gerontologist consult-
ing at Penn State and at Rowan Univer-
sity in Glassboro, N.J., measured adult
children’s perceptions of stubbornness
among their aging parents.
It proved a widespread complaint.
In an initial study of 189 adult children
and their parents, Dr. Heid and her col-
leagues found that 77 percent of children
(average age: 55) reported stubborn be-
havior by their parents, at least some-
times.
But two-thirds of the parents (aver-
age age: 80) described themselves as
stubborn, too.
In a later study, the researchers asked
192 middle-aged children to keep a sev-
en-day diary of parental interactions. Of
those who had contact with their par-
ents that week, 31 percent reported “in-
sistent” behaviors and 17 percent re-
ported “risky” behaviors; 11 percent
said they encountered both.
“The stories are endless,” said Dr.
Heid, whose interest in the subject was
incited by a grandmother determined to
shovel snow, despite her children’s pro-
tests, into her 80s.
Alternatives to surgery for an enlarged prostate
Personal Health
JANE E. BRODY
Ed Goldman, a retired bookbinder who
says he’s “pushing 80,” does not let his
age or enlarged prostate curtail his
physical activities and desire to travel.
He walks the streets of his beloved
New York for about two miles a day,
five or more days a week, and knows
every possible bathroom stop along his
usual routes.
When arriving in foreign territory,
he immediately checks out the location
of lavatories to avoid an embarrassing
accident. “The urgency, when it hits,
can be pretty scary,” he told me.
Mr. Goldman, like up to 90 percent of
men in their 70s, has benign prostatic
hyperplasia, or B.P.H., a nonmalignant
growth of the prostate gland. As the
prostate enlarges with age, it squeezes
the urethra that passes through it and
can disrupt normal urinary function.
The prostate is a walnut-shaped
gland that produces the seminal fluid
in a man’s ejaculate. The gland typical-
ly starts to enlarge in men’s 40s as
smooth muscle and lining cells prolifer-
ate. As the gland gradually increases
in size, nearly half of men develop
moderate to severe symptoms of the
lower urinary tract by their eighth
decade of life.
These symptoms can include hesi-
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Lori Kayne, a geriatric social worker
in Bridgewater, N.J., can tell such
stories. Her late father, whose poor bal-
ance had caused multiple falls but no se-
rious injuries, resisted her pleas to use
his walker. “We had a lot of screaming
matches,” she recalled — but she never
prevailed.
Then last year, her father fell and frac-
tured several vertebrae. “He was in ter-
rible agony for months,” Ms. Kayne said
— but at least he was finally relying on
the walker. She figured that at 87, he’d
grown more reasonable.
Nope. “As soon as he started to feel
better, he refused the walker, even
though he knew what could happen,”
Ms. Kayne said, sighing.
The polite social science term for such
skirmishes: mismatched goals. “If the
goal is not shared — the older adult
wants to walk to the grocery store him-
self and the child says, ‘I don’t think it’s a
good idea’ — that’s when conflict can
arise,” Dr. Heid explained.
Such clashes, and related reports of
stubbornness, increase when the parent
and child live together, she found. Per-
ceived stubbornness also rises when a
parent’s disability increases.
“When a child steps in, most com-
monly there’s a safety issue,” Dr. Heid
said. “The parent may not share those
feelings about their capabilities.”
Stubbornness might actually be a pos-
itive trait, Dr. Heid suggested.
It shows tenacity, persistence, a sense
of control.
But stubbornness, it turns out, can
also have hurtful consequences. In Dr.
Heid’s largest study, involving nearly
400 middle-aged children, the most
common response was avoidance: Chil-
dren back off and let the contested issue
go.
“But when they do, they report more
depressive symptoms and less positive
tancy starting to urinate; weak flow;
incomplete emptying of the bladder
resulting in urinary retention; a fre-
quent urge to urinate; and for some, an
urgency that can cause incontinence,
especially when lacking immediate
access to a bathroom.
The result is often a serious diminu-
tion in quality of life, for example,
when one has to make a sudden dash
to the restroom in the middle of a
meeting, golf game, concert or lecture
that perhaps lasted longer than ex-
pected. The urgent need to urinate
makes getting stuck in traffic or in a
stalled subway car even more stress-
ful.
Mr. Goldman said he uses the bath-
room every one to three hours and at
least once during the night, adding that
“it’s very unusual for me to sleep for
more than six hours at a time.” He
knows he’s lucky so far. For some men
who awaken every few hours to use
the bathroom while trying not to dis-
turb a bed partner (if they have one), a
six-hour stint of sleep would be consid-
ered a blessing.
Common risk factors for developing
B.P.H. include, in addition to age, a
family history of the condition, obesity,
metabolic syndrome, a sedentary
lifestyle and diabetes. There is a higher
incidence among African-American
men. Diets high in starches and meat
have been linked to progression of
B.P.H., while a vegetable-rich diet has
been associated with less severe symp-
toms.
The good news is there are now
relationships,” Dr. Heid said. “They may
be internalizing their distress.”
Arguing with one’s parents has simi-
larly unhappy outcomes. What helps,
the study shows, is reasoning. “It allows
for a more open exchange of views and
more discussion,” Dr. Heid said.
Reasoning with someone who seems
impervious to it sounds, well, challeng-
ing. “It’s a really hard thing, this mis-
match between what we need and what
we want and what’s good for us,” said
Marci Gleason, a social psychologist at
the University of Texas at Austin.
Social scientists have learned that
older adults who provide support have
increased well-being and better health.
Receiving help, on the other hand, is as-
sociated with depression.
With driving dangerous, the
compromise was a scooter.
After decades of helping their chil-
dren, older people understandably balk
at becoming dependent on them. “Even
if intellectually they accept it, actually
receiving help is difficult,” Dr. Gleason
said. “It can signal that you’re not
needed, and people want to feel needed.”
She suggests trying to equalize power
in the relationship, allowing the parent
to also provide support, even by just lis-
tening empathetically to a child’s ac-
count of her tough week. “It could be
beneficial for the relationship to not
have it all be one-sided,” Dr. Gleason
said.
She’s also a fan of incremental
progress, a negotiation that leads to a
more reciprocal exchange.
As proof of concept, meet the Abrams
family. Carl Abrams, a 90-year-old re-
tired Air Force colonel, lives in Williams-
town, N.J., with his wife, Joan, 88. He
quite a number of ways to alleviate the
symptoms of B.P.H. short of surgery to
remove part or all of the prostate,
which can cause other problems, in-
cluding erectile dysfunction. According
to guidelines published by the Ameri-
can Urological Association, recent
treatments have focused on slowing
the progression of the condition and
preventing its complications.
Still, the first approach to relieving
the symptoms of B.P.H., and perhaps
even preventing or slowing the pro-
gression of prostatic enlargement, are
focused on lifestyle changes. They
include reducing weight; minimizing
liquid intake late in the day; getting
regular physical activity; avoiding
smoking and consumption of alcohol,
caffeine and highly seasoned foods;
and treating constipation.
Also helpful for men (and women)
who have difficulty fully emptying
their bladder and soon have to return
to the bathroom is a technique called
double-voiding. After urinating nor-
mally, wait about 20 to 30 seconds and
try again. Men are likely to have more
success emptying their bladders by
sitting on the toilet and leaning for-
ward instead of standing.
The traditional “gold standard”
remedy for B.P.H. known as TURP, for
transurethral resection of the prostate,
involves inserting a scope through the
penis and cutting away excess prostate
tissue to relieve pressure on the ure-
thra. Though TURP is the most effec-
tive remedy for troublesome B.P.H., in
addition to causing sexual complica-
MARK MAKELA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
cheerfully agrees that yes, he’s plenty
stubborn. “He gets very angry and op-
positional,” said his older daughter, Ta-
mar Abrams, 63, who visits twice
monthly from Falls Church, Va.
In 2016, the family was worried about
his driving. Mr. Abrams had knocked
several side mirrors off his Buick, some-
times wandered out of his lane, once fell
asleep at the wheel and sideswiped a
truck. It was time to relinquish the keys,
the family said.
After extended wrangling, Mr.
Abrams agreed to a retest by the state
motor vehicle agency, a gambit that
backfired. “We were convinced he
would fail, but he aced it,” said his
daughter.
Months passed; his wife began refus-
ing to ride with him. The family negoti-
ated a series of escalating restrictions:
First, Mr. Abrams agreed not to drive at
night. Then, to drive only to familiar
places. Finally, to stay within five miles
of home.
“Sometimes he would blow up,” Ta-
mar Abrams said. “But if you gave him
some time and then returned to the dis-
cussion, he’d be O.K.”
Now, Mr. Abrams relies on a bright
red, battery-powered scooter. “An excel-
lent compromise,” he said. “If it wasn’t
for the scooter, I’d go crazy in the house.”
Twice weekly, he cruises two miles to
have lunch at Applebee’s, where the
servers all know his name, and picks up
a few groceries on his way home.
“If he didn’t have to cross a major in-
tersection, it would be a lovely ritual,”
Tamar Abrams said. Nobody (except
Mr. Abrams) feels good about his navi-
gating across six lanes on his scooter,
even at a traffic light.
But she understands. “You’re holding
on for dear life to who you think you are,”
she said. So, “we hold our breath and let
him do it.”
tions, this surgery incurs a risk of
bleeding that limits its usefulness for
men like Mr. Goldman who take antico-
agulants.
In a less invasive version of TURP
with fewer complications, a bipolar
current is used to ream out the
prostate. Another minimally invasive
technique, called HoLEP, uses laser
irradiation to remove excess tissue.
Experts say that aggressive surgical
treatment like TURP should now be
necessary to treat an enlarged prostate
only in certain circumstances. These
might include inadequate kidney func-
tion, recurrent urinary tract infections,
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Leaving shoes at the door:
Not purely a health issue
BY CHRISTOPHER MELE
Maybe you kick off your shoes at home
because you don’t want to track dirt
across clean carpets or floors, or maybe
it’s just a relief to shed them.
Taking off shoes inside the home is
also a common practice observed in
Asian and Middle Eastern countries and
households. But if you take them off
mainly because you’re worried about
harmful bacteria from the outside get-
ting inside and making you sick, you can
probably relax.
Those concerns are overblown, ac-
cording to experts, who added that more
pressing health risks are often over-
looked.
WHAT’S ON YOUR SOLES?
Charles P. Gerba, a professor and micro-
biologist at the University of Arizona,
studied how many and which kinds of
bacteria linger on the bottom of shoes.
In 2008, researchers tracked new
shoes worn by 10 participants for two
weeks and found that coliform bacteria
like E. coli were extremely common on
the outside of the shoes. E. coli is known
to cause intestinal and urinary tract in-
fections as well as meningitis, among
other illnesses.
“Our study also indicated that bacte-
ria can be tracked by shoes over a long
distance into your home or personal
space,” Mr. Gerba said in a statement.
(The study was not published in a
peer-reviewed journal, involved a lim-
ited number of participants and was
supported by Rockport, which was test-
ing machine-washable shoes.)
Mr. Gerba said last month of the find-
ings, “It kept me from putting my feet on
my desk.”
WHERE THE GERMS GO
It’s possible to transmit germs from
your footwear if you touch your shoes
and then your face or mouth, for in-
stance, or if you eat food that’s been
dropped on the floor.
But in the hierarchy of potential
health hazards at home, bacteria-caked
shoes rank comparatively low, accord-
ing to Donald W. Schaffner, a food micro-
biologist at Rutgers University.
Outside the home, there are objects
and surfaces that are frequently
touched but seldom, if ever, washed,
such as money, A.T.M. buttons and gas
pump handles, he said, adding, “Focus-
ing on people’s shoes feels like focusing
on the wrong vector.”
Over all, experts emphasized that
washing your hands with soap and wa-
ter remained the most important health
practice.
Lisa A. Cuchara, professor of biomedi-
cal sciences at Quinnipiac University in
Hamden, Conn., said that fecal bacteria
were certainly transferred from your
shoes to your floor at home but that “for
most healthy adults, this level of con-
tamination is more of a gross reaction
than a health threat.”
Putting the threat in perspective, she
noted that the floor in a public restroom
has around two million bacteria per
square inch. A toilet seat, on the other
hand, has an average of about 50 per
square inch.
“Think about that the next time you
place your purse or knapsack on the
bathroom floor and then bring it home
and put it on the kitchen table or
counter,” she said.
WHAT THE DOG DRAGS IN
If you are concerned about what two-
legged residents track in, then what
about your dogs?
Andrea Kaufmann of Cape May Court
House, N.J., said that she changes out of
her shoes into slippers to keep dirt off
the floors, but added that she has two
GRACIA LAM
bladder stones, blood in the urine, or
the patient’s unwillingness to take a
daily medication or failure to get relief
through drugs.
Among currently preferred treat-
ments are several categories of drugs,
including alpha blockers like Flomax,
5ARIs like finesteride, and PDE5 inhib-
itors like tadalafil.
There is also a combination drug of
an alpha blocker and a 5ARI that is
said to work better than either one
alone. While the sexual side effects of
surgery are usually permanent, if such
effects are caused by a medication,
they may be reversed by stopping the
..
Labrador retrievers. “I could sweep and
vacuum three times a day and still have
dirt on the floors from the dogs,” she
said. “They can’t take their shoes off.”
DIRT CAN BE HEALTHY
Considering the benefits of modern-day
sanitation, vaccinations and health care,
the likelihood of getting sick from our
shoes is “infinitesimally small as to al-
most be unwarranted,” said Jack A.
Gilbert, a professor in the department of
pediatrics and the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography at the University of Cali-
fornia, San Diego.
Mr. Gilbert, an author of the book
“Dirt Is Good,” said there were theories
suggesting that bringing elements of
the outdoors indoors could help stimu-
late autoimmune systems, particularly
in children.
In the first year of life, physical inter-
action with a dog can reduce a child’s
likelihood of developing asthma by 13
percent.
Interactions in a barn or farm can re-
duce it by 50 percent, he said.
Emily Ledgerwood, an assistant pro-
fessor of biological and environmental
sciences at Le Moyne College in Syra-
cuse, said her 3-year-old daughter had
recently helped her crack eggs to make
breakfast. When they were done, Ms.
Ledgerwood made sure they both
washed their hands to prevent any pos-
sible cross-contamination with salmo-
nella.
Later, her daughter helped weed the
garden and pick vegetables. Ms.
Ledgerwood let her have lunch without
first washing her hands.
CALEB KENNA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Taking your shoes off in the house is
largely a matter of cultural preference.
FOOTWEAR AT THE DOOR?
It’s best to take your shoes off if you
have young children crawling on floors
or people in the home who have al-
lergies, because pollen can be trans-
ferred to floors, especially to carpets.
“In cases where your immune system
is compromised — people who have can-
cer, have undergone an organ trans-
plant, have an infection — then there is
much more of a reason to take your
shoes off when you come home,” Ms.
Cuchara said.
If the person you are visiting prefers
your shoes off, it’s sound etiquette to
abide by their wishes, said April Masini,
who writes about relationships and eti-
quette for her website, Ask April.
“Even if you don’t see shoes at the en-
trance, you can always ask if your host
would like you to take off your shoes
upon entering,” she said.
This practice is also often observed in
Asian and Middle Eastern countries,
said Benjamin Hiramatsu Ireland, an
assistant professor of modern language
studies at Texas Christian University in
Fort Worth.
“Removing one’s shoes upon entering
a home stems from the respectful ob-
servance of religious practices that have
been integrated within the cultural fab-
ric and expected ‘to-dos’ of each of these
countries and, of course, for reasons
pertaining to hygiene,” he said.
drug and perhaps switching to another
one.
There are also now minimally inva-
sive techniques to reduce the pressure
exerted on the urethra by an enlarged
prostate. In one, called the UroLift
System, a telescope-like instrument is
inserted through the penis and one or
more small bands are inserted to re-
tract the part of the prostate that is
pressing on the urethra. It is usually
done in a urologist’s office as an outpa-
tient procedure under local anesthesia
and is supposed to result in immediate
symptom relief with minimal risk of
sexual side effects.
Another minimally invasive pro-
cedure, called Rezum Water Vapor
Therapy, uses convective water vapor
energy to destroy overgrown prostatic
tissue. As with the UroLift System, it is
done in an office setting under local
anesthesia. The risk of side effects,
including those associated with sexual
performance, is reported to be low.
Keep in mind that most of the data
about the success of UroLift and
Rezum, including reports from pa-
tients, come from their manufacturers.
If you are considering one of these, it
would be a good idea to speak with one
or more men who have had the pro-
cedure.
Most important, the urological asso-
ciation insists, is that patients with
B.P.H. be told about all the various
treatment options and their benefits
and risks, enabling them to make an
informed decision about how to treat
their problem.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019 | 13

Sports
Dismissing racism as part of the game
Problems with racism have not been
In Italy, after a striker limited to fan behavior. In 2014, soccer’s
global governing body, FIFA, and Eu-
is subjected to taunts, rope’s governing body, UEFA, banned
his own fans shrug it off the Italian soccer official Carlo Tavec-
chio — then serving as the president of
BY TARIQ PANJA Italy’s soccer federation — for six
months after he spoke of a fictional Afri-
To those present at Cagliari’s Stadio Sar- can player “eating bananas” before
degna on Sunday, the sounds were fa- coming to Italy.
miliar. Piara Powar, the executive director of
As Inter Milan’s new Belgian striker, Football Against Racism in Europe, said
Romelu Lukaku, stepped up to kick the combination of racist fan behavior
what would turn out to be a match-win- and the rise of far-right politicians had
ning penalty, Cagliari fans behind the created a “powder-keg situation” in Ita-
goal engaged in a prolonged round of ly. Powar estimated that there were
monkey chants. They continued as the about nine major racist incidents in Se-
shot by Lukaku, who is black, struck the rie A last season, suggesting the na-
back of the net. tional federation was incapable of tack-
The outburst was not the first of its ling the problem.
kind in the arena — Cagliari fans racially “We think the F.A. right now needs to
abused a black Juventus player last sea- be put on special measures,”
son — and it was swiftly condemned af- Italy’s reputation appears to have put
ter video of the incident circulated on so- some black players off moving to teams
cial media. But much of Italy seemed to there.
react with a shrug. Cagliari defended its “And here’s the reason why I decided
fans in a statement. League officials an- not to play there when I could,” Demba
nounced that at least for now, there Ba, a Senegalese striker now playing in
would be no discipline. Even Inter’s fans Turkey, wrote on Twitter in reaction to
defended the behavior, in a letter to their the statement released by Inter’s fan
new star. group. “And at that point I wish all the
The message to Lukaku, who joined black players would get out of this
Inter from Manchester United in Au- league! Surely it won’t stop their stupid-
gust, seemed to be: Don’t take it person- ity and hate but at least they won’t affect
ally, this is Italy. other races!”
The ugly incident was not the first Lukaku, a Belgian born to Congolese
episode of racist behavior in Italian soc- parents who spoke out about experienc-
cer, but the reaction to it highlighted ef- ing racism before the 2018 World Cup in
forts to brush such behavior under the Russia, called on the soccer authorities
carpet. When the young Juventus and companies that run social networks
striker Moise Kean was subjected to — where racist comments made toward
similar abuse at Cagliari last season — players from minority backgrounds are
one of a string of high-profile cases re- commonplace — to do more.
cently at the stadium — his coach and LUCA BRUNO/ASSOCIATED PRESS “We’ve been saying it for years and
one of his teammates initially blamed Romelu Lukaku celebrated after scoring Inter Milan’s third goal during a match against Lecce at the San Siro stadium in Milan last month. still no action,” he wrote. “Ladies and
him, saying he had provoked it. gentlemen it’s 2019.”
Sunday’s incident brought similar de- In response to the negative publicity
flections. Cagliari called the suggestion seemed racist to you, but it is not like they are afraid of you for the goals you utives from Facebook, Twitter and In- Bergamo. The French star Blaise Matu- surrounding the Lukaku incident, much
that its fans might be racist “out- that,” the fan group, L’Urlo della Nord — might score against their teams and not stagram to do more to stamp out wide- idi has been subjected to abuse at Ca- of it from outside Italy, Serie A an-
rageous.” The body tasked with investi- Scream of the North — said. “In Italy we because they hate you or they are rac- spread racial abuse on their platforms gliari and Verona. nounced this week that it would create
gating the matter said Tuesday there use some ‘ways’ only to ‘help our teams’ ist,” the statement continued. — the frequency of incidents, coupled On occasion, players who have ap- an anti-racism campaign to start in Oc-
was not enough proof to impose sanc- and to try to make our opponents ner- Lukaku urged soccer officials to “re- with the lack of punitive measures, has pealed to officials have found them- tober featuring a player from each of its
tions on Cagliari. vous, not for racism but to mess them act strongly on all cases of discrimina- been eye-catching. In December, the selves punished instead. In 2017, the 20 teams.
Perhaps most troubling for Lukaku, a up.” tion,” but Italy’s history in dealing with Napoli defender Kalidou Koulibaly was Ghanaian player Sulley Muntari, then “Racism is a cultural problem so ev-
group representing a section of Inter’s It said the use of racist comments did the problem has not inspired hope. abused during a game against Inter Mi- playing for Pescara, walked off the field eryone’s commitment will be needed,
supporters released a statement on not mean fans were racist, only that they While Serie A is not the only major Eu- lan. In 2018, the striker Michy Bat- during a game at Cagliari after the ref- from experts to fans, to promote a pos-
Facebook purporting to educate Lukaku were trying to “help” their team. ropean league where players of color shuayi, then playing for Borussia Dort- eree gave him a yellow card for com- itive, consistent and appropriate model
in the “ways” of Italian soccer. “Please consider this attitude of Ital- have been subjected to racist abuse — mund, claimed that he was racially plaining about racist chanting from the of support for a civilized country like Ita-
“We understand that it could have ian fans as a form of respect for the fact players in England recently urged exec- abused during a game at Atalanta, in crowd. He was suspended for a game. ly through its stadiums,” the league said.

NON SEQUITUR PEANUTS DOONESBURY CLASSIC 1993

GARFIELD CALVIN AND HOBBES

SUDOKU No. 0609

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

KENKEN CROSSWORD | Edited by Will Shortz

Fill the grid so
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Solution No. 0509
that every row,
column 3x3 box Fill the grids with digits so as not 13 14 15 16
to repeat a digit in any row or
Across 33 Barn dance call 56 Snack item from
and shaded 3x3 Nabisco
column, and so that the digits
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box contains
17 18

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shown, by using addition,   9 Bad response from an Hollywood

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38 Honey
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28 29 30 31 32 33
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40 41 42
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22 Red ___ 50 Kind of force
  5 Bills no more
23 Motors (around) generated by the 50 51 52
earth’s rotation   6 Setting in “The Rocky
Answers to Previous Puzzles 25 Part of a makeup Horror Picture Show” 53 54
artist’s kit 52 Plains natives
  7 Marilyn Monroe
28 People working at 53 Snack items from played one in “Some 55 56
home Mars Like It Hot”
32 Back on board? 55 Hide   8 They’re fed by the 57 58 59
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  9 Unsentimental PUZZLE BY MARK DIEHL
C O W L W I T C H L A C E 10 Undercover 27 It may be looped for a 38 Satan’s spawn 49 Trouble for Sylvester
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11 Very close 41 École teacher
B E E R I N N E S N I N E
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30 Surveyor’s instrument
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P L A I D C H I C 22 Weeds, say for two 46 Wooden shoe 51 It’s a sign
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S A N D S P U R L U M B E R eye in his search for material
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26 Traditional product of
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14 | FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Culture
New son of Zeus rises
THEATER REVIEW

The Public Works program

in New York updates the
heroism in ‘Hercules’
BY JESSE GREEN

When future cultural historians, should

there be any, look back on the contem-
porary stage, I hope they are able to
discern, amid the din of jukeboxes and
the lumbering of overproduced apes,
the real theater of our time.
That would include Public Works, a
program of passion plays for anxious,
left-leaning New Yorkers: as emblem-
atic of their fears and hopes as the
ones at Oberammergau were for 17th-
century Bavarians and the Dionysia
was for ancient Greeks.
Speaking of Greece, did I mention
that the series’s current offering, run-
ning through Sunday, is “Hercules”?
And not even the one by Euripides but
the one by a committee of Hollywood
scriptmongers writing for an audience
of tweens?
Most Labor Day weeks since 2013 —
following the holiday that falls on the
first Monday in September, and at the
end of its regular season of Shake-
speare in Central Park — the Public
Theater has mounted a huge (and
free) show involving a handful of pro-
fessional actors and many multiples
more of amateurs. We have seen
streamlined and musicalized new
versions of “The Tempest,” “Twelfth
Night” and even “The Odyssey” of-
fered as models of civic engagement
and reminders of the heritage of provo-
cation and healing the theater has
offered for centuries to troubled cities.
So how does a 1997 Disney cartoon,
beloved mostly by late-vintage millen-
nials now in young adulthood, come
into this exalted lineage?
As you might expect, bigly.
For one thing, this is the largest
Public Works outing yet. I don’t mean
the size of the ensemble, though there
are almost 200 performers, including a PHOTOGRAPHS BY SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES

10-piece orchestra and the Passaic

High School marching band from New
Jersey. Most come from community
organizations, in all five of the city’s
boroughs, that serve the young and
old, veterans and ex-convicts, domestic
workers and recreational dancers. Just
getting them all onstage seems like a
municipal engineering feat as difficult
and fundamentally optimistic as build-
ing new bridges.
But this “Hercules,” directed by the
Public Works founder, Lear
deBessonet, is also big in the sense of
spectacular, expanding the palette
from previous seasons in ways that are
both exciting and also mildly worri-
some. Stadium-size LED tickers were
not previously part of the aesthetic or
the agenda. Any one of the five muses
who act as narrators here rocks more
sequins with each costume than the
cast of “The Tempest” put together.
Though such changes sometimes
distract from the handmade ethos of
the event, they are apt for the mostly
comic material, adapted by the play-
wright Kristoffer Diaz from the movie’s
patchwork screenplay. As is standard
for animated Disney musicals, the
depths of the story are more fully
explored in the artistry of the execu-
tion than in the narrative itself.
So “Hercules” as a movie was al-
ready an expurgated, glossed-up prod-
uct. Mr. Diaz follows most of its con-
tours closely, giving us a Hercules
(Jelani Alladin) who is the son of Zeus
and Hera instead of (as in the classical
myth) Zeus and a mortal he neglected
to marry. When the minions of the
Menken and David Zippel — had to
address in making a 21st-century stage
version. For one thing, there weren’t
enough songs: just five, give or take.
And Pegasus, the de rigueur flying
sidekick dragged in from another myth
entirely, clearly had to go.
But the bigger problems involved
race and gender. Other than the
gospel-shouting muses, drawn as five
black women and given self-con-
sciously sassy dialogue, everyone in
this story was white. And the character
created as Hercules’s love interest, the
duplicitous but finally good-as-gold
Meg, was conceived as a fetchingly
cynical 1940s siren: Barbara Stanwyck
in a tunic.
Happily, the changes the creative
team has instituted to make “Hercu-
les” suitable today are entirely suc-
cessful; much of the new material is
better than the old, and the format is
strong enough to transform even mid-
dlebrow mass entertainment into
meaningful political theater.
Most obviously, a black Hercules
(backed by the wonderfully diverse
ensemble) completely alters the impli-
cations of a story about a man seeking
Top, Jelani Alladin as the title character in “Hercules,” based on the 1997 Disney ani- acceptance as “a good person of the
mated film, at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. From left above, Jeff Hiller, Roger Agora” — the public marketplace. As
Bart (as Hades) and Nelson Chimilio. he did playing Kristoff in the stage
version of Disney’s “Frozen,” Mr. Al-
ladin makes an unimpeachably earnest
envious Hades (Roger Bart) fail to kill Though many of the Disney ani- hero, here adding unexpected depths
the god-baby as instructed, he is raised mated musicals seem to exist outside of feeling as he considers, in a new
on earth as a lunk who wants nothing of time, “Hercules” has some late song that cuts through the movie’s
more than to be a hero so he can re- 20th-century problems that Mr. Diaz — kneejerk sarcasm, what it means “To
turn to his rightful place on Olympus. as well as the songwriters, Alan Be Human.”
Another new song, “Forget About
It,” establishes Meg’s proud independ-
ence, verging on disdain, even as Her-
cules misreads it as flirtation. “This
one’s tall/This one’s ripped/This one’s
mouth should stay zipped,” she sings.
His counterpoint begins: “She rolls her
eyes/and I’m filled with butterflies.”
As Meg, Krysta Rodriguez nails the
show’s new take, biting into her songs
(including a tougher version of the
movie’s “I Won’t Say (I’m in Love)”)
and a terrific new first-date scene that
establishes the character as fully mod-
How does a Disney cartoon come
into a lineage that includes “The
Tempest” and “The Odyssey”?
As you might expect, bigly.
ern. It’s no accident that unlike anyone
else in the production, Meg wears
skinny jeans and a leather jacket.
And though the bluesy new number
for Hades thankfully does nothing to
reframe the material or remediate his
villainy, “A Cool Day in Hell” does give
Mr. Bart, who sang Hercules’s songs in
the movie and now looks as if he woke
up on the bad side of a bender, a
chance to show off his comic mastery.
If the amateur cast is for the most part
enthusiastically adequate to its tasks
— and in some cases you’d be hard
pressed to guess whether they are
Actors’ Equity members or not — the
show wouldn’t work without a Hades
who knows how to wrap an audience in
his palm and squeeze.
All this makes “Hercules” something
of a one-off in the Public Works cata-
log, and also in Disney’s. It is caught
between opposing monsters: the com-
mercial and communitarian impera-
tive.
I don’t know whether Disney is
considering a stage future for this
adaptation, or whether the Public
Works partners and affiliates in nine
cities around the country may wish to
take it on, but either constituency
would find it rather difficult. Even the
formidable Mr. Menken and Mr. Zippel
did: A couple of the additional songs,
despite nifty lyrics, lay eggs. (They’d
work in a movie, though.) And the
staging of the requisite battle scenes,
despite gorgeous puppets by James
Ortiz, defeats the logistical efforts of
Ms. deBessonet and her team.
The resulting confusion was of little
import on a gorgeous Labor Day eve in
front of an audience primed to hoot at
lines like “You’ve become a celebrity.
That is not the same thing as being a
hero.” And when the citizens of Thebes
asked Hercules to prove his strength
by helping with affordable housing, the
1,800 or so citizens at the Delacorte
lapped it up like ambrosia.
But it was ambrosia with an after-
kick. The biggest change made in
“Hercules” may be the hardest one to
make in real life. Public Works has
turned it into a much more significant
story, one in which everyone, not just
the stud in the toga, has to learn to be
a hero.

Professor Matthew McConaughey

The actor is set to teach
a class in filmmaking at
the University of Texas
BY LAURA M. HOLSON
Matthew McConaughey, the Oscar-win-
ning actor and producer, has joined the
faculty of the University of Texas at
Austin and will teach a class this fall.
Mr. McConaughey has been a visiting
instructor in the university’s depart-
ment of radio, television and film at the
Moody College of Communication since
2015.
His new role represents “a mutually
beneficial relationship and recognizes
the contribution he has made to the uni-
versity,” Noah Isenberg, the chairman of
the department, said in an interview.
“This formalizes our relationship. His
passion for film is boundless.”
Mr. McConaughey has a home in
Austin and earned a film degree from
the university in 1993. This fall, a class of
about 40 students will study two movies
Mr. McConaughey has starred in: “The
Gentlemen,” due next year, and the 2012
drama “Mud.” Jeff Nichols, the director
of “Mud,” is scheduled to visit the class.
“It’s the class I wish I would have had
aughey said in a statement. “The ele-
ments of truth and genuine joy for the
process are timeless. That will always
be our classroom focus.”
Since 2015, he has taught a film pro-
duction class called “Script to Screen”
with Scott Rice, an associate professor.
The actor, who was named a professor of
practice, helped develop the course,
which explores every stage of a film’s
production, from screenwriting to post-
production.
Mr. McConaughey first gained atten-
tion in 1993 as a 20-something stoner in
“Dazed and Confused.” In the early
2000s, he starred in a series of romantic
comedies alongside Jennifer Lopez,
Kate Hudson and Sarah Jessica Parker.
He later became known for more seri-
ous roles, winning an Oscar for the 2013
movie “Dallas Buyers Club,” in which he
played an electrician and rodeo cowboy
who imported experimental drugs to
combat AIDS after he contracted H.I.V.
Mr. McConaughey’s offscreen antics
have occasionally gained as much atten-
tion as his onscreen presence. In 1999,
he was arrested on charges of marijua-
na possession after a neighbor com-
plained about noise coming from the ac-
tor’s home. The police found Mr. McCon-
aughey naked, playing the bongos. (The
charges were later dropped.)
have poked fun at how often he is pho-
tographed shirtless. In 2006, Matt Da-
mon did an impression of Mr. McConau-
ghey on the “Late Show With David Let-
terman.”
Actors and directors have long taught
college students the craft of filmmaking
and the business of Hollywood. Spike
Lee, the director of “Do the Right Thing”
and “BlacKkKlansman” and himself an
Oscar winner, taught a course at Har-
vard University in 1992 called “Contem-
porary African-American Cinema,”
which explored the history of black cine-
ma in the United States since 1964. He
has taught for years at New York Uni-
versity.
In the late 1990s, Oprah Winfrey
taught a class in leadership at North-
western University’s Kellogg Graduate
School of Management. While students
were thrilled, she got a cool reception
from some of the faculty members.
“There was a genuine concern that the
sensationalization may not be good for
the institution,” Walter D. Scott, a fellow
professor, said at the time.
The University of Texas thinks differ-
ently.
Dr. Isenberg, the department chair-
man, said he had discussed the new po-
sition with Mr. McConaughey over
lunch in June. “Matthew is the cultural JOHN RIVERA/ICON SPORTSWIRE, VIA GETTY IMAGES

when I was in film school,” Mr. McCon- And his fans — and a few friends — ambassador of Austin,” he said. Matthew McConaughey, in knit cap, at a University of Texas spring football game in April.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Altruism and the literary imagination
ESSAY
Evil draws big crowds,
the Nobel laureate writes.
Goodness is backstage.
BY TONI MORRISON
On an October morning in 2006, a young
man backed his truck into the driveway
of a one-room schoolhouse. He walked
into the school and after ordering the
boy students, the teacher and a few
other adults to leave, he lined up 10 girls,
ages 9 to 13, and shot them. The mind-
less horror of that attack drew intense
and sustained press as well as, later on,
books and film. Although there had been
two other school shootings only a few
days earlier, what made this massacre
especially notable was the fact that its
landscape was an Amish community —
notoriously peaceful and therefore the
most unlikely venue for such violence.
Before the narrative tracking the
slaughter had been exhausted in the
press, another rail surfaced, one that
was regarded as bizarre and somehow
as shocking as the killings. The Amish
community forgave the killer, refused to
seek justice, demand vengeance, or
even to judge him. They visited and
comforted the killer’s widow and chil-
dren (who were not Amish), just as they
embraced the relatives of the slain.
There appeared a number of explana-
tions for their behavior — their histori-
cal aversion to killing anyone at all for
any reason and their separatist convic-
tions. More to the point, the Amish com-
munity had nothing or very little to say
to outside inquiry except that it was
God’s place to judge, not theirs. And, as
one cautioned, “Do not think evil of this
man.” They held no press conferences
and submitted to no television inter-
views. They quietly buried the dead, at-
tended the killer’s funeral, then tore
down the old schoolhouse and built a
new one.
Their silence following the slaughter,
along with their deep concern for the
killer’s family, seemed to me at the time
characteristic of genuine “goodness.”
And I became fascinated with the term
and its definition.
Thinkers, of whom none was as unin-
formed as I was, have long analyzed
what constitutes goodness, what good is
good, and what its origins are or may be.
The myriad theories I read over-
whelmed me, and to reduce my confu-
sion I thought I should just research the
term “altruism.” I quickly found myself
on a frustrating journey into a plethora
of definitions and counterdefinitions. I
began by thinking of altruism as a more
or less faithful rendition of its Latin root:
alter/other; selfless compassion for the
“other.” That route was not merely nar-
row; it led to a swamp of interpretations,
contrary analyses, and doubt. A few of
these arguments posited wildly differ-
ent explanations: (1) Altruism is not an
instinctive act of selflessness, but a
taught and learned one. (2) Altruism
might actually be narcissism, ego en-
hancement, even a mental disorder
made manifest in a desperate desire to
think well of oneself to erase or diminish
self-loathing. (3) Some of the most
thought-provoking theories came from
scholarship investigating the DNA, if
you will, seeking evidence of an embed-
ded gene automatically firing to enable
the sacrifice of oneself for the benefit of
others; a kind of brother or sister to Dar-
win’s “survival of the fittest.” Examples
of confirmation or contradiction of the
Darwinian theory came primarily from
the animal and insect kingdoms: squir-
rels deliberately attracting predators to
themselves to warn the other squirrels;
birds as well and especially ants, bees,
bats all in service to the colony, the col-
lective, the swarm. Such behavior is
very common among humans. But the
question being put seemed to be
whether such sacrifice for kin and/or
community is innate, built, as it were,
into our genes just as individual con-
quest of others is held to be a natural, in-
stinctive drive that serves evolution. Is
there a “good” gene along with a “self-
ish” gene? The further question for me
was the competition between the gene
and the mind.
I confess I was unable and ill
equipped to understand much of the
scholarship on altruism, but I did learn
something about its weight, its urgency,
and its relevance and irrelevance in con-
temporary thought.
Keeping those Amish in mind, I won-
dered why the narrative of that event, in
the press and visual media, quickly ig-
nored the killer and the slaughtered chil-
dren and began to focus almost exclu-
sively on the shock of forgiveness. As I
noted earlier, mass shootings at schools
were perhaps too ordinary; there had
been two such shootings elsewhere dur-
ing that same time, but the Amish com-
munity’s unwillingness to clamor for
justice/vengeance/retribution, or even
to judge the killer was the compelling
story. The shock was that the parents of
the dead children took pains to comfort
the killer’s widow, her family and her
children, to raise funds for them, not
themselves. Of the victimized communi-
ty’s response to that almost classic ex-
ample of evil, in addition to their refusal
to fix blame, the most extraordinary ele-
ment was their silence. It was that si-
lence (that refusal to be lionized, tele-
vised) that caused me to think differ-
ently about goodness.
Of course thinking about goodness
RELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws
A painting of Toni Morrison by Robert McCurdy on display at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
implies, indeed requires, a view of its op-
posite.
I have never been interested in or im-
pressed by evil itself, but I have been
confounded by how attractive it is to oth-
ers. I am stunned by the attention given
to its every whisper and shout. Which is
not to deny its existence and ravage, nor
to suggest evil does not demand con-
frontation, but simply to wonder why it
is so worshiped, especially in literature.
Is it its theatricality, its costume, its
blood spray, the emotional satisfaction
that comes with its investigation more
than with its collapse? (The ultimate de-
tective story, the paradigm murder mys-
tery.) Perhaps it is how it dances, the
music it inspires, its clothing, its na-
kedness, its sexual disguise, its passion-
ate howl, and its danger. The formula in
which evil reigns is bad versus good, but
the deck is stacked because goodness in
contemporary literature seems to be
equated with weakness, as pitiful (a girl
running frightened and helpless
through the woods while the pursuing
villain gets more of our attention than
her savior).
Evil has a blockbuster audience;
Goodness lurks backstage. Evil has viv-
id speech; Goodness bites its tongue. It
is Billy Budd, who can only stutter. It is
Coetzee’s Michael K, with a harelip that
so limits his speech that communication
with him is virtually impossible. It is
Melville’s Bartleby, confining language
to repetition. It is Faulkner’s Benjy, an
idiot.
Expressions of goodness are
never trivial or incidental in my
writing. In fact, I want them to
have life-changing properties.
Rather than rummage through the ex-
quisite and persuasive language of reli-
gions — all of which implore believers to
rank goodness as the highest and holiest
of human achievement, and many of
which identify their saints and icons of
worship as examples of pure altruism —
I decided to focus on the role goodness
plays in literature using my own line of
work — fiction — as a test.
In 19th-century novels, regardless of
what acts of wickedness or cruel indif-
ference controlled the plot, the ending
was almost always the triumph of good-
ness. Dickens, Hardy, and Austen all left
their readers with a sense of the restora-
tion of order and the triumph of virtue,
even Dostoyevsky. Note that Svidri-
gailov in “Crime and Punishment,” ex-
hausted by his own evil and the lan-
guage that supports it, becomes so
bored by his terminal acts of charity, he
commits suicide. He cannot live without
the language of evil, nor within the si-
lence of good deeds. There are famous
exceptions to what could be called a
19th-century formula invested in identi-
fying clearly who or what is good. Obvi-
ously “Don Quixote” and “Candide”
both mock the search for pure goodness.
Other exceptions to that formula remain
puzzles in literary criticism: Melville’s
“Billy Budd” and “Moby-Dick,” both of
which support multiple interpretations
regarding the rank, the power, the
meaning that goodness is given in these
texts. The consequence of Billy Budd’s
innocence is execution. Is Ishmael
good? Is Ahab a template for goodness,
fighting evil to the death? Or is he a
wounded, vengeful force outfoxed by in-
different nature, which is neither good
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019 | 15
culture
black people: “Any white person assem- disorder, occurs in the very first novel I
bling with slaves or free Negroes for wrote. Determined to erase his self-
purpose of instructing them to read or loathing, Soaphead Church, a character
write, or associating with them in any in “The Bluest Eye,” chooses to “give,”
unlawful assembly, shall be confined in or pretend to give, blue eyes to a little
jail not exceeding six months and fined girl in psychotic need of them. In his let-
not exceeding $100.00.” That text ap- ter to God, he imagines himself doing
peared in Virginia’s criminal law as late the good God refuses. Misunderstood as
as 1848. it is, it has language.
Examples of the third: Instinctive kin Over time, these last 40 years, I have
protection is the most common repre- become more and more invested in
sentative of goodness — and I acknowl- making sure acts of goodness (however
edge several areas of failure to articu- casual or deliberate or misapplied or,
late them. From the deliberate sticking like the Amish community, blessed)
of one’s leg under a train for insurance produce language. But even when not
money to raise their family in “Sula,” to articulated, like the teaching priest in “A
setting a son on fire to spare him and Mercy,” such acts must have a strong
others the sight of his self-destruction. impact on the novel’s structure and on
Note this is the same mother who its meaning. Expressions of goodness
throws herself out of a window to save a are never trivial or incidental in my
daughter from fire. These acts are far writing. In fact, I want them to have life-
too theatrical and are accompanied by changing properties and to illuminate
no compelling language. On the other decisively the moral questions embed-
hand, there is the giving away of one’s ded in the narrative. It was important to
child to a stranger in order to save her me that none of these expressions be
from certain molestation in “A Mercy.” handled as comedy or irony. And they
The motive that impels Florens’s are seldom mute.
mother, a minha mae, seems to me quite Allowing goodness its own speech
close to altruism, and most importantly does not annihilate evil, but it does allow
is given language which I hoped would me to signify my own understanding of
be a profound, a literal definition of free- goodness: the acquisition of self-knowl-
dom: “To be given dominion over an- edge. A satisfactory or good ending for
other is a hard thing; to wrest dominion me is when the protagonist learns some-
over another is a wrong thing; to give thing vital and morally insightful that
dominion of yourself to another is an evil she or he did not know at the beginning.
thing.” Claudia’s words, at the end of “The
Another example of the third: Un- Bluest Eye”: “I even think now that the
questioning compassion in support of land of the entire country was hostile to
not just kin but of members of the group marigolds that year. This soil is bad for
in general. In “Home,” for example, certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it
women provide unsolicited but neces- will not nurture, certain fruit it will not
sary nursing care to a member of the bear, and when the land kills of its own
collective who has spent a lifetime de- volition, we acquiesce and say the vic-
spising them; their “reason” being re- tim had no right to live. We are wrong of
sponsibility to God: “They did not want course but it doesn’t matter. It’s too late.
to meet their Maker and have nothing to At least on the edge of my town, among
say when He asked, ‘What have you the garbage and sunflowers of my town,
done?’” A further instance of innate it’s much, much, much too late.”
group compassion is the healing of Cee, Such insight has nothing to do with
physically as well as mentally. It was im- winning, and everything to do with the
PATRICK SEMANSKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS portant to me to give that compassion acquisition of knowledge. Knowledge on
voice: “Look to yourself,” Miss Ethel display in the language of moral clarity
tells her. “You free. Nothing and nobody — of goodness.
is obliged to save you but you . . . You
nor bad? Innocence represented by Pip habit of goodness can be found in “A young and a woman and there is serious Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize
we know is soon abandoned, swallowed Mercy.” There a priest, at some danger limitation in both but you a person, too in Literature in 1993, died in August. This
by the sea without a murmur. Generally, to himself, teaches female slaves to read . . . Somewhere inside you is that free lecture, which she delivered at Harvard
however, in 19th-century literature, and write. Lest this be understood as person . . . Locate her and let her do Divinity School in 2012, will be reprinted
whatever the forces of malice the pro- simple kindness, here is a sample of some good in the world.” in “Goodness and the Literary Imagina-
tagonist is faced with, redemption and punishments levied on white people An example of the second: Goodness tion,” from the University of Virginia
the triumph of virtue was his or her re- who risked promoting literacy among as a form of narcissism, perhaps mental Press, in October.
ward.
Twentieth-century novelists were un-
impressed. The movement away from
happy endings or the enshrining of good
over evil was rapid and stark after
World War I. That catastrophe was too
wide, too deep to ignore or to distort
with a simplistic gesture of goodness.
Many early modern novelists, espe-
cially Americans, concentrated on the
irredeemable consequences of war —
the harm it did to its warriors, to society,
to human sensibility. In those texts, acts
of sheer goodness, if not outright comi-
cal, are treated with irony at best or la-
dled with suspicion and fruitlessness at
worst. One thinks of Faulkner’s “A Fa-
ble” and the mixed reviews it received,
most of which were disdainful of the de-
liberate armistice between soldiers in
trench warfare against each other driv-
en by a Christ-like character. The term
“hero” seems to be limited these days to
the sacrificing dead: first responders
running into fiery buildings, mates
throwing themselves on grenades to
save the lives of others, rescuing the
drowning, the wounded. Faulkner’s
character would never be seen or
praised as a hero.
Evil grabs the intellectual platform
and its energy; it demands careful ex-
aminations of its consequences, its tech-
niques, its motives, its successes howev-
er short-lived or temporary. Grief, mel-
ancholy, missed chances for personal
happiness often seem to be contempo-
Rouen
rary literature’s concept of evil. It hogs
the stage. Goodness sits in the audience
Fine Arts
and watches, assuming it even has a
ticket to the show. A most compelling ex-
ample of this obsession with evil is Um-
Museum
berto Eco’s “The Prague Cemetery.”
Brilliant as it is, never have I read a
more deeply disturbing fascination with
the nature of evil; disturbing precisely
because it is treated as a thrilling intelli-
gence scornful of the monotony and stu-
pidity of good intentions.
Contemporary literature is not inter-
ested in goodness on a large or even lim-
ited scale. When it appears, it is with a
note of apology in its hand and has trou-
ble speaking its name. For every “To Kill
a Mockingbird,” there is a Flannery
O’Connor’s “Wise Blood” or “A Good
Man Is Hard to Find,” striking goodness
down with a well-honed literary ax.
Many of the late 20th-, early 21st-cen-
tury heavyweights — Philip Roth, Nor-
man Mailer, Saul Bellow and so on — are
masters at exposing the frailty, the
pointlessness, the comedy of goodness.
I thought it would be interesting and
possibly informative to examine my the-
sis on the life and death of goodness in
literature using my own work. I wanted
to measure and clarify my understand-
ing by employing the definitions of al-
truism that I gleaned from my tentative
Pinault June 5th, 2019
— May 11th, 2020
research. To this end, I selected three:
1. Goodness taught and learned (a
habit of helping strangers and/or taking
risks for them).
Collection
2. Goodness as a form of narcissism,
ego enhancement or even a mental dis-
order.
3. Goodness as instinct, as a result of
genetics (protecting one’s kin or one’s
group).
An example of the first: A learned

16 | FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2019
travel
A Portugal of beaches, villages and little else
Exploring the last stretch
of unspoiled Atlantic coast
in all of southern Europe
BY ERIC LIPTON
The local butcher, his daughter standing
by his side, was selling roasted whole
chickens and slabs of fresh-cut beef to
customers who had only to look into the
store and nod to put in their orders,
much as they have been done in this tiny
hillside village in rural Portugal for dec-
ades now. Routines here are as well
worn as the cobblestone streets.
Just a block away, French-speaking
visitors waltzed into the row of recently
opened boutiques selling designer
dresses and bikinis, next to the site
where the French shoe designer Chris-
tian Louboutin is preparing to build this
town’s first hotel. It is a hint of the two
worlds that have come together in this
beachside town.
Melides is in the midst of a transfor-
mation as a wave of super-affluent Eu-
ropeans — artists, bankers, actors and
sports stars — have discovered this ex-
traordinarily beautiful spot in the mid-
dle of a 40-mile stretch of nearly un-
touched Atlantic Ocean beaches at the
edge of hundreds of square miles of cork
oak fields, vineyards and rice fields.
The Alentejo region, as the area is
known, has the last unspoiled stretch of
Atlantic Ocean coast in all of southern
Europe. The coast is largely unknown to
visitors from the United States, whose
bucket list for Portugal is generally the
famed cities of Lisbon and Porto, and the
Algarve region to the south, which has
some beautiful towns like Lagos, but is
often overrun with tourists.
Melides (pronounced Melidesh) and
the rest of the Alentejo coast — which
starts about an hour south of Lisbon and
runs about 90 miles down to the south-
western Portugal town of Odeceixe — is
what St. Tropez used to be in the 1950s,
before Brigitte Bardot, or Ibiza, before
the first wave of summer partygoers
ever heard of what is now a Mediterra-
nean hot spot.
That explains why Mr. Louboutin is
trying to build a boutique hotel in
Melides, where he has his own ocean-
side house. His neighbor is Noemi
Marone Cinzano, a countess and wine-
maker whose family once owned the fa-
mous Italian brand of vermouth.
“I have been traveling all my life, and
I have not seen a place in Europe that is
this untouched,” Ms. Cinzano, who built
a rustic seaside home here, said.
Other A-list homeowners in the area
include Philippe Starck, the interior dec-
orator and hotel designer; Anselm
Kiefer, the German artist; and Jason
Martin, the British abstract painter, who
took over a cavernous former nightclub
as his studio, and built a home on the
nearby hillside, where he is also pro-
ducing wine.
Children at play in the sand of Melides Lagoon in the Alentejo region.
Everyone knows this can hardly last:
rich people descending on a pristine ru-
ral community in search of their own
piece of nature and solitude. But at least
for the moment, Alentejo is a region of
unparalleled beauty and authenticity.
My family and I showed up here this
summer, almost by accident. TAP, Portu-
gal’s national airline, often offers dis-
counted flights to Lisbon from gateway
cities in the United States, like New York
and Washington. After booking such a
flight, but with no other plans, we read
about the crazy stretch of uninterrupted
Atlantic Ocean beaches here, and de-
cided to book a modest seaside cottage
(We used booking.com for a three-bed-
room house that cost $192 a night, in-
cluding all fees) in a town we could
barely find on the map, from a couple
who live in Lisbon.
THE ALENTEJO AREA has long been known
as one of the poorest and least populated
parts of Western Europe, although its
sandy soil is fertile. Grapes, rice, wheat,
rye, oats, olives, honey, asparagus, wal-
nuts, berries, truffles, mushrooms and
many other vegetables are grown or
produced in the region, which is known
as Portugal’s breadbasket.
The inland parts of Alentejo — featur-
ing historic towns and vineyards —
have for some time drawn outsiders. But
the Alentejo coast is a newer addition on
the international tourist map, pulling in
affluent visitors starting around 2000,
when many of them headed to the sea-
side village called Comporta, up the
road from Melides.
The land there, which once belonged
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Fontainhas beach in the village of Melides, Portugal. Melides, in the rural Alentejo region, sits in the middle of a 40-mile stretch of nearly untouched Atlantic Ocean beaches.
to the king of Portugal, has been owned
since the 1950s by the wealthy Espı́rito
Santo family, which, starting in the
1990s, began inviting friends to the area,
including Princess Caroline and Prince
Albert of Monaco.
Comporta is still appealing, with a
beach nearby and great places to eat,
such as Cavalarica Comporta, and lively
night life. It also has a growing list of lux-
ury boutique hotels nearby, like Quinta
da Comporta and Sublime Comporta.
Luxury cars fill the busy streets, couples
in bohemian-style outfits walk among
the art galleries, housewares stores,
nightclubs and outdoor bars. (The mos-
quitoes are also pretty overwhelming at
night, as the village is built at the edge of
a rice field.)
That is why I was glad we had ended
up staying a bit farther south near
Melides, a simple town of about 1,500
residents, four or so restaurants, a
THE NEW YORK TIMES
church, a few small stores and a super-
market. The town square features a post
office, a small cafe, a newsstand, a fu-
neral home and a butcher shop, along
with a collection of small tables where
locals gather to pass the hours.
Our rental was about 15 minutes out-
side Melides, and just two blocks from
what is the most extraordinary stretch
of beach I have seen anywhere in the
world, called Praia da Galé.
You walk down a long pathway to-
ward the vast expanse of the Atlantic.
Then you climb down a precarious set of
stairs built into the sandstone cliff, be-
fore you reach the beach. On the way,
you pass a dazzling collection of reddish,
weathered sandstones that look like ab-
stract sculptures. These formations,
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
PHOTOGRAPHS BY DANIEL RODRIGUES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
around five million years old, reach 130 day of each month. Grândola also has a spot, but in early August it is home to the to the airport to fly home — that I was
feet into the sky, sitting atop a carpet of classic Portuguese restaurant, A Talha Meo Sudoeste music festival, which reminded how disconnected we had
wild yellow chorão das praias flowers. de Azeite, where some of the best dishes draws crowds of backpackers, mostly been. As I saw the billboards, the big-
Finally, on sea level, as you turn in include açorda de bacalhau (a tradi- from Portugal and Spain, who camp in box stores of the city, the car dealer-
both directions, as far as you can see, is tional codfish bread soup) and arroz de tents next to the festival grounds. ships, I realized we had crossed a kind of
nothing but a vast empty reach of beach lingueirão (rice with razor clams). Our ideal version of a day was just threshold to return to the contemporary
and the occasional fisherman with a We got as far south as Zambujeira do hanging out in the nearly empty village world. The nine-year cycle of growing
pole in the sand, or a sprinkling of fam- Mar, a coastal village near the bottom of of Melides, or by the beach. It was on the cork, Alentejo’s clock, is stubborn, slow
ilies with beach umbrellas. So few peo- the Alentejo. It seemed like a sleepy drive back to Lisbon — we went directly moving, durable — and just right.
ple frequent parts of this beach that the
sand is crusty.
MILE AFTER MILE you can walk, uninter-
rupted. Not a single hotel or resort, just
the occasional snack shack and during
the day, a few lifeguards supplied by the
regional government. Long stretches of Book Now +1 202-349-0670
the coast are permanently protected as
national parks.
I found myself drawn to the beach. Af-
ter dawn, I would hike on the cliffs, some
200 feet high, overlooking the ocean.
This area has a network of sandy
trails from the coast miles into the coun-
tryside. For hours I walked alone, ex-
cept for the birds, beetles, wildflowers
and pines. Thankfully, the GPS on my
phone still worked, as I got lost one
morning on these unmarked trails.
Turning away from the ocean, I could
see only an endless canopy of green —
formed by a huddle of tall pines whose
umbrella-shaped branches create a pine
blanket in the sky.
I returned in the afternoon, with my
wife and daughters, after the sun finally
warmed the cool morning air. We were
there in the evening, to see the sun set as
the beach faces directly west. Finally,
late at night, I was there, standing by the
cliffs overlooking the ocean, gazing at
the crazy display of stars; there are no
nearby cities to spoil the show.
There are, not surprisingly, all kinds
of outdoor activities to choose from.
Simplest is the vast network of so-called
fishermen’s trails that stretch for 280
miles inland and along the Atlantic
called Rota Vicentina.You can also take
The Times Journeys Experience
horseback rides and surfing lessons, go
biking, watch dolphins, and go fishing,
kayaking or ballooning. Several
Travel the Times Way Times-selected experts
beaches, including an area called Santo A New York Times journalist or subject-
When you travel with The New York Times, you
André, have natural lagoons, making its matter specialist joins every tour
experience the story of a place alongside Pulitzer Prize-
calm, shallow waters safe for young chil-
dren. Santo André is also a nature re- winning journalists or world-renowned specialists Destinations that tell a story
serve with more than 240 bird species who join every tour, providing insight, analysis and Inspired by our journalism around
and hundreds of kinds of butterflies. the globe, all Times Journeys have
opinions for deeper context and perspective. a tale to tell
Melides also serves as a great launch-
ing point for day trips throughout the
Alentejo region, including to Comporta. Behind-the-scenes access
Jaunts we took included a drive Designed to provide perspective,
through cork oak fields. Every nine our itineraries are filled with
years, the bark is cut by hand from the extraordinary experiences
trees, but gradually it regrows. The cork
is used in wine bottles, as well as in Local insight and analysis
Scott Heller Anne Barnard Maureen Dowd Local journalists, resident artists
shoes, bags and other items, all of which Former Times Beirut New York Times
Times Theater Editor and others weave nuance into our
are sold in local shops. Bureau Chief Columnist
Behind the Scenes topics and themes
of New York Theater Perspectives on Opinions on the
FROM THE CORK FIELDS, we reached the Lebanon and Jordan Mediterranean
picture-perfect town of Evora, built by
the Romans and later taken over by the
Moors — which has a second-century
Roman temple and Portugal’s largest
medieval cathedral, along with restau-
rants, bars and stores. The UNESCO
World Heritage list calls Evora the
“finest example of a city of the golden
age of Portugal after the destruction of
Lisbon by the 1755 earthquake.” This
was the most tourist-intense part of our
week, but well worth the detour.
We spent an afternoon at a large or-
ganic farm, Herdade Aberta Nova, that View all of our departures and book now
includes a vast collection of peacocks, nytimes.com/timesjourneys
pigs, horses, donkeys, chickens, goats
Quoted tour prices are per person, double occupancy except where indicated and subject to availability. Excludes internal and international air. Programs subject to change.
and other farm animals.
All terms and conditions can be found at nytimes.com/timesjourneys or you can call 855-NYT-7979 and request a copy be sent to you. Abercrombie & Kent CST#2007274-
We also stopped by Grândola, the 20, Mountain Travel CST#2014882-10, Academic Travel Abroad CST#2059002-40, Insight Cruises CST#2065380-40, Judy Perl Worldwide Travel LLC CST#2122227-40.
county seat, where there is a large tradi-
tional farmers market the second Mon-