N.B.A.
BUBBLE
A STRANGE LIFE
AT DISNEY WORLD
PAGE 13 | SPORTS
Free speech
and left-wing
punishment
Michelle Goldberg
OPINION
An acquaintance came to me a few
weeks ago with the rough draft of a
letter about free speech and asked me
to sign. I declined, in part because it
denounced “cancel culture.” As I wrote
in an email, the phrase “ ‘cancel cul-
ture,’ while it describes something real,
has been rendered sort of useless
because it’s so often used by right-
wing whiners like Ivanka Trump who
think protests against them violate
their free speech.”
A little later my acquaintance came
back to me with a new version, which
didn’t mention “cancel culture.” Like
the people who wrote the letter, I think
left-wing illiber-
Illiberal alism is a problem,
though I’ve mostly
progressives
stopped writing
are a lot less about it since Don-
threatening ald Trump was
than the right. elected, because it
That doesn’t seems like com-
mean they plaining about a
don’t exist. bee sting when you
have Stage IV
cancer.
So I signed. The
statement, published in Harper’s Mag-
azine as “A Letter on Justice and Open
Debate,” spawned takes and counter-
takes, most of them, despite my mod-
est effort, about “cancel culture.”
At first I avoided wading into dis-
course about what’s now called the
Letter. It seemed self-indulgent to
write about media angst when the
United States is self-immolating be-
cause of unchecked disease and an
economic catastrophe that’s about to
get much worse. But as the debate
over free speech grew and grew, I
started to think I was using the burn-
ing world as an excuse to avoid per-
sonal discomfort.
From my (privileged) vantage point,
several things are happening simulta-
neously. The mass uprising following
the killing of George Floyd has led to a
necessary expansion of the boundaries
of mainstream speech. Space has been
created for daring left-wing ideas, like
abolishing the police, that were once
marginalized. Cultural institutions are
reckoning with the racism that leads to
mostly white leadership.
At the same time, a climate of puni-
tive heretic-hunting, a recurrent fea-
ture of left-wing politics, has set in,
GOLDBERG, PAGE 10
The New York Times publishes opinion
from a wide range of perspectives in
hopes of promoting constructive debate
about consequential questions.
“Originally, I really didn’t want to talk about it,” the comedian Fary said of recent Black
Lives Matter protests in France, because he did not want to be seen as a spokesman.
Y(1J85IC*KKNSKM( +#!"!$!@!z
NEWSSTAND PRICES
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Bos. & Herz. KM 5.80
Britain £ 2.40
The swimsuit trade in Xingcheng, China, began with homemade outfits sold on the beach. Now the 1,200 factories there make about a quarter of the suits sold around the world.
In China, waiting for a wave
Swimsuit factories hope
sales orders will rebound
before the season is over
BY RAYMOND ZHONG
There may be no place on earth that was
looking forward to summer more than
Xingcheng, a laid-back seaside city dot-
ted with the occasional high rise.
Hot sun, cold drinks. Long, languor-
ous days at the beach.
But, most important, swimsuits.
Xingcheng (pronounced SHING-
chung), an out-of-the-way factory city
on China’s northeastern coast, makes
swimwear that is exported to the United
States, Germany, Australia and dozens
of other countries — a quarter of the
world’s swimwear in total, it estimates.
This year, though, when China forced its
people to stay home to stop the coro-
navirus, Xingcheng’s production of
trunks, bikinis and one-pieces ground to
a halt.
Then, just as China started getting
back to work, the epidemic became a
pandemic, and the rest of the world be-
gan shutting down. Demand for
Xingcheng’s swimsuits dried up. Fac-
tories and workshops that reopened —
masks, disinfectant and temperature
checks in place — had very little to do.
ELLIOTT VERDIER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
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JOHN LEWIS
TOWERING FIGURE
OF CIVIL RIGHTS
PAGE TWO
INTERNATIONAL EDITION | MONDAY, JULY 20, 2020
A few factories in the coastal Chinese city are working on orders now, but many think
the suits they finish are going into warehouses, rather than onto sale racks.
Some thought about making other
stretchy products instead: yoga clothes,
scuba diving suits, wrestling outfits. But
that would have meant buying new ma-
terial, finding new suppliers, maybe
even investing in new machines. Start-
ing over, basically.
“Nobody was working. Nobody was
earning money,” said Yao Haifu, 42, who
‘Hello, white people!’
French comic is serious
PARIS
Barrier-breaking leader
of Paris stand-up scene
confronts issues of racism
BY LAURA CAPPELLE
As news of George Floyd’s killing by the
police in Minneapolis ricocheted around
the world last month, the French stand-
up comedian Fary Lopes, known as
Fary, wasn’t telling jokes.
On national radio, he described
France as “fundamentally not an-
tiracist.” In a video for Colors, a Berlin-
based music platform, he challenged
viewers: “Tell the truth. I was born here,
but you’re still terrified.” The clip has
been viewed more than 780,000 times.
Even without punch lines, the decla-
rations were in keeping with the comedy
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Israel NIS 14.00/ Luxembourg € 3.80
Friday 27.80 Malta € 3.60
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Friday 23.50 Morocco MAD 31
Italy € 3.70 Norway Nkr 38
has worked in swimwear factories in
Xingcheng for more than a decade. “In a
word? It was difficult.”
Mr. Yao runs neon-bright cloth
through his sewing machine with nim-
ble, practiced hands. The motor whines;
thread dances and shakes as it unspools
and is sucked into the machine. His col-
leagues at the factory sit in rows, heaps
acts that have made Fary a household
name in France. His two Netflix spe-
cials, “Fary is the New Black,” from
2018, and the two-part “Hexagone,” this
year, delve with bracing directness into
his experiences as a Frenchman of Afri-
can heritage. In 2019, he caused a stir
when he greeted the audience at the
Molière Awards — the French version of
the Tonys — by saying “Hello, white
people!”
In France, outrage over Floyd’s death
has fed into existing frustrations with
the country’s relationship with race.
Last month, large Black Lives Matter
demonstrations took place in Paris, pro-
testing local police brutality and the
French state’s refusal to officially recog-
nize racial or ethnic difference, in the
name of a “colorblind” vision of equality.
Fary remains conflicted about overt
activism. “Originally, I really didn’t
want to talk about it,” he said of the re-
cent protests, in an interview at the com-
COMEDIAN, PAGE 2
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Serbia Din 300 The Netherlands € 3.80
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SAME OLD FEELINGS
THE LURE OF MUSIC STILL
TEMPTS JARVIS COCKER
PAGE 14 | CULTURE
PHOTOGRAPHS BY GIULIA MARCHI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
of half-finished swimsuits by their sides.
The global contraction is hitting Chi-
na’s giant export sector hard. The coun-
try’s exports were up 0.5 percent in June
from a year earlier, even as the overall
economy rebounded more strongly. But
as Chinese industrial centers go,
Xingcheng may take longer than most to
recover.
Across the globe, pools, beaches and
water parks are reopening cautiously, if
at all. Travel and tourism are mostly at a
standstill. Perhaps never in recent his-
tory has so little of humankind had any
need for new swimwear.
And so, with a peak season’s worth of
sales already largely lost, Xingcheng’s
factories are scraping by an order at a
time, waiting for world governments to
get a grip on the illness. For fear to abate
and economies to mend. For more peo-
ple to venture back into the water — or
even just near it, a beverage in hand.
“It’s the same abroad and at home —
there’s still no spending power,” said
Hao Jing, a trader who sells swimsuits
from Xingcheng to international buyers.
Xingcheng is not a particularly well-
known city even within China. But it
produced $2 billion worth of swimwear
in 2018, according to the government’s
official Xinhua news agency. There are
1,200 swimwear companies in the city,
Xinhua says, employing as many as
CHINA, PAGE 8
The world has a lot to teach.
Learn more about our resources for libraries and
educators. Contact us today.
nyteducation@nytimes.com
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..
How Trump
fueled crisis
by passing
the buck
WASHINGTON
Pressing hard to reopen,
the White House pushed
responsibility to the states
BY MICHAEL D. SHEAR,
NOAH WEILAND, ERIC LIPTON,
MAGGIE HABERMAN
AND DAVID E. SANGER
Each morning at 8 as the coronavirus
crisis was raging in April, Mark Mead-
ows, the White House chief of staff, con-
vened a small group of aides to steer the
administration through what had be-
come a public health, economic and po-
litical disaster.
They saw their immediate role as
practical problem-solvers. Produce
more ventilators. Find more personal
protective equipment. Provide more
testing.
But their ultimate goal was to shift re-
sponsibility for leading the fight against
the pandemic from the White House to
the states. They referred to this as “state
authority handoff,” and it was at the
heart of what would become at once a
catastrophic policy blunder and an at-
tempt to escape blame for a crisis that
had engulfed the United States.
Over a critical period beginning in
mid-April, President Trump and his
team convinced themselves that the
outbreak was fading, that they had giv-
en state governments all the resources
they needed to contain its remaining
“embers” and that it was time to ease up
on the lockdown.
In doing so, he was ignoring warnings
that the numbers would continue to
drop only if social distancing was kept in
place, rushing instead to restart the
economy and tend to his battered re-
election hopes.
For scientific affirmation, they turned
to Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the sole public
health professional in the Meadows
group. A highly regarded infectious dis-
eases expert, she was a constant source
of upbeat news for the president and his
aides, walking the halls with charts em-
phasizing that outbreaks were gradual-
ly easing.
On April 11, she told the coronavirus
task force in the Situation Room that the
nation was in good shape.
A sharp pivot soon followed, with con-
sequences that continue to plague the
country today.
Even as experts warned that the pan-
demic was far from under control, Mr.
Trump went, in a matter of days, from
proclaiming that he alone had the au-
thority to decide when the economy
would reopen to pushing that responsi-
bility onto the states. The government
issued detailed reopening guidelines,
but almost immediately, Mr. Trump be-
gan criticizing Democratic governors
who did not “liberate” their states.
Mr. Trump’s bet that the crisis would
TRUMP, PAGE 6

2 | MONDAY, JULY 20, 2020
page two
Civil rights icon and conscience of Congress
JOHN LEWIS
1940-2020
BY KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
Representative John Lewis, a son of
sharecroppers and an apostle of nonvio-
lence who was bloodied at Selma, Ala.,
and across the Jim Crow South in the
historic struggle for racial equality, and
who then carried a mantle of moral au-
thority into Congress, died on Friday. He
was 80.
His death was confirmed in a state-
ment by Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of
the House of Representatives.
Mr. Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, an-
nounced on Dec. 29 that he had Stage 4
pancreatic cancer and vowed to fight it
with the same passion with which he
had battled racial injustice. “I have been
in some kind of fight — for freedom,
equality, basic human rights — for
nearly my entire life,” he said.
On the front lines of the bloody cam-
paign to end Jim Crow laws, with blows
to his body and a fractured skull to prove
it, Mr. Lewis was a valiant stalwart of
the civil rights movement and the last
surviving speaker from the March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom in
1963.
More than a half-century later, after
the killing in May of George Floyd, a
Black man in police custody in Minne-
apolis, Mr. Lewis welcomed the result-
ing global demonstrations against po-
lice killings of Black people and, more
broadly, against systemic racism in
many corners of society. He saw those
protests as a continuation of his life’s
work, though his illness had left him to
watch from the sidelines.
“It was very moving, very moving to
see hundreds of thousands of people
from all over America and around the
world take to the streets — to speak up,
to speak out, to get into what I call ‘good
trouble,’ ” Mr. Lewis told “CBS This
Morning” in June.
“This feels and looks so different,” he
said of the Black Lives Matter move-
ment, which drove the antiracism dem-
onstrations. “It is so much more mas-
sive and all inclusive.” He added, “There
will be no turning back.”
He died on the same day as did an-
other civil rights stalwart, the Rev. C.T.
Vivian, a close associate of the Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Mr. Lewis’s personal history paral-
leled that of the civil rights movement.
He was among the original 13 Freedom
Riders, the Black and white activists
who challenged segregated interstate
travel in the South in 1961. He was a
founder and early leader of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
which coordinated lunch-counter sit-
ins. He helped organize the March on
Washington, where Dr. King was the
main speaker, on the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial.
Mr. Lewis led demonstrations against
racially segregated restrooms, hotels,
restaurants, public parks and swim-
ming pools, and he rose up against other
indignities of second-class citizenship.
At nearly every turn he was beaten, spat
upon or burned with cigarettes. He was
tormented by white mobs and absorbed
body blows from law enforcement.
On March 7, 1965, he led one of the
most famous marches in American his-
tory. In the vanguard of 600 people de-
manding the voting rights they had
been denied, Mr. Lewis marched part-
way across the Edmund Pettus Bridge
in Selma into a waiting phalanx of state
troopers in riot gear.
Ordered to disperse, the protesters si-
lently stood their ground. The troopers
responded with tear gas and bullwhips
and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed
wire. In the melee, which came to be
known as Bloody Sunday, a trooper
cracked Mr. Lewis’s skull with a billy
club, knocking him to the ground, then
hit him again when he tried to get up.
Televised images of the beatings of
Mr. Lewis and scores of others outraged
the nation and galvanized support for
the Voting Rights Act, which President
Lyndon B. Johnson presented to a joint
session of Congress eight days later and
signed into law on Aug. 6. A milestone in
the struggle for civil rights, the law
struck down the literacy tests that Black
people had been compelled to take be-
fore they could register to vote and re-
placed segregationist voting registrars
with federal registrars to ensure that
Black people were no longer denied the
ballot.
Once registered, millions of African-
Americans began transforming politics
across the South. They gave Jimmy
Carter, a son of Georgia, his margin of
victory in the 1976 presidential election.
And their voting power opened the door
for Black people, including Mr. Lewis, to
run for public office. Elected in 1986, he
became the second African-American to
be sent to Congress from Georgia since
Reconstruction, representing a district
that encompassed much of Atlanta.
‘‘A MISSION AND A MANDATE’’
While Mr. Lewis represented Atlanta,
his natural constituency was disadvan-
taged people everywhere. Known less
for sponsoring major legislation than for
his relentless pursuit of justice, he was
called “the conscience of the Congress”
by his colleagues.
When the House voted in December
2019 to impeach President Trump, Mr.
Lewis’s words rose above the rest.
“When you see something that is not
right, not just, not fair, you have a moral
obligation to say something,” he said on
the House floor. “To do something. Our
children and their children will ask us,
‘What did you do? What did you say?’
For some, this vote may be hard. But we
have a mission and a mandate to be on
the right side of history.”
When he was younger, his words
could be more militant. History remem-
bers the March on Washington for Dr.
King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but Mr.
Lewis startled and energized the crowd
with his own passion.
“By the force of our demands, our de-
termination and our numbers,” he told
the cheering throng that August day,
“we shall splinter the segregated South
into a thousand pieces and put them to-
gether in the image of God and democ-
racy. We must say: ‘Wake up, America.
Wake up!’ For we cannot stop, and we
will not and cannot be patient.”
His original text was more blunt. “We
will march through the South, through
the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman
did,” he had written. President John F.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Kennedy’s civil rights bill was “too little,
too late,” he had written, demanding,
“Which side is the federal government
on?”
But Dr. King and other elders — Mr.
Lewis was just 23 — worried that those
first-draft passages would offend the
Kennedy administration, which they felt
they could not alienate in their drive for
federal action on civil rights. They told
him to tone down the speech.
Still, the crowd, estimated at more
than 200,000, roared with approval at
his every utterance.
An earnest man who lacked the silver
tongue of other civil rights orators, Mr.
Lewis could be pugnacious, tenacious
and single-minded, and he led with a
force that commanded attention.
Once he was in Congress, Mr. Lewis
voted with the most liberal Democrats,
though he also showed an independent
streak. In his quest to build what Dr.
MARK MAKELA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Representative John Lewis, top, in 2013. “I
have been in some kind of fight — for
freedom, equality, basic human rights —
for nearly my entire life,” he said in De-
cember. Above, Mr. Lewis, flanked by
then-President Barack Obama and his
wife, Michelle, at a march in Selma, Ala.,
in 2015. Left, Mr. Lewis, foreground, being
beaten by a state trooper in Selma, in 1965.
King called “the beloved community” —
a world without poverty, racism or war
(Mr. Lewis adopted the phrase) — he
routinely voted against military spend-
ing. He opposed the Persian Gulf war of
1991 and the North American Free Trade
Agreement, which was signed in 1992.
He refused to take part in the “Million
Man March” in Washington in 1995, say-
ing that statements made by the organ-
izer, Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Na-
tion of Islam, were “divisive and big-
oted.”
In 2001, Mr. Lewis skipped the inau-
guration of George W. Bush, saying he
thought that Mr. Bush, who had become
president after the Supreme Court
halted a vote recount in Florida, had not
been truly elected.
In 2017 he boycotted Mr. Trump’s in-
auguration, questioning the legitimacy
of his presidency because of evidence
that Russia had meddled in the 2016
election on Mr. Trump’s behalf.
That earned him a derisive Twitter
post from the president: “Congressman
John Lewis should spend more time on
fixing and helping his district, which is
in horrible shape and falling apart (not
to mention crime infested) rather than
falsely complaining about the election
results. All talk, talk, talk — no action or
results. Sad!”
Mr. Trump’s attack marked a sharp
detour from the respect that had been
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
accorded Mr. Lewis by previous presi-
dents, including, most recently, Barack
Obama. Mr. Obama awarded Mr. Lewis
the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the
nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2011.
TO HIS FAMILY, ‘‘PREACHER’’
John Robert Lewis grew up with all the
humiliations imposed by segregated ru-
ral Alabama. He was born on Feb. 21,
1940, to Eddie and Willie Mae (Carter)
Lewis near the town of Troy on a share-
cropping farm owned by a white man.
After his parents bought their own farm
— 110 acres for $300 — John, the third of
10 children, shared in the farm work,
leaving school at harvest time to pick
cotton, peanuts and corn. Their house
had no plumbing or electricity. In the
outhouse, they used the pages of an old
Sears catalog as toilet paper.
John was responsible for taking care
of the chickens. He fed them and read to
them from the Bible. He baptized them
when they were born and staged elabo-
rate funerals when they died.
“I was truly intent on saving the little
birds’ souls,” he wrote in his memoir,
“Walking With the Wind” (1998). “I
could imagine that they were my con-
gregation. And me, I was a preacher.”
His family called him “Preacher,” and
becoming one seemed to be his destiny.
He drew inspiration by listening to a
young minister named Martin Luther
King on the radio and reading about the
1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott. He fi-
nally wrote a letter to Dr. King, who sent
him a round-trip bus ticket to visit him in
Images of protesters being beaten
in Selma, Ala., shocked the
nation and led to swift passage
of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Montgomery, in 1958. By then, Mr. Lewis
had begun his studies at American Bap-
tist Theological Seminary (now Ameri-
can Baptist College) in Nashville, where
he worked as a dishwasher and janitor
to pay for his education.
In Nashville, Mr. Lewis met many of
the civil rights activists who would
stage the lunch counter sit-ins, Freedom
Rides and voter registration campaigns.
They included the Rev. James M. Law-
son Jr., who was one of the nation’s most
prominent scholars of civil disobedience
and who led workshops on Gandhi and
nonviolence. He mentored many civil
rights organizers, including Mr. Lewis.
Mr. Lewis’s first arrest came in Febru-
ary 1960, when he and other students
demanded service at whites-only lunch
counters in Nashville. It was the first
prolonged battle of the movement that
evolved into the Student Nonviolent Co-
ordinating Committee.
In three months, after repeated well-
publicized sit-ins, the city’s political and
business communities gave in to the
pressure, and Nashville became the first
major Southern city to begin desegre-
gating public facilities.
But Mr. Lewis lost his family’s good
will. When his parents learned that he
had been arrested in Nashville, he
wrote, they were ashamed. They had
taught him as a child to accept the world
as he found it. When he asked them
about signs saying “Colored Only,” they
told him, “That’s the way it is, don’t get
in trouble.”
But as an adult, he said, after he met
Dr. King and Rosa Parks, whose refusal
to give up her bus seat to a white man
was a flash point for the civil rights
movement, he was inspired to “get into
trouble, good trouble, necessary trou-
ble.” Getting into “good trouble” became
his motto for life. A documentary film,
“John Lewis: Good Trouble,” was re-
leased this month.
OVERRIDDEN BY ‘‘BLACK POWER’’
But by the time of the urban race riots of
the 1960s, particularly in the Watts sec-
tion of Los Angeles in 1965, many Black
people had rejected nonviolence in favor
of direct confrontation. Mr. Lewis was
ousted as chairman of the Student Non-
violent Coordinating Committee in 1966
and replaced by the fiery Stokely
Carmichael, later known as Kwame
Ture, who popularized the phrase
“Black power.”
Mr. Lewis spent a few years out of the
limelight. He headed the Voter Educa-
tion Project, registering voters, and fin-
ished his bachelor’s degree in religion
and philosophy at Fisk University in
Nashville in 1967.
During this period he met Lillian
Miles, a librarian, teacher and former
Peace Corps volunteer. She was outgo-
ing and political and could quote Dr.
King’s speeches verbatim. They were
married in 1968, and she became one of
his closest political advisers.
She died in 2012. Mr. Lewis’s sur-
vivors include several siblings and his
son, John-Miles Lewis.
Mr. Lewis was a popular speaker at
college commencements and always of-
fered the same advice — that the gradu-
ates get into “good trouble,” as he had
done against his parents’ wishes.
He put it this way on Twitter in 2018:
“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be
hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is
not the struggle of a day, a week, a
month, or a year, it is the struggle of a
lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make
some noise and get in good trouble, nec-
essary trouble.”
Roy Reed, who covered the civil rights
movement for The New York Times and
who died in 2017, contributed reporting
from an earlier version of this obituary.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg also contributed re-
porting.
..
Comedian
isn’t joking
about race
in France
COMEDIAN, FROM PAGE 1
edy club he co-owns in Paris, Madame
Sarfati. “I didn’t want to be seen as the
spokesperson of a movement, because
it’s the best way to ensure that what I do
no longer belongs to me.”
Fary, 29, has been single-minded
about forging his own path and breaking
down barriers. “Fary is the New Black”
was the first standup special that Netflix
had filmed in France, after the comedian
and his team approached the streaming
service. He has challenged stand-up’s
reputation in France as lowbrow enter-
tainment, working with the artist JR,
who designed the performance space at
Madame Sarfati, and the film director
Ladj Ly, who was nominated at the Os-
cars last year for “Les Misérables.” He’s
also taken his act to unusually presti-
gious venues: “Hexagone” was re-
corded at the Théâtre des Bouffes du
Nord, the home of the theater director
Peter Brook.
While sketch comedy has a long his-
tory here, American-style stand-up
gained mainstream recognition only in
the 2000s. The comic Jamel Debbouze
first opened doors for stand-up hopefuls
in 2006 when he founded the Jamel Com-
edy Club, a venue in Paris in which a
namesake TV show was filmed and
where French stand-up stars like
Blanche Gardin, Shirley Souagnon and
Fary cut their teeth.
Fary’s first performances, he said,
were at age 11, imitating Debbouze’s
sets with his cousin.
An uncle would hold charity events to
raise money for children in Cape Verde,
where Fary’s parents were born, and the
duo was enlisted to entertain guests.
“The first time, we did a Jamel set, and
the next time, to give them something
new, we wrote our own jokes,” he re-
membered.
Jason Brokerss, a comic who co-
writes Fary’s sets, describes Fary as a
comedy nerd. “He will message me at 5
a.m. and tell me to watch not even a set,
but one joke, at this exact time stamp,”
he said in an interview.
Fary, whose long list of favorite co-
medians includes Chris Rock and Eddie
Murphy, described his passion for the
craft as “painful at times.” “There are
jokes that make my head spin, because I
wonder how you even get to that level of
precision, “ he said.
“It’s the same thing as writing an al-
exandrine,” he added, referring to the
classical French poetic meter. “There
are so many constraints.”
His comedy club, Madame Sarfati, is
named after one of the most famous
characters in French comedy: The par-
ody of a Jewish mother played by Élie
Kakou, who died in 1999. Modeled after
North American clubs, it is one of only a
few venues in Paris that offer near-daily
performance opportunities for French
comedians. It took the investors, who in-
clude the theater mogul Jean-Marc Du-
montet, two years to find and renovate
the venue, a former restaurant chosen
partly for its location near the Châtelet
station, a transit hub easily accessible
for suburban visitors.
ELLIOTT VERDIER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
A ticket being scanned for a show at
Fary’s comedy club, Madame Sarfati.
Before Madame Sarfati opened last
November, Fary and Dumontet imag-
ined a number of “catastrophic scenari-
os.” Fary admitted wryly that they didn’t
include a pandemic: The club was
closed for nearly four months as France
went into lockdown, at an estimated cost
of around $110,000, according to its man-
ager, Jennifer Soussan.
Madame Sarfati reopened to the pub-
lic on July 8, and while social distancing
rules meant an audience of 75 people in-
stead of the usual 100, the all-male group
of comics that took to the stage for the
reopening night were visibly hungry to
try out new material. Jokes about lock-
down, racism and police violence came
thick and fast. Madame Sarfati keeps its
programming a mystery, which means
there is no telling whether you’ll see
Fary, Brokerss or newcomers strut onto
the stage designed by JR. “I want people
to come for stand-up, not for me,” Fary
said.
Despite the success of the recent real-
life demonstrations in Paris, Fary isn’t
convinced that meaningful change is on
the horizon. “France is a country that
sees its culture as fixed, not as some-
thing that evolves and adapts,” he said.
Still, the lineup at Madame Sarfati re-
cently offered the kind of racial diversity
you rarely see in French culture. Fary
suggested that this might actually ham-
per stand-up’s efforts to be taken seri-
ously, before deadpanning: “Maybe it
needs more white people, actually.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, JULY 20, 2020 | 3

World

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When completed, the $4.5 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, left, will be the largest in Africa. Top right, satellite images released last week showed water building up in the reservoir behind the dam. Above right, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia.

Rains heighten tension in Nile dispute

CAIRO
Huge Ethiopian dam nears
completion; Egypt views
reservoir as security threat
BY DECLAN WALSH
Every day, seasonal rain pounds the
lush highlands of northern Ethiopia,
sending cascades of water into the Blue
Nile, the twisting tributary of perhaps
Africa’s most fabled river.
Farther downstream, the water inch-
es up the concrete wall of a towering,
$4.5 billion hydroelectric dam across the
Nile, the largest in Africa, now moving
closer to completion. A moment that
Ethiopians have anticipated eagerly for
a decade — and which Egyptians have
come to dread — has finally arrived.
Satellite images released last week
showed water pouring into the reservoir
behind the Grand Ethiopian Renais-
sance Dam. Ethiopia hopes the project
will double its electricity production,
bolster its economy, and help unify its
people at a time of often-violent divi-
sions.
#FillTheDam read one popular hash-
tag on Ethiopian social media last week.
Seleshi Bekele, the Ethiopian water
minister, rushed to assuage Egyptian
anxieties by insisting that the engorging
reservoir was the product of natural, en-
tirely predictable seasonal flooding.
He said the formal start of filling,
when engineers close the dam gates,
has not yet occurred. Effectively, that
will be the moment when Ethiopia be-
gins its huge project and gains tremen-
dous control over the flow of Nile waters
into Egypt.
Despite those assurances, down-
stream in Egypt, which relies on the Nile
for 90 percent of its water, the images
brought consternation.
For nearly a decade, Egypt has been
negotiating with Ethiopia over how the
dam should be filled and operated. The
latest, last-ditch effort ended inconclu-
sively last Monday, and the satellite pho-
tos, combined with news reports from
Ethiopia, fueled speculation that the
dam’s reservoir had, in fact, begun to fill
up.
“The question is: What will we do?”
the television host Nashat el-Dihi said
on Egypt’s privately owned Ten TV sta-
tion on Wednesday. “The people are
worried, and that worry must have an
influence.”
Egyptian fears are amplified by the
repeated insistence of the prime min-
ister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, that his
country will close the dam gates by the
end of this month, come what may.
“If Ethiopia doesn’t fill the dam, it
means Ethiopia has agreed to demolish
the dam,” Mr. Abiy told lawmakers on
July 7.
Although the dam’s reservoir will take
at least seven years to fill, the start of the
process has acquired an intense signifi-
cance for both countries — a hydrologi-
cal Rubicon that if crossed without
agreement, could push their dispute in a
new and unpredictable direction.
At the United Nations last month,
Egypt’s foreign minister, Sameh
Shoukry, reiterated warnings that his
country viewed it as an issue of “exist-
ential” significance.
“Survival is not a question of choice,
but an imperative of nature,” he said.
Ethiopia’s ambassador to the United
Nations, Taye Atske Selassie, retorted
that the dispute over the Nile, which
flows through at least six countries, was
equally important for Ethiopia.
In reality, Egypt faces no immediate
threat to its water security.
A bitter divide rooted in history,
with control of the river at stake.
Even if Ethiopia proceeds as planned
this month, less than one-tenth of the
reservoir will be filled. With ample re-
serves of water behind Egypt’s own
dam on the Nile, at Aswan, there is little
risk that Egyptian fields will be parched
or that taps in Cairo will run dry.
But the two countries remain bitterly
divided on key issues, rooted in history,
pride and money, that in essence
amount to a dispute over control of the
Nile itself.
“This is an important moment,” said
William Davison, an analyst with the In-
ternational Crisis Group. “It raises the
prospect of the two downstream coun-
tries pulling out of talks, which may in-
crease tensions.”
Egypt wants legally binding assur-
ances that in the event of prolonged
drought, Ethiopia would slow or halt the
filling of the dam. Cairo also wants a say
in Ethiopia’s development of any other
dams on the Nile in the future.
Ethiopia rejects those demands,
which it views as a violation of
sovereignty, and says that Egypt must
accept that its centuries-old dominance
of the Nile has come to an end.
Trust is low on all sides. One Egyptian
official, who requested anonymity to
discuss sensitive international talks, ac-
cused Ethiopia of seeking a deal with
such vague commitments and with so
many loopholes that he likened it to a
block of Swiss cheese.
Ethiopian officials shoot back that
Egypt was behaving in a typically high-
handed manner, and they pointed to
strong backing from ordinary Ethi-
opians — many of whom have a financial
stake in the project.
Like tens of thousands of other Ethi-
opians, Yacob Arsano Atito, a political
science professor at Addis Ababa Uni-
versity in the Ethiopian capital, bought
government bonds in the dam years
ago. He hopes his investment of $225
will soon be repaid.
“I’m very happy the project is on its
way to completion,” he said.
In an interview, Mr. Bekele, the Ethi-
opian water minister, said that the dam
was not fully constructed. It currently
rises to more than 1,800 feet, about 260
feet short of its final height. Not all of its
13 turbines have been installed.
Although the dam’s reservoir has a
maximum capacity of 19.5 trillion gal-
lons, its optimal operating size will be
about 13 trillion gallons, the equivalent
of one year’s flow of the Nile.
In many ways, though, the dispute is
as much about politics as hydrology.
Mr. Abiy, the Ethiopian prime min-
ister, swept to power in 2018 with a repu-
tation as a reformer, and last year he
won a Nobel Peace Prize for his success
in forging peace with Eritrea. But re-
cently, his country has again become
mired in violent upheaval over the sta-
tus of the Oromo, its largest ethnic
group.
In the east of the country, the insur-
gent Oromo Liberation Army has been
carrying out attacks on the security
forces, and at least 166 people were
killed late last month during protests
over the killing of Hachalu Hundessa, a
popular Oromo musician and activist.
For Mr. Abiy, who has repeatedly
vowed to fill the dam this month, the
project provides “something that Ethi-
opians can unite around,” said Mr. Atito,
the political science professor.
There are also perils for Egypt’s au-
thoritarian leader, President Abdel Fat-
tah el-Sisi. His security forces do not an-
ticipate major protests if he fails to
strike a deal with Ethiopia, officials said.
But after building up the dispute for
so many years, Mr. el-Sisi’s legitimacy
could take a knock if he fails to act, par-
ticularly at a time when he is also facing
down threats from other regional rivals.
In a meeting with Libyan tribal lead-
ers last week, Mr. el-Sisi reiterated a
threat to send Egyptian troops into Lib-
ya to fend off forces backed by Turkey.
Stuck in the middle is Sudan, which
lies between Ethiopia and Egypt. Sudan
stands to benefit from cheaper electrici-
ty produced by the dam but worries that
any sudden release of water could dam-
age its own, smaller Roseires Dam.
Western diplomats say that veiled
Egyptian threats of military action
against Ethiopia are unlikely to be car-
ried through, although Egyptian offi-
cials refuse to rule it out.
The African Union, headed by South
Africa, is expected to call an emergency
meeting to discuss the crisis next week.
Mediators hope that, with one final
push, they can bridge the differences be-
tween Ethiopia and Egypt, before sea-
sonal rains fill the gap for them.
Simon Marks contributed reporting from
Palau, Sardinia; and Nada Rashwan
from Cairo.

A French woman becomes a champion of men

PROFILE
PARIS
Assa Traoré sees her role
as organizing a defense
against police brutality
BY CONSTANT MÉHEUT
Standing on a truck, her fist clenched
high and her back turned to a row of po-
lice vans, Assa Traoré galvanized the
crowd before her.
“You are powerful!” she shouted, to
the cheers of thousands who had gath-
ered on the Place de la République in
central Paris to protest police violence
and racism. “Your faces have been seen
all over the world!”
Until just a few weeks ago, Ms. Traoré,
35, a special-education teacher of Mali-
an descent, was largely known as the
spokeswoman for The Truth for Adama,
an advocacy group that has demanded
justice for her half brother, Adama
Traoré, who died in police custody in
2016, on his 24th birthday.
But now, with the spread of Black
Lives Matter protests, she has gained
wider prominence as the champion of
men who have been victims of discrimi-
natory police violence in France. Ms.
Traoré said that men in minority neigh-
borhoods are more likely to be targeted
by the police than women — and as a
woman, she could take a stand where
she was least expected.
“With my female voice, we’re going to
make these men visible and give them a
voice,” Ms. Traoré said in an interview in
her apartment in the Paris suburb of
Ivry-sur-Seine.
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s
killing in the United States, which set off
a wave of anger that spanned the world,
Ms. Traoré and her group have orga-
nized some of the biggest anti-racism
protests in Europe.
They assembled at least 20,000 pro-
testers in front of a Paris courthouse
early in June despite a police ban, then a
crowd of 15,000 just 11 days later on the
Place de la République.
Protesters in recent weeks have in-
cluded more white people and people
from upper-class areas of Paris, Ms.
Traoré said, than went to the first dem-
onstrations for Adama, back in 2016,
which mainly were attended by people
of color. “That’s when we thought: ‘This
is it, the fight for Adama has become a
popular fight,’ ” she said.
Ms. Traoré speaks with conviction.
“France has not come to terms with its
history, with slavery, with colonization,”
she said. “These are unsaid things that
leave traces, and we suffer the conse-
quences.”
France has struggled to confront rac-
ism for years. The Paris suburbs explod-
ed in riots in 2005, driven by resentment
among North African immigrants over
their treatment by the police and dis-
crimination in general, exposing the
rest of France to the country’s racial fis-
sures.
France, which colonized parts of Afri-
ca, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean,
has failed to fully integrate immigrants
from its former empire. Some of that
failure is rooted in its commitment to
universalism — a belief that no group
should be given preference, which crit-
ics say has muted discussion and
shielded the country from facing its co-
lonial legacy.
Ms. Traoré’s words have struck a
chord among the younger generation,
which has flocked to the protests.
“She’s clear, and that makes her
strong,” said Djenaba Dramé, a 21-year-
old Black student at the demonstration
Assa Traoré, center, at a protest against racism and police brutality in June at the Place
de la République in Paris. Her half brother, Adama, died in police custody in 2016.
on the Place de la République.
Christiane Taubira, who in 2012 be-
came the first Black woman to be named
Justice Minister, has called her “a
chance for France.”
Born in Paris in 1985, Ms. Traoré
draws on a family history in both France
and Mali. Two of her great-grandfathers
fought alongside French troops during
World War II, when Mali was still a
French colony, and her father, Mara-Siré
Traoré, emigrated from Mali to France
at age 17.
Ms. Traoré is one of 17 siblings in a
close-knit family where conversations
were conducted in a blend of French,
Soninke and Bambara languages. Her
father married four women: two white
Catholics, whom he divorced, and then
two Malian Muslims with whom he lived
MENIGAULT BERNARD/ALAMY
at the same time, as permitted by Is-
lamic law, despite the ban on polygamy
in France.
When he died of cancer in 1999, Ms.
Traoré was 14. As the eldest child still at
home, she took over the reins of the fam-
ily, filling in for her mother, Hatouma,
who did not speak fluent French, while
continuing her studies to become a spe-
cial-education teacher.
“She took on an almost motherly role
with my brothers and sisters,” said Las-
sana Traoré, 43, one of her oldest half
brothers, who saw this experience as
the foundation of her leadership today.
Ms. Traoré said that helping boys in
disadvantaged suburbs as part of her
work in special education made her real-
ize that Black and Arab men — whom
she called “our brothers” — were tar-
geted by the police when they became
teenagers, a situation that Human
Rights Watch documented in a report
last month.
“Saying that men matter, that their
voices count is part of our struggle,” Ms.
Traoré said. “We must keep fighting so
that all women around the world can
have the rights they deserve. But who’s
fighting, who’s defending our men?”
She said that she drew inspiration
from “Les Misérables,” the 2019 Oscar-
nominated movie by the French film di-
rector Ladj Ly that depicts police vio-
lence against Black and Arab teenagers
in a Paris suburb.
“If those men had been more visible,
perhaps my brother wouldn’t be dead
today,” she added.
Adama, her half brother, died in the
courtyard of a police station on July 19,
2016, in circumstances that are still in
dispute.
Mr. Traoré was pinned down by three
police officers, one of whom later ac-
knowledged placing “the weight of all
our bodies” on him, during an identity
check.
“France has not come to terms
with its history, with slavery, with
colonization. These are unsaid
things that leave traces.”
Mr. Traoré reportedly said that he
could not breathe and most likely
passed out during his transfer to the po-
lice station in Persan, a small town north
of Paris, where he was pronounced dead
two hours later.
Conflicting autopsies pointed to heart
failure or asphyxiation as the cause of
the death, but after much investigation
there is still no clear picture of what hap-
pened. No charges have been filed
against the officers, whom the Traoré
family accuse of having killed Adama.
“I told myself that his death could not
remain a minor news story,” Ms. Traoré
said. “We could not forget him and just
pretend, ‘Here’s another guy who died
over the summer.’”
Ms. Traoré said that the video of Mr.
Floyd’s killing had helped “illustrate”
what happened to her half brother. “Peo-
ple now understand how my brother
died,” she said.
But, she added, “If there hadn’t been
this big organizational effort before,
George Floyd’s death wouldn’t have
made any difference.”
With the help of seasoned anti-racist,
left-wing activists, Ms. Traoré has
worked to turn her advocacy group into
a movement, keeping politicians at bay
and relying mostly on social networks
that keep her phone buzzing all the time.
She has nearly 400,000 Instagram fol-
lowers.
Julien Talpin, a sociologist at the Na-
tional Center for Scientific Research in
Paris, said that Ms. Traoré had become
“a central political figure” with whom
many Black people, feeling neglected by
French political parties, could easily
identify.
Ms. Traoré’s activism has infuriated
French right-wing news media, which
accuse her of trying to tear French soci-
ety apart by pitting Black and white
communities against each other. It also
has put her at odds with the French au-
thorities.
She recently filed a libel suit against
the Paris police chief and declined an in-
vitation by the former justice minister,
Nicole Belloubet, for a meeting, arguing
that “justice should not be done in a tea-
room at the Élysée Palace.”
“A confrontation has been estab-
lished,” Ms. Traoré said. “It’s a small vic-
tory. But we don’t want a small victory.”

4 | MONDAY, JULY 20, 2020
world
Some party leaders dead after scoffing at virus
Nicaraguan government
is accused of an ‘erratic’
response to the pandemic
BY FRANCES ROBLES
A string of recent deaths across
Nicaragua — including mayors, judges,
police officials, sports figures, univer-
sity rectors and government employees
— is pointing to the chilling reality that
the coronavirus is devastating this Cen-
tral American country, although the
government is not publicly acknowledg-
ing it.
To critics of the government, the
deaths are a result of President Daniel
Ortega’s haphazard and politicized re-
sponse to the pandemic with no encour-
agement for wearing masks or social
distancing measures, little testing and
no stay-at-home orders or shutdowns.
Instead, the government has encour-
aged large gatherings.
That response seems to have hit
members of the governing Sandinista
National Liberation Front party the
hardest.
Several young epidemiologists, virol-
ogists and related specialists wrote in
the medical journal Lancet that
Nicaragua’s handling of the coronavirus
“has been perhaps the most erratic of
any country in the world to date.”
“They were the only ones going
around without masks,” said Dora
María Téllez, a former health minister
under the Sandinistas who broke with
the party, “as the mask came to be con-
sidered a sign of opposition.”
Francisco Aguirre Sacasa, a former
Nicaraguan ambassador to Washing-
ton, said the deaths of the public officials
were strikingly obvious when you
looked at the National Assembly and
saw a lot of empty chairs on the Sandi-
nista side.
“You can’t just ignore that,” he said.
“You can’t hide it. You can’t cover that
up,” he added. “It is obvious, obvious,
that Sandinistas have been dying.”
Still, the deaths of few officials have
been publicly attributed to Covid-19, the
disease caused by the coronavirus — as
is the case with most virus fatalities in
Nicaragua. Many are officially designat-
ed as “atypical pneumonia.”
Officially, the government reports
that just 99 people have died from the vi-
rus, although the Citizens Covid-19 Ob-
servatory, an anonymous group of doc-
tors and activists in Nicaragua, has reg-
istered 2,397 probable deaths.
Mr. Sacasa, the former ambassador,
said one of the Sandinista legislators
who died of Covid-19 in late May was his
cousin, María Manuela Sacasa de
Prego, although she also had cancer.
“Her kids told me she died of Covid,”
Mr. Sacasa said.
The government has now created
Covid-only hospital units and mass dis-
infection campaigns are being orga-
nized by the military. But many critics
say one clear sign that those measures
came too late are the high-profile deaths
of the party’s own members.
Dampening the mood in the country
further, on Friday, the United States
Treasury Department placed sanctions
on the son of Mr. Ortega and his wife, Ro-
sario Murillo, who is also the vice presi-
dent of the country.
Closed border cripples a once-bustling community
BLAINE, WASH.
Town in Washington State
was a cheap gas source and
a useful shipping address
BY RACHEL ABRAMS
Over the past couple of years, Mike Hill
poured more than $3.5 million into reno-
vating his Chevron gas station and
opening a Starbucks next door. People
from British Columbia were crossing
the border in droves to buy cheap gas
and milk in Blaine, Wash. It seemed like
a slam dunk investment.
Len Saunders, an American immigra-
tion attorney, remembers talking to Mr.
Hill about the plan when he was trying
to persuade Starbucks to open in town.
“They said to him, what if the border
closes down?” Mr. Saunders recalled.
The idea seemed so preposterous to
those who lived in Blaine that “everyone
laughed.”
Then the coronavirus arrived. Now al-
most no one comes to Blaine anymore.
When the border between the United
States and Canada closed to nonessen-
tial travel on March 21, the southbound
traffic into Blaine — the busiest crossing
between Washington State and British
Columbia — slowed to a trickle. In June,
just 12,600 people entered the United
States from British Columbia, down
from 479,600 during the same month
last year.
The economic impact on Blaine, a city
of about 5,000, has been crippling.
Beaches are now largely empty, save for
the rocks left by the receding tide. More
than a dozen gas stations that once bus-
tled with people heading elsewhere are
quiet. The stores that handled mail-or-
der goods for Canadians looking to
avoid taxes are piled high with packages
that their purchasers cannot pick up.
“The longer this goes, the more dev-
astating it gets,” Michael Ebert, the
Top, shirts with symbols of Nicaragua’s governing Sandinista National Liberation Front; above left, a funeral at a cemetery in Managua, the capital — victims of Covid-19 are usu-
ally buried the same day they died; above right, a video image of President Daniel Ortega, whose government has not ordered shutdowns or told people to stay at home.
The son, Juan Carlos Ortega, man-
ages a media company “which he uses
to stifle independent voices, spread re-
gime propaganda and defend the Orte-
gas’ violence and repression,” the U.S.
secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, said in
a statement.
Nicaragua, which spent the past two
years battling a popular uprising, was
one of a few countries that never shut
down schools and businesses.
Trying to stave off economic collapse,
the government continued to organize
mass events, even after the pandemic
Left, Mark Seymour, right, the owner of Drayton Oysters, hauling oysters in the border town of Blaine, Wash. Right, Len Saunders, an immigration lawyer, meeting with clients on the American side of Peace Arch Park.
president of Blaine’s Chamber of Com-
merce, said as he pointed to the empty
storefronts and recently closed shops.
The loss is particularly painful to Mr.
Hill, 59, a lifelong resident who has seen
the town go through cycles — he used to
help kick the drunks out of his family’s
bar, back when British Columbia
banned alcohol on Sundays and a rowdi-
er crowd frequented Blaine’s night
spots.
Mr. Hill acknowledged that Blaine
was always a way station for people
heading to perhaps more interesting lo-
cales. And sure, there were some empty
storefronts on Main Street before the
pandemic closed many of them down.
But in the last few years, he saw more
businesses coming into town.
In large part, the resurgence was fu-
eled by Amazon. Canadians could save
money on shipping and taxes by send-
ing their orders to stores in the United
States and picking them up later. Today,
Blaine has dozens of businesses han-
dling packages from online commerce.
Other businesses followed — including
INTI OCON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
was raging around the world.
A March rally, advertised as being
held in solidarity for countries suffering
coronavirus deaths, was called “Love in
the Time of Covid-19.” Beauty pageants,
boxing matches, art fairs, food festivals
and other events organized by the gov-
ernment also continued as planned, as
Sandinista lawmakers mocked opposi-
tion legislators for wearing masks.
Nicaragua’s response to the pan-
demic has “been lambasted throughout
the world as one of the worst,” said Ma-
teo C. Jarquín, a Nicaraguan professor
the Starbucks next to Mr. Hill’s gas sta-
tion, which opened in 2018, and a hemp
clothing store called Rawganique. A gro-
cery store was set to move in soon.
“We all felt like Blaine was finally go-
ing to hit its time,” said Mark Seymour,
who works with his father, Steve Sey-
mour, at their oyster farm and restau-
rant. “And then this happened.”
“Gas and packages have been the
backbone of our economy,” Mr. Ebert,
the Chamber of Commerce president,
said. “You come around the holidays,
these package places, by the time
they’re open, they’ve got about 20, 25 in
line.”
At Mail Boxes International, employ-
ees said that it felt like Christmas — only
without the joy. Yet-to-be-claimed boxes
are piled waist-high in the lobby. The top
shelves of the storeroom, normally bare,
are stacked to the rafters.
When the border first closed, many
Canadians figured it would reopen soon,
and they kept ordering online goods, the
owner, Brant Baron, said. He put a sec-
ond storage container in the parking lot
of history at Chapman University in Cal-
ifornia who was one of the authors of the
Lancet article.
“We should recognize all govern-
ments are struggling,” he wrote. “What
has no excuse is the lack of transparen-
cy and the blatant manipulation of infor-
mation.”
In May, the government released a re-
port justifying its approach to the pan-
demic. The report noted that a desper-
ately poor country like Nicaragua could
ill afford an economic shutdown. Many
people in Nicaragua must work to eat
to handle the overflow. But then the bor-
der reopening got pushed back again,
and then again, and Canadians stopped
ordering as much. Looking at all the
boxes, you would not know that busi-
ness is down 75 percent.
“All this is kind of a war zone,” Mr.
Baron said, gesturing to piles of “for-
wards” in the lobby.
Just months ago, cars might have
crawled through several lanes of traffic
for hours before crossing the border.
Blaine was the busiest U.S.
crossing into British Columbia.
Now, all of those lanes are empty. On a
recent afternoon, a U.S. Customs and
Border Protection vehicle sat in the
highway leading into Canada, and sev-
eral officers milled around.
“They tell me they’re bored,” said Mr.
Saunders, the immigration attorney
who recognized a couple of the officers
by name. Normally they would be sta-
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
MAYNOR VALENZUELA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
INTI OCON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
and cannot stay home, the government
said.
But it did not explain why it allowed
large gatherings to continue while simi-
larly popular, crowded events were can-
celed worldwide.
Among the recent deaths of Sandinis-
ta officials was that of Orlando Noguera,
the former mayor of Masaya, a city 15
miles south of Nicaragua’s capital. Mr.
Noguera was best known for a crack-
down on antigovernment protesters two
years ago that left seven people dead in
his city.
tioned inside the port of entry inspecting
applicants for admission, he said. Some-
times they patrolled Peace Arch Park, a
strip of land straddling the border where
people from both countries can still
meet. The park also serves as Mr. Saun-
ders’s de facto office, since he tries to
avoid meeting clients inside his office
these days.
Early in the pandemic, he worried
that his business would dry up. But
many people, especially couples sepa-
rated by the border closure, have been
rushing to get their green cards pro-
cessed. For a while, some even set up
tents in the park, Mr. Saunders said, un-
til those got shut down recently, too.
“Why do you think they’re in tents?”
he said. “They haven’t seen each other
in three months.”
On Tuesday, officials confirmed that
the border would remain closed until at
least Aug. 21, extending the reopening
for a fifth time.
Canada has had about half as many
coronavirus deaths per capita as the
United States. The number of cases in
..
Relatives of Edén Pastora, a govern-
ment ally and a prominent figure in the
nation’s civil war who was widely known
as Commander Zero and who once ran
for president, said he did not have the ill-
ness. But his death certificate, which
was read to The New York Times by a
family member, showed Mr. Pastora
died of “atypical pneumonia” — the usu-
al official designation for a coronavirus
death.
Orlando J. Castillo, the head of the
government telecommunications office
who recently had sanctions applied by
the United States Treasury Department
for human-rights violations, died on
June 2. Local media, citing family
sources, said the cause was Covid-19.
When a top police official, Olivio
Hernández Salguera, died in May, his
family insisted he had suffered a fatal
heart attack. But the media reported
that his body was buried the same day
he died, as is customary in Nicaragua
when people die of Covid-19 — suggest-
ing that he had the disease.
Ms. Téllez, the former Sandinista
health minister, provided The Times
with a list of 38 Sandinistas who were
believed to have died of the coronavirus
and said some 200 names have circu-
lated on social media.
She also said that Mr. Ortega did not
appear to be following his government’s
own strategy because he had not been
seen in public for over a month, the sec-
ond time he had disappeared during the
pandemic.
Carlos Fernando Chamorro, editor of
Confidencial, a leading news outlet, said
his team had counted some 100 deaths of
Sandinistas, including about 10 well-
known figures.
“The problem is that here, nobody of-
ficially dies of Covid-19,” he said.
The Nicaraguan government funnels
all media inquiries to Ms. Murillo, the
vice president. She did not respond to
requests for comment.
“They were the only ones going
around without masks, as the
mask came to be considered a
sign of opposition.”
In public comments, she has acknowl-
edged the deaths of the prominent gov-
ernment officials, but did not give the
cause. They had “transitioned to an-
other plane,” Ms. Murillo said.
“We live their legacy with the
strength of the revolution,” she said fol-
lowing the deaths of two officials. “Our
revolution makes us strong every day.”
Orlando Obando Cabrera, a Sandinis-
ta regional councilman in Bluefields, on
the Caribbean coast, posted videos on
his Facebook page in which he implored
Nicaraguans to stop looking for people
to blame for the health crisis.
“If I die in this struggle and you want
to find someone responsible, don’t look
for it in the government,” Mr. Obando
said in a video posted May 26, acknowl-
edging that he was being treated for the
illness. “If something happens to me,
don’t blame Daniel, don’t blame Rosario,
don’t blame others.”
Two days later, he vowed to beat
Covid-19. On June 13, Mr. Obando died.
Alfonso Flores Bermúdez contributed re-
porting from Managua, Nicaragua.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY RUTH FREMSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Canada has been steadily declining
since April, while cases in some states
are surging.
“I’m not very optimistic at all,” Steve
Seymour said during a recent interview
at the family business, Drayton Harbor
Oysters. “Why would they let us in?”
Drayton is just a couple of minutes
down the street from Mr. Hill’s Chevron
and Starbucks, and business is down,
Mr. Seymour said. Still, he considers
himself one of the lucky ones.
The city gave him permission to use
more outdoor space for extra tables, he
said, and on a recent afternoon,
customers were ordering grilled garlic
butter oysters and fried shrimp tacos to
eat at tables they were asked to bus
themselves. Mr. Seymour farms his oys-
ters nearby, and Drayton had been at-
tracting Washingtonians who liked the
farm-to-table approach.
“My whole vision now is just to get
through this year without being totally
in huge debt,” Mr. Seymour said. Blaine
had been on an upswing, after all. Busi-
ness, he was sure, would be back.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, JULY 20, 2020 | 5

world

They have chalk and a message. And support.

SELAH, WASH.
Neighbors’ warm reaction
surprises activists who face
city officials’ opposition
BY MIKE BAKER
First came the warning: A police officer
in the small city of Selah, Wash., told a
group of young people that if they con-
tinued drawing “Black Lives Matter”
chalk art on the sidewalk in front of City
Hall, they would be charged with a
crime.
Then came the pressure washer.
As the 10 protesters covered parts of
their artwork with their bodies, a city
worker walked among them, spraying
away the exposed parts of their mes-
sages and sending tubs of chalk tum-
bling into the street.
The young activists, wet from the
washing, watched in silence and held up
signs that were beyond the reach of the
pressure washer. “Hate has no home in
Selah,” one said.
The standoff earlier this month was
just one of a growing series of conflicts
between conservative leaders of Selah,
a central Washington community with
only a few dozen Blacks among its ap-
proximately 7,200 residents, and young
people from a wide range of back-
grounds who believe the city is long
overdue for a conversation about race.
As Black Lives Matter events spread
from urban centers to thousands of
smaller communities around the coun-
try, town officials who saw little reason
to explore percolating racial prejudices
are finding themselves confronted by
residents who have decided it is time to
step forward.
In Selah, where rich soils on the dry
side of the Cascades have nurtured a
global fruit-growing industry, city offi-
cials profess to be perplexed about the
sudden activism. The city administra-
tor, Don Wayman, said he did not see
any racial issues to address, calling the
Black Lives Matter movement “devoid
of intellect and reason” and characteriz-
ing the activists as a “mob.”
Chalk art has long been a tool of social
activism, a form of instant commentary
that takes political expression quite lit-
erally onto the streets. Cities have at
times targeted it, such as in San Diego,
where a man was charged with 13
counts of vandalism in 2013 for writing
anti-bank messages on a public side-
walk. A jury acquitted him.
In Washington State, a prosecutor in
Ferry County filed charges in 2018
against a political activist for writing
chalk messages on a walkway leading
into a meeting of county commissioners,
according to court records. The judge
later dismissed the charge, and a federal
judge has since noted that while the
state’s “malicious mischief” law pro-
hibits writing on public buildings, it does
not directly address public walkways.
Selah’s chalk activism began with Ga-
briel Fabian, 20, who was not politically
active until he saw the video of George
Floyd’s arrest and death in May in Min-
neapolis. Mr. Fabian, who is Latino, de-
cided that he needed to play a role in
halting the oppression of Black people
and that it would need to start at home.
“I basically said, ‘Enough is enough,’ ”
Mr. Fabian said.
In early June, he began drawing the
words “Black Lives Matter” on the
street outside of his home, which is on a
dead end. He included references to
Black people whose deaths in recent
years around the country have incited
protests over racial injustice.
By the end of the week, a city crew
came by with a street sweeper. Some
friends came by to draw more, and a
cleaning crew again washed the chalk
away . They did it again. Then again.
At one point, a letter from Police Chief
Richard Hayes arrived, addressed to
Mr. Fabian’s older brother. It said the
chalk drawing was, “by definition, graf-
fiti,” and could result in a citation.
Mr. Fabian’s mother, Laura Perez,
said it was clear that the city’s crack-
down had everything to do with the con-
tent of the message and the fact that it
was outside the home of a Latino family.
To her, it reinforced everything she had
felt about the town since moving her
family there from California eight years
ago.
She had seen her children being pro-
filed at school. She had been surprised
that the district offered little in Spanish
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOVELLE TAMAYO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Conflicts have arisen in the small city of
Selah, Wash., with activists, above, chalk-
ing messages of racial equality on private
driveways to avoid having the city remove
them. And, left, some counter-protestors
turned out during a Black Lives Matter
rally. Officials dismissed the protests, but
some residents voiced support.
despite the large number of Latinos who
had settled in the region, originally
drawn by agricultural work but now an
integral part of many communities in
Eastern Washington. And while her
boys were told not to wear rosaries at
school, they noticed that white students
were not confronted when they wore
similar items.
She said the family was stunned to see
the Confederate flag flown by some peo-
ple in the community and emblems of it
worn at school.
Still, Ms. Perez said she wanted to be a
good neighbor in her overwhelmingly
white neighborhood, and she worried
that when the young people started
drawing the chalk art that the military
veteran who lived across the street
might frown on their work.
After the letter from the police chief,
the family had a lawyer respond, object-
ing to the city’s handling of the art. Rob
Case, Selah’s municipal lawyer, re-
sponded with a more detailed warning,
saying the drawings were a violation of
the malicious mischief statute “that is
punishable by 364 days in jail and a
$5,000 fine.”
The city insisted that it had a policy of
cleaning away any chalk art it found, no
matter the message, though Ms. Perez
said she had seen no efforts to remove
recent chalk art tied to school gradua-
tions.
Mr. Wayman, the city administrator,
has told other Selah leaders that he
wants to protect the city from the “may-
hem and evil” seen in places like Seattle,
where a series of protests led to con-
frontations between Black Lives Matter
protesters and the police.
At one of Selah’s own Black Lives Mat-
ter events, Mr. Wayman acknowledged,
he told a council member from nearby
Yakima that Selah had not had problems
at its protests because the city has so
many concealed-carry gun owners.
The lawyer working with Mr. Fabian’s
family, Joseph Cutler, said that the city’s
targeted cleaning of the protest mes-
sages amounted to an infringement on
free speech.
Courtney Hernandez, who is Black
and has been organizing Black Lives
Matter events in the area, said it was
clear to her that the city was trying to
silence protest. She grew up in Selah,
she said, and knows that it has not al-
ways been welcoming to people of color.
Yet Ms. Hernandez said she was in
tears when she saw how many people
came to the first rally she organized in
Selah. And more people attended later
events, which often feature new chalk
art.
Mr. Fabian said several white neigh-
bors had invited him to draw on their
driveways, out of reach of the city’s
pressure washers.
One of them, Carmen Garrison, said
that after seeing what was happening
out on the street, she knocked on Mr. Fa-
bian’s door. Because of her age and con-
cerns about the coronavirus, she had not
attended the demonstrations, she said,
but the artwork on her driveway was an
opportunity to show her support for
changes that she said were overdue.
“I think Selah’s a little behind the
times,” Ms. Garrison said. “They need to
get with the program.”
The unexpected support from various
corners of the community has led Ms.
Perez to reassess what she now sees as
her own implicit biases. White people in
town, she said, had surprised her with
the extent of their vocal support; even
the military veteran — the one she
feared might oppose the chalk drawings
— has told her that he is in their corner.
“They showed us that we were
wrong,” Ms. Perez said. “People found
their voice.”

3 women leading Michigan fend off Trump’s attacks

LANSING, MICH.
Officials are pushing back
against barbs by president
that some call ‘anti-female’
BY KATHLEEN GRAY
Beyond being the women leading Michi-
gan’s state government, Gretchen Whit-
mer, Dana Nessel and Jocelyn Benson
have a lot in common.
All three are Democratic lawyers and
part of Generation X, with long lists of
accomplishments. Ms. Whitmer was the
first woman to lead the Democratic cau-
cus in the State Senate. Ms. Nessel ar-
gued before the Supreme Court and
helped pave the way for the legalization
of same-sex marriage. And Ms. Benson,
a Harvard Law School graduate, was
the dean of the Wayne State University
Law School in Detroit.
By 2018, the three were swept into
statewide office on a wave that flipped
much of Michigan’s leadership from red
to blue and put three women — Ms.
Whitmer, the governor; Ms. Nessel, the
attorney general; and Ms. Benson, the
secretary of state — in charge of run-
ning the state for the first time.
These women share another distinc-
tion: They’re all targets of President
Trump.
Trailing in polls to Joseph R. Biden Jr.
in this key battleground state, the presi-
dent has taken aggressive aim at Ms.
Whitmer — “that woman from Michi-
gan,” in his words — and the others, ze-
roing in on their mission to expand vot-
ing rights in a state where his 2016 win-
ning margin of just 10,704 votes was the
narrowest in the country.
The three women have in turn re-
sponded forcefully to Mr. Trump, de-
nouncing his coronavirus response, su-
ing his administration and tangling with
him over his maskless appearance at a
Ford auto plant. Ms. Whitmer, who has
been in the national spotlight as a poten-
tial running mate for Mr. Biden, was also
a potent foil to Mr. Trump in February,
jointly giving the Democratic response
to his State of the Union address.
Michigan Democrats believe that the
state leaders are a not-so-secret weapon
in the 2020 election. They see the presi-
dent’s frequent barbs — he has called
Ms. Nessel “the Wacky Do Nothing At-
MICHIGAN OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan is considered a
potential running mate for Joseph R. Biden Jr.
torney General” and Ms. Benson a
“rogue Secretary of State” — as helping
fuel the anti-Trump bandwagon in the
state, which before 2016 had not voted
for a Republican presidential candidate
since 1988.
“We’re enraged. We’re exhausted,”
said Lori Goldman, a Bloomfield Town-
ship realtor who started the group Fems
for Dems with about a half-dozen subur-
ban Michigan women after the 2016
election. “I’m a woman and I feel the
sting of how these women leaders are
being treated and called names.”
The group, which has grown to more
than 8,000 members, worked to elect
Ms. Whitmer, Ms. Benson and Ms. Nes-
sel. It also helped flip two congressional
seats, as well as five seats each in the
State House and Senate, from Republi-
can to Democrat in 2018.
“We are a bunch of dumpy, middle-
aged housewives,” Ms. Goldman said.
“That’s the one good thing about getting
older, you don’t need to have people like
you anymore.”
The three elected leaders continue to
push back against the Trump adminis-
tration.
Ms. Whitmer has kept up her criti-
cism of the lack of a federal strategy to
fight the coronavirus, which has in-
fected more than 81,000 people and
killed more than 6,300 in the state, and
has spoken out against the president’s
comments telling governors to “domi-
nate” demonstrators protesting against
DAVID GURALNICK/DETROIT NEWS, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, has sent Dana Nessel, attorney general, has taken a firm stand
out absentee ballot applications to all 7.7 million voters. after President Trump targeted her and other women.
police brutality and racial injustice. applications to all 7.7 million voters in
On Tuesday, Ms. Whitmer said it was the state.
“incumbent on every one of us to mask Despite little evidence, Mr. Trump has
up, from the White House to the State repeatedly criticized absentee voting as
House,” adding, “the fact that we’re be- an invitation for election fraud. He has
hind the rest of the world is a disgrace.” particularly focused on Ms. Benson’s
Ms. Nessel has joined or filed dozens mailing effort, initially threatening to
of lawsuits to reverse policies enacted withhold federal money for coronavirus
under Mr. Trump, including one filed on relief before backing off.
July 7 against the U.S. secretary of edu- In an op-ed article published in News-
cation, Betsy DeVos, a former chair- week in late May, Ms. Benson wondered
woman of the Michigan Republican why the president had singled her out
Party, over a rule she instituted reallo- when at least six other states were also
cating some public school funding to pri- sending absentee ballot applications to
vate schools. all voters.
“The obvious answer is that Michigan
is one of several states that will heavily
Twitter fights erupt over voter influence the outcome of this year’s
rights in a battleground state. presidential election,” she wrote. “We
cannot let misinformation — whether it
comes from the White House, the Krem-
Ms. Nessel called Mr. Trump “a petu- lin or anywhere else — sow seeds of
lant child” after he traveled to Ypsilanti, doubt in our elections.”
Mich., in May and declined to wear a Others have pointed to another rea-
mask while touring a Ford Motor Com- son for Mr. Trump’s attacks: his history
pany plant. “I swear, some days I wake of demeaning prominent women.
up and think Montgomery Burns is “In some ways, it’s not surprising that
president,” she said, referring to the you’ve got this trifecta of women in lead-
greedy boss in “The Simpsons.” ership, all of whom are Democrats,” said
Mr. Trump accused her of scaring Debbie Walsh, the director at the Center
businesses away from Michigan with for American Women and Politics at
her language. Rutgers University. “All of whom have
One of the president’s biggest con- been exercising leadership in making
cerns surrounding Michigan in Novem- sure that the state remains healthy and
ber appears to be Ms. Benson’s actions have elections that function.”
to ensure voting rights amid the pan- She added, “He sees this all as hostile
demic. She has sent out absentee ballot acts against him.”
MATTHEW DAE SMITH/LANSING STATE JOURNAL, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
The three state leaders are not the
only women in Michigan whom the
president has targeted. He has also re-
peatedly criticized Mary Barra, the
chief executive of General Motors, over
her decision to close American auto
manufacturing plants and what he per-
ceived as a slow transformation of some
plants to make ventilators for virus
treatment.
“Women are sharply viewing it as
anti-female,” said Richard Czuba, the
founder of the Glengariff Group, a non-
partisan polling firm in Lansing, Mich.
“I can see him going after Whitmer if
he’s worried about her being on the
ticket. But he has systemically attacked
every prominent female politician in
Michigan.”
The state and national Republican
parties have adopted Mr. Trump’s cam-
paign against the three female leaders,
bashing Ms. Whitmer’s handling of the
virus, suing her over her use of emer-
gency powers and slamming her fre-
quent appearances on cable news,
which they have called an “audition” to
become Mr. Biden’s running mate.
Republican leaders have also seized
on a comment by Ms. Whitmer’s hus-
band, Marc Mallory — a failed attempt
at humor, according to the governor —
in which he reportedly tried to exploit
his wife’s position to get the family boat
put in the water at their northern Michi-
gan vacation home before Memorial
Day. Republicans had blue-and-gray
beer koozies printed up: “Whitmer
Yacht Club . . . Lockdown for thee, Open
waters for me.”
The Republican-controlled Michigan
House of Representatives and Senate
have threatened to cut funding from Ms.
Nessel’s office. A group affiliated with
the Michigan Freedom Fund, a conser-
vative advocacy group funded primarily
by the DeVos family, has sued Ms. Ben-
son over the absentee ballot and inde-
pendent redistricting commission is-
sues, both of which were overwhelm-
ingly approved by Michigan voters in
2018. So far, the courts have rejected the
lawsuits, although Republicans are ap-
pealing those decisions.
And according to polls, Michiganders
are siding with the women.
Stuck at a 43 percent approval rating
at the start of 2020, Ms. Whitmer had
weathered a difficult 2019, unable to de-
liver on her signature campaign issue of
“fixing the damn roads,” and having lost
several crucial budget battles with Re-
publicans in the legislature.
But then the first confirmed coro-
navirus cases hit the state on March 10,
and Ms. Whitmer’s response to the pan-
demic, including a statewide lockdown
announced on March 23, turned the tide
in voters’ views of her.
Four separate polls taken in April,
May and June have shown rising ap-
proval ratings, despite several raucous
protests at the State Capitol against the
stay-at-home order. By June, she was at
60 percent, while Mr. Trump was stuck
around 42 percent nationally.
“In a crisis, people rally around their
leaders,” said Mr. Czuba, the pollster.
The Twitter fights have helped at least
one business in Michigan, too.
When the virus hit the state, Ivette Lo-
pez thought she’d have to permanently
close the Outdoor Beerdsman, her five-
year-old coffee and gift shop in northern
Michigan.
But then Mr. Trump’s Twitter war
with Ms. Whitmer began, and Ms. Lopez
started churning out T-shirts with the
slogan “That Woman From Michigan”
in her Boyne City home. She has now
sold more than 8,000 of them for $20 a
pop, including one that Ms. Whitmer
wore during an appearance on Comedy
Central’s “The Daily Show With Trevor
Noah.”
“Without these shirts, I would have
closed my business,” Ms. Lopez said.
“There’s no way I could have made it
through the winter.”

6 | MONDAY, JULY 20, 2020
world
A nurse caring for a patient at Houston Methodist Hospital with a televised presidential news conference in the background. Below, left, the White House chief of staff, Mark Mead-
ows, led the group directing the administration’s pandemic response; right, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, left, was a source of upbeat reports, while Dr. Anthony S. Fauci was sidestepped.
How Trump handoff fueled crisis
TRUMP, FROM PAGE 1
fade proved wrong. But an examination
of the shift in April and its aftermath
shows that the approach he embraced
was not just a misjudgment. Instead, it
was a deliberate strategy that he would
stick to as evidence mounted that the vi-
rus would continue to infect and kill
large numbers of Americans.
He and his top aides would openly dis-
dain the scientific research into the dis-
ease and the advice of experts on how to
contain it, seek to muzzle more authori-
tative voices like that of Dr. Anthony S.
Fauci and continue to distort reality,
even as it became clear that Trump’s
hopes for a rapid rebound in the econ-
omy and his electoral prospects were
not materializing.
Now interviews with more than two
dozen officials inside the administration
and in the states, and a review of emails
and documents, reveal previously unre-
ported details about how the White
House put the nation on its current
course during a fateful period this
spring.
• Dr. Birx was more central than pub-
licly known to the judgment inside the
West Wing that the virus was on a down-
ward path. Her model-based assess-
ment failed to account for a vital vari-
able: how Trump’s rush to urge a return
to normal would help undercut the so-
cial distancing and other measures that
were holding down the numbers.
• The president quickly came to feel
trapped by his own reopening guide-
lines. States needed declining cases to
reopen, or at least a declining rate of
positive tests. But more testing meant
overall cases were destined to go up, un-
dercutting the president’s push to crank
up the economy. The result was to inten-
sify Mr. Trump’s remarkable public
campaign against testing, a vivid exam-
ple of how he often waged war with sci-
ence and his own administration’s ex-
perts and stated policies.
• Mr. Trump’s bizarre public statements,
his refusal to wear a mask and his pres-
sure on states to get their economies go-
ing again left governors and other state
officials scrambling to deal with a lead-
ership vacuum.
• Not until early June did White House
officials even begin to recognize that
their assumptions about the course of
the pandemic had proved wrong. Even
now, there are internal divisions over
how far to go in having officials publicly
acknowledge the reality of the situation.
Judd Deere, a White House spokes-
man, said the president had imposed
travel restrictions on China early in the
pandemic, signed economic relief meas-
ures that have provided Americans with
critical assistance and dealt with other
issues, including supplies of personal
protective equipment, testing capacity
and vaccine development.
At a briefing on April 10, Mr. Trump
predicted that the number of deaths in
SHAWN THEW/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK
the United States from the pandemic
would be “substantially” fewer than
100,000. As of Saturday, the death toll
stood at 139,879; the pace of new deaths
was rising again; and the country, log-
ging a seven-day average of 65,791 new
cases a day, had more confirmed cases
per capita than any other major indus-
trial nation.
TRUMP’S CHOICE
The president had a decision to make.
It was the end of March, and his initial,
15-day effort to slow the spread of the vi-
rus by essentially shutting down the
country was expiring in days. Sitting in
the Oval Office were Drs. Fauci and
Birx, along with other top officials. Days
earlier, Trump had said he envisioned
the country’s being “opened up and rar-
ing to go” by Easter, but now he was on
the verge of announcing that he would
keep the country shut down for another
30 days.
The goal was to shift
responsibility for leading the
fight to the states in an attempt
to escape blame for a crisis that
had engulfed the country.
“Do you really think we need to do
this?” the president asked Dr. Fauci.
“Yeah, we really do need to do it,” Dr.
Fauci replied, explaining again the fed-
eral government’s role in making sure
the virus did not explode across the
country.
Mr. Trump’s willingness to go along
was a concession that federal responsi-
bility was crucial to defeating a virus
that did not respect state boundaries.
But though the president was ac-
knowledging the need for tough deci-
sions, he and his aides would soon be
looking to do the opposite: build a public
case that the federal government had
completed its job and unshackle the
president from ownership of the re-
sponse.
By mid-April, Trump had grown pub-
licly impatient with the stay-at-home
recommendations he had reluctantly
endorsed. Weekly unemployment
claims made clear the economy was cra-
tering, and polling was showing his
campaign bleeding support.
The issue was clear: How much long-
er do we keep this up?
To answer that, they focused on two
more questions: Had the virus peaked?
And had the government given the
states the tools they needed to manage
the remaining problems?
On the first question, Dr. Birx was op-
timistic: Mitigation was working,
though many outside experts were
warning that the nation would remain at
great risk if it let up on social distancing
and moved prematurely to reopen.
The group’s members believed they
had succeeded on the second question,
too, although shortages of protective
gear continued in some places (and
would flare again months later). A one-
time anticipated shortage of more than
100,000 ventilators had been overcome;
now there was enough of a surplus that
the United States could lend them to
other countries. A ban on elective surg-
eries meant there was plenty of hospital
bed space.
On testing, Mr. Trump shifted from
stressing that the nation was already
doing more than any other country to
deriding its importance. By June the
president was regularly making non-
sensical statements like, “If we stop
testing right now, we’d have very few
cases, if any.”
On April 10, Mr. Trump declared that it
would be his decision about whether to
reopen the country.
Days later, Drs. Birx and Fauci
presented Mr. Trump with a plan for is-
suing guidelines to start reopening the
country at the end of the month. Devel-
oped largely by Dr. Birx, the guidelines
laid out broad, voluntary standards for
states considering how fast to come out
of the lockdown.
In political terms, the document’s
message was that responsibility for
dealing with the pandemic was shifting
from Mr. Trump to the states.
On April 16, he made the message to
the governors explicit.
“You’re going to call your own shots,”
he said.
THE CONSEQUENCES
Dr. Birx had assembled a team of ana-
lysts who fed her a constant stream of
updated data, packaged in PowerPoint
slides emailed to senior officials each
day. But there were warnings that the
models she studied might not be accu-
rate, especially in predicting the course
of the virus against a backdrop of evolv-
ing political, economic and social fac-
tors. Among the models Dr. Birx relied
on most was one produced by re-
searchers at the University of Washing-
ton.
Dr. Birx declined to be interviewed. A
task force official said she had used the
University of Washington’s model in
only a limited way and that the White
House had used “real data, not modeled
data, to understand the pandemic in the
United States.”
But despite the outside warnings and
evidence by early May that new infec-
tions remained higher than anticipated,
the White House never fundamentally
re-examined the course it had set in
mid-April.
Instead, Dr. Birx regularly delivered
what the new team was hoping for.
“All metros are stabilizing,” she would
tell them, describing the virus as having
hit its “peak” around mid-April. The
slope was heading in the right direction.
ERIN SCHAFF/THE NEW YORK TIMES
DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES
She endorsed the idea that the death
counts and hospitalization numbers
could be inflated.
The real-world consequences of Mr.
Trump’s abdication of responsibility rip-
pled across the country.
During a briefing on April 20, Trump
mocked Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland,
a fellow Republican, for the state’s in-
ability to find enough testing. Dr. Birx
displayed maps with dozens of dots indi-
cating labs that could help.
But when Frances B. Phillips, the
state’s deputy health secretary, reached
out to one of those dots — a National In-
stitutes of Health facility in Maryland —
she was told that they were suffering
from the same shortages as state labs
and were not in a position to help.
“It was clear that we were on our own
and we need to develop our own strat-
egy, which is very unlike the kind of fed-
eral response in the past public health
emergencies,” Ms. Phillips recalled.
By early June, it was clear that the
White House had gotten it wrong.
Digging into new data from Dr. Birx,
they concluded the virus was in fact
spreading with invisible ferocity during
the weeks in May when states were
opening up with Mr. Trump’s encourage-
ment and many were all but declaring
victory.
With the benefit of hindsight, the head
of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, ac-
knowledged in a conversation with the
Journal of the American Medical Associ-
ation that administration officials had
severely underestimated infections in
April and May.
The number of new cases has now
surged far higher than the previous
peak of more than 36,000 a day in mid-
April. On Thursday, there were more
than 75,000 confirmed new cases, a
record.
Mr. Trump’s disdain for testing con-
tinues to affect the country. By the mid-
dle of June, lines stretched for blocks in
Phoenix and in Austin, Texas. And get-
ting results could take a week to 10 days,
officials in Texas said — effectively in-
viting the virus to spread uncontrolla-
bly.
It was a devastating situation, said
Mayor Steve Adler of Austin, who
watched as the COVID-19 cases at inten-
sive care units at area hospitals jumped
from three in mid-May to 185 by early
July. Mr. Adler had a simple plea for the
White House.
“When we were trying to get people to
wear masks, they would point to the
president and say, ‘Well, not something
that we need to do,’ ” he said.
Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami, a Re-
publican, expressed similar frustrations
with Trump’s dismissive approach to
mask wearing. “People follow leaders,”
he said, before rephrasing his remarks.
“People follow the people who are sup-
posed to be leaders.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
A president imagines
what his voters want
POLITICAL MEMO
He gets their grievances,
but surveys suggest he’s
unsure about their needs
BY MAGGIE HABERMAN
Standing in the White House colonnade,
President Trump told an interviewer
that he was “comfortable” with extend-
ing “freedom of speech” to the Confeder-
ate flag.
“People love it,” Mr. Trump told Cath-
erine Herridge of CBS News last week,
when she asked about a flag that many
Americans equate with the brutal his-
tory of slavery in the United States. “I
know people that like the Confederate
flag, and they’re not thinking about slav-
ery. I just think it’s freedom of speech.”
It was the latest example of Mr.
Trump’s promoting a caricatured view
of what he believes his base wants — in
this case defending a symbol of oppres-
sion that even the state of Mississippi
has decided to retire, as has the U.S. mil-
itary, which issued new guidance on
flags on Friday.
Whether holding a Bible aloft for a
photo op outside a historic church,
scolding NASCAR for banning the Con-
federate flag at its races or heralding the
“heritage” of the South, Mr. Trump re-
peatedly elevates to the public stage
what he imagines are the top priorities
for the voters who back him.
Liam Donovan, a Republican strat-
egist and former National Republican
Senatorial Committee aide, said that Mr.
Trump’s “preternatural ability to sniff
out and tap into what Republicans hate”
got him to the Oval Office.
“His intimate connection with the
base is one of shared grievance,” Mr.
Donovan said. “But when it comes to
what they’re for, it inevitably comes off
like a cartoon version of what a New
York billionaire would think conserva-
tives believe.”
When Mr. Trump first became a presi-
dential candidate in 2015, his view of the
conservative voters he was looking to
cultivate was informed by his own expe-
rience as a wealthy real-estate scion
who periodically waded into the culture
wars of late-20th-century New York
City. More recently, his view has been in-
fluenced by right-wing television, espe-
cially Fox News.
The way Mr. Trump views or talks
about his supporters has not changed
since he became president, even though
he has access, through surveys con-
ducted for his campaign and the Repub-
lican National Committee, to some of the
most richly detailed information avail-
able on the voters who supported him in
2016 and what they respond to. As a way
to gauge what his supporters react to, he
has thrown out provocative statements
at his rallies, where he has gotten the ad-
ulation he has craved for decades.
He remains overwhelmingly popular
with Republicans, although his support
within his party has slipped from its
highest points. A Reuters/Ipsos na-
tional poll released last week showed
that 83 percent of registered Republican
voters approve of the way he is doing the
job.
Other polling, however, shows that he
remains out of step with many Ameri-
cans, even some Republicans, on some
issues. A recent New York Times/Siena
College poll, for instance, showed that 53
percent of voters who described them-
selves as somewhat conservative had a
very favorable or somewhat favorable
view of the Black Lives Matter move-
ment, compared with 26 percent among
those who described themselves as very
conservative — suggesting that Mr.
Trump was playing to a smaller slice of
Republicans when he described Black
Lives Matter as “a symbol of hate.”
But in the absence of a forward-look-
ing case for his re-election or an agenda
for a second term, Mr. Trump’s ability to
harness conservative hostility against
the left has become a defining force in
his approach to politics.
Evangelicals, for instance, have long
felt that they were being mocked by
elites, and they broadly make the point
that Mr. Trump has heard their concerns
in a way previous presidents have not.
Yet Mr. Trump has shown difficulty un-
derstanding what motivates evangeli-
cals, as well as the distinction between
them and more secular Christians. A for-
mer supporter of abortion rights, Mr.
Trump could not recall the name of a
President Trump appearing at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial this month. He
remains highly popular with Republicans, though the support has slipped somewhat.
..
prominent annual anti-abortion rally,
March for Life, despite having been, in
January, the first sitting president to
speak at the event.
Though he rails about the closing of
churches around the United States to
combat the spread of the coronavirus,
Mr. Trump almost never attends church.
But because he has aggressively tar-
geted perceived enemies such as liber-
als and the mainstream media and has
stoked white grievance, most conserva-
tives have been willing to overlook what
he does and says in the name of his sup-
porters.
“He’s very good at identifying the vil-
lains whom Republicans hate — the lib-
erals, the media, illegal immigrants,”
said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster,
adding that Mr. Trump’s efforts are
“complicated by the current situation,
where our news is overwhelmed by the
virus, economic meltdown and mis-
trust.”
Mr. Trump is also aware that conser-
vatives favor his judicial appointments,
of which he has made roughly 200 since
taking office, and that those have kept
many of his supporters connected to
him.
In a statement, Judd Deere, a White
House spokesman, didn’t directly ad-
dress Mr. Trump’s view of his support-
ers but said that “the American people
elected Donald Trump because they saw
a fighter who could lower taxes, bring
jobs back, secure the border, rebuild the
military, fight for the vulnerable, ap-
point conservative judges and get the
Washington Swamp out of their daily
lives.”
A series of events over the years of the
Trump presidency has made clear that
Mr. Trump views the voters he calls “my
people” through the lens of what he
imagines they like.
His decision last month, following
days of protests over racial justice, to
walk to a historic church near the White
House — a walk for which largely peace-
ful protesters had been cleared out of
the way with chemical irritants — was
one such moment.
“It inevitably comes off like a
cartoon version of what a New
York billionaire would think
conservatives believe.”
After the president’s daughter, Ivanka
Trump, raised the idea of visiting the
church in an email to staff members, Mr.
Trump’s adviser, Hope Hicks, recom-
mended that he take a Bible, and aides
were told to secure a “pretty Bible,” ac-
cording to people familiar with the
episode. Ms. Hicks told associates that
the idea was for Mr. Trump to read
Scripture from the book, which he had
previously claimed was his favorite, de-
spite his apparent unfamiliarity with re-
ligious rituals.
Instead, Mr. Trump stood awkwardly
in front of the church, before he held the
Bible aloft and posed for cameras.
Waving the Bible in the air was offen-
sive, said Amanda Carpenter, a Republi-
can strategist and avowed Trump critic,
“but even more so the fact he used ex-
cessive state force to get that shot. That
made it a double slap in the face for con-
servatives who revere both the Bible
and limited government.”
In the past weeks, some advisers —
including Ronna McDaniel, the chair-
woman of the Republican National Com-
mittee — have told Mr. Trump he is
adopting a losing political stance by de-
fending the Confederate flag at
NASCAR events, according to people fa-
miliar with the conversations.
Others have told him that trying to
force local school districts to reopen is
seen as federal overreach by many con-
servatives.
Mr. Trump is convinced he’s right
about his supporters — and he can point
to the 2016 election and the high approv-
al rating he still enjoys among Republi-
cans. For years, few Republican elected
officials have bucked him, remaining si-
lent and suppressing any discomfort
they might feel when he deploys racial
demagogy as a favored campaign tool or
uses the presidency to help allies.
“Trump has remade conservatism
and the Republican Party as a single cult
of his own personality,” Jonathan Last,
the executive editor of the Bulwark, a
conservative website, wrote recently.
“And precisely because he never pro-
vided steadiness and seriousness, he
will control this cult even after he exits
the White House.’’
ANNA MONEYMAKER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Business
China dismantles a tycoon’s empire
HONG KONG
Abducted from Hong Kong
3 years ago, Xiao Jianhua
still may represent a risk
BY ALEXANDRA STEVENSON
Xiao Jianhua was once a trusted finan-
cier to China’s ruling elite who came to
represent an era of unbridled capital-
ism.
But three years ago, he was snatched
from a Hong Kong luxury hotel and dis-
appeared into Chinese custody. Now, the
empire he built is being dismantled by
the authorities in Beijing, as China
sends a strong message that its era of
debt-fueled excess is over.
On Friday, two regulators announced
coordinated moves to seize companies
worth hundreds of billions of dollars tied
to Tomorrow Group, the umbrella com-
pany that Mr. Xiao controlled for more
than two decades.
China’s banking and insurance regu-
lator said it had taken over four insurers
and two trust firms connected to Tomor-
row Group, while the securities regula-
tor said it had seized control of two secu-
rities firms and a futures company, ac-
cusing the businesses of providing mis-
leading information about their
shareholders and controller.
In staging the takeovers, China’s top
leadership is bringing to heel a key fig-
ure from a time of freewheeling finance
in which wealthy executives used their
political connections to build huge com-
panies that scooped up trophy assets at
home and abroad. But the move also
risks a public showdown with a tycoon
who knows about the secret wealth of
people in China’s ruling class.
In many ways, the fate of Mr. Xiao and
his empire was sealed in the early hours
of Jan. 27, 2017, when he was whisked out
of the Four Seasons Hotel in Hong Kong
in a wheelchair by a dozen men and tak-
en into custody in mainland China.
Since then, there has been no official
word about his whereabouts, though
people familiar with the situation said
that he was under house arrest. On Sat-
urday, Tomorrow Group confirmed for
the first time that Mr. Xiao was on the
mainland, saying that he was cooperat-
ing with the government as it restruc-
tured the conglomerate.
Mr. Xiao’s disappearance shattered
the illusion that Hong Kong’s business
community was beyond the reach of the
4 young hackers tell how they broke into Twitter
OAKLAND, CALIF.
Not a country like Russia
or a sophisticated group,
but scattered enthusiasts
BY NATHANIEL POPPER
AND KATE CONGER
A Twitter hacking scheme that targeted
political, corporate and cultural elites
began with a teasing message between
two hackers on the online messaging
platform Discord.
“yoo bro,” wrote a user named “Kirk”
last Tuesday, according to a screenshot
of the conversation shared with The
New York Times. “i work at twitter /
don’t show this to anyone / seriously.”
He then demonstrated that he could
take control of valuable Twitter ac-
counts — the sort of thing that would re-
quire insider access to the company’s
computer network.
The hacker who received the mes-
sage, using the screen name “lol,” de-
cided over the next 24 hours that Kirk
did not actually work for Twitter be-
cause he was too willing to damage the
company. But Kirk did have access to
Twitter’s most sensitive tools, which al-
lowed him to take control on Wednesday
of almost any Twitter account, including
those of former President Barack
Obama; former Vice President Joseph
R. Biden Jr.; Elon Musk, the founder of
Tesla; and many other celebrities.
Despite global attention to the intru-
sion, which has shaken confidence in
Twitter and the security provided by
other technology companies, the basic
details of who did it and how have been a
mystery. Officials are still in the early
stages of their investigation.
But four people who participated in
the scheme spoke with The Times and
shared numerous logs and screen shots
of the conversations they had on Tues-
day and Wednesday, demonstrating
their involvement both before and after
the hack became public.
The interviews indicate that the at-
tack was not the work of a single country
like Russia or a sophisticated group of
hackers. Instead, it was done by a group
of young people — one of whom says he
lives at home with his mother — who got
to know one another because of their ob-
session with owning early or unusual
screen names, particularly one letter or
number, like @y or @6.
The Times verified that the four peo-
ple were connected to the hack by
The billionaire Xiao Jianhua in 2013 outside the International Finance Center in Hong Kong, not far from the spot where he would be snatched a few years later.
Chinese authorities. It also sent a chill
through China’s political class, already
set on edge by the tough anticorruption
campaign waged by Xi Jinping, the
country’s leader.
For years, Mr. Xiao’s Tomorrow
Group and its constellation of compa-
nies have been a source of speculation
and mystery, because the ultimate own-
ership was hidden behind layers of shell
companies.
But in a sharply worded statement
posted on Saturday on social media, To-
morrow Group confirmed that it was the
owner of all nine companies and pushed
back against “malicious slanders.”
In a sign that Mr. Xiao could still put
The invasion last week has shaken confidence in Twitter, and officials are still in the early stages of their investigation.
matching their social media and cryp-
tocurrency accounts with accounts that
had been involved in the events on
Wednesday. They also presented cor-
roborating evidence of their involve-
ment, like the logs from their conversa-
tions on Discord, a messaging platform
popular with game players and hackers,
and Twitter.
Playing a central role in the attack
was Kirk, who was taking money in and
out of the same Bitcoin address as the
day went on, according to an analysis of
the Bitcoin transactions by The Times,
with assistance from the research firm
Chainalysis.
But the identity of Kirk, his motiva-
tion and whether he shared his access to
Twitter with anyone else remain a mys-
tery, even to the people who worked
with him. It is still unclear how much
Kirk used his access to the accounts of
people like Mr. Biden and Mr. Musk to
gain more privileged information, like
their private conversations on Twitter.
The hacker “lol” and another one he
worked with, who went by the screen
name “ever so anxious,” told The Times
that they wanted to talk about their
up a fight, Tomorrow Group accused the
government of setting up obstacles to its
operations and exaggerating the risk
that the nine companies posed.
Chinese censors moved quickly to
take down the statement, which was
first reported by The Wire, an online
publication.
China is trying to identify fault lines in
an economy that has survived for dec-
ades on a borrowing binge. In recent
weeks, the banking regulator has
purged tycoons and other shareholders
whom it accused of using banks and in-
surance companies as personal A.T.M.s.
Along with Mr. Xiao, Beijing has also
targeted Wu Xiaohui, who married a
work with Kirk to prove that they had
only facilitated the purchases and take-
overs of lesser-known Twitter ad-
dresses early in the day. They said they
had not continued to work with Kirk,
once he began more high-profile attacks
around 3:30 p.m. Eastern time on
Wednesday.
“I just wanted to tell you my story be-
cause i think you might be able to clear
some thing up about me and ever so
anxious,” “lol” said in a chat on Discord,
where he shared all the logs of his con-
versation with Kirk and proved his own-
ership of the cryptocurrency accounts
he had used to transact with Kirk.
“lol” did not confirm his real-world
identity, but said he lived on the West
Coast and was in his 20s. “ever so anx-
ious” said he was 19 and lived in the
south of England with his mother.
Investigators looking into the attacks
said several of the details given by the
hackers lined up with what they had
learned so far.
The Times was initially put in touch
with the hackers by a security re-
searcher in California, Haseeb Awan.
The user known as Kirk did not have
granddaughter of the former Chinese
leader Deng Xiaoping, rose to promi-
nence and bought the Waldorf Astoria
Hotel. Mr. Wu found himself in the gov-
ernment’s cross hairs in 2018, when his
insurance firm Anbang Group was
seized. He later pleaded guilty to de-
frauding investors and was sentenced to
18 years in prison.
Mr. Xiao and the business dealings he
undertook — most of them hidden
within the Russian-doll-like layers of To-
morrow Group — illustrated the cozy
ties between China’s business world and
its political elite.
From humble beginnings, Mr. Xiao
made his way to the prestigious Peking
JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES
much of a reputation in hacker circles
before Wednesday. His profile on Dis-
cord had been created only on July 7.
But “lol” and “ever so anxious” were
well known on the website OGuser-
s.com, where hackers have met for
years to buy and sell valuable social me-
dia screen names, security experts said.
For online game players, Twitter us-
ers and hackers, so-called O.G. user
names — usually a short word or even a
number — are hotly desired. These eye-
catching handles are often snapped up
by early adopters of a new online plat-
form, the “original gangsters” of a fresh
app.
Users who arrive on the platform lat-
er often crave the credibility of an O.G.
user name and will pay thousands of
dollars to hackers who steal them from
their original owners.
Kirk connected with “lol” late Tues-
day and then “ever so anxious” on Dis-
cord early on Wednesday and asked if
they wanted to be his middlemen, sell-
ing Twitter accounts to the online under-
world where they were known. They
would take a cut from each transaction.
In one of the first transactions, “lol”
NEXT MAGAZINE, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
University, an institution that would
prove critical to his entry into the world
of finance. There, he headed the official
student union at a time of political up-
heaval, as fellow classmates crowded
Tiananmen Square in Beijing to demand
democracy in 1989.
After Mr. Xiao graduated and entered
the realm of finance, he received an in-
vestment from his state-backed alma
mater for an early business venture.
Around the same time, he set up Tomor-
row Group.
He used the conglomerate to help fi-
nance transactions for the political elite
and wealthy Chinese who preferred to
stay in the shadows. He helped to facili-
brokered a deal for someone who was
willing to pay $1,500, in Bitcoin, for the
Twitter user name @y. The money went
to the same Bitcoin wallet that Kirk used
later in the day when he got payments
from hacking the Twitter accounts of ce-
lebrities, the public ledger of Bitcoin
transactions shows.
The group posted an ad on OGuser-
s.com, offering Twitter handles in ex-
change for Bitcoin. “ever so anxious”
took the screen name @anxious, which
he had long coveted. (His personalized
details still sit atop the suspended ac-
count.)
“i just kinda found it cool having a
username that other people would
want,” “ever so anxious” said in a chat
with The Times.
As the morning went on, customers
poured in and the prices that Kirk de-
manded went up. He also demonstrated
how much access he had to Twitter’s
systems. He was able to quickly change
the most fundamental security settings
on any user name and sent out pictures
of Twitter’s internal dashboards as proof
that he had taken control of the re-
quested accounts.
The group handed over @dark, @w,
@l, @50 and @vague, among many oth-
ers.
One of their customers was another
well-known figure among hackers deal-
ing in user names — a young man
known as “PlugWalkJoe.” On Thursday,
PlugWalkJoe was the subject of an arti-
cle by the security journalist Brian
Krebs, who identified the hacker as a
key player in the Twitter intrusion.
Discord logs show that while Plug-
WalkJoe acquired the Twitter account
@6 through “ever so anxious,” and
briefly personalized it, he was not other-
wise involved in the conversation. Plug-
WalkJoe, who said his real name is Jo-
seph O’Connor, added in an interview
with The Times that he had been getting
a massage near his home in Spain as the
events occurred.
“I don’t care,” said Mr. O’Connor, who
said he was 21 and British. “They can
come arrest me. I would laugh at them. I
haven’t done anything.”
Mr. O'Connor said other hackers had
informed him that Kirk got access to the
Twitter credentials when he found a way
into Twitter’s internal Slack messaging
channel and saw them posted there,
along with a service that gave him ac-
cess to the company’s servers. People
investigating the case said that was con-
sistent with what they had learned so
far. A Twitter spokesman declined to
comment, citing the active investiga-
tion.
MONDAY, JULY 20, 2020 | 7
tate partnerships with Mr. Xi’s older sis-
ter, as well as with the son-in-law of Jia
Qinglin, who was then a member of the
party’s highest decision-making body.
As Mr. Xiao built up his firm, China
embarked on its greatest period of eco-
nomic expansion and privatization in
the 1990s and 2000s.
Under the umbrella of Tomorrow
Group, Mr. Xiao amassed stakes in com-
panies that reached all corners of Chi-
na’s economy, from tightly controlled in-
dustries like banking and insurance to
rare metals, coal and property. The con-
glomerate had money in some of China’s
biggest firms, including the insurance
giant Ping An and banks like Harbin
Bank, Industrial Bank and Huaxia
Bank.
Huaxia Life, the insurance arm of
Huaxia Bank, was among the compa-
nies seized on Friday.
Along the way, Mr. Xiao became rich
— with a fortune estimated to be worth
as much as $5.8 billion.
After Mr. Xi became China’s top
leader in 2012, he promised to wage an
anticorruption war against both “tigers
and flies.” Mr. Xiao was marked as a ti-
ger.
But the two men had a connection that
was awkward, given Mr. Xi’s zeal for
tackling graft.
Mr. Xiao acted as a buyer of shares in
an investment firm owned by Mr. Xi’s
sister and her husband, according to a
New York Times investigation. A
spokeswoman for Mr. Xiao told The
Times in 2014 that the couple “did it for
the family.”
Eventually, Tomorrow Group became
so big that it threatened the stability of
China’s financial system. The most
prominent example was its sharehold-
ing in Baoshang Bank, which it used to
help fund dozens of companies.
The loans that Baoshang extended to
Tomorrow Group companies were kept
off its books until recently. Last year, it
emerged that the bank was on the brink
of bankruptcy. The authorities stepped
in; it was the first time in two decades
that the government had taken over a
bank.
Trillions of dollars of debt lie just be-
neath the surface of China’s financial
system, much of it off the books in trans-
actions undertaken by the largest share-
holders of banks like Baoshang. Two
other big banks failed last year and had
to be bailed out. Many experts fear that
more than a few other banks are ticking
time bombs.
Cao Li contributed reporting.
All of the transactions involving “lol”
and “ever so anxious” took place before
the world knew what was going on. But
shortly before 3:30 p.m., tweets from the
biggest cryptocurrency companies, like
Coinbase, started asking for Bitcoin do-
nations to the site cryptoforhealth.com.
“we just hit cb,” an abbreviation for
Coinbase, Kirk wrote to “lol” on Discord
a minute after taking over the compa-
ny’s Twitter account.
The public ledger of Bitcoin transac-
tions shows that the Bitcoin wallet that
paid to set up cryptoforhealth.com was
the wallet that Kirk had been using all
morning, according to three investiga-
tors, who said they could not speak on
the record because of the open investi-
gation.
In several messages on Wednesday
morning, “ever so anxious” talked about
his need to get some sleep, given that it
was later in the day in England. Shortly
before the big hacks began, he sent a
phone message to his girlfriend saying,
“nap time nap time.”
Then he disappeared from the Dis-
cord logs.
Kirk quickly escalated his efforts,
posting a message from accounts be-
longing to celebrities like Kanye West
and tech titans like Jeff Bezos: Send Bit-
coin to a specific account and your
money would be sent back, doubled.
Shortly after 6 p.m., Twitter seemed to
catch up with the attacker, and the mes-
sages stopped. But the company had to
turn off access for broad swaths of us-
ers, and days later, the company was
still piecing together what had hap-
pened.
Twitter said in a blog post that the at-
tackers had targeted 130 accounts, gain-
ing access and tweeting from 45 of that
set. They were able to download data
from eight of the accounts, the company
added.
“We’re acutely aware of our responsi-
bilities to the people who use our service
and to society more generally,” the blog
post read. “We’re embarrassed, we’re
disappointed, and more than anything,
we’re sorry.”
When “ever so anxious” woke up just
after 2:30 a.m. in Britain, he looked on-
line, saw what had happened and sent a
disappointed message to his fellow mid-
dleman, “lol.”
“i’m not sad more just annoyed. i
mean he only made 20 btc,” he said, re-
ferring to Kirk’s Bitcoin profits from the
scam, which translated to about
$180,000.
Kirk, whoever he was, had stopped re-
sponding to his middlemen and had dis-
appeared.

8 | MONDAY, JULY 20, 2020
business
China’s exports were up 0.5 percent in June from a year earlier. But while Xingcheng’s residents may visit the waterfront, left, and enjoy their families this summer, many of those who work in its factories, right, are waiting for swimsuit orders to rebound.
In China, waiting for a wave of orders
CHINA, FROM PAGE 1
100,000 people, or one in five residents.
This is hardly the most obvious place
to find an industry specializing in
beachy coverings.
Xingcheng sits on the Bohai Sea, in a
part of the country that most people in
China associate with smog and brutal
winters, not shorts and floral patterns.
But for people living nearby,
Xingcheng is a pleasant enough place to
watch the waves roll in. The summer
temperatures are mild. The morning air
pollution wafts away by midday. There
are 2,600 hours of sunshine a year — not
Miami, but not Edinburgh, either.
There is khaki sand and green-blue
water and a wide wooden boardwalk
that is lit up in the evenings. People set
out tables and chairs on the sand to eat
fish and drink beer. A pretty pavilion
catches the breeze at the end of a long
walkway that juts into the sea. The fac-
tory zone is a short drive away.
Mr. Yao, whose broad, boyish face is
topped with a curly pat of hair, sews
swimsuits in a small factory — 40 or so
workers — above an auto repair shop.
He is busier than he was a few months
ago, when orders seemed nonexistent.
Many evenings, he works overtime.
But Mr. Yao’s sense is that the gar-
ments he is helping to produce are large-
ly going into warehouses rather than be-
ing sold right away. Swimwear brands
are just stocking up for when customers
want to buy again, he said.
“Once there’s demand, they can sell
these orders and make up for the short-
fall during this period,” he said.
For Zhao Yang’s company in
Xingcheng, which employs around 70
workers and designers, swimwear or-
The bankers behind the sex criminal
Common Sense
J A M E S B . S T E WA R T
Jeffrey Epstein, the sex criminal and
financier, didn’t act alone. Now we
know in vivid detail who some of his
financial enablers were: executives
and bankers at Deutsche Bank.
This month, the New York Depart-
ment of Financial Services laid bare at
least some of the financial underpin-
nings of Mr. Epstein’s sophisticated
enterprise. Deutsche Bank agreed to
pay a $150 million fine for its dealings
with Mr. Epstein, who committed
suicide last August, and for two other
matters.
Mr. Epstein’s bankers “created the
very real risk” that payments through
the bank “could be used to further or
cover up criminal activity and perhaps
even to endanger more young women,”
the department asserted.
Deutsche Bank executives approved
Mr. Epstein as a client in 2013 and then
kept working with him, even though
employees worried about the fact that
“40 underage girls had come forward
with testimony of Epstein sexually
assaulting them,” as the bank put it in
internal communications about Mr.
Epstein in early 2015.
And even though such high-risk
clients are required to be carefully
monitored to detect and prevent illegal
activity, once Mr. Epstein was a client,
“very few problematic transactions
were ever questioned, and even when
they were, they were usually cleared
without satisfactory explanation,” the
New York regulator concluded.
Deutsche Bank itself is a corpora-
tion, and, as has often been said, it’s
people, not corporations, who do bad
things. Responsibility for working with
Mr. Epstein permeated the ranks of the
private-banking division, which caters
to wealthy clients.
Yet Deutsche Bank declined to pub-
licly identify any individuals involved
— and the authorities didn’t demand it.
The so-called consent order with the
New York agency included no names
Work is finding its way to Qi Lei’s factory in Xingcheng, left, but he is worried about the future. As he said, “Because of the epidemic this year, if you’re doing business, you’re by and large losing money.”
ders are starting to trickle in again,
though business is not exactly growing.
No new customers have approached
him lately, he said. He is still working his
way through a huge stock of fabric he
bought before the Lunar New Year holi-
days in January, in anticipation of a busy
spring season that never was.
Mostly, he is spending time at home
with his family, waiting out the eco-
nomic dislocation.
“A slower pace of life is not a bad
thing,” Mr. Zhao, 39, said.
The swimsuit industry in Xingcheng
took its first steps in the 1980s, at the
dawn of private enterprise in China.
According to “This City and
Swimwear,” a book by a local journalist,
of the bankers or executives who were
implicated; instead, the document is
littered with references like RELA-
TIONSHIP MANAGER-1 and EXECU-
TIVE-2. A bank spokesman, Daniel
Hunter, said the bank had meted out
appropriate punishments to employees
who were still at the bank, but he
declined to name anyone.
Based on descriptions of the employ-
ees in the consent order and inter-
views with current and former
Deutsche Bank officials, The New York
Times was able to identify nearly
every person anonymously described
in the order. At least one high-ranking
executive remains in her position: Jan
Ford, the bank’s head of compliance in
the Americas.
It is rare for companies and regula-
tors that are settling allegations of
crimes or other misconduct to name
the individuals responsible for those
misdeeds — a practice that perpetu-
ates the myth that such acts were
inadvertently committed by a faceless
institution and were not the conse-
quence of decisions made by human
beings.
Large companies “will happily pay a
big fine, as long as senior managers
are protected,” said John Coffee Jr., a
Columbia Law School professor and
author of the forthcoming book “Cor-
porate Crime and Punishment: The
Crisis of Underenforcement.”
Fines paid by public companies,
even of the $150 million magnitude that
Deutsche Bank is paying, fall almost
entirely on shareholders, rather than
on the individuals responsible. When
those individuals bear no discernible
consequences, the result is an aston-
ishing rate of recidivism, Mr. Coffee
noted, despite repeated apologies and
promises that bad behavior won’t
happen again.
New York’s Department of Financial
Services, not Deutsche Bank, wrote the
consent order that omitted the execu-
tives’ and bankers’ names. “The New
York State Department of Financial
Services is the first and only financial
regulator to take action against a
financial institution in connection with
Jeffrey Epstein,” said Sophia Kim, a
spokeswoman for the agency. “The
department’s consent order provides a
Han Wenxin, residents of the nearby vil-
lage of Beiguancun sewed bathing suits
at home and began selling them at
Xingcheng’s beaches. In time, factories
were built and merchants started selling
farther away — in Beijing, in Russia, in
South Africa and beyond.
As business grew, Xingcheng was
host to swimwear expos and runway
shows set to thumping club music.
Xingcheng sells internationally with
the help of people like Ms. Hao, the
trader, who works in the wholesale hub
of Yiwu, south of Shanghai.
She is spending her days reading
news about the pandemic on her phone
but not doing much business. A
customer from Dubai expressed inter-
Companies like Deutsche Bank typically “will happily pay a big fine as long as senior
managers are protected,” said the author of a new book about corporate crime.
wealth of detail about the course of
conduct of the bank, consistent with
D.F.S.’s role as the New York licensing
agency for the institution itself.”
While the bank may not be legally
obligated to name those responsible
for the Epstein relationship, it should
do so to rebuild public trust, said Bran-
don Garrett, a professor at Duke Law
School and author of “Too Big to Jail.”
“When a company does something
seriously wrong, then accountability is
all the more important,” Mr. Garrett
said. “You want assurances they’re
cleaning house. That’s especially true
for Deutsche Bank, which has been
around this block many times.”
Indeed, Deutsche Bank is a symbol
of corporate recidivism: It has paid
more than $9 billion in fines since 2008
related to a litany of alleged and admit-
ted financial crimes and other trans-
gressions, including manipulating
interest rates, failing to prevent money
laundering, evading sanctions on Iran
and other countries and engaging in
fraud in the run-up to the financial
crisis.
Deutsche Bank claimed to have put
all this behind it when it named Chris-
tian Sewing as chief executive in 2018.
“We all have to help ensure that this
Xingcheng
Beijing
Bohai Sea
Yellow R.
Yellow
Sea
CHINA
Shanghai
Yangtze R.
TAIWAN
Hong Kong
South
China Sea
200 Miles
THE NEW YORK TIMES
est in buying some swimsuits but never
made a down payment. A buyer in India
hinted at an order but didn’t follow
through.
Qi Lei employs a handful of people in
his airy Xingcheng factory, where indus-
trial machines cut fabric on room-length
tables into pieces that then are sent to
factories that stitch them into swim-
suits. All around his factory there is
cloth in great bolts; cloth stuffed into gi-
ant plastic bags; cloth in a riot of colors
and patterns, like snakeskin or tropical
flowers on a chevron background.
Work is finding its way to Mr. Qi — he
is cutting a lot of bikinis, he said. But he
can see that many local factories are not
as lucky. Some workers are still at home.
ANGELA WEISS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
kind of thing does not happen again,”
Mr. Sewing said earlier this month in a
message to employees. “It is our duty
and our social responsibility to ensure
that our banking services are used
only for legitimate purposes.”
Since neither the regulator nor the
bank would reveal the people responsi-
ble for the misconduct, my colleagues
and I decided to fill in some of the
blanks left by the consent order. (Some
of the bankers and executives con-
firmed their roles; none would com-
ment on the record.)
“RELATIONSHIP MANAGER-1,”
who brought Mr. Epstein into Deutsche
Bank, is Paul Morris, who had previ-
ously helped manage the Epstein
account at JPMorgan. Despite Mr.
Epstein’s conviction in 2008 of solicit-
ing prostitution from a minor and
widespread news coverage of his in-
volvement with underage girls, Mr.
Morris in 2013 introduced Mr. Epstein
to his Deutsche Bank bosses as “a
potential client who could generate
millions of dollars of revenue as well as
leads for other lucrative clients to the
bank,” according to the consent order.
In a subsequent email to higher-ups
at the bank, Mr. Morris noted that the
Epstein relationship could generate
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
“Because of the epidemic this year, if
you’re doing business, you’re by and
large losing money,” he said.
Mr. Qi is proud to help Xingcheng
make swimwear for the world. But he
worries about the industry’s future.
Young people do not want to sew swim-
suits anymore, he said. They are not as
willing as their forebears to grit their
teeth and work hard — to “eat bitter,” as
people in China say.
“Pretty much everyone who works in
this industry was a young girl 20 years
ago,” Mr. Qi said. “Now they’re getting
on in years.”
China’s factory sector was built over
the past four decades on its people’s
ability to move quickly and adapt. Peo-
annual revenues of up to $4 million.
Mr. Morris needed approval for a
client who carried such reputational
risk. He sent Charles Packard, the
head of the bank’s American wealth-
management division and described in
the consent order as “EXECUTIVE-1,”
a memo detailing Mr. Epstein’s contro-
versial past. In a subsequent email, Mr.
Packard said that he had taken the
issue to the division’s general counsel
and the head of its anti-money-laun-
dering operation and that neither felt
Mr. Epstein required additional review.
“We can move ahead so long as noth-
ing further is identified,” Mr. Packard
wrote in a May 2013 email to Mr. Mor-
ris.
(Deutsche Bank told regulators that
it found no written record of any ap-
proval from the executives Mr.
Packard said he consulted.)
At the time, Deutsche Bank was
aggressively expanding its American
wealth management business under its
new co-chief executive, Anshu Jain.
The bank developed a reputation for
courting wealthy clients whom other
banks shunned — including a default-
prone real estate developer named
Donald J. Trump.
Once the Epstein relationship was
underway, Deutsche Bank executives
ignored repeated red flags, including
suspiciously large cash withdrawals
and 120 wire transfers totaling $2.65
million to women with Eastern Euro-
pean surnames and people who had
been publicly identified as Mr. Ep-
stein’s co-conspirators, according to
the consent order.
That and other activity — including
media accounts of Mr. Epstein’s sexual
misconduct — led employees in the
bank’s anti-financial-crime department
to urge executives to further scrutinize
the Epstein relationship.
Mr. Morris and Mr. Packard met
with Mr. Epstein at his New York
mansion in January 2015 and asked
him “about the veracity of the recent
allegations,” according to the consent
order. No one took notes; the bank told
regulators it had no record of the sub-
stance of the meeting.
Whatever Mr. Epstein said, Mr.
Packard “appeared to be satisfied,”
according to the consent order. No one
..
PHOTOGRAPHS BY GIULIA MARCHI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
ple from the countryside poured into cit-
ies and towns, ready to take whatever
opportunities were available. The de-
mands of the world market changed so
rapidly that it helped not to get too tied
up in any one job or industry.
Today, in factory belts around China,
the pandemic is testing that resilience
again. What if summer comes and goes
and swimsuit sales still don’t pick up in a
major way? What happens to
Xingcheng then?
“Supposing there’s no work for an-
other year, I guess I’ll just have to
scrimp and make do,” Mr. Qi said. “I
don’t have any other ideas.”
Wang Yiwei contributed research
subsequently asked Mr. Morris for his
opinion. Deutsche Bank apparently
didn’t further investigate the allega-
tions against Mr. Epstein.
Eight days after the visit to Mr.
Epstein’s mansion, a bank committee
charged with vetting transactions that
pose risks to the bank’s reputation held
a meeting. According to a bank official
familiar with the meeting, it was run
by Stuart Clarke, chief operating offi-
cer for the Americas; other attendees
included Michael Chepiga, acting
general counsel for the Americas; and
Ms. Ford, the compliance executive
who had joined the bank just one week
earlier.
The committee concluded that it was
“comfortable with things continuing”
with Mr. Epstein, according to an email
that a committee member sent Mr.
Packard. One committee member
“noted a number of sizable deals re-
cently,” according to the consent order.
In other words, the relationship was
making money for Deutsche Bank.
The following week Ms. Ford, the
head of compliance, memorialized the
decision in an email to Mr. Packard
and other executives that put the onus
squarely on Mr. Packard: Deutsche
Bank would “continue business as
usual with Jeff Epstein based upon”
Mr. Packard’s “due diligence visit with
him.”
By November 2018, when the bank
began to wind down its business with
Mr. Epstein, Mr. Morris and Mr.
Packard had both left the bank. Mr.
Morris went to Merrill Lynch, where
he is a private wealth adviser. Mr.
Packard joined Bridgewater Associ-
ates, the hedge fund founded by Ray
Dalio.
Of the members of the risk-assess-
ment committee who approved con-
tinuing the Epstein relationship, Mr.
Clarke and Mr. Chepiga have both left
the bank. Only Ms. Ford remains.
The bank’s Mr. Hunter declined to
comment on her behalf.
“Deutsche Bank undertook appropri-
ate disciplinary actions based upon its
findings regarding the underlying
conduct, including termination for
some employees,” Mr. Hunter said.
“We do not comment on individual
instances of employee discipline.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, JULY 20, 2020 | 9

Opinion
We interrupt this gloom to offer . . . hope
Yes, America
is suffering
needlessly.
That may
save us.
Nicholas Kristof

Just one in six Americans in a poll last

month were “proud” of the state of the
country, and about two out of three were
actually “fearful” about it. So let me
introduce a new thought: “hope.”
Yes, the nation is a mess, but overlap-
ping catastrophes have also created
conditions that may finally let us extri-
cate ourselves from the mire. The grim
awareness of national failures — on the
coronavirus, racism, health care and
jobs — may be a necessary prelude to
fixing the country.
The last time the U.S. economy was
this troubled, Herbert Hoover’s failures
led to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election
with a mandate to revitalize the nation.
The result was the New Deal, Social
Security, rural electrification, govern-
ment jobs programs and a 35-year burst
of inclusive growth that built the mod-
ern middle class and arguably made the
United States the richest and most
powerful country in the history of the
world.
History doesn’t repeat, but it does
rhyme. And when I reached out through
the gloom to consult experts, I was
struck by how much hope I heard.
“On balance, I am very hopeful and
I’m very optimistic,” Darren Walker, the
president of the Ford Foundation, told
me.
Do we now Marian Wright
Edelman, the
have a founder of the Chil-
chance for a dren’s Defense Fund,
reset? Yes, I said that one reason
think we do. for hope is, para-
doxically, President
Trump and the way
he has become the avatar of failed “let
them eat cake” policies and narratives.
“Mr. Trump is the perfect opposition to
have,” Edelman said. “He represents
the implosion of the American dream,
and we can’t go down his road much
farther.”
“If we can’t get something done now,”
she added, “then shame on us.”
Betting markets like PredictIt expect
Joe Biden to sweep into the presidency
in January with a Democratic House
and a Democratic Senate. I’ve known
Biden since he was a senator, and he’s
no radical — but that reassuring, boring
mien may make it easier to win a man-
date and then use it to pivot the United
States onto a new path.
So perhaps today’s national pain, fear
and loss can also be a source of hope:
We may be so desperate, our failures so
manifest, our grief so raw, that the
United States can once more, as during
the Great Depression, embrace long-
needed changes that would have been
impossible in cheerier times.
The United States faces at least three
simultaneous crises: more coronavirus
deaths than any other country, the ILLUSTRATION BY NICOLAS ORTEGA; PHOTOGRAPH FROM GETTY IMAGES

worst economic slump since the Great

Depression and overflowing outrage
over racial inequity. Yet these crises are
all interlinked, all facets of the same
core failure of the country, one that has
its roots in President Richard Nixon’s
“Southern strategy” of 1968 and in the
racialization of social safety net pro-
grams thereafter.
Why is the United States about the
only advanced country to lack universal
health care and universal paid sick
leave? Many scholars, in particular the
late Alberto Alesina, a Harvard econo-
mist, have argued that one reason for
America’s outlier status is race. Invest-
ing in safety nets and human capital
became stigmatized because of a per-
ception that African-Americans would
benefit. So instead of investing in chil-
dren, we invested in a personal respon-
sibility narrative holding that Ameri-
cans just need to lift themselves up by
their bootstraps to get ahead.
This experiment proved catastrophic
for all Americans, especially the work-
ing class. Marginalized groups, includ-
ing African-Americans and Native
Americans, suffered the worst, but the
underinvestment in health and the lack
of safety nets meant that American
children today are 57 percent more
likely to die by age 19 than European
children are.
This boomerang effect of obdurate
white racism — what Dr. Jonathan M.
Metzl calls “dying of whiteness”—
means that Americans now are less
likely to graduate from high school than
children in many peer countries. Mean-
while, people die in the United States
from drug overdoses at a rate of one
every seven minutes.
This is deeply personal to me. As I’ve
written in a recent book, “Tightrope,” a
quarter of the children on my old No. 6
school bus in rural Yamhill, Ore., are
dead from drugs, alcohol and suicide —
deaths of despair. Others are homeless
or in prison. Although they were white,
they perished because of policy choices,
partly rooted in racism, that the United
States has pursued for 50 years.
Gaps in safety nets left us in turn
particularly vulnerable to a pandemic,
for underinsurance and lack of paid sick
leave helped spread the coronavirus.
The pandemic then caused people to
lose their jobs, which in the United
States meant that they lost health insur-
ance just when it was most needed.
Trump bungled the pandemic, as did
some local leaders, but the failure was
also 50 years in the making.
Do we now have a chance for a reset?
KRISTOF, PAGE 11

Our life was languid. Then my daughter’s family moved in.

It’s been Timothy Egan
exhausting Contributing Writer
and
exhilarating.
When we lived in Italy some years ago,
our family of four would sometimes visit
a family of more — a married couple and
nonna playing with her grandkids in the
garden, an uncle with a mental disabili-
ty, and the brother who never launched,
all living in a modest house of weath-
ered stone.
They argued without filter, finished
each other’s stories, and each took a
turn at cooking, cleaning or bringing
money and food into the home. It was
charming, particularly at the big after-
noon meal on Sunday, and, we thought,
anachronistic.
During the lockdown of 2020, our nest
has been a quarantined family of six —
our daughter and her husband, their
twin 1-year old boys, my wife and my-
self. It’s been exhausting, kinetic,
cramped, and one of the few consistent
joys in this awful time.
But as it turns out, three generations
living under one roof is not anachronis-
tic; it’s the future. Or, more precisely, a
past brought back to mainstream life.
Two years ago, the Pew Research Cen-
ter reported that 64 million Americans
were living in multigenerational house-
holds — the highest number on record,
and an increase of almost 70 percent
from 1980.
Last year, for the first time in 160
years, the average number of people in
the American household started going
up instead of down, to 2.63 people per
unit. The pandemic has only acceler-
ated the trend. An analysis by Zillow, a
real estate listing company, found that
32 million young adults were living with
their parents in April, a 10 percent spike
from the same time a year ago.
The anachronism was Beaver
Cleaver’s nuclear family, two parents
and a pair of non-adult kids. This was
the norm only for a small period in the
mid-20th century. With six in our house-
hold, we’ve been living the norm of 1790.
But that is closer to the way it was for
most of recorded history.
Somehow, in a blip of conformity
during the 1950s, the multigenerational
family came to be stigmatized. To this
day, there’s a whiff of class condescen-
sion directed at millennials and the
younger Gen Zers cohabitating with the
ones who brought them into this world.
I grew up in a family of nine, with one
bathroom for the kids. Whenever I told
somebody about my siblings, it was like
the scene in “Good Will Hunting” where
Matt Damon names his 12 brothers:
“Marky, Ricky, Danny, Terry, Mikey,
Davey, Timmy, Tommy, Joey, Robby,
Johnny and Brian.”
One of my friends had 14 in his family.
Hanging out at his house, kids would fly
out of laundry chutes or pop from clos-
ets at random, and nobody would blink.
Then, the crowded households were
mostly Irish Catholic, Southern Italian
and Polish. Now, the rise in extended
families reflects the nation’s changing
ethnic diversity: 29 percent of Asians
live in multigenerational households, 27
percent of Hispanics and 26 percent of
African-Americans. Whites are at 16
percent.
At the other end of the spectrum,
about 36 million Americans live alone,
representing 28 percent of all house-
holds. It’s wrong to equate living alone
with loneliness, but the forced social
isolation of this pandemic has surely
taken a toll on the solo.
Our newly crowded house, like the
households of so many others, came
together very quickly. We were not
trying to be demographically trendy.
They were here, as a stop between
GETTY IMAGES
moving from one city to the next, and
then we had to shelter in place, indefi-
nitely.
One day life was moving along at a
languid pace; the next day every hour
was assigned on a grid drawn up by my
daughter and taped to the refrigerator.
Somebody had to feed the twins — four
times a day — change their diapers,
cook the main meal, shop, clean.
And because we all had day jobs as
well, every square foot of our 115-year-
old house was precious, and potentially
a makeshift Zoom closet.
I marveled at the person I still
thought of as my little girl, drawing on
the same kind of instinctual strength
that had guided my sleep-deprived
mother through many a hard day.
The tiny humans learned how to
laugh and to make us laugh, danced to
three-chord guitar songs, and tried
mightily to trash our house. They have
no sense of gravity, and would as soon
walk off the deck into thin air as eat a
dirt clod. Seeing the world through a
toddler’s eyes, you marvel at clouds
skidding across the sky, a raven’s caw,
how good it feels to run through a sprin-
kler. Holding both of them while they
squirmed was like trying to keep a grip
on a pair of newly landed king salmon.
The fact that they had no idea that we
were living through the worst public
health crisis in a century was a pallia-
tive to the pain of the pandemic.
And then they left, a week or so ago,
moving a thousand miles away to a
different time zone. We lost an intimacy
that most of the world had known since
people formed family units. Our house
is still and aimless, three generations
back to one, and we are left to wonder
how so many of us can live like this.
TIMOTHY EGAN covers the environment,
the American West and politics. He is a
winner of the National Book Award and
author, most recently, of “A Pilgrimage
to Eternity.”
 ..
10 | MONDAY, JULY 20, 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

opinion

The virus brings couples clarity

Widespread social-distancing policies Based in Austin, Texas, the pair had even more inseparable. Their job teach-
A.G. SULZBERGER, Publisher Ashley Fetters meant many couples had two choices, planned on waiting until they reached ing at a ceramics studio started back up
DEAN BAQUET, Executive Editor MARK THOMPSON, Chief Executive Officer
neither particularly appealing: They the 18-month or two-year mark to move in May, “and even after being away from
STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON, President, International
could smush together into close-quar- in together. each other for a day, we both laughed
JOSEPH KAHN, Managing Editor
CHARLOTTE GORDON, V.P., International Consumer Marketing
tered, 24-hours-a-day cohabitation, “But then all of this happened, and it about how it was weird that we missed
TOM BODKIN, Creative Director
As everyone who’s ever been a boy- indefinitely, or be apart with limited just sped everything up,” Mx. Hender- each other.” Plus, in a time when cash
SUZANNE DALEY, Associate Editor HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS, V.P., International Circulation
friend, or a girlfriend, or a spouse or a in-person contact, indefinitely. Each son said. flow to any business or individual seems
HELENA PHUA, Executive V.P., Asia-Pacific
lover or a partner or even a friend with choice presented its own challenges, Mx. Henderson less dependable than usual, it made
KATHLEEN KINGSBURY, Editorial Page Editor SUZANNE YVERNÈS, International Chief Financial Officer
benefits — that is, anyone who’s ever and each one required couples to figure Move in? moved into their little sense to Mx. Henderson to contin-
liked or loved anyone — knows, it can out exactly what the terms of the ar- Get divorced? partner’s house in ue renting an apartment where they
take a long time to muster the courage rangement would be — quickly. The pandem- early spring under never slept anymore.
to say exactly what you want. But as countries reopen, a number of ic has forced the assumption that Indeed, across the globe, multitudes
Telling the truth about your hopes for those couples are now reaping the romantic the arrangement of people are either in precarious finan-
the future of a relationship (or situation- benefits: They’re emerging from quar- partners to would be temporary. cial situations or bracing for them. And
TAKE LEGAL PLOY AWAY FROM BULLIES ship) can be terrifying: I want us to see antine with a newfound sense of clarity, decide. Instead, over the many, like Mx. Henderson, are moving
each other more, I want us to see each about both the future and where they course of a few con- in with their partners — partly for love,
The New York State Legislature has before it an im- other less, I want us to stop being this stand in relation to each other. In other versations, the two and partly to save money.
A bill in New portant bill that would discourage abusive lawsuits way to each other, and I want us to stay words, if ever there were a scenario that recently decided it “I feel like the party line has always
York would filed with the sole purpose of silencing critics. Known this way forever are all easy enough could disabuse us once and for all of the was time for Mx. Henderson to move all been that everybody should ‘decide, not
discourage as SLAPPs, for strategic lawsuits against public par- combinations of words to string togeth- notion that the “right moment” is a their stuff in permanently. slide’ into cohabitation,” said Alexandra
er, but the hard part is finding, or creat- prerequisite for having an important Initially, Mx. Henderson was careful Solomon, a clinical assistant professor
frivolous ticipation, the suits are deliberate misuses of the legal ing, the right moment to say them. conversation, look around: We’re living to set boundaries. They wanted to en- of psychology at Northwestern Univer-
lawsuits aimed system intended to choke off free speech. But when the coronavirus pandemic through it right now. sure that both they and their partner sity and the instructor of Northwest-
at chilling Individuals and organizations who file a SLAPP took hold this year and upended life as James Henderson, 29, who uses the could count on having ample space and ern’s Marriage 101 course. “What I have
we know it, many couples suddenly pronouns they and their, and their boy- alone time every day. But after a few realized with the quarantine is what a
free speech. typically do not intend to win. Their goal is to intimi- didn’t have the luxury of waiting for the friend had just celebrated six months as months of cozy 24/7 hangout time, Mx. privileged position that is. It’s a privi-
date and harass critics by saddling them with prohibi- right moment. a couple when the coronavirus arrived. Henderson said, the two just became lege to make very mindful, thoughtful,
tively expensive, nerve-racking and time-consuming intentional choices about when to move
in together.”
legal processes. The ploy is a direct assault on free- Of course, involuntary home confine-
dom of expression, perversely cloaked as ordinary ment and financial strain against the
civil claims such as defamation, invasion of privacy or backdrop of a global health crisis do not
interference with economic advantage. add up to domestic bliss for everyone.
Joel Velez, 42, was quarantined in Flor-
The New York Times and other major news organi- ida with his wife of 18 years and their
zations are regular targets of lawsuits, in several cases four children for about a month before
filed by President Trump, who is notoriously given to he lost his job, for which he worked
nights, in a layoff.
threatening lawsuits. But while substantial organiza- For the first time in years, Mr. Velez
tions have the resources to fend off punitive suits, and his wife were on similar schedules,
smaller news organizations and people sharing their but their new abundance of time togeth-
er confirmed something he’d suspected
opinions on social media can be seriously hurt by legal
for a while. “We seem to have lost any
costs that can well exceed $100,000 and the wrenching kind of common ground besides, you
ordeal of discovery proceedings and court hearings. know, where we live and our kids,” he
Frivolous lawsuits are hardly new. But the spread of said. Last month, Mr. Velez suggested
they see a counselor. According to Mr.
social media has greatly expanded the power of indi- Velez, his wife suggested they split up
viduals and organizations to mobilize opposition to instead.
some project or to criticize, expose and ridicule way- Mr. Velez wondered aloud whether, if
the pandemic had never happened, his
ward politicians, oppressive organizations or bullying
marriage might have limped along for
businesses, and retaliatory SLAPPs have proliferated. another 15 years, neither party ever
Mr. Trump has been a major purveyor of SLAPPs, rising to the task of asking for a change.
including frivolous lawsuits brought by his campaign “This whole quarantine situation has
forced us to face the problems that
against The Times, The Washington Post and CNN. we’ve been experiencing,” he said. “To
However, most SLAPP cases, according to the Ameri- stop hiding from each other through
can Civil Liberties Union, involve real estate issues, work, or through our different sched-
ules.”
the protection of the environment, consumer rights or Robert Falconer, 29, and Julie Fisher,
animal rights in addition to criticism of public officials. 28, live in Calgary, Alberta, and when
Actions that have drawn SLAPPs include online criti- their city began to shut down, they, too,
had to immediately address a matter
cism, letters to the editor, fliers, petitions, protest dem-
they’d been putting off: They had been
onstrations, filing a complaint with a government talking about getting engaged, but there
agency, speaking out at public hearings and making was always just a little too much going
legal claims. on in their lives.
In mid-March, Mr. Falconer’s parents,
Here are some typical examples of SLAPPs, among who were living in Asia, decided to come
many cited on the website of the Reporters Committee and live with him. Mr. Falconer and Ms.
for Freedom of the Press: When a reporter in Connect- Fisher realized they would have to forgo
seeing each other in person for a while
icut reported that a candidate for the State Senate had
to minimize exposure risks for their
been arrested on a charge of drunken driving, the families. All at once, they had to choose:
candidate sued her for invasion of privacy and emo- throw together a proposal straightaway,
JACQUELINE TAM FETTERS, PAGE 11
tional distress. When at a meeting of the Phoenix City
Council in 2017 a grocer criticized the developer who
controlled the land on which the store stood, the devel-
oper sued for defamation.
SLAPPs have become so pervasive that since the
1990s, 30 states and the District of Columbia have
adopted some form of an anti-SLAPP statute (the
Free speech and left-wing punishment
politician in Connecticut withdrew his suit after the GOLDBERG, FROM PAGE 1 pany’s chief executive said, in a staff hoods.” But it seems strange to me to conditions a movement can neither
enforced, in some cases, through work- meeting, “something along the lines of argue that in the absence of better labor integrate new ideas nor build support
reporter’s lawyer invoked the state’s anti-SLAPP law). place discipline, including firings. It’s freedom of speech is important, but he law, the left is justified in taking advan- based on genuine transformations of
These do not preclude legal redress for businesses, the involvement of human resources had to take a stand with our staff, cli- tage of precarity to punish people for consciousness rather than guilt or fear
institutions or public figures who have been unfairly departments in compelling adherence ents, and people of color.” political disagreements. of ostracism.”
with rapidly changing new norms of It should be said that many people on None of this is an argument for a It’s not always easy to draw a clear
maligned — the laws typically require the plaintiffs to
speech and debate that worries me the the left, including some who are often totally laissez-faire approach to speech; line between what Willis described as
demonstrate that there’s a probability they can win; most. dismissive of the idea of left-wing illiber- some ideas should be stigmatized. “reinforcing orthodoxy” and agitating
it’s only if they can’t that the suit is dismissed, and in In her scathing rejoinder to the Letter alism, condemned Shor’s firing. Surely I recently spoke to Wasow about the to make language and society more
many states, the plaintiff is made to pay the defend- in The Atlantic, Hannah Giorgis wrote, one reason this episode has been in- reaction to Shor tweeting his paper. democratic and inclusive. As Nicholas
“Facing widespread criticism on Twit- voked so often is that there aren’t many “Much of what we call ‘cancel culture’ is Grossman pointed out in Arc Digital,
ant’s costs and lawyer fees. ter, undergoing an internal workplace comparable examples of such obvious just culture,” he said. “Culture has most signatories to the Letter probably
New York State has had an anti-SLAPP law on the review, or having one’s book panned social justice overreach. boundaries. Every community has agree that it’s a good thing that the
books for more than 25 years, but it applies only to does not, in fact, erode one’s constitu- Still, there’s no question that many boundaries. Those boundaries are casual use of racist and homophobic
tional rights or endanger a liberal soci- people feel intimidated. John always shifting. In the age of the inter- slurs is no longer socially acceptable.
suits brought over real estate developments, zoning
ety.” This sentence brought me up McWhorter, an associate professor of net, they move faster, and therefore “But those changes came about through
and the like, for example when a developer sues envi- short; one of these things is not like the English and comparative literature at where those boundaries are is less clear private sanction, social pressure and
ronmentalists who oppose a project. The bill now be- others. Anyone venturing ideas in Columbia who signed the Harper’s and less stable, and it makes it easier for cultural change, driven by activists and
fore the Legislature would broaden the scope to in- public should be prepared to endure Letter, told me that in younger generations,” he wrote.
negative reviews and pushback on recent days he’s Willis reminds us that when these
clude matters of “public interest,” which “should be social media. Internal workplace re- Even heard from over 100 changes were happening, the right
broadly construed,” and it would strengthen the views are something else. If people fear sympathetic graduate students denounced them as violations of free
court’s right to award the defendant costs and fees. for their livelihoods for relatively minor people will and professors, most expression. Of the conservative cam-
ideological transgressions, it may not come to of them left of center, paign against political correctness in
There is no good reason to delay passage of the bill. violate the American Constitution — the who fear for their the 1990s, she wrote, “Predictably, their
resent a left
The states that have yet to adopt anti-SLAPP laws workplace is not the state — but it does professional valid critique of left authoritarianism
that refuses
would be wise to follow suit. So long as any states have create a climate of self-censorship and prospects if they get has segued all too smoothly into a cam-
grudging conformity.
to make on the wrong side of paign of moral intimidation,” one
none or the laws vary widely, abusive plaintiffs are distinctions.
One of the more egregious recent left-wing opinion. “aimed at demonizing egalitarian ideas,
encouraged to go “forum shopping.” Representative examples of left-wing illiberalism is the Some on the left per se, as repressive.”
Devin Nunes, Republican of California, for example, firing of David Shor, a data analyst at the have argued, fairly, The same is happening today; the
filed defamation lawsuits in Virginia, though he and progressive consulting firm Civis Ana- that those worried about people losing president throws tantrums about “can-
lytics. Amid the protests over Floyd’s their jobs for running afoul of progres- cel culture” while regularly trying to use
the defendants were based in California. That was killing, Shor was called out online for sive orthodoxies should do more to the power of the state to quash speech
before the Virginia General Assembly toughened the tweeting about work by Omar Wasow, strengthen labor protections, since all NICHOLAS KONRAD/THE NEW YORK TIMES
he dislikes. Because Trump poisons
state’s laws. an assistant professor of politics at sorts of employees are vulnerable to everything he touches, his movement’s
Princeton, that shows a link between capricious termination. people to cross those lines.” hypocritical embrace of the mantle of
The best remedy against forum shopping would be a
violent protest in the 1960s and Richard In a much-discussed essay on what he But it’s a problem when the range of free speech threatens to devalue it,
strong federal anti-SLAPP statute. A bill introduced by Nixon’s vote share. called “reactionary liberalism,” The proscribed speech is so wide that the turning it into the rhetorical equivalent
Representative Steve Cohen, Democrat of Tennessee, Shor was accused of “anti-Blackness” New Republic’s Osita Nwanevu wrote, rules are hard to even explain to those of “All Lives Matter.”
has been around for more than a decade, and if en- for seeming to suggest, via Wasow’s “In practice, workers of all stripes often not steeped in left-wing mores. But to let this occur is to surrender
research, that violent protest is counter- lack the means and opportunity to Writing in the 1990s, at a time when what has historically been a sacred
acted it would provide uniform support for free speech productive. (Wasow is Black.) “At least defend themselves from unjust firings feminists like Catharine MacKinnon left-wing value. One reason many on the
and petitioning across the nation. some employees and clients of Civis — all the more reason for those preoccu- sought to curtail free speech in the name right want to be seen as free speech
A strong statute in New York State would be a criti- Analytics complained that Shor’s tweet pied with ‘cancel culture’ and social of equality, the great left-libertarian defenders is that they understand that
threatened their safety,” reported New media-driven dismissals to support Ellen Willis described how progressive the power to break taboos can be even
cal step in the right direction. The state is home to York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait. After just-cause provisions and an end to movements sow the seeds of their own more potent than the power to create
many of the nation’s major news media and a host of an internal review, Shor was let go; he at-will employment.” This is true; as destruction when they become censori- them. Even sympathetic people will
powerful institutions. An effective anti-SLAPP statute was also kicked off a progressive indus- Zaid Jilani wrote recently, “If it were ous. It’s impossible, Willis wrote, “to come to resent a left that refuses to
for New York is long overdue and could well prod try listserv. harder for employers to fire people for censor the speech of the dominant make distinctions between deliberate
Civis has denied that Shor was fired frivolous reasons, Americans would without stifling debate among all social slurs, awkward mistakes and legitimate
recalcitrant legislatures, including Congress, to take for a tweet, but an employee told The have less reason to fear that expressing groups and reinforcing orthodoxy disagreements. Cowing people is not the
action. Atlantic’s Yascha Mounk that the com- their views might cost them their liveli- within left movements. Under such same as converting them.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, JULY 20, 2020 | 11

opinion

Mass death The virus

is not inevitable
NEWS ANALYSIS
Donald G. McNeil Jr.
More than 600,000 peope worldwide,
including over 140,000 Americans, have
been lost to coronavirus, and many
experts fear the deaths will only accel-
erate in the fall as cold weather forces us
indoors. By year’s end, half as many
Americans may have died as did in the
four years of World War II.
And yet we are still arguing over how
to prevent this — each state struggling
over how much lockdown to impose and
what its governor can make its citizens
do.
“You know the five stages of grief —
denial, anger, bargaining, depression,
acceptance?” asked Dr. Emily Landon,
a coronavirus expert at the University
of Chicago medical school. “I think the
American people are in all five of them
— but different parts of the country are
in different stages.”
As death stalks us, especially our
elders, have we simply become inured
to the idea that they are doomed?
The stock market appears to have
priced in a huge wave of deaths. In the
2008-09 recession, it fell 50 percent and
took four years to recover. In March it
fell only 34 percent and has made up
much of that ground already. Looked at
with Wall Street’s bloodless arithmetic,
that makes sense: Most of the deaths
are among the very elderly and nursing
home residents, who no longer travel or
dine out or contribute much to the econ-
omy, and who are a burden on the strug-
gling Medicare and Social Security
Trust Funds.
One can even argue that the accept-
ance of death as master of us all is part
of the human psyche. But because of
modern medicine, we have been out of
touch with our ultimate fate for genera-
tions.
We’ve all heard of the Black Death
and perhaps the Plague of Justinian,
events that may have killed up to a third
of mankind and rewrote the fates of
empires. They seem lost in the mists of
time. But not that long back, our great-
great-great-great-grandparents felt the
omnipresence of death in ways we will
never know.
There is a chart famous among epide-
miologists titled “The Conquest of
Pestilence in New York City.” Produced
by New York City’s health department,
it tracks and explains deaths in the city
from 1805 to the present. At first glance,
it looks innocuous, like the ups and
downs of the Dow Jones index. But the
longer you stare at the fine print, the
more horrified you become.
This past March, before coronavirus
cases began to mount, the annual death
NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND MENTAL HYGIENE
Members of the St. Louis Red Cross Motor Corps during the influenza epidemic in 1918.
rate in New York City was about six per “miasma theory,” which held that bad
1,000 New Yorkers. The virus’s first smells caused disease. (Only a century
wave added about 2.5 more deaths per earlier, Americans had given up on the
1,000 to that baseline. By contrast, from “humors theory,” which posited that
1800 into the 1850s, deaths in the city disease was caused by imbalances
rose in a relentless series of epidemic between blood, urine, sweat and bile
spikes, year after year, with only brief that had to be rebalanced by bleeding,
respites in between. sweating or purging.)
The annual baseline back then was They also agreed that whether immi-
about 25 deaths per 1,000 New Yorkers, grants had brought some diseases or
and in some years the toll reached 50 simply suffered from them, no one was
per 1,000. In other words, in bad years, safe until everyone was safe, so they
New Yorkers saw twice as many people made public health
around them die as usual. And they universal.
were used to seeing about four times as
Some say As a result, New
much death as we now do. America is Yorkers took certain
The sharpest peaks were the cholera doomed. But steps — sometimes
epidemics of 1832, 1849 and 1854. But science and very expensive and
plagues came in waves, sometimes public spend- contentious, but all
more than one simultaneously: yellow ing have based on science:
fever, smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, saved us from They dug sewers to
diphtheria, typhus and meningitis. pandemics pipe filth into the
Other than cholera and typhus, most Hudson and East
of those were childhood diseases that
worse than Rivers instead of
adults were immune to because they this one. letting it pool in the
had survived them, so the chart is a streets. In 1842, they
parabola of maternal grief, each spike built the Croton
another nail in a hundred small coffins. Aqueduct to carry fresh water to Man-
The death rate began dropping after hattan. In 1910, they chlorinated its
the 1860s. New Yorkers — both citizens water to kill more germs. In 1912, they
and doctors — had finally stopped began requiring dairies to heat their
arguing and reached consensus on milk because a Frenchman named
some basic issues. Pasteur had shown that doing so spared
First of all, most finally accepted the children from tuberculosis. Over time,
“germ theory” of disease, acknowledg- they made smallpox vaccination man-
ing that it was caused by invisible ene- datory.
mies, not by swamps, trash, manure or Libertarians battled almost every
the other nuisances that underlay the step. Some fought sewers and water
UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE, VIA GETTY IMAGES
mains being dug through their proper-
ties, arguing that they owned perfectly
good wells and cesspools. Some refused
smallpox vaccines until the Supreme
Court put an end to that in 1905, in Ja-
cobson v. Massachusetts.
In the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918,
many New Yorkers donned masks but
4,000 San Franciscans formed an Anti-
Mask League. (The city’s mayor, James
Rolph, was fined $50 for flouting his own
health department’s mask order.)
Slowly, science prevailed, and death
rates went down.
Today, Americans are facing the same
choice our ancestors did: We can listen
to scientists and spend money to save
lives, or we can watch our neighbors die.
“The people who say ‘Let her rip, let’s
go for herd immunity’ — that’s just
public-health nihilism,” said Dr. Joia S.
Mukherjee, the chief medical office of
Partners in Health, a medical charity
fighting the virus in Massachusetts.
“How many deaths do we have to accept
to get there?”
A vaccine may be close at hand, and
so may treatments like monoclonal
antibodies that will cut our losses.
We need not accept death as our
overlord — we can simply hang on and
outlast him.
DONALD G. MCNEIL JR. is a science report-
er covering epidemics and diseases of
the world’s poor. He joined The Times in
1976, and has reported from 60 coun-
tries.
brings clarity
FETTERS, FROM PAGE 10
or wait until they could be together in
person again, whenever that might be.
“I was like, ‘We’ve got to rip the Band-
Aid off and just do it,’” Ms. Fisher said.
The night before Mr. Falconer’s mother
flew in, Mr. Falconer and Ms. Fisher
drove out to their favorite spot (a look-
out with a beautiful view of the Canadi-
an Rockies) during a snowstorm. They
couldn’t see a thing.
“There were so many things working
against us,” Ms. Fisher said with a
laugh.
“It was not romantic at all,” Mr. Fal-
coner added.
Frightening, dangerous times — like
a war, or the aftermath of a natural
disaster, or a pandemic — can be occa-
sions for people to reckon with their own
mortality, with the fact that everyone
gets just one precious life and has to
decide what to do with it before it’s over.
According to Dr. Solomon, this may be
one reason couples living through the
coronavirus pandemic have fast-
tracked conversations they may have
waited to have otherwise.
“Crises end up being turning points,”
Dr. Solomon said. “We get clear on what
matters.”
As countries reopen and many of us
cautiously resume some of our daily
lives, perhaps that’s what we should
strive to remember: Waiting for a per-
fect opportunity is a waste of time.
This month, Mr. Falconer and Ms.
Fisher will marry. On their pre-wedding
to-do list is getting Ms. Fisher’s engage-
ment ring resized. In his hurry to pro-
pose, Mr. Falconer was unable to get
adjustments made to the family heir-
loom he presented to Ms. Fisher the
night of the snowstorm.
The ring belonged to Mr. Falconer’s
grandmother, who got engaged to his
grandfather just before his grandfather
fought in the D-Day battle at Normandy
in 1944. His grandparents, Mr. Falconer
pointed out, also made a commitment in
a frightening, uncertain time, and had to
decide in a hurry whether they wanted
to build their futures around each other.
Ms. Fisher’s engagement ring may not
have fit her finger when Mr. Falconer
first presented it to her, but it was a
fitting reminder for the occasion: The
best time to start creating a future is not
at some yet-to-materialize “right”
moment, but at the present one.
ASHLEY FETTERS is a reporter based in
Hoboken, N.J.

We interrupt this gloom to offer . . . hope

KRISTOF, FROM PAGE 9
Yes, I think we do.
To the extent that America’s 50 years
of failures had their roots in racism, it’s
also striking that the new possibilities
interested, ineffective politics of Donald
Trump,” Lizabeth Cohen, a Harvard
historian, told me.
But wait! Even if Biden wins with
both chambers of Congress — a huge if
tional, privileged figure who seized
upon the catastrophe of the Depression
to transform America.
“F.D.R. wasn’t by nature a revolution-
ary, but out of the trauma of the Great

arise in part from mass revulsion at the
video of George Floyd’s life being
snuffed out by police officers. The cur-
rent Black Lives Matter protests, meas-
ured by the number of participants
(roughly 20 million), appear to consti-
tute the largest movement in American
history.
“There was something about seeing a
man’s knee on another man’s neck that
woke people up,” said Helene Gayle, the
chief executive of the Chicago Commu-
nity Trust. “People think I’m crazy, but I
have a sense of possibility.”
The polling is striking. Sixty percent
of Americans, including a majority of
white people, said in a CBS News poll
last month that they support ideas
promoted by the Black Lives Matter
movement. Almost as large a majority
supports a national health care plan. An
astonishing 89 percent favor higher
taxes on the rich to reduce poverty in
America.
The sense of opportunity thus is
emerging not solely from the wreckage
of past policies but also from new atti-
tudes, particularly among young peo-
ple. Half a century ago, there was some-
thing to Nixon’s claim of a “silent major-
ity” that backed his racist dog whistles;
today, polls indicate, the silent majority
want more spending to address racial
inequity, more effort to address climate
change and more input from scientists
on how to handle Covid-19.
It’s not clear, of course, that these
views will translate into wiser policies.
Congress is often more responsive to
wealthy donors than to voter opinions.
And while white Americans may chant
“Black Lives Matter,” they may not want
to back policies to share the bounty that
they have been hogging; few are talking
about fixing our unequal system of local
school funding built to transmit advan-
tage from one generation to the next.
Yet this inchoate movement is gain-
ing ground, and Trump is on the defen-
sive. In the rural Oregon town where I
grew up, most people voted for Trump in
2016, and until early this year they stuck
with him because they liked his nomina-
tions of conservative judges and his
pro-gun stance, but most of all they liked
the roaring economy. Now the collaps-
ing economy and Trump’s manifest
failures in managing the pandemic test
that support.
In the 1930s the unequivocal nature of
Hoover’s failures helped win Roosevelt
his mandate and made the New Deal
possible. Maybe national anguish can
again be the midwife of progress.
“It is possible that the best thing that
could have happened to make progres-
sive change possible is the crass, self-
— this is an age of toxic polarization.
Republican senators will filibuster (if
the filibuster survives), conservative
judges will overturn Biden executive
orders, and Tucker Carlson and Sean
Hannity will spew venom.
Actually, that sounds rather like the
1930s. Roosevelt was (initially) blocked
by the Supreme Court, and fervently
denounced by Father Charles Coughlin
on the right and Senator Huey Long on
the left. F.D.R. was regularly accused of
being a “warmonger” and a “fascist
dictator,” or of taking America on the
road to Communism.
Skeptics worry that Trump has per-
manently damaged American institu-
tions and norms, in ways that will im-
pair future progress. Perhaps. But
Nixon likewise challenged institutions,
norms and the rule of law, and the result
was that Americans came to value them
more. One result was the Democratic
tidal wave of 1974.
Like Trump, Nixon
took on journalists —
A series of his vice president,
national Spiro Agnew, excori-
crises may ated critics as “nat-
have exposed tering nabobs of
negativism” — but
America’s
ultimately Agnew
failings was convicted of a
enough to felony, and Bob
give us a Woodward and Carl
chance at a Bernstein inspired a
do-over. generation of kids to
become journalists.
Me included.
I often hear Ameri-
cans say that the country has never
been so divided. That doesn’t ring true.
Far more than today, households in the
1960s were riven by civil warfare, with
children denouncing parents as mur-
derers for backing the Vietnam War and
parents despairing of their offspring as
immoral good-for-nothings. If we sur-
vived the chasms of the ’60s, we can get
through this.
“I know we will see a better future,”
President Jimmy Carter told me re-
cently. “We have been through many
painful crises, some spanning years, but
we have always gotten back on our feet.
Sometimes there must be a reckoning
and course correction.”
I reached out to Carter because his
administration in the late 1970s roughly
marked the end of the postwar cycle of
inclusive capitalism. At age 95, he’s still
guardedly optimistic, as is Walter Mon-
dale, his vice president, a classic liberal
who at age 92 — “not too many more
years, and I’ll be getting old,” he told me
— said he feels “a lot of hope.”
Roosevelt was a somewhat conven-
Unprecedented times.
Depression he helped unleash a revolu-
tion that made America a richer, fairer
and better country,” said Cohen. “The
same is possible again — if we get ev-
erything right.”
Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter
Unparalleled coverage.
movement, along with a broad recogni-
tion that America is on a wrong path,
create a similar opportunity for Joe Subscribe to The New York Times
Biden.
Some of Biden’s aides are telling him International Edition.
to think in such grand terms, and he
seems drawn to the idea. “I do think
we’ve reached a point, a real inflection
nytimes.com/subscribeinternational
in American history,” he told reporters a
few days ago. “And I don’t believe it’s
unlike what Roosevelt was met with.”
Biden added that “we have an oppor-
tunity to make some really systemic
change,” but for now his policy positions
don’t show much sign of that. He is likely
to favor a public option as a path to
universal health coverage, stronger
moves on climate change, a higher
federal minimum wage, easier access to
college, and jobs programs to reduce
inequality. If enacted, these would put
America on a path more like that of
Europe and Canada, but they would be
short of Rooseveltian.
Add a universal child care/pre-K
program modeled on the military’s,
universal dental coverage, Canada-
style child allowances to cut child pov-
erty in half, major investments in K-12
education for disadvantaged children,
“baby bonds” to reduce wealth inequal-
ity, greater union protections and
“bandwidth for all” — then you are
talking history.
Is that a pipe dream? Perhaps. But a
series of national crises may have ex-
posed our failings enough to give us a
chance at a do-over.
This hope is not Pollyannaish. It rests
on a tragic toll of Covid-19 deaths, and it
requires a thousand caveats. Trump
might win in November. If Biden wins, a
Republican Senate might stymie his
proposals and block his nominees.
Deficits are now so enormous that
politics may become a dispiriting fight
about which programs to cut, not which
dreams to finance.
“Hope right now in America is blood-
ied and battered, but this is the kind of
hope that is successful,” said Senator
Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey.
“It’s hope that has lost its naïveté.”
Besieged as we are by plague and
crisis, a dollop of this “calloused hope,”
as Booker calls it, offers an incentive to
persevere. If in the depths of the Great
Depression we could claw a path out
and forge a better country, “calloused
hope” can guide us once more to a better
place.

12 | MONDAY, JULY 20, 2020
Sports
Detour from an Olympic dream
A runner rediscovers joy
in his sport while coping
with Tokyo postponement
BY SCOTT CACCIOLA
On an overcast morning in late March, a
few days after the International
Olympic Committee announced it was
postponing the 2020 Tokyo Games be-
cause of the coronavirus pandemic, Kyle
Merber made the short drive from his
home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., to
the Dutchess Rail Trail, one of his favor-
ite running routes.
Merber knew from the start, though,
that this run would be different.
Since graduating from Columbia Uni-
versity in 2012, Merber had been chas-
ing the singular goal of qualifying for the
Olympics in the 1,500 meters. Now, as he
wrestled with questions about whether
he had the psychological stamina and fi-
nancial resources to continue training
full time for another year — perhaps, he
thought, it was time to retire — he
slipped on his sneakers.
His plan was to cover 20 miles, which
would make it his longest training run
ever. He knew it seemed strange that he
was increasing his workload when he
had no real reason to increase his work-
load.
“I think part of it’s therapy right now,”
he said. “It’s what distance runners do:
We run.”
Merber, 29, was accompanied by his
wife, Patricia Barry, who pedaled her bi-
cycle through a cold drizzle as she
filmed him for a video that his team later
posted on YouTube. After he breezed
through his opening mile, his pace
quickened and he began to reflect.
“For the health of the world, it’s obvi-
ously the necessary move,” he said of
the postponement. “But that doesn’t
mean it hurts any less.”
Still, his mood brightened over the
course of the morning. The run, which
he would later describe as one of the
best of his life, pushed him past 100
miles for the week — an arbitrary figure,
but an achievement when so much else
had gone wrong.
In the three months since, Merber’s
mind-set about his career as a runner
has continued to evolve in ways he
never could have anticipated.
For so long, Merber had tied his iden-
tity to the Olympics and to the 1,500 me-
ters: The Olympics were his dream, and
the 1,500 meters was his race. But after
the Olympic postponement, Merber has
let go of those twin obsessions.
He now wants to focus on the 5,000 or
10,000 meters, distances better suited to
his strengths, and see where that leads.
And while he would still like to give the
Olympics, rescheduled for next sum-
mer, one last shot, his goal of competing
in Tokyo is no longer all-consuming.
More than anything, the lockdown, in
an odd and unexpected way, has led him
to rediscover the joy of running — a shift
that he revealed in a series of interviews
since the start of the year.
“I decided to do something really
new,” he said. “I think the biggest thing
is I got excited to train again. Maybe
what I’d been doing for so long had got-
ten stale.”
A CYCLE OF HIGHS AND LOWS
Merber, who has personal bests of 3
minutes 52.22 seconds for the mile and
3:34.54 for the 1,500 meters, has the sort
of shrink-wrapped 6-foot, 142-pound
frame that seems engineered for elite
cardiovascular performance. His ham-
strings have hamstrings. He is about 92
percent limbs.
Name change was ‘a long time coming’
BY KEVIN DRAPER
AND GILLIAN R. BRASSIL
Activists have spent decades pressing
professional sports leagues, college pro-
grams and high schools to abandon Na-
tive American names and imagery for
their teams.
The first domino fell in 1970, when the
University of Oklahoma retired its mas-
cot, a Native American named “Little
Red.” Over the ensuing years, Division I
schools like Stanford, Dartmouth and
Syracuse — and thousands of high
schools — dropped their mascots or
changed their names.
But the biggest lightning rod was al-
ways Washington’s National Football
League team, the “Redskins.” Its owner
has been recalcitrant about changing
the name of one of football’s oldest and
most valuable franchises, and its name
does not just appropriate Native Ameri-
can imagery, as do the N.F.L.’s Kansas
City Chiefs or the Chicago Blackhawks
of the National Hockey League, but is
considered by many to be a slur itself.
Last Monday, those at the forefront of
the fight finally won. The Washington
team announced that it would soon drop
its 87-year-old name and its logo, for a
yet-to-be revealed new name.
“This is part of a much larger move-
ment going on that Indigenous peoples
are situated in, and it is a long time com-
ing,” said Carla Fredericks, the director
of First Peoples Worldwide and a long-
time advocate against Native American
mascots. “I think that for anyone that is
Since the Olympics were postponed, Kyle Merber’s mind-set about his career as a runner has evolved in surprising ways.
He feels fortunate that he gets to run
for a living — “It’s a great way to spend
your 20s,” he said — and his sponsor, the
shoe brand Hoka One One, pays him
enough to travel, race and eat. He will
always run, he said, even after he retires
from the sport, but his outgoing ap-
proach in recent years has made him
uniquely popular among runners.
“Kyle’s been such a catalyst for creat-
ing these communities within the pro-
fessional running world,” said Sam Par-
sons, who runs for the Colorado-based
Tinman Elite club.
In nonpandemic times, Merber or-
ganizes an annual race, the Hoka One
One Long Island Mile, that brings to-
gether many of his high-level runner
pals. And in a sport that faces the peren-
nial challenge of broadening its audi-
ence, Merber is one of its resident over-
sharers, especially on social media.
There he is on Instagram (@kylemer-
ber), curled up in the fetal position in the
associated with the movement for racial
justice this is a significant gain, and this
is a significant moment.”
That movement for racial justice is, in
part, propelled by the Black Lives Mat-
ter movement, and the widespread re-
examination of systemic racism — in-
cluding statues, flags, symbols and mas-
cots that celebrate racist history — that
was prompted by the police killing of
George Floyd in Minneapolis in May.
But despite the collective power of
formerly disparate movements, not to
mention the half-century of activist
pressure, what finally triggered the
name change was not an acknowledg-
ment of Native people’s concerns or a
rumination on the name’s offense. In-
stead, Daniel Snyder, the owner of the
Washington N.F.L. team for more than
20 years, was seemingly driven by a
simpler motivation: money.
In a letter sent to the Washington
team dated July 2, FedEx, which pays
about $8 million a year for the naming
rights to the team’s stadium in Lan-
dover, Md., said if the name weren’t
changed, it would back out of the deal.
The threat carried extra weight, consid-
ering that Frederick Smith, the chair-
man of FedEx, owns a minority stake in
the team, which he had been quietly at-
tempting to sell for many months.
FedEx was among several corporate
heavyweights to take action to persuade
Snyder to act on the name. Bank of
America, Pepsi, Nike and other N.F.L.
sponsors issued statements asking the
team for a name change, and retailers
trunk of his car after a brutal workout.
There he is on Twitter (@TheRe-
alMerb), celebrating his friend Johnny
Gregorek’s recent world record for the
fastest mile in a pair of bluejeans.
Merber is known for his charmingly
self-effacing observations on training:
“The fact that I hated every second of
that workout must mean it’ll help me get
better at running.” And, more recently,
for his views on lockdown life: “Just got
in trouble again for making bacon while
my wife is on a work call.”
Humor might be a coping mechanism.
The 1,500 meters, in particular, requires
an unholy blend of strength, speed and
stamina, and Merber is transparent
about his setbacks, about dabbling with
self-doubt, about the time he shelled out
$15,000 for sports hernia surgery and
thought his career was finished.
“If you take five months off and can’t
run a lap without being in pain, you kind
of think that might be it,” he said.
Demonstrators in Minneapolis protested the nickname of the Washington National
Football League franchise before the team’s road game against the Vikings.
like Walmart, Amazon and Target
stopped selling the team’s merchandise
on their websites and in their stores.
Donald Dell, who represented Snyder
in brokering the $205 million, 27-year
stadium naming rights deal in 1999,
said: “He saw, if Fred turned on it and
didn’t want to stay involved in the sta-
dium and the name, that was a really big
point to him, and others would follow.
And they did.”
Suzan Shown Harjo, who was for-
merly the executive director of the Na-
ADRIANA ZEHBRAUSKAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
He has endured an exhaustive cycle
of highs and lows. He won the boys’ high
school mile at the prestigious Millrose
Games as a senior at Half Hollow Hills
West High School on Long Island, then
set an Ivy League record for the indoor
mile as a sophomore at Columbia. But
after stepping on a shard of glass the fol-
lowing summer, he wound up missing
his junior year.
He bounced back as a senior to run
the 1,500 meters in 3:35.59, an American
collegiate record. When he failed to ad-
vance out of his preliminary heat at the
2012 United States Olympic trials that
summer, he figured he would have more
opportunities.
But the hard truth is that every race
ought to be savored. Two months before
the 2016 Olympic trials, Merber sus-
tained a stress reaction in his lower
back. He wound up finishing ninth, miss-
ing the cut again.
The race was such a profound disap-
RICHARD TSONG-TAATARII/STAR TRIBUNE, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
tional Congress of American Indians
and is the best-known activist against
Native American team names, was
cleareyed about the order of concerns
for Snyder.
“He had to satisfy first, his FedEx and
other managerial and promotion part-
ners,” she said. “Second his merch part-
ners. Third, the franchise’s 40 percent
owners.” But ultimately the credit be-
longs to “the longevity and persistence
of our no-mascot movement,” Harjo
said.
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
pointment that Merber avoided watch-
ing a replay of it until earlier this year.
“It sucked because I was even further
out of the race than I remembered,” he
said. “It’s tough watching yourself be
human.”
In 2018, after struggling with groin
pain for months, he underwent bilateral
core muscle surgery to repair a sports
hernia, paying out of pocket for the pro-
cedure.
“I legitimately thought that was the
end,” he said.
He went so long without competing
that the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency
dropped him from the pool of athletes it
was testing regularly.
“That hurts,” Merber said. “Like,
‘You’re not at all suspicious anymore?’ ”
The small miracle was that Merber
was rounding into shape last year, then
reinjured his lower back. “Overdid it,” he
said.
A FRAGILE PLAN IS BLOWN APART
Before the coronavirus completely
gripped the globe and forced the
Olympic postponement, Merber trav-
eled to Arizona in January for a six-
week training camp. He had no margin
for error.
“I desperately need to be healthy,” he
said at the time.
He was pain free and building his
mileage on runs with Olympic medalists
like Matthew Centrowitz, Nick Willis
and Emma Coburn.
Yet even as he went about restoring
his confidence, Merber tossed and
turned whenever his late-night
thoughts drifted to the Olympic trials.
His anxiety was rooted in urgency. He
knew he had to realign his priorities af-
ter Tokyo, as his sponsorships were set
to expire at the end of the year. Besides,
he hoped to move forward with his life: a
family, a job that entailed doing some-
thing other than 600-meter repeats, a
shift toward full-fledged adulthood.
“I see two scenarios,” he said one
morning in February. “In the first sce-
nario, I see myself making the Olympic
team and achieving my childhood
dream. In the other scenario, I don’t
make the team but at least I can say I
gave it three good tries, and I’ll be able
to walk away without any regrets, know-
ing I did it the right way.”
That fragile calculus came apart after
Merber returned to New York. In the af-
termath of the Olympic postponement,
he wondered whether he had already
raced for the final time as a pro. The
world was in crisis — “My problems just
don’t seem that bad,” Merber said — but
he still felt lost. Tom Nohilly and Frank
Gagliano, his longtime coaches, could
sense it.
“This was his big final push to make
the Olympic team and prove that he
could do it,” Nohilly said. “When that
gets taken away, it’s a shock.”
In April, Merber seemed to flip-flop
over his future by the day. Did he want to
stick with the 1,500 meters? Or was it
time to ditch running altogether?
Part of the problem was that he lacked
a clear vision of what he would do in-
stead. For nearly eight years, Merber —
armed with a philosophy degree from
Columbia, marketing experience for his
sponsors and a license to sell life insur-
ance — had put his “real life” on hold for
the sake of his Olympic quest.
“My résumé,” he said, “is weird.”
“A CRAVING TO EXPLORE MORE”
Nohilly saw an opportunity for Merber
to recalibrate. Since his hernia surgery,
Merber had been struggling to generate
the sort of top-end speed that the 1,500
meters demands. The all-out sprints the
race required were also what made him
Now that their biggest target has
budged, activists have pushed for much
work to ensue in Washington.
Earlier this month, a letter, signed by
nearly every national American Indian
group and representatives from over
150 federally recognized tribes, was sent
to the N.F.L. commissioner, Roger Good-
ell. The letter made several demands, in-
“I think that for anyone
that is associated with the
movement for racial justice
this is a significant gain.”
cluding that he “require the Washington
team to immediately cease the use of ra-
cialized Native American branding,”
which seems on the verge of happening.
But it isn’t yet clear if one of the let-
ter’s requests, that the team’s burgundy
and gold color scheme be changed, will
be acceded to.
“One thing we have seen where there
have been shifts like this in the past is
there can be a faction of fans that refuse
to retreat from stereotypical names and
logos, and not changing the colors would
allow for that behavior,” Fredericks said.
Changing the name and logo doesn’t
mean as much if tens of thousands of
fans stream into FedEx Field wearing
their old team gear.
Washington fans have long worn
headdresses, war paint and other ster-
eotypical imagery and sung a team fight
song that contains references to “braves
..
feel most prone to reinjury.
In the back of his mind, Merber had
known for a while that moving to longer
races would probably be a better fit at
this stage of his career. (It is one of the
sport’s oddities that, for some runners,
longer races can actually be more physi-
cally forgiving than shorter ones.) He
had just been hesitant to take the
plunge.
“I never felt like I necessarily had
enough time to learn a new event or re-
ally get the mileage I needed,” Merber
said.
Now, because of the pandemic, he had
a wide window to experiment, and No-
hilly encouraged him to take advantage:
more miles, less all-out speed. From the
start, Merber felt liberated. He was run-
ning for the fun of it. He could focus
squarely on self-improvement.
He also began to re-evaluate his pre-
occupation with the Olympics: He, like
so many others, had fallen into the no-
tion that track and field truly matters
only once every four years. Why was he
limiting himself?
“There are so many other great things
in the sport that we don’t highlight,” he
said.
A 1,500 meter specialist decides
to focus on longer distances. He’ll
give Tokyo one last shot, but the
goal is no longer all-consuming.
After bumping his weekly mileage
from about 75 to more than 100, Merber
gauged his progress in May with a 10-
mile tempo run. He set a blistering pace,
finishing in about 49 minutes. “I could
kick my pre-quarantine ass,” he said.
It helped solidify his belief that he was
on the right path — a new path, but the
right one — and his coaches think he
could eventually graduate to the mara-
thon.
“He’s just getting stronger,” Nohilly
said, “and he’s enjoying the whole
process.”
Over the past four months, Merber
has run more than 1,500 miles — almost
all of them alone on the quiet roads and
trails near his home in Hastings-on-
Hudson. In a rare exception, he recently
retreated to rural Vermont to train with
a couple of friends. It was a nice change
of pace, Merber said. He had missed the
camaraderie.
But even now, after having increased
his mileage and reconsidered his priori-
ties, he feels conflicted. He will be grind-
ing through a track workout, he said,
and his mind will wander to a LinkedIn
message he had sent about a job open-
ing. It is sometimes difficult to concen-
trate. He is torn between his past and his
future.
“I’ll always be competing, but maybe
it doesn’t need to be a full-time gig any-
more,” he said, adding: “Now that I’m
older, I just have a craving to explore
more, to do things outside of running. I
want to develop my full person.”
At the same time, he cannot help but
daydream about his next race, most
likely in the 5,000 meters, at a time and
place to be determined, and the familiar
feelings — anticipation, excitement,
pressure — come flooding back.
A poor performance, he said, would be
upsetting. But he also worries that an
excellent result would steer him back to
wanting more of the life that he is trying
to leave behind.
So, he reminds himself of lessons
learned: that he runs for the love of it,
that there is room for gray — for balance
— in a sport so often defined by hard-
edged numbers. He only needed some
time and distance to understand.
on the warpath” and is played after
touchdowns. The team may get to delay
making those decisions if fans are not al-
lowed to attend games this season be-
cause of the coronavirus.
Fredericks referred to the campaign
to change the name of the University of
North Dakota athletic teams, the Fight-
ing Sioux. In 2015, the nickname was
changed to the Fighting Hawks, but the
green color scheme endured. “There is
still an opportunity for some further
leadership here by the team.”
Fifty years is a long time to be fighting
for one issue, to get so far but also to
have so far to go. The Chiefs, Black-
hawks, and baseball’s Cleveland Indians
and Atlanta Braves still exist, and more
than 2,200 high schools still use some
form of Native American imagery.
Those that have been in this fight made
it clear that it was always about the fu-
ture, never the present or past.
“A lot of the work that she did was the
attempt to create an environment that
was better than the one I grew up in,”
said Duke Ray Harjo II, who grew up in
the Washington area, about his mother
Suzan.
For Fredericks, the goal goes beyond
the next generation. “A lot of us have a
philosophy that the work we do is not
only for the current moment, but for sev-
en generations in the future. A lot of de-
cision making is taken with that value in
place.
“We are not going to give up ensuring
that our humanity and dignity be re-
spected.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, JULY 20, 2020 | 13

sports

Welcome to Disney World. Covid testing nightly.

able from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. I’ve tested it
On the Bubble twice, but I have not yet tried either
the New York strip steak or the
braised beef short ribs that had the
Los Angeles Lakers’ newly signed J.R.
BY MARC STEIN Smith excited, amid his various com-
plaints, when he read the menu aloud
last week on Instagram Live.
LAKE BUENA VISTA, FLA. A knock on the
heavy brown door of my first-floor • I am a coffee snob who has zero
hotel room at Walt Disney World fi- dexterity to make my own coffee de-
nally came just before 10 p.m. a week cently, no matter how hard I try. I
ago. stuffed one suitcase and two large
This was an all-business knock. duffel bags to capacity — but that left
Three technicians from BioReference no room to bring my own fancy coffee
Laboratories wearing white coats and maker. So I purchased some space-
face shields and accompanied by a efficient Keurig pods that looked inter-
representative of the National Basket- esting online, packed them to use with
ball Association, had arrived to admin- the machine in my room and hoped for
ister my first-ever coronavirus test. the best. After it was too late, I shared
According to the rules in the N.B.A.’s this plan with Utah Jazz forward Joe
corner of Disney World, no one was Ingles. “Keurig ain’t it,” Ingles said
allowed inside the 314-square-foot with a laugh. Utah’s coffee connoisseur
room I was limited to through Sunday. was right.
So I slid a chair up to the doorway to
receive a swab of each nostril and my • I can handle the isolation — I think.
throat. The sticks were snapped and The biggest inconvenience so far:
placed in a tube, then stored in a crate finding out, after fully unpacking, that
to take back to the lab. The swabs, we must move to a new room after
roughly five hours after I checked in, completing the seven-day quarantine. I
took less than a couldn’t function until two months’
minute. worth of clothes were all on the extra
Three daily I took my second hangers I brought, or until I found
food drop-offs coronavirus test last places for the extra work supplies,
and bad Monday night, toiletries, hats, snacks (peanuts
coffee, but at nearly 24 hours after mostly) and maybe even a small stash
least there’s a the first one, even of my favorite glass-bottle soft drink.
room service before I had a result
confirmed from the • I couldn’t leave the room until Sun-
until 2 a.m. first. But the goal day night, but I didn’t see any security
remained un- presence outside my window. I none-
changed: I needed a theless intended to obey the rules and
week’s worth of negative results from stay put, no matter how badly I wanted
daily tests to gain full entry into what to walk to the ice machine steps from
everyone refers to as the N.B.A. bubble my room.
— even though league officials, as Even that was not permitted.
Commissioner Adam Silver put it last
week, acknowledge that it is better • The thick, gray, rubber MagicBand
described as a campus, because it is by TORONTO RAPTORS/VIA REUTERS bracelet that functions as a room key is
no means “hermetically sealed.” The Toronto Raptors’ buses arriving at Walt Disney World. The three hotels that house the 22 teams are off limits to the 20 or so reporters approved to enter the N.B.A. “bubble.” adorned with two iconic silhouettes:
Only two reporters were fully inside. Mickey Mouse and Jerry West, the
Once the rest of us are allowed to look inspiration for the N.B.A. logo. It may
around, access restrictions for report- house the 22 teams are off limits. cases the Sunday that I arrived? But considerable curiosity surrounding 22 • The next time you fly, expect to feel prove to be the best Disney souvenir
ers will be the most onerous in league Yet this first-of-its-kind event, even this is the league I’ve been fortunate to teams living and playing at a single disoriented. Being back in the Dallas- we take home when this is all over — if
history. The N.B.A. believes that’s the after accounting for all those deter- cover for nearly 30 years. The moment site without fans. That includes jour- Fort Worth airport Sunday for the first we indeed get to keep it.
appropriate approach for what is rents, was simply not to be missed. is just too big, too historic and too nalists from The Associated Press, The time since March 13, even as much as I I am scheduled to be here until early
surely its most complex undertaking in Regular readers of my columns different to stay away. “This is going to Athletic, The Boston Globe, The Dallas typically travel, was . . . tense. Any September, before a handoff to my
league history, but the strictness know that for weeks, I have been voic- be a very unique opportunity to ob- Morning News, The Los Angeles time a line had to be formed, just figur- colleague Scott Cacciola. Of course, as
makes it difficult to say how much of ing concerns about the dangers of the serve the human condition,” said Times, Southern California News ing out where to stand and how to we all know by now, planning in 2020
the bubble we’ll be able to see. Report- N.B.A. restart, stemming from the Tommy Sheppard, the general man- Group, Sports Illustrated, USA Today, social distance was awkward. tends to be futile.
ers can go only three places after virus as well as soft-tissue injury risks. ager of the Washington Wizards. The Washington Post and The New So especially in these early stages,
quarantining — game venues, practice That apprehension hasn’t gone away; Closer to 20 journalists, compared York Times. • On top of the well-chronicled three for me as much as anyone, bubble life
sites and the hotel designated for the how could it when Florida racked up a with the anticipated 10, have been A few highlights and observations to daily food drop-offs made to everyone is probably best approached day-to-
news media. The three hotels that national record 15,300 new coronavirus approved to enter, a reflection of the share from the first 48 hours: in quarantine, room service is avail- day.

NON SEQUITUR PEANUTS DOONESBURY CLASSIC 1994

GARFIELD CALVIN AND HOBBES

SUDOKU No. 2007

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 Solution No. 1807 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

that every row,

column 3x3 box Fill the grids with digits so as not Across 26 Girl’s name that 53 “They rooked me!” 14 15 16

and shaded 3x3 to repeat a digit in any row or sounds like two letters
column, and so that the digits
  1 Ogden who wrote 56 Something that goes
box contains
of the alphabet 17 18 19
within each heavily outlined box
“Farewell, farewell, in a garage
each of the 27 ___ Romeo (Italian
numbers will produce the target number you old rhinoceros, /
auto)
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shown, by using addition, I’ll stare at something movie

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60 Go off, as a volcano 23 24 25 26

division, as indicated in the box.   5 Largest continent 61 Bat mitzvah dance

A 4x4 grid will use the digits
30 Tows 27 28 29 30
For solving tips   9 Responses to jokes 62 “Dancing Queen”
and more puzzles: 1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6. 31 Abandoned and group
www.nytimes.com/ helpless
14 Female friend from 31 32 33 34
sudoku 63 Like good gossip
For solving tips and more KenKen France 35 Cheerios grain
puzzles: www.nytimes.com/
64 Twinkler in the night 35 36
15 Delivery vehicles 36 Roman numeral X
kenken. For Feedback: nytimes@
sky
37 Where someone who
kenken.com
16 Make into law 65 ___ in show (canine 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44
goes next is standing award)
17 Exact 45 46 47
45 Military vehicles
KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC.
20 Pale, as a face
46 Hawaiian wreath Down
Copyright © 2018 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved. 21 First thing to do before 47 Google’s red, yellow,
48 49 50 51
  1 Tusked marine
changing clothes green and blue “G,” mammal 52 53 54 55 56
22 UPS competitor e.g.
  2 Easy to get along with
Answers to Previous Puzzles 48 Some canine sounds 57 58 59
23 Weapon of mass   3 Broadcast ender
destruction, informally 49 Debtor’s note
  4 Sneaky laugh sound 60 61 62
25 The Trojans of the 51 Put into office
  5 Stratford-upon-___
N.C.A.A. 52 Frat member 63 64 65
  6 Makeup of a beach
Solution to July 18 Puzzle   7 As a matter of fact PUZZLE BY ALEX EATON-SALNERS
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E X N I H I L O G R O O V E fire
camera app, say 50 Declarations at
D I S C O S T U M I T T E N   9 Borders of skirts 28 Pesky insect
39 Special ___ inaugurations
S U E D O H M A M I N O 29 Bus driver on “The
10 “I’ll take that as ___” 51 Professor’s email
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N Y U D E R A I L E D 11 Dust buster address ending
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A S H E B O T T O M L I N E 12 Like the ideal poker 53 ___-bitty
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32 Charged particles 54 Sister and wife of
V A M P I R E B A T P E R T drink
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S C H E D U L E E R I 33 Suffix with Smurf 43 Dieting strategy that
H A T S E T D E C A 18 Place to take a bath 55 At a distance
34 Where Samson slew may lead to ketosis
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A G E G A P R A I N D A T E at the entrance to a 37 Auto with a prancing 45 Made quick boxing 59 Part inserted to close
R E D S K Y E M P T Y N E T home) horse logo punches a cereal box

14 | MONDAY, JULY 20, 2020
Culture
Jarvis Cocker keeps hearing that voice
Back with a new band,
the former Pulp leader just
can’t quit writing songs
BY ROB TANNENBAUM
“Here’s one of the most exciting things
that’s happened to me recently,” said
Jarvis Cocker, British rock’s foremost
chronicler of hedonistic urges among
the educated classes. One leaned in,
expecting a rollicking anecdote. “I was
given a membership to the London
Library,” he revealed. “It’s a private
library, in London, surprisingly, that’s
been there for about 300 years.” (He
was only off by 122 years; it was
founded in 1841.)
Cocker was in New York in late
February to promote “Beyond the
Pale,” a seven-song album by his new
band Jarv Is . . . , the more diffuse and
electronic successor to Pulp, which he
led for more than 30 years. (After the
extent of the pandemic became clear,
the release date moved from May to
July.) He had chosen to meet in the cafe
at McNally Jackson, the SoHo book-
store. Music and books meld in Cock-
er’s mind — a question about touring
leads him to mention Richard Brauti-
gan, and one about living part time in
France brings his thoughts about Mi-
chel Houellebecq and Emmanuel Car-
rère.
In 1996, when Pulp was in the midst
of a run as one of Britain’s most popu-
lar and interesting bands, a Guardian
writer described Cocker as “a young,
gawky, bespectacled oddball” who was
also the “finest wordsmith of his gener-
ation.” He’s now 56, and still has the
physique of a pencil. On that February
night, he was wearing burgundy cor-
duroy pants, below a fabulous Savile
Row blazer. He spoke quietly, just
above the store’s playlist of Lloyd Cole
and the Blue Nile.
While drinking green tea and pinch-
ing bits of a scone, Cocker discussed
whether lyrics are important in music
and how David Bowie saved him from
prison, and opined on Steely Dan,
Bryan Adams and broken crockery.
These are edited excerpts from the
conversation.
Is “Beyond the Pale” partly about the
shrinking relevance of white people?
I hadn’t thought about that. Somebody
told me the origins of “beyond the pale”
is to do with when the English were
occupying Dublin, and they had a sec-
tion of town that was the Pale. That
was where you were safe. If you went
beyond the Pale, you were in the dan-
ger zone.
England is in a kind of complete
nervous breakdown at the moment,
with Brexit — which shouldn’t be called
Brexit, because it’s really about an
English myth of identity. That idea of
paleness that’s represented by the
things that have caused Brexit is some-
thing I would very much like to move
beyond. So, yeah, I think there’s some
of that.
Your mother is a councilor who sup-
ported Brexit. How did her conserva-
tive views influence you?
I’ve accepted from an early age that
I’m very different from my mother. It
makes me realize, there’s more to life
than your political persuasions. I was
loved in my household. Although I
disagree with my mother, there was
never really any animosity. I still love
her. She embarrasses me a lot, but I’m
not going to ban her from talking to me.
In a way, it might’ve been good prepa-
ration for being in a band, where you
Casually working hard for laughs
ON COMEDY
Latest stand-up special
by Hannibal Buress
meets the moment
BY JASON ZINOMAN
In his dynamite, accidentally topical
new special “Miami Nights,” released at
no charge on YouTube early this month,
Hannibal Buress describes himself as
“medium famous,” which he says trans-
lates to: “I constantly talk people out of
recognizing me.”
Comedy has traditionally been more
difficult to those in the middle. A-list
stars are given every break, and the
press loves a Next Big Thing. But those
in between face particular challenges
these days, with a glut of competition
and a Netflix approach that puts a pre-
mium on algorithmically informed ce-
lebrity. This helps explain the D.I.Y.
comedy-special movement that has ac-
celerated this year with many veteran
stand-ups, including Liz Miele, Mark
Normand and Matt Ruby, releasing
funny hours free online.
Some comics have taken this route in
reaction to the constraints of establish-
ment platforms. And in an introduction,
Buress appears to echo this critique
Jarvis Cocker is releasing a new album with Jarv Is ..., the electronic successor to Pulp, which he led for more than 30 years.
don’t agree with everyone’s opinion,
no?
Yeah. I’m writing a book at the mo-
ment, and it’s sent me back to the roots
of when I started writing songs. That
thing of going to your room and trying
to not make too much noise, but want-
ing to have something of your own,
and inventing something that you can
be the master of. When you’re living at
home, you’re not a master of anything,
when he says he self-produced “Miami
Nights” because YouTube provided him
“spontaneity and freedom that some
other outlets wouldn’t.”
There’s surely truth in this. At a time
when specials filmed last year appear to
belong to a different era, Buress shoe-
horned a Covid-19 joke into the credits
(if you freeze-frame and look carefully).
But almost as soon as he made the point,
Buress undercut it, saying: “Imma be
real: This is an ad.” Then he shouted out
his sponsor.
Buress is not one to get on a soapbox.
What makes him such an unusual co-
medic voice is that he has built his dis-
tinctive sensibility on a quality rare
among stand-ups: Nonchalance. Buress
talks about anxiety-provoking subjects
like dying, asthma attacks and run-ins
with the police with casual ease, coun-
tering the tension of danger with a deep
well of silliness. When he says that he
asked the rapper 2 Chainz an important
question — “Do you feel pressure to
wear multiple chains all the time?” —
it’s clear he means the opposite. He
works extremely hard to make you
laugh but can seem like he’s barely try-
ing. His jokes are tightly honed, but the
funniest part about them can be the
offhanded swagger with which he deliv-
ers them.
“Miami Nights” is not the lo-fi produc-
tion you expect from YouTube. It’s actu-
ally his slickest special yet, complete
really. You start to invent your fantasy
world, which conforms to your rules.
That’s like what a band is.
What kind of a book are you writing?
About 11 years ago, a festival in the
U.K. invited me to do a talk. I did a
PowerPoint presentation, to illustrate
my view of what makes good lyrics,
and whether lyrics are important to
songs. That talk has evolved over the
Hannibal Buress in his new “Miami Nights” special, which is free on YouTube.
with jokes that use Auto-Tune, multi-
media, some “Miami Vice”-era retro vis-
uals and dreamy camerawork. Kristian
Mercado’s playfully flashy direction
warms up the crowd with bursts of neon
and hip-hop, and often positions the
camera at a mouse’s-eye view. It’s amus-
ingly apt that the first special that films
Buress in a way to make him look like a
glamorous star is on a site known for
homemade cat videos.
Buress has the kind of gifts that
seemed destined for superstardom, but
he never exactly got there, which is curi-
TOM JAMIESON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
past decade. The book is called “The
Book Is a Song.” The conceit of it is
that during the course of the book, we
write a song together.
So what’s your answer? Are lyrics
important to songs?
No. [laughs] I really do think that. One
example is “Louie Louie” [by the
Kingsmen]. In the ’60s, people thought
it had obscene lyrics, but the reason
ous only if you think fame is distributed
fairly. His particular level of success is a
recurring theme in this hour. The special
begins with a shot of him doing jokes as
a teenager, and then it pivots into an
opening bit, in which he says he is asked
to host game shows twice a year. His re-
sponse, in a computer-generated de-
monic bass voice, is: “The prophecy will
be fulfilled, but the time is not now.”
Buress has become a go-to performer
for supporting roles in offbeat shows
like “Broad City” or “The Eric Andre
Show” as well as Hollywood comedies
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
why there was an F.B.I. investigation
was that you couldn’t hear the lyrics.
That didn’t matter, because the feel of
the song was exciting.
So if “Louie Louie” is a dirty song
that doesn’t have dirty lyrics, then
lyrics aren’t paramount?
They are important. The written word
is the nearest we can get to being
inside someone else’s head. That’s kind
of a magical thing, and it’s part of the
magic of books. So yeah, I’ve contra-
dicted myself. I’ve been reading lots of
books that tell me that, for any state-
ment, the opposite is also always true.
You’ve hosted a radio show for the
BBC, directed videos, done a bit of
acting, worked as an editor at Faber
& Faber. Was there a point when you
thought, “Maybe music isn’t the right
job for me anymore”?
I wondered about that. But then the
voice in my head wouldn’t give me any
peace. I always felt, whilst doing these
things, like I was cheating. I started
work on this record maybe seven years
ago. Then I was asked to play a con-
cert in Reykjavik in 2017. I was going
to turn it down, because I didn’t have a
band, but the voice spoke to me again
and said, Say yes. I had to learn to play
the songs with a band and present
them to an audience, and by doing
that, finish them off.
The voice was telling you to get back
to songwriting. But it sounds like
there was another voice, telling you
rock music is no place for a middle-
aged man.
Oh, I’m always getting that voice. If an
idea keeps coming back again and
again, you have to go with it.
Thematically, “Beyond the Pale”
sounds like the thoughts of a middle-
aged man who was once at the center
of cultural trends, no longer is and is
trying to deal with that. Does that
description resonate with you?
I have, in my previous musical incar-
nations, done pop music, which as a
child was my fantasy. Like some kids
dream about being a spaceman or a
fireman, I thought about being a pop
star. I achieved my childhood ambition
and found that it didn’t give me what I
hoped would come from that. To go
back into making music again, I had to
find a different focus.
The other thing that gets repeated
through the record is an idea of going
back to a basic, beginning state. The
song “Must I Evolve?” came from
reading a book, “The Mind in the
Cave” [by David Lewis-Williams],
which is about the dawn of human
creativity — the first cave paintings —
and an attempt to say what kind of
mental change happened in Paleolithic
man. Creativity is a fundamental part
of being human. I guess I was trying to
tap into that.
So if being a pop star is no longer
appealing, what new motivation did
you find?
I’ve not climbed a mountain. I haven’t
discovered a new species of plant. But
a song is an adventure you can have
with yourself.
I should’ve known all this, really.
When I went to college in London, to
St. Martin’s [School of Art], I wrote a
thesis about outsider artists. And then
I made a TV series for Channel Four in
the U.K., traveling around to speak
with outsider artists. There’s a guy
called Leonard Knight who built Salva-
tion Mountain, a big, kind of psychedel-
ic mound in the Salton Sea. There was
also a guy in France who covered his
house in broken crockery.
like “Tag,” but not the focus of his own
vehicle, beyond comedy specials. His
most viral moment might have come
when he responded to Bill Cosby’s scold-
ing of young people by reminding the
audience of rape allegations against
him, a comment made before prosecu-
tors looked again at the accusations. Un-
derneath his nonchalance, Buress can
be a brutal counterpuncher.
He shows that off again in the stand-
out section of this special when he re-
counts the story of his arrest in Miami
for disorderly intoxication. (Early on, he
says he is now sober.) For more than 20
minutes, he describes a confrontation
with a police officer that gets hostile af-
ter he jokingly asks him to get him an
Uber. It eventually leads to the officer
arresting Buress after he spoke to the
man’s body camera as opposed to his
face, which Buress explains as a result
of his career in show business. “I’m a
professional,” he says with mock um-
brage.
From his cell at the police station, he
continues to roast the officer and then
asks to discuss the mug shot as if it were
a photo shoot. “As I always do, I request
a preproduction meeting with the pho-
tographer to discuss vision,” he says. It’s
a riotously funny story that takes an
abrupt turn at the end when he finds out
that the cop was arrested himself after
choking someone in a bar, then fleeing
the scene. “How about if you run away
..
My question was always, “Why did
you make this?” And they never had
an answer, which was frustrating. But
eventually it clicked. It had never
crossed their minds to ask why. They
got so much pleasure that they could-
n’t stop.
Your new album is seven songs.
So many good albums are: “Fun
House” by the Stooges. “Aja” by Steely
Dan. There’s more than you’d think.
Is putting out only seven songs an
acknowledgment that the album is
dead?
No! Because I care about albums. I
never made the flip to digital. I would
never say, “We’re working on a new
CD at the moment.” A vinyl album is
the perfect form for listening to music.
A side of a record, 18 to 20 minutes, is
perfect. A CD, with 15 or 16 songs, is
too much time. Half the day’s gone if
you listen to it.
Will Jarv Is . . . play any Pulp songs in
concert, when concerts return?
We’ve done “His ’n’ Hers,” which is a
pretty obscure song. We might do a
couple more of the same level of ob-
scurity. I wouldn’t want to play the
ones that are really well known, be-
cause, um, I’m really mean.
No, the sound of those songs is a
product of all five people in the band,
attempting to stay in time with each
other. It wouldn’t feel right to play
“Common People,” or something like
that.
In 1996, you infamously climbed
onstage during Michael Jackson’s
performance at the Brit Awards in
order to, you said, protest the way
Jackson “sees himself as some kind
of Christ-like figure with the power of
healing.” Did you watch “Leaving
Neverland,” the recent documentary
about two men who say they were
sexually abused, as children, by Jack-
son?
I kind of purposely didn’t watch it. You
know, that incident happened and
changed my life forever, because of the
fallout.
Do you mean negative fallout?
In the U.K., suddenly, I was crazily
recognized and I couldn’t go out any-
more. It tipped me into a level of celeb-
rity I couldn’t ever have known ex-
isted, and wasn’t equipped for. It had a
massive, generally detrimental effect
on my mental health.
I was saved by David Bowie. There
was an accusation that I’d knocked
some kids off the stage. I’d been ar-
rested. The only footage that’d been
released was like a CCTV camera, and
you couldn’t see what was happening.
That year, David Bowie was getting a
lifetime achievement award, and he
had his own camera crew there. After
two or three days, they released their
footage, and then the charges were
dropped straight away. Among many
other things I’m grateful to David
Bowie for, that was amazing.
Given all your other media enter-
prises, how committed are you to
music?
Without wanting to sound dramatic, I
feel like it’s my calling. Even just the
way I remember events, it always, like,
What was in the charts at that time? I
make connections to songs. If I’m
running for a bus, I’ll probably be
going [sings to the tune of Bryan Ad-
ams’s “Run to You”], “I’m gonna run
for you.” I always have a song going
through my head to the activity I’m
doing. I accept the fact that that’s my
thing.
from the cops, you can’t be a cop any-
more?” Buress says. “Why is this dude
still working?”
Buress, who filmed this special last
August, keeps the focus of his story nar-
row, and the way he spins it is far less
overtly political than many other
comics’ bits criticizing the police. But
the meaning of great comedy adjusts to
the moment, and by releasing it now,
with the Black Lives Matter movement
at the center of public consciousness,
Buress makes his own statement. Even
though he makes the arrest sound like a
benign adventure, he is describing
overly aggressive policing that evades
accountability and escalates a minor
transgression into something far worse.
He chuckles throughout, often at him-
self, but there’s a darkness here that will
be more visible to some people now than
when he shot it.
Buress never gets particularly grave,
but bristles under the surface. His story
plays like a comic revenge fantasy, one
that stings because it’s real, something
he keeps reminding his audience. Bu-
ress doesn’t just name the police officer.
He shows local news coverage and
quotes news articles. He even intro-
duces his defense attorney in the audi-
ence. He explains that after he was ar-
rested, he found three suitable options
but went with this guy, because his last
name was Bieber, because, hey, why
not?
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Dancers have their day in the sun
RANDALLSTOWN, MD.
Studios manage recitals
with parking-lot stages
and pirouettes in the grass
BY JULIA JACOBS
On a sweltering Sunday afternoon this
month, families sat in folding chairs ar-
ranged in socially distant clusters in the
half-empty parking lot of a strip mall.
No one was under the impression that
it was an ideal spot for a dance recital.
The backdrop behind the small impro-
vised stage was a gas station and Mary-
land Route 26. The sun beat down so
hard that audience members unfurled
umbrellas between routines. When one
young dancer, lifting her body up from a
bridge, pulled her hands from the sur-
face of the stage, she winced as if she
had accidentally touched a stovetop.
Still, that the students were onstage at
all was enough for Kaniesha Reeder, the
owner of N’Ferno Performing Arts Cen-
ter, the studio putting on the show. Dur-
ing the four months of the coronavirus
lockdown, Ms. Reeder held onto hope
that she would be able to find a way for
her students to have their annual recital.
“We have survived Covid and we have
gotten these babies onstage,” a tri-
umphant Ms. Reeder told the audience
at the start of the show.
In March, as the pandemic acceler-
ated in the United States, the profes-
sional dance world contracted. Spring
performance dates for dance companies
were struck from calendars and soon
fall shows were canceled too.
In the world of amateur dance, the
pandemic was just as earth-shattering.
At dance studios across the country, reg-
ular classes went virtual, dancers found
stand-ins for the ballet barre in their
homes, parents demanded refunds for
tuition, and one question loomed large:
What would happen to the annual reci-
tal?
Among students of dance, the recital
is much more than just a performance.
It’s the culmination of a year’s work and
a social event: Dancers do one another’s
makeup and nervously practice their
steps before the curtain parts. Families
gather to hoot and holler for their danc-
ing relatives and deliver bouquets of
flowers.
When the pandemic hit, some studios
made swift decisions to cancel their per-
formances, while others held virtual
ones they knew could not compare to
the adrenaline-filled, sequin-covered
excitement of the real thing.
But others dug in their heels and re-
solved to find some way to put on their
biggest show of the year.
In Randallstown, that meant renting a
24-foot-wide stage that could be set up
outside, designing socially distant seat-
ing and buying a slew of protective tools,
including no-touch thermometers, air
purifiers and portable hand-washing
stations.
“I refuse to let this virus stop me from
having this recital,” said Ms. Reeder,
who opened her studio 12 years ago.
When it came time for the dancers to
perform, they walked single file to the
stage, all wearing masks with their glit-
tering costumes. An adult collected
their masks before they took the stage,
and after they bourréed in tutus to a
track from “Tangled” or performed a re-
gal modern routine to a song from “The
Lion King,” the masks went back on.
“They work so hard, and I really enjoy
seeing them onstage,” Ms. Reeder said.
An eye on the ‘world capital of self-immolations’
BOOK REVIEW
Eat the Buddha:
Life and Death in a Tibetan Town
By Barbara Demick. Illustrated. 325 pp.
Random House. $28.
BY PARUL SEHGAL
In “The Unwomanly Face of War,” an
oral history of World War II, the Nobel
Prize-winning writer Svetlana Alex-
ievich recounts a strange little story. A
woman leaps into dark water to rescue
a drowning man. At the shore, howev-
er, she realizes it is not a man she has
hauled from the water but a gigantic
sturgeon. The sturgeon dies.
Censors initially cut the scene from
Alexievich’s book. You’re not asking
about the right things, they remonstrat-
ed. Focus on bravery, on patriotism.
Let’s have less about fear, and less
about hairstyles. There was no place in
the canon for her sort of wartime
stories, Alexievich recalled in an inter-
view with The Paris Review. There
was no place for reality, which comes
stuffed with sturgeons and all manner
of misapprehensions and muddle;
reality, which shows notable indiffer-
ence, if not outright hostility, to plot.
Perhaps an alternative canon exists,
in the work of oral historians like Alex-
ievich, and in the deeply reported
narratives of journalists like Barbara
Demick. The method is programmatic
openness, deep listening, a willingness
to be waylaid; the effect, a prismatic
picture of history as experienced and
understood by individuals in their full
“We have survived Covid
and we have gotten these babies
onstage,” said an instructor who
took her show outside.
“This is something I feel like that they
deserve.”
Across the country, many dance stu-
dios are struggling to survive. Some are
seeing an exodus of students who can no
longer pay tuition because parents have
lost jobs or don’t see the value in virtual
rehearsals. Studios must continue to
pay teachers to conduct Zoom rehears-
als, send in rent checks and fund the so-
cially distant recitals.
They are mostly relying on loyal stu-
dents who are willing to pay during this
tumultuous period of online dance
classes. And the prospect of a live per-
formance in the near future can help
keep students invested and give them
something to work toward.
Gina Siciliano, who teaches early
childhood ballet for Integral Ballet in
Merrick, N.Y., was intent on preserving
a human connection over Zoom with her
students, who range from 2 to 8 years
old. Ms. Siciliano was tasked with pre-
paring the young dancers for a reimag-
ined recital that would involve dancing
in full costume and makeup in a public
park.
A primary concern for teachers has
been making sure that students’ off-site
training doesn’t result in injury. And Ms.
Siciliano knew the risk: In a Zoom re-
hearsal from her living room in May, she
was demonstrating a simple sauté when
she tripped and broke her ankle.
amplitude and idiosyncrasy. Alexievich
collects the daydreams of her subjects.
In Demick’s impressive account of life
in North Korea, “Nothing to Envy,” she
described a society on the brink of
starvation, cut off from the world,
lacking even electricity. But she told
love stories, too. Darkness proved to
be a surprising boon; some North
Koreans told her they grew to need it,
as it conferred the only freedom they
knew. Young people fell in love in the
dark: “Wrapped in a magic cloak of
invisibility, you can do what you like
without worrying about the prying
eyes of parents, neighbors or secret
police.”
“Eat the Buddha” is Demick’s third
book, all of them told in rotating per-
spectives — a model inspired by John
Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” and one she has
made her own. In “Logavina Street,”
she described daily life during the
Bosnian War through the lens of one
neighborhood in Sarajevo. “Nothing to
Envy” followed six refugees from the
port city of Chongjin. The close focus
gives her work its granularity, but it
also allows her to crosscheck the
stories of her subjects. “Good report-
ing should have the same standard as
in a courtroom — beyond a reasonable
doubt,” she has said. In her latest, the
masterly “Eat the Buddha,” she pro-
files a group of Tibetans with roots in
Ngaba County, in the Chinese province
of Sichuan, which bears the gory dis-
tinction of being the “undisputed world
capital of self-immolations.”
Despite the Buddhist taboo against
suicide, some 156 Tibetans — at the
time of Demick’s writing — have set
“I was wanting to dance fully so the
students could feel my energy,” she said.
“I guess I was overzealous.”
So, in the park on a day late in June,
Ms. Siciliano’s students wore street
shoes rather than ballet slippers with
their purple sparkling tutus and hair-
sprayed buns, to prevent tripping in the
grass.
The show — Integral Ballet called it a
pop-up recital — allowed students a
chance to perform choreography they
had started to learn months earlier,
when the word “coronavirus” was not
part of the common parlance.
MADELEINE GRANT
Barbara Demick.
themselves on fire in recent years,
protesting China’s rule. They have
perfected their technique, wrapping
themselves in quilts and wire to pre-
vent rescue, dousing themselves in
gasoline and swallowing it, too, to
ensure they will burn from the inside.
Almost a third of these people —
monks, mothers, ordinary citizens —
have come from Ngaba and the sur-
rounding region.
Why Ngaba? “Why were so many of
its residents willing to destroy their
bodies by one of the most horrific
methods imaginable?” This mystery
hooked Demick, who arrived in China
in 2007 as the Beijing bureau chief of
The Los Angeles Times. On the face of
it, Ngaba is better off than many of its
counterparts, she observes. The resi-
dents are comfortable, the infrastruc-
ture comparatively decent. (The gov-
ANDRES GONZALEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Parents wearing masks stood by their
parked cars watching a group in bright
yellow raincoats and knee-high boots
performing to “Singin’ in the Rain” un-
der the hot sun, with white clouds and a
blue sky behind them.
A class of teenage dancers wearing
long white ballet skirts had resigned
themselves to doing single pirouettes,
rather than doubles, on the uneven
grass of the outdoor stage.
For Ballet Folklórico México Danza, a
studio that teaches traditional Mexican
dance to children and adults in Hay-
ward, Calif., the big performance dates
ernment invested in a “blitz” of mod-
ernization in the hopes of quelling the
uprisings.) Some attribute the protests
to the harsh and oppressive police
presence. But Demick argues that the
roots run deeper. Ngaba was the site of
Tibet’s first meeting with Chinese
Communists, in the 1930s. “The people
of this region have a particular wound
causing excessive suffering that spans
three generations,” the monk Kirti
Rinpoche testified before a U.S. con-
gressional commission in 2011. “This
wound is very difficult to forget or
heal.”
Fleeing Nationalist forces, the Red
Army marauded through monasteries.
They burned holy books and manu-
scripts, and survived by boiling and
eating the skin of drums and the votive
offerings to the Buddha (from which
the book gets its title). Demick traces
this first encounter, and the ensuing
violent history, through the testimonies
of her cast of characters: students and
teachers, market sellers, the private
secretary to the Dalai Lama, the for-
mer princess of the Mei kingdom.
These scenes are narrated as flashes
of memory, anchored by the types of
details children remember, giving them
an unbearable vividness and horror.
One man recalls hiding as a boy when
his house was invaded by Chinese
soldiers. He emerged to find his grand-
father gone and grandmother shaken,
her scalp bleeding. He remembers
wondering: Where are her pigtails?
The former princess remembers being
so curious about the Chinese at first, so
delighted to meet them. Her mother
joked that she offered grass to their
JARED SOARES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
ANGELO SILVIO VASTA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Top, N’Ferno Performing Arts dancers on
recital day in Randallstown, Md. At left,
spaced apart at Ballet Folklórico México
Danza in Hayward, Calif. Above, an Inte-
gral Ballet dancer in Bellmore, N.Y.,
where a recital was held in a public park.
are not until fall. For now, the school is
navigating the challenges of socially dis-
tant rehearsing for roughly 120 students
while trying not to make too many as-
sumptions about what the world will be
like in October.
That month, the dance school is plan-
ning to hold its Día de los Muertos show;
in late November, it plans to perform its
Mexican “Nutcracker” — a show the
school is determined to put on, even as
big companies like the New York City
Ballet have had to cancel their “Nut-
cracker” runs.
For Ballet Folklórico, operating dur-
trucks, the first vehicles she had ever
seen. She thought they were horses.
Those who self-immolate today are
the grandchildren of those who partici-
pated in the early uprisings, Demick
writes. Having imbibed the Dalai La-
ma’s teachings of nonviolence, they
can only bear to hurt themselves. They
bear the scars of the “Democratic
Reforms” in eastern Tibet that began
in 1958. “Tibetans of this generation
refer to this period simply as ngabgay
— ’58. Like 9/11, it is shorthand for a
catastrophe so overwhelming that
words cannot express it, only the num-
ber,” Demick writes. “Some will call it
dhulok, a word that roughly translates
as the ‘collapse of time,’ or, hauntingly,
‘when the sky and earth changed
places.’ ”
Tibetans were forced into coopera-
tive living, stripped of their herds and
land. Their yaks — sources of their
food, clothing and light (candles were
made from yak fat) — were seized and
slaughtered, recalling the American
government’s devastating policy of
culling the Lakota’s bison. Daylong
public “struggle sessions” were insti-
tuted — rituals of public humiliation in
which those accused of perceived
infractions were compelled to admit to
crimes and submit to verbal and physi-
cal abuse — with children forced to
observe and cheer along. Some 20
percent of the population was arrested
and held in prisons that were often
only pits in the ground filled with
hundreds of people. An estimated
300,000 Tibetans died.
Demick covers an awe-inspiring
breadth of history — from the heyday
MONDAY, JULY 20, 2020 | 15
culture
ing a pandemic has meant cutting in-
person training to no more than a dozen
per class from 25 or 30. The dancers,
who returned to the studio in mid-June,
rehearse six feet apart, guided by red
tape on the floor; staff members sanitize
the bathrooms and doorknobs between
sessions.
René González, a co-owner of Ballet
Folklórico, seems particularly well
equipped to run a dance studio during
the pandemic. In March, Mr. González
retired from his career as a technician at
the Alameda County Public Health Lab-
oratory, and transitioned full time to
managing his dance school. He has
stayed in contact with his former col-
leagues to monitor coronavirus cases in
the area and understands that if cases
spike in the county he might have to
close his studio again and move classes
online.
“If we have to shut down, we have to,”
he said. “We can’t be selfish.”
Mr. González said the high school
where they perform the Día de los
Muertos show will likely want audience
members to be separated by two seats;
even with a dramatically reduced audi-
ence capacity, he said he would hold the
shows.
A significant challenge posed by
Covid-19 is couple choreography, an im-
portant part of traditional Mexican
dance. For now, Mr. González said that
couples dancing is out — as is choreog-
raphy that involves holding hands and
rotating in a circle.
“We’re not getting in circles, we’re not
touching hands,” he said. “I don’t know
when we’re going to get back to the nor-
malcy of teaching dance.”
When Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio
started allowing gatherings of fewer
than 50 people, Barb Coman, the co-
owner of NorthPointe Dance Academy,
set out to devise a way for a recital to
happen. Ms. Coman’s solution was to roll
out rubber flooring on the asphalt park-
ing lot in front of the studio.
For seven days in late June, the acad-
emy, in a suburb of Columbus, put on a
regimented, socially distant recital. A
dozen dancers at a time performed their
numbers in a 15-minute time slot. They
danced in taped-off squares, six feet
long, in which they could safely kick and
jump out of range of their fellow stu-
dents. Each student was allowed two
guests, who sheltered under separate
10-foot-long tents.
There were no stage wings for exits;
instead, the youngest dancers ran
straight off the stage and into their par-
ents’ arms.
The moratorium on touching meant
that any choreography with lifts or part-
nering had to be modified or mimed.
But, as Ms. Coman said: “At some point
it really wasn’t about the choreography.
It stopped being about that and turned
into, just let those kids dance.”
While the new recital structure made
it easier on the parents (they didn’t have
to pay for tickets or sit through an hour
and a half of other people’s children
dancing), it was much harder on the
teachers, who worked, at times, 12-hour
days in the studio’s parking lot to make
the recital happen.
Studio owners like Ms. Coman in Ohio
and Ms. Reeder in Maryland feel ex-
hausted and overworked in a way that
reminds them of the early days of open-
ing a dance studio. But as they hear
about other dance studios shutting
down altogether because of the pan-
demic, they’ve decided that they’ll do
anything to keep their doors open.
“Everything is 10 times the work for
way less money,” Ms. Coman said. “But
our business is still afloat.”
of the Tibetan empire, which could
compete with those of the Turks and
Arabs, to the present day, as the move-
ment for Tibetan independence has
faltered and transformed into an effort
at cultural and spiritual survival. She
charts the creative rebellions of recent
years, the efforts to revitalize the
language and traditions, Tibetans’
attachment to the Dalai Lama (and
their criticisms). Above all, Demick
wants to give room for contemporary
Tibetans to testify to their desires. If
the spectacular horror of the self-
immolations first caught her interest,
she finds, at least among her sources,
demands that sound surprisingly
modest. They want only the rights
enjoyed by the Han Chinese, she
writes — to travel, hold a passport, to
study their own language, to educate
their children abroad.
Her forecast is pessimistic. Only in
North Korea has she witnessed such
smothering surveillance and high
levels of fear, she writes, accelerated
by technological developments like a
social credit system in development
that will prevent “untrustworthy”
citizens from gaining employment,
buying plane tickets and using credit
cards.
In Ngaba, the last Tibetan-language
school — the last one in all of China —
has switched to teaching primarily in
Chinese. Meanwhile, across the coun-
try, Demick notices the same red bill-
boards springing up, proclaiming the
latest propaganda: “TOGETHER WE
WILL BUILD A BEAUTIFUL HOME.
BEND LOW. LISTEN TO WHAT PEO-
PLE SAY.”

16 | MONDAY, JULY 20, 2020
living
Five dishes to cook this week
This time of year is really about keeping it easy: Summer and simplicity go
hand in glove. The fresher and better tasting your produce, the less you need
to do to it, and even the plainest meal tastes good when you eat it outdoors, if
you can. Here are five dishes for the week. EMILY WEINSTEIN
ANDREW PURCELL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES. FOOD STYLIST: BARRETT WASHBURNE.
Eggplant and zucchini pasta
with feta and dill
There are two pounds of vegetables in this pasta dish by Kay Chun, which makes it a
meal unto itself. It is very simple, so much so that you may want to spice it up. Be
sure to season well, and cook the eggplant til it turns golden brown.
TIME: 20 MINUTES
YIELD: 4 TO 6 SERVINGS
6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 pound eggplant (about 2 small
eggplants), cut into 1-inch cubes
(about 7 cups)
Kosher salt and black pepper
1 pound green zucchini or yellow
squash, halved lengthwise and
sliced into ¼-inch-thick
half-moons (about 5 cups)
1 pound mezze rigatoni or any short
pasta
8 ounces crumbled feta (about 1½
cups)
¼ cup chopped fresh dill
Fragrant dill is a natural pairing
for eggplant and zucchini, but
fresh parsley or basil would also
be great.
MARCUS NILSSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES. FOOD STYLIST: MAGGIE RUGGIERO. PROP STYLIST: PAIGE HICKS.
For this summer, ways to make time fly
BY ALEXIS SOLOSKI
A funny thing about summer: It is long.
It is also hot. This one comes in the mid-
dle of a global pandemic.
And even in a changed and changing
world, I have reserved some mental en-
ergy for panicking about how my kids,
my husband and I will make it to Sep-
tember. Let me put it this way: On a re-
cent rainy Saturday, we baked banana
bread and played games. We made
lunch, built a cardboard lantern and
learned about the constellations. It was
exhausting. And they still put down two
Disney movies. Three months into
school closures, my children have
watched every show. There are no
shows left.
Parents worked from home with
small children for thousands of years —
without day care, compulsory schooling
or camps. What did children do? Short
answer: They worked and they played,
often with minimal adult supervision.
Unfortunately, as Steven Mintz, the
author of “Huck’s Raft: A History of
1. Heat 3 tablespoons oil in a large
nonstick skillet over medium heat. Add
eggplant, season with salt and pepper and
cook, stirring occasionally, until golden
and tender, about 10 minutes. Transfer to
a bowl.
2. Add 2 tablespoons oil and zucchini to
skillet and season with salt and pepper.
Cook, stirring occasionally, until tender but
not mushy, about 5 minutes.
3. While the vegetables cook, boil the
pasta in a pot of salted water until al
dente. Reserve 1½ cups cooking water
and drain pasta. Return pasta and
reserved cooking water to pot over
medium heat. Add remaining 1 tablespoon
oil and 1 cup of cheese and cook, stirring,
until the cheese melts and forms a sauce,
about 2 minutes. Stir in zucchini, eggplant
and dill; season with salt and pepper.
4. Serve pasta in bowls and top with
remaining cheese.
American Childhood,” told me, “The
pandemic has exaggerated and intensi-
fied the worst features of children’s play
today: adult intrusion; the decline of
physical, outdoor and social play; and
mediation by screens.” Ow.
So, how do we adults ameliorate that
while staying safe, employed and rea-
sonably sane? Here are some ideas.
GO OLD SCHOOL
In an email, Mintz, a history professor at
the University of Texas at Austin,
pointed to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s
1560 painting “Children’s Games.” A
canvas to give social-distancing enforc-
ers nightmares, it shows 100 or so Flem-
ish youths disporting themselves with
hoops, stilts, bubbles, marbles, the occa-
sional pig bladder and the wholesome
fun of beating one another with a
scourge. The Flemish parents are else-
where.
The painting suggests that a lot of
play is social, a difficulty in a pandemic.
But it also insists that the desire for play
is innate and that children will find ways
LINDA XIAO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES. FOOD STYLIST: BARRETT WASHBURNE.
Quick white bean and celery ragout
This subtle, delicious dish by Alexa Weibel is inspired by one from the restaurant
Chez Panisse. The recipe would make superb use of celery from the farmers’ mar-
ket, which is shockingly flavorful compared to the bagged bunches you get at the
supermarket (though those would work here too). Serve with toast, pearl couscous
or farro.
TIME: 15 MINUTES
YIELD: 4 TO 6 SERVINGS
⅔ cup vegetable stock, plus more
as needed
⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil
4 stalks celery, thinly sliced on an
angle, leaves reserved
2 medium zucchini (about 7 ounces
each), trimmed, quartered
lengthwise then cut into ½-inch
pieces
2 scallions, thinly sliced on an
angle
Kosher salt and black pepper
2 (15-ounce) cans cannellini beans,
rinsed and drained
Crème fraîche, mascarpone or
sour cream, for serving
Pesto, for serving
Cooked pearl couscous or grilled
bread, for serving
Salmon with crushed
blackberries and seaweed
In this recipe, the chef Sean Sherman joined two iconic ingredients of the Pacific
Northwest — salmon and blackberries — to honor Indigenous groups of the region.
The result is gorgeously simple and will shine with wild salmon and the best
berries you can find.
TIME: 15 MINUTES
YIELD: 4 SERVINGS
2 cups fresh blackberries
Coarse sea salt
4 (5- to 6-ounce) skin-on salmon
fillets, preferably wild-caught
sockeye salmon
3 tablespoons sunflower oil, plus
more as needed
2 to 3 tablespoons dried wakame
seaweed
Fresh chive stems, for garnish
1. In a medium bowl, crush half the
blackberries with the back of a fork. Add
the remaining whole blackberries, stir to
coat and season to taste with salt. Set
aside.
2. Pat salmon fillets dry with a paper
towel. Season with salt on both sides.
3. Heat a large, heavy sauté pan or
cast-iron skillet over high. When the pan is
Your kids could try making kites. OK, they won’t look like these, but does that matter?
to amuse themselves, especially if you
can supply some rudimentary toys —
kites, cards, blocks, dolls, balls, paper
boats and paper airplanes, a garden
hose if you have one, a half-filled tub.
If you prefer a thicker sauce, add
the beans at the beginning of
cooking so they break down as
they’re stirred.
1. Combine the stock, oil, celery, zucchini
and scallions in a large, deep skillet;
season generously with salt and pepper.
Cook over medium-high, stirring
occasionally, until crisp-tender, adding the
beans halfway through, about 10 minutes
total. If you’d like to make it brothier, add
⅓ cup vegetable stock and warm for 1
minute. Season with salt and pepper.
2. Divide among shallow bowls. Top with a
dollop of crème fraîche, drizzle with pesto
and top with celery leaves. Serve with
couscous or grilled bread.
hot, add 3 tablespoons oil and carefully
swirl it around to coat the bottom of the
pan. When the oil begins to shimmer,
working in batches if necessary, place the
fillets in the pan, flesh-side down, and sear
until the salmon picks up some color and
releases easily from the pan, 1 to 2
minutes. Flip the fish, reduce the heat to
medium and continue cooking until
cooked through, about 2 minutes more,
depending on the thickness of the salmon.
4. Transfer the fillets from the pan to a
warm plate and tent with foil until all fillets
are cooked, making sure to get any of the
salmon skin that may stick to the pan. (If
you’re cooking your fillets in multiple
batches, you’ll want to add 2 to 3
tablespoons of oil to the skillet before
pan-searing the second batch.)
5. Divide the salmon among plates,
serving it skin-side up. Top with the
blackberries, then garnish each plate with
the seaweed and a few chive stems.
DEVIN YALKIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
EMBRACE BOREDOM
Feeling that we ought to keep kids
happy and entertained is a compara-
tively modern mind-set and speaks to
certain luxuries. Instead of trying to
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Cherry tomato caesar salad
Melissa Clark went wild with the tomatoes to make this Caesar salad, which abso-
lutely could be dinner with a loaf of good bread. (Or garlic bread!) If you’re very
hungry, add avocado or shred poached or rotisserie chicken to layer in with the
tomatoes. Fresh, juicy, irresistible.
TIME: 20 MINUTES
YIELD: 4 SERVINGS
2garlic cloves, minced
¼
2
teaspoon fine sea salt
teaspoons fresh lemon juice
¾teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
3tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
4crisp leaves romaine lettuce,
thinly sliced
½ pound cherry tomatoes,
preferably a mix of colors, halved
4 anchovies packed in oil, coarsely
chopped
1½ ounces Parmesan, more to taste
Black pepper
JULIA GARTLAND FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES. FOOD STYLIST: BARRETT WASHBURNE.
Baked mustard-herb chicken legs
This recipe, adapted from the chef Gary Danko, is one of the best ways I know to
make chicken on a weeknight: Coat pieces of chicken with Dijon mustard, bread
crumbs and herbs, and bake for about 35 minutes.
TIME: 45 MINUTES
YIELD: 4 SERVINGS
4 leg-thigh chicken pieces, cut in 2,
or 8 thighs
1½ cups coarse fresh bread crumbs
2 teaspoons minced garlic
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
1 teaspoon chopped fresh tarragon
or other herb
Salt and pepper to taste
6 tablespoons Dijon mustard
If you don’t have fresh bread
crumbs, panko will do.
prevent boredom, maybe welcome it
and see what children do. Tom Hodgkin-
son, author of “The Idle Parent,” sug-
gested ramping up slowly, with an hour
or so of “nothing time” every day. Maybe
less, if your children are very young.
“You could try boring them with your
games so they invent something better,”
he advised. “Be a really boring mom.”
A D.I.Y. APPROACH TO CULTURE
Normally, around this time of year, my
desktop and actual desk are littered
with notes about outdoor theaters, con-
certs in the park and art installations
that might hold a child’s attention for 10
whole minutes. Now my calendar looks
like new-fallen snow.
If you can’t take your kids to cultural
events, have your kids bring culture to
you. “Be like Louisa May Alcott,” Mintz
suggested. The March girls of “Little
Women” make up fantasy plays, write
newspapers, craft costumes, act out
stories from Dickens’s “The Pickwick
Papers.” (“The Pickwick Papers” are
not exciting! And still they make do.)
..
JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES
1. In a small bowl, whisk together garlic,
salt, lemon juice and Worcestershire.
Whisk in olive oil.
2. Spread lettuce on a platter and drizzle
with dressing. Scatter tomatoes and
anchovies over lettuce and drizzle with
more dressing. Using a vegetable peeler or
coarse grater, grate or shave cheese over
the salad. Drizzle dressing over the plate
and finish with pepper.
1. Heat oven to 400 degrees. Trim excess
skin and fat from chicken. Combine bread
crumbs, garlic, parsley, tarragon and salt
and pepper on a plate or waxed paper. Use
a pastry brush to paint mustard lightly on
chicken legs. Carefully coat chicken legs
with bread crumb mixture.
2. Gently place chicken in a roasting pan
and bake for 30 to 40 minutes, or until
completely cooked. Serve hot or cold.
TWO WORDS: FREE LABOR
Housework can also become a form of
play, and depending on how well or
poorly your children do it, may be some
help.
In the 19th century, Hodgkinson said,
“children were seen as not necessarily a
burden on the household, but a welcome
labor force.” Employ them.
If you can take a few extra minutes to
gamify the chore — Mary Poppins’s
“Spoonful of Sugar” approach — they
may even enjoy it.
MUDDLE THROUGH
In general, find out what your children
like to do and encourage them to do it.
Or, make them do stuff that you like. In
my case, that means playing board
games and watching toy theater videos
on YouTube, plus the occasional Hayao
Miyazaki movie.
“Just let them watch a lot of films,”
Hodgkinson said.
“It’s temporary, it’s not forever,” he
said. “We really shouldn’t be too hard on
ourselves.”