RARE EARTHS ALTERED ART TOUGH HILLS TO CLIMB

A U.S. EFFORT TO WRENCHING THE CHALLENGE REPLICATES

HARVEST ITS OWN MEANING INSIDE CYCLING UP EVEREST
PAGE 7 | BUSINESS PAGE 14 | CULTURE PAGE 12 | SPORTS

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INTERNATIONAL EDITION | MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2020

Accounting Amid attacks

for Trump’s by the U.S.,
corruption China eases
its stance
Communist Party hopes
to reduce risk of appearing
Michelle Goldberg excessively nationalistic
BY JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ

For weeks, China fanned nationalist

OPINION
Recently, NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro
asked Joe Biden whether, if elected, he
could envision Donald Trump being
prosecuted. Biden replied that the
prosecution of a former president
would be a “very, very unusual thing”
and probably “not very good for de-
mocracy.” The former vice president
said he would not stand in the way if
the Justice Department wanted to
bring a case, but when Garcia-Navarro
pressed him, he suggested she was
trying to bait him into a version of
Trump’s threat against his 2016 oppo-
nent: “Lock her up.”
Restoring Biden’s reticence
is understandable,
the rule of because a president
law in the who runs the White
U.S. is not House as a criminal
the same as syndicate creates a
“lock her up.” conundrum for liber-
al democracy. In a
functioning democra-
cy, losing an election should not create
sentiment in its escalating war of words
with the Trump administration. Now, it
is toning down its message and calling
for a truce, as President Trump increas-
ingly makes Beijing a target in his bid
for re-election in November.
One after another, top Chinese diplo-
mats have called for “peaceful co-
existence” with the United States, forgo-
ing their previous assertions that Bei-
jing’s authoritarian system is superior.
Hawkish scholars are now emphasizing
prospects for defusing tensions, instead
of urging China to challenge American
military might. Journalists at state-run
news outlets are limiting their direct at-
tacks on President Trump, under in-
structions to take a more conciliatory
approach.
“There’s a reflection that we should
not let nationalism or hotheadedness
somehow kidnap our foreign policy,” Xu
Qinduo, a commentator for China Radio
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ARIS MESSINIS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES International, a state-run broadcaster,
Migrants trying to reach the Greek island Lesbos in March. Greece has secretly expelled more than 1,000 asylum seekers in an attempt to block maritime migration. said in an interview. “Tough rhetoric
should not replace rational diplomacy.”
In toning down the rhetoric, the ruling

Abandoned at sea by Greece

legal liability; there was a reason
Trump’s “Lock her up” chant was so
shocking.
But you can’t reinforce the rule of
law by allowing it to be broken without
repercussion. After four years of ever-
escalating corruption and abuses of
power, the United States cannot simply
snap back to being the country it once
was if Trump is forced to vacate the
White House in January. If Biden is
elected, Democrats must force a reck-
oning over what Trump has done to
America.
Of course, a Biden victory is far from
assured, and if he loses, there may be
no stopping this country’s slide into a
permanent state of oligarchic misrule.
But right now, while there’s still hope
of cauterizing Trumpism, ideas about
post-Trump accountability are perco-
lating in Democratic and activist cir-
cles.
Last year Biden’s running mate,
Senator Kamala Harris, of California,
said that she believed the Justice
Department would have no choice but
to pursue criminal charges against
Trump for the instances of apparent
obstruction of justice outlined in the
Mueller report. In January, Senator
Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massa-
chusetts, called for a Justice Depart-
ment task force “to investigate vio-
lations by Trump administration offi-
GOLDBERG, PAGE 11
The New York Times publishes opinion
from a wide range of perspectives in
hopes of promoting constructive debate
about consequential questions.
RHODES, GREECE
In new hard-line approach,
migrants are cast adrift
near Turkey on life rafts
BY PATRICK KINGSLEY
AND KARAM SHOUMALI
The Greek government has secretly ex-
pelled more than 1,000 refugees from
Europe’s borders in recent months, sail-
ing many of them to the edge of Greek
territorial waters and then abandoning
them in inflatable and sometimes over-
burdened life rafts.
Since March, at least 1,072 asylum
seekers have been dropped at sea by
Greek officials in at least 31 separate ex-
pulsions, according to an analysis of evi-
dence by The New York Times from
three independent watchdogs, two aca-
demic researchers and the Turkish
Coast Guard. The Times interviewed
survivors from five of those episodes
and reviewed photographic or video evi-
dence from all 31.
“It was very inhumane,” said Najma
al-Khatib, a 50-year-old Syrian teacher,
who said masked Greek officials took
her and 22 others, including two babies,
under cover of darkness from a deten-
“Greek authorities do not engage in
clandestine activities,’’ said a govern-
ment spokesman, Stelios Petsas.
“Greece has a proven track record when
it comes to observing international law,
conventions and protocols. This in-
cludes the treatment of refugees and mi-
grants.”
Since 2015, European countries like
Greece and Italy have mainly relied on
proxies, like the Turkish and Libyan
governments, to head off maritime mi-
gration. What is different now is that the
Greek government is increasingly tak-
ing matters into its own hands, watch-
dog groups and researchers say.
For example, migrants have been
forced onto sometimes leaky life rafts
and left to drift at the border between
Turkish and Greek waters, while others
have been left to drift in their own boats
after Greek officials disabled their en-
Afghan migrants landing on Lesbos in February. Watchdog groups and researchers said gines.
that Greece’s expulsion of migrants was illegal under European and international law. “These pushbacks are totally illegal in
all their aspects, in international law
and in European law,” said Prof.
tion center on the island of Rhodes on pulsions are the most direct and sus- François Crépeau, an expert on interna-
July 26 and abandoned them in a rud- tained attempt by a European country tional law at McGill University in Mont-
derless, motorless life raft before they to block maritime migration using its real and a former United Nations special
were rescued by the Turkish Coast own forces since the height of the migra- rapporteur on the human rights of mi-
Guard. tion crisis in 2015, when Greece was the grants.
“I left Syria for fear of bombing — but main thoroughfare for migrants and ref- “It is a human rights and humanitar-
when this happened, I wished I’d died ugees seeking to enter Europe. ian disaster,” Professor Crépeau added.
under a bomb,” she told The Times. The Greek government denied any il- Greeks were once far more under-
Illegal under international law, the ex- legality. GREECE, PAGE 4
Communist Party hopes to reduce the
risk that excessive nationalism will hurt
Beijing’s global image or cause tensions
between the superpowers to accelerate
uncontrollably. China’s ties with the
United States are at a perilous juncture
now that Mr. Trump has made assailing
Beijing a focal point of his election cam-
paign, with his administration taking a
series of actions against China in rapid
succession.
Just in recent weeks, the Trump ad-
ministration has shut down the Chinese
Consulate in Houston; imposed sanc-
tions on Communist Party officials; said
it would cancel the visas of some stu-
dents and tech company employees;
and proposed restrictions on two popu-
lar Chinese-owned social media net-
works. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
has traveled abroad urging countries to
band together to fight China’s “tyranny.”
Unwilling to concede or look weak,
China has responded in kind to most of
the measures, closing a consulate in
Chengdu and sanctioning American po-
liticians. But in rejecting Mr. Pompeo’s
criticisms, China’s foreign minister,
Wang Yi, also offered an olive branch,
saying the government was ready to
discuss all of Washington’s concerns “at
any level, in any area and at any time.”
Mr. Wang avoided the scathing de-
nunciations that have come to charac-
terize China’s “Wolf Warrior” diplo-
macy, named after an ultrapatriotic Chi-
nese film franchise. Only three weeks
earlier, Mr. Wang had told his counter-
part in Russia that the United States had
“lost its mind, morals and credibility.”
CHINA, PAGE 8

Madcap twists that suit the Fringe spirit

chickens named after British stand-up
LONDON
comedians, it was devastating. “Edin-
burgh is everything, really,” he said. “It’s
the focal point of our year.”
Edinburgh cancels festival, The festival’s cancellation has been a
big blow to long-term fans — and to the
but some shows will go on: 30,000 performers who travel to the
That is, online, from sheds Scottish city each August to show their
work. To fill the gap, some artists have New York Times
BY ALICE JONES

David Chapple began planning his trip

gone online to try to capture the anar-
chic, diverse and somewhat overwhelm-
ing experience of being at the Fringe.
Events
to the 2020 Edinburgh Festival Fringe a Among them is Francesca Moody, a Make the most of your time indoors.
year ago, since you can’t be too prepared theater producer in London who took Better understand the world outside.
when you hold the world record for the the original stage version of “Fleabag”
Our virtual gatherings are free to attend,
most Fringe performances attended in to the Fringe in 2013 and had planned to
one season. stage three plays in Edinburgh this and new events are added daily.
Having seen a record-breaking 304 month.
shows in 27 days in 2014, he was plan- When the festival was called off, her Explore the full schedule:
ning another Fringe viewing marathon fellow theater-maker Gary McNair timesevents.nytimes.com
this year for his wife’s 60th birthday. But joked that he would have to stage a
in early April, the event — the world’s “Shed Fringe” from his garden instead
largest arts festival — was canceled for — a pun that “set cogs whirring” in
the first time in its 73-year history, be- Moody’s producer brain. Six weeks ago,
cause of the coronavirus. she came up with Shedinburgh, an on-
PETER DIBDIN For Chapple, a civil servant who esti- line festival of comedy and drama that
From left: Gary McNair, Annie George, Harriet Bolwell and Francesca Moody with one mates that he spends half of his income streams live from a garden shed for
of the sheds used for “Shedinburgh,” a livestreamed comedy and drama festival. on watching live comedy and keeps FESTIVAL, PAGE 2

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2 | MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2020
page two
Naveed Hussain at the Lionel-Groulx subway station in Montreal that memorializes a priest who championed French-Canadian rights. He wants to honor Oscar Peterson instead.
Subway name strikes a discord
MONTREAL DISPATCH
MONTREAL
City divided over a push
to honor Black jazz great
instead of nationalist priest
BY DAN BILEFSKY
Steps away from Montreal’s historically
Black neighborhood of Little Burgundy,
the handsome gray-stone house where
the Canadian jazz virtuoso Oscar Peter-
son grew up sits conspicuously empty.
There is no city plaque on the house
designating it a landmark, nor any
street named after Mr. Peterson, a daz-
zling, finger-flying pianist and 20th-cen-
tury musical giant whom Duke Elling-
ton called “the maharajah of the key-
board.”
But Naveed Hussain, a 36-year-old
nurse, thinks something more should be
done to honor the musician — while re-
moving what he views as an anachronis-
tic blight, close by the musician’s child-
hood home.
Inspired by a global reckoning in sup-
port of Black rights, he wants to rename
the Lionel-Groulx subway station,
which memorializes a polarizing Roman
Catholic priest and historian who cham-
pioned the rights of Francophone Que-
becers in English-dominated Canada,
but who also espoused virulent anti-
Semitism and fascist sympathies.
“The metros and monuments in this
city are irrelevant to our current times
and glorify imperialists and conquerors
and, in the case of Lionel Groulx, some-
one who suggested certain immigrants
didn’t have a place in Quebec society,”
Mr. Hussain said. “Oscar Peterson is a
symbol of unity.”
Mr. Hussain, who lived for a time in
Little Burgundy, said he was fighting for
nothing less than the soul of the city, ea-
ger for the subway station to reflect the
contributions of Canadians of color.
But his push has given rise to a back-
lash and a counterpetition by those who
contend that Mr. Groulx deserves his
place in the city’s pantheon.
Especially for some older, French-
speaking residents, Mr. Groulx is a tow-
A Cuban historian who restored Old Havana
EUSEBIO LEAL SPENGLER
1942-2020
BY STEVEN KURUTZ
Eusebio Leal Spengler, who led an effort
to preserve Cuba’s Old Havana, trans-
forming that historic district from a for-
gotten slum into an architectural jewel
and tourist destination, died on July 31
in Havana. He was 77.
His death was reported by Granma,
the official newspaper of the Cuban
Communist Party. In recent years he
had been treated for pancreatic cancer.
In a statement, President Miguel
Diaz-Canel of Cuba called him “the Cu-
ban who saved Havana.”
Mr. Leal began his preservation ef-
forts in the 1980s, when the old center of
the capital city was a ruin. Residents
lived without indoor plumbing or reli-
able electricity, garbage piled up on the
streets, and 250-year-old buildings
sometimes collapsed before their eyes.
As a historian and director of the Ha-
vana City Museum, Mr. Leal was pas-
sionate about saving Cuba’s architectur-
al history. He once lay down in front of a
steamroller to save a colonial-era wood-
A mural of Mr. Peterson in Little Burgundy, a traditionally Black neighborhood district
in Montreal, where the virtuoso jazz pianist was born.
ering figure of the first half of the 20th
century whose insistence on equality for
Francophone Quebecers deserves to be
remembered.
“Leave the metro alone — it is a thank
you for what this man gave to Quebec,”
said Annie Roux, 60, a life coach and as-
trologer who lives near the station.
The naming skirmish has become an
emblem of a long-simmering cultural
battle over the toponymy of a city that
was colonized by both France and Brit-
ain, where street names honoring 19th-
century British monarchs sit alongside
grand boulevards renamed after 20th-
century Québécois nationalists.
Mr. Hussain said it was a fitting trib-
ute to Montreal’s multiculturalism that
someone like him, a Muslim Canadian
with Pakistani roots, was challenging
the celebration of a man with anti-Se-
mitic views in order to honor a Black
jazz great who won eight Grammy
Awards before his death in 2007 at 82.
Mr. Hussain’s petition to rename the
subway station (which hyphenates Mr.
Groulx’s first and last name) has re-
ceived nearly 25,000 signatures — al-
though some commentators on the
counterpetition criticized a “witch hunt”
against major figures of the past.
en street from being paved over.
Through his campaigning, Old Havana
was designated a UNESCO World Her-
itage site in 1982.
But lack of funds hampered Mr. Leal’s
ambitious restoration plans until the
early 1990s, when the Soviet Union col-
lapsed and Cuba lost millions in subsi-
dies. Out of the economic crisis, the Cu-
ban leader Fidel Castro, whom Mr. Leal
had befriended, gave him unprecedent-
ed authority to collect taxes and profits
from tourism in the old center.
Through a state-run company,
Habaguanex, Mr. Leal plowed money
into construction projects. He restored
elegant 18th-century plazas, baroque
cathedrals and restaurants and hotels,
including the pink-washed Hotel Ambos
Mundos, where Ernest Hemingway
wrote “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Para-
doxically, Old Havana became a capital-
ist success story: The restored build-
ings drew foreign tourists, whose
money then paid for more restoration
work.
By the mid-2000s, about 300 buildings
— roughly a third of those in Old Havana
— had been refurbished. And Mr. Leal,
who employed 3,000 workers as head of
the Office of Historian, was hailed as a
His campaign had also pitted modern-
izers against conservationists and
scholars who argue that the names of
subways, streets and statues should be
preserved as historical records.
Cities across the world, from Bristol,
England, to Lexington, Va., have been
rethinking their identities amid calls to
remove monuments honoring historical
figures who advocated slavery or held
racist views. In Canada, demands have
been growing to topple statues honoring
John A. Macdonald, the first Canadian
prime minister, because of his role in re-
pressing Indigenous people.
On a recent day in Little Burgundy,
once known as “The Harlem of The
North,” local residents lamented that
the social history of Black Quebecers
was noticeably absent or underplayed
in Quebec’s history books, popular cul-
ture and urban spaces, and overshad-
owed by the struggle of white, French-
speaking Quebecers for their own
rights.
“If you are brown or Black in Quebec,
you are seen as the Other,” said Char-
lene Hunte, head of outreach at the Un-
ion United Church, which Mr. Peterson
attended. Montreal, she observed, didn’t
have a single subway station named af-
GALUSCHKA/ULLSTEIN BILD, VIA GETTY IMAGES
Eusebio Leal Spengler turned a forgotten
Havana slum into an architectural jewel.
hero and a role model for preserva-
tionists around the world.
“He was a unique figure for his time,”
Jeffrey DeLaurentis, an American dip-
lomat who served in Cuba during the
Obama administration, said in an inter-
view. “He was also given an unusual
amount of autonomy. It was very novel
in the system that Cuba has.”
As Old Havana became an economic
engine for Cuba, Mr. Leal was known as
its unofficial mayor. He greeted well-
PHOTOGRAPHS BY NASUNA STUART-ULIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
ter women or ethnic minorities. “Black
history is being erased,” she said.
In Quebec, a majority Francophone
province, Mr. Hussain’s attempt to re-
brand the transport hub has intensified
enduring debates over language, mem-
ory and the legacy of colonialism.
Writing in Le Devoir, a leading Mont-
real newspaper, Luc-Normand Tellier,
an emeritus professor of urban studies
at Université du Québec à Montréal, ar-
gued that Lionel-Groulx station should
keep its name because of the pivotal role
its eponym played in shaping the
French identity of Quebec.
He suggested renaming the city’s
McGill subway station after Mr. Peter-
son, since James McGill, an 18th-cen-
tury Scottish businessman whose name
adorns McGill University, owned six
Black slaves. “Such a gesture would, at
once, underline how slavery was intoler-
able while honoring the contribution of
Blacks to Montreal society,” he wrote.
Robin Philpot, a prominent Quebec
writer, said that Montreal should guard
against a longstanding drive by the
British conquerors of Quebec and their
descendants to Anglicize the names of
streets and bridges in the city.
For others, like Eric Scott, who made
a documentary film about anti-
Semitism in Quebec, the support to keep
the station’s name reflected an unwill-
ingness to acknowledge “pro-fascist
sympathies” in Quebec in the 1930s
through the postwar period.
Experts agree that Mr. Groulx was a
divisive figure who had expressed anti-
Semitic views. But those views, they
say, weren’t his central preoccupation
and needed to be examined within the
context of the prevailing social mores of
his times.
Youssef Amane, a spokesman for the
mayor of Montreal, Valérie Plante, said
there was a moratorium on renaming
subway stations. He noted, however,
that Mr. Peterson had been honored
with a park in Little Burgundy as well as
a mural.
“There is more to be done to honor the
contributions of the Black community,”
Mr. Amane added.
Nasuna Stuart-Ulin contributed report-
ing.
wishers on the streets (typically in his
bureaucratic gray guayabera shirt). He
starred in a TV series about the capital’s
history, “Andar La Habana” (“Walk Ha-
vana”). He lectured at American univer-
sities and was sought out by journalists
as a leading public intellectual.
Old Havana’s renewal came at a cost,
however; some residents were relo-
cated when overcrowded buildings
were modernized. Preservation had its
limits, too. Visiting journalists, includ-
ing one from The New York Times in
2007, pointed out that Old Havana had
become like a movie set, a pretty facade,
while just blocks away poor Cubans
lived in decrepit buildings. Workers at
fancy hotels scraped by on a state salary
of $20 a month.
As Mr. Leal himself told The Times,
revitalizing Cuba’s colonial architecture
had done only so much to fix larger so-
cial ills. “It pains me to see every day the
border that divides what has been re-
stored and what remains to be restored,”
he said.
Eusebio Leal Spengler was born on
Sept. 11, 1942, in a working-class district
of Havana. He was reared by his single
mother, a washerwoman and cleaner,
and dropped out of school in the sixth
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Fringe spirit lives
in ‘Shedinburgh’
FESTIVAL, FROM PAGE 1
three weeks starting on Friday.
In fact, there are two sheds, each
measuring six feet by eight feet: one on-
stage at the Soho Theater in London, the
other at the Traverse Theatre in Edin-
burgh.
Both venues have been closed since
March, when the British government or-
dered theaters to shut to help slow the
spread of the coronavirus.
Setting up the sheds inside is a nod to
the questing spirit of the Fringe, which
takes over every corner of the city of Ed-
inburgh each August, transforming
pubs and gardens, gyms, parking lots
and lecture theaters into performance
spaces.
“The cancellation of the Fringe has
left a massive hole,” said Moody, who
has attended the festival for 17 years.
“This is an opportunity to acknowledge
how magical the festival is, how impor-
tant it is to me and to a lot of the artists
who have had success there.”
Thanks to social distancing rules and
space restrictions, the “Shed-ule” is
dominated by one-person shows, from
artists like Jack Rooke, Deborah
Frances-White and Tim Crouch. Audi-
ences will watch on Zoom after donating
at least 4 pounds, about $5, per ticket,
and profits will go toward a fund for art-
ists aiming to stage a show at the Fringe
next year.
Before planning was halted because
of the pandemic, this year’s Edinburgh
Festival Fringe had confirmed more
than 2,200 shows from 48 countries in
about 230 venues, said Rebecca Monks,
a spokeswoman for the Edinburgh Fes-
tival Fringe Society.
They were preparing for a similar-
scale festival to last year’s, in which over
3,800 shows were staged and more than
three million tickets were sold.
Edinburgh is “the way that arts orga-
nizations, venues, TV production com-
panies find new work — the fact that it
doesn’t exist this year will have a signifi-
cant impact,” said Moody, who knows
how life-changing a successful Fringe
can be.
When she and Phoebe Waller-Bridge
took “Fleabag” to a dank vault under
Edinburgh’s George IV Bridge seven
years ago, they raised money on Kick-
starter, didn’t pay themselves, and gave
away tickets for the first week to fill the
60-seater room. It became one of that
year’s most talked-about shows, which
led to a run at the Soho Theater in Lon-
don, where it caught the attention of the
BBC’s head of comedy.
This year, such opportunities have es-
sentially vanished.
“For all those artists who were taking
their first shot at the Fringe this year,”
Moody said, “that work might never re-
surface, because they might not have
the strong foundations, or the support,
to carry on.”
“Shedinburgh” is just one way theater
makers are keeping the Fringe flame
burning. Fringe on Friday is a weekly
Francesca Moody, in London circa 2013, the year she took the original stage version of
“Fleabag” to the Fringe. She had planned to stage three plays in Edinburgh this month.
grade to help support the family. No
other information was available about
his mother or father. Survivors include
his two sons, Javier Leal and Carlos
Manuel Leal.
After the 1959 revolution brought Cas-
tro to power, public education in Cuba
became free. In 1975, Mr. Leal earned a
bachelor’s degree in history, and later a
Ph.D. in historical sciences, from the
University of Havana. But he had early
on been self-taught, spending his youth
in libraries reading about history and ar-
chitecture. In the early 1960s, he was
made an apprentice in the Office of His-
torian, held at the time by Emilio Roig de
Leuchsenring.
When Mr. Roig died in 1967, Mr. Leal
assumed the role and oversaw the reno-
vation of the 18th-century governor’s
palace into a museum, his first restora-
tion project.
“By ancient tradition, every old city in
Latin America maintains the institution
of ‘chronicler,’ who is named for life to
save the memory of the city,” he told
Smithsonian magazine in a 2018 profile.
But Mr. Leal did not want Old Havana
to be a mummified city for tourists. He
used a portion of the Habaguanex prof-
its to build schools and health clinics and
..
hourlong cabaret streaming from per-
formers’ homes; Edinburgh Unlocked is
a comedy festival in audiobook form
from Penguin Random House, featuring
15-minute sets from stand-ups whose
shows were canceled; Zoo TV is offering
on-demand streaming of past Edin-
burgh performances; and Fringe of Col-
our is screening daily films by artists of
color.
Corrie McGuire, a comedy producer
and agent who has staged the raucously
interactive midnight show “Spank!” at
the Edinburgh Fringe for the past 15
years, estimates that her agency lost
£60,000 “overnight” when the theaters
closed in March. A quarter of that would
have come from Edinburgh.
Last week, she staged the first online
“Spank!” with the stand-up comedians
Lauren Pattison and Emmanuel Sonubi
performing from their bedrooms; Magi-
cal Bones, a break-dancing magician,
doing tricks in his kitchen; and Vikki
Stone singing songs from her attic.
“The cancellation of the
Fringe has left a massive
hole. This is an opportunity
to acknowledge how magical
the festival is.”
To combat the “Zoom fatigue” that
many people are feeling amid the pleth-
ora of online events and meetings dur-
ing the pandemic, McGuire said, she
created a virtual front row in which 10
audience members could volunteer to
“sit up front” and have their micro-
phones taken off mute so that perform-
ers could hear their reactions.
“Being able to have people from all
over the world watching the same gig
gave it real Edinburgh energy,” she add-
ed.
The comedian Mark Watson, who
made his name in 2004 with a 24-hour
comedy gig in a basement in Edin-
burgh’s Old Town, has embraced the fes-
tival’s madcap, have-a-go, collaborative
essence more than most, over 20 years
of performances.
Having staged a number of marathon
shows, Watson now plans to host a 24-
hour Fringe gig from his sofa in south
London at the end of the month to raise
money for comedians whose livelihoods
were flattened by the pandemic.
His plan, which he describes as “in-
sanely ambitious,” is to recreate the feel
of the monthlong festival in a day — its
“general mayhem and the wild outpour-
ing of ideas” — by hosting the gig on the
livestreaming platform Twitch, with
guest spots from well-known comedians
and newer talents.
The Fringe is a sort of “state of the na-
tion for comedy,” Watson said.
“I don’t think we can let something
like the Fringe die,” he said. “It’s gone
for now, but the spirit of it needs to stay
alive — for good.”
RICHARD LAKOS
to repair apartment buildings so that
longtime residents could remain. As he
told The Washington Post in 2000, he
took care to create “spaces of silence” in
his plan — living neighborhoods re-
moved from the tourist hordes.
His success brought him political in-
fluence. As a practicing Roman Catholic,
he sought to improve the relationship
between the Catholic Church and the
Cuban authorities, who had dispelled
priests after the revolution and officially
espoused atheism. When Pope Francis
visited Cuba in 2015, Mr. Leal showed
him around.
Building by building, block by block,
he continued his preservation efforts
until the end of his life. One of his last
and most ambitious projects was the
restoration of the National Capitol
Building, which, with its domed roof and
neoclassical architecture, resembles the
United States capitol. It opened in 2018
after eight years of work.
“What we’re doing here is trying to
preserve the patrimony, the memory of
the Cuban nation,” Mr. Leal told The
Times in 2005.
“I won’t see the full restoration of the
city,” he added. “So much is left to be
done, but this is a start.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2020 | 3

World
Palestinians see deal as betrayal
JERUSALEM
Israel-U.A.E. agreement
has ruptured decades of
unity in the Arab world
BY ISABEL KERSHNER
AND ADAM RASGON
When the unmarked United Arab Emir-
ates plane touched down on the tarmac
in Tel Aviv one night in May carrying 16
tons of unsolicited medical aid for the
Palestinians, it was rejected by the Pal-
estinian leadership, which said that no-
body had coordinated with them about
the shipment.
That was just a prelude to a greater
humiliation. Palestinian officials main-
tain that nobody consulted with them
before Thursday’s surprise announce-
ment by President Trump that Israel
and the Emirates had agreed to “full
normalization of relations” in exchange
for Israel’s suspending annexation of
parts of the occupied West Bank.
If the pullback from the planned an-
nexation was presented as some kind of
a balm for the Palestinians, many of
them considered it, instead, a stab in the
back. The deal was a diplomatic coup for
Israel, but it ruptured decades of pro-
fessed Arab unity around the Palestin-
ian cause. It swapped one Palestinian
nightmare — annexation, which many
world leaders had warned would be an
illegal land grab — for another, perhaps
even bleaker prospect of not being
counted at all.
“This agreement is very damaging to
the cause of peace,” said Husam Zomlot,
the head of the Palestinian mission to
Britain, speaking from London, “be-
cause it takes away one of the key incen-
tives for Israel to end its occupation —
normalization with the Arab world.”
“It basically tells Israel it can have
peace with an Arab country,” he added,
“in return for postponing illegal theft of
Palestinian land.”
Friday’s front pages blared out the
disconnect. Israel’s popular Yediot
Ahronot newspaper celebrated the “his-
toric agreement” and the cut-price deal
of “Peace in Exchange for Annexation.”
But the Palestinian government-run Al-
Hayat al-Jadida went with “Tripartite
Aggression against the Rights of the
Palestinian People,” in angry red letters.
The emerging Israeli-Emirati rela-
tionship is the most prominent achieve-
ment yet of what Prime Minister Ben-
jamin Netanyahu of Israel has called an
outside-in approach. That has entailed
courting the Gulf States — including
Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman as well
as the Emirates — to quietly come to
terms with Israel and then bring along
the Palestinians, rather than dealing
with the Palestinians first.
The conservative-led Israeli govern-
ment has long viewed the Palestinians
as intransigent and unwilling or unable
to compromise on long-held principles
that Israel sees as inflated demands,
casting them as serial quitters of peace
talks.
The deal between Israel and the Emir-
ates also reverses the order of diplomat-
ic steps envisioned by the Arab Peace
Initiative of 2002, a proposal endorsed
by the Arab League. That proposal
called for Israel to withdraw from occu-
pied territories to the boundaries that
existed before the 1967 Middle East war
and, in return, the Arab and Islamic na-
tions in the region would commit to nor-
malizing relations with Israel.
Mocking old predictions that Israel
would become increasingly isolated and
face a diplomatic “tsunami” for failing to
resolve the Palestinian conflict, Mr. Ne-
tanyahu has instead touted economic
peace and what he calls T.T.P. — terror-
ism, technology and peace. Other coun-
tries, including Arab ones, he has ar-
gued, see Israel as an ally in fighting Is-
lamist terrorism, a source of technolog-
ical innovation and not as the obstacle to
peace of old.
More broadly, Israel’s agreement with
the United Arab Emirates reflects the
new alliances in the Middle East be-
tween countries that feel threatened by
Iran. The Palestinian cause has been
sidelined, leaving the Palestinians feel-
ing isolated and, with the suspension of
annexation as the justification, used as
pawns.
“MbZ tried to use us as a fig leaf,” said
Nour Odeh, a Palestinian writer and an-
alyst, referring to Mohammed bin Za-
yed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and
de facto ruler of the United Arab Emir-
ates. “Nobody buys it,” she added.
ODED BALILTY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
“Palestine did not factor into this.”
That comes as an additional blow to
the Palestinians, who rejected the
Trump administration’s plan for resolv-
ing the Middle East conflict as hope-
lessly biased toward Israel and subse-
quently curbed their relations with the
administration.
The Palestinian polity has long been
weak, divided between the portions of
the West Bank nominally controlled by
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the
Palestinian Authority, and his rivals in
MUSSA ISSA QAWASMA/REUTERS
Above, Palestinians in Hebron watching
news about the agreement. Left, Tel Aviv
City Hall was lit up with the flag of the
United Arab Emirates. The deal swapped
one Palestinian nightmare — annexation,
which many world leaders had warned
would be an illegal land grab — for an-
other, perhaps even bleaker prospect of
not being counted at all.
Hamas, the Islamic militant group that
dominates the impoverished coastal ter-
ritory of Gaza.
The struggle now is not just against
Israel, but to remain relevant.
“Whatever happens, I’m the only
thing that needs to be resolved,” said
Saeb Erekat, the secretary general of
the Palestine Liberation Organization’s
executive committee and its veteran
chief negotiator. Insisting that ulti-
mately, the Palestinian question could
not be dismissed or ignored, he added:
“I’m the fact on the ground. I’m the real
fact on the ground.”
“There was never a single Emirati
who fought the Israelis in any war,” Mr.
Erekat noted. “There’s no war between
the Emirates and Israel.”
Israel and the Emirates have quietly
cooperated for years on security and
trade. Israeli ministers have openly vis-
ited, and Israel maintains a small office
at the International Renewable Energy
Agency in Abu Dhabi, one of the seven
Emirates. There is also a synagogue and
a resident rabbi there, Levi Duchman,
originally from New York.
Palestinian relations with the Emir-
ates, by contrast, have been sour for al-
most a decade. Abu Dhabi plays host to
Muhammad Dahlan, a former Gaza se-
curity chief turned vitriolic critic of Mr.
Abbas and his nemesis in exile. Palestin-
ian Finance Ministry records indicate
that the Emirates have not sent money
to the Ramallah-based government
since 2014.
“They don’t even invite us to their na-
tional day,” Mr. Erekat said.
The Emirates may also have been em-
boldened by the weariness of the wider
Arab public with the Palestinian cause
and by the almost apathetic response to
earlier moves by the Trump administra-
tion — like recognizing Jerusalem as Is-
rael’s capital and moving the United
States Embassy to the disputed city —
that once would have been explosive.
Palestinian analysts said the timing of
the latest announcement probably had
most to do with the upcoming presiden-
tial elections in the United States.
“The Gulf countries are interested in
keeping Trump in power,” said Ghassan
Khatib, a political scientist at Birzeit
University in the West Bank. “They
were very happy with Trump’s policy on
Iran and unhappy with Obama’s. So they
will do anything to contribute to the re-
election of Trump.”
As Oman and Bahrain, along with
Egypt, praised the deal, many here ex-
pected those small Gulf states to be the
next to forge relations with Israel.
In Ramallah, Palestinians denounced
the Emirates’ agreement with Israel as
a shameful betrayal, but hardly seemed
shocked. Soon after the announcement
on Thursday night, about 20 youths and
men gathered at Ashraf Hamoudeh’s
cafe to smoke hookahs and watch a soc-
cer match.
“This agreement will surely harm the
Palestinian cause, as well as Arab inter-
ests,” said Mr. Hamoudeh, 50. “It vio-
lates the consensus among all the Arab
countries that no single country can
sign peace agreements with Israel uni-
laterally.”
Nader Said, a pollster in Ramallah
and president of the Arab World for Re-
search and Development, a consulting
firm, said the deal merely makes public
and formalizes what was brewing be-
tween Israel and the Emirates all along.
But he worried that “this distraction
would allow Israel to focus on consoli-
dating its control of the West Bank by
building more settlements and roads,”
adding, “You would have thought that
the U.A.E. would have sweetened the
deal with some gestures toward Pales-
tinians.”
Some Israelis suggested that Mr. Ne-
tanyahu may even build more to placate
elements of his right-wing base angered
by his failure to fulfill the promise of an-
nexation.
The Palestinian Authority could also
find itself in a bind. Since May, to deter
Israel from carrying out its annexation
plans, it has curbed cooperation with Is-
rael, including security coordination,
and has refused to accept the tax reve-
nues that Israel collects on its behalf and
that make up a sizable portion of its
budget.
If there was any upside now, it may be
in staving off an annexation that many
analysts said could dash once and for all
hopes of a future Palestinian state based
on the two-state solution, the interna-
tionally accepted formula for resolving
the conflict.
But Ms. Odeh, the writer and analyst,
said that with constant settlement ex-
pansion, a creeping annexation was al-
ready underway. Nothing would change
in the Palestinian stance, or in Israel’s
long-term strategic need to deal with it,
she said, adding: “The Palestinians are
not going to wither away. We are here
and can be quite a nuisance. I think they
should know that by now.”
Mohammed Najib contributed reporting
from Ramallah, West Bank.

Somalia’s army told her to sew a skirt. Now she’s a colonel.

PROFILE
NAIROBI, KENYA
Daughter of rights activists
battles Islamic extremists
and gender discrimination
BY ABDI LATIF DAHIR
When Iman Elman decided to enlist in
the Somali National Army in 2011, the of-
ficer distributing uniforms gave her one
shirt and two pairs of pants. Puzzled,
Ms. Elman asked about the missing
shirt. There was none, he said. The extra
set of pants was provided for her to sew
into a skirt.
Ms. Elman, who was born into a fam-
ily of prominent peace and human rights
activists in the Somali capital of Mogadi-
shu but grew up in Canada, was 19 at the
time and wanted to join the front lines in
the country’s fight against the Shabab
extremist group. A skirt was not going to
do, she thought, and politely declined
the second pair of pants.
The incident, she said, served as a re-
minder of not only the challenges await-
ing her in the patriarchal world of the
Somali military but also the traditional,
conservative norms she would have to
overcome.
“We still have a long way to go,” she
remembered thinking at the time.
Almost a decade later, she is now Lt.
Col. Iman Elman, having risen from be-
ing a foot soldier and captain, and is in
charge of the army’s planning and strat-
egy — the only female department head
and one of the highest-ranking women
in the Somali military.
As one of just 900 women in an army
of 25,000, she is helping to push for ac-
countability and efficiency in a force
that’s battling one of the deadliest ter-
rorist groups on the African continent.
In a country where women remain mar-
ginalized politically, economically and
socially, Colonel Elman is also working
to deepen their role and help move them
beyond the menial jobs many are con-
fined to within the armed forces.
For decades, Somalia was mired in
conflict and chaos, rived by clan war-
lords competing for power and saddled
with a series of weak transitional gov-
ernments.
But Colonel Elman’s journey into the
military began as the country’s civil war
ebbed and a government backed by the
United Nations took control of the capi-
tal.
In 2011, as waves of Somalis from the
diaspora returned home, she visited
Mogadishu and hatched the idea of join-
ing the army. In discussions with sol-
diers, however, she was surprised by
how quickly the male officers tried to
discourage her, saying that she would be
assigned only domestic roles like cook-
ing and cleaning.
Their resistance only steeled her de-
termination. “That was my driving
force,” she said in a recent telephone in-
terview from Mogadishu.
“A lot of it was me feeling the need in
that moment to prove a point as to what
a female can and cannot do,” she said.
child soldiers, was fatally shot in Moga-
dishu.
By then, Ms. Adan had received refu-
gee status in Canada and was raising
their daughters in Ottawa. Colonel El-
man said her mother not only reminded
them of their roots but also ingrained in
them the notion that their gender should
not limit their ambitions.
In 2006, with violence continuing in
Somalia, Ms. Adan returned to Mogadi-
shu to head the Elman Peace and Hu-
man Rights Center, an organization that
is continuing the rights work of her hus-
band. In 2010, she was joined by her
daughter Ilwad, and the two have fo-
cused their efforts on women, children
and the vulnerable in Somali society.
When in 2011, Colonel Elman, then a
general arts student at University of Ot-
tawa, opted to join the military, many
were surprised that she was not follow-
LUCA BUCKEN ing in her father’s footsteps. But she did
Lt. Col. Iman Elman, who is in charge of planning for the Somali National Army, with not see a military career as contradic-
troops before their deployment in operations against the Shabab extremist group. tory to her father’s values and aspira-
tions, she said.
“When people look at it, they do see
“Not only do I know that I shouldn’t be girls, not knowing that they would never the irony,” she said. “But the reality is
limited because of my gender, but I feel be able to return. that my father and I are both striving for
like I can do just as much if not more As the war and the perils intensified, the same thing. We are both working for
than any of the men.” Ms. Adan and Mr. Elman decided the peace.”
Colonel Elman was born in Mogadi- wisest course was to split: She would Her sister Ilwad agrees, saying that
shu on Dec. 10, 1991, when Somalia was seek refuge abroad with their daughters while there’s “intentional division” be-
beginning to disintegrate. Midway to while he stayed behind to continue their tween military solutions and civilian ap-
the hospital for delivery, her mother, humanitarian work. proaches, there’s “a lot of complemen-
Fartuun Adan, and her father, Elman Ali It was a brave decision, but ultimately tarity in the work that we do.”
Ahmed, decided it was too dangerous in a tragic one. On Mar. 9, 1996, Mr. Elman, Last November, the family’s faith in
their neighborhood to leave her two old- who had popularized the slogan “Drop rebuilding Somalia was shaken after Al-
er sisters, Almaas and Ilwad, in the the gun, pick up the pen,” and who had maas was killed by an unknown assail-
house. They went back and fetched the set up an institute to rehabilitate former ant. Colonel Elman, who has lost close
colleagues in the war and has survived
three roadside bomb explosions and
countless encounters with the Shabab,
said she “broke down” after the shoot-
ing.
But after taking two weeks to mourn,
“we realized that there was no turning
back for us,” Colonel Elman said. “We
don’t have that option because we have
already sacrificed so much.”
For now, Colonel Elman is working on
instituting and strengthening reforms
aimed at creating an army that repre-
sents the true interests of the state in-
stead of clan allegiances. She has also
begun an effort to train army officers on
human rights and sexual assault —
something, she said, that was seen as
“nearly impossible” to implement when
she first suggested it to her superiors.
As the army’s chief planner, Colonel
Elman is also working to improve the
conditions of women in the army by in-
stituting quotas in recruitment and
training programs and creating an envi-
ronment to encourage more women to
sign up, including separate washing fa-
cilities and places to change clothes.
Colonel Elman said there is still a long
way to go “in terms of changing the
mind-set” of people in Somalia around
women serving, or holding key posi-
tions, in the army.
“You are not exactly sure if the coun-
try is ready to have a female general,”
she said. But no matter what, she said, “I
am very proud of how far we’ve come,
and even the small milestones that we
have reached have been quite signifi-
cant.”

4 | MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2020
world
Backlash in Britain over test scores
A fill-in grading system
for canceled exams draws
students’ ire and protests
BY MEGAN SPECIA
Hundreds of thousands of teenagers in
England tore open envelopes bearing
the results of their A-levels, comprehen-
sive exams that are supposed to assess
the quality of their secondary education
and serve as a barometer for college en-
trance.
But many were in for disappointment
last week, when the grades handed out
in England, Wales and Northern Ireland
were lower than they had expected,
based on their past grades and perform-
ance on previous mock exams. That was
the result of a system designed as a
stand-in for exams that had to be can-
celed this spring amid the coronavirus
pandemic, one that has been sharply
criticized as unfair to students from dis-
advantaged areas.
Samantha Smith, 18, from Telford in
England’s struggling West Midlands,
said she had long harbored concerns the
system would affect disadvantaged stu-
dents more. Her fears were confirmed,
she said, when she received scores far
lower than she had expected.
“It was unfathomable,” she said. “It
felt like a reminder of my place, and it
felt as though it was a way of the exam
board saying your post code is more im-
portant than your potential.”
Those grades have left her ineligible
for any of the law programs she had ex-
pected to begin in the fall.
Ms. Smith has joined many students,
parents, teachers and lawmakers in crit-
icizing the grading system, calling it ar-
bitrary and classist. Legal challenges to
the results have already begun.
In a typical year, students preparing
for college in Britain would sit for the ad-
vanced level qualifications, known as A-
levels, in the summer, and the grades
would determine university place-
ments. The exams are subject-based
and often compared with the American
SAT or ACT college entrance exams —
also criticized as biased against disad-
vantaged students — but they carry
even greater weight.
For most university-bound British
students, the A-level results are the only
quantitative measure of their secondary
education. But in the absence of testing
because of the coronavirus, the govern-
ment introduced a complicated system
to provide a grade for those students.
First, teachers gave an estimate of how
their students would have performed
had they taken the tests. Those grades
were then moderated by Ofqual, Eng-
land’s watchdog for exams and assess-
ments, which adjusted the grades
through a computer algorithm.
But that calculation heavily weighted
the historic performance of individual
schools. That had the effect of raising
scores for students from private schools
and those in wealthy areas and depress-
ing scores for students from less advan-
taged areas.
Ms. Smith, a first-generation Briton of
Afro-Hispanic descent who was home-
less for two years beginning at age 16,
had looked forward to taking her exams
Taking hard line, Greece abandons migrants at sea
GREECE, FROM PAGE 1
standing of the plight of migrants. But
many have grown frustrated and hostile
after a half-decade in which other Euro-
pean countries offered Greece only
modest assistance as tens of thousands
of asylum seekers languished in squalid
camps on overburdened Greek islands.
Since the election last year of a new,
conservative government under Prime
Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greece
has taken a far harder line against the
migrants — often refugees from the war
in Syria — who push off Turkish shores
for Europe.
The harsher approach comes as ten-
sions have mounted with Turkey, itself
burdened with 3.6 million refugees from
the Syrian war, far more than any other
nation.
Greece believes that Turkey has tried
to weaponize the migrants to increase
pressure on Europe for aid and assist-
ance in the Syrian war. Turkey has also
added pressure on Greece at a time
when the two nations and others spar
over contested gas fields in the eastern
Mediterranean.
“This practice is totally
unprecedented in Greece.”
For several days in February and
March, the Turkish authorities bused
thousands of migrants to the Greek land
border in a bid to set off a confrontation,
leading to the shooting of at least one
Syrian refugee and the immediate ex-
trajudicial expulsions of hundreds of mi-
grants who made it to Greek territory.
For years, Greek officials have been
accused of intercepting and expelling
migrants, on a sporadic basis, usually
before the migrants manage to land
their boats on Greek soil.
But experts say Greece’s behavior
during the pandemic has been far more
systematic and coordinated. Hundreds
of migrants have been denied the right
to seek asylum even after they have
landed on Greek soil, and they’ve been
Clockwise from top: Students in London protesting their lower-than-expected results on A-level tests, after a process some view as unfair to students from disadvantaged areas;
picking up test results; awaiting teacher consultations. “I do not see how a student can fail something that they haven’t actually themselves done,” said a principal in East London.
this year to qualify for a law program.
Despite the homelessness, and working
three jobs while finishing her schooling,
she had secured a place preliminarily in
the law programs at two universities,
based on her results in practice exams.
“Your personal circumstances, your ef-
forts overcoming adversity, it doesn't
matter,” she said. “Because a person like
you, a person from your background,
from your socio-economic class, you
forbidden to appeal their expulsion
through the legal system.
“They’ve seized the moment,” Profes-
sor Crépeau said of the Greeks. “The co-
ronavirus has provided a window of op-
portunity to close national borders to
whoever they’ve wanted.”
Emboldened by the lack of sustained
criticism from the European Union,
where the migration issue has roiled
politics, Greece has hardened its ap-
proach in the eastern Mediterranean in
recent months.
“This practice is totally unprecedent-
ed in Greece,” said Niamh Keady-Tab-
bal, a doctoral researcher at the Irish
Center for Human Rights, and one of the
first to document the expulsions.
“Greek authorities are now weaponiz-
ing rescue equipment to illegally expel
asylum seekers in a new, violent and
highly visible pattern of pushbacks
spanning several Aegean islands,” Ms.
Keady-Tabbal said.
Ms. al-Khatib, who recounted her or-
deal for The Times, said she entered
Turkey last November with her two
sons, 14 and 12, fleeing the advance of
the Syrian Army. Her husband, who had
entered several weeks earlier, soon died
of cancer, Ms. al-Khatib said.
With few prospects in Turkey, the
family tried to reach Greece by boat
three times this summer, failing once in
May because their smuggler did not
show up, and a second time in June after
being intercepted in Greek waters and
towed back to the Turkish sea border,
she said.
On their third attempt, on July 23 at
around 7 a.m., they landed on the Greek
island of Rhodes, Ms. al-Khatib said, an
account corroborated by four other pas-
sengers interviewed by The Times.
They were detained by Greek police offi-
cers and taken to a small, makeshift de-
tention facility after handing over their
identification documents.
Using video taken at this site by two
passengers, a Times reporter was able
to identify the facility’s location beside
the island’s main ferry port and visit the
camp.
PETER NICHOLLS/REUTERS
aren’t expected to do well. That’s the
same brush they paint you with.”
On average, student results have ris-
en in England, with slightly more of the
highest grades handed out than in previ-
ous years.
But around 40 percent of students in
England received a grade one step
lower than their teachers predicted, ac-
cording to the BBC, citing Ofqual fig-
ures, and 3 percent of students were
Migrants asleep in a buffer zone on the Turkish side of the border with Greece in Febru-
ary after being blocked by Greece from entering the country.
A Hellenic Coast Guard officer and an
official at the island’s mayoralty both
said the site falls under the jurisdiction
of the Port Police, an arm of the coast
guard.
On the evening of July 26, Ms. al-
Khatib and the other detainees said that
police officers had loaded them onto a
bus, telling them they were being taken
to a camp on another island, and then to
Athens.
Instead, masked Greek officials
transferred them to two vessels that
took them out to sea before dropping
them on rafts at the Turkish maritime
border, she and other survivors said.
The group was rescued at 4:30 a.m. by
the Turkish Coast Guard, according to a
report by the coast guard that included a
photograph of Ms. al-Khatib as she left
the life raft.
Ms. al-Khatib tried to reach Greece
for a fourth time, on Aug. 6, but said her
boat was stopped off the island of Les-
bos by Greek officials, who removed its
fuel and towed it back to Turkish waters.
shifted down by at least two grades.
In the face of a furious backlash, the
Department of Education said students
could appeal their grades, sit for exams
in the fall or use the results of practice
exams if those scores were higher.
At Leyston Sixth Form College, a
school for ages 16 to 19 in East London,
about 47 percent of the students re-
ceived grades lower than those estimat-
ed by their teachers, the principal, Gill
OZAN KOSE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
Some groups of migrants have been
transferred to the life rafts even before
landing on Greek soil.
On May 13, Amjad Naim, a 24-year-old
Palestinian law student, was among a
group of 30 migrants intercepted by
Greek officials as they approached the
shores of Samos, a Greek island close to
Turkey.
The migrants were quickly trans-
ferred to two small life rafts that began
to deflate under the weight of so many
people, Mr. Naim said. Transferred to
two other rafts, they were then towed
back toward Turkey.
Videos captured by Mr. Naim on his
phone show the two rafts being tugged
across the sea by a large white vessel.
Footage subsequently published by the
Turkish Coast Guard shows the same
two rafts being rescued by Turkish offi-
cials later in the day.
Migrants have also been left to drift in
the boats they arrived on, after Greek of-
ficials disabled their engines, survivors
and researchers say. And on at least two
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
TOLGA AKMEN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
TOLGA AKMEN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
Burbridge. said. That discrepancy was
significantly higher than the national
average.
“These students are being judged not
on their performance — because it’s
never been tested in the exam room —
but based largely on the historical data
of the school” they attended, she said.
The fact that high-performing stu-
dents with strong academic credentials
who attend schools in less advantaged
Najma al-Khatib, center, being rescued at sea on July 27 by the Turkish Coast Guard.
She said Greek officials had put her and 22 others in a life raft and set it adrift.
occasions, migrants have been aban-
doned on Ciplak, an uninhabited island
in Turkish waters, instead of being
placed on life rafts.
“Eventually the Turkish Coast Guard
came to fetch us,” said one Palestinian
survivor who was among a group aban-
doned on Ciplak in early July, and who
sent videos of their time on the island. A
report from the coast guard corrobo-
rated his account.
In parallel, several rights organiza-
tions, including Human Rights Watch,
have documented how the Greek au-
thorities have rounded up migrants liv-
ing legally in Greece and secretly ex-
pelled them without legal recourse
across the Evros River, which divides
mainland Greece from Turkey.
Feras Fattouh, a 30-year-old Syrian X-
ray technician, said he was arrested by
the Greek police on July 24 in
Igoumenitsa, a port in western Greece.
Mr. Fattouh had been living legally in
Greece since November with his wife
and son, and showed The Times docu-
..
areas are likely to see a lower grade than
those attending an elite school
amounted to “a scandal,” she said.
At her school, Ms. Burbridge said, the
impact has been felt most among the
highest and lowest achievers. For stu-
dents aspiring to places at highly com-
petitive universities, a slight reduction
in their grades based on the algorithm
could alter the course of their careers.
On the other end of the spectrum, the
lowest-performing students were as-
signed failing grades in subjects they
may have passed if actually tested.
“I do not see how a student can fail
something that they haven’t actually
themselves done,” Ms. Burbridge said.
Like many administrators and teach-
ers, she believes the system was ill-con-
ceived and deeply flawed. She said the
teachers’ assessments of their students’
grades are a better barometer of the stu-
dents’ skills than the system devised by
the government.
“A lot of my students have neither got
the grades that they deserve nor the
grades that they need to progress to the
next stage in their education or employ-
ment or apprenticeships,” she said.
“It felt as though it was a way
of the exam board saying
your post code is more
important than your potential.”
Some have called for the resignation
of Gavin Williamson, Britain’s education
minister, with some students protesting
outside government buildings on Fri-
day. But Prime Minister Boris Johnson
has defended the system as providing a
“robust set of grades.”
Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition
Labour Party, said in a statement posted
to Twitter that “the scale of the injustice
caused by the fatally flawed results sys-
tem has become clear.”
“Young people and parents right
across the country, in every town and
city, feel let down and betrayed,” he
wrote.
He demanded a return to teacher as-
sessments as “now the best option avail-
able.”
For many students, the coming weeks
will be a scramble to see whether they
can enroll in a university with their cur-
rent or mock scores, or whether they
will appeal the results or re-sit exams
next year.
“It’s a massive thing,” said Amy Turn-
bull, 19, a student from Manchester.
She had expected to take her exam
this summer, after already postponing
exams for a year as she recovered from
a broken back from a skiing accident.
She expected to achieve marks that
would allow her to enroll in a competi-
tive medicine program, but instead of
the three A’s she expected she got three
C’s. “I felt devastated,” she said. “I felt
like my whole future had just been torn
away.”
While she has received an offer of a
placement at another university, Ms.
Turnbull said the grades could damage
her career prospects.
“It’s determining the future of what
you are going to go do for the rest of your
life,” she said. “So it’s not something to
be taken lightly.”
TURKISH COAST GUARD COMMAND
ments to prove it. But after being de-
tained by the police in Igoumenitsa, Mr.
Fattouh said, he was robbed and driven
about 400 miles east to the Turkish bor-
der, before being secretly put on a din-
ghy with 18 others and sent across the
river to Turkey. His wife and son remain
in Greece.
“Syrians are suffering in Turkey,” Mr.
Fattouh said. “We’re suffering in
Greece. Where are we supposed to go?”
Ylva Johansson, who oversees migra-
tion policy at the European Commis-
sion, the civil service for the European
Union, said she was concerned by the
accusations but had no power to investi-
gate them.
“We cannot protect our European
border by violating European values
and by breaching people’s rights,” Ms.
Johansson said in an email. “Border
control can and must go hand in hand
with respect for fundamental rights.”
Patrick Kingsley reported from Rhodes,
and Karam Shoumali from Berlin.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
U.S. shows sign of losing ground on virus testing
Long lines, short supply
and results that take days
are contributing factors
BY SARAH MERVOSH,
NICHOLAS BOGEL-BURROUGHS
AND SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
For months, public health experts and
U.S. government officials have said that
significantly expanding the number of
coronavirus tests administered in the
United States was essential to reining in
the pandemic. By some estimates, sev-
eral million people might need to be
tested each day, including many people
who don’t feel sick.
But the country remains far short of
that benchmark, and, for the first time,
the number of known tests conducted
each day has fallen.
Reported daily tests in the United
States trended downward for much of
the last two weeks, essentially stalling
the nation’s testing response. Some
733,000 people have been tested each
day this month on average, down from
nearly 750,000 in July, according to the
COVID Tracking Project. The seven-day
test average dropped to 709,000 last
Monday, the lowest in nearly a month,
before ticking upward again at week’s
end.
The troubling trend comes after
months of steady increases in testing,
and may in part reflect that fewer people
are seeking out tests as known cases
have leveled off at more than 50,000 per
day, after surging even higher this sum-
mer. But the plateau in testing may also
reflect people’s frustration at the
prospect of long lines and delays in get-
ting results — as well as another funda-
mental problem: The nation has yet to
build a robust system to test vast por-
tions of the population, not just those
seeking tests.
Six months into the pandemic, testing
remains a major obstacle in America’s
efforts to stop the coronavirus. Some of
the supply shortages that caused prob-
lems earlier have eased, but even after
improvements, test results in some
cases are still not being returned within
a day or two, hindering efforts to quickly
isolate patients and trace their contacts.
Now, the number of tests being given
has slowed just as the nation braces for
the possibility of another surge as
schools reopen and cooler weather
drives people indoors.
“We’re clearly not doing enough,” said
Dr. Mark McClellan, the director of the
Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy
and the commissioner of the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration under former
President George W. Bush.
The downward trend may turn out to
be only a short-term setback: The na-
tion reported more than 800,000 tests on
Thursday and Friday. There are also
limitations to the data, which is largely
drawn from state health departments,
some of which have recently struggled
with backlogs and other issues. It may
not include tests done in labs not certi-
fied by the federal government.
But according to the figures available,
tests were declining in 20 states last
week, and data collected by the U.S. De-
partment of Health and Human Serv-
ices showed a similar trend nationally.
Without a vaccine or a highly success-
ful treatment, widespread testing is
seen as a cornerstone for fighting a pan-
demic in which as many as 40 percent of
infected people do not show symptoms
and may unknowingly spread the virus.
Testing a lot of people is crucial to seeing
where the virus is going and identifying
hot spots before they get out of hand. Ex-
perts see extensive testing as a key part
of safely reopening schools and busi-
nesses.
Testing capacity in the United States
has expanded from where it was only a
few months ago, but public health ex-
Look bad on a Zoom call? Might be time for a face-lift
Plastic surgeons say
business is booming
thanks to lockdowns
BY MATT RICHTEL
A growing number of people, stuck at
home and tired of staring at their own
haggard faces on Zoom, are finding a
fix: face- and eyelifts, chin and tummy
tucks and more.
At a time when many medical fields
are reeling from lockdowns when lucra-
tive elective work was postponed, cos-
metic surgery procedures are surging,
practitioners say, driven by unexpected
demand from patients who have found
the coronavirus pandemic a perfect mo-
ment for corporeal upgrades.
“I have never done so many face-lifts
in a summer as I’ve done this year,” said
Dr. Diane Alexander, a plastic surgeon
in Atlanta. She said she had performed
251 procedures through the end of July
from May 18, when her clinic opened
back up for elective surgery. “Pretty
much every face-lift patient that comes
in says: ‘I’ve been doing these Zoom
calls, and I don’t know what happened,
but I look terrible.’ ”
“This is the weirdest world I live in,”
Dr. Alexander added. “The world is shut
down, we’re all worried about global cri-
sis, the economy is completely crashing
and people come in and still want to feel
good about themselves.”
A testing site in Los Angeles. This month, for the first time since the start of the coronavirus outbreak, the number of tests conducted each day in the United States has fallen.
Testing in Kansas City, Kan. Experts fear the slowdown might reveal a sense of “pandemic fatigue,” where people get discouraged.
perts believe it must increase far more
to bring the virus under control.
The Harvard Global Health Institute
has suggested that the country needs at
least 1 million tests per day to slow the
spread of the virus, and as many as 4
million per day to get ahead of the virus
and stop new cases. Some experts view
that goal as too ambitious, and others
say the benchmark should focus not on a
particular number of tests but on the
percentage of people testing positive.
Yet there is broad consensus that the
current level of testing is inadequate
and that any decrease in testing is a wor-
One of her patients, a 55-year-old
woman named Joanne who asked that
her last name not be used because she
feared seeming vain, said she consid-
ered getting work done on her face for
years. But the pandemic finally made it
possible because she could conceal the
bruising and swelling during her recov-
ery period.
“Knowing everybody is staying in,
wearing a face mask, not coming out due
to social distancing, made it the spot on
right time,” she said. “Not one friend
knows I’ve done it. Family members
don’t know, and my sister and mom
don’t even know.”
The trend seems surprising in a tough
economy. Cosmetic surgery generally
isn’t covered by insurance, so pro-
cedures can cost as much as $25,000 for
a full body makeover — tummy, breasts,
face — and less for piecemeal work, like
$3,300 for eyelid surgery and $10,000 for
breast lift and enhancement. Patients
say they’re diverting funds they might
have spent on travel, concerts, sports
tickets, or other pleasures in their pre-
pandemic lives.
Since insurers generally don’t pay, it’s
difficult to track the precise number of
cosmetic procedures being done. Dr.
Lynn Jeffers, president of the American
Society of Plastic Surgeons, said de-
mand in America “is definitely busier
than what we had expected,” though she
added: “What we don’t know is if the
pent-up demand is transitory and will go
back to normal or will even dip.”
risome move in the wrong direction.
“There is a reasonable disagreement
about what that number ought to be, but
all of them are way ahead of where we
are right now,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, di-
rector of the Harvard Global Health In-
stitute. “There is no expert that I know
of that thinks that our testing infrastruc-
ture right now meets the needs of the
American people.”
Adm. Brett P. Giroir, the assistant sec-
retary for health and the Trump admin-
istration’s virus testing czar, said that
conducting millions of tests per day was
not realistic. The administration has
Patrice Solorzano, left, and her daughter, Jena, each took advantage of the solitude of
quarantine to get cosmetic surgeries.
Before Covid-19, invasive cosmetic
procedures like face-lifts had been de-
clining in favor of more minimal en-
hancements, like Botox injections,
fillers and other skin tighteners. Since
2000, the number of injectable pro-
cedures has risen by 878 percent, ac-
cording to the plastic surgeons society,
while the number of eyelid surgeries has
fallen by 36 percent and face-lifts by 8
percent in that period.
CHRISTOPHER SMITH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
asked states to test at least 2 percent of
their populations each month, or about
220,000 people per day nationally, which
Admiral Giroir said would be enough to
identify rising hot spots. “We are doing
the appropriate amount of testing now
to reduce the spread, flatten the curve,
save lives,” he said Thursday.
He said the government was already
testing large numbers of asymptomatic
people, and he described an effort to
strategically deploy tests, including to
those who are hospitalized and in nurs-
ing homes. “You do not beat the virus by
shotgun testing everyone all the time,”
HAIYUN JIANG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Colleen Nolan, executive director of
the American Academy of Cosmetic
Surgery, said she’d heard from surgeons
around the country that patients were
opting for more invasive procedures
now than in the recent past.
“They were going for fillers and Botox
because they didn’t have any down
time,” she said of patients. “Now they re-
alize they can have the procedure and
privately experience it.”
PHILIP CHEUNG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Admiral Giroir said, adding: “Don’t get
hung up on a number.”
Admiral Giroir also cited a decline in
known cases in states like Florida as an
indication that testing was sufficient.
But experts say the rate of people test-
ing positive in places like Florida re-
mains high, suggesting too little testing.
For much of the spring and summer,
the number of daily tests steadily in-
creased. The United States averaged
about 172,000 tests per day in April, be-
fore accelerating to an average of
510,000 in June and nearly 750,000 in
July.
The recent dip in testing is likely a re-
sult of several factors, epidemiologists
said. It may, in part, reflect an improved
outlook from earlier this summer, when
parts of the southern region known as
the Sunbelt were seeing alarming out-
breaks. The number of people hospital-
ized with the virus each day across the
country has decreased to around 45,000,
down from earlier peaks of around
59,000 in April and July. And the percent
of people testing positive over all is hov-
ering at about 7 percent, down from 8.5
percent in July.
“It’s an indication to me there are not
as many people getting sick,” said Nel-
son Wolff, the county judge in Bexar
County, Texas, where a site that pro-
vides free tests for people reporting
symptoms had seen a decline in de-
mand.
But experts fear that the slowing of
tests may also reveal a sense of “pan-
demic fatigue” — people who want or
need to be tested but may choose not to,
discouraged by stories of others waiting
hours in line and waiting as long as two
weeks for a result.
In Travis County, Texas, which in-
cludes Austin, the top health official, Dr.
Mark Escott, told local officials of a drop
in demand. “This is not because tests
are not available,” he said. “It is because
less individuals are signing up.”
That dilemma reveals perhaps the
biggest challenge going forward.
The solitude of quarantine was pre-
cisely what motivated Patrice
Solorzano, 62, who spent $20,000 on a
procedure known in the business as a
“mommy makeover” — a tummy tuck,
and breast lift and enhancement. She
underwent surgery on June 26, followed
by a two-week recovery in her home out-
side Dayton, Ohio.
By the second week, she said, “I was
fine. I popped myself up, got to the work-
station and went back online.”
Ms. Solorzano, who oversees 160 peo-
ple in 25 locations around the world as a
military contractor working on account
management for the Air Force, said the
expense wasn’t a financial burden in
part because she wasn’t spending as she
otherwise might. “I definitely don’t
spend it on gas,” she said. “We don’t go
to the mall and don’t really go shopping.”
She spent another $10,000 on a breast
lift and enhancement for her daughter,
Jena Solorzano, 24, who said she was
heading off to law school and thought
this moment was ideal to tackle a body-
image issue that has nagged at her in
part because of social media for years.
“It doesn’t help that every single so-
cial media page has a gorgeous woman
or a beautiful man on it,” she said, add-
ing: “Covid-19 actually gave us the per-
fect opportunity to get a more drastic
surgery.”
The loneliness of quarantine has also
motivated some people. A second pa-
tient of Dr. Alexander in Atlanta said
that she got a face-lift not only because
MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2020 | 5
world
The country has so far relied heavily
on laboratory tests, which are accurate
but can take hours or days for results
and are best suited for people who be-
lieve they may have been exposed to the
virus.
To expand testing to a level that could
keep the virus in check, experts say, the
United States will need to scale up other
types of testing, like antigen tests, which
are less accurate but can provide results
in as little as 15 minutes, and other new
technologies, like tests that could be
done at home.
Such an approach would reduce the
strain on laboratories, reserving those
tests for people who need them most,
while allowing the country to simulta-
neously screen large numbers of
asymptomatic people at schools, nurs-
ing homes, offices and neighborhoods.
By some estimates, as much as $75
billion in additional federal funding may
be needed. The Trump administration
agreed to allocate an additional $16 bil-
lion for states to conduct testing and
contact tracing, as part of a proposal Re-
publicans unveiled late last month. But
negotiations over a new coronavirus re-
lief bill have resulted in a standoff be-
tween the White House and Democratic
leaders in Congress, and only Congress
can approve new aid. Lawmakers have
left Washington until early September,
all but guaranteeing they will not ap-
prove more funds for testing until next
month.
The Food and Drug Administration
has approved just two companies to sell
antigen tests. One of the companies, the
Quidel Corporation, says it is making 1
million tests per week. The other, Bec-
ton, Dickinson & Company, said it is in-
creasing testing, with the aim of manu-
facturing 10 million tests by the end of
September.
Other tests are still entering the mar-
ket. For example, a saliva test devel-
oped by Yale University, which has been
tested on National Basketball Associa-
tion players and staff, won emergency
approval on Saturday from the Food and
Drug Administration.
“We are at an inflection point,” said
Dr. Jonathan Quick, who is managing
the pandemic response at the Rockefel-
ler Foundation. The organization has
said that the United States needs to
carry out about 4 million tests a day by
the fall. “That is a paradigm shift.”
“You do not beat the virus
by shotgun testing everyone
all the time. Don’t get hung up
on a number.”
Members of the Trump administra-
tion have repeatedly emphasized the
importance of testing. The nation’s top
infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony S.
Fauci, has said more testing of asymp-
tomatic people was needed. “We’re go-
ing to be doing more testing, not less,” he
told Congress in June.
Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the Trump ad-
ministration’s coronavirus coordinator,
has said that pooling tests together to
assess multiple samples at once could
expand capacity to as many as 5 million
tests per day.
The Department of Health and Hu-
man Services said in a report to Con-
gress that its aim was for the country to
have the capacity to perform 40 million
to 50 million tests each month by Sep-
tember, an average of about 1.3 million
to 1.6 million tests a day.
Admiral Giroir, the testing chief, said
the country was on pace to surpass that
number by the fall, with the majority be-
ing new tests to screen people. But he
said the figure was only a goal for capac-
ity, and that fewer tests might ultimately
be carried out.
Mitch Smith and Emily Cochrane con-
tributed reporting.
she had time to recover but also because
she had come face-to-face during
Covid-19 with a solitary life.
“I have great girlfriends but they
have husbands, and it does get lonely. I
realized I really want to meet some-
body,” said the woman, 57, who is di-
vorced. She asked that her name not be
used because “it feels very vain to be go-
ing in and doing something cosmetically
when so many people are struggling.”
Some plastic surgeons said some pa-
tients tell them that they want their
faces now to match newly in-shape bod-
ies since they’ve had time, for instance,
to take 10,000 steps each day. Other sur-
geons said that they’ve gotten a lot of in-
terest from people who spent the early
part of the pandemic sitting inside and
snacking on junk food.
Dr. Amy Alderman, another plastic
surgeon in Atlanta, said that many of her
patients have gained 10 to 20 pounds
while shut in at home. “It’s a common
theme,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s
what’s driving them here. They’re say-
ing: ‘As long as you’re doing my breasts,
could you do a little lipo?’ ”
Dr. Alderman said she’s been shocked
that the industry, and her practice,
hasn’t seen an economic backlash. She
said she figured “patients would be a lit-
tle hesitant spending between $6,000
and $25,000.”
“But I can’t keep up with the demand,”
she said. “I haven’t had an unfilled
minute in the operating room. And I’m
booked through September.”

6 | MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2020
world
How Trump’s drive to reopen schools backfired
A distrust of his motives
hardened teachers’ belief
that classrooms are unsafe
BY ELIZA SHAPIRO
In June, with the coronavirus crisis ap-
pearing to hit a lull in the United States,
teachers and parents around the coun-
try finally began feeling optimistic
about reopening schools in the fall. Go-
ing back into the classroom seemed pos-
sible. Districts started to pull together
plans. Then came a tweet.
“SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE
FALL!!!” President Trump declared on
July 6, voicing a mantra he would repeat
again and again in the coming weeks,
with varying degrees of threat, as he
sought to jump-start the nation’s flag-
ging economy.
Around the same time, caseloads in
much of the country started to climb
again. In the weeks since, hundreds of
districts — including nearly all of the na-
tion’s largest school systems, along with
scores of rural and suburban districts —
have reversed course and plan to start
the school year with remote instruction.
By some estimates, at least half of the
nation’s children will now spend a signif-
icant portion of the fall, or longer, learn-
ing in front of their laptops.
Rising infection rates were clearly the
major driver of the move to continue re-
mote learning. But Mr. Trump’s ag-
gressive, often bellicose demands for re-
opening classrooms helped to harden
the views of many educators that it
would be unsafe — and give their power-
ful unions fodder to demand stronger
safety measures or to resist efforts to
physically reopen.
“If you had told me that Trump was
doing this as a favor to the schools-must-
not-open crowd, I’d believe you,” said
Rick Hess, the director of education pol-
icy at the American Enterprise Insti-
tute, a conservative think tank.
Indeed, as the president has pushed
for schools to reopen, key constituencies
— parents and educators — have largely
moved in the other direction.
A July poll by Education Week found
that roughly 60 percent of educators
said the pandemic had worsened their
view of Mr. Trump, who already fared
poorly with much of that group. A recent
Washington Post poll found that parents
disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of
school reopening by a two-thirds major-
ity. And a new Gallup poll showed that
fewer parents want their children to re-
turn to school buildings now than they
did in the spring.
Teachers’ unions, which tend to sup-
port Democrats and have been among
Mr. Trump’s strongest critics, spent
most of the spring after schools closed
on the defensive, trying to appease their
Achild of immigrants and the face of a new America
Choice of Kamala Harris
reflects political clout of
a changing demographic
BY SABRINA TAVERNISE
When Kamala Harris’s mother left India
for California in 1958, the percentage of
Americans who were immigrants was at
its lowest point in over a century.
That was about to change.
Her arrival at Berkeley as a young
graduate student — and that of another
student, an immigrant from Jamaica
whom she would marry — was at the be-
ginning of a historic wave of immigra-
tion from outside Europe that would
transform the United States in ways its
leaders never imagined. Now, the Amer-
ican-born children of these immigrants
— people like Ms. Harris — are the face
of this country’s demographic future.
Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s choice of Ms.
Harris as his running mate has been cel-
ebrated as a milestone because she is
the first Black woman and the first of In-
dian descent in American history to be
on a major party’s presidential ticket.
But her selection also highlights a re-
markable shift in this country: the rise
of a new wave of children of immigrants,
or second-generation Americans, as a
growing political and cultural force, dif-
ferent from any that has come before.
The last major influx of immigrants,
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
came primarily from Eastern and
Southern Europe. This time the surge
comes from around the world, from In-
dia and Jamaica to China and Mexico
and beyond.
In California, the state where Ms.
Harris grew up and which she now rep-
resents in the Senate, about half of all
children come from immigrant homes.
Nationwide, for the first time in this
country’s history, whites make up less
than half of the population under the age
of 16, the Brookings Institution has
found; the trend is driven by larger
numbers of Asians, Hispanics and peo-
ple who are multiracial.
Today, more than a quarter of Ameri-
can adults are immigrants or the Ameri-
can-born children of immigrants. About
25 million adults are American-born
children of immigrants, representing
about 10 percent of the adult population,
according to Jeffrey Passel, senior de-
mographer at the Pew Research Center.
By comparison, the foreign-born por-
tion of the population is still much larger
— about 42 million adults, or roughly
Elementary school students waiting in the gymnasium for the school day to start in Godley, Texas, one of the first school districts in that state to reopen.
nervous members without alienating
parents exhausted by remote learning.
But Mr. Trump’s intervention may have
helped shift the political dynamic in
their favor.
LeeAnne Power Jimenez, the vice
president of the Tulsa Classroom Teach-
ers Association in Oklahoma and a
member of the state union’s Republican
caucus, said she was “frustrated” by Mr.
Trump’s approach to reopening, which
she characterized as more focused on
the economy than on teachers’ health
and safety.
Teachers “need to hear that our lives
are important,” Ms. Jimenez said, add-
ing that the president’s push to reopen
would help inform how she votes in No-
vember.
At an event at the White House on
Wednesday, the president called teach-
ers’ union leaders “disgraceful.”
There is widespread agreement on
most points of the political spectrum
From left: Kamala Harris at a campaign event in Wilmington, Del.; Donald Harris holding his daughter, Kamala, in 1965; Ms. Harris’s mother, mother, Shyamala Gopalan, left, with a friend during a civil rights protest in Berke-
ley, Calif., in the 1960s. In California, where Ms. Harris grew up and the state she now represents in the Senate, about half of all children come from immigrant homes.
one in six of the country’s 250 million
adults, Mr. Passel noted.
At 55, Ms. Harris is on the older side of
this second generation of Americans
whose parents came in those early
years. But her family is part of a larger
trend that has broad implications for the
country’s identity, transforming a
mostly white baby-boomer society into
a multiethnic and racial patchwork.
Because of the influx of immigrants
from outside Europe and their children,
every successive generation in America
in the past half-century has been less
white than the one before: Boomers are
71.6 percent white, Millennials are 55
percent white, and post-Gen Z, those
born after 2012, are 49.6 percent white,
according to William Frey, a demogra-
pher at the Brookings Institution.
“The demography is moving for-
ward,” said Marcelo Suarez-Orozco,
chancellor at the University of Massa-
chusetts, Boston, who has studied these
modern children of immigrants from the
Caribbean, China, Central America, and
Mexico. “This is the future in the U.S.”
The immigrants who arrived about 50
years ago — people from countries like
India, China and Korea — often had
higher education, but rarely went into
politics. Their children, now middle-
aged adults, are the ones moving into
American public life.
“When my parents came, it was like,
‘we just want to make it,’ ” said Suhas
Subramanyam, who was born to Indian
parents in Houston in 1986 and in 2019
became the first Indian-American to be
In the weeks since President Trump put schools at the center of his push to jump-start
the economy, hundreds of districts have reversed course on plans to reopen classrooms.
ERIN SCHAFF/THE NEW YORK TIMES
elected to the Virginia House of Dele-
gates. “But the second generation, we
want to make our mark on the world. I
wanted to do more than just work at a
law firm and make money. I feel very pa-
triotic about America.”
There were only about 12,000 Indian
immigrants in the United States around
the time Ms. Harris’s mother, Shyamala
Gopalan, arrived. Satish Korpe, an engi-
neer who moved to Virginia in 1975, said
there were so few Indian immigrants in
the state when he got there that there
was not a single Indian food store, and
people drove to New Jersey to buy gro-
ceries.
“In the mid-1970s, if you ran into
someone who was American, you might
have been the first Indian person they’d
ever seen,” he said. “Then in the 1980s,
maybe you would be the fifth. And in the
1990s, the tenth.”
These changes trace back to the pas-
sage of the landmark 1965 Immigration
and Nationality Act, which abolished
the quotas that were established in the
1920s to keep America white and Protes-
tant. The 1965 law banned discrimina-
tion based on ethnicity in the immigra-
tion system and prioritized entry for
people with relatives already in the
United States and those with special
skills.
In addition to opening the door to
many more immigrants from India, the
law also ended a strict quota on the num-
ber of immigrants from the West Indies.
Previously about only 100 Jamaican
immigrants a year were allowed into the
ANNA MONEYMAKER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
KAMALA HARRIS CAMPAIGN, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
country. And in 1960, around the time
when Ms. Harris’s father Donald Harris
began to settle in the United States,
there were fewer than 25,000 Jamaican
immigrants in the United States, accord-
ing to the Migration Policy Institute. But
by 2018, that number had increased to
more than 733,000.
In 1970, when Ms. Harris was growing
up and the effects of the 1965 law were
not felt fully yet, America was still
mostly a country of Black and white. Im-
migrants were less than 5 percent of the
population. Ms. Harris’ parents di-
More than a quarter of American
adults are immigrants or the
American-born children of
immigrants.
vorced when she was 5, and her mother
raised Ms. Harris and her sister as
Black girls, because she knew American
society would see them that way.
“My mother understood very well
that she was raising two Black daugh-
ters,” Ms. Harris wrote in her book, “The
Truths We Hold.”
Navigating the divide between Black
and white can be difficult for the chil-
dren of immigrants who are neither.
Ghazala Hashmi grew up in southern
Georgia, in the only Indian family in her
small town. Her father had brought the
family there after finishing his doctorate
in the late 1960s.
“We were a minority of one in our
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
LM OTERO/ASSOCIATED PRESS
that a functioning American economy
requires working schools, and that the
abrupt, unplanned shift to remote learn-
ing was disastrous for many children
who desperately need in-person in-
struction.
But even conservatives who said they
agreed with the president’s focus on re-
opening schools say he has been a poor
spokesman for the cause. They pointed
to his downplaying of the danger posed
by the virus, followed by his threats to
withhold federal aid to districts that did
not reopen classrooms, as potentially
alienating to centrist and even right-of-
center teachers and parents.
Many teachers and their powerful un-
ions said they saw Mr. Trump’s lan-
guage as bullying, wrongheaded, and
out of touch with the reality that the vi-
rus was raging through their communi-
ties, often in red states.
Teachers’ unions have played a deci-
sive role over the summer in shaping de-
school, always,” said Ms. Hashmi, 56,
who is now a state senator in Virginia. “I
never knew anybody who was like me. It
was extremely isolating.”
Ms. Hashmi was in second grade
when her school began to be integrated.
She has clear memories of the awkward
feeling of not fitting into a neat racial
category, in a country where people
clearly wanted to put her in one.
“I was very conscious as a child of be-
ing neither Black nor white,” she said.
“The white children would not play with
the Black children, and apparently I
could play with either. Sometimes I
could mediate. It was very formative to
be part of that as an immigrant and a
child of the South.”
These children of immigrants are
mostly better off economically than im-
migrants. They earn more, are more ed-
ucated, and are more likely to own a
home, according to a 2013 Pew report.
And they are more likely to marry a per-
son of another race: Interracial mar-
riage rates are especially high for sec-
ond-generation Hispanics, at 26 per-
cent, and among Asians, 23 percent,
Pew found.
The cultural clout of immigrant fam-
ilies may grow more, given that Ameri-
ca’s population is now growing at its low-
est rate since 1919, because of a drop in
births and an acceleration in deaths. If
current trends continue, 93 percent of
the growth of the nation’s working-age
population between now and 2050 will
be accounted for by immigrants and
their U.S.-born children, Pew projected.
..
cisions on reopening, by raising alarms
about health and safety, some of which
have been tied to Mr. Trump’s insistence
that the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention’s guidelines on safe school
reopening were too strict.
Teachers have threatened to conduct
sick-outs or strikes, and have already
filed a lawsuit to block reopening in
Florida, where the virus is raging.
Judd Deere, a White House spokes-
man, said unions and Democratic lead-
ers were seizing upon schools as a way
to attack the president.
“President’s Trump’s goal of seeing
schools open was never about politics, it
was about the health, growth and learn-
ing of our nation’s children, and it has
not backfired,” Mr. Deere said in a state-
ment. “Not only does the president want
to see schools open safely, but so do
teachers, students, parents and health
professionals.”
Perhaps nowhere was Mr. Trump’s
impact on the debate more clear than in
Chicago.
When the local teachers’ union sur-
veyed its members about reopening in
June, a little over half said they were ex-
tremely uncomfortable returning to the
classroom. That number rose to nearly
80 percent in recent weeks, said Jesse
Sharkey, the union’s president, as infec-
tion rates ticked up in the city and Mr.
Trump continued to push schools to re-
open in tweets and at news conferences.
When the president began highlight-
ing successful school reopenings in
Scandinavian countries with very low
virus rates, Mr. Sharkey said, “That did
a tremendous amount to undermine the
credibility about a safe reopening. It
wasn’t based on scientific or health cri-
teria, it was based on political expedien-
cy. And it didn’t help that it was Trump.”
Mayor Lori Lightfoot of Chicago an-
nounced this month that the school year
would begin online-only.
The American Federation of Teach-
ers, a national union, surveyed mem-
bers in mid-June and found that about
three-quarters were at least somewhat
willing to return to classrooms with
proper precautions. That number has
since dropped significantly, said Randi
Weingarten, the union’s president.
Stephen Swieciki, a high school social
studies teacher in New York and an ac-
tive member of that city’s teachers’ un-
ion, said he was nervous about the
prospect of returning to school even be-
fore Mr. Trump joined the debate so vo-
ciferously.
But when Mr. Trump started tweet-
ing, it “just solidified that this is not be-
ing planned rationally or with health ex-
perts’ recommendation in mind,” he
said.
Reporting was contributed by Julie
Bosman, Maggie Haberman and Shawn
Hubler.
KAMALA HARRIS CAMPAIGN, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
They are also a growing political
force: More than 23 million immigrants
will be eligible to vote in the 2020 presi-
dential election, Pew has found. That is
roughly 10 percent of the nation’s overall
electorate, a record high.
And because immigrants and their
children have tended to vote for Demo-
crats, the political winds are shifting in
states like Arizona, Nevada, Virginia,
Georgia and Texas.
Ashu Rai grew up in the 1970s about
70 miles east of where Ms. Harris was
born. Her town had a Sikh temple that
was a gathering place for South Asians
from miles around. As a child, she
played on the grass outside and went to
potluck suppers at people’s houses after
worship. But South Asians were still
rare in her suburban life, and for a while
as a teenager, Ms. Rai pretended to be
Hispanic.
“It was just easier to assimilate,
rather than trying to explain what being
from India meant,” said Ms. Rai, whose
Indian parents went to Wyoming in 1969
to earn postgraduate degrees before
moving to California.
Today Ms. Rai, a Democrat, feels
proud of her Indian roots. She works in
health care marketing, and organizes
dance parties for L.G.B.T.Q. South
Asians. She badly wanted Ms. Harris to
win the presidential primary. So when
the senator was picked for the ticket this
week, Ms. Rai was elated.
“My first word when I found out? I
think it was a swear word,” she said. “I
was like, ‘she’s got it.’ ”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Business
MP Materials’ mine in Mountain Pass, Calif., is the only operational rare earths mine in the United States. The company currently sends the ores it mines to China for processing.
The race for rare earths
WASHINGTON
Trump administration
is in a push to take away
production from China
BY ZACH MONTAGUE
An effort by the Trump administration
to break China’s stranglehold on the pro-
duction of coveted metals vital to na-
tional security and many industries has
ignited a battle among U.S. mining com-
panies and their political allies to win
hundreds of millions of dollars in federal
aid.
The metals, known as rare earths, are
used in products as diverse as smart-
phones, electric vehicles and wind tur-
bines as well as military hardware. Con-
cern about ensuring access to them has
grown more intense since the trade dis-
pute between the United States and
China, which dominates global produc-
tion, escalated.
The administration’s eagerness to
foster more domestic capacity has set
off a scramble in the small industry, en-
ticing a number of upstart companies
with no track record of mining or refin-
ing rare earths, some of which have
backing from powerful friends in Con-
gress.
With China supplying about 80 per-
cent of rare earths to the United States
as of 2018, the Trump administration has
set a goal of moving the entire supply
chain of rare earth metals to American
soil. And as political interest in the in-
dustry has grown, so has interest from
Wall Street.
By all accounts, building a domestic
industry is an ambitious undertaking.
The United States has only one opera-
tional rare earths mine, in Mountain
Pass, Calif.
The site was acquired out of bank-
ruptcy in 2017 by MP Materials, an
American company that is working to
refurbish a processing facility there that
dates to the 1950s. With the facility still
being modernized, the company cur-
rently sends the ores it mines to China
for processing.
MP Materials announced a deal to go
public in July, merging with a blank-
check company and opening itself up to
outside investment. MP Materials ex-
pects to raise about $490 million
through the deal. The company has also
faced political scrutiny over one of its in-
vestors, a Chinese company that owned
nearly 10 percent of MP Materials be-
fore the deal diluted its stake.
For years, a number of fledgling com-
panies have been working to develop
sites in other states.
They include Ucore in Alaska, Texas
Mineral Resources Corporation in
Texas, and Rare Element Resources in
Wyoming. Despite sitting on rare earth
deposits for years, none has broken
ground or begun processing the metals
in meaningful amounts.
In April, MP Materials was one of two
companies selected for a Pentagon
award focused on the production of a
narrow class of rare earth metals critical
to many military devices. Funding was
also awarded to Lynas Corporation, an
Australian company already extracting
ores from a mine in Australia, which en-
tered its bid in partnership with Blue
Line Corporation, a processing com-
pany in Texas. The amount of the award
was not disclosed.
SIM CHI YIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
AL DRAGO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Top, a processing plant in 2013 in Tianjin, China, that makes products using rare earths.
Above, in May, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, introduced a bill that would set
aside $50 million for the Pentagon to fund rare earth projects through 2024.
After the announcement, Senator Ted ager at Roskill, a commodities analysis
Cruz, Republican of Texas, wrote to Sec- company based in London. “For the U.S.
retary of Defense Mark T. Esper pro- to really be able to support itself, it can’t
testing the selection. He was joined by really be waiting on projects that are go-
five other Republican lawmakers, in- ing to take six, seven, eight, maybe up to
cluding Senators Michael B. Enzi and 10 years to really come to completion.”
John Barrasso of Wyoming, whose state To help spur the industry’s develop-
is home to the Bear Lodge mine owned ment in the United States, President
by Rare Element Resources. The letter Trump issued directives a year ago au-
argued that the Pentagon should direct thorizing funding for domestic compa-
funding only to companies operating en- nies working across five different stages
tirely in the United States. of rare earth production, including refin-
ing and manufacturing finished prod-
ucts.
The administration’s eagerness According to a Defense Department
to foster more domestic capacity proposal obtained by The New York
has set off a scramble in the Times, the Pentagon has already desig-
nated at least $125 million under the De-
small industry. fense Production Act for funding rare
earth projects through this year. By law,
A spokesman for Mr. Cruz said the the department can spend $50 million in
senator was only interested in building a each of the five categories identified by
domestic supply chain, and not pushing the White House, up to $250 million. The
on behalf of any specific company. “The administration has pressed Congress,
government should never pick winners so far unsuccessfully, for more.
and losers, which is a task for the mar- The Energy Department is also offer-
ketplace,” he said in an email. ing nearly $160 million for rare earths
Industry experts have cautioned that research and development this year.
the few other companies that could con- Last month, the Pentagon invoked the
ceivably meet the ideal of purely domes- Defense Production Act to award nearly
tic production are almost certainly $30 million to Urban Mining Company, a
many years away from that stage and small company in Texas that has said it
face considerable challenges in getting can manufacture finished rare earth
there. products by recycling the metals from
“We kind of consider it to take almost scrapped electronics containing them.
a decade to bring a rare earths project According to Urban Mining Compa-
from first mineral identification through ny’s website, it employs around 25 peo-
to production, and that’s really consider- ple. Since 2018, it has also paid at least
ing that everything goes relatively $240,000 to a lobbying firm run by Jeff-
smoothly,” said David Merriman, a man- rey A. Green, a specialist in rare earths
STEVE MARCUS/REUTERS
who has also represented Ucore since at
least 2011, according to the Center for
Responsive Politics.
A spokesman for Urban Mining Com-
pany did not immediately respond to re-
quests for comment.
In May, Mr. Cruz introduced a bill that
would set aside $50 million for the Pen-
tagon to fund rare earth projects every
year through 2024 and that would use
tax incentives to let manufacturers
write off double the cost of any domestic
rare earths they bought. Another bill in-
troduced in 2019 by Senator Marco Ru-
bio, Republican of Florida, would create
a cooperative of rare earth companies
that would act as a monopoly.
While the amounts of proposed fed-
eral aid are small by Pentagon procure-
ment standards — a single F-35 fighter
plane costs nearly $80 million — they
are a significant boost to early-stage
companies that have yet to break
ground.
Companies like Ucore and USA Rare
Earths, which owns a 70 percent stake in
Texas Mineral Resources Corporation,
have been aggressively making the case
that they can turn their mines into suc-
cess stories. Both have promoted ad-
vanced processing technologies and
mounted lobbying efforts, but have yet
to advance beyond an exploratory
stage.
From 2019 through the beginning of
this year, USA Rare Earth was repre-
sented by Jeff Miller, a prominent Re-
publican lobbyist who served on Mr.
Trump’s inaugural committee and also
helped direct Rick Perry’s presidential
campaign in 2016. A lobbying report
from July indicates that USA Rare Earth
specifically lobbied in support of Mr.
Cruz’s bill.
In June, the chief executive of Ucore,
Jim McKenzie, who had run the com-
pany since 2007, stepped down two
months after the company lost out to
MP Materials and Lynas for the grant
they won. Ucore has not started mining
or produced any significant revenue
since its founding in 2006, according to
its financial filings.
While the new funding for rare earth
production is closely tied to national se-
curity interests, the military represents
only a fraction of the market. To be eco-
nomically viable in the long run, rare
earth companies largely depend on
commercial demand, which has grown
slowly over time.
While the United States was once a
global leader in rare earths production
in the mid-20th century, it gradually
ceded its dominance to China, where lax
environmental regulations make it easi-
er to undertake highly polluting mining
activities. Since then, Chinese compa-
nies have also come to dominate the
business of separating out the metals
from the ores.
After China caused a surge in rare
earth prices by constricting supply in
2010, a raft of investors and companies
popped up in search of commercially vi-
able ways to build a rare earths business
in the United States. But China quickly
reversed course, causing prices to plum-
met, and undercutting efforts to build an
American industry.
Rare earths companies face many
other hurdles in the United States. Sepa-
rating and marketing the unique blend
of metals compounds at any given site
requires technical expertise and strat-
egy, and new mines face a lengthy envi-
ronmental permitting process, in part
because of radioactive wastes from the
ore that require safe disposal.
Wirelessly charging
while awaiting a fare
Wheels
BY JAMIE LINCOLN KITMAN
Starting next year, two dozen specially
outfitted electric Jaguar taxis will
roam the streets of the very green
capital of Norway. And when they are
idling at special taxi lines, they will be
able to be recharged from the ground
up.
This new program in Oslo, the Nor-
wegian capital, brings together a lux-
ury British carmaker, a leading Nordic
charge-point company and a former
NASA architect who grew up in a
public housing project in New York
City.
“In the building where a sniper shot
from the roof in ‘The French Connec-
tion,’ ” said the NASA alumnus, An-
drew Daga, referring to the 1971 police
drama with a memorable car chase.
Today, Mr. Daga is the chief execu-
tive of Momentum Dynamics in
Malvern, Pa. The company, which he
co-founded in 2009 with a focus on
advanced electric vehicle charging, has
been tapped to supply components
that, beginning in the first quarter of
2021, will power 25 electric Jaguar
I-Pace models for Cabonline/Norges-
Taxi in Oslo. Inductive charge pads
and associated equipment supplied by
Momentum will be placed upon and
beneath road surfaces at selected taxi
queues, enabling fast, hands-off charg-
ing for the I-Pace.
Norwegian lawmakers, concerned
about carbon emissions, have man-
dated the world’s most rapid transition
to electric vehicles. With its generous
tax incentives, the oil-rich country’s
car market now has the world’s highest
percentage of electric automobiles.
Battery electric vehicles captured
nearly 50 percent of its market through
June, compared with about 2 percent
in the United States. Norway is also
one of the most successful markets for
Jaguar’s roomy I-Pace, which was
introduced as a 2019 model (and retails
in America for $71,000 and up). Oslo’s
ambitious ElectriCity program envi-
sions an all-electric taxi fleet by 2024.
“We think that wireless charging is a
potential game-changer,” said Sture
Portvik, a manager for electromobility
in Oslo’s city government, “and we are
happy to assist by helping taxi drivers
keep moving and not adding cable
clutter to the city. By improving infra-
structure and providing better charg-
ing to the taxi industry, we are confi-
dent that by 2024 all taxis in Oslo will
be zero emission.”
At current power levels, likely to
increase significantly in the next few
years, 15 minutes of charging on the
Oslo pads adds 50 miles to the cars’
range. With frequent but brief stops
during the day, the cars will rarely be
fully charged, but should always be
charged enough.
“That’s the big idea,” Mr. Daga, 61,
said. “You don’t need to fill a battery to
100 percent or even 80 percent. You
just need to add another 20 percent
from wherever you start and you just
frequently recharge.
“It’s a concept referred to as grazing
rather than guzzling — a partial charge
here followed by another partial
charge somewhere else and at the end
of the day, you can stay in business
24/7,” he continued. “Convenience is a
factor, but efficiency is the point.”
Morgan Lind, the chief operating
officer of Recharge Infra, a division of
the leading Nordic charging company
Fortum, called it “the perfect charging
technology.”
“It is plainly there without anyone
having to change, understand, learn or
do,” he added.
Ancillary benefits are substantial,
too. They include eliminating conven-
tional charge points, which hog side-
walk space, and extending life for
batteries and system components that,
by being underground, won’t be ex-
posed to the elements. And because of
their locations and short-burst charg-
ing, there will be less downtime, which
is music to the ears of fleet owners and
taxi drivers alike. Software developed
by Momentum will enable monthly
billing to note each charging event.
Oslo, the Norwegian capital, will soon have two dozen electric Jaguar I-Pace taxis that
will be able to charge wirelessly at selected queues across the city.
MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2020 | 7
Mr. Daga’s company began supply-
ing systems for electric bus trials in
four American cities in 2015, and
started work recently with a major
European manufacturer on an urban
delivery truck program. Meanwhile, a
new engineering collaboration is un-
derway with the Chinese electric vehi-
cle engineering powerhouse Geely,
owner of Volvo, Lotus and the London
Electric Vehicle Company (the former
London Taxi International), though Mr.
Daga did not provide any details.
With few competitors as yet, Mr.
Daga anticipates they will arrive. “One
company won’t be responsible for
setting that up for the entire planet,” he
said.
His lofty hope is that the new sys-
tem, believed to be the world’s first,
will prove the efficacy of a wireless
charging infrastructure and will be
deployed virtually anywhere, speeding
the adoption of electric vehicles, which
many see as a key element in the
decarbonization of transportation.
Mr. Daga said Momentum is building
a new 90,000-square-foot headquarters
in Malvern and planning to double its
staff to over 100 people in 2021. The
Oslo program is more than a proof of
concept for this company: It is the first
commercial application of Momen-
tum’s technology and the realization of
a dream almost a dozen years in the
making.
“There was never a question in my
mind in the entire period since that
this was the right thing to do,” Mr.
Daga said. “It was almost a mission
that I was on.”
Mr. Daga moved as a teenager from
the New York borough of Brooklyn to
Ithaca, N.Y., where his Italian father, a
waiter, opened a popular restaurant,
the Elba Kitchen. He studied architec-
ture at Cornell, but his father’s death
led him to transfer to Temple Univer-
sity in Philadelphia. After Mr. Daga
graduated in the early 1980s, NASA
approached him, and before long he
was working on the
International Space
“We are Station.
happy to Momentum’s
assist by essential break-
helping taxi through came from
drivers keep Mr. Daga’s encounter
moving and with Bruce Long, an
electrical engineer-
not adding
ing professor at
cable clutter.’’ Bucknell University
with whom he later
founded the com-
pany. Mr. Long, who died in 2018, had
developed crucial wireless charging
knowledge while working in Antarctica
on missions to measure the movement
and depth of the continent’s glaciers
for Pennsylvania State University’s
geophysics program.
“One of the things that you need in
Antarctica is a means of powering
electronic devices without opening
their cases, because the blowing snow
will get into the case if you open it,” Mr.
Daga said. “So Bruce had been think-
ing about wireless power for some
time and applied it to our program, but
at a much, much higher power level
than he’d originally conceived. That
was the kernel of the intellectual prop-
erty, and it began to grow from there.
Now we’ve got a bit of a forest.”
He added: “I have wireless chargers
for my phones, and I don’t use them
much because there’s no compelling
reason to do that for a phone. But it is
a compelling reason to do it for a 5,000-
pound, moving vehicle.”
There will eventually be inductive
charging at home, Mr. Daga antici-
pates, but for now the goal is to con-
vert fleets over to electricity faster.
“The taxi fleets and transit authori-
ties of various cities that run buses
need to have the lowest possible cost
system for refueling those vehicles,” he
said.
Autonomous vehicles — cars with no
drivers — working urban and subur-
ban routes will be particularly well
suited to wireless, touchless charging
systems, Mr. Daga said.
“That’s what wireless power does,”
he said. “It automates the process of
delivering energy to fleets. It auto-
mates and makes safer and cleaner the
whole process of keeping those fleets
in constant operation. That’s the busi-
ness proposition.”
JAGUAR

8 | MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2020
business
The cost of dining out this summer
Rush to open restaurants
has hurt customers and
workers in fresh outbreaks
BY JENNIFER STEINHAUER
Across the United States this summer,
restaurants and bars, reeling from man-
datory lockdowns and steep financial
declines, opened their doors to
customers, thousands of whom had
been craving deep bowls of farro, frothy
margaritas and juicy burgers smoth-
ered in glistening onions.
But the short-term gains have led to
broader losses. Data from states and cit-
ies shows that many community out-
breaks of the coronavirus this summer
have centered on restaurants and bars.
In Louisiana, roughly a quarter of the
state’s 2,360 cases since March that
were outside of places like nursing
homes and prisons have stemmed from
bars and restaurants, according to state
data. In Maryland, 12 percent of new
cases last month were traced to restau-
rants, contact tracers there found, and
in Colorado, 9 percent of outbreaks over
all have been traced to bars and restau-
rants.
It is unclear what percentage of work-
ers transmitted the virus among them-
selves or to patrons, or whether
customers brought in the virus. But the
clusters are worrisome to health offi-
cials because many restaurant and bar
employees across the country are in
their 20s and can carry the virus home
and possibly seed household transmis-
sions, which have soared in recent
weeks through the Sun Belt and the
American West.
Since late June, scores of popular
restaurants throughout the country, in-
cluding in Nashville, Las Vegas, Atlanta
and Milwaukee, had to close temporar-
ily because of cases among employees.
Texas and Florida also had to close bars
this summer after a surge of new cases
hobbled those states. In a recent week in
San Diego, 15 of the 39 new cases in com-
munity settings stemmed from restau-
rants. And in Washington, cases have
begun to edge up since the city reopened
indoor dining.
In New York City and many other
places, indoor dining, which has proved
far more dangerous than outdoor eat-
ing, remains banned. Epidemiologists
roundly agree that indoor dining, espe-
cially in bars, is far more likely to spawn
outbreaks than outdoor settings.
“As of recently, we still hadn’t traced a
major U.S. outbreak of any sort to an
outdoor exposure,” said Lindsey
Leininger, a health policy researcher
and a clinical professor at the Tuck
School of Business at Dartmouth Col-
lege in New Hampshire.
In Spokane, Wash., 24 customers and
an employee, most of them between the
ages of 19 and 29, all tested positive for
the virus. Their cases were linked to a
taco restaurant, even though health de-
partment officials indicated that the
restaurant was practicing all the recom-
mended prevention methods.
“They are a factor that has to be man-
aged,” said Kelli Hawkins, a spokes-
woman for the Spokane Regional Health
District.
Since the beginning of the pandemic,
a few business sectors, most notably
health care (especially nursing homes)
and meat processing, have accounted
for a large share of cases in many states.
But as cities and states have moved to
reopen and many struggling restaurant
owners have rushed to restart, the virus
has come along for the ride. When the
coronavirus finally reached the last Cal-
ifornia county to see a case, remote
Modoc in the far northeastern part of
the state, it came via a little Basque
restaurant.
While millions of restaurant and bar
With Trump on the attack, China softens its tone
CHINA, FROM PAGE 1
The call for dialogue was repeated by
several prominent officials, including
Yang Jiechi, China’s top diplomat, and
Cui Tiankai, the ambassador to the
United States, in recent days. On
Wednesday, Le Yucheng, another senior
Chinese diplomat, accused American
politicians of telling lies to smear China.
But he also said the two countries
should work to prevent relations from
“spiraling out of control” over the next
several months.
“The change is that the United States
keeps attacking, and if China keeps
countering, and also stops communicat-
ing while simply following along ir-
rationally, it will probably only make the
relationship worse,” said Song Guoyou,
an American studies expert at Fudan
Unversity in Shanghai, describing the
shift in diplomatic strategy.
“China may be indeed sending this
kind of signal intensively to the United
States, saying it hopes to work with the
U.S. on issues calmly,” Mr. Song said.
The campaign for restraint also ap-
pears to be aimed, in part, at signaling to
Mr. Trump’s Democratic challenger, for-
mer Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.,
and others in the United States that
China still sees a friendly path forward.
While Chinese officials believe Mr. Bi-
den is less volatile and caustic than Mr.
Trump, many also worry that he would
continue to push for harsh action
against China on human rights, technol-
ogy and other issues, analysts said.
“There’s still a possibility that ten-
employees who were laid off during
lockdowns have been desperate to get
back to work, many have found them-
selves caught between bosses who want
them back as soon as possible and
customers who balk at following safety
rules, like mask wearing and maintain-
ing social distancing.
“I 100 percent felt forced back to work
at the bar,” said Jennifer Welch, a bar-
tender at a large pool hall in Baton
Rouge, La. “Even though I have an im-
munocompromised 1-year-old and, at
the time, my 58-year-old father was in
hospice for Stage 4 small-cell lung can-
cer.” Although unemployment would
have paid more, she yielded to the pres-
sions could become even more pro-
found, and more severe, in the future un-
der a Democratic administration,” said
Shi Yinhong, director of the Center on
American Studies at Renmin University.
Despite the softer tone, China’s un-
derlying view that the United States is a
strategic and ideological rival bent on
suppressing its rise has not changed.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, continues to
push a forceful agenda, including a
crackdown on free speech and activism
in Hong Kong, even in the face of punish-
ments by the United States. Mr. Xi’s gov-
ernment still routinely denounces
America as a bully and hypocrite.
But China’s aggressive moves have
also caused disputes with other coun-
tries including Australia, Britain, Cana-
da and India. Mr. Xi may now be seeking
to project a less confrontational image
as China finds itself increasingly iso-
lated.
“Beijing’s rhetoric appears aimed at
defusing the global backlash that its
brash diplomacy and harsh policies
have provoked,” said Jessica Chen
Weiss, an associate professor of govern-
ment at Cornell University in Ithaca,
N.Y.
As Mr. Trump has escalated his puni-
tive campaign against China, Beijing’s
propaganda apparatus has worked to
avoid stoking anger at home by instruct-
ing state media outlets to play down un-
favorable news and limit talk of war, Chi-
nese journalists say.
News of the closure of the American
Consulate in Chengdu last month, a vis-
sure, Ms. Welch said, and worked 10-
hour shifts.
Among food service workers, the out-
breaks in restaurants appear to have
particularly hurt Latinos, who had been
already disproportionately hit by the vi-
rus.
Brian Biondi, a bartender in the
French Quarter in New Orleans, did not
yearn to return to his job in June after
three months off, because he was wary
of getting the virus. By late July, his
fears materialized, and he came down
with a mild case of Covid-19, the illness
caused by the coronavirus.
“There are still a lot of people that are
denying the intensity, a lot of non-
On the day that the American Consulate in Chengdu closed, the Chinese police detained
a man who shouted slogans and held up Chinese flags in front of the compound.
ceral symbol of the erosion of ties be-
tween the two countries, was buried in a
two-sentence brief at the bottom of page
three of People’s Daily, the Communist
Party’s flagship newspaper.
Mr. Trump’s signing this month of two
executive orders meant to restrict the
use of Chinese-owned social media apps
in the United States did not even make
the evening news, one of the most
widely watched television programs in
China.
Hu Xijin, the chief editor of Global
maskers,” he said. After three weeks off,
Mr. Biondi is waiting to be returned to
the schedule. “I feel great,” he said. “I
still worry about long-term effects. I still
worry this took years off my life.”
Restaurants find themselves in a
bind. U.S. government aid approved by
Congress this spring mainly went to
businesses that kept most of their work-
ers employed, but restaurants and bars
were forbidden to open. Then many offi-
cials on the local, state and federal levels
— including President Trump —
pressed restaurants to reopen, even as
others cited them as reigniting the virus
this summer.
“Restaurants generate a lot of sales
THOMAS PETER/REUTERS
Times, a staunchly nationalistic party-
run tabloid, said that he has been sur-
prised by the speed at which ties with
the United States have deteriorated. In
this climate, he said, his newspaper had
an obligation “not to intensify this con-
flict” and was trying to limit the publica-
tion of content that could rouse hatred of
the American people.
“We stress that when the United
States suppresses China, in general we
would say that this is the work of the U.S.
government,” Mr. Hu said in an inter-
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
PHOTOGRAPHS BY WILLIAM DESHAZER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
In Nashville, above, masks are required
by law, and signs encourage social dis-
tancing. A restaurant in the city,
Pinewood Social, left, is operated by the
Strategic Hospitality group, which re-
quires temperatures be taken for every-
one entering. “We did research on what
places around the world were doing and
learned from them,” said Benjamin Gold-
berg, one of the group’s founders.
and payroll tax revenue, so some of the
pressure came from city and state gov-
ernments,” said Daniel Patterson, a chef
and restaurateur in California, where
cases exploded this summer. “And I
think one of the factors behind the quick
openings is that our society sees restau-
rants as disposable and those who work
in them as disposable, so in general, peo-
ple are less concerned with restaurant
worker safety than they are with their
own needs. They want a taco and a cold
beer when they want it.”
Like many businesses, restaurants
have been unable to tap business inter-
ruption insurance money because the
virus did not cause physical damage to
the properties.
To get federal aid, restaurants were
first required to spend 75 percent of that
relief on payroll (this was later reduced
to 60 percent). They also faced a short
deadline to rehire workers. But the only
way this was useful to businesses,
restaurant owners said, was if they were
able to reopen and generate revenue in
that period, which was nearly impossi-
ble. Most places were allowed to operate
at only 50 percent capacity, and the pan-
demic stretched on longer than anyone
expected.
“We scrambled to get as many people
in as fast as possible,” said Michael
Shemtov, who was forced to close two of
the 10 restaurants that he owns in
Charleston, S.C., and Nashville. “The
only way to lure them in was to pay them
for 40 hours a week, no matter how
much they worked or didn’t work.”
“But you can’t make up labor costs
view. “We would generally not hang
these hostile intentions on all of the
United States or all Americans.”
Still, Mr. Hu drew some criticism late
last month after suggesting on his social
media page that China should rapidly
expand its stock of nuclear warheads to
deter the United States. A prominent nu-
clear weapons expert, in an unusually
blunt rebuke, called such talk “hype”
and said its aim was to “incite dissatis-
faction” with the party and the military.
Tamping down frustration at the
United States among ordinary Chinese
may be challenging. Chinese social me-
dia sites have been awash with assertive
commentaries carrying headlines such
as “America will collapse this year” and
“Does the United States really dare to go
to war with our country?”
The public generally takes a hawkish
view of foreign policy, surveys have
shown, favoring greater military spend-
ing and a more assertive approach to de-
fending China’s territorial claims. Bei-
jing continues to take a tough stance on
Taiwan, the self-governed island China
claims as its territory, and on Thursday
said it had held military drills near it.
In some cases, Chinese internet users
have attacked scholars and journalists
who have toned down their rhetoric.
Jin Canrong, a professor of interna-
tional studies at Renmin University in
Beijing, has argued previously that
China should take a more assertive role
in global affairs and challenge Ameri-
ca’s influence.
China has the ability to destroy U.S.
..
with crazy-busy days on the weekend
anymore,” he added.
At the same time, “the conversation in
May moved from keeping restaurants
closed to getting back to work and life,”
he said. “There wasn’t a sympathetic
ear in the South Carolina governor’s of-
fice when we said we need to get the
numbers down before we reopen.”
In Louisiana this spring, Republican
lawmakers threatened Gov. John Bel
Edwards, a Democrat, with removing
his power to enforce emergency orders
if he did not permit businesses to re-
open. In a few states, the dynamic was
reversed: Restaurants pushed govern-
ments to let them reopen, arguing that
they would otherwise close for good.
“We were all understandably nervous
about opening up, but any bartender
worth their salt knows that when it’s
time to go to work, you leave your bag-
gage at home in order to take care of
your guests,” said Waites Laseter, the
head bartender at the Backspace Bar &
Kitchen, a New Orleans hot spot. Mr.
Laseter said the early days of safe prac-
tices and big tips waned as more busi-
nesses opened and tourists trickled in.
Many customers nastily opposed rules
and made his job a misery, he said.
“A friend of mine was threatened with
a gun over putting on a mask,” he said.
“I’ve always approached a bar as a safe
space. Anybody can make a vodka and
soda at home.”
But, he said, “Improper bar behavior
has become an act of political rebellion.”
Contact tracing can help keep restau-
rant outbreaks at bay, experts say, but
only in places without widespread infec-
tions. “I like to think that due to contact
tracing and quickly quarantining close
contacts, we have not had large out-
breaks in restaurants yet,” said Melissa
Lunt, the director of nursing at the Gra-
ham County Health Department in Ari-
zona. When workers were sickened in
two restaurants, the department moved
quickly to quarantine them to prevent
further community spread.
Testing is its own problem for work-
ers. While many cities offer free tests,
results can take days or even weeks to
return, leaving employees out of a job
while they wait.
“A lot of times the restaurant will foot
the bill if they want quick testing
through a private company,” said Dr.
Alex Jahangir, the chairman of a coro-
navirus task force in Nashville who has
studied the role of restaurants and bars
in outbreaks. “Sometimes the restau-
rant will tell their employees to come to
one of our city sites, which are free, but
the results may take three days. If peo-
ple are symptomatic, sometimes the
restaurant will refer the person to a local
medical center and will have their
health insurance pay for the test.”
Some proprietors are doing what they
can to keep operating and keep people
safe, at great cost and worry. Benjamin
Goldberg, a founder of Strategic Hospi-
tality, a group that runs eight spots in
Nashville, has opened some places with
indoor dining and kept other places
closed. In the interim, he and his staff
members have become public health ex-
perts of a kind. “We did research on
what places around the world were do-
ing and learned from them,” he said.
“City and state guidance were only the
baseline of our expectations.”
Short of testing everyone who worked
in or entered his restaurants — an im-
possibility — the company moved to
take the temperature of every customer,
worker and vendor before they are per-
mitted to enter. Employees are tested
regularly for the virus. All silverware
comes in a bag sealed with a sticker,
menus have gone virtual and pens used
to sign checks are sanitized and placed
in a sealed bag.
“We felt if we could build that trust in
the short term,” Mr. Goldberg said, “it
would pay off in the long term.”
military bases in Asia, he has said.
More recently, Mr. Jin has said China
should pursue a “chess war” with the
United States rather than armed con-
flict or a Cold War. He was criticized on
Chinese social media sites for his more
moderate tone.
In an interview, Mr. Jin defended his
views, saying the risk of an accidental
confrontation was higher before the
American election and that China would
keep a low profile. “China won’t fire the
first shot,” he said. “We won’t provoke.”
Even as China shifts tactics, its suc-
cess could be limited. The Trump admin-
istration shows no signs of easing its ef-
forts to dismantle decades of political,
economic and social engagement with
China. The State Department on Thurs-
day said it was designating the U.S.
headquarters of the Confucius Insti-
tutes, a Chinese government educa-
tional organization, as a diplomatic mis-
sion, a decision China denounced as “to-
tally unacceptable.”
The Trump administration is also un-
likely to heed calls for a cease-fire unless
Chinese officials go beyond promises of
reconciliation. Beijing may need to offer
concrete proposals on issues such as
military tensions in the South China Sea
or Mr. Xi’s crackdown in Hong Kong.
“There’s no way to maintain the
avoidance of major conflict without con-
crete trade-offs,” said Mr. Shi, the Amer-
ican studies expert at Renmin Univer-
sity.
Albee Zhang contributed research.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Opinion
My country is under attack
Belarusians Valzhyna Mort
took to the
streets to
reclaim their The opposition leader, fearing for her
dignity. The safety and her family, has been forced to
flee. Peaceful protests have been met
government with violence: Hundreds wounded, two
responded dead. People have disappeared into
with brutal detention, violently pulled off the
streets. And every night around 6 p.m.,
violence. before the most brutal police violence
begins, the internet is shut down. Bela-
rus is under attack from its own govern-
ment.
What’s happening in my country
didn’t start last Sunday, when a bla-
tantly rigged election returned Presi-
dent Alexander Lukashenko, the coun-
try’s autocratic ruler of 26 years, to
power — and provoked a wave of resist-
ance. No: Belarusians have lived under
state violence for decades. But in its
intensity and its brutality, in its effort to
punish the Belarusian people for
dreaming of something better, the
repression marks a new low in the
country’s history.
Rigged elections are nothing new to
Belarus; Mr. Lukashenko could not
have prospered so long without them.
But this time the fraud — the official
results had Mr. Lukashenko, who has
faced increasing discontent about his
rule, with close to 80 percent of the vote
— was so offensive, so humiliating, that
Belarusians experienced it as dehu-
manizing. To reclaim their dignity, they
took to the streets.
Peaceful and unarmed, they do so
with only their own bodies. People wear
white ribbons (a symbol of support for
the opposition); women, dressed in
white, carry flowers and sing lullabies.
At night, people blink lights on and off in
their apartments. In videos published
on Telegram channels, whole neighbor-
hoods of apartment blocks appear
blinking like a giant swarm of fireflies.
“Zyve Belarus!” (“Long live Belarus!”),
a voice shouts from a balcony. “Zyve!”
(“Indeed, it lives!”), strangers shout
back through the darkness.
At night, I lie in my bed in Ithaca, N.Y.,
trying to sleep. But my thoughts are
back in Belarus, which I left as a young
woman and where I regularly return. I
get up and message my friends in Bela-
rus: It’s already morning there. I’m still
in New York, but my body now lives on
Belarusian time.
The vicious- The protests that
have rolled nightly
ness of the across the country
crackdown, since Aug. 9 are
counterintuit- unique. There is no
ively, shows leadership, no con-
the power of trol center; even
the people. basic public coordi-
nation is difficult
because phone and
internet services are
off or unreliable. In a nation left without
a leader, everyone stands up to take
responsibility.
People use Telegram to mark their
location, request help and warn others
of police ambush. In self-organized
droves, they are walking out into city
streets as if to say: I exist, I have dig-
nity, I have a voice and I count. What is
happening in Belarus is a mass improvi-
sation in dignity, a movement against
dehumanization and invisibility.
With the internet down, information
from the country is fragmented and
unchecked. But what it shows, in horri-
fying short videos recorded on cell-
phones and circulated on Telegram, is
brutality and violence unleashed by the
police and special forces on a terrifying
scale. Rubber bullets and stun grenades
launched into peaceful crowds. Shots
fired into people’s backs. Truncheons
The unlikely triumph of Italian nationhood
Italy coheres
as America
breaks apart.
Roger Cohen
SANTA MARGHERITA, ITALY In Italy there
are seasons — and then there is the
season. Summer comes, the country’s
woes are set aside, and, to the eternal
refrain of “tutti al mare” (“Everyone to
the sea”), the exodus to the consoling
coast begins. The national debt fades
between sea and stars.
This year is a little different. Masks
dangle from ears in the new insouciant
look or are tied around elbows then used
for a bump-greeting. Beach chairs are
(anti-) socially distanced. With stores
operating two-at-a-time limits, the line
for focaccia is so long that people read
an entire newspaper (and Italians still
read them) as they wait. Americans
have almost vanished, as have the
Russians. Children’s beach chatter
revolves around the all-canceling virus,
which gives a new edge to games of tag.
The difference is the coronavirus,
wielded over defenseless demonstra-
tors. Journalists shot at and beaten.
Belarusians have never before been
attacked by their own troops so brutally,
so mercilessly.
It’s not just protesters, either. People
are being detained in great numbers for
the offense of walking down the street.
Cars are stopped by the police at ran-
dom, their drivers dragged out, beaten
and arrested. “Go home!” the riot police
scream in one video. “But we are
home!” a voice screams back.
Around 6,700 people have been de-
tained, according to the authorities — a
number so staggeringly high Michelle
Bachelet, the United Nations human
rights chief, said it suggested a “clear
violation of international human rights
standards.” And once detained, people
face horrors. Released protesters de-
scribe 50 men kept to a single cell, de-
nied food and all communication with
the outside, and subjected to severe
beatings. There is talk of torture.
The viciousness of the crackdown,
counterintuitively, shows the power of
the Belarusian people. Their very exist-
ence keeps the state in fear. Every
passer-by, to the riot police, is a pro-
tester; every citizen, to Mr. Lukashen-
ko’s regime, is a threat. (The approach
is ultimately futile: Early Friday, under
increasing pressure and after another
day of peaceful protests, the govern-
ment promised to release those de-
tained. Whether anyone will answer for
the sadistic treatment of the prisoners
is unknown.)
Resistance comes readily to Bela-
rusians. After all, during World War II,
many of them organized into one of the
largest resistance movements in Eu-
rope. But there’s also a rhythm to the
lurking like the knowledge that summer
will end. Contained, almost defeated,
yet out there beyond the drone of the
chirping cicadas, leaving Italians in a
limbo between liberation and fear.
Among Western nations, Italy was
the first to be hit hard by the pandemic.
The country learned the loneliness of a
new form of death. Its doctors battled in
extremis. It watched army trucks trans-
porting coffins to remote cremation
sites from the overloaded morgues of
Bergamo.
Then, strange thing, after some initial
missteps, Italy did what it has had the
most difficulty doing since the unifica-
tion of the peninsula in 1861: It cohered
into a nation and brought a fierce na-
tional will to bear on the virus. It went
into disciplined lockdown. It set aside,
through a unified front, the old slurs
exchanged between northerners and
southerners, the old parochialism of
city-states with longer histories than
the nation they find themselves in, the
old derision directed at its politics.
I am tempted to say that 2020 was the
year of Italy’s emergence, 159 years
after the Piedmont statesman Massimo
d’Azeglio declared: “We have made
Italy. Now we have to make Italians.”
Perhaps that’s an exaggeration, but not
without its truth.
Italy brought its rate of new infec-
defiance. Words are ripped into sylla-
bles: “Sva-bo-da!” (“Freedom”), “Ve-
rym-Mo-zham-Pie-ra-mo-zham!” (“We
believe we can, we will win”) and into
the masked faces of police officers, as
they brutalize their own people, “Mi-li-
cy-ja-Z-Naro-dam!” (“The police is on
the people’s side”).
So who is on our side? Are you,
world? Do you feel any empathy for
people beaten in plain daylight for
walking to the store, for people attacked
Inside Stadio Atleti Azzurri in Bergamo, Italy, after a soccer match between Atalanta
and Inter Milan. Play resumed on Aug. 1.
tions — now about eight per 100,000
inhabitants — down to one of the lowest
in Europe, lower even than Germany. It
did so as the United States, which spent
untold postwar treasure on keeping
Italy stable, threw its doors open to the
with truncheons? Do you think that
Belarusians should be sanguine when
the ambulance that arrives to tend to
the wounded spills out riot police in-
stead of doctors? For how long is it OK
to go on without being able to locate
your family and friends in one of Bela-
rus’s many prisons, where officials
shove desperate people away from the
doors like stray dogs?
Last year, Mr. Lukashenko called
Belarusians lazy “narodets” — a people
ALBERTO LINGRIA/REUTERS
pandemic through leaderless fracture.
This, in contrast to Italy, has been the
season of American unraveling.
I mentioned the buzzing cicadas and
their summer crescendo. In Aesop’s
fable generally known in English as
MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2020 | 9
SERGEI GAPON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
Protesting against
police violence in
Minsk, Belarus, on
Thursday.
VASILY FEDOSENKO/REUTERS
not worthy to be called a nation. But
Belarusians, who have always lived
inside the reactor of history, know
differently. And over the past week, in
love and solidarity with each other, they
have shown their authoritarian ruler
how greatly he is mistaken.
VALZHYNA MORT is a poet and the author
of the forthcoming “Music for the Dead
and Resurrected.” Born in Minsk, Bela-
rus, she teaches at Cornell University.
“The Ant and the Grasshopper,” but in
Italian as “La Formica e la Cicala”
(“The Ant and the Cicada”), the indus-
trious ant spends its summer laying in
supplies for the winter while the care-
free cicada passes the time singing, or,
as Italians describe improvident lazi-
ness, scratching its belly. When winter
comes, as it does, the starving cicada
begs the ant for food. The ant, vindi-
cated, tells it to go dance away the
winter.
Writing the other day in Milan’s
Corriere della Sera, Antonio Scurati
asked: “Dear reader, are you a cicada or
an ant?” His fear, he said, was that
Italians were tending cicada. The sun is
shining, let’s live a bit and believe that
the emergency has passed forever.
In this Phase 2 of the virus, with a rise
in cases in countries including Spain
and France, it’s an ant-or-cicada mo-
ment in many societies. I confess to
being something of a cicada by inclina-
tion, not in slothful tendencies I hope,
but in the belief that a life lived in fear
and obsessive prudence is not worth
living. How to weigh the cicada’s chirp-
ing pleasure against the ant’s cautious
husbandry, a short happy life against a
long inhibited one?
The answer is not evident. As with
most things in life, it lies in balance. It’s
COHEN, PAGE 11
 ..
10 | MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

opinion

Hitting the glass ceiling, suddenly

Ms. Brougher’s excruciating on-the- the results I achieved, but for not being an independent investigation into its
A.G. SULZBERGER, Publisher Kara Swisher record post about her time at Pinterest ‘collaborative.’ I believe that I was practices and policies.
MARK THOMPSON, Chief Executive Officer
Contributing Writer also resounds with a tiresome familiar- fired for speaking out about the ramp- Welcome to what happens when tech
DEAN BAQUET, Executive Editor
ity for those who have been monitoring ant discrimination, hostile work envi- start-ups that are created by people
JOSEPH KAHN, Managing Editor STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON, President, International
the diversity struggle in Silicon Valley ronment and misogyny that permeates who have no real management experi-
TOM BODKIN, Creative Director CHARLOTTE GORDON, V.P., International Consumer Marketing
for a while now. Her tale is one of a Pinterest.” The company has declined ence grow large. It’s complex, of
SUZANNE DALEY, Associate Editor HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS, V.P., International Circulation
The stories of gender exclusion I heard woman who had held top positions at to comment on Ms. Brougher’s allega- course, but it also remains inexplicable
HELENA PHUA, Executive V.P., Asia-Pacific
last week from women working at Google and Square and then found tions, but its chief executive and co- that an industry that so loudly pur-
KATHLEEN KINGSBURY, Editorial Page Editor SUZANNE YVERNÈS, International Chief Financial Officer
Pinterest and their former colleagues herself in her most powerful digital founder, Ben Silbermann, spoke with ports to celebrate meritocracy is actu-
were numbingly similar, with most role yet — the No. 2 executive at Pin- me more generally ally a mirror-tocracy — reflecting only
using the same words over and over terest — but without any power. It’s about the issues. those who look just like themselves.
again: Sidelined. Shut down. Doors not unlike the gender discrimination The C.E.O. I interviewed Ms. Across the board at tech companies,
closed. Inner circles. Toxic secrecy. battle that Ellen Pao waged against the had few Brougher, as well as diversity numbers have hardly
Homegrown boys club. Left out of powerful venture firm Kleiner Perkins many others, and budged. Men — most of whom are
answers to
A MILESTONE IN AN UNFINISHED JOURNEY meetings. Out of key decisions. Out of more than seven years ago and the
allegations
the picture emerges white — dominate managerial jobs and
promotions. Out. devastating blog post about sexual clearly that, even as the key ranks of engineers. As is often
Historians who specialize in voting rights and African- Which is why the essay “The Pinter- harassment and inequality written by that the the country has, the said, at this point it’s not a bug but a
A century after American women’s history have played a welcome and est Paradox: Cupcakes and Toxicity,” a former Uber employee, Susan social media technology industry feature.
the 19th published on Medium by its recently Fowler, more than three years ago. company has has not made I got Mr. Silbermann on a Zoom call
unusually public role in combating the myths that have ousted chief operating officer, (Ms. Fowler is now an editor for Times a culture of progress in building last week to talk about Ms. Brougher’s
Amendment, long surrounded the women’s suffrage movement and Françoise Brougher, landed with a Opinion.) discrimination. a fairer and more allegations. He said he could not speak
it’s past time the 19th Amendment, which celebrates its 100th anni- definitive boom. Ms. Brougher has also “Although 70 percent of Pinterest’s heterogeneous specifically about her because of the
to recognize filed a lawsuit against the social media users are women, the company is culture. legal action. But the introverted entre-
versary on Tuesday.
company — whose service lets users steered by men with little input from Pinterest appears preneur could not come up with easy
the women of In the lead-up to this centennial, these same cam- compile and share collections of im- female executives. Pinterest’s female to have a profoundly dysfunctional answers about the broader questions
color who were paigning historians have warned against celebrations ages — saying she was fired after she executives, even at the highest levels, culture where far too many of its either. In fact, he had no real answers
sidelined in and proposed monuments to the suffrage movement complained about gendered treatment. are marginalized, excluded and si- roughly 2,000 employees feel left out. at all — although I do give him credit
It follows another suit last month by a lenced. I know because until my firing In addition to Ms. Brougher’s lawsuit, for taking my call and making his first
the fight for that seemed destined to render invisible the contribu- top female executive against a finan- in April, I was Pinterest’s chief operat- Black former employees have publicly comments about the new scrutiny of
gender and tions of African-American women like Frances Ellen cial technology start-up, Carta, alleg- ing officer,” Ms. Brougher wrote. “Ac- complained about racial bias at Pinter- his leadership.
racial equality. Watkins Harper, Mary Church Terrell, Sojourner Truth ing pay discrimination and retaliation. cording to Pinterest, I was fired not for est. The company has since initiated “I have talked about how deliberate
you have to be to build products, but
and Ida B. Wells — all of whom played heroic roles in the
now I see how much more deliberate
late 19th- and early 20th-century struggles for women’s we have to be to build a culture,” Mr.
rights and universal human rights. In addition to speak- Silbermann said. “It does not just
ing up for Black women of the past, these scholars have happen.” (The company is already a
decade old.) “My title may be C.E.O.
performed a vital public service by debunking the most but that does not mean I know every-
pernicious falsehood about the 19th Amendment: that it thing.”
concluded a century-long battle for equality by guaran- Indeed not, even symbolically. I
pointed out that Pinterest’s web page
teeing women the right to vote.
listing its management had exactly
Americans who imbibed this fiction in civics classes three men on it and no one else —
are caught off guard when they hear the more compli- unusual even for tech companies,
cated truth — that millions of women had won voting which now at least pretend and pack
diverse images on their public-facing
rights before the 19th Amendment was ratified, and communications. Mr. Silbermann
millions more remained shut out of the polls after ratifi- responded, looking appropriately
cation. Indeed, as middle-class white women celebrated dejected, “I had no idea.” (When I
checked back after speaking with Mr.
ratification by parading through the streets, African-
Silbermann, that page had disap-
American women in the Jim Crow South who had peared. Pinterest confirmed that it was
worked diligently for women’s rights found themselves replaced by a page with additional
shut out of the ballot box for another half century — and executives on it, who were notably
more diverse.)
abandoned by white suffragists who declared their Mr. Silbermann apparently didn’t
mission accomplished the moment middle-class white have any idea either about the depth of
women achieved the franchise. the culture issues there, which both
alumni and current employees de-
As the distinguished historian Nancy Hewitt has scribe as cliquish and secretive — a
shown, a lengthy campaign and a range of subsequent critique leveled even by a person
laws was required to fully open ballot access to others, whom Pinterest itself introduced me to
including Black women, Mexican-Americans, Native as a supporter. More troubling still,
most said that management gave
Americans, Chinese-Americans and Korean-Ameri- favorable treatment to men over wom-
cans. Among those necessary laws were the repeal of en and treated people of color even
the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 and the adoption of worse.
“It’s a nepotism that favors those
the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the 24th who cozy up and say yes to power,
Amendment in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, ANASTASIIA SAPON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES which are the same small group of
along with its amendments of 1970 and 1975. In other The Pinterest office in San Francisco. SWISHER, PAGE 11
words, the 19th Amendment was one step in a long,
racially fraught battle for voting rights that seemed
secure a few decades ago but face a grave threat today.

Things worse than remote learning

The white suffrage heroes Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Susan B. Anthony got a stranglehold on the histori-
cal record in 1881, when they inaugurated the first vol-
ume of what would eventually become the influential
six-volume “History of Woman Suffrage.” The duo and
Isaac Lozano
their comrades established an enduring, self-serving
legacy when they designated a meeting at Seneca Falls,
N.Y., in 1848 as the starting point of the women’s rights
SAN DIEGO Last month, I learned that
movement. In fact, the movement already was stirring
my uncle died of Covid-19. Not long
in various forms, and in various places. after, his mother passed away from the
Books and studies timed to coincide with the 19th virus, too. Since my parents are essen-
Amendment’s centennial are rendering ever more can- tial workers, I’m starting my senior
year of high school worrying whether
did and inclusive versions of this story. In “Recasting they’re next.
the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suf- I live in one of San Diego’s most
frage Movement,” for example, the historian Cathleen infected ZIP codes. And I’m a Latino in
a county where Hispanics — 43 per-
Cahill foregrounds the suffrage struggles of women of
cent of Covid-19 victims yet only 34
color as they played out in New York City’s Chinatown, percent of the population — bear the
New Mexico and elsewhere. Ms. Cahill shows how white brunt of the pandemic.
suffragists worked with — and sometimes against — When schools went remote earlier
this year, low-income students like me,
marginalized women, including Native Americans and who have limited access to computers
Mexican-Americans. and the internet, faced challenges
In the forthcoming book “Vanguard: How Black keeping up with schoolwork. Trying to
study in cramped
Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on
quarters and without
Equality for All,” the historian Martha S. Jones offers a reliable connectivity
I’m a
version of the suffrage and voting rights story that be- low-income was frustrating. But
gins well before the 1848 meeting at Seneca Falls. The as schools begin this
student and fall, I’d much rather
history she recounts continues into the 1960s and ’70s my family is endure the troubles
with the work of revered African-American civil rights vulnerable to of distance learning
organizers like Septima Clark and Fannie Lou Hamer. Covid-19. The than return to cam-
Ms. Jones argues that the elided Black women were at benefits of pus prematurely and
returning to sacrifice my own
the forefront of the quest for women’s rights and were school are health or that of my
overlooked in history because they achieved their vic- not worth family.
tories in civic and political organizations on the Black Throughout the
our health. pandemic, my five-
side of the color line. Invisibility aside, she writes, Afri- member family has
can-American women “pointed the nation toward its been huddled in a
best ideals. They were the first to reject arbitrary dis- 920-square-foot, two-bedroom apart-
ment, where I share a room with my
tinctions, including racism and sexism, as rooted in
two brothers. For my parents, social
outdated and disproved fictions. They were the nation’s distancing isn’t an option. My father is
original feminists and antiracists, and they built a move- a supervisor at a car distribution com-
ment on these core principles.” pany, and my mother, in remission
from cancer, recently resigned as a
The 19th Amendment can fairly be seen as an impor- caregiver at a hospice facility. Cases in
tant milestone in an unfinished journey. It is morally our county were rising, so she opted
repugnant and counterproductive to mythologize it as a instead to take care of my autistic
cousin through a respite care program.
triumph of egalitarianism at a time when the voting It’s not much, but in my mother’s
rights Hamer and others paid for in blood are under words, the extra money will allow us to
attack in the courts and in state legislatures all over the salir adelante, or get ahead.
United States. This disturbing fact needs to remain In April, when my school started
distance learning, I struggled to stay
uppermost in mind as the country unveils its new suf- focused, bouncing from room to room
frage monuments and holds its celebratory events. in search of peace and quiet. In the
morning, I settled at the kitchen table
to attend online meetings while my
family was asleep. By the afternoon, I
fled to my parents’ room to finish
schoolwork but only until my father
came home from work and ordered me
out.
Sometimes I ignored my parents or
grimaced at them for no apparent
reason.
“Are you mad at me?” my mother
would ask.
“No, I just want to stay focused,” I’d
retort.
In truth, I was angry that I lived in a
coronavirus hot spot; that my immi-
grant parents could only provide me
with so much; that my middle-class
peers were ensconced in their own
bedrooms while I remained confined to
a skinny metal chair in my kitchen.
At school, I got straight A’s and was
praised by English teachers for my
writing. I saw myself as the poor Mexi-
can kid who could overcome financial
barriers with enough determination.
But when my uncle died of the coro-
navirus, I realized that gumption was-
n’t enough to overcome the obstacles
of a pandemic. We couldn’t even say
goodbye.
Black and Latino children already
grapple with disproportionately high
rates of Covid-19 and face systemic
barriers to testing and treatment.
Many of us live in multigenerational
homes and have parents who are
essential workers. We are less likely to
have access to health care. And low-
income schools across the country are
struggling to afford the supplies and
infrastructure required to reopen
safely.
I’m lucky that my district is postpon-
ing school reopenings until at least
October. But if I am ordered back to
MARÍA HERGUETA
campus prematurely, I won’t do it. As
difficult as distance learning was,
returning to the classroom now — as
cases in the U.S. break records and
experts foresee the pandemic persist-
ing until next year — would put my
home and the homes of millions of
low-income kids of color at greater risk
of infection.
I leave my apartment not knowing if
my next-door neighbors — only three
feet away from my front door — could
have the virus. I fear for my mother’s
life every time we go to our local laun-
dromat, a cramped space where vis-
itors don’t always wear masks.
Though we wash our hands and
disinfect items after arriving home, I’m
always left with a tingle of uneasiness
— like sensing a mosquito in a dark
room.
I’ve lamented this to friends who,
like me, live in tight quarters and have
seen family members sickened: As
much as we excel academically, our
ZIP codes still hold dominion over us
and our families. Living in a noisy
home with domestic responsibilities
during a pandemic was already a
challenge, but the death of a loved one
sapped my hope for the future and
brought closer the difference a few
digits on my address can make.
But passing the cracked sidewalks of
my apartment complex, I’m reminded
that others have it worse: My family is
financially independent, and we’ve
settled in a tight-knit community.
I hear my mother’s trailing words as
we bring home baskets of laundry —
and for a moment, I smile.
The pandemic poses unique chal-
lenges for kids like me. But if schools
can offer us support — as my district is
doing by providing free meals, internet
hot spots and laptops to those in need
— I know we can continue to learn
remotely while staying safe. And with
help from my teachers and hope that
the quarantine subsides, I’m applying
to college this fall.
Keeping students at home gives us
— and America — the best chance to
salir adelante.
ISAAC LOZANO is a senior at Bonita Vista
High School in Chula Vista, Calif. He is
working on a children’s book.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2020 | 11

opinion

Accounting for Trump’s corruption

GOLDBERG, FROM PAGE 1
cials of federal bribery laws, insider
trading laws and other anti-corruption
and public integrity laws.” The House
is discussing post-Trump reforms on
issues including abuse of the pardon
power, foreign election interference
and the independence of inspectors
general.
The Center for American Progress, a
liberal think tank with close ties to the
Democratic Party, recently released a
report titled, “How a Future President
Can Hold the Trump Administration
Accountable.” Protect Democracy, a
legal group founded by Ian Bassin,
Obama’s former associate White House
counsel, also has started to think about
what accountability processes should
look like, drawing on the experience of
countries around the world that have
transitioned to democracy from au-
thoritarianism.
“We have just been through a colos-
sal test case in how you corrupt and
incapacitate a great democracy,” said
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Demo-
crat of Rhode Island. “And failing to
learn those lessons is a disservice to
that democracy.”
Whitehouse was one of the Demo-
crats who, in 2009, called for some sort
of Truth Commission to examine the
legacy of the last Republican to wreck
the country. George W. Bush’s presi-
dency left America “deeply in debt,
bleeding jobs overseas, our financial
institutions rotten and weakened, an
economy in free fall,” Whitehouse said
then. His administration took the coun-
try to war based on lies and authorized
torture. There was a “systematic effort
to twist policy to suit political ends; to
substitute ideology for science, fact,
and law; and to misuse instruments of
power.”
“Disclosure and discussion,” the
senator said in 2009, would be the
difference between this history serving
as an instructive lesson or “a blueprint
for those darker forces to return and
someday do it all over again.”
But once President Barack Obama
came into office, his team didn’t want
to look back. Ben Rhodes, formerly a
senior Obama adviser, told me that the
team feared it would have been “in-
credibly disruptive,” amid an all-con-
suming financial meltdown, “to launch
investigations and prosecutions of your
predecessor.” There was the problem of
precedent: It can be a sign of demo-
cratic breakdown when a new govern-
ment goes after officials from the old
one. Further, said Rhodes, “high-rank-
ing people who were very busy with
two wars and a financial crisis” didn’t
have the bandwidth to navigate the
political complexities of a process that
would look, to Republicans, like parti-
san vengeance.
The Obama administration’s logic
then — like Biden’s today — made a
certain amount of sense. But it’s clear,
11 years later, that those decisions had
a cost. The “lack of accountability that
people felt around the financial crisis
and around torture didn’t go away,”
said Rhodes. “It metastasized.” A
generation of Republicans learned that
there was no price for flouting the
rules.
MATT CHASE
This time, Rhodes believes some
sort of commission is warranted. “If
you look at other countries, it’s impor-
tant that the process be constructed in
a way that doesn’t feel politically moti-
vated, that doesn’t feel like revenge,”
he said.
It should be, he said, a “safe space
for people to come forward and share
what they know about what hap-
pened.”
As Rhodes suggests, any post-Trump
rebuilding requires learning as much
as possible about the president’s many
misdeeds. Right now, we don’t know
what we don’t know — for every scan-
dal that a whistle-blower or journalist
has brought to the public’s attention,
there are likely many more that are
still secret.
The administration’s failure to con-
tain the coronavirus — exacerbated,
according to reporting in Vanity Fair,
by Trump’s hostile indifference to
hard-hit blue states — deserves some-
thing akin to a 9/11 commission. So
does the wholesale corruption of
American diplomacy, only a small part
of which was addressed by impeach-
ment. Just last month, The New York
Times reported that Trump instructed
America’s ambassador to Britain to
press the British government to hold
the British Open golf tournament at
Trump Turnberry, the president’s
money-losing golf resort in Scotland.
But we have little visibility into how
fully American foreign policy has been
perverted to serve Trump’s personal
interests.
But simply airing this regime’s
transgressions will not be enough. Sam
Berger, who wrote the accountability
report for the Center for American
Progress, points out that Trump and
his enablers can’t be shamed. To reveal
all they’ve done without imposing
consequences could only underline
what they’ve gotten away with, a
terrible message to future administra-
tions. “There’s not a confusion as to
whether or not Trump is acting cor-
ruptly,” Berger said. “It’s not that we
suffer from a deficit of instances we
can point to and say, ‘That was wrong
and you should be embarrassed.’
They’re not embarrassed!”
So where there’s been malfeasance,
we need legal sanctions. Prosecutions
that likely would have happened had
Trump not had presidential immunity
— like the campaign finance case that
helped land his former attorney, Mi-
chael Cohen, in prison — should go
forward when he’s out of office. The
CAP report calls for every government
agency to “conduct an immediate
internal review to identify corruption
during the Trump administration and
publicly report on the steps it will take
to address it. Where appropriate, infor-
mation obtained during these reviews
must be shared with law enforcement,
inspectors general, and congressional
committees.”
In order to avoid repeating Trump’s
politicization of law enforcement, a
President Biden would need to give
maximum autonomy to those in charge
of Trump probes, which he’s already
inclined to do. Bassin, from Protect
Democracy, goes so far as to argue
that if elected, Biden should choose an
attorney general who hasn’t been
involved in Democratic Party politics
in order to make the post-Trump clean-
up look as fair as possible.
“If America’s lucky enough to be
wrestling with the very difficult ques-
tions of accountability that countries
face after an abusive autocratic re-
gime, it’s going to be essential that the
attorney general be seen as independ-
ent and not as an arm of the White
House or Democratic Party,” Bassin
said.
For every Should Trump
officials face pros-
scandal that a ecution, Bassin
whistle-blower worries about even
or journalist the appearance of a
has brought political vendetta.
to the public’s “If they are seen as
attention, political retribution,
there are and look in any way
likely many like President
Trump’s own claims
more that are to ‘lock her up,’ that
still secret. can actually be
more destructive
than restorative,” he
said. “It risks sending us down a down-
ward spiral where each side, when
winning power, seeks to prosecute its
opponents.”
Given that Trump has convinced
large swaths of the country that the
F.B.I. is a hotbed of leftist subversion,
it’s hard to see how any prosecution
would seem legitimate to most Repub-
licans. But Bassin holds out hope that a
President Biden could restore, among
a majority of the country, “an under-
standing that there is a role for an
independent Department of Justice.”
“I don’t underestimate the challenge
here, but he’s got to do all the things
that are possible to get us back on that
path,” Bassin said. “Otherwise we are
going to be fighting over the very
foundational institutions of our democ-
racy endlessly.”
This might be our fate regardless.
But he’s right about the challenge for
Democrats, should they take power.
They must extirpate Trumpism, with-
out ever seeming to imitate it.

Hitting the glass ceiling

SWISHER, FROM PAGE 10
men,” a former female executive said.
Mr. Silbermann did not explicitly
deny this, but also seemed to be per-
plexed as to how Pinterest got this
way. “Over the last few months, I see
we can do a lot more to think about
what we need to do to build for women
and people of color,” he said. “It should
not take a public outcry” to fix the
problem.
Actually, the outcry is coming from
inside the house, and Ms. Brougher is
a very resonant narrator since she was
on its top floor. “Even on my level, I
think I have a seat at the table, but
really I don’t have a seat at the table,”
she told me. “So many women and
men look up to me, I could not stay
silent.”
Ms. Brougher has conducted her
career outside of the limelight, making
her perhaps one of the more unlikely
women to emerge with such allega-
tions. She has long been one of the
more private of the movers and shak-
ers at prominent Silicon Valley compa-
nies, working as a top digital advertis-
ing executive.
“Françoise is an incredible, char-
ismatic leader, yet she’s also intensely
private when it comes to publicity,”
said Aaron Zamost, who worked with
Ms. Brougher at Square, where he
oversees human resources, communi-
cations and policy. “For her to choose
to share her story in this way, she must
have had a uniquely difficult time.” I
received a spate of comments like this
supportive of Ms. Brougher from the
top echelons of Google and Square.
Unlike a lot of tech players, she
spent little time wooing the press, and
I had often found it hard to get her to
return my calls. The very worst thing I
had ever heard about her from both
Google and Square executives was that
she was “hard-charging” and “very
direct,” qualities I think are laudable
(perhaps because I share them).
Two years ago Mr. Silbermann re-
cruited her personally to come on
board in the No. 2 role, presumably
hoping she would bring the efficiency
she is known for to upgrading Pinter-
est’s start-up operations. Ms. Brougher
apparently did that, but says she be-
gan losing ground when she tried to
bring more transparency to the com-
pany, where power tended to reside in
silos and was hoarded greedily.
“I had two choices: To conform to
the behavior expected or behave as I
have always done,” Ms. Brougher says.
As Pinterest was preparing for its
April 2019 initial public offering, Ms.
Brougher says, she
Across the was not invited on
the road show to
board at tech
meet with invest-
companies, ors. She says she
diversity num- began to be left out
bers have of key decision-
hardly budged. making at the
company and was
no longer asked to
present to the board of directors, as
she had regularly done.
“I was excluded, and the real meet-
ings were happening after the meet-
ings I was in,” Ms. Brougher says,
noting that Mr. Silbermann and a small
circle of favorites — all men — were
making the calls. “This is why it was so
insidious.”
Ms. Brougher also discovered that
the schedule for her stock options
vesting was less favorable than those
of male executives at her level, which
meant it took her a lot longer to realize
gains. “I can do math,” she said, and
she complained to Mr. Silbermann.
Soon after, the company told her she
had trouble with “cross-functional
relationships” and was not “collabora-
tive.” Her previous performance re-
views had been positive, Ms. Brougher
says. Following what she describes as
a disastrous peer-review discussion
with the chief financial officer, Todd
Morgenfeld, she was let go during a
surprise Zoom call with Mr. Silber-
mann.
“I have been very lucky in tech,” Ms.
Unprecedented times.
Brougher says. “I want to change and
dismantle the system of gender bias at
this company and to rid it of the ster-
Unparalleled coverage.
eotype that holds men and women to a
different standard.”
For his part, Mr. Silbermann told me
Subscribe to The New York Times
that was exactly his intention, even if
he hadn’t previously managed to. He
International Edition.
ticked off solutions like bringing in
more expertise, fixing compensation, nytimes.com/subscribeinternational
adding more diverse board members
(one such director is on the way, he
said) and creating a “global listening
system” to hear his employees’ experi-
ences better. Mr. Silbermann also said
he would fire people for not adhering
to the better culture he intended to
promote now. “All of that is table set-
ting until there is the action, of course,”
he added.
Whatever he winds up doing, Ms.
Brougher has the means and power to
persist. She now acknowledges that
she could have tried to do more earlier
in her career to see the struggles of
other women and help them. She
promises this experience has strength-
ened her will to act.
“Here is a glass ceiling I never hit
into until my 50s that I suddenly did,
very violently,” Ms. Brougher says.
“You don’t see it at all. And then you
hit it.”
KARA SWISHER is the host of a new Opin-
ion podcast that will debut in Septem-
ber.

An unlikely triumph
COHEN, FROM PAGE 9
equally hard to say at what point rea-
sonable, lifesaving precaution over the
virus becomes unreasonable, job-de-
stroying, school-closing and life-
quenching fear — harder still because
rampant fear was a striking character-
istic of many societies before the virus.
For Italy, the overriding question is how
not to suffer a chaotic relapse from the
crisis-induced effectiveness of national
unity.
There will be renewed division and
disappointments, but I don’t believe
anything can undo what Italy revealed
of itself. Italy had a good war. To a de-
gree unimaginable in Donald Trump’s
America, and beyond even that of many
Europeans, Italians showed what long
history teaches: civic wisdom.
A summer fairy tale gripped Italy. It
centered on Atalanta, the small soccer
club of Bergamo, the northern town that
was the virus’s epicenter. Against all
odds, Atalanta reached the quarterfinal
of Europe’s premier club competition,
the Champions League, where, in an
empty stadium, it played Paris St. Ger-
main, the French capital’s rich Qatari-
owned club. When Atalanta took the
lead in the first half, a loud cheer
coursed down the Italian peninsula.
I watched the game this week with
Antonio Colpani and Laura Vergani,
both from Bergamo. Colpani told me of
his mother’s near death and his own
battle with the virus. Vergani recalled
the constant sirens and how one day
they stopped because the streets were
empty anyway and local authorities had
concluded that the sound spread panic.
“We beat it,” Colpani said. “Non mol-
lare mai.” He smiled as he uttered the
phrase — Never give up — by which
Bergamo lives. “Mola mia” in Bergam-
asco dialect.
Atalanta, unyielding, clung to its 1-0
lead until the last minute. Then Paris
St-Germain scored, and a moment later
scored again to win 2-1.
It would have been wonderful for the
fairy tale to continue, but perhaps for
Italy the agonizing defeat was a useful
reality check in this summer limbo, a
grain of ant in the song of the cicada.
“That’s life,” Colpani said, “Every-
thing can change in a minute.”

12 | MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2020
Sports
Conquering Everest from any hill
Cyclists take on challenge
of doing repeat climbs to
equal the tallest mountain
PHOTOGRAPHS AND TEXT
BY ALEC JACOBSON
As my altimeter clicked past 27,000 feet
for the day — into the range of the low-
oxygen “death zone” on Mount Everest
— and my eyes blurred with sweat and
sunscreen, a white Ferrari accelerated
past me into a curve.
I was drunk with fatigue, but the car
was real, as I slowly cycled up the road
to Mount Seymour Resort, below
Dinkey Peak, in North Vancouver,
British Columbia. I was far from the
world’s tallest mountain, but straining
to finish what is known as the Ever-
esting Challenge.
“Everesting” is straightforward: Pick
a hill, any hill, and go up and down it un-
til you attain 29,029 feet of climbing.
Friends can support you, but you must
do it under your own power and in a sin-
gle effort — no sleeping.
The result is more than double the
climbing of the hardest stages of the
Tour de France. With most cycling
events disrupted by the coronavirus
pandemic, Everesting has become a hot
activity for the ultra-endurance set.
When I explained the plan to my
brother, Chandler, he asked: “You’re go-
ing to ride your bike up a mountain on a
road for 12 hours wearing Lycra? Why
not just ride into the ocean and drown
yourself?”
A fair question, I thought.
The feat is a contrived festival of suf-
fering that plays out on a climb of no real
significance and often little beauty.
There is no starting gun or adoring
crowds, though, if you’re as lucky as I
was, your girlfriend will feed you hand-
fuls of M&M’s as you limp through the
final miles.
Which is precisely what Andy van
Bergen hoped for when he created the
challenge in 2014.
“Van Bergen translates roughly as
‘from the hills,’ ” van Bergen explained.
Fittingly, he has acquired a reputation
around Melbourne, Australia, as a true
aficionado of hills, leading the Hells 500
cycling club, which is known for fiend-
ishly difficult riding.
Though he is a luminary in the cycling
scene, van Bergen’s crushing rides were
lost on friends who were not cyclists. Af-
ter a ride with 23,000 feet of climbing, he
tried to explain the trip to a co-worker,
who simply said, “What else did you do
this weekend?”
Then van Bergen read an article on
the website Cycling Tips, where he now
works, by George Mallory, grandson of
the British mountaineer of the same
name. Training for an Everest expedi-
tion in 1994, Mallory wrote, he had Ever-
ested by cycling eight times up Mount
Donna Buang, outside Melbourne.
Van Bergen was captivated not only
by the challenge, but also by the idea
that climbing Everest on a bike was a
recognizably brutal effort for anyone, on
any hill, anywhere in the world.
“It’s intentionally designed with an
open framework,” van Bergen ex-
plained. “You’re pushing it for yourself,
which is what makes it special.”
He singled out a weekend in February
2014, and invited select riders to make
an effort on a hill near their homes.
“Sixty-five started and 35 to 40 fin-
ished,” van Bergen said. “That attrition
rate is pretty much what it is now.”
The ledger of 10,391 successful at-
tempts — on road bikes, on mountain
Gauff is sharpening her game and finding her voice
BY BEN ROTHENBERG
Before it all stopped, no tennis talent
was on a steeper climb than Coco Gauff
was.
Ranked 686th in women’s singles at
the start of 2019, Gauff proceeded to
crack the top 50, win her first WTA title
and make impressive runs at three
Grand Slam events, all before turning 16
years old.
Then came the abrupt halting of the
tennis tours in March.
“Obviously I missed competing and I
missed playing, but I think it was a good
little break for me because I was able to
train,” Gauff said. “I always consider
myself still in the development stage, so
having those months off to work on cer-
tain stuff definitely helped.”
Gauff, an American now ranked 53rd,
returned to competition for the first time
since January in Lexington, Ky., at the
new Top Seed Open, a WTA tournament
over the past week that attracted past
Grand Slam champions like Serena
Williams, Victoria Azarenka, Venus
Williams and Sloane Stephens. Gauff
advanced to Saturday’s semifinal,
where she lost in straight sets, 6-2, 6-4,
to Jennifer Brady, the No. 49 WTA sin-
gles player.
The career data on Gauff is limited,
but the small sample sparkles. In the
three Grand Slam main draws in which
she has played, Gauff twice beat Venus
Williams, a seven-time Grand Slam
champion, en route to reaching the
fourth round. She lost to the eventual
champion at those events twice — Si-
“I don’t like to turn nouns into
verbs, much less proper nouns
like Everest. I thought it was a
selfish thing to do.”
bikes, on bike trainers that simulate
climbing and while running — is kept at
a “hall of fame” at the website Ever-
esting.cc. Van Bergen verifies the com-
pletions using GPS data. There are dou-
ble, triple and quadruple Everestings
documented (sleeping two hours is al-
lowed after every 29,029 feet).
For years, Everesting was the exclu-
sive terrain of a niche corner of ultra-
climbers, but then the coronavirus pan-
demic hit.
With races and events canceled or
postponed, thousands of athletes in
peak form turned to alternative chal-
lenges, with new zeal for Everesting.
“We started the year with 5,000 in the
hall of fame,” van Bergen said last
month. “In May, there were 1,200 new
Everestings. In June, 1,300, and we’re on
track to beat that this month.”
And the Everesting record has been
falling fast.
Tobias Lestrell’s 8-hour-29-minute
ride up Belgrave-Ferny Creek Road in
Sherbrooke, Australia, had been the
record since 2017.
But on May 11, Phil Gaimon, a former
professional cyclist who is now a social
media star, clocked a 7:52 by doing 61 re-
peats of a section of Mountaingate Drive
in Los Angeles. Keegan Swenson, a pro
mountain biker from Utah, held the
record for a month before Lachlan Mor-
ton, who rides for E.F. Pro Cycling,
broke the record in June near his home
in Boulder, Colo. (He had to Everest
mona Halep at Wimbledon last year and
Sofia Kenin at the Australian Open this
year — and the other defeat was against
a defending champion — Naomi Osaka
at the 2019 United States Open, a loss
she avenged in January at the Austral-
ian Open.
Though she has had time to work on
aspects of her game like moving for-
ward, returns and her second serve, the
sudden stalling of the tour could be a
challenge for a player who has not yet
reached the expected pinnacle of her as-
cent.
“For me, what’s going to happen now
will make the difference between play-
ers who are just on a roll because
they’ve been winning a lot in the previ-
ous months and the ones who really are
going to be great,” said Patrick
Mouratoglou, Serena Williams’s coach
who runs an academy in southern
France where Gauff has trained.
Mouratoglou believes younger play-
ers seeking to climb the rankings might
have had an easier time staying eager
and invested during the uncertainty,
and several top players echoed his senti-
ments.
Serena Williams, 38, who is seeking a
record-tying 24th Grand Slam title, said
her mind-set would have been far differ-
ent had such a disruption happened be-
fore she had achieved her first break-
through.
“Oh my gosh, when I was looking for
my first major I would be, like, crazy,”
Williams said. “I would be like, ‘Wow,
this is so intense, this is so crazy.’ But it’s
different. I have everything I can want.”
twice because a GPS glitch on his first
attempt disqualified his time.)
“I’ve been a professional cyclist for al-
most 10 years, and for the whole period,
I’ve been very goal-focused,” Morton
said. With races canceled, his coaches
nudged him to find his personal Everest
in 7:29.
But two weeks later, on July 6, Alberto
Contador cut off two minutes by attack-
ing 76 repeats of a trail near Peñalara in
Spain. “I’m sure that someone will be
faster than me very soon,” said Conta-
dor, a two-time winner of the Tour de
France and the Giro d’Italia and three-
time winner of the Vuelta a España.
It took barely three weeks to prove
him right. Ronan McLaughlin, a coach
and amateur racer, notched 7:04 on Ma-
more Gap in Ireland on July 30.
Coco Gauff during her win over Naomi Osaka at the Australian Open in January. She
said the pause in competition during the pandemic gave her time to work on her game.
Azarenka, 31, who lost in the first
round at Lexington to Venus Williams,
traveled to Kentucky without her young
son, Leo. She said that a young player
with fewer outside interests might be
able to better handle the isolation of
playing on a tour during the pandemic.
“For me, it was only tennis when I was
Coco’s age,” Azarenka said. “I didn’t
have any other interest in doing some-
thing else, staying home and being a
parent instead of going to Lexington to
sit in a hotel room all the time. It takes a
Of the 5,760 full Everestings on road
bikes, only 300 have been completed by
women. One of them was by Morgan
Cabot, an amateur racer who completed
the ride near Vancouver last month.
“I wouldn’t have come up with the
idea,” she said, “but once I found out it
was a thing that people sometimes did,
that felt like, why not?”
The women’s record has dropped four
times during the pandemic, from 12:32
to 8:53, with Katie Hall, Lauren De
Crescenzo, Hannah Rhodes and Emma
Pooley notching successively faster
times since May 23.
Pooley, who won the women’s world
time trial championships in 2010 and
was a silver medalist in the women’s
road time trial at the 2008 Summer
Olympics, was at first repelled by the
ASANKA BRENDON RATNAYAKE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
little bit more — I would say personally
at this stage — sacrifice and mental sac-
rifice than before, or at least from my ex-
perience.”
“But if I was 17, I wouldn’t care,”
Azarenka added. “I would just go, ‘OK,
well, I’m just going to go and play ten-
nis.’ ”
But Gauff was not solely focused on
tennis during the shutdown, as she
spoke out during the national conversa-
tions on racism and police violence this
spring and summer. At a protest in June,
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
idea of Everesting. “I don’t like to turn
nouns into verbs, much less proper
nouns like Everest,” she explained. “I
thought it was a selfish thing to do. A
waste of a day, really.”
But the idea eventually took root, and
Pooley decided to try it by doing 10
climbs up Haggenegg in Switzerland.
The pain was hard to bear, but it brought
clarity, she said. “I should feel grateful,”
she added. “Not everybody gets to
choose how they suffer.”
I thought about this as I climbed.
The morning had been easy, and in the
quiet, as we spun past a deer grazing on
the shoulder of the road, I joked with my
riding partner, Matt Stibbs, about the
excitement of testing ourselves against
the unknown.
But there was attrition with each re-
Gauff addressed a crowd outside City
Hall in her hometown, Delray Beach,
Fla., speaking compellingly and confi-
dently without prepared remarks.
“It was definitely from the heart,” she
said, “and I think that when you speak
from the heart, you get the message that
you want.”
Gauff said Sunday that she had been
asked “maybe two minutes before” to
address the crowd, but she did not
shrink from the occasion. Gauff’s poise,
which has wowed so many in tennis over
the past 13 months, has run in the family.
“Why I felt calm was because of my
grandmother,” Gauff said. “She taught
me a lot over the years.”
Gauff’s maternal grandmother,
Yvonne Lee Odom, integrated Seacrest
High School in Delray Beach in 1961, be-
coming the school’s first Black student
as a 15-year-old.
“I learned a lot about her stories over
the years,” Gauff said of her grand-
mother, who spoke at the protest before
her granddaughter did. “That kind of
prepared me for that moment. I also felt
responsible since I do have a big plat-
form. It would be wrong of me to stay si-
lent when this is an issue going on.”
Gauff has also acted in less public
ways, like sending emails to the Lou-
isville Police Department seeking jus-
tice in the death of Breonna Taylor, a 26-
year-old emergency room technician
killed by officers in March.
In June, Gauff pivoted mid-tweet in
one of her several posts about the case:
“I AM SO HAPPY tennis is coming
back! I am glad to say I will be playing
..
Clockwise from left: Morgan Cabot, at the
rear, on a descent of Mount Seymour in
North Vancouver, British Colombia;
snacking and recharging the GPS are
essential to the Everest Challenge; Cabot
getting hugged by her husband after
finishing; nearing the top of the mountain
on the final lap; Cabot successfully “Ever-
ested” on Mount Seymour, but the effort
took a toll.
peat. By Lap 8, my shorts were crusted
with salt from my sweat and my calves
were cramped from dehydration. On
Lap 9, I vomited and wondered if it was
worth crossing the line from hard to dan-
gerous to be the 5,316th person to finish
the challenge on a road bike.
But as I gripped the handlebars and
stood in the saddle, I understood why I
had come to the mountain.
At a time when the world feels like it is
spinning out of control, with millions
sick and tens of thousands dying during
a terrifying and mismanaged pandemic,
it was a great privilege and of deep sol-
ace to control this little piece of suffering
I had contrived.
I am grateful for every moment of my
14-hour-7-minute ride straining to put
one pedal in front of the other.
the- Now that I have your attention Bre-
onna Taylor still hasn’t received justice
for her wrongful death.”
“Hopefully it can happen,” Gauff said
this month. “We just continue to de-
mand justice for her and continue to
peacefully protest. Hopefully we’ll see
some change.”
By contrast, Gauff has a less results-
oriented mind-set on the court.
Her father and coach, Corey Gauff,
said the main thing missing from her de-
velopment during the pandemic was
tournament play. Because of closures
around Delray Beach, the Gauffs prac-
ticed on courts in their neighborhood
that they had never previously used.
They also experimented with equip-
ment and adjusted technique because
Coco Gauff is still growing physically,
her father said, meaning she has been
able to add more spin and variety to her
shots.
“She’s got a lot more weapons than
she did before, and she’s improved some
other weapons she’s got,” he said. “Now
she’s got to learn how to put all that to-
gether, and we’ll see how it plays out in
matches.”
Gauff shares her father’s optimism
about the pause.
“I think my goal for the rest of the
year is to have fun competing again and
to really enjoy competing,” Gauff said.
“Because I think when I’m not so wor-
ried about results or ranking, that’s
when I play my best tennis. This whole
training block — when we found out
there were tournaments again — has
just been to continue to improve.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2020 | 13

sports

Coach’s personal touch revives Bayern Munich

On Soccer

BY RORY SMITH
The day before the biggest game of his
life, Per Mertesacker was called into a
room at Germany’s peaceful, beach-
side training facility a couple of hours
outside the Brazilian town of Porto
Seguro and was told he would not be
playing.
Joachim Löw, the national team
manager, coolly explained that he was
going to make some changes for Ger-
many’s quarterfinal match against
France. Though Mertesacker was
among the most experienced members
of his squad, and though he had played
every minute of the 2014 World Cup, he
was going to be one of them. Jérôme
Boateng would shift into the center,
with Philipp Lahm restored to his role
at right back.
At that point, Mertesacker — consid-
ered and amiable and understanding, POOL PHOTO BY RAFAEL MARCHANTE POOL PHOTO BY ROBERT MICHAEL

as intelligent a player as Löw could Left: Thomas Müller, right, opened the scoring in Bayern Munich’s 8-2 rout of Barcelona in a Champions League quarterfinal. Right: Trusted by his star players, Hansi Flick has already led Bayern to two trophies this season.
have hoped to have in his squad —
admits that his “ego came out a little
bit.” Since his retirement, he had built an that dwarfs that even of Pep Guardiola wrestled with his disappointment, That may be the most critical skill are familiar from his time as the Ger-
“I was in shock. I was thinking, ‘I impressive coaching résumé and a — 33 games played, 30 won, plus a Flick reassured him, assuaged his any coach at a club like Bayern can man Football Association’s technical
thought these guys trusted me.’ I was quietly lofty reputation, particularly Bundesliga title and a German Cup. doubts, told him that things might have. Bayern’s squad is filled with director. He had a head start on build-
asking, ‘What about this? What about over his eight years as an assistant to Flick took over when it seemed change again for the semifinal. He high-profile, high-earning stars. ing bridges.
that?’ ” Löw with Germany. Indeed, Bayern Bayern was finished as a force in emphasized that what was most im- Though the club’s reputation as “F.C. That is not to say that Flick has not
That was the point at which Löw had appointed him in the summer of Europe. On Friday, it produced what is portant was what was good for the Hollywood,” a place never more than a changed anything about Bayern’s
stopped talking, turned to his assist- 2019 in part because the club felt he certainly the most jaw-dropping result team. “He is a fantastic communica- day or two from some sort of public style. Kovac’s approach was reactive:
ant, Hansi Flick, and allowed him to might be able to step in if it needed to of the season, and a performance so tor,” Mertesacker said. fallout or simmering mutiny, has He spent training sessions drilling his
take over. Flick always knew just what dismiss Kovac. devastating that it may have brought That is the same experience Arne waned, a substantial portion of a Bay- squad of highly talented individuals in
to say. But it was not designed to be a long- Barcelona to the end of an era. The Friedrich — a mem- ern coach’s job is still managing the their defensive duties, creating a cli-
From the outside, the impact Flick term solution. Flick was 54 when he transformation, between then and now, ber of Germany’s fragile politics of the dressing room. mate of frustration. Flick’s emphasis,
has had since taking charge at Bayern returned to Bayern, and he had not between that team and this, is remark- “He has a squads at the 2008 It is a role in which Flick excels. instead, is on what they can do with
Munich in November after the firing of managed a team in 14 years. Even able. genuine European Champi- Mertesacker credits him not only with the ball, encouraging players to think
Niko Kovac verges on the miraculous; then, his experience was in Germany’s Although those who know Flick well interest in onships and the 2010 establishing lines of communication more about how to use their talents.
certainly, the 8-2 destruction of Bar- lower tiers: He had left Hoffenheim in — those who, like Thon, played along- you as a World Cup — re- between the players, the coaching staff There is a genuine belief in Munich
celona on Friday night that represents 2005 after failing to win promotion to side him and those who, like Merte- person. members. “He is and the rest of the back-room staff — that Lisbon may yet provide the high-
its (current) zenith seemed to come the second division. sacker, worked under him — do not He is not very open, very “so everybody who needed the infor- water mark. For such an enthusiastic
with a touch of the divine. When Flick was appointed as Löw’s seem quite as surprised as they might
afraid to show honest, even when it mation had the information” — but talker, Flick’s career has been a quiet
Under Kovac, Bayern was listing. A assistant, Mertesacker admitted that be. As far as they are concerned, there comes to critical with helping to foster the team spirit one. He has spent much of it away
fin de siècle air had settled on the club. there was some skepticism among the is no great mystery here, no secret his own opinions,” said that carried Germany to its World Cup from the limelight, an associate and an
The squad simmered with unrest, and players. “Hesitancy, I’d say,” he said. spell, no revolutionary tactical twist he vulnerability.” Friedrich, now the victory in 2014. assistant. Mertesacker, for one, never
its executives fretted over whether the “Of course he was a player, but you has unearthed. sporting director at “He was the one, I think, who told got the impression he was especially
time had come to ease waning stars, wait to see what he can bring.” To Instead, they say Flick’s great Hertha Berlin. “He Jogi Löw always to praise the substi- interested in being “the main man.”
iconic figures like Manuel Neuer and Bayern, which shared some of the strength is what made Löw turn to him takes time with players. It is not just tutes,” he said. “You don’t praise the Now, though, he is two games from
Thomas Müller, out of the team. same reservations, Flick was there to in that room in Brazil and ask him to ‘work, work, work.’ He is very authen- first team. You praise the guys who the brightest glare soccer can offer,
Flick was, as they saw it, a place- keep the seat warm, not to occupy it. help Mertesacker understand his tic. And that is the most important didn’t play, the ones who worked hard two games from the sort of achieve-
holder. He had played for the club in Within weeks, though, it was obvious decision. “He is very humble, he has a strength a coach can have.” all week and create the environment.” ment that brooks no debate. Thon,
the 1980s — as an “aggressive, tough that Bayern did not need to worry very human sense, a real social compe- Kahn — a board member at Bayern Flick’s ability to build good team certainly, is in no doubt that his time
and fair” midfielder, according to his about Mauricio Pochettino’s wage tence,” Mertesacker said. “He has a — puts it more succinctly. “He always chemistry may come from the relation- has come.
former teammate, Olaf Thon — and so demands or whether Julian Nagels- genuine interest in you as a person. He knows just what he has to say to play- ships he has with many of his players. “Bayern has the quality,” he said.
he understood the “culture” of Bayern, mann could be coaxed away from RB is not afraid to show his own vulnera- ers, especially in difficult moments,” he “He knows Neuer and Müller from the “They will win the Champions League,
as the team’s forthcoming chief execu- Leipzig. Flick would end the season bility. And that is contagious.” said. “He knows how to handle play- national team,” Kahn said. Others, like in public, and he will be seen as a great
tive, Oliver Kahn, put it. with a revitalized team, a win record That day in 2014, as Mertesacker ers.” Joshua Kimmich and Serge Gnabry, coach.”

NON SEQUITUR PEANUTS DOONESBURY CLASSIC 1994

GARFIELD CALVIN AND HOBBES

SUDOKU No. 1708

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

KENKEN CROSSWORD | Edited by Will Shortz

Fill the grid so
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
Solution No. 1508
that every row,
column 3x3 box Fill the grids with digits so as not Across 35 Time of lament 62 Shooting star, some 14 15 16

and shaded 3x3 to repeat a digit in any row or might think

column, and so that the digits
  1 Goes a-courting 36 Spends moolah
box contains
17 18 19

within each heavily outlined box   5 Buddies 39 Little VW 63 Lock of hair

each of the
numbers will produce the target number   9 Off-the-cuff remark 40 Displays of huffiness 64 ___ lily 20 21 22

1 to 9 exactly shown, by using addition, 14 Em, to Dorothy, in 65 Greek peak in

subtraction, multiplication or
41 Fruit-filled pastries 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
Thessaly
once. “The Wizard of Oz”
division, as indicated in the box. 42 Illusionist Geller
A 4x4 grid will use the digits
15 Openly acknowledge 30 31 32
For solving tips 43 Modern term of Down
and more puzzles: 1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6. 16 Garlic-flavored endearment
  1 Financial ctr. in
www.nytimes.com/
33 34 35
mayonnaise
46 ___ ID
sudoku
For solving tips and more KenKen
Manhattan
17 “In ___ of flowers …”
puzzles: www.nytimes.com/
47 Demonstrates some   2 “Most definitely, 36 37 38
18 Greets from across
kenken. For Feedback: nytimes@
sleight of hand monsieur!”
39 40
kenken.com
the way, say 51 Should arrive any   3 Feature of a Las Vegas
20 Lollygags minute now “bandit” 41 42 43 44 45
22 That is to say, in Latin 53 Ice cream serving   4 Things, collectively
KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC.
Copyright © 2018 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved. 23 Casually browse online 54 Property along the   5 Dog’s foot 46 47 48 49 50
ocean … or a hint to
26 Word before taught or the starts of 18-, 23-,   6 Director DuVernay of 51 52 53
effacing 36- and 47-Across “Selma”
Answers to Previous Puzzles 30 “Tiny” Dickens boy   7 The ___ Spoonful 54 55 56 57 58 59
59 Dance at Jewish
31 Drop of golden sun (1960s pop group)
weddings
  8 Stockholm native 60 61 62
32 Skin care product 60 Hanukkah potato treat
  9 Companion of “oohs”
33 Extremes of the earth 61 Again 63 64 65
10 Low-calorie drinks
Solution to August 15 Puzzle
11 Ha-ha, online PUZZLE BY ALAN MASSENGILL AND ANDREA CARLA MICHAELS
A S I S C A N T G O M S G 12 Sick 32 Elements of a 39 Air-conditioning 50 Sound
R I T A A R C H E R A O L strategy meas. preceding
A D C L I C K R A T E D U O 13 Info in a Who’s Who
listing 33 “Stupid” segments on 43 Needs for playing “Gesundheit!”
B E H E S T S T A M P E R
S A Y S H I C I S L A N A 19 Cry between “Ready” old David Letterman Quidditch 52 The Beatles’
H U S H A N O N and “Go!” shows 44 Is gaga over “___ Leaving Home”
S E C R E T S O C I E T Y 21 Leisurely walks 34 “We need help!”
L I Q U O R L I C E N S E 45 Madrid’s land, to 54 Sandwich inits.
S A M U E L B E C K E T T 24 Actress Berry 35 Mixes with a spoon, locals
say 55 Put a ring on it!
A Q U A L A R K 25 Centers of hurricanes 47 File shareable on
C U L T S L Y L O L I T A 36 Caspian and a PC or Mac 56 Gobbled up
27 Extremities
I C E D U P W I D E N E T Caribbean
28 Jacob’s first wife, in 48 Psychic glows 57 Less than zero: Abbr.
D N A O P E N A N E W T A B
I T S E T R A D E I R M A the Bible 37 Reply in a roll call 49 Sierra ___ (African 58 What it takes to
P A T R O T T E N S O O T 29 Cook in oil 38 E pluribus ___ country) tango
 ..
14 | MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Culture
Cracking codes in the everyday
Sanford Biggers makes
sculptures transformed by
gunfire and vintage quilts
BY SIDDHARTHA MITTER

One afternoon in June, the artist San-

ford Biggers, having returned to New
York after a stretch bunkered out of
town with his wife and young daughter
to avoid the pandemic, opened up his ex-
pansive basement studio in Harlem for a
socially distanced visit.
Mr. Biggers is a specialist in many
styles, and several were in evidence. A
shimmering silhouette made entirely of
black sequins, for instance, towered SANFORD BIGGERS AND MONIQUE MELOCHE GALLERY, CHICAGO; RCH PHOTOGRAPHY

along one wall; it depicted a Black

Power protester drawn from a late 1960s
photograph.
There were African statuettes that
Mr. Biggers purchases in markets, then
dips in wax and modifies at the shooting
range — a wrenching sculpture-by-gun-
fire that he has exhibited as multichan-
nel videos. There were also busts from a
series he is making in bronze and an-
other in marble, with artisans in Italy.
They merge Masai, Luba and other Afri-
can sculptural traits with ones from the
Greco-Roman tradition.
Most of all, there were quilts —
stretched against the wall, piled onto
pallets, in scraps on the cutting table.
For over a decade, Mr. Biggers has been
working with antique quilts alongside
his other media. He disrupts these heir-
looms with bold paint strokes, adorns
them with imagery, cuts into them to in-
spect the void.
“They’re portals, in a sense,” he said.
“I consider them between painting,
drawing and sculpture, and a repository
of memory — the memory of the body.”
The quilt, vernacular object par excel-
lence, proved to be rich terrain for what
Mr. Biggers calls “material storytell-
ing.” As the full scope of his quilt work
comes into view, it sheds new light on his
long-held concerns — with the Black ex-
perience, American violence, Buddhism
and art history — and reveals interior
dimensions of his journey.
Mr. Biggers made his first two quilt
works in 2009, installing them at Mother
Bethel African Methodist Episcopal
Church in Philadelphia. One of the vin-
tage quilts had a flower pattern; the
other was plaid. On each, he transposed
from a historical map the locations of the
church and safe houses from the Under-
ground Railroad, marked them like
stars in a constellation, and connected
them with charcoal and oil stick.
The reference was to a theory that
holds that people along the Under-
ground Railroad shared crucial informa-
tion in code through quilts hanging at
safe houses and other way points. Schol-
ars have found little validating evi-
dence, but for Mr. Biggers, the fact of
folk knowledge, even when it’s apocry-
phal, has worth in itself. “It’s more im-
portant that the story endures,” he said.
This fall, an exhibition of nearly 60 of
Mr. Biggers’s quilt-based pieces, titled
“Codeswitch,” will open in New York at
the Bronx Museum of the Arts before
traveling in 2021 to Los Angeles —
where the artist grew up — and New Or-
leans. A separate fall show planned at
Marianne Boesky Gallery in Manhat-
tan, titled “Soft Truths,” will present new
quilt works juxtaposed with his Afro-Eu-
ropean marbles.
Inspired by his interest in hidden
codes, Mr. Biggers’s quilts in turn reveal
hidden connections amid his eclectic
oeuvre. “It’s this series of works that has
allowed me to read his other work well,
and really come to terms with what it
might be up to,” said Andrea Andersson,
the director of the Rivers Institute in
New Orleans, who curated
“Codeswitch” with Antonio Sergio
Bessa of the Bronx Museum.
Mr. Biggers, who turns 50 this year, is
perhaps best known for his conceptual
installations mingling pathos and dark
humor. In “Blossom,” first shown in 2007
at Grand Arts in Kansas City, Mo., and
later acquired by the Brooklyn Mu-
seum, an artificial tree bursts through a
baby grand that he has converted to a
player piano; it plays his arrangement
of “Strange Fruit,” the haunting anti-
lynching lament.
“Laocoön,” involving a massive, in-
flatable vinyl Fat Albert character prone
on the floor, seemingly struggling to
breathe — based on the Iliad character,
depicted in Renaissance sculpture as an
icon of suffering — caused some unease
when it was shown at Art Basel Miami
Beach in 2015 and the next year at the
Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
for its apparent allusions to police
killings of Black men and to the car-
toon’s originator, Bill Cosby.
These works mobilized popular im-
agery and challenged viewers. When
Mr. Biggers works on quilts, the ap-
proach is different: The concept is not in
the final shape, but in the process. The
work is improvisational, meditative, pri-
vate.
“I sit with these quilts for months or
years before I can make a single mark,”
he said. “And then it’s led by what the
material is going to give back.”
Mr. Biggers has chafed against the art
world’s category silos, even while work-
ing his way through some of its presti-
gious precincts. He earned his master’s
degree in the late 1990s at the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago, specializing
in painting, but set that practice aside
once he arrived in New York in 1999 as
an artist in residence at the Studio Mu-
seum in Harlem.
In “Freestyle,” the museum’s influen-
tial 2001 exhibition of new Black artists,
he showed a collaboration with Jennifer
Zackin, “A Small World.” A side-by-side
montage of home movies from each art-
ist’s childhood, it pointed to uncanny
similarities between life in Black mid-
dle-class Los Angeles and in New York
Jewish families, while underscoring the
absurdity of enduring social barriers.
The work was reprised in New York in
the 2002 Whitney Biennial.
Mr. Biggers was also making music —
a talent he continues to cultivate, lead-
ing and playing keys in Moon Medicin,
his avant-funk ensemble, which in-
cludes Martin Luther and DJ Jahi Sun-
dance and is inspired by Sun Ra. “That
might be his superpower,” said the poet
Saul Williams, a collaborator and friend
since their days at Morehouse College in
Atlanta. “His relationship to music is
GIONCARLO VALENTINE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
SANFORD BIGGERS
something that strengthens his work
and emboldens his gaze.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Biggers was making
work with a ritual charge. Multiple
projects invoked mandalas, circles bear-
ing geometries sacred in Eastern reli-
gions. Some were joyous and participa-
tory — for instance, the patterned lino-
leum dance floors that he set up at
break-dancing competitions around
New York, inviting contestants, wel-
coming the scuffing.
Their title, “Mandala for the B-Bodhi-
sattva,” marked the B-boy, or break
dancer, as a kind of enlightened being.
The concept enfolded influences from
Mr. Biggers’s youth in the Los Angeles
hip-hop scene (he rapped, D.J.-ed,
GIONCARLO VALENTINE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Left, Sanford Biggers in his Harlem
studio. Top, “Reconstruction,” a 2019
work created from an antique quilt, birch
plywood and gold leaf. Above, quilt pieces
in progress. Below left, “Blossom,” whose
baby grand Biggers converted into a
player piano that plays “Strange Fruit,”
the antilynching lament.
danced, and wrote graffiti), and his
three years teaching English in Japan,
where he got into religion and aesthetics
and frequented monasteries.
The mandala turned mournful in “Lo-
tus,” a suspended disc of etched glass
with an intricate petal pattern, first
shown in 2007. Up close, the petals
turned out to repeat an 18th-century dia-
gram of a slave ship hold. The image is
one of various symbols — the tree, the
piano, the clenched fist, the Cheshire-
Cat smile — that he carries across for-
mats, including quilts.
“I’m riffing on them like a jazz musi-
cian would riff on a song standard,” he
said.
Mr. Biggers’s syncretism is its own
method, with its formal fluidity, its
propensity toward everyday materials
and a certain dance away from fixed
meanings. The painter Julie Mehretu,
his close friend for over 20 years, de-
scribed him as both an explorer and an
instigator, inviting the viewer’s inquiry
while already slipping to the next idea.
“There’s always this embedded, implicit
sociality in the material he uses, and in
what he’s investigating,” she said.
Mr. Biggers still identifies with Los
Angeles, where he grew up in Baldwin
Hills, a son of a neurosurgeon, in a mi-
lieu that mingled with and collected
Black artists. (His parents moved from
Texas so his father could practice medi-
cine; John Biggers, the distinguished
Houston-based muralist and teacher,
was a relative.)
On his return from Japan, he said, it
was elder Los Angeles artists such as
Varnette Honeywood and Samella Lew-
is who took him under their wing and
pointed him to art school. He would
drive to the desert to visit Noah Purifoy
in his found-object sculpture garden. “It
felt like going to see the oracle,” he said.
“It gave me the inspiration to see that
you don’t have to follow the norms.”
Like many with Southern roots, Mr.
Biggers had some quilters in the family.
His epiphany, however, came with the
landmark “Quilts of Gee’s Bend” show
at the Whitney Museum in 2002. In the
magisterial work of the Alabama quilt-
ers, he said, he saw all the possibilities of
painting, and more. “There was color,
modulation, rhythm, and all these com-
positional things,” he said. “But seeing
them in these beautiful textile works
made by a woman’s hands, it was touch-
ing on sculpture, touching on the body,
touching on politics.”
In the studio, Mr. Biggers showed a
few quilt pieces in progress — one, with
light purple and green squares, that he
was turning into a landscape with
boughs and yellow blossoms; another,
mostly orange and gray, onto which he
added gold strips to complicate the lat-
tice motif. Lurking on one quilt was a QR
code; once scanned, it opened an audio
track by Moon Medicin.
Mr. Biggers’s quilt work has grown in
the same years that the Black Lives
Matter movement has intensified, par-
allel to his own increasingly furious
sculptures addressing violence and re-
sponding to the cascade of mass-circu-
lated videos of Black deaths. His “BAM”
series of gunshot statuettes, which he
began in 2015 in a rage, are dedicated to
victims of police killings whom we have
come to know by their first names:
“BAM (for Sandra), “BAM (for Phi-
lando),” and so on. They are not depicted
directly, but symbolically, by means of
an African figurative sculpture dipped
in wax and taken to a shooting range;
the damaged but heroic effigy is then re-
cast in bronze.
When Mr. Biggers showed “BAM (for
Michael)” in St. Louis in 2018, he met
first with Lesley McSpadden, the
mother of Michael Brown, who was
killed by a police officer in Ferguson,
Mo., in 2014, and received her blessing.
He likened the works to power figures,
like the Congolese nkisi: “The action of
shooting them, dipping them in wax, the
whole protracted process, is a way of
giving them power — charging them,”
he said.
It’s his own exhaustion that has
caused him to pause the “BAM” series,
and he is no longer watching the death
videos, for now. “I can’t deal with that to-
day,” he said. “It’s overload. There’s a
point where there’s no longer any de-
tachment from these things happening.”
The quilts, however, continue. Their
softness is their strength. Their trans-
mittal attests to survival; whether they
broadcast freedom codes during the Un-
derground Railroad or not, an artist can
inscribe them now with salutary infor-
mation for today.
On the studio floor, Mr. Biggers
spread two vintage quilts, both red,
white and blue, but in clashing patterns
— one a grid of small squares split in tri-
angles, the other building out from the
center like a kaleidoscope image. He de-
scribed a possible tall piece combining
the two, with a totemic feel.
Lately, he said, he has been working
mostly by subtraction, cutting sections
from quilts. “To create two things with
red, white and blue, and then take some-
thing from it, is the gesture,” he said.
“Working through the idea of the demise
of our democracy.”
The material would guide him, he
said. Mr. Biggers is just the latest arti-
san in a continuing historical chain. “It’s
not for me to say what they mean now,”
he said. “These are objects for a future
ethnography.”

Even in space, paperwork is inescapable

TELEVISION REVIEW
An animated comedy
set in the ‘Star Trek’ world
homes in on the drudges
BY MIKE HALE
Comedy. The final frontier.
“Star Trek: Lower Decks,” the latest
“Trek” extension from CBS All Access
(following “Discovery” and “Picard”),
goes where no series in the franchise
has gone before, at least not intention-
ally: full-time laughs. The “Trek”
shows have had their playful elements
from the start. But when your primary
source of humor over the years has
been making fun of Vulcans or an-
droids who have no sense of humor —
well, you see the issue.
“Lower Decks,” whose 10 episodes
are appearing weekly through Oct. 8,
also stands out for being animated, but
that’s not a first. The earliest “Star
Trek” spinoff, back in 1973, was “Star
Trek: The Animated Series,” a straight-
forward continuation of the original for
which most of its cast supplied voices.
(Its two seasons are also available
from All Access.)
The new show goes its own way, in
keeping with the somewhat freewheel-
ing vibe the television side of the fran-
chise has exhibited under the supervi-
sion of Alex Kurtzman. Developed by
Mike McMahan, a specialist in ani-
mated, adult-oriented science-fiction
comedy — he was a creator of Hulu’s
“Solar Opposites” and an executive
producer of the category’s ne plus
ultra, “Rick and Morty” — it’s about
half “Star Trek” fan service and half
smutty workplace sitcom.
Apparently, that’s not an easy for-
mula. Through four episodes, “Lower
Decks” feels caught in between. It’s a
smooth and zippy package, but it does-
n’t register very strongly as either a
geekfest or a transgressive satire.
Which is another way of saying it’s not
space through a hull breach.
The heroes, all ensigns, include
Boimler (Jack Quaid), a Starfleet true
believer who records his own mock
captain’s log each day, and Mariner
(Tawny Newsome), an insubordinate
badass whose millennial self-absorp-
tion may have something to do with
her mother’s being the ship’s captain.
The ship, like the ensigns, has an infe-
riority complex: Given the less than
heroic name Cerritos, it’s a “second
contact” vessel, traveling to planets to
handle the paperwork after someone
else has sought out a new civilization.
Plots abide by “Star Trek” norms as
misunderstandings with funny-looking
aliens or viruses picked up on-planet
CBS ALL ACCESS lead to pitched battles that look cata-
An image from “Star Trek: Lower Decks,” the latest series to spin off from the original. strophic until suddenly everything’s
OK again. Boimler gets to spend a lot
of time screeching about the rules,
all that funny. Wherever it’s going, it’s brating the heroic officers on the much in the style of the touchy teen-
not doing it very boldly. bridge, “Lower Decks” focuses on the ager Morty on “Rick and Morty.”
Its premise, stated in the title, is a bit phaser fodder, the people we usually As background music, there’s a
obvious but certainly workable: After see in the background running through continual hum of “Trek” nostalgia and
six decades of series and movies cele- the corridors or being sucked into gentle mockery. Much of this comes in
enthusiastic outbursts from Mariner, a
Starfleet history buff, though her facts
are shaky. (The legendary Spock
“fought Khan and some space
whales.”) Reference is made to the
“most important person in Starfleet
history,” an in-joke that will delight
fans of “The Next Generation” and
“Deep Space Nine.”
In counterpoint, the show tweaks the
franchise’s tradition of hyper-virility,
with a Kirk- and Riker-like first officer,
Ransom (Jerry O’Connell), who can
dispatch green giants in hand-to-hand
combat and is given to pronounce-
ments like “Nothing compares to the
firm, hot pulse of a joystick in your
hand.” The determination to take the
“adult” in adult animation seriously
can take even less subtle directions, as
when a crew member mistakenly
offers a token of timber, rather than
crystal, to an alien leader and the
dignitary recoils and cries, “He’s got
wood!” There are several Prime Direc-
tives being violated there, one having
to do with lazy joke writing.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
An old debate finds new life
Two multi-CD sets offer
a chance to reassess the
conductor John Barbirolli
BY DAVID ALLEN
“He drove the orchestra hard whenever
there was a shadow of an excuse for do-
ing it.”
“He has evidently some of the defects
of his virtues.”
“The orchestra quickly and ap-
pallingly retrograded in its discipline
and its technical quality, while review-
ers became positively embarrassed to
record the level of mediocrity, or worse,
in the performances.”
This is just a sampling of the grim ver-
dicts that Olin Downes of The New York
Times delivered on John Barbirolli
when that young and little-known En-
glishman had the unenviable task, from
1937 to 1942, of following the epochal Ar-
turo Toscanini as music director of the
New York Philharmonic.
Perhaps Virgil Thomson, of The New
York Herald Tribune, was more recep-
tive?
“Mr. Barbirolli is a Latin out of his nat-
ural water; perhaps, too, just a little over
his head.”
“The best birthday present the Phil-
harmonic could offer itself and us would
be a good permanent full-time conduc-
tor, somebody worthy of the job.”
Perhaps not. Barbirolli, a Cockney of
French and Italian parentage who died
50 years ago this month, remains a cult
figure in England, but he is perhaps best
known in the United States for what he
was not.
Not Toscanini, that’s for sure. And not
Wilhelm Furtwängler, the German vi-
sionary who, in 1936, accepted the Phil-
harmonic’s podium, then declined it af-
ter protests about his relationship with
the Nazi party. Not Leopold Stokowski
of the Philadelphia Orchestra, nor Serge
Koussevitzky of the Boston Symphony.
Barbirolli has been perceived as not
much at all, really — just another one of
the Philharmonic conductors, often
overlooked today, who came between
Toscanini and, in the late ’50s, Leonard
Bernstein.
Two new box sets offer a welcome op-
portunity to reassess. One, from Warner
Classics, piles up 109 CDs — starting in
1928, with a chamber group chugging
through some Haydn, and ending in
1970, with Barbirolli, days from death,
lavishing care over Delius at the helm of
the Hallé, the orchestra in Manchester,
England, that he had saved in 1943.
Listen to it all and you’ll hear plenty of
duds, but plenty of classics, too: Mahler,
with the Berlin Philharmonic; Vaughan
Williams, ablaze; Elgar, with the great
cellist Jacqueline du Pré and without
her.
What you will not hear, one concerto
aside, is the New York Philharmonic.
For that, you must turn to Sony Classi-
cal, and six discs of RCA and Columbia
recordings that were boxed up earlier
this year.
“They either adore me or I nauseate
them,” Barbirolli said of his listeners,
and it’s easy to hear why. Here was a
conductor with a singular style, harking
back to the days of the Romantics, late
and later, whom he loved to perform. De-
tails mattered to him, as did a sense of
the whole, but he was never bothered by
scrappiness or slips; what counted was
the sound, the spirit of a composer, and
he would stop at nothing to capture it.
He was a depressive workaholic who
stayed up late into the night marking up
scores, learning them for months before
rehearsing them for nine hours a day,
tempers flaring. He was a brilliant cel-
list, and he could make his string sec-
tions sing like no one else, drawing out
the longest of lines with the fullest of
bows, swooping from note to note in de-
Sifting the ruins in a volatile mother’s wake
BOOK REVIEW
The Erratics: A Memoir
By Vicki Laveau-Harvie. 203 pp. Alfred
A. Knopf. $25.95.
BY PARUL SEHGAL
Ancient glaciers did not travel alone.
They carried within them pebbles,
rocks, even boulders, sometimes for
hundreds of miles. These migrating
stones, once deposited, are called
“erratics” — they stick out among their
new surroundings. When the
Cordilleran ice sheet worked its way
down the mountains of Alaska and
across western Canada, it melted to
reveal a trail of angular stones now
known as the Foothills Erratics Train.
This was the stark terrain of Vicki
Laveau-Harvie’s childhood in Alberta.
The wayward pebbles and stones
provide the title of her memoir — “The
Erratics” — and its enigmatic, anchor-
ing metaphor. It is the first book by
Laveau-Harvie, 77, and the winner of
Australia’s Stella Prize.
Who is the “erratic” of this desolate
story of dysfunction, in which the
author returns home to care for her
aging parents? Is it Laveau-Harvie’s
mother, an unpredictable creature of
florid narcissism and dangerous per-
fiance of all fashion. What he conducted,
he conducted with heart. You either get
him, or you don’t.
Giovanni Barbirolli — Tita, to his inti-
mates — was born in music, in the dying
weeks of the 19th century. His father and
grandfather were professional violin-
ists, but Tita took up the cello, attending
conservatory at 10 and performing in or-
chestras from 16. After service in World
War I, during which he first took the po-
dium in concert, he split his time as a cel-
list and conductor, starting a chamber
orchestra and cutting his teeth on op-
eras. His break came in 1927, covering
for a Thomas Beecham concert with the
London Symphony. One critic called it
“astonishing” but chided him for “senti-
mentalizing,” even “violating,” Elgar’s
Second Symphony. It would become a
familiar indictment, but an HMV record
executive decided to sign him that night.
On record, Barbirolli was initially
known as an accompanist, his strings
curling a halo around the pianist Arthur
suasion? “She is a kind of flesh-and-
blood pyramid scheme, a human
Ponzi,” Laveau-Harvie writes. “You
buy in and you are hooked. You have
an investment in believing the projec-
tions, the evangelical 3-D laser image
of personal power and aggrandize-
ment, this illusion of depth in thin air.”
Her mother breathed lies. She would
invent family members on a lark, and
kill them off for sympathy from the
neighbors. To get out of a teaching job
she no longer wanted, she successfully
faked her own death. She manipulated
with ease and evident pleasure — and
no one quite so efficiently as Laveau-
Harvie’s father, who remained besotted
with her, chief acolyte to her delusions.
Laveau-Harvie fled home as a young
adult, moving first to France, then to
Australia to work as a translator and
raise a family. (Is she the erratic, given
how far she wandered?) The book
begins when she learns her mother has
shattered her hip, and she and her
younger sister return to the “House of
Loony,” their fortress of a home on the
bleak Canadian prairies. “In winter the
cold will kill you,” she writes. “Nothing
personal.”
At the hospital, they unwind the web
of lies their mother has been spinning
to the staff — that she has 18 children,
that Laveau-Harvie is wanted by Inter-
pol. In frustration, Laveau-Harvie’s
sister takes their mother’s medical
Rubinstein in Mozart, his virtuosity
matching the violinist Jascha Heifetz’s
in Tchaikovsky.
Carried by soloists like these, word of
his promise reached the Philharmonic’s
boss, Arthur Judson, who thought for a
while of offering Barbirolli a week or two
of guest conducting. But with the
Furtwängler debacle raw, Judson sent a
surprising telegram in April 1936, offer-
ing a full third of the 1936-37 season to
this lowly director of Glasgow’s Scottish
Orchestra, overnight making him
Toscanini’s presumed successor. Barbi-
rolli was shocked; the British press was
baffled, and not a little afraid.
The stakes became clear as Barbirolli
stepped ashore in America. Reporters
startled him, asking how it felt to follow
Toscanini.
“I do not intend to follow in the maes-
tro’s footsteps,” he said carefully. “No
one can do that.”
Barbirolli was as awed as anybody.
His father and grandfather had played
MICHAEL CHETHAM
Vicki Laveau-Harvie.
chart and writes “MMA” — for “mad
as a meat-ax.” The writer worries:
“Maybe they’ll see that on the chart
and give her some medication called
MMA and kill her.” Her sister re-
sponds: “Do we care?”
Sorting through the house, they
discover their mother has been squan-
dering her savings, sending it to scam-
mers. They find their father disori-
ented and skinny as a scarecrow —
brainwashed, Laveau-Harvie writes,
and starved by their mother. The sis-
PHOTOGRAPHS BY CECIL BEATON/CONDÉ NAST, VIA GETTY IMAGES
Reporters startled him, asking
how it felt to follow Toscanini.
with Toscanini, including in the orches-
tra in the 1887 premiere of Verdi’s
“Otello,” which the great man remem-
bered when they met. Barbirolli had at-
tended Toscanini’s rehearsals and con-
certs in London for years, emerging
spellbound and writing that the Italian
conductor “radiates something very
pure and noble.”
But they were opposites in style.
Toscanini’s conducting was lean, driven
by rhythm; Barbirolli’s was lush, driven
by lyricism. “I look for warmth and ‘can-
tabile’ and a working atmosphere where
men play beyond the call of duty,” the
younger man said.
Barbirolli initially won over the Phil-
harmonic’s musicians and its audience,
earning a contract for three years, then
another two. The press was curious, too,
ters feed and bathe him, console him
as he pines piteously for his wife.
Keeping the couple separated is imper-
ative, the sisters decide, convinced that
their mother will kill him if she returns.
They push for their mother to be given
a diagnosis of dementia, even as the
doctors protest that she is competent.
For such a force of menace, Laveau-
Harvie’s mother is a strangely silent
antagonist. Once placed in care, she
vanishes from the story; the focus
shifts to the father — depicted as a
helpless, blameless lamb — and the
vulnerabilities of old age. The mother
is so absent, I began to wonder if
Laveau-Harvie still fears her contami-
nating charm, her ability to distort
reality.
In one scene, a conference is held to
decide on the mother’s future. In any
other book, it might be a pivotal mo-
ment — with the main players assem-
bled, the mother primed for attack, her
freedom in the balance — but we get a
vague sense of events. The writer
confesses that she has no memory of
what was said. She recalls only the
“quaking, liquefying dread” of being
near her mother. At the first sight of
her mother, in fact, Laveau-Harvie’s
sister tries to run: “She wheels around
like a horse catching the scent of a
bear upwind and I grab her arm. Don’t
move, I whisper. It’s OK.”
She can describe her mother’s hand-
John Barbirolli, the New York Philharmonic’s music director from 1937 to 1942, has
remained a beloved figure in England but is less known in the United States.
at first. But when Toscanini returned to
New York to lead the new NBC Sym-
phony, during Barbirolli’s first full sea-
son, 1937-38, the honeymoon ended.
Downes, of The Times, soured, savaging
Barbirolli’s talents and tastes, using a
performance of Elgar’s Second — per-
haps this conductor’s favorite work — to
wonder “at anyone professing to take
this symphony seriously today.” While
Toscanini held court with socialites,
Barbirolli refused to get involved in New
York high society, and attendance soon
began to dip.
When World War II was underway,
Barbirolli was unwilling to take Ameri-
can citizenship to satisfy union rules,
and was sick for his home country. He let
his Philharmonic contract end with the
1941-42 season, remaining in the United
States and making guest appearances
the following year only because the
wartime voyage across the Atlantic was
so perilous. He would not come back to
the Philharmonic until 1959.
The Sony set gives only a suggestion
of what Barbirolli achieved in New York.
He offered a good deal of new American
music and works new to the Philhar-
monic, as well as the understandable
British novelties — including the pre-
miere, in 1940, of Britten’s Violin Con-
certo, which one critic thought so poor
as to encourage “the enemies of democ-
racy.” If none of that appears in the box
set, what Sony does give us is evidence
that the artistry was not at all dim. Schu-
bert’s Fourth Symphony snaps by, crisp
and crackling; a Brahms Second is
touching in parts, tempestuous in oth-
ers; a headstrong Sibelius First snarls
and soars, leaving little indication that
the orchestra was in disrepair by April
1942, as the reviews alleged.
Barbirolli fled for Manchester in June
1943, scarred but still ambitious. The
Hallé today is an impeccably refined in-
strument, but when he arrived, this old-
est permanent symphony in England
barely existed, only 39 players strong.
He hired half an orchestra in a month,
much of it inexperienced, and rehearsed
in an abandoned schoolroom. Because
of the war, a third of the players were fe-
male, and he refused to fire them when
the men returned after fighting.
With their Free Trade Hall bombed
out until 1951, they played in whatever
halls they could find across the north of
England, and on Sundays at Belle Vue, a
Manchester circus seating 6,000, with a
zoo audible next door. The sensation
was immediate, the bonds forged to last.
Warner’s remastering could be better,
but there are revelations from this peri-
od: The slow movement of Vaughan
Williams’s Fifth, recorded shortly after
its 1943 premiere, practically levitates;
the ball bewitches in a fun “Symphonie
Fantastique” from 1947.
writing, however: “all confident
pointed flourishes, a martial-art-weap-
ons script.” And she prowls among her
possessions, her fur coats and china.
She dips into the past to present a few
examples of bizarre behavior — how
her mother once crept up behind her
and snipped off her ponytail with a
pair of scissors — but there is no full
accounting of what it was like to grow
up with such a woman, no interest in
exploring the sources of her cruelty. As
a choice it is unsatisfying, but also
curiously mesmerizing: the mother as
the glacier, the great governing force in
their family life, and still too dominant,
too vast to be seen whole.
In its compression and odd omis-
sions, its reluctance to diagnose, this
memoir is itself an erratic — an outlier
in its genre. Think of the vivid portraits
of the confounding mothers in Mary
Karr’s “The Liars’ Club,” Alison
Bechdel’s “Are You My Mother?” and
Jeanette Winterson’s “Why Be Happy
When You Could Be Normal?” Those
stories are ledgers of silences, persist-
ing confusions and, at times, outright
abuses. They are narratives of the
mother-daughter bond that rummage
deep in the past and carry into the
present, as the writer interrogates
what it means to wrest possession of
the story. “My mother composed me as
I now compose her,” Bechdel writes.
How moth-eaten “The Erratics”
MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2020 | 15
culture
Offers immediately came for Barbi-
rolli’s services, first from the London
Symphony and then the BBC, but he
stayed dedicated to the Hallé, even as
his dreadfully paid players often did not.
He took on more guest conducting after
1958, and even a second post at the
Houston Symphony between 1961 and
1967, but he would spend most of the rest
of his life training and retraining the
Manchester orchestra.
There’s a certain “what if” quality
about the final decades of Barbirolli’s ca-
reer, then — one made all the more
haunting by the success of some of his
later recordings with other orchestras,
which benefited from EMI technology
that the Hallé rarely had access to on its
mass-market labels. Barbirolli didn’t get
on with the Vienna Philharmonic, and
their Brahms cycle shows it, but he en-
thralled the Berlin Philharmonic, lead-
ing a devastating Mahler Ninth in 1964.
His Mahler with the New Philharmonia
Orchestra — a Fifth from 1969 and a con-
troversially broad Sixth from 1967 — is
convincing, and orchestras in the
British capital served him well: the BBC
Symphony in a steadfast Beethoven
“Eroica” and the London Symphony in a
grand, glistening “Tintagel,” by Arnold
Bax.
Tolerate the imperfections in playing
and production, though, and there is still
a special spirit in the records Barbirolli
made with the Hallé. Especially the ear-
lier ones: Schubert’s Ninth and
Vaughan Williams’s “A London Sym-
phony” have more flair in their 1950s
takes than in ones from the ’60s, and Vi-
ennese bonbons from Lehar and the
Strausses have an extra sprinkling of
sugar. Compare the mezzo-soprano Jan-
et Baker’s two accounts of Mahler’s “Ich
bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”:
The eyes dampen from the New Philhar-
monia (1969) but weep from the Hallé
(1967).
And then there is his Elgar, which has
the authority of tradition: Barbirolli
played under Elgar at the premiere of
his Cello Concerto, and elsewhere. He
helped Jacqueline du Pré make that con-
certo famous in a classic recording, but
also brought conviction to works like the
“Cockaigne Overture” (recorded three
times, with the love of a born Londoner),
the “Introduction and Allegro” (a trifle
that Barbirolli turned into a master-
piece six times on record) and even the
“Elegy,” short and sentimental.
He was happy to let Elgar’s grandeur
shine, but at his finest, like two accounts
of the Second Symphony with the Hallé,
Barbirolli embraced this composer’s in-
securities — conquering them, as he
conquered his own, with a palpable and
moving sense of sorrow and regret.
Plenty, in other words, to prove Olin
Downes wrong.
appears in comparison — and yet, how
intriguing is its approach. Laveau-
Harvie’s gaze repeatedly curves away
from personality to place — to the
setting of her childhood: the ice age
that deposited the Foothills Erratics
Train, the torn wood inlays and clut-
tered floors of the dilapidated family
home, which she navigates, high-
stepping, “like a Lipizzan dancing
horse,” wondering, with frantic para-
noia, if her mother has arranged an
ambush. She cannot travel without
noting potential fault lines and grind-
ing tectonic plates, without wondering
about the water table or dilating on the
black earth near active volcanoes —
“the lava cooling but still hot and dan-
gerous, just a crust on the top, nothing
you would really want to put your
weight on. You could drop through into
the molten surge below.”
Laveau-Harvie depicts her mother
neither as a riddle to be solved nor as a
woman to be understood, but as an
implacable act of nature, who must
only be survived. If she remains a hazy
character in the book, she inflects its
every sentence, its structure, its aver-
sions. She was a mother with a mon-
strous talent for twisting reality. In her
memoir of the aftermath, her daughter
tethers her story to the very ground
beneath her. She speaks only of what
she can confirm; she moves carefully,
finding her footing.

16 | MONDAY, AUGUST 17, 2020
living
5 dishes to cook this week
It seems impossible, but school has already started in some places and is
gearing up to start in others. Back-to-school season might be a little different
this year, but whatever it looks like, it’s still the beginning of the busy time for
many of us. The juggling act of work, home, family and class begins. Take a
deep breath. You’ve got this — though you might need a few meals with very
little hands-on prep. Don’t worry, the payoff is big and delicious. Here are five
dishes for the week. MARGAUX LASKEY
BEATRIZ DA COSTA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES. FOOD STYLIST: FRANCES BOSWELL.
Chile-oil noodles with cilantro
Your family members will most likely love this 20-minute spicy noodle recipe from
Judy Kim, but for the spice-averse, set aside some undressed noodles. Your picky
eaters could season the udon themselves, with their choice of soy sauce, sesame
oil, fried shallots and cilantro.
TIME: 20 MINUTES
YIELD: 4 SERVINGS
14 ounces dried udon noodles
¼ cup chile oil with crunchy garlic
2 tablespoons pure sesame oil
2 teaspoons Sichuan chile oil, or to
taste (use only the oil for a
milder sauce)
2 teaspoons soy sauce
½ cup finely sliced garlic chives or
scallions, plus more for garnish
2 tablespoons store-bought fried
shallots, crumbled by hand
(optional)
½ cup finely chopped cilantro (see
Note), plus a few sprigs for
garnish
Gained weight? Be kind to yourself about it
BY COURTNEY RUBIN
With the explosion of at-home exercise
programs, it may seem as if it’s never
been easier to work out. But the reality
is, it’s probably never been harder.
For every person posting a sweaty
“crushed it” selfie on Instagram, there’s
another one (or four) just trying to en-
dure pandemic-induced stress.
Add constant access to the refrigera-
tor and the guilt about what we’ve eaten
— or the exercise we haven’t done —
piles on faster than you can say “Quar-
antine 15.”
“So you’ve gained weight,” said Elyse
Resch, a nutrition therapist. “So what?
You’re alive. We’re doing the best we can
with the resources we have.” (Not to
mention that some are straining under
1. Bring a large pot of water to boil and
cook noodles according to package
instructions, stirring from time to time to
prevent them from sticking. Drain well in a
colander, then run noodles under cold
water until cooled.
2. Meanwhile, in a large bowl, combine all
three oils with the soy sauce and ½ cup
garlic chives.
3. Toss cooled noodles into the chile oil
mixture. Gently fold in the crumbled fried
shallots and chopped cilantro. Divide
among four bowls, and top with more
garlic chives and cilantro sprigs.
Note: For crisp cilantro, place leaves and
stems in an ice water bath until the leaves
are firm. Drain and spin in a salad spinner.
Store cilantro in the spinner and
refrigerate until ready to use.
LINDA XIAO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES. FOOD STYLIST: MONICA PIERINI.
For an easy starch, add chickpeas
to the feta, or toast bread or pita
on a free rack in the oven.
severe challenges, like significant
health concerns and financial worries.)
BREAK THE CYCLE
Above all, have compassion. “I don’t
think most people change their minds
by being yelled at or punched in the face,
but that’s how we talk to ourselves,” said
Phoenix Jackson, a clinical psychologist
who specializes in trauma. When Ms.
Jackson is having trouble, she likes to
find a photo of herself as a child and
think of how gently she’d like that per-
son to be addressed.
Next, recognize that weight and ambi-
tious exercise regimens may offer the il-
lusion of control, but the anxiety they
produce is not helpful. This is part of a
larger problem: Most of us feel pressure
to achieve or maintain a certain size.
ANDREW PURCELL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES. FOOD STYLIST: BARRETT WASHBURNE.
Slow cooker salsa verde chicken
A lot of slow cooker recipes get billed as “fix it and forget it,” but with prep steps like
sauté, marinate and sear, they actually aren’t that simple. This one, from Sarah
DiGregorio, really is. Just combine the ingredients in a slow cooker, cook for five to
six hours and enjoy, perhaps over rice or tucked into enchiladas or burritos.
TIME: 5 TO 6 HOURS
YIELD: 4 SERVINGS
1½ pounds boneless, skinless
chicken thighs
1½ cups jarred salsa verde
1 (4-ounce) can chopped mild green
chiles
8 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 jalapeño, stemmed, seeded and
diced
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon ground cumin
3 scallions (green and white parts),
thinly sliced
1 small bunch cilantro, leaves and
tender stems finely chopped
(about 1 heaping cup)
Kosher salt, to taste
Fresh lime juice, to taste
Any combination of rice, tortillas,
pepitas, queso fresco, diced
avocado and crushed tortilla
chips, for serving
Chicken-zucchini meatballs with feta
Ground chicken (or turkey) can skew dry, but this sheet-pan recipe from Ali Slagle
adds a little shredded zucchini to the meat mixture, which means the meatballs
stay moist in the heat of the oven. The meatballs roast alongside slices of zucchini,
then everything is served with spoonfuls of lemon-feta sauce.
TIME: 45 MINUTES
YIELD: 4 SERVINGS
3 large zucchini (about 1½
pounds)
Kosher salt and black pepper
1 large shallot, halved
½ cup panko
1½ teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon red-pepper flakes
1 pound ground chicken or turkey
2 tablespoons chopped fresh mint,
basil, parsley or dill, plus more
for serving
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus
more for greasing and drizzling
3 tablespoons lemon juice (from 1
large lemon)
4 ounces feta
1. Heat the oven to 425 degrees. Cut 2 of
the zucchini into ½-inch-thick slices.
Transfer to a plate, season with salt, and
set aside.
2. Working over a large bowl, using the
large holes of a box grater, grate the
remaining zucchini. Grate 1 shallot half
into the bowl as well. Add the panko,
cumin, ½ teaspoon red-pepper flakes and
½ teaspoon salt, and use your hands to
toss until combined. Add the chicken and
herbs and toss gently until combined.
“Break the cycle by asking yourself
where you learned that weight gain was
something to be ashamed of,” Paula
Freedman, a clinical psychologist who
specializes in eating disorders, wrote in
an email. Ask: Does this belief help me
be the type of person I want to be?
Christy Harrison, a nutrition thera-
pist who examined the issue of excess
weight and the coronavirus in a Wired
article published in April, said in an in-
terview that few of the early research
studies considered race, socioeconomic
status or quality of care — “social deter-
minants of health that we know explain
the lion’s share of health disparities be-
tween groups of people,” she wrote. Nor
did they reflect how doctors’ biases in-
fluence the way they care for higher-
weight patients.
1. Combine the chicken thighs, salsa
verde, green chiles, chopped garlic,
jalapeño, garlic powder, onion powder and
cumin in a 6- to 8-quart slow cooker. Stir
to evenly combine. (Don’t add salt now;
jarred salsas are often high in sodium.)
Cook on low until the chicken is tender
and the flavors are blended, 5 to 6 hours.
(If you will be away for 8 hours or more,
set the cook time for 4 hours on low and
set the slow cooker auto-switch to warm
for the remaining time.)
2. Use two forks to coarsely shred the
chicken. With the heat on low, add the
scallions and cilantro, and stir to combine.
Season to taste with salt and lime juice.
Serve with rice or in tortillas, if desired,
with accompaniments.
3. Lightly grease a baking sheet. With wet
hands, form the chicken mixture into 16
meatballs (around 2 to 3 tablespoons
each) and place them on one side of the
baking sheet. Drizzle with olive oil and
roast for 10 minutes.
4. Meanwhile, pat the sliced zucchini dry,
then lightly coat with about 1 tablespoon
olive oil. Season with pepper.
5. Coarsely chop the remaining shallot half
and transfer to a small bowl. Add the
lemon juice, season with salt, and stir to
combine.
6. Add the sliced zucchini to the other half
of the baking sheet, moving the meatballs
over, if necessary. Bake until the meatballs
are cooked through and the zucchini is
golden on the underside, another 15 to 20
minutes. For more browned meatballs,
broil for a few minutes, if desired.
7. Meanwhile, crumble the feta into the
shallot mixture. Add the ¼ cup extra-virgin
olive oil and the remaining ½ teaspoon
red-pepper flakes. Stir, breaking up the
feta a bit, and season to taste with salt and
pepper.
8. Eat the meatballs and zucchini with a
drizzle of the feta sauce and more fresh
herbs.
But strong evidence exists that obes-
ity (defined as having a body mass in-
dex of 30 or more) puts you at greater
risk of dying from Covid-19.
“At the end of the day, regardless of
what the science does or doesn’t say
about Covid and weight, we still don’t
have any way for people to lose weight
and keep it off,” Ms. Harrison said.
One tenet of diet — or wellness — cul-
ture is that eating for any other reason
besides screaming biological hunger is a
bad thing. This belief came from the rise
of diet clubs in the 1960s, where women
went to talk out their feelings so they
could avoid so-called emotional eating.
“You have to be starving to deserve to
eat in this culture,” Ms. Harrison said.
“But we are designed to get pleasure out
of food and connect over food.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
DAVID MALOSH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Cheddar scallion dip
Dip for dinner? You betcha. This hearty one from Melissa Clark is a cousin to
pimento cheese but without those potentially child-deflecting red peppers. Serve
alongside raw vegetables, a few different types of crackers or chips, and little
piles of salami, pepperoni and prosciutto.
TIME: 5 MINUTES
Zip it up with a dash or two of
YIELD: 1 CUP
Tabasco and some mashed garlic.
4 ounces cream cheese (at room
temperature), cubed Place the cream cheese, mayonnaise,
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
1 scallion, thinly sliced
scallion, salt, pepper (if using) and paprika
in a bowl and mix and mash well with a
¼ teaspoon fine sea salt, more to fork or spatula until smooth. Mix in orange
taste juice until smooth, and then mix in the
Cheddar. If the dip seems too thick, add a
Black pepper, to taste (optional)
little more juice. Taste for seasoning. You
¼ teaspoon sweet paprika
can also mix in a food processor if you like.
1 to 2 tablespoons fresh orange
juice, as needed
½ cup sharp Cheddar, finely grated
1 small garlic clove, mashed to a
paste (optional)
Hot sauce to taste (optional)
CHRISTOPHER TESTANI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES. FOOD STYLIST: SIMON ANDREWS.
Lemony shrimp and bean stew
Don’t let the word “stew” scare you. This brothy, buttery dish from Sue Li is really
more of a sauté, and it comes together in about a half-hour. Stretch the dish into a
meal for six by stirring in some extra butter and serving over cooked spaghetti or
rigatoni.
TIME: 30 MINUTES Substitute the shrimp with an
YIELD: 4 SERVINGS
equal amount of flaky white fish or
1 teaspoon fresh lemon zest and 2 even seared scallops.
tablespoons juice
1 teaspoon sweet or smoked
1. Combine lemon zest, paprika, garlic, ¾
paprika
teaspoon salt and ¾ teaspoon pepper in a
2 garlic cloves, grated
medium bowl. Add shrimp and toss to
Kosher salt and black pepper
coat.
1 pound peeled, deveined large
2. In a large pot, melt butter over
shrimp (tails removed)
medium-high heat. When butter is
4 tablespoons unsalted butter (½
foaming, add shrimp and cook, stirring
stick)
2 large leeks, trimmed, then halved occasionally, until pink and starting to curl,
2 to 3 minutes. Using a slotted spoon,
lengthwise, white and light green
transfer shrimp to a plate; set aside.
parts sliced crosswise ½-inch
thick (or 1 large onion, minced) 3. Add leeks, season with salt and pepper,
1 (15-ounce) can cannellini beans, and cook over medium until leeks are soft
rinsed and starting to brown on the edges, 4 to 5
2 cups chicken stock or vegetable minutes, stirring occasionally. Add beans
stock and chicken broth and bring to a boil over
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh high. Lower heat and simmer, 8 to 10
parsley (optional) minutes. Stir in reserved shrimp and any
Toasted bread, for serving juices from the plate, parsley and lemon
juice, and season with salt and pepper.
Serve with toasted bread.
Let’s say food really is giving you I can’t get my heart rate to this I’m not
comfort. “Go with it, love it, be grateful going to get the benefits.’ ”
for it,” Ms. Resch said. With one caveat: Ms. Resch prefers the word “move-
You’ll need to stay present to get com- ment” to “exercise.”
fort and satisfaction. If you’re too busy “Exercise connotes something you
judging yourself when you eat, you’re have to do,” she said. “You want to take
not savoring the texture and flavor. out the sense of doing it for a purpose
like weight loss or keeping muscle on.”
ASK WHY YOU EXERCISE Instead, ask yourself what makes you
So you’re not working out enough, or as feel good. It could be just stretching.
hard as you did pre-lockdown, and you Finally, look at feeling bad as the indi-
think this is a problem. cator that something might be ready to
This may be because, for you, exer- change, said Elizabeth Hall, an intuitive
cise is about controlling your body or eating coach. And the way to end the
compensating for what you’ve been eat- guilt and shame is actually just to notice
ing. “Exercise is its own pleasurable those feelings.
thing you can do for joy and for mental “Feeling bad is actually an invitation
health benefits,” Ms. Harrison said. “It’s to expand and shift our consciousness
hard to tune into that when you have all and let go of expectations and old pro-
these voices in your head saying, ‘But if gramming,” she said.