HOW SEA QUEST TO BRING BACK RICH

TURTLES ‘A GRUNT EVERYONE HISTORY

KNOW
WHICH Weekend HAD FORGOTTEN’
PAGE 6 | WORLD
AT EVERY
TURN IN
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BEACH
TO CALL BRITISH
HOME COLUMBIA
TRACING THE HUMBLE,
LUSCIOUS POTATO PAGE 12 | DESPITE TRADE GAP, PAGE 23 |
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INTERNATIONAL EDITION | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018

The insanity Big plans

along the to revitalize
Gaza fence Europe are
falling apart
BRUSSELS

Roger Cohen French leader’s initiative

undermined by a surge
in populism and Brexit
OPINION
BY STEVEN ERLANGER

When snipers shoot to kill civilians
approaching a wall, there are disturbing
echoes for anyone who has lived in
Berlin. I lived in Berlin.
I have passed several times through
the fence separating the first world of
Israel from the rubble-strewn open-air
prison of Gaza. It’s a violent transition in
a place of unreason. As usual Israel
overreaches, an eye for an eyelash, as
the Oxford professor and former Israeli
soldier Avi Shlaim once observed.
Israel has the right
Israel has to defend its borders,
but not to use lethal
the right to force against mainly
defend its unarmed protesters
borders, but in the way that has
not use lethal already left 35 Pales-
force against tinians dead and
unarmed nearly 1,000 injured.
protesters. Overreaction is
inherent to the exist-
ential threat Israel
claims, but that is
ever less persuasive. Israeli military
dominance over the Palestinians is
overwhelming and Arab states have
lost interest in the Palestinian cause.
Hamas, Israel claims, is using women
and children as human shields for vio-
lent demonstrators who want to pene-
trate the fence and kill Israelis. The
script is familiar: international investi-
gations will follow, inconclusive out-
comes, redoubled hatred.
Israel wins but loses. Israel haters,
and Jew haters, have a field day. You
know pornography when you see it. You
know a disproportionate military re-
sponse when you see it. It’s stomach
turning.
Gaza Redux: the violence is inevita-
ble. The Israeli-Palestinian status quo,
so called, incubates bloodshed. It’s
important to look beyond the Gaza
fence, symbol, like all fences, of failure.
This is what happens when diplomacy
dies, when compromise evaporates,
COHEN, PAGE 11
The New York Times publishes opinion
from a wide range of perspectives in
hopes of promoting constructive debate
about consequential questions.
The North Korean town of Hyesan. Nearby, smugglers take metal ore across the river into China to dodge sanctions imposed on Pyongyang by the United Nations Security Council.
How much do sanctions sting? ing smuggled into China at the crossing
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA
almost every night. He said smugglers
also headed the other way, moving sug-
ar, flour and 50-kilogram sacks of fertil-
North Korea is hurting, izer into North Korea.
but there’s no sign of There is growing evidence that tough
new sanctions imposed on North Korea
crisis to force nuclear deal to stop its nuclear weapons and missile
programs have begun to bite, and bite
BY CHOE SANG-HUN
hard. Factories have closed because of a
lack of raw materials, fishermen have
On a dark February night, the trucks un- deserted their boats and military units
loaded their contraband near Hyesan, a are resorting to charcoal-engine vehi-
North Korean town across a narrow cles and even ox-driven carts for trans-
river from China. As border guards portation.
looked the other way, workers used But the elaborate efforts to smuggle
carts to pull the cargo of metal ore — goods in and out of North Korea are
tungsten, lead, zinc, copper and gold among the signs that the closed, secre-
concentrates, all banned from export tive country is finding ways to cope.
under United Nations sanctions — The North is also responding with pa-
across the frozen river. triotic appeals, with belt-tightening and
By sunrise, all that was left were tire by giving priority to the allocation of re-
tracks and footprints on the ice. sources to the military and the political
A North Korean witness told an ac- elite. Despite shortages, exchange rates
quaintance living in South Korea that and key consumer prices are stable, and
ore, as well as other materials, was be- there is no sign of an approaching fam-
ED JONES/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
The North Korean flag displayed in lights
atop the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang.
ine, according to recent visitors and
North Korean defectors who remain in
contact with people inside the country.
President Trump and South Korea’s
president, Moon Jae-in, say their policy
DAMIR SAGOLJ/REUTERS
of “maximum pressure” on the govern-
ment of the North Korean leader, Kim
Jong-un, has helped bring him to the
bargaining table. Mr. Trump recently re-
vealed that he sent the Central Intelli-
gence Agency director, Mike Pompeo, to
a secret meeting with Mr. Kim this
month to lay the groundwork for the
first meeting between the leaders of the
United States and North Korea.
In the past week, Mr. Moon said that
Mr. Kim removed a key obstacle to nego-
tiations with the United States by ceas-
ing to demand the withdrawal of Ameri-
can troops from South Korea as a condi-
tion for denuclearizing his country.
It is far from clear, however, whether
the pain from sanctions is forcing Mr.
Kim to make concessions and whether it
could be enough to drive him to trade
away his nuclear arsenal.
Many analysts and North Korean de-
fectors have doubts about whether eco-
nomic pressure alone can change the be-
havior of an impoverished, tightly con-
SANCTIONS, PAGE 5
Last September, the enthusiastic new
French president, Emmanuel Macron,
laid out big plans for the European Un-
ion, intended to give fresh spark and
purpose to a bloc preoccupied with mi-
gration, populism and Britain’s exit, and
to breathe new life into French-German
leadership.
Then, as so often with the 28-nation
bloc, reality and national interests got in
the way. The German election last au-
tumn badly weakened Chancellor An-
gela Merkel, who needed six months to
assemble a governing coalition, one that
is even more wary about overhauls to
the eurozone.
The Italian election last month gave
the upper hand to populist, euroskeptic
parties that want to abandon pension
changes and expand Italy’s worrisome
national debt, adding to German jitters.
So after all the hoopla, Mr. Macron’s
proposed overhaul has been gutted. If
not “as dead as a dormouse,” as the Ger-
man weekly Der Spiegel opined before
his visit to Berlin in the past week, his
European initiatives have been heavily
watered down.
And for fans of Europe, that’s too bad.
The window for meaningful changes
is rapidly closing before elections next
year for a new European Parliament,
and the choices of a new European Com-
mission, European Commission presi-
dent and head of the European Central
Bank. Projects and legislation not ap-
proved by June or, at the latest, October
will fall by the wayside until 2020.
It would be a shame to miss this
chance, said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a
senior fellow at the Peterson Institute
for International Economics.
“It is urgent,” he said. “A window of
opportunity between now and Euro-
pean elections is real but narrowing.”
“The constellation of the most cen-
trist German chancellor in a long time in
her last term looking for her legacy and
a French president, newly elected on a
European platform and highly ambi-
tious, is very rare,” he added. “If you
think European reform can happen out-
side a crisis, you’ll never get a better
constellation than now.”
EUROPE, PAGE 5

A role that indulges the actor’s hero worship

ETYEK, HUNGARY
Antonio Banderas plays
Picasso, who sets his own
standard for greatness
BY TAFFY BRODESSER-AKNER
By the time Antonio Banderas shaved
off his eyebrows and hair to play Pablo
Picasso — his lifelong hero, his towering
standard of greatness — he had already
been asked to portray Picasso twice.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Twice before.”
He sat in a director’s chair, his face
contorted into [thoughtful emoji], com-
plete with chin strokes. On his nose,
cheeks and chin, he wore silicone pros-
thetics for the ways he did not resemble
Picasso: to thin out his featherbed lips,
to make his nose fleshier and his jowls
jowlier, to mask his beautiful face. It did-
CHARLIE GATES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES n’t work. The minute you looked at him,
The actor Antonio Banderas and the idol he is playing, Picasso, were both born in his chocolate pudding swimming pool
Málaga, Spain. After a long and full career, Mr. Banderas still sees this as a dream role. eyeballs gave him away.
It was his last day in Etyek, Hungary,
before heading to Malta for the final leg
of shooting for NatGeo’s “Genius,” an
anthology series that focuses on Picasso
in its second season and will have its
premiere on Tuesday. The Picasso he
was playing today was 67. When he was
shooting, he assumed the posture of a
67-year-old, but when he wasn’t, he was
Antonio Banderas, a human exclama-
tion point, his face an orchestra of in-
tense expressions: [extremely happy
emoji], [crying-laughing emoji], [de-
spondent emoji]. (A better way to put it:
His friend Salma Hayek told me that out
of all the characters he’s ever played, he
most resembles Puss in Boots in real
life.)
Oh yes, by the time he shaved off all
vestiges of hair above his neck, he al- A SUMMIT
ready had a long, full career. He already
was a star of great renown in Spain, FOR INNOVATORS
where he had served as a muse to Pedro
Almodóvar for seven movies. He al-
AND EXPERTS
ready had received accolades for his
1992 performance in “The Mambo
Kings,” a performance so openhearted
BANDERAS, PAGE 20

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2 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018
page two
Exorcism lessons amid fears of evil afoot
ROME JOURNAL
ROME
A priest, at times, needs
to talk tough to the devil
and say, ‘Shut up, Satan’
BY JASON HOROWITZ
Andrés Cárdenas sat in the back of the
auditorium, opened his folder and took
careful notes as a Catholic cardinal with
decades of experience in casting
demons out of possessed bodies gave a
master class on how to yell at the devil,
rid Muslims of black magic and purge
Satan from a cellphone.
Father Cárdenas, a Colombian priest,
wrote vigorously as the 89-year-old in-
structor, Ernest Simoni, explained that
although exorcisms — what he called “a
spiritual scientific instrument” — can be
practiced on Muslims, “they stayed
Muslims after.”
Cardinal Simoni, who is Albanian,
also said that fasting sometimes helped
the possessed but that often you had to
play hardball with Beelzebub by saying
things like “Shut up, Satan.”
After jotting it all down, Father Cár-
denas, 36, explained he had come to
Rome to learn about exorcisms “be-
cause it is a gift” he wanted to share with
his parishioners back in El Espinal, Co-
lombia.
He was one of 300 Roman Catholics —
mostly clerics but also lay men and
women furnished with authorization let-
ters from their bishops — to attend the
weeklong course, “Exorcism and Pray-
er of Liberation,” that organizers have
given annually for 13 years in hopes of
recruiting and training armies of poten-
tial exorcists to confront spreading de-
monic forces.
Participants paid about $375 (simul-
taneous translation was about $300 ex-
tra) to attend the sessions, which were
sponsored by conservative Catholic
groups and held at the Pontifical Univer-
sity Regina Apostolorum, run by the
conservative Legionaries of Christ reli-
gious order.
The would-be exorcists blamed the in-
ternet and atheism for what they see as
a spike in evil, but the urgency evident
in the course also seemed to have some-
thing to do with a growing conservative
view that the church has gone astray un-
der Pope Francis, and that end times
had drawn nigh.
The pope recently had conservative
heads spinning when he was quoted, in-
correctly according to the Vatican, by an
Italian reporter with credibility issues
as not believing in hell. “Beyond what is
tolerable,” the American cardinal Ray-
mond Burke, a leader of the conserva-
tive resistance to Francis, said at the
time.
Abstract artist besotted by paint
GILLIAN AYRES
1930-2018
BY RICHARD SANDOMIR
Gillian Ayres, a leading British abstract
painter whose pursuit of beauty led her
to use evocative colors, texture her
works with thick layers of oils and occa-
sionally to hurl paint at her canvasses,
died on Wednesday in North Devon,
England. She was 88.
Her son Sam Mundy said the cause
was heart and kidney failure.
“Painting is a visual, silent medium,
but I love it and I am obsessed by it,” Ms.
Ayres told The Guardian in 2001.
She was besotted by paint — what it
felt like physically and what she could
do with it. She used her hands, brushes,
parts of cardboard boxes and brooms to
arrange the vivid images that distin-
guished her work for more than 60
years. She often spent more time staring
at a work-in-progress to determine how
to organize shapes and space than she
did painting it.
Ms. Ayres recalled routinely painting
all night as a younger artist.
“I used to go a bit potty,” she told the
Christie’s auction house in an article
about her in 2015. “It was almost like I
couldn’t stop. That doesn’t happen now,
but I still need the whole day ahead of
me. I don’t need a dental appointment or
any other ruddy appointment interrupt-
ing!”
Like other abstract artists, she did not
discuss the meanings, if any, in her
Ms. Ayres created vivid, colorful images, such as “Dance of the Ludi Magni,” oil, 1984.
Printed in Athens, Denpasar, Beirut, Nivelles, Biratnagar, Dhaka, Doha, Dubai, Frankfurt, Gallargues, Helsinki, Hong Kong, Islamabad, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karachi, Kathmandu, Kuala Lumpur, Lahore, London, Luqa, Madrid, Manila, Milan, Nagoya, Nepalgunj, New York, Osaka, Paris, Rome, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Taipei, Tel Aviv, Tokyo,Yangon.
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In fact, the pope often speaks about
the devil. In this month’s apostolic ex-
hortation, Rejoice and Be Glad, he wrote
that while in biblical times, “epilepsy, for
example, could easily be confused with
demonic possession,” the faithful should
not conclude “that all the cases related
in the Gospel had to do with psycholog-
ical disorders and hence that the devil
does not exist or is not at work.”
Father Cárdenas had no doubts about
the pope’s belief in the devil. Neither did
Cardinal Simoni, who has encountered
evil firsthand, surviving decades in pris-
ons and work camps for practicing his
faith under the Albanian Communist re-
gime of Enver Hoxha.
During Monday’s keynote address,
the cardinal answered the questions of
Father Cárdenas’ fellow priests, like one
from a French priest who asked him to
share his exorcising secrets. “Pray with-
out interruption,” the cardinal said, re-
minding the audience that “more than
anything, chastity” was essential.
Asked if he preferred the ancient ritu-
al or the new Vatican norms introduced
in 1999, Cardinal Simoni said, “Jesus
knows all the languages.”
Another priest asked how to tell the
difference between bipolar and pos-
sessed personalities. “It’s important to
differentiate between psychopathic ill-
nesses, neurasthenia, pathologies,” the
cardinal said. “Satan you can recog-
nize.”
“This theme will be tackled on Tues-
day afternoon,” interjected Professor
Giuseppe Ferrari, an organizer of the
course, who runs a socio-religious re-
search group.
The Vatican has had an uncomfort-
able relationship with some of its best-
known African exorcists. Archbishop
Emmanuel Milingo, of Zambia, gained
notoriety as a healer and exorcist in the
1990s, when he lived in Italy and where
he was known as the “witch doctor
bishop.” He later married a Korean
woman at a group wedding presided
over by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and
was excommunicated for ordaining four
married men as priests.
More recently the Vatican has for-
mally recognized an International Asso-
ciation of Exorcists in 2014, which keeps
its 250 or so members updated on the
latest best practices in confronting the
devil. The death in 2016 of Father Gabri-
ele Amorth, Italy’s most famous demon
remover, prompted a new national out-
cry for recruits.
In the seminar on Monday, Cardinal
Simoni reported dramatic successes.
Asked by one priest how he knew if an
exorcism had worked, he responded,
“Ah, you can see it immediately,” ex-
plaining that one possessed person
went from jumping up and down and
“keeping three or four men busy” to ris-
ing with a “joyous smile.”
“Your exorcisms are very effective, it
ROGER MAYNE BARNES
Gillian Ayres in 1961. “Painting is a visual,
silent medium, but I love it.”
works. She insisted that she thought
only about the shapes, the space and the
colors.
“People like to understand, and I wish
they wouldn’t,” she told The Financial
Times in 2015. “I wish they’d just look.
It’s visual.”
Gillian Ayres was born in London on
Feb. 3, 1930. Her father was a part-
owner of a hat factory whose customers
included the British Army. Her mother,
the former Florence Brown, was a
homemaker. For a while, she attended
school in an air-raid shelter in London.
When she was attending a girls’
school in 1943, books on van Gogh, Gau-
guin, Cezanne and Monet inspired her to
paint. And at 16, she insisted on attend-
ing art school and was admitted to what
is now called the Camberwell College of
Arts in London.
Chafing at the rigidity of the teaching,
she left shortly before taking the final
COURTESY ALAN CRISTEA GALLERY, LONDON
Participants at the weeklong “Exorcism and Prayer of Liberation” course in Rome. Behind the program is a sense that the Roman Catholic Church has gone astray.
The 89-year-old instructor, Cardinal Ernest Simoni of Albania, explained
that exorcisms can be practiced on Muslims, but “they stayed Muslims after.”
exam. She got a job as a hotel chamber-
maid in Paris, then returned to London
to work in an art gallery with Henry
Mundy, a painter she had met at Cam-
berwell. They married in 1951 and di-
vorced 25 years later.
By the mid-1950s, Ms. Ayres was a ris-
ing abstract painter, splattering paint on
a canvas on the floor like Jackson Pol-
lock.
“The whole idea of the canvas as an
area in which to act, an area and what
one does with it — I wanted to find out
about that, obsessively,” she told The
Telegraph in 2010.
Ms. Ayres came of age in Britain with
abstract artists like Howard Hodgkin
and Victor Pasmore. Roger Hilton, an
older artist she admired, wrote a note to
her in the early 1950s that she often re-
ferred to in the ensuing decades, she
told The Independent in 1995. It de-
scribed the abstract painter’s journey
into the unknown, armed only with col-
ors, shapes and space-creating powers.
“Can he construct with these means,”
the note said, “a barque capable of car-
rying not only himself to some further
shore but, with the aid of others, a whole
flotilla, which may be seen eventually as
having been carrying humanity for-
ward?”
Ms. Ayres made her journey into ab-
stract art in Britain as a woman among
far more men.
“Nobody else was doing anything as
adventurous or uninhibited, like throw-
ing paint at the canvas, which only had
parallels in America,” Alan Cristea,
whose London gallery represents Ms.
Ayres’s original prints, said in a tele-
phone interview. “But she refused to be
classified as a woman artist; she
thought that was silly.”
Yet, he added, “She became sort of a
role model for women of the younger
generation.”
Ms. Ayres taught at St. Martin’s
School of Art in London and the Win-
chester School of Art in Hampshire,
where she was the head of painting.
In addition to her son Sam, Ms. Ayres
is survived by another son, Jim Mundy,
and a granddaughter. She continued to
live with her former husband for many
of the years after their divorce.
Ms. Ayres stopped painting about a
year ago because of illness.
TONY GENTILE/REUTERS
Guardian to orphaned elephants
DAPHNE SHELDRICK
1934-2018
BY NEIL GENZLINGER
Daphne Sheldrick, a wildlife conserva-
tionist who saved hundreds of orphaned
elephants in Africa, work chronicled in
documentaries like “Born to Be Wild,”
has died in Nairobi. She was 83.
The cause of her death on April 12 was
breast cancer, said an announcement on
the website of the David Sheldrick Wild-
life Trust, the organization Ms.
Sheldrick founded in honor of her hus-
band, a noted naturalist and crusader
against poaching who died in 1977.
Ms. Sheldrick, a British subject who
was born in Africa and spent her life
there, became an important voice in the
movement to save the declining ele-
phant population and to raise aware-
ness about poaching, which is fueled by
the ivory trade.
When she spoke about elephants, Ms.
Sheldrick strove to convey their intelli-
gence, their protective instincts and
their remarkable memories, something
Smithsonian Magazine invoked in 2005
when it highlighted her in an article
called “35 Who Made a Difference.”
“Elephants don’t forget,” the maga-
zine wrote. “Her face and voice will live
in the memory of many a hand-reared
orphan for decades as they roam the
parklands of East Africa, trumpeting
their freedom.”
Daphne Jenkins was born on June 4,
1934, in Kenya, which was still a British
colony. Her father, Bryan, and mother,
the former Marjorie Webb, had a large
farm and timber operation outside
Gilgil, northwest of Nairobi. Her mother
also liked to paint and filled the home
with imaginative artwork.
“Nursery rhymes danced off our bed-
room walls and hand-painted sunshine
birds of Kenya adorned silk lamp-
shades,” Ms. Sheldrick wrote in her au-
tobiography, “Love, Life, and Ele-
phants: An African Love Story” (2012).
Ms. Sheldrick’s father, she wrote, had
a great affection for the natural world,
and so he was distressed when, at the
outbreak of World War II, he was sent to
a game reserve in an area called Selen-
gai and ordered to kill animals to pro-
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
seems,” said Professor Ferrari, who
then told the crowd, “We will meet back
here after the coffee break.”
The students headed for a long table
with snacks and soda while reporters
pressed Cardinal Simoni about conduct-
ing exorcisms by cellphone, which is
technically banned by church law. (He
had done them “100, 1,000 times” he
said.)
Father Cárdenas waited in the aisle,
his cellphone out, hoping to get a picture
of himself with the cardinal. But the eld-
erly exorcist shuffled past, leaving the
Colombian grumbling, though not de-
monically.
Turning back to the topic at hand, Fa-
ther Cárdenas warned that black magic
can be transmitted through screens
(“American films are also a problem”),
that demons enter the body “through
the back of the brain,” and that early
traumas, like sexual abuse, can make a
person vulnerable to homosexuality and
the demons who, in grave cases, cause
suicidal or violent tendencies and need
to be chased away.
Daphne Sheldrick and her daughter Angela in Kenya in 1968 with Eleanor, an orphaned
elephant that was the subject of Ms. Sheldrick’s book “An Elephant Called Eleanor.”
vide food for British and Kenyan troops.
“By the end of the war he had shot
thousands of wildebeest and zebra, and
I know just how devastating this was for
him,” she wrote. “At least, if there is any
comfort to be had, there was no one bet-
ter than my father to carry out such
work. He was a sensitive naturalist, a
man who cared deeply about wildlife,
and he ensured that no wounded animal
was ever left to suffer.”
His assignment provided a revelation
for her when, in 1940, her mother took
her to visit him at his camp.
“As soon as I saw the location of the
camp I thought, ‘This is how I would like
to live, out here among the animals un-
der the sky,’ ” she wrote.
In 1953 she married Bill Woodley, who
worked on Kenya’s game reserves and
whose duties included battling poach-
ing.
It was a fraught time in Kenya, with
the Mau Mau rebellion making life dan-
gerous for European colonists, and Ms.
Sheldrick had some harrowing tales to
tell of brushes with violence.
Her marriage to Mr. Woodley ended
in divorce, in part because she and his
boss, Mr. Sheldrick, were drawn to each
other. They married in 1960.
Mr. Sheldrick became warden of
..
JASON HOROWITZ/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Organizers called the priests back in
for a lesson on a bishop’s role in exor-
cism, after which they broke for lunch.
While budding exorcists waited in line
for pasta behind texting students, or dis-
cussed the manifestations of pure evil
over yogurt, Mr. Ferrari said he hoped to
invite the pope’s preferred exorcist, a
Lutheran, to next year’s conference.
Replenished, Father Cárdenas and
the others returned to the basement hall
for the afternoon session, “Exorcism as
a Ministry of Mercy and Consolation
Amid the Bewilderment of Contempo-
rary Society.”
It was led by Archbishop Luigi Negri,
who made news in 2015, when he was
overheard on a train wishing for the
death of Pope Francis. The pontiff sub-
sequently replaced him as the leader of
the Ferrara archdiocese.
On Monday, Archbishop Negri
warned the priests what dark forces
they would be up against.
“The actor of this evil — this diabolical
and evil entity,” he explained, “is greater
than any single man.”
THE DAVID SHELDRICK WILDLIFE TRUST
Tsavo East National Park in Kenya. He
and Ms. Sheldrick lived there and began
taking in orphaned animals of all sorts,
with an emphasis on finding ways to re-
introduce them to the wild. Because of
poaching and a prolonged drought,
many were young elephants, which are
quite vulnerable in their first years. Ms.
Sheldrick developed a milk formula that
young elephants that had lost their
mothers could tolerate, and took to
hand-feeding them.
After Mr. Sheldrick’s death, she estab-
lished the Sheldrick Trust in Nairobi Na-
tional Park, focusing on elephants and
rhinoceroses.
In 2006 she was given the title of dame
commander by Queen Elizabeth II. She
is survived by a daughter from her first
marriage, Gillian Woodley; a daughter
from her second marriage, Angela
Sheldrick; two sisters, Sheila Wren and
Betty Bales; and four grandchildren.
In an interview with “60 Minutes” in
2009, Ms. Sheldrick was asked what she
admired most about elephants after
years spent with them.
“Their tremendous capacity for car-
ing is, I think, perhaps the most amazing
thing about them,” she said. “They have
all of the best attributes of us humans
and not very many of the bad.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
World
Hamas gives peaceful protests a chance
NEWS ANALYSIS
GAZA CITY
Group accused of hijacking
grass-roots campaign to
serve its own purposes
BY DAVID M. HALBFINGER
It was a striking tableau: Ismail Haniya,
the political leader of Hamas, the Is-
lamic militant group that has used sui-
cide bombs, rockets and tunnels in its
long struggle with Israel, standing be-
fore portraits of the giants of nonviolent
resistance — Mahatma Gandhi, the Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson
Mandela.
Urging on Palestinians who have
staged a new campaign of protests
along the fence separating Gaza from Is-
rael, Mr. Haniya likened their struggle
to those for India’s independence,
against racial segregation and discrimi-
nation in the United States, and against
apartheid in South Africa.
“This blessed protest is national,
peaceful, popular and civilized,” he said.
Minutes later, though, he called the
same protests “a deadly weapon” with
which to achieve the Palestinians’ goals,
saying that guns, rockets and attack
tunnels — the more familiar weapons
that have kept Hamas listed as a terror-
ist group by the United States, Euro-
pean Union and Israel — remained at
hand if needed.
Mixed messages have abounded dur-
ing the so-called Great Return March,
the grass-roots campaign that began
this month and seeks to highlight hard-
ship in Gaza and demand the right to re-
turn to lands in Israel. While organizers
promised peaceful disobedience of Is-
rael’s orders to stay far from the fence,
participants have thrown Molotov cock-
tails and other explosives, even attach-
ing one to a kite.
And while Mr. Haniya and other Gaza
leaders espoused Palestinian unity, he
also, without naming them, accused the
Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority
and its president, Mahmoud Abbas,
leader of Hamas’s archrival, Fatah, of
presiding over a corrupt era of “humilia-
tion, negotiations and security coordi-
nation” with Israel.
Few analysts, and certainly few Is-
raelis, have suggested that Hamas may
actually be rethinking its strategy
merely because it has joined what are
meant to be nonviolent mass protests
and has name-checked the heroes of
peaceful civil disobedience.
“It’s quite understandable that when
those that proscribe Hamas as a terror
organization see Haniya surrounded by
icons of peace, it does little to dispel
memories of very violent and bloody at-
tacks, including by suicide bombs,” said
Beverley Milton-Edwards, an expert on
political Islam at the Brookings Doha
Outrage over hip-hop award for duo with anti-Jewish lyrics
BERLIN
BY MELISSA EDDY
AND ANDREW CURRY
In Germany’s hugely popular hip-hop
music scene, one of the biggest albums
of the past year was from two trash-talk-
ing rappers who rhymed about their
prowess in bed and in the weight room,
and about violently dominating their op-
ponents.
The album has racked up sales, but it
has also attracted a different sort of at-
tention. In one song, the pair boast
about how their bodies are “more de-
fined than Auschwitz prisoners.” In an-
other, they vow to “make another Holo-
caust, show up with a Molotov.”
Widespread condemnation turned
into an uproar after the rappers, Farid
Bang and Kollegah, won the Echo award
for best hip-hop album at Germany’s
equivalent of the Grammys on April 12.
The lead singer of the country’s pre-
eminent punk rock band objected to the
award from the same stage that night.
“In principle I consider provocation is a
good thing,” Campino, the lead singer of
Die Toten Hosen, said. “But we need to
differentiate between art as a stylistic
device or a form of provocation that only
serves to destroy and ostracize others.”
Other winners have said they were re-
turning their prizes.
Posting on Twitter, the foreign min-
ister, Heiko Maas, wrote: “Anti-Semitic
provocations did not deserve awards,
they are simply disgusting.”
He also noted the unfortunate timing
of the ceremony. April 12 is a day of
worldwide solemnity. “That such a prize
was handed out on Holocaust Remem-
brance Day is shameful,” he wrote.
Germany’s recording industry associ-
ation had criticized the lyrics but de-
fended its choice in the name of artistic
freedom. Nominations are based on
popularity and rankings on music
charts, not artistic quality — a process
the association has pledged to re-exam-
ine after the outcry.
But beyond the resentment over the
award, the episode has also provoked
soul-searching about incitement in art,
and the extent of anti-Jewish sentiment
in German hip-hop in particular.
Ismail Haniya, left, the political leader of Hamas, likened the struggle of the Palestinians to freedom movements in India, the United States and South Africa.
Neither Hamas nor Gaza’s two
million residents, still recovering
from the past two conflicts, have
any appetite for more violence.
Center in Qatar who was a co-author of a
history of Hamas.
But if Mr. Haniya’s unexpected nod to
nonviolence struck some as contradic-
tory and self-serving — as evidence of,
one might say, a degree of chutzpah —
his organization’s embrace of the Gaza
protests had a clear logic that can be un-
derstood in much simpler terms.
Terms like “no-brainer.”
Its experiment with popular resist-
ance may or may not be wholehearted,
but it is indisputably pragmatic.
A month or two ago, Hamas was cor-
nered. Isolated regionally, rived by in-
ternal disputes, it had been unable to
ameliorate a deepening humanitarian
crisis in Gaza and was increasingly hu-
Left, the rappers Farid Bang, left, and Kollegah receiving the award for best hip-hop album at Germany’s Echo Music Awards. Right, Campino, the lead singer of the punk band Die
Toten Hosen, criticized that award on stage: “We need to differentiate between art as a stylistic device or a form of provocation that only serves to destroy and ostracize others.”
And most troubling, many believe, is
what it says about the rise in anti-
Semitism among young people, and the
millions of impressionable rap fans who
are generations removed from the hor-
rors of Nazi rule.
Germany’s attempts to atone for the
evils of its past, while confronting the
troubles of its present, is its never-end-
ing preoccupation. In the past week, in
response to a video showing a man in
Berlin wearing a Jewish skullcap being
attacked by a group of young men
speaking Arabic, Chancellor Angela
Merkel vowed to commit her govern-
ment to fighting anti-Semitism “relent-
lessly and with resolve.”
“This fight against such anti-Semitic
excesses must be won,” Ms. Merkel said.
(The victim in the video turned out not
to be Jewish — he was an Arab Israeli
who said he was trying to prove to a
friend that he could wear a skullcap in
Germany without being hassled.)
The objectionable lyrics in the win-
ning album, titled “Young, Brutal, Good
Looking 3,” do not explicitly deny the
mass slaughter of six million Jews by
the Nazis, nor do they specifically incite
hatred of Jews, both of which would
have made them illegal under strict Ger-
man laws banning Holocaust denial.
miliated by the failure of reconciliation
talks with Ramallah.
“They had to make too many conces-
sions in the hope of getting a little bit in
exchange, and they wound up getting
nothing whatsoever,” said Azzam
Tamimi, an analyst for a London-based
Arabic television channel with close ties
to top Hamas leadership.
After a decade running Gaza, and
hemmed in by an Israeli-Egyptian
blockade, Hamas was growing deeply
unpopular.
“Though most Gazans would blame
Israel fundamentally, and Egypt indi-
rectly, a lot of Palestinians would just do
away with all of Hamas to have a better
life,” said Tareq Baconi, author of “Ha-
mas Contained: The Rise and Pacifica-
tion of Palestinian Resistance,” to be
published next month by Stanford Uni-
versity Press.
The group was in such dire straits that
analysts and Israeli security officials
warned it might provoke a new war out
ALEX SCHMIDT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
Kollegah and Farid Bang did not re-
spond to requests for comment. On the
night of the ceremony, Kollegah replied
to criticism by saying, “I don’t want to
make a political debate out of this,” and
invited anyone who wanted to discuss it
to approach him at the after-party.
In the past, they have defended their
lyrics as art and exaggeration. On Face-
book last month, Farid Bang apologized
to Esther Bejarano, a 93-year-old singer
and Auschwitz survivor who had spo-
ken out about the lyrics. Both men have
offered to let Jews come to their con-
certs for free forever as proof, they said,
that they bore no hatred.
But Jakob Baier, a researcher at the
Hans Böckler Foundation focusing on
anti-Semitism in German rap music,
called the lyrics “despicable” and said
they scorned the victims of Auschwitz.
He noted that some of Kollegah’s other
songs and music videos promoted con-
spiracy theories and the message that
“the world is in control of evil, and the
evil is marked as Jewish.”
In the music video for his track “Apoc-
alypse,” a banker in a London office
tower is shown controlling the evil
forces in the world, and wearing a Star
of David ring. After a final showdown
between good and evil, Kollegah — a 33-
of sheer desperation to shake things up.
Yet, even the prospect of war seemed
unavailing. Neither Hamas nor Gaza’s
two million residents, still recovering
from the past two conflicts, in 2012 and
2014, had any appetite for another round
of violence.
“They’re absolutely exhausted,” Mr.
Baconi said.
To its rockets Israel had responded
with the Iron Dome antimissile system.
To its tunnels Israel was answering with
a $2 billion reinforced-concrete wall bur-
ied deep underground. And this month,
Israel said it had uncovered and de-
stroyed the longest operational tunnel
yet from Gaza.
It was no surprise, then, that after a
grass-roots idea for a peaceful, long-
lasting protest along the Gaza fence
started gaining widespread support,
Hamas brought a halt to what had been
a fairly steady tempo of rocket launches
into Israel and threw its organizational
might behind the demonstrations.
year-old convert to Islam whose real
name is Felix Blume — raps, “Muslims,
Christians and Buddhists lived together
in peace,” pointedly not mentioning
Jews.
Allegations of anti-Semitism have
dogged German hip-hop for years and
were even the subject of a recent docu-
mentary, “The Dark Side of German
Rap.” One song by the rapper Haftbefehl
mentions a conspiracy theory about the
Allegations of anti-Semitism
have dogged German hip-hop
for years and were the subject
of a recent documentary.
Rothschilds, a Jewish banking family,
and the video for another features im-
ages of Orthodox Jews carrying suit-
cases of money and diamonds over the
lyrics “money, money rich.”
Many lyrics are also homophobic and
degrading to women — issues in rap mu-
sic that transcend Germany’s borders.
In one song, the rapper Shindy says that
his openness to having sex — described
in an obscene way — with Jewish wom-
en is proof he is not an anti-Semite.
The scene’s politics lean heavily anti-
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018 | 3
MAHMUD HAMS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
By embracing the protests, Hamas
cannily aligned itself with a popular
movement that became even more pop-
ular as it took shape — and that generat-
ed an outpouring of international sup-
port when Israel responded with gun-
fire, killing dozens of Palestinians, al-
most all of them unarmed.
Instantly, the woebegone Palestinian
cause and the crisis in Gaza were back in
the news, and even the demand for a
right of return to Israeli land — one that
many supporters of a two-state solution
seemed ready to throw overboard —
was being taken seriously, cheering Pal-
estinians in refugee camps and the dias-
pora.
The time was ripe for a popular move-
ment in Gaza, where younger Palestin-
ians, like those on the West Bank and in
East Jerusalem, have grown disillu-
sioned with the moribund Oslo peace
process for self-governance, Mr. Baconi
said. Many want to turn the national
movement into a campaign for civil
ANDREAS RENTZ/GETTY IMAGES
Israel. Bushido, another popular Ger-
man rapper, once used a map of the Mid-
dle East, without Israel, as his Facebook
profile picture. In an interview, he said
that he had done it in solidarity with Pal-
estinians because of his own Arab roots.
“It’s not just about Israel, it’s about in-
justice everywhere,” he said. “But no
one listens when you’re calm and polite,
and so you have to use more drastic
means.”
Nevertheless, he faulted Kollegah’s
and Farid Bang’s lyrics. Words that con-
jure images like “concentration camps,
Auschwitz, Jews, people who were
gassed — those shouldn’t be used,” Bu-
shido said.
With surveys increasingly showing
that the Holocaust is receding from
memory, many are concerned that play-
ing down the gravity of what happened
under the Nazis can open the door for a
return of discrimination against Jews.
This comes amid a rise of far-right popu-
lism across Europe, and the arrival of
some 1.4 million migrants and refugees
in Germany, many from Middle Eastern
countries where hatred for Israel is
taught in schools. Some popular hip-hop
artists hail from Germany’s inner cities
and are of Turkish or Arabic descent.
(Farid Bang, whose real name is Farid
rights, rather than simply for statehood.
“Hamas is just jumping on the band-
wagon and recognizing the effective-
ness of popular resistance at this mo-
ment,” he said.
In fact, though it is better known for
armed struggle, Hamas has acknowl-
edged the utility of popular resistance
since it arose out of the First Intifada in
1987. And last year, it took another subtle
step in that direction, adopting a new
policy that acknowledged growing sup-
port for popular resistance.
Yet, not all Gazans see Hamas’s in-
volvement in the new protests as laud-
able. Some accused the group of cyni-
cally hijacking the demonstrations to
serve its own purposes, while still also
using young men as cannon fodder.
“It’s beautiful that we find Hamas
adopting this nonviolent struggle,” Mo-
hammad Al Taluli, a 26-year-old activist
who faces criminal charges for criticiz-
ing Hamas online, said sarcastically.
“One week before the peaceful protest
there was a military maneuver for the
Qassam brigades. Do they think they
fool us?”
“The gun is no longer a choice,” Mr. Al
Taluli added. “It’s a burden on anybody
who carries it.”
Yohanan Tzoreff, a former adviser for
Arab affairs in Israel’s civil administra-
tion in Gaza, viewed the protests
through the lens of Hamas’s long-run-
ning political rivalry with Fatah, in
which Hamas hopes eventually to seize
control of the Palestine Liberation Orga-
nization, over which Mr. Abbas now
maintains a tight grip.
“Which is the way that the people will
adopt?” Mr. Tzoreff said. “The way of
Ramallah, which means negotiations,
negotiations, negotiations, and our en-
tire fight will be at the international lev-
el; or the way in Gaza: popular resist-
ance, with a lot of readiness to sacri-
fice?”
For the moment, the two groups are
enjoying an uneasy public truce, with
Mr. Abbas expressing solidarity with
the Gaza protests.
“Fatah publicly support the protests,
but behind closed doors, they criticize
them as nothing more than a Hamas
stunt,” Ms. Milton-Edwards said.
For Hamas, the fate of its new em-
brace of popular protest depends on the
ability of its leaders, and the Gaza
marchers, to walk a fine line along the
fence with Israel.
Too much in the way of stone- or fire-
bomb-throwing could stir another
heavy-handed Israeli response — and
the kind of Palestinian blood bath that
could compel Hamas to answer back
with rockets.
“The more Israel uses disproportion-
ate force, the harder it is for Hamas to
continue holding back from retaliating,”
Mr. Baconi said. “At some point, Hamas
will start to lose legitimacy if it doesn’t.”
Iyad Abuheweila contributed reporting.
El Abdellaoui, has North African roots.)
Ms. Merkel’s government has ap-
pointed a commissioner to combat anti-
Semitism in response to reports that in-
cidents are increasing, especially
among the young.
According to the Research and Infor-
mation Center on Anti-Semitism in
Berlin, which records incidents of anti-
Semitism in the German capital, 947 oc-
curred last year, a 60 percent increase
from 2016.
Children in German schoolyards cas-
ually toss about “You Jew,” as an insult,
and reinforce stereotypes about Jews,
such as saying “Don’t be such a Jew”
when trying to convince someone to
lend some change.
“At a time when hate against Jews is
increasing around the world and a flood
of anti-Jewish sentiment can be seen on-
line, especially among young people,”
said Monika Schwarz-Friesel, a profes-
sor of linguistics at Berlin’s Technical
University, “to declare anti-Semitic and
fantastical, conspiratorial song texts as
‘artistic freedom,’ and award them
prizes is viewed by researchers of anti-
Semitism as particularly irresponsible.”
Anti-Semitic themes have plagued
other German music genres — in partic-
ular, punk and metal music popular
among the country’s neo-Nazis. But
those groups have remained largely un-
derground.
Popular German rappers, on the
other hand, have a huge fan base; Kolle-
gah has 1.4 million followers on Insta-
gram. And the fans skew young. The
music appeals to children and teens who
share and debate the latest songs on so-
cial media and in schoolyards. “Young,
Brutal, Good-Looking 3” topped the
charts in Germany, Austria and Switzer-
land and was streamed 23 million times
on Spotify in the first week of its release
on the service.
Some rap fans have said that the
lyrics were being unfairly scrutinized by
people who did not understand the
genre, in which rappers constantly try
to outdo and outshock their rivals.
“Of course I think this line is taste-
less,” Michael Fritzsche, 26, of Leipzig,
said, referring to the offending lyrics.
“But let’s be honest, a discussion about
the political correctness in music lyrics
should not be limited to rap.”

4 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018
world
Word from home proves painful
GAZIANTEP, TURKEY
New horrors in Syria bring
traumatic memories back
for Aleppo siege survivors
BY CARLOTTA GALL
As the government siege of a rebel-held
Syrian suburb has unfolded, one group
of exiles has felt especially tormented.
They are opposition leaders and ac-
tivists from Aleppo, Syria, who survived
the devastating government chokehold
of their own city.
Fourteen months after they were
forced to evacuate the last neighbor-
hoods of Aleppo, they are reliving their
trauma from southern Turkey, where
they have been spending hours online
encouraging activists and rebels in the
Eastern Ghouta region outside Da-
mascus, the Syrian capital, and helping
to disseminate videos and news from
the latest siege.
“The period that we witnessed and
lived in Aleppo was a real hell,” said
Hisham al-Skeif, one of the civilian lead-
ers of the Aleppo protests now living in
the Turkish city of Gaziantep. “Now
what is happening in Eastern Ghouta is
bringing it all back.
“The hardest thing is to see despair in
people’s faces,” he added, clenching his
fists and screwing up his face at the
memories and at one point breaking into
tears. “They think they are going to die
and no one cares.”
A writer and Arabic teacher from an
old Aleppo trading family, Mr. Skeif be-
came one of the most outspoken civilian
leaders opposed to President Bashar al-
Assad and his father, Hafez al-Assad,
who was president before him.
Mr. Skeif’s baby son was asphyxiated
by the dust of a bombardment. The fa-
ther made a last, ferocious denunciation
of the Syrian government on video just
before the evacuation of Aleppo in De-
cember 2016. That placed him on top of
the government’s wanted list.
“This regime does not fear weapons.
It fears words,” he said. “We had to keep
going in our revolution because if we
went back, our children would have to
live under a third generation of Assads.”
In exile, many of the Aleppo pro-
testers have dispersed or taken a break,
exhausted and depressed at the defeat
of their dream of freedom from dictator-
ship. Yet they feel compelled to share
their experience, even if they think the
outside world only tunes in after the
ghastliest horrors, like the April 7 attack
that witnesses and medical workers say
used chemical weapons to kill scores of
Syrians in Douma, in Eastern Ghouta.
The United States, Britain and France
joined in airstrikes a week later to pun-
ish the Assad government for the at-
tack; Syria, and its backers Russia and
Iran, has denied being behind the at-
tack.
Monther Etaki, a former design stu-
dent who was one of the last media ac-
tivists to document the Aleppo siege,
said of the act of bearing witness: “It’s
worthless, but it’s a duty to do it.”
A former fine arts student, Mr. Etaki,
28, struggles to support his extended
family with freelance media and design
work. “I lost my job,” he joked, referring
to his activism in Aleppo. “For people
who were relying on me for information,
I am no longer useful.”
But he continues to blog and post on
social media about the war in Syria and
to help those still resisting inside.
“I am just talking to friends in Ghouta
and giving advice how to survive be-
cause I have some experience,” he said.
“I am telling them to save their equip-
ment and not be worried, be calm, that
The new faces of Cuba: Still a lot of Castros
MIAMI
BY FRANCES ROBLES
For the first time in decades, Cubans
have a president whose last name is not
Castro.
But as the new president, Miguel
Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, who turned 58 on
Friday, takes his first strides to govern
an economically distressed country that
is perennially in crisis, he will do so with
a ring of Castros, and their various
spouses and children, around him.
Fidel Castro died in 2016 at 90, and his
eldest son, nicknamed Fidelito, killed
himself this year. But Raúl Castro, who
stepped down in the past week after two
terms as president, remains the leader
of the Communist Party and the head of
the armed forces. And other Castros run
the intelligence services and the vast
military conglomerate that manages
most state business. One is Raúl Cas-
tro’s most trusted bodyguard. Another
is a lawmaker who supports gay rights.
They are the defenders of a dynasty
that is ostensibly there to support Mr.
Díaz-Canel — but also to scrutinize him.
As an era comes to a close, these stal-
warts and heirs of the Cuban revolution
will be members of an inner circle that
aims to guarantee the succession of a so-
cialist state — all while managing the
delicate task of not creating the appear-
ance of a family dynasty reaching into
its third reign.
“Don’t anyone get their hopes up,”
said María C. Werlau, a Cuba researcher
who studies the violent legacy of the Cu-
Now in Turkey, clockwise from top, Monther Etaki, who blogs about the war in Syria; Molham Ekaidi, a former rebel commander in Syria who is back in school; Dr. Hamza al-
Khatib, who spent years treating the wounded in Aleppo, Syria, and has time now for his daughters; and Hisham al-Skeif, a civilian critic of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.
everything will be solved in the end.”
Fearful for his family — his son was
born on July 10, 2016, just before the
siege of Aleppo began — he said he lost
control at times toward the end.
“Once I cried,” he recalled. “Once I
burned my car. I forgot to take my
things.”
Many of the opposition members set
fire to their cars and belongings to pre-
vent them falling into the hands of the
pro-government militias that were en-
croaching into the rebel neighborhoods.
In the end, the last to leave were allowed
to drive their cars out since there was a
lack of buses and in the snow and freez-
ing night, the soldiers stopped checking
all those evacuating.
Mr. Etaki even left the gas on in his
home, hoping to destroy it so the pro-
government militias could not use it.
“I was thinking it would burn, but
then we did not evacuate that day and I
had to go back,” he laughed. There was
still just enough gas in the bottle to keep
warm that night, he said.
When he did leave, he said Russian
soldiers stole his computers, and his
ban revolution. “Díaz-Canel is purely
there for a cosmetic change; he is an off-
shoot of Raúl and has no power or per-
ceptible source of power. The succession
is well underway, and the second gener-
ation of Castros is well lined up to take
control when Raúl is really out of the pic-
ture.”
Here are some prominent members of
the clan:
RAÚL CASTRO, 86, stepped down after 12
years as president. He was defense min-
ister for nearly five decades, from 1959
to 2008, and has led the Communist
Party since 2006. He retains the title of
first party secretary, which he has held
since 2011, and which is “where true
power resides,” Ms. Werlau said.
But even Mr. Castro, with his revolu-
tionary credentials and fraternal con-
nections, could not pull off all of the
changes he had set out to make. Too
many old-guard associates put up obsta-
cles when they saw the widening in-
equalities that accompanied economic
reforms.
So although Mr. Castro is believed to
be planning a move from Havana to San-
tiago de Cuba — on Cuba’s southeastern
coast, the other side of the country — he
is not expected to leave Mr. Díaz-Canel
entirely to his own devices.
Mr. Castro was credited with
strengthening institutional control and
formalizing the concept of consensus
governing.
He believes in delegated authority. He
has made sure that there are enough in-
ternal checks and balances to keep an
eye on any successor with big ideas,
cameras and other equipment were tak-
en as well.
Dr. Hamza al-Khatib, who became
known for his work running the last
functioning medical center in Aleppo, Al
Quds hospital, warned a friend in Gh-
outa how the siege would play out.
“The beginning was a complete be-
siegement, not allowing anything in or
out,” he said. “Then there were a lot of
rumors, people coming who wanted to
negotiate. That takes about three
months. Then heavy shelling, barrel
bombs and gas attacks.”
Dr. Khatib urged his colleague to stay
safe somewhere and wait for the orga-
nized evacuation.
“I am telling him just not to lose faith
in life,” he said. “You and your wife will
live and don’t listen to the rumors. We
heard that a lot in Aleppo, that everyone
is a traitor.”
Many who went over to the govern-
ment side were arrested, and others
who chose to stay in their homes were
killed by the pro-government militias
who took control after the evacuation,
Mr. Skeif said.
Fidel Castro, Cuba’s former president, with his brother, then-President Raúl Castro,
right, at a Communist Party congress in 2016. The new president is not a Castro.
while still watching this one’s back.
Mr. Díaz-Canel was a handpicked suc-
cessor, and it is not in Raúl Castro’s in-
terest to see him fail.
“Raúl will be watching,” said Andy S.
Gómez, a Cuba expert, now retired, who
worked at the University of Miami.
“Raúl, as first party secretary, will be
not only watching him, but, more impor-
tantly, being there for him, symbolically,
so he can move forward.”
Alcibíades Hidalgo, who was Raúl
Castro’s chief of staff for a dozen years,
believes that his former boss will hold on
to power “until the day he dies.”
For those who did evacuate, the tran-
sition to a normal life has been hard in a
different way. Molham Ekaidi, 29, an ar-
chitecture student who became a rebel
commander, spent the first four months
in Turkey sitting inside his parents’
home, staring at the walls.
“For years, you only live for the mo-
ment. You do not think of the future and
you do not think about the previous
days,” he said, describing his years as a
fighter. “I had to think how to make my
living, how to raise my children. It was
very hard to start thinking. It took four
months before I spoke about architec-
ture.”
When Turkey opened its universities
to Syrian undergraduates to complete
their degrees, he joined the final year in
the architecture degree course.
“I didn’t remember anything,” he
said.
His fellow students are 10 years
younger than he is, and, he said, they
know little about the Syrian revolution.
“It is hard to connect with them,” he
went on. “They don’t know anything of
my life.”
ISMAEL FRANCISCO/CUBADEBATE, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
ALEJANDRO CASTRO ESPÍN, 52, is Raúl Cas-
tro’s son. Mr. Castro Espín runs the intel-
ligence services for both the armed
forces and the Interior Ministry. That is
a big task in a country that works hard to
stifle dissent and sniff out spies.
Mr. Castro Espín was part of the team
that negotiated with President Barack
Obama’s administration over restoring
diplomatic ties with the United States, a
sign that he is part of the most trusted
inner circle.
But he also has serious anti-imperi-
alist credentials: The title of a book he
wrote in 2009, “Empire of Terror,” offers
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICOLE TUNG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
He avoids watching video footage
from Syria, but has not ruled out return-
ing to fight if circumstances were to
change. Like other survivors, he de-
scribes restarting with smaller dreams.
“I do not have the big dream to have a
free country,” he said, “just an aim to
make a better life.”
Mr. Skeif said he was lost.
“There is no plan for my life,” he said.
But then he rallies and talks of a new po-
litical project for Syrian youth. “I have a
dream for girls like my daughters to
have political awareness,” he said, “so
they never have an Assad in the future.”
Dr. Khatib, 31, seems the most pos-
itive and confident of the survivors. He
works for an aid organization, supplying
medical relief to hospitals inside Syria
and is planning with his wife to further
his education.
“Now we think is a dead time,” he said.
“So we thought we can use this time.”
But he is also devastatingly realistic
about returning to Syria.
“Maybe my daughter will grow up
and by the age of 20 will never have been
to her country,” he said.
a not-very-subtle clue of his opinion of
Cuba’s big neighbor to the north.
“The most important of the younger
generation is Castro Espín,” said Brian
Latell, a former C.I.A. analyst who has
closely watched the Castro family. “I
think he has a lot of influence with his
father.”
Juan Juan Almeida, the son of a Cu-
ban revolutionary war hero, grew up
with Mr. Castro Espín and lived in his
house when they were children. He said
he was not convinced that his former
best friend had the skills to succeed af-
ter his father dies.
“He’s powerful, but his power was giv-
en to him by his father,” Mr. Almeida
said. “He will last as long as his father’s
power lasts.”
Some experts believe that Raúl Cas-
tro would have liked to have made his
son president, but that it would have
looked bad internationally to have an-
other Castro take over.
GEN. LUIS ALBERTO RODRÍGUEZ LÓPEZ-CALLE-
JAS was a Castro by marriage — he used
to be married to Raúl Castro’s daughter
Débora, and is the father of Mr. Castro’s
favorite grandson.
General Rodríguez is president of
Gaesa, the holding company that con-
trols the military’s business interests.
The military runs all of the hotels and
state-run restaurants, convenience
stores and gas stations, making General
Rodríguez one of the country’s most
powerful men.
“He must have 1,200 companies un-
der him,” said Guillermo Fariñas, an
outspoken critic of the government who
..
Damage
to Great
Barrier Reef
irreversible
SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA
A new study singles out
effects of climate change
in altered mix of species
BY JACQUELINE WILLIAMS
An underwater heat wave that damaged
huge sections of the Great Barrier Reef
off Australia two years ago caused a die-
off of coral so severe that the natural
wonder will never look the same again,
scientists say.
Nearly one-third of the reef’s coral
was killed when ocean temperatures
spiked in 2016, a result of global warm-
ing, according to a study published this
past week in the journal Nature.
The damage to the reef, one of the
world’s largest living structures, has
also radically altered the mix of its coral
species, scientists said.
“The reef is changing faster than any-
one thought it would,” said Terry P.
Hughes, the lead author of the study and
the director of a government-financed
center for coral reef studies at James
Cook University in the state of Queens-
land. “One thing we can be sure about is
the reef isn’t going to look the same
again,” Professor Hughes said.
The reef is home to thousands of
species, including sharks, turtles and
whales. Australia relies on it for about
70,000 jobs and billions of dollars annu-
ally in tourism revenue, all now threat-
ened by years of accumulated damage.
The study’s authors estimated how
much coral had died after the 2016 heat
wave, and then returned nine months
later to discern how many corals had re-
gained their color — a sign of restored
health — and how many had died. Their
report describes a catastrophic die-off
on the northern part of the reef, impact-
ing the mix of coral species.
Professor Hughes said scientists had
predicted a mass die-off resulting from
global warming, but “what the paper
shows is that it’s well underway.” He
added, “That transition is happening
here and now.”
Coral requires warm water to thrive,
but it is extremely sensitive to heat, and
an increase of two or three degrees
Fahrenheit, or about 1 to 1.5 degrees Cel-
sius, above normal can kill them.
Scientists said that if nations honored
global commitments in the Paris climate
accord aimed at preventing tempera-
tures from rising more than 2 degrees
Celsius, Australia would still have the
Great Barrier Reef in 50 years. It would
still look very different from today.
But if greenhouse gas emissions con-
tinue on their current trajectory, the reef
will be unrecognizable, they said.
“We’re in unchartered territory,” Pro-
fessor Hughes said, adding, “Where we
end up depends completely on how well
or how badly we deal with climate
change.” The Great Barrier Reef has
bleached four times since 1998, scien-
tists say. Record high temperatures in
2016 were followed by another bleach-
ing event last year.
“We’re now at a point where we’ve
lost close to half of the corals in shallow-
water habitats across the northern two-
thirds of the Great Barrier Reef due to
back-to-back bleaching over two con-
secutive years,” said Sean Connolly, also
with the center for coral reef studies at
James Cook University.
lives in Villa Clara Province. “I think the
one who manages the country economi-
cally is him.”
RAÚL RODRÍGUEZ CASTRO, General Ro-
dríguez’s son, is Raúl Castro’s body-
guard, the kind of position that lends it-
self to knowing all kinds of secrets, Mr.
Fariñas said.
MARIELA CASTRO is Raúl Castro’s daugh-
ter. A member of Parliament, she enjoys
an international and domestic following,
largely because of her support for gay
and transgender rights.
“Mariela is part of the scenery,” Mr.
Hidalgo said. “She’s a decorative figure
with a nice cause. In terms of power, she
is far from the role of her brother or her
ex-brother-in-law.”
Mr. Almeida said it boiled down to ap-
pearances.
“In terms of becoming a vice minister
or joining the Council of State, I don’t see
her doing that,” Mr. Almeida said.
“The idea is to present a democratic
face and erase the faces of the past. For
the international community, they need
to offer a nice friendly face of Cuba,
which means not putting forth a Castro,”
he said.
Mr. Hidalgo, a former ambassador to
the United Nations who later defected
and now lives in Miami, does not think it
will work.
“They are trying to give an appear-
ance of change to what is fundamentally
the same,” he said. “They are trying to
continue Castroism without Castros in
the near future, which is practically im-
possible.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
How much do sanctions hurt?
SANCTIONS, FROM PAGE 1
trolled nation that has endured extreme
hardship before.
Mr. Kim seemed to reinforce that per-
ception when he warned his people that
they must be prepared to overcome fur-
ther hardship. “Our revolution faced the
harshest-ever challenges,” Mr. Kim said
in his New Year’s Day speech.
“If you think the North Koreans would
revolt or the regime would collapse be-
cause of sanctions, you don’t know any-
thing about the North Koreans,” said
Kang Mi-jin, a North Korean defector
who collects North Korean consumer
prices for the South’s central Bank of Ko-
rea. “These are people who survived the
famine by eating weeds and even talk
proudly about it.”
But there is no doubt the latest sanc-
tions are causing pain in a way that ear-
lier rounds did not. Some analysts sug-
gest that changes within North Korea
such as the formation of a new middle
class, and Mr. Kim’s own promises to im-
prove the lives of his long-suffering peo-
ple, could make him more willing to give
up his nuclear weapons, if he can receive
convincing guarantees of his govern-
ment’s survival.
“We are starting to see the first major
test of the North Korean economy under
Kim Jong-un,” said Curtis Melvin, a re-
searcher at the U.S.-Korea Institute at
the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced
International Studies in Washington.
“MAXIMUM PRESSURE”
The latest rounds of United Nations
sanctions have been like no others that
North Korea has faced before.
Since September, the United Nations
Security Council has banned all key
North Korean exports, including coal,
iron ore, seafood and textiles. If en-
forced fully, they could eliminate a full
90 percent of the country’s total exports
in dollar terms.
Especially painful was the decision
last December to limit the North’s im-
ports of refined petroleum products to
half a million barrels a year, a 90 percent
reduction from the previous year.
North Korea can still extract 1.2 mil-
lion barrels of gasoline, diesel and kero-
sene from the four million barrels of
crude oil a year it is allowed to import,
mostly from China, said an energy ana-
lyst, Lee Jong-heon. But the combined
1.7 million barrels of refined petroleum
would be less than half the amount
needed to run all of the 280,000 cars in
North Korea, much less heat homes and
meet other needs, Mr. Lee said.
Experts said the sanctions, and Chi-
na’s apparent willingness to enforce
many of them, had dealt a blow to one of
the few bright points in the North Kore-
an economy: trade with China, which
had been an eager market for ore and
other North Korean natural resources.
“Production has sharply decreased, if
not come to a compete halt, in coal, iron,
zinc and copper mines,” said Jiro Ishi-
maru, who runs Asia Press, a Japan-
based website that monitors North Ko-
rea with the help of informants inside
the country. “Many miners don’t report
for work because management can’t
provide rations or pay wages.”
North Korean exports to China, which
account for more than 90 percent of the
North’s external trade, plunged by one-
third to $1.65 billion last year, with vol-
umes dropping by 60 to 95 percent in re-
cent months. Its official trade deficit
against China more than doubled to
$1.68 billion last year.
“Petty traders from the North who
used to cross into China in the morning
on foot or in small cars and then re-
turned in the evening with auto parts
and food to sell on the black market no
longer come,” said Wu Qiang, a North
Korea expert in China.
Macron’s plans to revitalize Europe are foundering
EUROPE, FROM PAGE 1
If populism and nationalism surged
with the impact of the financial crisis,
Mr. Macron argues, the best answer is a
more integrated European Union that
protects and benefits its citizens and a
more sustainable eurozone, with its own
budget, banking protections and finan-
cial management.
But resistance to Mr. Macron’s vision
of more Europe is mounting, in Ger-
many and beyond. The prospect of Brit-
ain’s exit from the union a year from now
has prompted the smaller, more eco-
nomically conservative nations of Eu-
rope’s north to come out firmly against
Mr. Macron’s proposals.
“It’s getting hard politically, it’s get-
ting hard timewise, and it’s getting hard
in terms of momentum,” said Jean Pi-
sani-Ferry, a French economist and for-
mer adviser to Mr. Macron. “Not only for
the countries with no appetite for it, but
for Germany, too.”
In Germany, new ministers are still
figuring out their jobs, Ms. Merkel’s gov-
erning Christian Democrats are run-
ning to the right and the Social Demo-
crats, the center-left party in the coali-
tion, have silenced their most prominent
pro-European voices.
Christian Democratic lawmakers
have been pushing to anchor any finan-
cial overhaul to a treaty change, which
in turn would require approval from in-
dividual parliaments, creating consider-
ably more uncertainty and delay.
In a joint news conference in Berlin,
Ms. Merkel promised Mr. Macron some
form of compromise on how to reinforce
the euro and the eurozone’s banks.
South Korean journalists who visited Pyongyang this month reported that everyone seemed to be carrying a cellphone, and women were more fashionably dressed than before.
A construction site in Pyongyang last year. Market-oriented reforms have given rise to a new, albeit small, middle class.
The sanctions have also led China and
other nations to send home tens of thou-
sands of North Korean workers, cutting
off another key source of hard currency
for Mr. Kim’s government.
Without foreign currency, North Ko-
rea will struggle to finance imports of
consumer goods for its people and raw
“There are of course always different
starting points when it comes to the
opinions of Germany and France,” she
said. “We need open debates, and in the
end we need the ability to compromise.”
But compromise will mean minor
changes, and almost surely on German
terms.
“The Italian political mess will be an
alibi for Germany and bad news for
Macron,” said Enrico Letta, a former
prime minister of Italy, at a meeting of
the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy. “We’re
wasting momentum.”
Nouriel Roubini, a globe-trotting
economist who predicted the crash of a
decade ago, said that the fundamental
problems of the euro “won’t be solved
until you have real fiscal and then poli-
tical union. But for now, it’s stalled, and
the Germans will see the Italian risks as
another reason not to move forward.”
The Germans are “worried as ever
that risk sharing becomes risk shifting,
that a fiscal union becomes a transfer
union,” he said.
Until eurozone countries like France,
Greece, Italy and Portugal “have done
enough fiscal austerity so that public
debt is sustainable, and do enough re-
form so that their potential growth ap-
proaches that of Germany,” Berlin will
hesitate, he added.
At the same time, Mr. Roubini said,
Mr. Macron has made some important
fixes in France, increasing market flexi-
bility, taxing some pensions and cutting
the budget deficit.
“So he can tell the Germans that ‘it’s
not only cheap talk I’m delivering, and
while you may not be able to accept full
materials for its factories. It will also be
unable to import fertilizer in time for the
planting season, raising the specter of a
return of food shortages, said Jin
Qiangyi, director of the Center for North
and South Korea Studies at Yanbian Uni-
versity in Yanji, China.
Humanitarian aid workers who have
The prospect of Brexit
has led the more economically
conservative nations to resist
the French leader’s proposals.
range of reforms, we can meet some-
where in the middle,’” Mr. Roubini said.
Macron proposals like a eurozone fi-
nance minister and a budget, to help
countries deal with high unemployment
or economic shocks, have been put aside
while the bloc tries to make a few less
spectacular and more technocratic
fixes.
Given timing, the European Commis-
sion, the executive branch of the Euro-
pean Union, has narrowed its focus, said
Valdis Dombrovskis, the commissioner
for the euro and financial stability. “We
need to strengthen the resilience of the
eurozone economy and its shock-ab-
sorption tools,” he said in an interview.
That means, he said, concentrating on
promoting structural overhauls in mem-
ber states, completing a banking union
and turning the European Stability
Mechanism, created in 2012 in a re-
sponse to the Greek debt crisis, into a
more competent European Monetary
Fund.
The idea is to protect eurozone coun-
tries and their banks from another cri-
sis. But there are concerns about the
governance of the new fund, about how
much money would be involved and
about how non-eurozone members
would contribute.
There are also worries about the
amount of nonperforming loans still
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018 | 5
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ED JONES/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
“If you think the North Koreans
would revolt or the regime would
collapse because of sanctions, you
don’t know anything about the
North Koreans.”
extending their decks to carry more.
Recent visitors also describe short-
ages of medicine. This was evident last
year, when South Korean doctors oper-
ated on a North Korean soldier who had
defected through a hail of bullets. When
they examined him, they found his in-
testines filled with worms.
BREAKING POINT
Despite these privations, analysts say
there are few signs that North Korea’s
economy has reached a breaking point.
In Pyongyang, there is still enough
electricity to keep streetlights on at
night, said South Korean journalists
who visited this month. Everyone
seemed to carry a cellphone, and wom-
en were more fashionably dressed than
before, they said.
After soaring last year, gasoline
prices have stabilized in recent months,
though they remain nearly twice as high
as a year ago. Pyongyang is likely to re-
spond by further reducing its reliance
on oil — petroleum accounts for only 12
percent of its energy production — us-
ing North Korean coal that it once ex-
ported to China in its own domestic
recently visited the country warn that power plants instead, said Mr. Lee, the
food shortages could be exacerbated by energy expert.
the lack of fuel, which could hamper “I don’t think the North will surrender
North Korea’s ability to transport grain its nuclear weapons because of oil short-
from areas of surplus to places where ages,” he said.
there is not enough. Trucks that used to Many experts and frequent visitors to
carry goods twice a day now run once a North Korea say its economy is more ro-
day on some routes, though some are bust than many outsiders realize. Mr.
CARSTEN KOALL/GETTY IMAGES
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France
in Berlin in the past week. Mr. Macron’s initiative has been heavily watered down.
held by banks in countries like Cyprus, hoped for gradual progress, increasing
Greece, Italy and Portugal, as well as bank liquidity first before moving to-
the amount of sovereign debt they hold, ward mutualization of debts, which re-
given the lesson of the euro crisis that mains a red line for Berlin.
sovereign bonds are hardly risk free. “But we need to move during this
So Germany and northern countries mandate,” he said. “We must agree not
in particular are pressing for more “risk to lose another year.”
reduction” before “risk sharing,” Mr. Given the populist surge, he added,
Dombrovskis said. “We need Europeans to feel these pos-
That means that another key change itive economic figures in their pocket-
intended to reassure citizens — a Euro- books, to show people that they are bet-
pean banking deposit insurance system, ter off with Europe than without.”
like one in the United States — is un- But risks increase over time, with
likely to happen soon. growth due to slow in the medium term,
Instead, Mr. Dombrovskis said he Brexit unresolved, Italy confusing and a
world
Kim’s government has introduced mar-
ket-oriented reforms, allowing more au-
tonomy for farms and factories and tol-
erating growing market activities that
have improved food supplies for the peo-
ple. A new, albeit still small, middle class
of moneyed entrepreneurs has
emerged.
The elites have also been enriched, al-
lowing them to stockpile goods and for-
eign currency.
“We have seen no big disruption in
markets yet that could be attributed to
sanctions,” Mr. Ishimaru of Asia Press
said. “North Korean markets have
proved quite resilient against sanc-
tions.”
Ms. Kang, the defector who collects
data using informants in the North, said
the country was now far better posi-
tioned to ride out the sanctions than in
the past. “They have markets,” she said.
“There is rice there. Many have cash re-
serves.”
She said the North had also benefited
from smuggling that had brought in
hard currency and some consumer
goods.
“The screws have been tightened, so
the pain is now bigger, but I don’t think it
is lethal,” said Rüdiger Frank, an econo-
mist at the University of Vienna who
studies the North. “I am not convinced
that the sanctions were the main factor
that led to the current talks.”
“BUNKER-BUSTER”
It may be too early to judge the full im-
pact of the sanctions, which began to
hurt only in the second half of 2017, after
China appeared to step up enforcement.
This means conditions in North Korea
could deteriorate further.
Some analysts have argued that Mr.
Kim’s decision to travel to Beijing and
meet with President Xi Jinping last
month may have been a sign of his des-
peration to ease sanctions.
Sanctions could be a true “bunker-
buster” for the North Korean economy,
said Kim Byung-yeon, an economist at
Seoul National University. He said that if
the sanctions remained in place, they
could threaten the government by creat-
ing privation among both the elites and
the general population.
The recent improvements in living
standards in North Korea could mean its
political elite and new middle class may
be unwilling to tolerate a return to eco-
nomic hardship, said Kim Dong-yub, a
North Korea analyst at the Seoul-based
Institute for Far Eastern Studies.
In Pyongyang, some families make
fewer trips to restaurants and choose
cheaper domestic goods over more ex-
pensive imports. Outside the capital, ru-
ral families now sometimes make do
with only two meals a day.
“My worry is that the gains and
progress made in recent years in terms
of food security and marketization could
fade as a result of the sanctions,” said
Katharina Zellweger, who has visited
North Korea 70 times since 1995, living
there from 2006 to 2011 to run a Swiss aid
program. “That would mean we are
moving backward.”
One Chinese trader who does busi-
ness with middle-class North Koreans
said that he had noticed a growing dis-
content with the government because of
the shortages.
“I can feel they are not satisfied with
the government, and if the authorities
cannot resolve the sanctions problem,
such dissatisfaction will go on and on,”
said the trader, who asked to be identi-
fied only by his English name, Terry, for
fear of repercussions in North Korea.
“They have lost the loyalty toward the
regime.”
Echo Hui contributed reporting from
Beijing.
possible trade war in the offing, noted
Mujtaba Rahman, an analyst at the Eur-
asia Group. “Markets remain compla-
cent for now, but it will not last forever,”
he said.
Jyrki Katainen, the European com-
missioner for jobs and growth, said in an
interview that “the main issue is trust
among member states, which is not as
good as it should be.”
Rather than a Macronian revolution,
he urged evolution, and a road map for
the next five or 10 years. “A longer per-
spective would help trust, with steps
made conditional, so it’s not unbal-
anced,” he said.
Heidi Crebo-Rediker, who was the
United States State Department’s first
chief economist, said that she foresaw a
slow process. “Until you have confi-
dence in all the banking systems, includ-
ing Italy, and an agreement that risks
can now be managed centrally, only
then you take that final step forward,”
she said.
“But just when you have the potential
to move forward in France and Ger-
many, there’s the potential for a real
scare from the south, from Italy,” she
added. “So even slow progress is now
under threat.”
Mr. Katainen, a Finnish former prime
minister, still sees progress coming from
Paris and Berlin.
“Macron and Merkel get along well,
respect one another, are both pro-Euro-
pean and ambitious,” he said. “Both
want to leave a mark on Europe. I see
Macron as pragmatic, setting his priori-
ties for the future, but it doesn’t mean
every detail must be done.”

6 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018
world
Lost in battle, found by sleuths
WASHINGTON
Amateur detectives put
a name to U.S. Marine’s
remains from World War II
BY DAVE PHILIPPS
A mystery that went unsolved for 73
years began when the American Her-
man Mulligan threw a grenade.
In the thick of some of the most vi-
cious fighting of World War II, on the is-
land of Okinawa, Private First Class
Mulligan’s grenade clattered into the
dark maw of a Japanese bunker and
blew up a cache of ammunition. The
huge explosion obliterated most of the
hillside, and blasted the 21-year-old Ma-
rine beyond recognition.
Amid the chaos, his unidentified body
was buried in a battlefield grave, while
the Marine Corps listed Private Mulli-
gan as missing in action. In the years af-
ter the war, he was reclassified as “unre-
coverable,” and the family that knew
him gradually died off, until his memory
was almost as lost as his bones.
The private’s story could have ended
there, among the roughly 72,000 Ameri-
can troops from World War II who have
not been accounted for. But the ending
has been rewritten by a black-and-white
snapshot found in a Marine veteran’s
trunk and by once obscure United
States Army files now shared among re-
searchers and amateur historians.
The photo inspired an informal net-
work of volunteer sleuths to track down
survivors of the battle, pore over forgot-
ten maps and comb through yellowed
files until they had traced Private Mulli-
gan’s likely remains to a burial plot un-
der a marble cross in Manila. Then they
found a cousin, James Patterson, who
could provide DNA for matching.
In March, Marines in dress uniform
knocked at the Patterson home near
Charlotte, N.C., where the private’s Pur-
ple Heart and dog tags have been on dis-
play for years near the front door. Pri-
vate Mulligan, they said, had been
found.
Until recently, the kind of detective
work that brought the lost Marine home
was largely handled by a small group of
researchers at the Defense POW/MIA
Accounting Agency, the arm of the
United States Defense Department re-
sponsible for finding and returning lost
war dead. Now, though, terabytes of dig-
itized military records can be searched
and shared over the internet, and a
growing number of war dead are being
found by members of the public.
In many cases, it turns out that the
dead are not missing, just their names.
American military cemeteries like the
one in Manila hold 8,500 unknown re-
mains, most from World War II, but the
accounting agency generally does not
focus on those cases. Troops in cemeter-
ies, even if unidentified, have at least
been buried with honor, the agency ar-
gues, so it concentrates instead on locat-
ing remains that never made it to a cem-
etery: infantrymen lost in a jungle am-
bush, say, or aircrews scattered by a
mountainside plane crash.
That has left thousands of open cases
that attract amateur investigators.
“A lot of these guys are pretty easy to
sort out, but the agency has other priori-
ties,” said John Eakin, a Vietnam vet-
eran who waged a five-year legal battle
with the agency, trying to compel it to
test the remains in a grave in the Phil-
ippines where he believed his cousin
was buried. (He turned out to be right.)
The accounting agency, with an annu-
al budget of more than $130 million, has
long been criticized for clearing few
cases. On average it identifies only
about 100 remains a year; the figure
rose to 201 in 2017 mainly because it
started exhuming more unknowns like
Private Mulligan.
The agency said in a statement that
“staff are systematically reviewing un-
known files to see if a case for exhuma-
tion can be made,” and that to go ahead,
officials must be persuaded the remains
are “more likely than not” to be pos-
itively identified.
The search for Private Mulligan
started with a blood-flecked Japanese
flag that Dale Maharidge, a Pulitzer
Prize-winning author who teaches jour-
nalism at Columbia University, found
among his father’s things after he died.
Mr. Maharidge’s father had been a
Marine on Okinawa, and the flag was a
souvenir taken from the brow of a dead
Dale Maharidge, left, said he thought that by tracking down Private Mulligan he could put his father’s “demons to rest.” Mr. Ma-
haridge hopes to bury the private near his father, right, at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
Private Herman Mulligan, above, was killed in combat on Okinawa in 1945 and his unidentified body was buried in a battlefield grave. He was listed as missing in action. Below left,
Private Mulligan’s Marine unit on Guadalcanal and, right, Steve Maharidge, a Marine who had kept a dog-eared snapshot of his buddy — Private Mulligan.
Japanese soldier and signed by more resigned to the idea that the man in the not know what had happened to him af-
than a dozen Marines. His father had snapshot would never actually be terward.
come home from the war haunted by brought home. Mr. Maharidge asked the accounting
combat and unwilling to talk about it, Private Mulligan worked in a textile agency for help finding Private Mulli-
but for the rest of his life, he kept a dog- mill as a teenager in Greenville, S.C., be- gan in 2011, but “I just ended up getting
eared snapshot of a buddy he lost in fore the war, and lied about his health to shuffled around,” he said. “No one ever
combat — Private Mulligan. get into the Marines, hiding his hemo- did anything.”
Mr. Maharidge decided to track down philia. He saw fierce fighting in Guam By the time he published “Bringing
the men of the flag, and ultimately the and then hit the beach on Okinawa, Mulligan Home” in 2013, the title had
man in the snapshot. where his regiment fought for weeks to changed from a quest to a metaphor — a
“I thought by finding Mulligan, may- pry Japanese defenders from the hill- reminder that the past can be as acrid
be I could finally understand my dad, side tombs that they used as bunkers. and hard to grasp as battlefield smoke.
and put some of his demons to rest,” Mr. On May 30, 1945, Private Mulligan His failure to find answers left him so
Maharidge said. threw his fateful grenade into one of the drained that he didn’t write again for
He hunted for years, cold-calling hun- tombs, not knowing it was packed with more than a year.
dreds of men with names like those on explosives. But once in the public eye, Private
the flag, and eventually found a few Ma- “The whole hillside blew out at him,” a Mulligan’s story took on a life of its own.
rine veterans who helped him piece to- veteran told Mr. Maharidge. “He got hit An amateur genealogist in Virginia
gether what happened on Okinawa. He in the face.” named Bridget Carroll heard Mr. Ma-
wrote a book about the search, “Bring- A few men remembered carrying the haridge give a radio interview and sent
ing Mulligan Home.” But he finished it bloodied private to an aid station but did him an email offering to help. “I love a
mystery,” she told him.
Before long, she had found Private
Mulligan’s cousin, James Patterson.
“We had his Purple Heart sitting here
in the house, but didn’t know a thing
about it,” said Mr. Patterson’s wife, Jean.
“But then I read the letters of his family
trying to find him after the war, and it
broke my heart.”
She joined the search. The family pro-
vided DNA to the agency that could
identify Private Mulligan, and urged the
agency to begin a search, but she said
the agency seemed to do little. Two
years later, she spotted a Facebook post
announcing that dozens of Marine re-
mains had been recovered by independ-
ent researchers on the island of Tarawa,
and posted a comment saying she hoped
Private Mulligan was among them.
Robert Rumsby, a former Army lieu-
tenant who had worked on the Tarawa
excavations, saw her comment and re-
sponded. He had developed a passion
PHOTOGRAPHS BY RYAN CHRISTOPHER JONES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES for World War II, and though he was
only 26 at the time, he had already spent
years indexing unknown graves from
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
the war. “This guy was a nobody, just a
grunt everyone had forgotten,” Mr.
Rumsby said of Private Mulligan. “But
that’s why we had to find him. Nobody
deserves to be left behind.”
Mr. Rumsby knew that World War II
dead were typically buried in temporary
cemeteries close to the fighting, in rows
usually filled chronologically. He used
an old map of the plots on Okinawa to
look for unknowns buried shortly after
Private Mulligan died. There were only
two, and one of them, in a grave labeled
X-35, looked promising.
After the war, the Army recorded de-
tails of each set of unknown remains in
records known as X files that are now
digitized and widely shared by re-
searchers. The files showed that X-35
had been exhumed and sent to Saipan to
be identified, along with thousands of
others.
Although the grave contained socks
stenciled with the name Mulligan, no
match was made, and the remains were
reburied in 1950 in an American ceme-
tery in Manila.
Mr. Rumsby compared the file for
X-35 to Private Mulligan’s personnel file
in 2016 and found several points of
agreement. A group of dentists then vol-
unteered to examine dental records, and
found that they matched.
The Patterson family submitted the
findings to the agency in the fall of 2016
with fingers crossed, knowing that
strong evidence was no guarantee that
the agency would take action. Some
seemingly rock-solid cases have lan-
guished for decades.
Pressed by the family and their sena-
tors and congressmen, the agency ex-
humed X-35 in the spring of 2017 and
sent a section of tibia to the military’s
DNA lab in Maryland to be compared
with the sample supplied by James Pat-
terson (he died in July 2017). The results
were a match.
“I don’t believe in closure. I don’t
think we ever really get over anything,”
Mr. Maharidge said a few days after
hearing the news. “But this feels pretty
good.”
Earlier this month, Mr. Maharidge,
the author who started the quest,
walked through the ghostly marble
headstones of Arlington National Ceme-
tery with Mr. Rumsby, the researcher
who had connected the crucial dots.
They stopped at the grave of Mr. Ma-
haridge’s father and Mr. Maharidge
produced a bottle of respectable 10-
year-old bourbon.
There was an empty plot three spaces
to the north, where they hoped to bury
Private Mulligan. The sun was setting,
and in the distance, a bugler sounded
taps at the Tomb of the Unknowns.
Mr. Maharidge poured glasses of
bourbon, then paused to splash a bit
from the bottle onto the grass.
“The dead drink first,” he said.
..
Internment
of Japanese
casts shadow
in high court
WASHINGTON
In travel ban case, echoes
of a wartime policy that
is now seen as harmful
BY ADAM LIPTAK
“I’m calling, very simply, for a shutdown
of Muslims entering the United States,”
Donald J. Trump said on Dec. 8, 2015. It
was early in his presidential campaign,
and he was saying that sort of thing all
the time.
On this occasion, though, he also cited
a historical precedent.
“Take a look at what F.D.R. did many
years ago,” Mr. Trump said. “He did the
same thing.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt
signed a 1942 executive order that sent
more than 110,000 people of Japanese
ancestry to internment camps.
“This is a president who was highly
respected by all,” Mr. Trump said of
Roosevelt. “They named highways after
him.”
In the coming week, the United States
Supreme Court will hear arguments in a
challenge to Mr. Trump’s own executive
order, one that restricted travel from
eight nations, six of them predomi-
nantly Muslim. It is the last scheduled
argument of a busy term, and it is very
likely to yield a major statement on
presidential power.
The justices will consider how much
to weigh Mr. Trump’s campaign state-
ments. And they will act in the shadow of
their predecessors’ decision in Kore-
matsu v. United States, which endorsed
Roosevelt’s 1942 order and is almost uni-
versally viewed as a shameful mistake.
The Justice Department has worked
hard to limit the damage from Mr.
Trump’s often extemporaneous and
rambling campaign statements. It was
hard to tell, for instance, precisely which
Roosevelt policies Mr. Trump referred to
or endorsed in his 2015 remarks.
“Impugning the official objective of a
formal national security and foreign pol-
icy judgment of the president based on
campaign trail statements is inappro-
priate and fraught with intractable diffi-
culties,” Solicitor General Noel J. Fran-
cisco told the justices in a brief filed in
February.
The challengers — Hawaii, several in-
dividuals and a Muslim group — took a
different view. Mr. Trump’s order, they
said, was “the fulfillment of the presi-
dent’s promise to prohibit Muslim immi-
gration to the United States.”
Korematsu v. United States
endorsed Roosevelt’s 1942 order
and is almost universally viewed
as a shameful mistake.
A pair of supporting briefs, from chil-
dren of Japanese-Americans held in the
detention camps and several public in-
terest groups, went further. They said
Mr. Trump’s latest travel ban is of a piece
with Roosevelt’s order.
“History teaches caution and skepti-
cism when vague notions of national se-
curity are used to justify vast, unprece-
dented exclusionary measures that tar-
get disfavored classes,” lawyers for the
Japanese American Citizens League
told the justices.
There are, of course, major differ-
ences between the two orders, as legal
scholars have noted. Roosevelt’s order
applied to people living in the United
States, many of them citizens, while Mr.
Trump’s order concerned nationals of
other countries living abroad. (The
countries initially included Iran, Libya,
Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Chad, North Ko-
rea and Venezuela. This month, the ad-
ministration lifted restrictions on travel
from Chad.)
In enforcing Roosevelt’s order, more-
over, the military singled out “persons of
Japanese ancestry.” Mr. Trump’s order,
by contrast, is neutral on its face, though
it disproportionately affects Muslims.
Still, the legacy of the Korematsu de-
cision figured in opinions in recent ap-
peals court decisions blocking Mr.
Trump’s third and most considered trav-
el ban, issued as a presidential procla-
mation in September.
The Korematsu decision occupies a
curious place in the Supreme Court’s ju-
risprudence, as a grave error that has
never been formally disavowed.
The supporting briefs in the new case,
Trump v. Hawaii, No. 17-965, urged the
justices to consider the similarities be-
tween the two executive orders. “Then,
as now,” one said, “the government pur-
sued a mass exclusionary measure of
sweeping and senseless scope.” Both or-
ders, the briefs said, relied on general
characteristics like ancestry and nation-
ality instead of individualized scrutiny.
In defending the Japanese intern-
ment, the Justice Department told the
Supreme Court that “the group as a
whole contained an unknown number of
persons who could not readily be sin-
gled out and who were a threat to the se-
curity of the nation.” Mr. Trump’s execu-
tive order bars entry of large numbers of
people “about whom the United States
lacks sufficient information to assess
the risks they pose.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Business
Crippled agency could aid exports
WASHINGTON
Big business groups urge
Trump to fill vacancies
and revitalize deal-making
BY ALAN RAPPEPORT
As trade tensions mount, an 84-year-old
Washington institution could have been
a powerful tool for President Trump.
The institution, the Export-Import
Bank, was created to help American
companies compete overseas and bol-
ster exports by providing cheap govern-
ment-backed loans.
But the institution, which once fi-
nanced multibillion-dollar projects, has
been effectively crippled by the Trump
administration. The bank has been with-
out a chairman since Mr. Trump took of-
fice, and the last of the bank’s five board
members quit in March. Since 2015, it
has not had the quorum of at least three
members that it needs to finance deals
or projects worth more than $10 million.
The effective closing of the bank has
put American manufacturers like Boe-
ing and General Electric at a global dis-
advantage, prompting a frenzied lobby-
ing campaign by business groups wor-
ried that the White House is undermin-
ing its own trade goals.
“The Export-Import Bank plays a vi-
tal role in supporting American compa-
nies as they work to sell their products
to customers across the world,” said
Neil Bradley, the executive vice presi-
dent and chief policy officer of the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce. “But as long as
the seats remain vacant, U.S. businesses
are at a disadvantage relative to global
competitors.”
In the past, the bank had been used by
large corporations like Boeing and Gen-
eral Electric, which received loan guar-
antees to sell products like airplanes,
satellites and industrial equipment to
developing countries, lifting sales and
supporting American jobs. It has pro-
vided loan guarantees to overseas air-
lines looking to buy American-made jets
and helped organizations like the Envi-
ronmental Chemical Corporation build
water facilities in Africa.
Proponents of the bank, including
some lawmakers, argue that the institu-
tion could be a powerful weapon for a
president who wants to increase domes-
tic manufacturing and narrow the gap
between what the United States imports
and what it exports.
The Export-Import Bank provides the
kind of government subsidies that other
nations regularly use to help domestic
companies compete abroad. Mr. Trump
regularly blames those subsidies for a
flood of cheap imports, saying they ex-
acerbate the United States trade imbal-
ance.
The bank was languishing before Mr.
Trump took office, but its condition has
worsened under his watch. Last year,
Mr. Trump’s pick to oversee the Export-
Import Bank, Scott Garrett, a critic of
the bank, was rejected by the Senate
over concerns that he would close the
agency. The other directors who were
nominated by Mr. Trump remain stalled
in the Senate, and the president has yet
to pick a new leader.
To business groups, manufacturers
and veterans of the bank, Mr. Trump ap-
pears to be undermining his own trade
aspirations by leaving the Export-Im-
port Bank in the lurch.
“I’m not sure he’s really being well
served,” said Fred P. Hochberg, the most
recent chairman of the bank, who de-
parted in 2017. “If you want to be able to
reduce trade deficits and you want to be
able to export more, particularly capital
goods, that’s what an Export-Import
Bank does.”
In recent years, the bank has been
G.E. pulls back on digital initiatives
Company aimed for top
as a software player, but
the cost proved daunting
BY STEVE LOHR
No old-line company embraced the dig-
ital wave with more gusto than General
Electric. The industrial giant spent bil-
lions, hired thousands of software engi-
neers and created image-morphing tele-
vision ads to recast itself as “a digital-
industrial company.”
The scope of G.E.’s digital ambitions
were put on full display in 2015, when the
company set up GE Digital as its own
business within the industrial conglom-
erate. Jeffrey R. Immelt, then chief exec-
utive, boldly declared G.E.’s goal to be-
come a “top 10 software company” by
2020.
Today, there are no such ambitions.
The spending at GE Digital is being
slashed, amid layoffs and sharply nar-
rowed aims at G.E. under John Flan-
nery, who became chief executive last
August.
In November, Mr. Flannery told in-
vestors that expenses at GE Digital
would be cut this year by more than 25
percent, or about $400 million. While he
insisted the digital initiatives are “very
barely functional. According to its most
recent annual report, the Export-Import
Bank authorized just $3.4 billion of
mostly short-term export credit in 2017.
That is down from the $20 billion that it
authorized in 2014, the last year that the
bank was fully operational. The report
points out that China provided $34 bil-
lion in medium- and long-term financing
key” to the company, he added, “we
want a much more focused strategy.”
G.E. is struggling with problems in its
big power-generation business, which
badly misjudged the electric power
market, and lingering uncertainties
about the liabilities of its finance arm,
GE Capital. Those immediate concerns
— along with how one of its jet engines
made with the French company Safran
was involved in the past week in a
Southwest Airlines accident — will
likely get the most attention from invest-
ors.
But the rethinking of GE Digital, with
its future still under review by Mr. Flan-
nery, points to the difficulty of producing
modern software for industrial busi-
nesses as they adopt digital technology.
No one disputes the overarching vi-
sion of the so-called industrial internet
of things — which includes low-cost sen-
sors and a flood of data and clever soft-
ware that should deliver insights to cut
costs, conserve fuel and design better
products, faster. But the company
greatly underestimated the challenges
of creating all the software needed to
achieve that grand vision, said analysts
and former G.E. managers.
G.E.’s technical prowess, they said,
lies in designing and manufacturing big
machines like power-plant turbines, jet
engines and medical-imaging equip-
for its exports in 2016, underscoring the
competitive disadvantage that the
United States faces.
The bank’s crippling has been costly
for both companies and their workers,
including Boeing. In the last two years,
two deals involving the sale of its com-
mercial satellites have been canceled
and one was significantly delayed given
ment. Its traditional software skills have
been in the specialized programs that
control the machines and factory opera-
tions. GE Digital was a striking depar-
ture into cloud-based internet software,
data analytics and artificial intelligence
tools like machine learning.
“G.E. reached too far outside its ex-
pertise and too fast,” said Steven
Winoker, an analyst at UBS. “And it be-
came a financial black hole.”
In an article last year in the Harvard
Business Review, Mr. Immelt wrote that
in 2016 “we put about $4 billion into de-
veloping analytics software and ma-
chine learning capabilities.”
G.E.’s digital effort dates to 2011, when
Mr. Immelt recruited William Ruh, an
executive at Cisco Systems. Later that
year, the company set up a center in San
Ramon, Calif., east of San Francisco. At
the time, Mr. Ruh announced big plans
to hire as many as 400 software engi-
neers to write code for the industrial in-
ternet.
The San Ramon work force swelled
sharply to 1,400 in the summer of 2016,
and to a peak of 2,000 last summer — be-
fore coming down to about 1,800, after a
round of cuts earlier this year.
During the buildup, G.E. recruited
veteran software managers who had
worked at leading tech companies, in-
cluding Google, Microsoft and Apple.
CHRIS KOEHLER
the lack of a quorum at the Export-Im-
port Bank. The stalling of these deals
alone has cost the company hundreds of
millions of dollars.
“Restoring the Export-Import Bank
to full strength is the single best thing
Washington can do right now to build on
the economic momentum of tax reform,
shrink our trade deficits and level the
With the cuts at GE Digital and its nar-
rowed focus, some of them have de-
parted.
In its early days, the San Ramon cen-
ter concentrated on writing data analy-
sis and modeling software for applica-
tions like predicting when a gas turbine
or jet engine would need maintenance,
before the machine failed. In 2013, G.E.
called that software Predix.
The product plan later broadened to
include a cloud-based software platform
for handling all kinds of sensor and ma-
chine data, and secure communications
from the factory floor to data centers.
G.E. even built its own data centers.
The software platform under develop-
ment was often referred to as an operat-
ing system for the industrial internet.
When the product concept expanded, so
did the Predix brand.
Today, according to former G.E. engi-
neers, Predix has been pared back to
mainly a set of software tools to help
write applications rather than being
connected to layers of code for automat-
ing data analysis.
The priority at GE Digital is now on
selling products for specific industrial
applications, sold as offerings in the
“Predix portfolio,” and tailored for G.E.’s
roster of existing industrial customers.
Less emphasis is being put on all-pur-
DIGITAL, PAGE 8
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018 | 7
playing field so American workers can
win,” said Tim Keating, Boeing’s execu-
tive vice president for government oper-
ations.
In 2015, General Electric said that it
would stop manufacturing certain gas
engines in Waukesha, Wis., and that it
would instead build a $265 million plant
in Canada, which was offering financial
support through its version of the Ex-
port-Import Bank, known as Export De-
velopment Canada. G.E. attributed the
move to the lack of United States export
financing, saying in a statement that the
company “will secure access to Canadi-
an Export Finance to fill the gap from
the lapse of the U.S. Export-Import
Bank.”
After the bank’s board became empty
last month, Jay Timmons, the chief ex-
ecutive of the National Association of
Manufacturers, sent letters to every
senator urging them to hold a vote on
Mr. Trump’s nominees. Mr. Timmons
warned that the lack of action was cost-
ing American jobs.
“Countries in Europe and beyond
have been luring U.S. manufacturers to
set up shop overseas to take advantage
of foreign export financing because the
U.S. system is effectively broken,” Mr.
Timmons said. “Manufacturers in the
United States have lost billions of dol-
lars in deals, and tens of thousands of
American workers have lost opportuni-
ties for well-paying jobs supported by
the exports that the Ex-Im Bank could
have helped secure.”
At a congressional hearing this
month, Representative Charlie Dent,
Republican of Pennsylvania, pressed
Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secre-
tary, about the fate of the bank and ar-
gued that not using its financing
amounted to a lost opportunity. He sug-
gested that some in the Trump adminis-
tration wanted the bank to collapse.
“The president says he wants to see
the trade deficit shrink; here’s a way we
can do it,” Mr. Dent said.
In an interview after the hearing, Mr.
Mnuchin would not say when the presi-
dent would nominate a new leader for
the bank, or whether some of his col-
leagues were rooting for its demise, but
he insisted that Mr. Trump supported
keeping the bank alive.
“The president does want it to func-
tion,” Mr. Mnuchin said.
In an interview last year with The
Wall Street Journal, Mr. Trump said he
had initially been opposed to the Export-
Import Bank, seeing it as unnecessary,
but had changed his mind.
But the White House has done little to
advance its nominees and politics con-
tinue to be an obstacle. Conservatives
have traditionally disliked the bank be-
cause they argue that it amounts to cor-
porate welfare and rewards rich corpo-
rations that do not need taxpayer assist-
ance.
“They distort markets, impose risk on
taxpayers and they’re bad policy for ev-
erybody,” said Senator Patrick J.
Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania,
who has been one of the most outspoken
critics of the Export-Import Bank.
Mr. Toomey has used procedural tac-
tics to delay the nomination of the re-
maining nominees to the bank’s board.
He said he wanted Mr. Trump to pick a
“reformer” like Mr. Garrett, who does
not believe in the current mission of the
bank.
Democrats who support the bank are
growing increasingly impatient.
“One of the best things we can do to
help the economy support jobs is to get
Ex-Im fully functioning as soon as possi-
ble,” said Senator Sherrod Brown, Dem-
ocrat of Ohio.
Action does not appear to be forth-
coming. An aide to the Senate majority
leader, Mitch McConnell, said that votes
on Mr. Trump’s other nominees would
not be held until he names a new chair-
man.
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Good times
are here,
so why all
the gloom?
Despite economic stability
around the world, experts
fret about the near future
BY NEIL IRWIN
By a lot of measures, these are very
good times for the global economy.
Nearly every major region of the planet
is enjoying solid growth and prosperity
simultaneously for the first time in a
decade.
Yet the world’s top economic policy-
makers, who were gathering in Wash-
ington over the weekend, are sounding
awfully glum.
“The present good times will not last
for long,” said Maurice Obstfeld, chief
economist of the International Mone-
tary Fund, as he released the fund’s lat-
est projections, which foresee a solid 3.9
percent expansion of the global econ-
omy in 2018.
Or as his boss, the I.M.F. managing di-
rector Christine Lagarde, put it, “The
current global picture is bright, but we
can see darker clouds looming.”
The international system “is now
in danger of being torn apart.”
The pessimism among policymakers
— who were getting together for the
spring meetings of the I.M.F. and World
Bank — contrasts with financial mar-
kets. Despite a bumpy couple of months,
stocks and most other financial assets
are still priced at levels that suggest
growth will continue apace for some
time to come.
“Economists are paid to worry,” said
Nathan Sheets, chief economist at
PGIM Fixed Income and a former offi-
cial at the United States Treasury and
the Federal Reserve.
What are these policymakers so wor-
ried about? Is this just a bunch of econo-
mists living up to their field’s reputation
as the dismal science — or worse, letting
their own policy preferences shape their
forecasts? Or is the world economy, for
all its apparent prosperity, actually in
peril?
TRADE WAR WORRIES
President Trump tweeted last month
that trade wars are “good, and easy to
win,” but it is safe to say that leading
economic policymakers do not agree.
They instead see the risk of ruin in the
administration’s tariff threats — a cycle
of retaliation that could disrupt compa-
nies’ supply chains and cause global
commerce to falter.
Ms. Lagarde argued in a speech this
month that the global trading system
has had tremendous benefits in terms of
reducing poverty and creating higher-
wage jobs. “But that system of rules and
shared responsibility is now in danger of
being torn apart,” she said.
For now, this remains more a theoreti-
cal risk than a cause of major disruption
to economic expansion.
The Trump administration has threat-
ened a withdrawal from the North
American Free Trade Agreement, a
steep tariff on steel and aluminum im-
ports and the intention to tax $50 billion
(or maybe $150 billion) of Chinese im-
ports.
But it has then backed away, entering
ECONOMY, PAGE 8

8 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018
business
Less is more in lingerie empire
BY VALERIYA SAFRONOVA
Before converting a set of handkerchiefs
into a bra and panties that began a 40-
year career for her and her best friend,
Gale Epstein dabbled in many varieties
of do-it-yourself work.
“I had a lot of stuff from her,” said Lida
Orzeck, 70, Ms. Epstein’s business part-
ner and longtime friend. It was a cold af-
ternoon in March, and she was seated
next to Ms. Epstein, 71, at a long white
table at the Park Avenue headquarters
in Manhattan of Hanky Panky, the un-
derwear company the two women
founded in 1977. “You were getting jeans
from vintage shops, then you sewed up
the bottoms or something and made
them into pocketbooks.”
“That was my denim period, yes,” said
Ms. Epstein, a Parsons School of Design
graduate. “I had a suede period too.
That was your first wedding dress. That
was pre-Hanky Panky, so that was
suede and appliqué. The second was
during Hanky Panky, so it was hand-em-
broidered silk scarves that we were us-
ing in our line.”
“My wedding dresses are only two out
of, what, 10?” Ms. Orzeck said. “Gale
also has a lot of sisters and other
friends.”
“They’re not conventional dresses,”
Ms. Epstein said. “But anyway, I don’t
design conventionally.”
Conventional or not, Ms. Epstein’s de-
signs have certainly proved to be popu-
lar. The thong she created for Hanky
Panky in 1986, known simply as 4811 and
priced at about $20, is still a top-selling
item for the company, which counts Ri-
hanna, Beyoncé, Angelina Jolie, Camer-
on Diaz, Emma Watson, Eva Longoria,
Kim Kardashian West and many others
as customers.
Thongs, which Hanky Panky
produces in a rainbow of hues and sev-
eral styles, make up more than half of
the company’s $50-million business.
The other half is made up of different
types of stretchy, form-fitting bottoms
and lacy, colorful bras.
The company’s products have all been
made in the United States — primarily
in the New York area — since its found-
ing, a considerable feat, given that the
number of manufacturing jobs in the
city has been declining since the 1950s
and significantly dropped after the ter-
rorist attack in 2001 as apparel compa-
nies moved production abroad.
In October, Hanky Panky’s employees
— a significant portion of whom work at
a multiuse warehouse in the borough of
Queens — discovered that they would
soon be part owners of the company. At a
party celebrating Hanky Panky’s 40th
birthday, Ms. Epstein and Ms. Orzeck
announced that the company had estab-
lished an employee stock ownership
plan, which transfers the ownership of
the company over to a trust for the bene-
fit of its workers.
An ESOP does not require employee
contributions. The right to shares will be
earned after six years of working contin-
uously full-time. When employees leave
the company, they retain their vested
ownership until attaining full retirement
age, and upon retirement they can re-
deem their shares. “Gale and I are still in
charge,” Ms. Orzeck said. “But we no
longer wholly own the company.”
One need not fear that the next Tanga
panty’s design will be crowdsourced.
“I’m still the last word on fit,” Ms. Ep-
stein said. “Of course, we make all sizes
and we have our in-house focus group,
but I’m still involved in the look and feel
of everything that comes through the
design room. I don’t even trust models
to give me exact feedback.”
ONE SIZE FITS MOST
At the company’s warehouse last
month, Rodney Yetter, Hanky Panky’s
quality-control manager, explained how
his team contributes to a customer re-
turn rate that is one-tenth of 1 percent.
“Any type of thing that goes wrong
with these is the same type of thing,” Mr.
Yetter said. “Human error is easy to find
if you know where to look for it. A lace
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Lida Orzeck, top left, with Gale Epstein, the founders of Hanky Panky. Fabric preparation and finished products, above. Thongs make up more than half of the company’s business
with runoffs, a skipped stitch on a ma-
chine. If you’re counting from the crotch
area, it’s easy to spot.” He added:
“Ninety percent of the returns are be-
cause of fit.”
Many of the thongs are “one size fits
most” and fit sizes 2 to 14. In a world that
requires endless size calibration, this is
surely a relief to customers (petite and
plus sizes are also available). “We offer
an assortment of brands, but Hanky
Panky continues to be a category
leader,” David Law, the chief merchant
at Lord & Taylor, wrote in an email.
Lord & Taylor was the first store to re-
ceive an order from Hanky Panky, in
1977, when Ms. Epstein and Ms. Orzeck
personally delivered 144 tops and bot-
toms that Ms. Epstein had spent an en-
tire weekend sewing.
The design that had lured the store’s
buyer was a bra-and-bikini set that Ms.
Epstein created from Victorian-era
handkerchiefs she found in a bridal shop
and gave to Ms. Orzeck as a birthday
gift. An original version of the set is in
the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s per-
manent collection.
Ms. Orzeck took the lead on sales, de-
spite having little experience in the
area. She had a doctorate from Colum-
bia University in social psychology.
Est.
1926
taxfreecars@bluewin.ch
“Boldly, as if I knew what I was doing,
I called up stores, asked for buyers,
made appointments,” Ms. Orzeck said.
“They all saw me. Because that’s the
way business was done then.”
The department stores were quick to
place orders, but soon bigger companies
began copying Ms. Epstein’s designs.
“We lost the department-store business
because they were looking for low price
and high volume,” Ms. Orzeck said.
THONG THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING
In 1986, Ms. Epstein developed her ver-
sion of the thong, a slightly more modest
version of the “G-string” that had long
been worn only by strippers and prosti-
tutes.
“One of the reasons the thong became
important in the 1970s and ’80s is that
more women were wearing pants, so the
visible panty line became an issue,” said
Colleen Hill, the curator of costume and
accessories at the Museum at the Fash-
ion Institute of Technology. “There was
also more acceptance of the body. The
fitness craze in the ’80s encouraged
women to feel better about their bodies
and show them off more.”
Many department stores balked at
the idea of selling backless underwear,
so Hanky Panky turned to boutiques.
G.E. pulls back on digital ambitions
DIGITAL, FROM PAGE 7
pose software for the wider industrial
world. In an interview, Mr. Ruh de-
scribed the change as “a pivot” rather
than a retreat.
“We’re still 1,000 percent behind our
Predix portfolio,” he said.
Two key products in that portfolio
were acquired. In September 2016, GE
Digital bought Meridium, a maker of
equipment-tracking software, for $495
million. Two months later, it bought
ServiceMax, whose software is used to
manage industrial field service work-
ers, for $915 million.
The current strategy, Mr. Ruh said, “is
about industrial apps” like those. It is a
measured, step-by-step approach but
one, Mr. Ruh said, that capitalizes on
G.E.’s strengths — its industry knowl-
edge and deep customer relationships
— and is lifting sales.
GE Digital remains a large player in
an increasingly crowded field of compa-
nies offering industrial internet soft-
ware of various kinds, in different mar-
ket niches. The entrants include the big
cloud suppliers like Amazon, Microsoft
and Google; major business software
companies like Oracle, SAP, IBM and
SAS Institute; G.E.’s industrial peers
such as Siemens, Honeywell and ABB;
and start-ups like C3 IoT, Uptake and
FogHorn Systems.
Over the next two decades or so, it
steadily built a following but remained
mostly under the radar. “They started
out small and were always very focused
on quality, which they still are,” Ms. Hill
said.
“We never scaled up to a certain vol-
ume because we were having too much
fun,” Ms. Epstein said. “We didn’t want
to create this massive organization that
would have gotten out of hand and
would have forced us at that time, in or-
der to compete, to go offshore.”
But in 2004 The Wall Street Journal
published a front-page story about the
company (the show “Sex and the City,”
among other cultural factors, had popu-
larized Brazilian bikini waxes), and
business exploded.
“That was the most difficult day of our
business life,” Ms. Epstein said. “We had
no sales department. We had no P.R.
agency.”
“You didn’t have a cellphone,” Ms.
Orzeck said. “We didn’t even have an e-
commerce website. We had 55 employ-
ees. This was a time when I would may-
be get five emails in a day, and there
were hundreds.”
The department stores returned, no
longer scandalized by the idea of a thong
or the company’s name. The company
G.E. set up a center in San Ramon, Calif., to push into the digital market. It invested
billions in the efforts, but this year it is cutting its expenses by 25 percent.
The opportunity for G.E., analysts
said, centers on its longstanding rela-
tionships with customers and selling to
them. And so far, only 8 percent of its in-
dustrial customers are using Predix
portfolio products, the company said.
The New York Power Authority, the
nation’s largest state-owned utility, is
one of them. The utility is working with
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
PHOTOGRAPHS BY CAROLINE TOMPKINS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
began to slowly and carefully increase
production, meting out limited inven-
tory to stores. “It was a balancing act,”
Ms. Epstein said. “We had to satisfy ev-
erybody in some way.”
Ms. Orzeck said, “It was much harder
than starting the company. Demand, a
reputation to uphold, expectations. It
was a gorgeous nightmare.”
Eventually, the company expanded,
hiring more than 100 new employees.
“We have always grown, and we have
lived through five recessions,” Ms.
Orzeck said. In fact, the economic down-
turn in 2008 is what allowed them the
breathing room to enter e-commerce,
late in the game.
“By 2009 every brand had a website,
except for us,” Ms. Orzeck said. “So the
time was right. We had to convince the
boutiques that they wouldn’t lose busi-
ness.”
In recent years, Ms. Epstein and Ms.
Orzeck have scaled back their involve-
ment in the company. Why shouldn’t
they take it a little bit easier after turn-
ing the thong into a classic cut, one that
remains a staple in many drawers?
But despite handing over some of
their ownership, they have no plans to
leave. “Why would I retire?” Ms. Orzeck
said. “This is still our baby.”
DAMIEN MALONEY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
GE Digital to build apps that improve
the efficiency of its power generation
and distribution network. In pilot
projects, the partnership has saved or
avoided $3 million in costs, said Gil
Quiniones, chief executive of the state
power authority. The goal is $500 million
in savings over the next decade.
But for a technology project to help its
..
Good times
are here,
so why all
the gloom?
ECONOMY, FROM PAGE 7
Nafta renegotiation, granting excep-
tions to the steel and aluminum tariffs to
many countries, and delaying tariffs on
Chinese imports.
A WORLD OF FINANCIAL IMBALANCES
Global policymakers are worried about
more than conflict over trade. They also
see an emerging series of financial im-
balances and risks that could cause, or
worsen, the next downturn.
For years, for example, some coun-
tries — Germany, Japan and China
prominent among them — have persist-
ently run current account surpluses,
meaning they export more than they im-
port and essentially export capital to the
rest of the world. Others, including the
United States and Britain, have run per-
sistent current account deficits.
Over time, these patterns can create
vulnerability to financial shocks; they
helped fuel both the 2008 global finan-
cial crisis and the 2010 eurozone crisis.
And the I.M.F. projects that they will
worsen in the next couple of years, de-
spite steady economic growth.
For example, Germany’s current ac-
count surplus is set to rise to 8.2 percent
of gross domestic product in 2018 and
2019 from 8 percent in 2017, according to
the World Economic Outlook. The
United States’ current account deficit is
forecast to rise to 3 percent of G.D.P.
from 2.4 percent.
The tools to prevent those shifts are
within each country’s purview. Ger-
many could spend more on domestic in-
vestment, and the United States could
reduce its budget deficit, which might
start to reduce those imbalances. Nei-
ther has much evident political appetite
to do so.
At the same time, years of efforts by
central banks to fuel economic recovery
have left interest rates low worldwide
and prices in financial markets rela-
tively high.
HIGH DEBT, LOW RATES
Another worry: While the major econo-
mies look relatively strong right now,
they may also prove brittle when the
next shock arises.
Rather than using this period of sta-
bility and prosperity to pay down debts,
some major economies are moving in
the other direction — including with ris-
ing public debt levels in the United
States and high private debt levels in
China.
That dependency on debt means that
whenever the next economic downturn
arrives, governments may have less lee-
way to deal with it by opening the flood-
gates of public spending.
And with interest rates still low across
the entire developed world, one of the
normal tools for dealing with a recession
still has limited power. For example, the
United States Federal Reserve entered
the last downturn with its short-term in-
terest rate at 5.25 percent, before cutting
it to nearly zero by December 2008. Cur-
rently, that target rate is between 1.5
percent and 1.75 percent.
The European Central Bank has even
less room to maneuver, with its policy
rates still near zero.
PEOPLE WHO TEND TO FRET
There is surely an anthropological di-
mension to the kind of worrying that
was emerging from conference halls in
Washington this past week.
The people who end up as central
bankers or finance ministers or I.M.F.
officials tend to worry a lot about what
could go wrong.
But there’s also no doubt that the good
news of the moment comes with warn-
ings worth listening to. Even when en-
joying sunny weather, it never hurts to
know what you’ll do if it starts to rain.
customers reduce energy consumption,
the state authority went with a start-up,
C3 IoT.
Brian Hurst, chief analytics officer at
Exelon Utilities, a large electric utility
corporation based in Chicago, is also
working on early-stage projects with
GE Digital. Mr. Hurst said the progress
was encouraging and he saw no evi-
dence that the cuts at GE Digital had af-
fected their joint work.
But it is something he is watching
closely. “The technology is moving so
fast,” Mr. Hurst said. “Today’s players
may not be tomorrow’s players.”
GE Digital, Mr. Ruh insisted, is build-
ing a business for the long term. Reve-
nue from the Predix portfolio products
reached $550 million last year, he said,
and sales are growing rapidly. GE Dig-
ital’s total revenue of $4 billion also in-
cludes all of G.E.’s traditional industrial
software, and the unit’s global work
force is more than 4,000.
“Our approach is heads-down,” Mr.
Ruh said. “We’re going to show you suc-
cess.”
Some analysts recommend putting all
the software in the industrial divisions,
like power and aviation, closer to
customers. “San Ramon shouldn’t ex-
ist,” said Scott Davis, chief executive of
Melius Research, an independent finan-
cial analysis firm.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018 | 9

Opinion
Standing up at your desk could make you smarter
We knew
sitting too
much was
bad for the
body. Now
we know it’s
bad for the
brain.

LILLI CARRÉ

Richard A. Friedman
Contributing Writer
This is an odd admission for a psychia-
trist to make, but I’ve never been very
good at sitting still. I’m antsy in my
chair and jump at any opportunity to
escape it. When I’m trying to work out
a difficult problem, I often stand and
move about the office.
We’ve known for a while that sitting
for long stretches of every day has
myriad health consequences, like a
higher risk of heart disease and diabe-
tes, that culminate in a higher mortal-
ity rate. But now a new study has
found that sitting is also bad for your
brain. And it might be the case that
lots of exercise is not enough to save
you if you’re a couch potato the rest of
the time.
A study published last week, con-
ducted by Dr. Prabha Siddarth at the
University of California at Los Ange-
les, showed that sedentary behavior is
associated with reduced thickness of
the medial temporal lobe, which con-
tains the hippocampus, a brain region
that is critical to learning and memory.
The researchers asked a group of 35
healthy people, ages 45 to 70, about
their activity levels and the average
number of hours each day spent sitting
and then scanned their brains with
M.R.I.
They found that the thickness of
their medial temporal lobe was in-
versely correlated with how sedentary
they were; the subjects who reported
sitting for longer periods had the
thinnest medial temporal lobes.
The implication is that the more
time you spend in a chair the worse it
is for your brain health, resulting in
possible impairment in learning and
memory.
Of course, the study cannot prove
that this link is causal. It’s possible
that people with pre-existing cognitive
problems might just be more seden-
tary. Still, the researchers screened the
subjects to rule out major medical and
psychiatric disorders, so this explana-
tion is unlikely.
What’s also intriguing is that this
study did not find a significant associa- associative, unfocused thought improves brain health could lower the
tion between the level of physical process. bar for everyone.
activity and thickness of this brain I remember once forgetting the It’s also yet another good argument
region, suggesting that exercise, even combination to my lock in the gym. for getting rid of sitting desks in favor
strenuous exercise, may not be enough Standing there naked, dripping wet of standing desks for most people. For
to protect you from and in a panic that I would be late to example, one study assigned a group
The the harmful effects an important meeting, I tried one of 34 high school freshman to a stand-
of sitting. wrong combination after another. ing desk for 27 weeks.
Peripatetics This all puts me in When that didn’t work, I walked The researchers found significant
conducted mind of the Peri- around the locker room in a daze for a improvement in executive function
their patetics, followers of few minutes, came back to the lock and working memory by the end of the
philosophical Aristotle, who con- and — voilà — opened it instantly. study. (True, there was no control
inquiries ducted their philo- Intriguingly, you don’t even have to group of students using a seated desk,
while sophical inquiries move much to enhance cognition; just but it’s unlikely that this change was a
strolling while strolling about standing will do the trick. For example, result of brain maturation, given the
about the the Lyceum in an- two groups of subjects were asked to short study period.)
cient Athens. complete a test while either sitting or I know, this all runs counter to re-
Lyceum. Sounds as if they standing. The test — called Stroop — ceived notions about deep thought,
Maybe they were on to some- measures selective attention. Partici- from our grade-school teachers, who
were on to thing. pants are presented with conflicting told us to sit down and focus, to Ro-
something. But what is it stimuli, like the word “green” printed din’s famous “Thinker,” seated with
about walking — in blue ink, and asked to name the chin on hand.
besides increased color. Subjects thinking on their feet They were wrong. You can now all
blood flow to the brain — that might beat those who sat by a 32-millisecond stand up.
facilitate thinking? Perhaps it’s the margin.
fact that you are constantly bom- The cognitive benefits of strenuous RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN is a professor of
barded by new stimuli and inputs as physical exercise are well known. But clinical psychiatry and the director of
you move about, which helps derail the possibility that the minimal exer- the psychopharmacology clinic at the
linear thinking and encourages a more tion of standing more and sitting less Weill Cornell Medical College.

How Erdogan wins

Nationalism, Soner Cagaptay
strong
economic
growth and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of
control of the Turkey has called for snap elections on
June 24, almost a year and a half be-
media will fore the scheduled date in November
help the 2019. He is expected to win because he
president has, once again, managed to stack the
odds — militant nationalism, strong
of Turkey’s economic growth, a post-coup state of
re-election emergency that allows him to deploy
in June. security forces to crush his opposition
and almost complete control of the
Turkish media — in his favor.
The Turkish economy grew at 7.4
percent last year. Mr. Erdogan is seiz-
ing the moment to take credit for the
strong economic performance before
the economy shows signs of overheat-
ing. And there are worries stirred by a
credit boom: The annual inflation rate
peaked at 13 percent in November, the
highest in 14 years. The current ac-
count deficit swelled to 4.7 percent of
the gross domestic product in Decem-
ber, and the lira tumbled to a historic
low in April.
Mr. Erdogan is enjoying popular
support because of a surge of Turkish
nationalism after his victory in the
Afrin area of northern Syria, which the
Turkish Army and its affiliates took
from the Kurdish People’s Protection
Units, or YPG. The YPG is linked to
the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK),
the terrorist group that Turkey has
been fighting for decades.
But there are concerns about the
elections being held while the state of
emergency, imposed in the aftermath
of the failed 2016 coup, remains in
place. The state of emergency gives
the police, controlled by the central
government, the right to arrest anyone
without a court order and gives the
government administration the man-
date to curb freedoms of expression,
assembly and association.
The Turkish government has used
these extraordinary powers not just to
clamp down on coup plotters but also
to crack down on the opposition par-
ties and activists. Selahattin Demirtas,
the leader of the pro-Kurdish People’s
Democratic Party, or HDP — one of
three parties in the nation’s Parliament
that oppose President Erdogan’s ruling
Justice and Development Party, or
AKP — has been imprisoned, along
with eight other HDP lawmakers.
Eleven of the party’s 59 lawmakers
have been expelled from Parliament.
Turkey’s deputy prime minister
labeled Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader
of the Republican People’s Party, or
CHP, the main opposition party, a
“national security issue.” Enis
Berberoglu, a prominent CHP law-
maker, was sentenced to five years in
prison after being accused of leaking a
video to Cumhuriyet, an opposition
newspaper, purportedly showing Turk-
ish intelligence personnel sending
weapons to Syria.
It is not a fair playing field for Mr.
Erdogan’s opponents. Turks get their
news mostly from television. Nowa-
days news networks in Turkey almost
exclusively broadcast Mr. Erdogan’s
message. According to a study that
analyzes live news coverage in Tur-
key’s 17 largest networks, last March
— before the April 2017 referendum on
constitutional amendments for and
against an executive presidency — the
president’s party received 470 hours of
airtime, the CHP 45 hours, the MHP 15
hours, and the HDP zero minutes.
With the sale of the Dogan Media
Company, the largest Turkish media
group, in March to Demiroren Holding,
Mr. Erdogan’s portrait on a cigarette case and a lighter at an Istanbul souvenir shop.
a pro-government conglomerate, 90
percent of the Turkish media is now
controlled by pro-Erdogan businesses.
Recent changes to Turkey’s election
system may also tilt the playing field
in Mr. Erdogan’s favor. Turkey has a
paper-based voting system. A new law
mandates that the chairman of the
election monitoring board in every
district of the country be a government
official. Previously, the chairman had
been elected by majority vote by the
board, which included representatives
OZAN KOSE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
of all political parties. The change
raises fears that these officials might
not be honest during the vote count.
Traditionally, the paper ballots were
placed in official envelopes after being
stamped by ballot-box officials to
prevent voter fraud. The new law
stipulates that even ballots missing the
stamp of the polling officials will be
considered valid, raising fears of ballot
stuffing.
Mr. Erdogan has also moved to
neutralize two key challengers: Meral
Aksener, a center-right nationalist
politician who recently founded the
Good Party, and Selahattin Demirtas,
the imprisoned leader of the pro-Kurd-
ish HDP.
Ms. Aksener is Mr. Erdogan’s only
right-wing challenger in Turkey, where
right-wing parties have formed the
government for all but 17 months since
1950. She split from the ultranationalist
Nationalist Movement Party last year
over differences with the party lead-
er’s decision to support Mr. Erdogan
during last April’s referendum on an
executive presidency. If she manages
to significantly increase her votes, she
could hurt Mr. Erdogan.
Ms. Aksener’s Good Party could be
disqualified from contesting the elec-
tion because of a shrewd move by Mr.
Erdogan in choosing the election date.
Turkish electoral law requires a poli-
tical party to hold its party congress
six months before contesting an elec-
tion. The Good Party misses the June
24 deadline by four days.
Turkey has a high electoral thresh-
old, requiring parties to win 10 percent
of the national tally before they can
gain representation in the legislature.
The party is currently polling just
under ten percent. Mr. Erdogan has
left Ms. Aksener with little time or
space to build her nascent faction into
a formidable oppositional force.
Mr. Erdogan’s other challenger is
the imprisoned HDP leader Mr. Demir-
tas. He is charismatic like Mr. Erdogan
and relatable. During the June 2015
elections, he broadened the HDP’s
traditionally narrow Kurdish national-
ist base by reaching out to liberal
Turkish voters. It was first time a
pro-Kurdish party crossed the 10 per-
cent electoral threshold and entered
the Turkish Parliament.
CAGAPTAY, PAGE 11
 ..
10 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

opinion

Is Russia sponsoring terrorism?

A.G. SULZBERGER, Publisher former Russian intelligence agent, According to these reports, the Islamic meets the criteria to be designated as a
Cory Gardner Sergei Skripal, and his daughter in the State now counts thousands of Rus- state sponsor of terrorism. If the an-
DEAN BAQUET, Executive Editor MARK THOMPSON, Chief Executive Officer English city of Salisbury. The attack sian-speaking jihadis among its forces. swer is yes, Russia would face restric-
JOSEPH KAHN, Managing Editor STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON, President, International also resulted in the hospitalization of We also know that Russia is ramping tions on American foreign assistance, a
TOM BODKIN, Creative Director JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DEMARTA, Senior V.P., Global Advertising British law enforcement officials who up its support for anti-American insur- ban on American defense exports and
SUZANNE DALEY, Associate Editor ACHILLES TSALTAS, V.P., International Conferences Despite the imposition of unprecedent- responded to the scene, as well as gents in Afghanistan. On Feb. 9, 2017, sales, limits on American sales of
CHARLOTTE GORDON, V.P., International Consumer Marketing ed sanctions against Russia by the bystanders. Gen. John Nicholson, the American certain items that have both civilian
JAMES BENNET, Editorial Page Editor HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS, V.P., International Circulation Trump administration and Congress Russia has denied the charges, but commander in Afghanistan, told the and military uses, and other financial
JAMES DAO, Deputy Editorial Page Editor HELENA PHUA, Executive V.P., Asia-Pacific over the past year, President Vladimir the evidence is overwhelming. So is Senate Armed Services Committee and other restrictions. Many of these
KATHLEEN KINGSBURY, Deputy Editorial Page Editor SUZANNE YVERNÈS, International Chief Financial Officer Putin only seems more intent on caus- the attack’s significance: Russia is now that Russia has “begun to publicly penalties are already required under
ing grievous harm to international officially responsible for a chemical legitimize the Taliban” as a means “to the Countering America’s Adversaries
peace and stability. weapons attack against a NATO mem- undermine the United States and Through Sanctions Act, and the Trump
Alongside increased financial sanc- ber state on its own soil — a brazen NATO.” administration is contemplating oth-
tions against Mr. Putin and his cronies, violation of sovereignty of our closest From Moreover, Russia’s ers.
there is another arrow in the American ally. It requires a serious American illegal and immoral Some will argue that applying such a
poison to
THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT RETURNS quiver that would add diplomatic
pressure against Russia: The State
response.
This startling confirmation comes on cyberattacks,
war against Ukraine
shows no signs of
toxic label to a major global power, one
with a permanent seat at the United
Having a sexist in the Oval Office who curries favor Department should consider adding the heels of horrendous chemical Moscow has ending. Since Rus- Nations Security Council, will not get it
With a man the country to its list of state sponsors weapons attacks by Mr. Assad against violated sia’s annexation of to back down, and might even further
with conservative religious groups is having dire con- of terrorism, alongside its close allies his own people in Syria. He is in power countless Crimea in 2014 and damage American-Russia ties, already
in the White sequences. Health workers in developing nations are Iran and Syria. only because the Kremlin provides him norms of subsequent support at an all-time low. Those are important
House who preparing for a rise in unsafe abortions due to Presi- The moral case for such a designa- with extensive diplomatic, military and warfare and for Russian-con- policy questions, which is why my
helped set off tion is sound. Russia has invaded its economic support. The use of chemical sovereignty. trolled proxies in the legislation leaves a final determination
dent Trump’s reinstatement of the global gag rule that neighbors Georgia and Ukraine, it weapons against civilians is illegal Donbas region, the to the professionals at the State De-
a new women’s prohibits federal funding of groups that provide abor- supports the murderous regime of under international law, particularly international com- partment.
movement, the tion services or referrals. Here at home, his adminis- Bashar al-Assad and our enemies in the Chemical Weapons Convention. In munity has failed to However, it is clear that the blame
amendment Afghanistan, and it is engaged in ac- fact, Syria’s illicit chemical program is adequately respond to continued Rus- for today’s distrust and tensions be-
tration has been hostile not only to abortion access, tive information warfare against West- part of the reason the United States sian aggression — and there has been tween Moscow and Washington lies
has a chance but even to birth control. ern democracies, including meddling continues to designate Syria as a state a devastating price to pay. More than entirely with the Kremlin and its atro-
of being But Mr. Trump’s presidency is also having some in the 2016 United States elections. sponsor of terrorism. 10,000 Ukrainians have died in the war cious behavior. We must take every
ratified. This week, the Organization for There is also evidence that Russia is and more than 1.7 million have been diplomatic step necessary to protect
effects he probably doesn’t intend. Rage at the election Prevention of Chemical Weapons playing both sides of the conflict in displaced. On July 17, 2014, Russian our allies and our democracy, and to
of a man who boasted about grabbing women’s geni- announced that the Kremlin had Syria — defending the murderous proxies shot down a civilian airliner, deter a revanchist Russia that is intent
tals helped set off the #MeToo movement’s reckoning crossed yet another previously un- Assad regime, but also fueling the killing all 298 onboard — including an on rewriting history and threatening
imaginable line, when it confirmed radical insurgency against it. Report- American. our way of life.
with sexual misconduct. A record number of women
findings by the British government ing by Ukrainian news outlets has This is why I plan to introduce legis-
are running for office around the country, many of that a Russian military-grade nerve shown that Russia has provided ma- lation that would require the State CORY GARDNER, a Republican from Col-
them announcing their candidacies after participating agent, which British authorities identi- terial support to the Islamic State, Department to determine within 90 orado, is a member of the Senate For-
fied as Novichok, was used to poison a including assistance in recruitment. days whether the Russian Federation eign Relations Committee.
in women’s marches the day after Mr. Trump’s inaugu-
ration.
And now, on Mr. Trump’s watch, feminists could
reach a goal nearly a century in the making, and that
many assumed would never come to pass — ratifica-
tion of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitu-
tion. It states: “Equality of rights under the law shall
not be denied or abridged by the United States or by
any state on account of sex.”
The fight centers on Illinois, where the State Senate
recently passed a bill to ratify the E.R.A. If the State
House of Representatives also passes the legislation —
supporters hope to see a vote next month, and are
cautiously optimistic about the outcome — then Illi-
nois will become the 37th state to ratify the amend-
ment.
Approval by just one more state would bring the
measure to the three-quarters threshold required for
constitutional amendments.
Congress sent the measure to the states in 1972 with
a seven-year deadline that was later extended to 1982.
Thirty-five states signed on by 1977, then extensive
conservative opposition arose, preventing further
ratification. Nevada’s ratification last year was the
first since then.
This recent progress counts as dizzying, considering
how long supporters have been at it. An entire genera-
tion of feminists has come of age largely knowing the
E.R.A. as their mothers’ and grandmothers’ fight.
There are some questions about what will happen if
a 38th state ratifies the amendment, given that it
would miss the deadline Congress set by at least 36
years, and five states have even voted to rescind their
ratifications. But E.R.A. supporters and some legal DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

experts make a plausible case that the amendment The site in Salisbury, England, where a former Russian intelligence agent and his daughter were poisoned with what the authorities say was a Russian military-grade nerve agent.
should still be recognized.
Then there’s the question of what the E.R.A. would
do. Even the most die-hard proponents of the amend-
ment acknowledge that it’s unlikely to radically ad-

The miracle cancer cure problem

vance women’s rights, at least in the short term. That’s
because, for decades, many courts have applied the
Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to sex
discrimination, creating a body of case law that’s func-
tioned as a sort of de facto E.R.A. Robert M. Wachter
The fight against the E.R.A. is being led by groups
on the religious right like the Illinois Family Institute,
using arguments that are the ideological heirs of those I frequently care for patients with
so vociferously expressed by Phyllis Schlafly, whose advanced cancer. A majority have
group Stop E.R.A. — the first word standing for “Stop already tried some combination of
surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.
Taking Our Privileges” — which became the Eagle Many have landed back in the hospital
Forum, prevented the E.R.A.’s ratification at the time. because the cancer has returned or
spread widely, and left them in in-
Those arguments include fearmongering about how
tractable pain or struggling to breathe.
coed locker rooms could become standard and alimony The hospital stay is often a time
for women outlawed — arguments that are hard to when patients decide to stop ag-
take seriously but that nonetheless helped Mrs. gressively fighting their cancer, and
Schlafly to very effectively convince Americans, in-
instead to focus on palliative care and
achieving a measure of comfort and
cluding many women, that the E.R.A. was bad news. grace at the end of life. The moment of
Looking at everything the E.R.A. would not do transition can be subtle. It’s sometimes
signaled by a sweet look from a hus-
raises the question of why it’s still needed. Here’s why band to a wife, a gentle touch of the
it is: The court decisions that make up the “de facto patient’s hand by an adult child, or two
E.R.A.” can be undone in a way a constitutional simple words: “It’s time.”
Over the past 20 years, evidence has
amendment cannot. The E.R.A. would add an extra demonstrated that palliative care
layer of legal protection for women — and men — decreases pain, improves comfort, and
against discrimination. This could become especially even, in some cases, prolongs life by a
few months. In my experience, conver-
important if Mr. Trump gets to pick additional conser- sations about turning to it often begin
vative Supreme Court justices. with patients recognizing that curing
There’s also a symbolic and emotional element to their cancer is impossible. Patients
sometimes ask for my opinion on this.
this fight that’s not to be discounted. Ruth Bader Gins-
While the conversation is often heart-
burg — who, before becoming a Supreme Court jus- breaking, it has rarely been a hard call.
tice, fought many legal battles over gender discrimina- But now it is. And that has thrown a
wrench into the way we treat patients
tion and is a longtime supporter of the E.R.A. —
with advanced cancer.
summed up this argument in 2014. The reason is a new generation of
“I would like my granddaughters, when they pick up cancer treatments that have become
available in the last few years. Some,
the Constitution, to see that notion — that women and
called immunotherapy, harness the
men are persons of equal stature,” she said. “I’d like patient’s own immune system to battle
them to see that is a basic principle of our society.” the tumor. Others, known as targeted
Enshrining women’s rights in the Constitution mat- therapies, block certain molecules that
cancers depend on to grow and spread.
ters. Doing so now, during this presidency, would be The medical literature — usually cir-
particularly fitting. cumspect when it comes to cancer, in
light of many overhyped treatments in
the past — now fairly gushes with terms
like “revolutionary” and “cure.” In this
case, the hype feels mostly justified.
Much has been written about the
promise of these treatments, as well as
their staggering costs — many cost
several hundred thousand dollars a
year. But what strikes me most about
them is that, by blurring the line be-
tween cure and comfort — and between
hope and hopelessness — they have
disrupted the fragile equilibrium that
we doctors have long taken for granted.
I recently cared for a woman in her
80s, clearly dying of lung cancer. Or so I
thought. “But what about immunother-
apy?” her family wondered. When I
reluctantly asked our oncologist about
this, he didn’t scoff. “It could work,” he
said quietly, as if not quite believing
what he was saying.
Oncologists are seeing patients
whose cases they once would have
pronounced hopeless experience Laza-
rus-like responses to these new thera-
pies. One of my hospital’s specialists in
multiple myeloma, a bone marrow
cancer with a previously dismal prog-
nosis, recently told me that he had
treated a patient with a new kind of
immunotherapy. “I think I cured my
first case of myeloma,” he said. His
voice was filled with awe.
This, of course, sounds like wonder-
ful news for patients and their loved
ones. And if these new treatments
worked most of the time, this would be
an unambiguously happy story. But
they don’t.
A recent analysis estimated that
about 15 percent of patients with ad-
vanced cancer might benefit from
immunotherapy — and it’s all but im-
possible to determine which patients
will be the lucky ones. Just last week, a
study of lung cancer patients demon-
strated the overall benefits of combin-
ing immunotherapy with traditional of it, or do so with only a few days left in
chemotherapy. But here, too, the re- their life, having needlessly suffered for
searchers noted that most patients will weeks or months. Our new uncertainty
not respond to the new treatments, and will probably make this worse.
it is not yet possible to predict who will What can we do to alleviate this?
benefit. And in some cases, the side First, it turns out that many patients
effects are terrible — different from can benefit from palliative approaches
those of chemotherapy but often just as even as they continue aggressive treat-
dire. ment for their cancer. In 2016 the Amer-
With patients and ican Society of Clinical Oncology rec-
If immuno-
family members ommended that concurrent care —
therapy primed to hold onto palliative and active cancer care deliv-
worked most
every reed of hope, ered at the same time — be made avail-
of the time, even a small chance able to patients with advanced cancer.
this would be of cure or prolonged Rules that force patients to choose one
an unambig- remission will cause approach or another, particularly those
uously happy the majority to stick that tie insurance coverage of palliative
story. But it with their pugilistic care or hospice to stopping active
approach to cancer. cancer treatments, should be scrapped.
doesn’t.
In our dichotomous Second, physicians need more train-
system — one that ing in how to have these hard conversa-
forces patients to tions with patients in light of the new
choose between the goal of comfort or cancer treatments. Doctors will need to
cure — this means that most of them become more at ease with the prognos-
will forgo palliative care. We already tic ambiguity, and better versed in the
know that despite the unquestioned possible benefits and harms of the new
value of hospice, many patients with therapies.
end-stage cancer don’t take advantage Finally, through the federal Cancer
Moonshot program, the government is
spending hundreds of millions of dol-
lars to study immunotherapy and other
emerging treatment options for cancer.
The sooner we can work out which
patients will — and just as important,
won’t — benefit from these approaches,
the better.
Sadly, for some patients, a cure will
prove elusive. As we continue to chase
progress in cancer, let’s be sure that we
don’t rob dying patients of a smaller,
more subtle miracle: a death with
dignity and grace, relatively free from
pain and discomfort.
ROBERT M. WACHTER is a professor and
chairman of the department of medi-
cine at the University of California, San
JUN CEN Francisco.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018 | 11

opinion

Silicon Valley and the Pentagon

Scott Malcomson
Is Silicon Valley going to war? In 2013,
Amazon beat IBM for a contract to
host the United States intelligence
community’s data cloud. Microsoft now
markets Azure Government Secret, its
cloud-computing service designed
specifically for federal and local gov-
ernments, to the Defense Department
and intelligence agencies. And last
year, Google signed a contract with the
Pentagon for Project Maven, a pilot
program to accelerate the military’s
use of artificial intelligence.
These partnerships might ease
anxiety in the Defense Department
about China’s artificial-intelligence
advances and ominous, state-led fusion
of civil and military technology devel-
opment. But a comparable fusion of the
United States government and Silicon
Valley would be a mistake.
This is not so much because it would
compromise Silicon Valley values, as
more than 3,000 Google employees
argued in a recent letter about Project
ILLUSTRATION BY JEFFREY HENSON SCALES, ICONS BY PURUAN/
ISTOCK, VIA GETTY IMAGES PLUS
The emergence of a civilian, entre-
The Pentagon is in a different posi-
tion. It came around very reluctantly to
the idea that it is dependent on private
industry for the defense of the country
and the projection of American power.
But come around it has, in no small
part thanks to China.
China’s state interest in A.I. was
initially economic, but military uses
were never far behind. As Elsa B.
Kania, a researcher at the Center for a
New American Security, explained in
an influential report, “A.I. is a high-
level priority within China’s national
agenda for military-civil fusion,” a
strategy that should allow the Chinese
armed forces to benefit from private-
sector advances in A.I.
The United States military seems to
have been spooked. In a 2017 memo,
the deputy secretary of defense,
Robert O. Work, wrote that while the
Defense Department had made “tenta-
tive steps” in A.I., “we need to do much
more, and move much faster.” The
memo announced the formation of
Project Maven to do just that. This
month, Gen. Stephen Wilson, the vice
chief of staff for the Air Force, said that
China is taking a “whole of nation”

The great snake oil slump
Paul Krugman
Stop me if you’ve heard this before. A
G.O.P. presidential candidate loses the
popular vote, but somehow ends up in
the White House anyway. Despite his
dubious legitimacy, his allies in Con-
gress take advantage of his election to
ram through a huge tax cut that blows
up the budget deficit while dispropor-
tionately benefiting the wealthy. While
the big bucks go to the big incomes,
however, the tax bill does throw some
crumbs at the middle class, and Repub-
licans try to sell the bill as a boon to
working families.
So far this account applies equally to
George W. Bush and Donald Trump. But
then the story takes a turn. The Bush
sales job was effective: While the 2001
tax cut wasn’t overwhelmingly popular,
more people approved than disap-
proved, and it provided the G.O.P. with
at least a modest political boost. But the
Trump tax cut was unpopular from the
start — in fact, less popular than past
tax hikes.
And this tax cut doesn’t seem to be
winning more support over time. Most
Americans say they don’t see any pos-
itive effect on their paychecks. Public
approval of the tax cut seems, if any-
thing, to be falling rather than rising.
And Republicans have pretty much
stopped even mentioning the bill on the
campaign trail.
Which raises the question: Why
doesn’t snake oil sell like it used to?
In the past, deficit hypocrisy was an
important weapon in the G.O.P. political
arsenal. Both parties talked about fiscal
responsibility, but only Democrats
Insanity on the Gaza fence The strategy
COHEN, FROM PAGE 1
of Erdogan
when cynicism triumphs. Even Presi-
dent Trump has lost interest in his
“ultimate deal” and sees North Korea
shimmering.
Six former directors of Mossad, the
Israeli intelligence agency, sounded the
alarm a few weeks ago. When those
most responsible for Israeli security say
Israel’s current course is self-defeating,
it’s worth paying attention.
Here’s Tamir Pardo, Mossad chief
from 2011 through 2015, speaking to the
Israel daily Yedioth Ahronoth: “If the
State of Israel doesn’t decide what it
wants, in the end there will be a single
state between the sea and the Jordan.
That is the end of the Zionist vision.” To
which Danny Yatom, director from 1996
to 1998, responds: “That’s a country
that will deteriorate into either an
apartheid state or a non-Jewish state. If
we continue to rule the territories, I see
that as an existential danger. A state of
that kind isn’t the state that I fought for.
There are some people who will say
that we’ve done everything and that
there isn’t a partner, but that isn’t true.
There is a partner. Like it or not, the
Palestinians and the people who repre-
sent them are the partners we need to
engage with.”
This is the conviction for which Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin died, assassi-
nated by an Israeli agent of the Messi-
anic fanaticism opposed to all territorial
compromise that has steadily gained
influence since 1967. There is no partner
if you’ve chosen God over several mil-
lion people you’d rather not see. But if
you look, there is.
Palestinian belief in two-state com-
promise has also eroded over the past
two decades. Increasingly, you may
hear “occupation” used as a term to
describe Israel’s very existence, rather
than the West Bank and Gaza, both
occupied during the 1967 Six-Day War
(Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 but
maintains effective control through an
practiced it, actually paying for policy
initiatives like Obamacare. Yet Demo-
crats were punished for doing the right
thing — remember “they’re taking $500
billion from Medicare”? — while Repub-
licans seemingly paid no price for their
cynicism. Voters focused on the extra
money in their pockets, ignoring the
long-run consequences of big tax cuts
for the rich.
So why is this time different?
I don’t think it’s the specifics of tax
policy. Bush and Trump both pushed
through big tax cuts for the rich with
what amounted to loss-leader cuts for
some middle-class families. If you look
at estimates of the distribution of their
tax cuts by family income, Bush and
Trump’s look fairly similar.
The political background is, however,
quite different. For one thing, in 2000
the U.S. had a budget
Why has surplus, and debt had
been falling relative
Trump’s tax to G.D.P., making
cut been such concerns about
a political long-run fiscal im-
fizzle? pacts seem remote.
In fact, Alan
Greenspan infa-
mously argued that a
tax cut was needed to keep America
from paying off its debt too fast.
By contrast, the U.S. ran large deficits
in the aftermath of the financial crisis,
and the people who yelled loudest about
an imminent debt crisis were the same
people who pushed through a $1.5 tril-
lion tax cut. And at least some voters
seem to have noticed, and even made
the connection between tax cuts and
Republican attempts to undermine
Medicare and Medicaid.
There are also, I suspect, a couple of
Trump-specific issues involved.
Bush, you may remember, ran on his
tax cuts from the beginning. Trump, on
the other hand, pretended to be a popu-
list — he even claimed that he would
raise taxes on the rich — and waited
until taking office to reveal himself as
just another reverse-Robin Hood Re-
air and sea blockade, among other
measures).
The Friday Gaza marches are pro-
tests against the 11-year-old blockade of
Gaza but also focused on reigniting
international interest in Palestinian
claims of a right of return to homes they
were driven from in 1948. There’s no
point mincing words: the right of return
is flimsy code for the destruction of
Israel as a Jewish state. It’s consistent
with the absolutist use of “occupation”
as defining Israel itself and with the
view that the sea is a pretty good place
for Jews to end up. It’s stomach turning.
Palestinians lost their homes after
Arab armies declared war in 1948 on
Israel, which had accepted United
Nations Resolution 181 of 1947 calling for
the establishment of two states of
roughly equal size — one Jewish, one
Arab — in British Mandate Palestine.
The resolution was a compromise in
which I still believe, not because it was
pretty, but because it was and remains
better than other options.
Intransigent Palestinians like to say
they take the long view. Well, 70 years is
a while, and Palestinians have been
losing. Half the territory is now less
than a quarter in any imaginable deal. I
don’t see why that trend would be re-
versed absent creative, unified and
pragmatic Palestinian leadership fo-
cused on a two-state future: laptops for
kids rather than keys to lost olive
groves.
The dead have died for nothing. Is-
rael, through overreach, has placed
itself in a morally indefensible noose,
policing the lives of others. Palestinian
leaders have borne out Yeats’ lines: “We
had fed the heart on fantasies, the
heart’s grown brutal from the fare.”
Shabtai Shavit, another Mossad
director, from 1989 to 1996, said: “Why
are we living here? To have our grand-
children continue to fight wars? What is
this insanity in which territory, land, is
more important than human life?”
Maven to the company’s chief execu-
tive, Sundar Pichai. Rather, it’s be-
cause the United States’ edge in
preneurial tech culture in the 1970s
owed as much intellectually, if not (at
first) financially, to the antiwar move-
approach to A.I. and the United States
should, too.
Yet we shouldn’t forget that civil-
techno-military competition exists in ment and the 1960s counterculture — military antagonism and the deep
publican. This has to be creating some great part because we have a tech hardly friends of the military-industrial American tradition of distrusting the
credibility problems. sector that is not dominated by the complex. Out of this the dominant, state have been crucial to the United
Also, while the Bush administration state and its needs. highly creative ethos of geek antiau- States’ ability to innovate. There are
was systematically deceptive in the way Narrowing the focus of the United thoritarianism grew. good reasons why defense-tech giants
it made its case for tax cuts (and the States tech sector to the needs of the It is hard to believe of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s like Raythe-
Iraq war, and environmental policy, and. Our
military would serve neither party. On that closer ties with on and Grumman missed out on such
. . . ), its deceptions generally involved the contrary, it would make the nation
technology the military would major tech advances as Web protocols,
selective and misleading presentations weaker. sector is good perpetuate this the smartphone, personal computers
of the facts rather than flat-out lies. To be sure, defense contracts are at innovation culture of innovation. and various types of encryption — all
Trump and his officials can’t be bo- hardly new in Silicon Valley, and precisely The technology of which would eventually have great
thered with such subtlety; they just lie, Google’s recent moves might be seen because involved in projects military significance. The biggest
blatantly, about everything. Again, as heralding Silicon Valley’s return to it is not like Azure Govern- reason was that none of these ad-
some voters seem to have noticed. its natural home in defense contract- dominated ment Secret and vances were directed at waging war;
One thing in particular I suspect is ing. But that would be to misunder- Project Maven is indeed, many aimed at transcending
registering with voters at some level, by the state.
stand both Silicon Valley history and also very different the power of the state.
even if they don’t know much about the today’s technology. from the data-shar- After the Cold War, the Soviet Un-
specifics, is the ludicrous optimism of The internet and much of digital ing projects of the ion’s extraordinary technological ca-
Trump economic promises. Republican computing did indeed emerge from 1960s. Those older technologies would pacity dissipated in large part because
claims about the benefits of tax cuts decades of United States defense con- not have been created in the absence it had been so reactive: The Soviets
aren’t just out of line with independent tracts, beginning as long ago as World of government funding. Today’s had let their adversary determine the
estimates; they’re so far out of the War I. Yet the Pentagon itself sloughed projects, in contrast, are all basically pace and scope of their own innova-
ballpark as to be in a different universe. off the internet — not knowing quite A.I. plays. Very little of this is defense- tion. The United States should not
Anyway, the bottom line is that tax what to do with it, and rightly judging specific, but all of it is useful for de- make that mistake.
cuts just don’t sell like they used to.
Which leaves you wondering what,
it to be insecure — to the National fense and espionage. Unlike, say,
Science Foundation. When the internet weapons development, A.I. research is SCOTT MALCOMSON is the director of
exactly, Republicans have left to run on. special projects at Strategic Insight
became a commercial concern, the inherently dual-use. United States tech
True, tax cuts probably had less to do National Science Foundation off-loaded giants would be pursuing it with or Group, a former State Department
with past G.O.P. successes than many it to the Department of Commerce. without government contracts. Silicon official and the author of “Splinternet:
party activists seem to imagine. Other Government might have given birth to Valley does not need the Pentagon to How Geopolitics and Commerce Are
factors were often much more impor- the internet, but it sure didn’t raise it. initiate these endeavors. Fragmenting the World Wide Web.”
tant. But those other factors also aren’t
what they used to be.
I mean, claims to be the defenders of
family values have lost their punch
partly because the public has become
far more socially tolerant — Americans
now support same-sex marriage by a
two-to-one majority! — and partly
because the current resident of the
White House may be the worst family
man in America. Flag-waving claims to
be more patriotic than Democrats
worked well for Reagan and Bush, but
are much more problematic for a G.O.P.
that looks more and more like the party
of Putin.
Still, Republicans needn’t despair.
After all, they’ll always have racism to
fall back on. And with the tax cut fiz-
zling, I predict that we’ll be seeing a lot
of implicit — even explicit — appeals to
racism in the months ahead.
Whatever happens
next, we’ll help you
make sense of it.
CAGAPTAY, FROM PAGE 9
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Mr. Demirtas was detained in No-
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The new Turkish Parliament is most and includes unlimited access to NYTimes.com and apps for
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the Republican People’s Party, an
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The AKP will have a solid majority Order the International Edition today at
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The executive presidency, which
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recently, of “The New Sultan: Erdogan
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12 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018
science lab
H E A D I N G FO R H O M E
Nature’s navigators: Sea turtles use magnetic fields to find their way
Sea turtles use the earth’s magnetic fields to navigate back
to the area where they were born decades earlier, according
to a new study that used loggerhead genetics to investigate
their travels.
After swimming for years in a giant loop from nesting
grounds in North Carolina and Florida to North Africa, the
SILENCE
Fields without song:
France farmland birds
are in steep decline
Birds in farming regions of France are
in trouble, and that may indicate prob-
lems in similar areas across Europe.
Scientists involved in long-running
regional and national bird-counting
surveys in France have reported pre-
cipitous declines in agricultural re-
gions, even among common birds like
blackbirds that seem well adapted to
human activity.
This finding follows news of a devas-
tating loss of insects in Germany, a
decline of nearly 80 percent over the
“They tend to be
weird and wonderful
in the way they live.”
Rikki Gumbs, of the Zoological
Society of London, on “evolutionarily
distinct” creatures, including the
endangered green-haired turtle.
CHRIS VAN WYK
past 40 years. A similar drop is thought
to be occurring throughout Europe.
Birds — as well as amphibians,
reptiles and mammals — face popula-
tion declines around the world because
of habitat loss and other problems.
But the most recent results from two
surveys — one nationwide in France,
the other limited to one region —
caused scientists to sound an alarm,
because the results suggest that agri-
cultural methods are hurting birds,
according to Benoit Fontaine, a
conservation biologist at the National
Museum of Natural History in
Paris and a leader of the national
survey, conducted twice a year by
volunteers. JAMES GORMAN
DEAGOSTINI/GETTY IMAGES
OUT OF AFRICA
Fossil finger bone
offers new clues
to exodus from Africa
A fossilized human finger bone found
in the desert of Saudi Arabia is said to
be 85,000 years old.
If the age is confirmed, it would be
the oldest Homo sapiens fossil found
on the Arabian Peninsula.
Along with recent finds of 80,000-
year-old human teeth from Asia and
65,000-year-old relics from Australia,
the Arabian finger bone provides evi-
dence that early modern humans
spread out of Africa much earlier and
farther than previously thought.
Robyn Inglis, an archaeologist at the
University of York in England who was
not involved in the research, said, “It’s
become increasingly clear that humans
dispersed far out of Africa and the
turtles nest on beaches within about 50 miles of where
they were born. The new study suggests that the turtles
learned their home beach’s distinctive magnetic signature
through what is called geomagnetic imprinting.
“This is vital information if you want to restore sea tur-
tles to areas where they once lived before being hunted to
U N D E R P R E SS U R E
Stress may explain
distress of clown fish
as water gets warmer
If you’ve ever seen “Finding Nemo,”
you’re familiar with the relationship
between clown fish and anemones.
Normally, algae serve as food for the
anemone, which provides protection
Levant before 60,000 years ago, a date
suggested by genetics.”
Traditionally, the migration of Homo
sapiens out of Africa was portrayed as
a single exodus. But archaeologists
and paleoanthropologists have chal-
lenged that idea.
They believe that the journey was
much more complicated and that there
probably were numerous routes, de-
partures and delays.
“This find, together with other finds
in the last few years, suggest that
modern humans, Homo sapiens, are
moving out of Africa multiple times
during many windows of opportunity
during the last 100,000 years or so,”
said Michael Petraglia, an archaeolo-
gist from the Max Planck Institute for
the Science of Human History in Ger-
many and an author of the paper,
which was published in Nature Ecol-
ogy & Evolution. NICHOLAS ST. FLEUR
for the fish and its eggs. It’s not quite
clear what the clown fish does for its
host, but those stinging tentacles offer
the fish safety. But even though the
fish don’t eat the algae, when warming
temperatures bleach coral and anem-
ones and the algae die, clown fish don’t
reproduce as before.
A team led by Tommy Norin, an
ecological physiologist at the Univer-
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
COLIN MARSHALL/FLPA/MINDEN PICTURES
extinction,” said Kenneth Lohmann, a professor at the Uni-
versity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and senior author of
the study, published in Current Biology.
He added that the same concepts may help restore salm-
on and other fish to rivers because many birds and fish
also use magnetic fields for navigation. KAREN WEINTRAUB
E X P R E SS I V E
Brow ridges evolved
as a communication
tool, not as a chewing
aid, researchers find
Eyebrows have become an obsession
of late, tattooed or microbladed,
shaped and drawn in bold dark lines.
Lifting one and not the other often
signals disbelief, amusement, curiosity.
Raising both can suggest surprise or
dismay. But early humans had thick,
bony brow ridges that were far less
nimble than ours.
Scientists have long thought those
brows served some structural purpose,
like support for chewing prehistoric
food. That they could also have been
used to signal aggression or intimidate
competitors was largely dismissed as
an evolutionary perk, as were the more
SUZANNE C. MILLS
flamboyant brows of modern humans.
But research by two anthropologists,
sity of Glasgow in Scotland, in work
Ricardo Miguel Godinho and Penny
published in Proceedings of the Royal
Spikins, published April 9 in Nature
Society B, studied fish in tanks with
Ecology & Evolution, suggests that the
healthy anemones and with bleached
anemones.
human brow has always been primari-
ly a social tool, and that the smoother
The researchers found that the fish
foreheads and expressive brows of
needed more energy just to stay alive
modern humans may have evolved to
in the stressful environment that is
accommodate increasingly complex
created by the bleaching of the anem-
relationships.
ones. JOANNA KLEIN
“With a flatter, more vertical fore-
head, that whole area above the eyes
becomes much more mobile, and the
muscles can make some really subtle
communicative gestures,” Dr. Spikins
said. DOUGLAS QUENQUA
PAUL O’HIGGINS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
ONLINE: TRILOBITES
Daily nuggets of science for mobile
readers. nytimes.com/trilobites
IAN CARTWRIGHT
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018 | 13

Sports
Barcelona in cup final: Spain expects jeering
and turned their backs when the Chi-
BARCELONA, SPAIN
nese anthem, “March of the Volunteers,”
plays before their national team
matches. In France, politicians called
Catalan club’s fans voice for the cancellation of future games af-
pro-independence fervor ter Tunisian-born fans booed the French
anthem before a friendly match be-
during playing of anthem tween France and Tunisia in 2008. And
for the past two years in the United
BY ANDREW KEH States, athletes inspired by the N.F.L.
AND RAPHAEL MINDER quarterback Colin Kaepernick have
knelt silently during the national an-
A long hail of whistles and jeers from a them to draw attention to police brutal-
crowd numbering in the tens of thou- ity and racial injustice.
sands might not be the most articulate But whistling — the European equiva-
way to express a political opinion, Arnau lent of American boos — at the Spanish
Pans acknowledged with a shrug. But, anthem at the Copa del Rey has become
in his eyes, it can serve a purpose. a particularly inescapable gesture pre-
Pans, 24, is a die-hard fan of the soccer cisely because of Barcelona’s unique po-
club F.C. Barcelona and like many such sition as a soccer powerhouse and a ves-
fans, an active supporter of the Catalan sel for pro-Catalan ideals. This Satur-
independence movement. On Saturday, day’s game against Sevilla F.C. in Ma-
for the fifth consecutive year, Barcelona drid will represent Barcelona’s eighth
— the most high-profile of Catalan insti- trip to the Copa del Rey final in the past
tutions — will appear in the final of the 10 years, meaning the jeers aimed at the
Copa del Rey, the oldest soccer tourna- anthem, and the king, have effectively
ment in Spain. And for the fifth straight become a fixture of the event.
year, that means questions about free The team keeps winning, the fans
expression and the boundaries of poli- keep whistling, and in this way a fraught
tical etiquette are being debated as ve- national conversation recycles itself al-
hemently this week as questions about most every spring.
team tactics and lineups. “You have this gesture of protest
The final of the Copa del Rey — the against these state symbols, and the
King’s Cup — is the only occasion in centralist Spanish side picks up on it, be-
Spanish club soccer that features the comes indignant and scandalized, and
playing of the national anthem. So for the whole thing escalates into a nation-
the past several years, that brief ritual alist debate,” said Mariann Vaczi, an an-
has given fans of Barcelona who sympa- thropologist who has studied the inter-
thize with the independence cause the section of nationalism and sports in
chance to whistle and jeer the song — Spain. “So something that starts out as a
and the royalty in attendance — with im- gesture becomes a ghost, a recurrent
punity, subverting the stately ritual and monster, for the Spanish state and the
exasperating their critics. royal family, all because the team has a
“It’s a way to show the world that habit of getting to the cup final.”
something’s happening in Spain, in Cat- Amid the yearly specter of whistles,
alonia,” Pans, a graduate student, said the same criticisms ring out, too. Re-
last Saturday outside Camp Nou, Bar- peating a popular refrain, Javier Tebas,
celona’s home stadium. “We know the president of La Liga, said this month
whistling the anthem is not a solution. in a television interview that “there
But it’s a way to open the situation to the should be punishments, including stop-
world.” ping the game” for disrespecting the
Political protests at sporting events, “symbols of the nation.” On Wednesday,
and soccer matches especially, are not Tebas told reporters that whistling at
uncommon. Anthem performances, the anthem was “verbal violence,” citing
however, often provide the biggest mo- the millions of people in Spain, including
ments, the largest audiences and invalu- some in Catalonia, who have emotional
able media coverage. ties to the song.
Soccer fans in Hong Kong, for exam- The harshest critics of the jeering reg-
ple, have for the past few years booed ularly call for the criminalization of acts
King Felipe VI of Spain, center, stood for the anthem at last year’s cup final while Barcelona fans whistled and waved Catalan flags.
viewed as disrespecting the national an-
them and other symbols of the govern-
ment and the monarchy. Others simply
find it disrespectful.
Yet irreverence toward the Spanish
anthem in sports stadiums has a cen-
tury-old history in this city. On Jan. 24,
1925, Barcelona fans jeered the anthem
and applauded the British anthem, dur-
ing an exhibition match. In response,
Miguel Primo de Rivera, the dictator of
Spain at the time, ordered the stadium,
Camp de Les Corts, closed for six
months as punishment.
In 2009, when Barcelona reached its
first Copa del Rey final in a decade, it
faced Athletic Bilbao, a team from the
Basque region that has its own sizable
segment of separatist fans. The result
was a deafening chorus of whistles and
GONZALO ARROYO MORENO/GETTY IMAGES
shouts as King Juan Carlos grimly
looked on. The teams have met in the fi-
nal two other times in the past decade, in
2012 and 2015; each time, raucous boo-
ing drowned out the regal melody.
The Barcelona club, which the Span-
ish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán
once described as the “unarmed army of
Catalonia,” has walked a delicate path
around the debate.
“We do not like anyone to whistle any-
one, but we always respect freedom of
expression,” Josep Vives, a spokesman
for the club, said in the past week. “Free-
dom of expression has never scared us.”
Speaking at a book event on Wednes-
day, the club’s president, Josep Maria
Bartomeu, said, “I’d like to think that
when the majority of our supporters
have expressed themselves by
whistling, they haven’t done it to belittle
any symbols, but to protest against cer-
tain attitudes against the people of Cata-
lonia that have taken place in recent
years.”
Inside Camp Nou last Saturday, at the
17:14 mark of the game (a reference to a
1714 military defeat that Catalans com-
memorate as their national day), a large
portion of the stadium engaged in a
chant of “Independencia!” and waved
Catalan flags.
Earlier this month during a Champi-
ons League match, the chants were ac-
companied by a flurry of yellow balloons
that symbolized support for the Catalan
politicians imprisoned for staging Cata-
lonia’s independence referendum last
fall that Spain declared unconstitution-
al. Play was briefly halted after some
balloons drifted onto the field, and the
club is facing a disciplinary investiga-
tion from UEFA, European soccer’s gov-
erning body.
Independence is an issue that has
split Catalonia down the middle, howev-
er, and some fans here have grown un-
comfortable with the political atmos-
phere around F.C. Barcelona. Xavier
Roig, a communications consultant and
Barcelona season-ticket holder, said he
stopped going to the stadium about sev-
en years ago because he became “too
uncomfortable with all the pro-inde-
pendence flags and shouting, which
only represents one part of Catalan soci-
ety.”
But the notion that politics and sports
must remain separate can be compli-
cated to defend, according to Alan
Bairner, a professor of sports and social
policy at Loughborough University in
England.
Bairner noted that the playing of an
anthem at a game itself could be seen as
a political act.
“Often, when somebody says politics
have no place in sport, they mean, ‘Your
politics have no place in sport,’” he said.

NON SEQUITUR PEANUTS DOONESBURY CLASSIC 1990

GARFIELD CALVIN AND HOBBES

SUDOKU No. 2104

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

Solution No. 2004 KENKEN THE SATURDAY CROSSWORD | Edited by Will Shortz 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
Fill the grid so
that every row,
column 3x3 box Fill the grids with digits so as not Across 28 ___ Corporation, 52 Juvenile put-down 15 16

and shaded 3x3 to repeat a digit in any row or predecessor of RC

1 “Fifty Shades of Grey,” 53 Baseball or basketball
box contains column, and so that the digits Cola’s Royal Crown 17 18
within each heavily outlined box e.g. Company 54 Passage between life
each of the and death
numbers will produce the target number 12 Wite-Out 30 “You flatter me”
19 20 21

1 to 9 exactly shown, by using addition, manufacturer 57 Motor Trend’s 1968

subtraction, multiplication or 34 Like some blankets Car of the Year 22 23 24 25
once. 15 Procedure that targets and arguments
division, as indicated in the box. 58 Subject of the
mutations 36 Familiar work force 26 27 28 29
For solving tips A 4x4 grid will use the digits Supreme Court case
and more puzzles: 1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6. add-ons, maybe Obergefell v. Hodges
www.nytimes.com/
16 Card game cry 30 31 32 33 34 35
37 “Zoolander” co-star, 59 Windows alternative
sudoku 17 Events of interest to
For solving tips and more KenKen 2001 36 37
puzzles: www.nytimes.com/ antiquers 60 Common
38 Purplish-red hue two-word email
kenken. For Feedback: nytimes@ 18 Bud drinker? 38 39
kenken.com 39 Rock sample?
19 Child’s request 40 Second hand Down 40 41 42
KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. 20 What people rarely do 41 Revolving barriers 1 Purge
Copyright © 2018 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved. 43 44 45 46 47 48 49
with shoes on 43 Have-nots, with “the” 2 Pauses
22 Qtys. for chefs 45 No-no for an offensive 3 #1 in the standings 50 51 52
lineman 4 Show of emotion
Answers to Previous Puzzles 23 Spinoff of TV’s “JAG” 53 54 55 56
46 Attire that’s often 5 Minute, in baby talk
25 Convinced checkered
57 58
26 Aid for achieving a flat 6 Marxist from Argentina
50 Like many easy-to-
stomach? digest foods 7 Super Mario Bros. 59 60
platform
Solution to April 20 Puzzle
8 Teacher of PUZZLE BY DANIEL NIERENBERG
D E C K C H A I R T B O L T lip-reading to the deaf 24 N.F.L. Hall-of-Famer 35 Fourth god to exist, in 49 Stuck, in a way
A P O L O O H N O W R O T E 9 Bag Carter Greek myth
W I N E G L A S S E A Z Y E 50 Expense for a
T E S T H I S N H E R S 10 Competition whose 26 Heart 37 Dropped
opponents try to touch business start-up
T H I S D O N A T E 39 Science fair display
H E N T H I R S T Y E O E each other 27 Topical
42 A dirty look 51 Landform near a loch
E L E P H A N T I F O N L Y 11 Ending with electro- 29 Not doing too much
W I N S O M E G R I D D L E 44 One of the detectives
12 Fruity Asian drink 52 Currency unit equal
H O T T U B O L I V E O I L 30 Predator of penguins in “Lethal Weapon”
O S S S U B V O C E F E E 13 Words accompanying to 100 kurus
31 Sites for some 46 Ron who wrote “Born
K A R E E M C A S T a raised hand, maybe on the Fourth of July”
S T R I N G E R D I A N touchdowns 55 Body image, for short
14 Mixed, in a way 47 Pistons great Thomas
C R O W D P I T A B R E A D
R E L I T E C O M M E R C E 21 Dada, to its critics 32 Punch the air 56 Gynecologist of
48 Starting point for
Y E E S H D E E P S T A T E 23 Hotel room restriction 33 Get bored with rappelling cinema
 ..
14 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Weekend

PHOTOGRAPHS BY GUILLERMO GUTIERREZ CARRASCAL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Peru’s love affair

with the potatoCHAHUAYTIRE, PERU

A humble crop’s birthplace

in the Andes yields new
inspiration for a cook
BY MADHUR JAFFREY

Gumercinda Quispe is a descendant of

Peruvian Incas, and here, high in the
Andes, more than 12,500 feet above sea
level, she has prepared a nourishing,
spicy potato soup, quacha chuño.
She has made it with both fresh pota-
toes and chuño, the dried, hard white po-
tatoes that are still prepared just a
stone’s throw away. The ancient preser-
vation process includes soaking them in
an icy stream, stomping them by foot to
remove the skins and drying them in the
sun.
I love potatoes. They are not a staple
in my native India, as they are in Peru.
In India, they are a beloved, cheap treat.
Cooked in thousands of different ways,
almost always creatively burnished
with selective spoonfuls from a treasure
chest of seasonings and spices, potatoes
are served in every town and village at
mealtimes and as chutney-augmented
street snacks. I wanted to learn more
about potatoes here in the land of their
birth.
In the little mountain village of
Chahuaytire near the town of Pisac in Quechua language of the Incas, and ter centuries of Spanish influence, they Top, planting ties can be changed by putting them out Pisac region of the Andes that stores
southern Peru, Ms. Quispe and I sat “cuta” means “ground.” go to the market and buy an asnapa, a potatoes in south- in the sun for a few days before cooking seeds in a climate-controlled vault for
down at a table close to the warm, sooty The sauce, a mouth-smackingly good bouquet of herbs that could include the ern Peru. Above them. This turns them softer and silkier. 1,300 varieties of potatoes — are always
hearth in the rustic restaurant where fresh chutney to this Indian, is not just New World huacatay but also gifts from left, potato chips Some are shaped like a puma’s paw; searching for new varieties, as are doz-
she works. The sun was shining bright hot from one of the dozens of chiles na- the Old World like cilantro, mint, orega- served at the others, an alpaca’s nose or a cat’s claw. ens of creative Peruvian chefs on the
outside, and the sky was a clear, cold tive to Peru, but sour from limes that no, parsley and tarragon. Sumaq Hotel, and Native to the Andes in Peru and north- lookout for wild and unusual indigenous
blue. came with the Spaniards, and deeply ar- Potatoes come in every texture and right, two of the west Bolivia, potatoes were domesti- ingredients.
“Put some sauce in the soup and drink omatic from huacatay and other wild color. You can see them in the markets: hundreds of varie- cated more than 10,000 years ago. And Freeze-drying the potato for chuño
from the bowl,” she said, motioning to herbs that grow in the mountains. reds, blues, purples, yellows and pinks, ties. yet new varieties are being discovered was just one method used to increase its
the verdant uchucuta sauce she had pre- There was a time when Incas used sometimes ringed with two colors when all the time. life after harvest. Running or walking
pared. “Uchu” means “chiles” in the only wild Peruvian herbs, but today, af- sliced open. The texture of some varie- Potato banks — like the one in the POTATO, PAGE 16
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
style
Comey
does dress
the part
he’s playing
Vanessa Friedman
UNBUT TONED
James B. Comey is a lot of things:
ex-director of the F.B.I., ex-United
States attorney, author, moral crusader,
“slimeball” (according to President
Trump) and so ubiquitous that he is
impossible to ignore. But whether you
think he is a heroic truth teller or a
self-aggrandizing grandstander, and
there are arguments for both, what is
indisputable is that he is also some-
thing else: a 21st-century embodiment
of a 20th-century archetype rooted
deep in American mythology.
The ultimate G-man. With all the
associations and expectations that
image implies. If the Trump adminis-
tration is its own reality show, Mr.
Comey represents a character from a
different Hollywood tradition. And if
the goal of his book, “A Higher Loy-
alty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership,” is to
define what “ethical leadership” looks
like — well. He’s providing an answer
in more ways than one.
Even though he is no longer actually
a G-man — not since being fired by Mr.
Trump last May. But oh boy, has he
been dressing and acting the part in
his TV appearances on George
Stephanopoulos’s “20/20” special,
“Good Morning America” and “The
Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”
And he is only going to get more
omnipresent, thanks to a media blitz
that includes appearances on “Today,”
“The View,” “The Rachel Maddow
Show” and CNN, and a book tour that
lasts until May 25, with stops in New
York; Chicago; Portland, Ore.; Wash-
ington; and Los Angeles (among other
cities). Demand for some of those
events is so high that tickets are being
resold on sites like StubHub for hun-
dreds of dollars.
Mr. Comey stares out from small
screens and promotional pictures
everywhere — trailers, social media
and reviews. He is steely eyed, often
glancing upward, as if to a higher goal,
or resolutely ahead; dark, brush-cut
hair just beginning to be smudged with
gray; the squareness of his jawline
matched only by the squareness of his
shoulders, his 6-foot-8 frame often
draped in layers of true blue.
Even in interviews, he rarely smiles
(though there were a few grins with
Mr. Colbert). His under-eye pouches
speak of sleepless nights worrying
about the soul of the executive branch
and the burdens of doing the right
thing. Warner Bros. couldn’t have cast
him better if it had tried.
The look is in many ways the culmi-
nation of a cinematic romance with
bureaucratic iconography that began
in 1935 with James Cagney’s film “‘G’
Men,” and continued through Kevin
New masculinity
in Cape Town
In the queer capital of South Africa, young
men are defining themselves through dress.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY KYLE WEEKS
Mziyanda Malgas, who is known as Lohaanda, 20.
Above, James B.
Comey being
sworn in before
the Senate Select
Committee on
Intelligence last
year. Left, Kevin
Costner as Eliot
Ness in the 1987
film “The Un-
touchables.”
PARAMOUNT PICTURES, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
Costner as Eliot Ness in Brian De in a dark suit, pristine white shirt and
Palma’s “The Untouchables.” Mr. dark red tie, caught forever in multiple
Comey fits neatly within this predeter- cameras and the watching imagina-
mined, easily read lens. It’s both com- tion.
forting and slightly unnerving to see Even when he takes off his tie, as he
how closely he resembles the fictive has for his recent TV appearances, or
embodiments of his role. Life imitating swaps the jacket for a collared shirt in
art imitating life. a dark shade, as he did for his Twitter
The names may be different, but page and his author photograph, as if
these men represent a common char- to acknowledge his role as a private
acter, whose seriousness of purpose citizen, his clothes still convey sincer-
and consistent moral code are con- ity and sobriety. There’s nothing really
veyed through seriousness of mien and casual about them.
consistent dress code. On Mr. Colbert’s show, he wore a
In many ways, these men have black shirt and matching trousers with
formed our fantasy of the ultimate a gray jacket finished in black buttons:
upstanding lawman, who subjugates Johnny Cash, the lawyer version. You
his persona to his ideals and his insti- can take the G-man out of the suit (and
tution by assuming the uniform of lore. the job), but not the suit out of the
At a time when casual Friday and the former G-man.
rights of the individual to self-expres- This has the Pavlovian effect of
sion through clothes are on the rise, it’s giving his words a believability (at
a clear pledge of allegiance to a differ- least for those who buy into the cultur-
ent convention. al stereotype). It helps counteract the
It’s a character Mr. Comey has been (understandable) perception that he is
honing for years, since he took the oath limelight seeking and self-promotional
of office as F.B.I. director in 2013, and because, even as he stands out there
immortalized in his testimony before on his own, he is connected to a much
Congress last June, when he appeared bigger tradition. And it’s an effective
“Masculinity to me means to be comfortable within yourself in your own skin and to
respect others,” said Tumi September, 25.
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
visual counterpart to the efforts of the
White House and the Republican Na-
tional Committee to label him as “Lyin’
Comey.”
In the drama of opposition, where
Mr. Comey is increasingly casting
himself, and being cast by others, as
the mission-driven antipode to the
president, his appearance acts as a
kind of supporting argument.
On the one hand is Mr. Trump,
whose hair is an elaborate construction
to hide a bald spot, whose skin is
shaded to disguise whatever its true
pallor may be, whose clothes billow
around his body as if to conceal the
girth beneath. On the other is Mr.
Comey, whose optics imply discipline,
self-control and lack of guile.
In case you missed it, he drew atten-
tion to the point himself, noting to Mr.
Stephanopoulos and in his book that
when he met Mr. Trump he was struck
by his “impressively” coifed hair that
“looked to be” all his own (but maybe
it wasn’t), his too-long tie and the
white pouches under his eyes, perhaps
from goggles worn while fake tanning.
(Former President Barack Obama, he
writes, looked “thinner” in person.)
Then there’s that now-famous story
about Mr. Comey’s attempt to use his
blue suit to blend into the Blue Room’s
blue curtains to avoid an awkward
encounter with President Trump, of
whom he was already suspicious. It
didn’t work, of course. But it did prove
he understands the value of clothing as
camouflage — and, indeed, communi-
cation.
In the book he also acknowledges
that he chose a gold tie for his news
conference about the Clinton emails
precisely because, as neither red nor
blue, it wasn’t “displaying either of the
normal political gang colors.” And that
when he first took office at the F.B.I. he
wore a blue shirt to distinguish himself
from the previous director, Robert S.
Mueller III, a devotee of white shirts,
and signal a new era. (Mr. Comey said
as well that he tried to encourage a
more casual dress code, but — well,
everything is relative.)
The question now is whether, in
becoming the avatar of the ultimate
G-man, Mr. Comey will herald its ren-
aissance or, by the time his tour is
finished and the final page has been
turned, its last gasp?
Depends, I suppose, on whether the
Netflix adaptation is far behind.
“I found freedom in my femininity,” said
Jonathan Knight, 19.
“You don’t have to be a ‘man’ to be mas-
culine,” said Wes Leal, 19.
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018 | 15
weekend
New venture
for founder of
Net-a-Porter
LONDON
BY MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED
Natalie Massenet said she had planned
to keep a low profile after she stepped
down in 2015 as the executive chair-
woman of Net-a-Porter, the luxury e-
commerce site she founded.
After more than two and a half years
away, she is returning to e-commerce —
but as a venture capitalist.
Ms. Massenet has teamed with Nick
Brown, an investor in consumer start-
ups, to form Imaginary Ventures. The
firm announced on Tuesday that it had
raised $75 million for its first fund,
money they expect to pour into direct-
to-consumer start-ups like Glossier,
which sells beauty products, and Keeps,
a hair-loss prevention company.
“I didn’t have a specific plan, other
than to take a break,” Ms. Massenet
said. “But while talking to various en-
trepreneurs, I found that this was some-
thing I enjoyed.”
The two will be focusing on e-com-
merce start-ups as they become bigger
and attract takeover interest from exist-
ing retailers.
Imaginary Ventures faces plenty of
competition. Firms like Forerunner
Ventures, Thrive Capital and Bench-
mark are active investors in e-com-
merce, on the hunt for the next Warby
Parker (the glasses company that re-
cently raised $75 million) or Stitch Fix
(the shopping service now valued at
about $2 billion.)
Nick Brown, far
left, and Natalie
Massenet of Imagi-
nary Ventures,
which said it
raised $75 million
for its first fund.
TOM JAMIESON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Ms. Massenet and Mr. Brown are
counting on Ms. Massenet’s Net-a-
Porter experience and contacts to help
Imaginary Ventures. The firm has al-
ready invested in companies like Glossi-
er and Everlane, an upstart clothing
brand. “Their understanding of con-
sumers in today’s age and how to build
great brands and guide entrepreneurs is
unparalleled,” Michael Preysman, Ever-
lane’s founder, said of the Imaginary
founders in a statement.
Ms. Massenet began as a fashion jour-
nalist before founding Net-a-Porter in
2000. She left Net-a-Porter shortly after
the e-commerce portal merged with its
rival Yoox.
Ms. Massenet had intended to largely
retire, keeping a yellow Post-it note with
the phrase “Just Say No” on her comput-
er as a reminder of how to respond to re-
quests. Other than joining a Net-a-
Porter rival, FarFetch, as co-chair-
woman, she succeeded in doing that.
Then came Mr. Brown. He was previ-
ously a partner at 14W Venture Part-
ners, where he invested in ventures like
Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop lifestyle site
and the shoe brand Allbirds.
Over the course of 2016, the two de-
cided to join forces and began talking to
prospective investors. Backers of the
new firm include Rick Caruso, a real es-
tate developer based in Los Angeles,
and two fellow fashion entrepreneurs,
Tom and Ruth Chapman, who built and
then sold Matchesfashion.com.
“I have found an openness to new sexual
experiences,” said Quaid Heneke, 25.

16 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018
weekend
Peru’s love affair
with the potato
POTATO, FROM PAGE 14
was the chief mode of transportation for
most ancient Andean peoples (certainly
the Incas); they could easily carry dried
potatoes with them and make a quick
stew with local herbs, chiles and water
PERUVIAN CHEESY POTATO SOUP WITH SPICY HERB SAUCE
TIME: 1 HOUR 20 MINUTES
YIELD: 8 TO 10 SERVINGS
4 white chuños (dried potatoes),
each about 1½ to 2 inches in
diameter
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 large (6 to 7 ounces) onion, peeled
and chopped
6 to 7 large cloves of garlic, peeled
and chopped fine
1 large stick of celery, diced
2 medium carrots, peeled and cut
into ½-inch rounds
1 1-inch piece of fresh ginger,
peeled and chopped very fine
8½ to 10 cups water or unsalted
chicken stock (if using salted
stock, adjust salt in Step 2)
1¾ pounds russet potatoes (2 to 4
potatoes, depending on size),
peeled and cut roughly into 1-inch
dice
½ pound peeled pumpkin or
butternut squash, cut into 1-inch
dice
2¼ teaspoons salt, or to taste
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh
mint leaves
from a mountain stream whenever
hunger called.
Dried potatoes in Peru come in many
forms. They can look like pebbles —
hard and smooth, in white or purple.
They can look like large gravel, with dif-
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh
oregano leaves
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh
tarragon leaves
3 tablespoons chopped flat-leaf
parsley leaves
3 tablespoons chopped cilantro
leaves
3 tablespoons chopped basil leaves
¼ pound feta cheese, cut into
⅓-inch cubes
3 ounces spinach leaves, stems
trimmed away and each leaf
halved or quartered
Uchucuta sauce, for serving (see
recipe)
1. The evening before you cook the soup,
wash the chuños and soak them in a large
bowl of warm water, enough to cover it by
several inches. Leave for 12 hours. Drain
the chuños the next day, wash them off
again and cut each potato into 8 to 10
parts. In a large pot, combine the chuño
pieces with enough cold water to cover by
several inches. Bring to a boil, then reduce
heat to low. Cover and simmer until the
chuños are puffed up and softer, about 20
ferent colors. But they can also be soft,
tasting and smelling as funky as fer-
mented bean curd or ripe cheese. Each
has a different flavor and texture.
The Inca guide who traveled with me
through the Andes still hikes carrying
dried potatoes (sometimes in a pow-
dered form) and llama jerky, essential
ingredients for a soup he considers a
part of his cultural inheritance.
Potatoes were given superb treat-
ment wherever I traveled. At the Sumaq
Hotel in the town of Aguas Calientes,
there was pastel de papa, a meltingly
soft potato cake with layers of thin-
sliced potato, bacon and cheese.
GUILLERMO GUTIERREZ CARRASCAL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
minutes. Drain and set aside.
2. Put the oil in a large pot (at least 6
quarts) and set over medium-high heat.
When hot, put in the onion and garlic. Stir
and cook for 3 minutes. Add the celery
and carrot. Stir and cook 3 minutes. Add
the ginger and stir a few times. Put in the
drained chuños, 8½ cups water or stock,
the russet potatoes, pumpkin or squash,
salt, herbs and feta. Bring to a boil, cover,
turn heat to low and cook gently for 30 to
40 minutes, or until vegetables are tender.
3. Add the spinach, stir and cook, covered,
on low heat for another 10 to 15 minutes
or until the vegetables are very tender but
have not turned to mush. Check the salt.
Thin the soup out with water or stock if it
is too thick. It should be drinkable from the
bowl.
4. Put 2 teaspoons of uchucuta sauce into
each bowl of hot soup and stir it in. Add
more if desired.
Note: Chuños are sold at grocery stores
carrying Peruvian products. If you can't
find them, skip Step 1. In Step 2, use
about 2¼ pounds of russet potatoes,
peeled and cut roughly into 1-inch dice.
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Papa a la Huancaina, which origi-
nated in the town of Huancayo in the
central highlands and is considered by
many to be Peru’s national dish, was ev-
erywhere, including the cafeteria at Ma-
chu Picchu. Boiled, sliced potatoes and
boiled, sliced eggs were placed on top of
lettuce leaves with some olives strewn
about, and dressed with a Huancaina
sauce that brought the dish together. Its
main ingredient was the long, aromatic
orange chile, aji amarillo.
Perhaps my favorite dish of all was
causa. Like lasagnas, causas are layered
terrinelike dishes, generally served
cold.
UCHUCUTA SAUCE (ANDEAN GREEN HERB AND CHILE SAUCE)
TIME: 10 MINUTES
YIELD: ABOUT 1½ CUPS
1 loosely packed cup flat-leaf
parsley leaves
2 loosely packed cups cilantro
leaves
¼ cup loosely packed fresh oregano
leaves
1 loosely packed cup fresh mint
leaves
2 tablespoons fresh tarragon leaves
2 tablespoons lime juice plus a little
more, if needed
2 to 3 fresh, hot green chiles,
chopped (See Note)
¼ cup chopped feta cheese
2 tablespoons peanut butter,
preferably organic and freshly
made
½ teaspoon salt, or to taste
ANDREW SCRIVANI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
..
food and drink
GUILLERMO GUTIERREZ CARRASCAL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Instead of pasta, potatoes — mashed Above, the Pisac
and seasoned with an aji amarillo paste, Archaeological
lime juice, olive oil and salt — are the Complex and the
most important element in a causa. ancient terraces of
They can provide one, two or even three the Incas as seem
of the layers in the dish. The other in-be- from the communi-
tween layers could include seafood sal- ty of Cuyo Chico.
ad, vegetable salad, chicken salad or, as Below left, a potato
in the Amazon region, pork-and-onion seller in Calca.
salad made with the addition of the fiery,
round charapita chile.
Whichever way it is served, causa is
always soothing — and delicious. For
the hotter regions of Peru, it is just as
cooling and satisfying as that warming
soup is in the Andean mountains.
1. Wash the parsley, cilantro, oregano,
mint and tarragon in deep water. Lift out of
the water but leave some clinging to the
leaves. Put in a blender with the lime
juice, 4 tablespoons water, the chiles and
the feta. Blend, pushing down with a
rubber spatula as needed.
2. When you have a smooth blend, add the
peanut butter and salt. Blend again to mix
thoroughly. Check the balance of salt, heat
and sourness. Add more herbs, chiles or
lime juice if needed.
Note: When shopping for hot, green
chiles, break a chile in half and smell it (or
even taste it) before buying, to make sure
it has heat. Fresh Peruvian chiles are hard
to find in New York. I use Thai bird’s-eye
chiles instead. Freeze what you do not
use.
ANDREW SCRIVANI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
music
A myth
of death
that will
not die
CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
MILAN
The tragedy of Orpheus
lives on in music despite
centuries of adaptations
BY CORINNA DA FONSECA-WOLLHEIM
On a recent evening at the Teatro alla
Scala here, I watched an audience of
well-heeled Milanese be turned, briefly,
into gods.
The tenor Juan Diego Flórez, as the
male lead in Gluck’s “Orphée et Euryd-
ice,” was hoping to lead his dead wife
back to the world of the living, and had
just been told he could sing his way
past the guardians of the underworld.
“L’espoir renaît dans mon âme,” Mr.
Flórez sang: “Hope rekindles in my
soul.” He ornamented the jubilant tune
with dizzying runs and rapid-fire flour-
ishes. When he was done, the audience
erupted in a stormy ovation that lasted
several minutes. The tale of Orpheus,
whose song softens the hearts of the
haughtiest deities, morphed into the
spectacle of the famously demanding
La Scala patrons, sitting in judgment
on operatic superstars.
The following afternoon, I took in a
performance of Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo”
at the Teatro Regio in Turin, Italy. This
time, the audience sat spellbound as
Mauro Borgioni poured his velvety
baritone into “Possente spirto,” a
showpiece full of the artful shudders,
particular to early Baroque singing,
that sound like a voice racked with
sobs. His singing was interspersed
with florid solos from members of the
orchestra, so that the virtuosity spread
across instruments and suggested a
hero-singer of boundless gifts.
And yet Orpheus’s musical powers
fail him when it matters: Forgetting
the divine injunction against turning
around to look at Eurydice as they
leave the underworld, he lets his gaze
fall on her, condemning his bride to a
second death. According to one version
of the Greek myth, Orpheus is torn to
bits, with his disembodied head crying
out Eurydice’s name.
The question of who is wooed by the
power of music lingered in my mind
after my weekend of Orphean operas. I
found myself thinking about how the
story and its subtexts are magnified in
settings by contemporary opera com-
posers, in a world where music is
omnipresent and is regularly, well,
instrumentalized for all sorts of impure
purposes. The ideal of persuasive song
must surely change in a world where
music can be used to boost consump-
tion, drive away teenage loiterers or
HIROYUKI ITO/GETTY IMAGES
Matthew Aucoin soften up detainees for interrogation.
composed “The As in the story of Orpheus, magic and
Orphic Moment” mastery are never far removed from
in 2014. control and ego.
On May 6 and 7, New Yorkers will be
able to reflect on some of these issues,
too, when the Masterworks Chorale
and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s will
present Gluck’s Italian-language ver-
sion of his opera, “Orfeo ed Euridice,”
along with Matthew Aucoin’s dramatic
cantata “The Orphic Moment,” written
in 2014.
The subject of Mr. Aucoin’s work is
what he calls the “dark heart” of the
story: the moment before Orpheus
turns around and loses his wife a sec-
ond time. “To me, there seems to be
something cold in the way the second
death seems like an excuse for more
music,” Mr. Aucoin said in a phone
interview. “It leaves me thinking — in
a distressed way as a composer — of
music being valued over love.”
Any opera about Orpheus, the musi-
cal icon of Greek mythology, is always
also about opera itself. Monteverdi
wrote his “Orfeo” in 1607, seven years
after Jacopo Peri’s “Euridice,” one of
opera’s founding works. Making the
case for the then-radical concept of
sung drama, both pieces turned to a
myth that puts music at the center of
the action and provides plenty of ex-
cuses for “actual” singing — what is
known as diegetic music. Gluck then
turned to the story when he set out to
reform the genre after what he saw as
the excesses of opera seria.
But as the musicologist Tim Carter
told me in a phone conversation, poli-
tical subtexts were always acknowl-
edged. “The story is also one of how
music can be abused either by individ-
uals or by state mechanisms,” he said.
“Monteverdi is a composer, so he’s
clearly out there to make a point about
how wonderful his music is. But even
so, there are moments in his ‘Orfeo’
where there’s an edge of warning: ‘Be
a bit careful, because music is really
powerful. But power is dangerous
stuff.’”
A survey of Orphean operas shows a
curious drop in the 19th century, fol-
lowed by a resurgence of interest after
World War I. It can be no accident that
composers including Darius Milhaud,
Philip Glass, Hans Werner Henze and
Harrison Birtwistle turned to it. For all
their differences and for all their buck-
ing of conventions, each of their treat-
ments was also a plea for the contin-
ued validity of opera as it drifted from
mainstream culture.
A similar energy seems to infuse
other operas in which music plays a
significant role, including Kaija Saaria-
ho’s troubadour-themed “L’Amour du
Loin.” In a phone interview, Ms. Saari-
aho said that Orpheus had not entered
her mind when she was working on the
opera but that she had been attracted
to a story where music was the central
subject matter while also functioning
as “a metaphor for many other things.”
In order to set apart the diegetic
music of the troubadour, she created a
special mode that evokes medieval
music. But his music is only ever heard
as sung by a pilgrim.
“We don’t know, in fact, if it is really
as he wanted it to be,” Ms. Saariaho
said. Thus the troubadour raises issues
of interpretation, dissemination and
perhaps even corruption that are
ultimately the concerns of a creative
artist. “Maybe I’m also reflecting my
aims as a composer,” she added.
For Mr. Birtwistle, Orpheus has been
something of an obsession. The charac-
ter pops up in his song cycle based on
Rilke sonnets and in his operas “The
Mask of Orpheus,” “The Second Mrs.
Kong” and “The Corridor.” That last
work, like Mr. Aucoin’s piece, zooms in
on the moment before the hero’s fatal
turn. In a phone conversation, Mr.
Birtwistle said that the fact that the
myth was so well known allowed him
to be innovative in his settings.
In his “Orpheus Elegies” for oboe,
harp and countertenor, Mr. Birtwistle
said, he “fractured the language” until
it became subordinate to the music. “In
a sense, the subject matter is the vehi-
cle for music,” he said. In his four-hour
“The Mask of Orpheus,” the multiple
and often contradictory versions of the
myth are mirrored in a multiplicity of
representations, with the principal
characters impersonated by a singer,
an actor and a puppet.
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018 | 17
weekend
outside the work’s musical orbit. Draw-
ing on Ms. Du’s interest in punk rock,
and performed at the work’s premiere
by Jennifer Charles, the aria proceeds
in sobs, wails and screams.
“Virtuosity is there in a lot of styles,”
Ms. Du said in a phone interview. “It’s
not just screaming and no pitch. It’s
understanding how the emotion drives
the content.”
Ms. Du described a recent produc-
tion of the opera that showed graphic
sexual violence during that aria.
“When women are going through those
motions on stage, I can’t wrap my
mind as a composer around telling
them to sing notes,” Ms. Du said.
And yet, she added, there is some-
thing about the aria that breaks
through the layers of craft and profes-
sionalism and shakes every performer
who sings it to her core. So far, every-
one who has sung it — including Ms.
Du herself — has broken down at the
end. In the performances with Ms.
Charles, Ms. Du said, “we had to turn
off her mike for the next part so we
would hear a little bit of sobbing up-
stage, but not in your ears. But I could-
n’t tell her to stop sobbing.”
In a way, Ms. Du’s lament is a break
with the centuries-old tradition of
opera turning agony into beauty. In-
vestigating music’s tendency to revel
and wallow in pain is also a driving
motivation for Mr. Aucoin, who is at
work at a new opera focusing on the
character of Eurydice. In this piece, he
sometimes has a countertenor and
baritone double up for the part of
Orpheus, endowing his voice with a
RAMELLA AND GIANNESE/PIVA, VIA TEATRO REGIO TORINO sort of supernatural halo.
“For me, it was important to reflect
Above, Mauro In addition, Mr. Birtwistle invented a the doubleness in Orpheus: the pleas-
Borgioni in the language made up of the component ure and pain, the mortal and the di-
title role of Monte- syllables of the names Orpheus and vine,” Mr. Aucoin said.
verdi’s “L’Orfeo” Eurydice. When Orpheus makes his He said he had been thinking of
at the Teatro Regio first utterances in this language, Mr. what he called “that alchemical trans-
in Turin, and left, Birtwistle said, “the whole piece is a figuration” of pain into pleasure in the
Juan Diego Flórez metaphor in the sense that it’s a dawn. context of the recent fall from grace of
and Christiane And in this dawn, like a child learning the conductor James Levine, who has
Karg in Gluck’s to speak, he constructs the word Eu- been accused of abusing young musi-
“Orphée et Euryd- rydice.” In this sense, Eurydice be- cians. “Part of his aesthetic, it seemed,
ice” at the Teatro comes more than just the object of was that no matter how much pain
alla Scala in Milan. Orpheus’s obsession; she is his cre- there was in the music, he treated it as
ation. if it were all pleasure,” Mr. Aucoin said.
There are no overt Orphean refer- “He was obsessed with the luscious-
ences in Du Yun’s Pulitzer Prize-win- ness, even where that wasn’t the emo-
ning “Angel’s Bone,” a harrowing para- tional content. I think it’s what made
ble about sex trafficking. But at the him both better than his musical peers
heart of the opera is an aria by one of and why there is something disturbing
the story’s victims that is uttered in a to some Levine recordings. And there
musical language that, similar to many is something equally uncomfortable in
BRESCIA/AMISANO, VIA TEATRO ALLA SCALA an Orphic lament, seems to rocket Orpheus.”
Grimaldi Forum Monaco / 28-29.04.2018 / artmontecarlo.ch
S A L O N D ’ART
The story and
its subtexts are
magnified in
galleries Air de Paris | Almine Rech | Art : Concept | Atlas | Blain | Southern |
settings by
contemporary Campoli Presti | Cardi | Carpenters Workshop | Catherine Issert | CONTINUA |
opera Cortesi | De Jonckheere | Franco Noero | Gagosian | Hom Le Xuan | In Situ –
composers. Fabienne Leclerc | Jean-François Cazeau | Jousse Entreprise | kamel mennour |
kaufmann repetto | Marlborough | mfc-michèle didier | Michael Werner | Mitterrand |
Monica de Cardenas | P420 | Pace | PACT | Pedro Cera | Perrotin | Pinksummer
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Sébastien Bertrand | Setareh | SMAC | The Breeder | TING Pop Up | Tornabuoni Art
| Victoria Miro | Vistamare | Xippas | ZERO… institutions & special exhibitions
Arabeschi di Latte | artgenève/musique - Jeff Mills, Weapons | Asad Raza, Root sequence.
Mother tongue | Carlos Cruz-Díez, Couleur Additive Monte-Carlo | Centre de la
Photographie Genève | Contemporary Art on a Private Boat | [criss-cross] art
institutions in dialogue | Elmgreen & Dragset, Temporary Art Museum/Powerless
Structures | Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation | Les Rencontres Philosophiques de
Monaco | Magic of Persia | MAMCO Genève | MEGA Foundation | Mousse Magazine
and Publishing | Musées nationaux du XXe siècle des Alpes-Maritimes - Chagall/Léger/
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Nouveau Musée National de Monaco | Pola Magnetyczne | Prix Off artmonte-carlo - F.P.
Journe | Robert Filliou, EINS. UN. ONE... | Rockbund Art Museum | Tel Aviv Museum
of Art | WK Archipel Collection books & magazines Artforum | Artphilein Editions
| artprice | ArtReview | Beaux Arts Magazine | &: christophe daviet-thery éditions et
livres d’artistes | COTE | Elephant | Frieze | La Strada | Le Quotidien de l’Art | Librairie
Vigna | Monopol | Monte-Carlo Society | Mousse | Spike | The New York Times
 ..
18 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

weekend books

Sex, drugs
and Shakespeare
BOOK REVIEW
Macbeth
By Jo Nesbo. Translated by Don Bartlett.
446 pp. Hogarth. $27.
BY JAMES SHAPIRO
In 1937, The New Yorker published
James Thurber’s “The Macbeth Mur-
der Mystery,” about an avid reader of
Agatha Christie who picks up a paper-
back copy of “Macbeth,” mistakenly
assuming it’s a detective story. She
soon discovers it’s a Shakespeare play
but is already hooked and reads it as a
whodunit. It takes her a while to iden-
tify who killed Duncan, after initially
refusing to believe the Macbeths were
responsible: “You suspect them the
most, of course, but those are the ones
that are never guilty — or shouldn’t be,
anyway.” Her prime suspect had been
Banquo, but “then, of course, he was
the second person killed. That was
good right in there, that part. The
person you suspect of the first murder
should always be the second victim.”
It’s a very funny story and an in-
sightful one, for Thurber shows how
closely Shakespeare’s tragedy follows
the contours of detective fiction.
Thurber wasn’t the first to draw such
connections; over a century earlier, in
a brilliant essay about the play — “On
witches, prophecies, visions, and the
mysterious figure of Hecate.
Nesbo’s most consequential decision
was when and where to set his story.
While he follows Shakespeare in locat-
ing it in Scotland, rather than taking us
back to the 11th century he places it in
the early 1970s. He doesn’t name the
city, though there are many hints that
it’s Glasgow. This choice signals Nes-
bo’s ambitions for his novel, giving it a
sharp social edge as well as a timely
political resonance. The Glasgow of
that era was a desperately grim place,
not unlike those parts of America now
ravaged by the opioid crisis: It was
staggered by alcoholism, environmen-
tal hazards, high suicide rates, corrup-
tion, gang warfare, the loss of industri-
al jobs and a significant rise in drug
abuse. Things were so bad that histori-
ans speak of the “Glasgow effect” to
account for why Glaswegians died
younger and suffered more than those
who lived in comparable places.
It’s tougher than it looks to create a
world that is faithful to Shakespeare’s
original while also feeling modern and
real. Placing Shakespeare’s story in a
late-20th-century world of drugs,
gangs and corrupt civic leaders goes a
long way toward solving this problem.
“Brew” — the term used for the drug
to which so many are addicted — is at
the heart of Nesbo’s novel and neatly
straddles the murky world of Shake-
speare’s witches, with their caldron, OWEN FREEMAN

the Knocking at the Gate in ‘Macbeth’”
— Thomas De Quincey had reflected
on how deeply Shakespeare under-
stood the interplay of murder and
suspense. If the many allusions to
“Macbeth” in the works of Agatha
Christie, Dorothy Sayers, P. D. James
and other crime writers are any indica-
tion, Shakespeare’s play may be seen
as one of the great progenitors of the
genre, making Jo Nesbo, the celebrat-
ed Norwegian writer of thrillers, an
ideal choice to update the play for
Hogarth Shakespeare, a series in
which best-selling novelists turn
Shakespeare’s works into contempo-
rary fiction.
Nesbo has spoken of finding himself
on familiar terrain here, arguing that
“Macbeth” is essentially a “thriller
about the struggle for power” that
takes place “in a gloomy, stormy crime
noir-like setting and in a dark, para-
noid human mind.” True enough, yet
many features of this 400-year-old
tragedy don’t easily fit the demands of
a modern, realistic thriller. One of the
pleasures of reading this book is
watching Nesbo meet the formidable
challenge of assimilating elements of
the play unsuited to realistic crime
fiction, especially the supernatural: the
and that of modern drug labs. By ma-
king addiction so central to his plot,
Nesbo also makes Macbeth’s paranoia
and hallucinatory visions, so crucial to
Shakespeare’s play, not just believable
but meaningful in a contemporary way.
Gang warfare also informs Nesbo’s
retelling and is well suited to the ex-
treme violence of Shakespeare’s origi-
nal, in which the fighting that is de-
scribed and staged is ferocious. In this
dangerous world of ever-shifting loy-
alties and ill-gotten gains, it’s easy to
become morally compromised. Such is
the fate of Nesbo’s Macbeth, who at the
outset is a good cop, but soon enough
hungers for promotion and power —
which prove more addictive than the
drugs and alcohol that trap so many in
the world of this novel.
In “Macbeth,” Shakespeare was
unusually stingy when it came to
sharing his characters’ back stories
and motivations. Did Lady Macbeth
have a child who died? Was the idea of
killing Duncan planted in Macbeth’s
mind by the witches or by Lady Mac-
beth, or had it been there, dormant, all
along? Why does Macduff abandon his
family? What Shakespeare withholds,
Nesbo delves into deeply, taking one of
Shakespeare’s shortest and most enig-
PHOTOGRAPH BY THRON ULLBERG
matic plays and expanding on what
brought his characters to this point in
their lives.
So, for example, we think of Macbeth
a lot differently once we imagine that
he spent part of his childhood in an
orphanage. And Duff (Macduff) be-
comes more sympathetic when we see
him torn between personal loyalties
and the demands of the heart. The
price paid by developing these inter-
twining back stories is that it takes
Jo Nesbo, left, has Nesbo almost 450 pages to connect
become known for them, though the pace rarely lags. He
his crime novels is gifted at using casual details to
far beyond his define character: It makes perfect
native Norway. sense that Banquo drives an old Volvo,
while Malcolm prefers a muscle car, a
secondhand Chevelle.
Minor characters like the demonic
Seyton and Caithness (here a woman,
and in love with Duff) have more
significance and are brought to life.
Surprisingly, although both Macbeth
and his wife, Lady, are vividly drawn,
Nesbo doesn’t give the couple much of
a history together — they’ve only
known each other for a few years —
which may explain why their relation-
ship feels far less intense and electric
than it does in Shakespeare’s original.
Nesbo also makes much of one ad-
Nesbo’s vantage he has over Shakespeare, who
“Macbeth” is a during the reign of the Scottish King
thriller about James, recently targeted for assassina-
tion, could not show a Scottish mon-
the struggle for arch being killed onstage. The murder
power that could only be described — so that early
takes place in a in the play Duncan is killed offstage
noir-like and in the final act Macbeth, who
setting. succeeds him as king of Scotland,
meets a similar fate, again offstage.
Nesbo works under no such con-
straints, and these violent scenes are
among the most memorable in the
novel. The result is inventive and
deeply satisfying, especially to readers
already familiar with the plot (and in
America that means pretty much
everyone who didn’t sleep through
10th-grade English).
While there are echoes here and
there of Shakespeare’s language
(which Don Bartlett, who translated
the novel from the Norwegian, has
handled well), Nesbo is less interested
in the original’s verbal texture than he
is in adapting its plot and delving into
the moral choices confronting its char-
acters. In the end, he offers a dark but
ultimately hopeful “Macbeth,” one
suited to our own troubled times, in
which “the slowness of democracy” is
no match for power-hungry strongmen
who demand unstinting loyalty from
ethically compromised followers, and
where the brave must band together to
defeat the darker forces that threaten
to destroy the social fabric.
James Shapiro teaches Shakespeare at
Columbia University. His next book is
about Shakespeare in a divided Amer-
ica.

By the Book THE SUNDAY CROSSWORD

James B. Comey Pluses and Minuses
Edited by Will Shortz

Across 44 “Party Up (Up in 95 Beaut 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

When James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. reading on electronic devices but I 1 Bedbug, e.g. Here)” rapper, 96 Was harder
director and author of “A Higher Loy- need to feel the pages. I am always 2000 19 20 21 22
5 “Police Line — for the bronco
alty,” reads fiction, it’s “almost always reading at least two books, one for Do Not Cross” 45 Bugs’s cartoon buster to hold on 23 24 25 26
material pursuer to?
something my kids are reading, so I can upstairs and one for downstairs. Until I
9 Gay ____ 46 Org. with 101 High flier 27 28 29 30 31
. . . pretend to be cool.” got fired, I read only on long flights evening 102 Firstborn
because there was too much work stuff 14 Blemish for 32 33 34 35 36 37
meetings 103 University of
a straight-A
What books are on your nightstand? to read at home. Now that I’m under- student 47 Book after Jonah Illinois city 38 39 40 41
“Grant,” by Ron Chernow (actual employed, I read mostly at night, but 19 R.p.m. indicator 49 “Get ____” 104 Lumbering, say
51 Root beer brand 106 In days of yore 42 43 44 45
nightstand); “The Last Lion: Winston sometimes during the day. Never in 20 Having gone tit
since 1937 107 “Same with me”
Spencer Churchill, Defender of the the morning. Wrong chronotype. for tat 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53
54 Script 109 Subjects of
Realm 1940-1965,” by William Man- 21 Florida city suggestion an apartment 54 55 56 57 58 59 60
chester and Paul Reid (living room What books did you look to as inspi- whose name about starting
ends with two restriction
table). ration or models while you were the fight scene? 61 62 63 64
state postal 111 Actresses Field
writing your own? 60 A.F.L. partner and Hawkins
JILLIAN TAMAKI abbreviations 65 66 67 68 69
61 The “A” of I.P.A.
What kind of reader were you as a Honestly none, because I was trying to 22 Humiliate 113 Rarity in a Polish
62 Ocean buildup name? 70 71 72 73 74 75 76
child? Any favorites from that time, book that gets those right. But Scott do something unusual — write a book 23 Makes eye
63 Willa who wrote 115 Like the digit “0”
or books you return to again and Turow gets the world of prosecution that was neither a pure leadership contact before
“My Ántonia” in 2018?
77 78 79 80 81 82 83
again? undressing?
and trials right in his work, especially book nor a pure memoir. I wanted it to 65 Mean-spirited 118 Iowa senator 84 85 86 87 88
26 Hoosier sort
The first real book I remember reading the classic “Presumed Innocent.” be a story-driven book that teaches in hoopster
elected in 2014
68 Richard Gere 119 “… but I could 89 90 91 92 93 94 95
on my own was “The Swamp Fox of a subtle way. We’ll see if it worked. 27 Expatriate title role be wrong”
the Revolution,” by Stewart H. Hol- If you could require the president to 28 Wide-eyed type 96 97 98 99 100 101
69 Eat a little here, 120 Reynolds of
brook, about Francis Marion. I read it read one book, what would it be? If somebody walked into your office 29 “What ____ a little there “Deadpool” 102 103 104 105
multiple times, and I’m not sure why. The United States Constitution isn’t a while you were writing, what would thou?” 70 Greek god of 121 James who was
In a strange twist, it was also one of book, so I would pick “The Road to they see? 31 One of five sleep nominated for a 106 107 108 109 110 111 112
my wife’s favorites, growing up in Iowa Character,” by David Brooks. I’m in an armchair with the laptop on permanent 72 Take for granted 1967 Grammy
113 114 115 116 117
members of the 76 Early Chinese for “Tell Mama”
at the same time as I was in Yonkers. my actual lap but atop one of those U.N. Security dynasty 122 Hives, e.g. 118 119 120 121
In high school, I got deeply into Do you have a favorite literary char- “read-in-bed” boards to make a better Council 77 Black ____ 123 Forte’s opposite
Tolkien’s books and also loved “Five acter or hero? angle for typing. Our loyal, and old, 32 One reading up 124 Old flames
122 123 124 125
78 Ballet
Smooth Stones,” by Ann Fairbairn, Atticus Finch. rescue-dog, Benji, is asleep somewhere on infant care, choreography? 125 Balance PUZZLE BY ROSS TRUDEAU / EDITED BY WILL SHORTZ THE NEW YORK TIMES
about an interracial relationship and near my chair. I’m listening to classical maybe 84 Sport Down 6 “Selma” director 35 Boxcars half 66 Build up 93 Supergiant in
the African-American struggle for civil Disappointing, overrated, just not music. 34 Equilibrium 86 RR ____ 1 All-too-common DuVernay 37 Looped in, in a 67 Fickleness of life Cygnus
rights. I liked those books so much I good: What book did you feel you 36 Minor setback 87 Widening of the V.A. diagnosis 7 Southernmost way 71 Demeaners of 96 A state of
were supposed to like, and didn’t? 38 Butts mouth? 2 Corroded
would try to read slowly to make them If you had to recommend one book to Ivy 38 Skipper, the #MeToo rapture
39 Parent wearing 88 Broody genre 3 Fall guy informally
last longer. I’m told no sensible author answers a student of government, what would your Superman
8 Hyphen’s longer movement, say
97 Notable whose
89 Racy film 4 Loses cousin
this one. it be? costume?
40 Places for 72 Part of a
name is an
91 FEMA offering intentionally 9 Agricultural conductors stockyard
Which genres are you drawn to and “The Terror Presidency,” by Jack 42 Year abroad 94 Cartoonist 5 What the locale that’s 41 Kind of tide
anagram of
73 Dungeons &
which do you avoid? You’re organizing a literary dinner Goldsmith. 43 The sun, for one Thomas classics stand weed-friendly? Dragons, e.g., GALORE
43 Breakfast order
I read mostly nonfiction, with heavy party. Which three writers, dead or Solution to puzzle of April 14-15 10 Down’s at a diner for short 98 Some arm bones
emphasis on biography and social alive, do you invite? Whom would you want to write your P F F T S H A K E U P A D E N O N O
counterpart: 48 Giggle syllable 74 T-shirt size: 99 Journalist Fallaci
psychology. If I read fiction, it is almost I read “Lean In,” by Sheryl Sandberg, life story? Abbr. Abbr.
E L I E T O N N E A U P I N C H R A N 49 The New Yorker 100 Emotionally
11 Trail mix bit cartoonist Chast 75 First name on
always something my kids are reading, when I was the F.B.I. director and Benjamin Weiser of The New York P U L L U P S T A K E S E S C A L A D E developed
S E L L S T O P S H O A G I E T I P 12 Title city in a 50 Tip of the the Supreme
so I can understand what they are recommended it to the work force, so Times is the most careful and thought- 1960 #1 song Court 101 ____ whale
S E V E N S P I C K U P S T E A M tongue?
reading and also pretend to be cool. Ms. Sandberg would be invited. And if ful journalist I have known and I loved N O S T R I L A G E N T S H A W 13 “Don’t panic” 76 Monsoons 105 Bacon runoff
52 Number
she doesn’t mind eating with dead his biography of the Polish defector U N E A S E I C O N A T E R I G H T
14 Event for Jesus between nueve 79 Draws 108 Cockeyed
Can you recommend any thrillers or people, I’d also have Reinhold Niebuhr Ryszard Kuklinski — “A Secret Life: N A T
T
L
E C
W A L K O N W A T
R I S K E G A D
E R
P E
N O O R
T R I
described in and once 80 Treeless plain 110 Boundary
other works of fiction that get law and Martin Luther King Jr. Both were The Polish Officer, His Covert Mission, L O O S E T E A P I E B E S O T S
Matthew 3:13- 53 Put out 81 Put on an act? between the
enforcement particularly right? 17 55 Make
remarkable observers of human nature and the Price He Paid to Save His A T M D E A D O N A R R I V A L P O T 82 February earth and the
15 Kegler’s org. 56 Politician birthstones
“Red Sparrow” and its sequel, “Palace and America. It would be really inter- Country.” Y O U S E E D E W S A L T M I N E underworld, in
M O S E S S H O E A C A I S I E 16 Popular Mexican inducted into the 83 1899 gold rush
of Treason,” by Jason Matthews, nail esting to pick their brains about cur- myth
A L I E S T A N D I N L I N E S C A T folk song Automotive Hall destination
the world of intelligence and counterin- rent events. What do you plan to read next? N E C K T I E S S K I D L O S E R S 17 Depletes of Fame 112 R.B.I.s or H.R.s
85 Be absolutely
telligence (and offer a cleareyed view “Trust,” by Francis Fukuyama, about T E R P M I L A N F L I E S T O
18 It’s a wrap 57 Trunk awesome 114 The “e” of i.e.
of modern Russia). Because crime and How do you like to read? Paper or how bonds within a society are made P U T O N N O T
I P A S O U R C E
I C E
I
I D E A
C A N
L S
E A S Y A
24 “Uhh …” 58 Tally, in Britain 90 Makes potable, 116 III or IV, maybe
terrorism filled so many of my work electronic? One book at a time or and broken. I started it last year and it T O S S E S T O R U N I N C I R C L E S 25 Positioned 59 Vituperated in a way 117 When doubled,
days, I tended to avoid books about several? Morning or night? has become only more relevant so I A N T I R I O T U N T A K E N U R L S 30 Lambaste 64 Orbitz booking 91 Wall St. worker a 2010s dance
those subjects, so I don’t know of a I like to read paper books. I have tried need to get back to it. S E E P R F S N O O N E R S E S P N
33 Auto repair chain 65 Grub 92 Probably will craze
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
theater
Tabloid heroines
storm the West End
LONDON
Tina Turner becomes
a musical showstopper,
and ‘Chicago’ still wows
BY MATT WOLF
All biographical musicals build to a cli-
mactic mini-concert, but I’ve rarely
heard an audience greet one with the
mighty roar that looks likely to be a con-
tinuing feature of “Tina: The Tina
Turner Musical,” which opened Tuesday
at the Aldwych Theater here.
The director, Phyllida Lloyd, and a
creative team that includes many of Ms.
Lloyd’s colleagues from the ABBA-
scored musical smash “Mamma Mia!”
have folded Ms. Turner’s formidable
songbook into a briskly efficient, if often
formulaic, survey of her life — or, at
least, a sizable chunk of it. (The rock
icon is now an ageless 78.) The story
contains few surprises, but the songs
possess a seismic power that can turn a
diverse public into a clamoring, ovation-
ready mass.
The show begins with a brief glimpse
of the adult Tina (the 2016 Tony nominee
Adrienne Warren, in a storming London
stage debut) with her back to the audi-
ence, clearly in performance mode.
Barely have we clocked that won-
drously unruly signature mop of hair be-
fore events rewind to Nutbush, Tenn.,
where a young girl by the name of Anna
Mae Bullock is being told off as “too
loud” in choir, and the seeds of a life-
changing talent are sown.
Many will know what came next,
whether from Ms. Turner’s autobiogra-
phy or the 1993 film “What’s Love Got to
Do With It”: a churchgoing youth that
gives way over time to fervently held
Buddhism, alongside episodes of abuse,
most often at the hands of the husband,
Ike Turner, who gives the soulful Anna
Mae her newly alliterative stage name.
The challenge is to find the narrative
dior.com
MANUEL HARLAN
pull of what could simply devolve into a
gig, as was true of “Soul Sister,” the Tina
Turner tribute show that ran on the
West End in 2013. Leading the trio of
names credited with the book of “Tina”
is the Olivier Award-winning American
playwright Katori Hall, who does what
she can to fold her subject’s life into her
art, and vice versa.
To that end, Ms. Turner’s 1983 hit
“Let’s Stay Together” is delivered as a
duet between Tina and Raymond, her
lover then and the father of her first son.
The subsequent “Better Be Good to Me”
emerges as a directive from the increas-
ingly self-aware Tina that Ike (Kobna
Holdbrook-Smith, lending real heft to a
potentially one-dimensional role) had
better abandon his adulterous, abusive
ways or take a hike. (The couple di-
vorced in 1976.)
Cast members give it their all, but Ms.
Hall and her colleagues don’t probe very
deep. There are passing nods to racism
and sexism that chime with the con-
cerns of our times, but the overriding in-
tention seems to be to get the audience
on its feet, cheering. And, pretty much
on cue, it does.
Ms. Warren shares the title role with
an alternate, Jenny Fitzpatrick, to ease
what must be a pretty heavy burden.
The performer is rarely offstage and
White gold, pink gold and diamonds.
sings with a feral, uncaged yearning
The overriding that does the show’s namesake proud.
intention of Smaller and more slight than the fa-
“Tina” seems mously leggy Ms. Turner, Ms. Warren
seems to grow in size and stature as she
to be to get the moves toward a fireworks-laden final
audience on its concert in Brazil that has the feeling of a
feet, cheering. victory parade. Which, really, is what
this remarkable life has been.
Ms. Turner is among the few stars, it
would seem, who haven’t appeared in
“Chicago,” the musical juggernaut that
over the years has found room in the
company for Melanie Griffith and Usher,
Brooke Shields and Jerry Springer, to
name just a few.
Archi Dior collection
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018 | 19
MANUEL HARLAN
Above, Adrienne
Warren starring in
“Tina: The Tina
Turner Musical.”
Top left, Ms. War-
ren with Kobna
Holdbrook-Smith
as Ike Turner. Left,
Cuba Gooding Jr.
and Sarah Soetaert
in “Chicago.”
TRISTRAM KENTON
This stripped-back, ultraslick produc-
tion has become the longest-running
American musical in Broadway history;
its 1997 London iteration bounced from
one West End theater to the next before
calling it quits in 2012.
That closing, it turns out, was tempo-
rary: Here “Chicago” is again, this time
at the Phoenix Theater and with a new-
found celebrity draw in the Oscar win-
ner Cuba Gooding Jr. (He and his fellow
principals are contracted through June
30, with subsequent casting to be an-
nounced.)
A relative theatrical neophyte with
only one Broadway credit, Mr. Gooding
weekend
might seem tailor-made for the part of
the smooth-talking lawyer Billy Flynn.
He recently played O.J. Simpson in a TV
mini-series whose depiction of the me-
dia circus that can be made out of the
American justice system is directly pre-
figured by this musical’s portrait of two
murderous chorus girls, Roxie Hart and
Velma Kelly, in 1920s Chicago.
In fact, Mr. Gooding is the least satis-
fying aspect of a reboot that otherwise
finds Walter Bobbie’s decades-old pro-
duction in shape, with every swiveled
hip calibrated to within an inch of the
finely drilled ensemble’s lives. Mr.
Gooding isn’t called upon to dance
much, and he just about survives the vo-
cal demands of John Kander and Fred
Ebb’s score. But more than once, you
hold your breath to see if the gravel-
voiced performer will hit, and hold, the
necessary note.
There are no such doubts when it
comes to his colleagues, many of whom
have appeared in the show before —
and, in the case of Ruthie Henshall, in
more than one role. London’s original
Roxie, Ms. Henshall later played Velma
and has now graduated to the smaller, if
choice, part of the prison warden Mama
Morton, who partners with Velma on the
song “Class,” a paean to a bygone age
when manners — remember them? —
were seen to matter.
Of the two leading ladies, “Chicago”
veterans both, the Belgian performer
Sarah Soetaert makes for an unusually
hard-edged Roxie, the kewpie-doll killer
who believes in murder as “an art.” You
don’t feel, as you do with the most mem-
orable interpreters of this part, the
tremulous self-discovery that overtakes
Roxie as she joins Velma when showbiz
gives them a second chance.
Velma, Josefina Gabrielle, is a one-
time Roxie who brings to her current as-
signment an age-defying physicality, do-
ing a cartwheel and the splits in quick
succession. Entirely at home in the
shape-shifting demands of Ann Reink-
ing’s choreography, famously patterned
after Bob Fosse’s original moves, she
transmits the razzle-dazzle that is the ti-
tle of one of the score’s best songs.
And if anyone thinks the piece itself
has dated, try this query on for size:
“Are you going to believe what you see
or what I tell you?” asks Roxie’s woebe-
gone victim. At a time when even the
president of the United States owes a
debt to reality TV, the intersection of life
and showbiz celebrated by “Chicago”
nowadays seems all too real. It’s good to
have the show back.

20 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018
weekend
The role
of dreams
BANDERAS, FROM PAGE 1
and passionate that few noticed that his
only English at the time was in the form
of phonetic imitation. He had already
wooed American audiences with his in-
timate portrayal of Tom Hanks’s lover in
“Philadelphia.” He had helped Robert
Rodriguez, another director who loved
him, achieve American acclaim via
“Desperado” and the “Spy Kids” mov-
ies. He had swashbuckled his way into
children’s hearts as a sultry, shod cat in
the “Shrek” spinoff, “Puss in Boots.” He
had directed two movies. He had sere-
naded in “Evita” and simulated French-
kissing with Catherine Zeta-Jones
through two of the most alive iterations
of “Zorro” we’d ever seen. He had se-
duced his way to a Tony nomination for
an energetic “Nine.” He had Angelina
Jolie’ed with Angelina Jolie in “Original
Sin.”
He was a beloved fixture in American
cinema — a masked avenger, a Latin
lover, a mariachi, a matador, an assassin
posing as, oh yes, a mariachi. He bided
his time in masks, with guns, with
swords; as he grew older, he was re-
warded with the chance to play (or al-
most play, in projects that got killed) his-
torical figures: Dalí, Mussolini, Pancho
Villa, and Picasso — and Picasso.
And now it was finally happening. He
was going to play his boyhood hero and
bring pride to Málaga, Spain — his
hometown and Picasso’s. When Mr.
Banderas was growing up, his mother
would stop in front of the house the artist
had been born in every time they passed
it and say, “Look, Antonio.” Now, in the
home he owns in Málaga, he can see that
house from his terrace.
All this, and still, when Mr. Banderas
sat down in a director’s chair next to me,
after I congratulated him on what must
be a significant lifetime achievement, he
shook his head and said I had it wrong.
Sure, it’s great, this work is great. But
it’s not the ultimate. Not yet. “Oh, no,” he
said, leaning in close. “I still don’t think I
have done the thing I will be remem-
bered for.”
In between dropping existential
depth bombs, Mr. Banderas told stories.
He stood with his legs spread apart, his
head thrown back and his arms raised to
the side and said that Salvador Dalí
liked to put honey on his lips after a meal
so that flies would gather and crawl all
over his face. “He found it to be an erotic
experience,” Mr. Banderas said, as he
closed his eyes and played piano fingers
over his lips to imitate the flies. Did you
know that Dalí (allegedly) hated blind
people? He thought they were faking.
“He would cross the street to yell at a
man walking around like . . . ” He felt
around with an imaginary cane and
laughed. “Ay, was he crazy.”
He was dressed for the day’s scenes in
a tank top under a silk button-down shirt
and trousers hiked up to around his
fourth rib. He wore over his bald head a
sparse netted gray wig to match Picas-
so’s thinning hair.
He considered Picasso, really consid-
ered him. They started out so similar,
but it’s easy to confuse details of birth
with the way a man turns out. Take their
treatment of women, for example. Ms.
Hayek said that Mr. Banderas is such a
good friend that when he read her essay
in The New York Times about being har-
assed by Harvey Weinstein, he was
among the first to call her. He wanted to
know why she hadn’t told him what Mr.
Weinstein was doing when Mr. Ban-
deras was making a cameo in her movie
“Frida.”
Picasso, on the other hand, said that
“women are machines for suffering”
and that to him, they were either “god-
desses or doormats.” “Genius: Picasso”
addresses Picasso’s misogyny as much
as his art. In the first episode a woman is
home with his offspring while he makes
out with another lover on the beach, and
the two women get in a fistfight in front
of him while he is painting “Guernica.”
Honestly, I told him, the lionization of
a man who treated women this way is
gross to me.
Mr. Banderas beseeched me to be
more generous. “The problem with Pi-
casso, from my point of view, I don’t
think he abused women, as we under-
stand that now,” he said. “The problem is
DUSAN MARTINCEK/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
that he wanted everything, everything,
“I still don’t all the time.”
think I have He enters a project with maximum
done the thing dedication, maximum research. The
more you know about a character, the
I will be more you can fill the white spaces with
remembered something rich. He asks: Do you know
for.” that Picasso’s grandson Pablito appar-
ently stood on a street near his home in
France with a sandwich board when his
grandfather wouldn’t allow him to visit
him in the final days? Go ahead, ask him
anything.
If you know your subject down to his
soul, then the subject is there when you
need him. “I’ve been with him now for
months every day, and I can just actu-
ally say, ‘O.K., come over here.’ The
ghost comes and just gets in your body
and you’re ‘boom.’”
On the days it doesn’t come so easily,
you can fill the white space with you.
Who is to say where Picasso ends and
Mr. Banderas begins? Who can give that
information, now that he has prepared
for this role three separate times?
Kenneth Biller, a creator of the show,
and Ron Howard, an executive
producer, immediately thought of Mr.
Banderas for the role. They worried that
they’d have to persuade him to play the
part, but he jumped up and agreed to do
it. He had recently happened upon the
first season of “Genius,” with Geoffrey
Rush as Albert Einstein and watched
the whole thing.
CHARLIE GATES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Clockwise from
top: Antonio
Banderas, who has
been a star on two
continents; with
Elena Anaya in
“The Skin I Live
In,” directed by
Pedro Almodóvar;
in “The Mask of
Zorro”; and as
Pablo Picasso.
AMBLIN/COLUMBIA-TRI-STAR
“Genius: Picasso,” which takes place
over 10 episodes, is shot during two
eras: Picasso’s youth, and his old age. In
his younger days, he is played by Alex
Rich. The camera follows Mr. Rich to
show the freneticism of youth. But dur-
ing the old-age scenes, the camera stays
still, like a portrait with Mr. Banderas
entering and leaving it. In those scenes,
it’s Mr. Banderas who supplies the ener-
gy.
How wonderful. How wonderful to
find in your late 50s a character that’s
been so meaningful.
Had Mr. Banderas stayed in Spain,
this would have been an entirely differ-
ent story. He would have continued on
the path Mr. Almodóvar had set for him,
playing men with depth and inner lives.
But he didn’t — he couldn’t.
He grew up going to the theater with
his parents: plays by Lope de Vega, Pe-
dro Calderón de la Barca. He marveled
at theater as an act of civilization. “It
was so beautiful,” he said. “We are all
here and we have an agreement. We’re
going to sit down here and you’re going
to tell me a story and you have to make
me believe it.” He wanted to be on the
other side of the theater. He wanted to be
onstage.
But his parents had seen how artists
were treated under the dictatorship of
Gen. Francisco Franco. Many were ex-
iled. His mother was distraught. “Don’t
be an actor,” she pleaded. “Be something
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
dignified.” He thought maybe he’d be a
soccer player instead.
Then in 1976, the year after Franco
died, an American theater company
came through Málaga with “Hair,” and it
was just over for Mr. Banderas. “Oh, my
God. What is this? What is this beard
and this long hair and this freedom?” he
remembered thinking. He told his par-
ents: “I have to do this.”
In 1981, while sitting at Café Gijón in
Madrid, a man with a red briefcase held
court telling funny stories. Mr. Banderas
had long hair and a mustache for a role
in a play. The man looked at him and
said: “You should do film cinema. You
are very romantic and you have a ro-
mantic face.” Mr. Banderas said: “O.K.
Cool.” Afterward, he asked other pa-
trons if anyone knew who the man was.
“They said to me: ‘He’s called Pedro
Almodóvar.’”
Two days later, Mr. Almodóvar came
to see Mr. Banderas in the play. In the
dressing room afterward, he asked Mr.
Banderas if he wanted to do a movie.
Their first movie was the 1982 comedy
“Labyrinth of Passion,” in which he
plays a terrorist.
They made six more movies together.
He played complex, brooding men —
people with souls. In Spain, for Mr.
Almodóvar, the soul was inherent in the
character. Later, in the United States,
working for American directors, Mr.
Banderas had to create his characters’
souls.
He had a choice. He could go back to
Spain and work with great directors —
the star system there revolves around
auteurs, not actors — and there was no
shortage of deep, complex roles for him.
But it was too late. By 1996, he was
married to Melanie Griffith. They had a
daughter, Stella. He had grown attached
to his stepchildren. The question be-
came one not of artistic fulfillment but of
practicality. “How can I keep my career
here? I’m married here. I live here. I
have to play here.”
And he loved America. “The culture
here.” He shimmered with delight.
“There is something very beautiful
about America, very innocent. Oh, yes.
It’s still new. It’s innocent.”
I expressed some surprise. Over the
course of my time in Hungary with him,
we’d gotten word of the mass school
SONY PICTURES CLASSICS
shooting in Parkland, Fla. America had
become horrifying to me. “Yes,” he said.
“But you guys believe. You believe ev-
erything — even in this moment, you be-
lieve.”
And the innovation! “These people
that invent Googles and Apples and all
these companies, they put heart in the
skies. Elon Musk doing this thing is un-
believable to me.” He knew he was of-
fered jobs that weren’t quite the best,
jobs that had been offered to five or 10
actors before him.
“I cannot play in the same league as
certain American actors, because my
accent didn’t allow me just to play a
banker from New York or an astronaut,”
he said. “So I have to be balancing.”
What could he do? “It was a desert for
Spanish actors.”
But lately, a strange thing has started
happening. He’s not being asked to wear
matador outfits anymore. At the ripe
(but still extremely handsome) age of
57, the roles got better. “They have more
weight, they are more complex, they are
more profound and I enjoy more to play
them, because you can just actually find
many different ways to play,” he said.
“It’s almost like a pot and you can’t stop
putting things in. Before, it was a uni-
form almost. They wanted the heroic,
the epic, the guy.”
Maybe it’s the Hispanic population
coming of age, he wondered. Great num-
bers with advanced degrees and a real
presence in cinema. “Now it’s normal to
see at the Academy Awards Mexican di-
rectors taking Oscars, Spanish actors,
actors from Puerto Rico.”
He subverted America’s attempts to
objectify him. He took artistic risks. He
became adept at infusing soul into one-
note characters (I’m talking what could
have been a throwaway role in “Miami
Rhapsody”; I’m talking the Nasonex
bee).
That’s the thing about Picasso: He
was considered one of the greatest art-
ists of the 20th century, and he was also
prolific. He wasn’t stingy with his tal-
ents. He didn’t think that to practice his
art would be to drain the supply of his
artistry. He knew that was not how
greatness works.
At the end of the day, Mr. Banderas sat
in the makeup trailer as a woman ap-
plied glue remover to his head with a
paintbrush, then pulled at the netting
that hosted the white hair he’d been
..
television
wearing. She did the same for his eye-
brows, where there was a shadow of
stubble. They began to work their fin-
gers at the silicone that covered his face.
He liked to help free himself from it.
Mr. Banderas lives in England now, in
Surrey, about an hour southwest of Lon-
don. He lives there with his girlfriend,
Nicole Kimpel, an investment adviser
he met at Cannes a few years ago.
The truth is, he doesn’t need to be in
America anymore. So many movie
shoots are done in Europe now for tax
reasons. And Ms. Kimpel has an identi-
cal twin sister who lives in Switzerland
whom she can’t bear to be too far away
from.
Stella is off at the University of South-
ern California, studying cinema. Of his
divorce from Ms. Griffith in 2015 he
says: “Melanie is a very generous wom-
an and an excellent mother and a great
lover for many years. But there is a mo-
ment that things were not working, and
before we started damaging each other
we just decided to take that option.”
Here’s the truth about why Antonio
Banderas stayed in the States for so
long. Yes, he got married. Yes, he loved
NASA and the Googles. Yes, he loved the
innocence. But you know what else? He
won’t say it, almost out of fealty to the
country he was born in, but Ms. Hayek
and Mr. Rodriguez will. In Spain, Ms.
Hayek said, “he could not do some of the
action movies. He’d never been on
Broadway.”
In Spain he could do a lot of interest-
ing work. But in the States, he can be an
action star, a comedy hero, a Nasonex
bee, a spy dad. In Spain he could be in
the theater, yes, but in America, he can
be on Broadway. That year he was in
“Nine”? Mr. Banderas said it was his
happiest time in America.
That’s who Antonio Banderas is.
“He’s someone who wants to eat the
world,” Mr. Rodriguez told me.
That’s the thing about being an actor
in America. When you’re famous there,
you’re famous everywhere. Mr. Ban-
deras stayed there because Spain sim-
ply wasn’t big enough for him.
In Hungary, sitting in his makeup
chair in the set of “Picasso,” Mr. Band-
eras said, “It’s hard to look into the mir-
ror and see a doddering old man.” He
didn’t take his eyes off himself when he
spoke. “Picasso is 67 here. I’m two and a
half years away from 60. It’s not so far
away.” He tilted his head, evaluating his
cheek. “It’s scary to visit an age before
you get there. But it’s somehow even
scarier when it’s not that far away.”
About a year ago, Mr. Banderas was
preparing breakfast in his home when
his arm began to hurt. He’d had an ar-
rhythmia issue for years, and one of his
doctors in Los Angeles had told him he
had a blockage in one of his arteries.
He’d been under a lot of stress recently
— the divorce, the move. He filmed sev-
en movies that year. He was smoking.
The pain in his arm was faint, but sud-
denly he felt it in his jaw. That’s when he
knew: He was having a heart attack.
He was in the hospital for just a day.
As the nurse, who was a fan, said good-
bye to him, she said: “Antonio, you’re
going to be very sad. For like a month or
two months you’ll be very sad, because
the hearts hold feelings. And you’re go-
ing to feel like the world is crumbling
around you. Don’t worry, because you
can put it back where it was and be the
happy person that you are and continue
doing your work.”
He didn’t think much of it, but as he
recuperated, he found that he couldn’t
shake his sadness. It engulfed him. It
was like nothing he’d ever felt before.
“Suddenly, you discover at your root lev-
el that it can be like in a second you can
say goodbye.”
But he’s Antonio Banderas, so eventu-
ally the sadness made way for a differ-
ent feeling: inspiration. He was still
here.
The first script he read after his heart
attack was “Life Itself,” written and di-
rected by Dan Fogelman (“This Is Us”).
Mr. Banderas read to the last page and
he knew he’d found his next project, a
drama about intersecting lives in Spain
and America. He was offered the role of
a “normal” character.
During filming, he was different than
usual. “I was not so anxious about what
is going to be the result of this, what is
going to be their opinions. No, it was
about me. It was — well, it’s very genu-
ine, because actually I love this profes-
sion. What about that? I love this profes-
sion.” After that, “things magically start
happening. Picasso came walking into
my life.”
The silicone was now gone from his
face. The hair was, too. He looked like a
beautiful egg. Every day when the
makeup came off, he was relieved to see
that he was still there underneath. It’s
scary to get old. Maybe it’s even scarier
because you still have all the energy in
the world, I suggested, and you feel like
you haven’t done the thing you’ll be re-
membered for yet.
He smiled. I took him too literally, he
said. It’s not that he doesn’t think he’ll be
remembered for what he’s already done.
It’s just that . . . Did he tell me the story
yet about what Dalí supposedly used to
say? “He used to say, ‘I am a very me-
diocre painter for the reason that I don’t
want to die. In fact, I am the best painter
in the world, but I don’t paint a good
painting, because if I paint a good paint-
ing I will die the next day. So I prefer to
be mediocre.’”
He gave me a combination [laughing
with mouth open emoji] and [eye-rolling
emoji]. Ay, was Dalí crazy. Didn’t he
know? Dignity comes when it’s re-
quired. Didn’t he know? Greatness only
gets greater the more it’s practiced. Oh
yes. That’s how greatness works.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018 | 21

living weekend

When
a romance
seems too
easy to trust
She thought that true love should have
all the insecurity of the movie version

Modern Love

BY ALI ELKIN

Recently, Joe and I were watching a

“Black Mirror” episode in which tech-
nology assigns relationship expiry
dates to couples. (It’s “expiry” because
they are British.)
Just as I was wondering how that
might apply to us, Joe said, “Maybe if
you never check the date, you never
get one.” BRIAN REA

Joe and I are engaged, by the way.

But I am plagued by doubt, wondering
if this is right. I look at data on failed
marriages, wanting to fail-proof my
own. I read articles that say criticism
and defensiveness will eat away at a
relationship, and I worry because I am
a rather critical and defensive person.
Contempt, I read, is “the kiss of death,”
and I worry I have some of that, too.
In search of a formula for happiness
and certainty, I sift through “Dear
Prudence,” “Ask Polly” and “Savage
Love.” I examine the marriages of
friends and acquaintances. I scan the
faces in engagement photos for clues.
“How happy are you?” I wonder.
“How certain?” I scour wedding web-
sites for evidence of doubt, but in these
polished places I never find it.
I read online accounts of broken
engagements, identifying signs and
symptoms, my heart pounding the way
it does when I wake up with a stiff
neck and read the meningitis page on
WebMD.
Part of the problem is I met Joe
when I was 22, when I believed the
romantic comedy of my life (based on
“When Harry Met Sally”) hadn’t
started yet. More accurately, I was in
the flashback phase of that rom-com:
Harry and Sally driving from Chicago
to New York together.
For a time, whenever I liked some-
one, I would try to game out the cir-
cumstances that would force us on an
extended road trip, which would set
the stage for us reuniting at some
unimaginable age, like 27. By then my
stock would have risen. I would be
thinner and more successful, possibly
even famous. I would have the neces-
sary collateral to ask for what I
wanted.
I envisioned this scenario with sev-
eral men, not one of whom gave any
indication of being a viable long-term
prospect. There was the guy who said,
“I value our friendship too much” but
would begin pawing at me when we
were alone; the guy I’d go home drunk
with throughout college (but only
when it was his idea); and the guy who
would come to my apartment late at
night to get stoned and lecture me
about Radiohead.
These quasi relationships were
accompanied by hours of texting or
G-chatting that mostly involved me
being an attentive sounding board. The
challenge of trying to impress thrilled
and unnerved me.
I would hungrily read back through
our witty exchanges, congratulating
myself on points I had scored. Doing so
would convince me that, as in a rom-
com, I had met the love of my life. Hell,
I’d already slept with him! But it was-
n’t the right time for us to be romanti-
cally involved. We still had at least five
years to go before we would reunite.
(That I envisioned this fantasy with
multiple men seemed like a smarter
bet, diversification.)
In movies, if a man is looking only
for sex, he is a cad. If he wants to talk,
he’s interested in something more. It
took me years to understand that men
can want any combination of sex and
conversation while having zero inter-
est in a relationship.
The scant attention I received from
these men felt safer than asking for
more. Also, it was dramatic: My whole
life was a “Will we or won’t we?”
And then I met Joe at a bar. He
talked to my friends and me and asked
for my phone number. Watching him
tipsily jab at his screen, I told him to
I read of call my phone to make sure he had
broken typed correctly. He hadn’t, so I typed it
engagements, in. He texted two days later.
Joe fell into my lap so casually that I
my heart thought nothing of it. I considered
pounding the dating him to be a good use of time
way it does while I worked on becoming that more
when I wake valuable person for someone else.
up with a stiff Joe was 30, I learned. We each sus-
pected an age difference, but this
neck and read eight-year gulf surprised us. I had
the meningitis grown up on Disney Channel Original
page on Movies and the earliest viral videos.
WebMD. Joe had seen almost every network
sitcom — “Cheers,” “Malcolm in the
Middle,” you name it. We overlapped
on “Friends.” He would say things like,
“Did you know ‘Roseanne’ had one of
the first same-sex kisses on network
television?” I had not.
We talked about our favorite movies
and I told him the truth, that mine was
the 1994 “Little Women” adaptation. I
told him how much I loved the Olive
Garden and lamented that the Times
Square location was too busy and
expensive. He told me about his dogs,
a Boston terrier (Pez) and a miniature
dachshund (Little Buddy).
On the phone to my mother during
those early weeks, I told her that Joe
seemed to like me an unprecedented
amount, and this filled me with a sur-
prising dread. “It seems too easy,” I
told her.
There was no drama with us. No
“Will we or won’t we?” Just a “We
are.”
“Let it be easy,” my mother said.
I worried because my text conversa-
tion with Joe rarely fell into that rapid-
fire rhythm I found so thrilling. But I
also wasn’t performing for him.
In July, we went to Vermont on our
first vacation together. One evening,
after we had done the requisite frolick-
ing in nature, I asked Joe what he
wanted for dinner.
He looked at me slyly and said,
“How about the Olive Garden?”
I threw my arms around him.
On the drive, I burped in front of him
for the first time. I remember it hap-
pening in slow motion, including the
part where I cried out “No!” right
after.
When I recovered, Joe told me that
the first night he stayed at my apart-
ment, I fell asleep on his chest and
drooled all over him.
Joe said “I love you” first. I said it
back, then retreated into my own head.
In all of my scheming before Joe, I had
never conceived of a situation in which
I would have the power to break some-
one’s heart. I had assumed the man
would have that power and my life
would be a constant charm offensive to
stop him from using it. I thought when
someone said “I love you” to me, it
would be the result of my hard work or
even trickery.
“What’s going on in that dome of
yours?” Joe asked as we stood on my
building’s fire escape. This is truly how
he speaks.
“I don’t want to say it,” I said.
“You can say it.”
“I’m freaked out because I can imag-
ine a day that I wind up hurting you,” I
said. “Not that I have any plans, but
the potential exists, and I can’t imagine
it the other way around.” This is truly
how I speak.
Joe said: “There’s an episode of
‘Malcolm in the Middle’ where Lois is
upset because Hal loves her a little
more than she loves him. He tells her
it’s O.K. because two people can’t love
each other that much. If they did,
they’d never leave the house.”
We had one big fight that first year. I
was dusting a ceiling fan in his apart-
ment and he got angry that I was
doing it in his prized Black Sabbath
T-shirt. I stormed out of the apartment
and walked to the subway.
“I guess we’re going to break up,” I
thought. “It’s not like he’s going to
chase me to the F train.” I needed to
refill my MetroCard but had only
pressed the first button when I felt him
tap me on the shoulder.
I’m 27 now, the age I imagined I
would be when one of those guys from
my past would realize I was the One.
In some ways, I am the version of
myself I hoped I would be. I am more
successful, by virtue of being six years
out of college. I’m a little thinner,
though I try to think about that less.
I sometimes wonder how I would do
on the dating market now, imagining
Harry and Sally reunions with those
indifferent men from my past. I’m in
touch with a few of them and, to be
honest, they don’t seem to be pining.
I try to remember that I am worthy
of anyone, but mostly that I am worthy
of Joe. It’s common for a woman to
have that kind of realization at the end
of a movie, to discover she was enough
all along. But what the movies get
wrong is that once the character real-
izes this, she is transformed forever. In
real life, I have to keep reminding
myself.
Ali Elkin, who lives in Brooklyn, is a
researcher for “Full Frontal With
Samantha Bee.”

Was it O.K. to lie to spare
an aging relative distress?
The Ethicist
B Y K WA M E A N T H O N Y A P P I A H
When my beloved 92-year-old mother
became gravely ill and passed away last
May, a first cousin who lives close by
requested that I not tell her 92-year-old
mother (my mother’s ex-sister-in-law)
about the illness (and death) should I
see her in the park. She felt that it
would be too difficult for her mother to
accept and might cause mental and
physical problems. During the summer,
when I did cross paths with my aunt,
she asked me how my mother was.
Hesitating, I said that everything was
just fine. Afterward, I felt bad and
angry that I had lied to my aunt; I felt
she should have been told. My aunt
wasn’t even able to say goodbye to my
mother during her illness or to attend
the funeral and memorial services. I
promised myself that should I see my
aunt again, I would inform her in a very
compassionate way about my mom’s
passing.
It took a few months, but I did see my
cousin with her mother in the park. My
aunt asked about my mother, and my
cousin interrupted and said that my
mother was fine. I corrected her and
told my aunt that unfortunately this
was not true. I told her that I was sorry
to have to inform her in this manner,
but my mother passed away a few
months ago and it hurt me not to be
able to pass on this information.
The next day I wrote to my aunt
explaining that I was sorry to have
withheld the information for so long. I
told her that my mother lived a wonder-
ful life surrounded by those she loved. A
few weeks later, my cousin stopped me
in the park and told me I was a jerk to
have done this. I told her that death is a
normal part of life and her request of
me was unjust and selfish. I wished her
a good life and walked away.
I believe I acted in the right manner.
My cousin will probably never speak to
me again. Being a person who avoids
confrontation, I find this uncomfortable.
Could I have handled this situation
better? Name Withheld
THERE ARE PEOPLE with dementia who
can be upset by being told sad news
but, perhaps because they lack short-
term memory, can’t really assimilate it.
It’s simply unkind to tell such people
the same painful truth over and over
again, and it may be best not to tell
them even once. But it sounds as if
your aunt was in a good position to
take in the fact that your mother had
died. In these circumstances, it was
disrespectful to deny her this informa-
tion. People who have the capacity to
absorb information are entitled to the
truth about things that matter to them.
Your cousin was wrong to lie to her
mother, therefore, and wrong to ask
you to play along, though she no doubt
did this with the best of intentions. But
you could certainly have handled the
situation better. Once you realized that
these lies were wrong, you should have
told your cousin that you weren’t going
to participate in the deception any
longer — and told her before you pas-
sed along the sad news. As it was, you
weren’t just delivering the news about
your mother; you were telling your
aunt that her daughter had been lying
to her. You were right to show your
aunt consideration and respect, but
you could have tried to spare some too
for your misguided but well-meaning
cousin.
TOMI UM
I am the youngest of three children and
the only daughter. My siblings are both
in their late 60s, and both my parents
have died within the last few years.
When I was a child, my mother told me
often that she had pined for a daughter,
and I have always been aware that this
desire was the reason she had a third
child — me. My brother who was the
second son always believed he was the
least-loved child. Recently I was going
through some old papers when I discov-
ered a letter written to my mother by a
close friend of hers when my mother
was pregnant with this brother. In the
letter, my mother’s friend refers to the
unborn child by my name, implying that
my mother was so sure that this baby
was a girl that my mother had already
named her. To me, this validates the
feeling my brother has always had that
his parents valued his siblings more.
My dilemma is whether to show my
brother the letter. On the one hand I
worry that he will be hurt and that it
will reopen an old wound. On the other
hand, it illuminates the truth of his
experience. Should I show my brother
the letter or keep silent? Name With-
held
we’ve seen, think that
SOME PEOPLE, AS
it’s better to live without painful knowl-
edge when there’s nothing you can do
about it. If your mother were still alive,
your brother could have taken this up
with her. Let me say I’m not confident
that such a conversation would have
yielded much of value; for one thing,
given how different children are, it’s
hard to evaluate claims that a parent
didn’t treat them equally. But at this
point, there’s not even a possibility of
seeking resolution in this way.
Once again, though, people are
entitled to be in touch with the truth
about things that matter to them. Your
discovery, you feel, confirms your
brother’s sense about how he was
valued. Maybe it will prove helpful to
him. (He may have felt guilty about
resenting your parents because he
wasn’t sure he had judged them fairly,
and the letter may relieve some of that
guilt.) Maybe it will, as you fear, prove
hurtful. The fact is, it’s hard to predict
how he’ll process it, and it’s not up to
you to do so. Don’t try to manage his
access to the truth. Let him see the
letter.
I work at a nonprofit where a majority
of our staff works far more than 40
hours a week. We are allowed to work
from home one day a week. One of my
co-workers has told me that when she
works from home, she is actually run-
ning errands and taking care of her
kids and that she will sometimes work
at night to make up for it. Since I and
many of our co-workers already work
many nights and weekends, this doesn’t
seem fair. She is often unavailable when
she is supposed to be working.
This co-worker is currently on ma-
ternity leave, but we’ve learned that she
will be allowed to work from home
indefinitely when her maternity leave
ends. I fear that she is going to pull
even less of her weight and that the rest
of us will have to cover for her. To com-
plicate matters, I suspect she gets this
leniency because she is friends with one
of our bosses. This is not the first time
new rules have been created to accom-
modate her, but not others in a similar
situation.
On the one hand, I don’t want to get
involved — if she wants to be dishonest,
that’s up to her. On the other hand, her
lies have a direct impact on me; I have
to work more because she’s working
less. Our clients are also affected, and
because we are dealing with legal mat-
ters, her dishonesty may be a breach of
her ethical responsibilities to them.
Should I stay quiet? If not, how can I
talk to management about this? Name
Withheld
IT WOULD, I agree, be good for your
organization and for your clients to
remedy this situation. If your nonprofit
has an H.R. department, you can start
there, and there’s always the board,
which is charged with advising and
supervising management. Consider
contacting a board member if there’s
one you know and trust, or send the
board the relevant information —
perhaps anonymously, if you’re wor-
ried about retaliation. The board
should be concerned that members of
the staff feel they cannot bring such
issues to management. And the board
should care about staff morale and
efficiency and doing the best for your
clients, all of which are at stake.
Taking such measures may not be
easy. But if you stay quiet, you’re con-
doning an abuse of the system. Be-
cause it can be hard to estimate how
long a legal task will take, clients and
colleagues count on staff members to
pull their weight. Your colleague isn’t
producing at the rate she would were
she working the hours she has been
paid for. What’s more, her special
treatment unfairly imposes burdens on
others, and it creates a bad atmos-
phere, which can itself affect produc-
tivity. Leniency goes too far when it
promotes dishonesty, unfairness and
disaffection.
Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philos-
ophy at N.Y.U. He is the author of “Cos-
mopolitanism” and “The Honor Code:
How Moral Revolutions Happen.”

22 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018
weekend
Eco-friendly lifestyle
grid, using solar panels for electricity,
holding tanks for water and a septic tank
for sewage. There is also a backup gaso-
line generator.
The solar panels are perched on the
(appliances included)
roof of a detached two-car carport, and
there is a utility room for the batteries
and solar power system. The washer
and dryer and water heater are under
the house, where there is also a half
bath.
swimming pool on the ground level. Cellphone coverage and a wireless in-
House Hunting In . . . The entrance to the house is reached ternet connection are available on the
Belize by a wood staircase to the upper-level property, according to Macarena Rose,
deck. The two bedrooms are at opposite the majority owner of Keller Williams
BY KEVIN BRASS ends of the house, with the kitchen and Belize, the company marketing the
dining area in the center multisided property. The current owners offer the
AN ‘OFF THE GRID’ TREEHOUSE room. One of the rooms connecting a house for short-term rentals, typically
IN WESTERN BELIZE bedroom to the kitchen is used as an of- for $200 to $350 a night.
$1.499 MILLION fice; the other serves as a living room. The property, which is reached by an
This elevated two-bedroom, two-and-a- Each bedroom has a dressing area unpaved road, is landscaped with fruit
half-bath wood house wraps around a and and en suite bathroom with a and nut trees. The Mahogany Hall Re-
100-year-old bullet tree. Built in 2012, it shower made from local slate. There is a sort, a boutique hotel with a restaurant,
is on a 1.9-acre lot about six miles from claw-foot porcelain bathtub in one bed- is about two miles from the property. It
the town of San Ignacio, which is best room. is about three miles to the small town of
known among tourists for its jungle eco- The kitchen has hardwood cabinets, Bullet Tree Falls. San Ignacio, the big-
lodges and Maya ruins. stainless steel appliances and a com- gest city in the area, is about a 15-minute
The 2,000-square-foot house is de- mercial-grade stove. The kitchen is sep- drive from the property and has a varie-
signed with three multisided rooms with arated from the dining area by a counter ty of small stores and restaurants.
wood-beam cathedral ceilings, con- and a built-in bench. There are air-con- The nearest international airport is
nected by two rectangular rooms. The ditioning units in the kitchen and in each the Philip S. W. Goldson International
exterior is palmetto wood; doors and bedroom. The furniture is part of the Airport in Belize City, about a two-hour
windows in the house are mahogany price, including a pool table in the patio drive from the property.
and the floors are a mix of hardwoods. area on the ground level.
The house has a zinc roof and is sur- Although the house was connected to MARKET OVERVIEW
rounded by a terrace with views of the the city power subsystem in 2015, it is Belize was once a British colony and the
Mopan River and local hills. There is a designed to operate completely off the official language is English, which
makes it an attractive destination for
tourists, retirees and second-home buy-
ers from Britain and North America.
The most popular tourist spot is the is-
land of Ambergris Caye, which is about a
half-mile from the world’s second-larg-
est barrier reef.
Tourism to Belize has grown in recent
The home can years, which has helped fuel home sales,
operate completely agents said. The number of overnight
off the grid, using tourist arrivals increased by 10.8 per-
solar panels for cent in 2017, from a year earlier, after
electricity, holding growing 13 percent in 2016, according to
tanks for water the Belize Tourism Board.
and a septic tank There is no multiple listing service or
for sewage. The central sales database in Belize, which
master bedroom, makes it hard to track sale data. But the
at right, has a number of sales and prices have been
claw-foot porcelain steadily rising in recent years, agents
tub. The dining said.
room, below right, In the inland Cayo District, where this
is separated from home is, Ceiba Realty Belize sold more
the kitchen by a property in 2017 “than in the five previ-
counter. ous years combined,” said Joshua Lohr,
an agent at the firm.
Cayo typically attracts people inter-
ested in an eco-friendly lifestyle, agents
said. Large parcels of land are available
in remote jungle areas.
Riverfront property is most in de-
mand, Mr. Lohr said, adding that prices
for some properties close to rivers had
jumped 25 percent since 2015.
Cayo homes are a bargain compared
with those in Belize’s popular coastal
destinations. Prices in the San Ignacio
area range from $85 to $125 a square
foot, compared with $150 a square foot in
the coastal town of Placencia and $180 a
square foot on Ambergris, Ms. Rose
said.
Buyers in the Cayo district are often
“looking for more bang for their buck,”
she said.
The decline in the value of the Canadi-
an dollar hurt the market, making it
more expensive for Canadians to buy
property in Belize, said John Acott, an
BENEDICT KIM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
agent in Cayo with Re/Max Belize Prop-
erty Center. “Last year for me was a lit-
tle mediocre,” Mr. Acott said. “But this
year is much better.”
Belize should get a boost from recent
announcements that the international
hotel chains Marriott and Four Seasons
are planning to open their first hotels in
the country, said Brittany McCann, an
agent with Belize Sotheby’s Interna-
tional Realty. International chains are
still a rarity in Belize.
“It means a lot more marketing dol-
lars” for Belize, Ms. McCann said.
WHO BUYS IN SAN IGNACIO
About 75 percent of Ms. Rose’s clients
are from the United States and about 15
percent from Canada, with the rest a
mix of Europeans and locals.
About 80 percent of Mr. Acott’s clients
are from the United States, primarily
seniors taking advantage of Belize’s re-
tirement program, which offers a resi-
dency visa and tax breaks. But agents
said that Cayo was starting to attract
more families and younger buyers.
Buyers are increasingly looking for
income-producing properties, such as
farms and guest lodges, Mr. Lohr said.
“As recently as two years ago, most
buyers wanted a place to retire and slow
down,” Mr. Lohr said. “Now most buyers
are looking for investment opportuni-
ties hoping to tap into the growing tour-
ism and rental markets.”
BUYING BASICS
There are no restrictions on foreigners
buying property in Belize. Foreign pur-
chases must be approved by the Belize
Central Bank, but the process is typi-
cally a formality, said Ryan Wrobel, an
attorney in Belize.
Belize follows English common law,
making the procedures and protections
for buyers similar to those in Britain or
the United States. “It’s a very simple
closing process,” Ms. McCann said. “It
doesn’t require tons of paperwork.”
Agents recommend hiring a lawyer,
who can handle the preparation of docu-
ments and confirm the title. Buyers typi-
cally place a 10 percent deposit when a
contract is signed; escrow accounts are
used to hold funds.
Mortgages are available, but usually
cover only 40 percent to 70 percent of
the purchase price, and the rates are
typically much higher than in the United
States. Most transactions are in cash,
Mr. Wrobel said.
LANGUAGES AND CURRENCIES
English; Belizean dollar (1 Belize dollar
= $0.50)
TAXES AND FEES
Last year the Belize government raised
the stamp tax on property sales by for-
eigner buyers to 8 percent of the sale
price from 5 percent. Lawyer fees are
typically about 2 percent to 4 percent of
the sale price, Mr. Wrobel said. Agent
fees are typically 6 percent to 8 percent
of the price and paid by the seller, he
said. Filing and registration fees typi-
cally add $500 to $1,000, he said.
The annual property tax on this prop-
erty is about $15.
CONTACT
Macarena Rose, Keller Williams Belize,
+501-727-565-1507;
kellerwilliamsbelize.com
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
real estate
Towers
that twist
as they rise
BY TIM MCKEOUGH
Standing on the High Line in New York
City recently while surveying the
twisted concrete structure rising out of
the ground for his latest building, the XI,
the architect Bjarke Ingels said, “It’s a
lot more dramatic in real life, huh?”
His client Ziel Feldman, the chairman
and founder of HFZ Capital Group, said
with a smile, “You’re not changing your
mind, are you?”
Mr. Feldman knew it was already too
late for major changes. Construction is
well underway on the XI (the Eleventh),
a mixed-use development at 76 11th Ave-
nue in New York City that is transform-
ing a full city block between 10th and
11th Avenues, and West 17th and West
18th Streets, directly south of the Frank
Gehry-designed IAC Building.
With Bjarke Ingels Group, HFZ is de-
veloping a project that aims to establish
its own neighborhood. On the large,
western portion of the site, there will be
two travertine-clad towers, which twist
and shift proportions as they rise, along
with a lower building on the southwest
corner connected by an enclosed glass
bridge.
The westernmost tower, rising 36
floors and about 400 feet, will have 149
condos with interiors designed by the
New York firm Gabellini Sheppard. The
east tower will rise 26 floors and about
300 feet and contain a Six Senses hotel
on the lower floors and 87 condos from
the 11th floor up, all designed by the
Paris firm Gilles & Boissier.
The lower building will serve as a yet-
to-be-determined art space and Six
Senses spa and club facilities. At the
center will be a porte-cochere and court-
yard with plantings, designed by the
Swiss landscape architect Enzo Enea.
Underneath the High Line, Mr. Ingels
is planning pavilions with restaurants
and retail stores, leading to a park on the
eastern edge of the site designed by
Field Operations and Diller Scofidio +
Renfro, which HFZ is developing with
Friends of the High Line as a street-level
extension of the popular elevated walk-
way.
“Our whole idea is to create a resort Two towers being
environment in an urban setting,” said built in New York
Mr. Feldman. “We have all the natural City go to great
resources — the water, the park, the lengths to offer
High Line.” (The High Line is an elevat- views. The “whole
ed park strip created from an aban- idea is to create a
doned railroad spur.) resort envi-
Mr. Ingels said he had designed ronment in an
twisted towers to maximize desirable urban setting,” a
views for residents inside, by allowing developer said.
RENDERINGS BY DBOX FOR HFZ CAPITAL GROUP
the buildings to peek around each other
and neighboring structures.
“We minimized the width of the tower
on the river, on the lower levels,” said
Mr. Ingels, describing the west tower,
which has a narrower base than top
when seen from 11th Avenue. “But then
as it rises, it expands, and at the top, it
occupies the full western facade.”
The eastern tower twists in the oppo-
site way, he added, maximizing lower-
floor views east and west, to the High
Line and Hudson River, but then pri-
oritizing views north and south over the
city at the top.
Inside the west tower apartments,
“There’s a real emphasis on natural ma-
terials, to reflect natural elements em-
bedded throughout the building,” said
Kimberly Sheppard, a partner at
Gabellini Sheppard. The materials in-
clude wide-plank oak floors, gray larch
wood Bulthaup kitchen cabinets with
White Princess quartzite counters, and
master bathrooms with walls clad in Taj
Mahal quartzite with a leather-textured
finish.
The amenity package includes a
4,000-square-foot fitness center with a
75-foot-long pool, a lounge and gallery in
the glass bridge, a wine tasting room, a
social lounge with billiards tables, a teen
room and a children’s playroom, in addi-
tion to priority access to Six Senses.
Sales are scheduled to begin on May 7,
with the establishment of a sales gallery
with an immersive installation by the
designer Es Devlin at 25 Little West 12th
Street. One-bedrooms will start at $2.8
million, two-bedrooms at $3.9 million,
three-bedrooms at $6.5 million, four-
bedrooms at $9 million and half-floor
penthouses at $25 million. The target
completion date, said Mr. Feldman, is
the last quarter of 2019.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
travel
An urban jewel
in a compact setting
An exhilarating blend of cultures
weaves its way through the largest city
on temperate and lush Vancouver Island
36 Hours
Victoria, British Columbia
BY SUZANNE CARMICK
This compact, eminently walkable city,
set amid the breathtaking beauty and
bounty of Vancouver Island, is lauded as
one of the world’s top small urban desti-
nations. Beyond the picture-perfect
downtown waterfront, British Colum-
bia’s capital, Victoria, is an exhilarating
blend of cultures: Canadian and First
Nations, Chinese and European (espe-
cially British). There are three universi-
ties, thriving arts and cultural institu-
tions, significant historic preservation, a
celebrated local food scene and Cana-
da’s mildest climate: That means year-
round forest visits, biking and golf; gar-
dens galore; even beehives downtown
(at the Fairmont Empress hotel; atop
the Harbour Air floating terminal).
There is wildness too: “bear jams” dis-
rupting traffic, cougar sightings and
soaring eagles, towering ancient trees,
log-strewn beaches and distant snowy
peaks.
Friday
Early days 3 p.m.
The blocks north of the Empress and
west of Douglas Street, including China-
town, comprise the Old Town. Start at
Bastion Square and Wharf Street, over-
looking the harbor, where James Doug-
las founded Fort Victoria in 1843 as an
outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
This area became the heart of com-
merce, industry and government,
swelling in size after the 1858 Fraser
Gold Rush. Next to the Old Victoria
Customs House is a grassy overlook
with a display telling the history of
British settlement and the indigenous
Lekwungen people. Check out the lively
Bastion Square pedestrian area of
shops, markets, restaurants and cafes;
then, on Government Street, browse
through Munro’s Books, situated in a
century-old bank, and founded in 1963
by the Nobel Prize-winning Canadian
writer Alice Munro and her then-hus-
band. Detour through Trounce Alley
(note the 125-year-old gaslights), then
walk east on Fort Street to La Taqueria
to snack on tacos amid festive music and
colorful tiles. A juicy carnitas taco with
pickled red onions and salsa is 3 Canadi-
an dollars, or about $2.35, and a Baja fish
taco with cabbage, salsa and chipotle
mayonnaise is 6 dollars; wash it down
with Mexican fruit soda or local beer.
Seven modern On the waterfront 6 p.m.
gallery spaces The Inner Harbour is where seaplanes,
adjoin an 1889 water taxis, kayak outfitters, whale-
mansion to form watching tours, restaurants and festi-
the Art Gallery of vals can all be found. Sit under the trees
Greater Victoria. and watch the boats and passers-by;
then head to the chateau-style Fairmont
Empress, one of several luxury hotels
built across Canada by the Canadian Pa-
cific Railway Company at the turn of the
20th century. Don’t miss the Q restau-
rant and bar, with its coffered ceiling,
gold and purple accents and portraits of
Queen Victoria. An elaborate British tea
is served daily in the spacious lobby. The
nearby majestic Parliament buildings
were erected in 1898 to enhance the cap-
ital’s profile after Vancouver became the
railway’s western terminus. Open daily
for touring, they are spectacularly illu-
minated at night. Thunderbird Park on
Belleville Street is a quiet spot among
the trees, where a regional First Nations
house and totem poles were recreated
by the Kwakwaka’wakw master carver
Mungo Martin in the 1950s.
The art of dining 8 p.m.
Stepping inside Little Jumbo feels like a
warm embrace: The exposed brick,
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018 | 23
weekend
aged wood and glowing copper ceiling
take you back in time. The restaurant,
which has received a number of acco-
lades, including for its design, food and
drinks, is a homage to two New York
City saloon owners in the 1860s who
championed the art of dining and mixol-
ogy. Dinner for two — try the warm Hal-
loumi cheese salad, spicy Fernet-
roasted nuts and grilled lingcod — in-
cluding choice British Columbian wines,
costs about 130 dollars.
Saturday
Urban oasis 9 a.m.
Fol Epi bakery is known for its wild-
yeast breads, made from milled-on-site
organic flours and baked in brick ovens.
Choose from an array of loaves, pastries
and quiches, then think ahead to a pack-
able lunch of sandwiches. Walk down
Douglas Street to Beacon Hill Park:
This 200-acre oasis is to Victoria what
Central Park is to New York City. The
landscape varies from manicured and
natural gardens to forest, swampland, PHOTOGRAPHS BY EMA PETER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
lakes, Garry oaks and camas fields, and
it includes a children’s farm and a 127- to teach Chinese language classes. rave reviews for its organic, local menu. Drive up the coast 1 p.m. The 19th-century
foot totem pole. Great blue herons nest Climb the stairs to the top floor of the Now the restaurant serves brunch, with Beyond the cemetery, Dallas Road takes Old Victoria
in the towering firs and peacocks strut; Yen Wo Society building to see the oldest hearty buckwheat and rye pancakes, other names but continues along the Customs House in
relax and listen to birds fussing and active Chinese temple in Canada. egg dishes (cured salmon scramble with dramatic rocky coast through neighbor- Victoria, British
fountains gurgling. Make time to tour fennel, capers and cream cheese), hoods such as upscale Oak Bay, where Columbia.
the nearby Emily Carr House (6.75 dol- Down to earth dinner 8 p.m. house-made lamb sausage and pork you’ll find art galleries and British-style
lars); the Victoria-born painter of Olo (meaning hungry in Chinook) belly, kale and mushroom Benedict, and pubs and teahouses. Stop at Willows
forests and First Nations scenes spent serves up serious fare with a nod to the even fried oysters (9 to 21 dollars). Beach for a walk or a swim, then contin-
her childhood gamboling in the park. region’s cultural diversity. The space is ue north past the University of Victoria
comfortable and rustic, with warm light Royal BC museum 11 a.m. to Mount Douglas Park. You can hike or
Along Dallas Road noon emanating from hanging spheres of You could spend hours in this stellar re- drive up; either way, the panoramic
This scenic stretch on the southern loosely wound wooden strips. A recent pository of natural and human history, view is remarkable: across Haro Strait
shore of the city, from Fisherman’s meal included crisp Hakurei turnip sal- with its singular collection of British Co- to the San Juan Islands, toward down-
Wharf to beyond Ross Bay Cemetery, ad, garganelli pasta with a meaty sauce, lumbia First Nations archaeological ma- town, or across rural Saanich. Hungry
draws walkers, joggers, bikers and and a dreamy dessert (rhubarb, salm- terials, as well as provincial archives. again? Head back to town for Foo Asian
dogs. Have a picnic, clamber down to the onberries, elderberry ice cream, fennel The First Peoples gallery includes a to- Street Food, where a hearty, steaming
beach or simply marvel at the water macaron), with local wine (about 140 tem hall and ceremonial house, an inter- bowl of curried noodle stir fry with pork
views and roadside homes. Start at Og- dollars for two). active language display and a collection and shrimp, prepared while you watch,
den Point, where interpretive kiosks tell of Argillite (black shale) carvings from costs 14 dollars. Alternatively, the
about the Breakwater and the Unity Haida Gwaii, while the Old Town recre- charming Venus Sophia Tea Room
Wall murals painted on both sides, de- Sunday ates period streetscapes and trades — a serves organic teas and sweets —
picting Coast Salish First Nations cul- cannery, hotel, sawmill — even the 1790s Cream Earl Grey with scones, cream
ture. Walk out to the lighthouse, watch- Brunch for breakfast 9 a.m. ship quarters of George Vancouver. Ad- and jam costs 14 dollars — and vegetari-
ing for sea otters and seals. Farther east, When it opened in 2016, Agrius garnered mission: 17 dollars. an lunch items.
past Clover Point, cross the road to Ross
Bay Cemetery. This rambling, peaceful
resting place of many of Victoria’s nota-
ble citizens is also where you’ll find
some of the city’s oldest heritage trees,
cuttings from which were planted all
over the young city.
To the garden 2 p.m.
From the cemetery, head to the exqui-
site Abkhazi Garden, tucked away on a
quiet block behind rhododendrons and
Garry oaks. The tranquil gardens, with
their several distinct outdoor “rooms,”
were designed to harmonize with the
rocky glacial outcroppings and native
trees on the hilly property, which in-
cludes rock ponds (with mallards and
turtles) and the 1950s Modernist sum-
This April, The New York Times will convene
the new Art Leaders Network, a select
group of the world’s most distinguished art
A SUMMIT experts and influencers—dealers, gallery
owners, museum directors, curators, auction
FOR INNOVATORS executives and collectors—to define and
assess the most pressing challenges and
AND EXPERTS opportunities in the industry today.
Through provocative interviews and
SPEAKERS INCLUDE
riveting discussions, senior New York Times
AI WEIWEI PAMELA J. journalists will explore myriad topics, from
Artist JOYNER the impact of economic events on the arts
to the outlook for galleries in the era of the
Founding Partner
JAMES Avid Partners LLC
mega-dealer, from the future of museums in
this technological age to the undiminished
RONDEAU
President and Eloise W. Martin MICHAEL fascination with contemporary art, and
much more.
Director GOVAN
Art Institute of Chicago This invitation-only gathering will take place
merhouse and former home (now tea- C.E.O. and Wallis Annenberg
house) of the couple whose love story Director in Berlin, a city whose story of renaissance
started it all. Suggested fee: 10 dollars AMY Los Angeles County Museum and reinvention mirrors the essence of this
(includes guide). CAPPELLAZZO of Art groundbreaking event.
Executive Vice President and
Afternoon art 4 p.m.
Chairman, Global Fine Arts Division THADDAEUS
At the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria,
seven modern gallery spaces adjoin an
Sotheby’s ROPAC
1889 mansion that once served as the Founder
museum. On permanent display are DOMINIQUE Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
works by Emily Carr and an impressive LÉVY
Asian collection and garden. There are
Partner JULIÁN
amber and ivory carvings, a Japanese
Shinto shrine and a Chinese Ming dy-
Lévy Gorvy ZUGAZAGOITIA
nasty bell presented to Victoria in 1903. Menefee D. and Mary Louise APPLY TO ATTEND
Admission is 13 dollars. Blackwell Director and C.E.O.
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art ARTLEADERSNETWORK.COM
Chinatown 6 p.m.
The 19th-century gold rushes and Cana-
dian Pacific Railway construction drew FOUNDING SUPPORTER HEADLINE SPONSOR
thousands of Chinese immigrants to
Victoria, where they settled above John-
son Street. Today, Canada’s oldest Chi-
natown is a National Historic Site, a
small, colorful (especially red, for luck), OFFICIAL WINE OFFICIAL CHAMPAGNE VENUE
SILVER SPONSOR BRONZE SPONSORS PARTNER PARTNER PARTNER
vibrant community of narrow streets
and alleyways, shops and restaurants,
beyond the resplendent Gates of Har-
monious Interest. The Victoria Chinese
Public School, built in 1909, is still used
 ..
24 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, APRIL 21-22, 2018 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

TIME , A HE RMÈS OB JECT.

Carré H
Time, square like a Hermès scarf.