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Elon Musk Moves to End $44 Billion Deal to Buy Twitter

The Far-Right Christian Quest for Power: ‘We Are Seeing Them Emboldened’

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The Mayor Who Never Sleeps

来源： 新闻播报
Elon Musk Moves to End $44 Billion
Deal to Buy Twitter
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Credit...Susan Walsh/Associated Press

In a regulatory filing on Friday, Mr. Musk said Twitter was in “material breach”
of the acquisition agreement.

SAN FRANCISCO — Less than three months ago, Elon Musk, the world’s
richest man, struck a blockbuster $44 billion deal to buy Twitter. He proclaimed
that the company had “tremendous potential.”

Since then, Mr. Musk has changed his tune. He sniped at Twitter’s top
executives. He unleashed tweets taunting the company’s board. He complained
that the social media service had too many spam accounts and that he could not
get insight into the issue. He tweeted a poop emoji to express his displeasure.
And on Friday, Mr. Musk tried to back out of the acquisition altogether.

In a regulatory filing prepared by his lawyers, Mr. Musk said he was terminating
the Twitter deal because of a continuing disagreement over the number of spam
accounts on the platform. He claimed that Twitter had not provided information
necessary to calculate the number of those accounts — which the company has
said is lower than 5 percent — and that it had appeared to make inaccurate
statements.

“Twitter is in material breach of multiple provisions” of the deal agreement, Mr.

Musk’s lawyers said in the filing, and the company “appears to have made false
and misleading representations.”

Mr. Musk’s move sets up what is likely to be an ugly and protracted legal battle
with Twitter. The billionaire signed a legally binding agreement in April to buy
the company for $54.20 a share, waiving due diligence to get the deal done
quickly. The terms included a $1 billion breakup fee if the agreement fell apart
and a clause that gives Twitter the right to sue Mr. Musk and force him to
complete or pay for the deal, so long as the debt financing he has corralled
remains intact.

For Twitter, completing a sale to Mr. Musk is paramount. The company has
struggled for years to grow, and its financial performance has been inconsistent.
No other potential buyer has emerged as a white knight, its advertising business
is under pressure, and it recently slowed hiring and laid off some employees.

Since April, Twitter’s shares have plummeted more than 20 percent, far below
what Mr. Musk offered to buy it. To accept less than the originally negotiated
price could expose Twitter to shareholder lawsuits. And in a sign of how the
company’s investors were banking on the deal, its shares fell 5 percent in after-
hours trading on Friday after Mr. Musk revealed his desire to end the deal.

Ann Lipton, a professor of corporate governance at Tulane Law School, said Mr.
Musk’s disagreement with Twitter over spam accounts might not constitute a
material breach of the deal, meaning it is a legally tenuous argument.

False representations about such accounts are in and of themselves “not grounds
to walk away,” she said. “They’re only grounds to walk away if they are so
overwhelmingly bad that it really just fundamentally jeopardizes the economics
of the deal. That’s a company material adverse effect.”
Yet even if Mr. Musk is forced to go ahead with the deal, sending such a letter
may give him a foothold for cutting the price. His action coincides with a
widespread slide in the value of tech stocks, including Tesla, the electric
carmaker he runs and the main source of his wealth.

Buyers have frequently used the threat of walking away to renegotiate a deal. At
the height of the pandemic, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton sued to back
out of its acquisition of Tiffany & Company. The two parties later shaved about
$420 million off the price.

Mr. Musk, 51, didn’t immediately return requests for comment.

In a tweet, Bret Taylor, Twitter’s chairman, said the company was intent on
seeing the deal through. He alluded to how the matter would end up in court,
saying he was “confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”
Many corporate cases are heard in Delaware, where Twitter is registered. The
company would almost certainly seek an expedited case, given the size of the
deal.

Citing a material adverse effect to end an acquisition has succeeded only once in
Delaware court, Ms. Lipton said. That deal was a $3.7 billion acquisition of
Akorn, a pharmaceutical company, by the health care company Fresenius Kabi
in 2017, she said.

“Twitter has an obligation to fight Musk on this, which they’d need to do

because they have a fiduciary duty to do what’s best for shareholders and
salvage the deal,” said Adam Sterling, executive director of the Berkeley Center
for Law and Business. “I imagine this will go to court and eventually end in
some sort of settlement that allows both sides to save face.”

Mr. Musk, who is famously mercurial, has long winged it in the biggest
moments with his businesses, which also include the rocket company SpaceX.
When he agreed to buy Twitter, he had no plan for the company, people with
knowledge of the situation said at the time. The billionaire was simply enamored
with the platform, where he has more than 100 million followers and which he
used heavily, they said.

Owning Twitter is tricky because the platform faces regulatory scrutiny and is
embroiled in a debate over free speech online. Its business has also faced
difficulties, especially in a competitive market for digital advertising. After Mr.
Musk struck the acquisition agreement, Twitter reported 16 percent growth in
revenue for the first quarter, below the 20 percent it had predicted.

Within weeks, Mr. Musk tweeted that the deal was on hold, saying he wanted
more details about the volume of spam and fake accounts. At one point, he said
striking a deal for Twitter at a lower price was “not out of the question.” He also
responded to tweets from Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s chief executive, who posted
details of how the company detects and fights spam, with a poop emoji.

Behind the scenes, Twitter continued giving Mr. Musk and his team access to
information about its platform, people with knowledge of the situation have said.
Last month, the company agreed to allow Mr. Musk direct access to its
“firehose,” the daily stream of millions of tweets that flow through the
company’s network. Twitter, which has said roughly 5 percent of its accounts
are spam since it went public in 2013, has also said the number is an estimate.

Even so, the number of fake accounts remained a concern for Mr. Musk. For
years before proposing the acquisition, he complained about spam on Twitter
and said the company should do more to authenticate its users. In 2020, he
appeared at a Twitter employee event and said the company should do more to
prevent spam.

Last month, in a six-paragraph letter, Mr. Musk’s lawyers demanded more

information from Twitter about its methods for counting fake accounts and
claimed the firm was “actively resisting and thwarting” his rights. The company
was “refusing Mr. Musk’s data requests” to disclose the number of fake accounts
on its platform, they said. That amounted to a “clear material breach” of the deal,
the lawyers continued, saying it gave Mr. Musk the right to break off the
agreement.

Twitter said on Thursday that it had heightened efforts to detect and block spam
after Russia used fake accounts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The company has added new requirements to its sign-up process and said it used
human auditors to vet its tally of spam accounts. It also said it removed one
million spam accounts each day, and locked millions more per week until the
operators of the accounts passed anti-spam tests.

Inside Twitter, Sean Edgett, the general counsel, sent a memo on Friday
afternoon to employees effectively telling them to keep quiet about the latest
twist in the deal with Mr. Musk.

“Given this is an ongoing legal matter, you should refrain from Tweeting,
Slacking or sharing any commentary about the Merger Agreement,” he wrote in
the memo, which was obtained by The New York Times.

Ryan Mac and Mike Isaac contributed reporting.

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The Far-Right Christian Quest for
Power: ‘We Are Seeing Them
Emboldened’
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 Credit...Tim Gruber for The New York Times

Supported by

Continue reading the main story

By Elizabeth Dias

July 8, 2022

Three weeks before he won the Republican nomination for Pennsylvania

governor, Doug Mastriano stood beside a three-foot-tall painted eagle statue and
declared the power of God.

“Any free people in the house here? Did Jesus set you free?” he asked, revving
up the dozens before him on a Saturday afternoon at a Gettysburg roadside hotel.

Mr. Mastriano, a state senator, retired Army colonel and prominent figure in
former President Donald J. Trump’s futile efforts to overturn the state’s 2020
election results, was addressing a far-right conference that mixed Christian
beliefs with conspiracy theories, called Patriots Arise. Instead of focusing on
issues like taxes, gas prices or abortion policy, he wove a story about what he
saw as the true Christian identity of the nation, and how it was time, together, for
Christians to reclaim political power.

The separation of church and state was a “myth,” he said. “In November we are
going to take our state back, my God will make it so.”

Mr. Mastriano’s ascension in Pennsylvania is perhaps the most prominent

example of right-wing candidates for public office who explicitly aim to
promote Christian power in America. The religious right has long supported
conservative causes, but this current wave seeks more: a nation that actively
prioritizes their particular set of Christian beliefs and far-right views and that
more openly embraces Christianity as a bedrock identity.

Many dismiss the historic American principle of the separation of church and
state. They say they do not advocate a theocracy, but argue for a foundational
role for their faith in government. Their rise coincides with significant backing
among like-minded grass-roots supporters, especially as some voters and
politicians blend their Christian faith with election fraud conspiracy theories,
QAnon ideology, gun rights and lingering anger over Covid-related restrictions.

Their presence reveals a fringe pushing into the mainstream.

“The church is supposed to direct the government, the government is not

supposed to direct the church,” Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican
representing the western part of Colorado, said recently at Cornerstone Christian
Center, a church near Aspen. “I’m tired of this separation of church and state
junk.” Congregants rose to their feet in applause.

A small handful of people who espouse this vision, like Ms. Boebert, have
recently come to power with the blend of Christian messaging and conspiracy
theories that Mr. Trump elevated. Others, like Mr. Mastriano, are running
competitive races, while most have long-shot campaigns and are unlikely to
survive primary races.

Credit...Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

The ascension of these candidates comes amid a wave of action across the
country that advances cultural priorities for many conservative Christians. The
most significant is the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and
end the constitutional right to an abortion — on top of its recent series of
decisions allowing for a larger role of religion in public life, such as school
prayer and funding for religious education. States have also been taking action;
many have instituted abortion bans. A Florida law prohibits classroom
instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in early elementary
school, and Texas has issued an order to investigate parents with transgender
children for possible child abuse.

Some of the candidates see the Supreme Court’s recent string of decisions as a
sign their mission is succeeding. In Georgia, Kandiss Taylor got only 3.4 percent
of the vote in the Republican primary for governor. “I’m glad the SCOTUS
decided to join me on the FRINGE! Jesus, Guns, & Babies,” she said in a tweet,
referring to her own campaign platform.

Declaring the United States a Christian nation and ending federal enforcement of
the separation of church and state are minority views among American adults,
according to the Pew Research Center. Although support for church-state
integration is above average among Republicans and white evangelicals, many
Christians see that integration as a perversion of faith that elevates nation over
God. The fringe vying for power is still a minority among Christians and
Republicans.

Like Mr. Mastriano, some of the candidates pushing that marginal view already
hold lower-level elected positions but are now running for higher office where
they would have more power, said Andrew Seidel, a vice president of Americans
United for Separation of Church and State.

“We are seeing them emboldened,” Mr. Seidel said. “They are claiming to be the
true heirs of the American experiment.”

At the Patriots Arise event, Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to Mr. Mastriano
and the former co-counsel for the Trump campaign’s effort to overturn the 2020
election, told the audience that “what it really means to truly be America first,
what it truly means to pursue happiness, what it truly means to be a Christian
nation are all actually the same thing.”

At Mr. Mastriano’s victory party on primary night, which included Sean Feucht,
an evangelical worship leader who led outdoor events in defiance of pandemic
restrictions, he announced that his faith was going on offense. “If I read articles
where you’re attacking Christians and painting us in a particular picture that is
hateful and intolerant, we won’t have the time of day for you,” Mr. Mastriano
said, to cheers.

Mr. Mastriano also said, “My campaign has no place for hate, bigotry and
intolerance.” Asked in an email to explain his views and thoughts on
representing non-Christians in Pennsylvania, Mr. Mastriano did not respond.

The fight over Christian power in America has a centuries-long history, dating to
the country’s origins, and it is again in sharp relief as the makeup of the nation
shifts. For generations, the United States has been made up mostly of Christians,
largely white and Protestant. In recent years, Christianity has declined at a rapid
pace, as pluralist and secular values have risen.

Since the Jan. 6 attack, which blended extremism and religious fervor, the term
“Christian nationalism” is often used broadly to refer to the general mixing of
American and white Christian identities. Historically, however, Christian
nationalism in America has also encompassed extremist ideologies.

In the 1948 presidential election, for example, a fringe political party called the
Christian Nationalist Party nominated Gerald L. K. Smith, a pastor with pro-
Nazi sympathies, and adopted an antisemitic, anti-Black platform that called for
the deportation of people with whom it disagreed.

Mr. Trump gained power in large part by offering to preserve the influence of
white evangelicals and their values just as many feared that the world as they
knew it was rapidly disappearing.

The fact that Mr. Trump, whom they saw as their protector, is no longer
president intensifies feelings for many conservative Christians that everything is
on the line. About 60 percent of white evangelical Protestants believe that the
election was stolen from Mr. Trump, according to a Public Religion Research
Institute survey conducted late last year. White evangelicals are also the most
likely religious group to be believers in QAnon, according to the survey. QAnon
refers to a complex conspiracy theory involving a Satan-worshiping, child-sex-
trafficking ring, and the F.B.I. has previously warned that some of its adherents
could turn violent.

Across the country, candidates have attempted to appeal to voters by

championing Christian identity in policymaking.
In Arkansas in May, State Senator Jason Rapert, who founded a group called the
National Association of Christian Lawmakers in 2020, lost the Republican
primary for lieutenant governor with 15 percent of the vote. The group offers
model legislation, like prohibiting abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy
and requiring the display of “In God We Trust” at public schools.

In Oklahoma, Jackson Lahmeyer, lead pastor of Sheridan Church, made a long-

shot attempt to unseat Senator James Lankford, who has embodied traditional
social conservatism. Mr. Lahmeyer lost, but got 26 percent of the vote. “Our
Constitution is built upon the Bible,” he said in an interview. He said that he did
not advocate a theocracy and that he supported the separation of church and
state, which he said “had nothing to do with the church staying out of the affairs
of the state.” He also said that “trying to remove Christianity, which this nation
was birthed upon,” from public schools had “absolutely” led to the rise in school
shootings.

In Wisconsin, State Representative Timothy Ramthun is significantly trailing in

a bid for governor that emphasizes his Christian faith and a promise to decertify
the 2020 election. He created a 72-page report of what he sees as evidence of
election fraud, and called his push to fight it “Let There Be Light” after words
attributed to God in the Bible. In an interview, he described his efforts as a
Christian act of truth-seeking. “I don’t lie,” he said. “I work for the Lord first
and foremost.”

In a livestream on Rumble, a video site popular with the far right, Representative
Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, urged followers to be
proud of “Christian nationalism” as a way to fight “globalists,” the “border
crisis” and “lies about gender.” “While the media is going to lie about you and
label Christian nationalism, and they are probably going to call it domestic
terrorism, I’m going to tell you right now, they are the liars,” she said.

Around the country there are active efforts to leverage the growing religious
fervor in the American right into voter turnout. That includes more typical
Republican voter outreach efforts, but also new groups mobilized since President
Biden took office.

In California, Freedom Revival, which started late last year and has used
worship to mobilize evangelicals to see Christian morality as the foundation for
governance, targeted conservative Christians with voter guides of its California
primary endorsements of “freedom-loving candidates” who stand for “traditional
values.” Endorsements included those for Anthony Trimino, a businessman who
felt divinely called in church to run for governor to bring “Christian, moral,
biblical values to Sacramento,” and who did not qualify for the general election;
and Sheriff Chad Bianco of Riverside County, who has previously defended his
past membership in the Oath Keepers, an extremist group, and who did win.

“We continue to support law enforcement officials who recognize and behave as
a shield of the people against drunken tyrannical rule,” Brittany Mayer, one of
Freedom Revival’s founders, said in an email.

A sense of religious grievance is deepening in the ultraconservative wing of the

Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, a
contingent that is increasingly allied with right-wing political causes like the
extreme push to punish women for abortion. At a conference in Memphis this
spring, Rod Martin, one of the founders of the Conservative Baptist Network,
described objections to Christian nationalism as simply a plot by Democrats.

“Let’s demonize patriotism by calling it nationalism and associating that with

Hitler. Ah, now let’s call it white nationalism,” he told the gathering, imitating
how he saw people on the left. “Then we’ll call it Christian nationalist so we’ll
make it sound like you are the ayatollah. It is all designed to demonize you.”

Young male pastors, he predicted, would increasingly adopt the Christian

nationalist label in defiance: “They are not saying they are theocrats; they are
saying they are deplorables.”

In a sign that political operatives see opportunity to capitalize on that feeling of

persecution, the next day a second conference was held in the same auditorium
with an explicit purpose to mobilize the constituencies these pastors represent.

Chad Connelly urged attendees to scan a QR code on the screen so he could

connect their churches to precinct poll-watching efforts, and said his group,
Faith Wins, worked with 312 churches in Virginia to register 77,000 new voters
ahead of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s win. Mark Meadows, former chief of staff for
Mr. Trump, described the importance of America as a Christian nation in
personal terms, with a story of how his 11th great-grandfather escaped religious
persecution on the Mayflower. “You may never see the fruit of your labor, but I
can tell you this: God will use your obedience to change this great nation,” he
said.

Rick Green, who leads a group called the Patriot Academy that runs “biblical
citizenship” training programs in hundreds of churches to instill the belief that
America was founded on Christian values, told the audience he saw “a window
of opportunity right now to convert millions of Americans to the principles of
liberty and to biblical values” because of “the chaos and insanity of the last two
years.”

In some places there are signs that conspiracy theorists and far-right activists are
embracing an explicitly Christian nationalist identity.

Andrew Torba, who founded Gab, a social media platform popular with
extremists, and is from Pennsylvania, wrote on the site that he endorsed Mr.
Mastriano as part of his own efforts to build “a coalition of Christian nationalists
at the local and state levels to help pioneer a grass-roots movement of Christians
in PA to help take it back for the glory of God.” Mr. Torba has written about
building Gab as “a parallel Christian society on the internet.”

The day after a mass shooting in Buffalo, where a white man was charged with
killing 10 Black people after posting a racist screed online, Mr. Torba posted on
Gab, “The best way to stop White genocide and White replacement, both of
which are demonstrably and undeniably happening, is to get married to a White
woman and have a lot of White babies.”

So-called replacement theory is the notion that Western elites want to “replace”
and disempower white Americans.

“Jesus Christ is King of Kings and we are going to lawfully, peacefully and
democratically take back this country and our culture in his name,” Mr. Torba
wrote in an email response to a request for comment. “There is absolutely
nothing you or any of the other powers and principalities can do to stop us.”

Events at times use violent rhetoric and imagery.

The Patriots Arise event, where Mr. Mastriano spoke, opened with a video of
conspiracy theories related to QAnon that prophesied that “control systems”
including “media propaganda, the child trafficking and the slave economy”
would “crumble down.” A robotic voice-over forecast a “great awakening,” and
an image of a guillotine blade accompanied the promise of “executions, justice,
victory.”

When Mr. Mastriano finished, a man in an American flag cowboy hat and shirt
presented him with a long sword, inscribed with “For God and country.”

“Because you’ve been cutting a lot of heads off,” explained Francine Fosdick, a
social media influencer who organized the event and whose website has
promoted a QAnon slogan. “You are fighting for our religious rights in Christ
Jesus, and so we wanted to bless you with that sword of David.”

He raised the gold hilt in his right hand. “Where’s Goliath?” he asked.

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Russia’s Lavrov Is Pariah at Group
of 20 Event, but Only for Some
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Credit...Angelo Carconi/EPA, via Shutterstock

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and other Western foreign ministers refused
to meet with the Russian diplomat, but for many others it was business as usual.

NUSA DUA, Indonesia — He was like a skunk at the tropical resort party,
shunned by many, though by no means all.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, attended a meeting of finance

ministers from the Group of 20 industrialized nations in Bali on Friday, despite
his country’s pariah status in Europe and elsewhere over its brutal war in
Ukraine. His country’s invasion of its neighbor drove two central topics of
discussion at the annual event: global disruptions of food and energy supplies.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken declined to meet with Mr. Lavrov, as did
several other Western foreign ministers. So many attendees refused to pose with
Moscow’s top diplomat that a customary group photograph was canceled.

But in a reflection of why Russia remains able to do business with the outside
world and fund its relentless war machine, Mr. Lavrov sat down with several
ministers from nations that have declined to join the Western-led coalition
against his country. They included diplomats from China, India, Brazil, Turkey,
Argentina and Indonesia.

Mr. Lavrov’s activities were one of several dramatic plotlines at a Group of 20

gathering also shadowed by the announcement of Prime Minister Boris Johnson
of Britain on Thursday that he plans to resign, and the Friday assassination of
Japan’s former prime minister, Shinzo Abe, an act that Mr. Blinken called
“shocking” and “a loss for the world.”

The gathering concluded without a traditional joint communiqué expressing

shared goals, an impossible feat given that Russia would have had to sign off on
any such document.

Mr. Blinken took indirect aim at his Russian counterpart during a plenary
session focused on food and energy insecurity, renewing Western charges that
Russia’s blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports is preventing the export of grain
and other agricultural products, causing shortages and spiraling prices
worldwide.

“To our Russian colleagues: Ukraine is not your country,” Mr. Blinken said. “Its
grain is not your grain. Why are you blocking the ports? You should let the grain
out.” He noted that the United States had committed more than $5 billion to
addressing the problem, while Russia has provided less than .02 percent of all
donations to the United Nations’ World Food Program.

Mr. Lavrov was not listening, however. He had made only a brief appearance at
the session, and delegated Russia’s official speaking role to an unprepared
subordinate, according to a Western official who was in the room.

Better Understand the Russia-Ukraine War

History: Here’s what to know about Russia and Ukraine’s

 relationship and the causes of the conflict.
On the Ground: Russian and Ukrainian forces are using a bevy of
weapons as a deadly war of attrition grinds on in eastern Ukraine.
Outside Pressures: Governments, sports organizations and businesses are
taking steps to punish Russia. Here is a list of companies that have pulled
out of the country.
Updates: To receive the latest updates in your inbox, sign up here. The
Times has also launched a Telegram channel to make its journalism more
accessible around the world.

Earlier, Mr. Lavrov had walked out of a group session during pointed remarks
about Ukraine by Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, according to
Western officials.

In remarks to reporters later, the acerbic Russian diplomat was anything but
cowed, insisting that he enjoyed the moral high ground.

Mr. Lavrov said that “blatant Russophobia” was causing Western nations to
persecute Russia, and that their sanctions were causing collateral damage to the
global economy. He said the United States and other Western nations were
prioritizing harm toward Russia above the G20’s mission of promoting global
economic health.

“The fact that they are not using the G20 for the objective that it was established
for is obvious,” he said.

Mr. Lavrov appeared to dismiss a proposal to create a sea corridor for Ukrainian
grain exports as a NATO plot to insert its warships in the Black Sea. And he
rejected any notion that he was disappointed not to interact with Mr. Blinken,
with whom he last spoke during a mid-January meeting in Geneva that American
officials saw as a last-ditch effort to head off an invasion. The Treasury
Department placed sanctions on Mr. Lavrov a few weeks later, calling him
“directly responsible” for the Feb. 24 military incursion.

“It was not us who abandoned all contacts, it was the United States,” Mr. Lavrov
said on Friday. “And we are not running after anybody suggesting meetings. If
they don’t want to talk, it’s their choice.”

Mr. Lavrov also took an opportunity to disparage Mr. Johnson a day after he said
he would step aside for a new leader. Mr. Johnson had led one the West’s most
aggressive responses toward Russia’s invasion, strongly supporting Ukraine’s
government.

“They were trying to establish this new alliance — the U.K., the Baltics, Poland
and Ukraine,” Mr. Lavrov said, calling it an attempt to create “an English
bridgehead on the continent” after Britain’s exit from the European Union.

“They were saying that NATO isolated Russia,” Mr. Lavrov said. “It was his
party that isolated Boris Johnson.”

The news of Mr. Johnson’s planned resignation led his foreign minister and
potential successor, Liz Truss, to return to London and miss Friday’s program.

While Mr. Lavrov’s mockery of Mr. Johnson and the West was not seconded by
other attendees, it was clear that American and European views toward Russia
and Ukraine did not represent a consensus among the ministers in Bali.

In opening remarks as the event’s host, Indonesia’s foreign minister departed

from Western rhetoric when she said that growing food and energy disruptions
make it the world’s “responsibility to end the war sooner than later and settle our
differences at the negotiating table, not the battlefield.” U.S. and European
officials have generally tried to avoid the perception of pressuring Ukraine into
peace talks with Mr. Putin, whom they doubt would negotiate in good faith.

While Mr. Lavrov may be barred from travel to the U.S. and the European
Union, he moved freely through the luxury hotel that hosted the Bali gathering,
which opened on Thursday.

India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, who was seen strolling and
chatting with Mr. Lavrov through the hotel lobby, said on Twitter that he and
Mr. Lavrov had “exchanged views” on matters including “the Ukraine conflict”
and Afghanistan. India has friendly relations with Moscow, a longtime patron
and source of arms sales. It has also helped Russia weather sanctions by
increasing its purchases of Russian oil, taking advantage of a significant discount
offered by Moscow.

U.S. officials have been frustrated by those purchases and worked to coax India
away from Moscow’s influence and abandon its neutral stance on the war in
Ukraine. But in remarks before meeting with Mr. Jaishankar, Mr. Blinken struck
a wholly positive tone, calling India “a great partner for the United States” on a
range of issues.

Mr. Blinken is likely to raise economic support for Russia during a scheduled
meeting here on Saturday with China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi. Like India,
China has increased its purchases of discounted Russian crude — helping Mr.
Putin maintain handsome oil revenues despite punishing sanctions.

But U.S. officials said that Mr. Blinken, who has not seen Mr. Wang since
October, will also stress the importance of maintaining open lines of
communication with Beijing and cooperating on areas of mutual interest like
climate and global health.

At the end of his day on Friday, Mr. Blinken met jointly with the foreign
ministers of Japan and South Korea, and expressed his shock at Mr. Abe’s
killing, which he called “profoundly disturbing.”

“For the United States, Prime Minister Abe was an extraordinary partner and
someone who clearly was a great leader for Japan, the Japanese people, but also
so admired as a global leader and one who really during his time in office
brought the relationship between our country, the United States, and Japan to
new heights,” he said.

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Louisiana Judge Allows Abortion
Ban to Take Effect
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 Credit...Emily Kask for The New York Times

The fast-changing status in the state is emblematic of the chaotic national

landscape that has unfolded in the two weeks since the Supreme Court
overturned Roe v. Wade.

A judge in Louisiana allowed state laws banning nearly all abortions to take
effect on Friday, lifting an earlier court decision that had temporarily blocked
them.

Abortions were immediately outlawed starting at conception, with an exception

for a threat to the life of a pregnant woman, but with no exceptions for rape or
incest. Under one Louisiana law, abortion providers face possible jail time of 10
or 15 years, depending on when the pregnancy was terminated.

Louisiana is among a number of conservative states that passed abortion

restrictions or bans in anticipation that the Supreme Court would rescind the
constitutional right to abortion, which it did last month. The decision triggered
those state bans, which quickly went into effect. Abortion rights groups,
however, sued in state courts and in some cases won temporary restraining
orders to block the bans, allowing abortions to continue.

In Louisiana, Judge Ethel Julien of the Orleans Parish Civil District Court ruled
on Friday that the court did not have the authority to extend a temporary
restraining order issued on June 27 because the case should have been filed in
the state’s capital, Baton Rouge.

Lawyers representing the abortion providers of Louisiana said the decision was a
temporary setback. The case is expected to be transferred to a Baton Rouge
court, where abortion rights advocates plan to ask for another suspension of the
abortion ban while litigation moves forward.

Read More on the End of Roe v. Wade

‘Pro-Life Generation’: Many young women mourned the Supreme Court

decision to overturn Roe. For others it was a moment of triumph and a
matter of human rights.
A Shift in Demographics?: Cities around the South have challenged the
supremacy of coastal supercities, attracting creative young people. Will
 abortion bans put an end to that?
New York’s Evolving Battle: Before Roe v. Wade, New York City was a
haven for women from across the country. Decades later, a new generation
of advocates has vowed that it will remain so.

Abortion providers in Louisiana had argued in the initial case that the state’s
trigger laws violated the State Constitution, were “void for vagueness” and did
not provide enough specifics about banned actions — such as what exceptions
existed for medical workers trying to save a pregnant woman’s life.

“The case continues on, the work continues on,” said Joanna Wright, one of the
lead lawyers representing a group of abortion rights advocates and a Louisiana
abortion clinic. “This was a decision on a technicality that had nothing to do
with the merits of our case.”

Jeff Landry, attorney general of Louisiana, celebrated the end of the temporary
restraining order and vowed to continue litigation in Baton Rouge.

“We certainly intend to continue to defend the laws of the state and to enforce
the laws,” Mr. Landry said.

The clinic, Hope Medical Group for Women, which had continued to provide
abortions after the initial court order blocked Louisiana’s trigger laws from
enforcement, said it would pause performing the procedure in light of Friday’s
decision.

Clinic staff members canceled abortion appointments and redirected patients to

other providers, but the clinic planned to remain open to see patients for
ultrasounds and “options counseling,” said Kathaleen Pittman, the administrator
of Hope Medical Group.

The fast-changing status of Louisiana’s trigger laws is emblematic of the chaotic

national landscape that has unfolded in the two weeks since the Supreme Court
overturned Roe v. Wade.

Litigators for abortion rights groups rolled out lawsuits challenging trigger bans
in a dozen states just after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the
landmark decision that since 1973 had guaranteed a constitutional right to
abortion.
Judges rejected those challenges in Ohio and Mississippi, but other cases,
including in Oklahoma, continue. According to the Center for Reproductive
Rights, which is litigating the suit in Louisiana, abortion is now unavailable in
nine states.

In Mississippi, the last abortion clinic in the state — Jackson Women’s Health
Organization, which brought the suit that the Supreme Court used to overturn
Roe — closed on Thursday when a legal challenge failed and the state’s trigger
law took effect.

“We asked the Supreme Court to return abortion policymaking to the people,”
said Lynn Fitch, the state’s attorney general. “Today, in Mississippi, for the first
time in many years, the will of the people as expressed through their elected
legislators is no longer held up in a court and will go into effect.”

An Arizona court heard oral arguments on Friday in a challenge to a state law

defining life as beginning at conception. The law had been held up by the
challenge soon after it passed in 2021, but clinics in the state had stopped
providing abortions following the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe,
out of fear that the state law would take effect immediately and ban abortion.

Most of the legal challenges nationwide are seeking to establish that the State
Constitution protects a right to abortion. In Louisiana, however, voters recently
amended the Constitution to say that it did not guarantee that right, making the
legal challenge steeper.

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He Had a Dark Secret. It Changed
His Best Friend’s Life.
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By Sam Dolnick

Photographs by An Rong Xu

July 8, 2022

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On his first night at the Brooklyn homeless shelter, Tin Chin met his best friend.

Estranged from his family, Mr. Chin was alone, stewing in anger and shame over
all he had lost and how low he had fallen. The Chinatown restaurants he
frequented with his wife and daughter, the elementary school drop-off routine,
the friendly neighbors in Queens — these had been the trappings of a middle-
class life that once seemed secure. A college graduate and former civil servant,
Mr. Chin had to learn his city anew, and now — he could still hardly believe it
— as a homeless person.

On that evening in 2012 in the Barbara Kleiman Residence in East

Williamsburg, he saw only one other Chinese person in the room. The man was
skinny, his ill-fitting clothes hanging loosely on his frame. Mr. Chin sized him
up with an expert eye: an immigrant, most likely from Fujian Province; no
family, no English, no documents.

“I’m at the bottom,” Mr. Chin remembers thinking. “But I’m better off than
him.”

The other man was named Mo Lin. Mr. Chin sensed that if they had met just a
few years earlier, they would have had very little in common. “At the beginning,
I can’t say I liked him,” he said. “But we are the two Chinese people in the
shelter, so we talk.”

Mr. Chin possessed little more than his closely guarded secrets, including a
criminal record that haunted him. They ran through his mind on a loop, but he
divulged them to no one, certainly not this new acquaintance, and instead shared
his story in broad strokes — he was born in Hong Kong and had grown up in
New York and was new to being homeless.

Mr. Lin was hesitant and didn’t say much. It would be a while before he
described his years scraping by in New York. He was indeed undocumented, and
although he had worked in innumerable Chinatown kitchens, his poor health had
long ago made steady work impossible, and he looked far older than his 46
years. He spent his days shuffling along the streets of Manhattan’s Chinatown,
smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk, watching staticky TV in threadbare
Fujianese community centers.
But the men soon began spending so much time together — always chatting in
the shelter, strolling downtown streets, sharing plates of noodles — that
acquaintances assumed they were family.

“We called them brothers,” said Mireille Massac, a Brooklyn food bank
organizer who spent time with them. “He took care of Mo. What Mo needed, it
went through Tin.”

Friendships can be hard to memorialize — relatives, partners, children often take

pride of place. But a friendship can be the defining bond in a person’s life,
offering a kinship that family cannot, a refuge through lonely, hungry days.

And can a friendship offer redemption for your worst mistakes? A decade after
their first night in the shelter, Mr. Chin wonders about that.

Credit...

The shelter rules said everyone had to be out by 8 a.m., and Mr. Chin and Mr.
Lin developed a routine. They headed to Chinatown together, where they would
buy dim sum, dumplings — whatever Mr. Chin could afford on the $200 he
received through public assistance every month. Mr. Lin’s favorite meal was the
fish sandwich from McDonald’s. He had unrelenting dental problems, and the
soft filet was easy to chew.

They often ate in a leafy park on the edge of Chinatown, sharing a bench and
watching the neighborhood swirl. Some days, they went to the library, where
Mr. Chin introduced his friend to the internet and the bottomless well of
YouTube. Mr. Lin was drawn to old Chinese war movies.

Adrift in his own life, Mr. Chin found purpose in helping his new friend. “I’m
playing a white knight role here,” he remembers thinking to himself as they
became closer. It had been a long time since he had been anyone’s white knight.

Over time, it became clear Mr. Lin had hardly explored New York. Mr. Chin
appointed himself personal tour guide.

Their first outing was Coney Island, Mr. Chin remembered. They took the
subway to the end of the line to see the aquarium. Mr. Chin had been there for
school trips as a kid, and he took his wife there on a date — sweet memories
laced with an acrid burn he kept to himself. Now he focused on Mr. Lin, who
had never seen an aquarium before. The sea creatures, the colorful fish, the
calming quiet of the underwater world astonished his friend and delighted Mr.
Chin. “His eyes were really amazed,” Mr. Chin said.

They walked along the boardwalk and bought hot dogs for lunch. For that
afternoon, it felt like their lives extended beyond shelter curfews and park
benches. They were New Yorkers, this was their city and maybe they would
have another hot dog, why not. Mr. Chin was buying.

They kept exploring New York, two homeless men in a postcard-perfect

montage. They took the Staten Island Ferry, where the view from the deck
reduces the skyline to a Tinkertoy city you can scoop into your hands. They tried
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but Mr. Lin grew bored after a couple of floors
and they quickly decamped for Central Park. But the Bronx Zoo was a hit.

“Especially the tiger,” Mr. Chin recalled. “The tiger really came out, it was the
first tiger he ever saw. Everything was the first thing he ever saw.”

New York adventures became part of their friendship, which deepened over
time. Lawyers, aid workers and friends who met them marveled at their devotion
to each other. Extensive details of their years together were also left behind in
grainy snapshots, police reports, immigration forms, nonprofit records, court
transcripts and old emails.

One December, they even went to Macy’s in Midtown to see Santa Claus.

They stood in line, two middle-aged homeless men towering above a sea of
children. If any parents looked at them sideways, Mr. Chin didn’t notice or care.
They finally made it to the front for a photo with Santa. In it, Mr. Chin sits on
the right, beaming. On the other side of Santa, Mr. Lin sits more stiffly, his
hands clasped in his lap, his puffy coat zipped to his collar. He smiles slightly,
unsure quite what to do.

Before they left, Mr. Chin translated his friend’s wish for Santa: a green card.

Over the next two years, the men settled into life at the homeless shelter. As
residents cycled in and out, they moved their cots closer together.

By then, Mr. Lin had picked up an old smartphone someone had left behind on a
park bench. At night in bed, he used Mr. Chin’s hot spot connection to get online
and watch his old movies.

Fights and robberies in the shelter were not uncommon, but Mr. Chin managed
to deflect attention with a tough-guy mien. But around 11 p.m. on Aug. 1, 2014,
while he was talking to a shelter administrator and Mr. Lin slept on his cot, a
shelter resident with a history of arrests jumped Mr. Lin and beat him bloody.
When Mr. Chin found his friend, Mr. Lin’s left eye was swollen shut, his mouth
an open wound, blood trailing from his nose. Mr. Chin went with him to the
hospital while the police arrested his assailant.

Mr. Lin had broken bones in his face and needed surgery. When he came to, Mr.
Chin was by his side, trying to contain an odd, nervous excitement that seemed
bizarrely out of place.

“I said: ‘Lin! This is a once in a hundred-year opportunity! This is it!’” He knew

his friend did not understand, but he didn’t expect him to.

For all the time they spent together, Mr. Chin had deliberately kept his past a
secret. He spoke of his wife and daughter, but he brushed past his career, and he
never mentioned his arrests or the years he spent in prison.

Here’s what he never shared: Early in the 1990s, Mr. Chin had been an
immigration officer at John F. Kennedy International Airport. His job included
interviewing Chinese people seeking asylum, desperate people seeking better
lives. People like his own father, people like Mr. Lin.

He worked there for five years, through the years following Tiananmen Square,
and he saw the surge of migrants that followed. Night after night, he listened to
accounts of persecution — many of them surely true, many of them surely
exaggerated. He was keenly aware that if his parents’ lives had gone differently,
he could well have been one of those people in line looking for mercy.

Now, seeing his friend battered, Mr. Chin remembered that there was a special
kind of visa — a U visa, was it? — that was granted to immigrant crime victims.
He raced to the library, where he used the free computer to research immigration
law.

It took a few sessions to confirm, but within two weeks, he wrote an email to
T.J. Mills, a lawyer who worked on immigration cases in Chinatown.

“I wish that you can look into to see if U visa can work for Mr. Lin,” he wrote
on Aug. 13, 2014. “With all due respect, Tin Chin.”

Mr. Chin still didn’t say anything to Mr. Lin, Mr. Mills or anyone else about his
career in immigration enforcement. “My background is ugly,” he said recently.
“No need to talk about it.” He sighed. “They said I was a dirty cop.”

In 1993, Mr. Chin lost his immigration job when federal agents found $1,700 in
his pocket, money he had extorted from a Chinese businessman. The man had
landed at Kennedy and claimed political asylum. Mr. Chin said he would send
him back to China unless he handed over his money. Hours later, federal agents
arrested Mr. Chin. He pleaded guilty and spent nearly a year in prison.

Then, years later, he was arrested again, and this time for something far worse.
In 2003, he was convicted as the leader of an international plot to swindle
dozens of Chinese immigrants out of their life savings. Prosecutors said Mr.
Chin set up phony offices across New York and promised visas to immigrants
who wanted to bring their relatives to the United States. He claimed that he
worked for the government and that through his connections he could get them
visas and green cards, for exorbitant fees. Money in hand, they said, he vanished,
only to change his name and address and do it all over again.
“Chin, a Chinese immigrant, preyed on a group of hardworking and
unsophisticated Chinese immigrants who wanted desperately to bring their
relatives from China to the United States,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing.

He was accused of stealing around $1 million, from grandmothers, farmers,

seamstresses, husbands — people risking everything to build new lives in New
York. A series of witnesses testified against him in a federal trial, repeatedly
identifying him in court as the mastermind. He was the only person connected to
the plot to be sent to prison.

To this day, Mr. Chin vigorously maintains that he was framed, and that
authorities fingered him only because of his previous arrest. Clearing his name
remains an animating desire, even as his long, handwritten letters to the judge
and other federal officials have yielded no progress.

He spent about a decade in prison and was released in 2012. He tried to reunite
with his wife and daughter, but it went badly. He washed up at the homeless
shelter, desperate to start anew but without a clue how to do it. And then he met
Mr. Lin.

“God or Buddha above sent me to help Mo,” he said. “He’s undocumented, and I
was an ex-immigration officer. It’s not really a coincidence that I met him.”

As his battered friend slowly began to recover, Mr. Chin pressed to help him get
his visa.

Mr. Chin remembered Mr. Mills, the immigration lawyer, from a free legal clinic
in a Chinatown church when Mr. Mills had once reviewed Mr. Lin’s case. In a
letter sent to Mr. Lin at the homeless shelter two months before the attack, the
lawyer had politely told him that obtaining legal status would be virtually
impossible. “Since you apparently entered the U.S. with a fraudulent document,
your inspection and admission are difficult to prove,” he wrote.

Mr. Mills and other caseworkers had nonetheless been struck by the two men’s
friendship. They didn’t know about Mr. Chin’s past, but they admired his
dedication to Mr. Lin. “Tin has been by his side the entire time,” Mr. Mills said.
“Tin is his best friend.”

As Mr. Mills looked into Mr. Lin’s case, he quickly agreed that Mr. Chin was
right about the U visa, which was created in 2000 to protect immigrants who
have suffered abuse in the United States and are willing to cooperate with law
enforcement. Mr. Mills began working on an application for Mr. Lin.

Mr. Chin became the go-between, helping Mr. Mills gather police records of the
assault, hospital documents listing Mr. Lin’s injuries and a blizzard of
application forms. The more Mr. Mills worked with Mr. Chin, the more his
unusual perseverance and deep fluency in immigration law struck him.

“I’ve honestly not known a better friend and advocate than you have been to
your friend Mo,” Mr. Mills wrote to Mr. Chin.

As Mr. Lin’s case crawled through the immigration system, he eventually

recounted his story to case workers.

In an interview he gave in 2019 to a volunteer who worked with Mr. Mills, he

talked about growing up on his family farm in rural Fujian Province. As a young
man, in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests, he went to a rally in Fuzhou
calling for more freedom and reforms — and found himself on the authorities’
list as a potential troublemaker. Fearing arrest, he said, he fled his home and
began a grueling quest to find safety in America.

With the help of a network of sympathizers and a series of loans he couldn’t

afford, he ended up at the Thai border, he said, and eventually on an airplane to
Los Angeles. When he landed, he retreated into an airport men’s room, where he
could be sure no one was watching him. He said he ripped up his passport and
headed to customs with two letters memorized: P. A. Political asylum.

He was allowed temporary entry, but after a judge ordered his deportation, he
spent the ensuing years hiding from the authorities, working grueling jobs for
little pay, fearful of being noticed. “I found work in a kitchen and worked as
hard as I could to pay for my bed, my debts, my wife,” he said in 2019 through
an interpreter. “I did this for eight years and then my body gave up.”

He eventually made it to New York and bounced around from shelter to shelter.
“I was so scared,” he said.

Mr. Mills was haunted by his story. “My whole sense of Mo, even though I
didn’t know him well — here’s a guy who the entirety of his life was one of just
survival,” he said. “Raw survival and getting beat up constantly.”
It took four years for the visa to come through, but it worked. On April 2, 2019
— 28 years after he first entered the United States — Mr. Lin received his visa.
He and Mr. Chin were at their Chinatown park when the document — sent to
Mr. Chin’s email address because Mr. Lin didn’t have one — came through.

“Mo had the sweetest smile I ever saw on his face all these years,” Mr. Chin
remembered. “He kept on asking me to read over and over every line to him.”

Now that he had a visa, it would be easier for Mr. Lin to visit the dentist and get
his teeth fixed. Maybe he could finally get out of the shelter. In three years, as
long as he stayed in the United States, he could apply for a green card. And he
could finally bring his wife, Huo Mei Li, to New York. He hadn’t seen her in
nearly three decades.

“There is so much time we have lost,” Mr. Lin told the nonprofit volunteer in
2019.

Mr. Chin had changed his friend’s life without revealing his own secrets about
his years working for the government or his arrests, but months after Mr. Lin got
his visa, Mr. Lin confronted him one day with a direct question:Are you an
immigration officer?

Someone at the park had clued him in. Now he wanted to know, had Mr. Chin
been toying with him all along? Could he have helped secure his paperwork long
ago?

As Mr. Chin remembers it, the confrontation quickly became tense. “You don’t
know how lucky you are,” he recalls saying to Mr. Lin. “How do you think you
got your visa? You should be thanking me.”

An iciness slipped into their friendship, but Mr. Chin says they eventually
moved past it. They continued spending time together, and Mr. Chin continued
to help Mr. Lin navigate the city and find doctors and dentists.

They had shared countless meals together, and soon they had a third person join.
Mr. Lin’s wife had made it to New York, and the pair were beginning to imagine
how they could build a life together in America. Mr. Lin still lived in the
homeless shelter while she stayed with a family friend, but he had dreams of
securing an apartment for them.
“The most important thing is to find a place where we can be together,” he said
in 2019.

In March 2020, Mr. Chin took Mr. Lin to Bellevue Hospital Center for treatment
for stomach ailments. Doctors kept him overnight and then admitted him to the
intensive care unit. It was the beginning of the pandemic, and the hospital had
suspended all visits, but Mr. Chin said a social worker regularly called him from
the hospital so the friends could chat on video.

Mr. Lin seemed weak and listless during their conversations. Mr. Chin was
worried. Within a few days, the hospital said that Mr. Lin had tested positive for
Covid.

Then, on the evening of April 17, Mr. Chin remembers the hospital called him.
“This is not the usual time they would call me,” he said. “I already don’t like it.”

Mo Biao Lin died at 7:33 p.m., an early victim of New York’s first wave of
Covid-19. He was 53 years old.

He was survived by his wife, Ms. Li, and an adult son who forged his own life in
another American city. They could not be reached for this article. Mr. Lin is
buried in a cemetery in Pennsylvania, near his son’s home. Engraving on his
coffin reads “Mr. Mo Biao Lin, 1966-2020.”

On the night his friend died, Mr. Chin stayed up past midnight writing his
thoughts in a long email to Mr. Mills.

“Now I ask Heaven, you put me into helping him to get his dream, because I am
the right person in this department,” he wrote. “Now you take him away.”

Mr. Chin, who is now 65, regularly flips through photos of his friend on a beat-
up old cellphone. He is finally out of the shelter and lives alone in an apartment
in Brownsville, Brooklyn, that’s packed to the ceiling with overstuffed boxes
and bulging plastic bags. Plenty of it belonged to Mr. Lin. He visits Chinatown
regularly and volunteers at a food pantry. He’s fixated on his conviction and
spends his nights poring through old transcripts of his trial.

He still sees Mr. Lin everywhere: at the Chinatown park where elderly men walk
dutiful laps. On the B60 bus that Mr. Lin used to ride to visit him. In the endless
Covid headlines. He sees him in his court case records, where his accusers’
quests for legal status resemble Mr. Lin’s.

Years later, people who spent time with the two friends remember their bond,
and remember being struck by its depths.

“I feel like Mo gave him his sense of self back,” said Rebecca Cooney, the
nonprofit volunteer who interviewed Mr. Lin in 2019 and spent time with them
both. “It was as if Mo was part of his way back to feeling like a human being.”

Mr. Chin revealed almost nothing about his life to Ms. Cooney, but she
remembered that both he and Mr. Lin seemed lost. “These are two people who
were suffering so much, it’s amazing that they would have the reserves inside to
give friendship to each other.”

This April, on the anniversary of Mr. Lin’s death, Mr. Chin took the subway to
Bellevue, where he found a park bench nearby. The shared rituals of a close
friendship never leave you, even if the friend does.

He lit a stick of incense and laid out a picnic of Mr. Lin’s favorite meal: French
fries, Coke and a McDonald’s fish sandwich. Mr. Chin had taken Mr. Lin’s
dentures after the funeral — a reminder, no matter how macabre, of his friend —
and now he placed them next to the food.

He called his friend’s name aloud a few times: “Lin, Lin, Lin.” Then he ate the
sandwich. No one approached him as he finished his lunch — or, rather, Mr.
Lin’s lunch.

He made no move to leave the bench.

Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro.

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The U.S. May Be Losing the Fight
Against Monkeypox, Scientists Say
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Credit...Anastasiia Sapon for The New York Times

Longstanding weaknesses in the public health system are giving the virus a
chance to become entrenched.

As epidemics go, the monkeypox outbreak should have been relatively easy to
snuff out. The virus does not spread efficiently except through intimate contact,
and tests and vaccines were at hand even before the current outbreak.

Yet the response in the United States has been sluggish and timid, reminiscent of
the early days of the Covid pandemic, experts say, raising troubling questions
about the nation’s preparedness for pandemic threats.
The first cases of monkeypox were reported in May, but tests will not be readily
available until sometime this month. Vaccines will be in short supply for months
longer. Surveillance is spotty, and official case counts are likely a gross
underestimate.

There are already at least 700 cases in the United States, but experts say the real
number is likely to be much higher. There probably will be many more
infections before the outbreak can be controlled, if at this point it can be
controlled at all.

“Why is it so hard for something that’s even a known pathogen?” asked Anne
Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who
first warned of monkeypox outbreaks more than a decade ago. “How many more
times do we have to go through this?”

With increasing travel and trade, new pathogens will emerge more frequently,
Dr. Rimoin said: “We’ve been hitting the snooze button on emerging diseases
for decades. The alarm is going off, and it’s time to wake up.”

The obstacles to preparedness are systemic, at every level of government, rather

than because of any one individual or agency, Dr. Rimoin and other experts said.

Even as the coronavirus pandemic drags into its third year, the public health
system in the United States remains a hamstrung patchwork, an underfunded
bureaucracy seemingly incapable of swift and forceful action. Its shortcomings
have persisted for decades, through many administrations.

The United States estimated in 2010, for example, that in the event of a
bioterrorist attack, 132 million doses of a vaccine for smallpox and monkeypox
would be required for those who cannot safely take an older-generation vaccine
with harsh side effects. Yet two months after the current outbreak began, the
strategic national stockpile holds just 64,000 doses.

The situation “reveals the failure in the U.S. to take public health seriously,” said
Zain Rizvi, who studies access to medicines at the advocacy group Public
Citizen. “Do we ever run out of fighter jets?”

What to Know About the Monkeypox Virus

Card 1 of 5

What is monkeypox? Monkeypox is a virus endemic in parts of Central and

West Africa. It is similar to smallpox, but less severe. It was discovered in 1958,
after outbreaks occurred in monkeys kept for research, according to the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention.

It’s often unclear which agency is ultimately responsible for a particular aspect
of the response. The strategic national stockpile used to be under the purview of
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example. The Trump
administration handed it to a different agency, yet the C.D.C. still makes
decisions about who should get the vaccine and when.

State and county-level health departments often set their own rules and priorities,
sometimes at odds with federal guidance. “The machine is just so ossified,” said
Gregg Gonsalves, an activist and epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public
Health. The “house is on fire, and it’s like everything is moving at sort of normal
speed.”

The global monkeypox toll has surpassed 8,100 cases, mostly men who have sex
with men, and about as many potential cases are under investigation. Many of
those patients cannot identify the source of their infections, suggesting that there
is significant community transmission.

In the United States, the C.D.C. has found at least two versions of the virus,
indicating at least two parallel chains of transmission.

“It’s pretty clear that we need to rapidly scale up the ability to diagnose this
now,” said Jay Varma, director of the Cornell Center for Pandemic Prevention
and Response.

The first missteps in the U.S. response to monkeypox were in testing. As in the
early days of the coronavirus pandemic, samples from monkeypox patients are
being funneled to the C.D.C. for final diagnosis, a process that can take days.
Only recently have tests been shipped to commercial laboratories; one of them
began offering testing on Wednesday.

A network of about 70 public health labs set up by the C.D.C. has the capacity to
identify orthopoxviruses, the family that includes smallpox and monkeypox. But
local doctors must first get clearance from a state epidemiologist, then somehow
get the samples to one of the labs, the same process used in early 2020 to
identify coronavirus infections.

Local health departments trace contacts only after a confirmed diagnosis,

allowing the chain of transmission to continue in the meantime.

“We clearly identified this as a major mistake that allowed Covid to get its
footprint in the U.S. and spread undetected for a month, without any of us
knowing,” said Angela Rasmussen, a research scientist at the Vaccine and
Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada.

“And now we’re just doing the same thing all over again, because that’s the way
it’s done.”

The C.D.C. should have made testing rapidly available to glean the extent of the
outbreak early on, she added: “Our failure to do that has almost certainly
allowed the outbreak to become much bigger than it could have been, and now I
have serious doubts about whether it can even be contained.”

In San Francisco, B, a 43-year-old medical writer who asked that his name be
withheld for privacy reasons, found himself shivering uncontrollably with a high
fever on June 14, eight days after he had multiple sexual encounters at a
bathhouse in Chicago.

When a blister appeared on B’s wrist on Friday afternoon, he suspected

monkeypox. But his health care provider said the city’s health department would
not be able to pick up his sample till Tuesday, June 21, after the Juneteenth
holiday.

No one reached out to him to ask about his contacts, or to offer vaccines to his
roommate or partner. It was Friday, a week later, before the sample was picked
up, and the following Wednesday — nearly two weeks after he had contacted his
health care provider — before he was told he had tested positive for an
orthopoxvirus.
By then, his lesions had healed, and he no longer needed to isolate. “The irony of
this happening on the same day as receiving the first test result is not lost on
me,” he said.

Even then, the health department told him it would likely be another week before
the C.D.C. could confirm that he had monkeypox.

“Two blisters and a rash on my butt is not the worst I’ve had in my life,” B said.
But given his experience, “I don’t think we’re prepared for another pandemic of
something that’s actually serious.”

A senior Biden administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to

discuss internal matters, acknowledged that implementation of monkeypox
testing had not been as convenient nor fast as it needed to be.

Negotiations between government officials and commercial labs began in the

third week of May, soon after the first cases were identified, he said. But it took
time to settle contracts, scale up test supplies and train personnel to handle the
virus.

Still, the official noted, the C.D.C. published test procedures in early June, and
the F.D.A. authorized additional test supplies to allow any interested lab to
participate. The wait time for test results has dropped from 15 days to nine days
from the start of symptoms, and is expected to drop further as lab capacity
expands in July, he said.

Another barrier to containing a disease like monkeypox is a dearth of sexual

health clinics, as Dr. Varma noted in a recent opinion article in The New York
Times.

Monkeypox was thought to present as a body-wide rash, but in the current

outbreak, most patients have developed only a few pox, primarily in the genital
area. Patients with genital symptoms are much more likely to seek care at sexual
health clinics, because they tend to offer confidentiality, convenience and free or
low-cost care.

But funding for these clinics has dropped by about 40 percent since 2003, after
accounting for inflation. Partly as a result of the decline, about one in five
Americans had a sexually transmitted infection in 2018, according to a C.D.C.
report, and those numbers have surged during the pandemic.
If monkeypox can’t be contained, it may become a permanent threat, especially
among men who have sex with men. “The fear is that this will become
entrenched as an S.T.I., you know, just like, say, syphilis is, or H.I.V. for that
matter,” Dr. Varma said.

“Without a lot of high quality sexual health services, you’re never going to be
able to control it, because you won’t identify people fast enough,” he added.

The National Coalition of STD Directors has called for a minimum of $30
million to strengthen sexual health clinics during the outbreak. “We still have no
federal coordinated plan, and states and cities are largely on their own,” said
David Harvey, the organization’s director.

“I have one simple question for the administration: Where is the money, the
resources, the training that is needed at the nation’s S.T.D. clinics to respond to
what is already an out-of-control outbreak?”

Public health in the United States generally is woefully underfunded and

understaffed, said Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and
Territorial Epidemiologists.

Although Covid brought more money into public health coffers, those funds
cannot be used for anything else. “We cannot function at the level I think that the
public needs and expects us to if we’re going to always be so categorically
funded,” she said. “We’re not learning this lesson for the first time.”

The experts did offer praise for one aspect of the administration’s response: the
messaging to men who have sex with men, which hews to the “harm-reduction”
approach, urging caution while recognizing people’s needs.

Rather than “stigmatizing them for wanting to have sex and enjoy themselves,
you meet them where they are,” Dr. Varma said of the C.D.C.’s monkeypox
messaging. “In terms of things that have gone well, that is among the best sort of
harm reduction advice I’ve seen.”

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Remembering James Caan and His
Potent Mix of Swagger and Delicacy
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Credit...Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images

“The Godfather” helped open up a range of roles for the actor that allowed him
to play against type and expectation in wonderful ways.
I’m not sure who owned the book, but eventually it ended up in my sweaty
young hands. Someone at school had told me about the scene in Mario Puzo’s
“The Godfather,” the one in which Sonny Corleone, the reckless eldest son with
a Cupid face and a massive endowment, steals off with one of his sister’s
bridesmaids. I remember racing through the passage (“her legs were wrapped
around his thighs”). It’s no wonder that when I saw Francis Ford Coppola’s film,
I was more than ready for James Caan.

He was unforgettably perfect — carnal, wild, exciting. Caan may not be the
actor you first think of in relation to “The Godfather,” with its astonishment of
legends, but the film is impossible to imagine without his volatile, kinetic
performance. Quick to anger, quick to fight, Sonny embodies his family’s
terrifying violence in its purest, most unpredictable form, the kind that churns
from inside, boiling up like magma. Sonny’s anger will be the death of him; it’s
preordained: He must die so that his youngest brother, the deliberate, mercilessly
disciplined Michael, can take over the family’s murder business.

Not every star finds as perfect a vessel as “The Godfather.” Talent counts, yes,
and as an actor, Caan was more gifted and nuanced than suggested by his tough-
guy persona. But the vagaries of both life and the movie business mean that few
actors and fewer stars have long, creatively unimpeachable runs. Timing also
matters as does taste, greed, grit and representation. Caan, who died on
Wednesday at 82, has two supreme masterpieces in his filmography: “The
Godfather” (1972) and Michael Mann’s “Thief” (1981). We can argue about the
sweep of his career, but there’s no debating the greatness that he brought to it.

Caan’s career emerged from the ashes of the old studio system. Following what
was then a familiar career trajectory, he started in TV before moving into film,
and was soon terrifying Olivia de Havilland in the schlocky 1964 thriller “Lady
in a Cage.” Looking at the film now (don’t bother), their roles are almost
comically emblematic of the era’s upheavals. De Havilland was classical
Hollywood personified, an elegant emissary of the old studio system, while Caan
would soon be among the upstarts who helped create and define that short-lived,
creatively intoxicating miracle known as New Hollywood.

“Lady in a Cage” is ridiculous, but it helped set Caan’s career in motion. It

would take a while for him to find material worthy of his gift, and the
performance is less memorable than his outfit, which includes sandals, a tropical
shirt that he later loses, exposing the rug that carpets his torso, and villainy’s de
rigueur accessory: a women’s stocking pulled over his face. Notably, he’s also
wearing snug-fitting jeans, which, like the sandals, were probably meant to
signal his thug’s menacing nonconformity but mostly just draw attention to his
body. Tight jeans, as attentive fans know, were a staple of Caan’s onscreen
closet.

It was Howard Hawks, one of the geniuses of the old studio system, who shortly
thereafter set Caan on his way by casting him first in “Red Line 7000” (1965)
and then, more important, in “El Dorado,” a western headlined by John Wayne
and Robert Mitchum. “I was this little punk working with Wayne and Mitchum,”
Caan said later, recalling how, during the shoot, he and Wayne almost got into it
on set. Mitchum brokered the peace, and the stars and the film came together
beautifully. It opened in 1967, the same year that “Bonnie and Clyde” shook up
the industry and audiences, and swept aside old Hollywood with its violence,
daring and bad attitude.

By the time Caan made “The Godfather,” he had established his range in movies
as different as Coppola’s directing debut, “The Rain People” (1969), and the
1971 made-for-TV movie “Brian’s Song,” a wildly popular melodrama in which
he played the N.F.L. halfback Brian Piccolo, who died young of cancer. Caan
also played a tragic football player in “The Rain People,” about a woman
(Shirley Knight) who embarks on one of the era’s existential road trips. En route
to self-discovery, she picks up Caan’s Kilgannon, a sweet, guileless, brain-
damaged former player whose tragically inapt nickname is Killer.

With his thick neck and trapezoidal torso, Caan looked like the athlete he plays,
but little about the performance in “The Rain People” is obvious. It’s a heavy
role — Killer is the story’s sacrificial lamb — yet Caan, working with Coppola,
imbues the part with a subtle, persuasive innocence that doesn’t patronize the
character or sanctify his disability. As an actor, Caan certainly could go big and
externalize a character’s inner workings (he does a lot around the eyebrows), and
Kilgannon has his outsize moments. Yet what makes the character work is the
poignant impassiveness that conveys just how brutally life has hollowed him out.

Caan’s ability to convey delicacies of feeling wasn’t a singular gift, but, in his
finest roles, it worked contrapuntally with his swaggering physicality and the
implied roughness telegraphed by his Bronx-and-Queens-cultivated accent. He
sounded like a tough, a delinquent, a bad, potentially dangerous guy, even if his
better characters were sometimes more complicated. As Caan’s reputation grew
(he was a longtime favorite of this paper’s film critics) and a range of roles
opened up to him, he played to and against type and expectation, becoming one
of the defining faces of New Hollywood.

It may come as a surprise just how big Caan was in the 1970s, particularly if
you’re really only familiar with “The Godfather.” Two years after Coppola’s
film blew up, in an essay on “The Last Detail” that consecrated Jack Nicholson
as a major star, The Times’s Vincent Canby also named Caan as one of the era’s
other young notables alongside Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman and Caan’s frequent
co-star, Robert Duvall. There are different reasons Caan’s reputation dimmed in
the ensuing decades; for one thing, while Nicholson was solidifying his fame as
a sailor in “The Last Detail,” Caan was repping the Navy in “Cinderella Liberty”
(1973).

I love “Cinderella Liberty,” but it hasn’t been canonized like “The Last Detail,”
written by Robert Towne and directed by Hal Ashby. But “Cinderella” deserves
love, partly because Caan is terrific in it as a sailor who, during an unplanned
leave, suddenly becomes involved with a good-time broad (a glorious Marsha
Mason). They’re loose and funny and sexy, and together create a raw,
unpredictable, memorable romance. Given how aggressively male-dominated so
many 1970s classics were, it’s worth remembering that Caan was good with
women in more ways than were hinted at in “The Godfather.”

There are all sorts of reasons the decades that followed were not always kind to
Caan, including the end of New Hollywood. He made good and forgettable
movies, disappeared, re-emerged and matured into avuncular roles. He was
discovered by newcomers like Wes Anderson (“Bottle Rocket”) and Christopher
McQuarrie (“The Way of the Gun”). For me, though, the second half of Caan’s
career is demarcated by “Thief,” the 1981 thriller in which he plays a master
burglar. It’s an action film with guns and violence, blowtorches and lots of tough
guys, but because this is quintessential Michael Mann, it’s also a romance.

When the film was released, some critics objected to what was seen as its softer,
mushier side, which feels like critic-speak for the fact that it features a woman.
When Caan’s character isn’t cracking safes or skulls, he is having a tender affair
with Tuesday Weld’s skittish restaurant hostess. The two fall in love, have one
of Mann’s signature soul-baring conversations across a table and adopt a baby.
It’s complicated. It’s also beautiful and it gets me every time I watch it. And
while the film doesn’t end happily — though maybe it does — it ends happily
for any viewer who’s open to it, its deep humanity and to Caan’s transcendent
performance.

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‘A One-Hour Layover Is Not Enough
Anymore’: A Flight Attendant’s Tips
on Surviving Travel Now
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Credit...Hannah Agosta

In two decades of flying, things have never been as stressful as they are now, a
cabin insider says. Here, her tips from 30,000 feet for avoiding airline chaos this
summer.

Twenty years ago, with my life at a serious crossroads, I applied to every single
airline, and a few months later I was officially a flight attendant. I loved my new
job, and it came with a completely new and exciting life.

But I didn’t sign up for what travel is like this summer.

The pandemic has changed flying more than any event I have experienced in my
career. If 9/11 changed how we board planes and enter airports, Covid-19
changed the experience on the airplane all together. It created a strain and made
everyone nervous. It brought politics into a realm that shouldn’t be political.

In the initial days of the pandemic, the airlines tried to save as much money as
they could. They allowed early retirements and furloughed many employees; on
top of that, many other employees quit to be with their families. Now we have an
employee shortage. Once the mask mandate was dropped, passenger counts
started to grow faster than airlines could handle. Now we are short-staffed and
overworked. Not just pilots and flight attendants, but also ground crews. You
may not think about ground crews, but without them there is no one to park the
planes, drive the jet bridges so you can board and get off, load your bags and
retrieve them, or scan boarding passes.

Something that is not common knowledge is that flight crews have time limits
on how long they can work, generally 12 to 16 hours at a stretch. Besides being
unsafe, it’s illegal for us to fly longer than that. If your flight crew gets delayed
and hits that time, it doesn’t matter if you have somewhere to be, we are done
when we are done. The way things are right now, there aren’t many back up
crews, so your flight may be canceled.

Historically, summer is always a challenging time to fly, but this summer is

much worse. There have been thousands of cancellations and delays each week,
and there doesn’t seem to be any relief in sight. I have seen many people miss
important things like weddings, cruises, international connections and even
funerals. The tears are very real, for very real reasons, and there is nothing I as a
flight attendant can do to help.

Travel is good for the soul. It revitalizes us, and allows us to re-center.
Sometimes you need to feel sand under your toes, smell fresh pine trees or
immerse yourself in the sounds of a new city just to remind yourself you are still
alive. But the key this summer is to travel smart. Take as much of the stress out
of travel as you can by planning ahead and being prepared. Here’s my best
advice based on two decades of working at 30,000 feet.
Go early

If you are going on a cruise, leave the day before. Count it as part of your
vacation. Stay in a hotel in a new city and explore. Have a nice dinner and a
glass of wine and enjoy yourself. Wake up slowly, have some coffee and
pancakes, and leisurely head to your boat. The extra money is worth the peace of
mind. I recently worked on a flight that was delayed. A family of eight missed
their connecting flight to Rome, which was the only flight of the day. They were
going to a cruise which they would now miss. (Buying travel insurance is not a
bad idea either.)

Always fly direct

That way if you are delayed, you don’t need to worry about making your next
flight. If you can’t avoid connecting, don’t book the shortest layover, because
you’ll be building in stress and the possibility of missing your flight. A one-hour
layover is not enough anymore. Thirty minutes, not a chance. In most cases,
three hours is safe.

Fly as early in the day as possible

The first flights of the day rarely cancel. Thunderstorms build as the day gets
warmer, flight crews reach their duty limits later in the day and traffic builds at
busy airports. Yes, that might mean a 3 a.m. alarm, but if your early flight does
happen to cancel, there will be more options to rebook a different flight.

Download the app of the airline you are flying

These apps have valuable information. They will keep you from having to wait
in impossibly long lines or to try and get someone on the phone if things go
wrong. You can track your bag, your incoming plane, and in some cases you will
know a flight is canceled before the flight crew even knows. The app can also
guide you in rebooking a new flight if needed.

Think twice about the cheapest fares

Flights are full. If you buy the cheapest seats you may not be able to sit with
your family. It says so when you purchase your ticket. Flight attendants aren’t
there to rearrange the whole plane just so you can sit together because you tried
to save money on a third party website. Also, be aware that if a flight is
oversold, and no one volunteers to give up their seat, the first to be bumped will
be the family that saved a few dollars by using a bargain website.

Pack smart

Don’t be “that guy.” Don’t hold up boarding because you have your extenders
open till they are bursting and you can’t figure out how to make your bag fit in
the overhead.

Bring a sweater

Here is a flight attendant secret: We sometimes keep the airplane cold

intentionally. For people who struggle with airsickness, heat makes it worse. We
don’t want anyone to use those sick sacks.

Don’t tell a flight attendant they look tired

We are and we know. You may cause us to ugly cry right there in the galley.

Bring patience

Be nice. Our goal at all airlines is to get you to your destination. Stay positive, at
least you aren’t at work.

Kristie Koerbel is a longtime flight attendant who has previously shared her
advice on Facebook.
Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign
up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling
smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway
or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places for a Changed World for
2022.

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‘Why Is Everyone Wearing Suits?’:
#GentleMinions Has Moviegoers
Dressing Up
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Credit...via Carson Paskill

A TikTok trend around the release of “Minions: The Rise of Gru” has young
people around the globe suiting up for the cinema.

Normally when Carson Paskill heads to the movie theater, he opts for a
comfortable outfit of sweatpants and a sweatshirt. But last weekend, he arrived
in a black suit, white collared shirt and dress shoes.

Mr. Paskill, 20, attended a screening of “Minions: The Rise of Gru” at the
Century 16 in Beaverton, Ore., on July 2 with eight of his friends, all dressed in
suits for the occasion.

“Anybody over the age of 25 was, like, really, really confused about what we
were doing there,” said Mr. Paskill, who has 1.6 million followers on TikTok.
“Like, ‘why is everyone wearing suits?’”

The inspiration is a TikTok trend known as #GentleMinions, which has amassed

more than 61 million views on the platform. It encourages “Minions”
moviegoers to film themselves as they dress up in suits and sunglasses to attend
screenings of the latest installment of the “Despicable Me” series.

You may be wondering, why suits? The precise answer is elusive. Participants
are also encouraged to accessorize with bananas, a Minion’s favorite snack, or
hold their hands in a steeple pose, Gru’s signature pose.

The first “Despicable Me” movie was released in 2010, introducing audiences to
Minions, the chaotic, overalls-clad yellow characters who speak gibberish, and
Gru, the villainous main character voiced by Steve Carell. It was followed by
four other films, “Despicable Me 2” in 2013, a “Minions” spinoff in 2015 and
“Despicable Me 3” in 2017. (“Despicable Me 4” is planned for 2024.)

For Obie Ike, 19, and other members of Gen Z, the films became an integral
feature of his childhood. So when he found out there would be another, he knew
he had to go see it out of “pure nostalgia.”

Mr. Ike, from East Riverdale, Md., and five of his friends bought tickets — and
then they learned about the trend.

The Return of the Minions

The diminutive capsule-shaped yellow yammerers are back with a

new movie, for the joy of children and adults alike.

‘Minions: The Rise of Gru’: “Amiable and colorful as it is, the movie is
also spectacularly inconsequential,” our critic writes of the second
installment of the “Minions” series.
A Global Success: The Minions’ joyous brand of simple comedy, slapstick
zest and nonverbal brio has won over fans around the world.
#GentleMinions: A TikTok trend around the release of the movie has
 young people around the globe suiting up for the movie theater.
First Appearance: The Minions were introduced to the public in the 2010
movie “Despicable Me,” and have since anchored the animated series
franchise.

“We thought it would just be fun,” he said. “It sounds a little strange, but it’s not
harmful and, hey, you just look really nice to go see a movie.”

After Mr. Ike and his friends watched the movie, which Mr. Ike described as
“really wholesome and very well put together,” they spotted fellow
#GentleMinions also decked out in suits. The groups decided to combine forces,
posing for photos and TikToks while trying to “look as gentlemanly as
possible.”

Teenagers across the globe, including in Australia, Singapore, Portugal and

Canada, have joined in. And while #GentleMinions is a play on the word
“gentlemen,” the trend isn’t just for boys.

Sofia Dominic, 19, attended the “Minions” screening with Mr. Paskill and his
friends. She selected a pair of black slacks and borrowed her boyfriend’s button-
down shirt. Another girl in the group wore a black dress with heels, which Ms.
Dominic said “fit right in.”

“Originally it was just going to be a guys’ thing,” Ms. Dominic said. “But
they’re very inclusive.”

“Minions” shattered box office records during its opening weekend, becoming
the highest-grossing opening over the Independence Day holiday. It has taken in
more than $200 million worldwide so far, according to an NBC Universal
spokesperson.

Jenna Johnson, an assistant professor at Toronto Metropolitan University who

specializes in social media, noted that Universal Pictures, the movie’s
distributor, had endorsed and promoted the trend on social media, replying to
videos and encouraging young people to wear their suits to the theater.

“What’s interesting about this is that it seems like it’s an organic, consumer-
driven viral social media trend on TikTok, but it may actually be part of an
effective PR stunt that has just taken off,” Ms. Johnson said.
Mr. Paskill said that while he’s seen previous “Minion” movies, participating in
the TikTok challenge was the main motivation for him to purchase a ticket.

“I doubt I would have seen that movie in theaters if it wasn’t for the trend,” he
said. “But I actually did enjoy the movie, which is great, because it wasn’t just a
gimmick. It was actually not too bad of a movie and I thought it was pretty
funny.”

There have been reports of people being disruptive instead of simply looking
dapper. The videos also encourage their well-dressed participants to clap
enthusiastically throughout the film, which in some cases has gotten out of hand.

A cinema chain in the United Kingdom banned moviegoers from arriving in

formal wear after rowdy Gentle Minions disrupted screenings. Other movie
theaters have also posted warnings to those showing up in suits that they could
be asked to leave.

At Vue Cinema in Worcester, England, groups of suit-clad teenagers reportedly

clapped, cheered, and mimicked Minions throughout the film, leading other
attendees to request refunds that cost the theater over $1,200. Another theater on
the Isle of Guernsey closed its doors for a day after multiple groups threw things
and swore during Minions showings.

Mr. Paskill said that when a security guard saw him and his friends dressed up,
the guard asked them not to be disruptive. But Ms. Dominic said the other
audience members took their outfits as a joke and had a positive reaction to their
antics.

“I think from most of the videos, it is largely an attempt to create a viral video
rather than to try and wreak havoc,” said Ms. Johnson, the social media
researcher.

More than creating a viral video or innocent chaos, Mr. Paskill said the
challenge gave him an opportunity to get out of the house with his friends.

“With other trends, you see it, and then you just sit in your room and do it,” Mr.
Paskill said. “But this was like a whole night, so I thought it was a great time.”

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The Postwar Japan That Shinzo Abe
Built
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 Credit...Nicolas Messyasz/Hans Lucas, via Redux

In January 2007, only a few months after he was elected, at 52, as Japan’s
youngest prime minister of the postwar era, Shinzo Abe delivered a speech
outlining his policy priorities after the opening ceremony of the 166th session of
Japan’s Diet, the country’s parliamentary body.
Most of the speech was a mundane laundry list of proposals, but one line proved
especially revealing about the character of the man. “My mission is none other
than to draw a new vision of a nation that can withstand the raging waves for the
next 50 to 100 years,” Mr. Abe said.

I have regularly returned to this line — over the course of my writing about the
former prime minister and as I reflected on his assassination on Friday —
because it provided insight into what animated Mr. Abe as a politician. He was
not a politician who was content to think small. His family hailed from
Yamaguchi Prefecture in western Japan. The area was home to some of the
principal architects of the Meiji Restoration — the return of the emperor as a
figurehead in 1867 and subsequent construction of a modern Japanese state by
reformist elements. Mr. Abe admired those leaders.

The leaders of Meiji Japan were not just building a modern state for its own
sake. They were building a state that would be able to fend off and eventually
compete with the European and American empires that were busy carving up
Asia. As Mr. Abe’s talk of building a nation to “withstand the raging waves”
suggests, he shared this fundamental sensibility.

He was a nationalist; he saw his country as engaged in a fierce competition

among nations and believed that a politician’s duty, first and foremost, was to
ensure the security and prosperity of his people. But he was also a statist, in that
he believed that it was ultimately the responsibility of the state and its leaders to
perform this duty. This is why debates about whether Mr. Abe was an ideologue
or a realist miss the point. Over the course of his career, he repeatedly acted in
ways that he thought would strengthen the Japanese state in its efforts to protect
the Japanese people in a dangerous world.

Decisions that may have looked ideological — for example, efforts by Mr. Abe
and other conservative politicians to introduce Japan’s version of patriotic
education to schools and replace textbooks that taught what he considered
“masochistic” history that discussed wartime atrocities — were fundamentally
about strengthening the state (whether or not replacing textbooks would achieve
this goal). His critics worried that the changes would undercut a core tenet of the
textbooks that they believed help retain Japan’s peaceful existence. But he
believed that a strong state needed to raise citizens who felt proud of their
country and were willing to sacrifice on its behalf, even by taking up arms if
necessary.
His statism was easier to see in other areas. He used the slogan “Escaping the
postwar regime” during his first premiership, and it continued to characterize his
vision in his second premiership — a self-conscious effort to uproot institutions
introduced during and immediately after the U.S. occupation of Japan. He
believed they constrained the country’s ability to defend itself, most notably the
postwar Constitution and Article 9, its war-renouncing peace clause.

During his second term, he ordered his government to reinterpret Article 9 to

permit Japan’s exercise of its right to collective self-defense, which would
enable its armed forces to come to the aid of an ally in certain circumstances.
Later he proposed amendments to the Constitution, including to Article 9, and
pledged that he would ratify them by 2020; this effort, however, failed.

In place of a country repentant about its past, he wanted to build a stronger, top-
down government that would feature a robust national security establishment
similar to what exists in the United States and Japan’s other peer countries. This
project became even more pressing as North Korea developed a nuclear arsenal
and China’s military grew along with its economic might. While he was not
averse to maintaining stable political and economic ties with Beijing, he never
lost sight of the dangers China could pose to Japan’s national security.

Mr. Abe’s embrace of what became known as Abenomics — his three-pronged

program of monetary stimulus, fiscal stimulus and industrial policies to
encourage new high-tech growth sectors and a more sustainable labor force —
similarly reflected his statism. He belatedly came to appreciate that to compete
with other nations, Japan had to end its long-term economic stagnation.

His vision of a stronger Japanese state was not universally popular; his zeal for
changes to strengthen the state, particularly its national security establishment,
often attracted sizable protests. Older Japanese remembered the wartime state all
too well and were uncomfortable with rebuilding Japan’s military power, but
young Japanese, too, mobilized at times to oppose his moves.

Nevertheless, at the time of his death, it appeared that the Japanese people might
finally be coming around to Mr. Abe’s vision. Thanks in part to Russia’s war in
Ukraine, a robust majority appeared to support higher levels of military
spending.

Even Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, a self-proclaimed liberal dove, has

indicated his support for higher military spending to boost the capabilities of
Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, a sign of just how much Mr. Abe’s Liberal
Democratic Party came to share his vision during his 30-year career.

While his judgment was not always sound and his actions took on authoritarian
tinges, I believe Mr. Abe nevertheless left Japan with a state more able to
articulate and execute the policies needed to “withstand the raging waves” of the
21st century.

After waging what was at times a lonely fight, Mr. Abe died just as the Japanese
people were possibly coming to appreciate his vision of a strong state capable of
defending the nation in a dangerous world.

Tobias Harris (@observingjapan) is the author of “The Iconoclast: Shinzo Abe

and the New Japan.” He is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress,
where he oversees the national security and international policy team’s work on
Asia.

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The Mayor Who Never Sleeps
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On a breezy June night in the Bronx, I was on the balcony at the restaurant Zona
De Cuba, sipping a mojito, vibing to a salsa band and peeking at a special menu
for the plant-based mayor of New York, Eric Adams, who was soon to arrive.

Under the heading “Mayor Adams’ Corner” could be found “Eat My Veggies”
cauliflower and broccoli and “Bite My Eggplant,” a dish spiced with roasted
pepper sauce.

Not a fish in sight.

I pulled out a notebook, getting ready to interview Adams. But Maxwell Young,
the mayor’s communications director, announced, “We have to go.” The mayor
had pulled up outside in his black Suburban, but plans had changed. We ran out
to the motorcade and headed to the Upper East Side.

Suddenly, we were staring down at a sidewalk full of blood. A young woman

had been shot in the head an hour earlier as she pushed her 3-month-old daughter
in a stroller on 95th Street.

Standing next to a school playground, John Miller, the storied deputy police
commissioner, briefed the mayor sotto voce about the 40-caliber bullet casing,
powder burns and a young man in a black hoodie shooting at point-blank range,
execution-style. The woman was 20 and her name was Azsia Johnson. It was
probably the baby’s father who was the shooter, he said. She had filed a
domestic violence report against him.

In a couple of days, the police would say that this beautiful young woman, a
doting mother of two, had been lured to the playground by her abusive ex, who
told her he had some things for their baby daughter. He shot her and ran, leaving
the baby on the street, and was arrested two days later.

I felt sick. I have covered gun violence and possible remedies for decades, and it
seems we’re losing this battle. Coming out of Covid, it feels as though bad
spirits have been unleashed all across the country.

It was Adams’s response to that sense of danger, his demand that the city
support the police in the fight against crime, that won him election last year.
Now the fight is his.

At a news conference on the night of the shooting with his police commissioner,
Keechant Sewell, the mayor looked grim. “More guns in our city means more
lives lost,” he said. “It means more babies crying as those who love them lie
dead.”

Credit...Dakota Santiago for The New York Times

After a steady rise since the start of the pandemic, murders and shootings in the
first sixth months of the year were down 10 percent and 12 percent in New York
City compared with last year, according to police figures. The Police
Department even announced on Thursday that it had made more gun arrests this
past quarter than in any since 1995. But other crimes have risen — overall crime
is up nearly 38 percent — and shocking crimes like the shooting of the young
mom and attacks on the subway have left New Yorkers fearful.

Adams has worked to increase patrols on subways and has restarted a special
anti-gun unit to combat gun crimes, specifically going after people who are most
frequently the perpetrators of violence.

“It’s ‘High Noon’ in America,” Adams warned in testimony before Congress in

favor of stronger gun laws. “The clock is ticking, every day, every minute
towards another hour of death.”

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, the quarterback for the compromise gun
bill that just became law, told me that Mayor Adams had given “energy and new
life” to a stalled anti-gun violence movement.

But it is tough going for Adams. He is pinioned from the left by the State
Legislature, whose bail reform laws made it harder to keep criminals prone to
violence in jail, and by district attorneys like Alvin Bragg of Manhattan, who
deprioritized jail time even for certain low-level violent crimes, and by
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others who are demonizing the police, deepening
morale problems. He is pinioned from the right by Clarence Thomas and the
other radical justices who issued the opinion overturning a century-old New
York statute that limited the number of guns on the streets and by a Republican
Party hellbent on arming Americans to the teeth.

The mayor had started that Wednesday with Commissioner Sewell and New
York’s attorney general, Letitia James. The commissioner noted that they had
taken 3,300 guns off the street so far this year (now it’s 3,700), and the trio
talked about lawsuits that Ms. James and the city had filed to crack down on
ghost guns, untraceable weapons made from a kit that are being illegally sold in
New York State.

That afternoon, the mayor and the commissioner had had a news conference
with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand about legislation recently passed that would
allow the federal government to crack down on gun trafficking across state lines.

By 9:30 p.m., we came full circle: The esoteric discussion went on by day and
the bloody reality reared its head at night. The shooting illustrated Adams’s
Sisyphean battle.

That Thursday night, he went back to the Upper East Side to a candlelight vigil
for Azsia Johnson and hugged her distraught mother, Lisa Desort, saying the
death “hit so close to home” because he had worked with Desort when she was
an emergency medical technician and he was a police officer.
At the police academy graduation at Madison Square Garden the day after that,
on Friday, the mayor spoke of how shockingly high crime was when he started
on the beat 38 years ago. “People no longer believed in the city,” he said.

But, the mayor continued, “every entity in the city was on our side,” as the
police tried to take the city back. “That’s not the climate you’re policing in,” he
told the white-gloved graduates. “You’re policing in a climate where everyone is
against us. Every story seems to be negative about our actions and not see what
we do every day. Laws are being passed that protect guilty people.”

Promising to be their general, telling them to ignore heckling, name-calling and

Twitter insults, he said they are now dealing with a situation where almost
anyone can carry a gun and where they can no longer count on criminals they
arrest staying in jail. “No, they’re going to come out probably the next day,” he
said, “because of a court system that just does not seem to understand the reality
on the streets.”

Then Adams, who first drew public attention early in his career as a police
officer who criticized police brutality, advised them: “You must be your
brother’s keeper. You must ensure that he or she never reaches the point where
they tarnish the shield, because one officer could destroy all the work that we are
attempting to do.”

His younger brother, Bernard, a former police officer who is the director of
mayoral security with a salary of $1 a year, told me that their mom drilled into
them that “you have to be your brother’s keeper” and watch out for the little guy
who wasn’t getting a fair shake.

Six months into the job, Eric Adams, 61, is at a crucial juncture. The
honeymoon, filled with hope for a dynamic new mayor, is over. Adams’s poll
numbers have dived, which the optimistic politician took with aplomb. “A C is
not an A, but a C is not an F,” he told reporters, adding that he interpreted the
numbers from tough New York graders to mean “We’re going to give Eric a
shot.”

The New York Post, which endorsed his candidacy, has now given Adams the
Homeric epithet “club-hopping.” The Times’s Emma G. Fitzsimmons wrote that
his efforts in Albany, where he once served as a state senator from Brooklyn, fell
short of achieving long-term mayoral control of public schools and other
measures. David Freedlander of New York magazine, asserting that Adams can
boast of few accomplishments, wrote recently, “It’s become hard to escape the
impression that New York City is being led by a mayor who is, frankly, winging
it.”

What Adams has brought to the job is a flair that’s refreshing after eight years of
the dyspeptic Bill de Blasio. Over the July 4 weekend, he tweeted a video of
himself taking a spin on a jet ski and “looking like a pro” in Mill Basin between
Brooklyn events. But the questions echo: Is he all hat and no cattle? Is he
skewing too much to swagger at the expense of substance?

“It’s like the second coming of ‘Beau James,’ Jimmy Walker,’’ one top
Democratic politico said, referring to the vivacious Roaring Twenties mayor
(who left office in a cloud of scandal). “But the most important thing is what you
do between 9 and 5, not 5 and 9.”

A top Democratic strategist agreed: “On paper, Eric is kind of a Democratic

superhero. But he needs real-world results, not just great swagger.”

In winning City Hall, Adams told a powerful, unique story about becoming a
policeman after being beaten by the police as a teenager. He presented himself as
someone who could soothe a jangly city and push back on defund-the-police and
coddle-the-criminal rhetoric on the far left, restoring a little perspective and
sanity as a moderate new face of the Democratic Party. He promised that he
could address injustices to Black victims, build a police force that treated people
with respect and deliver safe streets.

As the daughter of a police detective, I want to believe in that message. I want to

believe we can hold bad police accountable and root out the Derek Chauvins,
without straitjacketing officers to the point that forces suffer chronic blue flu and
quit in droves.

I also want to believe that moderate Democrats are not becoming pariahs in their
own party and heading toward extinction. I want to believe that you can work
hard and achieve serious goals while showing flair. Politics is so tepid on the
Democratic side and anti-democratic on the Republican side. The mayor’s
magnetic smile is a promise. His noir expeditions — turns on red carpets, drop-
bys at clubs, and theater and fashion events — reflect his belief that New York is
back and open for business, tourists, fun and, yes, swagger.
I also want to believe that New York doesn’t have to be, as the former police
commissioner Bill Bratton said, “the Wild West.” (Even as I was writing this
story, there was a cascade of news bulletins: A member of the mayor’s advance
staff was mugged in Brooklyn at knifepoint; a teenager on a scooter in the Bronx
was fatally shot; a man sleeping on a bench in Hudson River Park was stabbed to
death, and three people were shot, two fatally, by a man outside a Brooklyn
deli.)

I had run into the mayor in February at the dinner after the opening of “The
Music Man” on Broadway and asked him if I could follow him around for a
story, the days and nights of Eric Adams.

“Zero Bond?” the enigmatic mayor murmured with a smile, referring to the
private club in NoHo he frequently visits. (I never did get there.)

I began trailing him last month as he bounced around the city, wearing his navy
blue “NYC MAYOR” jacket, meeting with religious leaders about retrofitting
hotels for the homeless; climbing into a sanitation truck to help recruit workers;
announcing plans for major renovations at a park in the Bronx; delivering a
robot’s baby, complete with simulated blood, in a virtual reality program at
Einstein Medical Center in the Bronx to help with the maternal morbidity crisis
among Black mothers. He gave a Juneteenth speech in Central Park at the site of
Seneca Village, where he compared gentrification to slavery. On Father’s Day,
he went to a Mets game with his son, Jordan Coleman, 26, and threw out the first
pitch. (He ran into the former Trump flack Anthony Scaramucci, calling out, “I
love this guy!”) Then he stopped by a music festival in Jamaica, Queens, where
he grew up, and presented a proclamation to the New York City Football Club at
Yankee Stadium. At Gracie Mansion he gave a news conference about
improving nutrition at schools, boosting “vegan Fridays.” A reporter told the
mayor that she had talked to some kids who found the fare “squishy.”

“In his heart, he’s still a police officer — he’s always patrolling,” said Anne
Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor for health and human services, noting that the
mayor set up a weekly Zoom call on homelessness at 5 p.m. on Sundays. Several
staffers told me that when they do 8:30 a.m. Zoom meetings with the mayor,
he’s in his suit and tie on his stationary bike.

He was not always so fit. In his book, “Healthy at Last,” Adams writes that after
Sept. 11, he relied on comfort food. If he had a hard day, he craved a Quarter
Pounder or a bucket of KFC. He told me that when Tracey Collins, his longtime
partner who has been a high-ranking official at the city’s department of
education for over a decade, told him to eat a little better, he would pick up a
handful of cookies and stuff them in his mouth as though to say, “Leave me
alone.”

Then came the “horrific experience,” as he called it: One day in 2016, he woke
up blind in his left eye and suffering nerve damage in his feet, which could have
led to amputation. His diabetes was killing him. He switched to a plant-based
diet, lost 35 pounds and reversed the damage from the disease. He also cooked
for his mother, who died last year, to help her get healthier, and wrote a book on
the experience.

Every morning, he does transcendental meditation and then has his green
smoothie — blueberries, kale and spinach sprinkled with chia, cacao, acai, maca
and moringa. His bling: a stone bracelet Collins gave him for energy, a crystal
bracelet he was given by an elderly woman on the campaign trail and a stud in
his left ear, which was the result of a humorous promise on the campaign trail.
To relax, he said, he’s learning to play the guitar, at the moment, the song “Lean
on Me.”

The mayor can stop a staffwide Zoom if he thinks people are tired or nervous to
lead the group in deep breathing. But he doesn’t want to be a nanny, like Mike
Bloomberg.

“People want to have their steak, their cigarettes,” he said. “It’s all right with
me.”

Lorraine Grillo, the first deputy mayor who keeps a pack of Marlboros on her
desk, said she warned Adams: “I said, ‘Eric, I’m probably going to have a
cigarette once in a while, I’m going to eat a steak, I’m never, ever riding a bike.”

The mayor is a “low-drama person,” as one aide puts it. He stays pragmatic and
Zen, listening more than he speaks. He organizes everything on eight Excel
spreadsheets and challenges his staff if they are not prepared.

Being mayor has opened up a whole new exciting world to Adams. He told me
that he had always wanted to go to the Met Gala and loved attending. “I guess
after eight years of not having someone that was fun just really set the tone,’’ he
said. “New York is supposed to be fun. We should laugh. We should go to these
balls.”

Adams is so ubiquitous that he has earned the title “The Nightlife Mayor,” which
is derisive or complimentary, depending on who’s saying it.

“He has a lot of energy and is so determined to make New York a vital cultural
center,” Anna Wintour told me. “He seems to need no sleep.”

Coleman, a filmmaker who works at Roc Nation, thinks that criticism of his
father’s nocturnal wanderings is unfair.

“People need to cut him some slack,” he said, because “he’s devoted his whole
life to fixing this city” and “he gives 110 percent every time he wakes up.”

After an hour and a half at the crime scene that Wednesday night, I assumed the
mayor would want to postpone the interview scheduled at Zona De Cuba (which
is owned by the former Republican mayoral candidate Fernando Mateo). But we
ended up going at 11 p.m. to Osteria La Baia, the site of “fishgate,” the report
that he ate fish at the restaurant.

We sat down. The waitress asked, “Would you like your branzino?” The mayor
quickly shook his head no. He munched on a Caesar salad, carefully picking out
the croutons and anchovies, while he waited for his staff to deliver hummus,
eggplant and mushrooms from another restaurant.

We talked about recent stories in the press about the left eating itself alive with
infighting and cancel culture. “They are trying to out-perfect themselves,”
Adams said. “All the things we fought for, we’re losing because we were
fighting each other. We allowed Donald to stack the Supreme Court because
Hillary wasn’t pure enough for folks.”

And now Clarence Thomas is on a tear, he said, adding: “He’s still holding on to
what happened to him during his whole confirmation process, and he’s been
harboring that for a long time. This is the type of guy that sits in the basement
every day and plots.”

I wonder if he had watched the testimony of the Jan. 6 hearing suggesting that
his predecessor, America’s Mayor, Mr. Law and Order, Rudy Giuliani, cooked
up a coup while he was drunk.
“Talk about imploding,” Adams said. (A week later, Adams went to bat for the
supermarket worker charged with assaulting Giuliani, asking the Staten Island
D.A. to go easy on him.)

I asked about his night rambles.

“Remember, what is our title, the City That Never Sleeps,” he said, ordering a
Tito’s vodka and soda. “When I was a cop, I did the midnight shift for 11, 12
years. There’s another city that comes alive during the nights. I want them to
know, ‘Listen, I’m the mayor of you, too.’

“My mother used to tell me she would go to work, clean office spaces. She said
no one would even talk to her. It’s like she doesn’t even exist. They would just
ignore her being there. I said, ‘I’m not going to do that to people.’”

I noted that he doesn’t talk much about his father, a butcher. His mother, who
raised the six kids with money from cleaning work, is sometimes referred to as a
single mother. Their financial situation was so precarious that Adams had to
bring a bag of clothes to school in case they were evicted by the time he got out.
His pet was a rat named Mickey.

“Dad was in and out, in and out, in and out,” he said. “He’d come. He would
stay for three months, disappear for nine, come back. That was her love. I
remember her sharing with me one day, ‘You know, I hope I didn’t love your
father too much that I was just blind.’”

I told the mayor that people I’ve talked to are still hopeful about him but seem to
be getting impatient. One of my colleagues had told me the day before that she
was taking the 2 train and saw a man punch his girlfriend in the face during an
argument.

“If you place the accent on the wrong letter, you’re going to mispronounce the
word,” Adams said. “If you place the accent on the wrong moment in your life,
you’re going to mispronounce your life. Place it on how many times you got on
the train and nothing happened to you. Nothing eventful. That’s where the accent
should go, not ‘Hey, this is my 900th ride and you know what, I saw a homeless
person today. Oh my God, things are out of control.’ They’re not.”

I noted that he has received scrutiny for hanging out with some shady customers.
Some friends, like Al Sharpton, warned him before he took office that
appearances matter. Others were afraid he might be used by opportunists.

His night crawls, which make some City Hall staffers uneasy, include Zero Bond
and Osteria La Baia; the restaurant is owned by his close pal Zhan Petrosyants,
who pleaded guilty in 2014 to an illegal check-cashing scheme designed to
evade anti-money-laundering rules.

When a member of the New York State Senate was convicted of misdemeanor
assault for roughing up his girlfriend, Adams was one of the few who voted
against expelling him from office. He named Philip Banks deputy mayor of
public safety even though he was an unindicted co-conspirator in a corruption
scandal involving the Police Department and de Blasio donors in 2018. And he
appointed Frank Carone as his chief of staff despite scrutiny of his past business
dealings, raising “money for access” questions.

“The worst day of your life should not define your life,” the mayor insisted. “I
just believe that because I’ve had some worst days.”

He continued: “Phil is one of the best law enforcement officers in this country.
Imagine me saying, ‘I need to deal with crime. You did some dumb things; now
I’m going to leave you on the bench when my team is losing.’ No, I’m not doing
that.”

I wanted to know about his sparring with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The New
York Post summed it up with a witty headline: “Is this AOC’s or Adams’
Apple?” The mayor, who spent a few years as a Republican, has critiqued the
congresswoman’s socialist agenda and the “Tax the Rich” gown she wore to the
Met Gala. He chided it as the wrong message, arguing that the wealthiest New
Yorkers paid most of the city’s income taxes (although the top 1 percent make as
much as the bottom 90 percent). When he found himself on Anna Wintour’s A
list for the next gala, he trolled A.O.C. by sporting his own message on the back
of his jacket: “End Gun Violence.”

Adams said he had read a book on “the importance of our children disagreeing
with us. That is so natural. I’m almost twice her age. Our experiences are
different. She may find it hard to believe that there’s going to come a time that,
to her children’s generation, they’re going to say she’s out of touch.”

“I believe that it’s all right to disagree,” he said. “It’s not all right to be
disagreeable.”
He can get testy, though, when confronted. At a news conference in February,
after the media had questioned his failures at legislative changes in Albany, he
threatened to stop answering questions and suggested that the City Hall press
corps needed more diversity.

“Listen, it hits a sore spot, but we have to be honest,” he told me. He is only the
second Black mayor “and I sit in a room sometimes and I look around the room
and I say, ‘Where are the black reporters?’” He added: “My white counterparts,
they do one-two-three, one-two-three; that’s their dance. I do the boogaloo.”

Being a Black man in New York was challenging from the time he was young. I
asked about the night when he was 15 and was brutally beaten by the police after
he and his oldest brother got arrested for trying to cash a stolen money order.

“The craziest thing about it was that the cops were not angry at us,” he said. “It’s
one thing if you chase someone or they fought you back, tempers rage.” But
things were calm. “They were doing the paperwork. And the guy said, ‘You just
feel like a beatdown?’ The other guy said, ‘Yes.’ We didn’t know what the hell
they were talking about and they took us downstairs to the basement of the 103rd
Precinct and just started kicking us in our groin. They weren’t angry. It was just
some form of sadistic recreation.”

This assault inspired him to be a police officer, to fix the force from the inside. It
provided no such inspiration for his brother. “I don’t think my brother has ever
been right since that incident,” he said, sadly.

Despite his club-hopping, he said, he would stay home in his pajamas, watching
“The Twilight Zone,” if he had a day to himself. “I am socially awkward. I’m
extremely shy. I can spend the whole day binging on documentaries. When I was
a child, I would sit down and I would get excited about going home and
watching ‘Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.’ Animal behavior is the unfiltered
human behavior. We cover up what we feel. At our heart, we are all vulnerable.”

He continued that when he’s in a room with billionaires and celebrities, he can
see the “scared children” in them. “I look across the table from you, I see exactly
who you are. You have your own insecurities, you have your own concerns.
‘Does my wife still love me?’ ‘Am I still appealing?’ I may be mayor but I’m
still this child that just wants to do right.”

So which animal in the jungle are you?

He laughed. “Clearly, I am a lion. I am meant to rule the jungle.”

Underneath the swagger, beyond the swank parties, the serious parts of the job
are never far from his mind.

“Listen, I got to live up to the job,” he said. “I got to turn around the economy. I
have to make the city safe. I have to educate children and there’s no excuses. It
shouldn’t be, ‘Oh, you are a Black man. We’re going to give you a pass.’ No, I
don’t want a pass. I’m responsible for that woman being shot today. My job is to
make sure she could walk down a block pushing a carriage without being
assassinated. I’m going to live up to my responsibility, but don’t stack the deck.
Highlight where we are successful. We got some real W’s.” The press and
critics, he complained, laughing, “only talk about, ‘Hey, did you eat a piece of
fish?’”

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

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