36 HOURS
IN THE
THESE BIRDS APPEAR
TO KNOW HOOKS
FROM HANDSAWS
PAGE 11 | SCIENCE LAB
The power
of art in a
political age
David Brooks
OPINION
I sometimes feel I’m in a daily struggle
not to become a shallower version of
myself. The first driver of shallowiza-
tion is technology, the way it shrinks
attention span, fills the day with tempt-
ing distractions. The second driver is
the politicization of everything. Like a
lot of people, I spend too much of my
time enmeshed in politics — the predict-
able partisan outrages, the campaign
horse race analysis, the Trump scandal
du jour.
Searching, So I’m trying to
take countermeas-
desperately, ures. I flee to the arts.
for beauty I’m looking for
as the world those experiences we
turns ugly. all had as a kid:
becoming so envel-
oped by an adventure
story that you refuse to put it down to go
have dinner; getting so exuberantly
swept up in some piece of music that
you feel primeval passions thumping
within you; encountering a painting so
beautiful it feels like you’ve walked right
into its alternative world.
The normal thing to say about such
experiences is that you’ve lost yourself
in a book or song — lost track of space
and time. But it’s more accurate to say
that a piece of art has quieted the self-
conscious ego voice that is normally
yapping away within. A piece of art has
served as a portal to a deeper realm of
the mind. It has opened up that hidden,
semiconscious kingdom within us from
which emotions emerge, where our
moral sentiments are found — those
instant, esthetic-like reactions that
cause us to feel disgust in the presence
of cruelty and admiration in the pres-
ence of generosity.
The arts work on us at that deep level,
the level that really matters. You give
me somebody who disagrees with me on
every issue, but who has a good heart —
who has the ability to sympathize with
others, participate in their woes, long-
ings and dreams — well, I want to stay
BROOKS, PAGE 10
The New York Times publishes opinion
from a wide range of perspectives in
hopes of promoting constructive debate
about consequential questions.
Woody Harrelson, who stars in the new film “Champions,” a feel-good underdog com-
edy. “Even without fame, to deal with one’s ego is a powerful tussle,” he said.
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LAND OF
PICASSO
AND
SOROLLA
PAGE 23 |
TRAVEL
The QR code at a vegetable stall in Mumbai, India, enables customers to make instant payments with their phones and has expanded banking services to millions in the country.
Where digital money rules
NEW DELHI
BY MUJIB MASHAL AND HARI KUMAR
The little QR code is ubiquitous across
India’s vastness.
You find it pasted on a tree next to a
roadside barber, propped on the pile of
embroidery sold by female weavers,
sticking out of a mound of freshly
roasted peanuts on a snack cart. A
beachside performer in Mumbai places
it on his donations can before beginning
his robot act; a Delhi beggar flashes it
through your car’s window when you
plead that you have no cash.
The codes connect hundreds of mil-
lions of people in an instant payment
system that has revolutionized Indian
commerce. Billions of mobile app trans-
actions — a volume dwarfing anything
in the West — course each month
through a homegrown digital network
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GROWING POPULARITY ‘LIAISON’
OF REAL ESTATE THAT CO-STARS
Weekend IS NOT, IN FACT, REAL
PAGE 21 | INTERNATIONAL HOMES
SEEMED
DESTINED
TO SHARE
A SCREEN
PAGE 20 |
WEEKEND
JAPANESE DROPOUTS
BACK IN CLASS FOR
E-SPORTS CURRICULUM
PAGE 7 | BUSINESS
..
INTERNATIONAL EDITION | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023
Support
for Ukraine
ebbs in U.S.
as costs rise
WASHINGTON
Polls find more people,
particularly Republicans,
oppose further assistance
BY PETER BAKER
When he made his surprise wartime trip
to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv last
month, President Biden reassured
Ukrainians with great confidence that
“the Americans stand with you.” But the
question that remains unanswered is:
For how long?
For all of the president’s bravado
while he was abroad, the politics of
Ukraine back home in the United States
are shifting noticeably and, for the
White House, worryingly. Polls show
public support for arming the Ukraini-
ans is softening, while the two leading
Republican presidential candidates are
increasingly speaking out against in-
volvement in the war.
While the bipartisan coalition in Con-
gress favoring Ukraine has been strong
in the year since Russia’s invasion, sup-
porters of more aid fear the centrifugal
ATUL LOKE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES forces of the emerging presidential con-
test and growing taxpayer fatigue with
shipping tens of billions of dollars over-
seas may undercut the war effort before
Moscow can be defeated. And some of
them are frustrated that Mr. Biden has
not done more to shore up support.
The evolving dynamics were on full
display this week when House Republi-
cans, exercising the power of their new
India’s instant transaction system Mr. Modi’s predecessor, Manmohan
Singh, was pushed forward by Mr. Modi
majority, pressed Pentagon officials at
two hearings about spending on
holds promise for poorer nations after overcoming years of legal chal-
lenges over privacy concerns.
Ukraine, grilling them about where the
money is going and vowing to hold them
The government says about 99 per- accountable. Despite Mr. Biden’s
that has made business easier and lic-private model that India wants to ex- cent of adults now have biometric identi- pledge, the Ukrainian government has
brought large numbers of Indians into port as it fashions itself as an incubator fication numbers, with more than 1.3 bil- grown concerned enough that President
the formal economy. of ideas that can lift up the world’s lion IDs issued in all. Volodymyr Zelensky is trying to set up a
The scan-and-pay system is one pillar poorer nations. Nandan Nilekani, a co-founder of the telephone call with Speaker Kevin Mc-
of what the country’s prime minister, “Our digital payments ecosystem has information technology giant Infosys Carthy to make his country’s case.
Narendra Modi, has championed as been developed as a free public good,” who has been involved in India’s digital Overall, public support for Ukraine
“digital public infrastructure,” with a Mr. Modi said on Feb. 24 to finance min- identification efforts since their early aid has fallen from 60 percent last May
foundation laid by the government. It isters from the Group of 20, which India days, said the country had been able to to 48 percent now, according to surveys
has made daily life more convenient, ex- is hosting this year. “This has radically make a technological leap because it by The Associated Press-NORC Center
panded banking services such as credit transformed governance, financial in- had little legacy digital infrastructure in for Public Affairs Research. The share of
and savings to millions more Indians clusion and ease of living in India.” place. “India was able to develop afresh, Americans who think the United States
and extended the reach of government Indian officials describe the digital in- with a clean slate,” he said. has given too much to Ukraine grew
programs and tax collection. frastructure as a set of “rail tracks,” laid The IDs ease the creation of bank ac- from 7 percent a year ago to 26 percent
With this network, India has shown on by the government, on top of which in- counts and are the foundation of the in- in January, according to the Pew Re-
a previously unseen scale how rapid novation can happen at low cost. stant payment system, known as the search Center.
technological innovation can have a At its heart has been a robust cam- Unified Payments Interface. The plat- And even supporters make clear their
leapfrog effect for developing nations, paign to deliver every citizen a unique form, an initiative of India’s central bank commitment is not without bounds.
fostering economic growth even while identification number, called the Aad- that is run by a nonprofit organization, While 50 percent of those surveyed by
physical infrastructure lags. It is a pub- haar. The initiative, begun in 2009 under INDIA, PAGE 8 BIDEN, PAGE 5
A star’s ‘trip with fame’
is still a work in progress
and indie gems (“The Messenger,”
FROM THE MAGAZINE
“Triangle of Sadness,” which is an
Academy Award nominee this year for
best picture) — but let’s just say he’s
Woody Harrelson can play one of those actors who, when they
show up onscreen, well, you know
anyone. It’s being himself you’re in good hands.
that can prove a hard role. That certainly holds true for the new
“Champions,” which is directed by
BY DAVID MARCHESE Bobby Farrelly and is in theaters on
Friday. In this feel-good underdog
“I’m an A personality and a B facade,” comedy, a remake of the 2018 Spanish
says Woody Harrelson, and that’s as film “Campeones,” Harrelson plays a
good an explanation for his charm and disgraced minor-league basketball
success as you’re likely to find. The coach who is forced to lead a communi-
actor has carved out a lovable public ty-center team of players with intellec-
persona as a down-home new-agey tual disabilities. It’s a tricky part, with
stoner, but no one too laid-back could potential pitfalls of taste and tone, but
have had the career that he’s had. Harrelson, as he seemingly always and
Simply put, the industrious Harrelson unerringly does, lends the proceedings
is one of film’s greatest character a naturalistic ease and comfort. “I feel
actors. I could name a million things he like I’m in a place where I could tackle
has done — big moneymakers (“White almost anything,” he says, a mis-
Men Can’t Jump,” “Zombieland”), TV chievous gleam dancing across his
classics (“Cheers,” “True Detective”) HARREL SON, PAGE 2
Issue Number
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France € 4.50 Friday 33.00 Malta € 4.20 Portugal € 4.20 Switzerland CHF 5.70 United States Military
Gabon CFA 3000 Israel / Eilat NIS 12.80/ Montenegro € 3.40 Republic of Ireland ¤ 4.20 Syria US$ 3.00 (Europe) $ 2.50
Germany € 4.50 Friday 28.20 Morocco MAD 35 Serbia Din 300 The Netherlands € 4.50
Greece € 3.40 Italy € 4.50 Norway Nkr 45 Slovenia € 3.40 Tunisia Din 8.00
Hungary HUF 1290 Ivory Coast CFA 3000 Oman OMR 1.50 Spain € 4.20 Turkey TL 75
 ..
2 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

page two

It’s not easy being just Harrelson

HARREL SON, FROM PAGE 1
eyes. “I could play Oprah!”

The thing I liked the most about

“Champions” is the real sense of
affection and camaraderie that
comes through between you and the
actors playing the basketball team,
some of whom were first-timers.
What was most interesting or sur-
prising about acting with them?
Well, the scene when I first meet the
Friends, Bobby Farrelly made it so
that was actually my first time meet-
ing them — it was onscreen! I had so
much trepidation the night before.
When he told me, “Maybe we’ll go with
the script, maybe we’ll go off it, maybe
we just throw the script out,” I was like,
“Holy [expletive].” As an actor, I’m
maybe too rigid, but I’ve always
thought you kind of need that script,
even if you’re going to improvise. But
as with most fears, it was completely
illusory. These guys are so cool, so
funny, so honest. They’ll never tell you
a lie. They’ll tell you a fib — “your
shoe’s untied” — but their kindness
and warmth, within a couple of hours I
was hook, line and sinker a part of
them. I haven’t had much experience
with people with disabilities, so I didn’t
know what to expect and I’ve got to
say, it was probably the most enjoyable
experience I ever had making a movie.

It’s interesting to hear you say that

maybe you’re too rigid an actor, be-
cause I think one of the most appeal-
ing things about your performances
is that they never come off as me-
chanical or mannered. Is that just FOCUS FEATURES

part of the illusion?

When things are going right, I don’t
feel rigid. But there are performances
where I was like, why couldn’t I just
get outside whatever I was doing. Ten
years later, I’ll think of something I
should have done in a scene, and I
want to tear my head off. “Planet of the
Apes” — that’s one of those times
where there was so much technology
involved in what we were doing, I was
a little daunted. If I did that part again,
I could do it 20 times better. There’s
several roles that I go back and think:
Why didn’t I try this? Why didn’t I do
that? Why didn’t I step into a whole
’nother character? But it’s probably
best to let those things drop. They can
haunt you.

Another thought I had when I was

watching “Champions” was that it
reminded me so much of the kinds of
movies that were all over theaters in GLEN WILSON/COLUMBIA, VIA EVERETT COLLECTION

the ’90s. Basically, midbudget studio
movies like the Farrelly brothers used
to make. Some of your peers, guys
like Matt Damon, have said that
those movies, which you all made
your bones on, are disappearing
because of the way the business has
changed. But you never seem to be
lacking for good work. So how do you
see the movie business as having
evolved?
The business obviously changed.
Those movies that go into the theaters,
people want to see action: Marvel or
the Tom Cruise thing. Which doesn’t
necessarily bode well for a movie like
“Champions,” but I’m hopeful that
people go see it. I don’t know. I’ve been
lucky. I was glad to do “Carnage” and
such, but my heart is more with mov-
ies like this and the indies. Now to get
an indie done? Especially with all the
Covid protocols — which, to me, are
rather absurd.
What’s absurd about the Covid proto-
cols?
The fact that they’re still going on! I
don’t think that anybody should have
the right to demand that you’re forced
to do the testing, forced to wear the
mask and forced to get vaccinated
three years on. I’m just like, Let’s be
done with this nonsense. It’s not fair to
the crews. I don’t have to wear the
mask. Why should they? Why should
they have to be vaccinated? How’s that
not up to the individual? I shouldn’t be
talking about this [expletive]. It makes
me angry for the crew. The anarchist
part of me, I don’t feel that we should
have forced testing, forced masking
and forced vaccination. That’s not a
free country. Really I’m talking about
the crew. Because I can get out of
wearing a mask. I can test less. I’m not
in the same position they’re in, but it’s
wrong. It’s three years. Stop.
The one thing I’ll say about that is
that a big lesson of the pandemic is
that it turns out most of us are pretty
bad at rationally assessing risk and at
handling one another’s different
comfort levels with risk.
Yeah, anyway, as an anarchist, I don’t
do well with mandates.
There was a time in your career when
you did a fair bit of public activism.
You did the campus tours, the Go
Further thing, you protested at the
Golden Gate Bridge, you planted the
hemp seeds. But you don’t do much
of that anymore. Why not?
I did do a documentary called “Kiss the
Ground.” That would be the most re-
cent kind of advocacy, which is distinc-
tive because I feel like that helped
people look at regenerative agriculture
differently. Whereas climbing the
Golden Gate Bridge? At the time I was
fired up about it because they were
cutting down old-growth forests. But
what I realized is it makes zero differ-
ence. I could go protest, and maybe it
raises the awareness but doesn’t stop
the thing. I could go hang off one of
those big mountaintop-remover coal
things, but that’s not going to stop it.
Because there isn’t the political will.
I’m still interested in activism, but it
would have to be very precise and
helpful. I mean, getting arrested for
protesting the murder of ancient
trees? All it did was get me arrested. It
didn’t slow the murder.
I think around that same time, when
you were doing more activism, it was
also the one period in your career
when your productivity slowed down.
You’ve always worked a ton, except
for those few years in the late ’90s,
early 2000s. What was going on
then?
Around ’97 I had done maybe five
movies in a row, and I was so burned
out. It was my own fault. I could have
easily turned down some of those
projects, but at the end of it I had lost
my mojo. Whatever it was that made
me keen on acting was just gone. And
right at the end of that time, my sec-
ond daughter was born, and I wanted
to spend time with those gals. But I’d
be foolish if I didn’t admit that proba-
bly my popularity was lower. I did five
bombs in a row. You do one movie that
doesn’t succeed, ugh. But two, three
and then five? Then — I don’t remem-
ber if it was 2001 or 2002 — when I
said, OK, I’m ready to get back into it,
I’m thinking, I don’t know if there’ll be
a ticker-tape parade, but certainly
there’s going to be some warm re-
sponse. Nothing. No response. I even
agreed to do this movie that was not
good. I won’t get into any specifics, but
it was a stupid thing. I meet with the
director, and I’m going to do it —
they’re making it for like $500,000 —
then the guy just goes with someone
else! Didn’t call me. Nothing. I’m like,
whoa, man, things have gotten tough.
But slowly and surely I started getting
back into it, and things started going
better. I remember watching a screen-
ing of “Zombieland.” It was a huge
theater, and, man, it was like being at
the best rock concert you could imag-
ine. I was like, this is going to do well.
After that I started feeling like, OK,
I’ve still got some work to do until I get
to a time where I can take a year or
two off, but everything was happening.
I was thinking about how you re-
ferred to yourself as an anarchist
before, which I’ve seen you do in
other interviews. I understand theo-
retically what it means to call your-
HBO, VIA EVERETT COLLECTION
WARNER BROS., VIA EVERETT COLLECTION
KIM GOTTLIEB-WALKER/NBCU PHOTO BANK/NBCUNIVERSAL, VIA GETTY IMAGES
self that, but how does that show up but in my life I don’t look at authority
practically? with great fondness. It just feels like
I’m not a pure anarchist, for sure. I’m the government’s never like, Hey, can I
more of an anarchist/Marxist/capital- lend you hand? Even the social pro-
ist/redneck hippie. But government is grams they do are begrudging, and
always in the hands of big business. they’re constantly trying to nick
It’s like big businessmen working for money out of it. Do you see the govern-
bigger businessmen. There are excep- ment really reaching out a hand to the
tions. A friend of mine, after Trump little fellow? No. Especially the United
was elected, said, “I’ve got to do some- States government. I look at the United
thing.” So he did. He got elected to States government as fascism with a
Congress in a district in Minnesota smiley face.
where they hadn’t had a Democrat in
office in quite a long time. Dean It’s interesting to me that a guy like
Phillips is his name. That guy is pure. you grew up culturally conservative. I
He really cares. So I’m recognizing mean, you went to the same college
that there are those people out there, as Mike Pence, you canvassed for
Clockwise from top: Woody Harrelson, in the film “Champions,” playing a disgraced
basketball coach who is forced to lead a team of players with intellectual disabilities;
Harrelson with Jesse Eisenberg in “Zombieland” (2009); with Shelley Long in the TV
series “Cheers” in 1985; with Juliette Lewis in the 1994 film “Natural Born Killers”;
and alongside Matthew McConaughey in the first season of “True Detective” (2014).
Ronald Reagan. What flipped the
switch and made you interested in
other ways of thinking?
I’ve always been a student. I study life,
and as an actor, you’re studying. You’re
playing a doctor, you study a doctor.
Even outside of that, I love reading and
learning. But a big thing happened for
me when I was 23, I think. I was on a
bus going from St. Louis to Oklahoma
City — don’t recommend that on Grey-
hound — and this gal next to me sees
me blowing my nose. And I had all this
acne, and she goes, “You’re lactose
intolerant.” What? “You stop dairy, and
all these things are going to go away.”
You’re telling me it’s dairy, which does
a body good? So I did it, and days later
those symptoms were gone. It was like,
Wow, so what else is not true? Reagan,
the great communicator? This guy was
awful! I started seeing it for what it
was. I started understanding the eco-
logical impact of things, the heavy
footprint of the beast, as I call it. All
these various industries that are rap-
ing Mother Earth, getting giant tax
breaks. I started getting that this is
how the world actually works and that
being a Republican ain’t going to help
things. Being a Democrat ain’t going to
help either. I did vote for Biden though,
just because.
You’re obviously interested in the
workings of your own consciousness
and how it can change. Are you able
to articulate the ways that fame
affects one’s mind?
It’s not a good thing. I don’t think fame
is ever an evolving consciousness. It’s
fine and dandy for people to tell you
you’re great. Nothing wrong with that.
Moment you start believing it, that’s
when things are getting [expletive] up.
When everybody opens the door for
you — here’s the best table, here’s
whatever you need — and people bend
over backward, if your mind starts to
believe, yeah, I deserve this, it’s not
good. I’m still going through my trip
with fame, but even without fame, to
deal with one’s ego is a powerful tussle.
When Krishna talks to Arjuna in the
Bhagavad Gita, that’s what it is all
about. It’s about being more in the
spiritual self and less about the sen-
sory self. If your world is caught up in
sensory experience, that’s understand-
able. There’s a lot of sensory elements
to the world. But when you throw in
the added veneer of fame, how do you
then segue over to, OK, I want to be
the part of me that is my heart, my
loving nature? I could go on about this.
I asked because I’m interested.
It’s just very much in my mind now. In
every aspect that my ego has grown
outsized, I admonish myself. I have
such anger with myself for allowing it.
I want to see the kid I was, that 12-
year-old who’s so full of love for every-
body. Even into my 20s, I was the most
loving person. I had such kindness.
And then once fame came along, that
started [expletive] with those good
attributes. I do feel like I’m in a much
better place now than I was even five
years ago. My kids have always let me
know what an idiot I am. Let’s just say
they don’t pat me on the back unneces-
sarily. They’ve helped me to be a kind-
er, gentler soul. I’m generally a kind
person, but I’d be impatient, you
know? I don’t like incompetent people.
I can be hard on someone who’s not
doing their job right. I hate myself for
it. Luckily, I’ve had experiences lately
that have encouraged me to want to be
a better person. Even last year, like
seven months out of the year, I didn’t
drink. I do like to drink, but I realize
too much is not good for anybody. It
can make you more moody or aggro.
I’m drinking now, but I’m much more
moderate. Last night I think I had half
a glass of wine, as opposed to four,
maybe five. I start every morning with
Wim Hof. It’s possible to shift some of
the negatives: Drink less, eat less, all
of those sensory things that a guy like
me craves. I have a gluttonous side,
and I know that’s not going to help me
be a spiritually better person.
How does weed fit into that? Is it
helpful?
Probably no more helpful than alcohol.
There’s no real help to it, but I’m ad-
dicted! I’m a first-rate addict. But I do
have the dispensary, the Woods, and it
wouldn’t be right to go in there and not
have a puff. [Laughs.] But listen, I
want to smoke less, and I do smoke
less. I’m trying to evolve in as many
ways as I can. I know I should just stop
smoking, stop drinking, just eat raw
food. All those things, I should do.
Are there ways in which acting helps
you understand or improve yourself?
Yeah. Even when you’re studying to do
some barbaric type of character, like in
“Natural Born Killers” — not a com-
fortable place to be in, but all of us
have this dark side. You have your
shadow, these things that in some way
define an aspect of your character that
is not your prettiest self. I think there’s
a great deal of benefit to exploring
that. Jung and some of these other
guys think you should embrace your
shadow, almost love your shadow.
Maybe that is imperative to your over-
all growth: to accept yourself as you
are, with all your faults.
This interview has been edited and
condensed from two conversations.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 | 3

4 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023
World
U.S. ‘forever war’ flares up in Somalia
BALEDOGLE, SOMALIA
American commandos
advise and train elite
unit to fight Qaeda group
BY ERIC SCHMITT
The promise and perils of America’s
counterterrorism campaign were on full
display at a remote training base in cen-
tral Somalia.
It was graduation day for 346 recruits
who would join an elite Somali com-
mando unit trained by the U.S. State De-
partment, advised by U.S. Special Oper-
ations forces and backed by American
air power.
Since last August, the unit, called
Danab, has spearheaded a string of So-
mali Army victories against Al Shabab,
an Islamist terrorist group that is con-
sidered the deadliest of Al Qaeda’s
global branches.
“We’re more dedicated than ever,”
said Second Lt. Shukri Yusuf Ali, 24, who
joined the unit two years ago as one of its
few female members and was recently
selected to attend the U.S. Army in-
fantry training course at Fort Benning,
Ga.
But sadness hung over the ceremony.
Many of the recruits will be rushed to
the front lines to backfill two Danab bat-
talions decimated by a Shabab attack in
January that left more than 100 Somali
soldiers dead or wounded.
Somalia is currently the most
active front in the conflicts
between the United States and
Islamist extremists since the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
I first reported from Somalia 30 years
ago, when the U.S. military’s main mis-
sion there was to make the capital, Mo-
gadishu, and outlying areas in a famine
belt safe enough for aid deliveries,
which had been interrupted by fighting
among Somali factions.
The United States withdrew from the
country after the “Black Hawk Down”
episode of 1993, when Somali militia
fighters killed 18 American service
members in a blazing battle later de-
picted in books and Hollywood movies.
Now, nearly two decades after the rise
of Al Shabab, Somalia is the most active
front in the “forever wars” that the
United States has been waging against
Islamist extremists since the Sept. 11,
2001, terrorist attacks.
The American fight against Al Shabab
began in 2014 with a handful of military
advisers and grew steadily to a 700-
member training force that President
Donald J. Trump withdrew just before
leaving office in 2021. President Biden
restored 450 of the troops last year to ad-
vise Somali soldiers fighting a Shabab
insurgency that still controls much of
the country’s south.
Somalia is also the center of a U.S.
counterterrorism drone war that has
waned in other hot spots, including
Yemen, Libya and Pakistan’s tribal ar-
eas, where U.S. airstrikes have dimin-
ished the threat. In the past year, the
United States has carried out about 20
airstrikes in Somalia, down from a peak
of 63 in 2019. Nearly all of the past year’s
strikes, however, were in “collective
self-defense” of Somali forces.
I returned to Somalia last month for a
rare embed with U.S. Special Operations
Tunisia’s president vilifies sub-Saharan migrants
CAIRO
BY VIVIAN YEE AND AHMED ELLALI
Moussa Osman had been in hiding — his
family panicked, his appetite gone —
since Tunisia’s president declared mi-
grants from other parts of Africa pawns
in a “criminal plot” to make his predomi-
nantly Arab and Muslim nation “a
purely African country.”
The next day, Mr. Osman, a 35-year-
old former car salesman supporting two
children back home in violence-wracked
northern Nigeria, lost his construction
job when the company said it could no
longer employ migrants who had come
to Tunisia illegally.
Then, he said, his landlord started
talking about evicting him, worried
about being penalized for having mi-
grants on the property.
Last Sunday, a group of Tunisians
broke into Mr. Osman’s apartment, beat
up the migrants he was living with and
stole their passports and cellphones. By
Monday afternoon, he felt he had no
choice but to risk a taxi ride to the Ni-
gerian Embassy in Tunis, the capital,
hoping to secure some thin protection
from a campaign of arrests that migrant
associations and Tunisian rights groups
say has swept up hundreds of Black for-
eigners over the past month.
“I am a poor person, a poor migrant
living here in peace,” he said outside the
embassy, where other Nigerians had be-
gun camping, fearing for their safety. “I
left my children in a very difficult situa-
Clockwise from top: Danab recruits preparing for drills at the military base in Baledogle, Somalia; American Special Operations forces arriving at the base on a C-130 cargo plane;
and recruits at their graduation ceremony. Many would be rushed to the front line. The Danab group has won a series of victories, but it was mauled in a January fight.
forces. The visit offered a window into a
counterterrorism world in which a small
number of Americans, usually far from
the front lines, are advising and assist-
ing Somali troops waging a ferocious
daily fight against a formidable foe.
As U.S. commandos worked with their
Somali counterparts, an array of Ameri-
can, Somali and other African military,
diplomatic and aid officials expressed
cautious optimism about the Somali
government’s commitment to the fight
but lingering doubts over its ability to
hold the ground it retakes.
Now, in the wake of the attack on Jan.
20 in Galmudug State, in central Soma-
lia, Somali officials have asked for more
American firepower and renewed an ap-
peal to Washington for more drone
strikes and looser rules on when they
can be carried out. The request so far
has received a cool reception from the
Migrants gathering in Tunis, outside the Ivory Coast Embassy. Some sub-Saharan
migrants in Tunisia have been fired from jobs and thrown out of their homes.
tion, and here I find myself in another
critical situation.”
Nineteen months after President Kais
Saied instituted one-man rule in his
North African nation, derailing the only
democracy to survive the Arab Spring
revolts, he has shaken the country once
again with an ever-widening purge in
recent weeks that analysts and critics
say appears increasingly fueled by
paranoia, conspiracy theories and au-
thoritarian urges.
At Mr. Saied’s direction, the authori-
ties have come for some of Tunisia’s
Biden administration, which is wary of a
deeper military commitment.
The attack came as the Somali mili-
tary pressed its monthslong offensive,
with several powerful local clan militias
joining the fight against a terrorist
group that has wreaked havoc across
the Horn of Africa. The Somali govern-
ment has been resupplying the clan mili-
tias with ammunition and other aid.
Last May, Somalia elected a new pres-
ident, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who
also held the role from 2012 to 2017. Since
returning to office, he has declared an
all-out war on Al Shabab, vowing to limit
the organization’s geographical reach
and cut off its money. Intelligence offi-
cials estimate that the group has
roughly 7,000 to 12,000 members and an-
nual income — including money from
taxing or extorting civilians — of about
$120 million.
MOHAMED MESSARA/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK
most prominent politicians, journalists,
activists, judges and others who have
failed to bow to his wishes, accusing
them of conspiring against the state.
More than 20 such people have been ar-
rested or placed under investigation
since Feb. 11, including a well-known de-
mocracy advocate and Islamist poli-
tician on Tuesday, adding to the Saied
opponents already jailed or facing pros-
ecution.
But even critics were shocked by Mr.
Saied’s Feb. 21 tirade against migrants
from other parts of Africa, in which he
PHOTOGRAPHS BY DIANA ZEYNEB ALHINDAWI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
AFRICA
Detail
area
SO MA LIA
ETH IOP IA
GALMUDUG
Baledogle
Airfield
Mogadishu
KE NYA
Nairobi Indian Ocean
200 MILES
THE NEW YORK TIMES
The full-scale offensive started soon
after Mr. Biden redeployed American
trainers to Somalia. Those forces only
advise and assist Somali soldiers and do
not conduct unilateral counterterrorism
openly mined what was already a deep
vein of discrimination and prejudice
against dark-skinned people in Tunisia.
“The unspoken goal behind these suc-
cessive waves of irregular migration is
to consider Tunisia a purely African
country, with no affiliation to the Arab
and Islamic nations,” he said, accusing
the migrants of fomenting crime and vi-
olence.
His remarks, seemingly inspired by a
xenophobic political party that supports
him, echoed the white-supremacist
“great replacement” theory popular
with the European and American far
right, which contends that there is a se-
cret effort to replace white populations
with others.
In the days after his speech, workers
and students from sub-Saharan Africa
have been fired, thrown out of their
homes, banned from public transporta-
tion and assaulted, according to rights
groups.
After seizing power in July 2021, Mr.
Saied promised he had no intention of
becoming a dictator. For opponents, ac-
tivists and a rising number of Tunisians
who were once content to wait and see if
he could turn the country around, how-
ever, the spasm of arrests and increas-
ingly corrosive words showed a leader
embracing a grimmer autocracy than
many had imagined possible.
“When you say something that vio-
lent in a society that is already racist, it’s
playing with fire,” said Salsabil Chellali,
the Tunisia director for Human Rights
Watch. “The opposition, civil society,
lawyers, media and now migrants —
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
operations like the one in January by
members of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6
that killed a senior Islamic State finan-
cier in northern Somalia.
More than 1,000 foreign diplomats,
military trainers, U.N. workers, journal-
ists and others operate inside a security
zone near Mogadishu’s seaside interna-
tional airport, largely sealed off from the
metropolitan mayhem by giant concrete
blast walls topped by concertina wires.
In early February, I took an Ethiopian
Airlines flight to the city and stayed at a
hotel steps from the airport exit. Over
three days, a photographer colleague,
Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi, and I con-
ducted interviews in the security zone
and flew aboard an Air Force C-130
cargo plane to this Somali military base
northwest of Mogadishu to watch live-
fire training demonstrations and the
graduation ceremony. We kept body ar-
this is really a higher gear that he’s
shifted into recently. The worst that we
were expecting is happening.”
Though Mr. Saied’s support had al-
ready splintered, thanks to a free-falling
economy, the upheaval in recent days
has mobilized some Tunisians who were
still torn between wariness of the presi-
dent and loathing of the rivals he ejected
from power, whom many blame for the
economic stagnation and political paral-
ysis of the past decade.
Hundreds of people marched in sup-
port of migrants in Tunis last weekend,
and several anti-Saied factions have
called for a major demonstration
against the president on Sunday. Among
them is a powerful national trade union,
known by its French initials U.G.T.T.
One of the union’s officers was recently
arrested because he had helped orga-
nize a strike.
“The ‘let’s wait and see’ party was the
biggest one, and all of those who were in
the wait-and-see party are no longer in
the wait-and-see party,” said Thameur
Mekki, the editor of Nawaat, an inde-
pendent Tunisian media outlet. “After
his speech about migrants, they said, no,
it’s not possible to let the guy do what he
wants.”
Tunisia’s foreign ministry has ac-
cused critics, including the African Un-
ion, the United States and France, of
misinterpreting the president’s words.
On Feb. 24, Mr. Saied denied that his
speech was racist, asserting that legal
migrants had nothing to fear. Neverthe-
less, he repeated his claims about a con-
spiracy to effect a demographic change.
..
mor and helmet at the ready, in case of a
Shabab attack.
Soldiers for the Danab, which means
lightning in Somali, are recruited by em-
ployees of Bancroft Global Develop-
ment, a Washington-based company
that for years has worked with the State
Department to train African Union
troops and embed with them on military
operations in Somalia.
Recruits who pass physical exams, lit-
eracy tests and security background
checks are then sent to Baledogle,
where they undergo three months of
combat training with Bancroft instruc-
tors.
The State Department spends about
$80 million a year to train, equip, feed,
fuel and provide $300 monthly bonuses
to the Danab force, embassy officials
said.
In the field, U.S. Special Operations
forces, including Army Green Berets
and Navy SEAL commandos, work
closely with individual Danab units, ad-
vising on mission planning, intelligence
gathering and troubleshooting.
When the Danab go out on operations,
the U.S. advisers remain behind at small
operating bases but monitor live video
feeds of the operations from surveil-
lance drones and reconnaissance air-
craft.
If the Somali commandos run into
trouble, they first seek help from Somali
units nearby or from Ugandan helicop-
ter gunships. If all else fails, they call for
American backup.
If the situation is dire enough — with
the enemy attacking or threatening to —
the U.S. advisers can authorize a col-
lective self-defense airstrike, as they did
most recently on Feb. 21, American offi-
cials said.
The Jan. 20 attack near the village of
Gal’ad had the potential to deal the
Danab, and the large-scale offensive, a
crippling blow. Four car-bombers and 10
militants wearing suicide explosives
vests stormed a Danab encampment at
dawn, followed by withering heavy gun-
fire from about 100 Shabab fighters in
what American officials called a “cata-
strophic attack.”
An American airstrike overnight scat-
tered the Shabab fighters and the next
day, surviving members of the Danab
battalions joined with other Somali
army units to fight back, officials said.
“There are going to be casualties,”
said Cmdr. Jonathan H., a Navy SEAL
officer who is the U.S. Special Opera-
tions commander in Somalia. As part of
being allowed access, The New York
Times agreed to only partially identify
him for security reasons. “But there are
going to be many more successes if they
continue building on the momentum.
I’m cautiously optimistic about the
progress being made.”
At the graduation ceremony two
weeks after the attack, posters embla-
zoned with photographs of the fallen
Danab fighters hung in memory around
the army base. The camp will be re-
named after Maj. Hassan Tuure, the
Danab’s deputy commander who was
killed in the assault.
For Lieutenant Ali, a former graphic
artist in Mogadishu, there is no giving in
to the extremists.
“I’m not afraid; I am not afraid of any-
thing,” she told me, as we stood in a tent
just steps from the ceremony where the
hundreds of graduates occasionally
burst into rhythmic chants and clap-
ping. “I want to help the people of Soma-
lia. They need me.”
Charlie Savage contributed reporting
from Washington, and Declan Walsh
from Nairobi, Kenya.
Tunisia, with a population of about 12
million, is home to an estimated 20,000
sub-Saharan Africans, many of whom
crossed into Tunisia illegally for the me-
nial jobs that Tunisians often reject. Oth-
ers work or study legally.
A coalition of civil society groups that
have banded together to defend mi-
grants said it had received nearly 200
requests for food, shelter or other neces-
sities since last Saturday from both
groups. But it said the true number of
people affected was far greater, as some
calls represented a request for several
households, while others had not known
to call. Some Black Tunisians have also
reported a rise in harassment recently
based on their skin color.
Migrant associations warned mem-
bers to stay inside and tread carefully
when outside. The Ivory Coast’s embas-
sy was organizing repatriation flights.
Mr. Saied still enjoys some support,
according to analysts and interviews
with voters. These days, however, it is
nothing like the near-universal eupho-
ria that greeted his initial power grab.
Mr. Saied has done little either to fix
the economy or clean up corruption, as
Tunisians had hoped.
Weakened and frustrated, Mr. Saied is
lashing out because “he sees a threat
coming from everywhere — from
within, from the opposition, from out-
side the country, Europeans, Ameri-
cans,” said Mohamed Dhia Hammami, a
Tunisian political analyst.
Vivian Yee reported from Cairo and Ah-
med Ellali from Tunis.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Biden challenged by ebbing support for Ukraine
BIDEN, FROM PAGE 1
Fox News said American support
should continue for “as long as it takes to
win,” 46 percent said the time frame
should be limited.
“It’s this way with every foreign inter-
vention,” said Andy Surabian, a Republi-
can strategist who has advised two out-
spoken Republican voices against
Ukraine aid, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio
and Donald Trump Jr. “In the first few
months, it’s always popular. People
don’t like what Russia did; it’s awful. But
as time goes on, war weariness is a real
thing, especially in this country, espe-
cially when voters aren’t connecting
what’s happening in Ukraine with their
own security.”
Although skepticism of Ukraine aid
has grown on both sides of the aisle, the
party breakdown has been striking. Ac-
cording to Pew, 40 percent of Republi-
cans think too much has been given,
compared with 15 percent of Democrats.
The good news for Mr. Biden is that
Americans have grown more supportive
of his handling of the war, with 48 per-
cent approving of his response to the in-
vasion in the Fox poll, compared with 40
percent in August.
While Mr. Biden used his visit to Kyiv
and a follow-up stop in Warsaw to ex-
press solidarity with the Ukrainians, he
has talked less about the war to fellow
Americans while at home. He made a
relatively passing reference to the war
during his State of the Union address
and has focused mainly on domestic pri-
orities in recent campaign-style stops
around the country. In part, that may be
intended to deflect criticism that he
cares more about foreigners than Amer-
icans.
Aides said Mr. Biden’s speeches in
Kyiv and Warsaw were intended for an
American audience as well as interna-
tional ones. But the president has
shrugged off concerns about the ebbing
of public support for the Ukraine supply
effort, suggesting it is a factor mainly
among what he calls MAGA Republi-
cans, after former President Donald J.
Trump’s Make America Great Again slo-
gan.
John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the Na-
tional Security Council, said support re-
mains powerful in Congress itself. “Yes,
there are a small number of members on
Capitol Hill, in the House Republicans
specifically, that have expressed pub-
licly their concerns about support for
Ukraine,” he said at a recent briefing.
“But if you talk to the House leadership,
Ukrainian soldiers at an artillery position near Bakhmut. Supporters of aid for Ukraine fear growing taxpayer fatigue in the United States over shipping billions’ worth of weapons.
you won’t hear that. And you certainly
aren’t going to hear it on the Democratic
side. And you don’t hear it in the Senate.”
Indeed, Senator Mitch McConnell of
Kentucky, the Republican leader, and
key House Republicans like Represent-
ative Michael McCaul of Texas, chair-
man of the Foreign Affairs Committee,
have pushed Mr. Biden from the other
side, arguing that the president is not
doing enough for Ukraine. Mr. McCaul
took a congressional delegation to Kyiv
shortly after Mr. Biden, emphasizing bi-
partisan support.
But Mr. McCarthy, who during last
fall’s campaign said there would be no
“blank check” for Ukraine in a Republi-
can House, is under pressure from a
small but vocal part of his caucus critical
of American involvement in the war and
encouraged by Fox’s Tucker Carlson.
With a razor-thin working majority, it is
not clear whether he would allow an-
other robust aid package to come to the
floor for a vote and if so under what con-
ditions, which is why Mr. Zelensky
wants to talk, as was reported by Punch-
bowl News.
Among those pushing Mr. McCarthy
to block future aid is Representative
Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, the
former QAnon adherent who has be-
come a key ally since helping him win
the speakership. Speaking to Just the
News, a conservative website, Ms.
Greene said recently that she opposed
the war in Ukraine. “But you know
who’s driving it?” she asked. “It’s Amer-
ica. America needs to stop pushing the
war in Ukraine.”
While she and her allies have been on
the margins of the Republican Party on
Ukraine, the center of gravity may be
shifting. Mr. Trump recently lashed out
at Mr. Biden for visiting Kyiv instead of
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 | 5
DANIEL BEREHULAK/THE NEW YORK TIMES
East Palestine, Ohio, the site of a recent
toxic train derailment. In a fund-raising
video, Mr. Trump said, “we’re teetering
on the brink of World War III” thanks to
Mr. Biden and promised to “end the
Ukraine conflict in 24 hours.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr.
Trump’s most formidable potential chal-
lenger for the 2024 nomination, sought
to match the former president, criticiz-
ing what he called the “open-ended
blank check” for Ukraine and saying “I
don’t think it’s in our interest” to be in-
volved in the fight with Russia.
The announced and unannounced Re-
world
publican presidential candidates who do
support aid to Ukraine, like former Vice
President Mike Pence and Nikki Haley,
the former ambassador to the United
Nations, trail far behind those two front-
runners in early polling.
So far, Congress has approved $113
billion in military, economic, humanitar-
ian and other aid for Ukraine, not all of
which has been spent yet. Anticipating
trouble from the new Republican House,
the White House and lame-duck Demo-
cratic majority last winter pushed
through an aid package large enough to
last until summer. At the current rate of
spending, it would run out by mid-July,
according to the Center for Strategic
and International Studies.
A House Democrat who asked not to
be identified speaking critically of the
White House expressed concern that
the president’s team did not fully grasp
how Americans viewed the aid. While
they support Ukraine in principle, this
“In the first few months,
it’s always popular. People
don’t like what Russia did;
it’s awful. But as time goes on,
war weariness is a real thing.”
Democrat said, the way the aid has been
doled out through a steady drumbeat of
announcements of another $500 million
or $1 billion every week or two exacer-
bates the sense that endless funds are
heading out of the country.
Philip D. Zelikow, a University of Vir-
ginia scholar and former State Depart-
ment counselor, said military aid was
more popular than economic aid be-
cause much of it is actually spent on
arms produced by American defense
firms. But he said that economic aid was
critical to rebuilding Ukraine.
Still, some government veterans said
there is only so much Mr. Biden can do to
preserve public support, since the most
pronounced erosion has been on the Re-
publican side.
“President Biden probably has lim-
ited ability to reach the Republican audi-
ences that are most in play,” said Peter
D. Feaver, a Duke University professor
who has studied the relationship be-
tween public opinion and military oper-
ations and advised President George W.
Bush during the Iraq War. “He has a
daunting but perhaps doable task to
keep his left flank on board.”

6 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023
world
After years in U.S., migrants head home
Along with an influx
at border, there’s a wave
going the other direction
BY MIRIAM JORDAN
In August 2021, more than three dec-
ades after sneaking across the U.S.
southern border as young adults to
work and support their families in Mex-
ico, Irma and Javier Hernandez checked
in at La Guardia Airport for a one-way
flight from New York to Oaxaca. They
were leaving behind four American chil-
dren, stable jobs where they were val-
ued employees and a country they had
grown to love.
But after years of living in the United
States without legal status, they had de-
cided it was time to return to their home-
land. Ms. Hernandez’s mother was 91,
and they feared she might die — as Ms.
Hernandez’s father and in-laws had
done — before they saw each other
again. With dollar savings, they had
built a little house, where they could live,
and had invested in a tortilleria, which
they could run. Their children, now
young adults, could fend for themselves.
“Most of them never wanted
to stay. We gummed up
the works when we
militarized the border.”
“Only God knows how hard we
worked day after day in New York,” said
Ms. Hernandez, 57. “We are still young
enough that we could have kept going
there, but ultimately we made the diffi-
cult choice to return.”
The Hernandezes are part of a wave
of immigrants who have been leaving
the United States and returning to their
countries of origin in recent years, often
after spending most of their lives toiling
as undocumented workers. Some of
them had never intended to remain in
the United States but said that the cost
and danger of crossing the border kept
them in the country, once they had ar-
rived — and they built lives. Now, mid-
dle-aged and still able-bodied, many are
making a reverse migration.
Mexicans, who represent the largest
and most transformative migration to
the United States in modern history,
started a gradual return more than a
decade ago, driven by improvements in
the Mexican economy and shrinking job
Scientists tinker with trees’ genes to fight climate change
BY GABRIEL POPKIN
In a low-lying tract of southern Geor-
gia’s pine belt, a half-dozen workers
planted row upon row of twig-like poplar
trees. These weren’t just any trees,
though: Some of the seedlings being
nestled into the soggy soil had been ge-
netically engineered to grow wood at
turbocharged rates while slurping up
carbon dioxide from the air.
The poplars may be the first genet-
ically modified trees planted in America
outside of a research trial or a commer-
cial fruit orchard. Just as the introduc-
tion of the Flavr Savr tomato in 1994 in-
troduced a new industry of genetically
modified food crops, the tree planters
last month hope to transform forestry.
Living Carbon, the biotechnology
company in the San Francisco Bay Area
that produced the poplars, intends for
its trees to be a large-scale solution to
climate change.
“We’ve had people tell us it’s impossi-
ble,” Maddie Hall, the company’s co-
founder and chief executive, said of her
dream to deploy genetic engineering on
behalf of the climate. But she and her
colleagues have also found believers —
enough to invest $36 million in the four-
year-old company.
Irma and Javier Hernandez lived in the United States for 30 years and raised their four children in New York. But they never gained legal status and voluntarily returned to Mexico.
opportunities in the United States dur-
ing the last recession.
But departures have recently acceler-
ated, beginning with crackdowns on im-
migrants under the Trump administra-
tion and continuing under President Bi-
den, as many older people decide they
have realized their original goals for im-
migrating and can afford to trade the of-
ten-grueling work available to undocu-
mented workers for a slower pace in
their home country.
Their departures are among many
factors that have helped keep the total
number of undocumented immigrants
in the country relatively stable, despite
a flood of migrant apprehensions at the
The company has also attracted crit-
ics. The Global Justice Ecology Project,
an environmental group, has called the
company’s trees “growing threats” to
forests and expressed alarm that the
federal government allowed them to
evade regulation, opening the door to
commercial plantings much sooner than
is typical for engineered plants.
Living Carbon has yet to publish peer-
reviewed papers; its only publicly re-
ported results come from a greenhouse
trial that lasted just a few months. These
data have some experts intrigued but
stopping well short of a full endorse-
ment.
“They have some encouraging re-
sults,” said Donald Ort, a University of
Illinois geneticist whose plant experi-
ments helped inspire Living Carbon’s
technology. But he added that the notion
that greenhouse results will translate to
success in the real world is “not a slam
dunk.”
Living Carbon’s poplars start their
lives in a lab in Hayward, Calif. There,
biologists tinker with the way the trees
conduct photosynthesis, the series of
chemical reactions plants use to weave
sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into
sugars and starches. In doing so, they
follow a precedent set by evolution: Sev-
southern border that reached two mil-
lion last year.
“It’s a myth that everyone comes here
and nobody ever leaves,” said Robert
Warren, a senior visiting fellow at the
Center for Migration Studies, a think
tank, who wrote a recent report on the
trend.
“There’s a lot of people leaving the
country, and they’re leaving voluntari-
ly,” said Mr. Warren, who is one of sev-
eral demographers, including academ-
ics at Emory University, Princeton Uni-
versity and the University of California,
Los Angeles, who have been document-
ing the trend.
The current undocumented popula-
eral times over Earth’s long history, im-
provements in photosynthesis have en-
abled plants to ingest enough carbon di-
oxide to cool the planet substantially.
While photosynthesis has profound
impacts on the Earth, as a chemical
process it is far from perfect. Numerous
inefficiencies prevent plants from cap-
turing and storing more than a small
fraction of the solar energy that falls
onto their leaves. Those inefficiencies,
among other factors, limit how fast trees
and other plants grow and how much
carbon dioxide they soak up.
Scientists have spent decades trying
to take over where evolution left off. In
2019, Dr. Ort and his colleagues an-
nounced that they had genetically
hacked tobacco plants to photosynthe-
size more efficiently. Normally, photo-
synthesis produces a toxic byproduct
that a plant must dispose of, wasting en-
ergy. The Illinois researchers added
genes from pumpkins and green algae
to induce tobacco seedlings to instead
recycle the toxins into more sugars, pro-
ducing plants that grew nearly 40 per-
cent larger.
That same year, Ms. Hall, who had
been working for Silicon Valley ven-
tures like OpenAI (which was responsi-
ble for the language model ChatGPT),
met her future co-founder Patrick Mel-
lor at a climate tech conference. Mr. Mel-
lor was researching whether trees could
be engineered to produce decay-resist-
ant wood.
With money raised from venture capi-
tal firms and Ms. Hall’s tech-world con-
tacts, including Sam Altman, the chief
executive of OpenAI, she and Mr. Mellor
started Living Carbon in a bid to juice up
trees to fight climate change. “There
were so few companies that were look-
ing at large-scale carbon removal in a
way that married frontier science and
large-scale commercial deployment,”
Ms. Hall said.
In a field accustomed to glacial
progress and heavy regulation, Living
Carbon has moved fast and freely. The
gene gun-modified poplars, a technol-
ogy that essentially blasts foreign genes
into the trees’ chromosomes, avoided a
set of U.S. regulations of genetically
modified organisms that can stall
biotech projects for years. (Those regu-
lations have since been revised.) By
contrast, a team of scientists who genet-
ically engineered a blight-resistant
chestnut tree using the same bacterium
method employed earlier by Living Car-
CORRECTIONS
• An obituary on Thursday about Robert
Hébras, the last survivor of a 1944 mas-
sacre in which members of an SS Panzer
division killed almost everyone in the
village of Oradour-sur-Glane in France,
misstated how old he was at the time. He
was 18, not 19.
tion has stayed relatively constant at
about 10.2 million over the past several
years after peaking at nearly 12 million
in 2008, even with the large number of
new arrivals at the border.
An emergency health order adopted
to slow the transmission of the coronavi-
rus has allowed the border authorities to
quickly expel more than 2.5 million of
the new arrivals since 2020; hundreds of
thousands of others have been allowed
to enter the country during that period.
But a largely voluntary exodus of other
immigrants has kept overall population
numbers relatively steady, demogra-
phers say. (While deportations acceler-
ated under both the Obama and Trump
Planting modified seedlings in Georgia. Living Carbon will next plant its poplars on abandoned coal mines in Pennsylvania.
bon have been awaiting a decision since
2020. An engineered apple grown on a
small scale in Washington State took
several years to be approved.
“You could say the old rule was sort of
leaky,” said Bill Doley, a consultant who
helped manage the U.S. Agriculture De-
partment’s genetically modified organ-
ism regulation process until 2022.
Last month, on the land of Vince Stan-
ley, a seventh-generation farmer who
manages more than 25,000 forested
acres, or about 10,000 hectares, in Geor-
gia’s pine belt, mattock-swinging work-
ers carrying backpacks of seedlings
planted nearly 5,000 modified poplars.
The modified poplars were interspersed
with a roughly equal number of unmodi-
fied trees. By the end of the unseason-
ably warm day, the workers were
drenched in sweat and the planting plots
were dotted with pencil-thin seedlings
and colored marker flags poking from
the mud.
In contrast to fast-growing pines,
hardwoods that grow in bottomlands
• An article on Tuesday about the cook-
book author and teacher Raghavan Iyer
misstated an ingredient he used to make
lunch. It was black cardamom pods, not
black coriander pods.
• An article on Feb. 24 about a new olive
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
MARIAN CARRASQUERO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
administrations, those numbers were
too small to be a significant factor.)
The number of undocumented people
from about a dozen countries, including
Poland, the Philippines, Peru, South Ko-
rea and Uruguay, declined 30 percent or
more from 2010 to 2020.
The undocumented population from
Mexico, the principal source of immi-
grants to the United States, dropped to
4.4 million from 6.6 million during that
period.
Declines were recorded in all but two
states during the decade: 49 percent in
New York; 40 percent in California,
which lost 815,000 Mexicans; 36 percent
in Illinois; and 20 percent, or 267,000, in
like these produce wood so slowly that a
landowner might get only one harvest in
a lifetime, Mr. Stanley said. He hopes
Living Carbon’s “elite seedlings” will al-
low him to grow bottomland trees and
make money faster. “We’re taking a tim-
ber rotation of 50 to 60 years and we’re
cutting that in half,” he said. “It’s totally
a win-win.”
Forest geneticists were less sanguine
about Living Carbon’s trees. Re-
searchers typically assess trees in con-
fined field trials before moving to large-
scale plantings, said Andrew New-
house, who directs the engineered
chestnut project at the State University
of New York College of Environmental
Science and Forestry. “Their claims
seem bold, based on very limited real-
world data,” he said.
Steve Strauss, a geneticist at Oregon
State University, agreed with the need
to see field data. “My experience over
the years is that the greenhouse means
almost nothing” about the outdoor
prospects of trees whose physiology has
oil coffee line at Starbucks in Italy mis-
stated Howard Schultz’s role at Star-
bucks. He helped build the company in
leadership roles, but he is not a founder.
• An article on Feb. 24 about Israeli tech
executives who are considering moving
..
Texas. The data suggests that those res-
idents were not moving to other states
but returning to their home countries,
Mr. Warren said.
There has long been an ebb and flow
in undocumented immigration. People
leave home in response to push factors,
such as financial duress, drought and es-
calating violence, as well as in response
to pull factors in the United States,
chiefly jobs and haven.
The number of undocumented Polish
immigrants shrank by half from 2010 to
2019 amid improving conditions in Po-
land.
Brazilians returned in large numbers
when their country’s economy was
thriving, thanks to a food export boom
and successful bids to host the 2014
World Cup and 2016 Olympics that cre-
ated a construction bonanza.
Rubén Hernández-León, a sociologist
at U.C.L.A. who has conducted field re-
search on Mexicans who have returned
home, said that the primary reason peo-
ple gave for leaving the United States
was a desire to reunite with family.
The anti-immigrant rhetoric of for-
mer President Donald J. Trump coupled
with his administration’s crackdown on
unlawful immigration caused anxiety
that also drove some undocumented
people, especially Mexicans, to leave,
Mr. Hernández-León said.
A return to the homeland has always
characterized Mexico-U.S. migration.
For a long time, mainly men alone trav-
eled back and forth between their vil-
lages and the United States, earning dol-
lars during monthslong stays.
This circular migration was upended
in the early 1990s as the United States
introduced a spate of policies to fortify
the border, erecting barriers and de-
ploying more agents.
But the border restrictions backfired.
After facing risks and paying smugglers
to cross the border, undocumented
workers stayed in the United States,
rather than coming and going.
“Most of them never wanted to stay.
We gummed up the works when we mili-
tarized the border,” said Douglas S.
Massey, an immigration scholar at
Princeton. “They spent longer and long-
er time and had families.”
Now, he said, census data suggests
that many of them are electing to go
home.
“If they have savings and a house in
Mexico, they can retire there,” he said.
“Their kids born in the States are now
old enough to take care of themselves
and can go back and forth to visit.”
AUDRA MELTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
been modified, he said. “Venture capital-
ists may not know that.”
The U.S. Forest Service, which plants
large numbers of trees every year, has
said little about whether it would use en-
gineered trees. To be considered for
planting in national forests, which make
up nearly a fifth of U.S. forestland, Liv-
ing Carbon’s trees would need to align
with existing management plans that
typically put a priority on forest health
and diversity over reducing the amount
of atmospheric carbon, said Dana Nel-
son, a geneticist with the service. “I find
it hard to imagine that it would be a good
fit on a national forest,” Dr. Nelson said.
Living Carbon is focusing for now on
private land, where it will face fewer
hurdles. This spring it will plant poplars
on abandoned coal mines in Pennsylva-
nia. By next year Ms. Hall and Mr. Mel-
lor hope to be putting millions of trees in
the ground.
Audra Melton contributed reporting
from Georgia.
their businesses out of Israel because of
plans for a judicial overhaul misstated
Adam Fisher’s role at Bessemer Ven-
ture Partners. He is a partner, not a co-
founder. The article also referred incor-
rectly to Wix.com. It is a publicly traded
company; it is not private.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 | 7

Business
Games lure Japanese dropouts back to class
TOKYO
An e-sports school offers
intensive video training,
plus conventional courses
BY BEN DOOLEY AND HISAKO UENO
Wataru Yoshida had had enough. He
wasn’t going back to school.
He disliked his teachers, chafed
against the rules and was bored by his
classes. So in the middle of 2020, as Ja-
pan’s schools reopened after pandemic
closings, Wataru decided to stay home
and play video games all day.
“He just declared, ‘I’m getting noth-
ing from school,’ ” said his mother, Kae
Yoshida.
Now, after more than a year out of the
classroom, Wataru, 16, has returned to
school, though not a normal one. He and
around two dozen teenagers like him are
part of the inaugural class of Japan’s
first e-sports high school, a private insti-
tution in Tokyo that opened last year.
The academy, which mixes traditional
class work with hours of intensive video
game training, was founded with the in-
tention of feeding the growing global de-
mand for professional game players.
But educators believe they have stum-
bled onto something more valuable: a
model for getting students like Wataru
back in school.
“School refusal” — chronic absen-
teeism often linked to anxiety or bully-
ing — has been a preoccupation in Japan
since the early 1990s, when educators
first noticed that more than 1 percent of
elementary and middle school students
had effectively dropped out. The num-
ber has since more than doubled.
Other countries have reported higher
rates, but it is difficult to make direct
comparisons because of varying defini-
tions of absenteeism.
Japanese schools can feel like hostile
environments for children who don’t fit
in. Pressure to conform — from teachers
and peers alike — is high. In extreme
cases, schools have demanded that chil-
dren dye their naturally brown hair
black to match other pupils’, or dictated
the color of their underwear.
Making matters worse, counselors,
social workers and psychologists are
rare in schools, said Keiko Nakamura,
an associate professor of psychology at
Tohoku Fukushi University. Teachers
are expected to perform those roles in
addition to their other duties.
As they struggle to address school re-
fusal, educators have experimented
with different models, including dis-
tance learning. In December, Tokyo an-
nounced that it would open a school in
the metaverse. Promotional photos
looked as if they were straight out of a
Japanese role-playing game.
Frustrated parents with means have
turned to private schools, including
schools that emphasize socialization
and encourage children to create their
own course of study. The E-Sports High
Students at the E-Sports High School in Tokyo, above, competing in a video game tour-
nament. At right, Wataru Yoshida, a onetime dropout who is thriving at the academy
and took part in the tournament, at home with his mother, Kae, and their dog.
School students, however, mostly found the school’s game campus. It is a sleek
their own way to the school. pod — half spaceship, half motherboard,
For them, it seemed like a potential with glass floors and a ceiling circuited
haven. But for their parents, it was a last with green neon tubes — on the eighth
resort. Once the school realized it was floor of a building in the bustling
tapping into an unexpected demograph- Shibuya district of Tokyo.
ic of absentee students, it invested con- The ceremony offered reassurance to
siderable effort in soothing parental both students and parents. A former
concerns. minister of education sent a congratula-
tory telegram on the school’s opening.
The principal — in the form of a glitchy
To dropouts, the school was a virtual avatar — delivered a speech
potential haven. For their from a giant screen, then led students in
parents, it was a last resort. a programming exercise.
That mix would continue throughout
the school year. On Mondays, Wednes-
An information session last year ex- days and Fridays, pros instructed stu-
plained that the school’s lesson plans dents on competition strategies for pop-
met national educational standards, and ular games such as Fortnite. On one
administrators addressed concerns in- such day, students gathered around a
cluding video game addiction and ca- whiteboard for a nearly scientific lec-
reer prospects for professional game ture about the relative merits of Street
players. Fighter characters, then broke into
At the start of the Japanese school groups to put the lesson into action.
year last April, 22 boys, accompanied by On Tuesdays and Thursdays, stu-
dark-suited parents and grandparents, dents studied core subjects including
gathered for an entrance ceremony at math, biology and English. Classes
started at 10, later than at traditional
schools. There were no uniforms.
Another unaccustomed sight for a
school in Japan: tardiness.
On one day early in the school year,
only two of the boys showed up for the
start of first period, a lecture about infor-
mation technology. There were four
teachers.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES
As pupils straggled in, the teachers of-
fered a cheery hello or simply ignored
them. By third period — biology — five
students had arrived. Only two stayed
through the day’s last class, English.
The teachers were happy they came
at all.
“Kids who didn’t come to school in the
first place are allergic to being forced,”
said Akira Saito, the school’s principal,
an affable bear of a man who had spent
years teaching troubled students in Jap-
anese public schools.
The academy’s philosophy was to
draw them in with the games and then
show them that “it’s really fun to come to
school, it’s really useful for your future,”
he said.
Torahito Tsutsumi, 17, had left school
after bullying drove him into a deep de-
pression. He spent all day in his room
reading comics and playing video
games. When his mother, Ai, confronted
him about it, he told her that his life was
“meaningless.”
Traditional Japanese education puts a
premium on cultivating grit — known as
gaman. Educational methods often fo-
cus on teaching children the value of en-
durance, dispensing harsh punishments
and avoiding anything that looked like
coddling.
But as Ms. Tsutsumi watched her son
sink into depression, she feared what
might happen if she tried to force him
back to class. She had begun to lose hope
when Torahito saw a television ad for
the e-sports school.
By the school year’s halfway point, To-
rahito had made progress. He arrived at
school every day promptly at 10 and had
become more optimistic, his mother
said.
In truth, few of the students will be-
come pro players. E-sports have never
caught on in Japan, where people prefer
single-player games. And careers are
short anyway: Teenagers — with their
fast-twitch reflexes — dominate. By
their mid-20s, most players are no long-
er competitive.
The academy’s teachers encourage
students to seek other paths into the in-
dustry — programming or design, for
example — and to make pro games a
sideline, not a career.
Wataru, however, is focused on mak-
ing it big. By midsemester, he still wasn’t
getting to class much, but overall he was
thriving, commuting over an hour, three
days a week, for practice. He was less
reserved, more eager to goof off with his
new friends.
In November, after months of hard
practice, Wataru and a team of class-
mates made it through the first round of
a national competition for League of
Legends, a fantasy-themed game of cap-
ture the flag that has become one of the
world’s most popular e-sports formats.
The tournament was remote, but on
the day of the second round, Wataru and
his teammates showed up at the campus
early. The room was empty except for a
few chaperones. One team member had
overslept and would play from home.
They won their first game. Then a
group of older players smashed them.
Defeated, the team’s members sat
quietly for a time, the light from the
monitors washing over their disap-
pointed faces.
“I should probably go home,” Wataru
said.
He turned back to his monitor instead.
He was part of a team. And he was get-
ting better at that, too.

Let’s meet at the office around the bar cart

Executives experiment
with choices to figure out
hybrid work arrangements
BY EMMA GOLDBERG
The freight elevator doors opened onto
50,000 square feet of office real estate.
Right now, it is empty, but Seth Besmert-
nik, chief executive of the software com-
pany Conductor, gestured at the beams
and concrete floor with pride. He has
plans for his company’s new office —
conference rooms, a pickleball court
and, of course, all of his 200 employees
in the New York City area.
Mr. Besmertnik conceded that it had
been scary to persuade his board to sign
a lease doubling his office real estate in
2021, including the new 4,645 square
meters. But to him, leasing a larger of-
fice was a symbol of his belief in physi-
cal, in-person collaboration.
“As much as it might be nice to save
the money, I want to save our soul first,”
he said, with the zeal that often inflects
conversations about in-person work,
nearly three years into the pandemic. “I
want to do the right thing for the com-
pany in the long term.”
For many companies, though, signing
the lease for an office is just the first
step. Next, executives have to persuade
their workers to fill it. Conductor has re-
lied on both carrots (“Cold brew?
Beer?” Mr. Besmertnik offered, jok-
ingly, at 10:15 a.m.) and sticks (employ-
ees are required to come in three days a
week). And like most other companies,
it is still experimenting. “I’m consider-
ing going to four days,” Mr. Besmertnik
said. “We definitely won’t go to five. And
might just stay at three.”
Business leaders are in a phase of trial
and error that comes with staggering
stakes. They are figuring out how many
days to call employees back to the office,
and on top of that, how strictly to enforce
their own rules. While some companies
are in five days a week and others have
gone remote forever, many more em-
ployers have landed on hybrid solutions,
Perks at Conductor include free beer and Foosball, left, and a money booth, at right, used to reward employees for high performance.
and as they announce these plans they
are facing fierce resistance.
Amazon recently told its corporate
workers to return to the office at least
three days a week starting in May and
faced an outcry on Slack, its employee
messaging system.
Starbucks asked for three days from
its 3,750 corporate employees, prompt-
ing an open letter of protest.
“I prefer to work from home,” said
Eric Deshawn Lerma, 26, an executive
assistant at Amazon who is part of a
more than 29,000-person Slack channel
at the company called “Remote Advoca-
cy.” “To have that choice stripped from
me based on purely speculative obser-
vations does not sit right with me.”
Offices in the United States reached a
crucial benchmark at the start of this
year: They’re at half their prepandemic
occupancy. Just over half of workers
who can do their jobs from home are
now combining remote and in-person
work, according to Gallup. A closer look
at New York, from the Partnership for
New York City, found that 82 percent of
Manhattan office employers surveyed
in late January were maintaining or
adopting hybrid policies in 2023. So the
corporate experts — McKinsey, Mercer,
PwC — have consulted their crystal
balls and declared: The future is hybrid.
Hybrid looks vastly different in differ-
ent offices. If the future is hybrid, to
many executives that means the future
is choose-your-own-adventure. But now
the emphasis is shifting from adventure
to choice. Executives are making re-
turn-to-office plans with more perma-
nence, communicating requirements
more clearly after months of hesitation
and mushy expectations, though what
their plans look like vary widely.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY HILARY SWIFT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
“There’s not a Hybrid Office 101,
where you can pick up the book and see
what 100 offices have done before,” said
Richard Buery, chief executive of the
Robin Hood Foundation, which requires
employees to come in two days a week.
At Conductor, which has required all
employees within 90 minutes of an office
to return three days a week, managers
are ensuring that their teams adhere to
the rules. Mr. Besmertnik believes that a
lack of discipline, with hybrid work,
leads to “self-fulfilling failure.”
Orchard, a real estate company, gave
its 500 employees an “open enrollment”
period in which to decide whether they
wanted to work remote. The 60 percent
who selected the office are expected to
come in two days a week.
The decisions that chief executives
are making will have effects far beyond
their own work spaces. Researchers es-
timate that office real estate values will
plunge 39 percent from prepandemic
levels in the coming years. Economists
foretell a “doom loop” for urban com-
mercial areas: With fewer people com-
muting to downtown neighborhoods, re-
tail and services will suffer, prompting
even fewer people to commute, leading
to a drop in tax revenue that could fur-
ther hurt downtown services such as
public transportation.
Some companies have championed
an office-free future — especially
Airbnb, which has benefited as ultra-re-
mote workers move to far-flung cities.
“The cat’s out of the bag,” said Dave
Stephenson, Airbnb’s chief financial offi-
cer and head for employee experience.
He said that almost every finance chief
he has talked to who has had a policy of
bringing people back to work, “people
are doing less than what they’ve been
asked. If they’ve said they want to be
back three days a week, they’re getting
them back two.”
Fully remote work is simple enough to
dictate, as is fully in person. Hybrid
work often creates a conundrum. Em-
ployees say the primary motivation for
them to commute into the office is the
guarantee of seeing teammates. That
demands coordination, with everybody
coming in on the same day. But rigid
policies often bring greater backlash.
“Well-organized hybrid is the best of
all,” said Nick Bloom, an economist and
remote work expert at Stanford. “The
problem is that organizing it requires
managers to have discipline.”
Wall Street’s leaders have been clear
that work arrangements are not up for
popular debate. James Gorman, the
chief executive of Morgan Stanley,
whose employees are mostly in the of-
fice three or more days a week, said this
year that remote work was “not an em-
ployee choice.”
Other chief executives have been less
firm. They understand that their work-
ers save time and money by staying
home, and they want to earn the com-
mutes by making the office enticing.
At Orchard, the real estate company,
that meant employees were greeted on a
recent Wednesday with a bar cart
rolling past their desks, as the head of
facilities played a Chumbawamba clas-
sic — “I get knocked down, but I get up
again” — while offering beverages from
an ice bucket filled with Six Point I.P.A.s,
Modelos and sauvignon blanc.
Court Cunningham, the company’s
chief executive, declined to drink be-
cause he said he was heading to the
gym, and couldn’t combine burpees and
beer. But he emphasized that rituals like
happy hour ensured that the office was a
space where employees wanted to
spend their time, so managers didn’t
have to serve as hall monitors.
“It’s hard to make it work, but when
you do, it’s magical,” said Lorraine
Buhannic, Orchard’s chief people officer.
In Orchard’s magic, there’s some ran-
domness: “We basically rolled the dice
and said let’s make it two days a week,”
Ms. Buhannic said, adding that the deci-
sion was also partly based on employee
survey responses.
Business leaders realize, though, that
their roll-the-dice decisions are shaping
the way their employees approach work
— how people are generating ideas, and
balancing lives and careers. And
streams of research are emerging about
the effects of remote work on both.
A study in Nature last year found that
communicating virtually can inhibit cre-
ativity. Another study from researchers
at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology found that with the onset of re-
mote work, the formation of what sociol-
ogists call “weak ties” — measured in
terms of emails between people with
mutual contacts — declined 38 percent.
But then there’s the immense stress re-
lief that some workers have experi-
enced with remote work. Parents have
found that it enables them to better bal-
ance professional duties with child care.
Employees of color say it reduces mi-
croaggressions and cliques.
The best hybrid arrangements prom-
ise to combine the values that all sides
want: the creativity of in-person col-
laboration, the ease and fluidity of work-
ing from home. Some executives remain
hopeful they can strike that balance.

8 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023
business
A QR code at a food stall in Mumbai, India. The digital payment system enabled by the code is now used by close to 300 million individuals and 50 million merchants in the country.
Digital cash is king in India
INDIA, FROM PAGE 1
offers services from hundreds of banks
and dozens of mobile payment apps,
with no transaction fees.
In January, about eight billion trans-
actions worth nearly $200 billion were
carried out on the Unified Payments In-
terface, according to Dilip Asbe, the
managing director of the National Pay-
ments Corporation of India, which over-
sees the system.
The value of instant digital transac-
tions in India last year was far more
than in the United States, Britain, Ger-
many and France. “Combine the four
and multiply by four — it is more than
that,” as one Indian cabinet minister,
Ashwini Vaishnaw, told the World Eco-
nomic Forum in January.
The system has grown rapidly and is
now used by close to 300 million individ-
uals and 50 million merchants, Mr. Asbe
said. Digital payments are being made
for even the smallest of transactions,
with nearly 50 percent classified as
The value of instant digital
payments in India last year
eclipsed those in America,
Britain, France and Germany.
small or micro payments: 10 cents for a
cup of milk chai or $2 for a bag of fresh
vegetables. That is a significant behav-
ioral shift in what has long been a cash-
driven economy.
One impetus for the move toward dig-
ital payments was Mr. Modi’s 2016 deci-
sion to remove all large-denomination
currency from the market. Promoted as
an effort to eradicate black money in
politics, the shock devastated small
businesses that ran on cash.
Reliance on the digital infrastructure
deepened during the pandemic, as the
government used the ID numbers to
manage the world’s largest vaccination
drive and deliver financial aid.
While the system has become embed-
ded in Indian life, the concerns over data
privacy have not fully receded, even af-
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Dilip Asbe, above center, is managing
director of the National Payments Corpo-
ration of India, which oversees the system.
The code, right, is used for purchases as
small as a 10-cent cup of milk chai.
ter Supreme Court rulings governing its
use. Some worry that the sharp erosion
of checks on government power under
the strongman rule of Mr. Modi could
open the door to abuses of the central
identity database. With India pushing
its model abroad, in some cases in coun-
tries that lack strong legal safeguards,
these concerns will follow.
Amitabh Kant, one of India’s top co-
ordinators for the Group of 20 events,
said the government had struck the
right balance between privacy and inno-
vation. “We said that the data belongs to
the individual and that he has the right
to give consent for every transaction
that he undertakes,” he said.
In two dozen interviews in villages,
small towns and cities, a varied picture
of digital payments emerged. In a pair of
village shops in the northern state of Ut-
tar Pradesh, they made up about 10 per-
cent of daily sales; in the busier markets
of Delhi, that number could be a quarter
or half.
Even in sectors that have not yet
adopted digital payments, such as the
fishing industry in the southern state of
Kerala, the basic pillars of the digital in-
frastructure — the identity number,
bank accounts and mobile phone apps —
made it easier to deliver services.
In markets where digital payments
have taken hold, the raw excitement of
the newly converted is palpable. App
companies are working to ensure ease
of use across a wide spectrum of digital
literacy. Merchants on the same side-
walk help one another. And because this
is technology we are talking about, chil-
dren come to the aid of parents.
Small voice boxes provided by pay-
ment apps are a fixture at snack carts
and tea stalls, where vendors are too
busy to check phone messages after ev-
ery small transaction. A Siri-like voice
declares how much money was in-
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ATUL LOKE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
stantly received with each payment by
QR code. This has helped bridge mis-
trust among merchants long used to
cash transactions.
Merchants like the cobbler and the ice
cream seller at a central Delhi market
who do not have their own QR codes bor-
row their neighbor’s. It’s the digital ver-
sion of: I don’t have change, but will
make it work with help.
“I used to prefer cash,” said Rajesh
Kumar Srivastva, an auto-rickshaw
driver in Delhi. “But I learned the bene-
fits of this during the lockdown.”
Before the pandemic, Mr. Srivastva
pasted a QR code on the inside of his
rickshaw, but since only a quarter of his
payments were digital, they remained
an afterthought.
Just before the 2020 lockdown, Mr.
Srivastva paid a hefty electricity bill and
two installments of the loan on his vehi-
cle, depleting the cash at home.
His cash earnings usually were not
enough to justify travels for bank depos-
its. But his wife urged him to check the
account linked to the digital payments.
Unable to figure out his balance at an
A.T.M., he returned with his daughter, a
20-year-old civil engineering student.
First, his daughter withdrew 5,000 ru-
pees, roughly $60.
“She checked again, and said, ‘Papa,
there is 45,000 more left,’ ” Mr. Srivastva
said, before breaking into a big smile. “I
loved it!”
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Biden acts to toughen
cybersecurity strategy
WASHINGTON
President wants to force
companies to increase
safeguards against hacking
BY DAVID E. SANGER
The Biden administration has issued a
new cybersecurity strategy that calls on
software makers and American indus-
try to take far greater responsibility to
ensure that their systems cannot be
hacked, while accelerating efforts by the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and the
Defense Department to disrupt the ac-
tivities of hackers and ransomware
groups around the world.
For years, the U.S. government has
pressed companies to voluntarily report
intrusions in their systems and regu-
larly patch their programs to fix newly
discovered vulnerabilities, much as an
iPhone does with automatic updates ev-
ery few weeks.
But the new National Cybersecurity
Strategy, announced on Thursday, con-
cludes that such good-faith efforts are
helpful but insufficient in a world of con-
stant attempts by sophisticated hack-
ers, often backed by Russia, China, Iran
or North Korea, to get into critical gov-
ernment and private networks. Instead,
companies must be required to meet
minimum cybersecurity standards, the
new strategy contends.
The strategy is a policy document, not
an executive order, although it repre-
sents a significant shift in attitude to-
ward the “public-private partnerships”
that the government has talked about
for years. While some aspects of the new
strategy are already in place, others
would require legislative changes — po-
tentially a major challenge in a Republi-
can-dominated Congress. And the fed-
eral government does not have the abil-
ity to impose cybersecurity require-
ments on state-run facilities like
hospitals, which have been targeted by
hackers.
“The fundamental recognition in the
strategy is that a voluntary approach to
securing” critical infrastructure and
networks “is inadequate,” Anne Neu-
berger, the deputy national security ad-
viser for cyber and emerging technolo-
gies, said at an event at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, a
Washington think tank.
Every administration since that of
George W. Bush, 20 years ago, has is-
sued a cybersecurity strategy of some
kind, usually once in a presidency. But
President Biden’s differs from previous
versions in several respects, chiefly by
urging far greater mandates on private
industry, which controls the vast major-
ity of the United States’ digital infra-
structure, and by expanding the role of
the government to take offensive action
to pre-empt cyberattacks, especially
from abroad.
The Biden administration’s strategy
envisions what it calls “fundamental
changes to the underlying dynamics of
the digital ecosystem.” If enacted into
new regulations and laws, it would force
companies to implement minimum
cybersecurity measures for critical in-
frastructure — and, perhaps, impose li-
ability on firms that fail to secure their
code, much like automakers and their
suppliers are held liable for faulty
airbags or defective brakes.
“It just reimagines the American cy-
bersocial contract,” said Kemba Walden,
the acting national cyber director, a
White House post created by Congress
two years ago. “We are expecting more
from those owners and operators in our
critical infrastructure,” added Ms.
Walden, who took over last month after
the country’s first cyber director, Chris
Inglis, a former deputy director of the
National Security Agency, resigned.
The government also has a height-
ened responsibility, she added, to shore
up defenses and disrupt the major hack-
ing groups that have locked up hospital
records or frozen the operations of
meatpackers around the country, along
with government operations in Balti-
more, Atlanta and small towns across
Texas.
“We have a duty to do that,” Ms.
Walden said, “because the internet is
now a global commons, essentially. So
we expect more from our partners in the
private sector and the nonprofits and in-
dustry, but we also expect more of our-
selves.”
Read alongside the cybersecurity
strategies issued by the previous three
presidents, the new document reflects
President Biden wants to expand the government’s role in preventing cyberattacks.
..
how offense and defense in the sphere
have become increasingly central to na-
tional security policy.
The Bush administration never pub-
licly acknowledged American cyber-
attack capabilities, even as it mounted
the most sophisticated cyberattack one
state has ever directed at another: a
covert effort to use code to sabotage
Iran’s nuclear fuel facilities. The Obama
administration was reluctant to name
Russia and China as the powers behind
major hacks of the U.S. government.
The Trump administration bolstered
American offensive initiatives against
hackers and state-backed actors
abroad. It also raised the alarm about
having Huawei, the Chinese telecom-
munications giant it accused of being an
arm of the Chinese government, set up
high-speed 5G networks in the United
States and among allies, fearing that the
company’s control of such networks
would aid in Chinese surveillance or al-
low Beijing to shut down systems at a
time of conflict.
But the Trump administration was
less active in requiring American com-
panies to establish minimum protec-
tions on critical infrastructure, or seek-
ing to make those firms liable for dam-
age if vulnerabilities they had left unad-
dressed were exploited.
Imposing new forms of liability would
require major legislative changes, and
some White House officials acknowl-
edged that Mr. Biden could face insur-
mountable opposition from Republicans
in Congress if he sought to pass such
sweeping new corporate regulations.
The Biden administration’s move to
establish corporate liability for failure to
meet basic security needs “will have
decades-long ramifications,” said Glenn
S. Gerstell, a former general counsel at
the National Security Agency.
“In the cyberworld, we’re finally say-
ing that Ford is responsible for Pintos
that burst into flames, because they did-
n’t spend money on safety,” he added, re-
ferring to the famously combustible car
that was recalled in 1978.
Administration says a voluntary
approach to securing things like
railroads is inadequate.
Many elements of the new strategy
are already in place. In some ways, it is
catching up with steps the Biden admin-
istration took after struggling through
its first year, which began with major
hacks of systems used by both private
industry and the military.
After a Russian ransomware group
shut down the operations of Colonial
Pipeline, which handles much of the
gasoline and jet fuel along the east coast
of the United States, the Biden adminis-
tration used little-known legal authori-
ties held by the Transportation Security
Administration to regulate the nation’s
vast network of energy pipelines. Pipe-
line owners and operators are now re-
quired to submit to far-reaching stand-
ards set largely by the federal govern-
ment, and the Environmental Protec-
tion Agency is expected to do the same
for water pipelines.
There are no parallel federal authori-
ties for requiring minimum standards of
cybersecurity at hospitals, which are
largely regulated by states. Health cen-
ters have been another target of attacks,
from Vermont to Florida.
“We should have been doing many of
these things years ago after cyber-
attacks were first used to disrupt power
to thousands of people in Ukraine,” Ms.
Neuberger said in a recent interview.
She was referring to a series of attacks
on the Ukrainian power grid that began
seven years ago.
Ms. Neuberger cited Ukraine as an
example of a proactive cyberdefense
strategy: In the weeks after the Russian
invasion, Ukraine changed its laws to al-
low ministries to move their databases
and many government operations to the
cloud, backing up computer servers and
data centers around Kyiv and other cit-
ies that were later targets for Russian
artillery.
Within weeks, many of those server
farms were destroyed, but the govern-
ment kept running, communicating to
servers abroad using satellite systems
like Starlink, also brought in after the
war broke out.
The U.S. strategy is catching up with
its offensive program, which has be-
come increasingly aggressive. Two
years ago, the F.B.I. began to use search
warrants to find and dismantle frag-
ments of malicious code found on corpo-
rate networks.
DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Opinion
Different versions
of ‘cancel culture’
Pondering
the “Dilbert”
controversy
and the lab-
leak theory
of Covid. David French
I want to start this newsletter with two
radically different stories. At first
glance they have nothing in common,
but they’re both directly relevant to the
debate over cancel culture. Two very
different kinds of speech faced private
sanction, but only one was truly beyond
the pale. Understanding the distinc-
tions can help us achieve a greater
degree of tolerance, one rooted in truth
and grace rather than concerned about
mistakes or poor judgment.
First, let’s talk about Scott Adams, the
colorful creator of the comic strip “Dil-
bert.” Last week, after years of contro-
versial statements on Twitter, he finally
went too far — way too far. On a
YouTube livestream, he ranted that
Black Americans were a “hate group,”
and that white Americans should “get
the hell away from” them.
“Wherever you have to go, just get
away,” he said. “You just have to es-
cape.” In response, news networks that
collectively controlled hundreds of
newspapers decided to drop “Dilbert.”
Second, The Wall Street Journal
reported on Sunday that the Energy
Department had concluded (with “low
confidence”) that the Covid-19 pan-
demic most likely arose from a Chinese
lab leak. The Energy Department’s
tentative conclusion hardly settles the
debate over the roots of the coronavi-
rus, but it does highlight a division
within the federal government. While
the F.B.I. (with “moderate confidence”)
and the Energy Department believe
that the coronavirus likely leaked from
a lab, the National Intelligence Council
and four other agencies still assess
(with “low confidence”) that the corona-
virus has an animal origin.
In other words, there is now govern-
ment support for a theory that Face-
book and Twitter once labeled misinfor-
mation and censored on their platforms.
I spent the majority of my career
litigating First Amendment cases, and
since I began my litigation days in the
early 1990s, I’ve noticed two parallel
and confounding trends. First, the law
Lakota and the global reality of endangered languages
A new dic- John McWhorter
tionary is a
window into
one Native Not long ago, a book that is truly a gor-
American geous thing, in all senses of the word, was
published. It is a third and expanded
language — edition of a full-length dictionary of the
and a world Native American language Lakota. And I
of evolution mean full-length. The New Lakota Dic-
tionary, compiled by the Lakota Lan-
and adapta- guage Consortium under the supervision
tion. of the linguist Jan Ullrich, is of the physi-
cal heft most commonly associated with
brands like Webster and American Her-
itage.
Lakota is primarily spoken in North
and South Dakota. The closely related
Dakota language is spoken there as well.
Of the more than 300 Indigenous lan-
guages once spoken in the present-day
United States — differing as much as
English, Japanese, Hungarian, Thai and
Indonesian do — the vast majority now
are extinct as spoken languages or are
spoken fluently only by people nearing
the end of their lives.
Without serious efforts toward revital-
ization, dozens of them will become
extinct a generation from now, according
to an estimate in “Ethnologue,” which
catalogs languages. Many of the groups,
often assisted by linguists, seek to keep
the languages spoken in some fashion. Of
course, an important step is compiling
dictionaries and descriptions of how
their grammars work.
Compared with many Indigenous
American languages, Lakota is doing
rather well, with an estimated 2,000
native speakers remaining, according to
the Endangered Languages Project, and
this marvelous dictionary may help keep
the number of speakers from falling. It
gathers over 41,000 words and illustrates
them with more than 50,000 sentences,
usage notes and collocations.
Lakota is not my language of study, nor
are other Native American languages.
Yet partly because I am this strange
thing called a linguist and partly because
I am the kind of linguist who wants to
know a little of every language on Earth,
I have curled up with this book with a
glass of wine countless times over the
past couple of months just to savor the
cornucopia that this dictionary is.
However, I must admit that one section
of the dictionary gives me pause. For this
edition, Mr. Ullrich has contributed a new
section on the language’s grammar, and
as expertly composed as it is, it’s hard to
miss that Lakota, frankly, is hard!
of free speech is only getting more ro-
bust. Americans have more concrete
rights to speak free of government
censorship than they have at any prior
period in American history. At the same
time, however, according to a survey
from the Cato Institute, a libertarian
think tank, a strong majority of Ameri-
cans self-censor. They’re afraid to exer-
cise their rights.
Critically, much of this fear isn’t rooted
in concern about the government but
rather about employers and peers.
We have read story after story (from
across the political spectrum) of activ-
ists, corporations and colleges targeting
individuals for speech that is squarely
within the mainstream of either progres-
sive or conservative thought. In other
words, dissent — even thoughtful dis-
sent — has become dangerous, in both
right- and left-leaning America. Private
organizations are acting punitively
when the government cannot. This is the
essence of cancel culture, the wide-
spread use of private power to punish
allegedly offensive speech.
That said, many of us who recoil from
the excesses of cancel culture also reject
the idea that organizations should have
no standards at all. To take an extreme
example, if you find out that a colleague
is in the Klan, should you defend him
from termination? Or should a private
corporation remove a grand wizard from
its payroll as an act of necessary corpo-
rate hygiene?
How can American culture square this
circle? How can it defend a culture of
free expression while still understand-
ing that private entities can and often
should draw lines in accordance with
their own values and their own rights to
freedom of association?
One of the most useful definitions of
toxic cancel culture comes from the Yale
University professor Nicholas Chris-
takis. In a thoughtful 2020 Twitter
thread that highlighted several exam-
ples of improper private censorship, he
defined cancel culture as “1) forming a
mob, to 2) seek to get someone fired (or
disproportionately punished), for 3)
statements within Overton window.”
The Overton window is a political
term of art that roughly refers to those
ideas within the political mainstream.
The appeal of Christakis’s formulation
was that it concisely captured the pre-
cise public fear — that a person can be
cast out of polite society for saying
something completely conventional,
normal and in good faith.
But there’s a problem — the more that
I’ll give you just a quick sample. In a
basic sense, the word for “I” is “wa.” Or
more properly, it’s a prefix. So “made it”
is “káge,” and “I made it” is “wa-káge.” If
this were a language like English, that’s
pretty much all you’d need to know
about “I.” But the thing is that with many
verbs, you have to jam “wa” into the
middle of them. So “I found it” is “iyé-wa-
ye,” not “wa-iyéye.” There’s more: If the
verb is less about doing something than
having an experience, then “I” is said
differently, as “ma” instead of “wa,” also
often jammed in the middle. “Tired” is
“watúkha," and “I am tired” is “wa-má-
tukha.”
Lakota is like this throughout. But in
the grand scheme of things, it is about as
hard to learn as most of the world’s 7,000
languages. When it comes to grammar,
English is on the easy side. You need just
a single suffix, “-s,” to run through the
present tense conjugation. There are no
suffixes for the past, future or condi-
tional that change for person and num-
ber the way they do in, for example,
Romance languages. “I” stays the same
whether you are doing something or
experiencing it, and we certainly don’t
plug it into the middle of other words.
But as the world’s languages go,
English’s relatively streamlined gram-
matical nature is by no means the norm.
Typically, a language makes you face
either a boatload of prefixes and suffixes
or, if not, then a lot of tones. To oversim-
plify, what this means is that a language
tends to be like either Russian or Chi-
nese. Lakota is more like Russian.
So if a typical language — i.e., one not
like English — isn’t passed on from
parents to their children but is learned in
school and maybe starting only in the
teen years or later, the signal has a way
of weakening.
Researchers stipulate that the win-
dow on our ability to learn languages
with native competence starts closing
sometime during adolescence, because
of biology or just the fact that you get
busier and also shyer about making
mistakes.
The result tends to be that beyond
older speakers who grew up speaking
only the tribal language or learned it
alongside English from infancy, a new
version of the language develops. Pre-
dictably, it is less grammatically elabo-
rate. For example, I surmise that some-
one learning Lakota in school might not
master exactly which verbs you slide
the pronoun into, putting it instead at the
beginning as one would feel comfortable
doing when used to English. Also, vocab-
America polarizes, the more it contains
not one but two Overton windows, the
“red” window and the “blue” window.
Speech that is squarely mainstream in
Red America is completely out of
bounds in Blue America, and vice versa.
We could list any number of topics
where shifting standards and changing
norms breed intolerance at the ex-
tremes and confusion in the middle.
Millions of Americans thus tread lightly,
fearful that even the tentative expres-
sion of a dissenting thought could lead
to a vicious backlash.
Compounding the
How can problem, the nation’s
unrelenting mutual
we end political hatred
this cancel informs its judg-
culture? ment. The group
Switch the More in Common
presumptions. recently attempted
to measure partisan
animosity in connec-
tion with our cultural conflicts over
teaching American history. Its findings
were disturbing. America’s most parti-
san citizens view their political oppo-
nents as deeply reprehensible. Over-
whelming majorities of Republicans
and Democrats view the other side as
“hateful,” “racist,” “brainwashed” and
“arrogant.” That’s why they seek to
squelch opposing views. They see no
value in the speech of people they de-
spise. Instead, they see only bad people
expressing bad ideas in bad faith.
We’re losing the capacity for empa-
thy. We simply can’t place ourselves in
the other person’s shoes. Yet it takes a
certain degree of arrogance to presume
that we’re so obviously correct that
ulary gets smaller. It is natural to sub in,
for example, English words, especially
for things most often encountered in
English such as laptops and the kiddie
goop called slime. You might even often
sprinkle in transitional words like “any-
way.”
This is the way new generations speak
many threatened languages worldwide.
It’s been documented in the case of Irish
Gaelic, for example.
A great many In some parts of
Ireland, younger
languages people are certainly
of the future speaking it, but to a
will be considerable extent,
structurally it could be said to be
streamlined Irish in English, in
versions of which the quirkier
their original Irish rules get flat-
form. tened out in favor of
rendering it the way
you would in English.
And the truth is that
there is nothing wrong with this. We can
see it as language changing, especially
given that languages are always chang-
ing in countless ways, many of them
because they’re being used alongside
other languages. Languages in the same
mouth will mix, unsurprisingly.
For example, my linguist friend Ghi-
l’ad Zuckermann has assisted in the
revival of an Australian language, Barn-
garla, which stopped being spoken in
1964. In his book “Revivalistics,” he
notes that New Barngarla, inevitably,
disagreement isn’t just a sign of error but
of moral defect.
Even worse, we’re wrong. Our pre-
sumptions of our opponents’ views are
often simply false. Even as More in Com-
mon found unrelenting political hostility
between red and blue, it also found that
Democrats and Republicans have a
“deeply distorted understanding of each
other.” In fact, “Democrats and Republi-
cans imagine almost twice as many of
their political opponents as reality hold
views they consider ‘extreme.’ ”
How can we end this cancel culture?
Switch the presumptions. Rather than
beginning with the idea that our oppo-
nents are evil people who express evil
ideas, operate with a rebuttable pre-
sumption that our political foes are de-
cent people expressing heartfelt
thoughts in good faith.
Let’s apply this rebuttable presump-
tion to Scott Adams and to the lab-leak
theory. Is there a good faith defense of
Scott Adams’s words? Absolutely not.
The demand that white people “get the
hell away from” Black Americans is
gutter-level racism. I can’t even conceive
of a good faith defense to his malicious
words.
But what about the lab-leak theory?
There was never a good reason for sup-
pressing the idea that the virus leaked
from a Chinese lab. There was never a
good reason for presuming such specula-
tion was inherently racist, even if the
speculation sometimes came from people
you might despise. It is easy to articulate
a good-faith basis for the lab-leak idea.
Lab accidents happen, and the proximity
of the Wuhan Institute of Virology to the
initial outbreak was enough to raise
PABLO DELCAN
does not use some of the things that
original Barngarla did. For example,
Indigenous Barngarla pronouns were
awesomely baroque: “Ngadlaga” means
“we two” (but not “we three” or “we
four”) and only when used by a mother
and child or a man and his sister’s child
(not his brother’s) and then only in a
sentence that has an object. If there’s no
object — as in “We two are sleeping” —
then you have to use a different pronoun.
This distinction corresponded, in part,
to the nature of kinship in Indigenous
Barngarla society. But much has
changed in Barngarla lives since then to
force them into integration with white
Australian society to a large extent, and
making distinctions between pronouns
like that naturally feels less urgent today.
But what they are working with is still
Barngarla; it sure isn’t English.
This might seem like a dilution or
disintegration, but keep in mind that the
language I am writing in is a lexically
infected and grammatically streamlined
version of Old English. King Alfred
would find modern English alternately
incomprehensible and barbaric. Many
researchers think it got this way mainly
because of what Viking invaders did to
the language starting in the late eighth
century, C.E. They spoke Old Norse,
which was related to Old English but
different. When they started using Old
English, they probably spoke it as well as
an American speaks Spanish after a few
years of classes — functional, but just.
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 | 9
RICARDO TOMÁS
eyebrows (and questions) from the first
moments of the pandemic. Unlike Ad-
ams, there was no reason to presume this
belief was rooted in racism.
I’ll close with two good thoughts from
my friend, the Atlantic contributing
writer Thomas Chatterton Williams.
When the Adams story broke, he wrote:
“This is *not* ‘cancel culture.’ If you film
yourself going on a stupid and boring
racist monologue and upload it to the
internet and people notice it and react
negatively you just have to play it as it
lays.”
Exactly so. Adams would have paid a
rightful price for his comments years
before the present wave of punitive
corporate actions.
At the same time, however, just as
Adams’s comments were an extreme
outlier in American discourse, the re-
sponse to those comments should be an
outlier as well. A punitive private re-
sponse to speech should be the excep-
tion, not the rule. Again, I agree with
Williams: “I remain convinced you can-
not cancel or intimidate your way to a
better, more genuinely empathic and just
society — whether individual cases seem
merited or not,” he said. “The road to that
society is narrowly wended through
dialogue, patience, persuasion and al-
most certainly generosity.”
I would add another virtue to the list
above: truth. The road to a more empa-
thetic and just society is also paved by an
accurate understanding of our neighbors.
With exceptions, they are not monsters,
their views aren’t rooted in malice, and
we should extend the same grace to the
good faith expression of their ideas that
we seek for our own.
And they stripped Old English of its
harder things, like vast tables of verb
conjugations and noun declensions and
the meaningless gendering of nouns of
the kind that German imposes on “sil-
verware.” It’s why English is the only
standard language in Europe (other
than, for instance, Basque, Estonian,
Finnish, Hungarian and Saami, which
are not in the family that all the other
languages belong to) that does not as-
sign things to genders.
Then because of the Norman Con-
quest that followed the Vikings’ invasion,
you can scarcely produce an English
sentence without recourse to originally
French words. Just in that last sentence
there are eight (“because,” “Norman,”
“conquest,” “invasion,” “scarcely,” “sen-
tence,” “recourse” and “originally”). And
the Vikings planted plenty of their own
words, too. Without these new users, our
word for “take” would be “nim,” our word
for “knife” would be “sax,” and we would
speak casually of being blithe rather
than happy. I doubt anyone sees this as a
problem. We speak our English; only the
linguist calls it modern English, in salute
to there having once been some earlier
stage, which to us was a noble but by-
gone, “Beowulf”-y thing.
Revived languages today are going
through a similar process, and the result
will be more new versions of languages.
A great many languages of the future
will be structurally streamlined versions
of their original form, but in the end,
most of languages’ grammatical doo-
dads are accidental accretions. They
creep into a language and pile up over
time, and somehow toddlers can wangle
them and therefore do. But just as “sil-
verware” doesn’t need to be gendered,
full human expression hardly needs
eight tones (in Hmong), four gradations
of past tense, as in today, yesterday, a
little while ago or just now (in Kikongo)
or so many prefixes and suffixes that a
single verb can appear in 1,502,839 forms
(in Archi, a language of the Caucasus
Mountains).
Lakota will likely change in the same
way that many languages have. And
that’s normal. In any case, in this succu-
lent pot roast of a dictionary, the lan-
guage lives, improvises and even beck-
ons between the book’s covers. I salute
Mr. Ullrich, the Lakota Language Con-
sortium and the many, many native
speakers they collaborated with for 1,420
pages of glory.
JOHN MCWHORTER is an associate profes-
sor of linguistics at Columbia University.

10 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023
opinion
A.G. SULZBERGER, Publisher
JOSEPH KAHN, Executive Editor
MARC LACEY, Managing Editor
CAROLYN RYAN, Managing Editor
TOM BODKIN, Creative Director
SUZANNE DALEY, Associate Editor
KATHLEEN KINGSBURY, Opinion Editor
PATRICK HEALY, Deputy Opinion Editor
Both promise and peril
in Biden’s climate policy
Paul Krugman
In 2010, at the signing ceremony for
the Affordable Care Act, Joe Biden,
the vice president at the time, could
be overheard telling President Barack
Obama that “this is a big something
deal.” OK, that’s almost what he said.
And he was right.
Now, as president himself, Biden
has presided over three big deals.
After several years during which “It’s
infrastructure week!” became a
punchline, he passed a major infra-
structure bill. He pushed through
legislation to promote U.S. production
of sophisticated semiconductors. And
most important, Congress enacted the
Inflation Reduction Act, which despite
its name is mainly a climate bill;
we’re finally taking serious action to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Yet many observers, myself includ-
ed, have wondered whether Biden’s
climate policy is a big enough deal.
The media
often uses hyper-
The initiative
bolic language
is a really big about any pro-
deal, but will gram that in-
the grid be able volves spending
to handle it? hundreds of bil-
lions of dollars, so
Biden’s climate
initiative, which the Congressional
Budget Office estimates will involve
roughly $400 billion in climate spend-
ing, gets described as “massive.” But
that’s spending over the course of a
decade. And the budget office expects
cumulative gross domestic product
over the next decade to be more than
$300 trillion.
So we’re talking about spending
only a bit more than one-tenth of 1
percent of G.D.P. Can this possibly be
enough to make a real difference in
facing an existential threat?
Well, there are two important rea-
sons to believe that Biden’s climate
policy may be a much bigger deal
than the numbers might suggest. But
there are also reasons to worry that
the policy may fall short, not because
the spending is inadequate, but be-
cause of one crucial limiting factor:
an inadequate power grid.
The first reason to believe that
Biden’s policy may be a big deal is
that it comes at a crucial technolog-
ical juncture.
There was a time, not that long ago,
when it seemed as if limiting green-
house gas emissions would require
hard choices — that it would have to
be achieved largely through conser-
vation and increased energy efficien-
cy, which in turn would require
putting a substantial price on carbon,
either via carbon taxes or via a cap-
and-trade system in which emitters
would have to purchase permits. In
America finally has a climate strategy. But it depends not just on an expansion of solar
and wind power, but also on linking these new energy sources to the electrical grid.
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MEREDITH KOPIT LEVIEN, Chief Executive Officer
STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON, President, International
HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS, V.P., International Circulation
HELENA PHUA, Executive V.P., Asia-Pacific
SUZANNE YVERNÈS, International Chief Financial Officer
fact, there would still be a good case
for a carbon tax, if it were politically
feasible.
But huge progress in renewable
energy and related technologies, nota-
bly batteries, means that it now looks
almost easy to achieve a low-emission
economy. We can now easily envision
a society in which people drive electric
vehicles and cook on induction ranges,
using power generated by solar panels
and wind turbines, and experience no
sense of sacrifice.
The role of policy then becomes to
accelerate this transition — to push us
over the tipping point into a sustain-
able economy. And this need not in-
volve huge amounts of public money,
just enough to act as a sort of catalyst
for change.
A second, somewhat related reason
to think that Biden’s climate policy is a
big deal is that it doesn’t actually
mandate $400 billion in spending.
What it does, mainly, is set conditions
under which consumers and busi-
nesses can receive tax credits for
adopting green technology. That $400
billion is based on an estimate of how
many people will actually take advan-
tage of these tax credits — and given
the spectacular rate of technological
progress, that estimate may well turn
out to be low.
A report from Credit Suisse sug-
gests that the credits might “propel
much higher activity levels” than the
budget office projects — that in prac-
tice federal climate spending might be
$800 billion or more. And there may
also be a multiplier effect as private
firms make investments complemen-
tary to those directly subsidized, so
Credit Suisse suggests that the true
size of the climate plan may be more
like $1.7 trillion.
So Biden’s deal may be bigger than
it looks. Which is a good thing, given
the importance of the issue.
Now for my concern. America fi-
nally has a serious climate strategy.
However, it depends not just on a
rapid expansion of solar and wind
power, but also on linking these new
energy sources to the electrical grid.
But the U.S. power grid doesn’t have
enough capacity, and it is in general a
mess.
Part of the reason is that there isn’t
really a U.S. grid: Investment in elec-
tricity transmission is, as a Reuters
report put it, “controlled by a Byzan-
tine web of local, state and regional
regulators who have strong political
incentives to hold down spending.”
And this regulatory system wasn’t
designed to handle the sudden influx
of new energy sources; as a result,
simply getting permission to connect
to the grid can take years.
Here’s how I think of it: A clean-
energy future suddenly looks emi-
nently possible thanks to a technolog-
ical miracle — incredible cost declines
for renewable energy — and a political
miracle — Democrats’ success, despite
the narrowest of congressional major-
ities, in enacting legislation that looks
even better when examined closely.
But we may need a third, bureau-
cratic miracle to fix the electricity grid
and make this whole thing work.
COLLIN CHAPPELLE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Why are ketamine ads following me?
Jessica Grose
A few months ago I started noticing
that I couldn’t open Instagram or
TikTok without getting an ad for ke-
tamine. I previously knew ketamine
only as an illegal drug that could cause
dissociation, taken by acquaintances in
the dank basements of my misspent
youth, or as the sedative given to my
older daughter when her broken arm
needed to be reset in the hospital.
These ads promised incredible,
groundbreaking mental health out-
comes through ketamine tablets of-
fered via telemedicine, with the vast
majority of patients purportedly find-
ing relief from their depression and
anxiety. Some experts have cautioned
that ketamine, which is a Schedule III
controlled substance, is not ready for
general use, citing a “lack of long-term
data, potential for troubling side effects
and possibility for abuse,” as one re-
searcher noted.
I didn’t hear about any of these
concerns on TikTok. I heard only about
the miraculous benefits of ketamine.
Few of the social posts served to me
disclosed the fact that promoting ke-
tamine tablets in this way was an
off-label use of the medication.
Ketamine wasn’t the only mental
health treatment I would be offered on
social media. I was also frequently
getting ads that tried to convince me
that I had undiagnosed A.D.H.D.,
listing symptoms like “fidgeting”
(which I do constantly and always
have) as a behavioral red flag. While
fidgeting could be a symptom of
A.D.H.D., it could also be a symptom of
restless leg syndrome or a common
response to stress, boredom and anxi-
ety that doesn’t require treatment. I’m
certainly not equipped to tell after just
seeing a few Instagram reels.
Other posts warned that “overthink-
ing” and “overanalyzing” could be
other signs of A.D.H.D. (Or they could
just be signs of being an opinion jour-
nalist.)
The bombardment only got worse
when I decided to take a brief quiz
offered by one of the ketamine purvey-
ors to see if I was an appropriate can-
didate for this treatment. I answered
these questions honestly: I wasn’t
pregnant. I haven’t ever been suicidal
or diagnosed with a primary psychotic
disorder. I do have a history of clinical
depression and anxiety, though I ha-
ven’t had a significant episode since
2012. These days I do feel depressed
and anxious — probably as often as
any sentient human in the 21st century.
In about five minutes I was told I
was a fit for telehealth services, which
could include a few consultations with
a clinician and several ketamine tab-
lets sent directly to my home, with
Zoom guidance offered before and
after ingesting the drug for the first
few sessions.
When I didn’t go through with buy-
ing the package, which would have set
me back a few hundred dollars and
wasn’t likely to be covered by any
insurance, the marketing became even
more aggressive. I received follow-up
emails and texts, with offers of $100 off
my introductory program. In fact, just
as I was writing this paragraph I got
one, which touted the incredible, “sci-
ence backed” benefits of ketamine but
did not list a single risk of the drug. I
had to click through the ad and then
click about five more times on the
website to find a list of the side effects,
which include slurred speech, anxiety
(which the drug claims to ameliorate)
and, in rare cases and with heavy use,
urinary incontinence.
Last week my Times colleague Chris
The power of art in a political age
BROOKS, FROM PAGE 1
with that person all day. You give me a
person who agrees with me on every
particular, but who has a cold, resentful
heart — well, I want nothing to do with
him or her.
Artists generally don’t set out to
improve other people; they just want to
create a perfect expression of their
experience. But their art has the poten-
tial to humanize the beholder. How does
it do this?
First, beauty impels us to pay a cer-
tain kind of attention. It startles you and
prompts you to cast off the self-centered
tendency to always be imposing your
opinions on things. It prompts you to
stop in your tracks, take a breath and
open yourself up so that you can receive
what it is offering, often with a kind of
childlike awe and reverence. It trains
you to see the world in a more patient,
just and humble way. In “The
Sovereignty of Good,” the novelist and
philosopher Iris Murdoch writes that
“virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil
of selfish consciousness and join the
world as it really is.”
Second, artworks widen your emo-
tional repertoire. When you read a poem
or see a piece of sculpture, you haven’t
learned a new fact, but you’ve had a new
experience. The British philosopher
Roger Scruton wrote, “The listener to
Mozart’s Jupiter symphony is
Hamby published a big investigation
into the telehealth providers connect-
ing patients with ketamine. He ex-
plained that a pandemic-related loos-
ening of telehealth laws in 2020 al-
lowed for the prescribing of controlled
substances remotely and this led to an
increase in the availability of ketamine.
“The shift away from clinics has led
many patients to take the drug more
frequently and for longer periods of
time — multiple times a week, even
daily in some cases, and for months or
years — despite
scant research
The rules around on safety,” Mr.
pharmaceutical
Hamby wrote.
advertising need Before the tele-
a 21st-century health rules
update. were relaxed,
“patients needed
to first meet in
person with a doctor and treatment
was mostly limited to infusions in
clinics,” he added.
Mr. Hamby spoke to “more than 40
patients who said their access to the
drug was expanded through tele-
health” and found that while some said
they were helped by taking ketamine,
others admitted to abusing their pre-
scriptions and concealing resulting
health issues from their providers. Two
people Mr. Hamby spoke to felt embar-
rassed about potentially permanent
bladder issues. (As Mr. Hamby re-
ported, “When taken chronically in
high doses, ketamine can cause severe
bladder damage.”)
As The Wall Street Journal reported
in 2022, some of the companies selling
direct-to-consumer A.D.H.D. medica-
tions since the loosening of telehealth
regulations have already run into legal
trouble. The Journal reported that
some clinicians for the online mental
health start-up Cerebral, which offered
presented with the open floodgates of
human joy and creativity; the reader of
Proust is led through the enchanted
world of childhood and made to under-
stand the uncanny prophecy of our later
griefs which those days of joy contain.”
These experiences furnish us with a
kind of emotional knowledge — how to
feel and how to express feelings, how to
sympathize with someone who is griev-
ing, how to share the satisfaction of a
parent who has seen her child grow.
Third, art teaches you to see the world
through the eyes of another, often a
person who sees more deeply than you
do. Sure, Picasso’s “Guernica” is a politi-
cal piece of art, about an atrocity in the
Spanish Civil War, but it doesn’t repre-
sent, documentarylike, an exact scene
in that war. It goes deeper to give us an
experience of pure horror, the universal
experience of suffering, and the reality
of human bloodlust that leads to it.
Of course “Invisible Man” is a political
novel about racial injustice, but as Ralph
Ellison later wrote, he was trying to
write not just a novel of racial protest,
but also a “dramatic study in compara-
tive humanity which I felt any worth-
while novel should be.”
I haul myself off to museums and
such with the fear that in a political and
technological age, the arts have become
less central to public life, that we don’t
seem to debate novels and artistic
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
ELEANOR DAVIS
Adderall for A.D.H.D. via telemedicine,
did not have the proper credentials in
psychiatric care.
“When customers signed up, Cere-
bral asked them if they were interested
in being prescribed a controlled sub-
stance so they could be routed to a
nurse practitioner with a license to
prescribe such medication. This isn’t a
question typically asked on intake
forms in a psychiatry office and was
designed to give clients the drugs they
wanted, said people familiar with the
intake process,” The Journal found.
(Subsequently, major pharmacies have
refused to fill prescriptions for con-
trolled substances issued by the tele-
health companies Cerebral and Done,
which also prescribed Adderall. Cere-
bral told The Journal that only a “sin-
gle digit percentage” of its patients
were given a controlled substance to
treat A.D.H.D. and it has now stopped
prescribing Adderall to treat the dis-
order in new patients.)
On Feb. 24, the U.S. Drug Enforce-
ment Administration announced that it
was planning to tighten the rules
around prescribing or refilling con-
trolled substances via telemedicine,
which would include ketamine, and put
a damper on the free-flowing prescrip-
tion of the drug.
I believe these changes would be
more effective if they were paired with
enhanced regulation of online pharma-
ceutical advertising. It’s one thing to be
followed around the internet by a pair
of designer boots you covet that are
out of your price range. It’s quite an-
other to be stalked by prescription
drug advertisements for potentially
addictive medications, some of which
are violating even the very lax online
guidance around prescription pharma-
ceutical advertising that currently
exists in the United States.
breakthroughs the way people did in
other times, that the artistic and literary
worlds have themselves become stulti-
fied by insular groupthink, and this has
contributed to the dehumanization of
American culture.
But we can still stage our mini-rebel-
lions, kick our political addictions from
time to time, and enjoy the free play of
mind, the undogmatic spirit and the
..
The United States and New Zealand
are the only two developed countries
where it is legal to advertise prescrip-
tion pharmaceuticals direct to con-
sumers (D.T.C.). Though the American
Medical Association has called for a
ban on D.T.C. pharmaceutical advertis-
ing, it’s highly unlikely that these ads
will go away, as Vox’s Emily Stewart
argued in a recent article. A law pro-
fessor told Stewart that these ads are
here to stay because of the way
“courts have interpreted the First
Amendment to protect commercial
speech.”
In 2020, The Washington Post’s
Nitasha Tiku reported that drug com-
panies were “growing bolder” about
advertising on social media and that
the increased number of ads exposed
“loopholes around the way data can be
used to show consumers relevant ads
about their personal health, even as
both social networks and pharmaceuti-
cal manufacturers disavow targeting
ads to people based on their medical
conditions.” In the intervening three
years, there have been no updates to
ad regulation: The last time the F.D.A.
issued nonbinding guidance about
social media D.T.C. advertising was
2014, which is approximately 10,000
years ago in social media time.
According to an email from an
F.D.A. spokesperson, prescription
pharmaceutical advertising is sup-
posed to “present both benefit and risk
information to best serve the public
health.” Though some telehealth com-
panies, depending on how they are
structured, may fall outside the
F.D.A.’s regulatory purview, the
spokesperson said.
In Stat, Thomas J. Moore and G.
Caleb Alexander argue for closing that
telehealth advertising loophole. But
the issue is bigger than that. In De-
cember, The Wall Street Journal’s
Khadeeja Safdar and Andrea Fuller
published an investigation into
whether D.T.C. social media ads on
Meta platforms were adequately bal-
ancing the benefits and risks of the
drugs they were touting. Safdar and
Fuller wrote:
In a four-week period spanning
October and November, about 20
companies ran more than 2,100 ads
on Facebook and Instagram that
described benefits of prescription drugs
without citing risks, promoted drugs
for unapproved uses or featured
testimonials without disclosing
whether they came from actors or
company employees.
Their article doesn’t cover the dark
social marketing I received from the
ketamine purveyor over text and
email, which felt more personal and
invasive. In the aftermath of The
Journal’s investigation, lawmakers
have called for more regulation of
social media advertising, though there
were few details about what that
might look like.
At the bare minimum, there should
be a binding requirement — not just
suggested guidance — that the risks of
a medication be given equal weight
and presentation to the benefits, even
when there are character limits. The
F.D.A.’s own researchers have found
that some online advertisements seen
on mobile phones write the risks in
smaller font, present them after the
benefits or link to a landing page that
includes only benefits and no risks at
all.
A so-called miracle drug may not
seem so miraculous if it’s understud-
ied or poses a known risk for addic-
tion. We should all be well informed
before making that choice.
JESSICA GROSE writes about parenting.
KARSTEN MORAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
heightened and adrenalized states of
awareness that the best art still pro-
vides. Earlier this year I visited the
Edward Hopper show at the Whitney a
couple of times, and I got to see New
York through that man’s eyes — the
spare rooms on side streets, and the
isolated people inside. I forget most of
what I read, but those images stay vivid
in the mind.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 | 11

science lab

The false fossil and other mistaken identities

Retraction on cave art
shows why it’s important
that science correct itself
BY JOSHUA SOKOL

At its best, paleontology opens windows

into trillions of other lifetimes spent
swimming, scuttling, stomping and
soaring across this planet. Scientists,
the press and the public alike tend to tell
and retell these success stories, lioniz-
ing intrepid researchers. The most im-
pressive specimens are enshrined in
museums. But possibly just as impor-
tant is when scientists get something
wrong, badly, and somebody sets the
record straight.
In the last pre-Covid lockdown days of
2020, for example, Gregory Retallack, a
paleontologist from the University of
Oregon, and a few colleagues toured a
set of Indian cave paintings. Afterward,
they announced they had discovered
something that previous visitors had
overlooked: a 550-million-year-old fos-
sil called Dickinsonia from the dawn of
animal life.
The dramatic find drew outside scru-
tiny. Last December, a team led by Jo-
seph Meert, a paleontologist at the Uni-
versity of Florida, studied the same site.
“When we found the fossil, some alarm
bells went off in my head,” Dr. Meert
said.
First, the specimen looked different
than it had in pictures from 2020: Part of
it had rubbed off. Second, the team kept
noticing giant honey bee nests on the
surrounding rocks.
Then it clicked: This wasn’t a Dickin-
sonia at all. Neither was it a fossil. The
pattern on the cave wall was just a bit of
waxy material left behind by a bee nest,
the team reported in December, in the
same peer-reviewed journal that had
vetted the original finding. Another
study, recently accepted to the Journal
of the Geological Society of India, ar-
rived at the same result.
THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, LONDON/SCIENCE SOURCE

Like Tolstoy’s unhappy

families, each misidentified
fossil comes with its
own unhappy story.

Dr. Retallack is now working on a for-

mal correction. “It is rare but essential
for scientists to confess mistakes when
new evidence is discovered,” he wrote to
the Florida team, once its researchers
contacted him with their new analysis.
This discovery-that-wasn’t joins a
long, ignominious history of paleonto-
logical misfires. These range from out-
right misclassifications to pseudofossils
(where a nonbiological process made a
pattern that only looks biological) and
dubiofossils (weird, ambiguous rocks
that are probably not as important as PAUL D. STEWART/SCIENCE SOURCE SCIENCE PICTURE LIBRARY/SCIENCE SOURCE

they’re cracked up to be).
Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each
misidentified fossil comes with its own
unhappy story. Many rocks that look
lifelike but aren’t — like mineral nodules
that resemble fossil poop and supposed
“dinosaur eggs” and “dinosaur foot-
prints” — are screened out the first time
a paleontologist looks at them. Others
are just old mistakes, relics of a more
primitive scientific past. Still other er-
rors or misreadings persist in fringe
sources. Occasionally, though, they pen-
etrate modern scientific enterprise,
even through peer review from other ex-
perts, especially when key evidence is
ambiguous.
Each of the examples below is ambig-
uous in another way, too: as both a sci-
entific failure and a demonstration of
how science advances by publicly cor-
recting mistakes.
“SCROTUM HUMANUM”
In the 1670s, the English chemist Robert
Plot made perhaps the first ever scien-
tific illustration of a dinosaur fossil. He
suspected that the specimen was part of
a femur bone. But it was big — perhaps,
Plot reasoned, belonging to a Roman
Clockwise from top: an outdated depiction of dinosaurs; Friedrich von Huene, who
erred in trying to identify two species; Robert Plot, who mistook a dinosaur fossil for a
human femur; a Plot illustration, which was still falsely identified a century later.
war elephant, or a giant human de- FILLER IN THE FOSSIL RECORD
scribed in the Bible. In 1864, Canadian geologists announced
Almost a century later, the illustration the discovery of Eozoon canadense, the
was reprinted in a natural history vol- “dawn animal of Canada,” a wavy, striat-
ume compiled by a physician, alongside ed set of rock patterns they claimed
a new, fairly self-explanatory caption came from the fossilized shells of giant
that compared it to the dangly bits of an cellular organisms. The find filled a gap
ancient human. But these were no re- in the theory of evolution: Until Eozoon
productive organs: While the specimen canadense, there had been no prior fos-
itself has been lost, it was in fact part of a sil evidence for life on Earth before 540
femur of a carnivorous dinosaur, maybe million years ago.
Megalosaurus. In the following decades, though, evi-
dence mounted that the patterns were
A BAD YEAR FOR OLD SPECIES just layered, bent rock forged by high
In 1981, two different ancient species temperatures and pressures. Eozoon’s
named by the early 20th-century Ger- proponents never quit arguing that it
man paleontologist Baron Friedrich von was a real fossil, but they eventually
Huene — mercifully, already deceased died. But other very old fossils (like real corrected the following year: What had stakes. In 1996, scientists proposed that mented many chemical and geological
at the time — were both shown to be examples of Dickinsonia) emerged to fill looked like a separate animal was actu- they had found a microfossil in a Mar- processes that can “grow” intricate, tiny
cases of mistaken identity. One sup- the gap in the fossil record. ally the severed head from a known fos- tian meteorite. President Clinton even structures without the involvement of
posed mammal tooth was actually a bit sil cicada. held a news conference discussing the any form of life.
of the mineral chalcedony. The other, a DECAPITATED DISCOVERY implications of the discovery, footage of Some of the oldest claimed fossils on
dinosaur jaw, turned out to be a chunk of In 2019, one team announced the discov- LIFE ON MARS which was edited into the 1997 movie Earth might fall into this category —
petrified wood that mollusks had bur- ery of a new Triassic horseshoe crab- Differentiating impostor fossils from the “Contact.” and similar patterns could show up in
rowed into. like species. But the researchers were real deal can come with much higher Since then, scientists have docu- the first rocks returned from Mars.

A bird that may know a hook from a handsaw

Cockatoos show ability
to pick the tools they
will need for specific jobs
BY DARREN INCORVAIA
Cockatoos contain contradictions.
“They behave like gremlins,” said An-
tonio Osuna-Mascaró, a biologist at the
University of Veterinary Medicine Vien-
na.
His colleague Alice Auersperg
agreed.
“Imagine a toddler with pliers in their
head,” she said, that is also able to fly.
But just like toddlers, cockatoos can
be sweet and curious, always exploring
the world around them.
Dr. Auersperg and other researchers
put this curiosity on display in 2021,
when they reported that wild Goffin’s
cockatoos use tools. The researchers ob-
served birds, temporarily housed in a
field aviary, using their beaks to fashion
three tools — a wedge, a knife and a
spoon, “like a set of cutlery,” Dr.
Auersperg said — to help them pry open
tropical Wawai fruits.
It was clear the cockatoos were craft-
ing different tools for different purposes
but a critical question remained: Did the
birds see the tools that way?
In a study published Friday in Cur-
rent Biology, Dr. Osuna-Mascaró, Dr.
Auersperg and their colleagues showed
that the cockatoos are only the third ani-
mal, besides humans and chimpanzees,
known to select varying tools, based on
the tasks they expect to face.
The ability of chimpanzees to plan
tool use ahead of time inspired the cur-
rent cockatoo study, Dr. Osuna-Mascaró
said.
Chimps in northern Congo use short,
sturdy sticks to punch holes in termite
nests and then longer, thinner sticks to
fish out the insects and eat them. If the
chimps know that they’ve already left a
hole-puncher near a termite mound,
they won’t bother bringing another one
with them, showing that they think
ahead of time about the tools they need
for a task.
Dr. Osuna-Mascaró, who previously
worked on chimps, adapted the termite
fishing task for a group of captive cocka-
toos. Instead of bugs, the grand prize
was a cashew, their favorite food. Get-
ure out the correct solution. One, Figaro,
figured it out in 31 seconds, and another,
Fini, did it in 34 seconds.
The researchers then tested whether
the cockatoos could pick the right tools
to get a cashew from a simpler box,
which had no membrane and thus re-
quired only the fishing pole. When given
the simpler box, the birds picked up the
New experiments suggest that
cockatoos are only the third
animal known to plan ahead for
tasks by transporting tool sets.
pole significantly more than would be
expected if they were choosing between
the two tools at random, showing that
they understood that it was the right
tool for the fishing task.
ANTONIA OSUNA-MASCARÓ The critical experiment came next,
Different tools for different purposes: But, experts asked, do cockatoos see it that way? when the box was moved farther from
the tools, meaning the birds had to
choose the right implements and then
ting the treat out of a puzzle box re- flimsy pole that had to be stuck into the carry them over, either by climbing a
quired two tools: a short, sharp tool that hole to fish out the cashew. ladder or flying a short distance. When
had to first cut a membrane blocking the Once presented with the box and the deciding which tools to take on their
bird’s access to the nut, then a long, tools, six of 10 cockatoos were able to fig- journey, the cockatoos planned ahead,
like a human grabbing a phone, wallet
and keys before heading out for the day.
If facing a box with a membrane, the
cockatoos figured out how to carry the
tools together and came prepared with
both.
“They were able to recognize that
they would need both tools in the near
future,” Dr. Osuna-Mascaró said.
If the box didn’t have a membrane to
be cut, the birds tended to bring just the
fishing pole, much like the chimpanzees.
Crickette Sanz, a behavioral ecologist
at Washington University in St. Louis
whose prior work on chimpanzee tool
use inspired the cockatoo study, said it
“enriches our discussions of compara-
tive cognition” when the similarities be-
tween cockatoos and chimpanzees were
made so clear.
The researchers now hope to see
whether the cockatoos can manage this
feat even when the box is not in direct
view and to further explore the evolu-
tionary history of tool use in this species.
Dr. Auersperg thinks the study proves
a certain anti-avian turn of phrase needs
revising.
“Bird brain,” she said, “should actu-
ally be a compliment.”
 ..
12 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 | 13
 ..
14 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Sports
U.S. teenager aims to be villain on Dutch ice
said. “The top favorites in the 1,000 are
HEERENVEEN, THE NETHERLANDS
Hein and Jordan. And in the 1,500, Kjeld
and Jordan as well.”
BY KEVIN DRAPER As much as the Dutch want to beat
Stolz, however, they are also protective
Jordan Stolz, an 18-year-old American of him as he grows into his potential.
speedskater who is already one of the Stolz’s most dramatic race of the sea-
best in the sport, this weekend will race son occurred two weeks ago in Poland,
in front of 12,500 screaming Dutch fans the weekend after he skated a leg-dead-
at his first world speedskating champi- ening 20,000 meters across eight races
onships. in dominating the junior world champi-
Almost all of them will be rooting for onships. In the 1,500 meters, he was
him to lose. paired with Nuis, who holds the world MELISSA SCHRIEK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The fans will be cheering for their record and is the two-time defending Jordan Stolz, above and left, defeating the
countrymen, yes, but they will also be Olympic champion in the event. Dutch Olympic champion Kjeld Nuis in a
hoping that Stolz does not immediately Nuis held a sizable lead heading into 1,500-meter race last month in Poland.
make good on his potential to dominate the final 200 meters, but Stolz rode a
the sport for the next decade. At these perfect line through the final curve and
championships, Stolz is in Dutch terri- slingshotted ahead, seemingly getting Bron James walked onto the court and I
tory, literally and figuratively. even stronger on the final straightaway saw him in his rookie year. There was
Until this season, he had barely raced as Nuis visibly faded. just sort of this aura around him that I
in front of crowds numbering more than “I thought: He arrives with tired see around Jordan,” he said.
a few dozen, owing to the coronavirus legs,” Nuis told NOS, the Dutch national Still, when Heiden talks about his
pandemic and speedskating’s lack of broadcaster, after the race. “And then emergence as a star, he could just as eas-
popularity in the United States. In an in- you get spanked.” ily be referring to Stolz. “In ’77, I won the
terview in the past week sitting in the He had a warning for his competitors: men’s all-round world championships,”
stands of Thialf, the famed Dutch cathe- “At the world championships, he will be Heiden said. “The next weekend, I went
dral of speedskating, Stolz sounded ex- better than today,” Nuis said. to the junior world championships; it
cited about what was to come. An even more notable interaction be- was like taking candy from a kid. I went
“Skating in general, in an arena that is tween the two occurred in November, to the world sprint championships, and
just empty, is a little bit boring,” Stolz during a World Cup event in Heeren- KACPER PEMPEL/REUTERS my confidence was raging.”
said. “So, when there is a crowd, it is for veen. Demands on Stolz’s time — from
sure amplifying.” He added: “If they Prompted during an interview with would be able to make, and then win, the with the junior world championships It is obviously unfair, and premature, sponsors, fans and the media — are al-
want me to crash, then hopefully it does- NOS, Stolz said there wasn’t “more than Olympics. last month in Inzell, Germany, where to compare an 18-year-old who has won ready rising, and soon the pressures
n’t happen.” a 10 percent chance” that he would Last year, as a 17-year-old, Stolz quali- Stolz won what speedskating calls the just a handful of World Cup events to Nuis and Krol have experienced will
His coach, Bob Corby, sounded pos- break Nuis’s track record in the 1,500 fied for the Olympics in Beijing, though “all-round” title in a rout, collecting four Heiden, who won his first world champi- find him, too. If he performs as well as
itively giddy about the possibility. “Is he meters. The headline on the article his best finish was 13th place. “The gold medals and two bronze medals. onship at 18 and then took all five gold everybody thinks he will over the next
ready to be the villain?” Corby asked in about the interview, though, said Stolz Olympics is a whole new beast,” said These remarkable four months of re- medals at the 1980 Olympics when he three years, he will be one of the faces of
an email. “Oh yeah! He is definitely “dreams” of breaking the track record. Joey Mantia, who won a bronze medal sults have speedskating luminaries pre- was 21. the U.S. team at the 2026 Winter Games
ready for that!” Besides, Corby said, He did not come close, finishing ninth. as part of the United States team pursuit dicting future success for Stolz that Right? in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy.
“He likes beating the Dutch!” After the race, Nuis scolded NOS for its at those Games. “You see a ton of great seems almost impossible to imagine. “No, I don’t think it is unfair to com- Three days before his first race, Stolz
Dutch speedskaters have won the headline. “I don’t like putting words in athletes their first time through; it’s the “If he continues on his path, he will pare them,” Corby, Stolz’s coach, said. was sanguine about it all. He feels confi-
most medals at each Olympics since the an 18-year-old boy’s mouth,” he said. experience that matters the first time.” crush through a couple short-distance “It is hard not to compare them because dent and prepared, and prefers to focus
1998 Nagano Games, and the country Nuis said his defense of Stolz came world records, if not all three,” Mantia of his age.” on the process. “And if it’s a perfect race
supports several professional teams. from his own early struggles, when he said. “I think he has medal opportunities The parallels between the two are un- and I still haven’t gotten a medal, then
The Netherlands, with a population of began having success and people ex- “It is a big comparison, but in five events in the next Olympics.” canny. Both are from Wisconsin, both I’ll just have to accept that,” he said.
nearly 18 million, has eight fully indoor pected him to win world championships. obviously he looks like the If predictions of world records — he qualified for the Olympics as 17-year- His approach is an appropriate one
speedskating arenas; the United States “Everyone said, ‘Ahh, of course you will modern-day Eric Heiden.” already holds two junior world records olds but did not win any medals and both for speedskating, a simple sport. There
has two. win.’ That is the hardest thing to say to and the American national record in the started winning the next season as 18- are no heats and no qualifiers. There are
The best Dutch skaters admit that an athlete: ‘It will be easy.’ It is never 500 meters, which he will also race this year-olds. Heiden won his first world no re-dos. There is one race, and the
Stolz is one of the biggest threats to easy. Jordan, or when I skate good, we In the months after, Stolz shot straight weekend — weren’t grandiose enough, championship at 18, and Stolz can match skater with the best time wins. As Stolz
them. Thomas Krol, an Olympic cham- make it look easy, but it is not.” to the top of speedskating. He won four Stolz is being earnestly compared to that achievement this weekend. chases his first world championship
pion who has struggled this season, The pressure to win is immense, and it races at World Cup events, the most of perhaps the greatest speedskater ever. One of the few people not comparing gold medal, he has embraced an ap-
identified Stolz, along with Krol’s com- can be debilitating. Nuis said he began any man, and collected nine medals in “I don’t dare to say because it is a big Stolz to Heiden is Heiden, who went to proach that will be recognizable to any
patriots Hein Otterspeer and Kjeld Nuis, doing “mental training” to deal with the total. He finished the season in the top comparison, but obviously he looks like medical school after his skating career teenager.
as the favorites in 1,000-meter and expectations. Krol said he used a sports five in the 500 meters, 1,000 meters and the modern-day Eric Heiden,” said and became an orthopedic surgeon, in- “When it’s all or nothing, you just
1,500-meter races. psychologist after he won world cham- 1,500 meters, despite competing in only Gerard Kemkers, an Olympic medalist cluding for the Sacramento Kings. In- have to go out like it’s all or nothing,”
“I was hoping to say I was the top fa- pionship medals but began treating ev- five of six World Cups. who has coached both the United States stead, Heiden invokes a different ath- Stolz said. “So, I’ll just have to, I guess,
vorite, but I have to be realistic,” Krol ery race as a referendum on whether he The World Cup he missed conflicted and Dutch national teams. letic prodigy. “I can remember when Le- send it.”

NON SEQUITUR PEANUTS DOONESBURY CLASSIC 1998

GARFIELD CALVIN AND HOBBES

SUDOKU No. 0403

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

KENKEN THE SATURDAY CROSSWORD | Edited by Will Shortz

Fill the grid so Solution No. 0303 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

that every row,

column 3x3 box Fill the grids with digits so as not Across 25 Document for some 46 Adverb in the first 14 15 16

and shaded 3x3 to repeat a digit in any row or travelers line of the Gettysburg
column, and so that the digits
1 Epsilon follower
box contains
Address 17 18 19

each of the within each heavily outlined box 5 Targets of some 27 People of Pikes Peak
47 Street wear?
numbers will produce the target number orthodontic 28 Leads, e.g. 20 21 22 23

shown, by using addition, treatments 48 Many-time Emmy

1 to 9 exactly
subtraction, multiplication or
30 Doughnuts, e.g. nominee who got her 24 25 26
once.
9 A good word for start from a YouTube
division, as indicated in the box. giving? 32 All-in-one meal that web series
A 4x4 grid will use the digits often includes rice 27 28 29
For solving tips 14 ___ place
1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6.
49 Morgan of “The Real
and more puzzles: 33 Quick-tempered sorts Housewives of New
www.nytimes.com/ 15 Abrogate 30 31 32
York City”
sudoku
For solving tips and more KenKen 16 Tupperware 35 Theme shared by
puzzles: www.nytimes.com/ alternative “Great Expectations” 51 Seedy business for 33 34

kenken. For Feedback: nytimes@ and “The Great college applicants

17 End of March
kenken.com
35 36 37 38 39
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Madness, familiarly
36 Big to-do? 54 Fight site 40 41 42
19 Over 95% of its
KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. residents live near a 40 Go to the next line, 55 Convenience store
Copyright © 2018 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved.
brand 43 44 45
riverbank perhaps
56 Plants popular in
20 Ancestral spirit in 42 Leading position xeriscaping 46 47 48
Pueblo mythology
Answers to Previous Puzzles 43 Big part of New 57 Stuff
21 Big reference, but England 49 50 51 52
shortened 58 Cry out for
44 Title lyric after “Ours 53 54 55
23 As-usual link is a love …” in a 1950s
24 Available for a service hit Down 56 57 58

Solution to March 3 Puzzle 1 Suddenly crash

2 Film that gave Disney PUZZLE BY RYAN MCCARTY
R I B T I C K L E R C F O S its longest-reigning 10 Bug, in a way 29 Likely holders of 40 What has stories of
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B E E R F R I D G E O R C A
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Vinci Code” chains
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B O N E H E A D S C E R T S
Spanish or French 48 “___ it?”
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according to David
K A T A N A S C A R P 22 Concerning computer
7 French open activity, Hume 52 One-named singer
A M U S E P L A N A B A L display
for short? 38 Longtime name in with the 2014 #1
M I N I B R A I N C E L L S
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L O R E C Y B E R S Q U A T 9 Was, at one time 26 Postgame lament 39 Got down, in a way of Fear”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Weekend
A hyperpop duo
swerves to rock ’n’ roll
LOS ANGELES
100 gecs shook up
the underground. Their
follow-up is alt-rock.
BY JOE COSCARELLI
Laura Les and Dylan Brady, the experi-
mental pop duo known as 100 gecs,
wanted to set off fireworks indoors.
And if this were a few years ago, back
when the pair were quickly becoming
the internet underground’s favorite mu-
sical pranksters, they probably would
have just done it, pooling cash to hoard
semi-legal explosives and gleefully
wrecking the basement of whichever
friend of theirs cared the least. In its an-
archic “Jackass” ethos, few things could
be so gecs-y.
But at the end of last year, with an up-
coming major-label album to market —
and all the corporate guardrails that en-
tails — 100 gecs were being forced to
blow stuff up a bit more by the book. For-
tunately for Les, 28, and Brady, 29, the
other thing that comes with a fat record-
ing contract — besides a boatload of
commercial expectations, various
handlers and more rules — is resources.
The fireworks, after all, were for not
just mayhem but a music video — the
one expected to help propel the band’s
new single, “Hollywood Baby,” into a
mainstream crossover success.
So one evening last December, in the
parking lot of a soundstage in Van Nuys,
Calif., a small crew and an old-school py-
rotechnics expert made 100 gecs’ ab-
surd vision into an insurable reality,
erecting a perfectly dumpy two-room
house with no roof, which at least made
it look as if the fireworks were being ig-
nited inside.
When a tiny fireball hit Les, clad in a
thrifted Limp Bizkit T-shirt, directly in
the eye, the crucial thing was that it had
been captured on camera.
“There’s our short-form content,”
Brady cracked, his chronic deadpan de-
livery only ever disrupted by boyish en-
thusiasm.
That night’s elaborately D.I.Y. setup
— like the souped-up pop-punk of “Hol-
lywood Baby” — was 100 gecs with a
budget and plenty of good will to burn.
Since the group’s debut, “1000 gecs,”
blew minds, made memes and topped
critics’ year-end lists in 2019 with its
playfully futuristic genre-mashing, Les
and Brady have been on the steepest of
career trajectories, their sold-out shows
growing exponentially as Atlantic
Records positioned itself behind what-
ever the duo wanted to do next.
“It was definitely a ‘stop you dead in
your tracks, you have to pay attention’
moment,” Craig Kallman, the industry
veteran who signed the band to Atlantic,
said of 100 gecs’ viral rise.
Saddled almost immediately with the
weight of its own Spotify-branded sub-
genre (and accompanying playlist)
called hyperpop — for its synthetic, sug-
ary mix of Top 40 bombast, emo sincer-
ity-in-snottiness and rap swagger — 100
gecs were stamped as disruptive inno-
vators, the instant cult favorites who
weren’t expected to remain anyone’s se-
cret for very long.
Bridging the blown-out bass of the
SoundCloud era and the looming every-
thing-at-once cacophony of TikTok, 100
gecs had the kind of auspicious, stars-
aligning arrival that led those in the
group’s expanding universe to invoke
the paradigm-shifting breakthroughs of
Nine Inch Nails, for whom 100 gecs
opened on tour last year, and Nirvana.
Kallman, anticipating what is sup-
posed to happen now, called back to
“that transition from ‘Bleach’ to ‘Never-
mind,’” anointing “Hollywood Baby,”
with its arena-ready chorus, a “real
linchpin song to kick the door open.”
Yet in a rare balancing act, rapturous
hype for 100 gecs is still just as likely to
come from below as from the ambitious
benefactors above.
Jesse Taconelli, 25, a manager for acts
like quinn and Jane Remover who have
been grouped into the broader hyper-
pop sphere, said: “The influence that
gecs has is incredible and supernatu-
rally powerful in this scene,” which en-
compasses a loose, mutating network of
SoundCloud pages, Discord chats, mes-
sage boards and other unwieldy corners
of social media.
“They’re the Nirvana of that, the
ARIEL FISHER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Stones of that,” he said. “But in the inter-
net age, with an internet-y sound, and
when you get credited with creating a
wave like that, it becomes difficult to fol-
low up.”
After various delays and some stop-
gap releases, 100 gecs took about four
years. But where the band landed for its
sophomore LP, “10,000 gecs,” out March
17, is amusing in a way only Les and
Brady could muster: They made an alt-
rock album.
Instead of leaping deeper into the dig-
ital glitchiness that defined its name, 100
gecs found a fresher palette in the ana-
log, including rawer vocals, raging gui-
tar riffs and pummeling live percussion,
courtesy of the journeyman rock ses-
sion drummer Josh Freese (Guns N’
Roses, Weezer, A Perfect Circle).
Though still wobbly enough to be recog-
nizably gecs, the bones are sturdier.
“It’s funny to think, are people going
to call ‘Hollywood Baby’ hyperpop?”
Les wondered, noting that many of the
duo’s earlier conventions — “goofier
snares,” pitched-up nightcore vocals, su-
persaw synths — are minimized or ab-
sent.
“It could’ve been easier,” she
shrugged, a pile of discarded ideas, a
global pandemic and two headlining
tours later. “We could’ve made an album
in the style of the last one quickly. The
songs would’ve been pretty OK. It was
just boring.”
While the band had previously nod-
ded at maligned sounds like ska and nu-
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 | 15
metal, cutting them with Auto-Tune, Laura Les, far left,
trap drums and E.D.M., “10,000 gecs” and Dylan Brady
largely lingers in the crevices where the of 100 gecs. The
Warped Tour met the Family Values duo’s second
Tour, on the alternative edges of MTV’s album, “10,000
turn-of-the-century “TRL” empire. In gecs,” will be
just 10 songs across less than 30 min- released on
utes, the album recalls Korn and Sum 41, March 17 by
Primus and Cypress Hill, even incorpo- Atlantic Records.
rating the ignominious rap-rock calling
card of D.J. scratches over distortion.
And although it is a truism of the pop-
music present that a generation raised
on the all-you-can-absorb buffet of pira-
cy and streaming playlists has defeated
the dogma of genre walls, 100 gecs are
more pro-genre than post-genre, draw-
ing from musical tropes with a super-
fan’s precision and depth of reference, à
la the filmmaker Jordan Peele.
None of it, Brady and Les insist, is
ironic. “It would be so condescending to
be like, we are going to pull from terrible
genres,” Les said.
“Genres that have no worth,” Brady
mocked, recalling the tortured meta-
phors for collision that followed the re-
lease of “1000 gecs.” “Meme music made
in a computer blender — that’s not how I
think about it,” he said. “It’s just music
that we like.”
Les acknowledged a debt to viral de-
tritus — “Crazy Frog” and “Blue (Da Ba
Dee)” are frequent gecs touchstones —
and called the musician and comedian
Neil Cicierega an “Internet Jesus” for
his YouTube mash-ups.
“But there’s a lot of good craft built in
there,” Les said. “We like playing with
the different connotations that people
do have with things — whether good or
bad or silly or meme-y. But we’re pulling
from them because we think they’re
cool.”
Pointing to the skank-ready new
songs “Frog on the Floor” and “I Got My
Tooth Removed,” Brady added, “People
have been telling me that ska is bad my
whole life.”
In multiple interviews that spanned a
year of writing, recording, tweaking,
backtracking, touring, writing, and re-
cording some more, and ultimately let-
ting go, Les and Brady could be gloomy
(or just hung over), vaguely optimistic
(or just hung over) and often cagey, but
were always adamant that they were al-
most where they needed to be.
“It’s getting better, but I wish it was
getting more done,” Les said last spring,
after a night of studio trial and error that
lasted until 7 a.m. “This is a very spa-
ghetti-at-the-wall process,” she said.
“Then we whittle.”
Like comedians who would rather die
than explain their jokes, the two gecs — The band
both of whom produce and sing — could found a fresher
sound more like platitudinal politicians palette in the
while discussing their process than the
mischievous jesters of their public per-
analog,
sonas. But their dedication to the project including
and solace in each other shone through. rawer vocals,
“There’s differences in making music raging guitar
when there’s that much more pressure,” riffs and
Les said. “But we figure out how we can
make every day be fun.” pummeling
The pair first met as teenagers in sub- live percussion.
urban St. Louis, where Brady was hon-
ing a sample-based production style and
Les was struggling as a fuzzed-out sing-
er-songwriter. At first, Brady hoped to
recruit Les as a vocalist for a group he
envisioned as “Nine Inch Nails meets
Death Grips meets Beastie Boys,” but it
never happened. (“This is the album
that we made instead of doing that
band,” Les said of “10,000 gecs.”)
When Brady moved to Los Angeles
and Les to Chicago, they stayed in touch,
bonding over their passions for the com-
poser John Zorn’s Naked City and the
experimental production of Oneohtrix
Point Never and Sophie, but also the rap
of Sicko Mobb and Lil Durk.
In 2016, after a week together in Les’s
apartment, the pair quietly released a
five-song EP as 100 gecs, and continued
to work remotely afterward, sending
each other tracks and building an in-
creasingly adventurous sound. Some of
the group’s first shows, in early 2019 and
2020, took the form of virtual D.J. sets at
mock music festivals — Fire Festival
and Coalchella — in the world of
Minecraft.
Across the physical distance, the
pair’s creative connection proved to be
pure, uncomplicated and near-psychic.
“It feels even more natural and easy
than working by myself,” Brady said.
Early on, Brady had also dabbled in
the SoundCloud rap world, channeling
the Auto-Tune wails of Travis Scott, and
was managed by Cody Verdecias, a
young A&R executive and former musi-
cian. Verdecias, who took on 100 gecs,
hoped to elevate alternative music on a
mass scale, and he found success in re-
cent years with the hardcore band Turn-
stile, one of 21st-century rock’s greatest
grass-roots success stories.
“I strive with our A&R team to be pio-
neering and championing things that
are fresh and new,” Kallman said, cred-
iting Verdecias with helping him see 100
gecs’ potential. “They just felt like a
band that was going to have great cul-
tural significance, build a scene and a
loyal, dedicated following.”
In Brady’s tiny, windowless studio
last year, Verdecias said he had success-
fully been keeping Atlantic at bay as Les
and Brady toiled. “I told the label today,
big tracks coming!” Verdecias said.
“That’s like my main job.” Even he had-
n’t heard most of what was to come.
“I like to think that after this album,
they can become the 10-year album
band,” Verdecias teased.
Brady, noncommittal, noted that Led
Zeppelin once “did like four albums in
two years.”
“Yeah, but they only wrote half the
songs,” Les countered.
GECS, PAGE 20
 ..
16 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

weekend living

Some cases
bear fruit,
but not
this one
They came together quickly, but falling
in love apparently was not in the picture

Modern Love

BY HENRY CARROLL

She had the most beautiful profile. I

don’t mean her dating profile, which is
how we connected. I mean the side of
her actual face. Her features — from
her long brown hair to her flat-tipped
nose, voluptuous lips and strong
rounded chin — were full of character.
And she was smart, firing back funny
responses to my conversational
crumbs.
She was 36. I was 43. She was new
to Los Angeles. I had been here four
years. She was recently out of a seven-
year relationship. I had never man-
aged anything close to that. BRIAN REA

Our quick-fire exchange of mes-

sages ended with an agreed-upon late
afternoon drink the next Thursday.
When she arrived, she was surpris-
ingly guarded. I don’t think I was what
she was expecting. I saw a picture of
her ex on Instagram. He was kind of
hunky-looking and well groomed, with
hair like a 20-year-old.
She ordered an orange wine. I had a
gin cocktail. I made her laugh. She
touched my arm. She ordered another
wine. I had another gin. I wasn’t ner-
vous anymore. I asked if she would
like to have dinner. She said yes.
I guess that’s the moment it all
started for me. The point of emotional
no return. We walked up Rose Avenue
to a restaurant called Wallflower. She
held my arm.
We sat at the bar, and after a while I
realized that my hand was in hers.
Somewhere between courses I kissed
her on the cheek. We talked about love
languages. I touched her leg. We
walked outside and kissed while wait-
ing for her car. For a moment we
looked at each other and acknowl-
edged something about “potential.”
I told her to text me when she was
home safe. I never think to say that.
I replied to her text, saying I was
excited to see her again. She replied:
“me too xx.”
We didn’t see each other for another
three weeks. She was traveling for
work. I thought about her constantly.
People say we have too much
choice, and that’s the problem with
dating these days. But when you meet
someone special, the idea of going on a
date with anyone else feels utterly
pointless.
It was around this time that the olive
fell from the tree.
I had bought the olive tree a few
months earlier in Ojai. It was about
two feet tall. The tree wasn’t my first
choice. When I took my original pick to
the counter, the man said, “Wouldn’t
you prefer one that’ll give you fruit?
They’re not as pretty, but they’re more
fun.”
So I swapped the tree for a scruffier-
looking one, which I planted in an old
terra-cotta pot and put on a chair, as if
it were a guest in my garden.
I’d never had my own garden before.
After my last relationship, I moved
apartments and created a lush green
oasis from what was a lifeless cement
passageway. It gave me something to
focus on.
I made some benches, planted flow-
ering vines and a couple of cactuses. It
felt good to nurture new life. Sitting out
there with my morning coffee and
evening gin and tonic was a spiritual
experience.
Every day I would inspect my tree
for olives. Its flowers bloomed, then
fell, then nothing. Until late April,
when I saw a tiny green kernel on a
stem.
Over the next few weeks, I watched
the olive grow and expected to see
others.
When none appeared, I began to
worry that my precious olive would fall
in the night or be eaten by a pest.
By August the olive had grown to the
size of a fingernail. I imagined having
a party when it was time for it to be
harvested. Friends would come over
and we would pickle it.
It was in September, around the
same time she and I matched, that the
olive changed color. It transitioned
from green to brown to black and its
smooth skin wrinkled, and it grew
smaller.
When the olive finally fell, I knew
exactly what it was meant for, why it
existed. I put it in a small jar with a
metal lid and, for some reason, kept it
in the freezer.
She returned on Saturday, and we
arranged to meet the next Thursday.
When I picked her up, I had the olive
in my car. We went to a gallery open-
ing on Melrose Avenue. There was no
awkward warm-up this time. No get-
ting a feel for each other.
We joked about the art. A photogra-
pher documenting the evening kept
taking pictures of us. It felt as if we
were being immortalized, that this
moment was being preserved for a
reason.
We left the gallery and walked to a
bistro. My arm was around her shoul-
ders. Hers around my waist. As we
waited to cross the street, I kissed her.
We sat at the bar and ordered wine
and some small plates. I didn’t even
look at the prices. I’d pay anything to
hold her attention, to gaze at her pro-
file.
I couldn’t stop stroking her bare
legs, and once again my hand found its
way into hers. We talked about every-
thing: her pottery, my carpentry, bro-
ken hearts, the state of the nation. It
felt as if there had never been a more
perfect time for two lives to intersect. I
wanted to commit every part of her
past to memory, to fast-track my
knowledge of her entire life.
When I drove her home, she told me
that she was freezing her eggs. She
said that the injections might affect her
mood over the next few weeks. I was
comforted by her openness, as if she
were prepping me for the future, and I
couldn’t help imagining that maybe
one day we might make something
from one of those eggs.
I picked up the glass jar from the
ashtray and put it in her hand. She
jokingly asked if it was my sperm. (I
told you she was funny.) I recounted
the story of my first and only olive and
said I wanted her to have it. She said it
was the nicest gift she had ever re-
ceived.
For a second I thought she might
I recounted the cry.
story of my I walked her to her door. She said
first and only she had a friend staying for the week-
end. We tentatively agreed to meet the
olive and said I next week. We made out on her stoop.
wanted her to I remember smelling the side of her
have it. She neck for a moment. I just wanted to
said it was the hold a trace of her in her absence. I’m
nicest gift she never usually like this. Maybe it was a
bit weird.
had ever She asked me to text her when I got
received. home. I texted her before I got home. I
didn’t want her to think we lived too
far apart.
The next day I sent her some recom-
mendations of where to go with her
friend. She loved them all. On Monday
evening I asked about her weekend.
She told me it was lovely. She asked
about mine. I made it sound better
than it had been. I asked how her week
looked, if she was free on Friday.
I sat down while typing that mes-
sage. It felt somehow like a life-chang-
ing text.
It was around lunchtime the next
day that I began to get the feeling I
had been ghosted. Maybe her friend
was more than a friend. Maybe they’d
had a romantic time at the restaurants
I recommended, and my excellent
taste in venues had helped cement
their love.
I followed up on Wednesday
evening. For closure. It took her 84
minutes to reply.
I was amazing. I was awesome. She
had loved our time together. But —
I thanked her for reminding me what
it’s like to be excited about someone.
She asked if we could be friends. I said
that wouldn’t work.
I couldn’t sleep that night. The idea
of her having my olive kept agitating
me like the pea under the princess’s
mattresses.
The next morning, I texted her. I just
needed to get it out the way.
“Hey,” I wrote. “One final request.
That damn olive, if you haven’t already,
can you toss it in the trash. It weirdly
meant something to me and it was a
miscalculation to give it to you so soon.
I don’t want it back. I’d just rather it
didn’t exist.”
I ended the message with something
light. I didn’t want to sound dramatic.
She didn’t reply. Of course she didn’t.
I wonder if she did as I asked.
I kind of hope she did.
I kind of hope she didn’t.
Henry Carroll is an author in Los Ange-
les. His latest book is “Land: Photo-
graphs That Make You Think.”

My friend is dating a murderer.

Stuy, who runs the service DNACon-
nect, estimates there’s currently a 1
percent chance that an American

Should I do anything about it?

The Ethicist
BY KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH
I have a childhood friend who recently
moved into my home. Everything has
been going well, except she is dating an
inmate who was convicted of murdering
one of his family members. This inmate
is somebody we knew when we were
younger; our friend group was very
affected by the murder. I have my own
personal trauma with the inmate, and I
know my roommate does as well. He is
really not a great guy. But my room-
mate is convinced the inmate has
changed. She tells me details about
their relationship, as friends do. It’s
clear to me he hasn’t changed much. I
avoid talking about him as much as
possible, and change the subject if he is
brought up. Although he still has 11
years left on his sentence, he is trying to
appeal for a lesser term. I am hopeful
their relationship will end before he is
released. Otherwise, I fear for her
safety; I can see the red flags every day.
What do I do to help? My family tells
me that if I try to talk to her about it, I
will just push her away. But I’m having
a hard time just standing by. Name
Withheld
A RELATIONSHIP THAT takes place while
one party is in prison doesn’t tell you
very much about what things will be
like once that partner has been re-
leased. Physical violence can’t occur
when two people are meeting only
under supervision, and the incarcerat-
ed partner has a strong incentive to
behave well in order to maintain a
relationship that may be one of the few
positive elements in his life. Nor can I
judge whether this man would pose a
danger to your friend once he has been
released. You haven’t said anything
about what you think the “red flags”
are, beyond your opinion (not shared
by your roommate, who surely knows
him better than you do) that he’s not
much changed.
Still, to go by the available research,
men are much less likely to commit
violent crimes in middle age than in
their youth. In fact, a study of recidi-
vism rates for people paroled from life
sentences in California between 1995
and 2011 found that only 0.6 percent of
parolees were later convicted of fel-
onies, none of them for murder. Absent
specific information, then, I would say
that the risks here may be less sub-
stantial than you fear. And this inmate
won’t be released early if a parole
board thinks he poses a significant
danger.
A separate issue is how you and
your friends would feel if your room-
mate asked you to accept the presence
of someone who caused all of you
enormous distress, even if it was many
years ago. It would take a special
effort on your part to reconcile with
him, and it would be a lot for your
roommate to ask. And yet forgiveness,
even if partial and provisional, is a
worthwhile aim. Convey your con-
cerns, in a supportive way, but try to
be open as well to her views. A world
without second chances is a dismal one
for offenders who have served their
sentences. The best outcome for the
formerly incarcerated is to be reinte-
grated as law-abiding citizens, and
having a loving partner makes this
more likely. Whether maintaining the
relationship is what’s best for her is
ultimately something she’ll have to
decide for herself.
I am the American adoptive parent of a
child from China who is now 8 years
old. A few years ago, I began to take an
interest in locating his birth parents.
While most adoptions in China are
technically classified as “abandon-
ment,” there is a small but dedicated
international online community of
birth-family searchers, all of whom
agree on two things for a successful
search: Start as early as possible and
use DNA databases like GEDmatch and
23Mofang to find relatives. Otherwise
the likelihood of finding parents is
extremely low and gets worse over time
as paperwork is destroyed and memo-
ries become hazy.
Is it ethical to use my son’s DNA with
one of these databases? He has ex-
pressed some interest in locating his
birth family, and he has a right to un-
derstand his origins. I have enough
TOMI UM
concern about privacy, however, that
DNA ancestry is not something I would
choose to do for myself. This is com-
pounded by the Chinese government’s
murky use of DNA databases of its
male citizens, as reported by this paper.
My child’s DNA is his own; although
if I suggest genetic testing, he will agree
to it, as he is too young to grasp the
privacy issues at play. Yet, missing out
on finding his birth parents at a forma-
tive age is also not a decision I want to
make for him. What should I do? Name
Withheld
LET ME START with a couple of factual
observations. First, your odds of suc-
cess would seem to be extremely low
in any case. The Nanchang Project,
which aims to reconnect adoptees with
their families in China, reported in
November 2020 that 23Mofang — a
Chinese company inspired, its founder
says, by 23andMe — had its first suc-
cessful match, identifying a person
adopted into an American family from
Guangdong. Given that more than
140,000 Chinese children were adopted
internationally between 1999 and 2016,
that’s not encouraging news. Brian
adoptee would be able to locate a birth
family in China through DNA testing.
Many millions of Americans have
submitted DNA to ancestry services —
more than 22 million to AncestryDNA
alone. Although it’s hard to get up-to-
date information, the rate of uptake in
China doesn’t seem to be at all compa-
rable.
Second, adoptions facilitated by the
Chinese government are generally not
“closed” — that is, birth parents are
very rarely assured privacy and ano-
nymity. So there’s no reason to assume
that your son’s prospective interest in
learning about his ancestry would
necessarily conflict with the privacy
interests of his birth parents. In the
unlikely event that they or other close
biological relatives have chosen to
submit their genetic data to public
databases, they may well have been
hoping to be found.
What about your son’s privacy inter-
ests? It’s true that there are effectively
no restrictions on the Chinese govern-
ment’s use of genetic data. But assum-
ing that your son is planning to live
outside China, you may not need to
worry much. Besides, you can take
measures to anonymize his data, sub-
mitting it in a way that would not leave
him easily identified. Once you’ve got a
firm sense of options, you can talk
about them with your 8-year-old. Then
it’s up to you whether to get out the
swab, as the person whose fiduciary
duty it is to protect his interests. All
told, though, I would attach a slender
probability both to your fears and to
your hopes.
Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philos-
ophy at N.Y.U. His books include “Cos-
mopolitanism,” “The Honor Code” and
“The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Iden-
tity.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 | 17

books weekend

Preaching freedom
but keeping a tight
hold on the reins
BOOK REVIEW
The Courage to Be Free:
Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival
By Ron DeSantis. 256 pp. Broadside
Books. $35.
BY JENNIFER SZALAI
As governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis
has been casting himself as a Trump-
like pugilist. But the overall sense you
get from reading his new memoir is
that of the mechanical try-hard —
someone who has expended a lot of
effort studying which way the wind is
blowing in the Republican Party and is
learning how to comport himself ac-
cordingly.
Not that he admits any of this, pep-
pering “The Courage to Be Free” with
frequent eruptions about “the legacy
story,” but presumably those profes-
sionals could only do so much with the
material they were given. For the most
part, “The Courage to Be Free” is
courageously free of anything that
resembles charisma, or a discernible
sense of humor. While his first book
was weird and esoteric enough to have
obviously been written by a human,
this one reads like a politician’s mem-
oir churned out by ChatGPT.
DeSantis’s attempts at soaring rhet-
oric are mostly too leaden to get off the
ground. “During times of turmoil,” he
intones, “people want leaders who are Ron DeSantis, who
willing to speak the truth, stand for offers what he
what is right and demonstrate the calls “Florida’s
courage necessary to lead.” Of his blueprint for
childhood baseball team making the America’s revival”
Little League World Series, he says: in a book preced-
“What I came to understand about the ing an expected
experience was less about baseball presidential run.
than it was about life. It was proof that WADE VANDERVORT/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

media” and “runaway wokeness.” But
all the culture war Mad Libs can’t
distract from the dull coldness at this
book’s core. A former military prosecu-
tor, DeSantis is undeniably diligent and
disciplined. “The Courage to Be Free”
resounds with evidence of his “hard
work” (a favorite mantra), showing
him poring over Florida’s laws and
Constitution to understand “the vari-
ous pressure points in the system” and
“how to leverage my authority to
advance our agenda through that
system.”
Even the title, with its awkward feint
at boldness while clinging to the safety
of cliché, suggests the anxiety of an
ambitious politician who really, really
wants to run for president in 2024 and
knows he needs the grievance vote,
but is also trying his best to tiptoe
around the Trump dragon.
What a difference a dozen years
make. Back in 2011, a year before
DeSantis first ran for Congress, he
published “Dreams From Our Found-
ing Fathers” — an obvious dig at
Barack Obama, whom DeSantis lam-
basted for his “thin résumé” and “ego-
tism” and “immense self-regard.” It
was a curious book, full of high-toned
musings about “the Framers’ wisdom”
and “the Madisonian-designed political
apparatus.”
His new book will leave some sup-
porters, who have encouraged DeSan-
tis to “humanize himself” for a national
audience, sorely disappointed. In his
acknowledgments, he thanks “a hard-
working team of literary professionals
who were critical to telling the Florida
hard work can pay off, and that achiev-
ing big goals was possible.” You have
to imagine that DeSantis, a double-
barreled Ivy Leaguer (Yale University
and Harvard Law School), put a bit
more verve into his admissions essays.
At around 250 pages, this isn’t a partic-
ularly long book, but it’s padded with
such banalities.
Much of it is given over to laying out
what he calls “Florida’s blueprint for
America’s revival,” or, as he puts it in
his generic summary: “Be willing to
lead, have the courage of your convic-
tions, deliver for your constituents and
reap the political rewards.” What this
has meant in practice looks an awful
lot like thought policing: outlawing
classroom discussion of sexual orienta-
tion through the third grade; rejecting
math textbooks that run afoul of Flor-
ida’s opaque review process; forbid-
ding teachers and companies to dis-
cuss race and gender in a way that
might make anyone feel “discomfort,
guilt, anguish or any other form of
psychological distress.” Florida also
has a ban on abortion after 15 weeks —
which DeSantis has indicated he would
be willing to tighten to six weeks —
with no exceptions for rape or incest.
In this regard, all the bland plati-
tudes do serve a purpose. DeSantis’s
blunt-force wielding of executive
power might sound like a good time for
hard-core social conservatives, but if
part of the point of this book is to float
a trial balloon for a presidential run,
you can see the gears turning as he
tries to make his message palatable for
the national stage. Take out the gauzy
abstraction, the heartwarming clichés,
Much of what and much of what DeSantis is describ-
DeSantis is ing in “The Courage to Be Free” is
describing is chilling — unfree and scary.
Of course, DeSantis insists that he’s
chilling — simply doing his bit to fight “political
unfree and factionalism” and “indoctrination.” He
scary. removed Tampa’s democratically
elected prosecutor from office in large
part for pledging not to prosecute
abortion providers — explaining in the
book that he, DeSantis, was just using
the powers vested in him by Florida’s
state Constitution to suspend a “Soros-
backed attorney” for “a clear case of
incompetence and neglect of duty.” ( In
January, a federal judge ruled that
DeSantis was in violation of state law.)
DeSantis boasts about big-footing
companies and local municipalities
when he prohibited vaccine mandates
and lifted lockdowns. In April 2020,
when the president of the Ultimate
Fighting Championship expressed
annoyance at the possibility of dealing
with some “jackass mayor,” DeSantis
told him not to worry: “I will overrule
any mayor that gives you guys a hard
time.”
It’s unclear what happened to the
DeSantis of a decade ago, a boilerplate
libertarian and founding member of
the House Freedom Caucus who was
mainly preoccupied with fiscal auster-
ity and privatizing Medicare and Social
Security. His 2011 book contained
numerous tributes to “limited govern-
ment.” Now, he says, in his typically
windy way, anything he does that looks
suspiciously intrusive is in fact a
cleansing measure, purging public life
of excess politicization: “For years, the
default conservative posture has been
to limit government and then get out of
the way. There is, no doubt, much to
recommend to this posture — when the
institutions in society are healthy. But
we have seen institution after institu-
tion become thoroughly politicized.”
Fewer than 20 pages later, DeSantis
proposes making about 50,000 federal
employees — currently apolitical civil
servants — into “at-will employees
who serve at the pleasure of the presi-
dent.” By any measure, this would
amount to politicization on steroids.
But despite all the dutiful servings of
red meat, DeSantis looks so far to be
the favored son of the donor class —
which is probably the main audience
for this book. The message to them
seems to be twofold. First, don’t nor-
malize “the woke impulse”: When
Disney’s chief executive criticized
Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law
(officially titled Parental Rights in
Education), DeSantis cracked down
accordingly. Second, Republican do-
nors can take assurance from “the
Sunshine State’s favorable economic
climate” that, when it comes to what
truly matters to them, it will be busi-
ness as usual.
Reading books, even bad ones, can
be a goad to thinking, but what DeSan-
tis seems to be doing in “The Courage
to Be Free” is to insist that Americans
should just stop worrying and let him
do all the thinking for them. Any criti-
cism of his policies is dismissed as
“woke” nonsense cooked up by the
“corporate media.” (Rupert Murdoch’s
Fox Corporation and News Corp,
which owns the publisher of this book,
doubtless don’t count.) “I could with-
stand seven years of indoctrination in
the Ivy League,” DeSantis says, only
half in jest.
The bullying sense of superiority is
unmistakable, even when he tries to
gussy it up in a mantle of freedom.
DeSantis is not taking any chances: He
may have been able to “withstand” the
“indoctrination” of being exposed to
ideas he didn’t like, but he doesn’t
seem to believe the same could be said
for anyone else.

By the Book the sunday crossword

Ari Shapiro As Heard Around the Dinner Table
Edited by Will Shortz

Across 46 Literary 94 Bareilles who 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

The host of NPR’s “All Things Consid- Who is your favorite fictional hero or 1 Commuter’s character sang “Love
ered,” whose new book is “The Best heroine? Your favorite antihero or ticket who cries “I Song” 19 20 21
8 They take bows am madness 95 Tribe native to
Strangers in the World: Stories From a villain? 15 G-rated, say maddened!” the Great Basin 22 23 24
Life Spent Listening,” likes to read The German author Michael Ende, 19 “It’s not coming 50 Bog 96 Suit fabric
25 26 27
cookbooks: “Every page has the prom- who is best known for the novel “The to me” 51 Ill-humored 97 Agcy.
20 Floral brew 52 “Cool!” impersonated
ise of a happy ending.” Neverending Story" (on which the 21 Quintessential 55 Act theatrically in some scam
28 29 30 31 32 33 34

1980s fantasy film was based), also ingredient to 56 “Meet the calls 35 36 37 38 39
Are there any classic novels that you wrote a lesser-known book called borrow from a Press” host 98 Crouched in
neighbor Chuck terror 40 41
only recently read for the first time? “Momo,” published in 1973. It is a fable 22 Dine out 57 Attractions for 101 Private
I know that “Beowulf” is technically an about a girl who has a gift for listening. 24 Competitive antique hunters 102 Vegetarian 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49
setting in 60 Donnybrooks options …
epic poem rather than a novel, but I’m One day the Men in Grey arrive in her 61 Ironically funny or what
Fortnite 50 51 52 53 54 55
going to say it counts. The only version small Italian-flavored neighborhood. 25 Like many 62 Part of many a the shaded
I’ve ever read is the 2020 translation REBECCA CLARKE They preach the gospel of efficiency phone cards weight-loss ad letters in this 56 57 58 59 60

26 Often- 64 Buck chaser? puzzle are,

by Maria Dahvana Headley. Nearly and convince people to eliminate activ- mispunctuated 65 Something phonetically 61 62 63 64

every page has lines that I wanted to It is so hard to write books about cli- ities that squander time, like day- word checked 108 “The Three
65 66 67 68
read aloud. (Go figure — after a life- mate change that people want to read. dreaming. Momo is the only one unaf- 27 Lets it all out, at a T.S.A. Musketeers”
say checkpoint action scenes
time in radio, when I see words on a I once asked Michael Pollan about this. fected by their scheme. 28 Aurora, to the 67 One vs. 52? 109 Flatten
69 70 71 72

page my first instinct is to speak His entire body of work revolves I don’t know why the book never Greeks 68 Go on and on 110 Movie character 73 74 75 76 77 78 79
them.) around the human relationship to the really caught on in the United States, 31 Powerful 69 “Cool!” who replied
weapon, for 70 Crib “I know” to 80 81 82 83 84
You know how sometimes your natural world, so I asked why he hasn’t particularly as its themes feel more short 71 Bad impression? 43-Across
memory of a book is inexorably bound yet written a climate change book. He relevant with each year. I also can’t 32 Pop option 72 Tiny bit of work 111 They may 85 86 87 88 89 90 91
34 Firefly, e.g. 73 Famed Deco be long and
to the place you consumed it? I’ll thought for a while and then said — recall how an English translation of designer shocking 92 93 94 95
35 Aid in some
always remember reading this “Beo- perhaps it’s because he tries to write “Momo” reached me as a kid in Port- makeshift 74 Whitman of 112 Clink
wulf” during a West Virginia cabin books that give people hope, and he land, Ore., in the 1990s. Reading the repairs “Parenthood” 113 Gray matter? 96 97 98 99 100

38 Blackhead 77 Aftermath of a
weekend in November with some doesn’t know how to do that with book as a gay Jewish teenager, I think toddler’s meal 101 102 103 104 105 106 107
remover Down
friends. It is a perfect fireplace read; I global warming. I related to Momo’s outsider status, her 40 Company that 78 Train that stops 1 Tom Hanks 108 109 110
recommend a collective recitation, The novelist Amitav Ghosh wrote apart-ness. As an adult, I love that her created Pong in New Haven movie featuring
41 They can make and New York a giant piano 111 112 113
passing the book around the room about this dilemma in an insightful superpower is an ability to listen. a huge impact 80 They often don’t 2 It might turn out
while sipping a strong drink and gaz- nonfiction book called “The Great 42 Spongy mature until to be a drone PUZZLE BY JOHN-CLARK LEVIN / EDITED BY WILL SHORTZ THE NEW YORK TIMES
mushroom they turn 30 3 Barfly
ing into the fire. Derangement.” He proposes reaching Disappointing, overrated, just not 84 Yucatán native 4 Blue diamond 9 Share the ____ (sign) 41 Apple wireless file 79 Pot grower?
back to ideas and themes from pre- good: What book did you feel as if 43 Movie character
who said “I 85 Lie out on a in “Titanic,” e.g. 10 Fort Collins sch. transfer 80 Skinflints
Describe your ideal reading experi- modern literature and ancient myths. you were supposed to like, and did- love you” to scorching day 5 Lab culture 11 “____ Loss” (2022 #1 43 Do nothing 81 Does well on a test, say
110-Across 89 Landmark at medium album by Drake and 21 44 Paris bar tender? 82 Wild donkey
ence (when, where, what, how). Ghosh’s novel “The Hungry Tide” n’t? Do you remember the last book the entrance to 6 Star close to Savage) 46 Reddit Q&A 83 Fellow
45 Network
On an airplane — hoodie up, shoes off, actually inspired me to report a series you put down without finishing? supported by Narnia Venus? 12 Cyber Monday merchant 47 “The nerve!” 85 Along
no Wi-Fi, no distractions. I read “A of stories about climate change from I probably shouldn’t make a blanket “Viewers Like 92 “Yeah, but still ...” 7 Take 13 Mall security guard, 48 Finally 86 Many a Monopoly
You” 93 Online responsibility pejoratively 49 Under siege property
Little Life” beginning to end this way, the Sundarbans, a patchwork of man- statement like this, but here goes: I handicrafts 8 Bandleader 51 Turned red, say 87 Ear piece?
14 Exams with a 400-
on one long flight from South Africa to grove islands straddling the border of think a fair number of the nonfiction marketplace Shaw 52 Like an allegro tempo 88 Marx’s co-author for
1600 range
the United States (in a middle seat). India and Bangladesh. So he seems to books published today would be just as 15 Soup-serving dish 53 Landed “The Communist
Solution to puzzle of February 25-26 54 Subjects of VH1’s “I Manifesto”
No shade to Hanya Yanagihara, but be doing something right. good or better if they were the length 16 Interfacers with
T O F F P E S T S E P I C A R T S publishers Love the ...” series 89 They can be passed but
this is not the way I’d recommend of a long magazine article. To be hon- A C E R A L E V E T A P E S L E A P 17 Layer between the 55 ‘Fore not failed
digesting that particular book. What moves you most in a work of est, I even feel this way about some of C H R I S T MA S C A R R O L L O H H I crust and the core 56 Packaging string 90 Franklin who sang
T O N E P O E M D U E S A C T I O N 18 Need for a tough 58 Actress Ward “R-E-S-P-E-C-T”
literature? the book interviews that I do on NPR. 59 Many teens’ rooms, to 91 Robin Hood’s love
D I O R E A R N P OO R M E crossword, perhaps
Do you have any comfort reads? I want to view the world through the The topic may be interesting, but not A S S O R T A D DM I T T S D E F E A T 21 Command for creating parents 94 On the wagon
Sometimes I flip through “The Col- eyes of someone else. In my opinion, for 300 pages. (Even so, I have a rule L A T K E A G O G A E R I A L a revised draft 60 Pulitzer-winning 97 Little mischief-makers
A V E R E X I L E D D A D S W I S P 23 Sushi bar drink columnist Stephens 98 Veggie that’s often
lected Poems of Frank O’Hara” and there is no better way to inhabit an- that I will read a book cover to cover 62 “Du-u-u-ude!” pickled
B E E A
T T I T U D E S M E H A N T I 28 Wax-coated cheese
give myself a little dose of him in the other reality than by reading fiction. I before any author interview. So far I’ve A S L R O N A N S U B S F R E O N 63 Large coffee vessels 99 Virgil described its
29 Like words this clue 66 Made a fast stop? “cloud of pitch-black
middle of a day. I think “Having a Coke recently felt this way about the trans kept that promise for seven years.) I S T Y L I N G C R E M A C H A S E R S the in? 68 “Previously on ...” whirling smoke”
With You” may be the best love poem women in “Detransition, Baby,” by am aware that as a debut author work- T A D A S C H A R L I L A C D Y E 30 Easily frightened sort segment 100 Sign of neglect
E T A S F B I W E L L C OM E MA T T 32 Where you might go
ever written. I also read cookbooks for Torrey Peters, and about the teenagers ing in nonfiction, I am tempting fate. 74 “The kissing disease” 103 Channel that airs old
R E N T O L L A T A O I S M O N I T down in the ranks? MGM and RKO films
pleasure. They demand nothing of the coming of age in 1970s China in “A Map 75 “Coming face to face
T R U I S M P O N E F R A M E 33 Bauxite or galena 104 ____ Bankman-Fried,
with yourself,” per
reader, and every page has the prom- for the Missing,” by Belinda Huijuan What books are you embarrassed not F O R T H E E A S S K I N G K E E P E R 34 Things usually made in Jackson Pollock fallen crypto mogul
ise of a happy ending. Tang. to have read yet? A V OWA L A P E S MA L L the morning 76 Otherworldly 105 Excessively
R E M I N I T S A R G A R L A N D S 36 What’s in 77 Minority in New 106 Boston’s Liberty Tree,
Reading literature strengthens my Oh, there are so many. “War and I R A N M I S S I N N F O RMA T I O N 37 ‘Fore Zealand’s parliament for one
Which subjects do you wish more empathy muscles better than anything Peace,” “Moby-Dick,” anything by Jane N I N E B R A I N B L I N I E L S A 38 MADD ad, e.g. 78 What goes “up to 11,” 107 Kind of sauce for dim
authors would write about? else I can think of. Austen — I could go on and on. G T O S A I N T C Y N I C R E A P 39 Lefty in “Spinal Tap” sum
 ..
18 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

weekend art

Left, Arne Svenson

at the New York
apartment window
where he took
photos of neigh-
bors that were first
shown in 2013.
CAROLINE TOMPKINS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Images like these

set off a lawsuit

An uninvited gaze,
involving accusa- You have one filter when you’re walking
tions of an inva- the dog, another when you’re on the
sion of privacy. street to go shopping. Maybe you have
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ARNE SVENSON; VIA DANZIGER GALLERY zero filters for being at home.” By shoot-
ing people in their residences, he was

unsettling beauty
flouting a convention that allows urban
dwellers to coexist in tight proximity
with the shared illusion of privacy.
In most photographs of people caught
surreptitiously in public settings, the
sentence, and then you have to work. It’s artist is seeking naked facial expres-
Arne Svenson’s peeping images why cropping is so important. Crop out sions, unmasking social self-presenta-
the thing that completes the story. If you tion. Walker Evans’s undercover sub-
flout presumptions of privacy have a dog wagging its tail, crop out the way portraits (which he waited 25 years
dog or the tail. Don’t have them both.” to publish) and Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s
BY ARTHUR LUBOW Early on, he decided that he would fo- candid Times Square “Heads” (which
cus on the dirt and streaks on the win- incited a failed lawsuit much like the one
When Arne Svenson’s photographic se- dows. As a result, the subjects are usu- against Svenson) fall into that category.
ries “The Neighbors” was first exhibited ally a bit indistinct, which lends a paint- Svenson’s are different. “I wasn’t look-
in New York in 2013, the uproar over- erly quality to them. A woman viewed ing at faces,” he said.
whelmed the pictures. Press commenta- from behind, with upswept hair and an A woman twirling a long lock of her
tors got so riled up over how Svenson elegant black dress or slip, is rising from hair in the dim illumination of a floor
had used a telephoto lens to peer at the (or perhaps descending into) a blue lamp is a nocturne of beige and brown
unaware people living across the street Windsor chair. Because the lens is fo- worthy of Whistler; the gorgeous genre
from his building in the TriBeCa neigh- cused on the surface of the window, the scene supplies no information about its
borhood — and published the images image, with its alluringly dappled sur- female subject. It is temptingly easy to
without their consent — that it was hard face that mimics texture, could be a pas- compare any softly lit interior contain-
to judge how the photographs measured tel drawing on woven paper. Indeed, be- ing one or two people to Vermeer, but the
up artistically. cause of its subject matter, it evokes resemblance in some of these images is
Svenson, a successful artist, had comparisons with pastels of women hard to avoid. A woman with a towel
stumbled into the project after inher- seemingly captured unawares in the over her head could be Vermeer’s “Girl
iting a large telephoto lens from a de- bath by Degas, that consummate practi- With a Pearl Earring” all grown up —
ceased friend who had used it to photo- tioner of the male gaze. were she not looking down at her phone.
graph birds. Planning to sell it, he Although Svenson denies any erotic Nevertheless, they retain a whiff of
thought it should be tested first, and component to his photographs, the fris- the transgressive — the Peeping Tom
when he aimed at a wall in his apart- son of scopophilia unmistakably ani- quality that makes Hitchcock’s “Rear
ment, the distance was too short for the mates them. It is evident in a picture of a Window” creepy. When street photogra-
focal length. young man sleeping on a couch, with a phers catch their unsuspecting subjects
A building had recently risen opposite few inches of bare skin exposed be- in public spaces, some critics object that
his, in what had been a vacant lot. He tween his T-shirt and the seat of his blue- the practice is ethically fraught. How
turned the lens that way and saw a wom- jeans. His vulnerability to the penetra- much more problematic is it to eye such
an through a window. “I focused on her, tion of the camera — and our eyes — is a people relaxing at home?
and when I saw the clarity, I started go- powerful component of the image. And The picture that set off the firestorm
ing,” he said. Quickly obsessed, he might the prominence of the mullions not only of litigation is of a mother holding up her
have taken 200 shots waiting for the adds a formal geometric component but blond daughter. Because of the legal un-
light to shift. No one ever noticed, except also seems like a defensive barrier that certainty, Svenson excluded it from the
for a Boston terrier that eyed him curi- has been pierced. book of 42 images he published in 2015.
ously. Nor did he ever consider how his The furor that greeted these pictures Before getting the shot he coveted, he
subjects might respond if they knew. before their exhibition in 2013 led to waited a long time for the child’s hair to
“A lot of artists, and I think it’s a gift, press crews camping outside Svenson’s be tumbling in a yellow cascade. “I
“Many people are completely oblivious to the conse- building. “It became so insane,” he said. needed her to be a falling cherub, be-
think when quences of their actions,” Svenson, now Even though the people in the photos cause that’s what I saw,” he said.
they are in the 70, recalled during a recent interview. were not readily recognizable, they re- But he can now regard his work differ-
“If I ever thought of what their reactions sponded that they felt violated. ently than when he was in the heat of the
confines of would be, I somehow thought they “Many people think when they are in controversy. “It was difficult to separate
their home would be pleased.” the confines of their home that the win- the angst from the imagery,” he said.
that the They were not, especially when he ex- dow is a wall,” Svenson said. “I came un- “It’s just recently that I can see them
window is a hibited the photos at the Julie Saul invited into the room. In an urban situa- without that trigger effect of anxiety. I’m
wall. I came Gallery in Manhattan. tion, we have these layers of filters that really happy to have them back with
A decade has passed. In 2016, a bitter are stacked, like on the lens of a camera. me.”
uninvited into court case charging him with invasion of
the room.” privacy brought by some of the subjects
was decided in Svenson’s favor. The ap-
pellate judge found that while New York
State law prohibits the unauthorized use
of a person’s likeness for advertising or
commerce, an exception is made for art.
At least legally, Svenson’s photographs
qualified as art.
But are they good art? An exhibition
of 12 of these pictures at the James
Danziger Gallery in Santa Monica,
Calif., running through April 22, allows
us, with the distance of time and geogra-
phy, to make a detached judgment. In
their lighting and formal composition,
the pictures are beautiful, and in their
unabashed exercise of the voyeuristic
gaze, discomfiting and riveting.
Svenson still lives in the TriBeCa
apartment where he made the photo-
graphs. A self-taught art photographer,
he usually works in sequences and be-
fore the 2013 exhibition had solo shows
at the Grey Art Gallery in New York and
the Andy Warhol Museum in Pitts-
burgh. “Ever since I picked up a camera,
I never could satisfy what questions I
have with a single image,” he recalled in
January. “Everything for me is like a fac-
et in stone, and every way you turn, it
looks different.”
He said that part of what drew him
into the project was noticing how metal
mullions divided the windows into rec-
tangular sections. “They have this Mon-
drian look about them, and you can iso-
late different activities within a quad-
rant,” he said. “What you don’t see is so
much more powerful than what you do
see. My job is to give you the opening
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
theater
In ‘With No Fanfare,’
a breakup is literal
THEATER REVIEW
PARIS
Musical numbers mixed
with dreamlike vignettes
conjure a love affair’s end
BY LAURA CAPPELLE
While romantic drama fuels much of
the theatrical repertoire, what happens
after a catastrophic breakup isn’t
nearly as easy to translate onstage. In
“With No Fanfare,” a French musical
theater production directed by Samuel
Achache, it takes a set that literally
falls apart to establish the slow
process of picking up the pieces.
The metaphor is transparent, but it
The characters isn’t overblown. “With No Fanfare”
don’t get a (“Sans Tambour”) centers on a name-
happy ending, less couple, a man and a woman who
have already reached their breaking
or any real point when the play starts. The man
ending at all, (Lionel Dray) frantically washes the
but that lack of dishes in a small sink; the woman
resolution (Sarah Le Picard) accuses him of
rings true. caring only about clogged drains. As
they trade barbs, they punch the
kitchen walls, or whack household
items at them. One by one, the walls
collapse like a house of cards.
And that’s just the first 15 minutes.
What comes next — mourning and
rebuilding — is told through a whimsi-
cal mix of musical numbers and
dreamlike vignettes. At one juncture,
the cast re-enacts the medieval story
of the star-crossed Tristan and Isolde.
The process is unpredictable, tragi-
comic, slightly messy — and thor-
oughly touching.
“With No Fanfare” first made a
splash at the Avignon Festival last
summer, and it has now reached the
Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris,
where it feels right at home. When the
director Peter Brook brought this
dilapidated music hall back to life in
the 1970s, he didn’t hide the visible
wear and tear on the walls. The set, a
dior.com
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 | 19
weekend
two-story house designed by Lisa
Navarro, has a similarly ramshackle
quality, with peeling paint and a haz-
ardous stairwell.
Over the past decade, Achache has
developed a quirky brand of musical
theater, often in tandem with a co-
director, Jeanne Candel. The company
he founded in 2021, La Sourde, em-
ploys both musicians and actors, and
“With No Fanfare” takes advantage of
that as it weaves compositions by cast
members and the musical director,
Florent Hubert, on top of a series of
lieder by Schumann.
The soprano Agathe Peyrat sings
many of these numbers, and acts
almost as a shadow for the actors,
expressing their grief-stricken feel-
ings. Along with her, five musicians are
onstage nearly throughout, and they
also take smaller acting parts.
The back-and-forth between drama
and music lends “With No Fanfare”
much of its power, because the show’s
dreamlike logic can be hard to follow. PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTOPHE RAYNAUD DE LAGE
The part in which characters play
Tristan and Isolde doesn’t quite land, Above, Sarah Le have a melancholy quality. Achache
for instance: A relationship built on a Picard, left, and somehow connects them to the long,
mythical love potion isn’t an ideal point Lionel Dray as the frustrating process of rebuilding a life
of comparison for a modern couple. nameless central when the world you had imagined with
“With No Fanfare” is stronger when characters in someone collapses. As the nameless
Achache and his cast (who all get a “With No Fanfare” central man, Dray — an actor with
writing credit) let their imaginations (“Sans Tambour”) over-the-top energy — spends much of
roam freely. Once the central relation- at the Théâtre des the show standing precariously on a
ship has crumbled for good, the wom- Bouffes du Nord in half-destroyed stool, a hammer in
an suddenly reappears at a treatment Paris. Right, songs hand.
center where doctors offer remedies by Schumann are It makes little sense on paper, yet
for heartbreak. woven into the onstage what you see is a man strug-
There, the woman meets a third action. gling to re-establish a sense of nor-
character, a writer named Spinel. malcy. Achache doesn’t aim for a tidy
Played by the actor and singer Léo- narrative. The characters don’t get a
Antonin Lutinier, Spinel is a test pa- happy ending, or any real ending at
tient for the clinic’s offbeat, meta- all, but that lack of resolution rings
phorical procedures. On doctors’ or- true.
ders, he swims in his own tears. Later, At the end, Dray sits alone on the
he has surgery to remove the last upper level of the set, dangling his legs
remaining traces of love from his over the edge, and surveys the ruins
brain. with the others isn’t fully fleshed out. it, and then brings a ladder that doesn’t underneath. “And still, I coped with it,”
Lutinier brings a dryly burlesque Many scenes in “With No Fanfare” rely reach; when he tries to climb it despite he says, looking bemused. Mourning is
quality to the proceedings, and Spinel on plain physical comedy, as when this, the steps give out under him, a a mental journey, and “With No Fan-
is in some ways the most affecting Spinel tries to reach a piano that is Buster Keaton-style digression. fare” makes a fitting visual and musi-
character, even though his relationship hovering above the stage. He looks at Yet even the most absurd scenes cal response to its twists and turns.
LA ROSE DIOR COLLECTION
White gold and diamonds.

20 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023
weekend
Two stars
united by
a thriller,
and maybe
destiny, too
The French actors Vincent Cassel
and Eva Green simmer in ‘Liaison’
BY ELISABETH VINCENTELLI
Much about the new Apple TV+ series
“Liaison” was riding on whether Eva
Green and Vincent Cassel got along.
Their characters share a passionate his-
tory, so it was going to help considerably
if the two French actors, whose careers
had never overlapped, were at least
somewhat simpatico.
“Everybody was a little nervous, but
Vincent had a stroke of genius,” the
show’s creator, Virginie Brac, said in a
video interview. Cassel turned up at
their first meeting with a photo of his fa-
ther, Jean-Pierre Cassel, and Green’s
mother, Marlène Jobert, posing togeth-
er in the 1960s. Both parents used to be
big movie stars in France, and the snap-
shot was taken when they were appear-
ing in the Peter Shaffer play “Black
Comedy” in Paris.
“They were looking terrific and obvi-
ously getting along well, so Eva burst
out laughing,” Brac continued.
The ice was broken.
“It was interesting to realize that
somehow we have a past together,” Cas-
sel said in a recent video call from Paris.
“My father has died since, and she still
has her mother, but it would have been
fun for them to see that we’re working
together now.”
It’s been a long time coming. Cassel,
56, has been a bit of a loose cannon in
French cinema since his breakthrough
role nearly three decades ago as an
alienated youth from the projects in “La
Haine” (1995); American audiences
may know him best as a manipulative
choreographer in Darren Aronofsky’s
“Black Swan” and a mega-rich villain in
the HBO series “Westworld.” Green
broke out with her cinematic debut in
Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers”
(2003) and hasn’t slowed since, with
memorable roles as the double agent
Vesper Lynd in “Casino Royale” and in
three seasons of the Showtime gothic
horror series “Penny Dreadful.”
Cassel had been trying to work with
Green for 15 years — at least, he in-
sisted, since the 2008 film “Mesrine,”
which he had hoped she could join. He
finally snagged her for “Liaison,” a six-
episode romantic spy thriller. Green
plays Alison, a stiff-upper-lipped private
secretary to the British security min-
ister. Cassel plays Gabriel, a cool cucum-
ber of a mercenary working for a shad-
owy French organization who gets un-
der Alison’s skin. It helped that the actor
got to Green, too — albeit in a much
more playful manner.
“Vincent is extremely intense, and
you get out of your comfort zone, which I
love,” Green, 42, said by phone on her
way to a shoot in Greece. “He has a
crazy energy that is contagious. He’s
also very funny. He doesn’t take himself
seriously and he’s not actor-y.”
Billed as Apple TV+’s first Anglo-
French production, “Liaison” is a poly-
glot, border-hopping show that dips into
tense geopolitics, the Syrian civil war,
terrorism and counterintelligence —
100 gecs
shape-shifts
GECS, FROM PAGE 15
“Who else wrote them?”
“They’re like, old blues songs.”
“They got it done either way,” Brady
said.
Four months later, when the time fi-
nally came to play the album for Atlan-
tic, 100 gecs went all out, renting the
venue Irving Plaza in Manhattan for the
afternoon and rolling out a literal red
carpet for the expectant suits. At an ear-
splitting volume befitting the album’s
mosh-ready roar, “10,000 gecs” blared
from an empty stage toward rows of
seats, strobe lights flashing offbeat.
Controlling the proceedings from above,
Les and Brady headbanged in the bal-
cony.
Ultimately pleased with the finished
product, the label targeted a release
date still another eight months away —
enough time to press vinyl LPs and pre-
pare a proper marketing rollout.
“We’re not scared of squandering
anything,” Les said in December, as
“10,000 gecs” became a palpable reality.
“ ‘Oh, you had momentum’ — whatever.”
Top, Vincent Cas- fans of shows like “24” and “Homeland”
sel and Eva Green will be on familiar ground — and where
in Paris. “There the second-most-heated relationship is
was definitely the love-hate triangle among Britain,
electricity between France and the European Union. The
Eva and I because story, by Brac, is original. Cassel be-
we were very came involved in the show at a fairly
curious about each early stage and took on an active role in
other,” said Cassel its development.
of Green, whom he “I wanted to be part of the production
stars with in “Liai- process so I wouldn’t be surprised by
son,” above. any of the choices that would be made
later on,” he said.
In addition to the casting, he was in-
terested in who would end up in the di-
rector’s seat. When the name of the TV
veteran Stephen Hopkins (“24,” “House
of Lies”) came up, Cassel remembered
that they had met, and gotten along,
“The album wasn’t done, so,” Brady
added, “what were we supposed to do?”
Time, it turned out, had been the ulti-
mate luxury. Making harebrained music
on their computers was one thing, befit-
ting the lives of long-distance friends
with day jobs and managed expecta-
tions. But working through the right gui-
tar tones, the perfect live drum sound
and the best of 200 vocal takes was a
new privilege.
“It’s not like I’m getting off work and
having to do it in the evening,” Les, who
moved to Los Angeles in 2020 to pursue
100 gecs full-time, said. “It’s much easier
to make something when you’re not
worried about paying rent.”
Still, the duo insisted that their own
expectations were more modest than
those of their biggest boosters: release
the album, start another, “do the tour,
maybe sell some T-shirts,” Brady said.
“Nirvana? That was a complex situa-
tion,” Les had offered earlier. “There’s a
reason Kurt Cobain’s suicide note is
pretty crazy.”
“There’s definitely growing pains, but
neither of us are trying to make every
dollar we can,” she said. “Making music
is such a fun thing. If it wasn’t fun, we’d
just stop doing it.”
For now, though, Les added, “If I had
the choice of doing this and doing any-
thing else, I would be doing this.”
VIA APPLE
when Hopkins directed the 2000 thriller
“Under Suspicion,” starring Monica Bel-
lucci, then Cassel’s wife.
Cassel’s involvement continued on
set.
“I asked Virginie permission to tweak
things here and there,” he said. “I didn’t
want to come up with some superhero
character or anything like that. Believe
it or not, I wanted my character to be
very French — I wanted to come up with
a French antihero instead of a brave,
perfect spy.”
Cassel has a restless, chatty energy
that he channeled into a coiled intensity
for his role — an energy that crackled
during our call. As part of his research,
he said, he met men who were in Gabri-
el’s secretive line of work, from whom he
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
JULIEN MIGNOT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
picked up a few useful tips.
“Real bad guys move in silence, so it
has to be dry, effective, discreet,” he
said. “Especially if there are people who
are like lethal weapons physically and
know how to do this properly.”
“So I said, ‘Everything that I’m in-
volved with, I’m doing the choreogra-
phy,’” he added. “And they let me do it.”
His co-star’s approach was not quite
so proactive.
“Vincent would make little adjust-
ments, while Eva, who is very anxious,
stuck to the script,” said Brac, an experi-
enced French television maker. (She
was a writer on Seasons 2 and 4 of the
acclaimed policier “Spiral,” among
many credits.) “It works because they
liked each other in real life.”
In conversation, Green’s tempera-
ment did indeed seem rather opposite to
Cassel’s go-for-broke looseness. She
compared her early career theater ex-
periences, where she could perform di-
rectly to her audiences, with what hap-
pens in film and television.
“Some people treat you like puppets,”
she said. “Because of course you do a bit,
and then they choose a take, they edit,
they can play around. That’s why I’m al-
ways scared of watching my own mov-
ies. Sometimes I prefer to keep the expe-
rience in my heart.”
Cassel nonetheless found his co-star’s
style to be compatible with his own.
“Strangely enough — and I’ve said
that to her — as an actor I see myself in
her,” he said. “She’s kind of an outsider,
she’s particular, and she’s very instinc-
tive. On set she’s really brave, and you
ARIEL FISHER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
..
television
“It was
interesting to
realize that
somehow we
have a past
together.”
never know what’s going to happen.”
“There was definitely electricity be-
tween Eva and I because we were very
curious about each other,” he added.
(That augurs well for the two-part film
“The Three Musketeers,” coming this
spring, in which they play another pair
of tempestuous former lovers, Athos
and Milady.)
On camera, Green had to contain
some of the contact buzz she got from
Cassel’s behind-the-scenes energy and
enthusiasm, because of how buttoned
up her “Liaison” character is.
“She’s practically married to a job, the
phone is never off, she’s available 24/7,”
Green said. “What drew me to the story
is the fact that suddenly you have this
mysterious man coming back from her
past, and she’s so conflicted all the time
— she has to choose between basically
saving her country and protecting the
man she loves.”
But maintaining that electrical under-
current in person was critical; for all the
show’s cloak-and-dagger thrills, their
characters’ relationship is the beating
pulse of the series. In one scene set in-
side a car, the two stars generate so
much heat while simply looking at each
other that you want to reach out and
turn up the air conditioning.
“Even though it’s this international,
political, action-packed thriller, what
holds the thing together from my point
of view is this thing between Eva’s char-
acter and mine,” Cassel said.
He added, “It’s the unspoken attrac-
tion of two people who are dangerous for
one another with the weight of the past.”
Laura Les, far left,
and Dylan Brady
of 100 gecs. Their
second album,
“10,000 gecs,”
mashes together
genres different
from those on their
electrifying 2019
debut.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
INTERNATIONAL HOMES
Real estate
that is not,
in fact, real
The market for property in the metaverse
could grow by $5.37 billion by 2026
BY DEBRA KAMIN
This month, Gabe Sierra, a contractor
whose family has been in the construc-
tion business for more than 30 years,
will take offers for his latest creation: an
11,000-square-foot mansion with seven
bedrooms and a pool in Pinecrest, Fla.
To sweeten the deal on the 1,020-
square-meter home, he’s throwing in the
exact same house and a King Kong-size,
bright green gorilla that scales down-
town skyscrapers and stalks the streets
of South Florida.
The twin home is in the metaverse, a
catchall phrase for the growing immer-
sive digital world where avatars can
work, play and buy goods. Pixelated
parcels of land are being bought, sold
and built upon in a market now worth
$1.4 billion, making the metaverse a new
frontier for real estate builders and in-
vestors.
Mr. Sierra, an avid game player who
uses a purple gorilla as one of his ava-
tars, paid $10,000 for a digital parcel in
an online world called the Sandbox and
then worked with Voxel Architects, an
architecture firm specializing in virtual
3-D properties, to build the digital home
to pair with the real thing.
It all hits the auction block this month,
and he’s hoping to sell it for around $10
million.
“It’s a project that blends the line be-
tween physical and digital to the fur-
thest extent that I could on a residential
home,” Mr. Sierra said of the house,
called Meta Residence One. “It pairs a
real-world build and expands on it in the
digital space. As these technologies get
more immersive, it’s going to make a lot
more sense.”
“Buying a Much like real-world real estate, for
piece of real which prices fluctuate along with supply
estate for a and demand, metaverse real estate op-
erates on a fixed scale.
residential The internet may be boundless, but
purpose in the most virtual game universes have al-
metaverse is a ready been sliced and diced into a set
kind of number of parcels, meaning that as the
prestige.” number of buyers increases, prices rise
as well.
Financial transactions in the meta-
verse are handled in cryptocurrency
and powered by the blockchain, a dig-
itally distributed public ledger that elim-
inates the need for a third party like a
bank.
Despite the implosion of FTX, a cryp-
tocurrency exchange, and projections of
a crypto winter, the metaverse real es-
tate market is expected to grow by $5.37
billion by 2026.
In the Sandbox, one of the most popu-
lar metaverse worlds and the location of
Mr. Sierra’s $10,000 purchase, much of
the virtual land rush has been at the
hands of corporations like Adidas, Atari
and Warner Music Group, which have
bought spaces to create entertainment,
sell goods, open virtual headquarters
and host immersive gatherings for em-
ployees and fans.
Last year, the total value of land in the
Sandbox, which is sold via a nonfungible
token, or NFT, was estimated to be $167
million. And while land bought directly
from the Sandbox goes for about $400 a
parcel, there’s an active secondary mar-
ket in which prices can be many times
that.
Proximity to land owned by celebri-
ties and big-name brands drives prices
up: After Snoop Dogg bought parcels in
the Sandbox and christened them
“Snoopverse,” one buyer paid $450,000
just to become his neighbor.
Virtual opulence
Homes in the Row
are expected to sell
for about $75,000,
said Janine Yorio,
chief executive of
Everyrealm.
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 | 21
PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE ROW
“Land is becoming the infrastructure taxes on virtual real estate can relax, Surreal estate
of the metaverse,” said Sebastien Bor- said Mike O’Brien, who heads up the Everyrealm, a
get, the Sandbox’s co-founder. “In this Web3 and Digital Assets team at Ernst & metaverse com-
ecosystem, there are actors that are de- Young. pany, worked with
veloping and offering services for peo- Though tax law on virtual real estate artists to create the
ple to find the right land, buy the right is evolving, “we have yet to see property Row, above and left,
land and understand the value of that taxes on real estate that would be issued a futuristic col-
land.” by a government,” he said, though he lection of digital
The metaverse has been around since added that indirect taxes such as con- homes.
2003, when Second Life, a 3-D virtual sumer taxes, sales tax and gain consid-
world platform, came on the scene. But erations do often apply.
virtual real estate didn’t truly take off Mr. O’Brien is the owner of real estate
until late 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg in Superworld, another digital world
announced that the social media plat- mapped over Earth.
form formerly known as Facebook He recently bought the parcel of New
would be called Meta, betting on the fu- York City land that is home to the bar
ture of the next digital frontier. where he met his wife.
Since then, land prices in the meta- Builders of brick and mortar homes
verse have climbed into seven figures, are also tapping into the metaverse for
with a virtual estate purchased for $2.4 opportunities to reach new customers.
million in November 2021 in Decentra- In January, KB Home, one of the largest as varied as countertop materials and on this path of providing enhanced dig-
land and another for $1.65 million in Oth- homebuilders in the United States, cut overall architectural style. The move, ital tools, but the pandemic accelerated
erside in May 2022. the ribbon on a community in Decentra- said Amit Desai, KB Home’s chief mar- the need for us to really allow prospec-
And now, in addition to billboards and land, where potential buyers can enter, keting officer, is an outgrowth of the vir- tive home buyers to search for a home
burger joints for avatars, homes are be- explore and toy with customization op- tual walk-through options that have in- from the comfort of their current
ing constructed on these parcels. They tions on three model homes. creased since 2020. homes,” Mr. Desai said. “The metaverse
don’t offer shelter or a place to sleep. But Buyers can swap out characteristics “Even before the pandemic, we were is just a nice extension of that.”
they do offer our increasingly online
selves a place to gather and show off.
“Buying a piece of real estate for a res-
idential purpose in the metaverse is a
kind of prestige,” said Kristi Water-
worth, a journalist and contributing an-
alyst for The Motley Fool who writes
regularly about metaverse real estate.
It’s also a chance to bend the rules of
physics. Everyrealm, a metaverse tech-
nology and infrastructure company,
worked with artists including Misha
Khan and Daniel Arsham to create the
Row, a futuristic collection of digital
homes distinguished by melting, Sal-
vador Dalí-esque angles and dreamlike
floating spheres.
The homes premiered at Miami Art
Basel in an immersive exhibition and
are not yet for sale, but Janine Yorio, Ev-
eryrealm’s chief executive, said she ex-
pected each to sell for about $75,000.
Buyers will receive certificates of au-
thenticity, as well as 3-D models of their
homes, which they can place on plots in
the game worlds of their choice.
Some online worlds present digital
maps of Earth, allowing people to buy
places or coordinates with sentimental
or historic value. T.J. Brisbois, 37, a real
estate investor in Detroit, owns about a
dozen parcels in the Detroit of Upland.
He buys them, marks them up and re-
sells them. He estimates he’s made a 10
percent return on his money since he
started in 2022.
His purchases, he said, are just an ex-
tension of his business in the real world.
“I didn’t really get it until I got into it,
and I was willing to put in a few real-
world dollars,” Mr. Brisbois said. “It’s
important for people that are in real es-
tate, because there’s real opportunity
here.”
Buyers concerned about real estate

22 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023
Fashion
Rick Owens
builds his
own world
PARIS
BY VANESSA FRIEDMAN
Rick Owens, paramour of the strange
and the so-called prince of the under-
ground, can seem like he’s on another
planet, but he may actually be the most
relevant designer of the season.
There he was, standing in the depths
of the Palais de Tokyo, the contempo-
rary art museum, wearing giant plat-
form shoes and a bulbous leather jacket,
and talking about his latest collection,
which was named Luxor, though not for
the reasons one might expect.
Not because, for example, it was full of
Sphinx prints or sandy shades, the usual
fashion travel-related “inspiration.” But
because he has been spending a fair
amount of winter vacation time in the
shade of the pyramids and that got Mr.
Owens thinking.
“I mean, they have lasted and been
occupied by different civilizations and
added on to, but life goes on and they en-
dure and there’s something very re-
assuring about that,” he said, as fog ma-
chines were being primed overhead
(Mr. Owens loves a bit of fog). “What-
ever conditions we might have to en-
dure in our lifetime.
“There’s been a lot of irony and at
times contempt in fashion, and I wanted
to do the opposite of that,” he continued.
“Now is a time to be polished and pulled
together; earnest, and more formal, out
of respect for what other people are liv-
ing through.”
Yeah, he was talking about Ukraine,
among other things, but rather than go
back to the post-World War II period, as
so many designers have this week in
Paris, he went somewhere entirely
other. Maybe the royal court on Planet
Zog (or maybe just Planet Rick) viewed
through a Cecil B. DeMille-size lens,
R I C K OW E N S
with a sweeping grandeur that was vin-
tage and futuristic at the same time.
Mr. Owens’ clothes may look weird
and escapist, but they are grounded in
reality, which is what makes them so
good. They give regality to the stuff of
daily life, and who can’t use a dose of
that? Plus, he sells everything he shows.
In his world, there’s no such thing as
just-for-the-runway.
Giant puffy garlands covered in matte
sequins in rose, gold, black and silver
S C H I A PA R E L L I
VALERIO MEZZANOTTI/OWENSCORP
curved around and about the body, like
big squishy doughnuts hugging the
torso, over long dresses cut to the waist
on one side to expose a hip (and some
matching briefs), trailing down on the
other side like a train; later, they came in
little life rafts around the biceps to
mimic the poufs of Elizabethan dress.
The shoulders of satin jackets jutted
skyward to frame the face. Denim faded
into a sea of greens and blues in cumu-
lous cloud layers, or hefty fringe. There
GI V E N C H Y ALESSANDRO LUCIONI
were metallic capes and little jackets
that twirled out from the clavicle —
wearable (the word of the season), and
not just in the Owens context.
It’s been 20 years since he arrived in
Paris, a spooky wraith from an endless
Don’t let your bag
look too pristine
BY MARISA MELTZER
Jenny Walton had coveted an Hermès
bag for years before finally buying one
last fall.
“They’re never going to go out of
style,” Ms. Walton, 33, offered as a rea-
son she wanted to own one of the brand’s
handbags, which can cost four, five,
even six figures.
Hermès’s bags include the Kelly and
its more famous sister, the Birkin, both
of which have long been regarded as
symbols of status. Particularly the
Birkin, which for decades had a reason-
able claim to the title of rarest handbag
in the world.
That reputation, for the most part, has
not changed. But as a growing resale
market has made Hermès bags avail-
able to more people — reality TV stars,
say, or those whose wealth does not
span generations — the image that the
bags convey, according to some, de-
pends on their condition. To that (small)
group, the more pristine the bag, the
more gauche its wearer seems.
“Real Housewives have closets full
and that has a kind of tacky look,” said
Ms. Walton, an American illustrator and
influencer who lives in Milan. She
bought her Hermès bag — a second-
hand, purplish-brown Kelly with gold-
plated hardware — at Reese, a designer
consignment store in Paris, for 3,000 eu-
ros, or about $2,900 at the time. With vis-
ible markings from previous use, she
said, “it just looks cooler.”
Candice Bergen has used Hermès
bags as a canvas for paintings. Julia Fox
has a Birkin bag with slashes on its
edges. (In a video on TikTok, she
claimed the slashes were a result of a
machete attack.) The novelist Danielle
Steel has carried a Kelly bag that shows
its age. Mary-Kate Olsen also has a
Kelly bag, which is so faded, its original
color is hard to discern. “Though the bag
costs upward of $10,000, she treats it like
the overstuffed briefcase of a used-car
salesman,” Liana Satenstein, a senior
fashion writer at Vogue.com, wrote of
Ms. Olsen.
Though Hermès bags have always
been pricey, they haven’t always been so
rarefied. According to the company, the
Birkin, released in 1984, was born from a
conversation that year between the ac-
tress Jane Birkin, for whom the style is
named, and Jean-Louis Dumas, then the
chief executive of Hermès. While seated
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
California rave toting a suitcase full of
washed-out leather jackets cut like cou-
ture who has grown into one of the most
successful Americans to ever dare
breach the pantheon of French fashion.
As if in recognition, along with all the
usual familiar weirdos in the audience
wearing their Owens finery and watch-
ing this collection was a former French
minister of culture, Jack Lang.
Mr. Owens has done it not by putting
himself in service to someone else’s her-
itage brand, but by defining his own.
From the start he has preached a wider
understanding of beauty; using his vi-
sion of the “otherworldly” as an argu-
ment for tolerance. Since the pandemic
began, however, he has been suffusing
his work, which could veer toward the
aggressive, with a kindness and opti-
mism that has made it seem particularly
germane. He cited all the factories and
fabric origin stories of his pieces in his
show notes, both as a nod to sustainabili-
ty (he’s trying) and simply as credit
where credit was due.
The result is that rare and essential
quality: a recognizable aesthetic lan-
guage all its own. It’s very hard to
achieve.
Matthew M. Williams has not been
able to figure it out in his almost three
years at Givenchy, though this collection
was at least a step forward, with a focus
on elegance and shoulders (the big
shoulder is resurgent, often the broader
the better). Think sweeping greatcoats,
SCHIAPARELLI
floor-length leather skirts with deep-V
shirts and skinny scarves tied loosely at
the neck and dangling to the ground,
and a whole evening section of Hep-
burn-esque black dresses, plus some
pearly numbers. They are chic but ge-
neric, like a paint-by-numbers version
of the archive.
By contrast, Daniel Roseberry has
honed in on a clear lexicon at Schiapar-
elli, leaning into the house’s singular
combination of drama and surreal hu-
mor, which is why his couture speaks so
Mr. Owens’ effectively to the red carpet set (most re-
clothes may cently, Michelle Yeoh wore Schiaparelli
look weird and when she made history as the first Asian
to win the Screen Actors Guild Award
escapist, but for best actress). Now, with his first
they are ready-to-wear show for the brand, he’s
grounded in on a mission to make the extremes
reality, which somewhat more accessible without ton-
is what makes ing down the attitude or the double en-
tendres.
them so good. So there was the Schiap keyhole,
winking from the center of a slinky jer-
sey dress; here was a sharp trouser suit,
the lapels and pockets lined in gold-edge
dressmaker’s measuring tape. There
was a black overcoat, gold buttons glint-
ing strategically from each nipple; here
was a “fur” chubby made entirely of
leopard-spotted silk fringe. And there
was a velvet strapless gown with a gold
face — jeweled eyes, nose, mouth — on
the bodice.
You could see where he was going.
RESEE
next to one another on a flight from Carrying a beat-up
Paris to London, Ms. Birkin told Mr. Du- Hermès handbag
mas that she needed a bag for all the may suggest that,
things she had to tote around for her to you, it is not just
children. a marker of status.
According to Rachel Koffsky, the in-
ternational head of handbags at the auc-
tion house Christie’s, Ms. Birkin is said
to have described the Birkin bag as a
great rain hat. Ms. Koffsky added that
Ms. Birkin would personalize her bags
with stickers and key chains.
Hermès’s Haut à Courroies bag also
had utilitarian origins: It was designed
to transport saddles and riding boots.
Last month, a visibly worn Haut à Cour-
roies bag owned by the fashion editor
André Leon Talley sold for more than
$32,000 at auction at Christie’s.
In 2018, Ryan Reineck, 36, an art di-
rector who lives in Manhattan, paid
6,800 euros, or about $8,300 at the time,
for what he described as a “messed up”
Haut à Courroies bag. Its imperfections
give the bag character and “a history,”
Mr. Reineck said.
W. David Marx, the author of the book
“Status and Culture,” said that for lux-
ury goods to function as status symbols,
they need cachet, an association with
high-status lifestyles and to be used in a
way that is not only to mark status.
Someone carrying a beat-up Hermès
bag suggests that they are not simply
wearing it because of its label, according
to Mr. Marx. It can give the impression,
he wrote in an email, that “I don’t even
care if it gets beat up, because I’m not
using this for status marking.”
“It’s just a bag,” he wrote. “Who cares
if it’s beat up?”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
travel
A pilgrimage
for art lovers
A series of exhibitions in 2023
will be dedicated individually
to the works of Picasso and Sorolla
36 Hours in . . .
Madrid
BY ANDREW FERREN
Madrid has little to prove as a premier
art destination. Its central “golden trian-
gle of art”(anchored by the Prado, the
Reina Sofía and the Thyssen-Borne-
misza museums) makes for a dazzling
art lovers’ pilgrimage, and the city is
bolstered by cutting-edge cultural foun-
dations like Espacio Solo and Thyssen-
Bornemisza Art Contemporary. In 2023,
Madrid is commemorating the 50th an-
niversary of Pablo Picasso’s death and
the 100th anniversary of Joaquín Sorol-
la’s with a series of exhibitions dedi-
cated to each artist. Also, few cities have
seen such a flurry of hotel openings
since the pandemic’s onset — including
the Edition, the Four Seasons, the Man-
darin Oriental and the Hard Rock. One
thing that hasn’t changed is the city’s
warm embrace of anyone wanting to
join the fun. Since so few Madrileños are
actually from Madrid, everyone is wel-
come.
Friday
3:30 P.M. | STROLL THE NEW AGORA
Hemmed in for decades by four busy
boulevards, Plaza de España was a spot
locals typically tried to avoid. A 70-mil-
lion-euro redesign ($75 million), com-
pleted in November 2021, has trans-
formed the plaza by diverting traffic
away or into tunnels. New shaded prom-
enades and playgrounds have become a
magnet for locals and visitors, and pe-
destrian paths now link the plaza to
landmarks like the nearby Royal Pal-
ace; the Parque del Oeste; and the Ma-
drid Río, a vast park built along the Man-
zanares River. Also now readily accessi-
ble from the plaza: the 2,200-year-old
Temple of Debod, given to Spain by the
Egyptian government in 1968; the Cer-
ralbo Museum, an ornate 19th-century
nobleman’s palace; and the Sabatini
Gardens, where sculptures of Spanish
kings stand among the towering magno-
lia and cypress trees.
4:30 P.M. | TAKE A ROYAL TOUR
Madrid’s Royal Palace is sometimes
skipped by visitors who feel “muse-
umed out.” That’s a shame. The finest
18th-century artists and craftsmen
came to Madrid to adorn the palace’s ev-
ery surface in frescoes, silk damask and
lots of gold leaf. One room is floor-to-ceil-
ing porcelain, while another has a dining
The finest 18th- table that can be set for 120 guests. The
century artists and vast armory’s shimmering suits of ar-
craftsmen came to mor are a hit with children, as are the
Madrid to adorn royal kitchens, which had holes near the
the Royal Palace’s bottoms of the doors so the royal cats
every surface in could keep the mice at bay. Next to the
frescoes, silk palace, an extraordinary new Royal Col-
lections Gallery will bring together 600
damask and lots of
gold leaf. One rarely seen masterpieces when it opens
room is floor-to- this summer. Avoid lines by buying tick-
ceiling porcelain. ets (€12) online.
8 P.M. | TAP YOUR HEELS
Several of Madrid’s historic flamenco
tablaos (traditional venues with smaller
stages) sadly didn’t survive the Covid
era. One that did is Corral de la Morería,
just south of the Royal Palace. Inside,
there’s an eight-seat, Michelin-starred
restaurant led by the Basque chef David
García, where diners enjoy nine courses
before taking V.I.P. seats for the fla-
menco performance in the tavernlike
main room (€135, dinner and show). If
you can’t land a restaurant reservation,
the main room offers simpler fare two
hours before showtime (about €95, din-
ner and show). The 70-minute perform-
ances in this intimate setting often fea-
ture top dancers like Jesús Carmona,
who can fill an auditorium in New York
or London.
Saturday
10 A.M. | GRAB BREAKFAST
The canary-yellow-tiled Golda, in the
trendy Salesas neighborhood, draws an
in-the-know crowd with its mostly
healthy Middle Eastern-accented
breakfast fare, like toast with hummus,
roasted tomato, feta and sumac (€6.50)
and a densely marbled chocolate-pista-
chio babka (€6). After breakfast, it’s
worth popping down the street into the
stunning grand Baroque church of
Santa Bárbara, built in the 1750s by one
of Spain’s most cultivated queens, Bár-
bara de Braganza. Anyone traveling
with young children may prefer break-
fast at Frida, a few blocks away, which
has outdoor seating overlooking a small
playground and whose menu includes
children’s favorites, like pancakes (€9).
11 A.M. | GALLERY HOP, THEN SHOP
For more than a decade now, Salesas
and the north end of Chueca have been a
center of Madrid’s most compelling con-
temporary art galleries and innovative
Spanish boutiques. Showing mostly in-
ternational artists under 40, the Trav-
esía Cuatro, Alzueta and Albarrán Bour-
dais galleries all feature invitingly
quirky spaces. For apparel, two stand-
outs include Oteyza for exquisitely tai-
lored men’s clothing, including capes,
with a distinctly Castilian accent (hand-
made sneakers, €385; bespoke suits
starting at €1,800).
Nearby is Ecoalf, which creates luxu-
rious garments by upcycling old water
bottles and fishing nets (raincoat, €385).
Keep up your energy with treats like
milhojas (layers of puff pastry and
sweetened cream) from La Duquesita,
which opened in 1914.
12:30 P.M. | EXPLORE MUSEUMS
Sometimes it’s nice to shift gears and en-
joy some bite-size museums that don’t
require a half-day to explore. Two such
visual bonbons happen to be a short
stroll away from each other in the pretty,
tree-lined Chamberí neighborhood.
Children and adults will enjoy the
Museo Geominero (free), a four-story,
1917 Beaux-Arts jewel box filled with
mineral and fossil delights — including
massive amethysts, heaps of fool’s gold
and fossils. And no matter when you vis-
it Madrid, it’s endless summer at Museo
Sorolla (€3, free on Saturdays after 2:30
p.m.), the glamorous former home and
studio of Joaquín Sorolla, one of Spain’s
most celebrated painters, best known
for his sun-dappled images of frolicking
children and fashionable ladies enjoying
the seaside. His death in 1923 is being
honored with exhibitions here and at the
Royal Palace this spring.
2:30 P.M. | SIT AT A SUSHI COUNTER
Spaniards rank among the world’s high-
est per capita consumers of fish, so it
only makes sense that the cuisine of Ja-
pan, another fish-loving nation, would
have a presence in Madrid. No place in
the city treats fish with greater rever-
ence than Kappo, a chicly spare Japa-
nese restaurant with just six tables
handily located three blocks from the
Sorolla Museum. Behind a 12-seat sushi
bar, the chef Mario Payán serenely pre-
pares nigiri after nigiri as he monitors
the pacing of each diner’s 18-to-20-
course omakase meal. Mr. Payán has de-
veloped a cultlike following for the sim-
plicity of the setting and the purity of the
dishes. Lunch for two, about €180. Re-
serve ahead.
5 P.M. | DISCOVER REGIONAL CRAFTS
Even if you aren’t venturing to see more
of Spain on this trip, you can find many
of the country’s best regional products,
including ceramics, textiles, sweets and
olive oil, in a handful of charming shops
clustered in the historic city center, be-
tween the neighborhoods of La Latina
and Las Letras. Two standouts are Real
Fábrica, which has mohair blankets
KEY
STOPS
Corral de la Morería is a traditional fla-
menco tablao with one untraditional factor
— an eight-seat Michelin-starred restau-
rant.
Museo Sorolla is the former home and
studio of the artist Joaquín Sorolla.
Reina Sofía is Spain’s national museum of
modern and contemporary art.
Ecoalf is a fashion label and a store that
upcycles plastic bottles and fishing nets to
make luxury garments.
WHERE
TO EAT
Golda is a cheery cafe with Middle Eastern-
accented breakfast fare.
Frida offers family-friendly breakfast options
and outdoor seating.
The Omar is a brunch spot with the air of a
classic European coffeehouse.
El Jardín de Arzábal is a restaurant in the
Reina Sofía Museum with a lush, jungly
terrace.
WHERE
TO STAY
Rosewood Villa Magna, newly renovated, is
among the city’s most luxurious addresses
and near the major art museums and high-
end shops of the upscale Barrio de Sala-
manca. Its three roaring fireplaces in the
lobby and bar make it ideal for a cozy winter
stay. Doubles from €850, or $908.
CoolRooms Palacio de Atocha, in an 1850s
palace in the historic city center, has some
of the most spacious rooms in Madrid, not
to mention top-floor suites with large decks
and hot tubs. Doubles from about €250.
Bastardo, a hipster hostel in trendy Chueca,
has a buzzing lobby and a variety of room
options — from singles to shared rooms to
family rooms that sleep six. Doubles from
about €90.
For short-term rentals, the pretty Almagro
neighborhood offers quiet streets lined with
boutiques, galleries and small restaurants in
walking distance of museums and attrac-
tions.
from the Rioja region (€189) and retro
enamelware coffee sets (€57.50) from
the Basque Country, and Cocol, which
sells Majorcan alpargatas (Spanish for
espadrilles) in a chic range of colors
(from €47) and ceramics inspired by the
traditional crockery of Talavera de la
Reina in Toledo Province (platters from
€69).
8 P.M. | LOUNGE IN THE LOBBY
A couple of years ago, Urso Hotel in
Chueca went old school and added live
piano music to its lobby cocktail bar —
making it the perfect spot to slide into
evening mode while musing on the day’s
highlights (cocktails about €10). From
Urso, it’s a lovely stroll to dinner at La
Vaquería Montañesa, where the restau-
rateur Carlos Zamora gets the mood just
right with a minimalist but cozy and
candlelit ambience and a range of sim-
ple yet superb dishes with top-quality
produce. Starters include crab and
shrimp croquetas, a five-tomato salad,
and three different artichoke prepara-
tions. Beef, lamb and fresh fish are
brought daily from Cantabrian farms
and ports. Dinner for two, €80.
MIDNIGHT | FIND THE SECRET BAR
Spaniards love the idea of starting the
late-night fun with “la primera copa,” a
postprandial first drink in a somewhat
sophisticated spot before the night
evolves (or devolves). Head to the cozy,
candlelit Jack’s Library, a hidden bar
slinging craft cocktails (from €12) in
Chueca, tucked behind what appears to
be an expensive flower shop. Afterward,
you can dance and perhaps spot minor
celebrities at the current hot spot Lula
on Gran Vía (entry €30, including one
drink). If your idea of Saturday-night
fun includes mirror balls and hundreds
of shirtless musclemen, then the gay
club Kluster should be on your agenda.
Sunday
10 A.M. | BREAK SOME EGGS
Hemingway once wrote, “Nobody goes
to bed in Madrid until they have killed
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 | 23
weekend
PHOTOGRAPHS BY EMILIO PARRA DOIZTUA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
A world-class art
destination with
groundbreaking
cultural founda-
tions, Madrid
embraces visitors.
Clockwise from
above: the city’s
rooftops; brunch
at the Omar; and
Corral de la Mor-
ería, one of the
surviving flamenco
tablaos in Madrid.
Below, Pablo
Picasso’s “Guer-
nica” is on display
at the Reina Sofía.
the night.” Whether you did, or merely
left it gasping for air, you’ll want a
hearty breakfast. The high-ceilinged
room at the Omar, the restaurant inside
the new Thompson hotel (the chain’s
first property outside North America)
has the air of a classic European coffee-
house with large round tables and large
windows overlooking Plaza del Carmen
near the Puerta del Sol. The €40 brunch
is an absolute extravaganza with a ta-
ble-covering deployment of fruit, yo-
gurt, cured meats and baked goods to
which one can add eggs Benedict, the
perfect tortilla Española and Moroccan
flatbreads with cheese and baba
ghanouj.
11 A.M. | GO BAREFOOT TO CHURCH
The austere-on-the-outside Monastery
of the Royal Barefoot Nuns (€6),
founded in 1559 by Juana de Austria —
the daughter, sister and mother of Span-
ish and Portuguese kings — today sits
surrounded by the shopping centers,
taverns and offices of the Puerta del Sol.
Still home to a handful of Clarissine
nuns, an order dedicated to sacrifice and
spirituality whose members live with-
out heating or shoes, the monastery fea-
tures a suite of the Eucharist tapestries
by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens.
Visits are by guided tour only, so ad-
vance booking is essential.
NOON | ENJOY LUNCH WITH PICASSO
This year commemorates the 50th anni-
versary of Pablo Picasso’s death. Cultur-
al organizations in the two countries in
which the artist lived, Spain and France,
have developed a program of some 50
exhibitions and events to honor the oc-
casion. While the Reina Sofía’s major Pi-
casso exhibition, “Picasso 1906: The
Great Transformation,” won’t open until
November, one of the artist’s most cele-
brated masterpieces, “Guernica,” is on
permanent view at the Reina with a fas-
cinating display of drawings, paintings
and photographs that document its cre-
ation. For year-round outdoor dining, El
Jardín de Arzábal at the museum has a
beautifully tented terrace filled with
plants.
 ..
24 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
THE ART OF COLLECTING
TEFAF Maastricht
Nevertheless, an art fair persists
After a brazen heist at last
year’s TEFAF, dealers and
collectors are coming back
BY TED LOOS
The last thing the organizers of a venera-
ble event like the European Fine Art Fair
want to be associated with is a heist.
But during last year’s fair in Maas-
tricht, the Netherlands, four men
smashed a glass display case with a
sledgehammer and took jewelry, the po-
lice said, in broad daylight as horrified
collectors and dealers looked on.
A spokesperson for the Dutch police
said last month that a team of 20 officers
was still working on the investigation, in
cooperation with Interpol and Europol,
and that a reward of 500,000 euros
(about $533,000) was being offered by
an insurance company investigative
agency. No one has been charged with
At the scene the crime yet, and the police would not
Right, police officers specify what jewelry was taken.
in Maastricht in June So as the latest edition of the fair,
after a TEFAF display known as TEFAF, opens on Saturday,
case was smashed running through March 19, security may
with a sledgeham- be on the minds of participants.
mer and jewelry was About 270 dealers from all over the
stolen. The robbery world will be showing their wares with a
remains under wide variety of specialties, including the
investigation. jewelry specialist Baghat of Mumbai, In-
PRAHLAD BUBBAR
dia, and the design gallery Friedman
Benda of New York and Los Angeles.
The fair’s Showcase section, for newer
galleries, includes London’s Callisto
Fine Arts and nine others.
“It hasn’t stopped dealers from com-
ing back to the fair,” Hidde van Segge-
len, the fair’s chairman, said of the rob-
bery. (The London jewelry dealer Sym-
bolic & Chase, the target of the robbery,
was invited to return but is not partici-
pating.)
Though Mr. van Seggelen, a dealer of
contemporary art based in Hamburg,
Germany, said he could not divulge too
much about security measures, two new
features will be obvious to all. Metal de-
tectors at the main entrance will be on
hand for the first time, and in another
new precaution, visitors will have to
check their bags. “We’re taking the right
measures,” he said.As for the galleries,
“They trust us,” Mr. van Seggelen said.
“We gave a briefing to all the dealers,
and they realize this was an exceptional
case that happened.”
Marie-Amélie Carlier, an exhibitor
who is the director of the Paris gallery
Brimo de Laroussilhe, said that she was
not concerned.
“It was about jewelry, so it’s a bit dif-
ferent,” said Ms. Carlier, who will be
showing medieval and Renaissance
works, ones that are harder to make off
with. “We are not very worried about
works of art.”
The noted contemporary art collector
Joop van Caldenborgh, who established
a private museum called the Museum
Voorlinden in Wassenaar, the Nether-
lands, his hometown, also expressed a
lack of worry.
“I’m not that easy to scare,” said Mr.
van Calderborgh, who serves on
TEFAF’s advisory board and has at-
tended the fair many times. “And most
people aren’t, either.”
Masterpiece London recently an-
nounced that it would not hold its fair
this June, so Maastricht remains the
MARCEL VAN HOORN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
ROSENBERG & CO., NEW YORK
rare fair with deep reserves of pre-20th
century artworks.
“We’ve been extremely lucky that
we’ve been able to survive,” Mr. van
Seggelen said of TEFAF Maastricht,
which is on its 36th edition (a newer
New York edition takes place in May).
“Covid was difficult,” he added. “And
we’re a destination fair that’s not in a
major city.” The 2021 edition of TEFAF
Maastricht was entirely virtual, and
2019 was the last time the fair both took
place in its early March time slot and ran
its full 10-day length.
The exhibitor Marianne Rosenberg,
who runs Rosenberg & Company in New
York, said that the winnowing of Mas-
terpiece, while unfortunate, “strength-
ens the hand” of TEFAF, adding, “The
fairs that remain are stronger.”
Ms. Rosenberg has spent her whole
life dealing art — her grandfather was
Paul Rosenberg, who helped create a
market for Picasso’s work and became
one of the early 20th century’s most in-
fluential dealers — but this is her first
appearance at TEFAF. She joins a dozen
other galleries debuting at the fair.
She will be showing around 40 works,
and visitors to her booth in the section
for works on paper will not see the tradi-
tional marker of an already-sold piece.
“I don’t like red dots,” Ms. Rosenberg
said. “When I sell something, I take it
down and I put something else up.”
Among her star offerings is Jacques
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 | S1
GALERIE VON VERTES
Villon’s Cubist drawing “Étude pour On view
Monsieur D. Lisant” (1913), in crayon From left, three
and pencil. works being shown
“I love it for a number of reasons,” Ms. at the European Art
Rosenberg said. “I have a soft spot for Fair in Maastricht,
works on paper, and my other soft spot is the Netherlands:
Cubism.” “Prince Dara Shikoh
The work depicts the artist’s father as a Royal Ascetic,”
reading a newspaper. “He’s breaking up a Mughal miniature
the space very heavily,” Ms. Rosenberg painting from the
said of Villon’s pictorial approach. “But mid-17th century in
it’s a warm, familiar subject.” India; “Étude pour
The overall market for such works “is Monsieur D. Lisant”
back to where it should be,” Ms. Rosen- (1913), a Cubist
berg said, after temporarily booming in drawing by Jacques
the early pandemic era, and then dip- Villon; and “Arnold”
ping in 2022. (1983), a painting
“Last year, the fairs were horrific,” by Gerhard Richter.
she said. “We were sitting there like
bumps on a log.”
Ms. Carlier of Brimo de Laroussilhe
is, by contrast to Ms. Rosenberg, a
TEFAF veteran. She noted that her
gallery had been showing at Maastricht
for 20 years.
For this year’s booth, one of Brimo de
Laroussilhe’s notable pieces is a frag-
ment of a marble sculpture that deco-
rated a tomb of the 14th-century royal
known as Blanche de France, depicting
two very cozy-looking dogs, one sleep-
ing and one gnawing on a bone. The art-
ist is unknown.
What may seem unusual to contem-
porary viewers is that in medieval
FAIR, PAGE S5

S2 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023
THE ART OF COLLECTING
Art rooted in nature in full bloom
Three artists examine our
relationship to nature and
share hope along the way
BY KERIDWEN CORNELIUS
For years, TEFAF Maastricht has been
famous for its botanical arrangements:
flower towers, cascades of blossoms,
and eye-catching displays that redefine
the term “wallflower.” The theme is a fit-
ting ode to spring in tulip country and a
nod to nature’s role in inspiring art, from
ancient cave drawings to Van Gogh’s
“Sunflowers.”
Now, at a watershed moment for the
planet, nature-themed art is taking on
new meaning. Artists are using their
work to raise awareness of the harms
humans have done to the environment.
But not all of their creations are full of
doom and gloom.
For this year’s fair, three artists have
transformed their love of botany, biol-
ogy and ecology into sculptures depict-
ing futuristic organisms, multispecies
collectives, and flora infused with emo-
tion. These pieces celebrate actions that
ADRIAN SASSOON, LONDON, PHOTOGRAPHY BY SYLVAIN DELEU
can help us heal the planet: connecting
with plants and animals, and living in
awe of nature.
ALJOSCHA
Aljoscha’s amoebic artworks look like
the love children of smoke and slime
molds. Floating in midair as if they
oozed out of a wormhole in the space-
time continuum, the sculptures radiate
shades of chartreuse, neon pink and au-
rora borealis green. To the artist, these
acrylic and silicone creations are “po-
tential life-forms.” They flow from his
view of himself as “a biological process
running in an utterly biological world.”
Growing up in eastern Ukraine, the
artist was enthralled by nature — the
swaying grass on the steppe and ever-
morphing clouds moving over lakes.
Lately, his birthplace has been barraged
by missile attacks during Russia’s inva-
sion. In his philosophy, humans have
mutated into the planet’s most danger-
Putting a natural style front and center
A Kyoto gallery highlights
the impact of art that is
free of synthetic materials
BY DAVID BELCHER
Japanese art has long been associated
with a simple and elegant portrayal of
nature. Embodying that approach is the
Nihonga movement of the turn of the
20th century, which uses all-natural ma-
terials to highlight a deep connection to
the planet.
The Shibunkaku gallery in Kyoto has
gathered 22 artworks from 13 Japanese
artists who flourished in Nihonga for
TEFAF Maastricht, which starts next
week. The goal is to honor the impact of
these artists — all deceased — as well as
focus on their renewed relevance in a
world whose battles over climate
change increasingly embrace the use of
natural products.
From nature For Dai Tanaka, 58, the chief execu-
The Nihonga style tive and director of Shibunkaku, this is a
of painting incorpo- chance for the gallery to help make the
rates mineral pig- world more aware of the Nihonga move-
ments, and some- ment. The term, which means “Japa-
times ink, with other nese paintings,” was used to refer to Jap-
organic pigments on anese art as far back as a thousand
silk or paper. From years, but was then applied to a specific
left, examples of movement of natural art that evolved
Nihonga works to around the turn of the last century. Mr.
be shown at TEFAF: Tanaka sees this rich history as a guide-
“Rice Paddy in post for the future of art.
Winter” by Ikeda “For us Japanese, nature is some-
Yoson, “Quails” by thing that accompanies human exist-
Kayama Matazo and ence, where the gods dwell,” Mr. Tanaka
“Black Cat” by said in a recent video interview. “We are
Kimura Buzan. grateful for the changing seasons and
the blessings of nature. We believe that
these qualities resonate in a deep way
with contemporary problems, be it envi-
ronmental destruction, climate change
or the creation of a new sustainable way
of life.”
The Nihonga style of painting incor-
ous predators, representing an exist-
ential threat to all forms of life. But he
believes we will mutate beyond this, ex-
panding our capacity for wisdom, empa-
thy and happiness.
“I hope we can transform ourselves
into a new species which cares for all
kinds of life and for maintaining the
porates mineral pigments, and some-
times ink, with other organic pigments
on silk or paper. The term was coined
during the Meiji period, roughly 1868 to
1912, to differentiate it from Yoga, or
Western-influenced Japanese painting.
Shibunkaku, founded in 1937 in Kyoto,
has defined itself for decades as cele-
brating art from different cultures, eras
and genres, with a focus on early mod-
ern and modern Japanese fine art, most
notably calligraphy and painting. The
gallery has been dealing in Nihonga art-
work since just after World War II.
The classic Nihonga works traveling
to Maastricht are from 13 artists who
were born as early as 1873 and who lived
as late as 2004. They include “Quails” by
Kayama Matazo, “Rice Paddy in Win-
ter” by Ikeda Yoson, “Black Cat” by
Kimura Buzan, and “Two Geese” and
“Goose and Reeds” by Kawai Gyokudo.
The gallery represented some of
these artists during their lifetimes, and
BECK & EGGELING
highest possible level of biological diver-
sity on Earth,” the artist, who has lived
in Düsseldorf, Germany, more than 20
years, and prefers to use his profes-
sional name, Aljoscha, wrote in an
email. One day, he thinks, humans will
dwell in houses made from living
ecosystems. Artists will create works
all of the paintings have been re-
mounted in the original hanging scroll
format in wooden frames.
In addition, the gallery will bring
works by Inoue Yuichi; Morita Shiryu,
who led a postwar revolutionary move-
ment in Japanese calligraphy; and Lee
Ufan, a South Korean abstract painter
with a deep connection to Japan.
The idea for this presentation germi-
nated during a small exhibition by Shi-
bunkaku on Nihonga art at the Ogata
gallery in Paris in October. The gallery
executives then decided that the time
was right to bring it to a larger audience.
“In Paris, we were aware of the timely
issue of sustainability and the way that
we Japanese perceive nature has ex-
isted from the beginning as a bond be-
tween people that comes from bonding
with nature,” Mr. Tanaka said. “Then we
realized immediately that now was the
time to promote Nihonga to the world.”
This sense of timing is as much about
ROBERTO MAROSSI
from living substances. Museums will
function as zoological gardens.
Aljoscha’s art embodies this vision of
a more utopian future. His installation at
TEFAF, exhibited with Düsseldorf’s
Beck & Eggeling International Fine Art,
is titled “The Paradise Engineering:
Metamorphosis into a New Species,
Free from Suffering, Fear, Aggression,
and Intolerance to the Unknown.”
Through this display of biology-inspired
imaginary beings, “I am trying to pro-
mote the message of a necessary
change in our attitude toward the won-
der of life,” he said. “I believe that, more
than ever, we have a great chance to
compose a paradise in our heads and to
heal the wounds we cause the Earth.”
JUNKO MORI
The metalworker Junko Mori’s creative
process mirrors the uncontrollable na-
ture of evolution. First, she said, she fills
her mind with images: flowers from her
gallerist’s Instagram feed; sea crea-
tures she sees on surfing and body-
boarding trips; memories of bacteria
she watched wriggling under a micro-
scope during biology class. Then, she
taps into this primordial soup of ideas,
and lets everything propagate and
cross-pollinate. Working out of a con-
verted pig shed at her home in North
Wales, she forges, welds, and hammers
every silver or steel component, without
any final design in mind.
“I let them grow like the mutation of
cells,” said Ms. Mori, who is exhibiting at
TEFAF with Adrian Sassoon gallery of
London. If the sculpture starts to look
predictable, she changes its shape. “I
deliberately create a moment of muta-
tion,” she explained. “Then it’s about re-
peating these accidental mutations so
the final outcome is something I could
never imagine.”
education as it is the immediate impact
on the environment, he said. The corner-
stone of Nihonga is that no chemicals
are used, and the Shibunkaku team felt
that once people understood this, it
could change art forever.
“We don’t want to say that oil painting
is harmful to the world, but we just want
to explain that Japanese paintings have
been made from nature for centuries,”
Mr. Tanaka said. “When a painter
wanted white pigment, they crushed a
white shell or azurite for blue or mala-
chite for green.”
And the moment to celebrate a more
natural approach to art may be now, he
said, since the world is more attuned
than ever to the impact of synthetic ma-
terials.
“What inspired this idea now is that
some museums in the world are experi-
encing things being thrown on paintings
to protest the state of the environment,”
he said, referring to the recent trend of
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Ms. Mori’s creations look like chime-
rical species — hybrids of barnacles and
cumulus clouds, a baobab and a weep-
ing willow, a waterlily and fiddlehead
ferns, sea urchin spines and a swarm of
starlings. These forms communicate
her feelings about nature, influenced by
her life in the Welsh countryside.
She and her woodworker husband
compost manure from surrounding
farms, and she is fascinated by this col-
laboration between bacteria and fungi
that makes the vegetables that she
grows flavorful. “These tiny micro-
cosms live together in a beautiful way
and give space to each other,” she noted.
She wants her art to visualize those
harmonious relationships and offer an
antidote to the damage humans have
done to the environment. “My work cel-
ebrates the beauty we have been given
and represents coexisting in nature,”
she said.
LILLA TABASSO
At first glance, Lilla Tabasso’s artworks
could be mistaken for bouquets of dried
flowers. But look closer, and you might
marvel that these floral arrangements,
as spindly as spun sugar, are fashioned
from glass. Ms. Tabasso achieves this
hyper-realism through her skill at shap-
ing Murano glass in the flame of a blow-
torch and by depicting the natural Inspiration
process of decay. Clockwise from top:
In one piece, firecracker-shaped flow- detail from “Tu-
ers fade alongside sprays of straw-col- lipaniera” by Lilla
ored grasses. In another, weeds frozen Tabasso, a 2017-18
under snow wilt into a clod of root-tan- installation from the
gled soil. “There is beauty in decaying artist Aljoscha at
flowers,” she said, “because death is a Kunstraum Dornbirn
part of life, and real beauty is the perfect in Austria and Junko
combination of imperfections.” Mori’s “Propagation
The Milan-based artist initially stud- Project; Tanka
ied biology and botany before realizing Bloom” (2022).
she wanted to work with nature in a
more creative way. “For me, nature is
the most beautiful medium for talking
about emotions and the human condi-
tion,” said Ms. Tabasso, who is showing
her work with the first-time TEFAF
Maastricht exhibitor Caterina Tognon
gallery of Venice.
Her creations capture the fragile hu-
man condition in glass and other ma-
terials. A plant piercing through a box
expresses the desire for freedom. A vase
of flowers divided into light and dark il-
lustrates the chiaroscuro quality of hu-
man nature. A wispy papyrus reed, the
source of ancient Egyptian paper, hon-
ors plants’ contributions to creative in-
spiration. An elaborately decorated but
empty vase crystallizes the hollow feel-
ing we get when we neglect our inner
landscapes.
Through these glass encapsulations
of emotions and conditions — beauty,
suffering, desire, deterioration — Ms.
Tabasso suggests that humans and the
rest of the living world share the same
fate. “It’s all connected,” she said. “We
are destroying nature, but we are doing
the same to ourselves.”
Still, Ms. Tabasso conveys a message
of hope through one of her pieces, in
which her glass flowers emerge from
cracks in concrete: “Nature,” she said,
“always prevails.”
PHOTOGRAPHS BY SHIBUNKAKU
climate activists defacing art, including
a van Gogh painting last year in London.
“It feels like these issues are now at the
forefront in the art world, which made
us think about what we have in Japa-
nese art.”
That urgency, Mr. Tanaka said, has
made him aware of how visibility at a
global art fair can help reveal the way
Nihonga can lead the way toward soft-
TEFAF visitors can see works from 13 Japanese
artists who flourished in the Nihonga movement.
ening and maybe even shaping the art
world of the future.
“With the issues we are facing as a
planet, Japanese art can reveal the val-
ue in sustainability and the future,” he
said. “It’s important to let people know
that the philosophy and values and way
of thinking we have in Japan are worth
telling the world.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
The art fair that curators love
Four museum pros share
their prized finds from
TEFAF Maastricht
BY TED LOOS
In theory, any collector who is willing to
pay for a work of art is a good collector.
But art dealers favor having a mu-
seum as a client, since an institutional
purchase confers prestige on the art, as
well as the gallery that sold it.
TEFAF Maastricht has always prided
itself on having groups of museum cura-
tors, directors, donors and trustees who
attend the fair, and actually collect there.
The famously strict vetting process, and
the fair’s overall reputation, provide a
comfort level for some of the world’s
most prestigious institutions.
“I sold to two museums from my booth
last year,” said TEFAF’s chairman,
Hidde van Seggelen, a contemporary art
dealer based in Hamburg, Germany.
Here are a few notable museum acqui-
sitions that originated at the fair over the
last few years.
MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
Bust of the painter Henri Nazon by
Émile-Antoine Bourdelle, 1893
Marietta Cambareri, curator of decora-
tive arts and sculpture at the M.F.A., saw
this terra-cotta bust in 2019, in the booth
of the Parisian gallery Talabardon &
Gautier. It was the last time she attended
TEFAF in person, and she is planning to
go back this year.
She was with a group of several col-
leagues, who all agreed that the piece
was worth buying.
The bust was love at first sight. “This
was a no-brainer,” Ms. Cambareri said.
“The M.F.A. did not have a sculpture by
Bourdelle in the collection before this ac-
quisition, so it filled a significant gap in
our 19th-century holdings.” Beyond that,
the sculptor and the subject were close
friends, and Bourdelle once worked in
the studio of Auguste Rodin.
But the appeal was more than just
checking off boxes. “It’s so sensitively
modeled, and it has a powerful pres-
ence,” Ms. Cambareri said. She added, “I
am a big terra-cotta person.”
The curator had a heads-up from the
dealers that the bust would be at the fair,
a routine form of communication before
a fair starts, which she said can be help-
ful for planning. “We go in prepared —
we know what funds we have,” Ms. Cam-
bareri said.
Museum purchases are rarely imme-
diate. Typically, an institution puts a
piece on hold before beginning what can
be a lengthy process of getting a pur-
chase approved by an acquisition com-
mittee, or courting a collector to donate
it. And the museum needs time to look
into a work’s provenance — the history
of its ownership — and condition, too.
Everything checked out with this
bust. “It just fits,” Ms. Cambareri said of
its role in the M.F.A.’s overall collection.
And having it on hand is giving her ideas
for future shows. “We want to create an
THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART
JOHN LOWELL GARDNER FUND, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
installation around this moment in turn- shop, with many hands working on the
of-the-century sculpture in Paris,” she bejeweled objects that made the studio
said. famous, particularly the Fabergé eggs
and other pieces commissioned by the
CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART Russian czars. “Silversmiths worked for
Cigar box by the House of Fabergé, at- him, just like they did for Tiffany,” Ms.
tributed to Feodor Ivanovich Rückert, Brown said; Feodor Ivanovich Rückert
circa 1896–1908 is thought to be the individual crafts-
Heather Lemonedes Brown, the Cleve- man.
land Museum of Art’s deputy director The only other cigar box that’s similar
and chief curator, was browsing at the in size and style is in the Fabergé Mu-
2018 edition of TEFAF Maastricht. seum in St. Petersburg, Russia, she add-
Stephen Harrison, then the museum’s ed.
decorative arts curator, let her know The museum also has plenty of con-
that he had made a discovery. She re- text for the acquisition.
called, “He said, ‘I’ve found something “We have a wonderful collection of
fantastic, come take a look.’ ” Fabergé already, with a gallery solely
The Fabergé cigar box, sporting a devoted to it,” Ms. Brown said. “Some-
green and blue peacock, is made of sil- times you buy to add to a strength,
ver gilt, enamel and gold, plus one sap- sometimes to fill a gap — in this case, it’s
phire. It was in the booth of the London a strength.”
dealer Wartski. She noted that a fair visit by a curator
“There’s a riot of color in the enamel can be considered a success even if
work,” Ms. Brown said. “The peacock nothing ends up being acquired from a
was considered a symbol of imperial particular fair.
royalty.” “Being able to see so many works un-
The House of Fabergé was a work- der one roof is helpful,” Ms. Brown said.
THE ART OF COLLECTING
THE MET
CECILIA HEISSER / NATIONALMUSEUM
“We also use it to remind dealers what
we’re looking for.”
“Fairs are so important,” she added.
“If we don’t go, we really miss it.”
METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
Commode by Pietro Piffetti, circa 1760
On view now at the Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art is an 18th-century Italian
commode by Pietro Piffetti that made its
way via a circuitous route into the muse-
um’s collection. Wolfram Koeppe, a sen-
ior curator of European sculpture and
decorative arts at the Met, spied the ob-
ject at TEFAF in 2018, in the booth of the
London dealer Luca Burzio.
Mr. Koeppe knew it would be a great
addition to the museum, with one catch.
“A rising enthusiasm was slowed down
upon learning the substantial price tag,”
he said. “The commode seemed not to
be within reach at that moment.” The
piece was shown again the same year at
a New York edition of TEFAF, where a
collector, Errol Rudman, snapped it up.
As it happens, Mr. Rudman lived only
a block away from the museum. He
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 | S3
learned of the museum’s interest in the Collecting
piece and later, he bequeathed it to the Clockwise from top
Met; he died not long after acquiring it. left: a cigar box by
Mr. Rudman also left the museum some the House of Faber-
Old Master paintings. gé, circa 1896-
The Met did not previously own any- 1908; a commode
thing by Piffetti (1701–1777). Finding by Pietro Piffetti,
anything outside of Italy by his hand is circa 1760; “Bertel
“extremely rare,” Mr. Koeppe said. “He Thorvaldsen in His
had a highly individualistic artistic per- Studio” (1840) by
sonality. The patterns he applied are Johan Wilhelm
quite daring.” Gertner; and a bust
The gilt bronze mounts on the com- of the painter Henri
mode are attributed to a different arti- Nazon by Émile-
san, Francesco Ladatte, and the piece is Antoine Bourdelle
one of a pair; the other one is in a private (1893).
collection.
Mr. Rudman was known as a painting
collector, and not a furniture specialist,
said Mr. Koeppe, who speculated that
the floral inlay may have reminded Mr.
Rudman of a still life.
NATIONALMUSEUM
“Bertel Thorvaldsen in His Studio”
(1840) by Johan Wilhelm Gertner
In 2019, Magnus Olausson, the director
of collections for the Nationalmuseum in
Stockholm, was notified by a dealer that
a special picture would be on view at the
Maastricht fair. (It was being shown by
Talabardon & Gautier, the same gallery
that sold the terra-cotta bust to the
M.F.A. Boston.)
“But you always have to take a close
look,” said Mr. Olausson. He inspected
and thoroughly approved of the portrait
of a well-known sculptor of the Danish
Golden Age, “Bertel Thorvaldsen in His
Studio” (1840) by Johan Wilhelm Gert-
ner.
“It’s a glamorous picture of a glam-
orous person, done in a realistic way,”
Mr. Olausson added.
The oil painting dovetails with the mu-
seum’s interest in art from neighboring
Denmark. The Danish Golden Age is
“one of our strongest fields,” said Mr.
Olausson, who noted that the National-
museum is Scandinavia’s largest mu-
seum as far as holdings, with around
700,000 objects.
The portrait is small, roughly nine by
twelve inches, “but it has a great pres-
ence,” said Mr. Olausson. “It has an inti-
mate feeling, and you can really look at
him.” Thorvaldsen, who eventually lived
much of his life in Italy, was an interna-
tional art star of his era. “He was a great
celebrity in Sweden,” Mr. Olausson add-
ed.
The portrait, which is on view now,
managed to star in an exhibition of Dan-
ish Golden Age art in 2019, the same
year it was acquired, because of the mu-
seum’s nimbleness. “Time is one of our
weapons,” Mr. Olausson said of the lack
of bureaucracy, and the fact that the
streamlined staff can make decisions
quickly. “That’s our competitive advan-
tage.”
He added, “In this case we had to re-
act immediately — the purchase only
took a couple days.”
A note to eager dealers at this year’s
TEFAF: The fast-acquiring museum is
now focusing on making acquisitions of
French art of the 18th and 19th cen-
turies.

S4 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023
THE ART OF COLLECTING
A spotlight for Korean art pioneers
SEOUL
Choi Jongtae, 90, and
Youn Myeungro, 86, reap
renewed visibility
BY DAVID BELCHER
The long arc of South Korea’s postwar
art history — and the country’s transfor-
mation in those 75 years — looms large
at this year’s TEFAF Maastricht, where
Gana Art, a Seoul-based gallery, is show-
casing two of the country’s pioneering
artists.
The South Korea of today is a far cry
from the country into which the sculptor
Choi Jongtae, 90, and the painter Youn
Myeungro, 86, were born. Their careers
provide a rare glimpse into the way Ko-
rean art has shifted as the nation has
evolved, from a colonized and war-torn
agrarian country to one ruled by military
dictatorships, before becoming a global
economic powerhouse in the 1990s.
The presence of their work at the
Maastricht fair reveals how, years later,
artists of any age can help define what
constitutes art.
The journey of both artists has been
witnessed firsthand by Lee Hojae, 68,
the founder and chairman of Gana Art.
He has long championed Mr. Choi (the
gallery has represented him seven times
at art fairs over 38 years), and several of
the artist’s TEFAF-bound sculptures re-
veal his signature style: Christian im-
agery with an Eastern flair.
His works became popular in the
1960s and ’70s, as the postwar European
Their careers give a rare glimpse into the way
Korean art has shifted as the nation has evolved.
Art Informel movement grew out of the
work created by genre-defining artists
who were responding to the horrors of
World War II.
That movement, in which abstract art
became more associated with blotches
and impulsive strokes of paint, influ-
enced the famous Dansaekhwa
monochromatic art movement. But as a
Christian who worked very much in that
realm, Mr. Choi had his own riff on ab-
straction, Mr. Lee said.
“Back in 1985, I invited Mr. Choi to
show at FIAC in Paris because we
wanted to show that his work is very Ko-
Choi Jongtae
Clockwise from
bottom right, Mr.
Choi’s sculptures
“Two People”
(2017), ”Hooray”
(2022) and “Mother
and Child” (2018),
with the artist.
Having witnessed
colonization, war,
dictatorship and
democracy in South
Korea, Mr. Choi said
he created work
that was “free from
the constraints of
Korean history and
the associated pain
and sorrow I have
experienced
throughout my life.”
rean but has universal power,” Mr. Lee
said during a recent interview at Gana
Art, in the upscale Pyeongchang-dong
area, referring to Foire Internationale
d’Art Contemporain, the first interna-
tional art fair for the gallery.
“His work is very simple and very
pure,” Mr. Lee continued. “A lot of his
sculptures reflect Giacometti, including
a few pieces we’re taking to TEFAF. He’s
Catholic, but his Christian works are
more like Buddhas in their posturing
and serenity.”
Mr. Lee felt a sense of discovery in his
professional relationship with Mr. Youn,
too, which also extends to the 1980s.
Founded in 1983, Gana Art has repre-
sented him at global art fairs since 2016.
His and Mr. Choi’s works both fit within
the vision of the gallery; Gana Art has
championed South Korean artists who
tend to bend the rules.
“We are trying to offer a new glimpse
of Korean art history by giving a re-
newed, broader visibility to these pio-
neer artists outside of the Dansaekhwa
movement,” Mr. Lee said. “Mr. Youn led
the abstract art movement in South Ko-
rea back in the 1950s, but what I find in-
teresting is that he is abstract but
changes his style every decade. He uti-
lizes Western art materials but the end
result is very Eastern.”
It’s this kind of universalism that has
inspired Gana Art to bring this history to
Maastricht this year.
For Mr. Choi and Mr. Youn, it’s a late-
career chance for their works to teach
new viewers about their country and its
place in the global art world, as well as
each of their personal journeys.
“As a sculptor, I have focused my work
on the human condition, because I grew
up in a period of Japanese colonization in
Korea, and I was directly impacted by
the liberation from that in 1945, the Kore-
an War, military dictatorship and Korean
PHOTOGRAPHS VIA GANA ART
democratization,” Mr. Choi said by email
through a translator. “But I have aimed
to create works that were free from the
constraints of Korean history and the
associated pain and sorrow I have expe-
rienced throughout my life.”
Tapping into that sorrow was a turn-
ing point for him at the Paris show in
1985, where his sculptures seemed to
take him to a deeper place artistically —
almost like a grieving process, he said.
“Some attendees in 1985 said that the
overall mood of the exhibition seemed to
be one of sadness, and I realized the sad-
ness pervaded the entire space,” he said.
“I remember going to a cafe next to the
exhibition hall and breaking down in
tears. It was very healing. It has taken
me more than 35 years, but I have finally
overcome my sadness and now create
sculptures that embody love and peace.”
Mr. Choi’s works at TEFAF were cre-
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
ated in the last five years or so. They in- Youn Myeungro
clude several pastels on paper depicting From far left,
the Virgin Mary with (and without) “Breathing” (2010)
child, along with bronzes titled “Two and “Ode to Gyeom-
People” (2017) and “Hooray” (2022) — jae (Jeong Seon)”
figures that carry a whiff of Picasso. (2002), two paint-
For Mr. Youn, his “Ode to Gyeomjae ings by Mr. Youn,
(Jeong Seon)” (2002), which will travel below, a trailblazer
to Maastricht, pays tribute to Gyeomjae in South Korea’s
Jeong Seon, an 18th-century artist who abstract art move-
founded a Korean style of landscape ment in the 1950s.
painting. Lee Hojae, the
Like his predecessor, Mr. Youn de- founder and chair-
picts landscapes by applying acrylic man of the gallery
paint on a linen canvas but then adding Gana Art, said Mr.
iron powder — as artisans first began Youn was “abstract
doing during the Joseon era to give tra- but changes his
ditional white porcelain a brownish hue. style every decade.”
Iron powder mixed with acrylics or oils
creates a thick texture, allowing him to
depict the rough lines commonly seen in
many Asian paintings.
“As the iron corrodes and changes col-
or upon oxidation, the black hue gradu-
ally transforms into a softer brown,” Mr.
Youn explained by email through a
translator. “In this series, I used a dy-
namic but gentle brush stroke to ex-
press the essence of nature.”
Another of his entries for TEFAF is
“Breathing” (2010), which uses a simi-
lar approach with acrylic paint and iri-
descent powder. The result looks almost
like black marble with branchlike flour-
ishes.
“This series encapsulates the respira-
tion of nature,” Mr. Youn said. “Breath-
ing is not visible to the naked eye but is
present everywhere. I came to realize
that the winds, trees and fragrances of
this world all exist because of some form
of breathing.”
Gana Art will also be bringing the
works of 12 other artists to TEFAF
Maastricht: Huh Myoungwook, Hwang
Hosup, Kim Kulim, Oh Sufan, Park Suk-
won, Park Yungnam, Rim Dongsik,
Shim Moon-seup, Lee Ufan, Yayoi
Kusama, Ethan Cook and, in a true rep-
resentation of art history, Claude Monet.
Mr. Lee pointed out that Mr. Choi and
Mr. Youn have been a huge influence on
many of these artists, young and old.
“These two are artistic giants in
South Korea,” he said. “We have an obli-
gation to let the world know about these
artists.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Selling the family silver
LONDON
Knowing what makes a
piece valuable can help
you avoid costly mistakes
BY GINANNE BROWNELL
When a great-uncle dies or an older par-
ent downsizes, having to go through
boxes of family heirlooms can feel
daunting. If the items include family sil-
ver, it can be especially overwhelming.
Finding out what’s worth keeping and
what should be donated or sold involves
more knowledge and skills than it takes
to sort through mementos and photos.
But taking the time to gather informa-
tion about value and provenance could
help avoid costly mistakes.
“It’s certainly true that people do of-
ten give away valuable items without
fully understanding their value,” wrote
Simon Surtees of John Surtees, a shop in
the London Silver Vaults, a subter-
ranean market that reputedly holds the
world’s largest retail selection of antique
and contemporary silver. “Which is a
shame considering how accessible con-
tent is these days online.”
For centuries, silver was ubiquitous:
de rigueur on formal dining room tables
or as valued wedding, anniversary and
hostess gifts, and cherished as small to-
kens of affection between friends. But in
the last several decades, society has be-
come less formal in entertaining, and
that has led to a decline in the desire to
own things like silver tea services and
decorative objets d’art.
There is, however, still a collector’s
market for silver, both antique and more
contemporary pieces.
At TEFAF Maastricht, starting next
week, a few of the galleries will be exhib-
iting antique silver pieces: Piva & C. of
Milan is displaying an 18th-century
Neapolitan silver soup tureen with the
coat of arms of the Lanza di Trabia fam-
ily, while Koopman Rare Art of London
is selling a pair of Georgian candle-
sticks, with stems in the form of male
and female satyrs, that once belonged to
S & J STODEL
the 20th Earl of Kildare.
“This top end of the market has held
up rather well over the last few years,”
wrote Jim McConnaughy, senior vice
president of S. J. Shrubsole, a New York-
based antique silver store that has
shown at TEFAF in the past. “But gen-
eral silver, even handsome but typical
18th-century pieces, are not as popular
as they once were. Much older modern
material is now sold by weight.”
While the chances are low that the
decorative silver platter that has been in
the family for generations or the Art
Deco candelabra given as a wedding gift
from the in-laws will have the value of
museum-quality works exhibited at
fairs like TEFAF, it does not mean that
there is no market for them. But first
they have to be properly valued.
START ONLINE
For those who have silver and want to
find out if it is worth anything, experts
said, it is useful to do internet research
before contacting dealers, auction
houses or museums.
S & J STODEL
Start by examining the pieces for hall-
marks. Hallmarks are the stamps on the
metal that can indicate not only the
standard or purity of the piece but also
who made it, when and where. Accord-
ing to Alastair Dickenson, a British sil-
ver dealer who has appeared as an ex-
pert on the BBC program “Antiques
Roadshow” for more than 30 years, Eng-
lish hallmarking has been around for al-
most 700 years.
“It’s quite an old cliché,” he said, “but
it’s the oldest form of consumer protec-
tion known.”
Some pieces will have four or more
hallmarks. On English silver, for exam-
ple, a lion passant (walking lion) de-
notes a guarantee that the silver is ster-
ling — at least 92.5 percent pure — while
French solid silver is stamped with Mi-
nerva’s head in profile. There will also
often be a date mark, a maker’s mark
and even a town mark. (In London, for
example, a leopard’s head was used.)
American silver, however, often car-
ried only the maker’s mark. “Tiffany are
the one exception,” said Mr. Dickenson,
THE ART OF COLLECTING
S & J STODEL
BONHAMS
BONHAMS
“as they had their own personal dating
system.”The place where a piece was
manufactured can sometimes add value
— particularly if it was somewhere that
did not have a large silver making indus-
try.
“There was a Georgian coffee pot
which sold recently that was made in
Malta,” said Adam Langford, who along
with his brother runs Langfords, an an-
tique and modern silver shop in the Lon-
don Silver Vaults. “If it was an English
coffee pot, it would have been £2,000
[$2,406], but because it was Maltese it
was £15,000 [$18,050].”
INSCRIPTIONS DON’T ALWAYS HURT
An inscription on a piece does not neces-
sarily mean it will not be of interest on
the silver market, especially if a connec-
tion could be made to a historical event.
“If it said, ‘To Jane on her christening,’
that would not necessarily be a good in-
scription,” said Stephen Stodel of S & J
Stodel, which is in the London Silver
Vaults and specializes in English, Chi-
nese and Japanese silver. But a silver
An art fair persists
FAIR, FROM PAGE S1
times, “Royals got three tombs: one for
the body, one for the heart and one for
entrails,” Ms. Carlier said. “This was for
her entrails.”
Blanche de France was the daughter
of King Charles IV (known as Charles
the Fair) and Jeanne d’Evreux.
Funerary sculpture was important in
the Middle Ages, Ms. Carlier said: “You
planned your tombs when you were still
alive, and you chose your artists care-
fully.” The material was a sign of status.
“In the 14th century, marble was very
rare,” she said. “It was only used for the
most important monuments.”
The subject was typical for female fu-
nerary ornament. “Dogs symbolize fi-
delity,” Ms. Carlier added. “Dogs were
for women, and it was always lions for
men.”
Though much of the material at
TEFAF has European origins, that is not
true of everything. One dealer new to
the fair is Aicon of New York, specializ-
ing in contemporary Indian and Paki-
stani work.
The London dealer Prahlad Bubbar is
another newcomer, concentrating on
“the arts of South Asia and the Islamic
world,” he said.
The gallery “takes a fresh approach to
traditional works, and shows them in a
conceptual way,” Mr. Bubbar added.
“We try to bring attention to material
that has been overlooked.”
Though he said he “may try to confuse
people by showing a contemporary
work,” most of the 20 or so pieces in his
TEFAF booth are quite old.
One of the objects may also have a
royal history: a late 15th-century
“voided velvet” textile — voided be-
cause there are areas with no pile —
from what is now Iran, part of the em-
pire ruled by the Timurid dynasty.
“The period was a high point for the
Islamic art world,” Mr. Bubbar said.
“The textile was a ceremonial fabric for
draping on a throne or sitting on, but not
for walking on like a rug.”
He is also showing a Mughal minia-
ture painting on paper, part of a larger
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 | S5
mug or bowl inscribed around an impor- Timeless shine
Clockwise from far
tant historical event — say, a major
horse race or a coronation — could be of left, an assortment
interest and value, he said. of silver pieces: a
“There are people that just remove all Chinese goblet,
inscriptions, and all the way through our circa 1840 to 1860;
dealing career we’ve had to battle with Art Deco dishes
people trying to get them to sell us an designed in England
item,” he said. “They think they’re doing in the 1930s; an
the right thing by restoring it and remov- English travel
ing something that could have some his- sewing case from
torical importance.” 1871; an English
sugar bowl, circa
GET HELP 1885; and a
Once research is done on the hallmarks, Japanese ginger jar,
the next step often is contacting a dealer circa 1900.
or an auction house. This can come down
to a personal preference, as some auc-
tion houses may charge higher commis-
sions than a private dealer.
Ellis Finch, head of Bonhams’ silver
department in London, which holds
eight silver auctions a year, said that his
department got inquiries every day.
Many pieces, he said, are not particu-
larly valuable. “But then if you’ve got a
tea set that’s from the Victorian period or
before, that could be made by, say, an em-
inent silversmith, like Paul Storr,” he
said, “then suddenly you’ve discovered
your tea set is going to be really commer-
cial, very sellable and very collectible.”
IS IT MUSEUM-WORTHY?
Museums might also be interested in sil-
ver pieces, especially if they are con-
nected to the region where a museum is
or might make an important contribu-
tion to an existing collection.
“As a curator, I actively seek met-
alwork that brings design, handwork
and cultural significance to Winterthur’s
collection,” wrote Ann Wagner, the cura-
tor of decorative arts for the Winterthur
Museum, Garden and Library in Dela-
ware. “My wish list is shaped by a sensi-
tivity to today’s (and tomorrow’s) audi-
ences as well as sensitivity to the mu-
seum founder’s standards.”
And if all else fails, silver still may
have value as a special gift, she wrote.
“My husband and I have been giving
small items like 20th-century silver
mugs and trays as presents to the young-
er generation,” she wrote, “as a way to
pass on that message of artistry and af-
fordability.”
Friends forever
A fragment of a
marble sculpture
that decorated a
tomb of the 14th-
century royal known
as Blanche de
France, depicting
two dogs that
symbolize fidelity.
BRIMO DE LAROUSSILHE
album, that comes from the mid-17th
century in India: “Prince Dara Shikoh
as a Royal Ascetic.”
“It’s extremely elegant,” Mr. Bubbar
said. “A great patron of the arts who is
depicted in a yogic pose.”
In recent years, TEFAF has expanded
to include contemporary art and design.
This year, around a quarter of the deal-
ers are showing at least some modern
and contemporary work, though they
tend to lean toward established, living
masters rather than cutting-edge work.
At least two galleries are displaying
paintings by the German artist Gerhard
Richter. Schönewald Fine Arts of Düs-
seldorf, Germany, will show Mr.
Richter’s “2.5.88” (1988), and Galerie
von Vertes of Zurich will offer Mr.
Richter’s “Arnold” (1983).
That tilt toward the more recent suits
Mr. van Caldenborgh, the collector and
museum founder, well. “I’ve been en-
couraging them in that direction,” he
said. “Contemporary art is more in
vogue than classic art.”
He noted that he had bought several
works from the fair over the years. And Security
he certainly does not have to go far to Below, preparations
transport them between his home and for TEFAF in 2022.
his museum, which later this year will This year, there will
have shows devoted to Alex Katz and be metal detectors
Anselm Kiefer. at the fair’s main
“I live right across the street,” Mr. van entrance, and
Caldenborgh said. “It’s very conven- visitors will have to
ient.” check their bags.
MARCEL VAN HOORN/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK

S6 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023
THE ART OF COLLECTING
A billionaire brings Rembrandt home
AMSTERDAM
Thomas Kaplan’s treasure
trove visits the walls of the
Hermitage Amsterdam
BY NINA SIEGAL
“She is our ‘Mona Lisa,’ ” said Thomas
Kaplan, the American billionaire art col-
lector, standing in front of Rembrandt’s
“Minerva in Her Study.”
“Whenever I look at her,” he said, “I
can’t believe that she’s in anyone’s col-
lection, let alone ours.”
“Minerva,” which Rembrandt painted
in Amsterdam in 1635, is one of 35 works
that Mr. Kaplan and his wife, Daphne
Recanati Kaplan, have lent to the Her-
mitage Amsterdam from their personal
trove of Golden Age masters, known as
the Leiden Collection, for the museum’s
current exhibition, “Rembrandt & His
Contemporaries.”
Filling two floors of the grand mu-
seum on the banks of the Amstel River,
the show, which runs through Aug. 27,
explores a type of Dutch old master
painting that has received little atten-
tion in recent years: the so-called “his-
tory” painting.
The Hermitage exhibition adds to the
Dutch capital’s luster for art lovers this
spring, especially for old-masters afi-
cionados already visiting Maastricht for
TEFAF. Not only is the Rijksmuseum
hosting its blockbuster “Vermeer” exhi-
bition, but now Mr. Kaplan’s private col-
lection provides a glimpse of more of his
contemporaries. Visitors who haven’t
been able to purchase a ticket to the
sold-out Vermeer show can take a short
walk across the river to a look at his
17th-century predecessor, Rembrandt,
instead.
Crowned and wearing a large golden
cloak, “Minerva” might not be every-
one’s idea of a mysterious Mona Lisa
beauty. She’s stolid and broad jawed
with tired eyes, her hand resting on a
book. The Roman goddess represents
both wisdom and war, and the struggle
between these two contrary forces plays
A Schiele townscape will be restored
‘Town Among Greenery’
survived World War II but
has long been in decline
BY FARAH NAYERI
In the late 1930s Otto and Marguerite
Mandl, an art collector couple, fled Aus-
tria, which was facing Nazi occupation,
and made their way to the United States
by way of Switzerland, Britain and
Cuba. They left behind major artworks
including Egon Schiele’s “Town Among
Greenery (The Old City III),” a 1917
townscape of rooftops and verdant hills.
In 1948, after Germany had surren-
dered to the Allies, the couple (who
changed their name to Manley) asked
the Austrian government to ship them
the painting. Austria agreed, on condi-
tion that it be shown at the Venice Art
Biennale.
That important Schiele townscape —
completed a year before the artist’s sud-
den death from the Spanish flu at age 28
— remained in the family for 70 years
until it was donated in 2006 by the cou-
ple’s estate to the Neue Galerie in New
York, which has one of the most impor-
tant collections of Schiele works in the
United States.
Having survived World War II and a
trans-Atlantic crossing, “Town Among
Greenery” is once again at risk. The can-
vas is getting slightly loose and wobbly
in places, and the paint might lift up and
flake off. So the TEFAF Museum
Restoration Fund — which was set up in
2012 to support the restoration of and re-
search into “significant museum art-
works” — is stepping in with a gift of
25,000 euros ($26,500) to save it.
The oil painting is experiencing an
out in her expression.
“She takes my breath away,” said Mr.
Kaplan. “She represents the apogee of
Rembrandt’s aspirations as a history
painter. He’s painting what he loves and
what he most believes in. She’s every-
thing he finds noble in his profession.”
Today, Rembrandt is often most ap-
preciated for his portraits, especially
the nearly 80 self-portraits he produced
in his lifetime. But during his own era, he
aspired to a loftier goal with history
paintings, which were considered at the
time to be the apex of artistic achieve-
ment.
This genre of paintings didn’t really
depict history as we think of it today, but
rather subject matter that was taught as
history in the 17th century: Old Testa-
ment stories, mythology and allegory.
“History painting in general is less
known, and less appreciated, but it’s a
very important part of Dutch art,” said
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., a senior adviser
to the Leiden Collection, in an interview.
“ongoing deterioration,” and is “not
something, in its present state, that they
can exhibit,” said Rachel Kaminsky, one
of the five experts on the TEFAF
restoration fund judging panel and a pri-
vate New York-based art dealer who for-
merly headed the Christie’s Old Master
paintings division.
Post-restoration, the canvas will look
“nice and taut and flat,” Ms. Kaminsky
said. It will be cleaned, and “where there
have been small losses, they will fill
those and retouch them.”
Why a Schiele painting? It’s only the
third 20th-century work ever to receive
a grant from the TEFAF fund. And the
Neue Galerie is a museum of early-20th-
century German and Austrian art and
He had served as curator of northern ba-
roque paintings at the National Gallery
of Art in Washington, D.C. until 2018.
“These pictures tell stories about
moral and ethical issues that we all have
to deal with in life,” he said. “There’s no
reason that they shouldn’t be as perti-
nent and important today as they were
in the 17th century.”
Mr. Kaplan, who made his fortune in
silver and gold mining, as well as natu-
ral gas production, is currently the chief
executive of the Electrum Group, an in-
vestment firm specializing in natural re-
sources. He currently owns 17 Rem-
brandt paintings, an estimated half of all
those still left in private hands; two of
them are featured in this show. They are
part of a larger collection of some 250 old
master paintings that he and his wife
have amassed over the last two decades.
They began buying in 2003 and pur-
chased works at “a rate of about a paint-
ing per week” said Mr. Kaplan, until
about 2008. They have continued to col-
TEFAF RESTORATION FUND
design co-founded by the billionaire
businessman and collector Ronald S.
Lauder.
The Neue Galerie is planning an exhi-
bition of Schiele landscapes in 2024, Ms.
Kaminsky said, and “the idea is to con-
serve so that it can be viewed and in-
cluded in this exhibition.”
The restoration will serve a scholarly
purpose, too. Technical analysis — in-
cluding X-rays to examine what’s under
the townscape — will study the human
figures that dot the canvas to determine
if they were originally sketched in by
the artist or painted in directly. Experts
will also analyze the pigment to figure
out what kind of paints to use in the
restoration.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY HERMAN WOUTERS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
lect since then, but at a slower rate.
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Kaplan
dashed through the museum’s galleries,
pointing out his prized works — Isaac de
Jouderville’s portrait of Rembrandt,
Carel Fabritius’s “Hagar and the Angel,”
and “Old Testament Figure, Probably
King Solomon” by Arent de Gelder —
like a child showing off his favorite toys.
“I just want to show you two more
things,” he said, even though there were
more.
Mr. Kaplan likes to refer to himself as
a “Rembrandt evangelist.” It’s his feel-
ing that the 17th-century Dutch master
might need a slight boost to his reputa-
tion.
“Rembrandt is a brand all over the
world and the name is well known, but it
is a brand name that needs, as it were, to
be refreshed,” he said. “It’s like being
able to refresh Gucci.”
That is part of the reason he wanted to
bring the collection to Amsterdam. The
other was that an opportunity presented
itself.
The Hermitage Amsterdam, a pri-
vately funded Dutch museum, was es-
tablished in 2009 as a branch of the State
Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg,
Russia. The Dutch museum contracted
with the State Hermitage Museum to re-
ceive art on loan from the Russian col-
lection for temporary exhibitions.
After Russia invaded Ukraine last
February, however, the museum re-
nounced its link to Russia, bringing an
abrupt end to the partnership. Since
then, the Amsterdam museum has been
working to redefine its identity and has
not yet settled on a long-term solution.
With the museum facing a gap in its
program schedule for the spring, the
Leiden Collection stepped in. It was the
first time Mr. Kaplan was bringing his
old master artworks “home,” to the
place where many of them were created.
“We are in transition, and we’re in the
midst of finding new strategies for the
future, and we gave ourselves at least a
Born in Austria in 1890, Schiele had a
difficult childhood. After studying at the
Vienna Academy, he went on to develop
his own very individual style. Today, he
is considered one of the masters of Ex-
pressionism and is known for his highly
erotic and disturbing drawings of some-
times underage nudes, which in 1912 led
him to spend 24 days in prison for inde-
cency.
But about a third of his output as an
artist consisted of landscapes, and this
is an important one.
“It’s a really beautiful painting, and
definitely representative of the direc-
tion that Schiele was heading in in the
last two years of his life,” said Jane Kallir,
the author of the Egon Schiele catalogue
raisonné, accessible online at egon-
schieleonline.org.
While Schiele’s earlier landscapes are
“very flat, very two-dimensional” and
thinly painted, in this case the paint is
“more thickly applied and built up in
very expressive layers,” Ms. Kallir
noted. That produced a three-dimen-
sionality and a townscape that recedes
into the distance.
These are “qualities that you don’t see
in Schiele’s earlier landscape painting.”
The other big difference, Ms. Kallir
pointed out, was that here, the town-
scape includes human figures, “where-
as in the earlier work, not only are there
no figures, but he actually called a lot of
these paintings ‘The Dead City.’”
It was a title he repeatedly used in ref-
erence to the ancient medieval city of
Krumau, his mother’s birthplace, which
is represented in many other Schiele
townscapes besides “Town Among
Greenery.” He “liked the idea of these
old, desolate walls surviving the lives of
their human inhabitants,” she said.
The Neue Galerie in New York said it
was delighted to hear the news that its
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
year to do that,” said Marlies Kleiterp, History paintings
Clockwise from top,
the Hermitage Amsterdam’s head of ex-
hibitions. “It’s quite easy to find exhibi- Thomas Kaplan with
tions, but it’s not that easy to find exhibi- “Minerva in Her
tions with as high a quality collection as Study” by Rem-
Mr. Kaplan has. He has done us a great, brandt; “Bust of a
great favor.” Bearded Old Man,” a
Ms. Kleiterp said the museum had not miniature Rem-
yet discussed the possibility of an ongo- brandt portrait that
ing relationship with Mr. Kaplan. “It’s Mr. Kaplan once
filling in a gap but also perhaps a step- considered his
pingstone for the future, we don’t know,” “Moby Dick” before
she said. he acquired it; and
Mr. Kaplan did not say if the current visitors studying
partnership would lead to a more per- “Elisha Refusing
manent connection to the museum. Naaman’s Gifts” by
“When you have a positive experience, Lambert Jacobsz at
it gives you positive reinforcement,” he the Hermitage
said. “And this experience has been ex- Amsterdam.
tremely positive.”
The Kaplans have never exhibited
their collection at home, he said. For the
first 13 years that they were amassing
works, he and his wife tried to remain
anonymous, naming the Leiden Col-
lection after Rembrandt’s birthplace,
rather than after themselves. They re-
garded the collection as a kind of “lend-
ing library” and have lent works from
the collection to about 80 museums
since 2003.
In 2016, he “came out” as the owner,
just before lending some 30 works to the
Louvre in Paris for the show “Master-
pieces from the Leiden Collection: The
Age of Rembrandt.” Many of the same
works later traveled to the Louvre Abu
Dhabi in 2019 and were supplemented
by paintings from the Louvre’s own col-
lection for “Rembrandt, Vermeer and
the Dutch Golden Age.”
The collection was scheduled to travel
more, but when the pandemic hit, the
paintings were put in storage, said Mr.
Wheelock — until now.
Mr. Kaplan is confident that history
painting is still very relevant. “That’s an
angle that’s best test-driven in Amster-
dam,” he added, because the public in
the Dutch capital is already familiar
with Rembrandt’s larger body of work.
If “Minerva” is the painting the col-
lector considers his “Mona Lisa,” there’s
another he once considered his “Moby
Dick,” he said, “my great white whale.”
As his handlers pressed him to stay on
track for a scheduled lunch, Mr. Kaplan
said, “Can I just show one more thing?”
He led the way to the smallest painting
in the exhibition, Rembrandt’s 1633
“Bust of a Bearded Old Man,” a minia-
ture portrait, curiously contained in a
velvet-covered traveling case.
The work once belonged to the Ameri-
can banker and U.S. Treasury Secretary
Andrew W. Mellon, who appreciated it
so much that he wanted to be able to
take it with him anywhere.
Mr. Kaplan had wanted to buy the por-
trait for years, from the moment he saw
it on display in 2004, but he could not
convince its former owner to part with
it. He finally persuaded him by offering
an extraordinary sum — a price
Christie’s told him was the highest price
ever paid for an artwork per square
inch. “It was worth it to me,” said Mr.
Kaplan.
But what is the connection to history
painting?
“That’s very personal,” he said.
“When I look at it, I feel as if I’m gazing
upon the face of God. If that’s not history,
then what is?”
application for TEFAF restoration Restoration
money — the third such application the TEFAF is providing a
museum had made — had been ac- grant of 25,000
cepted. euros ($26,500) to
“I was overjoyed, and immediately the Neue Galerie in
shared it with the Manley family,” said New York to restore
Renée Price, the Neue Galerie’s director. a 1917 Egon
She recalled that the Manleys decided to Schiele townscape,
give the painting to the Neue Galerie af- “Town Among
ter seeing the museum’s 2005 exhibition Greenery (The Old
of Egon Schiele works. City III).”
Asked whether the Neue Galerie de-
served a grant from TEFAF, she replied,
“We are just like all of our peers: we
need to raise funds.”
“We cannot rely on one benefactor,”
she added, noting that Mr. Lauder had
other major philanthropic activities,
such as supporting schools and kinder-
gartens.
The museum’s goal is to be “as finan-
cially independent as is possible: this is
really what we aim for. And executing
our mission responsibly is all part of
that,” she said.
The question that arises about Schiele
is why he has escaped contemporary
scrutiny and condemnation for repre-
senting naked underage girls when
other artists working around the same
time — such as Paul Gauguin — have
been called out.
“There have been attempts to
#MeToo Schiele, but they haven’t really
stuck,” said Ms. Kallir. She noted that his
work was “a much more fluid explora-
tion of sexuality and gender and iden-
tity” that people today could relate to.
“He was really a kid himself when he
was doing a lot of this work,” she said.
In the meantime, admirers of Schiele
and his work will be able to see the solo
exhibition of his landscapes at the Neue
Galerie next year, for which Ms. Price
said she was looking to show between 40
and 60 works.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
How ‘a city of art’ comes to life
The masterminds behind
TEFAF’s design share its
ambitions and challenges
BY SAM LUBELL
Designing a major art fair is like creat-
ing a temporary metropolis. It involves
months of research, imagining and plan-
ning; weeks and weeks of building; and,
above all, it requires a singular vision: to
bring hundreds of presenters and thou-
sands of attendees together.
Based in Amsterdam, Tom Postma
and his firm, Tom Postma Design, have
designed installations and exhibitions
for museums, galleries, boutiques and
art shows like Art Basel (in Miami
Beach, Paris and Hong Kong), Art Brus-
sels and Art Düsseldorf. And since 2001,
they have been directing the design of
TEFAF Maastricht, considered the
world’s leading art fair by many in the
art world.
The firm creates the fair’s overall ex-
perience — including its striking en-
trance, inventive lighting, intricate
flower arrangements and varied public
spaces — and devises many of the
booths for its wide-ranging tenants,
from ancient to contemporary art, an-
tiques, design and jewelry. “You can
have a lot of fun in how you display each
type of art,” Mr. Postma said, noting that
“if you don’t understand what the art is,
and what it’s about, it’s really difficult.”
In a recent interview, Mr. Postma and
Dani Mileo, the firm’s design director,
shared the joys of translating art into ar-
chitecture, the logistics behind building
A once-lost fantastical world
Overlooked for years, the
German artist Ursula is
getting a major exhibition
BY ANDREW RUSSETH
For a half-century, the German artist Ur-
sula Schultze-Bluhm made work that
could astonish viewers. One critic pro-
posed that she “would not have been al-
lowed to paint in the Middle Ages” and
“would have been burned.”
Her sinuous, wildly colored composi-
tions, which she built with patterns of
dots and lines, suggest deep-space mar-
vels or activity under a microscope, with
mysterious beings that dance, fly and
metamorphose. Monstrous faces float
across a black expanse in “Nightmares”
(1961), while “The Unicorn” (1983) has
the mythical animal growing from the
thigh of a strange, humanoid entity. “The
more fantastic, the more real they are,”
she once said of her work.
Ms. Schultze-Bluhm, who went by just
Ursula in her professional life, partici-
pated in big shows, like the quinquennial
Documenta in Kassel, Germany, along
with art giants like Andy Warhol. But af-
ter her death in 1999, at 77, “museum ex-
hibitions did not materialize,” Renate
Goldmann, the director of the Van Ham
Art Estate, wrote in an email.
Today, “most of the younger genera-
tion don’t even know her name,” Stephan
Diederich, the curator of the collection of
20th-century art at the Museum Ludwig
said by phone.
On March 18, the Ludwig will try to
remedy that; as the TEFAF Maastricht
fair winds down in the Netherlands,
across the border in Cologne, Germany,
the museum will open the first Ursula
retrospective in three decades. Running
through July 23, it takes its name (“Ur-
sula — That’s Me. So What?”) from the
title of her last self-portrait, from 1995.
Occupying the Ludwig’s largest exhi-
bition space, the show will be a major cel-
ebration in Cologne, the city that Ursula
called home for decades. It arrives as
some in the art world aim to bring atten-
tion to long-marginalized women.
At last year’s Venice Biennale, about
90 percent of the artists in the main show
were women, an unprecedented share,
“a city of art,” and the visual marvels
this year’s TEFAF attendees can look
forward to. The following conversation
has been edited and condensed.
Tom, let’s talk about your journey as a de-
signer. You started your career as a sculp-
tor. Can you talk about that part of your ca-
reer and how it evolved into what is a very
artful, experiential approach to exhibition
design?
TOM POSTMA I studied and worked as
an artist for 20 years, working with gal-
leries and creating exhibitions. Parallel
to that, I started to do more and more
monumental sculpture for buildings
and parks. I began to get more inter-
ested in the design world and the archi-
tectural elements within it. At a certain
moment — I think I was 39 — I had to
decide between the autonomous life of
an artist or the collaborative life of a de-
signer. I ended up as a designer in the
art world, and that’s where I found my
market.
I first did galleries. I started working
on bigger shows. Then TEFAF asked
me to do what was then a small art fair
for them in the Netherlands. I like work-
ing within the art world. It’s a much
more aesthetically aware world than,
say, the commercial world.
How has your approach to exhibition de-
sign evolved?
POSTMA I love art in the broader sense
— the contemporary but also the classi-
cal. As an artist, I know that art should
be the center of an exhibition and not
the other way around. We really try to
serve the art. You have to look at how to
tell the story of the art pieces, whether
and many were historical figures. Chus
Martínez, the head of the Institute Art
Gender Nature at the FHNW Academy
of Art and Design in Basel, Switzerland,
said that she hoped Ursula’s work would
be reclaimed “as they are reclaiming
also Hilma af Klint,” the pioneering
Swedish abstract painter and mystic
who died in 1944. A 2018–19 af Klint exhi-
bition at the Guggenheim Museum in
New York set an attendance record.
Even when Ursula was actively ex-
hibiting, she faced difficulties in winning
acclaim. “It was always much easier for
her husband, as a male artist,” said Dr.
Diederich, who curated the Ludwig
show with Helena Kuhlmann, a curatori-
al assistant. Dr. Diederich got to know
Ursula in the 1990s when the Ludwig did
a show focused on the art of that man,
Bernard Schultze, a German abstract
painter whom Ursula married in 1955.
“She often was seen, let’s say, only as his
wife,” he said.
In 1968, the couple moved from Frank-
furt to Cologne, where they shared a stu-
dio. Ursula handled admin for both of
them, once confiding to a collector-
friend that she had to “steal the time
from myself for my own creative work,
which makes me unhappy.” She and her
MAARTEN WILLEMSTEIN
by one artist or several artists. How do
you translate that into architecture?
What are the view lines? How do you en-
ter the gallery? What do you see? What
are the most important pieces? What
are the through lines? What is the
rhythm?
DANI MILEO It’s also about the identity of
the presenter. Galleries have an identity
in themselves. At an art fair, you’re look-
ing at how you approach each particular
booth. How will its design complement
the works? We design everything in 3D.
We look at all the view lines, the differ-
ent materiality, the lighting. We’re really
lucky, because we work with amazing
clients who are specialists in what
they’re showing. We talk with them
about their intention — what do they
want to get out of it? We do research on
sites or go in person to explore.
It’s also understanding the audience.
If it’s a show at the national maritime
museum, there will be schoolchildren
coming as well as scholars. There are
different layers and different ways that
people will engage.
Can you talk a little more about your history
and approach with TEFAF?
MUSEUM LUDWIG, COLOGNE
husband nicknamed each other Spider
and Bear, and in her artistic pursuits,
Spider was utterly independent. “I
never had any academic training, so
there is very little my husband can tell
me, because he sets out from other prin-
ciples,” she said.
THE ART OF COLLECTING
POSTMA It started small and grew to be
the most spectacular show in its catego-
ry. There is no more elaborate fair in
terms of public spaces and the display of
art. TEFAF and Art Basel are very dif-
ferent animals. For contemporary fairs,
it’s much more about white cubes. At
TEFAF, it’s about 7,000 years of art that
you can buy. It’s a feast of aesthetic ex-
perience. Each booth has its own atmos-
phere, its own story. You have to cater to
all that and create a world where every-
body fits in.
MILEO You create a whole world for
TEFAF. You step out of the car park at
the convention center, you head for the
entrance and suddenly enter something
completely different.
You forget about the world outside.
It’s like a city of art. At the moment you
need to rest, there’s a place to rest. At the
moment you need to eat, there’s a place
to eat. There’s always fatigue — there
are a few hundred galleries. You have to
know where the right moments are.
Every year, you create a large installation
from cut flowers. How did you start working
with flowers for the show?
POSTMA It has to do with the Nether-
lands, which is one of the world’s largest
exporters of flowers. The Netherlands is
flower country. People want to see the
flowers.
We grew slowly into that at TEFAF.
Now, many people come just to see the
flower arrangements.
MILEO This year, we’re doing something
really fun. In previous years, we’ve had
light walls — thousands of LED lights
backlighting the entrance.
This year, there’s a glowing skylight
TKMUSEUM LUDWIG, COLOGNE, PHOTO RHEINISCHES BILDARCHIV, COLOGNE
The freewheeling nature of Ursula’s
art has also acted as an obstacle to ac-
ceptance in the hidebound art industry.
“It’s kind of hard because she doesn’t fit
into any canon,” said Ms. Kuhlmann.
Her art can appear eccentric or obses-
sive while also bearing Surrealism’s so-
phisticated symbolism. The assemblage
sculptures that Ursula began making in
the late 1950s radiate rich psychological
content. “The picture is housed in my
mind and waits to be released into the
outside world, onto the canvas,” Ursula
once wrote.
At a moment when contemporary art-
ists are experimenting with ways to ex-
press hybrid or fluid identities, she looks
prescient. “I can see young people get-
ting crazy about it,” said Ms. Martínez,
proposing that Ursula’s art shows “what
it is to transition, not only in terms of
gender, but in terms of a social body that
transitions, that kind of modifies param-
eters of, let’s say, the patriarchat” (patri-
archy in German).
The midcareer British artist Emma
Talbot, who appeared in last year’s
Venice Biennale, paired her own richly
evocative work with Ursula’s in a 2020
show after she was introduced to it by a
Düsseldorf art dealer. “The thing that is
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 | S7
MARK NIEDERMANN
above and an incredible cascade of flow- A different world
ers coming over the top of the wall, al- Tom Postma, bot-
most like a waterfall. Beautiful white tom left, and Dani
flowers, then pink. At the bottom, there Mileo, the design
are larger and heavier blooms. At the director of Tom
rest of the fair, this approach is translat- Postma Design, the
ed into flower clouds, bubbles. They’re firm that has been
more lightweight and floaty and friendly. responsible for
building TEFAF’s
Where did this idea come from? experience every
year since 2001
MILEO During the pandemic, TEFAF re- (from top left,
moved the show’s ceilings for airflow. shows from 2022
We were playing with compression and and 2020). It’s “a
tension and making the space feel more year-round project,”
open. The emerging and flowing flowers said Ms. Mileo —
were inspired by the idea of the show the next one starts
coming back from the pandemic. as soon as the last
is over.
Let’s talk about logistics.
POSTMA There are hundreds of truck-
loads coming in. It’s somewhat of a logis-
tical nightmare. People don’t realize that
they’ve built these structures in weeks.
They think they’ve been there forever.
MILEO It’s a huge operation. There are
four or five weeks of build. For us, it’s a
year-round project. We start the next
one as soon as this one’s done.
How do you keep it fresh every year?
MILEO The minute one is finished,
there’s a moment when you’re most in-
spired. You can see the potential of
things again. You have a glass of Cham-
pagne and you’re on a high. We come
back into the office, and we’re super in-
spired and we feed off each other.
POSTMA Every time, there’s a new story
to tell. The key is you have to be a little
crazy about art.
Wild things
Ursula, seen paint-
ing in a Frankfurt
studio around
1966, below, was a
prolific painter of
expressive, colorful
visions and mysteri-
ous beings, such as
those in “Demon
minuet” (1996), far
left, and “The two
guardians” (1986).
“The more fantas-
tic,” she once said
of her work, “the
more real they are.”
really interesting to me is the way that
an intelligent, logical, savvy, knowing
person can also make things which tune
into an unconscious language, which al-
lows the space to not know,” she said in a
phone interview.
The art market has been taking notice,
too, according to Dr. Goldmann, who
handles works by Ursula and her hus-
band as part of the Cologne auction
house Van Ham. They were bequeathed
after his death in 2005 to a group that
sells them to raise funds for the col-
lection of the Museum Folkwang in Es-
sen, Germany.
At Sotheby’s in 2021, an Ursula paint-
ing from 1967 once owned by the French
dealer Daniel Cordier went for more
than five times its high estimate, at
€32,760 (about $39,300 at the time) — a
modest sum in the art field but an im-
pressive result nonetheless.
The couple’s estate also bequeathed
art to the Ludwig, which is providing 43
of the nearly 250 pieces in the sprawling
retrospective. “It doesn’t work that well
to show only a few of her works,” Dr.
Diederich said, “because it’s really a
whole world which she creates in her
work, and the public should, let’s say,
dive into her work, into her world.”
 ..
S8 | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, MARCH 4-5, 2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION