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PAGE 8 | BUSINESS
From U.N.,
uneasy facts
about Iran
Nikki Haley
OPINION
Last week, the United Nations pub-
lished a report with news a lot of peo-
ple don’t want to hear. A panel of ex-
perts found that Iran is violating a
United Nations weapons embargo —
specifically, that missiles fired by
Yemen’s Houthi rebels into Saudi
Arabia last year were made in Iran.
The mullahs in Iran don’t want to
hear this news, because it proves Iran
is violating its international agree-
ment. Die-hard defenders of the Iran
nuclear deal don’t want to hear it be-
cause it proves, once again, that the
Iranian regime can’t be trusted. And
some members of the United Nations
don’t want to hear it because it is fur-
ther proof that Iran is defying Security
Council resolutions, and the pressure
will be on the U.N. to do something
about it.
A new report Yemen is the
scene of the world’s
proves that worst humanitarian
Tehran is crisis today. After
violating the three years of brutal
international civil war, 75 percent
weapons of the population is
embargo, in need of humani-
with deadly tarian assistance.
consequences. The government has
virtually ceased to
exist. Terrorist
groups like the
Islamic State and Al Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula are exploiting that
lawlessness to pursue their barbaric
agendas.
The U.N. report reveals much more
than just the Iranian sanctions vio-
lation. It charges the anti-government
Houthi rebels with not only launching
ballistic missiles into Saudi Arabia but
also using the people of Yemen as
human shields and kidnapping Yemeni
children to fight in the war.
At the same time, the report notes
that Saudi restrictions on imports of
civilian goods into Yemen worsened
the suffering there. Saudi Arabia is
now working to address this through a
new Yemen humanitarian aid plan. We
welcome its engagement with the
United Nations to try to address the
humanitarian crisis, and urge it to do
more.
But the report, for all its bad news,
should be welcomed by those who wish
to prevent the conflict in Yemen from
becoming a direct, major confrontation
in the Middle East. By confirming that
Iran is the source of the missiles and
other weaponry fired into Saudi Ara-
bia, the U.N. panel has given the world
a chance to act before a missile hits a
school or a hospital and leads to a
HALEY, PAGE 16
The New York Times publishes opinion
from a wide range of perspectives in
hopes of promoting constructive debate
about consequential questions.
Taking on Austria’s Nazi legacy
GRAZ, AUSTRIA
Far-right resurgence gives
boundary-pushing artist’s
work new relevance
BY PALKO KARASZ
One summer day in 1965, a small car
stopped on Vienna’s central Heldenplatz
or “Heroes’ Square.” Out climbed a slen-
der man of average height, his suited fig-
ure covered from head to toe in white
paint.
A black line ran up his body, as if split-
ting him in two. But his grinning face
gave an air of mischief as he walked with
a spring in his step right in front of the
balcony of the Hofburg imperial palace,
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where, in 1938, Hitler was greeted by
/W e П
cheering crowds after the Third Reich’s
M N П
annexation of Austria.
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The man was Günter Brus, known for
.C ha ГР
his artistic “actions,” which were some-
VK "W ИЗ
times irreverent and sometimes vio-
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Andorra € 3.70
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Bos. & Herz. KM 5.50
VIDEO STARS IRAQI KURDISTAN
SIX SECONDS HAUNTED BY WAR, YET
OF GOOFINESS A PLACE OF GREAT BEAUTY
PAGE 5 | TECH PAGE 15 | TRAVEL
..
INTERNATIONAL EDITION | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2018
How a fixer
for Trump
keeps tales
out of view
Tools include tough talk,
hush money and links
to tabloid publications
BY JIM RUTENBERG, MEGAN TWOHEY,
REBECCA R. RUIZ, MIKE MCINTIRE
AND MAGGIE HABERMAN
As accounts of past sexual indiscretions
threatened to surface during Donald J.
Trump’s presidential campaign, the job
of stifling potentially damaging stories
fell to his longtime lawyer and all-
around fixer, Michael D. Cohen.
To protect his boss at critical junc-
tures in an improbable political rise, the
lawyer relied on intimidation tactics,
hush money and the nation’s leading
tabloid news business, American Media
Inc., whose top executives include close
Trump allies.
Mr. Cohen’s role has come under scru-
tiny amid recent revelations that he fa-
cilitated a payment to silence a porn
star, but his aggressive behind-the-
scenes efforts stretch back years, ac-
cording to interviews, emails and other
records.
They intensified as Mr. Trump’s cam-
GILLES SABRIÉ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES paign began in the summer of 2015,
In remote China The Dzongsar Monastery in Sichuan Province, China. A reporter who visited the monastery was detained by the police. It was an act, he writes, when a former hedge-fund manager
that illustrates China’s hypersensitivity to foreign correspondents and belies the confidence the country exudes over its rising place on the world stage. PAGE 3 told Mr. Cohen that he had obtained pho-
tographs of Mr. Trump with a bare-
breasted woman. The man said Mr. Co-
hen first blew up at him, then steered
Glimpse of the outside world
him to David J. Pecker, chairman of the
tabloid company, which sometimes
bought, then buried, embarrassing ma-
terial about his high-profile friends and
allies.
In early 2016, after a legal affairs web-
the assumption that North Koreans, citi- site uncovered old court cases in which a
GANGNEUNG, SOUTH KOREA
zens of the most isolated country on female former Trump business partner
earth, are cut off from knowledge of the had accused him of sexual misconduct,
outside world by the restrictions im- Mr. Cohen released a statement sug-
Curious onlookers wonder posed by their autocratic leader, Kim gesting that the woman, Jill Harth,
Jong-un. “would acknowledge” that the story was
how North Korean athletes With 22 athletes and an entourage of false. Ms. Harth said the statement had
will react to the Games around 500 cheerleaders, arts perform- been made without her permission and
ers, journalists and security minders at that she stood by her claims. It was not
BY MOTOKO RICH
the Winter Games, the North Koreans the last time Mr. Cohen would present a
have been subjected to endless scrutiny denial on behalf of a woman who had al-
When the North Korean figure skaters about what they are seeing here and leged a sexual encounter with Mr.
Ryom Tae-ok and Kim Ju-sik took to the whether it is, well, blowing their minds. Trump.
ice last week, cheerleaders chanting More broadly, analysts and officials In August of that year, Mr. Cohen
their names stowed the unified Korean wonder if engaging with the outside learned details of a deal that American
flags they had waved at other events world could have a political effect back Media had struck with a former Playboy
here at the Pyeongchang Olympics and home. model, Karen McDougal, that prevented
whipped out their national flag. Those scuffling for information find her from going public about an alleged
After that unmistakable outburst of only scraps. The North Korean skaters affair with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen was
patriotic fervor, it was all the more in- seemed to enjoy a variety of global food not representing anyone in the confi-
congruous when the pair began skating in the athletes’ cafeteria, said Kam Alex dential agreement, but he was apprised
to a distinctly Western song: “A Day in Kang Chan, a South Korean skater who of it by Ms. McDougal’s lawyer and ear-
the Life” by the Beatles, in a cover by also trained with Mr. Marcotte. JAMES HILL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES lier had been made aware of her attempt
Jeff Beck. Megan Duhamel of Canada, who with North Korean cheerleaders celebrated the results of the skaters Ryom Tae-ok and Kim to tell her story by the media company,
“I have no clue how they chose it,” her skating partner, Eric Radford, won a Ju-sik of North Korea during the pairs figure skating competition at the Olympics. according to interviews and an email re-
said Bruno Marcotte, a prominent bronze medal in pairs figure skating and viewed by The New York Times.
French Canadian coach. He worked is married to Mr. Marcotte, said that the Two months later, Mr. Cohen played a
with the pair, who placed 13th, for eight North Korean skaters became fans of South Koreans taught their teammates higher standard of living in the South, direct role in a similar deal involving an
weeks last summer in Montreal and said protein bars made by a friend of hers in from the North how to dance to K-pop might be tempted to defect, as athletes adult film star, Stephanie Clifford,
their North Korean coach had selected Montreal, and that she gave them sev- music, said Sarah Murray, the Korean from other Communist countries have whose stage name is Stormy Daniels,
the song. “I think the fact that every- eral to take home. women’s hockey coach. done at previous Olympic Games. No who once said she had had an affair with
body was, like, ‘Huh?’ makes it even In the locker room before a game be- The subtext of some of the curiosity is North Korean athletes have defected Mr. Trump. Last week, Mr. Cohen said
more special.” tween the unified Korean women’s whether the North Koreans, exposed to during an Olympics, although one de- he had used his own money for the
The musical choice seemed to belie hockey team and Sweden, some of the glimpses of popular culture or the NORTH KOREA, PAGE 10 FIXER, PAGE 5
lently confronting. In the 1960s and ’70s,
these artistic performances challenged
deeply conservative social attitudes and
a culture of forgetting in postwar Aus-
tria.
In time, Mr. Brus came to be admired
as a boundary-pushing artist. He would
trade his paintbrush for a razor blade
and turn it against his body to explore
the limits of expression. And the Austri-
an state would come to regard him as a
notorious troublemaker.
But on that day in 1965, to Mr. Brus’s
disappointment, “Absolutely nothing
happened,” he said in a recent interview
at his home in the city of Graz, in the
south of Austria. Passers-by were large-
ly unfazed, although a police officer ap-
OVERSEAS
prehended the living painting, fined Mr.
Brus for disturbing the peace and ush- A N I N V I TAT I O N
ered him into a taxi. T O T R AV E L
Now, more than a half-century later,
Mr. Brus’s 80th birthday is being cele-
brated in Vienna with the exhibition
“Unrest After the Storm” at the Belve-
dere 21 museum, and artists and cura-
CHRISTIAN JUNGWIRTH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Günter Brus. In the 1960s and ’70s, his artistic performances challenged deeply tors say Mr. Brus’s work has taken on re-
conservative social attitudes and a culture of forgetting in postwar Austria. ARTIST, PAGE 2
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2 | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2018
page two
Taking on Austria’s Nazi legacy
ARTIST, FROM PAGE 1
newed significance after Austria’s re-
cent right-wing turn. The show opened
this month and runs through Aug. 12.
“Unrest After the Storm” brings to-
gether works from across Mr. Brus’s
eclectic output. These include early “in-
formal” paintings reminiscent of Jack-
son Pollock; drawings; illustrated poet-
ry; costume design; and footage and
photographs of his shocking actions.
It is for his actions that Mr. Brus is
best known: carefully orchestrated per-
formances involving naked bodies, self-
harm, and the use of bodily fluids like ex-
crement, blood and tears, to explore ta-
boo themes like birth and sexuality. But
they are not the main focus of this exhib-
ition. Records of them are shown in dia-
logue with drawings, paintings and po-
ems that further explore the limits of the
body.
Along with other artists like Otto
Muehl and Hermann Nitsch, Mr. Brus
formed a group that became known as
the Vienna Actionists. Together, they
put away the canvas and made their
bodies a part of their art.
“Austria was not a police state but
close enough,” Mr. Brus said. Postwar
Austria was a traditional society,
strongly influenced by the church and
governed by strict rules. Mr. Brus re-
called being fined as a young man for
walking on a patch of grass.
“We rebelled against this society,”
said his wife, Anna Brus, during the in-
terview at their home. “It was so unbe-
lievably palpable, how these Nazis were
everywhere, on every corner, much
more than the police.”
As Mr. Brus’s notoriety grew, so did
the anger some members of the public
felt toward him. He and his wife both re-
ceived death threats, and there was a
petition to take away their child. “The
aim was to break taboos,” Mr. Brus said
of his actions. “My art doesn’t just stink
in the physical space but smells in the
souls of the people,” he said.
Mr. Brus’s work was not only taboo-
breaking, it was also political. Today,
many in the art world in Austria are sim-
ilarly engaged. Last year, riding the
wave of a backlash against Europe’s
treatment of the migration crisis, the
far-right Freedom Party again took up
key posts in Austria’s government, fol-
lowing a break of over a decade.
“I feel this political consciousness in
his work,” said Harald Krejci, curator of
the exhibition. He said that he had se-
lected several works for their political
content. One is titled “Average Austri-
ans and Austrians-by-Choice Demand a
Ministry of Re-engagement in National
Socialist Activities and Excuses,” and
features these words written on the Aus-
trian flag. Mr. Brus made this work in
2000, after the Freedom Party achieved
a record share of the vote in an election.
In 1968, as student protests swept
Western Europe, the Vienna Actionists
were invited to stage an action in a lec-
ture hall at the University of Vienna.
“Art and Revolution” involved Mr. Brus
cutting himself, urinating, defecating
and masturbating while singing Aus-
tria’s national anthem, in an outrageous
effort to show the facts of life with no fil-
ters. As a result of the performance, Mr.
Brus was prosecuted for the crime of
“degrading symbols of the state” and
fled with his family to exile in West
Berlin.
How Europe’s migrant crisis reached the streets of Brussels
BRUSSELS
BY MILAN SCHREUER
The city is freezing. At night, Hamza
Khater eats and sleeps at a volunteer-
run shelter. He spends his days hanging
around the international bus stop next
to the Gare du Nord train station.
“What am I looking for? I am looking
for a life,” said Mr. Khater, 31, who fled
the violence-ravaged Sudanese region
of Darfur a year ago. Specifically, he is
looking for a chance to reach Britain. He
has been for months.
Sudanese migrants like Mr. Khater
are increasingly visible in Brussels,
around train stations, in public squares
and parks, sometimes sleeping in the
streets. Mehdi Kassou, an organizer for
a volunteer group that provides shelter
for about 500 migrants each night, esti-
mates that about 45 percent of them are
Sudanese.
Their presence reflects the latest
phase in a migration crisis that has dis-
rupted politics in one European country
after another. It also leaves the center-
right government of Belgium, which is
set to hold elections next year, strug-
gling to reconcile its legal and humani-
tarian obligations with its “tough but
fair” rhetoric on migration, and a deter-
mination to avoid large-scale migrant
camps in the capital.
Very few of the Sudanese people who
have recently arrived in Brussels seem
to be planning to stay: Sudan was not
among the top 10 countries of origin for
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those applying for asylum in Belgium
/W e П
last month. Many, like Mr. Khater, hope
M N П
to reach Britain, which is Sudan’s for-
O t's У
mer colonial power and has a sizable Su-
.C ha ГР
danese population.
VK "W ИЗ
And some are former residents of the
Л
РЕ
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РЕЛИЗ ГРУППЫ "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
In “Wiener Spaziergang” or “Vienna Stroll” (1965), Günter Brus made himself into a living painting and took a walk in the city.
KHASAQ (SIEGFRIED KLEIN), BELVEDERE, VIENNA
One of Mr. Brus’s works in the exhibition “Unrest After the Storm,” which is being
shown in Vienna as a celebration of the artist’s 80th birthday.
“In Berlin we found an open and toler- Drawing gave him newfound liberty
ant, liberal society and my wife didn’t once he had reached his body’s limits.
even know what the police looked like (After the work “Zerreissprobe,” or
for the first two years,” Mr. Brus said. “The Real Test,” in 1970, in which Mr.
Ms. Brus easily found work as a seam- Brus slit himself with a razor and beat
stress and later a fashion designer, and himself to exhaustion, ending up blood-
Mr. Brus found new artistic expression ied, panting and sweating, the artist
in collaborations with other artists. called an end to the actions.)
“Jungle,” the camp near Calais, France’s move on, in secret and without papers,
main ferry port for travel to Britain, that to Britain. Often that involves camping
became a symbol of the global migration for months near bus stops, truck stops,
crisis in 2015, home to migrants from the train stations or seaports.
Middle East, Africa, Afghanistan and So what do countries owe such transi-
elsewhere. tory migrants? Belgium’s state secre-
When the French government closed tary for asylum policy and migration,
the camp in October 2016, evacuating Theo Francken, has argued that the
thousands and offering to resettle them state cannot take responsibility for
around the country, many made their those who do not claim asylum.
way to Brussels, another international His reasoning is that if Belgium al-
transit hub. Over the summer, tents and lows a few hundred migrants to reside
makeshift shelters appeared in Maxi- illegally on its territory, it could attract
milian Park. Migrants who might once millions of others, potentially plunder-
have headed for Calais continue to ar- ing Belgium’s generous social security
rive in the city, hoping to journey on- system.
ward. Seeing unauthorized migration rise in
Brussels last summer, the Belgian gov-
ernment ordered a series of heavy-
“Ministers are pounding their handed raids on informal camps and
chests, saying, ‘Look at me, homeless shelters. Those raids — along
how many people I have with falling temperatures — have large-
ly succeeded in breaking up camps in
deported now.’ ” public parks, and received wide popular
support.
Mr. Khater certainly does not want to Even so, hundreds of Belgian families
stay in Belgium. “I am afraid here,” he have reacted by inviting migrants into
said, “because I don’t have an education, their homes. (Last month, the govern-
I don’t have money, I don’t speak ment proposed police raids on the
French.” houses of citizens suspected of shelter-
Most important, he added, “Belgium ing unauthorized migrants.) Medical
doesn’t understand the politics of Su- charities are providing food, clothes and
dan; if I ask asylum here, Belgium may assistance, and volunteers have set up
send me back to Italy immediately, or shelters like the one where Mr. Khater
worse, even to Khartoum.” sleeps, in a former office building. The
European Union law requires mi- total cost of sheltering one migrant is
grants to apply for residency or asylum about 10 euros per night, organizers esti-
in the first country in the bloc they mate.
reach. In the past three years, tens of There have been several demonstra-
thousands of Sudanese have crossed the tions against the government policies,
Mediterranean by boat, landing in Italy, and about 3,000 people formed a human
Greece or Spain. Most applied for asy- chain around migrants at the Gare du
lum, and only a few hundred have been Nord last month to prevent a police raid.
deported, according to the International The crackdown has also exposed Bel-
Organization for Migration. gium to the possibility of rebuke on hu-
Many Sudanese, however, seek to man rights grounds.
GÜNTER BRUS; PHOTOGRAPH BY LUDWIG HOFFENREICH
The exhibition in Vienna also empha-
sizes the partnership between Mr. and
Ms. Brus. Valie Export, a feminist visual
artist and contemporary of the Action-
ists, said Mr. Brus’s treatment of women
stood out from the rest of the group. She
said the actions Mr. and Ms. Brus collab-
orated on “had a poetic language.”
Ms. Brus said she was often asked
how she endured being part of her hus-
band’s actions, like “Transfusion,” in
which Mr. Brus, naked, painted his
wife’s body in a space littered with nails
and other sharp objects, before engag-
ing in what appeared to be a sex act,
while she sat, still and impassive.
“In our partnership, in our common
work, this was never a question,” Ms.
Brus said. “In our work we were com-
rades, friends, and it was a very natural
relationship,” Mr. Brus added immedi-
ately.
Eva Badura-Triska, curator of several
past exhibitions on Vienna Actionists at
Mumok, Vienna’s museum of modern
art, said that when you looked at Mr.
Brus’s art “you are facing the truth.” She
added that watching a work like “Zer-
reissprobe” was “not a pleasure,” in the
same way it was not a pleasure to watch
the bloody experience of birth, or to see
somebody dying or defecating.
“But when you look away,” Ms.
Badura-Triska said, “you are getting
into moral territory that may turn out to
be problematic for society.”
Migrants congregated in Maximilian Park near an immigration office in Brussels last
year. Belgium has ordered raids on informal camps and shelters for the homeless.
In September, the government invited
Sudanese officials to help identify and
expel people in the country illegally who
did not want to apply for asylum. Ten Su-
danese were subsequently sent to Khar-
toum, and accounts quickly surfaced
that at least three had been abused upon
their return.
The Belgian government ordered an
investigation of the allegations. It con-
cluded earlier this month that Brussels
had not done enough to assess the risks
faced by those deported, and warned
that migrants who had not applied for
asylum still had the right to be protected
from torture.
The report said it was impossible to
establish whether the abuses had taken
place.
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Dancer cast in varied roles,
both lyrical and ferocious
RUTH ANN KOESUN
1928-2018
BY ANNA KISSELGOFF
Ruth Ann Koesun, a principal dancer in
American Ballet Theater who epito-
mized the company’s early eclectic pro-
file by excelling in roles as varied as
Billy the Kid’s Mexican sweetheart and
the “Bluebird” pas de deux from “The
Sleeping Beauty,” died on Feb. 1 in Chi-
cago. She was 89.
Her death was confirmed by her god-
daughter, Ellen Coghlan.
Because of her lyrical style in ballets
like “Les Sylphides,” Ms. Koesun was of-
ten cast as a Romantic ballerina. But she
could also show dramatic ferocity, as the
evil antiheroine Ate in Antony Tudor’s
“Undertow,” which depicts a young mur-
derer’s development.
Contemporary ballet makers favored
her. In 1950, Herbert Ross, a new choreo-
grapher and future film director, cast
her in his “Caprichos,” based on Goya’s
etchings. She portrayed a dead woman
who is tossed around by her partner in
choreographed movements that sug-
gested she was inert.
She found her signature role in Ballet
Theater’s revivals of Eugene Loring’s
“Billy the Kid,” from 1938. A brilliantly
stylized experimental work that used
occasional speech, the ballet had a bio-
graphical plotline by Lincoln Kirstein
(who would become a founder of New
York City Ballet), and a double role for
Ms. Koesun, who portrayed both the
sweetheart and the mother of the outlaw
Billy.
Her mix of hidden virtuosity and
tender emotion complemented the
power of John Kriza, her frequent ballet
partner, as Billy. Both performed the
ballet with the company before Presi-
dent John F. Kennedy and the first lady,
Jacqueline Kennedy, at the White House
on May 22, 1962.
Ruth Ann Koesun was born on May 15,
1928, in Chicago to Dr. Paul Z. Koesun, a
Chinese physician in Chicago’s China-
town, and the former Mary Mondulick,
who was of Russian descent.
She met Mr. Kriza, later a Ballet The-
ater star, while studying at the Chicago
ballet school directed by Bentley Stone
and Walter Camryn, and performed
with him in nightclubs and summer
stock.
Ms. Koesun joined the company in
1946 while it was appearing in London
and advanced quickly to principal danc-
er. She retired from Ballet Theater in
1969. Her marriage to Eric Braun, a
principal dancer with the troupe, ended
in divorce after eight years.
Ms. Koesun, who lived in Chicago,
leaves no immediate survivors.
Her first years in the company were
auspicious. The cover of the Nov. 3, 1947,
issue of Life magazine consisted of a
double portrait of two young Ballet The-
ater dancers, Ms. Koesun and Melissa
Hayden.
Rarely had a novice received such
rave reviews as those that greeted Ms.
Koesun in May of that year for her role in
Ballet Theater’s “On Stage!” Michael
Kidd, the future Broadway and Holly-
wood choreographer, had cast her as a
very young dancer suffering from stage
OLIVIER HOSLET/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY
At the Gare du Nord, Mr. Khater and
several fellow travelers showed wounds
and scars that they said had been in-
flicted by the Belgian police. One had a
dislocated thumb, another a fresh cut
across his jaw, yet another a stitched
eyebrow. Several had open wounds. All
said they knew Sudanese men who had
recently been deported to Khartoum
and then dropped out of contact.
“Why aren’t the police kind to us?”
Mr. Khater asked. “I am running for my
life. I did do nothing wrong. I don’t un-
derstand the politics here.”
Mr. Kassou, the shelter organizer,
agreed that “certain officers in certain
towns, not all police” could be “pretty vi-
olent with migrants.” “We very regu-
larly have people who enter with
..
Ruth Ann Koesun with John Kriza in
Michael Kidd’s “On Stage!” in 1947.
fright at a rehearsal. “It was little Ruth
Ann Koesun who captured all hearts last
night,” the critic John Martin wrote in
The New York Times. He praised her
“lovely line” and “immeasurable
charm.”
Walter Terry, the dance critic for The
New York Herald Tribune, wrote later
that year that Ms. Koesun’s progress
“has been so rapid” and hailed “her
highly individual quality of movement,
shy but not weak, delicate but assured.”
“She had a unique style,” Richard Cov-
ello, an arts writer in Chicago who fol-
lowed Ms. Koesun’s career closely, said
in a telephone interview, noting her hid-
den technical strengths. “She was a
strong dancer locked in the dainty,” he
said.
In 1951, Mr. Martin wrote of her “ex-
quisite dancing” in the “Bluebird” pas
de deux with the French guest star Jean
Babilée, adding that he wondered why
“a dancer of these potentialities does not
always exhibit them.”
Over the years, Ms. Koesun’s other
partners included Erik Bruhn, and her
repertoire included Mr. Tudor’s “Dim
Lustre,” David Lichine’s “Graduation
Ball,” Bronislava Nijinska’s “La Fille
Mal Gardée,” Frederick Ashton’s “Les
Patineurs” and new works as well,
among them Mr. Babilée’s “Till Eulen-
spiegel.”
She performed often in Jerome Rob-
bins’s early ballets, including “Fancy
Free” and “Interplay.” Mr. Covello said
that she was the only dancer to perform
each of the three female roles in “Fancy
Free.” This was thanks to a fluke.
The ballet ends with three sailors
chasing a young woman who appears
very briefly onstage after the two main
women in the ballet have left. In previ-
ous performances, Ms. Koesun had
danced each of the two main female
roles. On this occasion, she was in the
wings when the third woman was late
and did not appear.
“So,” Mr. Covello said, “Ruth Ann
went back onstage and did the part.”
wounds, even bites from police dogs,” he
said.
Sarah Frederickx, a spokeswoman for
the Belgian police, said officers treated
transitory migrants in “a very empathic
and humane way.” That being said, she
added, “it is possible that during certain
operations, for instance when people
fiercely resist police actions, officers use
force, but in proportion.”
Many aspects of what is happening
are familiar, according to Johan Leman,
an emeritus professor of anthropology
at the Catholic University of Leuven
who is an expert on Belgian migration
policy and has worked with migrants in
Brussels for decades. “Irregular migra-
tion from Africa to Europe isn’t new,” he
said. Tough return policies have existed
in Europe since the 1980s, and the conti-
nent experienced a refugee crisis in the
1990s after the breakup of Yugoslavia.
“What is new,” he said, “and what I
have never seen before in Europe to this
extent, is, first of all, that ministers are
pounding their chests, saying, ‘Look at
me, how many people I have deported
now.’ And secondly, that people are be-
ing deported back to a country of which
we manifestly know that the govern-
ment is violating human rights — I am
thinking of Sudan here.”
Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-
Bashir, is wanted by the International
Criminal Court for trial on charges of
war crimes and genocide.
When police officers arrested several
Sudanese migrants, including three mi-
nors, around the Gare du Nord last year,
Mr. Francken, the state secretary for
asylum policy, described the operation
on Facebook as a “cleanup.” After a pub-
lic outcry condemning the remark as
xenophobic, he offered his apologies to
the prime minister, who did not accept
them.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION РЕЛИЗ ГРУППЫ "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2018 | 3

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World
A celebration that ends in detention
DZONGSAR MONASTERY JOURNAL
DZONGSAR MONASTERY, CHINA
Reporting trip to write
about Tibet traditions
turns into hours in custody
BY STEVEN LEE MYERS
The monks, dressed in crimson robes
and wielding blue plastic swords, were
rehearsing a dance they would per-
form the next day in celebration of the
Tibetan New Year. Then a uniformed
police officer appeared in the temple
and said there were a few questions to
answer.
So began nearly 17 hours in police
custody for me and a French photogra-
pher, Gilles Sabrié, a long though not
uncommon experience for foreign
correspondents in China. It was hardly
an ordeal, to be clear; journalists face
far worse threats and abuse in China
and elsewhere. It was, rather, a bother.
For the Chinese, though, it was a
self-inflicted embarrassment. We had
traveled high into the mountains of the
Tibetan plateau last week to write
about holiday traditions in that part of
China. By detaining us, and ultimately
expelling us from the region, the au-
thorities succeeded in preventing that.
So I am writing this instead.
China is a country that exudes confi-
dence in its rising place on the world
stage — and yet its officials belie that
confidence with their hypersensitivity
to what a foreign correspondent might
encounter traveling untethered, and
thus uncensored.
Journalists in China are, as a result,
alternately ignored and followed. They
are harassed, detained and even as-
saulted, according to the latest survey
by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of
China, an organization not recognized
by the government.
Conditions have, by all accounts,
deteriorated under President Xi Jin-
ping, who envisions a “new era” of
Communist Party supremacy after a
headlong plunge into capitalism and, in
hindsight, comparative openness un-
der his predecessors.
Mr. Xi’s attitude is reverberating
through the ranks of officials, who
seem to so fear any deviation from the
official orthodoxy that they consider it
safer to avoid journalists than engage
them.
The survey found that half of foreign
correspondents encountered obstacles
to reporting over the last year. The
figures were even higher in sensitive
regions: the mostly Muslim area of
Xinjiang in the west, for example, or
the cities along the tense border with
North Korea. They were highest of all
in Tibetan areas.
There is probably no issue in China
more fraught than Tibet. The country
considers it part of its historical em-
pire, but many elsewhere believe it
was illegally incorporated in 1951, after
decades of de facto independence
Brazil planning pre-election crackdown on fake news
RIO DE JANEIRO
BY ERNESTO LONDOÑO
Worried that Brazilians will soon be
flooded with fake news before a critical
presidential election, the country is set-
ting out to crack down on organized ef-
forts to intentionally mislead voters.
The officials leading the effort argue
that the right to free speech cannot
come at the expense of an illegitimate
outcome, in an election that could dra-
matically alter the course of Brazil, the
world’s fourth-largest democracy, after
India, the United States and Indonesia.
“It is necessary to consider which of
these two principles must be sacrificed
in the name of an election that is neutral
and not tainted by deceitful news,” said
Luiz Fux, a Supreme Court justice who
recently assumed the presidency of the
Supreme Electoral Tribunal, the highest
authority on election laws and regula-
tions. “Sometimes the excessive con-
cern with freedom of expression ends up
violating a more important principle —
the democratic principle.”
At Justice Fux’s direction, Brazil’s
Federal Police established a task force
of law enforcement and intelligence per-
sonnel, which is developing strategies to
prevent fake news from being produced
and to limit its reach once misleading
content starts spreading online.
“It is not our intention to infringe on
anyone’s freedom of expression or their
right to voice an opinion,” said Eugênio
Ricas, the director of the Federal Po-
lice’s organized crime division, who is
leading the fake news task force. “The
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fering with an election.”
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Judicial officials say the task force is
studying the tactics used by groups that
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in the past and assessing under which
current laws they could most effectively
be charged. They have also been con-
sulting and negotiating with American
Above, monks celebrating Losar, the Tibetan New Year, at the Dzongsar Monastery in Sichuan Province, China. Below, stuffed yaks and a bear hang from a monastery ceiling.
following the collapse of the Qing
dynasty in 1912.
Today, the Tibet Autonomous Region
of China is off-limits to journalists
without special permission, but foreign
correspondents can freely travel to
China’s other mostly Tibetan regions,
technology companies, including
Google, Twitter, Facebook and Whats-
App, in hopes of turning them into part-
ners in the fight against fake news
rather than targets of enforcement ac-
tions and fines.
If their initiative succeeds, Brazilian
officials say that the October election,
which will take place in a deeply polar-
ized society, could serve as a template to
address a problem that has undermined
faith in democracy across the world.
But officials acknowledge that they
are up against vexing legal, technolog-
ical and ethical quandaries. Key among
them is a 2014 law that gives internet us-
ers in Brazil strong privacy and freedom
of expression protections.
Officials acknowledge that they
are up against vexing legal,
technological and ethical
quandaries.
While officials are mainly concerned
about fake news strategies deployed by
rival campaigns, not a foreign power,
they caution that such tactics are often
planned and executed abroad, which
makes shutting them down difficult.
Judicial and law enforcement officials
have called on Congress to pass a law es-
tablishing clear rules and penalties for
fake news. A bill introduced last year in
the Senate would make intentionally
spreading false information about is-
sues that affect public health, public
safety, the economy and the electoral
process punishable by up to two years in
prison.
Yet it is unlikely that lawmakers will
pass controversial legislation before the
election, according to politicians and an-
alysts.
That leaves officials having to make
use of laws and regulations they view as
anachronistic for a 21st-century prob-
lem.
These include electoral and defama-
tion penal codes that were passed before
the internet existed, and a dictatorship-
era public security law from the 1980s
РЕЛИЗ ГРУППЫ "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
like those in the bordering province of
Sichuan. At least, officially they can.
Sichuan is where the Dzongsar
monastery is. It clings to the top of a
narrow ridge overlooking a winding
gorge that drains into the Yangtze, the
river that marks the border between
that prohibited spreading rumors with
the potential to generate panic or un-
rest.
“Those laws are not adequate to apply
to the tactics of today,” Mr. Ricas said.
“The evolution of the internet and com-
munication,” he added, “makes it hard to
be relying on laws from the ’80s, the
’60s, the ’40s.”
The legal situation has made building
constructive relationships with technol-
ogy companies a pinnacle of the plan.
Social media companies like Face-
book initially dismissed accusations
that they had been a vehicle for sophis-
ticated disinformation campaigns in the
United States in 2016. Yet as evidence
has mounted, the technology giants
have sought to cast themselves as pro-
active stakeholders in the fight against
fake news.
They have a powerful incentive to co-
operate because the tribunal headed by
Justice Fux is in the process of finalizing
guidelines for electoral advertising on-
line. At a time when Brazilian politicians
are increasingly turning to social media
rather than traditional outlets to target
voters, the social media platforms are
positioned to make a windfall.
This reliance on social media to get
the campaigns’ messages out are ex-
pected to put the companies in the cross
hairs of fake news disputes, and they
say they are doing what they can to com-
bat the problem.
“The elections in Brazil are a priority
for us, and we have been taking a series
of steps to make sure our platform gives
people a voice, encourages civic engage-
ment and helps strengthen democracy,”
a press officer for Facebook said in an
emailed statement. “We have made sev-
eral product improvements to reduce
the reach of low quality content, elimi-
nate the economic incentives behind
most fake news, and prioritize content
from trustworthy and informative
sources.”
Google, which has been sued and
fined dozens of times in Brazil as part of
efforts to get online content removed,
has met with judicial officials to explain
the advances, and limitations, of its tools
We could have registered when
we arrived at the police station,
but it soon became clear that our
mere presence was the problem.
the two regions. The closest airport, in
Kangding, is an 11-hour drive away,
along roads that pass through the
mountains that rise to the Tibetan
Plateau. The gorge’s elevation reaches
nearly 11,500 feet.
The monastery dates to the eighth
century, but its temples were de-
stroyed in 1958 during China’s cam-
paign to impose Communist Party
control. Rebuilding began in 1983, and
it now has some 200 monks who live
and study in six temples.
Losar, the Tibetan New Year, is a
festival that like its Chinese counter-
part, unfolds over several days of
rituals and family reunions. The monks
we encountered were preparing for a
ritual that would lure villagers from
miles around to climb the steep ascent
from the valley; that such rituals have
resumed suggested a growing govern-
ment acceptance of traditional faith.
I had barely caught my breath from
A rally in São Paulo, Brazil, against Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a presidential candidate
who is the leading target of fake news stories, according to Veja, a local magazine.
to combat fake news. “While there is al-
ways more to do, we believe the actions
we are taking will help prevent the
spread of blatantly misleading, low
quality and downright false informa-
tion,” a Google press officer said in a
statement.
Law enforcement officials in Brazil
have expressed particular interest in
WhatsApp, the messaging app owned
by Facebook, which has about 120 mil-
lion active users in Brazil.
While WhatsApp is in the middle of a
legal battle before Brazil’s top court over
its encryption practices, company rep-
resentatives in Brazil recently told judi-
cial officials they would abide by what it
considered reasonable court orders re-
questing the suspension of accounts
found to be systemically spreading fake
news.
While government officials and the
technology companies’ representatives
say their discussions have been cordial
and productive to date, the companies
have made it clear they do not intend to
become arbiters of truth.
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
PHOTOGRAPHS BY GILLES SABRIÉ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
the climb when we were escorted to
the police station in the closest village,
Damaxiang.
The ostensible reason was a require-
ment to register with the local authori-
ties, as foreign travelers are required
to do within 24 hours of arriving in a
new location in China (or 72 hours in
rural locations, as this surely was).
This is a formality typically handled by
hotel receptionists, but we had arrived
late the night before, at a guesthouse
that, while rustically charming, lacked
modern amenities.
We could easily have registered
when we arrived at the police station,
but it soon became clear that our mere
presence was the problem.
An officer explained that we had to
wait for officials to come from Dege,
the county seat, which was a two-hour
drive away. Another officer arrived
and brusquely told us we could no
longer use our phones. It was now
detention, though a soft one.
We waited first inside, then outside
in the station’s sun-drenched court-
yard, which had a basketball court
where local kids play in the summer.
The officers, who were Tibetans, talked
about their jobs, their wages and the
LALO DE ALMEIDA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
A BBC World Service poll last year
found that 92 percent of Brazilians ex-
pressed concern about being able to dis-
cern between fact and falsehood online,
the highest percentage of respondents
in any country surveyed.
The two front-runners in the race —
former president Luiz Inácio Lula da
Silva, a leftist, and Congressman Jair
Bolsonaro, a right-wing provocateur —
have taken aim at news outlets for criti-
cal coverage, in much the same way
President Trump has criticized Ameri-
can news organizations.
Mr. Bolsonaro and his surrogates, for
instance, labeled fake news an article in
Folha de São Paulo that raised questions
about how he and his family afforded
their real estate holdings on public-ser-
vant salaries.
Mr. da Silva is by far the leading target
of negative fake news stories in Brazil,
according to an analysis by Veja, a
weekly newsmagazine, which recently
published a cover story about misinfor-
mation campaigns. One example was an
article falsely claiming that Mr. da Silva
..
difficulty of attracting girlfriends and
ultimately wives. This is an abiding
complaint among young men in a
country with a surfeit of them.
I asked one officer if the village was
not, despite our detention, a peaceful
place. “Sometimes people lose their
yaks,” he replied, “and we help them
find them.”
By the end, the officers seemed
sympathetic. They even shared their
lunch — stir-fried yak meat, among
other dishes — served by an officer
wearing an apron over his uniform.
The delegation from Dege arrived,
not to ask any questions, as we had
been told, but to escort us back to
Dege. After three hours of circular
questions in the police station there —
Why had we come? Whom did we
know there? — an officer in plain
clothes declared that we should have
registered first, and that we should
have requested permission to come in
the first place.
That was not true, but it was the
official way of saying we were being
expelled. The police would now escort
us back to Kangding.
“Kafkaesque” is overused as an
adjective to describe authoritarian
regimes, but one aspect of the word is
apt — the comic absurdity of how
power is sometimes wielded.
The driver of the police car that took
us back to Kangding wore a Yankees
cap, which he turned backward at one
point. The officer in the front seat
synced his mobile phone to the police
radio and sang along, karaoke style, to
a popular rock dirge by Da Zhuang,
with lyrics rolling up his screen. “Wo
men bu yi yang,” the title and refrain
go. “We are different.”
We arrived at a hotel in Kangding
after 2 a.m., only to spend nearly an
hour arguing with a woman who iden-
tified herself as Liu Xiaoli, a represent-
ative of the Public Security Bureau.
Her hostility was palpable. At one
point, she asked suspiciously how she
could know for certain that we had
been in police custody since 10 the
previous morning, as if the police had
not just delivered us to the hotel.
We were allowed to check in, effec-
tively freed, though a guard remained
in the lobby for the rest of the short
night. The next morning, Ms. Liu and
three others piled into a sport utility
vehicle and drove us to the airport in
Chengdu, Sichuan’s capital, where we
boarded a flight back to Beijing.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and
the State Council Information Office
did not respond to questions about our
detention.
After the correspondents’ club re-
leased its report, a spokeswoman for
the foreign ministry, Hua Chunying,
dismissed the complaints detailed in it,
saying that the majority of correspond-
ents operated without trouble in China.
“We hope that what you write and
what you capture on your cameras,”
she said, “will present a China that is
real, multidimensional, and compre-
hensive.”
had said he would ascend to the presi-
dency even if it meant trampling the fed-
eral judge who convicted him of corrup-
tion and money laundering last year.
Mr. Bolsonaro is the rare Brazilian
public figure who is the subject of more
fake news stories that cast him in a pos-
itive light than a negative one, according
to Veja’s analysis. A spokesman for Mr.
Bolsonaro did not respond to an emailed
query about whether the campaign con-
siders the use of fake news a legitimate
electoral tactic. Mr. de Silva recently
said such tactics should not be em-
ployed.
Marina Silva, a former environment
minister who is running third in the
polls, announced that she was recruiting
an army of volunteers to discredit the
type of disinformation campaigns that
she said derailed her past two bids for
the presidency, in 2010 and 2014. False
stories spread on social media about Ms.
Silva before those elections included a
claim that, as an evangelical, she in-
tended to ban video games and an accu-
sation that her bodyguards fatally beat a
gay man who tried to approach her.
While there is widespread agreement
among Brazilians that fake news has
had a corrosive effect on the country’s
democracy, some worry about the rami-
fications of a government crackdown.
The Internet Rights Coalition, a civil so-
ciety group that opposes regulation and
censorship of online content, recently is-
sued a public letter raising alarm about
Brazil’s plans.
“We have already seen troublesome
initiatives and a proliferation of laws
aiming at active monitoring and regulat-
ing of online speech and delegating fact-
checking to authorities,” the group said.
But Justice Fux pointed to the Ameri-
can election as a cautionary tale about
what can happen if there is no effort to
check false information.
“In the American election, freedom of
expression trumped over fake news,” he
said. “Here in our country we recognize
that while a right may be exercised, it
can also be abused.”
Lis Moriconi contributed reporting.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Tools of Trump’s fixer
FIXER, FROM PAGE 1
$130,000 payment to her, which has
prompted a complaint alleging that Mr.
Cohen had violated campaign finance
regulations. Legal experts also have
noted that the payment on behalf of his
client may have violated New York’s
ethics rules.
Mr. Cohen, who is still described as
Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, although
he is no longer on the Trump Organiza-
tion payroll, has denied any wrongdoing
and insists that the arrangement was le-
gal. In an interview, he disputed details
of some of his other activities that were
described to The Times. But he has
never shied away from his role as Mr.
Trump’s loyal defender. “It is not like I
just work for Mr. Trump,” Mr. Cohen said
in an interview in 2016. “I am his friend,
and I would do just about anything for
him and also his family.”
An examination of the efforts to shield
Mr. Trump from aspects of his own past
shows how Mr. Cohen maneuvered in
the pay-to-play gossip world — popu-
lated by porn stars and centerfold mod-
els, tabloid editors and lawyers with B-
and C-list entertainment clients — that
came to unusual prominence in an
American presidential election.
Mr. Cohen exploited mutual self-inter-
est. By heading off trouble involving Mr.
Trump’s history with women, he ac-
crued loyalty points, the ultimate cur-
rency with Mr. Trump. He dealt with
lawyers who could win fat cuts of any
settlements women might reach with
American Media or with Mr. Trump.
At least two women got money. Ms.
McDougal also got a promise of favor-
able attention in American Media publi-
cations, which include The National En-
quirer, Star, Us Weekly and Radar. Mr.
Trump, of course, benefited the most:
avoiding more scrutiny as he struggled
to dismiss multiple allegations of grop-
ing and unwanted advances that arose
during the campaign.
One American Media executive, in a
2016 interview, said that the priority was
that nothing embarrassing come out.
But in the gossip economy, secrets last
only as long as the incentives to keep
them do.
RISQUÉ PHOTOS
It was July 2015 when Mr. Cohen re-
ceived a phone call from Jeremy From-
mer, a hedge-fund manager turned dig-
ital entrepreneur, who had obtained
photos of Mr. Trump appearing to auto-
graph the breasts of a topless woman
from the estate of Bob Guccione, the
founder of Penthouse magazine. Mr. Co-
hen was not pleased.
“He was in a rage,” Mr. Frommer said
in an interview. “He’s like, ‘If you show
those photos, I’m gonna take you
down.’ ”
It was the rough talk of a Long Island
native who started his career juggling
work as a personal injury lawyer and
taxi fleet manager and met Mr. Trump
after acquiring units in Trump build-
ings.
After Mr. Cohen joined the Trump Or-
ganization in 2006, the role that Mr.
Trump wanted him to play was clear: a
combination of aggressive spokesman
and lieutenant who would take on the
real estate mogul’s antagonists. It was a
job Roy Cohn, a New York lawyer best
known for advising Senator Joseph Mc-
Carthy, had done decades earlier for Mr.
Trump. Mr. Cohen’s work for his boss
was often a mystery even to others in his
office, but his devotion was clear.
In talking with Mr. Cohen, Mr. From-
mer mentioned Mr. Pecker. Years earli-
er, Mr. Frommer had sold American Me-
dia the exclusive rights to a suggestive
photograph of Arnold Schwarzenegger
— which it did not publish — and he
knew the company’s chief executive.
Mr. Frommer recalled Mr. Cohen’s
saying, “Yeah, I know Pecker.” Mr.
Frommer added, “That’s where the con-
versation calmed down.”
Mr. Pecker and Mr. Trump, a staple of
the American gossip media since the
1980s, have a friendship that goes back
decades. The relationship benefited Mr.
Trump throughout the campaign as The
Enquirer lionized him and hammered ri-
vals like Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and, fi-
nally, Hillary Clinton.
Mr. Cohen formed his own bond with
Mr. Pecker, keeping in touch with him
and Dylan Howard, a top executive,
throughout the campaign.
American Media acknowledged those
ties, saying in a statement, “Michael Co-
hen and President Trump have been
personal friends of Mr. Pecker’s for dec-
ades.” But, it said, neither of them “nor
any other individual has attempted to,
or ever, influenced (or will ever influ-
ence) coverage at A.M.I.’s publications.
Period.”
After the initial blowup, Mr. Frommer
said, he and Mr. Cohen quickly agreed
that Mr. Frommer would take the Trump
photos to Mr. Pecker. The men soon be-
gan discussing potential business deals,
including an interview with Mr. Trump
as part of a joint project between Ameri-
can Media and Mr. Frommer’s company,
Jerrick Media, according to text mes-
sages and emails reviewed by The
Times.
“Spoke to Cohen we are set. Well
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done!” Mr. Pecker told Mr. Frommer in a
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July 2015 text exchange.
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Two months later, when Mr. Frommer
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view would take place, Mr. Cohen re-
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sponded in an Oct. 5 email: “No no . . .
relax. I am on it and will make it hap-
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pen.”
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Mr. Frommer said he had assured Mr.
Cohen at the time that he wouldn’t make
the photos public — “I said, ‘Don’t
worry, I’m not going to publish them’ ”
Above, Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s longtime lawyer, has worked to stifle embarrassing stories about his boss’s past. Below,
Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate, claimed to have had a consensual affair with Mr. Trump while he was married.
— but that the decision had nothing to do
with the business talks.
In the end, American Media con-
cluded that the photos were of little val-
ue. The interview and the deals never
materialized for Mr. Frommer, who went
on to publish one of the Trump photos on
his own website.
American Media said in a statement
that it had no interest in suppressing the
photographs. But in early 2016, an
American Media executive, speaking
only on condition of anonymity in dis-
cussing internal company thinking, said
that when the negotiations between
A.M.I. and Mr. Frommer began, they
were intended to suppress the photos,
part of broader efforts by American Me-
dia to “catch and kill” information that
would damage Mr. Trump.
In an interview Friday, Mr. Cohen ac-
knowledged directing Mr. Frommer to
A.M.I., but said he did so not because of
photographs of Mr. Trump but for other
photos of “another notable individual
that I had no interest in seeing or want-
ing.”
Back then, however, Mr. Cohen ac-
knowledged that he had been eager to
keep the photos hidden. “Mr. Trump has
a family,” he said. “I felt like I had to pro-
tect his family.”
A PLAYMATE’S STORY
For Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump, Ameri-
can Media was more than a company
they could rely on for friendly coverage.
It was also where people looking to sell
potentially damaging information about
Mr. Trump were likely to turn.
In the summer of 2016, American Me-
dia came to Mr. Cohen with a story in-
volving Ms. McDougal, the former Play-
boy Playmate. She claimed to have had
a consensual affair with Mr. Trump in
the mid-2000s, early in his marriage to
Melania Trump. Mr. Trump denies an af-
fair.
Ms. McDougal had retained Keith Da-
vidson, a Hollywood lawyer, who
reached out to contacts at American Me-
dia.
After negotiating on and off for a cou-
ple of months, A.M.I. agreed to give Ms.
McDougal $150,000 for the exclusive
rights to her story, along with promises
of publicity and marketing opportuni-
ties through its fitness magazines. The
contract did not identify Mr. Trump, but
required her to keep quiet about any re-
lationship with a married man.
A.M.I. had shared her allegations
with Mr. Cohen, though it said it did so
only as it worked to corroborate her
claims, which it said it ultimately could
not do. But that was not the only heads-
up Mr. Cohen received.
Soon after Ms. McDougal signed the
confidential agreement on Aug. 5, 2016,
Mr. Davidson emailed Mr. Cohen, “Mi-
РЕЛИЗ ГРУППЫ "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
chael, please give me a call at your con-
venience.” Mr. Davidson followed up by
explaining to Mr. Cohen over the phone
that the McDougal transaction had been
completed, according to a person famil-
iar with the conversation. Mr. Cohen
said, “I don’t recall those communica-
tions.”
Mr. Davidson acknowledged the
public’s interest in Ms. Clifford’s and Ms.
McDougal’s stories, but said that he was
“not at liberty to discuss private client
information.”
In the months after Ms. McDougal’s
agreement with A.M.I., Mr. Trump’s re-
lationships with women drew more
scrutiny on the campaign trail.
The release of an audio recording that
captured the candidate bragging about
grabbing women’s genitals inspired nu-
merous women to step forward with al-
legations that he had groped or kissed
them against their will.
According to people in contact with
her at the time, Ms. McDougal ex-
pressed frustration with what she
viewed as foot-dragging by A.M.I. in ful-
filling commitments made in her con-
tract and with Mr. Davidson’s lackluster
response to her. She reached out to a
prominent First Amendment lawyer,
Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., who had made
a public pledge in October 2016 to de-
fend anyone threatened with legal ac-
tion by Mr. Trump for making allega-
tions against him. Mr. Boutrous briefly
represented Ms. McDougal, focusing
primarily on her restrictive contract
with A.M.I., which in late November
2016 agreed she could respond to “legiti-
mate” press inquiries about the alleged
affair.
Ms. McDougal’s story eventually be-
came public, in a Wall Street Journal ar-
ticle published days before the election.
The New Yorker published new details,
including an interview with her, last
week.
QUELLING A STORM
Over the years Mr. Cohen had come to
know Ms. McDougal’s lawyer, Mr. Da-
vidson, well enough that when New
York magazine profiled Mr. Davidson
last week, Mr. Cohen offered an enthusi-
astic endorsement: “He has always
been professional, ethical and a true
gentleman.” (The California State Bar
suspended Mr. Davidson’s law license
for 90 days in 2010, for four counts of
misconduct.)
Mr. Davidson’s client list had included
the professional athletes Jalen Rose and
Manny Pacquiao, as well as gossip-page
regulars who placed him in the middle of
the sex-tape cases of the “Austin Pow-
ers” actor Verne Troyer, the wrestler
Hulk Hogan and the onetime Playboy
model and MTV host Tila Tequila. He
was a natural choice for Ms. Clifford, the
PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
BENNETT RAGLIN/GETTY IMAGES
adult film actress, when she sought to
sell her own Trump story.
Ms. Clifford was alleging that she had
had a consensual sexual relationship
with Mr. Trump after they met at a ce-
lebrity golf tournament about 10 years
earlier (Mr. Trump denies her claims).
Just two months after Ms. Mc-
Dougal’s story was effectively muted by
her contract with American Media, Mr.
Davidson set about brokering Ms. Clif-
ford’s silence. This time, the negotiator
on the other end of the transaction was
Mr. Cohen.
Ms. Clifford agreed to a $130,000 set-
tlement in mid-October 2016 in ex-
change for keeping quiet, according to
contracts seen by The Times and people
familiar with the matter. To make the
payment, Mr. Cohen created a Delaware
limited liability company called Essen-
tial Consultants, news of which was first
reported by The Wall Street Journal last
month, and he claimed in a statement
first released to The Times last week
that the money came from his own
pocket.
Ms. Clifford has suggested in recent
days that she believes Mr. Cohen has
breached that agreement and that she is
preparing to speak out. In 2011, she had
told her story about Mr. Trump to two
gossip publications. One of them, In
Touch magazine, did not publish the
story after Mr. Cohen warned that he
would pursue aggressive legal action,
The Associated Press reported last
month.
The other outlet, The Dirty, took down
a brief story after Mr. Davidson threat-
ened legal action just a day after his cli-
ent had provided information to the
website, according to Nik Richie, The
Dirty’s founder, and a letter seen by The
Times.
After the deal between Ms. McDougal
and A.M.I. was completed, Mr. Da-
vidson regularly exchanged emails, text
messages and calls with Mr. Cohen, ac-
cording to people familiar with the con-
tacts, including last week, when Mr. Da-
vidson publicly bolstered Mr. Cohen’s
statement that he had paid Ms. Clifford
himself.
Mr. Cohen went on to steer a new cli-
ent to Mr. Davidson, Chuck LaBella, a
former NBC executive who worked
closely with Mr. Trump on “The Appren-
tice” and the “Miss USA” pageant. Mr.
LaBella had become the object of an in-
tense Twitter campaign — led by the co-
median and ardent Trump critic Tom Ar-
nold — calling upon him to share any-
thing he might know about misbehavior
by Mr. Trump. He became a client of Mr.
Davidson last fall, according to people
familiar with the arrangement.
Murray Waas contributed reporting, and
Jaclyn Peiser contributed research.
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2018 | 5
Diplomats’ injuries
stump brain experts
21 Americans serving
in Cuba were victims
of mysterious ‘attack’
BY GINA KOLATA
A group of American diplomats sta-
tioned in Havana appear to have symp-
toms of concussion without ever having
received blows to their heads, medical
experts have found.
The diplomats originally were said to
have been victims of a “sonic attack,” a
possibility that the Federal Bureau of In-
vestigation reportedly ruled out in Janu-
ary.
The experts’ report, published last
week in the journal JAMA, does not
solve the mystery, instead raising even
more questions about what could have
caused the brain injuries.
The incidents occurred in 2016, when
18 of the 21 affected diplomats reported
they heard strange sounds in their
homes or hotel rooms. The noises were
loud and sounded like buzzing or grind-
ing metal, or piercing squeals or hum-
ming, the diplomats recalled.
Many said they felt increased air
pressure, as if they were riding in a car
with the windows rolled partway down.
Three diplomats said they felt a vibra-
tion.
All but one reported immediate symp-
toms: headache, pain in one ear, loss of
hearing. Days or weeks later, other
symptoms emerged, including memory
problems, an inability to concentrate,
mood problems, headaches and fatigue.
The United States State Department
asked researchers at the University of
Pennsylvania to investigate. Their re-
port confirmed neurological problems in
the diplomats, including signs of what
appear to be concussions.
“The study was conducted by the top
concussion research team in the world
utilizing state-of-the-art methods,” said
C. Edward Dixon, a professor of neuro-
logical surgery at the University of
Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the
research. The findings suggest “a signif-
icant brain insult,” he said.
Other experts were less convinced,
noting inherent weaknesses in such a
study, despite the expertise of the group
conducting it. It would be premature,
they said, to conclude there is a mysteri-
ous new medical syndrome with an un-
known cause.
The study’s lead author, Dr. Douglas
H. Smith, director of the Center for
Brain Injury and Repair at the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania, emphasized that
there is much more to learn.
“This is a preliminary report,” he said.
“We thought it was important to get it
out from a public health standpoint.”
But, he added, the patients’ symp-
toms were notable. “Uniformly, every-
one who saw these patients was abso-
lutely convinced,” he said. “It looked like
concussion pathology. Processing
speed, inability to remember — those
are such classic symptoms we see in
concussion.”
“We all believe this is a real syn-
drome,” Dr. Smith added. “This is con-
cussion without blunt head trauma.”
Like concussion patients, some of the
diplomats improved on their own, while
others recovered only after therapy to
regain balance or cognition. “Many
went from being miserable to returning
to work,” Dr. Smith said.
Dr. Smith and his colleagues do not
think audible sound caused the injuries,
as sound in an audible range does not
The United States Embassy in Havana. The lead author of the study on the American
diplomats said they were suffering “concussion without blunt head trauma.”
CORRECTIONS
• An article on Thursday about injuries
suffered by some snowboarders mis-
stated the part of the halfpipe that Kevin
Pearce hit when he sustained a trau-
matic brain injury before the 2010
Olympics. He hit his head about halfway
world
damage the brain. Perhaps, they specu-
lated, a device that produced another
sort of harmful energy also produced an
audible sound. Low-frequency infra-
sound, high-frequency ultrasound and
microwaves have all been shown to
damage the brain, the researchers
noted.
One drawback to the report is that
there was no comparison group, said
Karen Postal, immediate past president
of the American Academy of Clinical
Neuropsychology.
The researchers relied on a battery of
cognitive tests that determined cogni-
tion had been weakened or impaired if
scores were below the 40th percentile.
But scores between the 25th and 75th
percentiles are considered normal, Dr.
Postal noted.
A control group would have shown
whether the diplomats who were posted
in Cuba did better or worse than other
subjects similar to them — ideally oth-
ers in the State Department who also re-
ported sleep problems, which can inter-
fere with thinking.
“It is common for non-brain-injured
people to have one or two low scores
when given a large set of tests,” Dr. Post-
al said. “These test results may repre-
sent normal variability.”
Dr. Christopher Muth, a neurologist at
Rush University Medical Center in Chi-
cago, wrote an accompanying editorial
noting that the report should be viewed
with caution.
The diplomats were examined an av-
erage of 203 days after the purported in-
cidents, and it is not known if they spoke
to one another about their symptoms.
Most of the American diplomats
suffering concussion-like
symptoms said they had heard
strange sounds in their homes or
hotel rooms in Cuba.
“With certain symptoms, you have to
take the word of people describing the
symptoms,” Dr. Muth said in a telephone
interview.
At the same time, the examiners
knew the patients had been complaining
of neurological symptoms, he noted.
Some of the findings depend on the doc-
tor’s subjective interpretation, which
could have been biased.
Since many of these symptoms are
common in the general population, “you
don’t necessarily have to evoke a whole
new syndrome to explain them,” Dr.
Muth said. “At the same time, no one
clear diagnosis immediately comes to
mind that can fully explain all of the re-
ported findings.”
Dr. Lee Schwamm, vice chairman of
the neurology department at Massachu-
setts General Hospital, also was uncon-
vinced by the findings.
“I don’t want anyone to think these
patients are making this up,” he said.
The patients “deserve a tremendous
amount of compassion and evaluation.”
But weaknesses in the study — which
are no fault of the researchers — give
him pause. The fact that more than 200
days passed before the subjects were
evaluated raises the risk of “recall bias,”
he said: the patient’s memory of the ini-
tial exposure becomes less reliable.
“We need to keep open the possibility
that in a state of heightened vigilance
and anxiety, it is quite natural for indi-
viduals to develop the same symptoms,”
he added. “Sometimes a suggestion can
provoke symptoms.”
MERIDITH KOHUT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
down the wall of the halfpipe, not on the
edge of the halfpipe.
• An article on Feb. 12 about a fight club
in Chengdu misidentified an amateur
boxer. He is Li Guowei, not Li Weiguo.
 ..
6 | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2018 РЕЛИЗ ГРУППЫ "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

world

Silence on meddling leaves a vacuum

NEWS ANALYSIS
WASHINGTON

U.S. response to Russia

lacks direction as Trump
focuses on own vindication
BY PETER BAKER

After more than a dozen Russians and

three companies were indicted on accu-
sations of interfering in the 2016 elec-
tions, President Trump’s first reaction
was to claim personal vindication: “The
Trump campaign did nothing wrong —
no collusion!” he wrote on Twitter.
He voiced no concern that a foreign
power had been trying for nearly four
years to upend American democracy,
much less resolve to stop it from con-
tinuing to do so this year.
The indictment secured by the special
counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, under-
scored the broader conclusion by the
American government that Russia is en-
gaged in a virtual war against the
United States through 21st-century
tools of disinformation and propaganda,
a conclusion shared by the president’s
own senior advisers and intelligence
chiefs. But it is a war being fought on the
American side without a commander in
chief.
In 13 months in office, Mr. Trump has
made little if any public effort to rally the
nation to confront Moscow for its intru-
sion or to defend democratic institutions
against continued disruption. His ad-
ministration has at times called out Rus-
sia or taken action, and even Mr.
Trump’s national security adviser,
speaking in Germany on Saturday,
called evidence of Russian meddling
“incontrovertible.” But the administra-
tion has been left to respond without the
president’s leadership.
“It is astonishing to me that a presi-
dent of the United States would take this
so lightly or see it purely through the
prism of domestic partisanship,” said AL DRAGO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Daniel Fried, a career diplomat under
presidents of both parties who is now at
the Atlantic Council. He said it invari-
ably raised questions about whether Mr.
Trump had something to hide. “I have no
evidence that he’s deliberately pulling
his punches because he has to, but I
can’t dismiss it. No president has raised
those kinds of questions.”
Rather than condemn Russia for its
actions, Mr. Trump in the past has said
he accepts the denial offered by Presi-
dent Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Trump has
not imposed new sanctions called for in
a law passed by Congress last year to re-
taliate for the attack on America’s poli-
tical system, or teamed up with Euro-
pean leaders to counter a common
threat. He has not led a concerted effort
to harden election systems in the United
States with midterm congressional elec-
tions on the horizon, or pressed lawmak-
ers to pass legislation addressing the sit-
uation.
Michael A. McFaul, an ambassador to
Moscow under President Barack
Obama, called Mr. Trump’s reaction to
the indictments “shockingly weak” and
said he should instead have criticized
Mr. Putin for violating American
sovereignty or even announced plans to
punish Moscow.
“Instead, he just focused on his own
campaign,” Mr. McFaul said. “America
President Trump, center, and Melania Trump, right, in West Palm Beach, Fla. Mr. Trump has made little if any public effort to rally the nation to confront Moscow over its efforts to upend American democracy.
was attacked, and our commander in
chief said nothing in response. He looks
weak, not only in Moscow but through-
out the world.”
The president’s silence has not neces-
sarily stopped lower levels of his admin-
istration from responding to Russian ac-
tions, sometimes going further than Mr.
Obama, who was also criticized for not
doing enough to counter Moscow’s
threat. The Trump administration has
decided to send weapons to Ukraine so it
can defend itself against Russian inter-
vention, and recently imposed sanctions
on more human rights violators. After
Russia ordered the United States Em-
bassy in Moscow to shed most of its
staff, the administration responded by
ordering Russia to close its consulate in
San Francisco and diplomatic annexes
in New York and Washington.
Likewise, in just the past few days, the
Trump administration formally blamed
Russia for an expansive cyberattack
last year called NotPetya and threat-
ened unspecified “international conse-
quences.”
The nation’s intelligence agency di-
rectors, including those appointed by
Mr. Trump, unanimously warned in con-
gressional testimony that Russia was al-
ready meddling in this year’s midterm
elections.
Mr. Trump’s own aides readily ac-
knowledge the reality that he does not.
Besides describing Russian interfer-
ence as undeniable on Saturday, Lt. Gen.
H. R. McMaster, his national security
adviser, speaking at the Munich Securi-
ty Conference, said Mr. Mueller’s
charges made clear that Russia had
been engaged in a “sophisticated form
of espionage” against the United States.
“With the F.B.I. indictment, the evi-
dence is now really incontrovertible and
available in the public domain,” he said.
Late Saturday night, however, Mr.
Trump, contradicted General McMas-
ter, writing on Twitter shortly before
midnight that his aide “forgot to say that
the results of the 2016 election were not
impacted or changed by the Russians
and that the only Collusion was between
Russia” and the Democrats.
In a second late-night tweet, Mr.
Trump said that the Federal Bureau of
Investigation missed warning signs of
the gunman who killed 17 people at a
Florida school on Wednesday because it
was too focused on the Russia investiga-
tion. “Very sad that the FBI missed all of
the many signals sent out by the Florida
school shooter,” he wrote. “This is not
acceptable. They are spending too much
time trying to prove Russian collusion
with the Trump campaign.”
It was part of a two-day Twitter tirade
that was unusually angry and defiant,
even by Mr. Trump’s standards. In his
tweets on Sunday, Mr. Trump sought to
shift the blame to Democrats for Rus-
sia’s meddling, saying that Mr. Obama
had not done enough to stop the interfer-
ence.
The president denied — despite the
ample evidence to the contrary — that
he had ever suggested that Moscow
might not have been involved. He called
Representative Adam B. Schiff of Cali-
fornia, the top Democrat on the House
Intelligence Committee, a “monster.”
And he asserted that the Russians were
“laughing their asses off” because the
efforts to investigate and combat
Moscow’s meddling had only given the
Russians what they wanted.
“If it was the GOAL of Russia to create
discord, disruption and chaos within the
U.S. then, with all of the Committee
Hearings, Investigations and Party ha-
tred, they have succeeded beyond their
wildest dreams,” Mr. Trump wrote.
Mr. Trump has long viewed reports of
Russian intrusion as a threat to his le-
gitimacy, a way for Democrats, the news
media or the “deep state” to question his
victory in the Electoral College over Hil-
lary Clinton in 2016. When his Justice
Department indicted the 13 Russians
and three Russian entities on Friday for
trying to “sow discord in the U.S. poli-
tical system,” the president focused on
the fact that no evidence was presented
that he or his campaign was knowingly
involved.
Indeed, the indictment made no as-
sertion that the president or anyone af-
filiated with him did anything wrong,
understandably a relief for Mr. Trump,
given a year of investigation and news
reports exploring the possibility of col-
laboration with Russia. The “informa-
tion warfare against the United States,”
as one Russian organization called it,
started as early as 2014, predating Mr.
Trump’s entry into the race.
But the indictment also determined
that by 2016 the effort had evolved into a
deliberate attempt to support Mr.
Trump and disparage Mrs. Clinton. And
the charges against the Russians are not
the end of the investigation by Mr. Muel-
ler, nor do they mean that there were no
contacts or cooperation that may even-
tually spell legal trouble for people in the
president’s orbit.
The findings included in Friday’s in-
dictment bolstered the conclusions of
American intelligence agencies, which
for more than a year have said that Rus-
sia interfered in the election, which Mr.
Trump has occasionally accepted but
more often dismissed as a “hoax.”
For the moment, the government is
left to act without the president. Jeh C.
Johnson, a secretary of homeland secu-
rity under Mr. Obama, said the best way
to stop Russia from interfering in the fu-
ture is the threat of a powerful response.
“When it comes to cyberattacks, it will
always be easier to be on offense than
defense,” he said. “But when it comes to
cyberattacks between nation-states, the
most effective defense is to simply make
the offensive behavior cost-prohibitive.”
But the best way to do that, experts
said, is for the president to lead the way.
“The U.S. government cannot mobilize
an effective strategy without White
House leadership and prioritization,”
said Heather A. Conley, a State Depart-
ment official under President George W.
Bush who testified at a Senate hearing
in the past week on defending against
Russian interference.

To stir discord, Russians turned most often to Facebook

SAN FRANCISCO
BY SHEERA FRENKEL
AND KATIE BENNER
In 2014, Russians working for a shad-
owy firm called the Internet Research
Agency started gathering American fol-
lowers in online groups focused on is-
sues like religion and immigration.
Around mid-2015, the Russians began
buying digital ads to spread their mes-
sages. A year later, they tapped their fol-
lowers to help organize political rallies
across the United States.
Their digital instrument of choice for
all of these actions? Facebook and its
photo-sharing site Instagram.
The social network, more than any
other technology tool, was singled out
on Friday by the United States Justice
Department when prosecutors charged
13 Russians and three companies with
executing a scheme to subvert the 2016
election and support Donald J. Trump’s
presidential campaign. In a 37-page in-
dictment, officials detailed how the Rus-
sians repeatedly turned to Facebook
and Instagram, often using stolen iden-
tities to pose as Americans, to sow dis-
cord among the electorate by creating
Facebook groups, distributing divisive
ads and posting inflammatory images.
While the indictment does not accuse
Facebook of wrongdoing, it provided the
first comprehensive account from the
authorities of how critical the compa-
SN ws" Ы
United States. The indictment further
batters Facebook’s image after it has
spent months grappling with questions
about how it was misused and why it did
not act earlier to prevent that activity.
Jonathan Albright, research director
at Columbia University’s Tow Center for
Digital Journalism, said the indictment
laid bare how effectively Facebook
could be turned against the United
States.
“Facebook built incredibly effective
tools which let Russia profile citizens
here in the U.S. and figure out how to
manipulate us,” Mr. Albright said.
“Facebook, essentially, gave them ev-
erything they needed.” He added that
many of the tools that the Russians
used, including those that allow ads to
be targeted and that show how wide-
spread an ad becomes, still pervade
Facebook.
Facebook, with more than two billion
members on the social network alone,
has long struggled with what its sites
show and the kind of illicit activity it
may enable, from selling unlicensed
guns to broadcasting live killings. The
company’s business depends on people
being highly engaged with what is
posted on its sites, which in turn helps
make it a marquee destination for ad-
vertisers.
When suggestions first arose after the
2016 election that Facebook may have
influenced the outcome, Mark Zucker-
berg, the company’s chief executive, dis-
missed the concerns. But by last Sep-
those who abused our service and ex-
ploited the openness of our democratic
process.”
He added that Facebook was working
with the Federal Bureau of Investiga-
tion ahead of this year’s midterm elec-
tions in the United States to ensure that
a similar manipulation campaign would
not take place. “We know we have more
to do to prevent against future attacks,”
he said.
Facebook has previously questioned
whether law enforcement should be
more involved in helping to stop the
threat from nation-state actors. Face-
book said it worked closely with the spe-
cial counsel’s investigation.
YouTube did not respond to a request
for comment, while Twitter declined to
comment. PayPal said in a statement
that it has worked closely with law en-
ERIC RISBERG/ASSOCIATED PRESS forcement and “is intensely focused on
Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook. An investigation found that Russia combating and preventing the illicit use
used Facebook to sow conflict, distribute divisive ads and post inflammatory images. of our services.”
According to the indictment, the In-
ternet Research Agency, created in 2014
hired thousands of people to monitor election. On Saturday, President Trump in St. Petersburg and employing about
content and has worked with Robert S. cited those tweets as evidence that Rus- 80 people, was given the job of interfer-
Mueller III, the special counsel leading sia’s disinformation campaign was not ing with elections and political pro-
the investigation into Russian election aimed at handing him a victory. cesses.
interference. It has also changed its ad- In Silicon Valley, where Facebook has The group began using American so-
vertising policy so that any ad that men- its headquarters, some critics pilloried cial media to achieve those aims in 2014,
tions a candidate’s name goes through a the company after the indictment be- when it started making Facebook pages
more stringent vetting process. Mr. came public. dedicated to social issues like race and
Zuckerberg has vowed to not let Face- “Mueller’s indictment underscores religion. Over the next two years, the in-
book be abused by bad actors. the central role of Facebook and other dictment said, the Russians stole the
Yet Facebook’s multiple mentions in platforms in the Russian interference in identities of real Americans to create
Friday’s indictment renew questions of 2016,” said Roger McNamee, a Silicon fake personas and fake accounts on so-
ponent, Hillary Clinton. In October 2016,
according to the indictment, one Rus-
sian-controlled Instagram account
called Woke Blacks posted a message
saying: “Hatred for Trump is mislead-
ing the people and forcing Blacks to vote
Killary. We cannot resort to the lesser of
two devils. Then we’d surely be better
off without voting AT ALL.”
Around 2015, according to the indict-
ment, the Russians also started pur-
chasing ads on Facebook and other so-
cial media sites like Twitter, targeting
specific communities within the United
States. The group used stolen PayPal ac-
counts to pay for the ads and to promote
posts, spending hundreds of thousands
of dollars on the outreach.
In one ad, published to promote a
Facebook event called “Down with Hil-
lary,” an image of Mrs. Clinton was
shown with a black “X” painted across
her face. The text read, “Hillary Clinton
is the co-author of Obama’s anti-police
and anti-Constitutional propaganda.”
By mid-2016, according to the indict-
ment, the Russians were using their
fake Facebook personas to organize po-
litical rallies in the United States. That
June, for example, posing as the United
Muslims of America on Facebook, they
promoted a rally called “Support Hilla-
ry. Save American Muslims.” For an Au-
gust 2016 event organized through Face-
book, the Russians also paid for a cage to
be built that was large enough to hold an
actress depicting Mrs. Clinton in a pris-
on uniform.

ny’s platforms had been to the Russian tember, Facebook had disclosed that the why the world’s biggest social media Valley venture capitalist who had in- cial media. The group then used those to At every step, the Russians used
/W e П

campaign to disrupt the 2016 election. Internet Research Agency had bought company didn’t catch the Russian activ- vested early in Facebook. “In its heyday, populate and promote Facebook pages Facebook’s own tools to make sure their
M N П

Facebook and Instagram were men- divisive ads on hot-button issues ity earlier or do more to stop it. How ef- television brought the country together, like United Muslims of America, Black- propaganda was as effective as possible.
O t's У

tioned 41 times, while other online sites through the company. It later said 150 fective the company’s new efforts to re- giving viewers a shared set of facts and tivist and Secured Borders. Those tools allowed them to get real-
.C ha ГР

that the Russians used were featured far million Americans had seen the Russian duce foreign manipulation have been is experiences. Facebook does just the op- By 2016, the indictment said, the size time results on which types of ad cam-
paigns were reaching their target audi-
VK "W ИЗ

less often. Twitter was referred to nine propaganda on the social network and also unclear. posite, enabling every user to have a of some of these Russian-controlled
times, YouTube once and the electronic Instagram. Rob Goldman, Facebook’s vice presi- unique set of facts, driving the country Facebook groups had ballooned to hun- ence or which posts were getting the
Л

payments company PayPal 11 times. The resulting firestorm has damaged dent of advertising, waded into the dis- apart for profit.” dreds of thousands of followers. most engagement with viewers.
РЕ

It is unprecedented for an American Facebook’s reputation. Company offi- cussion on Friday with a series of tweets Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice presi- The Russians then used these groups
technology company to be so central to cials, along with executives from Google that argued that Russia’s goal was to dent of global policy, said in a statement to push various messages, including Sheera Frenkel reported from San Fran-
what the authorities say was a foreign and YouTube, were grilled by American sow chaos among the electorate rather that the company was grateful the gov- telling Americans not to vote in the 2016 cisco, and Katie Benner from Washing-
scheme to commit election fraud in the lawmakers last fall. Facebook has since than to force a certain outcome in the ernment was taking action “against election for either Mr. Trump or his op- ton.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Debunked: The tale of the pope and the rabbits
DNA research helps upend
domestication saga widely
cited among scientists
BY JAMES GORMAN
The details of how most animals became
domesticated lie deep in the murky past,
much debated and glimpsed only in tan-
talizing hints from fossils and DNA.
Except for rabbits.
Their story was clear, and it was a
strange and compelling tale. Around
600 A.D., Pope Gregory the Great de-
creed that fetal rabbits, or laurices, were
not meat, and could be eaten during
Lent, when meat was not allowed.
Monks in France — where else? —
quickly saw an opportunity and began
to keep and breed rabbits as a meaty
non-meat to nourish them through a
cold and fishy Lent.
Lent, a period of penance and self-de-
nial for many Christians, began last
Wednesday, but any of them to whom
this story suggests a new menu should
stop right there. The whole story is
wrong, according to a new scientific re-
port. “None of it is even close to being
true,” said Greger Larson, one of the
main authors of the report debunking
the myth.
“The whole thing is a house of cards,”
Dr. Larson said, acknowledging that he
too had cited the story, as had many
other researchers. The remaining ques-
tion, he said, is: “Why did we never
question this? Why were we so willing to
believe in this origin myth?”
By “we,” he means scientists, not
Christians or Roman Catholics who ob-
serve Lent. A quick, unscientific survey
of several recipients of extensive Catho-
lic education drew blank stares when
the subject of fetal rabbits came up. I
myself can say that in eight years at St.
Justin’s Grammar School, during which
time eating meat on Friday was forbid-
den and often discussed, not one nun
ever said, “But, laurices, now, no prob-
lem there.”
I did ask some with expertise, just to
be sure. Charlie Camosy, a theologian at
Fordham University who writes about
ethics and animals, read the paper and
supplementary material from Dr. Lar-
son’s article in Trends in Ecology & Evo-
lution. “Nothing about this is familiar to
me,” he emailed back. He did say that
misconceptions about religious ideas on
animals were common.
Less deodorant, cleaner air
Some consumer products
contribute as much as cars
to components of smog
BY KENDRA PIERRE-LOUIS
AND HIROKO TABUCHI
The deodorants, perfumes and soaps
that keep us smelling good are fouling
the air with a harmful type of pollution
— at levels as high as emissions from to-
day’s cars and trucks.
That’s the surprising finding of a
study published Thursday in the journal
Science. Researchers found that petro-
leum-based chemicals used in per-
fumes, paints and other consumer prod-
ucts can, taken together, emit as much
air pollution in the form of volatile or-
ganic compounds, or V.O.C.s, as motor
vehicles do.
The V.O.C.s interact with other parti-
cles in the air to create the building
blocks of smog, namely ozone, which
can trigger asthma and permanently
scar the lungs, and another type of pollu-
tion known as PM2.5, fine particles that
are linked to heart attacks, strokes and
lung cancer.
Smog is generally associated with
cars, but since the 1970s regulators have
pushed automakers to invest in tech-
nologies that have substantially re-
duced V.O.C. emissions from automo-
biles. So the rising share of air pollution
caused by things like pesticides and hair
products is partly an effect of cars’ get-
ting cleaner. But that breathing room
has helped scientists see the invisible
pollutants that arise from a spray of de-
odorant or a dollop of body lotion.
The researchers said their study was
inspired by earlier measurements of
V.O.C.s in Los Angeles that showed con-
centrations of petroleum-based com-
pounds at levels higher than could be
predicted from fossil-fuel sources alone.
Concentrations of ethanol, for example,
were about five times as high as ex-
pected. And those levels were increas-
ing over time.
“You can see these really rapid de-
creases in tailpipe emissions,” said Bri-
an C. McDonald, a scientist at the Co-
operative Institute for Research in Envi-
ronmental Science at the University of
Colorado, Boulder, who led the study. “It
just made sense to start looking at other
sources and seeing whether they could
be growing in relative importance.”
SN ws" Ы
While people use far more fuel, by
/W e П
weight, than they do lotions and paints,
M N П
Dr. McDonald and his colleagues found
O t's У
a marked difference in how much of the
.C ha ГР
pollutants from those products end up in
VK "W ИЗ
the air.
Even though drivers can use gallons
Л
of gasoline each week, “it’s stored in an
РЕ
airtight tank, it’s burned for energy, and
converted mostly to carbon dioxide,”
said Jessica B. Gilman, a research
chemist at the National Oceanic and At-
The purported link between the European rabbit and Pope Gregory the Great appears to have grown from a written reference in 1936.
But Dr. Larson and others took the
story for granted, and the debunking
started out as something else entirely.
Dr. Larson researches the origins of do-
mestic animals like dogs and pigs. He
asked a graduate student in his Oxford
University laboratory, Evan K. Irving-
Pease, to use the well-accepted date of
rabbit domestication, 600 A.D., as a ba-
sis for checking the accuracy of a tool
that helps researchers use modern DNA
to look back in time and estimate when
different species diverged.
Mr. Irving-Pease first did a bit of his-
torical housekeeping and searched for
the papal edict. “He comes back,” Dr.
Larson said, “and says, ‘Small problem.
It doesn’t exist.’ ”
That was only the beginning. With a
tug on that one thread, the whole story
unraveled.
Mr. Irving-Pease went on to docu-
ment a kind of historical telephone
game, with an initial error embellished
and extended by one writer after an-
other.
The problem began, he said, in 1936
when a German geneticist, Hans
Air pollution in Los Angeles. As cars produce less smog, the role of other sources be-
comes easier to measure.
mospheric Administration also involved
in the study. Those carbon dioxide emis-
sions are not smog-forming V.O.C.s,
though they are a major driver of hu-
man-caused climate change.
“But these V.O.C.s that you use in ev-
eryday products — even though it may
just be a teaspoon or a squirt or a spray
— the majority of those kinds of com-
pounds will ultimately end up in the at-
mosphere, where they can react and
contribute to both harmful ozone forma-
tion and small-particle formation,” Dr.
Gilman said.
Forty percent of the chemicals added
to consumer products wind up in the air,
the researchers found.
Forty percent of the chemicals
added to consumer products
wind up in the air, the
researchers found. There they
react in harmful ways.
To make their calculations, the
study’s authors constructed a computer
model that simulated air quality in Los
Angeles, weaving in data from the
chemical composition of consumer
goods and tailpipe emissions. Using the
model, they could see the fingerprints of
the chemical compounds coming from
personal care products and also esti-
mate how many V.O.C.s from paints and
finishes inside buildings were being re-
leased to the outside world. Roughly half
of the V.O.C.s in Los Angeles air could be
attributed to consumer products, the au-
thors found.
California has regulated emissions
from consumer products since the late
1980s, and United States government
regulations have followed suit, setting
V.O.C. emissions limits for a range of
РЕЛИЗ ГРУППЫ "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
Nachtsheim, writing about domestica-
tion, said that Saint Gregory of Tours
(not Pope Gregory, a different person al-
together) had written that fetal rabbits
were popular during Lent.
Actually, Saint Gregory merely de-
scribed one person consuming fetal rab-
bits during Lent, and that person was
sick, died shortly thereafter, and may
not even have been a Christian.
Nonetheless, in 1963, another writer,
Frederick E. Zeuner, in another book on
domestication, added to the mistake and
said the fetal rabbits were not consid-
ered meat.
“From that point on,” Mr. Irving-
Pease said in an email, “the story takes
on a life of its own, as further small de-
tails get embellished in each retelling.”
In the end, he wrote, the “watery” envi-
ronment of the womb made the fetal rab-
bits fish, “St. Gregory becomes Pope
Gregory and, finally, his manuscript be-
comes a papal edict.”
With that story debunked, Dr. Larson
says, the whole business of rabbit do-
mestication is unclear. It is known that
domestic rabbits descended from the
FREDERIC J. BROWN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
items, including paints, varnishes and
lacquers.
Concerned consumers may be
tempted to turn to “natural” products,
though the researchers say that isn’t a
cure-all. For example, one class of com-
pounds called terpenes gives many
cleaning products a pine or citrus smell.
These terpenes can be produced syn-
thetically, or naturally from oranges.
“But whether it’s synthetic or natural,
once it gets into the atmosphere it’s in-
credibly reactive,” Dr. Gilman said. Sim-
ilar natural compounds give the Blue
Ridge Mountains in Appalachia their
name, from the blue haze formed by ter-
penes emitted from the trees there, Dr.
Gilman added.
Galina Churkina, a research fellow at
the Yale School of Forestry and Envi-
ronmental Studies who was not in-
volved in the study, noted that the study
did not consider emissions related to bi-
ological sources like trees and animals.
But the authors said their study was not
the end of this line of research.
There are tens of thousands of chemi-
cals in consumer products, and re-
searchers have not yet pinpointed
which chemicals are most likely to form
ozone or PM2.5 particles. “One of the
things that we’re hoping the public takes
away from this is that our energy
sources and the consumer products we
use every day are continually changing
the composition of our atmosphere,” Dr.
Gilman said.
Notably, some of the V.O.C.s used in
consumer products were replacements
for chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs. Those
chemicals were phased out beginning in
the 1980s because they thinned the
Earth’s ozone layer.
For consumers looking for a greener
solution, Dr. McDonald offered some ad-
vice. “Use as little of the product as you
can to get the job done,” he said.
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2018 | 7
world
APCOR/DKV
European rabbit, Oryctolagus cunicu-
lus, which originated in France and
Spain.
They were kept by humans in penned
warrens and fattened for slaughter in
hutches at least as early as the first cen-
tury B.C. That is not, however, the same
THE PRINT COLLECTOR, VIA GETTY IMAGES
as controlling their breeding, usually
considered a mark of domestication. Pope Gregory the Great, who wasn’t even part of the myth’s origin: The original refer-
Dr. Larson and colleagues write that ence was to Saint Gregory of Tours, a different person of the same era.
the earliest evidence of skeletal changes
that mark a difference between domes-
tic and wild rabbits occurs in the 18th Medieval times in warrens and hutches; there is a consensus that it happened in
century, around the time people began and most recently bred as pets. All of modern times and that his paper
keeping rabbits as pets. At such recent this is the story of their domestication. showed that domestic rabbits are more
times, DNA evidence is not very useful. That is where Leif Andersson, of Upp- closely related to wild rabbits from
Dr. Larson suggests that the reason sala University in Sweden, disagrees. southern France than to those from the
for the acceptance of the fetal-rabbit Dr. Andersson, who was a senior author Iberian Peninsula.
story is that even scientists fall victim to of a 2014 paper on the rabbit genome, Rabbits may have been domesticated
the appeal of a good narrative. And he found the debunking of the myth per- around 600, he wrote, saying that he
said, it indicates an underlying, and mis- suasive, but he noted in an email that he found nothing in Dr. Larson’s paper to
taken view of domestication as an event, and his co-authors did not cite the story exclude the possibility that, papal edicts
not a process. The domestication of rab- in their genome paper. aside, “French monks or farmers in
bits, he believes, involves a long interac- But, he said, he did not agree that all Southern France, because they loved
tion with humans. They were hunted for instances of domestication have been rabbit meat, made a specific effort dur-
thousands of years in Southwest France continuous processes over a long peri- ing a period of 50-100 years to establish
and the Iberian Peninsula; consumed as od. For rabbits in particular, he said, that tame rabbits that became the founding
fetuses; kept by Romans and during conclusion was “misleading.” He said population for the domestic rabbit.”
InterContinental London Park Lane
October 9-11, 2018
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October 9-11, London
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experts from the international oil and gas industry will gather in London for
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• Implications for petrochemicals, refining and power infrastructure
Register your interest at
oilandmoney.com
For sponsorship inquiries, contact
Brenda Hagerty, bhagerty@nytimes.com

8 | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2018
world
‘They want to destroy us’
FROM THE MAGAZINE
Fear of the government
pervades the remote
ranchlands of Oregon
BY JENNIFER PERCY
I took the eastern route from Idaho, on a
day of freezing rain, over the Straw-
berry Mountains, into the broad John
Day River Basin in Oregon. I was used
to empty places. Most of my childhood
was spent in this region of eastern Ore-
gon, in remote areas of the sagebrush
desert or in the volcanic mountains with
their jagged peaks and old-growth
forests. My family moved away just be-
fore I entered high school, and I never
returned; I’ve felt in romantic exile ever
since.
This part of America that had once be-
longed to my childhood became the
spotlight of national news in the winter
of 2016, when the Malheur National
Wildlife Refuge — an old childhood
haunt — became the scene of a cowboy
takeover. The takeover began as a pro-
test in the town of Burns after two
ranchers were sentenced to prison for
arsons on federal land. The ranchers,
Dwight and Steven Hammond, caught
the attention of the Nevada rancher Am-
mon Bundy, who thought the punish-
ment unfair.
Bundy and a crowd of nearly 300
marchers paraded through Burns, and a
splinter group eventually took over the
Malheur headquarters. For 41 days,
they refused to leave, protesting federal
ownership of public lands, which they
considered unlawful and abusive. I did-
n’t understand what had happened
since I left, why so many people seemed
so disillusioned and angry.
The ground was snow-covered when I
visited John Day last winter and the
temperature below freezing. I was there
to attend a meeting organized by
Jeanette Finicum, the widow of LaVoy
Finicum, an Arizona rancher who had
been shot and killed by government
agents a year earlier. LaVoy was a
leader of the Malheur occupation. He
left the refuge for a speaking engage-
ment in John Day with plans to return,
but he was shot three times at a Federal
Bureau of Investigation roadblock.
The meeting was up the road at the
Grant County Fairgrounds, in a building
called the Trowbridge Pavilion, where
every summer local residents gathered
to show prizewinning livestock. The
parking lot was crowded with pickup
trucks mounted with Don’t Tread on Me
flags and decorated in stickers that
read, “LaVoy” or “Not Guilty.”
A long line formed to get in the door,
and I started a conversation with Robin
Olson and her 18-year-old daughter,
Emily. The Olsons lived in Powell Butte,
a town of less than 2,000 people in cen-
tral Oregon, not far from where I grew
up. “This is the West,” she told me. “This
is the real West. If only everyone could
see it.”
The building was about the size of a
gymnasium, and inside an American
flag that looked big enough to be a para-
chute hung behind a small stage
equipped with a podium and a projector
screen. In exhibit booths, people bought
copies of books on patriot ideology, in-
cluding an end-times novel by LaVoy
Finicum and a biography of the rancher
Cliven Bundy, Ammon’s father, by
Shawna Cox, another Malheur occupier.
“The rural people don’t have power to
stand up against this mighty army that’s
coming up against them,” Cox told me.
The Finicum family sat on one side of
the stage and the Bundys on the other.
Three members of the Bundy family —
Cliven, Ammon and his brother Ryan —
were at the Nevada Southern Detention
Facility in Pahrump. After the Malheur
occupation, 26 of the occupiers had been
charged with federal conspiracy. The
Bundy brothers and five others were ac-
quitted in October 2016, but the Bundys
and their father were in detention over a
2014 standoff with the Bureau of Land
Management at the Bundy ranch.
About 650 people showed up at the
meeting that afternoon, and tens of
thousands of viewers watched on Face-
book Live. These patriots were right-
wing populists who felt they were losing
power. Many in the crowd expressed ex-
citement about President Donald
Trump and advocated for the transfer of
federal lands to local control. They
blamed environmentalists for the de-
cline of rural culture and talked about
the Endangered Species Act as a gov-
ernment conspiracy meant to drive
ranchers off the land.
LaVoy’s widow, Jeanette Finicum,
had thick white hair with a fringe of
bangs. She was a soft-spoken mother of
12, and at one point, she stepped onstage
to share a video montage that included
images of armed federal agents and
burning cars, followed by “peaceful” im-
ages of cowboys, including LaVoy and
Ryan Bundy. “I ask: Who are the real
terrorists?” she said to the crowd.
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Robin Olson told me that a lot of the
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region’s thinking about politics in the
M N П
West originated from a publication
O t's У
called Range magazine. “What you will
.C ha ГР
find,” she told me, “is that it was never
VK "W ИЗ
about the sage grouse, never about the
spotted owl and never about the wolf. It
Л
was about getting people off the land.”
РЕ
Range could be found in almost every
grocery and tack store in rural Oregon.
The glossy quarterly claims a reader-
ship of around 170,000, half of them
Joe Cronin on his ranch in the Malheur National Forest in Oregon. A government agency has found that his cattle endanger the spawning grounds of bull trout on the property.
The landscape of eastern Oregon. Protections for endangered species have fueled
theories that the government is trying to eliminate ranchers to control the land.
ranchers and farmers in the rural West.
Range, its website says, is “devoted to
the issues that threaten the West, its
people, lands and wildlife.”
In many ways, it seemed, the people
were constructing their ideas of the land
upon a fantasy of the past. In the 2003
book “Where Land and Water Meet: A
Western Landscape Transformed,”
Nancy Langston, an environmental his-
torian, writes about how each wave of
white settlers to the Malheur ignored
the history preceding their own. When
Peter French first arrived in 1872,
Langston writes, “the place had seemed
nearly empty to him, and indeed it was
this apparent emptiness that made the
watershed such a fine place to establish
an empire.” Of course, the land was not
empty at all, but belonged to the Paiute
Indian tribe, which had been living in
the region for at least 13,000 years.
In the 1970s, the Federal Land Policy
and Management Act shifted the focus
of the Bureau of Land Management
from resource extraction to conserva-
tion. The policy coincided with the be-
ginning of the Sagebrush Rebellion, a
grass-roots revolt among ranchers, log-
gers and miners against environmental
laws, like the 1964 Wilderness Act and
the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Rural
communities believed these new re-
strictions and regulations undermined
their prosperity and shifted the fate of
small-town economies into the hands of
the federal government. If an endan-
gered species lived on the range, for ex-
ample, the bureau could decide to cut
cattle numbers. Such protections fueled
theories that the government was try-
On Joe Cronin’s ranch. “Nobody back East loses one second of sleep over two ranchers.
They said we’re bad guys,” Mr. Cronin said.
РЕЛИЗ ГРУППЫ "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
ing to eliminate ranchers to control the
land.
If you drive two hours south of John
Day on Route 395, you’ll pass 1.7 million
acres of Malheur National Forest and
end up in Burns, a town of a few thou-
sand people. Outside Burns, on an old
ice-age lake bed, is the ranch of Joe
Cronin. In the spring, Cronin’s ranch fills
with birds from the neighboring Mal-
heur National Wildlife Refuge: great
egrets, trumpeter swans, black crowned
night herons.
At 7 a.m. one day last January, there
were more tractors on the road than
cars. Cattle huddled in the snow-cov-
ered fields. I drove beneath a wood
ranch gate, fitted with steer horns, and
Cronin stepped out of his house to greet
me in the driveway. He was a blue-eyed,
68-year-old, with a white goatee, wear-
ing a plaid Elmer Fudd hat, baggy blue-
jeans and a mossy-oak camo coat with
matching gaiters. His wife, Gay, made
coffee in the kitchen, and their son Dirk
loaded frozen hay bales onto a tractor
bed. This was Cronin’s “home ranch,”
where he housed his cattle in the winter
and provided shelter for their new-
borns. In the spring, he gathered the cat-
tle in trailers the size of semis and
hauled them north, into the Malheur Na-
tional Forest, where he owned 320 acres
of land. He also had a permit that al-
lowed him to graze his cattle for five and
a half months of the year, usually June to
October, on lands in the Malheur man-
aged by the U.S. Forest Service. Every
year he and Gay attended a required
meeting to discuss the terms of their
permit. Usually, the Forest Service de-
PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETER VAN AGTMAEL/MAGNUM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Robin Olson and her daughter Emily near their home in Powell Butte, Ore. Ms. Olson
said that the federal government was attempting to push people off public lands.
cided how many cattle he could let out
on the range and for how long. If an en-
dangered species lived on the federal
land, the terms of the permit were sub-
ject to change.
Cronin called the Bundy takeover of
the refuge a protest and didn’t see any-
thing wrong with that. He was quiet for a
minute. “Well, they probably shouldn’t
have taken over that refuge, but what I
liked about it was that it got this conver-
sation going about government over-
reach. People wouldn’t believe it other-
wise.”
Joe and Gay didn’t travel much, be-
cause the cattle always needed to be
looked after. Burns was a vibrant timber
town until around 1973, when the mill
started laying off workers, and the un-
employment rate in Harney County
reached 30 percent. The mill closed after
the Forest Service restricted the cutting
of old-growth forest in the mid-1990s.
The biggest employers in the region are
now the Forest Service, the Bureau of
Land Management and other govern-
ment agencies. Cronin was in the log-
ging business for years, but it was hard
to make ends meet. He bought a small
ranch in 1994. He started with four cows,
and after 10 years those four cows
turned into a 600-head operation. He
didn’t use antibiotics or hormones, and
his cattle were grass-fed, with no fertiliz-
ers in the field. Each calf was born into
his open arms.
After he fed the cows, he took me for a
drive on some icy back roads. Near Rat-
tlesnake Creek, we stopped to gaze at a
herd of half-starved mule deer. “Our
main problem,” he said, “is with the Fish
and Wildlife Service.” A few years ago
the agency found the bull trout was vul-
nerable in waters including the river
that runs through Cronin’s land. It deter-
mined that grazing cattle endangered
the fish’s spawning grounds.
“They say the cows are killing the
fish,” Cronin said. “I think it’s a vehicle to
remove cattle off national forest. I can’t
see anything wrong with that river. I
think the government science is
slanted.”
Cronin switched parties because of
gun control in the ’80s. “I went right up
to the courthouse and changed to a Re-
publican.” He tapped the gun on the
dashboard: a .22 Magnum he’d packed
for 30 years. “I don’t have a permit to
carry concealed,” he said. “I’m one of
those guys who wants you to see my
goddamn gun. See where it’s at. Almost
put it away for you but thought, No, she
just needs to see me the way I am. It’s
part of our lifestyle.”
Cronin brushed some hay from his
shoulder. “Now,” he said, “I know The
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
New York Times, they don’t like any-
thing Trump does. When he was elected
though, oh, my God, maybe something
will start happening to help us out here.
I’m just looking at natural-resource
uses. Out here, no one has ever done
anything for us. We are saying what’s
happening and nobody is listening and
nobody cares. Nobody back East loses
one second of sleep over two ranchers.
They said we’re bad guys.”
Later that day, Cronin and his wife
took me to see the spot where LaVoy
Finicum had been shot. There were elk
tracks in the thickets and ice on the
roads. He pointed out the dying trees
with bare branches and yellow needles.
“The forest doesn’t look like this on our
property,” he said. “The government’s
side of the fence looks like [expletive].”
Cronin stopped the truck. He pointed
to a smear of red spray paint in the snow.
Two years after a standoff at a
United States wildlife refuge,
many in the region believe their
way of life is being trampled.
“That’s probably where he died, right
there.”
Nearly half the state of Oregon ap-
peared to be on fire when I returned in
August. Megafires were burning nearly
300,000 acres, and the skies turned a
sickly yellow hue in the evening.
The Forest Service offices for the Mal-
heur National Forest are on the out-
skirts of John Day in a building deco-
rated with big topographical maps,
Smokey Bear posters and replicas of old
skulls in glass viewing cases. The office
worked with 60 ranchers, including Joe
Cronin. When I sat down with Steve
Beverlin, the forest supervisor for the
Malheur National Forest, I asked about
the ranchers who didn’t trust the gov-
ernment. Beverlin looked surprised.
“None of our permittees attended the
Finicum event in John Day,” he said.
“Our employees all have a good relation-
ship with all the permittees. They don’t
talk like that. They recognize the laws of
the United States.”
I told Beverlin that I’d spent time with
one of his permittees, and he did talk like
that. Beverlin asked who it was, and I
told him it was Joe Cronin. He shrugged.
It was the first he’d heard of it.
I met Cronin and Gay in the town of
Seneca, population 197, and followed
them down an old logging road for two
hours into the woods. Along the way,
Cronin stopped his truck, got out and
pointed at a sign. “Now,” he said, “I want
you to pay attention to this.” The sign re-
..
minded fishermen to release bull trout,
which have been listed as “threatened,”
or they would be fined. That was all.
Cronin climbed back into his truck.
The settlement that Cronin called
Cow Camp was a mix of trailers, trucks,
old farm equipment and homesteader
shacks. He and Gay slept in the original
homestead, a one-room cabin. The wood
was gray and cracked. Sparrows built
nests in the awnings and small animals
burrowed beneath a sagging fence. In-
side, bright, buttery pine boards cov-
ered the walls. There was a queen bed
with a quilt and two gun racks.
Cronin searched for his glasses and
smoothed a topographical map of the
Malheur National Forest over the top of
the dining table. On the map, his private
property, 320 acres, was marked in blue.
It was a small island in a sea of green,
which was the public land where he had
a grazing permit. Cronin’s allotment of
grazing land was divided into eight pas-
tures, and the North Fork of the Malheur
River ran through one pasture called
Mountain Unit.
The Forest Service had just started
limiting use on one of Cronin’s pastures
to protect bull trout habitat. The agency
wanted Cronin to keep his cattle out of
the creek, which is an important spawn-
ing ground for the fish. Cronin tried, but
he couldn’t keep the cows out unless he
fenced off the whole pasture. He needed
that pasture if the calves were going to
gain enough weight. Cronin asked the
agency if he could fence off the creek in-
stead, and they agreed. But then he
would have to find another water
source. There were springs running be-
neath the ground that would be easy
enough to dig up. But he needed permis-
sion, and the process would take
months.
“If they are going to take away my
permit,” he said. “I’ll tell them I disagree
with that, without just compensation.
O.K., are you going to compensate me
for it? Do you want to buy from us, so we
are never on there again?”
For dinner, Cronin cooked a beef
brisket the size of a football on an out-
door grill and talked about global warm-
ing. He poured meat juice on his dogs’
food. “You got to get that Range maga-
zine,” he said. “This article on why
global warming was a farce had graphs
and everything.” In the article, the au-
thor accused scientists of installing tem-
perature-monitoring devices near as-
phalt to record higher temperatures. “I
assume it’s all fact-checked,” Cronin
said.
In October, the Interior secretary,
Ryan Zinke, and his team announced
their intent to amend 98 science-based
sage-grouse management plans in 10
states, a plan that favored resource ex-
traction over conservation. In Decem-
ber, Trump announced the largest fed-
eral land reduction in United States his-
tory, including almost half of Grand
Staircase-Escalante National Monu-
ment in southern Utah. Escalante’s
once-seamless expanse of protected
land was divided into three separate
monuments.
On Jan. 8, almost a year after the rally
in John Day, the Bundys walked free.
They had been on trial in Las Vegas for
11 months, before Judge Gloria M.
Navarro dismissed the case, citing the
“flagrant misconduct” and “deliberate
attempts to mislead and distort the
truth” by federal prosecutors and the
F.B.I. The prosecution had withheld
more than 1,000 pages from the defense,
including reports that federal snipers
had surrounded the Bundy family as Bu-
reau of Land Management agents had
prepared to impound their cattle and
that F.B.I. surveillance cameras had re-
corded the Bundy home.
In August, I met Emily and Robin Ol-
son for dinner at Tastee Treet, a vintage
hamburger joint in Prineville. We sat in
a red vinyl booth, and Robin ordered a
bacon cheeseburger and a root-beer
float. While Robin ate, she reflected on
the landscape she had seen on a road
trip in July. They had driven 5,600 miles
through 10 Western states in two weeks.
They had tried to hit every Western
state, but had missed California and
Utah. They had never passed a town of
more than 20,000 until they reached
Fort Collins, in Colorado. “The rural
United States, it’s like eastern Oregon,”
she said, “and that’s like the entire
world.
“I think if people are honest,” Robin
said, “they look at all this and think
black helicopters and tinfoil hats, but if
you really go deeper, you’ll ask: ‘What
are they doing to take away the forestry,
logging and timber industry? What are
they doing to take away farming?’”
“Too much to be a coincidence,” Emily
said. “The spotted owls, the wolves, the
sage grouse, the cougar, the frogs.”
I tried to suggest a lack of understand-
ing between rural and urban people, but
Robin stopped me.
“No,” she said. “We just want different
things.” The statement was cold and
clear. It suggested the end of reconcilia-
tion. “We don’t want you breathing
down our back,” she said. “Bottom line is
we don’t trust you. We don’t trust you to
look out for our best interests. And in
truth we don’t even know that you know
how to. A lot of people were saying this
was about saving the bunnies and but-
terflies, but that’s not what this is
about.”
Robin sat over her empty plate. “It’s
about getting people off the land,” she
said. “It’s dark.”
This article has been adapted from The
New York Times Magazine.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
tech
Fame that really is fleeting
LOS ANGELES
At six seconds a spot,
Giphy productions offer
brief but broad exposure
BY KATHERINE ROSMAN
Against the backdrop of a green screen
in a studio space, Nico Santos, a star of
the sitcom “Superstore,” was perform-
ing an SMH.
To translate for those unfamiliar with
abbreviations popular on internet plat-
forms, this means the actor was shaking
his head, implying a judgment of “I truly
cannot believe how stupid people are.”
He did an SMH while looking at the
camera, then again with his eyes closed
and his lips pursed in a disappointed
sideways smirk. People are stupid in
many different ways, and so too must be
the reaction shot Mr. Santos was filming
for Giphy, the company that is the best-
known purveyor of GIFs, the seconds-
long soundless video clips that give peo-
ple a shorthand to express an emotion or
reaction through their phones or com-
puters. Most GIFs are pulled from mov-
ies, television shows and other media
events. But here at Giphy Studios, the
emphasis is on creating original con-
tent.
“How about a ‘shake my head into a
face palm,’” said Wallis Millar-Blan-
chaer, an associate producer and direc-
tor at the studio.
Mr. Santos, who will appear in the
coming film “Crazy Rich Asians,” re-
moved his glasses and delivered the
two-tiered SMH reaction. Then he deliv-
ered a “Girl, no.” This was followed by a
“Yasss, queen,” and then a “EWWW”/
“just threw up in my mouth.”
Like emojis, GIFs have become an oft-
used replacement for words in texts and
messaging apps. This gives these video
snippets a lot of currency as young peo-
ple increasingly favor private messag-
ing over posting publicly on social me-
dia. A 2016 study by BI Intelligence re-
ported that the number of global active
users on four top messaging services
(WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat and
Viber) was exceeding those on the Big
Four social networks (Facebook, Insta-
gram, Twitter, LinkedIn).
It also is a new marker of that increas-
ingly atomized American achievement:
fame. “You know you’ve made it when
you’re a GIF,” Mr. Santos said.
GIFs (pronounced like “gifts” without
the T) are now so ubiquitous that even
non-techies in their 40s recognize them
when shown on a phone. (“Oh those!”
they will say. “Yes, I’ve see them on
Facebook.”) Some 300 million Giphy
daily users are sharing 2.5 billion GIFs
per day through Twitter, Tinder, text
messages, Slack, Gmail and, as of re-
cently, in Instagram stories, said Brad
Zeff, the chief content officer of Giphy.
Giphy Studios thinks it can help old-
school companies like H&R Block break
into private messaging with branded
GIF campaigns. For a campaign for HP,
a spinoff of Hewlett-Packard, Giphy
brought in Matt Cutshall, a star on Insta-
gram, and shot him holding an HP de-
vice and acting silly.
Absolut Vodka, known since the 1980s
for its distinctive photography in adver-
tising, has also succumbed, commis-
sioning GIFs of the fruits that flavor its
booze, twisting temptingly.
In some cases, Giphy Studios asks
such companies to help cover produc-
tion costs; for other brands, it offers the
service for free. GIFs featuring actors,
musicians and other “talent” are also
made for free, with Giphy staff members
assessing pop-cultural relevance in de-
ciding who should get such treatment.
Engulfed in the artificial audioscape
FUTURE TENSE
BY TEDDY WAYNE
“What if death is nothing but sound?”
asks the protagonist of “White Noise,”
Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel. “Electrical
noise,” his wife responds. “Uniform,
white.”
For DeLillo, the background aural
oversaturation of quotidian life — beep-
ing microwaves, commercial jingles,
cars on highways — signified death and
our attempted denial of it. Compared
with the modern digital soundscape,
though, his era is positively muted.
Bombastic, attention-grabbing inorgan-
ic noises are becoming the norm, disrup-
tive sonic alerts trigger Pavlovian feed-
back, and simulated sounds are sup-
planting analog ones.
Consider the cacophony produced by
today’s mobile phone or tablet. Beyond
an all-you-can-hear buffet of ring tones,
there is the default whoosh and ding of
text messaging; the click of typing;
alarms that sound like analog clocks or
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ers: the clatter of files being “tossed”
into the trash or recycle bin (and of be-
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ing “emptied”), email alerts, start-up
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and shutdown chimes.
We are now so sufficiently habituated
to these sound effects that their pres-
ence in TV shows and movies is no long-
The actor Nico Santos filming GIFs at Giphy Studios in downtown Los Angeles. The company emphasizes the creation of original content for the brief video clips.
Above left, the office space at Giphy Studios; right, Samantha Scharff and Brad Zeff, of Giphy Studios and its parent company.
Giphy, which was founded in 2013 and
has raised about $150 million from ven-
ture capitalists, is still “pre-revenue,” to
use start-up parlance. “We don’t want to
turn revenue on in earnest prema-
turely,” Mr. Zeff said.
Part of its strategy is to make this Los
Angeles studio a hub for actors, musi-
cians and social-media influencers on
promotional tours, where they will film
reaction shots based on terms that Gi-
phy users often plug into search boxes.
The dissemination, it is hoped, will make
them “GIF-amous.”
“I really want it to be a stop on a press
tour,” said Samantha Scharff, Giphy Stu-
dios’ chief executive, offering a tour of
the space. “You go to ‘Kimmel.’ You go to
Giphy.” There is a miniature golf course
that winds through the office and most
of the conference and meeting tables
double as Ping-Pong tables, as is de ri-
gueur at start-ups. Pillows on couches
er a novelty; it is stranger to hear a land-
line ring in a contemporary show than to
hear the default iPhone marimba beat.
Mobile games may be where sounds
have changed most over the last decade.
Phones have a small dynamic range,
meaning the difference between the
softest and loudest portions is limited
compared with, say, a high-quality mov-
ie theater sound system.
“Everything is loud for games,” said
Jean-Luc Cohen-Sinclair, an assistant
professor of electronic production and
design at the Berklee College of Music
and New York University who has
worked on games’ sound designs.
“They’re designed to have ‘transient-
rich’ sounds that have a ‘snappy attack’
— a quick, percussive buildup of energy,
like someone snapping their fingers, as
opposed to a fading note on a violin.”
Why can you so often overhear other
people’s games? Prof. Cohen-Sinclair
said that designers accentuate the
midrange sound frequency, which trans-
lates best to earbuds and small speak-
ers, and to which humans are most sen-
sitive. Because mobile games often
compete with external noise, they also
contain louder sounds that often carry
beyond the player’s earbuds.
Constant earbud and headphone use
and high-decibel public venues have led
to hearing loss (the World Health Orga-
nization estimates that over one billion
teenagers and young adults are at risk),
forcing listeners to crank up the volume
even more. And, of course, there is the
occasional altruist who eschews ear-
buds altogether and generously allows
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are stitched with “LMAO” and “OMG.”
There are a few different filming rooms,
including one with a brick wall that the
staff thinks of as its “New York stage.”
This December day at Giphy Studios
was an unusually busy one, with Gwen
Stefani stopping by at the last minute to
film holiday-themed GIFs, and three
other scheduled shoots: with Mr. San-
tos, a band called Portugal. The Man,
and the actress Amber Stevens West.
Against another green screen, Ms.
West filmed tarot-card-theme GIFs, un-
der the direction of Ms. Millar-Blan-
chaer and Michael Bruno, an associate
producer and director at Giphy Studios.
Best known for her role in the 2014 film
“22 Jump Street,” Ms. West stood behind
a white rectangular cutout that was sus-
pended from a rod. She wore a blue cape
and then a white robe over her jeans and
T-shirt. This was the first time Giphy
had used a costume for a shoot.
others to share in the melodious sounds
of his game, music or video.
We tend to think of visual stimuli as
the dominant forces of distraction in
modern culture, but sounds too make
bids on our attention in the raucous mar-
ketplace of noise. Moreover, we have
been conditioned physiologically to re-
spond to these auditory cues with dopa-
mine spikes, especially when the alert is
for the reward-based feedback of social
media validation. It’s hard to be nonre-
active to the sound of an incoming text
or new Twitter follower.
Something similar was certainly at
play with the ringing landline of yester-
“How about a ‘You are awesome’?”
Ms. Millar-Blanchaer said. Then, “Let’s
do a ‘You Got This!’”
Ms. West posed gamely and emoted
as directed.
“It’s kind of like an acting exercise,”
she said.
For nonactors, preening in front of a
camera with directors calling out emo-
tions to convey merely with facial ex-
pressions and gestures can be cringe in-
ducing.
This was the case with Portugal. The
Man, who are originally from Wasilla,
Alaska, and who won a 2018 Grammy for
best pop duo/group performance for
“Feel It Still.” They arrived at Giphy Stu-
dios toward the end of the day and sat
down with the production staff to get or-
ganized.
The idea was to make GIFs connect-
ing to “internet holidays,” which tend to
be popular among Giphy users — in this
GARY HALLGREN
year, but phone calls come at a far
slower pace, take more time and rarely
involve the caller (let alone hundreds of
them) affirming how much they “like”
you.
Digital brands have developed im-
printing strategies that pander to our
shorter sonic attention spans. Televi-
sion and film networks and production
companies have always had audio sig-
natures so long as there have been so-
called talkies; think of the fanfare ac-
companying the iconic 20th Century
Fox logo, the growling lion of MGM, the
three-tone chime of NBC.
Contrast those with the popular net-
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2018 | 9
PHOTOGRAPHS BY EMILY BERL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
case National Doughnut Day, Pizza Day,
Beer Day, Video Game Day/Gaming
Day and Earth Day.
Mr. Bruno asked if anyone would ob-
ject to these. “We have no reservations
or moral compass whatsoever,” one of
the bandmates said. “We’ll do any-
thing.” That was before they knew
they’d be asked to juggle doughnuts.
In the studio, each of the four musi-
cians took his turn and was a good sport,
hamming it up for the camera as
producers shouted hashtags.
Zach Carothers, the bassist, went
first, and seemed relieved when he was
done posing with doughnuts placed over
each finger like rings. He sat down in the
back of the studio and shrugged. “Our
record label is always looking for inter-
esting ways to shovel us into all sorts of
crap,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve
heard, but these GIF things are pretty
popular on the interwebs.”
works of the cable and streaming age.
HBO has long begun its shows with a
television zapping onto a static field that
resolves into an ethereal hum. Netflix
has a four-second double timpani strike
followed by a wash of strings. Amazon
Originals offerings start with a whoosh-
ing, revolving sound and conclude with
a series of vibrant chimes. The new 21st
Century Fox logo forgoes the orchestral
arrangement and ends in a series of
R2D2-like bleeps.
Whereas the old guard privileged
pleasing musicality or organic sounds
and tried to create distinctive signa-
tures that somehow represented their
brand, the new wave seems primarily
concerned with securing the viewer’s at-
tention immediately, at a minimum of
time, through jarring, synthesized
noises that are ultimately interchange-
able with those of other companies.
“It’s a ruthlessly corporate way of try-
ing to coerce the attention of the viewer,”
said Paul Grimstad, a writer and com-
poser in New York who has scored a
number of films. “The scale of attention
asked of the viewer for a Netflix episode
is comparably smaller than the grand
cinematic experience the 20th Century
Fox orchestral fanfare sets you up for.”
Many digital sound effects, such as
the camera shutter, can be classified as
“skeuomorphs,” or imitation objects
that unnecessarily use ornamental de-
sign features of the originals (such as
fake stitching on pleather seats). Their
ubiquity suggests a postmodern aural
backdrop in which the artificial is in-
creasingly replacing the real. For people
Q+a
Google
Assistant
My Android tablet recently got the
Google Assistant update, but I find I
miss pressing the Home button to get
the little box that used to pop up with
the search icons for more information
about people and places on the
Chrome page I was reading. Now I
just get the Google Assistant asking
if I want help. Is there a way to get
the old feature back?
The Google Now on Tap feature was
designed to save time by quickly get-
ting you more information about a
topic already on your screen — like the
name of an actor in a movie review or
details about a restaurant mentioned
in an email. Pressing the Home button
brought up a box of icons for search
locales like Google Search, Google
Maps and YouTube.
Even if you have downloaded and
installed the Google Assistant on your
tablet or Android phone, you can still
get a version of the screen search
shortcut with the Google Assistant.
When you press and hold the Home
button on a Chrome page (or other text
screen) and the Google Assistant panel
pops up with its “How can I help?”
offer, tap the “What’s on my screen?”
button.
If you want to capture an image of
the screen you were originally viewing,
tap the “Share screenshot” under the
Assistant’s greeting instead.
If you are not seeing any search
options, make sure Google Assistant
has permission to scan the page for
searchable content. Press and hold the
home button to summon the Assistant
and tap the blue-and-white icon on the
right side of the screen. On the next
screen, tap the three-dot More menu in
the upper-right corner, select Settings
and then Tablet (or Phone), and scroll
down to the General area. Make sure
“Use screen context” is enabled.
Sampling
Twitter
I do not have a smartphone. Can I
still use Twitter? Do I need an ac-
count?
You do not need a touch-screen mobile
gadget or even an account to sample
the free service.
With or without an account, it is
possible to write posts and follow other
Twitter users over S.M.S. text on a
feature phone that has texting capabili-
ty and a data plan. Twitter has a set of
S.M.S. commands that let you perform
basic actions, like following or unfol-
lowing another Twitter user.
You can also browse posts from
users with public accounts on the
Twitter.com site, as long as you know
the name of the account or accounts
you want to read. Once you know the
account name, just add it (after a
slash) and the end of the twitter.com
address to go to that user’s page of
tweets on the web. And you can use
Twitter’s search page to look for ac-
count names or topic keywords.
If you want to post and experience
Twitter without having to fiddle with
S.M.S. codes or manually search for
content — but are not quite up to being
a public presence in the Twitterverse
— you can also create a protected
account instead of a public one.
With a protected account, you can
follow other users with public accounts
and add their posts to your feed. But if
people want to follow and interact with
you, they must send you a request
first. J. D. BIERSDORFER
who grew up hearing only the real
sounds, the new distinctions are most
likely clearer.
“Someone who’s 80 and someone
who’s 12 are going to have different re-
sponses to a sound,” said Will Mason, a
visiting professor of music theory at
Oberlin. But the 12-year-old isn’t neces-
sarily at a disadvantage, he said: “We
want to privilege the real sounds over
the synthesized ones, and we want to
think a shift to a landscape character-
ized by these ‘artificial sounds’ is a dys-
topian element. But I wonder why it is
that we want to call it dystopian. There
seems to be some knee-jerk, intuitive
way in which that’s the default stance
and in which the real is preferable.”
One reason, aside from our longstand-
ing skepticism over synthetic imita-
tions, may be the preponderance of ma-
levolent or duplicitous artificial intelli-
gence voices in science fiction, from
HAL 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey” to
Samantha in the 2013 film “Her.” Most of
us now have our own HALs and Saman-
thas in the form of Siri and other virtual
phone assistants, which, though rudi-
mentary at this point, should eventually
approach the fluency of their fictional
forebears. Their speech-simulation abil-
ities, along with their mobility, are help-
ing acculturate us to a future in which
public spaces are flooded with digitized
and recorded voices on top of all the
dings and chimes to which we have
grown accustomed.
Teddy Wayne is the author of three nov-
els, most recently “Loner.”

10 | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2018
Sports
Russian doping case rocks an unlikely sport
GANGNEUNG, SOUTH KOREA
Urine test finds traces
of a banned substance in
a curling bronze medalist
BY SCOTT CACCIOLA
Victoria Moiseeva, in a high-stakes
match, found it impossible to push a
brewing scandal out of her mind Mon-
day at Gangneung Curling Centre. It
was the first time in her life that she
could not fully focus while competing.
“This is simply terrifying to think
about,” she said.
Moiseeva, the skip, or head curler, of
the Russian women’s team was refer-
ring to the possible effects of a failed
doping test by a fellow Russian curler
here at the 2018 Winter Olympics.
She and some other Russian athletes
fretted that the damage from this single
case could be widespread.
North Koreans get
a peek at the world
NORTH KOREA, FROM PAGE 1
fected in 1991 during a world judo cham-
pionship in Spain.
Some analysts theorize that exposure
to the outside world could eventually
drive change back home.
“It might be better to think that an in-
formation inflow will slowly alter the
preferences of North Koreans by inev-
itably poking holes in the ideology,” said
Robert E. Kelly, a professor of political
science at Pusan National University in
South Korea. “Over time, this should
change the regime and make it easier to
deal. That’s the hope anyway.”
Some American officials espouse a
version of this view. “Our sense is the
more North Koreans that come here and
can see how successful the South has
been, the better,” Marc Knapper, the
deputy chief of mission at the United
States Embassy in the South Korean
capital of Seoul, said during a news con-
ference before the Games.
“Maybe they’ll discover what good
things accrue when they decide to rejoin
the international community and make
the right decisions,” Mr. Knapper added.
Yet even North Korea watchers who
support greater athletic and cultural ex-
changes say none of it will slow down
the country’s nuclear ambitions.
“Of course they will proceed with
their nuclear program,” said Andrei
Lankov, a North Korea expert at Kook-
min University in Seoul. “Nothing can
be done, short of a military invasion, to
reverse it. The best we can hope for is to
achieve some kind of freeze.”
Any North Korean who might try to
steer the government in a new direction
risks severe punishment. Dissidents are
thrown into prison camps, and Kim
Jong-un has had hundreds of people
killed, including his own uncle, and, it is
widely believed, his half brother.
Critics say countries hosting North
Koreans become susceptible to propa-
ganda designed to soften the North’s im-
age. They point to the regime’s charm
offensive at the Olympics, including a
visit by Kim Yo-jong, Kim Jong-un’s sis-
ter.
Those who promote more engage-
ment with the North say change will be
evolutionary, not revolutionary. “North
Koreans, including North Korean offi-
cials, will see they are lagging very be-
hind the world,” Mr. Lankov said. “Some
of them will say, ‘Let’s overthrow the
government,’ but many more will say,
‘Let’s change our policy a bit.’ ”
It is not even clear how much the
North’s athletes and supporters have
seen or heard while at the Games. The
dozen female players on the joint
hockey team sleep in separate dorms
and ride a separate bus from their South
Korean teammates.
The North Korean cheerleaders and
journalists are staying in a remote re-
sort in Inje County, at least a 90-minute
drive from many of the Olympic venues.
The cheerleaders are not even al-
lowed to slip to the bathroom on their
own, and minders from the North Kore-
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Ryom Tae-ok, in air, and Kim Ju-sik are among the North Korean athletes at the Games.
“It will simply upend sports in our
country,” she said. “This is simply terri-
fying to think about.”
The athlete, Alexander Krushelnyt-
sky, is the first from Russia to come un-
der investigation at these Games for us-
ing a banned substance, jeopardizing
the bronze medal he won last week in
the mixed doubles competition with his
wife. It also complicates Russia’s effort
to rehabilitate its image after a vast
state-backed cheating scheme at the
2014 Sochi Games it hosted left it nomi-
nally barred as a team from this year’s
Games. The International Olympic
Committee had been considering allow-
ing Russia to march under its own flag at
the closing ceremony Sunday. But sev-
eral members now privately suggest
that allowing that would risk appearing
to appease Russia.
Krushelnytsky stands out because he
does not ski, skate or soar off banks of
halfpipes — athletic pursuits here that
are among the most physically demand-
ing. No, he curls, sweeping a broom to
guide a granite rock across a sheet of ice.
an delegation, as well as South Korean
police officers, are constantly monitor-
ing them, the athletes and performers.
“Leaving North Korea is even harder
than leaving the mafia,” said Sue Mi
Terry, Korea chairwoman at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies
in Washington. Would-be defectors
“know their entire family, extended rela-
tives, friends will get executed or
rounded up and sent to labor camps” she
said.
What’s more, she said, the athletes
and cheerleaders at the Olympics are
“carefully handpicked and vetted North
Koreans, children of the elite ruling
class” who have decent living stand-
ards. “Why risk bringing serious harm
to your loved ones when you are living a
pretty good life?” Ms. Terry said.
Analysts say it is also presumptuous
to assume any North Korean who goes
abroad would immediately want to
move.
“If you use the analogy of someone
coming from the Midwest or a small
town and you go to New York for a week-
end, and there’s all of a sudden all of this
stuff — a lot of people that I know from
quieter cities tend to get very over-
whelmed,” said Jenny Town, assistant
director of the US-Korea Institute at the
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced In-
ternational Studies.
Defectors say those who have been
abroad are likely to receive some kind of
ideological “re-education” session upon
returning home.
Still, some experts say exposure to
the outside world may ultimately under-
mine the regime’s efforts to keep citi-
zens in line.
Ideological education “can’t take
away people’s thoughts after they expe-
rience what it’s like in a democratic soci-
ety,” said Kang Dong-wan, professor of
North Korean culture and politics at
Dong-A University in Busan, South Ko-
rea. “Wouldn’t the cheerleaders and the
athletes wonder why they are being con-
trolled while other South Koreans in the
crowd sitting right next to them are
cheering naturally and moving about
freely?”
The North’s athletes at the Olympics
have said little in public, but have gener-
ally conveyed their loyalty to their na-
tion.
Some spectators riveted by the
North’s synchronized cheerleaders ac-
knowledged it was likely some actually
wanted to go back.
“Many South Koreans worked abroad
after the Korean War, when things were
tough for South Korea,” said Kim Myo-
jong, 34, an orthopedic surgeon in the
stands for the pairs skating short pro-
gram. “But instead of staying abroad be-
cause it was easier to make money
there, they decided to return to help
South Korea’s development. Maybe the
North Korean elites who have outside
exposure might feel the same.”
Su-hyun Lee contributed reporting from
Gangneung and Seoul, South Korea.
CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES
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On rare occasions, there have been
doping violations in curling, since it is a
taxing feat of endurance to sweep the
broom round after round. The sport,
however, is not accustomed to being at
the center of such a high-profile case, so
the news sowed confusion and puzzle-
ment among some of the curlers here.
“I was a bit shocked this morning,”
said Madeleine Dupont, the skip of the
Danish women’s team. “I was like, ‘That
cannot be true.’ But then again, people
have been taking all sorts of stuff: natu-
ral medicine or lip balm or I don’t know
what. So I wouldn’t really judge anyone
until I knew it was on purpose.”
Asked if she thought the sport’s repu-
tation could be harmed, said: “I think
most people will laugh and be like,
‘What would you possibly need doping
for?’ ”
Krushelnytsky, in a routine urine
check, was found to have traces of mel-
donium in his system. Use of the drug, a
heart medicine that increases blood flow
and has been banned from most sports
since 2016, has ensnared other Russian
Thomas Ulsrud, a 46-year-old Norwegian curler, makes it a point to outperform his younger teammates in their various conditioning tests.
Curling’s (sculpted) arms race
GANGNEUNG, SOUTH KOREA
Competitors get buff
in a sport not known
for in-shape athletes
BY SCOTT CACCIOLA
Thomas Ulsrud lifts weights, hammers
through squats and hangs upside down
from metal bars, molding his abdominal
muscles with a sadistic series of
crunches. His torso has more ridges
than a fjord.
“I guess I was blessed a little from na-
ture’s side,” Ulsrud said, “but I do like to
work out.”
None of this would be all that unusual
except that Ulsrud is a 46-year-old curl-
er.
Obliterating the sport’s tired reputa-
tion as ground zero for paunchy, beer-
swilling weekend warriors, curlers like
Ulsrud, who is back at the Olympics for
the third time with Norway, are repre-
sentative of a growing emphasis on fit-
ness — for men and women alike. They
bench press, bang out bicep curls and
lay off the sauce.
Some, like Ulsrud and Marc Kennedy,
a Canadian Olympian, have gone so far
as to showcase their physiques in racy
promotional calendars for the sport.
“It kind of goes to show you just how
far curling has come,” said Kennedy, 36,
who posed shirtless while doing yoga
with two curling stones for the cover of
the 2018 Men of Curling Calendar.
Brian McWilliams, the head trainer
for U.S.A. Curling, said that when he
joined the organization in 2006, he dis-
covered that he was responsible for con-
ditioning players who were still smok-
ing cigarettes during fifth-end breaks,
which is the equivalent of halftime.
“I was like, ‘What did I just get myself
into?’ ” McWilliams said.
But curling, the sport that involves us-
ing brooms to direct a heavy granite
rock down a sheet of ice, has joined the
CrossFit age. Phill Drobnick, the coach
of the American men, said he thought
that this was the first Olympics in which
athletes in doping cases in recent years.
Neither Krushelnytsky, who has left
the athletes’ village for Seoul, the South
Korean capital, to await results of the fi-
nal test, nor his wife, Anastasia Bryz-
galova, are competing in team events.
Sergei Belanov, the coach of the Rus-
sian women’s team, voiced public sup-
port for Krushelnytsky.
“I don’t believe that a young man, a
clever man, will use the same doping
that was so big the last two years,” Be-
lanov said. “It’s stupid. But Alexander is
not stupid. So sorry, I don’t believe it.”
The drug is thought to enhance endur-
ance and would possibly play a role in
curling by increasing the stamina of ath-
letes, who must be accurate with their
shots, sometimes down to the centime-
ter. Hard sweeping can take a toll over
the course of a long match. As a result,
more curlers than ever, especially at the
Olympic level, are training with weights
and focusing on fitness to improve their
endurance and precision.
“It’s like any sport: You need
strength,” Nina Roth said after leading
The fitness craze in curling has taken hold of both men and women.
every team in the field had bought into a
fitness program in the run-up to the
Games.
“In the past, if you were a good shot
maker, you could be pretty good and still
be successful,” said Aileen Geving, who
plays for the United States women’s
team. “But the game has gotten so pre-
cise: The ice is better, and the players
have gotten better. Any bit of edge is go-
ing to make a difference. So if fitness is
that difference, you’re going to work for
it.”
Joanne Courtney, 28, who is compet-
ing for Canada and has a reputation as
one of the strongest sweepers in the
world, has worked with a trainer in Ed-
monton to add muscle mass to her upper
body. The more weight she has over the
broom, she said, the more downward
pressure she can apply to the ice.
She also does interval training — on
treadmills and rowing machines — to
hone her anaerobic fitness and her ex-
plosiveness. She does the bulk of her
training in the summer.
“That’s where I try to build as much
muscle as I possibly can,” she said.
Sweeping is important because it
heats the ice while creating micro-
scratches on the surface, and this helps
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
the United States women’s team to a
narrow win against Denmark. “But you
have to do it on your own merit.”
Brent Laing of the Canadian men’s
team said he had no idea how meldo-
nium would enhance performance.
“Outside of beer and Advil, that’s the
only painkillers I’ve ever heard of for
curling,” Laing said. “I imagine it wasn’t
that. Hopefully not, or else I’d be in trou-
ble.”
Russia was barred from the Olympics
in December after an investigation into
a state-backed doping program. The In-
ternational Olympic Committee, howev-
er, later cleared more than 160 Russian
athletes to compete in South Korea as
Olympic Athletes From Russia under
the Olympic banner.
Moiseeva, whose team lost to Switzer-
land on Monday morning, said she
thought about reaching out to Krushel-
nytsky and Bryzgalova but decided
against it. She would not have known
what to say to them, she said.
“It is simply impossible to believe,”
Moiseeva said in Russian, adding: “We
“Any bit of edge is going to make
a difference. So if fitness is that
difference, you’re going to work
for it.”
players control for distance and trajec-
tory as the rock travels down the sheet.
As for Ulsrud, he said he began to fo-
cus on weight training in his mid-30s as
a way of sustaining his career. He guided
the Norwegians to the silver medal at
the 2010 Winter Olympics and to a world
championship in 2014. Ulsrud now
makes it a point, he said, to outperform
his younger teammates in their various
conditioning tests.
The sport clearly has changed.
“It used to be older people, drinking
beer all night,” Ulsrud said. “And those
were the best players! You’d meet them
at the bar.”
About that calendar: It features elite
curlers in various states of undress, in-
cluding Ulsrud, who posed in his under-
wear with his teammates for the month
of December.
The photo shoot was on the second
floor of a busy restaurant in Oslo. The
lunchtime crowd was riveted.
..
delighted in the results and in the suc-
cess of the pair. It’s impossible to believe
that someone could do such a thing and
sleep calmly at night and ruin not just
the life of one person but those of a large
number of people.”
She went on, “We always said it was
so great to be involved in a sport where
you wouldn’t have such scandals be-
cause this is simply not necessary. You
don’t need to be faster, higher and
stronger. You need to be more accurate,
not necessarily stronger. I can’t even un-
derstand what medication would be nec-
essary and what you could use it for in
curling. For that reason, it’s very hard to
believe.”
That this was playing out at the curl-
ing venue contrasted with a sport
known for exacting standards when it
comes to courteous behavior and a
sense of fair play. Curling also has a long
tradition of opponents meeting for beers
after a good, clean tournament.
Tariq Panja and James Hill contributed
reporting.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY IAN WILLMS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
The calendar is the work of George
Karrys, the owner and publisher of The
Curling News, an industry bible based in
Toronto. Karrys said he had nearly sold
out of the 10,000 copies he had printed,
with the net proceeds going to charities.
This is the second edition. Bowing to
public demand after he published sev-
eral calendars featuring female curlers,
Karrys came out with the first Men of
Curling Calendar in 2014. (Ulsrud was in
that one, too.)
“It was pretty explosive,” said Karrys,
a former Olympic curler for Canada.
Karrys lets the curlers follow through
on their own artistic visions. For the lat-
est calendar, Ulsrud and his three team-
mates chose a holiday dinner tableau,
with Havard Vad Petersson posing like a
roasted pig with an apple in his mouth.
“He drew the short straw,” Ulsrud
said.
The target audience is no secret.
“You get a lot of the older ladies up in
Alberta or Saskatchewan who are just
going to buy those things up,” said John
Landsteiner, a member of the United
States men’s team.
Neither Landsteiner nor any of his
American teammates are featured in
the calendar — “We’re not exactly the
beefcakes,” said John Shuster, a four-
time Olympian and the team’s leader —
but they were no less focused on making
gains (or losses, as the case may be) in
the weight room ahead of the Games.
After Shuster labored to a last-place
finish alongside his teammates at the
2014 Winter Olympics, he made big
changes. He worked on his conditioning,
refined his diet and dropped about 35
pounds. As a result, he said, he has more
energy, no longer feels jet lag after long
flights and can power through tourna-
ments.
Known as the skip, Shuster orches-
trates the game plan and throws the
most important shots, leaving most of
the sweeping duties to his teammates.
But at the American mixed doubles tri-
als in December, Schuster had to sweep
— and sweep a lot, grinding through 10
matches over five days with his partner,
Cory Christensen.
“I couldn’t have done that four years
ago,” Shuster said.
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12 | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2018
Business
First, office space. Then the world.
The ambitious founders
of WeWork want to
transform the way we live
BY DAVID GELLES
On a cold February morning at the
Brooklyn Navy Yard, the skeleton of a
modern 15-story building was rising in
New York City from a muddy construc-
tion site along the East River. As long
and as tall as a cruise ship, the sleek
glass structure loomed above rusty, cen-
tury-old dry docks, serving notice to the
industrial neighborhood that the new
economy was coming.
The project, known as Dock 72, is the
brainchild of WeWork, the fast-growing
New York start-up valued at a whopping
$20 billion. In just eight years, WeWork
has built a network of 212 shared work-
ing spaces around the globe. But We-
Work’s chief executive and co-founder,
Adam Neumann, isn’t content to just
lease out communal offices. Mr. Neu-
mann — a lanky, longhaired 38-year-old
Israeli — wants nothing less than to rad-
ically transform the way we work, live
and play.
When Dock 72 is completed this year,
if the aggressive timeline holds, it will
represent the fullest expression of Mr.
Neumann’s expansive vision to date.
There will be an enormous co-working
space, a luxury spa and large offices, for
other companies like IBM and Verizon,
that are designed and run by WeWork.
There will be a juice bar, a real bar, a gym
with a boxing studio, an outdoor basket-
ball court and panoramic vistas of Man-
hattan. There will be restaurants and
maybe even dry cleaning services and a
barbershop.
It will be the kind of place you never
have to leave until you need to go to
sleep — and if Mr. Neumann has his way,
you’ll sleep at one of the apartments he
is renting nearby.
It’s an all-encompassing sort of ambi-
tion, and Mr. Neumann is the brash and
idealistic pitchman. Simply by encour-
aging strangers to share a beer at the of-
fice, he argues, WeWork can heal our
fractured society.
“How do you change the world?” Mr.
Neumann asked in a recent interview.
“Bring people together. Where is the
easiest big place to bring people togeth-
er? In the work environment.”
It may sound simplistic, but around
the globe, companies are buying what-
ever it is that Mr. Neumann and his co-
founder, Miguel McKelvey, are selling.
WeWork has rapidly expanded to 20
countries, assembled a formidable exec-
utive team and attracted some 200,000
members. Big companies like JPMor-
gan Chase and Siemens are signing on
as tenants, and revenues are growing
fast, expected to top $2.3 billion this
year.
WeWork last year bought the iconic
Lord & Taylor building on Fifth Avenue
in Manhattan, which is being trans-
formed into the company’s new head-
quarters. That deal was made possible
in part by a recent $4.4 billion invest-
ment from SoftBank, the Japanese tech-
nology group led by the enigmatic bil-
lionaire Masayoshi Son.
The company has already started We-
Live, its residential offering, and Rise,
its gym. It acquired Meetup, the social
network that facilitates in-person gath-
erings, and the Flatiron School, a coding
academy. Still to come: WeGrow, the
company’s for-profit elementary school,
set to open in September. WeWork has
even invested in plans to create giant
wave pools for inland surfing.
A company ostensibly about co-work-
ing now employs yoga instructors, ar-
chitects, teachers, environmental scien-
tists, software engineers, molecular bi-
ologists and social psychologists.
Is it all a bit much for a young com-
pany still trying to build out its core
business? “I’ve made that argument,”
said Bruce Dunlevie, a WeWork board
member and partner at the venture cap-
ital firm Benchmark. But, he said, “great
Google Chrome taming ads and tightening grip on the web
BY JOHN HERRMAN
As advertising has become more intru-
sive in recent years, hundreds of mil-
lions of web users have installed ad-
blocking software to ward off full-page
pop-ups, blaring video pitches that start
automatically and large ads with un-
stoppable countdown clocks that ob-
scure the content you actually want to
see.
Last week, Google did something
about the problem: The company updat-
ed its browser, Google Chrome, so that it
bans such ads by default on mobile de-
vices and desktop computers.
The change will probably improve the
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The update to Chrome, first an-
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nounced last year, is not a universal ad-
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blocker, the company insisted, but a fil-
ter. It will affect only those websites that
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allow four types of desktop ads and
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eight types of mobile ads that violate the
standards established by a group called
the Coalition for Better Ads, of which
Google is a member (as is Facebook).
A bar inside the WeLive complex at 110 Wall St. in New York City. Tenants get various perks such as hot tubs on the terrace and arcade games and a pool table in the laundry room.
entrepreneurs like Adam don’t listen to
guys like me.”
As WeWork expands in all directions,
it faces persistent questions about its
rich valuation and the durability of its
business model. Critics argue that the
company does little more than corpo-
rate real estate arbitrage — leasing a
space, spiffing it up, then subleasing it
out to other tenants. The company owns
hardly any properties, giving it precious
few hard assets. Its growth projections
strike many as unattainable, and it has
missed expectations before. A number
of upstarts loom as potential competi-
tors, seeking to replicate WeWork’s suc-
cess. And many WeWork tenants are un-
proven start-ups that could quickly fold.
IWG, a publicly traded co-working
company that has more members and
more real estate than WeWork, is valued
at just $2 billion. Yet Mr. Neumann has
convinced investors that WeWork is
worth 10 times that figure.
“Adam’s explanation for the valuation
of WeWork speaks for itself,” said Chris
Kelly, co-founder and president of Con-
vene, a company that offers flexible
event spaces and is backed by major
real estate firms. “This is not an Excel
spreadsheet calculation. He believes
there’s an energy behind the brand, and
he’s gotten people to invest at that valu-
ation. He has not tried to explain it in tra-
ditional financial terms.”
Indeed, to assess WeWork by conven-
tional metrics is to miss the point, ac-
cording to Mr. Neumann. WeWork isn’t
really a real estate company. It’s a state
of consciousness, he argues, a genera-
tion of interconnected emotionally intel-
ligent entrepreneurs. And Mr. Neu-
mann, with his combination of inspira-
tion and chutzpah, wants to transform
not just the way we work and live, but
the very world we live in.
It’s an audacious, perhaps delusional
plan for a company that made its mark
by building communal desks and pro-
viding refreshments. And so far, it
seems to be working.
Mr. Son, WeWork’s largest investor, is
betting that the company will grow ex-
ponentially in the years to come, making
“By focusing on filtering out disrup-
tive ad experiences, we can help keep
the entire ecosystem of the web healthy,
and give people a significantly better
user experience than they have today,”
Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, a Google vice
president, wrote in a blog post on Feb.
13. “We believe these changes will not
only make Chrome better for you, but
also improve the web for everyone.”
For the most part, the update has
been embraced by the industry. After
all, it seems like a win for publishers,
quality advertisers and users alike.
But Google did not become the cre-
ator of the world’s most popular browser
and a dominant advertising force by
running its business in a manner that
did not serve its own interests.
With the Chrome update, the com-
pany hopes to come out ahead by less-
ening the temptation of web users to in-
stall more comprehensive ad-blocking
software. In other words, Google is bet-
ting that ridding the web of especially
intrusive ads will render it more hospi-
table to advertising in general — and
more profitable for advertisers and
Google itself.
РЕЛИЗ ГРУППЫ "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
his multibillion-dollar investment a ver-
itable bargain.
“Make it 10 times bigger than your
original plan,” Mr. Son told Forbes late
last year. “If you think in that manner,
the valuation is cheap. It can be worth a
few hundred billion dollars.”
CLOSE COMMUNITIES
The notion that white-collar workers
might actually like their offices is a rela-
tively new one. From the counting-
houses of industrial England to the sky-
scrapers of 1980s Manhattan, offices
were mostly uninspiring places de-
signed to maximize space, often with
row upon row of unglamorous desks.
“The only kind of model that anyone
had for laying out a large workplace was
a factory,” said Nikil Saval, author of
“Cubed: A Secret History of the Work-
place.” “So the office was made to re-
semble an assembly line.”
PETER PRATO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Adam Neumann, a founder of WeWork,
says it is more “we” than “me.”
This dreary state of affairs began to
change in earnest, at least for some, dur-
ing the dot-com bubble. Tech companies
built playful offices with beanbags and
Ping-Pong tables, making work spaces
less formal. Free food became common-
place.
Raised expectations for amenities
and interior design gradually seeped
into the mainstream, and today, more
and more employees — especially mil-
lennials — expect enlightened, uncon-
ventional offices.
The new filter will be rolled out gradu-
ally to the browser’s hundreds of mil-
lions of users. Website operators had a
few months before the introduction to
become compliant; going forward,
those who violate the standards will be
given 30 days to get in line. If they don’t,
Google will demonstrate its leverage
not by simply removing offending ads
from a noncompliant site, but by dis-
abling all of its ads. Revenue to the of-
fending websites would presumably
plummet as a result.
Utilizing Chrome’s popularity in this
way is yet another example of Google’s
singular position in the modern web.
“Chrome literally exists to protect
Google’s advertising business,” said
Mark Mayo, a vice president at Mozilla,
the company behind the web browser
Firefox, a competitor to Chrome.
“Google has done a tremendous amount
of stuff — their products are web-based
— and probably most of it positive, but
what we’ve also seen, obviously, is a
tremendous centralization.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a
nonprofit digital rights organization, is-
sued a statement on Friday that said the
Enter WeWork. With people bouncing
between employers, jobs concentrated
in cities and technology making it easier
to work remotely, the demand for co-
working was suddenly real, and ready to
be monetized. Mr. Neumann, who grew
up on a kibbutz in Israel, had an epiph-
any: Bring the communal vibe to the of-
fice.
Soon he and a friend — Mr. McKelvey,
an equally tall Oregonian who grew up
on a collective and was working as an ar-
chitect — founded an eco-friendly co-
working space in Brooklyn. They sold it,
but they quickly turned around and
started WeWork in 2010.
“Me and Miguel have this common
ground,” Mr. Neumann said. “We both
grew up in very close communities.”
WeWork didn’t invent co-working
spaces, of course. IWG, better known as
Regus, has been around for decades.
But Mr. Neumann and Mr. McKelvey
COLE WILSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Miguel McKelvey, the other founder of
WeWork, says it has 200,000 members.
quickly hit upon a recipe that drew
throngs of start-ups: an industrial chic
aesthetic, some big common areas with
comfy couches, free beer and piped-in
pop music.
Individuals pay as little as $45 a
month for occasional access to a desk in
a common area. Start-ups can pay a few
thousand dollars for a private room on a
month-to-month basis, and some big
companies pay millions of dollars a year
for spaces that hold thousands of em-
ployees over multiple locations.
The update to Chrome,
introduced this month, is not a
universal ad-blocker, the
company insisted, but a filter.
Google Chrome update “fails to address
the larger problem of tracking and pri-
vacy violations” on the web. It also criti-
cized Google and the Coalition for Better
Ads, calling it a trade group that “lacks a
consumer voice.”
“Google exploiting its browser domi-
nance to shape the conditions of the ad-
vertising market raises some concerns,”
the foundation said.
It took some time for Adblock Plus,
which makes popular ad-blocking soft-
ware that can be installed on Google
Chrome, to figure out which types of ads,
exactly, Google would be filtering, ac-
cording to a company spokesman, Ben
Williams. Once Adblock Plus had a firm
idea, it determined that the update will
not risk losing the interest of the tens of
millions people who use its ad-blocking
software.
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
COLE WILSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
It’s a formula that has caught on from
New York to Tel Aviv to Shanghai. In
New York alone, WeWork has 49 spaces,
most of them nearly full. At the WeWork
in Harlem, dance companies share
space with hair care start-ups in a com-
mon area adorned with murals of jazz
musicians. At a WeWork in TriBeCa,
fashion designers and alcohol distribu-
tors work shoulder to shoulder in a spar-
tan space decorated with neon lighting.
For WeWork to really succeed in
changing the way we all work, it is going
to have to win over big corporations
seeking space for thousands of employ-
ees. The strategy is an odd reversal for
WeWork, which made its name catering
to freelancers and start-ups.
The Weather Channel recently moved
its ad sales team into an enormous We-
Work in Midtown Manhattan. Barbara
Bekkedahl, who runs the group, said the
transition was easy and the space com-
fortable and stylish.
But Ms. Bekkedahl had a complaint,
too, one that highlights one of the down-
sides of communal work space. She sug-
gested that the hygienic and sartorial
habits of some of her new office mates
were lacking.
“As a TV sales team, we groom and
dress for outside sales,” she said. “Some
of the techie and start-up types housed
at WeWork aren’t facing customers all
day, so don’t always have the same
standards.”
Gripes about grooming are unlikely to
slow down WeWork’s business with cor-
porate clients, especially if Mr. Neu-
mann makes good on his promise to
save them money. Because WeWork is
building out so much space and buying
so much furniture, Mr. Neumann says,
he can renovate and operate an office for
a fraction of the cost that companies
would normally spend.
“We have economies of scale,” he said.
“I’ll cut your operational costs between
20 to 50 percent.”
It might seem like another instance of
Mr. Neumann’s talking a big game but
for the fact that more and more compa-
nies — GE, HSBC, Salesforce and Micro-
soft among them — are signing on.
Chrome will not block ads that run be-
fore videos on sites like the Google-
owned YouTube, for example. Such ads,
which can be blocked by Adblock Plus,
lay outside the scope of the recommen-
dations made by the Coalition for Better
Ads.
“It’s laudable, what they’re doing, get-
ting rid of the worst of the worst for-
mats,” Mr. Williams said, “but I don’t
think it will cause people not to down-
load ad blockers or to uninstall them.”
Adblock Plus makes money, however,
by accepting payments from major com-
panies to “white-list” them — those who
pay, that is, do not get blocked. Among
those paying for the kind treatment:
Google.
Likewise, Mozilla, which is paid by
Google for traffic sent to its search en-
gine through Firefox, depends on the
company for much of its revenue.
Scott Spencer, a director of product
management at Google, said the com-
pany is sensitive to consumers’ growing
awareness of its power. “Google is not
neutral when it comes to the open web,”
he said. “We’re a search company, we
want to ensure that there is a healthy
..
For years now, big companies have
outsourced payroll processing, janitori-
al services and security. It’s not a stretch
to imagine more of them outsourcing the
design and maintenance of their offices
to a company like WeWork.
“We only have 200,000 members,” Mr.
McKelvey, 43, said. “That’s ridiculous.
We need to have two million and then 20
million.”
MORE ‘WE’ THAN ‘ME’
Bankers and lawyers poured out of sky-
scrapers and made for the suburbs on a
recent Monday night in Manhattan’s fi-
nancial district. But at 110 Wall Street, a
building controlled entirely by WeWork,
the party was just getting started.
Last year, this 1960s-era office tower
was converted into a mixed-use devel-
opment of Mr. Neumann’s design. There
is a co-working space. On the ground
floor are trendy restaurants including
Westville, Fuku, Momofuku Milk Bar
and a bar called the Mail Room.
And then there is a WeLive: a com-
plex of about 200 fully furnished apart-
ments rented out on a short-term basis.
Tenants get the signature WeWork aes-
thetic of unpolished wood and wrought
iron, as well as various perks. There are
hot tubs on the terrace. There are arcade
games and a pool table in the laundry
room. There are a chef’s kitchen and a
communal dining room. At a bar on a
residential floor, a happy hour was
brewing and free Tempranillo wine was
flowing.
In the communal dining area, three
brothers — Jordan, Jake and Jimmy De-
Cicco — were cooking for a half-dozen
social media influencers, hoping to stir
up enthusiasm for their protein-infused
iced coffee company. Over rib-eye
steaks and brussels sprouts, they talked
about promoting the brand and break-
ing into new markets, passing out beers
to anyone who walked by.
The brothers are all in: They live in
WeLive, work in the adjacent WeWork
space and exercise at WeWork’s nearby
gym, Rise.
“It’s awesome,” Jake DeCicco said.
“You just roll out of bed, go down the ele-
vator and get to work.”
Had Mr. Neumann been there to share
a beer, those words would have been
music to his ears. He believes that creat-
ing a work and living environment
where people mingle is in fact a world-
changing innovation. Each WeWork has
a “community manager” who keeps
tabs on members, makes introductions
and organizes social activities.
If more strangers are colliding by the
grapefruit water, the thinking goes, they
are more likely to meet up and invest in
one another’s socially responsible start-
ups, and then the world will be a better
place.
“Once you choose to enter a WeWork,
you choose to be part of something more
‘we’ than ‘me,’ ” Mr. Neumann said.
“People start coming together. They’ll
see each other in the elevator, they talk
in the stairways. There’s a thousand
other things they do.”
Elevators. Stairways. Hardly world-
changing innovations. But WeWork
takes extra steps to encourage fraterni-
zation. Like beer kegs that never run
dry.
More than most companies, WeWork
promotes the consumption of alcohol as
an inherent virtue. Posters on the wall
encourage people to have a drink. There
are wine tastings at WeLive. Company
parties feature top-shelf liquor. Mr. Neu-
mann has a well-known penchant for te-
quila, and a well-stocked bar is promi-
nent in his office.
On a recent Tuesday at 4:07 p.m., the
community manager of a WeWork in
Midtown Manhattan sent an email read-
ing: “It’s time to get your creative juices
flowing! Join us on the 5th floor to drink
some wine & paint a beautiful picture.”
Just after noon on Valentine’s Day, there
was an invitation to share wine and cake
in the common area.
Though alcohol is a social lubricant
for some, it can be off-putting to many
SHARED, PAGE 13
and sustainable web for people to be
searching and getting information from.
We’re also obviously an ad-serving com-
pany.”
He framed Chrome’s ad filter as the
latest in a series of positive innovations,
spanning back to the pop-up ad blocker
in its original incarnation a decade ago
and including more recent security pro-
tections against scams and malware.
Mr. Spencer compared the web to a
series of roads crowded by people trying
to get to work. “At some point someone
has the idea that we need to put in some
traffic lights,” Mr. Spencer said. “No-
body likes waiting for the light, but ev-
eryone appreciates not getting stuck in
traffic.”
Google is in a position to install and
operate the traffic lights — with outside
input, of course. It also raises questions
about what sort of actor Google is on the
web. Is it a government? A budding mo-
nopoly? A reluctant leader? All three?
“We don’t want to be doing this alone,”
Mr. Spencer said. “We understand the
concerns that exist, and we want to
make sure that other voices have a
channel and are being heard.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Eduardo Andrade, a 60-year-old truck driver, said his annual income increased $6,000 as a result of a driver shortage. The increase in drivers’ hourly wages is the highest since 2013.
Why everything costs more
The telltale indicators
of a growing economy
show up in rising inflation
BY MATT PHILLIPS
AND NATALIE KITROEFF
It’s the worrisome byproduct of a
healthy economy: inflation.
Just about every nation on earth is
now growing. Europe and Japan finally
pulled out of their doldrums. And the
United States economy, which continues
to chug along, could get some extra juice
from the tax cuts and other deficit-in-
creasing moves by the government.
To economists, executives and invest-
ors, there can be too much of a good
thing. The fear now is that inflation will
start to rise more quickly, potentially
crimping global growth or forcing bor-
rowing costs higher. That prospect
spooked the markets earlier this month,
briefly sending stocks down more than
10 percent before investors recovered
their nerve.
While still low, prices are starting to
rise, in what will amount to a major shift
if it persists. Higher prices for rents,
gasoline, medical care and food helped
drive prices up 2.1 percent in the 12
months that ended in January.
THE ROOT OF INFLATION
IS A STRONG ECONOMY
After the global financial crisis, the
world sank into one of the deepest reces-
sions since the Great Depression. And
for most of the last decade, it has been in
an economic funk, characterized by low
levels of growth and piddling price in-
creases.
To get their economies out of that rut,
central banks helped push interest rates
sharply lower. The goal was to bolster
investment and growth. And now it ap-
pears that the world economy is finally
starting to generate real momentum.
First, office space. Then the world.
SHARED, FROM PAGE 12
others. Many women have shared
stories of feeling uncomfortable with
what they described as a frat house cul-
ture at some WeWorks, prompting some
to leave.
As WeWork has grown, minor scan-
dals have rattled the company. In 2015,
the company grew ensnared in a compli-
cated legal dispute with a group of for-
mer janitors who tried to unionize at a
subcontractor that WeWork used. The
next year, WeWork drew scrutiny for its
use of arbitration to settle workplace
disputes and for its firing of an employee
who refused to adhere to a related pol-
icy.
But so far nothing — not alcohol, labor
disputes, questions about the business
fundamentals or bad publicity — has
managed to alter the company’s trajec-
tory.
SN ws" Ы
“We’re a disrupter of the way people
/W e П
view the spaces they work in on a day-
M N П
to-day basis,” said Mr. Dunlevie of
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Benchmark. “And we’re in the early
.C ha ГР
days of taking advantage of that phe-
VK "W ИЗ
nomenon.”
Л
TEACHING TYKES
РЕ
In September, WeWork will open its
most ambitious project to date: a kin-
dergarten. It may also be the effort that
tests whether WeWork is flying too close
The United States has been ahead of
the pack, having started its somewhat
sluggish recovery in the second quarter
of 2009.
Last year, the American economy
ended up growing at a better-than-ex-
pected 2.3 percent — and it is gathering
strength. The Federal Reserve Bank of
Atlanta estimates that the economy will
expand at 3.2 percent this quarter.
A GROWING ECONOMY
INCREASES DEMAND
As the economy gains momentum, com-
panies and business buy more. Metal
tubes. Industrial hose. Accounting and
legal services. Steel. Wireless internet.
Tires. Printer toner.
And amid the Amazonification of
American retail, cardboard boxes. Lots
of cardboard boxes.
“Clearly, demand is strong,” Thomas
A. Hassfurther, head of the corrugated
products division at the Packaging Cor-
poration of America, said on a confer-
ence call with analysts. “We’re in a
phase now where the box business is
tracking the G.D.P. a lot closer than it
had been,” he added, referring to the
country’s gross domestic product.
To make more boxes, his company
needs more of the material that goes
into them, like raw cardboard fiber and
chemicals. And it is paying higher prices
for both. “We’re competing with every-
body for that same shortage of labor and
equipment,” Mr. Hassfurther said.
TO GET RAW MATERIALS,
COMPANIES NEED TRUCKS
Trucks deliver the raw ingredients and
trucks deliver the final goods. But there
is a limited supply of trucks.
Basic economic theory then kicks in.
When demand goes up and supply holds
steady, prices should rise. Companies
that need things shipped are willing to
pay more to get them delivered.
Sure enough, so-called spot rates for
freight — the price for deliveries not
The dining room at the WeLive facility. The complex, which is in a building controlled
entirely by WeWork, has about 200 fully furnished apartments for short-term rental.
to the sun. The creation of Mr. Neu-
mann’s wife, Rebekah, 39, the school is
known as WeGrow. When it opens, it
promises a well-designed space with a
curriculum that emphasizes socializing
and entrepreneurship for 3-year-olds on
up.
WeGrow won’t scale as rapidly as We-
РЕЛИЗ ГРУППЫ "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
covered by longer-term contracts —
rose more than 20 percent last year.
Those rates aren’t likely to fall any-
time soon. While trucking companies
are ordering more vehicles for their
fleets, it will take time for those rigs to be
ready. And even when they are, an acute
shortage of drivers could limit the num-
ber of vehicles deployed.
“If you buy more trucks, the challenge
is finding enough drivers to put in those
trucks,” said Bob Costello, the chief
economist of the American Trucking As-
sociations.
A SHORTAGE OF TRUCKERS
MEANS WAGES WILL RISE
When trucking companies need more
employees, they simply offer more
money. In recent months, hourly wages
for truckers moved steadily higher. In
the fall, their annual growth rate ex-
ceeded 4 percent, the fastest pace seen
since late 2013.
When Eduardo Andrade looked at one
of his pay stubs in the fall, the trucker
thought his boss might have made a
mistake. His check from Baylor Truck-
ing, a family business based in rural In-
diana, showed that he was earning 52
cents per mile, up from the 48 cents he
had been making. He often drives for
three straight weeks, moving food and
garments from the East Coast to the
Midwest and then hauling insulation
materials back. The raise will fatten his
paycheck by $6,000 per year, if he main-
tains his regular mileage.
“This is the biggest increase I have
ever had with the company,” said Mr.
Andrade, who has driven for Baylor for
a decade. The 60-year-old has seven
grandchildren and plans to spend his ex-
tra cash to buy them more movie tickets,
clothes and pizza dinners.
SURGING TRANSPORT COSTS
EAT INTO PROFITS
Those higher wages have to be paid for
— and it’s usually trucking customers
COLE WILSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Work has, so the financial upside is lim-
ited. Yet should something go wrong,
the fallout could be devastating: It’s one
thing to be responsible for the internet
going out or paper running low at the
communal printer. It’s another thing to
take responsibility for the health and de-
velopment of someone’s child.
GEORGE ETHEREDGE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
that end up footing the bill.
For example, during the third quarter,
packaged food companies, which need
lots of trucks to ship their products, saw
their margins shrink by 0.8 percentage
points. They attributed the trend, in
part, to rising freight costs.
“All my companies are talking about
it,” said Robert B. Moskow, an analyst
who researches companies in the food
industry for Credit Suisse.
COMPANIES PASS ON
COSTS TO CONSUMERS
Corporations are in the business of ma-
king as much money as possible, and
they generally aren’t inclined to simply
accept thinner profit margins.
They have a couple of options. They
can try to reduce costs in other parts of
their businesses. Or they can try to
charge more for their products.
Tyson Foods, the giant meat and
chicken company, recently told analysts
that it planned to increase prices to off-
set rising freight costs. Tom Hayes,
Tyson’s chief executive, estimated that
rising freight prices would cost the com-
pany more than $200 million this year.
“Ultimately, the consumer is going to
pay for it at some point,” Mr. Hayes said.
Tyson would be able to offset $200 mil-
lion in freight costs by charging roughly
1 percent more for its products, accord-
ing to Mr. Moskow, the Credit Suisse an-
alyst. For a pound of boneless chicken
breast — an average price of about $3.07
— that would be a price increase of 3
cents.
By itself, a 3-cent price increase for a
pound of chicken isn’t significant. But
recent signs suggest that prices are edg-
ing higher for a range of products, like
oil and gasoline, clothing, car insurance
and medical care.
And if other industries follow suit, it
would mean that the United States —
and likely the world — is finally shifting
into a higher economic gear after over a
decade of sputtering.
Though Ms. Neumann has no back-
ground in education (on the website, she
describes herself as “an avid student of
life” and says her “superpower” is “intu-
ition”), she has applied for accreditation
from the state, has hired a team of ca-
reer educators and is accepting applica-
tions for the coming school year. Tuition
for toddlers: $36,000 a year.
“We all understand how complicated
and regulated school is compared to the
simpler business that we are already in,”
Mr. Neumann said. “But we decided
we’re going to go into education. If you
really want to change the world, change
kids when they’re 2.”
As he proselytized, Mr. Neumann was
sitting on an enormous leather couch in
his Chelsea office, which is bigger than
many New York City apartments. It in-
cluded a conference table, a video con-
ferencing setup, several desks, a bar,
spreads of food, a Peloton exercise bike,
a climbing machine, a boxing bag hang-
ing from the ceiling, a gong, an ante-
chamber where assistants work and a
private bathroom.
“It’s going to work,” Mr. Neumann
continued. “Is it going to be perfect?
Definitely not. Are we going to make
mistakes? A hundred percent. Are we
going to be comfortable admitting those
mistakes? Definitely. It’s what we do
here.”
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2018 | 13
Five tips
for a time
of volatility
Wealth Matters
PAU L S U L L I VA N
The stock market has been shaken by
turbulence in the last few weeks, some-
thing it hasn’t experienced in a few
years.
The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock
index plunged more than 10 percent
from Jan. 26 to Feb. 8, a sell-off that
pushed the market into a correction.
The S.&P. has since rebounded, regain-
ing much of the lost ground. That type
of volatility is a normal occurrence, but
theories abound to explain what
caused it.
Adam I. Taback, deputy chief invest-
ment officer for Wells Fargo Private
Bank, said the volatility was the result
of the economic expansion’s being in
the seventh or eighth inning of a base-
ball game.
“We may have extra innings in this
cycle,” he said. “But people are more
cognizant that the equity markets have
more risk in them. They’re happy that
their portfolios are diversified but
worried where they are in the eco-
nomic cycle.”
Some try to take a more historical
view. Jack Ablin, founding partner and
chief investment officer at Cresset
Wealth Advisors, said volatility typi-
cally arose for three reasons: a techni-
cal correction where stocks pause but
continue rising because company
fundamentals are sound; a correction
that reflects a change in the business
cycle; or a systemic correction, like the
1929 stock market crash or 2008 finan-
cial crisis.
“The one we experienced last week
was the mildest,” Mr. Ablin said. In
other words, just a technical correc-
tion.
Others think it was a return to the
normal function of a stock market:
Some days, investors sell more stock
than they buy.
“When the Dow drops 1,000 points,
that’s more a testament to the growth
of the Dow,” said Francis M. Kinniry,
head of portfolio construction at Van-
guard. “That’s still just a 4 percent
move, because the Dow is at 25,000.
Dropping 100 points on the S.&P. 500
doesn’t get people upset, but it’s the
same thing.”
Who is correct won’t be known for
months, or years, when market histori-
ans look back. That’s cold comfort for
investors who are worried now. A
report on Wednesday showed that
inflation pressures appeared to be
building, heightening the anxiety
among investors.
Don’t fret. Here are five tips from
professionals that could help ensure
that a volatile ride doesn’t derail your
financial planning.
Pick individual winners. With wild
swings in the markets, active invest-
ment managers — those who buy and
sell individual stocks instead of allocat-
ing money to an investment fund that
tracks an index — say their skills are
more in need now.
They argue that stocks are going to
begin to show differences and that
their skills at stock selection will keep
investors’ portfolios from being
dragged down with an entire index. In
other words, in a market where every-
thing isn’t going up, selecting the best
individual companies makes more
sense.
Francisco Bido, the head of quantita-
tive research and a portfolio manager
at Cognios Capital, said he had reduced
the number of stocks he invested in
after the recent volatility. The move
came out of conviction, not fear, he
said.
business
“A lot of those big passive vehicles
out there buy so many stocks because
they have a mandate to track an in-
dex,” he said. “I think it helps to be a
bit more concentrated. It allows invest-
ors to find a different avenue.”
His strategy is also an argument to
know what you own. That’s good ad-
vice in any market.
Consider bonds carefully. Years of
low interest rates have had the same
lulling effect on investors as the stead-
ily climbing stock market. But bonds,
which remained low for years, are now
returning a higher yield, adding pres-
sure to the shaky stock market.
But rising interest rates could eat
away returns for individual investors.
Driving this worry is a new chairman
of the Federal Reserve, Jerome H.
Powell, who took charge on Feb. 5, as
the stock market dipped.
An alternative to bonds for affluent
investors is private debt, which pro-
vides loans to small and medium-size
companies. The loans are generally
just a few years in duration and pay an
annual yield of about 10 percent.
Find alternative strategies. Alterna-
tive investments are the province of
investors who are willing to sacrifice
access to their money for higher re-
turns. But when markets were posting
double-digit gains, they became less
attractive.
Hedge funds, in particular, earned a
bad reputation for the high manage-
ment fees they charge on top of taking
a share of any profits. Some sophis-
ticated institutional managers, like the
California Public Employees’ Retire-
ment System, announced in 2014 that it
was getting out of hedge funds because
they were too expense and complex.
But financial advisers and money
managers argue that in a volatile
investing environment, investors
should reconsider hedge funds and
alternative assets like private equity,
private debt and real
estate because their
Market returns are less
turbulence correlated to the
is normal, fluctuations of the
and there
are many
theories
about what
stock and bond
markets.
“Last year, you
could ignore risk and
focus on return,” said
causes it. Jae Yoon, chief in-
vestment officer of
New York Life In-
vestment Management. “This year,
we’re getting more normal volatility,
and most clients will find they don’t
have enough alternative strategies.”
Go global. In Europe and Japan, the
economic recovery started later and,
the thinking goes, still has years to
run. In some cases, the recoveries in
Europe and Japan started in 2014, as
opposed to 2009 in the United States,
said Darrell L. Cronk, president of the
Wells Fargo Investment Institute.
He said the strong rally in the United
States markets had many investors
with overweight investments in Ameri-
can stocks, a phenomenon known as
home-country bias.
But since last year, many developed
and emerging markets have begun to
perform strongly. “The more explosive
growth is happening in the younger
economies around the world,” said
Rick Pitcairn, chief investment officer
of Pitcairn, an investment adviser to
wealthy families.
Enjoy the ride. Once markets be-
come volatile, they tend to stay that
way for a while. It’s a shift in investor
sentiment.
“There’s persistence in volatility,”
Mr. Kinniry said.
But volatility is not necessarily a bad
thing when you have a plan. Mr. Cronk
pointed out that big corrections were a
normal part of an economic cycle.
The last two economic recovery
cycles, in the 1990s and the 2000s, had
three corrections apiece toward the
end, he said. Investors who bailed after
the first correction in each recovery
missed out because the markets rose
20 percent afterward.
“Corrections are normal and
healthy,” Mr. Cronk said. “Investors
should look at them opportunistically
more so than be afraid of them.”

14 | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2018
Opinion
America meddles in elections, too
NEWS ANALYSIS
Russia isn’t
the only
Scott Shane
country
trying to
steer the
Bags of cash delivered to a Rome hotel
outcomes of for favored Italian candidates. Scan-
foreign votes. dalous stories leaked to foreign news-
papers to swing an election in
Nicaragua. Millions of pamphlets,
posters and stickers printed to defeat
an incumbent in Serbia.
The long arm of Vladimir Putin? No,
just a small sample of the United
States’ history of intervention in for-
eign elections.
Last week, American intelligence
chiefs warned the Senate Intelligence
Committee that Russia appears to be
preparing to repeat in the 2018
midterm elections the same full-on
chicanery it unleashed in 2016: hack-
ing, leaking, social media manipulation
and possibly more. Then on Friday,
Robert Mueller, the special counsel,
announced the indictments of 13 Rus-
sians and three companies, run by a
businessman with close Kremlin ties,
laying out in astonishing detail a three-
year scheme to use social media to
attack Hillary Clinton, boost Donald
Trump and sow discord.
Most Americans are understandably
shocked by what they view as an
unprecedented attack on our political
system. But intelligence veterans, and
scholars who have studied covert
operations, have a different, and quite
revealing, view.
“If you ask an intelligence officer,
did the Russians break the rules or do
something bizarre, the answer is no,
not at all,” said Steven L. Hall, who
retired in 2015 after 30 years at the
C.I.A., where he was the chief of Rus-
sian operations. The United States
SN ws" Ы
“absolutely” has carried out such
/W e П
election influence operations histori-
M N П
cally, he said, “and I hope we keep
S
O t's У
doing it.”
W
.C ha ГР
Loch K. Johnson, the dean of Ameri-
can intelligence scholars, who began
VK "W ИЗ
his career in the 1970s investigating
the C.I.A. as a staff member of the
Л
Senate’s Church Committee, says
РЕ
Russia’s 2016 operation was simply the
cyber-age version of standard United
States practice for decades, whenever
РЕЛИЗ ГРУППЫ "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
American officials were worried about
a foreign vote.
“We’ve been doing this kind of thing
since the C.I.A. was created in 1947,”
said Mr. Johnson, now at the Univer-
sity of Georgia. “We’ve used posters,
pamphlets, mailers, banners — you
name it. We’ve planted false informa-
tion in foreign newspapers. We’ve used
what the British call ‘King George’s
cavalry’: suitcases of cash.”
The United States’ departure from
democratic ideals sometimes went
much further. The C.I.A. helped over-
throw elected leaders in Iran and
Guatemala in the 1950s and backed
violent coups in several other coun-
tries in the 1960s. It plotted assassina-
tions and supported brutal anti-Com-
munist governments in Latin America,
Africa and Asia.
But in recent decades, both Mr. Hall
and Mr. Johnson argued, Russian and
American interferences in elections
have not been morally equivalent.
American interventions have generally
been aimed at helping non-authoritar-
ian candidates challenge dictators or
otherwise promoting democracy. Rus-
sia has more often intervened to dis-
rupt democracy or promote authoritar-
ian rule, they said. Equating the two,
Mr. Hall says, “is like saying cops and
bad guys are the same because they
both have guns — the motivation mat-
ters.”
This broader history of election
meddling has largely been missing
from the flood of reporting on the Rus-
sian intervention and the investigation
of whether the Trump campaign was
involved. It is a reminder that the
Russian campaign in 2016 was funda-
mentally old-school espionage, even if
it exploited new technologies. And it
illuminates the larger currents of his-
tory that drove American electoral
interventions during the Cold War and
motivate Russia’s actions today.
A Carnegie Mellon scholar, Dov H.
Levin, has scoured the historical record
for both overt and covert election influ-
ence operations. He found 81 by the
United States and 36 by the Soviet
Union or Russia between 1946 and
2000, though the Russian count is
undoubtedly incomplete.
“I’m not in any way justifying what
the Russians did in 2016,” Mr. Levin
said. “It was completely wrong of
Vladimir Putin to intervene in this way. State Department and its affiliates. For
That said, the methods they used in the 2000 election in Serbia, the United
this election were the digital version of States funded a successful effort to
methods used both by the United defeat Slobodan Milosevic, the nation-
States and Russia for decades: break- alist leader, providing political consult-
ing into party headquarters, recruiting ants and millions of stickers with the
secretaries, placing informants in a opposition’s clenched-fist symbol and
party, giving information or disinfor- “He’s finished” in Serbian, printed on
mation to newspapers.” 80 tons of adhesive paper and delivered
His findings underscore how routine by a Washington contractor.
election meddling by the United States Vince Houghton, who served in the
— sometimes covert and sometimes military in the Balkans at the time and
quite open — has been. worked closely with the intelligence
The precedent was established in agencies, said he saw American efforts
Italy with assistance to non-Commu- everywhere. “We made it very clear
nist candidates from the late 1940s to that we had no intention of letting
the 1960s. “We had bags of money that Milosevic stay in power,” said Mr.
we delivered to selected politicians, to Houghton, now the historian at the
defray their expenses,” said F. Mark International Spy Museum.
Wyatt, a former Similar efforts were undertaken in
C.I.A. officer, in a elections in wartime Iraq and Afghanis-
The C.I.A.
1996 interview. tan, not always with success. After
helped Covert propagan- Hamid Karzai was re-elected president
overthrow da has also been a of Afghanistan in 2009, he complained
elected mainstay. Richard M. to Robert Gates, then the secretary of
leaders and Bissell Jr., who ran defense, about the United States’ bla-
backed the agency’s opera- tant attempt to defeat him, which Mr.
violent coups. tions in the late 1950s Gates calls in his memoir “our clumsy
But in recent and early 1960s, and failed putsch.”
wrote casually in his At least once the hand of the United
decades,
autobiography of States reached boldly into a Russian
Russian and “exercising control election. American fears that Boris
American over a newspaper or Yeltsin would be defeated for re-elec-
interferences broadcasting station, tion as president in 1996 by an old-
in elections or of securing the fashioned Communist led to an overt
have not desired outcome in and covert effort to help him, urged on
been morally an election.” A self- by President Bill Clinton. It included an
equivalent. congratulatory American push for a $10 billion Inter-
declassified report national Monetary Fund loan to Russia
on the C.I.A.’s work four months before the voting and a
in Chile’s 1964 elec- team of American political consultants
tion boasts of the “hard work” the (though some Russians scoffed when
agency did supplying “large sums” to they took credit for the Yeltsin win).
its favored candidate and portraying That heavy-handed intervention
him as a “wise, sincere and high- made some Americans uneasy. Thomas
minded statesman” while painting his Carothers, a scholar at the Carnegie
leftist opponent as a “calculating Institute for International Peace, re-
schemer.” calls arguing with a State Department
C.I.A. officials told Mr. Johnson in the official who told him at the time, “Yel-
late 1980s that “insertions” of informa- tsin is democracy in Russia,” to which
tion into foreign news media, mostly Mr. Carothers said he replied, “That’s
accurate but sometimes false, were not what democracy means.”
running at 70 to 80 a day. In the 1990 But what does democracy mean?
election in Nicaragua, the C.I.A. Can it include secretly undermining an
planted stories about corruption in the authoritarian ruler or helping challeng-
leftist Sandinista government, Mr. ers who embrace democratic values?
Levin said. The opposition won. How about financing civic organiza-
Over time, more American influence tions?
operations have been mounted not In recent decades, the most visible
secretly by the C.I.A. but openly by the American presence in foreign politics
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
ADAM MAIDA
has been taxpayer-funded groups like
the National Endowment for Democra-
cy, the National Democratic Institute
and the International Republican Insti-
tute, which do not support candidates
but teach basic campaign skills, build
democratic institutions and train elec-
tion monitors.
Most Americans view such efforts as
benign — indeed, charitable. But Mr.
Putin sees them as hostile. The Na-
tional Endowment for Democracy gave
a $23,000 grant in 2006 to an organiza-
tion that employed Aleksei Navalny,
who years later became Mr. Putin’s
main political nemesis, a fact the gov-
ernment has used to attack both Mr.
Navalny and the endowment. In 2016,
the endowment gave 108 grants total-
ing $6.8 million to organizations in
Russia for such purposes as “engaging
activists” and “fostering civic engage-
ment.” The endowment no longer
names Russian recipients, who, under
Russian laws cracking down on foreign
funding, can face harassment or arrest.
It is easy to understand why Mr.
Putin sees such American cash as a
threat to his rule, which tolerates no
real opposition. But American veterans
of democracy promotion find abhorrent
Mr. Putin’s insinuations that their work
is equivalent to what the Russian gov-
ernment is accused of doing in the
United States today.
“It’s not just apples and oranges,”
said Kenneth Wollack, president of the
National Democratic Institute. “It’s
comparing someone who delivers
lifesaving medicine to someone who
brings deadly poison.”
What the C.I.A. may have done in
recent years to steer foreign elections
is still secret and may not be known for
decades. It may be modest by compari-
son with the agency’s Cold War ma-
nipulation. But some old-timers aren’t
so sure.
“I assume they’re doing a lot of the
old stuff, because, you know, it never
changes,” said William J. Daugherty,
who worked for the C.I.A. from 1979 to
1996 and at one time had the job of
reviewing covert operations. “The
technology may change, but the objec-
tives don’t.”
SCOTT SHANE is a national security
reporter for The Times and a former
Moscow correspondent.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION РЕЛИЗ ГРУППЫ "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2018 | 15

opinion

A.G. SULZBERGER, Publisher

Justice for our children killed by ISIS
By Diane and John Foley, the parents of
DEAN BAQUET, Executive Editor MARK THOMPSON, Chief Executive Officer
James Foley; Marsha and Carl Mueller,
JOSEPH KAHN, Managing Editor STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON, President, International
the parents of Kayla Mueller; Shirley
TOM BODKIN, Creative Director JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DEMARTA, Senior V.P., Global Advertising
and Arthur Sotloff, the parents of
ACHILLES TSALTAS, V.P., International Conferences
Steven Sotloff; and Paula and Ed Kas-
SUZANNE DALEY, Associate Editor
sig, the parents of Peter Kassig.
CHARLOTTE GORDON, V.P., International Consumer Marketing
JAMES BENNET, Editorial Page Editor HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS, V.P., International Circulation
One by one, our children — James
JAMES DAO, Deputy Editorial Page Editor HELENA PHUA, Executive V.P., Asia-Pacific
Foley of New Hampshire, Steven Sot-
KATHLEEN KINGSBURY, Deputy Editorial Page Editor SUZANNE YVERNÈS, International Chief Financial Officer
loff of Florida, Peter Kassig of Indiana
and Kayla Mueller of Arizona — were
taken from us by the hateful criminals
of the Islamic State.
Finally, the time for justice has
come. Two Islamic State fighters,
THE UNDOING OF JUSTICE REFORM Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee
Elsheikh — part of a cell of British
In the decade or so before Donald Trump became jihadists who tortured and killed our
President president, America’s approach to criminal justice was
children in Syria — have been cap-
tured. We are deeply grateful to Presi-
Trump and changing fast — reckoning with decades of destructive dent Trump and the men and women
his attorney and ineffective policies that had ballooned the prison of the F.B.I., the United States military
general have population and destroyed countless lives. Red and blue and our allies in the Syrian Democratic
Forces who apprehended these men in
a backward states were putting in place smart, sensible reforms January.
worldview that like reducing harsh sentencing laws, slashing prison The question now is what will hap-
is translating populations and crime rates, and providing more re- pen to these deluded sadists, who
remain in the custody of the Syrian
into regressive sources for the thousands of people who are released Kurdish fighters who captured them.
policies. every week. The F.B.I. has had access to interro-
President Obama’s record on the issue was far from gate them. The British government
long ago rescinded their citizenship
perfect, but he and his first attorney general, Eric
and seems to want nothing further to
Holder Jr., took several key steps: weakening racially do with them. They should be brought
discriminatory sentencing laws, shortening thousands to America to face our justice system.
of absurdly long drug sentences, and pulling back on We want the world to know that we
agree with the longstanding British
the prosecution of low-level drug offenders and of government position that it would be a
federal marijuana offenses in states that have legal- mistake to send killers like these to the
ized it. This approach reflected state-level efforts and military prison at Guantánamo Bay, or
to seek the death penalty in court. REUTERS
sent a message of encouragement to those still leery of Either path would make them martyrs Alexanda Kotey, left, and El Shafee Elsheikh were captured in January and remain in the custody of the Syrian Kurdish fighters.
reform. in the eyes of their fanatic, misled
Within minutes of taking office, Mr. Trump turned comrades in arms — the worst out-
come. Instead, they should be tried in Syria, for different purposes. Jim and As the heartbroken parents of Jim, the fair trial that makes our nation
back the dial, warning darkly in his Inaugural Address our fair and open legal system, or in a Steven were courageous conflict jour- Steven, Peter and Kayla, we beseech great. Let that show the world how
of “American carnage,” of cities and towns gutted by court of international justice, and then nalists, daring to bear witness to the our government to insist that Mr. wrong the Islamic State is about Amer-
crime — even though crime rates are at their lowest in spend the rest of their lives in prison. Syrian thirst for freedom and the Kotey and Mr. Elsheikh receive a fair ica. That would be the best way to
decades. Things only got worse with the confirmation That is what our children would have threat of violent jihad; Peter and Kayla and public trial either in the federal honor our children.
wanted. were committed, compassionate hu- criminal courts of the United States or As parents who have lost children to
of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who, along with Mr. Mr. Kotey and Mr. Elsheikh captured manitarians who responded to Syria’s the International Criminal Court in The violence, we also ask for life impris-
Trump, appears to be stuck in the 1980s, when poli- our children in 2012 and 2013. They had suffering. All risked Hague. When crimes like these are onment for these men. Execution could
ticians exploited the public’s fear of rising crime to sell recruited others to promote their Give the their lives pursuing a made public, victims like us can be be misconstrued as martyrdom, per-
twisted view of the world, and tor- greater good, as our heard and begin to heal. The accused petuating violence and diminishing
absurdly harsh laws and win themselves re-election. mented their captives simply for being
killers a trial military does, and as will hear how their crimes have de- America’s stature as a defender of
Perhaps that’s why both men seem happy to distort, if Americans. Just as the Sept. 11 attacks and life in many other journal- stroyed others, and perhaps even human rights.
not outright lie about, crime statistics that no longer was a horrific assault on our country, prison. ists and humanitar- begin to repent. And we can hope that If, as a nation, we truly believe “that
the public beheadings of Jim, Steven Execution ians do. justice will put an end to such crimes all men are created equal, that they are
support their narrative. and Peter were a deliberate, defiant just makes We hope a trial of against humanity. endowed by their creator with certain
Mr. Sessions has repeatedly hawked a nationwide assault on all of us; so was the torture martyrs. these two dangerous These men should face justice in a unalienable rights, that among these
crime wave. To the contrary, in 2017 the crime rate in by other fanatics that Kayla endured men would lead to public courtroom because they are are life, liberty and the pursuit of hap-
before her death. the capture of others, criminals, not soldiers. They impris- piness,” then let us be above the brutal-
the nation’s 30 biggest cities actually went down.
The Islamic State wants to intimi- equally culpable, oned unarmed civilians, then sa- ity and hatred of the Islamic State.
As bad as the dishonesty is the fact that Mr. Trump date us and lure us into a similar ha- who seek to hide amid frightened distically abused and murdered them. In remembrance of our brave Jim,
and Mr. Sessions have managed to engineer their tred of them. But we must be true to refugees, and to an end to the impunity They are cowards, not warriors. The Steven, Peter and Kayla, let us treat
backward worldview largely under the public’s radar, our children’s commitment to human- that allowed the Islamic State to Islamic State is a delusional and ex- their captors with the justice and hu-
ity. spread. When such hate-filled perpe- ploitative cult, not a state. manity we would have wanted for our
as a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice Jim, Steven, Peter and Kayla were trators are captured, brought to a Our first choice would be to try them children and for ourselves.
documents. Last May, Mr. Sessions ordered federal like so many of your own sons and public trial and held accountable for in a federal criminal court, where they Let us remember that real greatness
prosecutors to charge as aggressively as possible in daughters. They were four unique, their evil deeds, we hope their conta- belong because their victims were lies in the moral courage to do what is
passionate young Americans. They gious hatred will begin to abate. It is a Americans. Force them to be judged by right and just, even in the face of the
every case — reversing a policy of Mr. Holder’s that cared about others, which led them to necessary first step. a jury of our compatriots. Give them opposite.
had eased up on nonviolent drug offenders and others
who fill the nation’s federal prisons. In January, Mr.
Sessions rescinded another Obama-era policy that
discouraged federal marijuana prosecutions in states
where its sale and use are legal. (Mr. Sessions has long
insisted, contrary to all available evidence, that mari-
juana is “a dangerous drug” and “only slightly less
Not a good look for golf
awful” than heroin.) it (fake water!) and no one to blame
The reversal of sensible criminal justice reform Joe Zimmerman but yourself (liberal wind!).
But the president appears to have
doesn’t stop there. Under Mr. Trump, the Justice De-
skipped those lessons, and he tends to
partment has pulled back from his predecessor’s in- behave like the one guy at the course
vestigations of police abuse and misconduct; resumed Golf was so close! It was so close to who is hand-wedging the ball out of the
the use of private, for-profit prisons; and stopped moving beyond that stereotype — the trees. Golfers like this do exist, but no
image of a rich, old, unathletic white one wants to play with them.
granting commutations to low-level drug offenders man making sexist jokes and trading People like this get asked to play
who have spent years or decades behind bars. real estate tips. The image of someone once and then never get invited back:
Meanwhile, Mr. Sessions, who as a senator was one like Donald Trump. “Remember that guy who parked his
The dominance of Tiger Woods golf cart on the greens?” “Yeah, the
of the most reliable roadblocks to long-overdue federal started to make it seem cool, and the guy who left his Aerosmith ringtone on
sentencing reform, is still throwing wrenches into the First Tee program tried to make it full blast and picked up every putt
works as Congress inches toward a bipartisan deal. accessible for kids of all backgrounds. inside 10 feet?” You don’t have to be
But Tiger Woods disappeared for a invited to play, though, when you own
Mr. Sessions called the Sentencing Reform and Correc-
while. And now the president, who the course.
tions Act, a sweeping bill that would reduce some generally likes to spend long holiday You can get an idea of the way the
mandatory-minimum sentences, and that cleared the weekends near a golf course, is hog- president manipulates truth by looking
Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, a “grave ging golf’s headlines. It’s making me at how he talks about golf. In 2013, he
think twice before admitting out loud tweeted, “Just won The Club Champi-
error.” That earned him a rebuke from the committee’s that yes, I am a golfer. onship at Trump International Golf
chairman, Senator Charles Grassley, who pointed out Most people I talk to seem to under- Club in Palm Beach — lots of very
that the attorney general is tasked with enforcing the stand that President Trump doesn’t good golfers, never easy to win a C.C.”
represent a typical American (if we But he didn’t win that year; Tom
laws, not writing them. “If General Sessions wanted to have to have immi- Roush did. Apparently, Mr. Trump won
be involved in marking up this legislation, maybe he grants, how about the senior division that year. No golfer
We were
should have quit his job and run for the Republican Norwegians?); men in their right mind would confuse the
so close know he doesn’t club champion with the senior division
Senate seat in Alabama,” Mr. Grassley said. to moving represent men accu- winner.
Mr. Grassley is no one’s idea of a justice reformer, beyond the rately ( just your Golf can be very addictive. There are
but he supports the bill because, he said, it “strikes the stereotypes. typical “locker room so many different areas within the
right balance of improving public safety and ensuring Alas. talk”), and golfers game, you almost have to obsess to be
know he doesn’t good. Addicted golfers often take two
fairness in the criminal justice system.” represent golf. But if forms — those who love to play the
So what has this administration done right? The list you’re not those things, you might not game, and those who love the escape.
is short and uninspiring. In October, Mr. Trump de- know. I grew up playing in West Virginia,
Mr. Trump as a golfer is like the usually on public courses for $8 to $10
clared the epidemic of opioid abuse a national emer- villain in a comedy movie about golf. for 18 holes. There was always that one
gency, which could be a good step toward addressing it For “Caddyshack” fans, Mr. Trump is guy who was out there clearly avoiding
— but he’s since done almost nothing to combat a like if Judge Smails had a baby with a bad marriage or an unrewarding job.
Rodney Dangerfield and the baby grew Playing with that guy, I would think,
crisis that killed more than 64,000 Americans in 2016.
to be a man’s size and yelled its net “Doesn’t he have four kids to raise?”
In his State of the Union address last month, Mr. worth from his yacht at unsuspecting Golf’s biggest strength is also its great-
Trump promised to “embark on reforming our prisons dolphins. est weakness: You disappear into a
to help former inmates who have served their time get There has been some discussion different world for five hours — a
about the president being good at golf, magical forest world where you drive
a second chance.” It’s great if he really means that, but which I find annoying. I can’t have him your own buggy and send a tiny
it’s hard to square his assurance with his own attorney play my favorite sport and also be sphere at the sky.
good at it. But when you watch him On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump
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general’s opposition to a bill that includes recidivism-

play, as you can on YouTube, you see said, “I’m going to be working for you;
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reduction programs intended to achieve precisely this that he has what you’d call a “terrible” I’m not going to have time to play golf.”
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goal. swing and a “very bad” putting stroke. ANDREW MILLIGAN/PA IMAGES VIA GETTY IMAGES
But in his first year, he spent more
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In the era of Donald Trump, candidates of both par- It’s possible he is good compared than 90 days at a golf club. It’s pretty
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with bad golfers, but he is certainly clear to me he’s turning to golf as an

ties should be proud to run as reformers — but partic-
bad compared with good golfers. Yet said he throws the football well be- count your own strokes. Golfers de- escape from a job he finds unreward-
VK "W ИЗ

ularly Democrats, who can cast the issue not only as a he speaks about his game very confi- cause he flicks his wrist right at the velop a very strict honor code and a ing. Which might not be the worst
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central component of a broader progressive agenda, dently, saying things like, “For me, the end. moral obligation to themselves and thing for him, or us.
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but as yet another example of just how out of touch golf swing is clearing the hips, getting The most confusing aspect of Presi- their playing partners to be 100 per-
them out of the way.” I played golf in dent Trump as golfer is that golf is the cent honest. And if golf is nothing else, JOE ZIMMERMAN is a comedian who has
with the country Mr. Trump and his administration college and hip clearance never once ultimate test of integrity and humility. it is humbling — when you hit your ball appeared on “Conan” and Comedy
are. came up. It’s kind of like if Tom Brady There are no referees, so it’s on you to into a lake, there is simply no denying Central’s “The Half Hour.”

16 | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2018
opinion
No country for young men with AR-15s
Ross Douthat
Four years ago the essayist Helen
Andrews wrote a critique, for the
religious journal First Things, of what
she described as “bloodless moralism”
— meaning the decay of public moral
arguments into a kind of a vulgar
empiricism, a mode of debate so cring-
ingly utilitarian that it can’t advance
the most basic ethical claim (“Do not
steal . . . ”) without a regression analy-
sis to back it up (“ . . . because bicycle
thieves were 4 percent less likely to
obtain gainful employment within two
years of swiping their neighbor’s
Schwinn”).
Since Andrews noted in passing that
this tendency had infected not only
proud utilitarians and explanatory
journalists but even reputed conserva-
tive moralists like, well, me, I’ve tried
to keep her critique in mind ever since.
In last week’s column, for instance,
which argued that the #MeToo move-
ment should turn its ire against
pornography, I decided not to bore my
readers with research papers and
simply appealed to moral intuition and
recent cultural experience, which
make as strong a case as any study for
the viciousness of porn.
But now that the massacre in Flor-
ida has made mass murder the week’s
pressing subject, Andrews’s essay also
offers a useful way of thinking about
some of the problems with the gun
control debate — on both sides, but
particularly among conservatives like
myself, who often pick apart specific
weaknesses in liberal gun control
proposals, relying on studies and ex-
periments that show the limits of pro-
hibition, taking a clinical and some-
what bloodless approach to an issue
that rouses liberal zeal.
There is value in clinical critiques, as
there is in the rebuttals to my porn
argument that emphasized the prob-
lems with enforcing smut restrictions.
But technical issues and practical
concerns are not the heart of the gun
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debate. The reason that mass shoot-
ings aren’t leading to legislative action
is that we have a chasm between two
sweeping moral visions, one pro-gun
and one anti-gun, that is now too wide
to be easily bridged by incremental-
ism.
The anti-gun moral vision regards
America’s relationship to gun owner-
ship as a kind of collective moral mad-
ness, a love affair with violence, a
sickness unto death. Liberals increas-
ingly write about gun ownership the
way social conservatives write about
abortion and euthanasia — it’s a cul-
ture of death, a Moloch devouring our
children, a blood sacrifice to selfish
individualism.
The pro-gun moral vision, mean-
while, links arms and the citizen, treat-
ing self-defense as an essential civic
good, a means of
A restriction maintaining Ameri-
cans as free people
compatible rather than wards
with a vision (or prisoners) of the
of armed state.
citizenship. The pro-gun vision
is linked, of course,
to practical concerns
— support for gun ownership is higher
in rural areas where the police are far
away. But it’s essentially a moral-
political picture in which the fullness of
citizenship includes the capacity to
protect and defend, to step in when the
state fails and resist when it imposes
illegitimately.
If you asked me to defend only one
of these moral pictures I would defend
the pro-gun vision. I am not a gun
GEORGE FREY/GETTY IMAGES
High-capacity clips, including the type
used for the AR-15, at a gun store in Orem,
Utah. An AR-15 was used in the shootings
at a Florida high school on Wednesday.
РЕЛИЗ ГРУППЫ "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
owner but I can imagine many situa-
tions and political dispensations in
which a morally responsible citizen
should own a weapon; I have encoun-
tered many communities where “gun
culture” seems healthy and responsi-
ble rather than a bloodthirsty cult. And
the claim, often urged on anti-abortion
writers like myself, that guns and
abortion should both be opposed on
“life” grounds seems like a category
error, since every abortion kills but
guns sit harmless in millions of house-
holds and many deter violence or turn
back evil men.
However: A fetishization of guns
and violence is also a real American
cultural phenomenon, perhaps espe-
cially among alienated, isolated young
men. And for them and for others
(including the N.R.A. these days), the
guns-and-citizenship ideal can curdle
into a crude myself-alone libertarian-
ism for an age of polarization and
mistrust.
Which leaves me wondering if
there’s a way to adapt a high-minded
vision of guns and citizenship to our
era of extended adolescence and
young-male anomie.
For instance, instead of debating gun
regulations that would apply to every
gun owner, we could consider limits
that are imposed on youth and re-
moved with age. After all, the fullness
of adult citizenship is not bestowed at
once: Driving precedes voting pre-
cedes drinking, and the right to stand
for certain offices is granted only in
your thirties.
Perhaps the self-arming of citizens
could be similarly staggered. Let 18-
year-olds own hunting rifles. Make
revolvers available at 21. Semiautomat-
ic pistols, at 25. And semi-automatic
rifles like the AR-15 could be sold to
30-year-olds but no one younger.
This proposal would be vulnerable to
some of the same practical critiques as
other gun control proposals. But it is
more specifically targeted to the
plague of school shootings, whose
perpetrators are almost always young
men.
And it offers a kind of moral bridge
between the civic vision of Second
Amendment advocates and the in-
sights of their critics — by treating
bearing arms as a right but also a
responsibility, the full exercise of which
might only come with maturity and
age.
You’re wrong! I’m right!
Nicholas Kristof
We live in two Americas.
In one America, a mentally unstable
president selected partly by Russia lies
daily and stirs up bigotry that tears
our social fabric.
In another America, a can-do presi-
dent tries to make America great again
as lying journalists stir up hatred that
tears our social fabric.
The one thing we all agree on: Our
social fabric is torn. In each America,
people who inhabit the other are often
perceived as not just obtuse but also
dangerous. Half of Democrats and
Republicans alike say in polls that they
are literally afraid of the other political
party.
This is not to equate the two world-
views. I largely subscribe to the first,
and I’m a villain in the second. But I do
believe that all of us, on both sides,
frequently spend more time demoniz-
ing the other side than trying to under-
stand it, and we all suffer a cognitive
bias that makes us inclined to seek out
news sources that confirm our world-
view.
A classic study offered free research
to ordinary Democrats and Republi-
cans. People on both sides were eager
to get intelligent arguments re-
inforcing their views, and somewhat
interested in arguments for the other
side that were so silly they could be
mocked and caricatured (it’s very
satisfying to dismiss rivals as libtards
or bigots). Neither Democrats nor
Republicans were interested in intelli-
gent arguments challenging their own
views.
Decades ago, a media expert at
M.I.T. named Nicholas Negroponte
foresaw the emergence of a news
product that he called “The Daily Me,”
Uneasy truths about Iran
HALEY, FROM PAGE 1
dangerous military escalation that
provokes a Saudi military response.
It is imperative that we seize this
opportunity. Iranian missiles have
already come close to hitting civilian
targets in Saudi Arabia. Last Novem-
ber, Houthi militants fired a missile at
a major civilian airport outside Riyadh.
Fortunately, the missile fell short of its
target. But, as this newspaper re-
ported, it detonated so close to the
terminal that it caused people inside to
jump out of their seats. And the debris
it left scattered around the airport had
Iranian fingerprints all over it.
In December, the United States and
our partners took the extraordinary
step of declassifying evidence from
this missile attack, as well as from
other attacks by missiles, conventional
arms and explosive boats of Iranian
origin — all used by the rebels in Yem-
en and all violations of U.N. resolu-
tions.
In a warehouse in Washington, we
put on display recovered pieces of the
missile fired at the Riyadh airport, with
its telltale nine valves running the
length of it and lack of large stabilizing
fins, proof of its Iranian manufacture.
Some of the missile remnants on dis-
play were stamped with the logo of
Shahid Bagheri Industries, an Iranian
manufacturer. Based on the strength of
this and other evidence, our intelli-
gence community concluded unequivo-
cally that the weapons had been sup-
plied by the Tehran regime. As I said at
the time, they might as well have had
“Made in Iran” all over them.
The U.N. report agrees with our
intelligence, and it makes an addi-
tional, critical finding. When we first
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
with information tailored to a user’s
needs. Negroponte was thinking of
local weather, sports, particular inter-
ests and so on, but what actually ar-
rived with the internet was a highly
political version of “The Daily Me.”
There’s not an exact parallel in the
way the right and the left seek out
like-minded news sources. The right
has spawned conspiracy nuts like Alex
Jones who believe that the Sandy Hook
school shooting was faked, and one
study found that the more people
watched Fox News, the worse they did
on a current events test.
So I’m not advocating that you waste
time on Breitbart propaganda any
more than I’m saying that it was worth
listening to leftists in the 1970s who
praised Chairman Mao. But wherever
we stand on the spectrum, there are
sane, intelligent
On both sides voices who disagree
with us — and too
we’re too often we plug our
quick to
ears to them.
reject the
On the left, there
other’s views. has been some out-
rage at conservative
voices on the Times
Op-ed pages. But as a progressive
myself, steeped in the liberal world-
view, I must say that I often learn a lot
— however painfully — from these
conservatives with whom I utterly
disagree, partly because they gleefully
seize upon inconvenient facts that my
side tends to ignore because they don’t
fit our narrative.
Moreover, there’s some experi-
mental evidence that our biased ap-
proach to getting news actually makes
us dumb. For example, one experiment
asked 1,000 people to look at a simple
data set and draw conclusions about a
skin cream’s effectiveness. Not surpris-
ingly, Democrats and Republicans
were about equally good at calculating
the math and determining how well it
worked.
But when the experiment offered the
very same data set and said it referred
to the effectiveness of a gun control
measure, Democrats and Republicans
alike went to pieces. In one version,
the numbers showed that a gun control
measure worked — and Republicans
unveiled our evidence last year, some
skeptical observers questioned
whether the Iranian weapons had been
transferred to Yemen before the impo-
sition of the U.N. arms embargo in
April 2015. The new U.N. report makes
it clear that the weapons were intro-
duced into Yemen after the arms em-
bargo was imposed, putting Iran in
undisputed violation of the United
Nations resolution.
No one, in truth, should be surprised
by these findings. Since the signing of
the nuclear agreement, the Iranian
regime’s support of dangerous militias
and terror groups has markedly in-
creased. Its missiles and advanced
weapons are turning up in war zones
all across the Middle East. And Houthi
militants continue to fire them into
Saudi Arabia, including in December,
January and this month.
The world can no longer claim igno-
rance or skepticism of Iran’s role in
fomenting instability in the Middle
East. To acknowledge the Iranian
origin of missiles falling on Saudi
Arabia is not, as some charge, to lay
the groundwork for war. Far from it. It
is a necessary prerequisite for prevent-
ing war.
Today, armed with this evidence, we
have the chance to rein in Iran’s behav-
ior and demand that it live up to its
international agreements that discour-
age conflict. But if action is not taken,
then someday soon, when innocent
Saudi civilians are killed by Iranian
weapons, the chance for peace will be
lost.
NIKKI HALEY is the United States perma-
nent representative to the United Na-
tions.
..
kept flubbing the math. In another
version, the gun control measure was
ineffective, and this time the Demo-
crats couldn’t manage the calculations.
The evidence on these biases is
complex, studies sometimes haven’t
replicated well, and I don’t want to
exhibit confirmation bias in my warn-
ings of confirmation bias. Researchers
also caution that it’s too glib to say we
are all locked in our echo chambers, for
most Americans still are regularly
challenged by dissonant information.
But what does seem clear is that
rigid ideological beliefs impair our
cognitive functions. For many years,
Philip Tetlock of the University of
Pennsylvania has been running experi-
ments measuring the ability of thou-
sands of people to make sound predic-
tions.
The best forecasters, Tetlock finds,
are not experts or even intelligence
officials with classified information, not
liberals and not conservatives, but
rather those instinctively empirical,
nonideological and willing to change
their minds quite nimbly. The poorest
marks go to those who are strongly
loyal to a worldview.
I wondered whether to write this
column, for there are so many urgent
— and progressive! — causes on the
table that I want to thunder about:
Dreamers, guns in American life,
White House dismissiveness toward
domestic violence, and so on. But the
“Daily Me” problem also undermines
the capacity of liberals to win these
arguments. When we stay within our
own tribe, talking mostly to each other,
it’s difficult to woo other tribes to
achieve our aims.
The ideological blinders may worsen
because of our tendency to seek out
like-minded people. A 2014 Pew survey
found that half of consistent conserva-
tives and 35 percent of consistent
liberals say “it’s important to me to live
in a place where most people share my
political views.”
It should be possible both to believe
deeply in the rightness of one’s own
cause and to hear out the other side.
Civility is not a sign of weakness, but
of civilization.
FROM READERS
Viewing my country from abroad
Re “What Living Abroad Taught Me
About America,” by Janine di Giovanni
(Opinion, Feb. 10): Like Ms. di Gio-
vanni, I am an expat, an Australian
living in Switzerland. I deeply empa-
thize with Ms. di Giovanni’s feelings
about her native country. Living abroad
taught me to love Australia, and also to
be deeply conscious of its defects.
I once lived in America, just before
the Reagan era. I have always defended
America from the criticisms of my
European friends, even my daughters.
Criticize away, I said, but to what other
country can you turn for hope?
Now, like Ms. di Giovanni’s friends, I
have given up on America. Not only
because of President Trump, though he
could hardly be worse, but because of
the stinking morass he has uncovered in
the heartland. And this morass has been
perpetuated by the egoism, greed and
arrogance of the vulture elite. Its liberal
wing, broken, trumpets its sympathy for
the left behind, but does nothing. Its
illiberal wing is in heaven.
All this exists in Europe, too, of
course, but we have not sunk so low.
Here I feel there is hope, and Europe
will be able to show the way. You Ameri-
cans, even if you get out of this crisis,
will never again be the beacon on the
hill for the rest of us. At best, you will be
just one of the lights on the lower slope;
at worst, you will be a broken lamp in
the crevasse.
“I know we can do it,” Ms. di Giovanni
says. “Yes, we can,” Barack Obama said
in 2008. No, Barack, despite your decen-
cy, you couldn’t.
IAN GREEN, NYON, SWITZERLAND
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION РЕЛИЗ ГРУППЫ "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2018 | 17

Culture
Yesteryear’s movies, waiting in the wings
LONDON

Adaptations of films
like ‘Jubilee’ and ‘Network’
are the stage genre du jour
BY ROSLYN SULCAS

The famous “mad as hell” line from

Paddy Chayefsky’s “Network” rings out
nightly here at the National Theater,
where Ivo van Hove’s adaptation of the
1976 film is playing to packed houses. Its
prophetic evocation of a world in which
news is showbiz and showbiz is news
seems like a perfect fit for our screen-
filled, headline-screaming times.
“Network” is just the latest in a long
line of screen-to-stage adaptations that
have helped turn Mr. van Hove, a Bel-
gian experimental director based in the
Netherlands, into a major name in world
theater. His first film adaptation was Jo-
seph Losey’s “The Servant,” in 1982;
next year, he will direct Cate Blanchett
in an adaptation of Joseph L. Mankie-
wicz’s “All About Eve.” In between, he
has directed some 16 plays derived from
movies by directors including Luchino
Visconti, Ingmar Bergman, John Cas-
savetes and Michelangelo Antonioni.
Mr. van Hove’s signature style is itself
cinematic: The process of producing
film and video is often part of the stag-
ing, with cameras capturing action on-
stage and backstage and projecting it on
giant screens, a strategy that feels in
tune with our age of incessant image
capture.
And it’s not just Mr. van Hove; theater
has been experiencing a boomlet of
movie adaptations. Derek Jarman’s
punk-inflected “Jubilee” (1978), adapted
by Chris Goode, has opened at the Lyric
Theater in London after earning rave re-
views at the Royal Exchange in Man-
chester, England. Ingmar Bergman’s JAN VERSWEYVELD

“Fanny and Alexander,” adapted by

Stephen Beresford, is opening at the Old
Vic this week. Theatrical versions of
Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game”
(1939) and Visconti’s “The Damned”
(1969) have been playing in repertory at
the Comédie-Française. “The Exorcist”
has been running in the West End in
London since October. And in Vienna,
Krzysztof Kieslowski’s monumental, 10-
part “The Decalogue,” condensed into a
two-and-a-half hour play, is being per-
formed by the Volkstheater. (Originally
made for television, the series found an
international audience at film festivals.)
Why the sudden rash of movies on-
stage now?
Movies have long been a birthplace of
Broadway musicals, and they continue
to provide lucrative revenue streams for
big studios, looking hard at their back
catalogs for the next big thing. But the
stakes are different in theater, where
even a successful production is unlikely
to run more than a few months, and
where the choices of material are mark-
edly less commercial, mostly derived
from European art films. (“Network”
and Simon Stone’s 2016 adaptation of
Woody Allen’s “Husbands and Wives”
are notable exceptions.)
“I think what has happened over the
last 10 years or so is that we’ve stopped
having the idea that theater is essen-
tially a literary form,” Mr. Goode said in
a telephone interview. “I think we’ve
started to ask: What else can provide
the genesis of a stage production?”
Mr. Goode said that he had initially
been resistant to the idea of working
from film sources because of a “cultural
misunderstanding” of the roles of the-
ater and film. “We think either film is
like theater with better special effects,
or that theater is made by people who
can’t afford a film yet,” he said. “And you
are setting yourself up for a disappoint-
ment one way or another because you
can’t re-enact what an audience loves
about a film.”
He added that he was also often skep-
tical of the motivations for choosing
films as sources for the stage. “It can be
a way of hooking an audience who are
already familiar with the material, and
that can feel like convenience food; too
much of the lifting is predone.”
But “Jubilee” — a dystopian fantasy in
which Queen Elizabeth I is transported
into a future where nihilist girl-gangs
roam a decaying London — is hardly
convenience food.
Mr. Goode said he had long been using
“Jubilee” as “an example of what film
can show us about theater spaces” and
began to think about transferring it to
the stage as its 40th anniversary ap-
proached. “There is a literacy to our in-
teractions with film and the screen to-
day, and I think it has made theater art-
ists more able to think critically around
how film communicates,” he said. “It’s a
really different grammar to the novel.”
In an interview in London, before the
premiere of “Network” in November,
Mr. van Hove said, “I used to be a real
film freak when I was young.” And, he
added, film scripts often dealt with
themes he couldn’t find in theater texts:
“Visconti’s ‘Rocco and his Brothers,’
which I did a few years ago, is a fabulous
script about immigration and integra-
tion. And I have never found a text as
extreme on the subject of death as
Bergman’s ‘Cries and Whispers.’ ”
Asked why he thought film was such a
popular theatrical source now, Mr. van
Hove said that theater “is very good at
having an open mind.” And perhaps, he
added, his example inspired others to
follow suit. “People are always predict-
ing the death of theater,” he said, “but I
think it will be one of the most important
art forms of this century if it keeps its
JOHAN PERSSON
identity as a live event. You can watch a
movie at home now on a screen almost
as big as in a cinema, so why leave your
home? But live theater, with the engage-
ment between audience and perform-
ers, is a different thing.”
Christiane Jatahy, the Brazilian direc-
tor whose “Rules of the Game” offers an
update of the storied Renoir film, said in
a telephone interview that she thought,
for the generation now in their 40s and
50s, cinema was a repository of memory
and images. “The difference with books
is that when you use this material, it’s
not only about the story, but the images
JOHAN PERSSON
the audience have from the film,” she
said. “Maybe this challenge provokes
ideas about creation, and this is interest-
ing for directors.”
Ms. Jatahy added that she thought it
was important to make cinema itself
part of the dramaturgy of her play. “Not
just to create images or set, but how to
build the story,” she said. “In the play,
Robert, a protagonist in the film, is to-
tally addicted to cameras and films his
guests. So he is Renoir in a way.”
Our familiarity with images, the ubiq-
uity of binge-watching, the daily bom-
bardment of clips on social media — all
Above, Bryan Cranston in the stage adap-
tation of “Network.” Far left, Harold
Finley and Toyah Willcox in ‘‘Jubilee,”
based on a 1978 movie, and left, Travis
Alabanza, also in “Jubilee.”
of this perhaps feeds into a hunger for
the human-scale thrills of theatrical
magic. (Opera, too, is currently in love
with the movies; a spate of new pieces
— Thomas Adès’s “Exterminating An-
gel,” Missy Mazzoli’s “Breaking the
Waves” and Nico Muhly’s “Marnie”
among them — show a similar interest
in cinematic source material.)
“When we watch film, we know every-
thing can be C.G.I.-ed,” said Mr. Beres-
ford, referring to computer-generated
imagery.
The playwright, whose adaptation of
“Fanny and Alexander” is being di-
rected by Max Webster, added, “In the-
ater, when you make people fly or disap-
pear, there is a genuine marveling.”
Mr. Beresford said he believed that
the adaptations of film for the stage re-
flected the current confidence of the art
form. “Some people will tell you that it’s
a symptom of an impoverished, com-
mercially driven theater, but I think the-
ater has realized it can be a medium for
big spectacle,” he said, pointing to the
work of Robert Lepage, Robert Wilson
and Matthew Bourne. “The idea of the-
ater cannibalizing film materials and
the language of film is the sign of a confi-
dence, I think. Theater is in a robust
state; it’s colonizing.”

Metropolitan Opera speeds up transition

Yannick Nézet-Séguin
will take over as music
director in 2018-19 season
BY MICHAEL COOPER
The Metropolitan Opera, which has
been rocked this season by sexual mis-
conduct accusations against its former
music director, James Levine, is passing
the baton to his successor. And fast.
The company has announced that
Yannick Nézet-Séguin will become its
new music director next season, two
years ahead of schedule. The acceler-
ated ascension will give much-needed
musical stability to the Met, the largest
performing arts organization in the
United States, which suspended Mr.
Levine, its longtime conductor, in De-
cember and opened an investigation
into his behavior.
“The orchestra and the chorus, they
need a leader,” Mr. Nézet-Séguin, 42,
said in an interview, noting that a music
director does not just conduct perform-
ances but is also responsible for such
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ecstatic about the move. Jessica
Phillips, a clarinetist and the chair-
woman of the Met’s orchestra commit-
tee, said in an email, “As fellow musi-
cians excited by Yannick’s vision for the
future, it is our hope that the Met’s in-
spired investment in his brilliance un-
derscores its commitment to the musi-
cal artists and artistry that are the
lifeblood of the Met Opera.”
The company’s investigation of Mr.
Levine, who was suspended after The
New York Times reported the accusa-
tions of four men who said that he had
sexually abused them when they were
teenagers or his students, continues.
Mr. Levine has denied the accusations.
Next season will feature a number of
notable conducting debuts. Mr. Du-
HIROYUKI ITO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES damel, the music director of the Los An-
Left, Yannick Nézet-Séguin at the Metropolitan Opera last year. Right, the tenor Jonas Kaufmann, who will return next season. geles Philharmonic, will conduct Verdi’s
“Otello.” Robert Spano, of the Atlanta
Symphony Orchestra, will conduct
veiled along with the 2018-19 season, tra, will conduct three productions next that the more he got to know the work- “Marnie”; James Gaffigan, “La Bo-
which will feature the Met debut of the season (“La Traviata” and revivals of ings of the opera house and its company, hème”; and Cornelius Meister, “Don
conductor Gustavo Dudamel; the Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” and the more eager he was to begin. Giovanni.”
planned return of the elusive tenor Jo- Poulenc’s “Dialogues des Carmélites”) “I know what I want to do, and I just A number of Met favorites will make
nas Kaufmann; a revival of Wagner’s as well as two Met Orchestra concerts at needed to have the time to start doing star turns. Mr. Kaufmann, who has can-
“Ring” cycle; and four new productions. Carnegie Hall; beginning in 2020, he will it,” he added. celed his last three planned appear-
her Desdemona in “Otello,” with Stuart
Skelton in the title role. Christine Go-
erke will bring her acclaimed
Brünnhilde to the Met for the first time
in the “Ring.” Plácido Domingo will sing
in Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi” and “La
Traviata.”
Javier Camarena will star in Bizet’s
“Les Pêcheurs de Perles”; Juan Diego
Flórez will sing Alfredo in “La Travi-
ata”; and Michael Fabiano will star in
“La Bohème” and Boito’s “Mefistofele.”
The mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton will
sing Fricka in the “Ring.”
Anita Rachvelishvili, who scored a
major success this season as Azucena in
Verdi’s “Il Trovatore,” will sing Amneris
to Ms. Netrebko’s Aida and the Princess
de Bouillon to her Adriana Lecouvreur,
as well as Dalila in some performances.
The baritone Quinn Kelsey will get two
plum Verdi assignments: Giorgio Ger-
mont in “La Traviata” and Aida’s father,
Amonasro.
Mr. Nézet-Séguin said that he had
been happy to rearrange his schedule
and cancel a number of appearances to
make the directorship and some added
performances possible. But he will be

tasks as granting tenure to new musi- The season will open on Sept. 24 with lead at least five operas a year. The Met Peter Gelb, the Met’s general man- ances at the Met, is set to return in a re- busy, he acknowledged in New York at
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cians and molding the company’s over- Darko Tresnjak’s new staging of Saint- said that in recognition of a new $15 mil- ager, predicted in an interview that Mr. vival of Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del the end of the interview — which he
M N П

all sound. Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila,” starring lion gift from the Neubauer Family Nézet-Séguin’s arrival would cheer the West.” Mr. Gelb said that since Mr. Kauf- gave after traveling from Philadelphia,
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Met officials said that they had been Elina Garanca and Roberto Alagna. Mi- Foundation, he would officially be the entire company. mann had made it clear that he did not where he had announced in the morning
.C ha ГР

discussing moving up Mr. Nézet- chael Mayer will direct both Nico Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer Music Di- “The Met, obviously, has suffered wish to leave his home in Germany for that he would be leading the Philadel-
VK "W ИЗ

Séguin’s start date long before Mr. Lev- Muhly’s Hitchcockian “Marnie” and rector. from what happened with Jim,” he said. long stretches of time, Mr. Gelb had of- phia Orchestra on a tour of Israel.
ine’s troubles surfaced in December, Verdi’s “La Traviata,” with Diana Dam- Asked how he viewed the case of Mr. “And I would say the healing process be- fered to “tailor-make” repertoire for him When the interview was over, he got
Л

and that they had hoped to be able to an- rau. Anna Netrebko will star in David Levine, and whether he felt the com- gan the day Yannick set foot in the build- to sing when he is free. up, saying that he needed some time to
РЕ

nounce it with the company’s next sea- McVicar’s new production of Cilea’s pany needed healing, Mr. Nézet-Séguin ing conducting rehearsals of ‘Parsifal,’ In addition to the title role of “Adriana rest before his next engagement: the
son. But they said that Mr. Levine’s sus- “Adriana Lecouvreur.” was circumspect. “For me, I see my own because the orchestra and the chorus Lecouvreur,” Ms. Netrebko will sing nearly six-hour “Parsifal.”
pension had given extra impetus to the Mr. Nézet-Séguin, who is also the mu- curve with the institution, and I’m fo- clearly gravitate to him.” Verdi’s Aida. Sonya Yoncheva will star “There’s a tiny show that’s coming up
plan. The sped-up succession was un- sic director of the Philadelphia Orches- cused on this, solely,” he said, adding Some musicians said that they were in Tchaikovsky’s “Iolanta” and reprise tonight,” he said with a smile.

18 | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2018
culture
A Netflix sampler, clockwise from above: Matt Smith and Claire Foy in “The Crown”; a scene from “BoJack Horseman”; and DeWanda Wise in “She’s Gotta Have It.”
Just what is Netflix, anyway?
CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
By signing Ryan Murphy
and Shonda Rhimes, it’s
creating its own world
BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK
Ryan Murphy, welcome to the Upside
Down.
Last week, the streaming giant
Netflix announced that Mr. Murphy —
the producer of “Glee” and “American
Crime Story” and much, much more —
had left 21st Century Fox to join its
ranks, in a deal said to be valued at up
to $300 million.
That’s a lot of money, but it’s not
mine, and ordinarily, I don’t much care
how an entertainment Croesus moves
around its ducats. TV outlets make big
deals all the time.
The reason that this one — like
Netflix’s poaching of Shonda Rhimes
from ABC last year — has the feeling
of a turning point is that, as with all
things Netflix, there is a definitional
question involved. Netflix, both artis-
tically and as a business, is something
different. But what?
Is it most similar to an online-video
platform, like YouTube? A network,
like NBC? A channel, like HBO?
(These questions apply as well to other
streamers, like Hulu and Amazon
Prime, but to Netflix above all.)
The Murphy and Rhimes deals
suggest something else: It’s an entire
parallel TV universe, and it’s still ex-
panding.
Think of Netflix as the Upside Down
in its sci-fi series “Stranger Things.”
By this I don’t mean that it’s a nefar-
The Beat goes on
BOOK REVIEW
Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Edited by Nancy J. Peters. 144 pp.
New Directions. $16.95.
BY JEFF GORDINIER
One day when I was about 14 or 15 and
wandering the aisles of a bookstore in
Southern California, my eyes were
drawn to “Endless Life,” a collection of
poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I
grew up in a conservative household in
an even more conservative neighbor-
hood, and I doubt I’d had any expo-
sure, up till that point, to Ferlinghetti
and his transcontinental, transcend-
ental comrades known as the Beats. All
I knew, as I flipped through the book,
was that the words were bouncing
around the page:
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The pennycandystore beyond the El
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is where I first
M N П
fell in love
O t's У
with unreality
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VK "W ИЗ
What is this? I thought. Why is this
guy allowed to write that way? To a
Л
teenager with an inchoate interest in
РЕ
language, those leaping lines conveyed
a swig of freedom:
The world is a beautiful place
ious or dangerous force. But it is a kind
of alternative TV dimension, overlay-
ing and replicating the known world of
traditional television, that tries to
acquire one of everything that exists in
the universe of TV.
Initially, the company did this
through literal acquisition: buying
streaming rights to hit TV series. Then
it did it through imitation: reviving
Fox’s “Arrested Development” and
creating originals, like “House of
Cards,” in the mold of premium cable.
Now it’s imitating through acquisition,
spiriting away the likes of Mr. Murphy
and Ms. Rhimes to its well-remunerat-
ed plane.
The history of TV is one of upstarts
and competitors, and my first instinct
was to liken Netflix to something like
cable, which rose as a serious competi-
tor to broadcast TV in the 1980s.
But there’s an important difference
between cable channels and Netflix
(besides whom you write your check
to). Cable channels have brands. That
was what made them different from
broadcast networks, which tried to be,
and had to be, everything. Cable chan-
nels had specialties and sensibilities:
CNN was news; ESPN was sports;
HBO was adult sophistication (give or
take an “Entourage”).
A cable brand might evolve — Bravo
went from an arts channel to the “Real
Housewives” channel — but the idea
was to offer a specific aesthetic to a
specific audience.
Netflix doesn’t have that; in fact, it is
specifically anti-that. Its brand is “stuff
that you like to watch on TV.” It devel-
oped a vast library of reruns, and with
that, a proprietary trove of data on
who likes to watch what and how
much. Then it made more of that, or
bought it. If you liked “30 Rock,” here’s
to be born into
if you don’t mind happiness
not always being
so much fun . . .
I had never bought a book of poetry
before — at that age, doing so had
never crossed my mind — but I bought
“Endless Life,” kick-starting a habit of
impulse purchasing that continues to
this day. I spent time with it. Fer-
linghetti’s “spontaneous” transgres-
sions of punctuation and spacing ap-
pealed to a kid who was warming up to
the intoxicating provocations of punk
rock, and I can’t be alone in having had
that response. Unscientific polling over
the years has led me to believe that
Ferlinghetti (like E. E. Cummings and
Charles Bukowski) used to be some-
thing of a gateway poet for young
people in America, and a residue of
nostalgic fondness remains even for
those readers who have moved on to
ostensibly more sophisticated stuff. (If
you’re looking for a contemporary
analogy, one can hope that thousands
of Rupi Kaur fans will eventually find
their way to, say, Louise Glück and
Nikky Finney.) Whenever I’m visiting
San Francisco, I still make a pilgrim-
age to City Lights, the North Beach
bookstore, founded by Ferlinghetti,
that stands as a kind of Plymouth Rock
for American poetry and progressive
thought.
But how does Ferlinghetti’s work
hold up now? (Ferlinghetti himself has
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Ryan Murphy, left and Shonda Rhimes, producers who have both jumped to Netflix. His
deal is said to be valued at up to $300 million.
“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” If you
liked “Damages,” here’s “Bloodline.”
Look at just the past few months of
Netflix programming. There’s “The
Crown,” a BBC-style historical drama.
“Wormwood,” an Errol Morris docu-
drama. “One Day at a Time,” a 21st-
century reboot of a 1970s network TV
multicamera sitcom. “Dirty Money,” a
“Frontline”-esque documentary anthol-
ogy. “She’s Gotta Have It,” a risqué
romantic comedy. “My Next Guest
Needs No Introduction,” a David Let-
terman interview series. Oh, and why
not — let’s throw in a “Cloverfield”
sequel and a Will Smith movie.
Something for everyone — that was
the ethos of broadcast TV in the old
three-network era. The obvious anal-
ogy, then, is that Netflix isn’t cable at
all; it’s a broadcaster, pitching a big
tent.
But, as I’ve written before, there’s
held up well. At press time, he is still
alive and nearing his 99th birthday.)
As a publisher, a patron of the arts and
a free-speech pioneer, he has been
rightly celebrated for decades; he
played a crucial role in the defense of
Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” even winning
an obscenity case for daring to publish
that zeitgeist-capturing incantation.
Yeah, O.K. — but what about his
writing? The release of “Ferlinghetti’s
Greatest Poems” (I wish New Direc-
tions had gone ahead and called it
“Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Hits,” like an
album full of ear candy by Tom Petty
or Elton John) gives us a chance to
revisit that question. It’s a complicated
one. Do the quicksilver qualities that
can make Ferlinghetti’s poetry so
captivating to an adolescent under-
mine our ability to take it seriously
with the passing of years? In his more
unfortunate moments, as in the poem
called “Underwear,” corny humor
lands with a clank and you can’t help
wincing: “Underwear can really get
you in a bind / Negroes often wear /
white underwear / which may lead to
trouble.”
It seems self-evident that the pass-
ing of years has done “Underwear” no
favors. At the same time, it would be
churlish to deny that Ferlinghetti has
given the popular canon many indeli-
ble lines. For a while in the 1950s and
1960s, his voice stood out amid a
mounting dissident chorus; in these
days of hashtagged political resistance,
ROBERT VIGLASKY/NETFLIX
BRINSON+BANKS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
one very important difference. Broad-
casters, whose advertising model
required millions of eyeballs on every
individual show, had to make sure that
everything they aired appealed to a
broad range of people.
That business imperative had aes-
thetic results: It gave us family sit-
coms and comfort-food cop dramas.
It’s less true today, in the era of smaller
audiences — but it’s still much more
true of NBC than, say, of IFC.
Netflix, on the other hand, is breath-
takingly broad and microscopically
niche at the same time. It’s selling a
platform to everyone, but by providing
products for very specific tastes.
Netflix assumes a future in which
we’re watching our faves on our own
screens, rather than gathering around
an electronic fireplace — and as long
as the monthly payment clears, it’s all
the same to the company. It’s less a big
NAT FARBMAN/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION, VIA GETTY IMAGES
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, left, at a poetry
reading.
it is not uncommon to come across
portions of his stanzas reconstituted as
memes on Instagram and Facebook:
I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
tent than a Dothraki tent city, to bor-
row a metaphor from “Game of
Thrones.”
What does this mean for Ryan Mur-
phy and Shonda Rhimes? Maybe not
much at all. They were both powerful
producers with a lot of freedom who
will now have a lot of freedom and
more money.
Mr. Murphy was, in a way, the Net-
flix-iest of producers to begin with:
He’d made everything from a broad-
cast network sitcom (“The New Nor-
mal”) to an action show (“9-1-1”) to a
marquee cable drama (“Feud”) to an
HBO film (“The Normal Heart”). He
may be able to branch out even more,
but he was hardly fettered.
What Ms. Rhimes does at Netflix
will be interesting. She’s the consum-
mate network TV producer, having
essentially defined the current voice of
ABC with “Grey’s Anatomy” and
“Scandal.”
She might do something very differ-
ent with the license of streaming — but
if she doesn’t, that will fit in all the
same at Netflix, which resurrected the
broadcast favorite “Gilmore Girls”
with much the same tone, give or take
a few curse words. One curious thing
about Netflix is that every sensibility
— niche and mass, G-rated and NSFW
— exists on the same platform and the
same plane.
Is all the deal-making worth it?
Whether Netflix is emptying its deep
pockets wisely by making itself into a
Hall of Fame for established stars (see
also Dave Chappelle) isn’t my concern
as a TV critic.
What I do care about is whether
Netflix can nurture original, distinctive
art, especially if it continues growing
into a huge, all-encompassing alterna-
TV.
Based on passages like that, it’s not
much of a stretch to put Ferlinghetti in
the company of skilled songwriters. He
knows how to craft a hook. His lines
have an easy, welcoming flow. (In this
book, the poems are arranged chrono-
logically and fluidly, as if they were
part of an “Abbey Road”-like sym-
phonic collage or a Hollywood high-
light reel.) He has a gift for helping you
hear what needs to be said, free of
impenetrable filters. He is allergic to
willful obscurity and “our little literary
games,” as he declared in one “Howl”-
referencing populist manifesto that he
titled, with characteristic directness,
“Populist Manifesto No. 1”:
We have seen the best minds of our
generation
destroyed by boredom at poetry
readings.
Poetry isn’t a secret society,
It isn’t a temple either.
Secret words & chants won’t do any
longer.
Returning to Ferlinghetti is ulti-
mately about returning to the romantic
associations of the milieu that
produced Ferlinghetti, so it makes
sense that some of Ferlinghetti’s most
plangent stanzas are the ones in which
he looks back at the heyday of the
Beats, that “rebel band who / rose over
the rooftops of / tenement boneyards /
intent on making out / And made out
of madness / a hundred years of beati-
..
NETFLIX
DAVID LEE/NETFLIX
And I worry whether it can do that
when derivation is the business strat-
egy itself: selling people new versions
of things they already like. It’s fine that
Netflix can toss around enough money
to reactivate David Letterman. But
does it have the kind of culture that
could discover a new David Letter-
man?
In its short life as an original pro-
grammer. Netflix has made a few
series I’d consider legitimately great.
But most of them have involved ma-
king deals with creators with limited
track records (“BoJack Horseman,”
“American Vandal”) or talented artists
relatively new to creating series
(“Master of None,” “Lady Dynamite”).
(As I’ve also written before, these
shows tend to be comedies, which may
translate more directly and easily to
the streaming format.)
A more familiar experience on Net-
flix is the good-enough version of a
drama you’ve seen elsewhere. “God-
less,” say, was a perfectly decent dark
western, but no “Deadwood.” “Strang-
er Things” is a joy, but it’s a pastiche
by design: It’s the Netflix ethos in
story form, reproducing and remixing
memories in ways that tickle just the
right nostalgia pleasure centers.
It may be that Netflix’s approach
means more competence and fewer
out-and-out stinkers. And I have no
reason to believe that Mr. Murphy and
Ms. Rhimes will become any less cre-
ative because Netflix backed up a
money truck.
But if Netflix is truly becoming a
parallel TV universe, I hope its algo-
rithm finds room for the experimental
and untried. It’s hard to be ground-
breaking when your whole purpose is
to take people where they’ve already
been.
tude.” Maybe there’s no way to dissoci-
ate Ferlinghetti’s poetry from the
nostalgic gauze of various North Beach
beatnik tropes — proto-hipsters wear-
ing berets and listening to bebop and
smoking French cigarettes, etc. — but
what remains intact in the poems
(even as their creator approaches a
century of living) is the fresh, youthful
energy of that moment. The liberating
pulse can still be pretty contagious. His
high points are the poems that you
wish you could listen to in a car, on a
long coastal highway, with the win-
dows rolled down — and you certainly
can’t say that about Robert Lowell.
Does the occasionally tossed-off
imperfection of the poems give them a
kind of time-capsuled charm? If you’re
willing as a reader to be forgiving, it
can be a blast to go back to the way the
words bounce. And Ferlinghetti him-
self can’t resist the pull of the past. In
“Plan du Centre de Paris à Vol
d’Oiseau,” this is how he remembers it:
yearnings & gropings
fantasies & flame-outs
such endless walking
through the bent streets
such fumbling art
(models drawn with blindfolds)
such highs and sweet inebriations—
I salute you now.
Jeff Gordinier, a former Times reporter,
is the food and drinks editor of Esquire
magazine.
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