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PAINFUL PAST
FORGET HISTORY?
CHINA WON’T
PAGE 6 | BUSINESS
How much
did Xi get
out of Italy?
Ilaria Maria Sala
OPINION
China, a country the size of a small
continent, tends to leverage its heft by
negotiating with other states one-on-
one rather than through regional blocs.
It has put this technique to use with
Asean, the Southeast Asian associa-
tion, using bilateral deals to divide
members. Judging by the tone of Presi-
dent Xi Jinping’s visit to Italy and
France over the past week, China has
adopted the same approach in Europe
— this time pitting the Italian govern-
ment, which is anti-European Union,
against the pro-E.U. French govern-
ment of Emmanuel Macron, among
others.
As expected, Italy signed a wide-
ranging memorandum of understand-
ing, or M.O.U., with China, becoming
the first major Western economy to
endorse Beijing’s colossal and contro-
versial “One Belt,
The One Road” infra-
structure initiative.
government Most contentious,
in Rome perhaps, was the
is a very Italian government’s
unreliable decision to grant a
partner, even Chinese state-owned
for China. company access to
two ports, including
one used by the
United States Navy
that is just 100 kilometers from NATO’s
largest air base in the Mediterranean
region.
But did Mr. Xi really get out of Italy
what he came for?
Since June 2018, when the awkward
motley coalition formed by the populist
Five Star Movement and the extreme-
right, anti-immigration League came
to power, the Italian government has
been as triumphalist as its politics
have been amateurish and confused.
The same goes for its recent dealings
with Mr. Xi.
Essential terms of the M.O.U. — and
of the 29 contracts signed along with it,
which range from the frivolous to the
reckless — are exceedingly vague. In
fact, some commitments are inherently
noncommittal.
Sicilian blood oranges are to be
flown to China for distribution by the
e-commerce giant Alibaba. The cities
of Verona and Hangzhou have been
twinned, as have the region of Langhe
with its vineyards and that of Yunnan
province and its rice terraces. New
media partnerships, including with
Chinese state news outlets, were an-
nounced — even as, on the margins of
a meeting Friday between Mr. Xi and
the Italian president at the presidential
palace in Rome, a member of the Chi-
nese embassy’s staff told an Italian
SALA, PAGE 11
The New York Times publishes opinion
from a wide range of perspectives in
hopes of promoting constructive debate
about consequential questions.
The single-minded pursuit of a quirky grape
YARRA GLEN, AUSTRALIA
An Australian winemaker
is dreaming of producing
an excellent nebbiolo
BY ERIC ASIMOV
In an unassuming shed near this small
Australian town in the center of the
Yarra Valley, just northeast of Mel-
bourne, Luke Lambert makes gorgeous,
minerally chardonnays and perfumed,
savory syrahs under the Luke Lambert
label.
The wines are fresh and energetic, far
from the jammy, alcoholic fruit bombs
and the cheap “critter label” commod-
ities that have dominated perceptions of
Australian wine in the United States
over the last 20 years. They are the sorts
of wines I love to drink — pure and un-
pretentious but with character and
depth.
Yet, despite the excellence of these
Y(1J85IC*KKNPKP( +&!"!$!=!@
NEWSSTAND PRICES
Andorra € 3.70
Antilles € 4.00
Austria € 3.50
Bahrain BD 1.40
Belgium € 3.50
Bos. & Herz. KM 5.50
Cameroon CFA 2700
In Lodz, Poland, the mayor has defied the governing party and embraced immigrants. They are needed to replace the 2.5 million Poles who have moved to other countries.
Poland’s immigration paradox
LODZ, POLAND
Anti-foreigner policies
at time of labor shortage
make for double standard
BY MARC SANTORA
The far-right Law and Justice party
came to power in 2015, at the height of
Europe’s migrant crisis, after running a
campaign that inspired choruses of “Po-
land for Poles.” With national elections
due in October, the governing party is
once again promoting its vision of “Po-
land First.”
The party’s loud, anti-immigrant rhet-
oric has created special headaches for
the European Union, which has largely
failed to distribute quotas of migrants
from North Africa, the Balkans and the
Middle East around the Continent be-
cause of resistance from Poland and
other hard-line member states.
So it may come as a surprise that the
Polish government has, very quietly,
presided over the largest influx of mi-
grant workers in the country’s modern
history — though they are mostly Chris-
tians from neighboring Ukraine.
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki
has not been shy about promoting the
government’s agenda. “We want to re-
SEAN FENNESSY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Luke Lambert has made superb syrahs
and chardonnays in the Yarra Valley for
years. But his passion is nebbiolo.
Canada CAN$ 5.50 Finland € 3.50
Croatia KN 22.00 France € 3.50
Cyprus € 3.20 Gabon CFA 2700
Czech Rep CZK 110 Germany € 3.50
Denmark Dkr 30 Great Britain £ 2.20
Egypt EGP 32.00 Greece € 2.80
Estonia € 3.50 Hungary HUF 950
HIDDEN GEMS
PERSIAN PRIZES
IN THE LOUVRE
PAGE 15 | CULTURE
INTERNATIONAL EDITION | THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019
Antonina Marushko at her salon in Lodz. Ukrainians like her are an exception to na-
tional restrictions because they are considered Christian and “culturally similar.”
shape Europe and re-Christianize it,” he
said in 2017 in an interview with a Catho-
lic television station. The government
recently ordered that all new passports
include the phrase, “God, Honor, Moth-
erland.”
But immigration is Poland’s paradox.
It has benefited greatly from the Euro-
pean Union’s open borders, earning bil-
lions of dollars in remittances from the
wines and the dedicated fans in several
continents who prize them, if Mr. Lam-
bert has his way, 15 years from now they
will be no more than fond memories. He
will instead concentrate on a single un-
likely wine: nebbiolo.
In pursuit of his dream, Mr. Lambert,
who will turn 40 this year, has bought 36
acres of land just north of the Yarra Val-
ley, near the town of Yea.
There, on part of a steep, bowl-shaped
hillside facing northeast, he will begin
this October to plant nothing but nebbi-
olo. Ultimately he will have about six
acres, just about the size that Mr. Lam-
bert, a fierce individualist, and his life
and business partner, Rosalind Hall, can
farm themselves. He will make just the
one wine.
“I always loved the Japanese ethos of
doing one thing and doing it to the best
of your ability,” he said. “In the end I just
want a small six-acre vineyard that I can
manage every vine and every liter of
wine myself.”
Nebbiolo is the great red grape of
northern Italy. When grown in the foggy
hillside vineyards of the Langhe in the
Israel NIS 13.50 Malta € 3.50 Qatar QR 12.00
Israel / Eilat NIS 11.50 Montenegro € 3.40 Republic of Ireland ¤ 3.40
Italy € 3.50 Morocco MAD 30 Reunion € 3.50
Ivory Coast CFA 2700 Norway Nkr 33 Saudi Arabia SR 15.00
Jordan JD 2.00 Oman OMR 1.40 Senegal CFA 2700
Lebanon LBP 5,000 Poland Zl 15 Serbia Din 280
Luxembourg € 3.50 Portugal € 3.50 Slovakia € 3.50
hundreds of thousands of Polish work-
ers who have migrated to other coun-
tries in the bloc, especially to Britain.
Yet with Poland now facing a labor
shortage, the government is failing to
lure back the diaspora and is restricted
by its political stance against migrants.
If government officials rarely speak
about needing migrant workers, the in-
fusion of Ukrainians is apparent in
Piedmont region, it becomes Barolo and
Barbaresco, wines with a power to
transport that is matched by only a few
others in the world.
In more northerly Alpine vineyards,
as in Valtellina, Carema, Ghemme and a
few other places, it is likewise made into
wine with the potential for intensity,
grace and nuance.
Outside northern Italy, good nebbiolo
has been something of a holy grail. It’s
challenging to grow, to say the least,
quirky and finicky. While I’ve had an oc-
casional compelling bottle from Califor-
nia producers like Jim Clendenen or
Palmina, and I’ve seen it growing in un-
likely places like the Sonoma Coast of
California and the Baja Peninsula in
Mexico, for the most part the nebbiolos
I’ve had from outside its spiritual home
have been pleasantly fruity at best.
“It’s a variety that is its own thing, a
different shape texturally, a different fla-
vor profile to any other and the absolute
best food wine there is,” Mr. Lambert
said. “It seems like the ultimate chal-
lenge in the world of wine.”
WINE, PAGE 2
Issue Number
Slovenia € 3.40 Turkey TL 17 No. 42,311
Spain € 3.50 U.A.E. AED 14.00
Sweden Skr 35 United States $ 4.00
Switzerland CHF 4.80 United States Military
Syria US$ 3.00 (Europe) $ 2.00
The Netherlands € 3.50
Tunisia Din 5.200
FAST LEARNERS
GOOGLE’S NEW ROBOTS:
SIMPLER, YET EFFECTIVE
PAGE 6 | BUSINESS
PHOTOGRAPHS BY LAURA BOUSHNAK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
many Polish cities. According to Euro-
stat, more than 683,000 foreigners re-
ceived their first residence permits in
Poland in 2017, the highest number for
any country in the European Union.
There are now over two million Ukraini-
ans working in Poland, most flocking to
cities that are the engines driving the
Polish economy.
The question is whether they will stay.
Last year, the European Union began al-
lowing visa-free travel for Ukrainians,
and Germany is easing work require-
ments for skilled workers, targeting
Ukrainians. A survey found that 59 per-
cent of Ukrainians in Poland said they
would leave for Germany if the labor
market opened up.
“There is no ownership of the issue by
the government,” said Anna Wicha, a di-
rector at the Adecco Group, one of the
largest employment agencies in Poland.
“You ask how many Ukrainians are
working here and they will say 500,000.
But it is more than two million. And
many may be going to Germany.”
For now, the government lacks a long-
term strategy to expand the labor pool.
Many experts and some opposition poli-
ticians in Poland say the situation will be
resolved only if political leaders soften
their resistance to migrants and em-
brace plurality. But at the national level,
even talking about immigration can be
politically lethal.
POLAND, PAGE 4
..
Taliban face
former U.S.
captors in
peace talks
DOHA, QATAR
Across a negotiating table,
the two sides try to agree
on a definition for terrorist
BY MUJIB MASHAL
When the United States invaded Af-
ghanistan in 2001 and toppled the Tal-
iban government, even those who sur-
rendered were treated as terrorists:
handcuffed, hooded and shipped to the
American detention camp in Guantá-
namo Bay, Cuba.
Now, in a stark demonstration of the
twists and contradictions of the long
American involvement in Afghanistan,
five of those men are sitting across a ne-
gotiating table from their former cap-
tors, part of the Taliban team discussing
the terms of an American troop with-
drawal.
“During our time in Guantánamo, the
feeling was with us that we had been
brought there unjustly and that we
would be freed,” said one of the former
detainees, Mullah Khairullah
Khairkhwa. “But it never occurred to
me that one day there would be negotia-
tions with them, and I would be sitting
there with them on one side and us on
the other.”
The five senior Taliban officials were
held at Guantánamo for 13 years before
catching a lucky break in 2014. They
were exchanged for Sgt. Bowe
Bergdahl, the only known American
service member to be held by the insur-
gents as a prisoner of war.
In recent months, as the Americans
and militants took up intense negotia-
tions to try to end the conflict in Afghani-
stan, the Taliban leadership made a
point of including the former prisoners.
Each day during the recent round of
talks in Doha, Qatar, the five men sat
face to face with American diplomats
and generals.
During days of slow and at times frus-
trated discussions at the most recent
session, which ended on March 12, it was
the Taliban side that was often more
emotional. Some gave impassioned
speeches about how vital it was that the
Americans completely leave Afghani-
stan in as little as six months.
The usual response from the Ameri-
can side, led by the senior envoy Zalmay
Khalilzad, was to give detailed technical
explanations about why withdrawing
was complex and needed to be slower,
perhaps over years.
But other than Mullah Khairkhwa,
the former detainees seemed more re-
luctant to speak, officials involved in the
talks said.
When they did address the group,
they seemed less harsh or strident than
some of the other Taliban negotiators,
perhaps mellowed by years of hardship
or wary that their freedom could be frag-
ile. Over the past few years, they have
AFGHANISTAN, PAGE 4
dior.com

2 | THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019
page two
Winemaker’s quest for a great nebbiolo
WINE, FROM PAGE 1
In the Yarra Valley, more than a few
winemakers are making the effort with
nebbiolo. Timo Mayer, who makes ex-
cellent, savory pinot noirs, also makes a
nebbiolo with aromas and flavors of
dark fruit and flowers.
Mac Forbes, a questing producer who
makes a variety of terrific wines, also
makes a ruggedly tannic nebbiolo with
flavors more on the red-fruited side of
the spectrum.
Of all the nebbiolo producers in the
Yarra Valley, none have approached
Luke Lambert’s 2017 nebbiolo, which
has not yet been released.
The tannins, which can sometimes
get out of hand with nebbiolo, are re-
strained in the ’17. Its aromas and fla-
vors are nuanced and complex, with
dark fruit, menthol, flowers, tar and
earthy minerals. Its texture is fine, even
elegant. It’s the truest, most honest ex-
pression of nebbiolo that I’ve had from
outside northern Italy.
I tasted other vintages of the Lambert
nebbiolo. The 2016 is earthy but not
nearly as aromatic, while the ’15 is a fine
effort, gently herbal and mineral. But it
all came together in 2017.
“We’re at the pointy end of something
really good,” he said.
Arriving at the 2017 nebbiolo was not
easy. Mr. Lambert, who grew up in Bris-
bane, on the east coast of Australia,
came to the Yarra Valley in 2004, drawn
by the freshness and liveliness he found
in the wines from historic producers like
Mount Mary and Yarra Yering.
As with so many Australian winemak-
ers, Mr. Lambert’s ideals were forged
through travel across classic European
wine regions, like the Piedmont of Italy,
where he fell in love with Barolo and
Barbaresco.
“For me, nebbiolo makes the best
wines in the world,” he said. “When I
first tried the wines of Bartolo Mas-
carello, Giacomo Conterno and
Giuseppe Rinaldi, I was completely
blown away and wanted to make nebbi-
olo and nothing else.”
In the Yarra, Mr. Lambert worked a
series of jobs at established wineries
while starting to make his own wine in a
garage in Yarra Glen. In 2010, he began
consulting with Denton, whose View
Hill Vineyard in the northern Yarra is
punctuated with granite boulders. It al-
ready had a little bit of nebbiolo planted.
Mr. Lambert now makes all the Den-
ton wines, as well as his own. Over the
years, nebbiolo has been added to the
vineyard, from which he gets the grapes
for the Luke Lambert nebbiolos. The
vineyard now has six acres of nebbiolo,
with seven different clonal selections,
each a mutation of nebbiolo with subtly
different characteristics.
“We’ve thrown ourselves into it, and
worked hard on the viticulture,” he said.
“It hasn’t always worked. Sometimes
it’s been a complete fail.”
Nebbiolo has a long growing season,
which can make it subject to early
spring frosts as well as late fall rains. In
the Yarra, it’s the first variety to bud in
spring, which begins in September here,
and the last to be picked in May, a full
month after cabernet sauvignon. The
2018 vintage was so difficult, Mr. Lam-
bert said, that he did not make any neb-
biolo, instead using the grapes for rosé
(a very good one at that).
“It’s just one of those things,” he said.
“Because the variety is susceptible, and
because we farm lightly with organic
principles, every now and again you’re
going to have to declassify or not make
one at all. Not forcing a wine in a direc-
tion when the quality isn’t there is an im-
portant part of what we do.”
Mr. Lambert makes the nebbiolo tra-
ditionally, allowing the ambient yeast to
A renowned Russian critic and documentarian
MAYA TUROVSKAYA
1924-2019
BY RICHARD SANDOMIR
Maya Turovskaya, a Russian film and
theater critic, once called “the Susan
Sontag of Soviet aesthetic thought,” who
also co-wrote a popular documentary in
the 1960s that drew parallels between
Stalin-era totalitarianism and Nazism,
died on March 4 at her home in Munich.
She was 94.
Her son, Vladimir Turovsky, con-
firmed her death. She had lived in Ger-
many for more than 15 years.
Ms. Turovskaya established a reputa-
tion for writing cultural criticism that
was erudite and cleareyed — and that
managed not to outrage the Soviet au-
thorities.
In making the documentary “Ordi-
nary Fascism” (also known as “Triumph
Over Violence”), which was directed by
Mikhail Romm, she avoided running
afoul of censors because it is substan-
tially an anti-Nazi film.
She and the co-writer, Yuri
Khanyutin, dug deeply into archives, in-
cluding the Soviet Union’s, for Nazi
propaganda footage; film from the pri-
vate collections of Hitler and Joseph
Goebbels; soldiers’ amateur film; chil-
dren’s drawings from the Theresien-
stadt concentration camp; and photo-
graphs of Nazi victims at Auschwitz.
The movie, with Mr. Romm as its sar-
donic narrator, mocked Nazism and jux-
taposed images of its evil actions with
contemporary film that the crew shot in
Moscow, Warsaw and Berlin — every-
Luke Lambert is planning to build a winery near the Yarra Valley in Australia where he can focus exclusively on the nebbiolo grape. Outside northern Italy, good nebbiolo has been something of a holy grail.
AUSTRALIA
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Vineyard
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Yarra Gle
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YARRA VALLEY
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ferment the juice at its own pace without
temperature controls. He ages the wine
in foudres, big old barrels of French and
Slavonian oak. He bottles without fining
or filtration.
He does have one special tool in his
winemaking. Mr. Lambert is a drummer,
and keeps a set in his winery, where he
sometimes jams with his partner, Ms.
Hall, who plays guitar. Loud drumming,
especially with the bass drum, he said,
helps the sediment in the wine settle to
the bottom of the vat, and eliminates any
Maya Turovskaya in 2012. She had a reputation for writing cultural criticism that was
erudite and cleareyed — and that managed not to outrage the Soviet authorities.
day scenes of students, lovers, mothers
and children — that stood in counter-
point to the malevolence of fascism.
The overall effect was to draw clear
but subtle connections between Nazi
Germany and Stalinist horrors without
offending the Soviet Union, while noting
the Soviet people’s sacrifices during
World War II.
Jane Taubman, a retired professor of
Russian at Amherst College in Massa-
chusetts, said that the documentary’s
target audience had no problem intu-
iting its meaning. “Russians, whose cul-
ture has existed under censorship for
the better part of 200 years, are used to
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
Above left, barrels at Mr. Lambert’s winery in Yarra Glen. The Luke Lambert label has earned fans around the world.
remaining carbon dioxide.
“Luckily, Rosalind is a pretty amazing
musician, so when she plugs in the Strat
and we lay into some Stooges covers, it
becomes a winemaking tool,” he said.
“We may need to patent that.”
His projected new vineyard will be
called Sparkletown, a name coined by
JENS SCHWARZ
reading between the lines (or the
frames) of what is called ‘Aesopian lan-
guage’ to a degree unknown in the
West,” she said in an email.
The documentary was released in late
1965 and seen by millions in the Soviet
Union.
“Maya said that it led to a lot of self-
reflection in the Soviet Union and made
people stop and think,” said Olga Ger-
shenson, the author of “The Phantom
Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish
Catastrophe” (2013) and a professor of
Judaic and Near Eastern studies at the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst,
in a phone interview. “The Soviet press
his 9-year-old daughter, Olive.
On a visit to the new property, they
saw the sun bouncing off the rocks and
hills in the distance, and the name was
set.
The vineyard site is full of rocks and
iron, with a bit of alluvial soil over the
top. Mr. Lambert will plant five different
praised the film as an anti-fascist docu-
ment.”
Ms. Turovskaya did little work in film
production after “Ordinary Fascism.”
Instead, she focused on film and theater
criticism, writing for newspapers, mag-
azines and journals. She wrote books
about the German playwright Bertolt
Brecht, the Russian film and stage ac-
tress Maria Babanova and Andrei
Tarkovsky, the brilliant Soviet director
whose striking, often abstract films
were admired in the West but banned in
his homeland.
Ms. Turovskaya wrote that each of Mr.
Tarkovsky’s films — including the cele-
brated “Ivan’s Childhood,” about an or-
phan boy who scouts for the Soviet
Army during World War II — was a
chapter in one long film.
“The subject is but the peg upon
which to hang a revelation of the inner
world, a world that is not merely a col-
lection of memories but a universe fur-
nished with laws of its own,” she wrote in
“Tarkovksy: Cinema as Poetry” (1981).
“The elements within this universe are
united by what Tarkovsky himself
called ‘rhythm.’”
In their book “Russian Critics on the
Cinema of Glasnost” (1994), Michael
Brashinksy and Andrew Horton, who
compared Ms. Turovskaya to Susan
Sontag for the effortlessness and so-
phistication of her prose, wrote: “Be-
cause Turovskaya, a drama critic first,
understands theater so well, she is bet-
ter than most critics at appreciating film
as performance. A connoisseur of belles
lettres as well, she is always attentive to
the literary core of a film.”
Ms. Turovskaya viewed with a gimlet
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
clones of nebbiolo on three different
rootstocks at three different densities,
and he plans to farm organically with a
particular focus on soil health.
“It’s going to give us lots of informa-
tion to track what works best, while also
building some complexity and layers
into the single wine,” he said.
eye the success of the 1960s James Bond
films, including “Dr. No,” Thunderball”
and “From Russia With Love”
In a 1966 issue of the Soviet literary
journal Novy Mir (New World), Ms. Tur-
ovskaya wrote that “one can speak as
ironically as one likes about the rather
stupid adventures of brave Bond,” but
she suggested that the popularity of the
films, based on Ian Fleming’s spy nov-
els, “may be rightfully considered as an
index of the monotony and dullness of
life” in the West.
Maya Iosifovna Turovskaya was born
on Oct. 27, 1924, in Kharkov, Ukraine.
Her father, Iosif Turovsky, was an eco-
nomics professor, and her mother, Fani
(Shub) Turovskaya, was a physician.
When she was very young, her father
was arrested and jailed for political rea-
sons.
After being released, he worked as an
engineer.
“My mother read Freud, my father
read the classics,” Ms. Turovskaya said
in an interview with The New York
Times in 1998. “We followed the Spanish
Civil War; we were internationalists.
My father had been imprisoned, and at
least half the children in my class had
missing fathers. We were children of the
Great Terror.”
After graduating in the 1940s from
Moscow State University, where she
studied philology, she received a degree
in theater science from the State The-
ater Institute. Following her education,
she was hired by a state radio commit-
tee but was fired quickly for being Jew-
ish.
Ms. Turovskaya began to write about
theater, film and culture in the 1950s.
..
PHOTOGRAPHS BY SEAN FENNESSY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
The first crop won’t come in for four or
five years, and Mr. Lambert estimates
that the vines won’t be mature enough
for making a nebbiolo for maybe a dec-
ade. Meanwhile, he will continue mak-
ing his Yarra Valley wines.
“Quitting those wines is a way off yet,”
he said. “In the meantime, that’s the ba-
sis for the business and what pays for
building Sparkletown.”
I wondered if he would miss making
those wines. “I’m proud of the wines
we’ve made, but when I look at them,
none of them have been as good as they
could be because I’ve had too much go-
ing on, been doing too much and spread
too thin,” he said. “Every hour I spend
on one wine has to come from another
wine, and because of that none of them
can reach their full potential.”
Along with the vineyard project, Mr.
Lambert and Ms. Hall plan to do a bit of
mixed farming for the family, including
a small olive grove just for family and
friends and a few animals. They’re ex-
pecting a baby in September, which he
says will increase the population of
Sparkletown to four.
“Sparkletown will be that one wine
and one place that I can devote every
hour I’ve got,” Mr. Lambert said. “I’m
not saying it’ll be amazing or rival the
quality of Barolo, but it will be my best
effort with no concessions and no short-
cuts. I can’t do any more than that. And
just thinking about that makes me
happy.”
But her reputation did not blossom until
the next decade, when the Soviet Union
was still in a post-Stalin political thaw
under Nikita S. Khrushchev.
By the late 1980s, her renown as a
critic, scholar and historian had grown
so much that she began to lecture at col-
leges in the United States and hold infor-
mal seminars about film with Russian
scholars from Yale, Harvard, Amherst,
Columbia and elsewhere.
“She’d show us a couple of films and
give us her interpretations,” Professor
Taubman said in a telephone interview.
“She was just full of wonderful informa-
tion and incredibly generous. She called
me Janechik and called Amherst her da-
cha.”
In 2008, Ms. Turovskaya won a Nika
Award, the Russian equivalent of an Os-
car, from the country’s Academy of Cine-
ma Arts and Sciences for her contribu-
tions to cinematic science, criticism and
education.
In addition to her son, she is survived
by a grandson and a sister, Bertha Ro-
ginskaya.
Ms. Gershenson, the professor and
author, recalled interviewing Ms. Tur-
ovskaya a decade ago in a coffee shop in
Munich.
“She had a long view of history,” Ms.
Gershenson said. She quoted her as say-
ing: “I have lived a very long life, I know
it very well. Everything is changing.
Now, if something is observed at the mo-
ment, it does not mean that it always has
been. We are all accustomed to imagin-
ing that everything is always like this
and everything will always be like that.
In fact, everything changes all the time.
Continuously.”
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019 | 3

World
Netanyahu sees a principle in taking Golan
JERUSALEM
If Israel seizes territory
‘in a defensive war,’ he
argues, ‘then it’s ours.’
BY DAVID M. HALBFINGER
AND ISABEL KERSHNER
For decades, international law has held
that territory seized in war must be re-
turned. But Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu of Israel has asserted that
this is no longer a given.
He made the argument Tuesday after
President Trump recognized Israel’s
sovereignty over the Golan Heights, but
his remarks, two weeks before a tight Is-
raeli election, were taken to refer to the
West Bank as well.
“There is a very important principle
in international life,” Mr. Netanyahu
said late Monday after attending the Go-
lan signing ceremony at the White
House. “When you start wars of ag-
gression, you lose territory, do not come
and claim it afterwards. It belongs to
us.”
And moments before landing at Ben-
Gurion Airport outside Tel Aviv on Tues-
day, he emphasized the point, telling re-
porters, “Everyone says you can’t hold
an occupied territory, but this proves
you can. If occupied in a defensive war,
then it’s ours.”
The prime minister’s remarks were
certain to cheer right-wing voters who
believe that international acceptance of
Israeli control of the Golan, a strategic
plateau captured in the Arab-Israeli
War of 1967, could pave the way for an-
nexation of at least part of the occupied
West Bank.
But legal experts and leaders of many
foreign countries said that interpreta-
tion did not comport with international
law, which does not recognize
sovereignty over territory taken from
another country by force.
Still, Mr. Netanyahu’s argument re-
flected how much the diplomatic con-
text for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
has shifted. With the Trump administra-
tion unilaterally acting in defiance of
longstanding international consensus
on the status of Jerusalem, Palestinian
refugees and now the Golan Heights, it
has become possible to speak openly of
annexing the West Bank in a way that
was not considered acceptable a few
years ago.
A Haaretz poll published on Monday
found that 42 percent of Israeli voters
support annexation of some portion of
the West Bank, including some who fa-
vor a two-state solution in which the
West Bank and Gaza would become a
Palestinian state.
But Israeli sovereignty over the Go-
lan remains a minority view. The United
Nations secretary general and many
countries in the region, whether allies
like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates or adversaries like Iran and
Syria, which claims the Golan, have con-
demned the American move.
At the United Nations Security Coun-
cil on Tuesday, several nations rebuked
Mr. Trump’s declaration, calling it a vio-
lation of international law that would
only heighten tensions.
The French ambassador, François De-
lattre, called the declaration “a breach of
international law, in particular the obli-
gation of states to not recognize an ille-
gal situation of occupation.”
Those sentiments were echoed by
Britain, Russia and China.
Jonathan Cohen, the American repre-
sentative, said Mr. Trump’s decision was
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arguments for claiming Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights were seen as referring to the West Bank as well.
The Jewish settlement of Naale in the West Bank. A poll published this week found that
42 percent of Israeli voters support annexation of some portion of the West Bank.
“of critical strategic and security impor-
tance” to Israel.
“To allow the Golan Heights to be con-
trolled by the likes of the Syrian and Ira-
nian regimes would turn a blind eye to
the atrocities of the Assad regime and
the malign and destabilizing presence of
Iran in the regions,” he said.
Yet even the Trump administration
hastened to portray the Golan procla-
mation as unique and said that it should
not be seen as precedent in other territo-
rial disputes.
“This is an incredible, unique situa-
tion,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
said Tuesday morning. “Israel was
fighting a defensive battle to save its na-
tion, and it cannot be the case that a U.N.
ARIEL SCHALIT/ASSOCIATED PRESS
resolution is a suicide pact. It simply
can’t be, and that’s the reality that Presi-
dent Trump recognized in his executive
order yesterday.”
Mr. Pompeo did not specify which
United Nations resolution he considered
suicidal, but several Security Council
resolutions have identified the Golan
Heights as occupied territory. After Is-
rael annexed the territory in 1981, the
United Nations Security Council passed
a resolution declaring the move illegal,
based on the principle that “the acquisi-
tion of territory by force is inadmissi-
ble.”
Ever since Mr. Trump’s tweeted rec-
ognition of the Israeli claim of
sovereignty over the Golan, Mr. Pompeo
Saar Falls in the Golan Heights. The Trump administration has portrayed its recogni-
tion of Israel’s claim to the Golan as unique and not a precedent in other disputes.
has been peppered with questions about
how the situation there differs from the
Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 —
an act that resulted in American-led in-
ternational sanctions that remain today.
Mr. Pompeo has insisted that the situ-
ations are different, and his argument
that Israel was acting defensively is the
first time he has tried to give a rationale
for what distinguishes Mr. Netanyahu’s
assertion of sovereignty from President
Vladimir V. Putin’s. Mr. Putin has long
argued that he, too, was acting in the de-
fense of the Russian-speaking majority
in Crimea.
But Mr. Pompeo’s argument that the
recognition of Israeli sovereignty over
the Golan was just an acknowledgment
DAN BALILTY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
AMMAR AWAD/REUTERS
of facts on the ground may undercut his
effort to draw distinctions.
It suggests that over time, the United
States might acquiesce to Russian
sovereignty over Crimea.
As a presidential candidate in 2016,
Mr. Trump argued that the sanctions im-
posed on Russia made little sense and
that the American foreign policy estab-
lishment was more committed to the
outcome in Crimea than most Ameri-
cans were.
Much as proponents of Israeli annex-
ation of Palestinian territory might find
Mr. Trump’s move encouraging, there
are important practical and legal dis-
tinctions between the West Bank and
the Golan Heights. The Golan was part
of Syria before 1967. It was largely de-
populated, with thousands of Syrians
fleeing north after Israel captured it.
The small remaining population of
mostly Druse residents were offered cit-
izenship by Israel, though few took it.
By contrast, Israel contends that the
West Bank was not legally part of any
sovereign nation before Israel captured
it in 1967, and thus considers it disputed,
rather than occupied, territory. Israel’s
failure to annex the West Bank has left
the door open to a negotiated solution.
At the same time, Israel’s annexation
of the Golan did not stop consecutive Is-
raeli prime ministers — including Mr.
Netanyahu himself — from holding ne-
gotiations with the Syrians with a view
to returning the Golan in exchange for a
peace agreement.
A bigger difference is that the West
Bank has around 1.8 million Palestinian
residents, who would vigorously oppose
Israeli annexation.
Offering them Israeli citizenship
would most likely turn Israel into a bina-
tional state.
Saeb Erekat, chief negotiator for the
Palestine Liberation Organization,
blasted Mr. Trump for trying to “delegit-
imize” the United Nations “and the role
of international law to peacefully solve
conflicts.” Mr. Netanyahu, he added,
“believes that the powerful and the oc-
cupier can dictate their occupation and
annexation and hold the occupied popu-
lation hostage.”
Analysts cautioned that Mr. Netanya-
hu could to be trying to exaggerate the
effect of Mr. Trump’s move for political
reasons.
“This is him spinning the proclama-
tion into more than it is,” said Ofer Zalz-
berg of International Crisis Group. “If
Israel annexed Gush Etzion, would
Trump let it lie? He could decide that the
Golan was desirable, but the West Bank
is not. He did not commit to recognizing
all Israeli annexation. Trump never said
he was going to be consistent.”
Even legal experts who are sympa-
thetic to Israeli claims in the West Bank
and East Jerusalem stressed the differ-
ences between those territories and the
Golan.
“It can’t serve as a precedent,” said
Alan Baker, a retired Israeli diplomat
and a former legal adviser to the Israeli
Foreign Ministry who lives in a West
Bank settlement.
“Every situation has its own specific
aspects,” he added.
Mr. Baker, co-author of a 2012 govern-
ment report that argued that the West
Bank was not occupied and that the Is-
raeli settlements there are legal, said
one of the main differences between it
and the Golan was that under the Oslo
Accords of the 1990s, both the Israelis
and Palestinians committed to deter-
mining the future status of the West
Bank through negotiations.
“According to international law,” he
said, “you can’t acquire territory, annex
or take sovereignty as an act of war, only
as part of a negotiation and with the
agreement of the former sovereign.
That’s the normal practice.”
But he added that “if a state is exercis-
ing the right of self-defense against an
aggressor, then the defending state is
permitted to remain as long as the
threat exists and as long as the other
state presents a danger.”
Since 1948, Mr. Baker said, Syria has
threatened Israel. Today it is also un-
stable and has used chemical warfare
against its citizens.
David E. Sanger and Edward Wong con-
tributed reporting from Washington, and
Michael Schwirtz from the United Na-
tions.

Professor with harsh words for China’s leader is suspended

BEIJING
BY CHRIS BUCKLEY
One of China’s most prestigious univer-
sities has suspended a law professor
and placed him under investigation af-
ter he published a series of essays that
warned of deepening repression under
President Xi Jinping, he said on Tues-
day.
The professor, Xu Zhangrun of Tsing-
hua University in Beijing, shot to promi-
nence last July when he published a pas-
sionate essay that was a rare rebuke of
Mr. Xi’s rule. The essay denounced Mr.
Xi’s authoritarian tendencies as driving
China back to closed, repressive politics
that could prove disastrous for the coun-
try.
In spite of censorship, the essay
spread in China, capturing a current of
disquiet about the direction of the coun-
try. Professor Xu received warnings, but
he kept publishing pieces that criticized
the authorities’ intolerance of dissent.
Now, the ruling Communist Party
seems to want to silence him.
His fate will be closely watched as a
measure of how far the party under Mr.
Xi will go in tightening restrictions on
Chinese academic life, which is already
heavily controlled. Since Mr. Xi came to
power as party leader in 2012, he has
taken particular aim at legal ideas, like
constitutional limits on power, that he
warned could be used to weaken party
control.
In a series of mobile phone messages,
Professor Xu said that several Tsinghua
University officials had ordered him on
Monday to stop all teaching and re-
search and told him his pay would be cut
drastically. He said a university “work
team” would investigate him, focusing
on the essays he had written since July.
He said he had been questioned for
one and a half hours by the officials.
“I don’t know what they’ll do next,” he
said. “I’ve been mentally preparing for
this for a long time. At the worst, I could
end up in prison.”
The effects of Professor Xu’s suspen-
sion could ripple beyond the leafy Tsing-
hua campus in northwest Beijing. The
university is one of China’s most inter-
nationally reputable; it hosts many for-
eign academics, as well as Schwarzman
College, founded by Stephen A.
Schwarzman, a Wall Street financier.
Mr. Xi himself studied at Tsinghua, as
have many other senior officials.
“A spirit independent, a mind unfet-
tered,” an old Tsinghua motto goes.
The investigation into Professor Xu,
56, could be used as a warning against
any potential dissent, said Geremie R.
Barmé, an Australian Sinologist who
has translated Professor Xu’s essays.
“Xu has repeatedly spoken out with
eloquence, humor and devastating can-
dor,” Mr. Barmé said by email. “Tsing-
hua University has now determined that
such poisonous thinking must not infect
the student body.”
Last year, the Communist Party intro-
duced a “patriotic education” drive
“Xu Zhangrun’s hardships aren’t
unique to him,” Ms. Zhang said by tele-
phone. “Caring about what happens to
Xu Zhangrun is caring about ourselves.”
Professor Xu’s circumstances are like
those of many liberal Chinese intellectu-
als over the past decade. Once, they en-
joyed a measure of official tolerance.
“I’ve been mentally
preparing for this for
a long time. At the worst,
I could end up in prison.”
But the Communist Party has made it in-
creasingly difficult for many to teach,
publish or go abroad.
In earlier years, Professor Xu was al-
lowed to lecture at Chinese universities
and publish essays and interviews in
WU HONG/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK party-run newspapers and journals. But
An essay denouncing Xi Jinping’s authoritarian tendencies circulated in China last year. tightening restrictions have closed off
The professor who wrote it, Xu Zhangrun, has said that he is under investigation. such venues, and liberal academics like
Professor Xu have become increasingly
disheartened about the prospects for
seeking to ensure that academics and suspended and could still teach. But political relaxation and a measure of de-
universities conform to party values, Professor Xu insisted that was incorrect mocratization under Communist Party
but that effort fizzled while the leader- and that word of his suspension may not rule.
ship focused on external worries. Pro- have reached some colleagues. “He cares greatly about scholarship,”
fessor Xu could now be used as an exam- Even so, the word had spread among said Sarah Biddulph, a professor of law
ple to revive that campaign, Mr. Barmé his friends and supporters in Beijing at the University of Melbourne in Aus-
said. and abroad, prompting denunciations. tralia, who has known Professor Xu
Offices reached at the Tsinghua Uni- Zhang Yihe, a writer in Beijing, said she since 1995, when he studied at the uni-
versity law school said they had not and other liberal intellectuals wanted to versity. “He is certainly not someone
heard about Professor Xu’s suspension. speak out in the hope that Professor Xu who would just grandstand or chase
A professor there, Zhang Jianwei, said could be protected from worse punish- some form of notoriety.”
by phone that Professor Xu had not been ment. In other recent steps to dismantle in-
tellectual dissent, party officials in 2016
engineered the takeover of a Chinese
history magazine that had served as a
forum for liberal former officials and
scholars. Last year, the authorities in
Beijing shut the Unirule Institute of Eco-
nomics, a think tank that favored eco-
nomic and political liberalization.
Nevertheless, Professor Xu contin-
ued publishing critical essays — written
in rapier-sharp classical Chinese style,
rich in ridicule and historical references
— mostly on the Chinese-language web-
site of The Financial Times. From there,
they spread among Chinese readers, al-
though censorship stymied circulation.
“In a season of discontent and buf-
feted by winds from all directions, si-
lence now reigns in our realm,” Profes-
sor Xu wrote in an essay about his cen-
sors that Mr. Barmé translated.
Adding to the nervousness of leaders
are the approaching anniversaries of
student protests in Beijing a century
ago, the Tiananmen Square protests 30
years ago and the founding of the Peo-
ple’s Republic of China 70 years ago.
Professor Xu said the investigation of
him by a team of officials from the uni-
versity carried echoes of Mao’s destruc-
tive Cultural Revolution, when intellec-
tuals and officials were investigated by
“special case teams.”
“Yesterday the investigation team
told me that I was suspended from re-
search. But thinking is in our blood,” he
said. “Unless you liquidate me, how
could you ever stop me doing my re-
search?”

4 | THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019
world
Poland’s immigration paradox
POLAND, FROM PAGE 1
When Pawel Chorazy, the deputy min-
ister of investments and development,
said during a televised debate before the
October local elections that “the inflow
of immigrants to Poland needs to be in-
creased to sustain economic growth,” he
was met with scorn.
Joachim Brudzinski, the interior min-
ister, said that Mr. Chorazy’s comments
were “not a position of the government.”
The prime minister, Mr. Morawiecki,
said that Mr. Chorazy “got seriously
ahead of himself.”
Then he fired him.
“Politicians are dancing on the line,
well aware that you can wake up
demons,” said Irena Kotowska, head of
the center for demography at the War-
saw School of Economics. “It is easy to
play into nationalist feeling with anti-
immigrant rhetoric. But the reality of
the need in the labor market is more and
more clear every day.”
“This is a defining moment for the
country,” she added. “Some decisions
simply have to be made.”
In the central city of Lodz, the contra-
dictions of Poland’s migration dilemma
are evident. Unlike national leaders,
however, the mayor, Hanna Zdanowska,
has embraced immigrants. When she
ran last October, she called for an inclu-
sive Poland that welcomed newcomers.
The governing party campaigned
hard against her, but she won with 70
percent of the vote, which she credited
in part to the city’s history of tolerance.
It was once a manufacturing center with
hundreds of red brick factories, a di-
verse population of Dutch, English and
German residents and a strong Jewish
contingent.
Henryk Panusz, 89, whose family
members were leaders in the knitwear
industry and part of a boomtown that
was an eclectic mix of ethnicities and
cultures, said Lodz “was the promised
land.”
“Until the Second World War, there
were so many cultures and ethnicities
and nationalities,” he said.
After the war, Lodz struggled under
Communist rule before the Iron Curtain
started disintegrating in Poland in 1989.
After the country joined the European
Union, providing a chance for people to
leave more easily, the city’s population
declined to under 690,000, from more
than 850,000. That was part of an exo-
dus since 2004 of 2.5 million people from
a nation of 38 million.
But Poland has also benefited from
billions of dollars’ worth of European
Union subsidies that have helped turn
the country into one of the Continent’s
fastest-growing economies. Lodz has at-
tracted international companies, while
reinventing many old factories as cul-
tural spaces to attract artists.
Even though the economy has
thrived, however, and despite millions
spent on a publicity campaign, the Pol-
ish government has had little success in
luring home many of those who went
abroad in search of better pay and great-
er opportunity.
5 Taliban face their former U.S. captors in peace talks
AFGHANISTAN, FROM PAGE 1
stayed in Doha and have been reunited
with their families, but they remain un-
der watch by the Qatari authorities at
the request of the United States.
The five former Guantánamo detain-
ees had varying roles during the Taliban
government. Mullah Khairkhwa served
as a governor and acting minister of in-
terior. Abdul Haq Wasiq was deputy
minister of intelligence.
Perhaps the most notorious figure in
the group is Mullah Fazel Mazloom, a
front-line commander who was also
chief of the Taliban army. While accusa-
tions of human rights abuses by the oth-
ers have generally remained vague,
there seems to be considerably more ev-
idence against Mullah Mazloom, who is
accused of mass killings and scorched-
earth brutality.
During an initial tribunal hearing at
Guantánamo — The New York Times
obtained the transcript via the Freedom
of Information Act — Mullah Mazloom
(his last name means “meek”) showed
no remorse.
“There is a 25-year war between per-
son to person, village by village, city by
city, province by province and tribe
against tribe,” he told the tribunal. “If
you think this is a crime, then every per-
son in Afghanistan should be in prison
or bring them here.”
Still, he insisted: “I never fought
against the new government. I never
fought against America.”
In their introductions around the ta-
ble as negotiations started last month,
the five men held up their detention at
Guantánamo as the most important part
of their identity.
“In important moments like this, my
own personal troubles don’t come to
mind,” Mullah Khairkhwa said in the in-
terview, after the negotiations had
ended. “I am really not thinking about
who is sitting across from me and what
they had done to me.”
“What is important is what we are
talking about,” he said, “and what is in it
for our interests, for our goal and for our
country.”
The men’s Guantánamo files include
several notations about uncooperative
behavior and instigations, including
throwing milk at guards and tearing up
their mattresses in protest.
Listed in Mullah Khairkhwa’s record,
along with making disruptive noises or
A Mass offered in Polish at a Catholic Church in Boston, England, in 2016. “Even if you have the worst job, it is a better life,” said one Pole now living in Britain.
Aleksandra Modrzejewska left Lodz
in 2014 and found a job as a waitress
when she first arrived in Britain. She
now lives in Chelmsford, England, and
works as an insurance broker. She says
she believes the assurances of the gov-
ernment in London that no matter what
happens when Britain leaves the Euro-
pean Union, a process known as Brexit,
she will be able to stay.
“No one I know is thinking of leaving,”
she said. “Brexit may have an impact on
new people coming, but, as far as I can
tell, for people who have built their lives
here, it is not going to change anything.”
“It was just a different quality of life,”
she added, explaining her decision to
leave Poland. “People are much more
open and inviting of different cultures
and nationalities.”
For officials in Lodz, and elsewhere in
Poland, the labor shortage is a problem
that could curb economic growth.
More than half of the companies in the
country reported having trouble finding
Among the Taliban negotiating the American withdrawal from Afghanistan were five officials who were held at Guantánamo Bay.
“I am really not thinking
about who is sitting
across from me and what
they had done to me.”
refusing to eat or shower at times, is
this: trying to kill himself and urging
others to kill themselves. But in his tri-
bunal hearing, Mr. Khairkhwa denied
having done so.
“There was no spoon in my meal, so I
asked the guard for a spoon,” Mullah
Khairkhwa said, according to the tran-
script. “Other detainees also shouted
that they did not have spoons, either.
The sergeant said he was sorry and
from orders of his boss he could not pro-
vide me with a spoon.”
“When I asked the reason,” Mullah
Khairkhwa added, “he said that I was
РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
workers, according to a survey by Work
Service, Poland’s largest employment
agency.
Antonina Marushko, 30, came to Lodz
from Ukraine three years ago with her
husband and two children. She said the
move had been difficult. But, she added,
she did not want to leave. She worked
and saved and recently was able to open
her own beauty salon.
“Our life is here now,” she said.
To reconcile the new arrivals with the
government’s anti-immigrant, Christian
identity, Poland’s leaders have gone to
great lengths to create narrow policies
that almost completely limit the influx to
Christians. That goal was all but stated
in proposed legislation that would make
it easier for people from former Soviet
satellite countries that are “culturally
similar” to Poland to become permanent
residents.
Polish immigration officials declined
to be interviewed for this article. But the
government has worked so hard for so
trying to kill myself and encourage oth-
ers to do the same.”
Most of the men were detained and
sent to Guantánamo after they surren-
dered — or even after they started co-
operating with the leadership of the new
government the United States had in-
stalled in Afghanistan.
At the time of his arrest, Mullah
Khairkhwa had retreated to private life
in his family’s home village and had
reached out to President Hamid Karzai,
who gained power after the American
invasion.
Mullah Khairkhwa, according to his
Guantánamo documents, was accused
of narcotics trafficking and of closely as-
sociating with Osama bin Laden’s men
in Al Qaeda. He denied both accusations
in his hearings.
Mr. Wasiq, the Taliban’s former depu-
ty intelligence chief, had come to a meet-
long to build a narrative that bolsters
suspicion of all outsiders that even an
immigration policy built on proximity
and cultural affinity is fraught.
The influx of Ukrainians has come at
the same time as a straining in the rela-
tionship between the Polish and Ukrain-
ian governments over the politicization
of history and the difficult pasts of the
two nations, which share a border that
has shifted multiple times over the dec-
ades.
For Ukrainians migrating to Poland,
those tensions can ripple into daily life.
Ms. Marushko, the beauty parlor owner,
said that her son was the only Ukrainian
in his class and that some of the other
children — presumably repeating talk
they heard at home — had told him that
Poland was for the Poles.
Ms. Marushko said that one of her old-
er Polish clients routinely mocked
Ukrainians, calling them radioactive be-
cause of Chernobyl, a bitter reference to
the nuclear disaster in 1986.
QATAR MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
ing with C.I.A. operatives to discuss co-
operation with American and Afghan of-
ficials. But he and some of his associates
who had come along were bound and
taken away, with at least one of them
rolled up in a carpet.
Mullah Mazloom had surrendered to
Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek
strongman in northern Afghanistan
whose militia allied with American Spe-
cial Operations forces. General Dostum
sent thousands of Mullah Mazloom’s
men to an overcrowded prison, and his
militia killed hundreds — if not thou-
sands — of those foot soldiers after an
insurrection in the prison.
Mullah Mazloom and some others
were eventually turned over to the
Americans.
A timeline for an American withdraw-
al from Afghanistan has been a stubborn
sticking point during the long days of
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
ANDREW TESTA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
“Things are better now,” Ms. Marush-
ko said, referring to her experiences of
prejudice.
Perhaps the biggest problem for Po-
land is that another generation, despite
growing up in an era of economic
growth, also seems eager to leave.
“There is still the perception here that
you make it outside of Poland,” Ms.
Wicha, of the Adecco Group, said.
Ms. Modrzejewska, the insurance
broker in Britain, agreed. “Even if you
have the worst job, it is a better life,” she
said.
She talks frequently with her family
and her 14-year-old sister, Magda, who
seems to have taken the message to
heart.
“I want to be a doctor or a medical en-
gineer,” Magda said. “We also have fam-
ily in Florida. I am too young to know
what I will do, but I think about it, and
going to Florida is my dream.”
Joanna Berendt contributed reporting.
talks. But an even more frustrating is-
sue has been how to define who is a ter-
rorist and who is not. That definition is
central as the United States has tried to
seek assurances from the Taliban that
Afghan territory will not again be used
as a staging ground for terrorist attacks
against the United States and its allies.
When they were toppled and hunted
down, the Taliban were an oppressive
regime, denying citizens basic rights, in-
cluding keeping women and girls out of
school and behind house walls. In the
group’s 18-year insurgency since, they
have resorted to acts of terrorism like
truck bombings that have caused mass
civilian casualties.
But now that the United States’ pri-
ority has shifted to withdrawal, and out
of the pragmatic need to negotiate with
the Taliban, American envoys have
turned to parsing words to find some
definition of terrorism they can hold in
common with the Taliban.
In some of the sessions, sitting across
the table from the former Guantánamo
detainees was Gen. Austin S. Miller, the
commander of the American and NATO
forces in Afghanistan.
Last October, General Miller nar-
rowly escaped death in an attack by a
Taliban infiltrator that killed a promi-
nent Afghan security chief, Gen. Abdul
Raziq, who had been walking beside him
in a heavily guarded compound in Kan-
dahar Province.
According to several officials on both
sides who knew details of the talks, Gen-
eral Miller told the Taliban that he re-
spected them as fighters, but that the
war needed to end. He also evoked a mu-
tual need to fight the terrorism of the Is-
lamic State.
“We could keep fighting, keep killing
each other,” General Miller was quoted
as saying. “Or, together, we could kill
ISIS.”
Mullah Khairkhwa said that even
though the two sides had not been able
to reach a final agreement this time, the
two sides shared a common interest, at
least, in ending the war.
“It’s been a long war, with lots of casu-
alties and destruction and loss,” he said.
“What gives me hope is that both teams
are taking the issue seriously. On every
issue, the discussions are serious, and it
gives me hope that we will find a way out
— as long as there are not spoilers to
ruin it.”
..
Leaders quit
at Vatican
women’s
magazine
ROME
Publication’s founder says
hierarchy dominated by
men did not value its work
BY ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
The founder and the entire editorial
board have quit a Vatican women’s mag-
azine that has drawn international at-
tention for exposing the abuse of nuns,
citing a “climate of distrust and progres-
sive delegitimization” of their work in-
side the Vatican’s communications of-
fice.
In a letter of resignation to Pope Fran-
cis, Lucetta Scaraffia, the founder and
editor of Women Church World, wrote
that the editorial board members, all
women, felt in the last few months that a
hierarchy dominated by men was mar-
ginalizing them and did not value their
work.
“It seems to us that a vital initiative is
being reduced to silence, to return to the
antiquated and arid method of the top-
down selection, under direct male con-
trol, of women who are perceived as be-
ing reliable,” Ms. Scaraffia wrote in the
letter, dated March 21, which was pro-
vided to The New York Times. Instead of
promoting fruitful discussion, the Vati-
can preferred to return to a “clerical self-
referential” mode, she wrote.
The monthly magazine, published by
the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore
Romano, has focused on women’s issues
and on the role of women inside the Ro-
man Catholic Church. Recently it had
become a forum for revealing and dis-
cussing hardships faced by some nuns
around the world, including the ex-
ploitation of their labor and sexual
abuse by priests.
The resignations at the magazine,
which was created seven years ago un-
der Pope Benedict XVI, were first re-
ported by The Associated Press. Ms.
Scaraffia said that until recently it had
editorial independence and papal sup-
port, first from Benedict and then from
Francis.
DOMENICO STINELLIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Lucetta Scaraffia, founder of Women
Church World magazine, said its work
was being “reduced to silence.”
“They were trying to
delegitimize us in every
way they could. They wanted
to sabotage the magazine.”
That changed when Andrea Monda
became the new director of L’Osserva-
tore Romano in December, Ms. Scaraffia
said in an interview on Tuesday. She
said that Mr. Monda began participating
in the magazine’s editorial meetings
along with journalists from his newspa-
per. The staff of the magazine felt con-
trolled, she said.
“No one had ever imposed on us peo-
ple from the outside,” she said.
In a statement issued by the Vatican
press office, Mr. Monda denied that he
had tried to meddle with the magazine,
which he said enjoyed “the same total
autonomy and the same freedom that
have characterized the monthly insert
since it was born.”
He said he had limited his involve-
ment to suggesting possible themes and
contributors to Ms. Scaraffia.
After the board of the magazine
threatened to resign in January, “they
pretended to accept our autonomy,” she
said. But the board felt its work was be-
ing undermined when L’Osservatore
Romano began publishing its own arti-
cles about women’s issues, with a differ-
ent editorial slant.
“They were trying to delegitimize us
in every way they could. They wanted to
sabotage the magazine, so we decided to
leave, before they took us out,” she said.
The resignation letter was to be an-
nounced in the next edition of the maga-
zine, which is scheduled to be published
next Monday. Ms. Scaraffia said she did
not know whether there would be an is-
sue at all.
Mr. Monda said the magazine would
continue to be published.
The Vatican communications office
has been undergoing an overhaul. The
Holy See’s chief spokesman and his dep-
uty resigned in December.
“They wanted us out because we were
autonomous,” Ms. Scaraffia said. “They
want only people controlled by them.”

..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Inquiry erases a line drawn after Watergate
NEWS ANALYSIS
WASHINGTON
Investigation’s legacy
may be the expansion
of presidential power
BY PETER BAKER
After Watergate, it was unthinkable that
a president would fire an F.B.I. director
who was investigating him or his associ-
ates. Or force out an attorney general for
failing to protect him from an investiga-
tion. Or dangle pardons before potential
witnesses against him.
But the end of the inquiry by the spe-
cial counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, made
clear that President Trump had success-
fully thrown out the unwritten rules that
had bound other chief executives in the
45 years since President Richard M.
Nixon resigned under fire, effectively
expanding presidential power in a dra-
matic way.
Mr. Mueller’s decision to not take a po-
sition on whether Mr. Trump’s many
norm-shattering interventions in the
law enforcement system constituted ob-
struction of justice means that future oc-
cupants of the White House will feel en-
titled to take similar actions. More than
perhaps any other outcome of the Muel-
ler investigation, this may become its
most enduring legacy.
To Mr. Trump and his allies, this is the
correct result, a restoration of the right-
ful authority of a president over the ex-
ecutive branch as stipulated in the Con-
stitution. Under the theory that Mr.
Trump’s legal team advanced, the Jus-
tice Department and the F.B.I. work for
the president and therefore a president
can order investigations opened or
closed, fire prosecutors, grant pardons
or otherwise use his constitutional
power, even if it seems overtly self-inter-
ested or political.
It was that view that Attorney Gen-
eral William P. Barr embraced in a 19-
page memo he drafted last year as a pri-
vate citizen and sent unsolicited to the
White House months before Mr. Trump
appointed him to lead the Justice De-
partment. And it was that same view
that informed Mr. Barr’s decision on
Sunday to make the ruling that Mr.
Mueller would not and declare that Mr.
Trump had not obstructed justice.
“I celebrate this, I salute this, I think it
is a very good thing because the possi-
bility of having the president investi-
gated because of his exercise of his core
constitutional powers was a very, very
bad thing to have out there,” said David
B. Rivkin Jr., a former Republican Jus-
tice Department official who has written
on the topic. “It debilitates the govern-
ment at all levels.”
To Mr. Trump’s critics, however, the
development represents a dangerous
degradation of the rule of law, handing a
president almost complete leeway to
thwart any effort by federal law enforce-
ment authorities to scrutinize his ac-
tions, almost as if he were a king.
“They’re just trying to create a new
kind of monarchy in the United States
and have a president who’s not account-
able,” said former Representative Eliza-
Spotlight lingers on Mueller, a reclusive figure of fascination
WASHINGTON
BY NOAH WEILAND
AND KATIE ROGERS
Most Friday nights as he conducted his
investigation, Robert S. Mueller III
drove seven miles from his offices by the
Capitol to Salt & Pepper, a dimly lit,
mostly empty restaurant near his home,
settling into a wooden booth partly cov-
ered by a dowdy red curtain.
The ritual — usually undertaken with
two friends, a glass of white wine, a plate
of scallops and no security detail — was
perhaps the most public contrast to the
way Americans came to know Mr. Muel-
ler in his 22 months as special counsel:
as a partisan symbol more than a per-
son, his name synonymous with what-
ever they wanted to believe about Presi-
dent Trump and American law enforce-
ment, their hopes and fears stashed in
the pockets of his pinstripe suits.
Throughout his investigation, Mr.
Mueller chose to remain silent, the rare
recluse in a world rife with Twitter bat-
tles and talking heads. But now, with his
report filed, Congress clamoring for
more of his findings and a polarized pub-
lic picking over the remains of his work,
the tight-lipped Vietnam veteran and
former F.B.I. director, who will be 75 in
August, remains a figure of mystery and
fascination.
The post-report spotlight may prove
to be a new test.
On Sunday, before his findings were
revealed for the first time, a usually
photo-shy Mr. Mueller drew a gawking
crowd outside St. John’s Church near
the White House, where he attended
morning services, a visit that allowed
for some of the first pictures of him since
he was appointed special counsel in May
2017.
But inside the church, few congre-
gants took notice. Mr. Mueller, who is
known to visit other Episcopal churches
around Washington, is a regular.
“Let’s put it this way: no un-
announced visitors,” Preston Cherouny,
who runs business operations for the
A Secret Service officer outside the White House. President Trump has thrown out the unwritten rules that have bound chief executives since President Richard M. Nixon resigned.
According to Attorney General William P. Barr, the special counsel did not establish a
conspiracy between Mr. Trump and Russia to influence the 2016 presidential campaign.
beth Holtzman, a New York Democrat
who sat on the House Judiciary Commit-
tee that passed articles of impeachment
against Mr. Nixon for obstruction of jus-
tice and other charges before his resig-
nation in August 1974.
The question of obstruction has
church, said in an interview. “It was just
a typical Sunday around here.”
For all the intrigue his investigation
has spawned, Mr. Mueller — a lifelong
Republican and consummate WASP
whose nickname in government was
“Bobby three sticks” — led a secretive
but ordinary life, bucking the spotlight
that came with being painted as a liberal
fantasy or conservative boogeyman.
The sightings were sporadic. Around
the time he indicted over a dozen Rus-
sian nationals for election interference,
Mr. Mueller was spotted in a 7-Eleven
store by the National Zoo wearing run-
ning pants and a cinched-waist parka.
Last September, Mr. Mueller and his
wife, Ann Standish, were seen at a spa-
cious help desk at Georgetown’s Apple
Store, peering curiously into a personal
MacBook, just days after Paul Manafort,
Mr. Trump’s former campaign chair-
man, pleaded guilty and signed a plea
agreement with the special counsel’s
team.
The Apple employee who fixed Mr.
Mueller’s computer told a reporter that
he was stunned when he walked out of
the back of the store to see his newest
client.
“Come on. I read the paper,” said the
employee, who would only identify him-
self as Yit, citing concerns over Apple’s
privacy policies. “Both of them were re-
ally nice. It was just business.”
In January, as Mr. Mueller closed in
on indicting Roger J. Stone Jr., he visited
Stohlman Subaru in Northern Virginia.
The dealership declined to divulge de-
tails about its customers or transac-
tions, but a person familiar with Mr.
Mueller’s negotiation said he either
bought or leased a new Forester, the
same model he drove to the office last
week in the final days of his investiga-
tion.
At work, Mr. Mueller nurtured a sense
of detachment. As the investigation un-
folded, he stayed tucked in his own office
outside his prosecutors’ cubicles, drift-
ing in and out of his team’s windowless
conference rooms and spartan open of-
fice space. Never one for small talk, he
rarely sat in on interviews, sneaking
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cial counsel neither accused the presi-
dent of a crime nor exonerated him.
Beyond those bottom-line conclu-
sions, Mr. Mueller’s full report has yet to
be released, and it remained unclear
whether it ever will be. House Demo-
crats have demanded that it be sent to
them by next Tuesday, but the Justice
Department outlined a longer schedule,
saying that it will have its own summary
ready to send to lawmakers within
weeks, though not months.
So far, there are no plans to give a
copy of the report to the White House in
advance of any public release, according
to a Justice Department official.
At the heart of the obstruction ques-
tion is when a president’s use of his oth-
erwise legitimate authority under the
Constitution becomes an abuse of
power. When the House Judiciary Com-
JOSHUA ROBERTS/REUTERS mittee approved three articles of im-
peachment against Mr. Nixon for cover-
ing up the Watergate burglary and other
crimes, it asserted that “he knowingly
misused the executive power by inter-
emerged as the most debated part of Mr. fering with agencies of the executive
Mueller’s investigation. According to a branch,” including the F.B.I. and the Jus-
summary by Mr. Barr, Mr. Mueller did tice Department.
not establish a conspiracy between Mr. In effect, the result was to draw a line
Trump and Russia to influence the 2016 that subsequent presidents steered
presidential campaign, but when it clear of, no matter how frustrated they
came to obstruction of justice, the spe- might be at times with investigators
TASOS KATOPODIS/GETTY IMAGES
As special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III became a partisan symbol to both sides. For all
the intrigue that his inquiry spawned, he managed to lead a secretive but ordinary life.
into the room toward the end to sit in si- porate idioms like “we need to square
lently, or stopping in merely to say hello the circle” — or merely sit in silence, let-
to a witness, letting his prosecutors ting his team handle negotiations over
speak for him. an interview with the president.
When he met with Mr. Trump’s law- In the absence of interviews and pub-
yers, he entered the room through a dig- lic statements, a rapt public began to
ital lockpad and sat in the middle of a search for clues in Mr. Mueller’s appear-
conference room table, his investigators ance, turning the square-jawed investi-
seated to his sides, according to John M. gator into a political Rorschach test. His
Dowd, one of the lawyers. Mr. Mueller, Sea Ranch-branded baseball caps, his
when he did engage, would deploy cor- tailored suits and the Casio watch he
CLIFF OWEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
pursuing them. To prevent a repeat of
Mr. Nixon’s actions, including his order
firing the Watergate special prosecutor,
Congress enacted a law creating an in-
dependent counsel who would not re-
port to the president.
But both parties grew disenchanted
with independent counsels after the ex-
“They’re just trying to create
a new kind of monarchy in
the United States and have a
president who’s not accountable.”
perience of Presidents Ronald Reagan
and George Bush during Iran-contra
and Bill Clinton during Whitewater and
the Monica S. Lewinsky affair, so they
let the law expire. When presidents did
use their pardon power in cases close to
them — Mr. Bush granting clemency to
Caspar W. Weinberger shortly before
leaving office and Mr. Clinton doing the
same with Susan McDougal in his last
hours in the White House — it was con-
sidered an egregious violation of the
norms.
In the absence of an independent
counsel law, Mr. Mueller was appointed
as a special prosecutor who still an-
swered to the Justice Department,
and other investigators sported were
pored over much in the same way that
Melania Trump’s clothes are examined
for evidence of her concealed politics.
“He is very comfortable in a Brooks
Brothers,” Garrett M. Graff, a journalist
who wrote a book about Mr. Mueller’s
tenure at the F.B.I., said in an interview.
“That carries through in a lot of what he
does. He’s deeply conservative. Not in a
political sense, but in a traditional
sense.”
His weekly visits to Salt & Pepper, an
aggressively unhip restaurant in Wash-
ington’s Palisades neighborhood near
the gated community where he lives,
were often set against the backdrop of
explosive news his team generated. As
he dined with confidants, including Ken-
neth L. Wainstein, his former chief of
staff at the F.B.I., Mueller-related news
coverage would often be flashing on a
large television screen nearby.
One evening, Mr. Mueller was eating
and talking animatedly at the same time
that his spokesman released a rare
statement refuting a BuzzFeed News
article about interactions between Mr.
Trump and Michael D. Cohen, the presi-
dent’s former personal lawyer.
Even last Friday, as Washington
hummed with anticipation over what
might be included in his report, Mr.
Mueller stuck to his routine. Hours after
handing the report to Attorney General
William P. Barr, Mr. Mueller was again in
one of his favorite booths, at ease and
laughing, drinking white wine and nib-
bling on appetizers and complimentary
breadsticks, according to his waiter.
As the official part of the work winds
down — CNN spotted Mr. Mueller driv-
ing into his office building on Monday —
speculation abounds about what Mr.
Mueller might do next, and his office has
offered few clues: “The special counsel
will be concluding his service in the
coming days,” Peter Carr, his spokes-
man, said in an email.
Mr. Mueller has options. He could
sign a tell-all book deal. He could pick up
where he left off on the paid speaking
circuit, talking again to groups like the
Nuclear Energy Institute or the Insur-
THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019 | 5
world
meaning he had less latitude, could not
indict the president even if he thought it
merited and could be fired by the presi-
dent he was investigating, as Mr. Trump
threatened to do repeatedly.
“What we tried to do in the wake of
Watergate was control a president who
had accrued excessive power,” Ms.
Holtzman said. “And these reforms
seem to be going by the wayside, and
we’re seeing the consequences. It’s re-
ally a disastrous situation for our de-
mocracy.”
Undaunted by post-Watergate con-
ventions, Mr. Trump fired James B.
Comey, the F.B.I. director, after Mr.
Comey rebuffed his requests for loyalty
and to drop an investigation into Mi-
chael T. Flynn, the president’s former
national security adviser, according to
contemporaneous memos kept by Mr.
Comey.
Mr. Trump likewise railed against At-
torney General Jeff Sessions for recus-
ing himself from the Russia investiga-
tion because it meant that his own ap-
pointee was not able to rein in the inqui-
ry. He eventually fired Mr. Sessions the
day after the November midterm elec-
tions.
And Mr. Trump has publicly left open
the possibility that he might pardon
some of those who came under scrutiny
by Mr. Mueller or New York prosecu-
tors, while praising associates who re-
fused to cooperate and denouncing
those who did as “rats.”
For nearly two years, Mr. Trump’s le-
gal team has taken an expansive view of
the executive powers afforded to the
president under Article II of the Consti-
tution, insisting that Mr. Trump’s ac-
tions fell within those boundaries no
matter what his motive.
Their case was made most succinctly
in a confidential letter written in Janu-
ary 2018 to Mr. Mueller by the presi-
dent’s lawyers at the time, John M.
Dowd and Jay Sekulow. In the letter,
they argued that by definition Mr.
Trump could not obstruct justice be-
cause his powers were so broad as presi-
dent that he could “if he wished, termi-
nate the inquiry, or even exercise his
power to pardon.”
“Every action that the president took
was taken with full constitutional au-
thority pursuant to Article II of the
United States Constitution,” they added.
“As such, these actions cannot consti-
tute obstruction, whether viewed sepa-
rately or even as a totality.”
Since Mr. Mueller’s report remains
undisclosed, it is not known how much
these constitutional arguments weighed
in his decision not to make a finding on
obstruction. Mr. Barr argued that since
there was no underlying crime of con-
spiracy, it would be harder to prove a
corrupt intent to obstruct.
Some expressed skepticism that the
line has moved. “I don’t think that
means that the definition of obstruction
has changed,” said Timothy Naftali, a
New York University professor and for-
mer director of the Nixon presidential li-
brary. “What I think we may find is the
evidence wasn’t sufficient to take on the
huge battle of indicting a president.”
Maggie Haberman and Katie Benner
contributed reporting.
ance Information Institute. He could be-
come a Twitter clearinghouse for com-
mentary on the investigations still en-
circling Mr. Trump.
Or he could return to WilmerHale, the
white-collar Washington law firm where
he occupied a 12th-floor corner office in
the years leading up to his appointment
as special counsel, defending clients
such as the National Football League
and Sony. Three co-workers left the firm
with him to become prosecutors in the
Russia investigation.
Jamie S. Gorelick, who worked with
Mr. Mueller at WilmerHale, said he was
unassuming and “wickedly funny” as a
partner at the firm, giving advice to law-
yers on particularly complex cases. If
Mr. Mueller returns, she said, he will
most likely continue with his previous
specialties: overseeing investigations
for corporations and nonprofits and
helping with cases related to cyber-
security.
Mr. Graff, who has dined out casually
with Mr. Mueller, surmised that he
might surprise with a memoir, wanting a
last word on his life’s work.
According to people who have known
him for years, taking such a public route
is unlikely. Mr. Mueller is not part of the
gossipy Washington ecosystem of din-
ner parties and book celebrations — in a
Time 2018 Person of the Year runner-up
profile, Mr. Mueller was described as
“the kind of man who flicks the lights off
and on at his home to inform guests that
it’s time to leave a social gathering.”
Cristina C. Arguedas, a lawyer who
knows Mr. Mueller from when he was a
young prosecutor and she was a public
defender, described him as too regi-
mented to break course now.
“I would bet you my house that you’re
never going to see him again in the pub-
lic eye,” Ms. Arguedas said, unless he is
subpoenaed to testify to Congress,
which is already a topic of discussion
among Democrats. “I think he resumes
his civilian life as if he didn’t have the
most important job in the country for the
last two years.”
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

6 | THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019
Business
Beginning in the 1840s, following the first Opium War, China was forced to accept unrestricted trading by Britain, the United States and others. Historians say that still stings.
In trade talks, history’s burden
WASHINGTON
Resistance to U.S. requests
by China is built in part on
long memory of bad deals
BY ALAN RAPPEPORT
When President Trump’s trade team
presented Chinese officials with a list of
bold economic demands in Beijing last
May, one of China’s state-controlled
news outlets, Global Times, panned the
request and blared a curious headline:
“Is it now 1840?”
Five months later, China’s national
news agency, Xinhua, accused Vice
President Mike Pence of lacking knowl-
edge of China’s past after he complained
that Beijing was merely paying lip serv-
ice to opening its economy.
Behind the pushback is a long and
painful history of China’s surrendering
to Western powers, with origins in what
the Chinese news media refers to as a
“century of humiliation” that began with
the “unequal treaties” of the 19th cen-
tury after the first Opium War.
History has been haunting the trade
negotiations between the world’s two
largest economies that have dragged on
for more than a year. While the Ameri-
can administration’s requests surround-
ing forced technology transfer and sub-
sidies of state-owned enterprises re-
main unresolved, the deepest division
centers on the United States’ insistence
of an enforcement mechanism that
gives it power to impose tariffs if China
abrogates its end of a trade agreement.
That issue was expected to be front
and center on Thursday, when Steven
Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, and
Robert Lighthizer, Mr. Trump’s top trade
negotiator, will again try to make head-
way toward a final deal during a two-day
visit to Beijing. Next week, a delegation
of government officials from China is
scheduled to be in Washington for addi-
tional talks.
As they work to agree on trade terms,
Trump administration officials have
outlined various situations for enforcing
an agreement. Most recently, negotia-
Inside Google’s rebooted robotics program
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF.
The goals are less flashy,
but the advances may hold
more real-world potential
BY CADE METZ
Google has quietly been retooling an
ambitious but troubled robotics pro-
gram that was once led by an executive
who left the company amid accusations
of sexual harassment.
Starting in 2013, the internet company
spent tens of millions of dollars buying
six robotics start-ups in the United
States and Japan. The project included
two teams specializing in machines that
looked and moved like humans. In a nod
to Google’s grand ambitions, Andy Ru-
bin, the vice president of engineering
who ran the effort, called it Replicant.
(The term was originally used in the sci-
tors have called for a system in which
representatives from both countries
would meet to address problems that
arise, pushing complaints to the top lev-
els of government as necessary.
The Chinese have agreed to periodic
meetings at the levels of office director,
vice minister and minister, which would
allow the United States to keep tabs on
China’s behavior and air complaints
from companies about unfair business
practices. If China fails to keep its agree-
ment, the United States would respond
“proportionally but unilaterally,” Mr.
Lighthizer said at a congressional hear-
ing last month.
But China is resisting the Trump ad-
ministration’s demand that the United
States be allowed to impose tariffs if Bei-
jing fails to keep its promises and that
China agree not to retaliate with its own
punitive measures.
The Trump administration says such
a mechanism is necessary to ensure
that China lives up to its agreement and
does not repeat what the administration
says is a pattern of reneging on past
promises. But such disarmament has
proved to be unpalatable in China, in
part, historians say, because of stinging
memories of one-sided treaties from an
earlier era.
“Every schoolchild in China and ev-
ery educated Chinese person knows
about the ‘century of humiliation,’” said
Stephen R. Platt, a historian and author
of “Imperial Twilight: The Opium War
and the End of China’s Last Golden
Age.” “There’s a lingering memory of
that history from the 19th century that
goes a long way to explain the desire in
China for a global trading order that
works more on China’s terms.”
He added, “They have to look strong
on trade.”
In 1839, the big trade war that gripped
the world was between Britain and
China, then ruled by the Qing dynasty.
Britain was buying large quantities of
Chinese silk and tea, but China was buy-
ing little in return, creating an uncom-
fortably large trade deficit. So Britain
turned to smuggling Indian opium, a
product that proved hard to resist, into
China, and a trade war turned into a real
one.
The three-year war ended with the
BRIAN DAWSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
A robotic arm that taught itself to identify
and toss objects at a Google lab.
ence-fiction movie “Blade Runner.”)
Little came of it. Over the next few
years, Google either sold off the compa-
nies it had acquired or shut them down.
The best known of them, Boston Dy-
namics, was bought by the Japanese
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Treaty of Nanking, which gave Britain
control of Hong Kong and opened sev-
eral new trade ports in China. British
merchants were allowed to go to China
and trade freely with no restrictions.
That was just the beginning. By the
1850s, the United States, Russia and
France signed treaties with China with
the same terms, allowing foreigners to
sell goods with low tariffs and giving
them privileged status in mainland
China.
Chinese culture was disrespected,
and China was forced to adhere to the
traditions of Western diplomacy. The in-
flux of foreign culture reoriented China’s
economy, eventually leading to the dy-
nasty’s downfall in 1912.
Some historians, such as William C.
Kirby, a professor of Chinese studies at
Harvard Business School, argue that the
unequal treaties did have benefits for
China, such as modernizing its institu-
tions and its education system. Howev-
er, that does not always mean that trade
“Every schoolchild in China
and every educated Chinese
person knows about the
‘century of humiliation.’”
pacts are mutually beneficial.
“One should always be cautious that
what is good for you, you imagine is
good for the other party automatically,”
Mr. Kirby said. “It might be, it might not
be.”
Trump administration officials have
tried to make the case that the changes
it wants China to make will benefit ev-
eryone.
“The kinds of things that we’re asking
for are not anti-Chinese at all,” Mr.
Lighthizer told National Public Radio
this week. “In fact, the reformers would
say it’s pro-Chinese. It will help their
economy, not hurt their economy.”
Despite suggesting that their inter-
ests are aligned, it has been difficult for
the United States to push China to make
changes without coming across as bully-
ing or insensitive. After talks stalled in
February, Larry Kudlow, the director of
the National Economic Council at the
White House, said that Mr. Lighthizer
conglomerate SoftBank and is still
working on robots that move like hu-
mans or animals. Mr. Rubin left Google
in 2014 after the harassment allegations.
Google regrouped and reconsidered
its focus on the mechanics of complex
robots. It has been rebuilding its pro-
gram for the last few years, with robots
that are much simpler than the human-
oid-shaped machines that hung on the
walls inside Mr. Rubin’s lab.
The new effort is called Robotics at
Google. It includes many of the engi-
neers and researchers who worked un-
der Mr. Rubin, and it is led by Vincent
Vanhoucke, a principal scientist at
Google. Mr. Vanhoucke, a French-born
researcher, was a key figure in the de-
velopment of Google Brain, the compa-
ny’s central artificial intelligence lab.
His team recently moved into a new lab
on Google’s main campus in Mountain
View, Calif. The New York Times was re-
cently provided a first look at some of
the technology the company has been
working on.
NG HAN GUAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
had read the “riot act” to Liu He, China’s
vice premier and the country’s top trade
negotiator.
It has also been hard for the Trump
administration to sell the agreement as
being two-sided. Mr. Trump has accused
China of essentially stealing from the
United States for decades, and his ad-
ministration is demanding that China
buy more American goods, stop subsi-
dizing its own companies and treat for-
eign companies fairly. In return, the
United States has so far offered to re-
move some, but not all, of the $250 bil-
lion worth of tariffs Mr. Trump imposed
last year.
“I consider that we’ve rebuilt China,”
Mr. Trump said last week at an event in
Ohio. He stated a figure of “$500 billion a
year taken out of our country,” referring
to the amount of Chinese goods im-
ported into the United States.
China remains skeptical that many of
the concessions that Mr. Trump is ask-
ing for will really help lift its economy.
While memories of long-ago humilia-
tion might still be fresh in China’s col-
lective mind, its status in the world has
changed drastically in the last 150 years.
Now the world’s second-largest econ-
omy, China has been exerting its own in-
fluence around the world.
Development programs like the Belt
and Road Initiative, a global infrastruc-
ture investment plan, have drawn criti-
cism from the United States and in parts
of Europe for being insufficiently trans-
parent and putting vulnerable econo-
mies in precarious positions.
“Chinese policy has shifted from fear
of being bullied into unequal treaties
into becoming a bully itself and forcing
unequal agreements on weaker na-
tions,” said Michael Pillsbury, a China
scholar at the Hudson Institute who ad-
vises the Trump administration.
But, Mr. Pillsbury points out, the Chi-
nese do not see things that way when it
comes to a trade deal with the United
States.
The Communist Party was founded
nearly a century ago on a promise of
putting a stop to humiliation at the
hands of foreigners.
“The Communist Party was created
on a narrative of standing up to, and
ending, unequal treaties,” he said.
While the machines may not be as
eye-catching as humanoid robots,
Google researchers believe that the sub-
tly more advanced technology inside
them gives them more potential in the
real world. The company is developing
ways for these robots to learn skills on
their own, like sorting through a bin of
unfamiliar objects or navigating a ware-
house filled with unexpected obstacles.
Google’s new lab is indicative of a
broader effort to bring so-called ma-
chine learning to robotics. Researchers
are exploring similar techniques at
places like the University of California,
Berkeley, and OpenAI, the artificial in-
telligence lab founded by the Silicon Val-
ley kingpins Elon Musk and Sam Alt-
man. In recent months, both places have
spawned start-ups trying to commer-
cialize their work.
Many believe that machine learning
— not extravagant new devices — will
be the key to developing robotics for
manufacturing, warehouse automation,
GOOGLE, PAGE 7
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
As outcry swelled,
Boeing said little
Company appeared caught
flat-footed following the
2nd crash of one of its jets
BY DAVID GELLES
As much as any company in corporate
America, Boeing would appear to be
well prepared to deal with a public-rela-
tions crisis. A major exporter and mili-
tary contractor, Boeing has deep ties in
Washington and spends lavishly on lob-
bying.
Dennis A. Muilenburg, the chief exec-
utive, is on the board of the Business
Roundtable, an influential group that
seeks to shape public policy. Boeing’s
top executive in the nation’s capital is a
seasoned operator who worked in the
Clinton White House.
Yet for all the scrutiny Boeing faced
after the crash of Ethiopian Airlines
Flight 302 and the subsequent ground-
ing of its 737 Max 8 planes around the
world, the company initially had very lit-
tle to say.
It issued brief statements, expressing
sympathy and standing by its planes. It
communicated quietly with the news
media and government officials. And
Mr. Muilenburg stayed out of sight — his
first substantial public comments came
in the form of a statement released more
than a week after the crash in Ethiopia.
To many observers, Boeing appeared to
be caught flat-footed by the growing
public outcry.
“Their comments have been very en-
gineering-esque,” said Richard Levick,
founder of Levick, a Washington crisis
communications firm. “There has been
no human face to this.”
Boeing now faces its most public reck-
oning since the accident in Ethiopia this
month, which followed the crash of an-
other 737 Max 8 jet, Lion Air Flight 610,
in Indonesia in October.
In Washington this week, two Senate
subcommittees were scheduled to hold
hearings dealing with federal oversight
of the aviation industry. Witnesses will
include the transportation secretary, the
head of the Federal Aviation Adminis-
tration and the chairman of the National
Transportation Safety Board.
The crash in Ethiopia set off a global
crisis for Boeing. In the days that fol-
lowed, regulators around the world
grounded the 737 Max, lawmakers
pushed for investigations and airlines
called for compensation.
Aviation experts zeroed in on new
anti-stall software included in the 737
Max that is believed to have contributed
to the Lion Air crash and may have
played a role in the Ethiopian Airlines
crash. Boeing has lost about $40 billion
in market value in recent weeks.
At first, Boeing stood by the airwor-
thiness of the 737 Max, even as some
regulators took the jetliner out of serv-
ice. After President Trump tweeted con-
cerns about aviation safety two days af-
ter the crash, Mr. Muilenburg called the
president and encouraged him to keep
the planes flying.
Yet Boeing did not make Mr. Muilen-
burg or other executives available for in-
terviews at the time. Nor did anyone in
Washington — like Transportation Sec-
retary Elaine Chao or Daniel Elwell, the
acting F.A.A. chief — truly step forward
to become the face of the government
response.
“You had inconsistent signals coming
from the Department of Transportation,
the F.A.A. and the N.T.S.B.,” said Jeffrey
Sonnenfeld, a leadership professor at
the Yale School of Management. “There
was no one commanding voice of au-
thority.”
Meanwhile, the story quickly tran-
scended Washington. Passengers
scheduled to fly on a 737 Max asked to
switch planes. The travel website Kayak
added a feature that allowed shoppers to
sort flights by plane type.
“Boeing responded as a business-to-
business company, but this has become
a business-to-consumer issue,” Mr. Lev-
ick said. “Consumers now care about
what plane they are on.”
The F.A.A. eventually grounded the
737 Max planes, but not until after regu-
lators around the world had already
done so. Boeing supported the decision,
with Mr. Muilenburg, the day after his
first conversation with Mr. Trump, plac-
ing another call to the White House to
say as much.
Though it appeared to be a flip-flop,
Boeing 737 Max jets parked in Renton, Wash. The jets have been grounded worldwide.
..
Mr. Sonnenfeld said Boeing was doing
the best it could with limited and con-
stantly changing information.
“They weren’t avoiding or denying,
they just didn’t have all the facts,” he
said. “It’s just a very confusing situa-
tion, and they needed to frame the issue:
Here’s what we know and here’s what
we don’t know.”
Even with the planes grounded, there
have been tense moments. On Tuesday,
a Boeing 737 Max 8 that Southwest Air-
lines was flying to California to be
grounded made an emergency landing
in Orlando, Fla., after the pilots reported
“performance issues” with one of the en-
gines shortly after takeoff, the airline
said. There were no passengers on
board. The F.A.A. said it was investigat-
ing.
Boeing has traditionally relied on in-
house employees, rather than public-af-
fairs consultants, to manage periods of
intense public scrutiny. But after that
hectic week following the Ethiopia
crash, Boeing turned to Sard Verbinnen,
a crisis communications firm based in
New York that it kept on retainer, for as-
sistance. What followed was a more as-
sertive posture by Boeing.
On March 18, Mr. Muilenburg re-
leased a statement and video express-
ing regret for the crashes and emphasiz-
ing Boeing’s commitment to safety.
Days later, Boeing took out full-page ad-
vertisements in newspapers including
The New York Times, The Washington
Post and The Wall Street Journal. Sard
Verbinnen declined to comment.
But as Boeing tried to seize control of
the narrative, the bad news kept com-
ing. The United States Justice Depart-
ment opened an investigation into Boe-
ing’s rushed development of the 737
Max. The Transportation Department’s
inspector general is examining how the
plane was certified.
BEN STANSALL/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
Dennis A. Muilenburg, Boeing’s chief,
stayed out of sight when the crisis began.
And the United States Defense De-
partment’s inspector general said it was
looking into complaints that Patrick M.
Shanahan, the acting defense secretary
and a former Boeing executive, had
been promoting his former employer
and talking down other military con-
tractors.
So far, Boeing has not hired any out-
side law firms to help it with the mount-
ing investigations. It is relying on its
Washington office, led by Timothy Keat-
ing, who previously worked in govern-
ment relations at Honeywell Interna-
tional and served as a special assistant
to President Bill Clinton and as staff di-
rector for the White House Legislative
Affairs office.
To advocate for Boeing in Washing-
ton, Mr. Keating has assembled a team
that includes more than a dozen former
government officials.
Boeing said it was being responsive to
inquiries from lawmakers. “We are en-
gaging with offices from across the
country to share the facts,” Boeing said
in a statement. “We’re taking every
phone call and responding to every re-
quest.”
On Saturday, Boeing hosted about a
dozen pilots and executives from five
airlines in Renton, Wash.
It was the first time Boeing had met
directly with airline pilots since the
crash in Ethiopia, and followed a round
of more contentious meetings between
Boeing and pilots after the Lion Air
crash last year.
Jon Weaks, president of the South-
west Airlines Pilots’ Association, said
his pilots expected to be in more regular
communication with Boeing from now
on.
“As the pilots of the aircraft, we need
more direct interaction with Boeing go-
ing forward,” he said.
Jack Nicas contributed reporting.
LINDSEY WASSON/REUTERS

..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
U.S. pushes for limits on imports of metals
WASHINGTON
The quota demand
has been rejected by
Canada and Mexico
BY ANA SWANSON
Nearly a year after imposing stiff tariffs
on foreign metals, the United States is
pressing Canada and Mexico to agree to
permanent limits on the amount of steel
and aluminum they export to America
each year.
The demand, reiterated in meetings
with Canadian officials this week, has
been rejected by Canada and Mexico
and is eliciting opposition from Ameri-
can companies that use foreign steel
and aluminum in their products.
The dispute is further complicating
efforts to complete a new North Ameri-
can Free Trade Agreement, which faces
a long battle in Congress and requires
ratification by legislators in all three na-
tions. Canada and Mexico had hoped
that President Trump would remove the
tariffs last year, when the three coun-
tries agreed on a new trade deal, known
as the United States-Mexico-Canada
Agreement. That did not happen, and
Mexico and Canada are now demanding
that the United States drop the levies as
a condition of their ratifying the deal.
But Mr. Trump’s advisers appear hes-
itant to do away with what they see as a
source of leverage with Canada and
Mexico. Democrats, who now control
the House, have made clear they will not
approve the new agreement without
changes that could require all three
countries to sign off, and the White
House may use the tariffs as a cudgel to
force Canada and Mexico to agree to any
alterations.
On Monday, Chrystia Freeland, the
Canadian foreign minister, called the
tariffs “illegal and unjust” and “com-
pletely unacceptable.” Ms. Freeland’s
comments came after she left a meeting
with Robert Lighthizer, the United
States trade representative, that fo-
cused mainly on the tariffs.
Ms. Freeland said Canadians would
be “really troubled” with the prospect of
moving forward to ratify the new trade
pact while the tariffs were still in place.
“To a lot of Canadians, it just doesn’t
make sense,” she said.
Google’s robotics lab in Mountain View, Calif. The company’s retooled program is training robots to develop skills on their own.
A new lab full of fast learners
GOOGLE, FROM PAGE 6
transportation and many other tasks.
“Robotics has long held the popular
imagination, but what is easily the most
important change is the application of
machine learning,” said Sunil Dhaliwal,
a general partner with Amplify Part-
ners, a Silicon Valley venture capital
firm. “The utility is in the software.”
Robots are already used in ware-
houses and on factory floors, but they
can handle only specific tasks, like pick-
ing up a particular object or turning a
screw. Google wants the machines it is
working with to learn on their own.
On a recent afternoon inside Google’s
new lab, a robotic arm hovered over a
bin filled with Ping-Pong balls, wooden
blocks, plastic bananas and other ran-
dom objects. Reaching into this pile of
clutter, the arm grabbed a banana be-
tween two fingers and, with a gentle
flick of the wrist, tossed it into a smaller
bin several feet away.
For a robot, it was a remarkable trick.
When first presented with that pile of
clutter, the arm did not know how to pick
up a single object. But equipped with a
camera that looked down into the bin,
the Google system analyzed its own
progress during about 14 hours of trial
and error.
The arm eventually learned to toss
items into the right bins about 85 per-
cent of the time. When the researchers
tried the same task, their accuracy rate
was about 80 percent.
It may sound simple enough, but writ-
Steel at U.S. Steel’s Granite City Works plant in Illinois. American companies that use foreign steel and aluminum say that capping imports could result in steep price increases.
To try to resolve the impasse, the
Trump administration has proposed
switching Canada’s current 25 percent
tariff on steel and 10 percent tariff on
aluminum to a quota system, in which a
specific amount of Canadian metal
would be allowed into the United States
each year, people familiar with the dis-
cussions say.
But Canada has rejected that idea, as
have American companies that use for-
eign steel and aluminum in products as
varied as beer cans and jet planes. They
argue that capping metal imports at a
specific level would be more disruptive
ing computer code to tell a machine how
to do that would be extremely difficult.
“It is learning more complicated things
than I could ever think about,” said Shu-
ran Song, one the primary researchers
on the project.
Researchers believe that these ma-
chines could work in warehouses and
distribution centers run by companies
like Amazon and UPS. Today, humans
sort through items that move in and out
of distribution centers. A system like
Google’s could automate part of the
process, though it is unclear when it will
be ready for commercial use. Amazon,
which has already deployed other kinds
of robotics in its distribution centers, is
interested in this kind of technology.
But many robotics experts warn that
moving this kind of machine learning
into the real world will be difficult. Tech-
nology that does well in the lab often
breaks down inside a distribution center
because it can’t deal with unexpected
objects it hasn’t seen before or tasks that
require movements it has never tried.
“This is not the right solution for all
problems,” said Leif Jentoft, the chief
executive of the Massachusetts com-
pany RightHand Robotics and a sea-
soned robotics researcher. “These tech-
nologies can sometimes seem more
powerful than they are.”
In another corner of Google’s lab, re-
searchers are training robotic hands to
manipulate objects — push, pull and
spin them in subtle ways.
The three-fingered hands are hardly
РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
than tariffs and could result in steep
price increases or a scarcity of metals.
The United States and Mexico are
locked in similar negotiations over
American tariffs on Mexican metal. Jar-
ed Kushner, the president’s son-in-law
and a senior White House adviser, trav-
eled to Mexico last week to discuss the
tariffs, the new trade deal and invest-
ment.
On Tuesday, associations represent-
ing the aluminum industry in all three
countries sent a letter to Mr. Trump ask-
ing for their industry to be exempted
from any tariff or quota. “Replacing a
BRIAN DAWSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
complex, at least in the physical sense.
The software helping them learn is the
breakthrough, and researchers hope the
hands can eventually learn to use tools
and other equipment.
Google is taking a similar approach
with all its robotic hardware. The arm
that tosses objects into a bin is not an
elaborate machine designed by Google
engineers. Built by Universal Robots, it
is commonly used for manufacturing
and other tasks. Google is training it to
do things it couldn’t otherwise do.
In a third part of the lab, researchers
are training a mobile robot sold by a Sili-
con Valley start-up, Fetch. This rolling
machine is learning to navigate unfamil-
iar spaces, which can help in places like
warehouses and factories.
Google is tight-lipped about how it
hopes to deploy the technologies it is
working on, but as with other forms of
automation, there is an obvious ques-
tion of whether it will take away jobs.
“It is hard to imagine a future where
that is not the case,” said Michael Chui, a
partner with the McKinsey Global Insti-
tute, a business research organization.
But other researchers believe that the
robots will complement human labor in-
stead of replacing it.
“There are still so many jobs in the
warehouse that robots can’t do,” said
Ken Goldberg, a robotics professor at
Berkeley and one of the researchers be-
hind Ambidexterous Robotics, a new
start-up. “What they can do is assist
with some of the drudgery.”
JEFF ROBERSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
tariff with a quota on aluminum imports International Economics in December
in North America would be highly detri- showed that Mr. Trump’s tariffs would
mental,” the letter said. create 8,700 jobs in the United States
Mr. Trump has credited his tariffs steel industry, but that steel users would
with reviving the United States steel pay an extra $650,000 for each job creat-
and aluminum industries, saying last ed.
week that American steel mills were Some American steel makers have
“roaring back to life.” promoted the idea of quotas as a way to
American giants like United States prevent surges of cheap metal, particu-
Steel and Nucor say the tariffs have larly Chinese steel and aluminum, from
helped them build new facilities and hire being routed into the United States
workers. through countries like Canada and Mex-
Still, economists suggest those gains ico.
have come at a high price. Calculations Mr. Lighthizer, who negotiated simi-
published by the Peterson Institute for lar quotas to help the United States steel
O C T O B E R 8–10 , 2 0 1 9
I N T E RC O N T I N E N TA L LO N D O N PA R K L A N E
C E L E B R AT I N G 4 0 Y E A R S
Join us for the 40th Oil & Money
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O I L A N D M O N E Y. C O M
THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019 | 7
business
industry during the Reagan administra-
tion, has supported the approach.
But businesses say that approach
could be even more detrimental to
American companies and the economy.
“What we hear from our member
companies is tariffs are bad and quotas
are worse,” said John Murphy, the sen-
ior vice president for international pol-
icy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
In a statement on March 22, Canadian
leaders of the United Steelworkers
called on their government not to ratify
the new trade pact until “tariffs and quo-
tas are removed from the equation.”
Economists say that quotas, if mis-
managed, can quickly lead to shortages,
rationing and other logistical problems.
If companies are not able to get crucial
parts back and forth across the border,
investments in factories or oil and gas
pipelines can be delayed, potentially at
the expense of American workers.
Aaron Padilla, the senior adviser for
international policy at the American Pe-
troleum Institute, said quotas would fur-
ther hinder the oil and gas industry,
which needs steel to build pipelines and
other infrastructure and has already
been affected by tariffs.
“With surging production of natural
gas and oil, the steel needs have in-
creased,” Mr. Padilla said. “Quotas can
actually stop steel at the border.”
Depending on how the Trump admin-
istration managed the quota, companies
shipping a product might not necessar-
ily know whether the cap would be filled
by the time that product reached the
border. That could result in companies’
having to either store the metal or have
it sent back to the factory at great ex-
pense. Traders can also game a quota
system, stockpiling metal and then
flooding the market when the quota pe-
riod opens, which can lead to shortages
for users and big profits for sellers.
In a report on Monday, Harbor Alu-
minum Intelligence, a consultancy, said
that one trader had bought over 200,000
metric tons of Canadian aluminum in
March, a potentially profitable trade if
Canada accepts the United States’ offer
of a quota.
By placing a numeric limit on the
products that can move across a border,
quotas can also encourage importers to
ship only the highest-value goods, in or-
der to maximize their profit.
Elisabeth Malkin contributed reporting
from Mexico City.
Keynote speakers:
Ben van Beurden
Chief Executive Officer
Royal Dutch Shell
H.E. Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi
Minister of State for Energy Affairs
State of Qatar
President and Chief Executive Officer
Qatar Petroleum
H.E. Thamir Abbas Al Ghadhban
Deputy Prime Minister for Energy Affairs
and Minister of Oil
Federal Government of Iraq
Bob Dudley
Group Chief Executive
BP

8 | THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019
style
Is Apple saying goodbye to fashion?
Vanessa Friedman
UNBUT TONED
A sudden, striking influx of glamorous
nontechies at a tech hub in California.
Grumbles about nondisclosure agree-
ments. Excited, surreptitious glances.
Gossip about disruption. A drumroll for
a hitherto hush-hush, industry-upset-
ting announcement.
Sound familiar?
This is not a description of what
happened Monday at the Apple event
in Cupertino, as the company unveiled
its new video service and television
shows (among other things). It is a
description of what happened on Sept.
9, 2014, at the Apple event in Cuperti-
no, when the Apple watch was un-
veiled. For those of us who remember
that day, the run-up to this week has
provided an eerie sense of déjà vu.
Not to mention a question: What’s
the deal with wearables and fashion?
Five years after the watch’s much-
ballyhooed introduction, is the relation-
ship over? Has technology found a
new object for its affections?
For a brief, shining moment, there
was such an intense attraction. The
trend wheel turns so fast these days
that it is easy to forget, but take a
moment, please, to remember when.
Because it is possible that there is a
lesson for us all buried in the end of the
affair (apologies to Graham Greene).
“There is this endless hunger in
fashion for newness and what’s the
next thing, and Apple and Silicon
Valley really promises that,” said
Mimma Viglezio, the editor of the
digital platform ShowStudio. “So they”
— we! — “just embraced it.”
THE PHEROMONES WERE FLYING
In advance of the watch’s introduction,
Apple — which, after all, had been built
on some of the principles dear to lux-
ury, including the allure of tactile de-
sign and planned obsolescence —
began seducing glossy executives right
and left to come work for the company.
Most notably there was Paul Den-
eve, the chief executive of Yves Saint
Laurent; Patrick Pruniaux, of TAG
Heuer; and Angela Ahrendts, the chief
executive credited with using technol-
ogy to transform Burberry, who ar-
rived at Apple to run its retail and
e-tail operations with a gilded halo still
fresh on her head.
Front-row denizens like Alexandra
Shulman, then the editor of British
Vogue, and Lauren Indvik, then the
editor of the website Fashionista, flew
out to Cupertino in the middle of New
York Fashion Week, suggesting that
when it came to shows, the one in
California was the one that mattered.
During Paris Fashion Week, Apple
had an unveiling at the super-boutique
Colette and Karl Lagerfeld came. Later,
there was a dinner at Azzedine Alaïa’s,
so designers like Olivier Rousteing (of
Balmain) and models like Cara Delev-
ingne could ogle the accessory.
The watch made its magazine debut
on the cover of China Vogue. Apple
took out a 12-page ad in American
Vogue. One year after the first unveil-
ing, also during fashion week, Apple
announced a partnership with Hermès,
and the following May the company
underwrote the Met Gala for the “Ma-
nus x Machina” show, itself an ode to
the coziness of fashion and technology
(which was the unofficial dress code of
the party).
Tim Cook, the chief executive of
Apple, showed up; Jony Ive, Apple’s
chief design officer, was a co-host,
along with Anna Wintour, the artistic
director of Condé Nast and editor of
American Vogue. As symbolism went,
the picture said it all.
(Or seemed to, anyway; whether the
cosiness was part of an overall fashion
strategy or just a series of coincidental
niceties between a company that
makes glossy inanimate things and an
industry that makes animate things
glossy, we’ll likely never know, given
how tight-lipped Apple is.)
In any case, Apple was only a part of
it.
Samsung’s Gear S also made its
fashion week debut in September 2014,
courtesy of Diesel Black Gold. Intel
teamed with Humberto Leon and Carol
Lim of Opening Ceremony to create
the MICA smartbangle. Will.i.am intro-
duced the “puls” cuff, inspired in part
by Chanel’s signature Maltese cross
cuffs.
Not long afterward, Ralph Lauren
introduced the connected Ricky bag
with a light and a charging port (which
followed its connected tennis shirt,
which monitored heart rate). “It’s a
game changer for us in luxury,” David
Lauren, the company’s executive vice
president for advertising, marketing
and corporate communications, said at
the time.
TAG Heuer, Intel and Google teamed
up to make their own connected ver-
sion of the Carrera watch. Louis Vuit-
ton made a connected Tambour Hori-
zon and described a future internet of
Louis Vuitton things. It was like a
smart-accessory orgy.
That moment in 2012 when Google
The Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, with Laurene Powell Jobs, at the 2016 Met Gala
for the “Manus x Machina” exhibition. Apple underwrote the cost of the lavish event.
Glass strutted down the runway at a
Diane von Furstenberg show, and
everyone cringed — even DVF could
not rescue that gadget-cum-glasses
from its own nerdiness — was treated
as simply an awkward early harbinger
of better things to come. This was the
future!
The cool of California was going to
rub off on the hidebound fashion world,
and the glamour of fashion was going
to fill consumers with desire for prod-
ucts. Instead of competing for the
same wallet share, they would both
benefit.
TROUBLE IN PARADISE
But then Mr. Deneve left Apple. So did
Mr. Pruniaux. And next month, Ms.
Ahrendts departs. Intel “exited the
end-product wearables area in 2017,”
according to a company spokeswoman,
and has pivoted to data analysis used
to inform retailers and brands, among
others.
Will.i.am refocused on “artificial
intelligence and voice-controlled com-
puting, for B2B and B2C hardware” his
representative said. Ralph Lauren no
longer sells a connected bag.
All the talk about wearables and
fashion has gone very, very quiet.
“The Venn overlap is not as great as
anyone thought,” said Scott Galloway, a
professor of marketing at the New
York University Stern School of Busi-
ness and the founder of the digital
think tank L2. “Technology is essen-
tially about creating utility and spread-
ing it over billions of people. Fashion is
about creating a moment, a trend, a
romance and spreading it across a
small amount of influential people.”
This does not mean that wearables
themselves are over (although it would
be good if someone could think of a
different word for the category, since
theoretically it could apply to anything
you put on your body).
By all accounts, the smartwatch
industry, which accounts for 44 percent
of the “wearable devices” market,
according to the research group Inter-
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It has been only five years
but all the talk about
wearables and fashion has
gone very, very quiet.
national Data Corporation, is doing just
fine. I.D.C. predicts that watches will
be among the main drivers of a 15.3
percent growth in the market this year.
(A new report from the NPD group
said that in 2018, sales of smart-
watches in the United States increased
54 percent.)
In Apple’s Q1 2019 earnings call in
January, Mr. Cook said that its wear-
ables category was up 50 percent (that
primarily means watches and Air-
Pods). A spokesman for Hermès said
its Apple watch was one of its most
popular models. Louis Vuitton’s smart-
watch accounts for half of its watch
business.
But while once upon a time there
were rumors that other designers
would join the gang, and third parties
like Coach and Kate Spade have made
bands for the Apple watch, the talk
these days is all about the watch’s
being a platform for health and fitness
— which is also why the fitness brands
(Nike especially) are still gung-ho.
That does not mean fashion itself is
not interested in technology. There is a
lot of excitement among executives I
speak to about augmented reality as a
shopping tool. As far as material sci-
ence and production go, technology is
hugely promising, especially as the
industry looks more and more to sus-
tainability.
“What’s happening is, it has spread
into the back end of production nan-
otechnology and fabric,” said Amanda
Parkes, the chief innovation officer of
Future Tech Lab, which works with
startups. “But that takes time to de-
velop, like biotech.”
In the meantime, a few brands are
dallying with cool stuff on the side.
Jimmy Choo recently unveiled a
heated lace-up urban hiking boot. It
Louis Vuitton earphones.
Angela Ahrendts, senior vice president for retail at Apple, at a store opening in October
in Chicago. The former Burberry chief executive is leaving Apple next month.
warms up using a battery in the heel
and then connects to a phone app so
you can control and monitor the tem-
perature. Ralph Lauren has designed
heated versions of its Polo 11 and
Olympic puffer jackets (they are also
controlled via an app).
Vuitton introduced wireless ear-
phones made with Master & Dynamic
technology and is testing a connected
suitcase. And Levi’s has been selling
its Commuter x Jacquard by Google
connected jean jacket since fall 2017.
But the fact that all of those develop-
ments, which five years ago would
have been trumpeted with drumrolls
and bells and whistles, slipped in prac-
tically under the radar reflects the new
state of . . . well, I wouldn’t call it es-
trangement, but rather a cooling of the
once-heated relationship.
IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S ME
“The connected boot is playful and was
just one of those things we kind of add
on when it makes sense,” said Sandra
Choi, the creative director of Jimmy
Choo, who added that the boot had
been well received. It was not included,
though, in the company’s presentation
during the most recent Milan Fashion
Week because it was not considered
core to the Jimmy Choo identity or
even indicative of future direction.
Paul Dillinger, the head of global
product innovation at Levi’s, said
much the same, noting that the con-
nected jacket is positioned in Levi’s
Commuter Collection, “which is a fairly
niche area of the business.” When it
came time for the next season’s re-
lease, instead of offering a new style or
a new product, the company chose to
offer the same product — with new
applications.
“We put the creative energy of fash-
ion design into the jacket’s digital
collateral rather than physical collat-
eral,” Mr. Dillinger said.
Mr. Galloway of N.Y.U. said the
conclusion was simple: “There was
only one wearable that was really a
fashion statement, and that was your
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
SARAH MAZZETTI
Jimmy Choo connected boots.
SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES
phone.” Which may have been the root
of the problem. We thought that wher-
ever that led, everything else would
follow. Apparently not.
All of which suggests we are over
the fashion-tech PDAs. We’re kind of
platonic acquaintances now. Every
once in while it’s nice to meet again
and air kiss.
So what have we learned from the
last five years?
Maybe that the real future of fashion
and technology has nothing to do with
screens.
Maybe that the concept of a “hero
product” that is so associated with the
world of technology doesn’t really
work in the context of an industry that
already has its own hero products
(Hollywood might take note of that
one).
Indeed, Mr. Dillinger said he was
initially quite skeptical about the idea
of the Jacquard. “I really value the
objects of fashion for being what they
are,” he said.
It’s possible we don’t actually want
our clothes, or our accessories, to do
much more than they already do,
which is make us feel good and be tools
of self-expression, symbols of member-
ship in a group, clues to aspirations.
That’s what the phone did. And,
though no one necessarily saw it com-
ing, what AirPods and Vuitton ear-
phones — which cost almost $1,000,
but which, since their introduction in
January, have sold three times as
much as the second-generation LV
smartwatch released at the same time
and currently have wait lists — are
doing: acting as visible semaphores of
identity.
According to I.D.C., by 2023 “ear-
worn devices” will be the second-
largest category of wearables, account-
ing for 31 percent of the market. (By
contrast, it predicts that smartclothes
will account for only around 3 per-
cent).
In other words, that drumroll in your
head? It’s actually hearables. Though
personally I like “earwear” better.
..
Basquiat
has nothing
on this guy
BY ALEX HAWGOOD
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JESSICA LEHRMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Name Daniel Moon
Age 39
Hometown Pasadena, Calif.
Now lives in a loft in downtown Los
Angeles that he shares with his girl-
friend.
Claim to fame Mr. Moon is something
of a mad scientist of hair coloring,
dyeing the heads of Kanye West, Miley
Cyrus and Madonna in expressionistic
rainbow hues that look painterly. He
was once called “the leader of the hair
graffiti color cult,” by i-D magazine.
“I created my own freehand style
where showcasing crazy colors in a
high-end way makes it more like art,”
Mr. Moon said. “Madonna once said to
me, ‘Oh, Danny, I feel like a Basquiat
right now, the way you’re coloring my
hair.’”
Big break In high school, he bleached
his wrestling teammates’ hair as a way
for them to stand out during tourna-
ments. But he didn’t get serious about
hair dyeing until the joined the Ma-
rines when he was 18.
“My girlfriend would send me pic-
tures of her changing her hair week
after week while I was on a base in
Okinawa with nothing but male Ma-
rines,” he said. “There were four girls
on the island, so, yes, I wanted to be a
hairdresser.”
He left the military in 2001 and re-
turned to Los Angeles, where he ap-
prenticed at several high-end Beverly
Hills salons. He eventually landed a
chair at Andy LeCompte’s studio,
where he worked from 2008 to 2016. “I
was surrounded by the best of the
best,” Mr. Moon said. “Andy introduced
me to off-the-wall techniques I had
never seen before.”
Latest project Mr. Moon opened his
own salon, Hair Los Angeles, in the
downtown Arts District last year. The
minimalist white space is decorated
with his photography and art col-
lection, along with his line of plastic
aprons, cutting capes and glitter hair
gel. “Because my work is often identi-
fied as art, people just thought my
salon was a gallery or something,” he
said.
Next thing Being an outré Hollywood
colorist means that he is subject to the
whims of his high-profile clients,
whether that means turning Katy
Perry’s hair a shade of “Muppet-refer-
enced, sherbet-pink orange” or provid-
ing Zoe Kravitz a “blond moment that
will withstand the history of time” for
Allure magazine.
“Everybody is in a really good head
space when I show up,” he said.
“They’re like, ‘All right, dude, what you
got?’ ” For those looking to parrot his
kaleidoscopic touch at home, Mr. Moon
plans to sell his own line of hair color
products later this year.
Moon man His Instagram followers
know him by his nickname, Major
Moon. He said the stage name of sorts
is a play on “the color world, the Bowie
world and the intergalactic world” of
his creative practice and his military
past. “It goes both ways,” he said.
Mr. Moon’s rainbow-hued work on, from
top, Larry Armstrong and the rapper AK.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019 | 9

Opinion
Do you speak my language? You should
In an Bénédicte de Montlaur
increasingly
global world,
Americans In January, the Modern Language
should be Association made an astonishing an-
nouncement in The Chronicle of Higher
adding, not Education: From 2013 to 2016, colleges
slashing, across the United States cut 651 foreign
opportunities language programs. French was the
hardest hit, losing 129 programs, fol-
for their lowed by Spanish with 118, German with
children to 86 and Italian with 56. Once these pro-
learn another grams close, they are very hard to
reopen.
tongue. According to a Pew study from last
year, only 20 percent of K-12 students in
America study a foreign language
(compared with an average of 92 per-
cent in Europe), and only 10 states and
the District of Columbia make foreign-
language learning a high school gradua-
tion requirement.
The decline in language education
could have devastating effects for gen-
erations to come. With fewer options for
learning a foreign language in school, a
sharp decrease in interest is likely to
follow. According to the Modern Lan-
guage Association, enrollment in col-
lege-level foreign-language courses
dropped 9.2 percent
The decline from 2013 to 2016.
The association
in language says these changes
education are most likely a
could have direct result of the
devastating 2008 recession,
effects for which hit foreign-
generations language degree
to come. programs harder
than many other
humanities pro-
grams. As programs
shrink so does the supply of qualified
teachers. It’s a vicious cycle.
And yet, knowing a foreign language
is becoming ever more essential. The
freshman congresswoman Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, who is Spanish-English
bilingual, recently tweeted, “Bilin-
gualism is a huge advantage in the
economy and the world.” Ms. Ocasio-
Cortez, who at age 29 is already one of DINGDING HU
the best-known members of the Demo-
cratic Party, is a case in point. directly tied to its application in their opening of dual-language programs for adopted in part to maintain and tion to be active participants in a multi-
Her sentiment is shared by many. In other fields of study. Georgia Tech, for decades. strengthen the diversity of languages lingual world, dual-language and multi-
response, some educators and parents example, has devised programs aimed In concert with these efforts, Mayor spoken in the state. cultural education is crucial. Govern-
are rethinking the way language is at developing language skills that allow Bill de Blasio of New York announced The French government has long ment spending on foreign-language
taught and calling for expanded access them to work more effectively in, and to last month that 47 more pre-K dual- played a role in the support of French education and the education of qualified
to language education. be more attractive to, international language programs in city schools will language programs in the United foreign-language teachers needs to
Nationwide, parents and teachers companies and organizations. The open in the fall. In total, there will be 107 States. French offers both great profes- increase. More states need to enforce
have been leading grass-roots initia- University of Rhode Island is offering a dual-language programs for the 2019-20 sional potential and access to the vast language-education requirements.
tives to provide foreign-language learn- program “for students looking to be- school year, including the city’s first and growing Francophone community, Colleges need to recognize the impor-
ing in public schools, and some universi- come truly global engineers,” which French, Haitian-Creole, Hebrew and which could reach 700 million by 2050. tance of their foreign-language educa-
ties have instituted innovative language combines a foreign language degree Japanese pre-K programs. As cultural counselor of the French tion programs. In turn, more parents,
programs. From pre-K to graduate with one in engineering. Elsewhere, Utah is aiming to interna- Embassy, I have spearheaded the cre- students and teachers need to lobby for
studies, there is a move toward holistic In public schools, parents have also tionalize its population by offering ation and development of the French language programs.
language education, based on the notion pushed for dual-language immersion dual-language programs to English Dual Language Fund, inaugurated by The necessity of foreign-language
that learning a language should be programs, which foster fluency for speakers; its International Education President Emmanuel Macron in 2017, education could not be clearer right
grounded in the real, everyday use of students who need help with English Initiative became law in 2008, and its which supports bilingual programs in now. The future in America, and every-
that language. while allowing English speakers to gain public schools now offer about 200 public schools in the United States. The where, is multilingual. And so is the
Some universities have restructured a new language. In Anchorage, Alaska, immersion programs. “Global Califor- process of adding such programs varies present.
programs to emphasize the ability to the school board recently approved a nia 2030,” an initiative by the state’s enormously from one state to another,
work, socialize and research across French dual-language program after a superintendent of public education “to but the commitment of school districts BÉNÉDICTE DE MONTLAUR is the cultural
languages, offering dual degrees in petition by parents. In New York, parent vastly expand the teaching and learn- is crucial for their development. counselor of the French Embassy in the
which students’ language education is organizing has been instrumental in the ing of world languages,” was recently If Americans want the next genera- United States.

Can Exxon Mobil protect Mozambique from climate change?

The money Leigh Elston
could make
the country
more resilient MAPUTO, MOZAMBIQUE On Tuesday
— if it doesn’t evening, five days after Cyclone Idai hit
central Mozambique and the rains
just end up started, thousands of survivors were
causing more still stranded, waiting to be rescued
conflict and from trees or the roofs of houses.
On that same evening, far from the
corruption. floods, I was in an air-conditioned office
here in the capital with a group of
bankers and oil industry executives,
hearing about how rich and happy
Mozambicans would soon be. Standard
Bank was presenting a new report on
the billions of dollars it predicted the
Mozambique government will earn
from the giant natural gas projects the
American oil companies Exxon Mobil
and Anadarko plan to start building in
the northernmost province of Cabo
Delgado this year.
We observed a minute of silence for
the victims of the flood. What was not
observed was the possibility that cli-
mate change, driven by the oil and gas
industry, had any responsibility for the
natural disaster.
If the Standard Bank report is right,
Mozambique will earn $80 billion to
$100 billion over the next 30 years from
Exxon’s project alone. Anadarko’s
project is estimated to deliver $67 bil-
lion. Those are huge sums in a country
whose gross domestic product is esti-
mated to be around $14 billion.
With that kind of money, the govern-
ment could hire around 850 doctors and
17,600 teachers, build 3,200 low-cost
homes and provide 4,000 hospital beds,
per year the bank estimates.
It could rebuild Beira, Mozambique’s
fourth-largest city, 90 percent of which
is estimated to have been damaged or
destroyed by Cyclone Idai, and the town
of Buzi, home to 200,000 inhabitants,
which is totally submerged.
It could also fund a proper climate
risk management and resilience pro-
A family stranded in Mozambique after Cyclone Idai hit. The nearby city of Buzi, home to 200,000 inhabitants, was totally submerged.
gram, which would be able to provide
better warning of disasters, giving
people time to evacuate, and improve
rescue and relief efforts. It could finance
the building of houses, schools, hospi-
tals and roads better able to withstand
storms and flooding.
This should be a priority. Mozam-
bique ranks third in Africa as the most
exposed to weather-related hazards,
including cyclones, droughts and floods
— the number and intensity of which
are likely to increase.
Historically, Mozambique has con-
tributed less to climate change than
almost any country on the planet. The
gas plants could be argued to have a net
emissions benefit, as much of the gas
will be liquefied and shipped to China to
replace dirtier coal-fired power.
“But being better than coal is a low
bar and is not enough for a stable cli-
mate,” said Jonathan Gaventa, a senior
associate at the sustainable develop-
ment think tank E3G, who recently
moved to Maputo. “Both coal and gas
power generation are also beginning to
be challenged by low-cost renewable
resources.”
That doesn’t change the fact that
Mozambique needs the money. But will
it really improve the lives of ordinary
people?
I saw one attendee leave the presen-
tation early. “I had this awkward feeling
— with thousands of deaths and the
emergency, and I am here discussing
who gets the biggest piece of the cake,”
SIPHIWE SIBEKO/REUTERS
he told me later.
Weak state institutions and low gov-
ernment accountability make Mozam-
bique vulnerable to the “resource
curse” — when a dependence on natu-
ral-resource revenues leads to higher
rates of conflict and corruption and a
decline in democracy and economic
growth.
The conflict has already begun. Since
October 2017, Islamist insurgents have
been attacking villages, burning houses
and decapitating residents in Cabo
Delgado. Little is understood about the
cause of this violence, but rising poverty
and inequality are thought to be at its
root. The gas projects will further dis-
rupt the area’s economic balance.
The government has cracked down
with mass arrests. Human Rights
Watch has reported that the “security
forces have allegedly arbitrarily de-
tained, ill-treated and summarily exe-
cuted dozens of people they suspected
of belonging” to the insurgency.
Since Cyclone Idai hit, the insurgency
has dropped from the headlines, aided
by the fact that the governor of Cabo
Delgado has reportedly ordered jour-
nalists to stop covering the conflict. At
least two journalists have been detained
for doing so.
Corruption is also worsening. In 2016
it was revealed that the government
had secretly taken out $2 billion in debt,
backed with illegal state guarantees,
assuming that the money could be
repaid with revenue from the gas
projects before anyone noticed.
According to a United States Federal
District Court indictment of three for-
mer Mozambican government officials
and others, at least $200 million of this
money was spent on kickbacks and
bribes. Some of the rest was used to buy
military patrol boats, at a vastly inflated
price, which were supposed to protect
Mozambique’s seas and rivers. Not one
of these boats has been deployed for the
cyclone relief effort.
All this, perhaps, gives a better indi-
cation of what the gas revenues may be
spent on, rather than schools or climate
resilience. Some employees at the oil
companies have even whispered that
perhaps it would be better to leave the
gas in the ground.
But that won’t happen. Presidential
elections will be held later this year.
Frelimo, the party that has won every
election since independence in 1975, will
win again. The gas projects will move
forward. Revenues will be used to
tighten the party’s grip on power. Cor-
ruption and inequality will increase.
And long after the flooding from Cy-
clone Idai has receded, the poorest
Mozambicans will still be left stranded.
LEIGH ELSTONis a journalist covering the
energy industry in sub-Saharan Africa.
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10 | THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

opinion

This friendship has been digitized

A.G. SULZBERGER, Publisher
part of our understanding of the “good friendships had dropped from three to by contrast, is when you care for your
Stephen Asma life,” as far back as we can trace the two. At the end of a 2006 study, close to friend for her sake, not for any benefit
DEAN BAQUET, Executive Editor MARK THOMPSON, Chief Executive Officer human story. “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” 25 percent of respondents said they you can accrue from the relation. This
JOSEPH KAHN, Managing Editor STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON, President, International which is perhaps our oldest tale, writ- didn’t have anyone they could truly is selfless friendship. You can have
SUZANNE DALEY, Associate Editor JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DEMARTA, Senior V.P., Global Advertising ten some 4,000 years ago, is a bro- trust. More recent research suggests only a couple of these friends because
CHARLOTTE GORDON, V.P., International Consumer Marketing “I’ll be there in a few minutes,” my mance of sorts between Gilgamesh and that these trends are persisting, as they require a lot of time, work and
JAMES BENNET, Editorial Page Editor HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS, V.P., International Circulation 15-year-old son shouted from his room. his beloved friend Enkidu. The Bible, intimacy among teenagers is replaced effort, and a general blending or inter-
JAMES DAO, Deputy Editorial Page Editor HELENA PHUA, Executive V.P., Asia-Pacific “I’m playing Xbox with a friend.” too, celebrates friendship in the story by efficiency. twining of two lives. You have to clock
KATHLEEN KINGSBURY, Deputy Editorial Page Editor SUZANNE YVERNÈS, International Chief Financial Officer
“Who’s your friend?” I inquired. of Naomi and Ruth, revealing Ruth’s The loss of intimacy, however, does time with these people, and you must
“A guy named Scuzzball,” he replied. great loyalty and devotion despite the not seem to be a concern among the make sacrifices for each other.
“Oh, what’s Scuzzball’s real name?” lack of blood ties. young people actually growing up Classmates and workmates can
I asked. Each year, more and more of our online; they report feeling socially become friends, as can fellow members
“I have no idea,” he said, slightly lives take place in the digital space. supported by large networks of online of sports teams and musical groups,
annoyed. The average teenager spends up to “friends” whom they rarely or never spouses, religious or military col-
“Where’s he from?” I continued. nine hours a day online. My freshman see face-to-face. Getting “likes” and leagues, and so on. These examples
RULES HINDER ADDICTION TREATMENT “Somewhere in Canada, I think . . . college students tell me they are actu- other forms of digital grooming from suggest that friendship needs three
no, wait, maybe it’s France. I don’t ally on screens for larger audiences validates their re- criteria for full realization: shared
The federal government released a report last week really know. Oh, wait, it doesn’t even Do I need to around 12 hours a peated self-disclosures. experience, loyalty and shared inten-
Drugs like that came to a striking conclusion: More than 80 per- matter, because Scuzzball just left the
explain to my day, since almost all But do these young people even tionality, or mental connection.
buprenorphine game and he’s been replaced with a homework is also know what they are missing? And does What about in the digital sphere?
cent of the roughly two million people struggling with
bot.” son that a bot now online. Accord- it matter? Our online “friends” — whether it’s
could sharply opioid addiction in the United States are not being “That sucks,” I tried to commiserate. will never ing to a 2018 Pew Social isolation has certainly in- Scuzzball or the Facebook friend
curb the treated with the medications most likely to nudge them “Your buddy is replaced by artificial have his back? report, nearly 90 creased in Japan, where half a million you’ve never met — satisfy the inten-
nation’s opioid into remission or prevent them from overdosing. This intelligence?” percent of 18- to young people live as “hikikomori” — tionality criterion, because we commu-
“It doesn’t matter, Dad, it happens 29-year-olds regu- recluses who don’t leave their homes. nicate extensively with language and
overdose crisis. denial of care is so pervasive and egregious, the re-
all the time! The game continues.” larly use social media. In 2016, the And loneliness in Britain has increased report to each other long-term goals,
But federal port’s authors found, that it amounts to a serious ethical My son’s indifference about playing American Academy of Pediatrics re- enough that the government has creat- disappointments, beliefs and other
laws make breach on the part of both health care providers and the with a person or a bot is actually very leased a policy statement warning, ed a “minister for loneliness.” Accord- facets of mental life.
criminal justice system. typical of gamers these days. They “Children who overuse online media ing to a new survey, 86 percent of We can share experiences with a
it difficult for refer to one another as “friends,” but to are at risk of problematic internet use, American and British citizens believe person online, but the experiences
The Food and Drug Administration has approved
people who me their bond looks very tenuous. I and heavy users of video games are at that “increased use of technology” is seem thin when compared with face-
three medications to treat opioid use disorder — don’t recognize any sense in which risk of internet gaming disorder.” Even contributing to social isolation. to-face experiences. Online adventures
need such
methadone, buprenorphine and naltrexone. All of them Scuzzball and my son are real friends. Silicon Valley is growing skeptical Some of the earliest philosophical (social networking, gaming) can cer-
medications work by binding to the brain’s opiate receptors in a way And that concerns me. I wonder about digital utopia; 32 percent of tech work on friendship comes from Aris- tainly strengthen friendship bonds that
to get them. that reduces the cravings that people addicted to drugs
whether the pre-internet, face-to-face professionals now believe digital life totle, who pointed out in his “Nico- were forged in more embodied interac-
experience of friendship that I knew will harm our mental well-being over machean Ethics” that friendships of tions, but can they create those bonds?
like OxyContin and heroin experience, but without growing up will be lost to our post- the coming decade. pleasure and utility are easily formed Teenagers playing “Call of Duty”
causing the same euphoric high as those drugs. internet children. And I’m not alone. Around 2005, people reported that but also easily abandoned because with online teams, for example, are
Methadone and buprenorphine have proved especially Friendship has been an important the average number of their strong such bonds are flimsy. Deep friendship, ASMA, PAGE 11

effective. Patients who take one of those medications

are half as likely to die from their addiction; they are
also more likely to stay in treatment, and they tend to
have better long-term health outcomes.
Neither drug is new or experimental — methadone
was approved to treat opioid addiction in 1972 and
buprenorphine in 2002. Some countries have shown
that increasing access to them can significantly drive
down the rate of overdose deaths.
Yet, many drug courts and most residential treatment
programs in the United States prevent participants
from using these medications; and the rehabilitation
programs that do offer them rarely offer all three op-
tions. The treatments are not available in most emer-
gency rooms, as The Times has reported, even though
studies show that patients given buprenorphine in an
E.R. are twice as likely to be in treatment a month later
than those who are given an information pamphlet.
They are also not available in most prisons, even
though a significant portion of the federal inmate popu-
lation suffers from opioid use disorder. Opioid overdose
is a leading cause of death among those who’ve been
recently released.
Part of the problem is stigma and a profound lack of
awareness. Methadone and buprenorphine are opioids.
They are weaker than drugs like OxyContin, fentanyl
and heroin that have fueled the current crisis, but many
law enforcement and medical professionals still see
them as trading one addiction for another. Or they mis-
takenly believe that the medications should be used
only temporarily, to help wean patients off stronger
opioids. Or they see them as an optional complement to
behavioral interventions instead of an essential compo-
nent of opioid addiction management.
IGOR BASTIDAS
None of these perceptions is supported by the bal-
ance of scientific evidence.
There’s also a logistical barrier to getting these drugs
into the hands of people who need them. Doctors are
allowed to give methadone only at specialized clinics
where patients must report every day for their dose.
Lines at such clinics are often long, and according to the
The fight over Europe’s ‘refugee crisis’
federal report, which came from the National Acade- able (“regional disembarkation plat- closed passage to Europe. Migration spicuously absent from the practices
mies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, Medicaid John Dalhuisen forms” in Africa) or empty slogans catastrophists typically focus on Afri- Europe has employed to reduce the
does not cover the treatment in at least 14 states. (“controlled centers” within the E.U.’s ca, but even in 2016, the peak year for pressure on its borders.
borders). None are put forward with Central Mediterranean crossings, only This, in the end, is the crucial ques-
Buprenorphine is available by prescription, but
much conviction. 165,000 came from the continent. This tion: How do governments deliver
health care professionals must obtain a special license The European Parliament elections are This is unwise. If mainstream lead- is a large and unsustainable number, humane, effective border control? The
to write those prescriptions, a process that requires just two months away. The big ques- ers — on both the left and the right — but it is not uncontrollable — and it is honest answer must be: with difficulty,
them to complete hours of additional training, grant the tion is how Europe’s alliance of far- are hoping that the declining number certainly not an invasion. at cost and through significant admin-
right populists will fare. Their strategy of migrant arrivals will, on its own, halt The story to counter the populist istrative, and some legislative, re-
Drug Enforcement Administration access to all of their
is clear. In a speech in July, Viktor the far-right populist insurgency, they narrative should start like this: There forms.
patient records and agree to strict limits on the number Orban, the prime minister of Hungary are going to be disappointed come is no invasion; migration is control- It is possible, however, and neces-
of patients they can treat with the medication. In many and a figurehead of the far right, bellig- May. lable and must be controlled. But that sary. The broad outlines are already
states, would-be buprenorphine prescribers also must erently declared that “the time has That’s in large part because the is not enough. How migrant flows are clear. A coalition of willing European
come for the European elections to be populist narrative on migration is managed and reduced matters, too. governments should come together to
submit to stringent criteria for insurance reimburse-
about a great, important, common number-proof. The story illiberal lead- Populists say they will stop everyone. ensure quick but fair processing of all
ment. These restrictions also are not justified by scien- European issue: the issue of immigra- ers tell is simple, emotional and power- Principled politicians asylum applications in reception cen-
tific evidence. tion, and the future related to it.” The ful: Europe faces a barbarian invasion, To beat must instead say: ters in frontier states and to return
Fewer than seven percent of the nation’s doctors right wing is organized and confident. and only Europe have the will to stop We will control our those with no claim to protection to
Mr. Orban concluded, “We believe we it. High numbers of arrivals prove
the far right, borders humanely; their countries of origin. For this, they
have gone through the trouble of clearing these hurdles. the E.U.’s
are that future.” their premise, while low numbers we will not stop reach agreements with these countries
As a result, more than half of all counties have no li- Is Mr. Orban correct? The conven- prove the effectiveness of their reme- mainstream everyone, but we will that speak to their actual interests;
censed buprenorphine prescriber at all. That’s too bad. tional wisdom in Europe these days dies. No matter that their heartless parties need a discourage those where possible, they return refugees to
According to the national academies report, just about says that the far right has peaked. This policies are largely irrelevant. Mr. credible story with no claim to transit countries willing to receive
view is based largely on the idea that Orban’s fences in Hungary and the — and real protection from them, but only if their rights are fully
anyone with opioid use disorder — teenagers, pregnant
the “refugee crisis” is over. If the popu- Italian government’s hounding of solutions. setting out and send respected there, which requires invest-
women, people with other serious medical conditions — list surge was fueled by a real problem rescue boats are highly visible, but the back those who ment and monitoring. Finally, they
can be treated safely and effectively with the medica- in 2015, when over a million refugees real work is being done in Libya and come; we will re- distribute recognized refugees from
tion. and migrants entered Europe, there is Turkey and by the increasingly ap- spect human rights these centers across other participat-
no such problem today. palling conditions on the Greek islands and refugee law; we will welcome the ing European Union states.
President Trump declared a public health emergency
It’s true that the numbers have come — policies and failures for which Eu- persecuted; we will rescue those adrift Mainstream European politicians
to respond to the opioid crisis in 2017, but so far that down — to under 150,000 irregular rope’s leaders share a collective re- at sea; we will work with and invest in and parties should endorse such a plan
declaration has led to very little meaningful action. arrivals last year, which is still above, sponsibility. neighboring countries (like Turkey) to immediately, and then begin figuring
Congress passed a suite of opioid bills in the fall, but but not too far from, the pre-2014 aver- The point, though, is this: Populists expand the space in which refugees out the details. That will be hard work,
age of about 100,000 a year. This analy- propose, carry out and advertise poli- can live (and be returned to) in dig- but less costly — and less dangerous —
that legislation contained almost no funding. And in
sis leads to the comforting but danger- cies that are consistent with their nity; and we will offer migrants the than not coming up with a plan. Doing
most states, strategies that might truly mitigate the ous conclusion that the tremors still story. Mainstream parties should copy opportunity to come and work regu- nothing, or doing many things ineffec-
disaster — from evidence-based addiction treatments rippling through the European political this approach. larly, in proportion to our needs and tively, is not going to convince voters
like methadone and buprenorphine to proven harm- landscape will subside once public What they need, first and foremost, capacity. and certainly won’t win back those
perception has caught up with reality. is a different story. The populist narra- They don’t just need to say these seduced by populist fear-mongerers.
reduction approaches like needle exchanges and safe
The ubiquity of this view may ac- tive of a migrant invasion took hold at things; they also need to show that Democrats can beat populists this May
injection sites — remain vastly underutilized or outright count for the inertia of mainstream the height of the refugee crisis. The they are doing them. They need poli- by telling a better story and carrying
illegal. political parties. They appear to have reality, however, is that the events of cies that match their story. Much out better policies. They have just two
Public health forecasts indicate that the opioid over- given up on any serious efforts to 2015 were exceptional, the product of touted “European” values are at the months to prove it.
reform asylum and migration policies. the near simultaneous implosion of two heart of this story. They are important,
dose epidemic might claim another 500,000 lives in the
The proposals that do still emerge are close-by countries — Syria, which they are popular, they are what distin- JOHN DALHUISEN is a senior fellow at the
next decade. Many of those deaths could be avoided — either irrelevant (10,000 more Euro- generated some five million refugees, guish democrats from demagogues — European Stability Initiative, a think
if existing technologies would just be put to use. pean Union border guards), undeliver- and Libya, which opened a previously and they are, for the most part, con- tank.

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opinion

The paranoid center

Ross Douthat
Over the last three years, since Brexit
and the Trumpening and the general
rise of disreputable forces in Western
politics, there has been a steadily boil-
ing elite panic about the power of the
paranoid fringe, the mainstreaming of
conspiracy theories, the pull of fake
news and the danger of alternative
realities.
And yet over that same period, a good
many members of the opposition to
Donald Trump — a mix of serious jour-
nalists, cable television hosts, pop
culture personalities, erstwhile govern-
ment officials, professional activists and
politicians — have been invested in
what appears to be exactly the kind of
W.M.D. was a pimple compared to
Russiagate.”
Like many of Taibbi’s claims over the
years, this one seems overdrawn. Yes,
the most extreme forms of the collusion
narrative were always exceedingly
unlikely, but the combination of a real
Russian crime and a lot of lying and
guilty-seeming behavior by Trump and
his hangers-on made a certain amount
of speculation inevitable and reason-
able. Yes, the mainstream press gave
too much credence to the Steele dossier
and rushed to publish too quickly on
seemingly incriminating stories. But as
long as you got news from somewhere
other than Rachel Maddow the case for
skepticism was amply available as well.
And — as Taibbi concedes — the various
Russiagate conspiracy theories didn’t
actually lead us into a shooting war with
Russia, whereas the Iraq debate gave us
a true foreign policy disaster, not just a
strange cultural obsession with a spe-
cial prosecutor’s work. But the parallel
is still useful, because both the march to
war with Iraq and the Russia panic
show us the ways in
The Russia which a politics of
once called “the paranoid center.” Be-
cause the center believes in the basic
goodness of American and Western
institutions, the basic wisdom and
patriotism of their personnel, its threat
matrix is always attuned to Great Ene-
mies outside and radicals within, and its
greatest fears tend to involve the two
groups working together — whether
that means Middle Eastern dictators
and Islamist sleeper cells after Sept. 11
or the grand alliance of Putinists and
homegrown white nationalists that’s
blamed for Donald Trump.
Meanwhile the extremes, in different
but sometimes overlapping ways, are
much more skeptical about American
institutions, much more “unpatriotic” in
the way that David Frum once dis-
missed right-wing critics of the Iraq war,
and thus much more likely to be skepti-
cal of any narrative that asks you to
simply trust the wisdom and good inten-
tions of, say, figures like James Comey
and John Brennan.
This gives both the far left and the far
right an advantage when it comes to
seeing through the paranoias of the
center — even as both are tempted

This friendship has been digitized conspiracy-laced alternative reality

ASMA, FROM PAGE 10
having collective emotional experi-
ences, as in the case when my son’s
squad must work to capture the ene-
my’s munitions. And these shared
adventures strongly trigger the dopa-
mine pleasure system, so it seems like
there should be bonding. However, the
online “friends” may be little more
than dopamine-dosing tools and easily
replaced without much dissonance.
Indeed, one doesn’t even know who
Scuzball is, or where he lives, or if he’s
a he, or if he is a person or a bot.
The kind of presence required for
deep friendship does not seem cultivat-
ed in many online interactions. Pres-
ence in friendship requires “being
with” and “doing for” (sacrifice). The
forms of “being with” and “doing for”
on social networking sites (or even in
interactive gaming) seem trivial be-
cause the stakes are very low.
More important, the “shared space”
of digital life is disembodied space. We
cannot really touch one another, smell
one another, detect facial expressions
or moods, and so on. Real bonding is
more biological than psychological and
requires physical contact. The emo-
tional entanglement of real friendship
produces oxytocin and endorphins in
the brains and bodies of friends —
cementing them together in ways that
are more profound than other relation-
ships.
It is possible that virtual reality and
augmented reality technology will
soon be able to generate such friend-
ship-forming experiences. Having
embodied adventures with another
person — even in a V.R. suit — is more
likely to trigger the deeper oxytocin-
based bonding. Current social network-
ing, however, seems to privilege the
shallow triggers of the brain’s reward
system (dopamine squirts in the ven-
tral tegumental area).
Perhaps the most defining feature of
deep friendship is “doing for,” as when
my friend has my back in a combat
situation or, more prosaically, brings
me soup or medicine when I’m sick.
Only strong bonds, built through em-
bodied mutual activities, have the
Did Xi conquer Italy?
SALA, FROM PAGE 1
journalist to stop “writing critically
about China.” The M.O.U. mentions
“synergies,” “reciprocal interests” and
“collaboration” — notably regarding
infrastructure, energy and telecom-
munications — while skipping over
crucial details. (So, Chinese 5G tech-
nology or not?)
The risks for Italy seem plain, but
there are pitfalls for China, too. A
provision in the M.O.U. stipulates that
either party can back out of the agree-
ment by giving just three months’
notice. Another section states that the
deal is not legally binding.
China, which is eager to sell more of
its products in more markets, is urging
the Italian government to finally push
through a plan for a high-speed rail
link between Turin, Italy, and Lyon,
France. That project has been a bane
of Italian politicians for two decades,
repeatedly blocked by activists oppos-
ing its costs and its possible envi-
ronmental impact. It remains an issue
today, notably for a part of the Five
Star Movement’s core constituency.
China’s global ambitions will also have
to contend with local politics.
For all the pomp surrounding Mr.
Xi’s welcome last week — royal hon-
ors, mounted guards, a soul-rending
performance by the tenor Andrea
Bocelli — Matteo Salvini, one of Italy’s
two deputy prime ministers and its
interior minister, skipped the festivities
altogether.
As Mr. Xi was arriving in Rome last
Thursday evening, Mr. Salvini, who
heads the League, left the city to cam-
paign for regional elections in Ba-
silicata, in the southeast. On Saturday,
the day the M.O.U. was signed, he
attended an industrial forum in Lom-
bardia, his home province, where he
said: “Do not tell me that China is a
free market. Italy loses 60 billion euros
a year to Chinese counterfeits.” As Mr.
Xi was wrapping up his visit Sunday
morning, Mr. Salvini posed with a cow
power to motivate real sacrifices. But
it is unclear why online “friends”
would bother to do the hard work of
friendship. When the going gets tough,
wouldn’t my disembodied online friend
just retreat to frictionless virtual
friends who have few needs and make
few demands? When I asked my un-
dergraduate students whether they
had people in their lives who would
bring them soup when they’re sick,
they laughed at my Stone Age query
and said they’d just order soup from
GrubHub or UberEats.
In the end there are three possibili-
ties regarding friendship and digital
life. First, digital life replicates all of
the essential criteria of friendship, so
there’s nothing to worry about. I sin-
cerely doubt that. Alternatively, digital
life fills and absorbs waking life time
so that people do not
The loss of engage in paradigm
cases of friendship
intimacy does (like sports, col-
not seem to lective arts, free-
be a concern range childhoods,
among the etc.). In this way,
young people digital life contrib-
actually utes to certain kinds
growing up of social isolation. Or
online. last, digital life
produces false
friendships (because
they are relatively
disembodied). In other words, young
people do not know that they lack real
friends.
Maybe our fears about technology
are exaggerated. My son reminds me
that the average American kid still
gets an enormous amount of face-to-
face social time in school every day.
“We hang out!” he told me, when I
asked what he does with his friends.
“During lunch and free time we play
multiplayer games on our phones,” he
elaborated, “and we talk about the girls
and teachers. We help each other with
homework. We insult each other and
laugh at memes, and maybe pull some
pranks.”
When I asked what makes a good
friend, he said, “Friends should have
common interests, and I like it if the
and tweeted the picture with a kiss
emoji saying “Happy Sunday from us.”
Here is Italy’s most popular poli-
tician spurning his own government’s
most important international agree-
ment to date. Why? Does Mr. Salvini
want to claim plausible deniability
should any of the deals Italy has
signed with China go sour or displease
voters?
If nothing else, his snubs and provo-
cations suggest major divisions, or at
least deep confusion, within the Italian
government. It should concern China
to have such a partner.
After the general elections last year,
Italy struggled for several months to
form a government, and the void al-
lowed political novices to find their
way to important positions. Among
these is Michele Geraci, a former
economics professor and trader who
spent a decade in China. Today he is
the main force behind Italy’s participa-
tion in One Belt, One Road, and under
secretary of state at the Ministry of
Economic Development, where he
oversees international trade and heads
a new China task force. Since assum-
ing that post, he has said, “we are all
Sino-Italians.” He has also asked his
staff to forgo WhatsApp in favor of
WeChat, a Chinese messaging app
riddled with security loopholes.
Mr. Geraci’s Sinophilia couldn’t
stand in starker contrast to Mr. Salvi-
ni’s “Italians first” slogan, yet both
men are prominent League members.
That divergence is only one example
of the messiness of Italian politics today.
Against that backdrop, Mr. Xi may have
come out of his visit to Italy looking like
the only adult in the room. But that
doesn’t mean he is in control or will get
what he wants. If the Italian govern-
ment is an unreliable partner for its own
constituents, other Europeans and
NATO, it may be for China as well.
is an Italian journalist
ILARIA MARIA SALA
based in Hong Kong.
that they believed themselves to be
resisting.
panic shows
us how a
paranoia can mani-
fest itself not just on
the far-left and
toward paranoias that locate all the evils
of the world within the establishment, in
the interlocking directorates of Wash-
person is funny. I guess they should With the apparent “no collusion” paranoid style far-right fringes but ington and Wall Street or the military-
also be nice and loyal . . . but be able to conclusion to the Robert Mueller inves- can take root in the very heart of industrial complex or the Brussels-
give and take a good put-down too!” tigation, there will now be a retreat from in the heart of the American estab- Berlin axis.
These modest criteria are pretty this alternative reality to more defensi- the American lishment. Neither form of paranoia is necessar-
close to my own. In my own friend- ble terrain — the terrain where Trump is establishment. In both cases, the ily worse or better than the other — and
ships, I’m willing to accept that flawed a sordid figure who admires despots exaggerated fear of neither, it should be stressed, is always
attachments are better than none, so I and surrounded himself with hacks and Saddam Hussein’s wrong. The paranoid center tends to
guess I should extend the same real- two-bit crooks while his campaign was arsenal and terror- take real threats and then inflate them,
ism to my son’s generation. buoyed by a foreign power’s hack of his ism ties and the exaggerated fear of rather than inventing them ex nihilo;
In truth, the more I learn about opponent. Russian capacities and influence, the the paranoid fringes tend to identify real
online life, the more I begin to doubt All of this is still true, in the same way truest believers belonged to the center- establishment failures and corruptions
my understanding of friendship alto- that once the W.M.D. and Qaeda connec- right and center-left — neoconserva- but then over-imagine conspiracies and
gether. It wouldn’t be the first time I tions turned out to be illusory, Saddam tives and hawkish liberals in the Iraq puppet masters.
theorized something into a corner. Hussein was still a wicked dictator case, and an alliance of center-left pun- But the paranoid center generally has
I was surprised and moved, for whose reign deserved to end. But as dits, overeager reporters, national a power that the fringes lack — both the
example, to learn from a BBC report with the Iraq war, what has been sold, security figures and NeverTrump Re- formal power of institutions and the
about a young man named Mats Steen and often fervently believed, about publicans in the case of Russiagate. cultural power to set narratives and
whose body was severely disabled by l’affaire Russe has been something far And in both cases the strongest skep- declare the boundaries of legitimate
Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Before more sweeping — a story about active ticism came not just from partisans debate. And this can make centrist
his death at 25, he had accumulated collaboration and tacit treason and the (Trump-defending Republicans with paranoia more dangerous and more
many devoted friends in the virtual subjection of United States policymak- Russia, Bush-hating Democrats with easily disguised.
space of “World of Warcraft” as a ing to Vladimir Putin’s purposes, a story Iraq) but also from the ideological At the same time, the center still
well-loved muscular avatar. where the trail of kompromat and collu- fringes, both further left and further believes in authority figures in a way
On his blog, Steen wrote: “There my sion supposedly went back decades, a right. The Iraq war was fiercely op- that the fringes don’t. So one might
handicap doesn’t matter, my chains are story that was supposed to end with posed by paleoconservatives and anti- hope, in this specific case, that having
broken and I can be whoever I want to indictments in Trump’s inner circle, if war libertarians as well as by the anti- an establishment figure like Robert
be. In there I feel normal.” Some of his not the jailing of the man himself. war left, and the strongest skeptics of Mueller rendering a skeptical verdict
closest friends online did not even I’m borrowing the parallel to the Iraq the Russiagate narrative have been will suffice to put the more baroque
know about his disability, and they debate from Matt Taibbi, the left-wing left-wing journalists — Taibbi, Glenn Trump-Russia conspiracies to rest . . . or
became close because their nightly muckraker and flamethrower, whose Greenwald, Michael Tracey and others. at least to banish them from cable and
communications jumped straight over splenetic denunciation this weekend of This pattern points to the essential newsprint, and back to the extremely
the usual biases of gender, race, reli- the media’s Russia coverage declared difference between paranoias of the long Twitter threads where they first
gion, place, age, ability, and got on with that as “a purely journalistic failure . . . fringes and what Reason’s Jesse Walker flourished, and ultimately belong.
the mysterious bonding of souls, via
the shared minutiae of everyday strug-
gle. Some of Steen’s online friends flew
to Norway from various countries to
attend his funeral and pay respects to
his family. As a measure of friendship,
that’s way more impressive than bring-
ing someone soup. Our worries about
online life are inevitable, I suppose.
We’ve never seen anything quite like it
in the social world before. But maybe,
just maybe, the kids are all right. May-
be even that Scuzzball kid.
STEPHEN ASMA is a professor of philoso-
phy at Columbia College Chicago and a
member of the Public Theologies of
Technology and Presence program at
the Institute of Buddhist Studies. He is
a co-author of “The Emotional Mind:
The Affective Roots of Culture and
Cognition.”
Whatever happens
FROM READERS next, we’ll help you
make sense of it.
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Sports
Fight star faces accusation of sexual assault
have asked staff members to refer to
DUBLIN
him as the “famous sportsman,” accord-
ing to a journalist at one of Ireland’s na-
tional newspapers.
Conor McGregor was held An internal memo from the broad-
caster RTE leaked into the public do-
and released; police main after the arrest.
investigation continues The document, which appears to be
the schedule for a morning radio show,
BY TARIQ PANJA was stamped “not for publication/
broadcast” in capital letters and was
Conor McGregor, the Ultimate Fighting printed on Jan. 18. It explained that Mc-
Championship’s biggest star and one of Gregor had presented himself at a police
the world’s highest-paid athletes, is un- station at 5 p.m. a day earlier. On the
der investigation in Ireland after a wom- morning the memo was printed, RTE
an accused him of sexual assault in De- news bulletins included the story of the
cember, according to four people famil- man being questioned but did not name
iar with the investigation. him. RTE declined to comment.
McGregor has not been charged with McGregor’s rapid rise from a desti-
a crime. Following the usual protocol in tute mixed martial arts fighter living
criminal investigations in Ireland and with his mother to the U.F.C.’s most-
much of Europe, where a formal charge prized asset has become one of the big-
does not necessarily follow an arrest, gest stories in Ireland in the past dec-
McGregor was arrested in January, ade. McGregor, who goes by the nick-
questioned by law enforcement authori- name Notorious when fighting, has
ties and released pending further inves- largely enjoyed the attention, regularly
tigation, according to the people. taking to social media to brag and show
The allegations have not been proved, off the trappings of his newfound
and the fact that an investigation is con- wealth.
tinuing does not imply that McGregor is McGregor shot to wider fame in 2017
guilty of a crime. A lawyer for McGregor when he participated in one of the most
in Dublin did not respond to messages lucrative boxing matches ever, losing to
seeking comment. the undefeated champion, Floyd May-
On Tuesday, McGregor announced his weather Jr. He has also been in the head-
retirement from the U.F.C., though a lines for the wrong reasons, courting
spokeswoman said it was unrelated to controversy since he rose to promi-
the investigation. nence four years ago. In July, he pleaded
McGregor’s most recent fight was a guilty to a charge of disorderly conduct,
bout in October that he lost to Khabib after he threw a dolly at a bus during a
Nurmagomedov. He has previously an- promotional appearance at Barclays
nounced his retirement, only to come TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES Center in New York. Two fighters were
back. Conor McGregor after pleading guilty to an unrelated disorderly conduct charge in New York last year. He is the U.F.C.’s biggest star, earning an estimated $99 million last year. injured by shattered glass.
The woman making the allegation In January, the Nevada Athletic Com-
said the assault had occurred at the Bea- mission suspended McGregor from
con Hotel, an establishment attached to als charged with rape unless they are without charge while investigations ing reported now,’’ the statement said in the room McGregor stayed in and also fighting for six months and fined him
a business park on the edge of Dublin. convicted, which has not happened in continued. part. “The assumption that the Conor secured closed-circuit camera footage, $50,000 for his role in a brawl that took
There is little to suggest it would be a this case. News outlets reporting the “Investigations are ongoing in this retirement announcement today is re- according to a person with knowledge of place after his loss to Nurmagomedov in
haunt for one of Ireland’s best-known identity of a suspect before a charge is case, and at this time a file continues to lated to this rumor is absolutely false.” the investigation. October. Nurmagomedov was barred
sports figures, a multimillionaire with a brought often face costly libel and be prepared for the Director of Public The Beacon is about a 25-minute The limitations on naming suspects for nine months and fined $500,000 for
loyal, global fan base. McGregor is an breach of privacy lawsuits in Ireland. Prosecutions,” a police statement said. drive from Crumlin, the working-class and McGregor’s wealth — he made an his role in the melee.
occasional guest there, usually booking Publication after a charge is filed could McGregor and the U.F.C. have not neighborhood in South Dublin where estimated $99 million last year, accord- On March 11, McGregor was arrested
its penthouse, according to a person lead to a more serious contempt of court commented on the allegations. Karen J. McGregor grew up. People familiar with ing to Forbes — have created an unusual in Miami Beach and charged with rob-
with knowledge of the situation. His indictment. Kessler, a publicist for McGregor in New the hotel operations, speaking on condi- dynamic in an era when celebrity scan- bery and criminal mischief after he was
most recent visit occurred in December. A spokesman for Ireland’s police serv- Jersey, issued a statement that did not tion of anonymity, said McGregor had dals are usually the subject of fervent accused of stealing a cellphone from
The Irish news media have reported ice would not confirm whether McGreg- address the validity of the accusation, visited before the night the police say media scrutiny. someone trying to take his picture. His
on the case since news of the assault or was the suspect. In response to a re- but asserted that his retirement had the incident took place. He booked the Some newsrooms in Ireland have lawyer described the altercation as mi-
broke late last year, but without naming quest for comment related to an “un- nothing to do with the investigation. hotel’s penthouse, the only two-room barred employees at meetings from nor and said McGregor, who was re-
McGregor. Laws in Ireland restrict the named sportsman,” it said a man had “This story has been circulating for suite in the facility. even mentioning McGregor’s name in leased after posting bail, would cooper-
news media from identifying individu- been arrested on Jan. 17 and released some time, and it is unclear why it is be- The police retrieved evidence from connection with the case. Managers ate with the police.

NON SEQUITUR PEANUTS DOONESBURY CLASSIC 1992

GARFIELD CALVIN AND HOBBES

SUDOKU No. 2803

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

KENKEN CROSSWORD | Edited by Will Shortz

Fill the grid so
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
Solution No. 2703
that every row,
column 3x3 box Fill the grids with digits so as not Across 28 Palindromic girl’s 60 Crime film genre 14 15 16

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

box contains column, and so that the digits 1 Volunteer’s offer 62 Noah Webster’s alma 17 18 19

within each heavily outlined box 30 Often mater

each of the
5 Fivers
numbers will produce the target number 32 Bonny miss 63 Star ___ 20 21 22

shown, by using addition,

9 Nickname for
1 to 9 exactly 64 Request needed to
subtraction, multiplication or
Cleveland Browns fans 34 Barely manage, with 23 24 25 26
once. “out” understand four clues
division, as indicated in the box. 14 Talking in a movie in this puzzle
A 4x4 grid will use the digits theater, e.g. 36 It’s generally not 27 28 29 30 31
For solving tips
1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6.
67 Pass
and more puzzles: 15 Withered
played so much
www.nytimes.com/
32 33 34 35 36
37 Notable 68 One of Thanos’s
sudoku
For solving tips and more KenKen
16 World Golf foes in the Avengers
puzzles: www.nytimes.com/
Hall-of-Famer Lorena 41 Give a raw deal movies
37 38 39 40

kenken. For Feedback: nytimes@ 17 Tome 44 Have a bug 69 Vet school subj.
kenken.com
41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48
20 Like Guinness 45 Nashville landmark, 70 It may have a big
familiarly mouth 49 50 51 52 53 54
21 Dandies
KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. 49 Goon
22 Editorial 71 ___ souci (carefree)
Copyright © 2018 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved.
55 56 57 58 59
override 52 Goose egg 72 Popular bait for
catching striped bass 60 61 62 63
23 Down Under predator 54 Issa of “Insecure”
Answers to Previous Puzzles 24 Unsavory sort 55 Boston Garden legend Down 64 65 66
Bobby 1 One who doesn’t
26 Court org. — or a 67 68 69
former court org. 56 See 51-Down believe

27 D.C. summer setting 58 They can carry a tune 2 Subject of 70 71 72

Hemingway’s “Death
Solution to March 27 Puzzle in the Afternoon”
PUZZLE BY DAMON GULCZYNSKI
C L O M P N I G H C A S H 3 Rubs oil on 13 Tear-jerker 39 Tina Fey’s role on “30 48 “We totally should!”
A U D I S O R E O A B U T 4 Label on some Rock”
R A I N Y P A T T Y M E L T packages of jerky 18 Cry of surprise 50 Terrier type
U N I C O R N S T A R T U P 40 “The Book of ___”
H B O A M Y 5 Pale wood 19 “Got it” (2010 film) 51 Says “56-Across!,” for
Z O M B I E B A N K S H I P example
6 Sexy, muscular man 25 Banned pollutants 41 Cadged
I S A A C C U E M O N A 53 Card count
P A R R S H U N S E W A N 7 Gaffe 29 Frost relative 42 Wonder Woman, for
I K I D E A T A I S L E one 57 Kind of shirt
8 Oozed 31 Childish retort
T A O P A T E N T T R O L L 43 Big news regarding
9 Bobs and bouffants 59 Cocoon dwellers
B A R O A T 33 Nos. at the beach extraterrestrials
F I N A N C I A L M Y T H S 10 Doesn’t sit idly by 61 Geom. figure
O V E R S H A R E G H A N A 35 Watergate-___ 46 Barbecue griller’s
C A I N E G G S E R R O R 11 Common riddle ending purchase 65 N.Y.C. subway letters
38 ___ and Carla (1960s
I N N S R O O S N U D G E 12 Spoiled R&B duo) 47 Moderate’s opposite 66 Hems and haws

14 | THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019
Culture
Unlocking a rarely staged ‘Diary’
PARIS
Ivo van Hove’s production
of Janacek’s song cycle
is poetic and surprising
BY ROSLYN SULCAS
A woman enters a studio apartment,
makes herself some coffee and presses
play on a tape recorder. “Sit at the pi-
ano,” a male voice on the tape says.
A man stands in front of the projected
image of a naked woman, her body im-
printed on his white shirt.
A couple embraces passionately on
the floor as dappled light filters across
their bodies.
A man sits alone on a narrow bed. “I
will be waiting for you,” he says, as the
lights dim.
These are some of the poetic, surpris-
ing images from Ivo van Hove’s staging
of Leos Janacek’s song cycle, “Diary of
One Who Disappeared,” which will
come to the Brooklyn Academy of Music
on April 4 to 6.
Angular, lyrical and passionate, “Dia-
ry” — written for tenor, mezzo-soprano,
a small chorus of three women, and pi-
ano — is rarely performed in concert,
and it’s even more rarely staged. But it is
pure drama. Based on an anonymous se-
ries of poems published in a Czech news-
paper and completed in 1920, it tells the
story of a young man who falls wildly in
love with a Gypsy girl, abandoning his
village and family to follow her.
It’s an unusual project for Mr. van
Hove, the Belgian director who has be-
come one of the most important voices
on the international theater scene. He
has directed more than a dozen operas
as well as classic and contemporary
plays; adapted films for the stage; and
soon will tackle a signature American
musical, with his revival of “West Side
Story” scheduled to come to Broadway
next year.
But a song cycle?
“I haven’t done anything quite like
this before,” he said in an interview at
the Comédie-Française in Paris, where
he was rehearsing a new production,
“Electre/Oreste.”
“You have to invent more,” he added.
“An opera composer is thinking about
staging, but with this you have to create
a theatrical world. It’s bringing alive
something that was just going to stand
there and sing.”
Mr. van Hove and his longtime part-
ner, the designer Jan Versweyveld,
drew from Janacek’s own history for the
production. The story of “Diary” paral-
lels the composer’s obsession with
Kamila Stosslova, a married woman 35
years his junior, who inspired some of
his most important works.
“The black Gypsy girl in my ‘Diary of
One Who Disappeared’ — that was you,”
Janacek wrote in one of his more than
700 letters to Stosslova. “That’s why
there’s so much emotional fire in the
work. So much fire that if we both caught
on, we’d be turned into ashes.”
Mr. van Hove said: “I always adore
when an author writes something that is
a matter of life and death, which this is, I
think, to Janacek. Some of my work, like
‘Electre/Oreste’ or ‘Boris Godunov,’ is
very political. But this one is about why
we are here on earth, what is this life of
ours?”
Netrebko plus Kauffman equals greatness
OPERA REVIEW
LONDON
The Royal Opera staging
of ‘La Forza del Destino’
is a comet-rare pairing
BY ZACHARY WOOLFE
“I like it very much,” Verdi wrote of
“La Forza del Destino” a few months
before his opera was to open. “I don’t
know if the public will feel the same,
but it is certainly something quite out
of the ordinary.”
The public, it turns out, often hasn’t
felt the same. Even today, “Forza”
struggles for affection more than prac-
tically any of Verdi’s mature works. It’s
unwieldy and weird, with creaky plot
twists and jarring shifts of mood.
Yet when it is taken seriously, staged
intelligently, cast carefully and con-
ducted with energy and polish, it can
indeed be something quite out of the
ordinary. And at the Royal Opera here,
it is fully extraordinary.
The central draw is the starry, com-
et-rare pairing of the soprano Anna
Netrebko, 47, and the tenor Jonas
Kaufmann, 49, the major singers of
their generation. They have come
together in a staged opera only once
before: “La Traviata” here in London,
11 years ago.
Since then, both have dived into
darker, heavier roles, occasionally
overlapping in repertoire but never on
the same stage. Until now.
And it feels like the meeting of two
veterans at the top of their game, their
chemistry comfortable and their com-
JAN VERSWEYVELD
Top, Ivo van Hove’s staging of “Diary of
One Who Disappeared.” Right, “We
started to see a framework to let this
short song cycle shine,” the director said
of the production. Above, Mr. van Hove.
Pulling out a few sheets of paper cov-
ered in neatly written notes, Mr. van
Hove said that he always began a
project by writing down his initial
thoughts. “It’s important to remember
why you want to do it,” he said. “This
piece is really human. It’s not about gods
and dramatic events; it’s about things
that everyone has experienced. Every-
one has been in love with someone who
hasn’t been in love with him or her, or
has experienced platonic love.”
He added that he had long been a fan
of Janacek’s music; his Flemish Opera
production of “The Makropulos Case” in
2002 was one of his first forays into
opera. He suggested “Diary” to the
bined effect galvanizing.
Ms. Netrebko, in particular, singing
Leonora for the first time, gives one of
the performances of her career. Her
voice is startlingly voluptuous and
generous in the middle and lower
registers. It’s down there where this
pitifully persecuted character — vio-
lently separated from her lover, who in
turn has aroused the eternal ire of her
brother by accidentally killing their
father — really lives.
Her Leonora sounds death-hounded
from the start, while also vibrating
with the immense fervor — from love,
from faith — that drives her forward.
Ms. Netrebko sings with both relish
and precision, having clearly internal-
ized the bel canto lessons of earlier
Verdi — like the other Leonora, in “Il
Trovatore” — but now with an earthier
flavor.
This is a more spontaneous creation
than her serene Aida or her stilted
Tosca, with the grandeur and sorrow of
her Adriana Lecouvreur and a febrility
that recalls her Lady Macbeth.
Ms. Netrebko’s stage presence has
also grown more confident in recent
years, and, paradoxically, more mod-
est: She’s less busy in her acting, and
more meaningful. The singer who
might have once boiled over in exag-
gerated frenzy in “Pace, pace, mio dio”
is now as focused in that climactic aria
as the slow burn of a candle’s wick.
In her duets with Mr. Kaufmann, his
voice’s duskiness unsettles into stormy
passion. His sound shadowy and
haunted, with tears at its core, he is
adept at playing outsiders like Don
Alvaro, but occasionally he can seem
muted onstage, merely grumpy. While
the exciting bit of strain and hint of
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Muziektheater Transparant, a small, in-
novative opera company based in Ant-
werp, Belgium, with which he has long
collaborated; he wanted to bring out Ja-
nacek’s ability “to write dialogue that
became music, to turn language into
notes. Even when they are singing, they
Jonas Kaufmann as Don Alvaro and Anna Netrebko as Leonora in Verdi’s “La Forza del
Destino,” just the second time they have performed together in a staged opera.
are talking.”
He and Mr. Versweyveld began to
read Janacek’s diaries and his letters to
Stosslova. (The relationship remained
almost entirely platonic, and most of her
letters were destroyed by Janacek, at
her request.)
BILL COOPER
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
JAN VERSWEYVELD
JAN VERSWEYVELD
“I think Janacek saw his feelings re-
flected in the poems,” Mr. van Hove said.
“It’s a kind of self-portrait. We started to
see a framework to let this short song
cycle shine.”
Since the mezzo-soprano part is
slight, Mr. van Hove decided to give the
wear in his tone can conjure thoughts
of Mario del Monaco, Mr. Kaufmann
doesn’t go for del Monaco-type Italian-
ate recklessness; sometimes he seems
too obviously to be pacing himself.
But he gets Alvaro’s wounded dig-
nity and wariness, and he feeds off
other singers, whether Ms. Netrebko
or the robust baritone Ludovic Tézier.
As Leonora’s brother, Mr. Tézier shows
both Don Carlo’s implacability and the
utter exhaustion of a life spent in sin-
gle-minded pursuit of vengeance. He
sings “Urna fatale” with the sustained
patience and intensity that define the
character.
Antonio Pappano, the Royal Opera’s
music director, isn’t one to force vigor
out of extremes of fast and slow, loud
and soft. Nothing in the score rushes,
and nothing lags: You’re simply aware
of the action moving forward at a pace
that feels natural — propelled but
never harassed.
There are details that shine: I’m
thinking, for one, of the shivery frost of
strings as Padre Guardiano leads
Leonora to the cross in the second act.
But listening to Mr. Pappano and his
committed orchestra is less about
piecing together the moments than
appreciating the flow. And to have that
effect of a unified vision in “Forza,”
notorious for its disjointedness, is an
achievement, indeed.
The company could have sold out
this run with its luxurious stars alone,
but it recognized that this work, as
much as any in opera, needs to be solid
throughout its cast. Ferruccio Furlan-
etto is a booming, sensitive Padre
Guardiano, a moral anchor in a world
of restlessness and rootlessness.
Alessandro Corbelli is a piquant Fra
..
Gypsy girl, Zefka, more of a voice. He
asked the Belgian composer Annelies
Van Parys to add more music for the
character, which she based on Romany
folk songs.
“It’s full of colors, very personal and
sensitive,” said Marie Hamard, who will
sing the role in Brooklyn. “Annelies
gives a true thickness and density to the
feminine voice.”
Mr. van Hove also incorporated ex-
tracts from Janacek’s diaries that are
read by an actor (Wim van der Grijn)
who is dressed to resemble an older ver-
sion of the cycle’s tenor protagonist (An-
drew Dickinson), emphasizing the simi-
larities between composer and charac-
ter.
Working with the dramaturge Krys-
tian Lada, Mr. van Hove and Mr. Ver-
sweyveld decided to make this main
character a photographer, and the stage
space, in part, a darkroom. “It’s an ate-
lier, a world of imagination, in which the
pictures that have been taken bring
back the past that is sometimes forgot-
ten,” Mr. van Hove said.
Mr. Versweyveld said the challenge
was to create an intimate space, in
which the character looks back on his
life and love, but also to evoke the
woods, trees and natural light that he is
recalling. The solution was an apart-
ment in which the character lives and
works, permeated by golden, mottled
light when the memories of glimpsing
and meeting Zefka are evoked.
“I like to design things that are func-
tional,” Mr. Versweyveld said, adding
that the mid-20th-century-modern set
was inspired by the interiors of the pho-
tographer protagonist’s home in the An-
tonioni film “Blow-Up.” Similarly, he
added, “the light may be striking or
beautiful, but it always serves a pur-
pose. When it comes through the walls
like light in a forest, it is opening up the
space in the most dramatic moment in
the show.” (Unlike in many van Hove
productions, there is no video element.)
Mr. van Hove said that his prepara-
tion for directing an opera or vocal score
began with finding a good recording,
and working with a dramaturge who
knows the music intimately. “I really
study; it takes me three times as long for
an opera as for a theater production,” he
said, adding that while he doesn’t read
music, he has learned to understand a
score in terms of “where the opportuni-
ties are for a director.”
“If you are not deeply interested in
music,” he said, “stay away from it as a
director, because there has always been
a director there before you: the com-
poser.”
There are also practical issues to take
into account. “You have to be sure,” he
said, “that everything is absolutely con-
structed for singers, much more than
with actors, because they have to take
care of what they are singing, respond to
others onstage and also be able to see
the conductor.”
“It’s really music theater,” said Mr.
van Hove, who added that the show’s
genre — a combination of spoken word,
music and visual elements — greatly in-
terested him. His adaptation of Thomas
Mann’s “Death in Venice,” incorporating
music by Weber, Schoenberg and Nico
Muhly, will have its premiere on April 4
with the Royal Concertgebouw Orches-
tra of Amsterdam.
“What can it give us? What can it
bring?” he added. “I would like to think
about this in the next years.”
Melitone, and smaller parts are gifts
from two still-vital old hands, Robert
Lloyd and Roberta Alexander.
Veronica Simeoni is an agile voice
and presence as Preziosilla, the eerie
energizing spirit of the opera’s battle
encampment scenes. Christof Loy, the
director of this more or less modern-
dress production, which first played in
2017 in Amsterdam, renders her a kind
of demon in a society driven half-mad
by war.
The comic and tragic are in this
staging cut from the same abrasive
cloth, with crowd scenes that quickly
turn threatening and characters who
lurk moodily on the edges. Carnival-
like sequences take on genuine mania
and menace.
Mr. Loy’s work here is sensible and
intelligent; he treats “Forza” not as
caricature but as fodder for clear,
specific drama. He appreciates opera’s
extroversion, its heightening of reality,
but never abandons subtlety. It’s an
ultimately straightforward approach
that gives the work’s delirious strange-
ness its due while insisting “Forza” can
be appreciated earnestly.
The production is not exactly staged
on a single set, but there is neverthe-
less the sense, as there should be, that
these characters have never managed
really to escape the room in which
their troubles began. The killing of
Leonora and Carlo’s father also peri-
odically returns as fragments of a
black-and-white film projected on the
wall, its style reminiscent of Italian
neorealist cinema.
That genre’s vividness, honesty and
compassion also come to life in Ms.
Netrebko’s crushing yet rapturous
performance.
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019 | 15

culture

Discovering Persia in Paris

PARIS

Hidden at the Louvre

are prized rarities from
the ancient city of Susa
BY ELAINE SCIOLINO

I visited the ancient Persian city of Susa

only once, in 1982, on a trip to Iran’s
western border during the Iran-Iraq
war. The Iraqis had attacked a huge
swath of Khuzestan Province, where
Susa is, and the Iranians wanted to show
the destruction to the outside world.
In the Old Testament, Susa is best
known as the place where Esther out-
witted Haman to save the Jews from an-
nihilation. It is also the site of a 250-acre
palace complex built by Darius the
Great in the fifth century B.C. The Iraqi
strikes had badly damaged the ruins of
the palace’s audience hall.
When Darius became the ruler of the
Persian Empire, he made Susa his per-
manent capital. One of the oldest cities
in the world, it became a commercial,
bureaucratic and political hub that was
as important as Persepolis, a largely
ceremonial site about the same size,
which Darius also built.
Even before the Iraqi attacks, howev-
er, there would have been little for us to
see in Susa. Over the centuries, invaders
had captured, plundered and destroyed
the palace complex.
Starting in 1885, French archaeolo-
gists carried out wide-ranging excava-
tions there. Most of the artifacts they
discovered — tens of thousands in all —
ended up in the Louvre.
“France made a very clever diplomat-
ic agreement and had a monopoly,” said Clockwise from left: one of the limestone columns that supported the roof of the audi-
Julien Cuny, curator of the Persian col- ence hall in the palace of King Darius at Susa; the handle of a fourth-century-B.C. vase,
lections at the Louvre. “For decades, shaped like a winged ibex; and a frieze of archers, also from the palace.
only the French could dig, and every-
thing they dug up was allowed to come
to France.”
It was only after Reza Shah came to
power in Iran in 1925 that a new agree-
ment was negotiated, and from 1928 on,
the discoveries were shared by the two
countries. The 1979 Iranian revolution
put an end to such joint projects.
These days, the Louvre considers the
remnants of Susa among its most prized
holdings. But unlike its blockbusters, in-
cluding the Mona Lisa (the museum’s
most visited work of art, for which it has
placed signs from the main pyramid en-
trance to the painting itself), and the Is-
lamic collection (which has its own
30,000-square-foot modernist wing),
the Darius palace rooms are little visited
and hard to find.
To get there, you take the escalator by
the Passage Richelieu entrance under
the pyramid, turn right and enter the PHOTOGRAPHS BY JULIEN MIGNOT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Near Eastern Antiquities section, an un-

wieldy collection that spans 9,000 years.
Then you walk straight until you
reach a flight of stairs. You climb the
stairs, continue through Room 231, turn
left at Room 305 and keep walking until
your destination: several rooms, start-
ing with 308. If there is a more direct
route, I haven’t found it.
It is worth the journey. The story of
Susa is little known, even among some
Iranian visitors, who often confuse it
with that of Persepolis, Mr. Cuny said. In
late 2018, the Louvre installed an inter-
active 3-D display in French, English
and Spanish at which visitors can take a
virtual tour of Susa, beginning with the
Great Gate to the large courtyard and
continuing into the palace’s column-
lined audience hall and throne room.
The centerpiece of the main Persian
room at the Louvre is the upper part of
what was a nearly 70-foot-tall limestone
column, decorated at the top with two
kneeling bulls. Thirty-six of these col-
umns once supported the roof of the
128,000-square-foot audience hall, or
apadana, at Susa. The column was
pieced together from several fragments
that were found on the site.
Susa was a center for artistic brick-
making. Large, decorative friezes of
polychrome glazed bricks, some of them
molded into bas-reliefs, line the walls,
pieced together like giant puzzles from
thousands of fragments. One frieze
shows bearded, richly clad archers car-
rying bows, quivers and spears as they
march. Others depict muscular lions,
their mouths open wide as they bare
their teeth; griffons with lions’ heads,
bodies and forelegs, the hind legs of an
eagle and the horns of a ram; and
winged bulls. The friezes use dazzling
glazes of turquoise, green, brown, white
and yellow.
One of the most unusual objects in the
Louvre collection is a handle of a fourth-
century-B.C. vase in the shape of a
winged ibex. It was made in silver and
gold, so delicately that it seems to be fly-
ing. There are also clay accounting to-
kens (representing quantities of goods)
and pottery; carved cylindrical seals;
gold jewelry with semiprecious stones;
terra cotta figurines; and metal, clay
and ivory sculptures. Fragments of
black-and-white floor tiles from an un-
known composite material show that
they had been made to look like marble.
If you leave the Darius palace rooms
and retrace your steps, you will come
upon another treasure uncovered in
Susa: a seven-foot-tall black stone stele
in the shape of an index finger, standing
alone under spotlights. Carved into it in
cuneiform script is the Code of Ham-
murabi, the Babylonian system of law in
ancient Mesopotamia. Dating from
about 1750 B.C., the stele was plundered
and taken back to Susa in the mid-12th
century B.C.
It consists of 282 laws, including ones
governing trade, slavery, theft, interest
rates, the presumption of innocence and
the principle of “eye for an eye, a tooth
for a tooth,” with punishments deter-
mined by the violator’s social status.
Unlike much of the Louvre, the Near
Eastern Antiquities section is gloriously
free of crowds. The Code of Hammurabi,
however, has been added to the French
elementary school curriculum, and on
any given day, there may be several
classes of students sitting at its base, as
museum curators tell its story.
“You ask me why I am interested in
Iran, well, it’s because it was the center
of the world,” Mr. Cuny said. “The
Persian Empire — the center of the
world in that era. You enter these rooms,
and you have arrived in Persia.”
Elaine Sciolino is the author of “The Only
Street in Paris” and “The Seine: The
River That Made Paris,” which will be
published in November.

Bright lights, big city

BOOK REVIEW
Little Boy
By Lawrence Ferlinghetti. 179 pp.
Doubleday. $24.
BY ROBERT PINSKY
Lawrence Ferlinghetti has celebrated
his 100th birthday, last Sunday, with
the publication of “Little Boy,” his life
story told in flashes and arias. No one’s
biography has more completely or
ardently embodied the visions and
contradictions, the achievements and
calamities, the social mobility and
social animosities, of that life span.
Poet, retail entrepreneur, social
critic, publisher, combat veteran, paci-
fist, poor boy, privileged boy, outspo-
ken socialist and successful capitalist,
with roots in the East Coast and the
West Coast (as well as Paris), Fer-
linghetti has not just survived for a
century: He epitomizes the American
culture of that century.
Specifically, he has been a unique
protagonist in a national drama: the
American struggle to imagine a demo-
cratic culture. How does the ideal of
social mobility affect notions of high
and low, Europe and the New World,
tradition and progress? That struggle
of imagination underlies the art of Walt
Whitman and Duke Ellington, Emily
Dickinson and Buster Keaton. It also
underlies a range of American issues,
from the segregation of public schools
to the reality of human-caused climate
change. Those political issues involve
the American interbreeding of the
highbrow and the vulgarian in a super-
charged process whose complexities
defy simplifying terms like “culture
wars.”
As to social mobility, the opening
pages of “Little Boy” range from an
orphanage in Chappaqua, N.Y., to prep
school at Mount Hermon in Massachu-
setts; from malnutrition to luxury. He
lived with his Tante Emilie on the
Upper West Side in New York and in
Strasbourg, France (French was the
little boy’s first language) and then in a
mansion in Bronxville, N.Y., where
Emilie for a spell became the govern-
ess. After his graduation from the
University of North Carolina, Fer-
linghetti commanded a submarine
chaser in the Normandy landings, then
“went to the Pacific as a navigator . . .
and saw Nagasaki seven weeks after
the second bomb was dropped and saw
the landscape of hell and became an
instant pacifist.”
Is Ferlinghetti’s career as an influen-
tial, best-selling poet a story of high
culture or of popular culture? Is his
City Lights, as bookstore and pub-
lisher, a San Francisco tourist trap? Or
is City Lights a literary, moral and
legal shrine that not only published
Frank O’Hara’s “Lunch Poems” and
Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl and Other
Poems” but in a 1957 court case estab-
lished First Amendment principles
that transformed American life? The
store’s North Beach location has been
designated an “official” San Francisco
landmark. Is that a funny contradiction
in terms? Or a triumph? The answer to
all these questions is, emphatically, yes
— all of the above.
The cover of “Little Boy” bears the
label “A Novel” — not a matter of
literary form so much as an assertion
of the autobiographer’s right to invent,
embellish and creatively misremem-
ber. The book begins with a few dozen
pages of engaging narrative of a con-
ventional kind: ancestry and childhood
anecdote. That linear setup gradually
Lawrence Ferlinghetti in his San Francisco studio last year.
sublimates into long, lyrical sentences
of freewheeling associations: the ver-
bal riffs of a good talker. Readers hop-
ing for reminiscences of Beat figures
like Ginsberg (“Ginzy”) and Jack
Kerouac (“Ti-Jean”) may be disap-
pointed. Ferlinghetti approaches writ-
ers and writing in a more sweeping,
lofty way, as in his vision of Ginsberg
“arm in arm” with “the other great
writers and poets and great articula-
tors of consciousness,” a procession
that includes Shakespeare, Tolstoy,
“sexy tragi-romantic Vincent Millay
and Dylan Thomas sweet singer.”
Above all, Ferlinghetti is literary in
the American way of his generation,
with the appealing old-fashioned en-
thusiasm of an autodidact (despite his
master’s from Columbia). As a child, he
thrilled to “Horatius at the Bridge” and
“The Charge of the Light Brigade.” He
even calls Shakespeare “the bard of
Avon” and notes that the Cantos of
BRIAN FLAHERTY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
“Old Ez” Pound “couldn’t possibly be
sung.” He also admires and mocks “old
Tea Ass Eliot.” The mingled derision
and awe, doubt and aspiration come
from that underlying cultural duality of
high and low.
Ferlinghetti’s vastly influential first
book of poems, “A Coney Island of the
Mind,” echoes that doubleness in its
very title: In this corner, the Mind with
a capital M; and in the other corner,
Brooklyn’s thrilling, low-class amuse-
ment park. The book’s first poem,
which so many of us read as enthralled
teenagers, begins with a great Euro-
pean artist whose name is the second
word: “In Goya’s greatest scenes we
seem to see / the people of the
world / exactly at the moment
when / they first attained the title
of / ‘suffering humanity.’”
We generations affected by Fer-
linghetti’s book (over a million copies
sold) may never have seen a Goya
image, but we could intuit that name’s
resonance with the poem’s closing
phrases:
They are the same people
only further from home
on freeways fifty lanes wide
on a concrete continent
spaced with bland billboards
illustrating imbecile illusions of
happiness
and the “strange license plates / and
engines / that devour America.” I
know the limitations of this writing,
but can you dare say you’ve outgrown
a poem if you’re gratefully indebted to
it?
Goya and the billboards and the
story of “Little Boy” echo a great na-
tional question. From the sublime
mass-art works of Buster Keaton, now
preserved in university archives,
through the ebullient logic of classical
music in “Looney Tunes,” to the ab-
surdity of a president rising from a
dumb “reality” TV show, from Coney
Island to the Mind: Who, little boys
and girls, juvenile yet old, do we think
we are?
Robert Pinsky’s most recent book of
poetry, “At the Foundling Hospital,” was
a finalist for a National Book Critics
Circle Award in 2016.

16 | THURSDAY, MARCH 28, 2019
travel
Clockwise from left: “No Turning Back,” a statue by Veryl Goodnight, outside the Cheyenne Frontier Days Old West Museum; guests dining in a restored rail car at A.M. Booth’s Lumberyard in Huntsville, Ala.; and the Terry Bison Ranch, just outside Cheyenne, Wyo.
Praising pioneer women and rocket scientists
THE 52 PLACES TRAVELER
The state of Wyoming
and a city in Alabama
observe major milestones
BY SEBASTIAN MODAK
When the planners restoring the Wyo-
ming State Capitol in Cheyenne un-
earthed a set of old blueprints for the
building, they realized that at some
point in the past, history had fallen prey
to bureaucracy. A cluster of fluorescent-
lit offices and a copy room on the build-
ing’s second floor, it turned out, had
been home to the Wyoming territorial
assembly and, later, the Supreme Court.
Where people now battle paper jams, a
Constitution had been drafted and state-
hood ratified.
When I visited the Capitol, teams of
painters were recreating the original
trompe l’oeil wallpaper, others were re-
storing the wooden banisters of the
viewing deck and, in general, bringing
the entire section of the building back to
its single-room, former glory in time for
July 10, when Wyoming will celebrate
129 years of statehood. 2019 also marks
150 years since the territory of Wyoming
guaranteed women the right to vote and
hold office — 51 years before the United
States guaranteed women voting rights
with the 19th Amendment. On the eve of
statehood, from that very room, Wyo-
ming officials sent a rebuttal to the
United States Congress, which was re-
luctant to welcome a state where wom-
en could vote. The telegram reportedly
said something along the lines of: “We
will remain out of the Union 100 years
rather than come in without the wom-
en.”
More than 1,000 miles away, another
momentous paint job was underway in
Huntsville, Ala. When I saw it, the 363-
foot-tall vertical replica of the Saturn V
rocket that towers over the city was
about a quarter of the way through its
face lift, the line between bright white
and weathered yellow marking the
progress. It, too, is set to be finished this
summer, just in time to commemorate
50 years since the Saturn V rocket built
in Huntsville launched Neil Armstrong,
Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the
moon on July 16, 1969.
It was an exciting time to be in Chey-
enne and Huntsville, as each was gear-
ing up for a year of events commemorat-
ing these milestones: one an outright
celebration of the force that built a city,
the other a renewed call to action.
HISTORY, HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
February might not be the ideal time to
visit Wyoming, but it does help you un-
derstand the resilience of its original in-
habitants and those who came during
the Western expansion. I felt it most
while standing right by the dome of
Cheyenne’s capitol building during a be-
hind-the-scenes look at the ongoing
restoration project. The wind quickly
turned every exposed part of my body
numb.
“This is not a climate for you if you’re
soft to the world,” Affie Ellis told me over
pizza a few days later. “Our women have
a no-nonsense attitude to the world.
They get things done.”
I had asked her what it was about Wy-
oming that had led to so many firsts for
women. Including her own. An enrolled
member of the Navajo Nation, Ms. Ellis
became the first Native American in
Wyoming’s Senate when she assumed
office in January 2017.
Long before Ms. Ellis, there were oth-
ers who gained prominence after the
territory’s decision to grant women’s
suffrage. There was Esther Hobart Mor-
ris, America’s first female justice of the
peace; the first all-women jury, con-
vened in Laramie a year after suffrage
passed into law; Martha Symons, the
first female bailiff; and Nellie Tayloe
Ross, who in 1925 became the first fe-
male governor in the United States.
Everyone I spoke to, from legislators
to museum curators, viewed the 150th
anniversary of women’s suffrage in Wy-
oming as an opportunity to shine a light
on the state’s significance for women’s
rights. On Dec. 10, the state will cele-
brate suffrage in the same room in the
capitol building where it was defended
on the eve of statehood. But even now,
you can see reminders of it everywhere.
In front of the Cheyenne Depot Mu-
seum, a bronze statue of a woman star-
ing into the horizon honors those wom-
en who took the train to Wyoming.
There’s another statue of a woman, by
the sculptor Veryl Goodnight, leaning
on a wagon wheel outside the Cheyenne
Frontier Days Old West Museum; it’s ti-
tled “No Turning Back” and honors the
earliest homesteaders.
There are omissions and complica-
tions. With so much focus on the hearti-
ness of the pioneer women, I saw a dis-
heartening lack of attention paid to the
indigenous women who were here long
before. One exception was an expansive
section of the Wyoming State Museum
devoted to the stories of the tribal
groups who once called the plains home,
including a candid portrayal of genocide
and displacement.
There’s also the murkiness around
why the territory of Wyoming was the
first to pass women’s suffrage at all. The
established narrative — that Wyoming
was facing a population crisis and
needed to incentivize women to move
out West — is on shakier ground these
days. For one, it discounts the role of
women like Esther Hobart Morris and
others who, some say, were fervent cam-
paigners for suffrage, not grateful recip-
ients of men’s magnanimity. But there’s
There’s also the murkiness
around why the territory of
Wyoming was the first to pass
women’s suffrage at all.
also evidence of a political battle won by
legislators who believed that if black
men were going to vote, then as a coun-
terweight, white women should as well.
The anniversary is forcing Wyo-
mingites to confront that history and
ask those questions. The result is that a
major focus of the sesquicentennial is on
encouraging more civic engagement
from the women of Wyoming.
Ms. Ellis, for example, felt compelled
to run for office when she took her
daughter to a Senate debate. At the
time, there was only one woman in the
State Senate. Looking around the room,
Ms. Ellis’s daughter asked her, “Mom,
do they let girls be in the Senate?”
“It was all I needed to hear to turn my
life upside down,” Ms. Ellis told me.
OTHER WYOMING SPOTS I LOVED
• Just a short drive from Cheyenne is the
Terry Bison Ranch, home to a hotel, a
steakhouse and a whole lot of bison. If
you’ve got the stomach for it, take the
train tour to the ranch to feed bison from
the palm of your hand and then dig in to
a seriously delicious bison burger at the
Senator’s Steakhouse.
• If you’re focusing your Wyoming trip
on Cheyenne, it’s worth spending an af-
ternoon in Laramie, about 40 minutes
away. Home to the University of Wyo-
ming, it exudes an energy that’s at once
young and quirky. Grab a vegetarian
bite at Sweet Melissa and bounce be-
tween the many antiques shops that dot
South 2nd Street.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
PHOTOGRAPHS BY SEBASTIAN MODAK/THE NEW YORK TIMES
A CITY CAUGHT IN NASA’S ORBIT In Huntsville, nowhere is that re- custom guitars and mandolins. breweries, restaurants and bars. An-
Before it was “Rocket City,” Huntsville invention more on display than at Lowe “What people don’t realize is that en- other place I loved was A.M. Booth’s
was a cotton town, and the “Watercress Mill Arts and Entertainment, a cotton gineers here do a lot more than just Lumberyard, a deceptively gigantic
Capital of the World.” mill that’s been repurposed into the space things. They make guitars, they space that includes multiple bars, out-
“In other places, you might get a little largest privately owned arts facility in brew beer, they write songs,” Mr. Davis door patios, music stages and a restored
watercress sprinkled into a salad. Here, the United States. I passed a studio said. “The creative community and the train car from the 1920s that you can
you could get a nice big bowl of the stuff,” where an artist creates “plausible, fic- engineering community, they feed on have dinner in.
said Brooks Moore, 92, a retired NASA tional maps;” a cigar box guitar work- each other here, and that means all of a • There’s a lot of development going on
rocket scientist who has lived in the shop; a facility that creates miniatures sudden you have this cool stuff going on in Huntsville, including the building of
Huntsville area since 1952. We were in for tabletop role-playing games; and a that couldn’t exist anywhere else.” what will amount to a second downtown
the city’s massive U.S. Space and Rocket pottery store. On its periphery, the Tan- at MidCity. For now, much of it is still a
Center, a museum chronicling the work gled String Studio is a performance OTHER SPOTS IN HUNTSVILLE construction site, but it’s worth heading
of the nearby NASA Marshall Space space and workshop where Danny Da- • For drinks, head to Campus 805. Once to The Camp, an outdoor live music ven-
Flight Center, where every major devel- vis — who, for 30 years, worked on a middle school, the complex has been ue with a food truck that serves a dan-
opment in spacecraft technology took propulsion systems for NASA — builds converted into an appealing array of gerously good hot chicken sandwich.
place for decades.
Mr. Moore now volunteers here as a
NASA emeritus Docent at the Center.
Clad in a white lab coat, he talks to vis-
itors under the shadow of the Saturn V
rocket he helped build. He was re-
assigned to the NASA Marshall Space
Flight Center when it was established in
WOMEN’S FORUM
FOR THE ECONOMY & SOCIETY
DaringCircles
1958. His job was to build a rocket to get
people into space. by the Women’s Forum for the Economy & Society
Mr. Moore told me stories for an hour.
He told me about the strange tension
that came from working with a team of
German engineers under the guidance
of Dr. Wernher von Braun who, a few
years earlier, had been designing the V-2
rockets that had rained carnage on Lon-
don. He walked me through the steps
THE DARING CIRCLES
that led to a full-fledged space race with
Russia — first, a race for intercontinen-
tal ballistic missiles, then satellites, then
the moon — each of which Mr. Moore
was a part of. Of the Apollo 11 launch it- The Daring Circles invites select business leaders, experts and influencers
self — when he saw the rocket he had to engage for long-term positive impact on issues where women are
helped design send three astronauts to disproportionately impacted and where the leadership of women
the moon — he was remarkably under- is paramount. Each programme is comprised of a combination
stated. of corporations, institutions, organisations, academia and
“It was an extremely interesting ex-
more to source content and insights to influence policy.
perience and this was a highly motivat-
ed group,” he said. One of the biggest The Daring Circles are designated to generate
challenges? Breaking the news to the evidence-based insights and drive tangible action
astronauts that computers would be fly- among Daring Circle members and beyond.
ing the rocket, not them.
“‘We’ve got computers and you’ll be
the passengers,’ we told them,” Mr. Women & Access to Health: Aims to improve
Moore said. “That didn’t go over well.” and promote women’s access to health, in
There’s a lot going on in Huntsville to both developed and developing countries,
commemorate the 50th anniversary of by supporting emerging technologies that are
the Apollo 11 launch. Space is the city’s addressing these gaps.
calling card and can be found every-
where, from the names of local beers
(try the Straight to Ale Monkeynaut) to
Women & AI: Aims to to increase the participation
and visibility of women working in AI, as well as
novelty menu items (I heard about, but
did not seek out, a supercharged pig-in- to capitalise on AI’s potential to benefit women
a-blanket called the “Werner von and all of humanity.
Brat”).
The Space and Rocket Center is, pre- Women & Climate Change: Aims to build
dictably, going all out to celebrate 50 solutions that both empower women to lead
years. On July 16, launch day, an attempt actions against climate change and that
to break a Guinness World Record for consider and address the disproportionate
launching the most miniature rockets impact climate change has on women’s
into the air at once — 5,000 of them —
empowerment and equality whilst creating a
will be hosted here.
A new, state-of-the-art planetarium new, greener economy.
just opened in the center, too, which tells
the story of the Apollo launch, and can Women & STEM: Aims to advance and remove
do things like map the stars exactly as barriers to women’s leadership in science,
they would appear in the Huntsville technology, engineering and mathematics
night sky if there was no light pollution occupations at all levels, thereby increasing
or cloud cover. A small, but powerful, ex- women’s impact through STEM and on the
hibit on the Apollo landing has just
opened. There will be concerts, a car future of STEM itself.
show and models of NASA’s Space
Launch System (SLS), the next genera- Women & Supplier Diversity: Aims to improve the infrastructure
tion of rocketry, set up across the Ten- that enables supplier diversity in Europe – both that connects
nessee Valley. women-owned and led businesses to large corporates and
It’s all very fun, but to come face to that enables companies to empower women throughout their
face with a reservoir of living history supply chains.
like Mr. Moore and hear the firsthand
stories of someone who took us to the
moon is the real reason to go to
Huntsville now. That, and everything
not related to rockets, as many a resi-
dent told me.
In fact, “more than just rockets,” was Members of the Strategic Committee
a kind of rallying cry I heard again and
again. Being in a place that was trying to
go beyond its history was a stark con-
trast from my experience in Cheyenne,
where there was a concerted effort to
embrace the past.