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REMOTE WORK
WHO BENEFITS,
WHO DOESN’T
PAGE 7 | BUSINESS
Implications
of the two
China fires
Bret Stephens
OPINION
We’ll probably never know exactly
what sorts of documents were inciner-
ated at the Chinese Consulate in Hous-
ton in the days before the United
States forced it to close, after accusing
it of being a hub of espionage. We may
also never know what caused this
month’s catastrophic fire aboard the
U.S.S. Bonhomme Richard, a massive
amphibious assault ship that was being
fitted out to double as a small aircraft
carrier, in the port of San Diego.
What we should know is that the two
fires are actually one. America is rac-
ing toward a conflict
Is America with China that it
may be ill-prepared
prepared for to wage.
a Cold War The closure of the
with China? consulate comes on
Don’t count the heels of a quad of
on it. bellicose speeches
from top administra-
tion officials, col-
lectively amounting to a declaration of
Cold War against China. Robert O’Bri-
en, the U.S. national security adviser,
painted China’s leadership as unrecon-
structed Marxist-Leninists. The F.B.I.
director, Christopher Wray, spoke of
China’s practice in the art of “malign
foreign influence.” Attorney General
Bill Barr accused China of “economic
blitzkrieg.” And Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo hinted the free world
may need a new version of NATO, this
one aimed at Beijing instead of Mos-
cow.
Given that the source is Team
Trump and the timing is an election
year, it’s tempting to dismiss the
speeches’ warnings as cynical, hypo-
critical, political — and therefore
wrong. Why complain about civil liber-
ties in Hong Kong when we have goon
squads in Portland? Why accuse China
of trashing global norms when that’s
been Trump’s ambition from the begin-
ning? Why characterize Chinese Presi-
dent Xi Jinping as a linear ideological
descendant of Joseph Stalin when, as
we know from John Bolton, Trump was
fulsomely praising him and soliciting
his help for his re-election bid?
And why all of this now, when Trump
needs enemies both foreign and do-
mestic to rescue his flagging re-elec-
tion bid?
But the problem with these ques-
tions is that — however on-point they
STEPHENS, PAGE 11
The New York Times publishes opinion
from a wide range of perspectives in
hopes of promoting constructive debate
about consequential questions.
Olivia de Havilland The two-time Oscar winner who starred in “Gone With
the Wind” (above) and then fought Warner Bros. for better roles has died. PAGE 2
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Monowara Begum and her children were not yet seeing money that her husband, Mahammed Heron, sent home to Bangladesh: It was paying the debt from sending him abroad.
Virus cuts global lifelines
LONDON
Hundreds of millions
threatened with poverty
as remittances dry up
BY PETER S. GOODMAN
For more than a decade, Flavius Tudor
has shared the money he has made in
England with his mother in Romania,
regularly sending home cash that en-
abled her to buy medicine.
Last month, the flow reversed. His 82-
year-old mother sent him money so he
could pay his bills.
Suffering a high fever and a persistent
cough amid the coronavirus pandemic,
Mr. Tudor, 52, could no longer enter the
nursing home where he worked as a
caregiver. So his mother reached into
her pension, earned from a lifetime as a
librarian in one of Europe’s poorest
countries, and sent cash to her son in
one of the wealthiest lands on earth.
“It’s very tough times,” he said. “I’m
lost.”
Around the globe, the pandemic has
jeopardized a vital artery of finance sup-
porting hundreds of millions of families
— so-called remittances sent home from
wealthy countries by migrant workers.
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FOR ALL TASTES
A VEGGIE BURGER
EVERYONE LOVES
BACK PAGE | LIVING
INTERNATIONAL EDITION | TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020
As the coronavirus has sent economies
into lockdown, sowing joblessness, peo-
ple accustomed to taking care of rela-
tives at home have lost their paychecks,
forcing some to depend on those who
have depended on them.
Last year, migrant workers sent home
a record $554 billion, more than three
times the amount of development aid
dispensed by wealthy countries, accord-
ing to the World Bank. But those remit-
tances are likely to plunge by one-fifth
this year, the most severe contraction in
history.
The drop amounts to a catastrophe,
heightening the near-certainty that the
pandemic will produce the first global
increase in poverty since the Asian fi-
nancial crisis of 1998. Some 40 million to
60 million people are expected this year
to fall into extreme poverty, which the
World Bank defines as living on $1.90 a
day or less.
Diminishing remittances are both an
outgrowth of the crisis gripping the
world and a portent of more trouble
ahead. Developing countries account
for 60 percent of the world economy on
the basis of purchasing power, accord-
ing to the International Monetary Fund.
Less spending in poorer nations spells
less economic growth for the world.
Like the pandemic that has delivered
it, the slide in remittances is global. Eu-
rope and Central Asia are expected to
No trouble learning lines:
New film’s star is a robot
An android is exploring
her ‘human’ side to take
on her first acting role
BY SARAH BAHR
The strangest part of Matthew Helder-
man’s video call came when he bit into
an apple.
Or rather, what followed.
“What kind of apple is that?” asked
the 23-year-old with blunt bangs and big
brown eyes peering at him through his
laptop screen.
Helderman, the chief executive of
BondIt Media Capital, was meeting with
the leading lady of “b,” the $70 million
sci-fi film his company is backing.
Only the actress, Erica, was not, in
fact, a woman but an android. Though
her curious eyes were trained on Hel-
derman’s face, there was a giveaway: a
faint whirring as she rose from her chair.
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Much of life in Doha, Qatar, has shut down, and Mr. Heron has stopped sending money
home from the city. His wife sees no way to send her 16-year-old son to school.
suffer a fall of nearly 28 percent in the
wages sent home from other countries,
while sub-Saharan Africa expects a drop
of 23 percent. South Asia appears set for
a 22 percent decline, while the Middle
East, North Africa and Latin America
and the Caribbean could absorb a reduc-
tion of more than 19 percent.
Over all, the pandemic has damaged
Erica was created by Hiroshi Ishigu-
ro, a roboticist at Osaka University in Ja-
pan, to be “the most beautiful woman in
the world” — he modeled her after im-
ages of Miss Universe pageant finalists
— and the most humanlike robot in ex-
istence. But she’s more than just a pretty
face: Though “b” is still in preproduc-
tion, when she makes her debut,
producers believe it will be the first time
a film has relied on a fully autonomous
artificially intelligent actor.
Yet despite her flawless features and
easy smile, her pupils are clearly plastic.
Her synthesized British voice has a
slight metallic tone that sounds as if
she’s speaking into a pipe. When she
walks, the motion of her air compressor
joints makes it look as though she’s per-
forming either a sped-up or slowed-
down version of the robot. For that rea-
son, a majority of her scenes will be
filmed while she’s sitting down.
But she does have one advantage
ERICA, PAGE 2
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Spain € 3.70 U.A.E. AED 15.00
Sweden Skr 45 United States $ 4.00
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MONKEY MARAUDERS
THAI CITY IS OVERRUN BY
SWEET-TOOTHED OUTLAWS
PAGE 4 | WORLD
SALAHUDDIN AHMED FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
SEBASTIAN MODAK/THE NEW YORK TIMES
the earning power of 164 million migrant
workers who support at least 800 mil-
lion relatives in less affluent countries,
according to an estimate from the
United Nations Network on Migration.
“We are talking about a staggering
number of people who are benefiting
from these remittances,” said Dilip
REMITTANCES, PAGE 4
..
Why U.S.
is losing the
battle with
Covid-19
FROM THE MAGAZINE
The chronic underfunding
of public health has come
back to haunt America
BY JENEEN INTERLANDI
In the early days of May, Umair Shah,
director of the public health department
in Harris County, Texas, was feeling
hopeful.
It looked as if his county might suc-
ceed in controlling the coronavirus out-
break. The number of new cases per day
had plummeted to an average of about
50 from a peak of 239 in early April, and
it was holding steady. On the charts that
Shah studied on his computer each
morning, the uptick — a mountain that
had been rising for weeks — had given
way to a plateau.
The virus wasn’t disappearing. But it
wasn’t spreading rapidly anymore, ei-
ther.
Achieving that stalemate was no
small feat. For one thing, Harris County
stretches across 1,800 square miles of
the state’s southeastern edge. The re-
gion includes two international airports,
four international seaports and the city
of Houston. The first case was con-
firmed there in early March, around the
same time that cases first popped up in
New York, and modelers initially wor-
ried that the county’s hospitals and
morgues would be overrun — just as
New York’s eventually were.
For another thing, the work itself was
grueling. By early May, Shah’s staff had
logged 16-hour days, six or seven days a
week, for two months. Contact tracers
and outreach workers had made thou-
sands of phone calls: to persuade people
exposed to the virus to report their
symptoms, get tested and self-isolate;
and to prevail on businesses, apartment
complexes and nursing homes to hang
more hand-washing signs and distrib-
ute informational pamphlets.
Shah and his team had not been par-
ticularly well armed for any of these
fights. Decades of research shows that a
robust national public health system
could save billions of dollars annually by
reducing the burden of preventable ill-
nesses and keeping the population
healthier over all. But like most public
health departments across the United
States, Harris County’s was grossly un-
derfunded.
Shah, an internist, had started out in
clinical medicine, but his parents
pressed him from early on to “do well,
and do good,” and to his mind, public
health was the best way to fulfill that
charge. His department employed just
700 or so people in a broad range of
health-promotion efforts, whether mos-
quito control or maternal health and
child health.
He recently secured a $15 million
budget increase, thanks to some ag-
PANDEMIC, PAGE 8

2 | TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020
page two
From left: Olivia de Havilland in “The Snake Pit” (1948), which was among her favorite films; the two-time Oscar winner as a presenter at the 75th Academy Awards in 2003; and Ms. de Havilland with Joseph Cotten in the 1977 disaster movie “Airport ’77.”
An understated star in ‘Gone With the Wind’
OLIVIA DE HAVILLAND
1916-2020
BY ROBERT BERKVIST
Olivia de Havilland, an actress who
gained movie immortality in “Gone
With the Wind,” then built an illustrious
film career, punctuated by a successful
fight to loosen the studios’ grip on con-
tract actors, died on Sunday at her home
in Paris. She was 104 and one of the last
surviving stars of Hollywood’s Golden
Age.
Her death was confirmed by her pub-
licist Lisa Goldberg.
Ms. de Havilland was both a classic
Hollywood beauty and an honored
screen actress whose very name and
bearing suggested membership in a
kind of aristocracy of moviedom.
Though she was typecast early in her
career as the demure ingénue, she went
on to earn meatier roles that led to five
Academy Award nominations, two of
which brought her the Oscar, for “To
Each His Own” (1946) and “The Heir-
ess” (1949).
Those roles came to her in no small
part because of the resolve she showed
when she stood up to the studios and
won a battle that helped push Holly-
wood into the modern era, surprising
the movie moguls, who may not have ex-
pected such steel in an actress so softly
attractive and, at 5-foot-3, so unintimi-
datingly petite.
She had shown similar grit a decade
earlier, in her breakthrough role, when
she held her own against her formidable
co-stars — Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh
and Leslie Howard — in “Gone With the
Wind.”
The 1939 Civil War epic was briefly
pulled from the HBO Max streaming
service last month and returned with an
introduction saying that the film
presents the Georgia plantation at its
center as “a world of grace and beauty,
without acknowledging the brutalities
of the system of chattel slavery upon
which this world is based.”
As Melanie Hamilton Wilkes, the fi-
ancée and then wife of Mr. Howard’s
Ashley Wilkes, she brought intelligence
and grace to her portrait of a woman
whose shy, forgiving, almost too kindly
nature stood in sharp contrast to the of-
ten venomous jealousy of her high-spir-
ited sister-in-law, Scarlett O’Hara (Ms.
Leigh). Ms. de Havilland’s performance
led to an Oscar nomination as best sup-
porting actress, though the award went
to another member of the cast, Hattie
McDaniel, who played Mammy, Scar-
lett’s housekeeper. (Ms. Leigh won in
the best-actress category.)
Ms. de Havilland was under contract
to Warner Bros. when the film’s original
director, George Cukor, working for
MGM, invited her to audition for the role
No trouble learning lines: The lead actor is a robot
ERICA, FROM PAGE 1
over the Margot Robbies and Brad Pitts
of the world: She’s immune to the coro-
navirus.
Ishiguro has a dream, and in it, the
world is filled with Ericas. The barista
who hands you your coffee. The anchor
who delivers the nightly news. The re-
ceptionist at the doctor’s office.
He can make artificially intelligent
androids that walk and talk, of course.
But he’d rather you forget they aren’t
human.
To that end, his goal is to understand
what makes humans, well, human. “Eri-
ca does not understand or operate in the
same system as humans,” the 56-year-
old director of the Intelligent Robotics
Laboratory at Osaka University said by
email. “So she always makes believe to
be human.”
Ishiguro developed Erica with the
goal of creating an android that people
wouldn’t just relate to, but would also
confide in and feel affection for. The
more humanlike he could make her ap-
pear, he said, the more people would
trust her.
When he unveiled her in 2015, she was
the most advanced of the dozens of an-
droids he had produced over his career.
They have performed in plays, sung in
malls and even delivered the news.
When one of “b’s” producers, Sam
Khoze of LIFE Productions, was looking
for an android to headline a feature film
in 2017, he entertained pitches from sev-
eral robotics companies. But the mo-
ment he met Erica, Khoze said, he knew
she was their star.
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20TH CENTURY FOX
of Melanie. (He was later replaced by
Victor Fleming.) After getting the part,
she had to plead with her studio boss,
Jack Warner, to lend her to the MGM
production, which was being overseen
by David O. Selznick.
By then she had established herself at
Warner as a familiar heroine in some 20
films and had begun a long collaboration
with the prolific director Michael Curtiz,
encompassing nine films. Most notable
was a string of action features and cos-
tume dramas opposite the dashing Errol
Flynn, among them “Captain Blood”
(1935), “The Charge of the Light
Brigade” (1936) and “The Adventures of
Robin Hood” (1938), in which she played
Maid Marian.
Warner had signed Ms. de Havilland
to a seven-year contract in 1935 on the
strength of her performance that year
as Hermia, the defiant daughter who re-
sists an arranged marriage, in Max
Reinhardt’s film adaptation of “A Mid-
summer Night’s Dream.” (The year be-
fore, she had made her professional
stage acting debut in the same role in a
Hollywood Bowl production by Rein-
hardt.)
After her success in “Gone With the
Wind,” Ms. de Havilland returned to
Warner with the expectation of more
challenging roles. For the most part,
they did not materialize.
One exception was “Hold Back the
Dawn” (1941), in which she played an
American schoolteacher who is seduced
in Mexico by a wily European exile
(Charles Boyer). Her performance
earned her another Oscar nomination,
but this time she lost to her sister, Joan
Fontaine, who won for “Suspicion.” The
two were rarely on speaking terms after
that. (They are the only sisters to win
best-actress Academy Awards, and
their sibling rivalry was called the fierc-
est in Hollywood history.)
The formula roles kept coming. When
Ms. de Havilland complained, she was
told that she had been hired because she
photographed well and that she wasn’t
required to act.
The studio had misread her determi-
nation. She began to refuse roles she
considered inferior. Warner retaliated
by suspending her several times, for a
total of six months, and, after her con-
tract expired, insisting that because of
the suspensions she was still the studio’s
property for six more months.
Ms. de Havilland sued. The case
dragged on for a year and a half but Da-
vid finally beat Goliath when the Califor-
nia Supreme Court upheld a lower-court
ruling in her favor in 1945. What became
known as the de Havilland decision es-
tablished that a studio could not arbi-
trarily extend the duration of an actor’s
contract.
When she resumed her career, Ms. de
Havilland appeared in four films in rapid
succession, all released in 1946. In one,
“She really looks like a human,” Khoze
said. “Even down to such small details
as her tongue and eyelids.”
A COMPELLING PITCH
When Khoze pitched the project to Hel-
derman and BondIt Media Capital,
about two years ago, its android actor
was unquestionably the selling point.
Helderman, whose company’s credits
include the 2017 Netflix movie “To the
Bone,” said the film had a dime-a-dozen
sci-fi plot that wouldn’t have made it
onto his radar if it hadn’t been for the
star. Video calls with Ishiguro and Kohei
Ogawa, an assistant professor at Osaka
University who had joined the Erica
project in 2016, convinced Helderman
that the project was more than slush-
pile material.
In the story, which was written by
Khoze, Eric Pham, the visual effects su-
pervisor, and Tarek Zohdy, Erica plays
an artificially intelligent woman, b, who
can surge into the body and mind of any
human host. The film follows her cre-
ators’ efforts to gain control of her as she
becomes self-aware.
Erica had originally been set to star in
a project directed by Tony Kaye (“Amer-
ican History X”), but scheduling issues
led the producers to abandon it. No di-
rector or human co-stars are attached to
“b” yet (Khoze said they have inter-
viewed several filmmakers and will
make their choice in the next few
weeks), but some of Erica’s scenes were
filmed in Japan last year. They hope to
finish the rest in Europe next summer.
But while she awaits her human coun-
KEVORK DJANSEZIAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Ms. de Havilland in “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (1938) with Errol Flynn, with whom she was often paired in action features.
“The Dark Mirror,” she played twins, next year with “The Heiress,” directed
one good and one evil. In her Oscar-win- by William Wyler and adapted by Ruth
ning performance in “To Each His Own,” and Augustus Goetz from their Broad-
she was an unwed mother who must way play based on Henry James’s
give up her infant son when his father, “Washington Square.” Ms. de Havilland
her lover, a World War I flying ace, is presented an affecting portrait of a re-
killed in action. pressed, spinsterish young woman
Ms. de Havilland soon took on one of dominated by her rigidly protective fa-
her most demanding roles, that of a ther (Ralph Richardson). It was one of
young bride who becomes mentally ill Ms. de Havilland’s favorite roles.
and is sent to an institution, in “The “The films I loved,” she said in 1964,
Snake Pit” (1948). The film, directed by “the great loves, are ‘The Snake Pit,’
Anatol Litvak, was an unflinching study ‘The Heiress’ and, of course, ‘Gone With
of mental illness and the treatments the Wind.’ ” But she did not love Holly-
available then, from narcotics to electro- wood, and in the 1950s she startled the
shock. Ms. de Havilland was nominated town when she abandoned it to live in
for a best-actress Oscar but did not win. Paris with a new husband, though she
She captured her second Oscar the kept her American citizenship.
ELIZABETH SADEGH
Erica, the android star of the film “b,” with its producer, Sam Khoze. Erica can speak
English and Japanese but is still being trained in having deeper conversations.
terparts, Erica is rehearsing. There’s like teaching a child why we respond the
just one problem: She has no emotional ways we do.”
memories. The team taught her how to perform
over more than two years of daily ses-
ACTING SCHOOL FOR ANDROIDS sions using what Helderman calls a
Helderman said that when he initially “Marlon Brando” method. Some stars
met her, Erica’s acting chops were non- might draw on their own experiences to
existent. create a character, but they instructed
“At first, she didn’t understand what Erica to emulate other actors’ perform-
acting was,” Helderman said. “It was ances. Actors explained out loud how
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
WARNER BROS. PICTURES, VIA PHOTOFEST
“For Olivia,” William Stadiem wrote in
a profile of her in Vanity Fair magazine
in 2016, “there was a whiff of decay and
disappointment about Hollywood.”
Olivia Mary de Havilland was born on
July 1, 1916, to British parents in Tokyo,
where her father, Walter, a cousin of the
aviation pioneer Sir Geoffrey de Havil-
land, ran a firm of patent lawyers,
though he was not a lawyer himself. In
1919 her mother, the former Lillian Ruse,
an elocution teacher, moved with Olivia
and Joan, her younger sister by 15
months, to Saratoga, Calif., near San
Francisco.
The de Havillands divorced and Lil-
lian married George M. Fontaine, a de-
partment store executive, whose sur-
they were feeling in each scene to Erica.
“She’d ask questions like, ‘Why am I
saying this line more loudly or more
softly?’ ” Helderman said. “Or, ‘Why am
I doing this thing when the camera is
there, but not when it isn’t?’ ”
Their biggest challenge, he said, was
hardly memorization — she immedi-
ately mastered her lines. But it took her
months to grasp the concept of not just
reciting a line, but speaking it softly or in
full voice, depending on the context, and
bolstering the words with body lan-
guage. Khoze said they taught her the
dialogue for a scene in one session, then
worked on character development and
body language in another.
Of course, there are limits to her capa-
bilities: She cannot improvise. Well, she
can, within limits, Helderman clarifies,
it just wouldn’t be nearly as clean a per-
formance as a practiced sequence.
And unlike a human actor, she’ll have
to persuade the audience not to reject
her as creepy or repulsive.
The Japanese roboticist Masahiro
Mori proposed a theory in 1970 known
as the “uncanny valley,” which says that
the more humanlike a robot appears, the
more positively humans will react to it
— but only to a point. If the resemblance
is too strong, the robot can trigger a
sense of revulsion or eeriness. It’s still
unclear exactly what triggers the un-
canny valley, said Karl MacDorman, an
associate professor of human-computer
interaction at Indiana University-Pur-
due University Indianapolis: factors
might include facial and body propor-
tions, the pace and naturalness of
..
UNIVERSAL PICTURES, VIA PHOTOFEST
name Joan later took as her stage name.
Ms. de Havilland was married twice.
Both marriages ended in divorce. The
first, in 1946, was to Marcus Aurelius
Goodrich, a Texas-born novelist, screen-
writer and journalist; they had a son,
Benjamin, and divorced in 1952. She
married Pierre Galante, the author of
military histories and at one point editor
of the magazine Paris Match, in 1955 af-
ter the couple met in France. They
moved to Paris, had a daughter, Gisele,
and divorced in 1979. Ms. de Havilland’s
son died of Hodgkin’s disease in 1991.
Before she was married, Ms. de Havil-
land had romantic relationships with
James Stewart, Howard Hughes and the
director John Huston, with whom she
reunited for a time after her first di-
vorce. By her account she also turned
away a smitten young John F. Kennedy,
who was visiting Hollywood after his
PT-boat service in World War II.
She is survived by her daughter,
Giselle Galante Chulack. Joan Fontaine
died in 2013 at 96.
From the mid-60s onward, Ms. de
Havilland’s acting was largely confined
to sporadic roles in television series like
“The Love Boat”; television movies like
“The Royal Romance of Charles and Di-
ana” (1982), in which she played the
Queen Mother; and mini-series like
“Roots: The Next Generation” (1979).
Her work in the 1986 NBC mini-series
“Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna,” in
which she played a Russian empress,
brought her a Golden Globe Award and
an Emmy nomination. In 1965 she be-
came the first woman to head the jury at
the Cannes Film Festival.
She returned to feature films only oc-
casionally, among them the hugely suc-
cessful 1977 disaster movie “Airport ’77,”
in which she joined an ensemble cast of
veteran actors. Her last Hollywood film
was “The Fifth Musketeer” (1979), in
which she played the mother of Louis
XIV (Beau Bridges). But even when she
was well into her 80s, she had not en-
tirely given up the idea of returning to
the spotlight. She was a presenter at the
Academy Awards in 2003.
Ms. de Havilland’s readings of scrip-
ture on Christmas and Easter at the
American Cathedral, on the Avenue
George V, became annual events in
Paris. In 2010, Nicolas Sarkozy, then the
president of France, awarded her the
Légion d’Honneur.
In 1999 she was honored with a party
in Paris to celebrate the 60th anniversa-
ry of “Gone With the Wind.” At one point,
one of the hosts recalled, with a glass in
hand, she toasted the film and its lead-
ing actors, reminding the room that she
was the last one still standing.
“Let us raise a mint julep to our stars,”
she proclaimed, “on that great veranda
in the sky!”
Allyson Waller contributed reporting.
speech, and the fluidity or jerkiness of
movement.
He said that lack of sympathy in the
face of adversity can be a plus for uncan-
ny computer-animated or robotic vil-
lains like Gollum from “Lord of the
Rings,” using viewers’ unsettledness to
their advantage. “You’re not supposed
to relate to or feel empathy for Gollum —
though sometimes, we do,” he said. “But
when we can’t relate to a protagonist
we’re supposed to want to succeed,
that’s where the uncanny valley can be-
come disruptive.”
“WHAT IS A HUMAN BEING?”
While she awaits co-stars, Helderman
said, Erica continues to run lines with
amateur local actors. “The coronavirus
is a double-edged sword,” he said. “We
don’t know when production can begin
again, but she’ll be ready when it does.”
The script calls for three supporting
human lead actors, but Khoze said
they’re also looking at other robots for
supporting roles and are in negotiations
to hire a robot for a crew position.
But Erica still has a way to go in the
quest to not just masquerade as hu-
mans, but to emulate them. She speaks
both English and Japanese and can talk
to a stranger in Japanese for 10 minutes
on more than 80 topics. But Ishiguro
said they’re still working toward con-
versations that are deeper or involve
multiple people.
“The machines that humans use be-
come more human,” he said. “So the
most important question for us is, ‘What
is a human being?’ ”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
World
Opposition activists said 50,000 to 100,000 people poured into the streets of Khabarovsk, Russia, last weekend. Such an outpouring of anger has little precedent in modern Russia.
Protests swell in eastern Russia
KHABAROVSK, RUSSIA
Tens of thousands march
in city of Khabarovsk over
arrest of a popular governor
BY ANTON TROIANOVSKI
Watching the masses of protesters
chanting “Freedom!” and “Putin re-
sign!” while passing drivers honked, ap-
plauded and offered high-fives, a side-
walk vendor selling little cucumbers
and plastic cups of forest raspberries
said she would join in, too, if she did not
have to work.
“There will be a revolution,” the ven-
dor, Irina Lukasheva, 56, predicted.
“What did our grandfathers fight for?
Not for poverty or for the oligarchs sit-
ting over there in the Kremlin.”
The protest in Khabarovsk, a city
4,000 miles east of Moscow, drew tens of
thousands of people for a three-mile
march through central streets for the
third straight week on Saturday, part of
daily demonstrations. Residents were
rallying in support of a popular gover-
nor who was arrested and spirited to
Moscow on July 9 — but their remark-
able outpouring of anger, which has little
precedent in post-Soviet Russia, has
emerged as stark testimony to the dis-
content that President Vladimir V. Putin
faces across the country.
Iran’s ex-president woos Saudis by mail
BY FARNAZ FASSIHI
A former president of Iran, known in the
West for speeches that assert the Holo-
caust was invented and that Israel
should be erased from the map, has writ-
ten a chummy letter to his country’s
most ardent Arab foe: the crown prince
of Saudi Arabia.
So far, at least, it appears to be a one-
way exchange.
Nonetheless, the letter by the former
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is
striking in that Mr. Ahmadinejad wrote
it at all. Other members of Iran’s hierar-
chy, led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
have described the 34-year-old prince,
the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, as ad-
venturous, brutal and immature. And
for his part, the prince has compared
Ayatollah Khamenei to Hitler and called
any engagement with Iran useless.
Flouting Iran’s stated policy toward
Saudi Arabia, Mr. Ahmadinejad sent the
letter, filled with flattery and praise, to
the prince this month, inviting him to
join hands to end the Yemen war, ac-
cording to a copy that Mr. Ahmadine-
jad’s office provided to The New York
Times.
Portraying the prince as a man of
peace, the letter asserted that he would
take steps to bring peace to the region
and thus secure his legacy and please Is-
lam’s prophet, Muhammad.
The letter made no mention of the
prince’s prosecution of the five-year-old
war in Yemen, which the United Nations
calls the world’s biggest man-made hu-
manitarian disaster.
“I know that your excellency is not
happy about the current situation of in-
nocent people dying and getting injured
every day and infrastructure being
damaged,” the letter said. “You are up-
set that regional resources belonging to
UPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws
Mr. Putin won a tightly scripted refer-
endum less than four weeks ago that re-
wrote the Constitution to allow him to
stay in office until 2036. But the vote,
seen as fraudulent by critics and many
analysts, provided little but a fig leaf for
public disenchantment with corruption,
stifled freedoms and stagnant incomes
made worse by the pandemic.
“When a person lives not knowing
how things are supposed to be, he thinks
things are good,” said Artyom Aksy-
onov, 31, who is in the transportation
business. He was handing out water
from the trunk of his car to protesters
under the baking sun in Lenin Square,
on the protest route. “But when you
open your eyes to the truth, you realize
things were not good. This was all an il-
lusion.”
Across Russia, fear of being detained
by the police and the seeming hopeless-
ness of effecting change has largely kept
people off the streets. Many Russians
also say that whatever Mr. Putin’s faults,
the alternative could be worse or lead to
greater chaos. For the most part, anti-
Kremlin protests have been limited to a
few thousand people in Moscow and
other big cities, where the authorities
usually crack down harshly.
Partly as a result, Mr. Putin remains
firmly in control. And independent
polling shows he still enjoys a 60 percent
approval rating, though the figure has
been falling.
But the events in Khabarovsk have
shown that the well of discontent is such
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former president of Iran, flouted Iran’s stated policy toward
Saudi Arabia in writing to invite the crown prince to end the Yemen war.
the people are used for destruction in-
stead of developing peace and prosper-
ity. For these reasons you will welcome a
just peace.”
It was signed, “your brother Mah-
moud Ahmadinejad.”
The Saudis have portrayed the Yemen
conflict as essentially a battle with Iran,
which supports the Houthi rebels who
routed the Saudi-backed Yemen govern-
ment from vast swaths of the country in
2015.
Saudi Arabia has not yet responded to
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s letter, which was de-
livered to the Saudi interest office in
Tehran, according to his office. The
Saudi mission to the United Nations did
not respond to an inquiry about whether
the prince had received the letter.
The Yemen war reflects a far deeper
rift between Iran and Saudi Arabia,
that minor events can ignite a firestorm.
The weekend crowds have been so large
that the police have not tried to control
them — even though the protesters did
not have a permit, let alone a clear
leader or organizer.
And with Russians switching en
masse from television, which is con-
trolled by the government, to the largely
uncensored internet to get their news,
the state could easily lose its grip on the
narrative.
“There will be a revolution. What
did our grandfathers fight for? Not
for poverty or for the oligarchs
sitting over there in the Kremlin.”
Khabarovsk, a city of 600,000 close to
the eastern terminus of the Trans-Sibe-
rian Railway and the Chinese border,
had not seen any protests of much sig-
nificance since the early 1990s. That
changed after July 9, when a SWAT
team dragged the governor, Sergei I.
Furgal, out of his car and whisked him to
Moscow on 15-year-old murder accusa-
tions.
Khabarovsk social media forums
erupted in indignation over an arrest
that looked like a Kremlin move to elimi-
nate a young and well-liked politician
who had upset an ally of Mr. Putin in the
regional election in 2018.
As they have on previous weekends,
the protesters gathered in the central
ALI ATMACA/ANADOLU AGENCY, VIA GETTY IMAGES
which have been locked in a rivalry over
which nation should take a leadership
role in the global Islamic community.
In recent years tensions have escalat-
ed and diplomatic relations have broken
down between the two countries.
“The Saudi government is despotic,
dictatorial, corrupt, tyrannical and de-
pendent,” Ayatollah Khamenei in-
veighed in a speech in 2019, expressing
confidence that the ruling Al Saud dy-
nasty would collapse in the near future
at the hands of Islamic revolutionaries.
Mr. Ahmadinejad also wrote to the
leader of the Houthis, Abdul-Malik
Badreddin al-Houthi, and to the United
Nations secretary general, António
Guterres. The three letters represent a
proposal by Mr. Ahmadinejad to medi-
ate an end to Yemen’s war by creating a
committee of international dignitaries.
IGOR VOLKOV/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Lenin Square by the headquarters of the
regional government. They marched
down a main street, blocking traffic, and
made a three-mile loop through the city
center before returning to the square.
Police officers walked along casually on
the sidewalk, without interfering.
The crowd, some of whom wore face
masks stenciled with Mr. Furgal’s name,
looked like a cross section of the city, in-
cluding working-class and middle-class
residents, pensioners and young people.
The most concrete demand in their
chants was that Mr. Furgal face trial in
Khabarovsk rather than in Moscow, but
they did not shy away from challenging
Mr. Putin directly. They shouted “Shame
on the Kremlin!”, “Russia, wake up!”
and “We are the ones in power!”
Mr. Putin on July 20 appointed a 39-
year-old politician from outside the re-
gion, Mikhail V. Degtyarev, as the acting
governor of the Khabarovsk region, an-
gering residents further. Asked whether
he would meet with the protesters, Mr.
Degtyarev told reporters that he had
better things to do than talk to people
“screaming outside the windows.”
One of the protesters, Vadim Serzhan-
tov, a 35-year-old railway company em-
ployee, said he had held little interest in
politics until recently. The arrest of Mr.
Furgal, whom residents praise for popu-
list moves such as cutting back on offi-
cials’ perks, was a turning point, Mr.
Serzhantov said.
“To be honest, I used to not care at all,”
he said. “But this is lawlessness.”
Mr. Guterres’s spokesman, Stéphane
Dujarric, said he had no knowledge of
the letter.
Roozbeh Mirebrahimi, an independ-
ent Iran analyst based in New York, said
the Saudi crown prince would “not take
him seriously because all the people
who are dealing with Iran, either region-
ally or internationally, they know who
holds the rein and it’s Khamenei.”
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-elec-
tion in 2009 stirred national unrest and
brutal crackdowns resulting in the
killing of protesters and jailing of activ-
ists and journalists.
In recent years his relationship with
Iran’s leadership deteriorated, and Mr.
Ahmadinejad tried to separate himself
from many of the Islamic Republic’s
policies.
In an interview with The New York
Times last year Mr. Ahmadinejad called
for Iran to directly negotiate with Presi-
dent Trump because he was “a man of
action,” and said he had written Mr.
Trump three letters.
He has recently been an outspoken
critic of a proposed 25-year economic
and military partnership between Iran
and China and said Iranians would
never accept such a deal.
But the letter to the prince is perhaps
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s boldest act of defi-
ance. The letter, according to one of his
advisers, also signals an opening to nor-
malizing relations with the United
States, despite Mr. Trump’s so-called
maximum pressure policy against Iran.
“Mr. Ahmadinejad believes in good
strategic relations with everyone, in-
cluding Saudi Arabia and the U.S.,” said
the adviser, Abdul Reza Davari. “He be-
lieves Iran’s problems will not go away
until the animosity with the U.S. is re-
solved and the road to Washington goes
through Riyadh and we must pave the
way.”
When opinions vary
on just what is fact
MOSCOW
Group hired by Facebook
to curb fake news accused
of ties to Ukraine’s far right
BY ANTON TROIANOVSKI
To understand the complexity of polic-
ing online disinformation, consider the
small Ukrainian fact-checking group
StopFake.
This year, Facebook hired StopFake to
help curb the flow of Russian propagan-
da and other false news across its plat-
form in Ukraine.
StopFake, like all of Facebook’s out-
side fact checkers, signed a pledge to be
nonpartisan and not to focus its checks
“on any one side.” But in recent weeks,
StopFake has been battling accusations
of ties to the Ukrainian far right and of
bias in its fact-checking. The episode
has raised thorny questions for Face-
book over whom it allows to separate
truth from lies — and who is considered
a neutral fact checker in a country at
war.
“They are empowering these organi-
zations and these people to be making
calls about what kind of information,
what kind of opinions, what kind of com-
munications are illegitimate or legiti-
mate,” Matthew Schaaf, who leads the
Ukraine office of the American human
rights group Freedom House, said of
Facebook and its fact checkers. “The
question that needs to be asked is: Do
these people deserve our trust?”
A Ukrainian news outlet, Zaborona,
published an article this month citing
photographs of a prominent StopFake
member meeting with nationalist fig-
ures, including a white-power rock mu-
sician whose lyrics deny the Holocaust.
StopFake denied having any far-right
ties or bias, calling the Zaborona article
part of a campaign of slanderous “infor-
mation attacks.”
Zaborona’s editor, Katerina Ser-
gatskova, said she fled Ukraine last
week after receiving death threats.
(StopFake has condemned the threats.)
On Facebook, some of her critics had
claimed, without evidence, that she was
a Kremlin agent.
The episode underlines the high
stakes facing American social media
companies as they try to respond to dis-
information in the world’s geopolitical
hot spots. After being criticized for fail-
ing to stop the spread of disinformation
during the 2016 presidential campaign
in the United States, Facebook sought to
avoid becoming an arbiter of truth by
creating a third-party fact-checking pro-
gram.
The program now includes more than
50 organizations that check facts in
more than 40 languages, including
global news agencies such as Agence
France-Presse and Reuters alongside
smaller groups like StopFake.
Yevhen Fedchenko, StopFake’s editor
in chief, declined to comment for this ar-
ticle. He has told other media outlets
that he plans to file a lawsuit to defend
StopFake’s reputation, and he wrote in
an email that “our legal team advised us
against talking to media until the hear-
ing in the court.”
Facebook said in a written statement
that all its fact checkers followed a
“Code of Principles to promote fairness
and nonpartisanship in fact-checking.”
Baybars Orsek, the director of the group
that administers that code of principles,
said it was conducting an “interim as-
sessment” of StopFake in light of the
Zaborona report.
He said his organization, the Interna-
tional Fact-Checking Network, which
was set up by the Poynter Institute for
Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Fla.,
takes reports of far-right ties seriously.
He acknowledged that nonpartisanship
had long been a particularly difficult
thing to ascertain during an armed con-
flict like Ukraine’s.
“They are working in a country where
they are still practically in war with Rus-
sia,” Mr. Orsek said of StopFake. “This is
a question we also struggle with as fact
checkers: How do you do nonpartisan
fact-checking when you have tanks on
the street?”
Many European countries struggle
with far-right groups, but critics say
The studios in Kyiv, Ukraine, of StopFake, a fact-checking group that was hired by
Facebook to curb the flow of false news across its platform in Ukraine.
TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020 | 3
they are tolerated to an excessive de-
gree in Ukraine because they share a
common enemy with the country’s intel-
lectual mainstream: Russia. The notion
that Ukraine has a far-right problem, in
turn, is amplified and distorted by Rus-
sian state propaganda, which often
falsely refers to Ukraine’s pro-Western
revolution in 2014 as a fascist coup.
Deadly fighting between Ukrainian
forces and Russian-backed separatists
continues to simmer in the country’s
east. And propaganda has for years
been a key tool for the Kremlin in its ef-
fort to keep Ukraine in Russia’s orbit.
The debate over treatment of the far
right came to a head after Zaborona
published its article describing what it
said was evidence of StopFake’s bias, in-
cluding social media photographs show-
ing Marko Suprun, who hosts Stop-
Fake’s English-language video program
about Russian disinformation, meeting
with two Ukrainian nationalist musi-
cians at a gathering in 2017.
The songs of one of the musicians, Ar-
seniy Bilodub, include “Heroes of the
White Race” and, referring to the Holo-
caust, “Six Million Words of Lies.” Anton
Shekhovtsov, an external lecturer at the
University of Vienna who studies far-
right movements in Europe, said in an
interview that he did not see StopFake
itself as a far-right organization, “but I
don’t think that they are nonpartisan.”
StopFake countered that Zaborona
was employing “the fallacy of guilt by
association” in presenting the photo-
graphs as evidence of far-right connec-
tions on the part of Mr. Suprun. Mr.
Suprun did not respond to requests for
comment.
Experts cite the challenge of
doing nonpartisan fact-checking
during an armed conflict like
the one in Ukraine.
“He has also been photographed
alongside Rabbi Yaakov Bleich, but this
does not make him a member of his syn-
agogue,” StopFake said in a lengthy re-
sponse to the Zaborona article posted
online. Mr. Suprun, the statement add-
ed, “is not involved in the joint fact-
checking project StopFake has with
Facebook.”
Ms. Sergatskova, Zaborona’s editor, is
originally from Russia and received
Ukrainian citizenship in 2015. A promi-
nent Ukrainian journalist on Facebook
called her a “lefty F.S.B. mold” — refer-
ring to the Russian spy agency — and
other commenters posted her home ad-
dress in Kyiv, the Ukraine capital, before
she went into hiding.
Human Rights Watch and the Com-
mittee to Protect Journalists urged the
Ukrainian authorities to investigate the
threats against Ms. Sergatskova.
Ukrainian media organizations, includ-
ing StopFake, signed an open letter con-
demning the threats. The Ukrainian po-
lice did not respond to a request for com-
ment.
Ukrainian journalism students and
faculty members started StopFake in
2014 to counter Russian disinformation,
drawing praise from Kyiv civil society
and Western supporters of Ukraine.
StopFake’s agreement to sign on as one
of Facebook’s two fact-checking part-
ners in Ukraine gave it added clout.
Facebook says it reduces a post’s dis-
tribution in users’ News Feeds if a third-
party fact checker marks a post as false,
but it does not take it down. Maksym
Skubenko, who heads Facebook’s other
Ukrainian fact-checking partner, Vox-
Check, said users typically saw posts
and articles marked as false within sec-
onds of when his team entered a fact
check into Facebook’s system.
StopFake’s website shows that the or-
ganization has carried out some 200 fact
checks of posts and articles for Face-
book in Russian and Ukrainian since the
group started working for the social net-
work in April. Many of the fact checks
are apolitical and related to the coro-
navirus pandemic. A smaller number
address issues of Ukrainian national
identity, generally when the item being
fact-checked fits into a pro-Russian nar-
rative.
Maria Varenikova contributed reporting
from Kyiv, Ukraine, and Davey Alba from
New York.
BRENDAN HOFFMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

4 | TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020
world
Clockwise from above left: The owner of a general store in Lopburi, Thailand, has given in to the monkeys; there are at least 8,400 macaques in the area, most of them in a few city blocks; a police officer mimed using a slingshot to scare the animals away.
Thai city besieged by greedy outlaws
THAILAND DISPATCH
LOPBURI, THAILAND
Monkeys were revered
in an ancient capital.
Now they are taking over.
BY HANNAH BEECH
The customers waiting outside a bank in
Lopburi, Thailand, had left their jewelry
at home and kept other treasures out of
sight. But danger lurked anyway.
In broad daylight, they watched a
thief steal an iced tea and a vandal bra-
zenly attack a motorcycle seat. One
woman quit her place in the line when a
stalker crept up and threatened to bite
her.
With a sigh, a police officer bran-
dished a slingshot, and the monkeys
scattered. Less than a minute later, they
were back.
Lopburi, the onetime capital of a Sia-
mese kingdom and a repository of an-
cient architecture, is a city under siege.
Crab-eating macaques, members of a
Southeast Asian species with piercing
eyes and a curious nature, have spilled
out of the temples where they were once
revered and taken over the heart of the
old town.
Their growing population, at least
8,400 in the area, with most concen-
trated in a few city blocks, has decimat-
Poverty threatens as global lifelines are severed
REMITTANCES, FROM PAGE 1
Ratha, lead economist on migration and
remittances at the World Bank in Wash-
ington.
Venturing overseas for work is laced
with danger, exposing migrant workers
to dishonest recruitment agents, ex-
ploitative employers and the physical
perils of manual labor. It is also a singu-
larly effective means of upward mobil-
ity.
Households receiving remittances eat
better and are more likely to continue
their children’s education, rather than
pressing them into the work force. Ba-
bies born into homes receiving remit-
tances tend to be higher in birth weight.
In some countries, migrant workers
can tap into unemployment insurance
and other government programs — es-
pecially Eastern Europeans from Euro-
pean Union nations who have labored in
other member states. But in many coun-
tries, migrants operate in gray areas,
unprotected by government relief and
especially vulnerable to hard times.
“Some people, either naïvely or with
good intentions, say this Covid-19 de-
mocratizes us all, and we are all exposed
to it equally,” said Mahmoud Mohieldin,
an Egyptian economist who serves as a
United Nations special envoy on financ-
ing sustainable development. “This is
not true. The impacts are very much dis-
proportionate.”
For families in poor countries, send-
ing a relative abroad to earn money
tends to be a collective undertaking.
People pool their cash to finance jour-
neys in what amounts to the largest in-
vestment they will make in their lives.
The pandemic has turned such ven-
tures into disasters.
Three years ago, Mahammed Heron
left his village outside Dhaka, Bangla-
desh, for work in the energy-rich nation
of Qatar, tracing a route pursued by tens
of millions of South Asian migrants.
He borrowed 400,000 Bangladeshi
taka, or about $4,700, from relatives and
UPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws
ed parts of the local economy. With terri-
torial troupes of macaques roaming the
neighborhood, dozens of businesses —
including a music school, gold shop, bar-
ber and movie theater — have been
forced to close in recent years.
The coronavirus pandemic has added
to the chaos. The frolicking monkeys
drew droves of tourists as well as Bud-
dhist faithful, who believe feeding the
animals is meritorious. Their favorite
offerings included coconut yogurt,
strawberry soda and brightly colored
snack packs. Now the macaques don’t
understand where that source of suste-
nance has gone. And they are hungry.
Over the years, the monkeys moved
into abandoned buildings, trashing dis-
play cases and rattling the bars installed
to keep them out. Unless security
guards are vigilant, they rip antennas
and windshield wipers off parked cars.
Dangling earrings, sunglasses and
plastic bags that look like they may have
food in them are irresistible to the mon-
keys. And in the areas of the city most
densely packed with the animals, many
residents live in fear of the next sneak
attack.
But in a Buddhist-majority culture in
which culling monkeys would disturb
spiritual sensibilities, local officials and
residents have few options to fend off
the gangs of macaques. Besides, in the
past, the monkeys drew tourists to Lop-
buri. Without them, the economy might
suffer even more.
For years, Flavius Tudor has sent money he has made in England to his mother in
Romania. Now, he’s not working, and his mother had to send him money.
engaged a local recruitment agent that
bought him a plane ticket, secured a
work visa and promised him a job. This
was a monumental amount of money in
Bangladesh, more than twice the na-
tional income per capita, $1,855. His
wife, Monowara Begum, was terrified.
Her first husband — Mr. Heron’s older
brother — had been killed by a drunken
driver more than a decade earlier in
Saudi Arabia, where he had been work-
ing as a hospital janitor.
But if the prospect of her husband’s
venturing to the Persian Gulf was fright-
ening, staying put seemed riskier still.
Her family lived in a shack made of
corrugated aluminum that was vulnera-
ble to the torrential rains of the mon-
soon. They had no running water. Mr.
Heron earned perhaps 300 taka per day
working in the surrounding rice pad-
dies. They could rarely afford meat or
fish, subsisting on rice and potatoes.
Her oldest son had a heart condition that
At a hardware store across the street
from the ruins of a 13th-century Hindu
temple, oversize stuffed animals in the
shape of crocodiles and tigers peer out
at the street where the monkey traffic
outpaces that of pedestrians. The plush
toys were meant to scare away the mon-
keys, and it worked for a couple of
months. But the macaques soon figured
out that they weren’t real, said Yupa
Srisanguan, the shop owner.
“It has never been this bad,” Ms. Yupa
said, as a young male macaque wan-
dered into her store, intent on chewing
the loops of rubber hose hanging from
A truck idled at the light, its
flatbed filled with crates of fruit
for the market. A monkey
spotted the produce.
the ceiling. “We’re not against the mon-
keys, but it’s difficult when people are
afraid of being bitten when they come to
our store.”
When she was a little girl, Ms. Yupa,
70, said, the monkeys were fewer, bigger
and healthier, their fur shiny and thick.
They kept to the temples, as well as the
ruins of the ancient Khmer civilization
that once held sway over this part of
central Thailand.
But with an influx of monkey-en-
chanted visitors, some foreign, came an
easy and often unhealthy font of food.
SUZIE HOWELL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
required medicine. The only way out of
poverty was to invest in her children’s
education, but tuition payments
reached 6,000 taka per year.
“Our financial situation was never
good,” Ms. Begum explained in an inter-
view via a video link, as birds chirped
loudly in the village. She reluctantly
agreed to the plan.
When Mr. Heron landed in Doha, Qa-
tar, in September 2018, the furnace-like
heat was not the only shock: The re-
cruitment agency had failed to line up a
job. “I was cheated,” he said in an inter-
view by video.
He looked frantically for work, even-
tually securing a position at a staffing
agency that sent him on a variety of as-
signments — cleaning offices, landscap-
ing and digging into the sandy earth to
lay fiber optics cable.
Mr. Heron was paid a monthly salary
of 900 Qatari rial (about $250) and as-
signed a bunk inside a dormitory room
Along with bananas and citrus, the ma-
caques feasted on junk. Their fur
thinned. Some went bald. Without hav-
ing to worry about their next meal, the
monkeys, which can give birth twice a
year, had more time for other pursuits.
The population exploded.
Compared with the monkeys of the
forest, their urban counterparts have
less muscle and are more susceptible to
hypertension and blood disease, said
Narongporn Doodduem, the director of
a regional office of the Wildlife Conser-
vation Department.
“The monkeys are never hungry,” he
said, “just like children who eat too
much KFC.”
As traffic recently piled up at a light in
old town Lopburi, Nirad Pholngeun, a
police officer, kept his slingshot at the
ready. He has been stationed at this
street corner for five years and has
watched the growing monkey popula-
tion with alarm.
A truck, presumably from out of town,
idled at the light, its flatbed filled with
crates of fruit for the market. A monkey
spotted the produce, wove through the
traffic, leapt onto the truck and held
aloft a juicy dragon fruit. The one expe-
ditionary macaque drew dozens more.
By the time the light turned green, the
crates were cleared and the gorging had
begun.
Throughout the mayhem, Mr. Nirad
raised his slingshot but there was little a
police officer could do against so many
he shared with 15 other men, all Bangla-
deshis.
Every two or three months, he sent
home about 30,000 taka, but it all went
toward his debt — still only one-fourth
repaid.
Then, in May, with the coronavirus
shutting down much of life in Doha, the
agency stopped paying the workers, Mr.
Heron said. He suffered an asthma flare-
up that required hospitalization, absorb-
ing all his cash. He stopped sending
money home.
For Bangladesh over all, remittances
received from other countries plunged
by 23 percent in April from a year earlier
and were down 13 percent in May, ac-
cording to the nation’s central bank,
though they increased in June.
Schools remain shut in Bangladesh,
but Ms. Begum sees no way to afford
sending her 16-year-old son, Hasan,
when they open.
She has been urging Hasan to find
work — perhaps in construction, maybe
at an auto repair shop. He has been re-
sisting, preferring to stay at home and
read textbooks.
“I want to continue my studies,” he
said. He imagines a life as a software en-
gineer. His face lights up as he describes
this — a slender teenager, standing
shirtless in front of his shack as roosters
crow, envisioning himself in a shiny of-
fice, leaning over a computer.
Every few days, he and his mother
use a smartphone app and a prepaid in-
ternet card to talk to Mr. Heron,
stranded in the dormitory in Qatar. He is
too ill to work, he said, but he lacks
money to fly home. After another year,
the staffing company is contractually
obligated to pay for his return flight. He
bides his time, hoping his health im-
proves, hoping his pay resumes, hoping
his own children escape his fate.
“I dream that my sons will do some-
thing in their life,” he said.
In the town of Patzún, Guatemala, Ed-
gar Tzirin’s family used the money he
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
macaques. His battle tactic was a cha-
rade anyway. The slingshot held no pro-
jectiles.
“It’s hopeless,” he said. “Within a
blink of an eye there are more monkeys.
So many babies.”
Local wildlife officials have begun
sterilizing the monkeys en masse to con-
trol their numbers. More than 300 ani-
mals underwent surgery last month,
and 200 more will be sterilized in Au-
gust.
Capturing the monkeys for the opera-
tions is a major undertaking, said Mr.
Narongporn, the wildlife official. On the
first day of the June campaign, the mon-
key catchers wore camouflage-printed
uniforms and lured the animals into
cages with food. But by the second day,
the monkeys knew to avoid them. The
monkey catchers had to switch to wear-
ing shorts and floral shirts, pretending
they were tourists.
“The monkeys are smart,” Mr.
Narongporn said. “They remember.”
With the coronavirus dissuading
many tourists and Buddhist pilgrims
from visiting Lopburi, local residents
have taken to feeding the monkeys
themselves.
“We can’t let them starve,” said
Itiphat Tansitikulphati, the owner of the
Muang Thong Hotel.
Every day, an old female monkey calls
on his hotel, waiting politely for her meal
to be served. Banana cake is her favor-
ite, but plain fruit will do, too.
made in his job as a prep cook at a New
York soup and sandwich restaurant to
erect a new house. Mr. Tzirin earned
about $2,000 a month. Every two weeks,
he dutifully sent home $500 to $700.
This money proved vital when the co-
ronavirus threw his three sisters out of
work. When his mother landed in the
hospital — maybe with the coronavirus
— he paid for her care.
But in April, with New York in lock-
down, Mr. Tzirin lost his job. When his
grandfather died the following month,
he was unable to send money home for
the funeral — a deep wound. He used to
speak to his family every two to three
days, but he can no longer bear it, reced-
ing into isolation and loneliness. He has
not told them that he lost his job.
Diminishing remittances
are both an outgrowth
of the crisis and a portent
of more trouble ahead.
Mr. Tzirin gets up at 5:30 every morn-
ing and goes out looking for construc-
tion work or odd jobs as a day laborer,
but he usually returns home empty-
handed. “There’s nothing,” he said.
Many migrant workers are contend-
ing with two emergencies at once — a
loss of income combined with the men-
ace of the virus itself.
Mr. Tudor, the Romanian immigrant
living in Britain, left his home region of
Transylvania when he was in his early
20s. Abandoning a perilous life as a coal
miner, he landed first in Spain, where he
worked in security. As the global finan-
cial crisis struck the country in 2009, he
moved to Britain, settling in Weston-su-
per-Mare, a seaside town of 76,000 peo-
ple, about 150 miles west of London.
He took care of older people through
stints arranged by staffing companies.
His most recent job was at a for-profit
nursing home called The Heathers. He
..
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADAM DEAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
“A long time ago, a lot of Lopburi was
forest so we are taking the land from the
monkeys,” Mr. Itiphat said.
A third generation hotelier, he has re-
linquished the top floor to the monkeys,
who have wrecked it with the zeal of
drunken partygoers, ripping up wooden
planks and shredding corrugated metal.
An electric fence protects the ground
floor of the hotel. But even before the co-
ronavirus hit, visitors, many of whom
were traveling businesspeople, were
scared off by the marauding monkeys,
Mr. Itiphat said. His hotel barely sur-
vives.
“The balance between humans and
monkeys is off,” he said. “It hurts busi-
ness.”
Nearby, Patiphan Tantiwong runs a
general store on the main street of Lop-
buri. He has given in to the macaques. A
plump male sat on bags of dog food, sip-
ping a yogurt drink. A clutch of young-
sters swarmed a counter waiting for
handouts of cookies. There were mon-
keys among the piles of batteries and
monkeys among the light bulbs.
The babies squeaked and played a
form of macaque peekaboo.
“The monkeys were here before us,”
Mr. Patiphan said, as a juvenile tugged
on the hem of his trousers demanding a
treat. “We have to adapt to them, not the
other way around.”
Muktita Suhartono contributed report-
ing.
was making 848 pounds, or about $1,070,
a week. His wife was cleaning rooms at a
hotel, bringing home £1,200 a month.
As the coronavirus emerged, his
wife’s hours were reduced. Hospitals be-
gan shifting older patients stricken with
the virus to nursing homes.
According to Mr. Tudor, by early
March, 23 of the 30 rooms at The
Heathers were full of coronavirus pa-
tients. Within a week, nine were dead, he
said. He and his colleagues were sup-
plied only with disposable surgical
masks. One colleague demanded more
protective gear and was fired. He said
that during his last week at the facility,
the manager placed a woman with de-
mentia who did not have the virus in the
same room as someone who did.
“It was horrible,” Mr. Tudor said. “It’s
only about business. It’s about money.”
Reached by phone, a part-owner of
The Heathers, Bipin Patel, declined to
answer questions. “We’re not making
any comments,” he said.
Mr. Tudor soon came down with a fe-
ver and a cough, forcing him to stop go-
ing to work. He twice tested negative for
the coronavirus, but he has been unable
to secure another job.
In recent years, Britain has sharply
reduced government support programs
for the jobless and those struggling to
pay their bills, folding them into a lump
sum program known as universal credit.
Mr. Flavius has traded his paycheck
for a £1,000 monthly universal credit
payment, cutting his income roughly in
half. His eyeglasses have broken, but he
can’t afford to replace them. When the
rent came due last month, he paid it only
with the help of his mother, back in Ro-
mania. “The world doesn’t know where
it’s going,” he said. “No society can han-
dle this situation.”
Nic Wirtz contributed reporting from An-
tigua, Guatemala, Hari Kumar from
New Delhi and Geneva Abdul contribut-
ed research from London.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
A town rethinks its Confederate pillars
LEXINGTON, VA.
Lexington, Va., reassesses
its ties to a legacy that
symbolizes slavery
BY REID J. EPSTEIN
It’s a short drive in the Virginia town of
Lexington from a home on Confederate
Circle past the Stonewall Jackson Me-
morial Cemetery and over to the Robert
E. Lee Hotel, where locals like to stop for
a drink.
There may be tourists there looking
for directions to the Lee Chapel, or one
of the two Stonewall Jackson statues in
town. They might see a Washington and
Lee University student paddling a ca-
noe down the Maury River, named for
the Confederate oceanographer
Matthew Fontaine Maury.
If medical treatment is needed, resi-
dents can head to the Stonewall Jackson
Hospital. For groceries, there’s a Food
Lion at Stonewall Square, which isn’t far
from Rebel Ridge Road, just up the way
from Stonewall Street and Jackson Ave-
nue.
For 150 years Lexington, a pictur-
esque town in the Blue Ridge Moun-
tains, has been known to the outside
world as the final resting place of Lee,
the Confederacy’s commanding general
during the Civil War, and Jackson,
whom Lee referred to as his “right arm.”
They form the basis of a daily existence
here that has long been tethered to the
iconography of the Civil War and its two
most famous Confederate generals,
whose legacy has seeped into the town’s
culture like the July humidity.
But Lexington is no longer a bastion
of conservatism. It is a liberal college
town of about 7,000 people that voted 60
percent for Hillary Clinton four years
ago, and in 2018 gave 70 percent of its
vote to the Democratic Senate candi-
date, Tim Kaine. Black Lives Matter
signs dot the windows of downtown
stores, and residents haven’t backed a
Republican for president since Ronald
Reagan.
These dueling sensibilities place Lex-
ington at particularly delicate intersec-
tion of the national debate over Confed-
erate monuments and emblems. As
Americans protesting racial injustice
have torn down statues and memorials
to Confederates, the town finds itself re-
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“ ‘Thank you for the gift of saving this
college, but we don’t appreciate that
contribution to such an extent that we
think we should continue to honor you.’ ”
LUCAS MOREL Politics department chairman
at Washington and Lee University
assessing its identity, divided between
the growing imperative to eradicate
symbols of slavery and decades of cul-
tural and economic ties to the Confeder-
ates who fought to preserve it.
“When you’re surrounded by all of the
symbols, it just is a way of life,” said Mar-
ilyn Alexander, 67, the lone Black mem-
ber of the City Council. “It was not until
recently that there was a realization for
me that there was such an outcry from
the community, that felt these symbols
and signs needed to come down or be
changed.”
City Council meetings in July have
been almost entirely devoted to the
question of the city-owned cemetery
named for Jackson; one session lasted
five hours, ending with a unanimous af-
ter-midnight vote to remove signs bear-
ing Jackson’s name. A second meeting
began with pleas from residents to put
“It’s not just the history that’s shameful,
it’s the way the people are so committed to
preserving it in this town. This preservation
has caused me deep pain.”
ADAMA KAMARA
Community organizer and activist
the signs back up. The council plans a missed by a federal appeals court, from
session on Friday to discuss new names, the local chapter of the Sons of Confed-
with a vote possible in September. erate Veterans; until this spring no one
“I long for the days of people com- had proposed removing Jackson’s name
plaining about potholes and not her- from the cemetery, where a towering
itage,” said Lexington’s mayor, Frank statue of the general rises above his
Friedman. family plot.
Ms. Alexander said it had never oc- At Washington and Lee, students’ de-
curred to her to propose taking Jack- grees still come with portraits of its two
son’s name off the cemetery, believing namesakes, and at the Virginia Military
that it would have no support from white Institute, where Jackson taught before
Lexingtonians. “Most of my life I have the war, first-year students are required
come to realize that these are things that to re-enact the 1864 Battle of New Mar-
have just been, this is the way it is and ket as Confederate soldiers.
this is the way it’s always going to be,” Still, attitudes have started to change
she said. in recent years. Grace Episcopal Church
For decades, the names of Lexing- downtown dropped Robert E. Lee from
ton’s Confederate forebears have mostly its name in 2017, and last year the local
gone unchallenged on local landmarks. Boy Scout council changed its name
A 2011 City Council vote to forbid flying from the Stonewall Jackson Area Coun-
the Confederate flag on municipal flag- cil to the Virginia Headwaters Council.
poles drew a lawsuit, eventually dis- Bigger changes are now afoot in town,
Congratulations
Greta Thunberg
PHOTOGRAPHS BY EZE AMOS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
“I long for the days
of people complaining
about potholes and
not heritage.”
FRANK FRIEDMAN
Mayor of Lexington, Va.
which has a Black population of just un-
der 9 percent. Carilion, the Roanoke,
Va.-based health care conglomerate that
owns the Stonewall Jackson Hospital,
said Thursday that it would change the
name to Rockbridge Community Hospi-
tal. Francesco Benincasa, whose family
owns the Robert E. Lee Hotel, said Fri-
day that it would be renamed “The Gin”
starting next month.
“It’s a little hard to brand hospitality
after generals,” Mr. Benincasa said in an
interview.
Lexington’s universities are facing
their own reckoning. At Washington and
Lee, 79 percent of the faculty voted on
July 6 to strip Lee’s name from the
school, prompting the board of trustees
to announce “a thoughtful and delibera-
tive process” to examine Lee’s legacy.
One of the leading proponents of
keeping the Lee name is Lucas E. Morel,
2020 Prize Winner
TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020 | 5
world
an Abraham Lincoln scholar who is
chairman of the politics department. He
argued that the name honors Lee’s con-
tributions to the school — he led its re-
vival after the war — without making a
judgment about his leadership of the
Confederate army.
“We can separate Lee’s generalship of
the Confederacy and his symbolism as
patron saint of the Lost Cause from his
laudable contribution to the university,”
Professor Morel said. “To remove Lee’s
name is to say, ‘Thank you for the gift of
saving this college, but we don’t appreci-
ate that contribution to such an extent
that we think we should continue to hon-
or you.”’
At the Virginia Military Institute, until
2015 all students were required to salute
the statue of Jackson when passing it. A
public university, the school has re-
tained its conservative politics, well af-
ter the Supreme Court ordered it to ad-
mit women in 1996.
But Virginia’s state politics, which
govern the school, have changed. Demo-
crats control the state legislature. Gov.
Ralph Northam, a 1981 Virginia Military
Institute graduate who is working to
take down state-owned Confederate
monuments, “has confidence that
V.M.I.’s Board of Visitors will do the
right thing,” said his spokesman, Grant
Neely.
Jennifer Carroll Foy, a member of the
Virginia House of Delegates who in 2003
was among the first group of Black
women to graduate from the Virginia
Military Institute, said the Jackson stat-
ue should be moved to a museum.
“We can’t say in Virginia that we’re
open for business but we’re closed to di-
versity and inclusion,” said Ms. Foy, who
is now running for governor. “No child
looks at a Confederate monument and
feels inspired.”
David Sigler, a City Council member
who graduated from Washington and
Lee and works as the financial aid direc-
tor at the Virginia Military Institute,
said renaming the Stonewall Jackson
Cemetery ought to be the first move to
pivot the town’s identity away from its
Confederate past.
“Our small business owners, they
have products to sell, meals to prepare,
they want their tables filled in their
restaurants,” he said. “I will feel bad if
they lose one customer because we re-
named the cemetery. But I think we
might gain two customers for every one
we might lose in the long run if we’re not
so one-dimensional.”
photo © Anders Hellberg / graphic design by Change is good

6 | TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020
world
Anger unleashed by Washington brings chaos
SEATTLE
Cities in a bind as protests
set off by Portland events
turn violent in some states
BY MIKE BAKER, THOMAS FULLER
AND SHANE GOLDMACHER
A series of strident new protests over
police misconduct has rattled cities
across the United States, creating a new
dilemma for state and local leaders who
had succeeded in easing some of the tur-
bulence in their streets until a show-
down over the use of U.S. government
agents in Oregon stirred fresh outrage.
With some demonstrators embracing
destructive protest methods and police
often using aggressive tactics to subdue
both them and others who were demon-
strating peacefully, the scenes on Satur-
day night in places like Seattle, Los An-
geles and Oakland, Calif., recalled the
volatile early days of the protests after
the death at the end of May of George
Floyd, a Black man, while in the custody
of the Minneapolis police.
The latest catalyst was the deploy-
ment of federal law enforcement agents
in Portland, Ore., whose militarized ef-
forts to subdue protests around the fed-
eral courthouse have sparked mass
demonstrations and nightly clashes
there. The confrontations have also in-
spired new protests of solidarity in other
cities, where people have expressed
deep concern about the federal govern-
ment’s exercising such extensive au-
thority in a city that has made it clear it
opposes the presence of federal agents.
President Trump has seized on the
scenes of national unrest — statues top-
pled and windows smashed — to build a
law-and-order message for his re-elec-
tion campaign, spending more than $26
million on television ads depicting a law-
less dystopia of empty police stations
and abandoned emergency services
hotlines that he argues might be left in a
nation headed by his Democratic rival,
Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Biden insisted last week that the
president’s pledge to inject a federal
law-and-order presence into the already
volatile issue of policing shows that Mr.
Trump is “determined to sow chaos and
division. To make matters worse instead
of better.”
The situation has left city leaders,
now watching the backlash unfold on
their streets, outraged and caught in the
middle. Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle
said in an interview Sunday that the city
was in the middle of a self-fulfilling
prophecy, with protesters infuriated by
the federal presence in Portland smash-
ing windows and setting fires, the very
images of “anarchy” that the president
has warned about.
“There is no question that the actions
in Portland have escalated things, not
just in Seattle, but nationwide,” Ms.
Durkan said.
At the same time, a new round of
street unrest could intensify differences
among local officials over how best to
address the complaints of demonstra-
tors and respond to vandalism and vio-
lence.
In June, amid a wide-ranging police
reform movement, the Seattle City
Council banned the use of tear gas and
other crowd control tactics, including
Strategy of denial fails to make things seem normal
NEWS ANALYSIS
WASHINGTON
A president who once said
the worst was over now
admits it is yet to come
BY PETER BAKER
He insisted that it was safe, that people
could go back to work, that schools could
reopen, that he could hold packed indoor
campaign rallies, that he could even
hold a full-fledged, boisterous, bunting-
filled nominating convention as if all
were well.
Only now, it is all crashing down
around President Trump. The president
who shunned masks and pressured
states to reopen and promised a return
to the campaign trail finds himself can-
celing rallies, scrapping his grand con-
vention, urging Americans to stay away
from crowded bars and at long last em-
bracing, if only halfheartedly, wearing
masks.
It may not be the death of denial, but it
is a moment when denial no longer ap-
pears to be a viable strategy for Mr.
Trump. For more than three years in of-
fice, he proved strikingly successful at
bending much of the political world to
his own vision of reality, but after six
months the coronavirus pandemic is
turning out to be the one stubborn, inal-
terable fact of life that he cannot simply
force into submission through sheer
will.
The president’s springtime confi-
dence that he could cheerlead the coun-
try back to a semblance of normalcy in
time to kick-start the moribund econ-
omy and power himself to a second term
in November’s election has proved un-
equal to the grim summertime medical
and autopsy reports emerging from the
American South and West. With more
than 65,000 new cases and 900 deaths
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The police arrested dozens in Seattle. “There is no question that the actions in Portland have escalated things, not just in Seattle, but nationwide,” Mayor Jenny Durkan said.
A protest in Oakland, Calif., against the use of federal troops in Oregon began peace-
fully, but another set of protesters smashed windows and lit a fire at the courthouse.
pepper spray. The police chief has ob-
jected, and the United States Depart-
ment of Justice intervened with a law-
suit, winning a temporary restraining
order on Friday that blocked implemen-
tation of that ban. Over the weekend, Se-
attle officers used pepper spray and
flash-grenades to disperse protesters.
Over the weekend, dozens of people
were arrested in Seattle. Protesters in
Los Angeles clashed with officers in
front of the city’s federal courthouse
downtown. Police also made arrests at
being registered each day, Mr. Trump
has been forced to retreat from the rose-
colored assessment of the health of the
nation — and his presidency.
Not that he has admitted a change. As
he revived his coronavirus briefings last
week, he still insisted that most of the
country was doing well and offered up-
beat predictions about conquering the
virus. But his actions belied that view as
he canceled his party’s presidential con-
vention in Jacksonville, Fla., citing the
same health care concerns that he had
disparaged in shifting it abruptly from
Charlotte, N.C., in the first place.
Even the decision to begin holding the
briefings again was an admission that
the crisis he wanted so desperately to be
over in fact is accelerating even as he
falls behind former Vice President Jo-
seph R. Biden Jr. by double digits in the
polls. Mr. Trump would have rather been
talking about almost any subject other
than the virus, but there he was again at
the lectern three days in a row dutifully
reading the warnings that his advisers
had given him to read.
“This is a case when you line it all up,
it’s the last season of ‘The Apprentice,’
we’ve got 100 days left and the reality
TV star just got mugged by reality,” said
Rahm Emanuel, who served in Con-
gress and as White House chief of staff
to President Barack Obama before serv-
ing two terms as mayor of Chicago.
His defenders said Mr. Trump has re-
sponded to the situation as it has
changed. “With this virus we entered a
realm of unknown unknowns, making
decision-making tough for anyone, in-
cluding this president,” said Christo-
pher Ruddy, the chief executive of
Newsmax and a friend of Mr. Trump’s.
“Considering the conflicting advice he’s
gotten from medical experts, I think he’s
done a great job on the economic re-
sponse and a good job in lowering the
daily death count. The public will even-
tually see that.”
White House officials have insisted
group of demonstrators also protesting
the federal presence in Portland.
Some cities welcomed Mr. Trump’s of-
fer to send federal law enforcement
agents in to help combat escalating
gang violence and drug crime but in-
sisted they would brook no federal
agents on their streets arresting and
tear-gassing protesters.
Democratic city and state leaders
pushed back against the new federal
presence but also expressed frustration
that some on the streets were going too
far and playing into the president’s gam-
bit.
“I’m furious that Oakland may have
played right into Donald Trump’s
twisted campaign strategy,” Oakland’s
mayor, Libby Schaaf, said in an inter-
view on Sunday. “Images of a vandal-
ized downtown is exactly what he wants
to whip up his base and to potentially
NATASHA MOUSTACHE/GETTY IMAGES
justify sending in federal troops that will
only incite more unrest.”
In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a
Democrat who has repeatedly clashed
protests in smaller cities, such as Om- with Mr. Trump, had said she welcomed
aha, Neb., and Richmond, Va. the president’s intervention on enacting
In Oakland, what had been a peaceful gun control and investing in community
protest led in part by a group of mothers programs.
proclaiming “Cops And Feds Off Our “Any other form of militarized assist-
Streets” devolved after dark as another ance within our borders that would not
set of protesters smashed windows at be within our control or within the direct
the county courthouse and lit a fire in- command of the Chicago Police Depart-
side. ment would spell disaster,” she said in a
An armed protester was shot and letter to the president last week.
killed in Austin, Texas, by a motorist Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New
whose car, according to witnesses and Mexico on Sunday called the adminis-
the police, had been aimed toward a tration’s decision to send law enforce-
DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES
As President Trump revived his coronavirus briefings, he still insisted that most of the
country was doing well and offered upbeat predictions about defeating the virus.
that Mr. Trump had not changed his nier,” said Dr. Jonathan S. Reiner, a
view of the virus at all and that he al- prominent cardiologist who treated for-
ways took it seriously. Speaking on the mer Vice President Dick Cheney. “Un-
condition of anonymity, however, senior fortunately, when a president refuses to
Republican officials have expressed ex- accept scientific reality,” Dr. Reiner add-
asperation that the president, in their ed, “his words and actions are emulated
view, mishandled the virus, leaving the by large numbers of Americans who
party vulnerable to not only losing the then dismiss the seriousness of the pan-
White House but the Senate as well. demic with predictable disastrous con-
The public has grown increasingly sequences.”
worried as caseloads have soared to From the start, Mr. Trump has repeat-
twice what they were during the earlier edly underestimated the virus, likening
peak of the pandemic in March and it to the flu, frequently predicting that it
April. Where 30 percent of Americans will simply “disappear” on its own, de-
believed the crisis was getting worse in nouncing media “hysteria” over the dis-
early June, 66 percent now believe it is, ease, insisting that cases will go down to
according to Gallup. Three-quarters of almost zero and then prematurely de-
those surveyed said they expected the claring victory in the war against it.
disruption to travel, school, work and He said in March that “no way am I
public events to continue until the end of going to cancel the convention” and con-
the year or even into next year before tended that “we’re going to be in great
the situation begins to improve. shape long before then.” A month later,
“He needed to be the pandemic presi- citing health experts, he declared that
dent. Instead he became a pandemic de- “the worst days of the pandemic are be-
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
GRANT HINDSLEY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
ment agents to the state — a measure
the administration has sought to distin-
guish from the agents sent to guard fed-
eral property in Portland — as “a bit sus-
pect.”
“They have not provided the federal
funding that was promised to Albuquer-
que for police and crime interventions,”
she said in an appearance on ABC’s
“This Week.” She said that the state
would work with federal agents if they
folded into existing efforts to address vi-
olent crime. But, she said, “If we’re go-
ing to incentivize unrest, then that’s
something altogether different.”
“I’m furious that Oakland may
have played right into Donald
Trump’s twisted campaign
strategy,” the city’s mayor said.
Portland has been the epicenter of the
most recent protests. After the initial
mass demonstrations in the aftermath
of Mr. Floyd’s death, protests in the city
continued each night, although with
fewer participants. The police have
complained of persistent vandalism,
people pointing lasers at law enforce-
ment agents and protesters who threw
objects such as commercial-grade fire-
works at officers, including those pro-
tecting the federal courthouse.
Mr. Trump’s campaign has sought to
capitalize on the unrest to reassure vot-
ers that he will bring an end to the turbu-
lence. “If there is a danger for Demo-
hind us.” When North Carolina’s gover-
nor insisted that the convention in Char-
lotte would have to be limited by public
health measures, Mr. Trump angrily
moved most of it to Jacksonville, where
he promised a full event.
By last week, he was grudgingly bow-
ing to the reality that the virus has
spread, not ebbed, admitting that it
would “get worse before it gets better”
and canceling Jacksonville, saying “it’s
not the right time for that.” After his ini-
tial effort to resume arena rallies was a
bust in Tulsa, Okla., and the second one
scheduled for Portsmouth, N.H., was
canceled, Mr. Trump now says he will
conduct “telerallies.”
The rising infections have also forced
Mr. Trump to be more supportive of
masks after months of scorning them.
When he first announced that public
health experts wanted the public to
wear masks, he immediately undercut
the message by declaring that “I don’t
think I’m going to be doing it,” complain-
ing that it would not look good as he
greeted foreign visitors.
In the months since, he reposted a
Twitter message that mocked Mr. Biden
for wearing a mask and disparaged a re-
porter who insisted on wearing a mask
to a news conference “because you want
to be politically correct.”
This month he wore one in public
where he would be photographed for the
first time and told Americans that it was
an act of patriotism to wear one. “If you
can, use the mask,” he said in a televised
briefing. “When you can, use the mask.”
Even so, he has not worn one himself
in public again, not even when visiting
his Washington hotel for a political
event or hosting Little League players
at the White House to mark the reopen-
ing of Major League Baseball.
Kayleigh McEnany, the White House
press secretary, insisted last week that
Mr. Trump had not adjusted his ap-
proach to the virus, saying he “has been
consistent” on masks and always sup-
..
crats generically, it is if the Republicans
are able to define them as being on the
side of the anarchists in Portland,” said
Scott Jennings, a veteran Republican
strategist. But he said that Mr. Trump’s
heated and broad-brush rhetoric has
made the Republican cause harder.
“The bottom line is, it’s a situation that
requires nuance and it’s a presidency
that has not engaged in a lot of nuance.”
Democratic strategists and Biden of-
ficials expressed confidence that Mr.
Trump’s attacks posed little immediate
political risk, even as street protests es-
calated. For one, they said, the presi-
dent’s warning of a dark Democratic-
run future is in stark dissonance with
the reality that the unrest is happening
under his own administration. They said
the police issue was being treated by
many voters as a distraction by Mr.
Trump from his faltering coronavirus
pandemic response and the struggling
economy.
“No matter how many troops Donald
Trump sends into American cities, it’s
not going to distract them from their pri-
mary concern which is the coronavirus
and their health,” said Jared Leopold, a
Democratic strategist.
For city officials, the challenge is
more immediate than the November
election — it is bringing an end to nights
of clashes on their streets.
Mr. Floyd’s death in Minneapolis at
the end of May drew out millions in an
unusual show, across a broad range of
race and class, of support for racial jus-
tice.
City leaders had managed to calm the
most intense protests in most cities af-
ter soul-searching debates at the com-
munity level over funding for the police
and the use of tear gas on protesters.
Crowds have waned in most parts of the
country, though pockets of resistance
have continued.
But any possibility that life in down-
town Portland will return to a less dis-
ruptive state appeared to be turned on
its head earlier this month, when federal
officers deployed to the city.
The Portland mayor, Ted Wheeler, has
objected, asking them to leave because
their presence seemed only to reignite
tensions.
Protester numbers swelled into the
thousands, with nightly clashes. On
Sunday morning, protesters knocked
down a fence surrounding the court-
house and federal agents deployed tear
gas. The Portland Police Bureau got in-
volved, declaring a riot.
The focus on the federal agents in
Portland has frustrated some activists
who see the pushback against their
presence as a distraction from the racial
injustices that had been the focus of pro-
tests in May and June.
In Portland on Saturday night, as pro-
testers marched to a hotel where they
believed federal agents could be stay-
ing, some participants urged the
marchers not to forget earlier protests
against the local police.
“It’s complicated, it’s chaotic, and it’s
a little hard for us to stay focused. We
need to stay focused. We cannot forget
this is also about the Portland Police Bu-
reau.” Kinsey Smyth told the crowd.
“This is not about destruction, this is
about rebuilding.”
Contributing reporting were Kate Con-
glin, Rebecca Halleck, Julie Bosman,
Maggie Haberman, Nick Corasaniti and
Melina Delkic.
ported them. “He hasn’t changed,” she
said. “The reason he wants to bring back
these briefings is to get information out
there.”
Kellyanne Conway, the president’s
counselor, acknowledged that the spikes
in infections followed states’ reopening,
but blamed the governors. “Some of
these states blew through our gated cri-
teria, blew through our phases and they
opened up some of the industries a little
too quickly like bars,” she told reporters.
Reminded that it was the president who
had encouraged them to reopen quickly,
she pointed to the one time he chided
one state, Georgia, for going too far.
Mr. Trump and his team have contin-
ued to insist that he has handled the vi-
rus decisively, always citing his decision
early on to limit travel from China and
the increases in the supply of ventilators
and testing capacity. The president like-
wise has continued to press schools to
reopen fully and in person in the fall,
even though his own son’s private
school will not. But even there he gave
some ground last week by acknowledg-
ing that schools in areas hard hit by the
virus might need to delay doing so.
But in much of the country, school
leaders, like many governors and may-
ors, are paying less attention now to a
president whose predictions have fallen
flat and are paying more attention to the
numbers on the charts. If a political con-
vention in Jacksonville is not safe in the
coronavirus age, many schools are com-
ing to the conclusion that it may not be
safe for them either, at least not on a full-
scale basis.
“The virus and science, not politics,
will determine spread of the virus and
whether and when schools and our
economy can reopen without having to
slam shut again,” Thomas R. Frieden, a
former director of the Centers for Dis-
ease Control and Prevention, said last
week. “Facts matter. Science matters.
Supporting and being guided by public
health matters.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Business
New York tries to lure New Yorkers
City hopes local visitors
can help revive tourism
industry worth $45 billion
BY PATRICK MCGEEHAN
Broadway theaters and museums that
tourists would flock to are still closed.
The United States has banned travel
from China, Brazil and much of Europe.
And Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New
York State has ordered a quarantine for
visitors from 31 of the country’s states.
Four months after New York City shut
down to combat the coronavirus, its vi-
tal tourism industry remains essentially
paralyzed even as the city struggles to
revive its moribund economy.
The enormous challenge the city
faces was on vivid display when the
Statue of Liberty reopened on July 20.
Instead of carrying the usual throngs of
visitors from around the world, the first
boats to the island that holds the statue
ferried more journalists than paying
customers.
Times Square, typically gridlocked
with visitors, was nearly as lonesome.
“It’s not that happening,” Swathi Roja,
who lives in Washington, said while as-
sessing the intersection called the
“crossroads of the world.” “Maybe I’m
not getting the real New York City.”
The abrupt lockdown in March of New
York City, along with the entire state,
came just before the annual onslaught of
tourists as the weather warms. Officials
were expecting more than 67 million vis-
itors to the city in 2020, about one-fifth of
them from outside the United States.
Now the city’s tourism officials are
left wondering how they will revive an
industry that brought in about $45 bil-
lion in annual spending and supported
about 300,000 jobs.
Not since the grim days of the 1970s,
when crime was rampant, the subway
was in disarray and boarded-up store-
fronts were abundant, has promoting
New York to out-of-towners seemed so
daunting, said Jonathan M. Tisch, the
chief executive of Loews Hotels and a
former chairman of NYC & Company,
the city’s tourism marketing agency.
“There are all kinds of challenges that
are going to make our jobs of rebuilding
tourism and New York City’s economy
even tougher,” said Mr. Tisch, who
worked the front desk at one of his fam-
ily’s hotels as a college student in the
1970s.
Mr. Tisch said that rebuilding the
city’s image as a safe and fun place to
visit would take a lot of time and help
from the state and city government.
Along with rhetorical support from
elected officials, hotels and restaurants
are seeking tax breaks and rent relief.
“We can survive this,” he said.
Mr. Tisch is one of dozens of leaders in
the tourism business who have been de-
vising plans for the industry’s recovery
from its longest and steepest slump in
memory. The situation is unlike New
York City’s brief shutdown after the ter-
rorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, because
Americans felt a patriotic urge then to
help the city heal, he said.
Two nights after the attacks, on Sept.
Who may win and who may lose with remote work
BY NOAM SCHEIBER
When the pandemic hit and tens of mil-
lions of American workers suddenly re-
deployed to their basements and living
rooms, it was easy to imagine that their
workdays would unfold roughly as be-
fore, with communication tools like
Slack and Zoom substituting for face-to-
face interactions (and maybe with
slightly greater multitasking opportuni-
ties).
But the shift to a heavily remote work
force — companies like Facebook and
Twitter have announced that they will
allow many employees to work from
home permanently — has the potential
to change people’s work lives in much
more profound ways. It could signifi-
cantly affect their wages, alter career
prospects and restructure organiza-
tions. And as with many economic
shocks, workers are likely to be affected
unevenly.
The changes that remote work is ac-
celerating “are a disaster for low-skilled
labor and could be a good thing for high-
skilled labor,” said Gerald F. Davis, a
professor of management and sociology
at the Ross School of Business at the
University of Michigan who has written
extensively about shifting work ar-
rangements. “I anticipate it having this
centrifugal effect.”
Many workers could gain an increase
in disposable income and flexibility, but
others could be pushed into contracting
arrangements that lower their wages
and make their livelihoods more precar-
ious. Even highly skilled workers may
find it harder to band together to im-
prove their pay and working conditions.
So-called fully distributed companies,
where everyone works remotely, often
pay employees somewhat less than they
might earn in the most expensive metro-
politan areas, but more than they would
make elsewhere.
DuckDuckGo, an internet privacy
company with a well-regarded search
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Clockwise from top: The Statue of Liberty reopened this month to virtually no visitors; in Times Square, performers dressed as cartoon characters seemed to outnumber visitors
on a recent Saturday; and a souvenir shop on Liberty Island was nearly empty. To stir interest among local residents, New York has introduced a campaign called “All In NYC.”
13, shows resumed at all 23 Broadway
theaters.
But this time, with confined indoor
spaces making it easier for the virus to
spread, the theaters plan to remain dark
until next year. Without the Broadway
shows that serve as the city’s thumping
heart, hundreds of hotels and restau-
rants in Manhattan are simply trying to
survive 2020.
engine, formally bases its compensation
on salaries at a group of technology
companies across the United States, ex-
cluding the San Francisco Bay Area. Au-
tomattic, the maker of the website-
building tool WordPress, pays employ-
ees on the basis of job responsibilities
and qualifications, regardless of loca-
tion. (In contrast, tech companies with
physical headquarters often pay work-
ers less if they live in less expensive ar-
eas.)
Pay that doesn’t depend on location
benefits skilled workers living outside
the most expensive markets, and espe-
cially where jobs with generous pay are
scarce. Jason Caldwell, a marketing
manager at WordPress.com, makes
safely into the six figures working from
Billings, Mont. He is hoping to buy a plot
of more than 100 acres where members
of his family can build homes.
And while wages for high-skilled
workers in the Bay Area could increase
less quickly as a more remote world re-
duces local competition for talent, even
they could come out ahead in the end.
Reduced hiring of affluent workers in
the Bay Area would also mean fewer
bidders for real estate, slowing the rise
in housing prices, said Adam Ozimek,
the chief economist of Upwork, an online
freelancing marketplace.
The deeper change is organizational.
At a typical company, small chunks of in-
formation relevant to one’s work tend to
be scattered throughout the organiza-
tion — with the woman on the other side
of your desk pod, the guy three cubicles
over, the manager at the end of the hall.
This forces workers into a series of per-
son-to-person interactions throughout
the day, making it necessary for them to
keep similar hours, even when that’s not
convenient.
By contrast, distributed organiza-
tions like DuckDuckGo and Automattic
seek to “separate individuals from the
information they possess” and create a
centralized “knowledge repository,” the
“The perception is that if Broadway is
closed, New York City is closed,” Mr.
Tisch said.
In the second week of July, the occu-
pancy rate of New York hotels was only
37 percent, according to STR, a research
firm. That is down from more than 90
percent in recent summers.
“We think it’s too soon to encourage
travel and invite folks to come back in,”
Jason Caldwell, a marketing manager at WordPress.com, works from Billings, Mont.,
and hopes to buy 100 acres where members of his family can build homes.
Stanford business scholar Jen Rhymer
has written. This makes it possible for
employees to complete their assign-
ments from anywhere, at almost any
time of day, without having to check in
frequently with colleagues.
At Automattic, which spreads its
roughly 1,200 full-time workers across
more than 75 countries, managers like
Mr. Caldwell often spend about four
hours a day reading and writing memos
on one of the company’s internal blogs,
known as P2s.
They document any development
that might be relevant to their co-work-
ers — notes like “Google Chrome just
announced a change, here’s what I un-
derstand about it,” Mr. Caldwell said, or
a description of an effort to highlight the
company’s one-on-one training sessions
for users.
At DuckDuckGo, which has about 100
full-time workers across 17 countries, all
relevant developments are recorded in a
said Fred Dixon, the chief executive of
NYC & Company, the marketing agency.
Mr. Dixon said that for the past four
months New York City had had no tour-
ism to speak of and that he was not even
estimating how many visitors it would
tally for the year.
So, instead of promoting the city in in-
ternational capitals and other faraway
places as it typically does, the agency is
SHIRLEY YU FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
software program called Asana. In any
given week, employees focus on their
“top priority” contribution to a company
project.
Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo’s
founder and chief executive, said the
company tried to keep the projects small
and self-contained, with their goals and
scope clearly detailed in a written tem-
plate, allowing people to work independ-
ently without constant coordination.
“This system works best when it con-
tinues to be modular — there are not
tons and tons of people on a project,” Mr.
Weinberg said. “It’s easy to jump in as a
new member. You read a one-page docu-
ment and understand what’s going on
with it quickly.”
DuckDuckGo, like other distributed
companies, also creates specific oppor-
tunities for bonding. There is a weekly
“neighbors meeting” in which four or
five colleagues who don’t normally work
together are randomly assigned to min-
PHOTOGRAPHS BY VICTOR J. BLUE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
narrowing its focus to New York and its
surrounding areas.
This month, New York introduced a
campaign called “All In NYC” created by
Aruliden, a marketing firm in the city, to
stir interest among local residents in ex-
ploring the city and seeing some of its
sights.
The strategy is similar to a campaign
being employed by Paris, which is en-
gle, and an annual companywide gath-
ering that is normally in person but was
held online this year.
Several academics and industry ex-
perts said the changes might go even
further. For example, remote compa-
nies, because they are set up to allow
people to work efficiently on their own,
are also well positioned to use contrac-
tors and other workers who are not em-
ployees.
“If you know how to have remote full-
time employees, it’s much easier to have
remote on-demand people from a free-
lancing platform,” said Stephane Kas-
riel, who until recently was the chief ex-
ecutive of Upwork, which counts Au-
tomattic, the Wikimedia Foundation and
other fully or heavily distributed organi-
zations as clients. He added that much of
what made this possible was sound
management that companies with phys-
ical offices didn’t adopt simply because
they could afford to be sloppy.
The ease of working as a freelancer
can be a boon to many skilled workers,
who can command high hourly rates
through Upwork and other freelancing
marketplaces.
But for lower-skilled workers, such as
those in customer service or data entry,
working as a contractor tends to reduce
wages and increase insecurity. Compa-
nies often pay low-skilled employees
above-market wages because they have
internal pay scales, but pay only the
market price for a contractor or
freelancer.
Mr. Ozimek of Upwork acknowledged
that outsourcing work could reduce
wages for low-skilled workers but said
this didn’t take into account the lower
cost of living for remote workers outside
expensive cities and the job creation
that platforms like Upwork made possi-
ble by allowing new businesses to form
and scale quickly. Both he and Mr. Kas-
riel said freelancers on Upwork tended
to be relatively skilled and well paid, as a
new study from the company shows.
TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020 | 7
couraging its own residents to tour the
city without the usual hordes. “Paris is
yours” is the theme.
But even a scarcity of tourists may not
be enough of a lure to get jaded New
Yorkers to venture to the city’s famous
attractions. Local residents were no-
where to be found among the few vis-
itors to the Statue of Liberty on the
morning it reopened.
For now, the city may have to rely on
people like Shin Roldan, 31, and her new
husband, Keith Roldan, 30.
The couple, who live within commut-
ing distance in Morristown, N.J., were
having a honeymoon of sorts a few
months after a “pandemic wedding” in
their backyard, Ms. Roldan said.
Despite the city’s ban on indoor din-
ing, the Roldans said they were enjoying
their stay at a Manhattan hotel. They
had ridden the aerial tram to Roosevelt
Island in the East River and planned to
go to the observation deck atop the Em-
pire State Building.
“We can take a lot of pictures, just the
two of us, with nobody else in the pic-
tures,” Mr. Roldan said. “That’s always a
problem in New York.”
The fourth phase of the city’s reopen-
ing, which started on July 20, was a
mixed blessing for Brad Hill, whose
company operates the concessions on
Liberty Island and nearby Ellis Island,
the site of an immigration museum.
The reopening allowed him to bring
back more than 100 employees who had
been laid off since mid-March. But with
so few tourists, he said, being open
again was a losing proposition.
Just a few days before, Mr. Cuomo had
upended his plans by excluding muse-
ums from the list of places that could re-
open. That ruled out Ellis Island, whose
main attraction is its exhibitions on im-
migration and archives that enable vis-
itors to search for records of their rela-
tives.
Mr. Hill said that he had spent about
$60,000 preparing the dining areas and
gift shops on the two islands to accept
customers in a socially distant manner.
Now he was no longer planning to hire
some 150 seasonal workers for the sum-
mer.
Mr. Hill said that he was having flash-
backs to the recovery from past shut-
downs of the statue, after the Sept. 11 at-
tacks and Hurricane Sandy, in 2012.
“The only problem with this one is
there are no tourists,” he said.
Some intrepid travelers have made
longer treks in defiance of Mr. Cuomo’s
quarantine rules.
Shea Ellis, 33, and Tony Green, 34,
drove to New York from Talladega, Ala.,
in a state on Mr. Cuomo’s list, with Mr.
Green’s three children.
Ms. Ellis, a business manager, said
she was undaunted by the spreading vi-
rus.
“It’s all over the country,” she said. “I
haven’t been worried about it.”
Mr. Green, a truck driver, said, “You
can’t just stop your life.”
They said they liked the lack of traffic
in New York, but were disappointed that
so much of the city, including the 9/11
Memorial Museum, was still closed.
“You don’t get the real experience,”
Ms. Ellis said.
Even highly skilled workers could
find less leverage at a distributed com-
pany than at one where they work in of-
fices, however. Laurence Berland, a
longtime Google engineer who was ac-
tive in organizing workers there before
he was fired last fall, said that digital
tools made it easy to coordinate re-
motely among workers already in-
volved in an organizing effort but that it
was often difficult to recruit new work-
ers who were not in the same physical
space.
“Some people maybe correctly con-
sider it a big red flag to say to someone
on a corporate chat, ‘Hey, can we talk on
a noncorporate device?’ ” Mr. Berland
said.
One typical way of enlisting co-work-
ers, he said, is to start a conversation af-
ter overhearing them complain about a
company practice — something less
likely to happen remotely.
Sandy Pope, the bargaining director
for the Office and Professional Employ-
ees International Union, which repre-
sents workers at the crowdfunding site
Kickstarter as well as university and
clerical staff members elsewhere, said
remote work could create inequality
among workers performing the same
job because it was harder for them to
share information discreetly outside an
office.
“There’s a lack of transparency,” Ms.
Pope said. “The lack of ability to even
track what’s going on.”
She said this lack of transparency
could also make it easier for companies
to outsource work without employees’
knowledge.
Whatever the case, it appears that
more and more traditional companies,
recently forced into remote work, are
exploring how to use the setup to better
advantage. Upwork’s client registra-
tions have increased significantly dur-
ing the pandemic, Mr. Ozimek said,
though a need for cost savings may
partly explain it as well.
 UPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws ..
8 | TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

business

Why U.S. is losing the battle with Covid-19

PANDEMIC, FROM PAGE 1
gressive lobbying and a turn in political
fortunes: The Commissioner’s Court,
which controlled the health depart-
ment’s budget, had turned Democratic
during the previous election for the first
time in a generation. But even that had
not been enough. When the county con-
firmed its first cases of the coronavirus,
formally known as SARS-CoV-2, the de-
partment had just 10 epidemiologists on
staff, not even one for every 180 square
miles.
Shah was amazed at what they had
been able to achieve: a monthlong stale-
mate against the pandemic of the cen-
tury. But he also knew that success was
fragile, and he wasn’t completely sur-
prised when it began to evaporate in
mid-June. The people of Texas and offi-
cials at every level were bitterly divided
over how to balance public health and
private liberty — whether people could
be ordered to wear masks or to close
their businesses for the greater good
and, if so, for how long. Politics had won
out far too often over sound science. As a
result, the state’s reopening had been
hasty and poorly coordinated. And now,
a month and a half in, case counts were
rising and intensive-care units were
bracing for an onslaught.
Texas was not alone. In other coun-
tries, officials locked down entire cities
and employed large-scale, high-tech
surveillance programs to stop the virus
from spreading. In the United States,
decades of near-total neglect had left the
entire public health apparatus too weak
and uncoordinated to mount even a frac-
tion of that response. The Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, the na-
tion’s leading public health department,
had stopped holding its own news con-
ferences in early March. In May, several
states — not just Texas — rushed to re-
open. And by late June, case counts
were surging in at least 20 of them.
The country was on track to achieve
the least successful coronavirus re-
sponse in the developed world, with the
most total cases, the highest death toll
and the worst projections for late sum-
mer and early fall: tens of thousands
more deaths by year’s end, according to
the most trusted models. And that was-
n’t even accounting for a possible “sec-
ond wave.” Or for flu season or hurri-
cane season, either of which would al-
most certainly worsen the current cri-
sis.
As the plateau on his computer screen
gave way to another mountain, Shah
worried that his team was too ex- Clockwise from above: Diego Mon-
hausted and demoralized to continue. telongo, an intern, with a patient in Hous-
Public health interventions work best ton; Modupe Allen, left, a nurse practi-
when the forces of politics and culture tioner, and Joyce Kadara, a registered
are aligned behind them — when elected nurse, at a drive-through testing center;
officials provide the necessary re- Pamela Miller, a nurse in Houston, on
sources, and citizens abide by the neces- July 1, during a surge in virus cases; and
sary strictures. Even now, with hospi- Dr. Umair Shah, right, director of Harris
tals filling up, such convergence seemed County Public Health, with Lina Hidalgo,
unlikely. The people of Harris County the county’s chief executive.
were tired, too, he guessed.

IN THE PAST CENTURY, the largest gains in
human health and life expectancy have
come from public health interventions,
not medical ones. Clinical medicine —
treating individual patients with medi-
cation and procedures — has registered
enormous gains. But even stacked
was the right one, and in the meantime
constituents clamored for officials to do
less, not more. When Hidalgo erected a
temporary field hospital in April so that
intensive-care units would not be over-
whelmed by a surge of coronavirus in-
fections, Republican lawmakers ac- PHOTOGRAPHS BY RAHIM FORTUNE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

against those triumphs, public health —
the policies and programs that prevent
entire communities from getting sick in
the first place — is still the clear winner.
“It’s saved the most lives by far, for the
least amount of money,” Tom Frieden, a
former director of the C.D.C., told me re-
cently. “But you’d never guess that,
based on how little we invest in it.”
Between early March, when the first
cases of coronavirus were detected in
Harris County, and May 1, when Gov.
Greg Abbott began his phased reopen-
ing of the entire state, the Harris County
chief executive, Lina Hidalgo, was sued
at least five times. She was sued over a
rodeo closure, bar closures and church
closures. She was sued over mask
edicts. She was also called a tyrant, a
fearmonger and a fool and told her polit-
ical career would be over. She was trying
to follow the science anyway.
Abbott originally left the coronavirus
response to local leaders like her, be-
cause, he said, the state was too big for a
one-size-fits-all plan. But in late March,
he reversed course and issued a state-
wide order superseding all existing local
ones. Now, in May, he was lifting that
state order and loosening restrictions
far more aggressively than scientists
advised or local officials like Hidalgo
were comfortable with. Abbott’s plan in-
volved opening the economy in phases.
The first phase included restaurants, re-
tail shops and movie theaters, all at 25
percent capacity, beginning on May 1.
On May 18, the second phase would be-
gin.
The governor promised that each
phase could be adjusted or possibly de-
layed if case counts rose in the interim.
But critics said that his timeline moved
too quickly to measure those upticks. It
would take several days for people to
take full advantage of the lifting of re-
strictions and at least two weeks beyond
that to see the impact on the spread of
the virus and the disease it causes,
Covid-19. In the meantime, almost none
of Abbott’s own criteria for a safe re-
opening were being met. Testing capaci-
ty was still limited, and contact tracing
had yet to be sufficiently scaled up. Offi-
cials had no hope of pinpointing poten-
tial case surges or of keeping them in
check. And if they could not contain the
virus once they reopened, the entire
shutdown would have been for nothing.
Viruses were invisible — and slow. It
took weeks to know if any given decision
cused her of wasteful overreaction. And
when she made masks mandatory in all
public spaces, Lt. Gov. Daniel Patrick
singled her out for rebuke.
Abbott quickly issued yet another ex-
ecutive order, stating unequivocally that
mask wearing was a matter of personal
choice. (Abbott did not respond to re-
quests for comment for this article.) His
resistance to tough restrictions aligned
him with other Republican governors
(in Florida and Arizona, for example)
and with President Trump, whom he
visited at the White House in early May,
as reopening efforts across the country
made headlines. The virus was far from
under control in most of those states, but
ailing economies were taking prece-
dence over safety concerns.
Abbott accelerated the timeline for re-
opening the state when a Dallas-based
hair stylist was sentenced to a week in
jail for opening her salon in defiance of
his shutdown, and two Republican state
representatives followed her lead by
getting their own haircuts. Abbott ini-
tially threatened to prosecute shop own-
ers who violated his edict. But now, with
a working mother in jail and his own
party in partial revolt, he reversed
course again, softening the penalties for
such infractions and announcing that
salons and barber shops could reopen
on May 8 — 10 days earlier than
planned. The move confused and frus-
trated other business owners: If salons
and barber shops could open, why not
tattoo parlors and bars?
By Memorial Day weekend in late
May, Texas was almost fully reopened.
The state had not met its own criteria for
keeping the coronavirus in check. No
one seemed certain whether or how to
enforce the social-distancing edicts that
remained. And while Harris County’s
case counts had plateaued, case counts
in other parts of the state were rising.
Public health initiatives have always
been vulnerable to both public resist-
ance and political interference. Some of
the United States’ first public health de-
partments emerged as a response to ex-
actly this problem. From the republic’s
earliest days it was clear that certain
health threats could not be staved off by
individuals acting alone. Elected offi-
cials also knew that when it came to pro-
tecting constituents from such threats,
the wisest course of action was almost
always the least politically popular one.
Businesses had to be closed when
“It’s like we’re shouting out
the window, trying to tell
everyone, ‘Hey, this thing
is out of control.’ ”
plagues sneaked in on merchant ships.
People and goods had to be quarantined
and certain behaviors, like spitting in
public, occasionally outlawed. Inde-
pendent health committees were often
created during public health crises and
authorized to act as needed so that the
worst outcomes could be prevented —
ideally without some politician’s having
to lose his next election. In time, some of
those committees morphed into perma-
nent departments.
THE TEXAS HEALTH and Safety Code gives
the local public health authorities power
to act in times of crisis to protect the
community. But in May, Abbott sus-
pended those powers, so that leaders
like Hidalgo and Shah could not issue
any rules that were more strict than
those he issued. By then, just about all
businesses were open at some level, and
case counts were rising with alarming
speed. Shah felt as though he were
trapped in the driver’s seat of a car with
a stuck accelerator. “It’s like we’re
shouting out the window, trying to tell
everyone, ‘Hey, this thing is out of con-
trol,’ ” he told me. “But we can’t do any-
thing to slow it down.”
It wasn’t just the bars and restaurants
and movie theaters that worried him; it
was the layering of so many other risks.
There had been outdoor graduations,
Mother’s Day and Father’s Day celebra-
tions and Memorial Day weekend.
There had also been a demonstration
with thousands of protesters over of the
murder of the Houston native George
Floyd. Each event increased the virus’s
opportunity to spread. And each added
to the forward momentum. “Every time
we dial forward, the consequences of di-
aling back become greater,” Shah said.
“And so we keep dialing forward. And it
builds on itself and creates this col-
lective sense that: ‘Hey, everything is
OK. Everything is back to normal. We
can go to the gym again.’ ”
Abbott initially dismissed the uptick
in cases, saying that it was a result of
more testing — a sign that things were
going well — not a cause for alarm. Then
he played down the cases, explaining
that the uptick was confined to jails,
meatpacking plants and nursing homes
and therefore not a concern for the
wider population. When it became clear
that young adults were driving the
surge, he admonished individual groups
to take more personal responsibility for
protecting themselves. On June 12, he
told reporters that he was concerned
but not alarmed. On June 17, he clarified
his mask-ordinance ban, saying that
county leaders could order businesses
to order customers to cover their faces.
But by then, mask wearing itself had be-
come a cultural flash point, every bit as
contentious as business closures and
rapid reopenings.
America was a paradox — a beacon of
science embedded in a culture increas-
ingly suspicious of scientists — and Har-
ris County reflected that paradox per-
fectly. Its cities were filled with medical
and scientific riches, including a NASA
space complex, an energy sector rife
with engineers and the Texas Medical
Center, the biggest health care complex
in the world. But the doctors, scientists
and engineers who populated those in-
stitutions lived right alongside one of
the most vocal and effective anti-vacci-
nation lobbies in the nation — more than
60,000 Texas families had obtained non-
medical vaccine exemptions in recent
years, 25 times as many as 15 years ago.
The epidemiology team had been ex-
panded to include hundreds of contact
tracers and other new hires, but they
struggled to stop the virus’s spread, es-
pecially as the reopening continued.
There was still not enough testing ca-
pacity to meet demand, and the wait
time for results was still too long. For
contact tracing to work, sources of infec-
tion need to be pinpointed as quickly as
possible. “You can’t trace without a
case,” as Shah is fond of saying. By mid-
June, Hidalgo worried that the virus had
outrun their best efforts. “We’re throw-
ing everything we have at it,” Hidalgo
told me. “And we have no evidence right
now that any of our strategies are work-
ing.” The leveling out of cases that Shah
and his team managed to achieve — the
plateau — was gone. New case counts
were up to 200 a day and, given the test-
ing shortage, the actual number of cases
was probably much higher than that.
MANY EXPERTS AGREE that lockdowns to
stop the coronavirus from spreading
could have been safely lifted, in a tar-
geted way, based on careful localized as-
sessments and close monitoring. Re-
strictions would be reintroduced as
needed — potentially several times in
the next few years — until either a vac-
cine was made available or 70 to 80 per-
cent of the population developed immu-
nity to SARS-CoV-2. Numerous papers
have laid out a range of potential models
for creating this system. But even the
least ambitious of these plans requires
more coordination and consensus than
the nation’s leaders have mustered at
any point in the past several months —
and a more robust and empowered pub-
lic health apparatus than the United
States has had in a generation.
The coronavirus pandemic has laid
bare gnawing questions at the core of
America’s many divisions: Are we will-
ing to trust science and scientists in a
crisis? What, exactly, do we want from
our government? And what are we will-
ing to sacrifice for one another? A recent
poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation
found that a majority of Americans, in
both political parties, favor strict social-
distancing edicts and other tight meas-
ures to control viral spread.
Health departments across the coun-
try have seen their budgets shrink by
nearly 30 percent since 2008. As a result,
they have had to cut 56,000 jobs (nearly
23 percent of the total public health work
force) and to make do without a roster of
operational essentials, including mod-
ern laboratory equipment, modern com-
puter systems and routine pandemic
preparedness drills. The C.D.C. budget
has remained flat over the same period,
relative to inflation, and the White
House recently eliminated a directive
aimed specifically at pandemic pre-
paredness, a move that was widely
noted and denounced as SARS-CoV-2
reached pandemic proportions.
As 2020 wears on, Shah and others are
grappling with a new and bitter reality:
Because of the economic crisis, which
was triggered by the current pandemic,
which was worsened by a lack of public
health investment, public health agen-
cies will probably suffer more budget
cuts in the coming years.
In late June, Abbott reversed course
again and ordered the state’s bars to
close and restaurants to reduce their ca-
pacity to 50 percent (they had been at 75
percent for several days). He also issued
an executive order requiring all Texans
in counties with more than 20 active co-
ronavirus cases to wear masks in public.
Scientists worried that it was too little
too late, and by early July, the numbers
seemed to prove them right. On July 8,
the state hit a record 9,952 new coro-
navirus cases reported in a single day.
The state’s positivity rate — the portion
of all tests done that come out positive —
also rose to 15.6 percent, from 7.9 per-
cent just three weeks earlier.
Hospital beds were filling up, hospital
floors reconfigured and surge units
readied. Doctors and nurses, in Harris
County and elsewhere, have begun a
worrying and familiar census-taking of
ventilators and personal protective
equipment. And the same stories that
played out in Wuhan and Lombardy and
Seattle and New York were beginning
anew. And not only in Texas. In more
than 35 states, including some that had
previously brought their outbreaks un-
der control, daily case counts are rising,
positivity rates are rising and grim
records are being set — and then quickly
surpassed. People in Texas, Florida, Cal-
ifornia and New Jersey are bracing for a
second wave of outbreaks in the fall,
even though the first wave has yet to
fully recede. The root of this catastro-
phe, doctors, scientists and health histo-
rians say, is our failure to fully incorpo-
rate public health into our understand-
ing of what it means to be a functioning
society. Until we do that, we will be un-
able to effectively respond to crises like
this one — let alone prevent them.
Adapted from an article that originally
appeared in The New York Times Maga-
zine.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Opinion
I’m a lip reader in a masked world
If our
collective
pandemic
experience
has taught us
anything, it’s
that small
sacrifices to
help others
are not
exactly
everyone’s
strong suit.
Jennifer Finney Boylan
Contributing Writer
When my mammogram was done, the
technician looked at me and smiled.
“Nice boots,” she said.
Which was a nice thing to say. Except
that because I am hearing-impaired, I
didn’t think she said “boots.” Instead, I
was certain she said a different word,
something that seemed a little more
specific to the procedure she had just
completed.
I blushed. This examination had just
become much more intimate than I
expected. “Thank you,” I said, uncer-
tainly.
“Where did you get them?” she asked.
The conversation appeared to be
getting stranger. For a long moment I
considered the possible answers to this
question. Then the penny dropped, and
my mouth dropped open. “Oh my god,” I
said. “You said, ‘boots.’ I thought you
Colonialism made the modern world. Let’s remake it.
This is what Adom Getachew
real “decol-
onization”
should “Decolonize this place!” “Decolonize
look like. the university!” “Decolonize the mu-
seum!”
In the past few years, decolonization
has gained new political currency —
inside the borders of the old colonial
powers. Indigenous movements have
reclaimed the mantle of “decoloniza-
tion” in protests like those at Standing
Rock against the Dakota Access pipe-
line. Students from South Africa to
Britain have marched under its banner
to challenge Eurocentric curriculums.
Museums such as the Natural History
Museum in New York and the Royal
Museum for Central Africa in Brussels
have been compelled to confront their
representation of colonized African
and Indigenous peoples.
But what is “decolonization?” What
the word means and what it requires
have been contested for a century.
After World War I, European co-
lonial administrators viewed decoloni-
zation as the process in which they
would allow their imperial charges to
graduate to independence by modeling
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said something else.”
She looked confused. “What word did
you think I . . . .” Then her mouth
dropped open too. And we both
screamed.
This story makes me laugh, but the
more I think about it, the sadder it gets.
Because it’s really a story about how
when you’re hearing-impaired, you can
find yourself suddenly dropped into an
alternate reality. Once, I was a brash
and confident person, a fountain of
energy, a woman who, by any measure,
was absolutely full of beans. Since I lost
much of my hearing several years ago,
though, I’ve become a lot shyer, a little
more melancholy, always a little bit
afraid that I’m missing out or misunder-
standing whatever it is that’s going on.
Now, in the age of Covid-19, with so
many people wearing masks, life has
gotten even harder.
I have space-age hearing aids and
other assistive devices that enable me
to negotiate the world, and I am grateful
for them. But I also rely on other visual
clues to get by — reading lips and get-
themselves on European states. But in
the mid-20th century, anticolonial
activists and intellectuals demanded
immediate independence and refused
to model their societies on the terms
set by imperialists. Between 1945 and
1975, as struggles for independence
were won in Africa and Asia, United
Nations membership grew from 51 to
144 countries. In that period, decoloni-
zation was primarily political and
economic.
As more colonies gained independ-
ence, however, cultural decolonization
became more significant. European
political and economic domination
coincided with a Eurocentrism that
valorized European civilization as the
apex of human achievement. Indige-
nous cultural traditions and systems of
knowledge were denigrated as back-
ward and uncivilized. The colonized
were treated as people without history.
The struggle against this has been
especially central in settler colonies in
which the displacement of Indigenous
institutions was most violent.
South Africa, where a reckoning
with the persistence of the settler
regime has gripped national politics,
reignited the latest calls for decoloni-
zation in 2015 with the #RhodesMust-
ting cues from people’s facial expres-
sions. These, alas, are the very things
that masks obscure.
Let me be clear: Even with the diffi-
culties they present, I’d much rather
live in a world where people are wear-
ing masks than one in which people go
without them. On the internet, you can
learn how to make
In the age of a deaf-friendly face
mask with a clear
Covid-19, with plastic insert over
so many people the mouth — al-
wearing masks, though, as the
life has gotten novelist Sara Novic
even harder. wrote in The Wash-
ington Post re-
cently, they aren’t a
perfect solution,
and not only because they can fog up.
The real problem is that it’s hearing
people who need to wear them if the
goal is to make the lives of people like
me easier. And if our collective experi-
ence of mask-wearing has taught us
anything so far, it’s that asking people to
make a sacrifice to help others has not
A statue of King Leopold II is smeared with red paint and graffiti in Brussels in June.
Fall movement. Students at the Uni-
versity of Cape Town targeted the
statue of the British imperialist Cecil
Rhodes, but saw its removal as only
the opening act in a wider struggle to
bring white supremacy to an end.
exactly emerged as Americans’ strong
suit.
Masks do two things — they can pre-
vent us from getting sick, and they can
prevent those of us who are sick (and
may not even know it) from infecting
others. Of the two goals, it’s the second
one that masks are especially good at.
When you wear a mask, it’s not only, or
even mostly, to protect yourself. The
bigger benefit is to others.
And that’s the challenge. Among a
certain demographic, keeping other
people alive is less important than one’s
own sense of personal freedom — if
freedom is defined by your right to not
care about anyone other than yourself.
When you refuse to wear a mask,
you’re sending me a message as clear as
anything in sign language. You’re telling
me that you care more about being
comfortable than you do about keeping
other people alive — let alone going the
extra mile to ensure that they’re alive
and can understand you.
Back in April, the president called
masks “voluntary” and added, “I don’t
VIRGINIA MAYO/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Under the banners of “more than a
statue” and “decolonize the university,”
students called for social and economic
transformation to undo the racial
hierarchies that persist in post-apart-
heid South Africa, free university
TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020 | 9
DEREK ABELLA
think I’m going to be doing it.” Although
he finally wore a mask in public during a
visit to Walter Reed National Military
Medical Center this month, his attitude
— prepare yourself for a shock — con-
tinued to be lackadaisical. “I’ve never
been against masks,” he said, “but I do
believe they have a time and a place.”
So you’ll forgive me if I don’t take his
(very) recent conversion to the ranks of
the mask-promoting seriously, and feel
skeptical that it will last.
What was at the heart of the presi-
dent’s reluctance to embrace mask-
wearing? Partly it’s that masks provide
a visible reminder of his failure to effec-
tively respond to the crisis. The reluc-
tance serves as a continuation of his
governing philosophy, the Peek-a-boo
Baby Doctrine, in which things that
Donald Trump cannot see do not exist.
This is a man who calls for less testing
for the coronavirus — because if you
don’t test, the numbers go down.
This is a president who makes judg-
ments about the world based on superfi-
BOYLAN, PAGE 11
tuition and an Africa-centered curricu-
lum.
Now, partly riding the global surge
of Black Lives Matter mobilizations,
calls for decolonization have swept
Europe’s former imperial metropoles.
In Bristol, England, last month, pro-
testers tore down the statue of Edward
Colston, the director of the Royal Afri-
can Company, which dominated the
African slave trade in the 17th and 18th
centuries. Across Belgium, protesters
have focused on statues of King
Leopold II, who ruled the Congo Free
State (now the Democratic Republic of
Congo) as his personal property from
1885 to 1908. King Phillipe II of Bel-
gium recently expressed “regret” for
his ancestor’s brutal regime, which
caused the death of 10 million people.
Colonialism, the protesters insist,
did not just shape the global south. It
made Europe and the modern world.
Profits from the slave trade fueled the
rise of port cities like Bristol, Liverpool
and London while the Atlantic econ-
omy that slavery created helped to fuel
the Industrial Revolution. King
Leopold amassed a fortune of well
over $1.1 billion in today’s dollars from
Congo. His vision of the Royal Mu-
GETACHEW, PAGE 10

10 | TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020
opinion
A.G. SULZBERGER, Publisher
DEAN BAQUET, Executive Editor
JOSEPH KAHN, Managing Editor
TOM BODKIN, Creative Director
SUZANNE DALEY, Associate Editor
KATHLEEN KINGSBURY, Editorial Page Editor
They want your attention.
But don’t give it to them.
EDITORIAL OBSERVER
Charlie Warzel
Writer at Large
Last year, I wrote a column about the
U.S. World Cup team and the unexpect-
ed lesson it taught us on its march to
world domination: Our greatest weap-
on is our attention and how we choose
to wield it.
The U.S. team understood that its
dominance and fearlessness to address
inequities in the sport would spark
controversy and invite critics (includ-
ing President Trump) to try to hijack
the moment for personal gain. The
team members sidestepped the usual
traps — when the President turned his
Twitter feed on them, they didn’t en-
gage directly. Instead they used the
spotlight it created to highlight what
mattered to them: their gender-dis-
crimination lawsuit, for one. It worked.
Their lesson feels especially reso-
nant right now as we attempt to navi-
gate one of the most tumultuous mo-
ments in many Americans’ lifetimes.
The most privileged of us are trapped in
our homes and glued to the internet,
hiding from a deadly virus, and our
attention appears not only frayed but
also deeply unfo-
We need cused (myself very
much included). Our
to be more worst impulses are
disciplined winning out.
about feeding Take some of the
the trolls. national media’s
preoccupation with
examining our cas-
cading national crises through the
narrow lens of free speech and cancel
culture. One camp argues that the
boundaries of acceptable conversation
are shrinking, creating a chilling effect
on speech that is “illiberal.” This crowd
wrote an open letter alluding to it in
Harper’s that set the internet ablaze for
weeks (weeks!).
This debate is about power in an era
dominated by the internet, which
means it’s also, ultimately, about atten-
tion. The camp that is worried about
“illiberalism” seems to understand this
better than the camp arguing that the
cancel-culture critics are elite public
intellectual grifters.
This crowd knows that this line of
argument is irresistible to the navel-
gazing circles of media and politics
(and opinion sections like this one). It is
perfectly calibrated to spark outrage
online — especially at this moment of
political and social unrest. If my time
shackled to online discourse has taught
me anything, it’s this: Using a social
media platform to argue that your voice
is being silenced is an amplification
cheat code, a surefire way to find an
audience and turn your voice into the
loudest in the room.
Some (but not all) of the free speech
defenders are extremely effective
attention hijackers. A cynic might
argue that they saw an important
national conversation where attention
was focused on protest (arguably the
purest exercise of one’s speech), racial
justice and the concerns of frequently
marginalized voices — one that they
were largely on the outskirts of — and
found a way to reframe that debate to
once again be at its center.
Lately, I’ve been dwelling on a coun-
terfactual: What if the ideological
opponents of the free speech defenders
followed the road map laid out a year
ago by the U.S. women’s team? What if
instead of engaging on their terms,
The U.S. women’s soccer team captured the World Cup, and our attention, last year with
a perfect, unapologetic display of defiance, determination and grace under pressure.
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they dismissed the argument, ignoring it
altogether?
There’s a similar dynamic at play with
President Trump’s pandemic news
conferences, a spectacle the president
started up again in an attempt to reverse
his disastrous approval rating on the
virus response. Because he’s the presi-
dent, the national press will cover him. It
doesn’t matter that he has used public
appearances to undermine public health
advice and politicize a virus his adminis-
tration seems unwilling to control. The
decision to devote precious airtime —
even when the impact could be harmful
to public health — is framed as an obliga-
tion to “newsworthiness.” But this fram-
ing is disingenuous. Newsworthiness is
a choice masquerading as an inevitabil-
ity. And so networks devote airtime to
the president and to his misinformation
(on Wednesday he suggested children in
schools won’t bring the virus home), to
his cynical change in “tone” and to
diversions like his relationship to a
Jeffery Epstein friend, Ghislaine Max-
well.
The American public collectively
seems unable to break or divert our
attention, even when we know it may be
harmful to those who seek it. That seems
to be the case with the recent fixation on
Kanye West and his dubious presidential
campaign and very public mental health
breakdown. In an excellent essay, Andre
Gee argued that Mr. West’s personal
turmoil isn’t our entertainment (his wife
argued similarly in an Instagram post on
Wednesday), though many are treating
it that way. Mr. Gee makes an important
distinction that Mr. West shouldn’t be
coddled or absolved because of his
behavior, but that we should not become
complicit and feed the drama — by
indulging his campaign or gawking at
and dunking on his manic tweeting. But
because Mr. West is a towering figure in
pop culture and a masterful attention
seeker, we give in and give no thought to
the consequences.
“True resistance,” the artist Jenny
Odell wrote in her book “How to Do
Nothing,” is “the ability not just to with-
draw attention but to invest it some-
where else, to enlarge and proliferate it.”
What if the camp that believes cancel
culture is an overhyped boogeyman
followed Ms. Odell’s advice and re-
framed the debate so that it centered
more around the issues that matter to
them: a more just, inclusive, equitable
discourse?
What does that even look like? What if
we redirected our attention based solely
on the consequences? Instead of con-
stantly amplifying arguments we think
are unworthy (simply because it feels
good to mock them), what if we choose
not to give them oxygen? Why not re-
frame the debate and set the terms of the
conversation?
We are staring down an unfathomable
crisis: nearly 150,000 Americans dead
from a pandemic that is out of control,
with no government response in sight.
We’re about to confront a rolling evic-
tions crisis, a looming financial collapse,
a momentous presidential election. The
existential threat of climate change
remains unaddressed. Federal troops
are clashing with protesters in a major
American city. Threaded through each
of these crises is the festering wound of
systemic racism, which the country is
attempting to grapple with through
intergenerational national unrest.
In other words, we have every possi-
ble reason to withdraw our attention
from those who greedily seek it and
invest it somewhere else.
CHARLIE WARZEL covers technology,
media, politics and online extremism.
DAMON WINTER/THE NEW YORK TIMES
In Portland’s ‘war zone,’ the troops menace
Nicholas Kristof
PORTLAND, ORE. To watch Fox News
is to learn from Sean Hannity that the
“Rose City” of Portland is “like a war
zone” that has been, in Tucker Carl-
son’s words, “destroyed by the mob.”
So I invite Hannity and Carlson to
escape their bubbles and visit Port-
land, stroll along the Willamette River
and enjoy a glass of local pinot noir.
They’ll be safe — unless they venture
at night into the two blocks beside the
federal courthouse.
Citizens need to be vigilant there,
for armed groups periodically storm
the streets to attack peaceful visitors.
I’m talking, of course, about the unin-
vited federal forces.
I’ve watched them fire round after
round of tear gas, along with occa-
sional rubber bullets or other projec-
tiles. They even repeatedly tear-
gassed Portland’s mayor, Ted
Wheeler, who has demanded that they
go home, leaving him blinded and
coughing on his own streets.
“They knocked the hell out of him,”
President Trump boasted on Fox
News. “That was the end of him.”
Trump is pretending that he is
bringing law and order to chaotic
streets, and now he has dispatched
similar troops — what else can you
call a militarized force like this but
“troops”? — to other cities, including
Seattle, where that city’s mayor has
also said they are unwanted. Yet if
Trump is actually trying to establish
order, he is stunningly incompetent.
The ruthlessness of the federal forces
has inflamed the protests, bringing
huge throngs of Portlanders out to
protect their city from those they see
as jackbooted federal thugs.
“Their presence here escalates,”
Kate Brown, Oregon’s governor, told
Federal agents clashing with protesters near the Federal District Courthouse in Portland, Ore., last week.
Colonialism made the modern world. Let’s remake it.
GETACHEW, FROM PAGE 9
seum for Central Africa, which opened
in 1910 soon after his death, repro-
duced a narrative of African backward-
ness while obscuring the violent ex-
ploitation of the Congolese.
By tearing down or defacing these
statues, protesters burst open the
national narrative and force a con-
frontation with the history of empire.
This is a decolonization of the sensory
world, the illusion that empire was
somewhere else.
Laying a flag of the Democratic
Republic of Congo on the statue of
King Leopold or hauling the Colston
statue into the sea, where thousands of
enslaved women and men lost their
lives, tears apart the blinders and
boundaries between past and present,
metropole and colony. Insisting on the
presence of the past, the protests
reveal Europe’s romance with itself,
unmasking its political and economic
achievements as the product of en-
slavement and colonial exploitation.
This historical reckoning is only the
first step. Acknowledging that colonial
history shapes the current inequalities
me. “It throws gasoline on the fire.”
Brown noted that the federal troops
may also be breaking the law. “We
cannot have secret police abducting
people into unmarked vehicles,” she
said. “This is a democracy and not a
dictatorship.”
The paradox is that Oregon is simul-
taneously begging for federal assist-
ance to address a real threat — the
coronavirus pandemic. Brown said she
has been pleading for Covid-19 tests
and for personal protective equipment,
but the federal government has re-
buffed the state.
“It’s appalling to me that they are
using federal taxpayer dollars for
political theater and making no effort
to really keep our communities safe,”
Brown said.
So let’s be real: Trump isn’t trying to
quell violence in Portland. No, he’s
provoking it to divert attention from
140,000 Covid-19
deaths in the United
If President
States. Once again,
Trump is he’s tear-gassing
actually peaceful protesters
trying to to generate a photo
establish op — and he’s doing
order, he is this every night in
stunningly downtown Portland.
incompetent. This is a reckless
campaign tactic to
bolster his own
narrative as a law-
and-order candidate, a replay of Rich-
ard Nixon’s successful 1968 campaign
theme.
It is true that some protesters are
violent. Some start small trash fires.
Others paint graffiti, including “kill
pigs” and “kill cops,” or hurl water
bottles or firecrackers at federal
agents. Some protesters point lasers at
officers and in one case a man alleg-
edly hit an agent with a hammer.
Such violence is wrong and plays
into Trump’s narrative. Representative
John Lewis, who died earlier this
month, showed how much more power-
ful it is for changemakers to endure
violence than to commit it.
But it’s also true that the vast major-
ity of those in the crowds each evening
are peaceful. They sing about racial
justice, chant “Feds out now” and try
and hierarchies that structure the
world sets the stage for the next one:
reparations and restitution.
Reparations is not a single act. The
Caribbean Community has already
demanded reparations for slavery
and Indigenous genocide from Brit-
ain, France, Spain and the Nether-
lands. Although there is little move-
ment at the level of states, the Univer-
sity of Glasgow agreed last year to
pay 20 million pounds (about $25
million) for development research
with the University of the West Indies
in recognition of how the university
benefited from the profits of the trans-
Atlantic slave trade.
The Herero of Namibia, who suf-
fered the 20th century’s first genocide
at the hands of Germany, have also
called for redress. Their efforts follow
the successful bid for reparations by
the Mau Mau of Kenya, many of
whom were tortured during Britain’s
brutal suppression of their independ-
ence movement in the mid-20th cen-
tury. In other contexts, activists have
focused on the return of the looted
artifacts that fill Europe’s great muse-
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, reacting after being exposed to tear gas fired by federal
officers while attending a protest against police brutality and racial injustice in front of
the Federal District Courthouse last week.
to protect their city from violent in-
truders dispatched by Trump.
The protesters — including a “Wall
of Moms” who turn out each night to
lock arms and shield protesters —
protect themselves with bicycle hel-
mets and umbrellas, while suburban-
ites bring leaf blowers to dispel tear
gas (this works surprisingly well).
Medics attend to the injured, and
cleanup crews collect litter.
“They have guns; I have an umbrel-
la,” said a protester named Jackie —
who added that she was fearful of the
government and did not want her last
name published. That’s common in
dictatorships, but I find it ineffably sad
to breathe tear gas in my beloved
home state and to interview Ameri-
cans with such fears of their own lead-
ers.
On the streets, I have no fear of the
protesters (except when they pull their
face masks down to shout slogans,
risking the spread of Covid-19), but it’s
prudent to worry about the troops. In a
ums. France, for instance, has commit-
ted to returning 26 stolen artworks to
Benin.
But reparations should not focus
only on the former colonies and their
relations with European states. Co-
lonialism lives on inside Europe’s
borders, and Europe itself must be
decolonized. Black Europeans experi-
ence discrimination in employment
and education, are racially profiled
and are subject to racist violence at
the hands of the police and fellow
citizens.
The European Union recently
avowed that “Black lives matter,” but
its policies deprive Black people of
equal rights, imprison them in camps
and drown them in the Mediterranean.
Overseas imperialism was once be-
lieved to be a political necessity for
European states; today, anti-immi-
grant politics plays the same role. In
either case, European policymakers
disavow responsibility for the misery
they bring about.
Repair and redress is owed as much
to Black Europeans as it is to former
colonial states. It would mean treating
..
NATHAN HOWARD/GETTY IMAGES
few weeks, they:
■ fired “less lethal” munition at a
peaceful protester named Donavan La
Bella, fracturing his skull and requir-
ing facial reconstruction surgery. Video
shows that the shot was unprovoked.
■ clubbed a Navy veteran, Christo-
pher J. David, as he tried to ask federal
agents how they squared their actions
with the Constitution.
■ allegedly sexually assaulted a
lawyer who had been arrested after
taking part in the “Wall of Moms.”
An iconic moment came when a
woman known as Naked Athena con-
fronted the troops while wearing only a
hat and face mask. Her naked vulnera-
bility as armed troops fired pepper
balls at her feet underscored the ab-
surdity of Trump’s narrative that he is
“protecting” anything.
Beware. What you’re seeing in Port-
land may be coming to other cities.
After all, Trump’s verdict on the
troops: “In Portland, they’ve done a
fantastic job.”
MASON TRINCA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Black Europeans, and all migrants
from the colonized world, as equal
participants in European society. And
this form of reparation cannot be per-
ceived as one-off transactions. Instead,
it must be the basis of building an
inclusive and egalitarian Europe.
This is no easy task and will not
happen overnight. But we should
remember that just 80 years ago,
colonial rule appeared to be a stable
and almost permanent feature of inter-
national politics. In just three decades,
anticolonial nationalists had trans-
formed the world’s map.
The struggle for racial equality in
Europe is a fight for a truly postcolo-
nial condition, and its creation is im-
plied by each dethroned statue. If
colonialism made the modern world,
decolonization cannot be complete
until the world — including Europe —
is remade.
ADOM GETACHEW is a professor of politi-
cal science at the University of Chicago
and the author of “Worldmaking After
Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-
Determination.”
.. UPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020 | 11

opinion

Medical school, blackness and blame

Damon Tweedy
A senior white physician stands by
silently as a white patient uses a slur
to describe a Black nurse.
A middle-aged doctor asks a Black
student why the lower-income Black
patients in the clinic aren’t able to
speak and act the way she does.
Several young doctors make fun of
“Black-sounding” names in a newborn
unit and speculate when each infant
will later enter the penal system.
Instances of racism like these are
happening in medical schools across
America today, just as they happened
when I was a medical student 20 years
ago.
I still vividly recall the afternoon
many years ago when a patient angrily
suggested that I go back to Africa and
stay there, and the shrug that my
white supervisor offered when I told
him what happened. I’ll also never
forget when a Muslim student’s name
was openly mocked by a senior doctor
who questioned whether he was a
terrorist. Nor will I forget the moments
I saw Black patients’ intelligence,
motivation and truthfulness derisively
questioned.
Facing the power of those above us,
I remember many of my peers and me
putting our heads down, just enduring,
on our way to becoming full-fledged
doctors. The stings never faded.
Now, however, many future physi-
cians of color are doing what we were
too afraid to do: They are speaking up
and demanding change. And medical
school leaders are being forced to
listen to them. Medicine, like other
institutions in society, is now being
called to task by its own for the role it
has played in perpetuating the long-
standing inequities that have led us to
this moment.
The conversation took on new ener-
gy at the start of the Covid-19 pan-
demic, which exposed racial health
disparities dating back to the origins of
our country. And it became inflamed in
the aftermath of George Floyd’s video-
recorded murder.
I see myself in all of the dimensions
of this overdue conversation: I am the
medical student facing discrimination,
a Black man with pre-existing health
conditions and a medical school profes-
sor forced to face the cold reality that I
have not done nearly enough to help
my patients or my students of color.
On so many levels, Black patients
and Black doctors are perpetually
fighting upstream. Covid-19 has killed
Black people at a rate roughly two
times greater than would be expected
based on their share of the population.
Still, diabetes, heart disease and many
cancers have disproportionately rav-
aged Black families for much longer.
Leading medical journals across all
clinical specialties have chronicled
these stark realities for years. But
wide-scale interventions are scarce.
Racial health disparities can’t
change until the health system
changes itself. Starting that transfor-
mation means
shifting the way
While the that medical stu-
blatant horrors dents are taught
of the past are the interplay be-
gone, the ideas tween race and
that fueled health. For far too
long, medical
race-based schools have ne-
medicine glected to tackle
stubbornly the full complexity
linger. We of race in their
can change. curriculums. And
two problematic,
longstanding prej-
udices have filled that vacuum and
impeded progress.
One is the focus on race as a catego-
ry signifying distinct biological differ-
ence, a belief that dates back to slav-
ery, where it was used as justification
to maintain the practice. Yes, Black
people are much more likely to have
sickle cell anemia, just as white people
are more likely to have cystic fibrosis.
But these and other diseases that
closely, but not precisely, track with
race (or more accurately, ethnic origin)
represent a very small fraction of what
is encountered in medicine.
Still, distinctly race-based biology
remained mainstream medicine
throughout much of the 20th century.
And this allowed for some of medi-
cine’s most egregious sins: As recently
as the 1970s, Black people were experi-
mented upon under the guise of scien-
tific study and sterilized without their
consent.
While those blatant horrors of the
past are gone, the ideology that fueled
those actions stubbornly lingers.
A 2016 study at one institution found
that half of the medical students and
residents surveyed agreed with one or
more false statements about biological
differences based on race, such as the
idea that Black people had thicker skin
and less sensitive nerve endings than
their white counterparts.
The study only buttressed earlier
surveys in which white physicians
consistently categorized Black patients
as less intelligent. Such false beliefs,
left unchallenged, or worse, tacitly
reinforced by professors, can lead a
new generation of doctors to perpetu-
ate discriminatory practices. To name
just one example: Black patients are
prescribed less pain medication for
injuries comparable with those of their
non-Black counterparts.
The other major flawed way in
which medical education has histori-
cally been wrong on race is in its ea-
gerness to ascribe health differences
primarily to Black people’s supposed
pathological misbehavior.
Too often, physicians assume certain
groups of people bring an array of
maladies or misfortunes upon them-
selves with intentional bad choices.
During my residency training in psy-
DELCAN & COMPANY
chiatry, a doctor I worked with sug-
gested that Black men were more
likely to have poor judgment (exclud-
ing me of course, he quickly added)
and that this explained why they faced
higher rates of involuntary hospitaliza-
tion and the potentially negative con-
sequences that come from it.
The overlapping prejudices embed-
ded in the medical establishment are
ultimately harmful not because they
hurt feelings but because they alienate
patients who need help and lead to bad
medicine. They are biases that prevent
the profession from taking a more
accurate and enlightened view that
emphasizes the pervasive environmen-
tal and economic roots of patients’
health problems.
Covid-19 has highlighted these is-
sues. Pathologizing Black behavior
leads to blaming Black patients, like
the theory of an Ohio physician and
politician who publicly speculated last
month whether Black people are more
susceptible to Covid-19 because they
don’t wash their hands enough.
A more nuanced approach, informed
by public health, leads to exploring the
real, underlying reasons the coro-
navirus has caused more destruction
in Black communities: crowded multi-
generational housing arrangements,
more frequent use of public transporta-
tion and employment in newly hazard-
ous front-line service jobs.
In recent years, many medical
schools have begun broadening curric-
ulums to include implicit bias and the
social factors that influence the health
of diverse patient groups. But even the
most dynamic lecture can be easily
drowned out by the hundreds of hours
students spend experiencing the
broader informal curriculum in clinics
and hospital, where myths about bio-
logical difference and behavioral pa-
thology still linger.
So it’s essential that we set up ways
to ensure physician-educators are also
trained and periodically evaluated in a
tangible and accountable way. That
way they can pass along a more em-
pathic and open-minded approach to
treating patients. And it’s a task too
important to be relegated to a certain
lecture or delegated to Black faculty. If
it doesn’t involve every component of
the medical school, we will continue to
perpetuate the problem.
Thanks to the work of brave young
medical students who have pushed us
to have this introspective discourse
and re-examine our practices, medi-
cine is being presented with an oppor-
tunity to reckon with its troubled past
and redefine its societal role.
A profession sworn to heal can no
longer passively accept the inequities
it has witnessed for decades — or the
hand that it has played in them.
DAMON TWEEDY is an associate professor
of psychiatry at Duke University School
of Medicine and the author of “Black
Man in a White Coat: A Doctor’s Reflec-
tions on Race and Medicine.”

I’m a lip reader in a masked world

BOYLAN, FROM PAGE 9
cial appearances. Back in April he said:
“I don’t know, somehow, sitting in the
Oval Office behind that beautiful Reso-
lute Desk — the great Resolute Desk — I
think wearing a face mask as I greet
presidents, prime ministers, dictators,
kings, queens, I don’t know. Somehow, I
don’t see it for myself.”
Translation: He wasn’t going to wear
a mask because he was afraid it would
look funny. And now, we’re supposed to
believe he’s a convert — even though as
late as Tuesday evening he was spotted
in a small group at the Trump Interna-
tional Hotel, sans mask.
I’ve spent too much of my life worry-
ing about looking funny, about not fitting
in, both as a partially deaf person living
in a world dominated by the hearing and
as an L.G.B.T.Q. woman living in a world
dominated by straight and cis people.
I’m tired of living in a world in which
hearing people never think about the
rest of us. I’m tired of living in a world in
which transgender people constantly
have to explain and justify the facts of
our existence. I’m tired of living in a
world in which, for some white people,
the simple statement that Black lives
matter is somehow considered radical.
It is not the degree to which we all can
resemble the supposed majority culture
— straight, abled, cis, white — which
ought to determine whether or not we
can live our lives with dignity and peace.
It is the degree to which we celebrate
our diversity, in all its messy abun-
dance. You want to make America great
again? In the words of David Bowie,
turn and face the strange.
As I left the hospital after my mam-
mogram, I told the technician where she
could get a pair of boots like mine. They
were made by a company called Sorel
and were called “Cate the Great.” I
mentioned another couple of boot com-
panies I liked as well.
“OK,” she said. “Thanks for the tips.”
For just a second, I paused, uncertain.
Had I heard her right?
“Tips,” she said firmly. “I said tips.”
JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN is a professor of
English at Barnard College. Her most
recent book is “Good Boy: My Life in
Seven Dogs.”

Implications of the two China fires

STEPHENS, FROM PAGE 1
are as criticisms of Trump — they
obscure two hard facts a Biden admin-
istration will also confront. The first is
that, under Xi, China has become
drastically more repressive at home,
more aggressive abroad, and more
shameless about both than at nearly
any point since the death of Mao.
This is not a matter of Beijing react-
ing badly to Trump (as the early
Obama administration erroneously
supposed that bad relations with Rus-
sia were a matter of Moscow reacting
badly to George W. Bush). Some of
China’s biggest digital heists date to
the Obama years — including the 2015
hack of the Office of Personnel Man-
agement, which gave Beijing the back-
ground security files for nearly 22
Firefighters responding to a fire at the Chinese Consulate in Houston on July 21.
million current or former U.S. govern-
ment employees and their family mem-
bers. China’s outrageous and illegal
claims to most of the South China Sea
also predate Trump and will fester long
after he’s gone.
What stands out now is just how
brazen Beijing has become. Take one
detail from Wray’s speech: “We have
now reached the point where the F.B.I.
is opening a new China-related coun-
terintelligence case about every 10
hours,” he said. In one case, a single
scientist, Hongjin Tan, pleaded guilty
to stealing an estimated $1 billion in
trade secrets from an Oklahoma-based
energy company.
Multiply that hundreds if not thou-
sands of times over, and what you have
is arguably the largest single theft of
MARK MULLIGAN/HOUSTON CHRONICLE, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
foreign property since Germany looted
Europe in World War II. Whatever else
one might say against the Trump
administration, it isn’t lying about
China.
But this brings us to the second
blunt fact. U.S. power in East Asia is
waning. Trump’s decision to withdraw
the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Part-
nership — the single best hedge the
U.S. had against Chinese economic
dominance of the region — may, in
hindsight, prove to be his single worst
policy mistake. He has tried to shake
down both South Korea and Japan to
pay more for basing U.S. forces: penny
ante politics that only raise doubts
about America’s reliability as an ally.
And then there’s the degraded state
of the U.S. Navy, epitomized by the fire
on the Bonhomme Richard (itself the
latest in a string of corruption, leader-
ship, cost over-run and competency
scandals to bedevil the service).
Trump came to office with grand plans
to build a 355-ship Navy, up from the
current 300. The Pentagon all but
admits it has no hope of reaching that
goal. Meanwhile, the Chinese Navy —
which isn’t stretched around the world
— has 335 ships, a 55 percent increase
in 15 years,
If the U.S. and the People’s Republic
were to come to blows after some
incident over some atoll in the South
China Sea, is it confident that it would
prevail?
When (fingers crossed) Joe Biden is
president, he needn’t ask his cabinet
members to deliver philippics against
Beijing. But, as George Kennan once
wrote about another regime, he must
be prepared to confront China with
“unalterable counter force at every
point where they show signs of en-
croaching upon the interests of a
peaceful and stable world.”

12 | TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020
tech
Personal trainers bridge social distances
Setting up sessions online
keeps their clients in shape
and saves their businesses
BY JOHN HANC
The routine was the same for six years.
On Saturday mornings, Jason Atlas
changed into a T-shirt, comfortable
shorts and lightweight training shoes,
then headed down to the basement gym
of his home in New York State, where
precisely at 10 a.m., he met his personal
trainer, Matt Sulam, for an hourlong
strength-training workout.
Mr. Sulam, 48, an independent con-
tractor who until recently saw most of
his clients in their homes, had become a
familiar presence since he was first
hired by Mr. Atlas, a lawyer, in January
2014.
“Matt actually knows the code to our
side door,” Mr. Atlas said. “He comes in,
says a quick hello to our dog Hudson,
who is waiting for him, then through the
mud room, through the kitchen where
he usually grabs me a water because I
nearly always forget, and then heads
down to the basement bellowing his
nickname for me, which is J-Star.”
All of that has changed in recent
months. Except, Mr. Atlas joked, “he still
calls me J-Star.” Their sessions are now
virtual, via Google Hangouts; it’s just
one example in a field that is figuring out
what the socially distanced future holds
for those in a business that involves
close physical contact with clients.
Like many other fitness profession-
als, Mr. Sulam saw his business come to
a lurching halt when the epidemic
struck. On March 12, he got a call from
one longtime client.
“They were apologetic,” said Mr. Su-
lam, who has made a full-time living as a
trainer since the late 1990s. “It was like:
‘I’m sorry, I can’t have you come to the
house. We want to adhere to this shelter-
in-place policy.’ ”
Text after text followed from clients
expressing similar sentiments. “It was
an avalanche of cancellations,” Mr. Su-
lam said. “ ‘I thought to myself, ‘I have to
shift on the fly.’ ”
And he did, with a grace that belies a
178-pound man with 18-inch biceps. His
reimagining of the way he does business
mirrors what many others in his indus-
try have done since the onset of the epi-
demic. (According to the federal Bureau
of Labor Statistics, there are about
357,000 fitness trainers and instructors
in the United States.)
The day after his clients began cancel-
ing sessions, Mr. Sulam was speaking to
his brother, Benjamin. “He told me he
was staying in touch with his friends us-
ing video calls,” Mr. Sulam said. “I could-
n’t remember the last time I’d made a
video call, but that’s when the light bulb
went on. I said: ‘Wait a minute. I can do
virtual training sessions this way. Most
of my clients have some equipment at
home. All they need to do is put their
phone somewhere I can see what
they’re doing.’ ”
In just a few days, Mr. Sulam did noth-
ing less than reinvent the delivery struc-
ture for his service: He took a Google
Do-it-yourselfers adapt technology for the disabled
Big projects may matter
less than better access to
ordinary devices and tasks
BY DAVID M. PERRY
Technology is changing the ways that
disabled people interact with the world;
perhaps more important, it’s also shift-
ing how the world interacts with dis-
abled people.
With the 30th anniversary of the
Americans With Disabilities Act being
observed this month, many leaders, de-
signers and scholars in the disability
community say that they aren’t excited
by stair-climbing wheelchairs, mechan-
ical exoskeletons or brain-controlled
prosthetics. They are drawn to innova-
tions that embed accessibility into ev-
eryday technologies and the spaces that
we all share. Also, they want people to
stop trying to solve problems that don’t
exist.
Mark Riccobono, who lost his sight to
glaucoma as a child and is president of
the National Federation of the Blind,
says that blind people generally love
their white canes, a simple and effective
piece of technology. “A couple times a
year, someone comes to us and says, ‘We
have this great new idea for how to re-
place the cane!’ ” he said. “We try to be
objective, but no. You’re trying to solve a
problem that’s not a problem.”
Disability technology can be so quo-
tidian that nondisabled users don’t even
notice. GPS and spell-check, so ubiqui-
tous for so many people, are technolo-
gies that assist me with dyslexia. Smart-
phones, where I find my GPS, may be
the most powerful accessibility devices
in history, especially now that voice con-
trol offers an alternative to touch
screens for blind and low-vision users,
or people without the manual dexterity
to operate them. (No interface is per-
fect, however. Some people might actu-
ally want buttons instead of sleek
screens. And affordability remains a
problem.)
As hubs for accessibility program-
ming, though, smartphones drive down
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Matt Sulam, a personal trainer, started offering virtual workout sessions during the pandemic after making a few adjustments at his home, including installation of an adjustable
cellphone holder for better vantage points when exercising. “I told them, ‘This is going to be a seamless, productive new avenue to continue your training,” he said.
Hangouts tutorial online, and also pur-
chased an adjustable cellphone holder
that enabled him to give his clients a bet-
ter vantage point when he needed to
demonstrate exercises. He also made a
more significant investment with an up-
grade of his Android phone to the model
with the largest and highest-resolution
costs. For example, Fred Downs, who
lost his left arm when he stepped on a
land mine during the Vietnam War and
is now an advocacy director for Para-
lyzed Veterans of America, says that in
1980, screenreaders cost up to $50,000 a
unit and could read one page at a time
out loud. Now every computer, phone
and tablet can read nearly any screen.
Smartphones provide navigation, man-
age hearing aids, run speech apps and
can even drive a wheelchair.
Disability-related technologies are
not just growing through incremental
adjustments to existing products; trans-
formative ones are on the horizon. Rory
Cooper is director of the Human Engi-
neering Research Laboratories, spon-
sored by the University of Pittsburgh
and the U.S. Department of Veterans Af-
fairs. He was paralyzed because of a
spinal-cord injury in 1980 and has used a
wheelchair since then. Now he is im-
proving mobility devices, including
wheelchairs and scooters, by adapting
components designed for vehicles and
drones. Mr. Cooper says he can take new
batteries, motors and algorithms from
other industries and build “a much
lighter chair with the same capabilities.”
He has developed a waterproof chair
that runs on compressed air, originally
for a wheelchair-accessible water park.
Water parks are fun, but more impor-
tant, the innovation will make it easier
for wheelchair users to go out in the rain.
Meanwhile, makers of self-driving cars
are now consulting not just blind users,
who have long been involved, but people
with myriad other disabilities, including
those in wheelchairs, who would need to
be able to roll into the vehicle.
At the New York Public Library’s Di-
mensions lab, Chancey Fleet, who is
blind, is working with a team to make
spatial learning easier for blind people
and to provide access to information —
part of the library’s core mission — to
those who can best get it through touch.
Visitors to the lab in the Heiskell branch
of the library in Manhattan are invited to
make 3-D printed objects and tactile
graphics, or graphics embedded with
Braille and other textural elements to
make their meaning legible by touch.
screen; he even sought advice from the
daughter of a client who works in the
film industry.
“I’m not trying to be a documentary
filmmaker here,” Mr. Sulam said. “But I
needed to know a little about framing,
lighting, positioning and angles, so I can
see everything you’re doing and you can
Ms. Fleet is hoping to end what she calls
“image poverty.”
She says as a blind child, “I thought I
was someone who didn’t have any apti-
tude” in science, technology, engineer-
ing and mathematics, “even though I did
well academically.” But she later real-
ized her problem was not with science
and technology per se. ”Looking back, it
seems as though I was a spatial learner,”
she said. “If the images are there, it
turns out that the aptitudes are there.”
Experts in disability and technology,
like Ashley Shew, associate professor at
Virginia Tech in the Department of Sci-
ence, Technology and Society, says that
the best of these projects emerge out of a
do-it-yourself culture that is prominent
within disabled communities. Too often,
the biggest and most promising innova-
tions may come with hidden barriers,
see me demonstrating proper form on
an exercise, if needed.”
He then called his clients: “I told
them, ‘This is going to be a seamless,
productive new avenue to continue your
training, without me coming to the
house or without you leaving.”
He also set up an online payment ac-
count through his bank that allowed for
easy billing and payment for his ses-
sions ($95 an hour).
As of mid-May, all but one of Mr. Su-
lam’s nearly 20 clients continued train-
ing on a virtual basis. Moreover, he has
gotten inquiries from new clients who
live out of state — business that he pre-
HAYLEY WALL
like cost, maintenance and the need to
customize them.
“We’ve been misled,” said Ms. Shew,
who identifies as multiply disabled and
uses hearing aids and prosthetics. “The
public perception is very celebratory
about new developments,” but this
“completely looks over issues of mainte-
nance and wear. People think you’re giv-
en this item once, and then it’s fixed for
all eternity.”
Not only are devices like prosthetics
and hearing aids often not covered by in-
surance, but expert care is hard to find.
Ms. Shew, for example, travels four
hours for leg prosthetic care. Mean-
while, too much technology is designed
around a perception of what’s normal.
For example, arm prosthetics are often
designed with five fingers — a hand —
but Ms. Shew says, “A lot of arm ampu-
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEPHEN SPERANZA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
viously would not have been able to ac-
cept. “I can go anywhere now,” he said.
And where Mr. Sulam seems headed
is to a more successful business model.
“The savvy personal trainer is not sit-
ting back waiting for things to return to
normal,” said Mark Nutting, the author
of “The Business of Personal Training.”
Nancy Waldron, an entrepreneurship
expert and associate professor at Lasell
University in Newton, Mass., thinks that
the lesson of Mr. Sulam’s pivot is rele-
vant to all businesses — not just those
that involve barbells.
“So many small businesses have said,
‘I can’t sell my product, I can’t sell my
services, I’m just going to have to shut
down,’ ” Dr. Waldron said. “Without giv-
ing themselves the time to think about
possible changes, and be innovative.”
Mr. Sulam, she said, is making himself
even more valuable.
“In a year or two, his clients are going
to say, ‘That was a hard time, but he was
there for me in a way I didn’t expect,’ ”
she said. “That matters to clients.”
Other personal-services providers in
the fitness and health industry have also
changed what Dr. Waldron calls this
“value proposition.”
When the lockdown in California be-
gan and she realized that her livelihood
tees don’t necessarily want” that but in-
stead would like a bike-riding arm or a
chopping arm.
Maintenance isn’t the only issue for
users of disability-specific technology;
intellectual property law can restrict the
ability of users to customize their de-
vices to suit their changing needs. Ian
Smith, a software engineer who is deaf,
has dwarfism and uses a power wheel-
chair, points out that too often disabled
people are not permitted to tinker with
devices because of trademark issues,
negating what many call the right to re-
pair. “You’re at the mercy of the manu-
facturer for upgrades and repairs,” he
said.
Sara Hendren, who teaches design at
Olin College of Engineering in Massa-
chusetts and is the parent of a child with
Down syndrome, illustrates the benefits
of empowering disabled designers in
her forthcoming book, “What Can a
Body Do?” In it she introduces us to
Chris, who was born with one arm. After
being stymied initially in trying to
change his infant’s diaper, he ultimately
joined felt holsters to soft cords that he
could attach to his shoulder. The baby’s
feet rest in the felt, secure.
“The result is nothing that would daz-
zle at some tech expo,” but it reveals,
Ms. Hendren said in an interview, how
the right technology can make the
“world bend a little bit” toward the user,
rather than just bending the user toward
a normative world.
Bob Williams, policy director at Com-
munication First, an advocacy group for
people like him who have speech-relat-
ed communication disabilities, has cere-
bral palsy and uses a stand-alone device
to produce audible speech. It was de-
signed around 1990, and Mr. Williams is
worried about obsolescence. Today,
many nonspeaking individuals can use
apps with speech tools built into tablets,
smartphones and computers. “It’s a
bridge” between disabled and nondis-
abled people, Mr. Williams says, be-
cause everyone can “relate to the tech-
nology.”
In my family, we’ve certainly found
that to be the case, but not everyone
does. My son, a white Midwesterner
..
was on hold, Sarana Miller, a yoga in-
structor in Berkeley, responded in true
yogi fashion.
“I took a deep breath,” she said.
She then began to think about how to
keep her practice — usually done in stu-
dios or homes or on retreats — alive. She
decided to try virtual teaching, even
though she had no experience with it.
Within a few days, Ms. Miller, 45, had
downloaded the basic version of Zoom
and set up lights and a camera in her
home studio.
A test class for friends went well, Ms.
Miller said, “so I thought, ‘Let’s open it
up to a larger audience.’ ”
She sent emails to students, new and
old, inviting them to a Sunday morning
class in March. Now, her Sunday classes
average 135 participants, compared
with an average of 30 to 35 before.
“I’ve grown my business in a way I
would have never expected,” she said.
For Travis Macy, an endurance-sports
coach in Evergreen, Colo., the challenge
was not solvable with a technology re-
boot. “It’s less of a supply issue, and
more of demand,” Mr. Macy said. “All the
races my clients were training to do
have been canceled.”
Mr. Macy thought about how he could
create new demand for his niche busi-
ness. “We’re now saying, ‘OK, so if such
and such a race isn’t happening this
year, is there a cool mission or journey
you’d like to take?’ ” he said. “ ‘Some-
thing meaningful to you?’ ”
He found clients eager to develop and
prepare for such personal challenges.
One plans to ride the Colorado Trail —
485 miles from Denver to Durango,
through the Rocky Mountains — on a
mountain bike. Another has expressed
interest in a bike-riding tour of the West
this summer with his wife. Others are
planning to compete in virtual races.
“It’s highly individualized,” said Mr.
Macy, who charges a monthly retainer
for his services. “My role now is to help
with identifying the goal, planning and
guiding the client’s training and maybe
helping with the route and gear.”
While many are trying virtual train-
ing, some fitness pros are going low-
tech and taking advantage of improving
weather. Bob Phillips, a longtime per-
sonal training colleague of Mr. Sulam’s,
has been offering outdoor exercise ses-
sions to two to three clients at a time.
Meeting in local parks that have re-
mained open, Mr. Phillips, 57, who lives
in Melville, N.Y., brings equipment —
kettlebells, cables and the suspension
trainers known as TRX — and puts cli-
ents through a 60-minute, socially dis-
tanced, circuit workout.
While he respects what his friend Mr.
Sulam has done with his virtual training,
Mr. Phillips said: “It’s not in my nature.
To me personal training is still hands-on,
face to face.”
He intends to keep the outdoor ses-
sions as an option for clients.
Those who want to stay in the field for
the long term, though, will need to be as
nimble as Mr. Sulam has been.
Mr. Atlas, for one, appreciates it.
“Of course, it’s preferable to have him
here, because he’s part of our routine,”
he said. “But the virtual training ses-
sions are a phenomenal substitute.”
who is autistic and has Down syndrome,
uses a speech app called Proloquo2go.
There’s a default setting that mimics
how he talks, but not everyone finds a
voice that is fitting.
Meryl Alper, assistant professor of
communication studies at Northeastern
University, argues in her book “Giving
Voice,” that this app creates inequality.
Not only do many families have trouble
with programming apps like this, but
Proloquo2go doesn’t “have a single
speech option in U.S. English in a voice
that uses speech samples from an adult
woman of color. The only one that is ra-
cialized is Saul, a ‘hip-hop’ voice.”
Over email, David Niemeijer, the chief
executive of AssistiveWare, the com-
pany that makes Proloquo2Go, blames
prohibitive costs in making new voices.
He hopes coming collaborations among
producers of text-to-speech technolo-
gies will lower those costs.
Designers and scholars
in the disability community
don’t want efforts wasted
on problems that don’t exist.
The lack of nonwhite voices in this
app is one of many such examples, says
Damien Williams, a Ph.D. student at Vir-
ginia Tech. Mr. Williams says that dis-
ability technology often reflects biases
about race, gender and ideals of what is
or should be “normal.” There are soap
dispensers that don’t recognize black
and brown skin, for example, and auto-
mated captioning can’t always handle
accented English.
For Ms. Shew, the Virginia Tech pro-
fessor, the best way to ensure that this
transformation continues will require
centering the power — and the money —
on disabled people as the initiators of in-
novation. “The future of assistive tech
should be ‘cripped,’ ” a once-pejorative
term that many members of the disabili-
ty community have reclaimed, she said.
“It should be bent, claimed, reclaimed,
reforged, hacked, owned/controlled,
made, swapped and shared by disabled
people.”
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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020 | 13

Sports
‘Learn from us and what we’ve gone through’
rus, though his daughter did not become
Virus hit U.S. rowing team ill and later tested positive for antibod-
ies.
hard, and members warn “Now the message is, learn from us
of the infection’s effects and what we’ve gone through,” Nowak
said.
BY JULIET MACUR Emily Regan, an Olympic gold med-
alist from Williamsville, N.Y., who was
The women on the United States na- among those infected, wrote a post on
tional rowing team think that young, Facebook this month highlighting how
healthy people need to take the coro- debilitating the disease could be, even
navirus more seriously. They learned for some of the world’s best athletes who
that the hard way. have incredibly powerful and efficient
More than one-third of the team was lungs. Most women at the training cen-
infected with Covid-19, the disease ter are vying to make the eight-oared
caused by the virus, in March and April, boat for the Tokyo Games next summer,
during the initial swell of the virus in when the United States will try to win its
New Jersey, according to Dr. Peter fourth straight gold medal in that
Wenger, the team doctor for its training marquee event.
center in Princeton, N.J. “The narrative that has been going
At least 12 women had the virus, he around in some places is that you won’t
said, based on various test results of ath- get the virus if you’re young and strong,
letes and observations he had made of or if you get it, it won’t be bad, but we’re
rowers who were not tested but showed perfect examples of how that is totally
symptoms of infection. During that first not true,” Regan said. She added: “Look
wave of infections, testing wasn’t yet what the virus still did to us. It knocked
widely available. us down pretty hard.”
In late March, several days after New The rowers infected ranged in age
Jersey instituted a stay-at-home order from 23 to 37, Regan said, and many bat-
as the coronavirus began to ravage tled symptoms for weeks. The cases
parts of the state, Marc Nowak, the were categorized as mild, though some
team’s physical therapist, tested pos- athletes dealt with complications for as
itive for the virus after experiencing mi- many as 40 days, according to Wenger.
nor coldlike symptoms and promptly re- None of the rowers required hospitaliza-
porting them to U.S. Rowing. tion, he said.
In the previous two weeks, Nowak Regan, 32, said it took her a month to
said, he had come into direct contact feel back to normal after she fell ill. More
with “pretty much the whole team” of 33 than three months later, she is still try-
women during 30-minute physical ther- ing to get back into competitive shape,
apy sessions of hands-on stretching and she said. That level of fitness was ex-
muscle and joint manipulation. Out of tremely high: Regan is a four-time
caution — and fortunately for the team world champion in her ninth year on the
— Wenger used one of his office’s limited national team.
coronavirus tests to check on his col- “I’ve never struggled like that be-
leagues. fore,” she said.
One by one, starting four or five days Early in the year, before the spread of
after exposure, rowers began to show the virus was well known in the United
symptoms of infection. States, Regan and her teammates were-
“In that first wave of things happen- n’t worried about getting infected. They
ing, everything was really sketchy and were preoccupied with making the team
there weren’t really directives about for Tokyo and were anxious that the
wearing masks,” said Nowak, who has pandemic would affect the Games.
worked with the national team for 18 Many could not bear the idea of the
years. “We just didn’t have the informa- Olympics being postponed or canceled
tion we needed to take the right precau- and enduring another year of grueling
tions.” training. But their priorities changed in
Nowak said his wife, who is an operat- a matter of a few chaotic days.
ing room nurse, and two adult children By mid-March, the pandemic dis-
living with them also contracted the vi- rupted the team’s training routine as
delivered some alarming news.
The federation emailed each of them
to say that Nowak, their therapist, was
likely to be positive for Covid-19, and
that the rowers might have been ex-
posed to the coronavirus.
The athletes were told to quarantine
for 14 days and pay close attention to
how they were feeling and alert the host
families many of them were living with.
Mass testing stations were not widely
available, and Wenger, the team doctor,
was left to figure out which rowers
might have been infected by using con-
tact tracing and by closely monitoring
them for symptoms.
Five athletes reported varied symp-
toms the day Nowak tested positive, in-
cluding fatigue, headaches, coughing
and congestion, Wenger said.
Two athletes said they had lost their
sense of smell, so Wenger subsequently
asked other athletes to do what he called
“the bacon test” — to fry bacon and sniff
it. If they didn’t smell anything, it could
mean they were infected.
Kendall Chase, a rower from Ever-
green, Colo., smelled nothing when she
took a whiff of a jar of strongly scented
eucalyptus essential oils. Chase, 25, had
written off a sore throat as a cold be-
cause she didn’t have a fever or a cough.
But then she came down with a searing
headache that lasted for six days. She
described feeling congested, “like my
brain was being destroyed by my si-
nuses.”
For more than a week, Chase was
sidelined in her host family’s house,
barely able to even leave her bedroom.
She said she couldn’t remember the last
time she went eight days without work-
ing out. The team usually trains for four
to seven hours a day, including two or
three separate sessions.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY BENJAMIN NORMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES “One day I tried to go for a walk and I
Top, Emily Regan, an Olympic gold medalist, said it took her a month to feel back to made it maybe 30 seconds out the door
normal after a bout with Covid-19. Above, members of the U.S. rowing team practicing before turning around,” she said. “I just
on single sculls to facilitate social distancing, instead of in their eight-oared boat. couldn’t do it. The sun hurt my eyes so
much that I couldn’t take it.”
As Chase recovered, Regan was living
sports leagues widely canceled compe- rowers to each grab a rowing machine, in her condominium in Princeton and
titions and other operations. The rowers called an ergometer, and some weights thought she had avoided getting the vi-
had to move their team boats out of from their indoor training facility to rus. The day the Olympics were post-
Princeton University’s boathouse, at the bring home so they could train while poned, she felt short of breath while row-
university’s request, and onto trailers in gyms were closed. Three days later, the ing on the ergometer, but she blamed it
the adjacent parking lot. Games were postponed until 2021 and on the cold weather and her disappoint-
New Jersey’s stay-at-home order on their collective mood was as low as they ment about the Games.
March 21 then sparked a rush for the thought it could be — until U.S. Rowing It wasn’t until 12 days after the team
had been exposed that clear symptoms
hit her. First it was exhaustion and a
slight fever. Two days later, breathing
became painful and her entire body
hurt. Her fever rose to 101.7 degrees.
For two days, Regan was in agony, un-
able to move and struggling to breathe.
She felt a sense of panic: she was used to
training up to two hours straight and
now she couldn’t even walk 20 feet with-
out feeling like she would collapse.
Matt Imes, the director of high per-
formance at U.S. Rowing, said the ath-
letes have been encouraged to return to
training with the team whenever they
feel comfortable. They are rowing out of
a boathouse on Mercer Lake in West
Windsor, N.J., and no one on the team
has shown serious lingering effects
from the virus, Wenger said.
To return, the rowers must quaran-
tine for two weeks or quarantine for
three days and then test negative for the
virus for two consecutive days before
joining training sessions. They must
wear masks as soon as they step out of
their cars for practice, but they don’t
have to wear them while rowing. They
also fill out a questionnaire each day
about how they are feeling, so the doc-
tors and training staff can keep tabs on
their health.
At practices on Mercer Lake, they
train in single sculls because those one-
person boats allow for easy social dis-
tancing. During indoor workouts on er-
gometers, the machines are spaced 12
feet apart, unusually far and more than
the six feet of social distance recom-
mended by health officials.
Physical therapy sessions are now
limited to rowers working through inju-
ries, Nowak said, with no general ses-
sions geared toward maintaining peak
performance. And, of course, Nowak
and the rowers wear masks.
While so much has changed, the row-
ers know they must remain vigilant
about their well-being to avoid another
raft of infections cutting through the
team. Wenger often reminds them that
their Olympic success is at stake.
“I told them that the people that stay
uninfected and get four-to-five training
blocks in before Tokyo are the ones who
will walk away with the medals,”
Wenger said. “So that’s one big reason
for them to take precautions extremely
seriously, and they do.”

NON SEQUITUR PEANUTS DOONESBURY CLASSIC 1994

GARFIELD CALVIN AND HOBBES

SUDOKU No. 2807

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 Solution No. 2707 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

that every row,

column 3x3 box Fill the grids with digits so as not Across 33 Auto pound, for one 51 Fish with long jaws 13 14 15 16

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

column, and so that the digits
  1 Triumph of diplomacy 35 Totally dominate, in 53 Certain female baby
box contains
17 18
within each heavily outlined box   5 Not do much of slang on a farm
each of the
numbers will produce the target number anything 36 “Let me see …” 56 Response to 19 20 21

1 to 9 exactly shown, by using addition,   9 Norse trickster 37 The girl in the Disney “Objection!,” maybe

once. subtraction, multiplication or 13 Lunge toward song “Kiss the Girl” 60 Writing that can get 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

division, as indicated in the box. 15 1992 Brendan Fraser 38 So-called “twin you in trouble
A 4x4 grid will use the digits
29 30 31 32
For solving tips killings” in baseball, 61 Woolworth’s, once
1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6.
film about a thawed
and more puzzles: for short 62 Gal’s guy
www.nytimes.com/
Cro-Magnon 33 34 35 36
39 Celebrate wildly 63 Object of dirty looks?
sudoku
For solving tips and more KenKen 17 “The Tortoise and the
40 Some whiskeys
puzzles: www.nytimes.com/ Hare,” e.g. 64 Circle in the game 37 38 39

kenken. For Feedback: nytimes@

41 One who brushes off a hangman
18 Shorelines
kenken.com
plate, informally 40 41 42
65 Actor Rogen
19 Framework for vines
42 Clears one’s mind, Down
21 Twosome on TMZ with “up”
43 44 45

KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. 22 Muscleman of “The   1 [Fizzle]

Copyright © 2018 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved.
43 Wok, for one 46 47 48 49 50
A-Team”   2 Raise the ___
44 Bubble gum in 1906,
23 “___ and improved!”   3 Chat room pal
e.g. 51 52 53 54 55
25 It’s the place to be   4 Accounts of Paul
Answers to Previous Puzzles 46 Behind financially Bunyan, say 56 57 58 59 60
29 “___ of the tongue 48 ___ Speed Wagon (old   5 Tenant
leads to that of the truck)
  6 Ariana Grande’s “___ 61 62
heart”: Jefferson 49 Military installations: Last Time”
32 ___ Grande Abbr. 63 64 65
  7 Berry in a purple
Solution to July 27 Puzzle smoothie
PUZZLE BY ROSS TRUDEAU
  8 Section of a bookstore
S A R A S L I P S J O C K 28 Things most 39 Key piece in French 52 Liqueur flavor
A R A L H E N R I A V I A   9 Rich soils
interstates don’t have chess 54 One with pointy
Y O D A H I K I N G G E A R 10 Meditation syllables
A M I S S J A K E R O T 30 “OMG, I’m dying!” 41 Fabrication
11 Kit ___ bar shoes and ears
H A I K U P O E M M S N 31 Reactions to slugs 42 Put away for
A D O P T W I N D
12 Outs’ opposites 55 Meh-feeling
33 Wrist bones safekeeping
C P A D R E S S T I G E R 14 No. on a business card
34 Early Indo-European 44 Some building 56 Some drug cases, for
H I G H E N D H E I G H H O 16 On and on and on
A P R O N S T A G E T I P 36 It’s spun by beams short
20 Part of M.I.T.: Abbr.
P E E R E R A S E mendacious people 45 “Thanks, I ___
24 Burger King offering 57 Liveliness
E A T H E I D I K L U M that”
26 Like something that … or a hint to the
S P A M I E N N E A T O 58 Fast runner Down
H Y B R I D C A R S O N T O really shouldn’t have shaded answers 47 Source of beautiful
plumes Under
E L L E O H G E E U K E S happened 38 Org. staffed by sloths
D E E P S E E Y A T Y R E 27 Edmonton N.H.L.’er in “Zootopia” 50 Refine, as metal 59 Elizabethan ___

14 | TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020
Culture
Talking about the feelings that move the feet
In video diaries, dancers
share their work, pain
and deepest thoughts
BY BRIAN SEIBERT
Ayodele Casel is a top-shelf tap dancer,
as generous of spirit as she is precise in
technique. But years ago, she discov-
ered that even appreciative audiences
didn’t always grasp all that she was try-
ing to communicate with her feet.
“They would come up to me after
shows and say things like, ‘That was re-
ally good,’ ” she recalled in a phone con-
versation from her apartment in the
Bronx. And while she appreciated the
praise, she found it “a bit one-dimen-
sional.”
In response, she began explaining
herself — with words, speaking as part
of her tap performances.
“Tap dancers always talk about how
the dance moves us, but I also feel that
we move the dance,” she explained. “Our
upbringing and life experience inform
how we do what we do and why we do it.
I thought that if we gave people more
context, if we shared more of our hu-
manity, then they might see themselves
in us, and the dancing would be a bonus.”
“Diary of a Tap Dancer” is what she
called the 2005 show that emerged from
this idea and the five versions that have
followed. What’s most distinctive about
the sixth, besides its being a video se-
ries, is a widening of focus. This one has
many dancers, many diaries.
The past year has been a busy one for
Ms. Casel: a Radcliffe Fellowship at
Harvard, a triumphant show at the
Joyce Theater, performance and teach-
ing gigs all over. “Two weeks before the
pandemic was declared, I had been in
like five different cities on seven differ-
ent planes,” she said. “I just wanted to sit
down for a little, so when they said you
have to shelter in place, I was so grate-
ful.”
Stuck inside, she took stock. “Think-
ing back over the last 25 years of my life
as a tap dancer, I felt so fulfilled,” she
said. “I realized that what I really want
to do is amplify other voices in my com-
munity.”
So a few weeks back, when New York
City Center asked her if she had a project
she wanted to work on, she had an an-
swer. Each Tuesday through Aug. 25, a
new installment of “Diary of a Tap Danc-
er, v. 6: Us” will debut on the City Center
website. (The videos will remain up in-
definitely.) And while last week’s entry
featured Ms. Casel — in verbal and tap
conversation with the young Andre
Imanishi in Japan — the rest make room
for those other voices.
The videos, directed by Ms. Casel and
her wife, Torya Beard, are short, around
five minutes, a mix of tap and talk,
photo-album montages, old footage and
new. It’s all been edited, but “we’re not
going to pretend we’re in a dance studio
or on a movie set,” Ms. Casel said.
“These are video diaries about where we
are now.” Some address Covid-19; others
express how tap has been misunder-
stood or dip into long-overdue conversa-
tions about tap and race.
In the series opener, the voluble and
always swinging 60-year-old veteran
Ted Levy compares the way the pan-
demic has caused people to reassess
their lives with the kind of self-searching
that tap dancers do while practicing, or
woodshedding.
“The whole corona thing was nature’s
way of stopping everybody,” he says.
“The whole world gets to do what we do
on a regular basis: We got to go in the
shed” and figure things out.
His name is Joseph Boulogne, not ‘Black Mozart’
An 18th-century polymath
whose vivid music and life
are blurred by a nickname
BY MARCOS BALTER
Last month, Searchlight Pictures an-
nounced plans for a movie about Joseph
Boulogne, the 18th-century composer
also known as Chevalier de Saint-
Georges.
When the announcement was made,
headlines resurrected yet another moni-
ker for Boulogne: “Black Mozart.” Pre-
sumably intended as a compliment, this
erasure of Boulogne’s name not only
subjugates him to an arbitrary white
standard, but also diminishes his truly
unique place in Western classical music
history.
Few musicians have led a life as fasci-
nating and multifaceted as Boulogne’s.
Recounting it, however, is an exercise in
educated guesswork. What is known is
scantily and contradictorily docu-
mented, when not purely anecdotal. To
make matters worse, a 19th-century
novel by Roger de Beauvoir, “Le Cheva-
lier de Saint-Georges,” intertwined fact
and fiction so seamlessly that many of
its fabrications gradually found a place
in Boulogne’s assumed biography.
What we know is that Boulogne, the
illegitimate son of a wealthy French
plantation owner and an enslaved Afri-
can-Guadeloupean woman, was born
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“Tap dancers are more than just
rhythms,” he said in an interview last
week. “We’re more than a smile and a
song, but you have to set up a context in
which the dance can be understood.”
Ms. Casel calls Mr. Levy “an encyclo-
pedia of the art,” and he calls her “the
Oprah Winfrey of tap.” Recounting
Zoom calls among the project partici-
pants, he marveled at how easily she
gets people to open up emotionally.
“I’ve found that dancers don’t take
stock of their feelings with any kind of
frequency,” she said. Tap is a form of
emotional expression and an outlet, but
“you also really need to say it out loud.”
For many of the contributors, doing so
between 1739 and 1749 on the island of
Basse-Terre, the western half of the ar-
chipelago of Guadeloupe. When he was
about 10, he and his mother followed his
father and the rest of the man’s legiti-
mate family back to France, where
Boulogne was enrolled in elite schools
and received private lessons in music
and fencing.
His first claim to fame, in fact, was as
a champion fencer, the best-known dis-
ciple of the renowned master La Boës-
sière. A painting depicting a match be-
tween Boulogne and the Chevalier
d’Éon remains on display at Bucking-
ham Palace.
Boulogne’s extraordinary fencing tal-
ent led Louis XV to name him Chevalier
de Saint-Georges, after his father’s no-
ble title, even though France’s Code Noir
prohibited Boulogne from officially in-
heriting the title because of his African
ancestry. He earned a nearly mythical
status even across the Atlantic: John
Adams described him as “the most ac-
complished man in Europe in riding,
shooting, fencing, dancing and music.”
Very little is known about Boulogne’s
musical training. But when François-Jo-
seph Gossec, one of France’s pioneering
symphony writers and most prominent
conductors, founded the Concert des
Amateurs series in 1769, he invited
Boulogne to join its orchestra, first as a
violinist and later as its concertmaster.
Boulogne’s first documented compo-
sitions are from 1770 and 1771. While
these are clearly works by a composer
in public is new, and scary. The video di-
ary of Starinah Dixon addresses this
newness directly. “All of my choreo-
graphic work has been related to happi-
ness or paying homage to the fore-
fathers of this art form or about social
justice,” she said from her home in Chi-
cago. “This seems a time to let people
know about myself as a person.”
Growing up amid “turmoil and chaos
in one of the worst neighborhoods of
Chicago,” she said, she took after her
mother, a “ ‘remain calm through the
storm’ type of person.” Now she wants
to be more honest about her doubts and
pain. “During quarantine, I’ve had a lot
of time to think,” she said. “For so much
still searching for his voice, they demon-
strate his commitment to the new and
unexplored. The six string quartets of
his Opus 1 were among the first in that
genre to be written in France. His three
sonatas for keyboard and violin (Op. 1a)
feature those instruments as equals,
breaking away from the Baroque tradi-
tion of basso continuo, which was still
very much in vogue. His harmonies, tex-
tures and formal schemes place him
within a Classical style that was still in
the process of forming.
His first public and critical success as
a composer came with his two violin
concertos (Op. 2), which premiered in
1772 at the Concert des Amateurs series,
featuring Boulogne himself as soloist.
The level of craft and sophistication in
these pieces far surpass his efforts of the
previous two years. The particularly
beautiful Largo movement of the second
concerto already features many trade-
marks of his later style, including a pen-
chant for whimsical colors that run the
range of instruments and an under-
standing of how to balance orchestral
forces with clarity.
When Gossec was invited to direct the
Concert Spirituel series in 1773, he
named his concertmaster as his succes-
sor. Under Boulogne’s direction, the
Concert des Amateurs orchestra be-
came widely regarded as the best in
France, if not all of Europe. His raised
profile as a conductor led to an invitation
in 1775 to apply for the directorship of
the Académie Royal de Musique, the
of my life, I’ve done what everybody
else wanted me to do. But I’m about to
be 33, and it’s time for me to speak my
truth.”
That truth doesn’t exclude the politi-
cal. “For so much of the world, the face of
tap is still white,” she said. “For a long
time, when I told people I was a tap
dancer, they would say, ‘I didn’t know
that Black people did that.’ Well, tap is
for everybody, but it is also Black.”
Other diarist-dancers take the politi-
cal angle more directly. “My entry is
about identity, about history, about rac-
ism,” Ryan Johnson said. “It’s not an at-
tack on whiteness. It’s about me finally
being in a space where I can say what
BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
An engraving of Joseph Boulogne, also
known as Chevalier de Saint-Georges.
country’s most prominent musical posi-
tion. His candidacy, however, was
crushed by a petition to Marie Antoi-
nette from a group of performers who
objected to “accepting orders from a
mulatto.”
Also in 1775, he wrote two symphonies
concertantes for two violins and orches-
tra (Op. 6), his initial contribution to a
genre he and other French composers of
the time helped define. A hybrid of the
Baroque concerto grosso and the Classi-
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
MARIDELIS MORALES ROSADO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
I’ve been feeling.”
Actually, Mr. Johnson has been speak-
ing his mind for years. His Washington
company, Sole Defined, presents “per-
cussicals,” shows that use African-
American percussive dance to address
social injustice in Black communities,
and its extensive arts education pro-
gram is centered in using art for change.
Still, “Diary of a Tap Dancer” seems
different to him in its potential reach.
“You mean I can actually talk about
something real on the City Center plat-
form, and it can’t be censored?” he re-
called asking Ms. Casel.
A lot of the something real has to do
with race. “It’s important to say that tap
cal concerto, a symphonie concertante
usually featured two or more soloists in
a virtuosic dialogue that emulated a mu-
sical duel. Boulogne wrote eight such
pieces between 1775 and 1778, a testa-
ment to the demand for them among
French audiences.
In 1778, Mozart traveled to Paris, stay-
ing from March to September and
briefly under the same roof as Boulogne,
hosted by Count Sickingen. It is implau-
sible, to say the least, that Mozart did
not hear Boulogne’s music during this
period. Intriguingly, Mozart’s first com-
position after his return to Austria was
his Symphonie Concertante in E-flat (K.
364). And in an article published in 1990
in the Black Music Research Journal,
Gabriel Banat points to the remarkable
similarities between an excerpt from
Boulogne’s Violin Concerto (Op. 7, No.
1), from 1777, and a passage from Mo-
zart’s K. 364, from the following year.
The gesture in question recurs in
Boulogne’s solo string writing — a diffi-
cult sequence climbing to the highest
register of the instrument, immediately
followed by a dramatic dip — but had
never appeared in Mozart’s work until
this Presto.
When lack of funding forced the Con-
cert des Amateurs to end in 1781,
Boulogne and his musicians found a
home with the newly formed Concert de
la Loge Olympique, which quickly
gained a reputation as the best orches-
tra in Europe. It was under this umbrella
that Boulogne conducted the premiere
..
Ayodele Casel, left, dancing in the back-
yard of her home in New York. She and
her wife, Torya Beard, directed “Diary of
a Tap Dancer, v. 6: Us,” which includes an
interview with the artist Ted Levy, above.
dance was created by Black people,” he
said, “but we don’t like to have that con-
versation because it’s connected to slav-
ery.”
And the issues, of course, aren’t only
historical. Touring with “Stomp” and
Cirque du Soleil, Mr. Johnson said, he’s
appeared on major stages across the
world. “But when I get offstage, I go
right back to being a Black man,” he
said. “And that means people looking at
me like I don’t belong in the hotels that
we’re staying in. The people who want a
picture or autograph are the same peo-
ple that, if they saw me walking down
the street, would pull their children
closer or grab their bag.”
“There’s so much pain, and that’s why
we dance,” he continued. “For me, it’s a
spiritual thing. Half the time my eyes
aren’t even open. Some of my best
shows come when I’m upset. Like when
I think about six or seven years ago,
when I got beat up by two cops in my
mom’s driveway and I called her name
and nothing could happen. That was
what initiated me to use my art for re-
form.”
The video diary of Lisa La Touche
tells a more recent story. In 2006, she
moved with two suitcases to Chicago
from Calgary, and for the past 12 years,
she has lived the dream in New York, in-
cluding a stint on Broadway in “Shuffle
Along.” But in March, she found herself
with three suitcases and her toddler son
on a plane back to Calgary, fleeing the
virus.
The move was supposed to be tempo-
rary. But as she recovered from Covid-
like symptoms in her mother’s base-
ment and found a place in Calgary for
herself and her son, she gradually sur-
rendered to a gut feeling: She wasn’t go-
ing to return to New York.
And who helped pack up her New
York apartment and put her belongings
on a truck to Canada? Who helped un-
load the truck on the other end and build
her a wooden board to dance on? Tap
dancers did.
“I’m mixed-race,” Ms. La Touche said.
“It’s complicated in my family right now,
and I’m careful about what I sign up for
because I’m so fragile. But making this
diary has helped me keep my sanity,
processing what I’m experiencing while
having a pair of tap shoes. Those who
haven’t been heard from need to be
heard.”
of Haydn’s six Paris symphonies,
among many other important commis-
sions.
Discouraged by his persistent lack of
success in opera, by dwindling patron-
age because of changes on the political
scene, and by his increased activism in
the French Revolution as an enlisted of-
ficer, Boulogne sharply reduced his mu-
sical activities toward the end of his life.
He died in 1799, not a penniless man, but
certainly a far less relevant and valued
figure in French society than he had
been a couple of decades earlier.
Nevertheless, his influence in France
and abroad, both as a curator and a cre-
ator, was felt long after his death. It is a
remarkable fact that his music has sur-
vived two centuries of neglect caused by
the systemic racism that permeates the
notion of a Western canon. Neither his
omission from music-history textbooks
— of the two most used in America, he
gets a brief, vague mention in one and is
absent from the other — nor a lack of ad-
vocacy from programmers, publishing
houses and record labels has erased him
completely.
This is the ultimate proof that
Boulogne doesn’t need to be anyone’s
second best — let alone anyone’s Black
echo. So, yes, I cannot wait to see the
movie. But spare me the awful nick-
name.
Marcos Balter is a composer and profes-
sor of music composition at the Univer-
sity of California, San Diego.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020 | 15

culture

Epic poetry through 21st-century eyes

New translations challenge
modern ideas about tales
that shaped our norms
BY TALYA ZAX

The “Aeneid,” Virgil’s epic about the

founding of Rome by the Trojan refugee
Aeneas, is so influential that T. S. Eliot
once described it as “the classic of all
Europe.”
Shadi Bartsch, a classics scholar at
the University of Chicago, thinks that for
the past 2,000 years, we’ve been reading
it wrong.
Before Virgil wrote the “Aeneid,”
Bartsch said, Aeneas was considered a
traitor who helped the Greeks take Troy.
In recasting him as a hero, Virgil
changed our understanding of Rome’s
history. What readers have historically
missed, according to Bartsch, the au-
thor of a new translation of the “Aeneid”
(Random House) coming out in October,
is that Virgil’s depiction was self-con-
sciously political, designed to frame
Rome’s expanding empire as just, virtu-
ous and divinely mandated.
“He’s writing an epic that points to it-
self and says, ‘Hey, look, I’m in the
process of creating a national myth,’ ”
she said. Looked at closely, the “Aeneid”
is really a story “about how you rewrite
a character into history, turning him
from someone who was criticized into
someone who is praised.”
Bartsch’s translation is one of several
new books, including Maria Dahvana
Headley’s translation of “Beowulf” and
Catherine Nicholson’s “Reading and BRITISH LIBRARY

Not Reading ‘The Faerie Queene,’ ” to
re-evaluate the lessons of epic poetry, a
genre consisting of book-length narra-
tive poems that tend, in the words of the
poet and critic Edward Hirsch, to be “ex-
alted in style, heroic in theme.”
In addition to providing the underpin-
nings for world literature, epic poetry
has for much of history been used to de-
fine social values and shape nations’ po-
litical identities. The new books explore
subjects ranging from Apollonius
Rhodius’s “Argonautica,” a Greek epic
from 300 B.C. that predates the “Aeneid”
by three centuries, to Edmund
Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene,” pub-
lished in England at the end of the 16th
century. The books, arriving in the polit-
ically turbulent landscape of 2020, sug-
gest that it’s time to take a hard second
look at these tales, which have for so
long shaped the West’s understanding
of the world.
Those second looks have turned up
several shared themes. One is a new
skepticism regarding the relationship
that has developed between the epic and
prevailing ideas about male heroism. “A
lot of toxic masculinity has been shaped
by imperfect understandings of epic po-
etry,” said Headley, whose “Beowulf”
translation is due in August from Farrar,
Straus & Giroux.
That result, she and Bartsch agree, is
a consequence of choices made in read-
ing, not the substance of the epics them-
selves. Bartsch pointed to the story of
Aeneas’s love affair with the Carthagin-
ian queen Dido, whose suicide male
scholars have historically framed as the
act of a woman who has “deluded herself
out of passion.” But her suicide isn’t just
a matter of a broken heart, Bartsch said;
it’s a response to a position of unexpect-
ed political weakness.
“To whom do you / abandon me — to
what sort of death?” Dido accuses Aene-
as. “Should I await Pygmalion, my
brother, who’ll raze my city? Iärbas,
who’ll enslave me?”
“I think we have the idea, as readers,
‘I’m looking for the superheroes, and the
superheroes are going to be presented
as simplistically good guys,’ ” said Emily
Wilson, whose 2017 translation of the
“Odyssey,” the first by a woman in Eng-
lish, helped set off the current trend of
re-evaluation, which has been led large-
ly by women. In addition to Wilson’s,
Headley’s and Bartsch’s translations,
novels like Pat Barker’s “The Silence of
the Girls,” Madeline Miller’s “Circe” and
Headley’s own “The Mere Wife,” all pub-
lished in 2018, have attempted to re-en-
vision the stories of epics — the “Iliad,”
the “Odyssey” and “Beowulf,” respec-
tively — through the eyes of secondary
female characters.
But the new focus on women’s voices
isn’t just about a wish for greater equity
in the epic. It reflects a sense of urgency
about restoring nuance to the public’s
understanding of the genre. As political
crises have, in the West, posed fresh
challenges to the stories that have
shaped our norms and principles, those
who study epics see critical readings as
an increasingly vital endeavor.
“Epic poetry has shaped the way that
we perceive our universe. We’ve used
these epics to justify ourselves,” Head-
ley said. “Now is the moment to open the
doors.”
Why now? Nicholson’s “Reading and
Not Reading ‘The Faerie Queene’ ”
(Princeton University Press), published
in May, notes that the word “crisis” was
initially a medical term referring to “the
decisive juncture in the course of a dis-
ease, after which a patient either dies or
begins to recover.” Spenser wrote “The
Faerie Queene” in the 16th century “out
of a protracted sense of crisis,” Nich-
“We’ve used these epics
to justify ourselves.
Now is the moment to
open the doors.”
olson said. As she began work on her
book in the 21st century, she found her-
self “thinking about what it would mean
to read in crisis.”
Now, reflecting on the fraught period
between her book’s conception and its
publication, she said, “One of the things
I’ve realized about the experience of cri-
sis is it makes us prone to allegorize ev-
erything. Part of the experience of read-
ing at a moment when you feel the world
is changing into something you no long-
er recognize is the impulse to look to lit-
erature and say, ‘Aah, it’s like this.’ ”
LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART
In many ways, the history of epic po-
etry is the history of political change —
and, yes, often crisis. Dante Alighieri —
the subject of John Took’s coming “Why
Dante Matters” (Bloomsbury) and Guy
P. Raffa’s “Dante’s Bones: How a Poet
Invented Italy” (Belknap Press) —
produced “The Divine Comedy” while
his city, Florence, was being torn apart
by a battle between the Guelphs, whose
political lodestar was the pope, and the
Ghibellines, who looked to the Holy Ro-
man Emperor.
Spenser wrote “The Faerie Queene”
while working as a high-level British co-
lonial administrator in Ireland, imple-
menting brutal tactics of oppression.
Virgil wrote the “Aeneid” in the first
years of the Roman Empire, as Au-
gustus attempted to reshape his image
from that of a ruthless autocrat to that of
a beneficent leader. Homer composed
the “Odyssey” in Athens around the end
of the 8th century B.C., some 100 years
before the city-state developed the first
form of democracy.
By “grappling with questions about
the relationship of individual to commu-
nity,” Wilson said, Homer anticipated
that shift.
Perhaps because epic poems have so
often originated in times of political up-
Left, a 17th-century depiction of Dido and Aeneas, who could be viewed as a traitor
rather than a hero. Above, the circa-1000 manuscript that contains the original “Beo-
wulf.” Below, “The Faerie Queene,” published at the end of the 16th century.
BRITISH LIBRARY
heaval, the lessons readers have taken
from them have changed over the dec-
ades and centuries. The history of the
“Aeneid,” Bartsch said, shows how great
the range of interpretations can be:
Early Christian medievalists “chose to
read the poem allegorically as a bild-
ungsroman of the good Christian every-
man”; Mussolini upheld it “as support-
ive of the resurgence of the Roman Em-
pire”; and certain 19th-century Ameri-
cans saw it as a poem about “refugees
who head westward to found a new na-
tion, defeat the natives in war, take over
that land and call it God’s will.”
Those interpretations aren’t neces-
sarily mistaken, Bartsch said; they’re
an understandable result of “people
thinking their reading supports their set
of enduring values.”
But what most unites this new set of
books is that they seek, by embracing
the neglected complexity of their source
texts, to challenge existing values, not
affirm them. As Tom Phillips, the author
of “Untimely Epic: Apollonius Rhodius’
‘Argonautica’ ” (Oxford University
Press), put it: “You can’t simply act as
Homeric heroes did.”
Headley gave an example. Readers of
“Beowulf,” she said, often “have this un-
derstanding that we are essentially on
the side of the human characters.” But
the monsters the humans battle are “de-
scribed as canny and brave and intelli-
gent,” and given persuasive emotional
back stories. “Beowulf,” seen from their
perspective, is a story about the human
instinct to “create a situation in which
your neighbor is the monster.” The ac-
cepted value may be that humans are
the heroes; the monsters, for their own
good reasons, have a different idea.
“The Faerie Queene” concludes with
a sequence known as “The Mutability
Cantos,” which first appeared in editions
issued a decade after Spenser’s death.
Tacked on to the poem’s original six
books — out of the 12 Spenser planned —
it’s a conclusion of startling ambiguity.
“Not only does it fail to provide us with a
unified world vision, one of the things
epic is meant to provide, but it ends by
reflecting on its own failure to do that,”
Nicholson said. It concludes “with a
prayer for a moment when things would
be clear, and resolve.”
That moment never came. But the
point of the epic might have been some-
what different from what Spenser imag-
ined: not to provide a cohesive vision for
society, but rather an opportunity for
each generation of readers to imagine,
anew, what that vision ought to be.
“The voice of the people is always go-
ing to change,” Wilson said, “because
the people change.”
Talya Zax is the deputy culture editor of
The Forward.

An even temper in stormy times

BOOK REVIEW
Intimations: Six Essays
By Zadie Smith. 97 pp. Penguin Books.
$10.95.
BY JOHN WILLIAMS
Wunderkinds, even those who deserv-
edly stick around a long time, don’t
seem to age normally. Zadie Smith’s
presence will always carry a signifi-
cant memory of the 24-year-old who
published “White Teeth” to interna-
tional acclaim. But, being subject to the
space-time continuum, Smith is in her
mid-40s now, and has the temperament
and perspective of someone who could
be (a compliment, in this case) 105.
It’s never a boom time for wisdom —
almost by definition; if it were more
common, it wouldn’t be valued so
highly — but this is an especially arid
era for it. We’re in the Age of Certainty,
at least in the bellowing of its various
constituents. And maybe that’s fine;
maybe some times are just for fighting
ideological fire with ideological fire.
But “polemic” is too generous a word
for the dominant cultural tone.
All of which makes Smith feel espe-
cially out of time. In the brief foreword
to her first book of essays, “Changing
My Mind,” she wrote: “Ideological
inconsistency is, for me, practically an
article of faith.” That faith doesn’t seem
to have wavered in the 10 years since
that book was published. “Intimations,”
her slender new collection (less than
100 pages) of ultra-timely essays (sev-
eral written in the past few momentous
months), showcases her trademark
levelheadedness.
This cast of mind doesn’t mean that
Smith avoids moral stances. In “Inti-
mations,” she speaks clearly and force-
fully about the murder of George Floyd
and the legacy of slavery and the
systemic sins revealed by Covid-19.
“The virus map of the New York bor-
oughs turns redder along precisely the
same lines as it would if the relative
shade of crimson counted not infection
and death but income brackets and
middle-school ratings,” she writes.
“Death comes to all — but in America
it has long been considered reasonable
to offer the best chance of delay to the
highest bidder.”
At her most withering, on the sub-
ject of race, she writes about the many,
“even in the bluest states in America,”
who “are very happy to ‘blackout’ their
social media for a day, to read all-Black
books and ‘educate’ themselves about
Black issues — as long as this educa-
tion does not occur in the form of actu-
al Black children attending their actual
schools.”
But despite these jabs, Smith re-
mains unmistakably noncombative.
This spirit appears born not of a fear of
confrontation but a genuine perplexity
(of a searching, brilliant kind) at the
nature of experience and people, in-
cluding herself. She says that the art of
writing, though it’s often advertised as
“creative,” is really about “control.”
“The part of the university in which I
teach,” she says, “should properly be
and the COVID-19 Emergency Relief
Fund for New York.)
Smith herself left New York early on
in the pandemic’s course, and she
expresses guilt about this without
over-performing it. She bemoans,
when thinking about the apocalypse or
anything even approaching it, her lack
of a survival instinct. “A book like ‘The
Road’ is as incomprehensible to me as
a Norse myth cycle in the original
language,” she writes. “Suicide would
hold out its quiet hand to me on the
first day — the first hour.”
In an essay called “Suffering Like
Mel Gibson” (its title is a play on a
popular meme), she writes provoca-
tively of Christ on the cross, looking at
those crucified beside him and wonder-
ing “whether his agonies, when all was
said and done, were relatively speak-
GABRIELA HERMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES ing in fact better than those of the
Zadie Smith, shown here in 2016, is trying to make sense of our lives today. thieves and beggars to his left and
right whose sufferings long predated
their present crucifixions and who had
called the Controlling Experience sions and who asks where her hair no hope (unlike Christ) of an improved
Department.” “comes from.” (“Jamaica and England post-cross situation.” This thought
As a writer and reader, what she — via Africa,” she tells him. Ben re- comes in a passage addressing the
finds — in a phrase perfectly suited to plies: “Ho ho ho! Interesting mix!”) As word of this century so far, “privilege,”
her sensibility — is “a wide repertoire the essay closes, Smith watches Ben which she does with her usual many-
of possible attitudes.” But out in the from afar, the optimistic face she’s used sidedness: She notes her own advan-
world, living eludes control; it’s “mys- to seeing changed into “a stern portrait tages; parses the stubbornness of
tifying, overwhelming, conscious, of calculation and concern,” worried, inequality; and outlines the explana-
subconscious,” and “it just keeps com- Smith assumes, about the constant tory (and experiential) limitations of
ing at you.” heavy traffic needed for the place to privilege, including its ultimate inabili-
Smith’s gifts as a novelist animate pay the rent. ty to shield anyone from suffering,
her essays. Writing about the neigh- Anxiety lurks through these few sometimes to the point of suicide. In
borhood nail place where she regularly pages. This is a work of minor dimen- Zadie Smith’s universe — meaning, for
goes for stress relief, we get a portrait sions at — and about — a major time. my money, the one we’re all living in —
of her masseur, Ben, who teases her (Royalties from the book will go to two complexity is king.
for always reading during their ses- charities, the Equal Justice Initiative She sympathizes with the genera-
tions coming up behind her, born into a
beleaguered century and now living
through the current crises with wor-
ried eyes on a deeply tenuous future.
In one of the finest lines in “Inti-
mations,” Smith writes: “The infinite
promise of American youth — a prom-
ise elaborately articulated by movies
and advertisements and university
prospectuses — has been an empty lie
for so long that I notice my students
joking about it with a black humor
more appropriate to old men, to the
veterans of wars.”
It might be engrossing to hear Smith
in conversation with those she now
teaches, to see where their ideas over-
lap and diverge. Toward the end of the
book, she writes elliptically of identity
as an “area of interest.” Elsewhere she
argues for solidarity among “the
plague class — that is, all economically
exploited people, whatever their race.”
Interested in what she once called
“coalition across difference,” Smith has
some opinions that she defines as
commonplace but that she must know
are now hotly debated.
She resists, for instance, the idea of
“hate crime” as a desirable distinction,
calling it “an elevation of importance in
what strikes me as the wrong direc-
tion,” lending an undeserved power to
the bigotry that inspires the term.
“The hatred of a group qua group is,
after all, the most debased and ir-
rational of hatreds, the weakest, the
most banal,” she writes. “It shouldn’t
radiate a special aura, lifting it into a
separate epistemological category. For
this is exactly what the killer believes.”

16 | TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020
living
A veggie burger unlike the others
Black beans crowned
by an egg on top is enough
to satisfy even carnivores
BY DAVID TANIS
A friend asked me what I was planning
for my July column. “Black bean bur-
gers,” said I.
“Really, why?” was the clearly unen-
thusiastic response.
Well, for one thing, I like beans. I love
beans, in fact. And lately I have had veg-
etarian burgers on the brain.
Perhaps it has something to do with
sitting outdoors on a recent warm sum-
mer evening, as lighter fluid perfumed
the neighborhood, followed by the acrid
smoky aroma of beef fat dripping on
glowing charcoal briquettes. It didn’t
make me crave red meat.
Though I do appreciate the occasional
burger with a big pile of fries and an ice-
cold beer, my dinners at home have been
largely vegetarian of late.
CHOPPED CUCUMBER AND
TOMATO SALAD
TIME: 40 MINUTES
YIELD: 6 SERVINGS
1 cup diced red onion
2 garlic cloves, smashed to a paste
with a little salt
3 tablespoons red wine vinegar
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
2 roasted peppers, preferably
orange or yellow, chopped
3 cups halved cherry tomatoes
3 cups chopped thin-skinned
cucumber, such as Persian, skin
on, in ½-inch cubes
½ cup chopped celery hearts, plus
leaves
Kosher salt and black pepper
3 tablespoons roughly chopped
flat-leaf parsley
4 ounces feta or queso fresco,
crumbled (about 1 cup)
STRAWBERRY-COCONUT
ICE CREAM CAKE
TIME: 30 MINUTES, PLUS FREEZING
YIELD: 8 TO 10 SERVINGS
2 quarts/about 1 kilogram
strawberries, preferably small,
pretty ones
¾ cup/150 grams granulated sugar,
plus 3 tablespoons for sauce
1 cup/240 milliliters coconut milk
½ teaspoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon vodka
1 cup/240 milliliters heavy cream
1 cup/85 grams toasted coconut
flakes, for garnish (see Note)
Basil or mint leaves, for garnish
1. Briefly rinse berries with cold water,
then lay them out on a clean tea towel.
Hull berries, except for a dozen or so
pretty ones. Set those aside for garnish.
2. Put 1 pound hulled berries in a blender
or food processor. Reserve the rest for
sauce and garnish. Add ¾ cup sugar,
coconut milk, salt and vodka. Blend until
smooth. You should have about 4 cups.
3. In a chilled bowl, whip heavy cream
until stiff. With a rubber spatula, gradually
fold strawberry purée into whipped cream,
½ cup at a time, until well incorporated.
It’s OK if a few swirls remain.
4. Pour into an 8-inch springform pan
about 3 inches deep or into a similar-size
Pyrex pie pan or ceramic dish. Freeze for 4
to 6 hours, until quite firm. (Test with a
UPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws
But I wasn’t after the handcrafted
veggie burger you’ve seen in food maga-
zines, photographed to look not just like
a burger, but the best-looking burger
you’ve ever seen. Big, beautiful, boda-
cious and juicy — the classic here’s-a-
gorgeous-burger-that-even-carnivores-
would-like.
That kind of patty has heft and color
and nuts and grains, grated carrots and
beets, designed to have a meatlike
“mouthfeel.” You could get anyone to eat
it without much coaxing.
I envisioned a homely black bean bur-
ger that wasn’t like that at all. I wanted it
to taste like really good Mexican refried
beans.
I planned to emphasize, not disguise,
the black beans in the mixture, and I def-
initely did not want to add bread crumbs
or filler to make it firm. I wanted it to be
highly seasoned, with cumin, cilantro,
scallions, green chile and pimentón. I
didn’t care if it could be grilled. Of course
I didn’t want it mushy, either, but cooked
beans by their very nature are not
meant to be chewy.
1. Put onion, garlic, vinegar and olive oil in
a large mixing bowl. Let macerate for 10
minutes.
2. Add roasted peppers, cherry tomatoes,
cucumbers and celery. Season to taste
with salt and pepper, and toss well. Let
macerate for at least 20 minutes, tossing
several times with the dressing. You can
also prepare the ingredients in advance,
and assemble the salad up to 1 hour
before serving.
3. To serve, toss once more and transfer
to a deep platter or wide bowl. Sprinkle
with parsley and feta.
skewer or paring knife, going all the way to
the bottom of the pan. It should come out
clean.)
5. Make the strawberry sauce: Put
remaining berries in a blender with 3
tablespoons sugar. Purée and transfer to a
pitcher or serving bowl. Cover and
refrigerate.
6. If using springform pan, unmold frozen
cake and transfer to a cake plate. (Serve
directly from glass or ceramic pan.)
For body, I added cooked brown rice,
which seemed a compatible choice. I
hand-mashed the mixture for maximum
texture. To bind, I used cornstarch and
egg. Then I dusted the patties on both
sides with fine cornmeal and pan-fried
them.
To me, this was an extremely deli-
cious burger — tender, with a pleasantly
crisp exterior. It occurred to me that a
fried egg on top would be a nice addition.
In France, when a beef burger is topped
with an egg, it’s called à cheval (on
horseback), so the idea isn’t without
precedent.
Well, when those two got together in a
toasted bun, they made a heavenly com-
bination. It was like a great fried egg
sandwich and the best black-bean patty,
both on the same bill. So I wrote the reci-
pe that way.
There would be Mexican-style jal-
apeño pickles on the side. A big chopped
salad, too. And for dessert, strawberry-
coconut ice cream made into a cake.
Here was a fine vegetarian picnic for
staying at home, inside or out.
Sprinkle with toasted coconut flakes, and
garnish with reserved berries dipped in a
little of the sauce, and basil or mint leaves.
Keep at room temperature for 10 to 15
minutes before serving. To serve, cut into
wedges and drizzle with strawberry sauce.
Note: To make toasted coconut flakes,
simmer ¼ cup water with 4 teaspoons
granulated sugar to dissolve. Add 1 cup
unsweetened coconut flakes and mix to
coat. Spread on a parchment-lined baking
BLACK BEAN BURGER
WITH AN EGG ON TOP
This is a vegetarian burger that does not
mimic the texture or look of ground
meat, but it isn’t meant to. It’s more like
deluxe refried beans. Though you can
serve this well-seasoned patty like a tra-
ditional burger, on a bun with the usual
condiments, it is at its best topped with a
fried egg. Dusted with fine cornmeal,
the burgers are pan-fried as the mixture
is too soft to grill. They may be seared in
advance and reheated in the oven until
crisp.
JALAPEÑO PICKLES
These medium-spicy pickles, versions
of which can be found throughout Mex-
ico and Central America, make a perfect
garnish for burgers, tacos or sand-
wiches, or they may be served with
drinks. They are often made only with
jalapeños, plus a little onion and carrot.
Jalapeños vary in heat: Some are very
spicy, some not. If you wish to make the
pickles spicier, add a few serrano chiles,
split lengthwise.
sheet, and bake at 325 degrees until
golden, about 10 to 15 minutes. Check
frequently, and stir once or twice for even
browning. Cool before using.
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
CHOPPED CUCUMBER
AND TOMATO SALAD
Here’s an easy summer salad that’s al-
ways a winner. There are many similar
chopped salads served throughout the
Eastern Mediterranean, but this ver-
sion with halved sweet cherry tomatoes
is especially attractive. Your own take
can be a variation: Use large tomatoes,
chop the vegetables as small or large as
you like (roughly chopped has its
charms), add other herbs like basil, mint
or dill, or swap the feta for mozzarella.
STRAWBERRY-COCONUT
ICE CREAM CAKE
This is an impressive dessert to serve,
showered with toasted coconut and
adorned with berries. Use sweet, ripe
summer berries from a farm stand for
the best flavor — they should really
smell like strawberries. Whipped
cream, coconut milk and a touch of
vodka help keep the mixture from form-
ing ice crystals. It should ideally be
served within 24 hours for the best tex-
ture.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREW SCRIVANI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
BLACK BEAN BURGER WITH AN
EGG ON TOP
TIME: 1 HOUR
YIELD: 6 SERVINGS
2 (15-ounce) cans black beans, or 4
cups cooked black beans, on the
firm side
1 cup cooked brown rice, cooled
1 cup chopped cilantro, leaves and
tender stems, plus sprigs for
garnish
1 serrano chile, finely chopped
1 cup chopped scallions, both white
and green parts
½ teaspoon chipotle chile powder or
pimentón picante
2 teaspoons cumin seeds, toasted
and ground, or 1½ teaspoons
ground cumin
Pinch of ground cayenne
Salt
1 large egg, beaten
2 tablespoons cornstarch dissolved
in 1 tablespoon cold water
Neutral oil, such as grapeseed or
safflower, for frying
Fine cornmeal, for coating patties
1 sunny-side up egg per person
(optional, but recommended)
Toasted buns, lettuce leaves and
condiments (optional)
1. Put beans in a colander set over a bowl
and drain well. (Reserve juices for another
purpose or discard.) Pat the beans dry
with paper towels, then mash them a bit
with a wooden spoon or potato masher,
but leave them chunky.
2. Transfer beans to a large bowl with the
rice and toss together. Add chopped
cilantro, serrano chile, scallions, chipotle
powder, cumin and pinch of cayenne, to
taste. Season generously with salt and mix
well to incorporate.
3. Add the egg to the cornstarch solution
and beat together, then drizzle it all over
the bean mixture and mix well to
distribute.
4. Form mixture into six thick patties of
equal size. Each patty should weigh about
4½ ounces. Place patties on a baking
sheet and place in freezer for 10 minutes
to firm. (For a firmer mixture, prepare a
day in advance of cooking and refrigerate.)
5. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Add ½-inch
oil to a heavy skillet over medium heat.
Dust patties lightly on both sides with fine
cornmeal. (It’s OK if they are slightly
frozen.) When oil is shimmering, slip the
patties into the pan; work in batches to
avoid crowding, or use two pans. Fry the
burgers gently, about 3 minutes per side
until nicely browned, adjusting heat as
necessary. Transfer burgers to a baking
sheet and let them crisp further for about
20 minutes in the oven (or let them cool
and reheat later).
6. Meanwhile, fry the eggs, if using. Put a
sunny-side-up egg on top of each warm
burger, and serve on buns or warm plates
with lettuce and condiments, if using.
Garnish with cilantro sprigs.
..
Learn
to become
your own
facialist
BY KARI MOLVAR
Isabelle Bellis, a New York-based aes-
thetician accustomed to using her hands
for much of the day — lifting, sculpting
and massaging the facial muscles of her
clients — has felt a noticeable loss since
deciding to permanently close her Man-
hattan studio after the pandemic hit. But
to lend support to her regulars and to
anyone else looking to clear pores, de-
puff under-eye bags and calm inflamma-
tion, she and many other facialists have
been dispensing at-home care tips.
For example, Joomee Song, a Los An-
geles-based aesthetician, has been field-
ing emails and sending out curated care
packages of skin products, while Elaine
Ng Huntzinger has teleconferenced
with clients to offer pointers on gua sha
(the ancient Chinese facial toning prac-
tice) from her Paris apartment. Much
can be done remotely, experts say, like
incorporating one of these quick but ef-
fective facials into your routine.
DECONGEST AND CLARIFY
Now that many people are homebound,
Bellis said, there’s an opportunity to
“liberate one’s skin from the pore-clog-
ging effects of daily makeup.” To further
clear complexions, Bellis recommended
beginning with a double cleanse: Lather
on an emollient balm to dissolve debris,
then an alpha-hydroxy wash to elimi-
nate excess oil (try Holifrog’s Kissim-
mee Vitamin F Therapy Balmy Wash,
$42, and Shasta AHA Refining Acid
Wash, $38).
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
From there, minimize acne-causing
bacteria with a blue-light therapy device
— Huntzinger is a fan of Foreo’s Espada,
$134 — or consider a pore-refining clay
mask, such as Aesop’s Chamomile Con-
centrate Anti-Blemish Masque, $45, fol-
lowed by a non-greasy moisturizer (try
Shani Darden’s Weightless Oil-Free
Moisturizer, $48). Bellis finishes by ap-
plying a cold compress made from a
chilled herbal tea blend of calendula,
chamomile, rose hips and fresh mint,
which, she said, contains antihistamines
that reduce swelling. “And make enough
so you have a cup to drink,” she added. A
facial should be relaxing whether the
setting is a spa or your living room, and
hydrating will only give your skin an
added boost.
BRIGHTEN AND SMOOTH
Exfoliating gently each day, or even
once a week, can work wonders, but
sometimes a deeper cleanse is called for
— especially in summer, when sweat
and sunscreen can lead to buildup and a
dull, uneven complexion. For a facial
that can counteract this effect, Song rec-
ommended beginning by lightly sweep-
ing a gauze pad saturated in a pore-re-
fining toner, such as Circumference’s
Active Botanical Refining Toner, $60,
over the face. For a more powerful reme-
dy, buff with a dermaplaning tool — Der-
maflash’s One, $139, has a vibrating
edge that lightly removes the top layer
of skin.
Then, apply a brightening serum,
such as Klur’s Brilliant Light, $80, which
contains ferulic acid and vitamins C and
E, ingredients that work in harmony to
reduce dark spots. To speed absorption
when applying any serum, Huntzinger
recommended rubbing it between your
fingers for a few seconds, then tapping it
into your skin. “Next, I make fast, brush-
like motions from my jawline to my
cheekbones,” she said. “With my fin-
gers, I lightly pat around my eyes, and
finish by pressing my face with my
whole hand, making sure the serum has
fully penetrated.” Finally, slather on a
moisturizer with sunscreen to prevent
any discoloration from returning.
HYDRATE AND HEAL
Facialists typically rely on multiple
products to give skin a fresh, plumped
appearance. If you don’t have the pa-
tience (or budget) for quite so many lay-
ers but want to achieve a dewy look,
start by finding a single, high-quality se-
rum that contains hyaluronic acid — a
humectant that pulls in moisture like a
sponge. Bynacht’s Hypercharged Glass
Skin Serum, $320, is made with a blend
of eight hyaluronic acids of varying mo-
lecular weights to ensure it reaches the
skin’s deepest layers. A more affordable
option is L’Oréal Paris’s 1.9 percent Pure
Hyaluronic Acid 7 Replumping Am-
poules, $25.
Apply the serum with a gentle touch,
starting at the center of the face and
then moving out to the sides and up to
the temples, Song said. Follow with a
creamy mask, such as Epara’s Intense
Hydrating Mask, $133.